Incredible CORD Convention tonight. Fuller report tomorrow after I finish studying that invisible handjob to economic elites they call macroeconomics.
Author Archives: Josh Eidelson
Further demonstration of how occupation destroys both the occupied and the occupier:
Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin. The incident was not as shocking as the recording of an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old. Nor was it as nauseating as the pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man’s head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth. But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians. The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to “play something sad” while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass. It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint.
But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs. The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. “What about Majdanek?” he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp. The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem. Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial “not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust”.
Evan takes the Teaching Fellows Program Web Survey up on its attempt to make sure his job description is accurate:
Only at a very conservative estimate of a single hour of preparation and a single hour of grading, plus office hours and teaching staff meetings, does a 20 hour figure become possible; but with 14 students in their second year of language study the grading perhaps more than any other part of the course yields significantly more work-hours per week. My hours are usually in the range of 30 per week. I have discussed this issue exensively with my language coordinator and the chair of my department. The amount of work stems not from a departmental requirement but rather from the actual pedagogical task of providing top-quality language instruction. I think all parties acknowledge the value of the teaching program to my own professional preparation, but the fact that the work exceeds 20 hours per week by virtue of its very nature makes it an additional challenge for me to have as much time as my TF 3.5 colleagues for my own academic needs. Indeed, the University”s own Prown Report (1989) documents how graduate students teaching language on the whole take longer to finish their dissertations as a byproduct of the additional amount of effort involved in their teaching. I do not seek an adjustment in my teaching responsibilities, rather an improvement in the compensation I receive for my efforts. To this effect please reference the grievance of which I was a co-signer that was filed with the Graduate School in April. I am committed to providing the best possible classroom experience for my students, and accordingly I think Yale should be committed to supporting my ability to do just that.
LWB Exclusive: An e-mail correspondent uncovers just how far back Yale’s resistance to the right of its graduate students to organize goes:
so i’m working on this paper about this guy jerome davis, a div school professor fired in 1936, allegedly for being a left- radical. davis was also the president of the local american federation of teachers local. the aaup investigated, and this was the statement (almost in its entirety) from President James Rowland Angell (who I’m assuming must have some relation to another asshole Rowland) to their investigatory body on January 8, 1937:
“Academic freedom is in fact threatened far more by the proposed unionization of teachers in the American Federation of Teachers and by that kind of pressure than it has ever been at Yale, or can conceivably become during the present generation.”
the more things change…
Augusto Pinochet is indicted:
Former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet was indicted Monday for the kidnapping of nine dissidents and the killing of one of them during his 1973-90 regime. Judge Juan Guzman said he also put the 89-year old former ruler under house arrest. Guzman said he made the decision to try Pinochet after carefully reviewing an interview Pinochet gave to a Spanish language television station in Miami. He said he is convinced Pinochet is healthy enough to stand trial.
Henry Kissinger is still at large.
Rejecting the divisive ploy being floated by some in the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force reaffirms its commitment to keep fighting for all rights for all people:
For our part, we want to be absolutely clear and on the record: We specifically reject any attempts to trade equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, a group that includes many elders, for the rights of senior citizens under Social Security or, for that matter, the rights of any other group of Americans. Finally, although the struggle for freedom can be difficult and painful for those without full equality, it would be an historic mistake to grow tired of the battle or surrender basic rights and equality in order to make the road easier. We have made it through some extremely harsh and challenging times, including losing thousands and thousands of our friends and family to HIV/AIDS. This is a community that has heroically walked its own path of tribulations and travail, determined to be free and proud American citizens.
We will not sacrifice our rights – or the rights of others like senior citizens – on the altar of political expediency. Most of us, if confronted with that choice, would not even know where to begin. Which right would we give up? The right to adopt children? The right to serve our country proudly and with honor? The right to be at our partner’s bedside in death? And how much would we be willing to hurt others like seniors as part of a cynical deal to help ourselves? We are not for sale to those who would undermine Social Security and we are not prepared to walk away from political leaders who have stood with us. Nothing short of full equality and protection granted to all other American citizens is acceptable. We know that these are times that require wise and brave people who believe and love justice and freedom.
The Onion on Wal-Mart:
Wal-Mart, the world’s largest discount retailer, announced its biggest-ever rollback Monday, with employee pay cuts of up to 35 percent. “Just in time for the holiday shopping season, we’re rolling back the hourly wages of workers in every department—housewares, automotive, health and beauty, and so many more!” Wal-Mart president and CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. announced at a press conference. “From Baton Rouge to Boise, we’re continuing our tradition of low, low prices and using our muscle to create unbelievable savings!” “For us!” Scott added. Scott then turned to a large projection screen on which the company’s trademark yellow happy face whizzed through the aisles of a Wal-Mart, enthusiastically “slashing” the hourly wages of employees all over the store. “Paying $7.75 an hour for a Class-2 cashier with fewer than two years’ experience?” a cheery narrator asked in amused disbelief. “How about $6.50? And $8.45 an hour for a dockworker to unload boxes of bath towels all day? We think $6.75 sounds more like it!” In addition to wage rollbacks, Scott said Wal-Mart will discontinue a number of shelf-stocking, warehousing, and sales-floor jobs that have been occupying valuable space on the payroll. “Why, some of those old stockers have been collecting dust in our aisles and ledgers for five years,” the narrator said as the smiley-face ushered reluctant ex-employees and their bloated wages to the parking lot. “It’s time for a store-wide clearance! Out with the old and in with the new!” According to Scott, employees at all 1,362 Wal-Marts, 1,671 Supercenters, and 550 Sam’s Clubs will be notified of the rollbacks this week by greeters stationed at the employee entrance of each store. Greeters will address employees by their first names, shake their hands, and inform them of the store’s special new wage plan. Those who remain on staff will find red “Wage Rollback!” stickers on their time cards in celebration of the occasion and in compliance with the scant federal regulations protecting minimum-wage earners.
And on social security:
President Bush signed an ambitious Social Security plan into law Monday that will allow citizens to bet a third of their payroll taxes on their favorite sports teams. “It’s time we gave the American people the chance to make some real money for retirement,” Bush said, speaking from the new Office of Social Security and Pari-mutuel Wagering Building. “Some naysayers think the average citizen doesn’t know how to handle his own money. When spring training starts next year, it’s up to you to prove them wrong.” “It’s your money,” Bush added. “You earned it. You should be able to bet it on whatever team you want.” Under the new plan, participating citizens will be asked to list their favorite teams on their W-2 forms. At the start of each major sports season, program participants will visit their local Social Security booking offices to review point spreads and sample playoff trees. Citizens’ team selections will be subject to approval by their employers, who contribute a percentage of wages to the employee Social Security Earned Benefits Fund, or “pot,” under the new system. “For too long, Social Security has been managed by an elite group of government accountants and economists,” said U.S. Sen. Paul Ryan (R-WI), a longtime advocate of Social Security reform and athletics-based gambling. “Why let your retirement money sit around in an account when you could double or triple it in a single year? Under the new plan, anyone with access to a sports page can control his financial destiny.”
It’s funny because it’s true. Which is also why it’s sad.
Zach on Bernard Kerik:
This is not “ironic” – and turning to sarcasm here obscures thr profoundly logical nature of this contradiction, for Kerik’s economic relationship with an undocumented domestic worker, and his withdrawal from the nomination for the secretariat of homeland security say something worth serious attention about the inexorable but unspeakable relationship between the security state’s complete reliance upon those it criminalizes.
Who would have thought, back in the era of Zoe Baird, that having an undocumented nanny would become an excuse to cover up more career-threatening embarrassments?
The leadership of the Human Rights Campaign, at a meeting last weekend in Las Vegas, concluded that the group must bow to political reality and moderate its message and its goals. One official said the group would consider supporting President Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security partly in exchange for the right of gay partners to receive benefits under the program.
Talk about forgoing the big tent. The Human Rights Campaign has always been too conservative for me. But this would be a new low. First, because contrary to the impression one might get from Queer Eye for the Staight Guy, scores of queer folks and their families also depend on social security to enable them to retire with dignity rather than into poverty, and they too deserve better than this privatization sham. Second, because now more than ever, as the economic justice movement struggles to better do justice to its queer constituents, standing on the wrong side of one of the major economic justice debates of the next four years can only narrow the movement. Third, because social security privatization is also incredibly unpopular with the American public, as it should be. So if, as the article suggests, the HRC’s new focus is on introducing gay America to everybody else, this seems like a particularly ill-chosen move to start with. (Spotted by Julie Saltman)
Speaking of Social Security, some one should ask David Brooks whether he’d be comefortable staking his national security on the stock market. Because if not, he’s in a strange position to be telling working class Americans to entrust their economic security to it. There’s a reason we call it “Social Security,” not “Social Program In Which If You Play Your Cards Right You Have A Decent Shot Ending Up Less Poor Than Without It.”
Wal-Mart Watch: SEIU, the UFCW, and the Teamsters – oh my:
The unions are talking of spending $25 million a year on the effort, more than has ever been spent before in a union campaign against a single company. “This isn’t a campaign, this is a movement,” said Greg Denier, spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. “There’s no precedent for this. It’s a movement to confront the reality of Wal-Mart-ization. No other company has ever had the global economic impact that Wal-Mart has.” Wal-Mart has 1.2 million workers in the United States, more than any other company, but no unionized workers. It has a history of fiercely resisting unionization efforts…
The new effort, to be announced officially in several months, will also be unusual because most union campaigns involve just one union. Because Wal-Mart is so huge, labor leaders have concluded that several unions should work with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. on the effort. Among those participating are the Service Employees International Union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Many union leaders have criticized the food and commercial workers for doing too little over the past decade to unionize Wal-Mart, but the union’s new president, Joseph Hansen, has vowed to do more. Andrew L. Stern, the service employees’ president, said: “Wal-Mart is much too big for any one union to tackle. The Wal-Mart-ing of the economy is a threat to every union.”
Frequent readers (thanks, Dad) know that I’m an advocate of broad-based progressive moments as the only effective instrument of progressive change. In particular, I’ve used this space to argue that in support of moves within the labor movement towards a broader conception of what it means to sdvocate for the interests of workers, be it native and immigrant workers standing together in the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides, partnership between healthcare workers and patients calling for universal coverage, or SEIU’s strong stance against the Federal Marriage Ammendment as an assault on the rights of its members. As was declared at the first union event I ever attended in New Haven, in response to President Levin’s intimations that Yale’s unions have a broader agenda, “You bet we have a broader agenda.” I’ve also criticized those movements locally and nationally when the broader agenda has proved not as broad as one would hope.
This is a debate that must take place in every progressive movement committed to winning over the next years. The environmentalist movement, as Randy Shaw argued compellingly in his Activist Handbook, is a prime example as well. Looks like former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach agrees:
For example, I’ve been trying to tell my friends at the Sierra Club that the most important battle for the Sierra Club and the next two years might be over public education. That is the battle line over collective activity, interdependence, the values we care about — much more so than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That’s a skirmish along the way that’s not strategic. It’s way off to the side.
Via Ralph Taylor at Nathan’s site, who also points back to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger’s “The Death of Environmentalism”:
The truth is that for the vast majority of Americans, the environment never makes it into their top ten list of things to worry about. Protecting the environment is indeed supported by a large majority — it’s just not supported very strongly. Once you understand this, it’s much easier to understand why it’s been so easy for anti-environmental interests to gut 30 years of environmental protections…Whereas neocons make proposals using their core values as a strategy for building a political majority, liberals, especially environmentalists, try to win on one issue at a time….The serial losses on Rio, Kyoto, CAFE, and McCain-Lieberman were not framed in ways that increase the environmental community’s power through each successive defeat. That’s because, when those proposals were crafted, environmentalists weren’t thinking about what we get out of each defeat. We were only thinking about what we get out of them if they succeed. It’s this mentality that must be overthrown if we are to craft proposals that generate the power we need to succeed at a legislative level.
…There is no better example of how environmental categories sabotage environmental politics than CAFE. When it was crafted in 1975, it was done so as a way to save the American auto industry, not to save the environment. That was the right framing then and has been the right framing ever since. Yet the environmental movement, in all of its literal-sclerosis, not only felt the need to brand CAFE as an “environmental” proposal, it failed to find a solution that also worked for industry and labor. By thinking only of their own narrowly defined interests, environmental groups don’t concern themselves with the needs of either unions or the industry. As a consequence, we miss major opportunities for alliance building. Consider the fact that the biggest threat to the American auto industry appears to have nothing to do with “the environment.” The high cost of health care for its retired employees is a big part of what hurts the competitiveness of American companies…Because Japan has national health care, its auto companies aren’t stuck with the bill for its retirees. And yet if you were to propose that environmental groups should have a strategy for lowering the costs of health care for the auto industry, perhaps in exchange for higher mileage standards, you’d likely be laughed out of the room, or scolded by your colleagues because, “Health care is not an environmental issue.”…Let’s go for the massive expansion of wind in the Midwest — make it part of the farm bill and not the energy bill. Let’s highlight the jobs and farmers behind it. But bring about this sea-change in the way the environmental movement thinks and operates isn’t going to be easy. For nearly every environmental leader we spoke to, the job creation benefits of things like retrofitting every home and building in America were, at best, afterthoughts.
We all have a lot of work to do.
Josh Eidelson 