Category Archives: Social Justice

Avatar, District 9 & White Liberation Fantasies

December 18, 2009 James O'Keefe Leave a comment

[NOTE: I haven't seen Avatar, though being a fan of Aliens and some of James Cameron's other work (the less about True Lies the better), I am inclined to do so. Still, spoiler warning if you haven't seen either Avatar or District 9.]

Annalee Newitz of Io9 hits the analysis on the head when she critiques Avatar as just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. From the previews I have seen, her take looks spot on.

She goes on to talk about white privilege and makes a good connection with the situation of Wikus in District 9:

Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be
white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but
never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it's like to
be a Na'vi because he always has the option to switch back into human
mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very
different lesson. He's becoming alien and he can't go back. He has no
other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what?
He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely
because he's hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a "cure"
for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races,
it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of
being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and
nobody will let you be a leader of anything.

She concludes with:

Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky
way of turning every story about people of color into a story about
being white. Speaking as a white person, I don't need to hear more
about my own racial experience. I'd like to watch some movies about
people of color (ahem, aliens), from the perspective of that group,
without injecting a random white (erm, human) character to explain
everything to me. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to
show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what
we've seen before. But until white people stop making movies like Avatar, I fear that I'm doomed to see the same old story again and again.

Praise Be!

Current Affairs, Social Justice, War on Terror

Eight years later, using nonviolence in Afghanistan still looks like a good choice

December 1, 2009 James O'Keefe 1 Comment

In March of 2002, while running for Treasurer of the Commonwealth, I did a one day tour of the Fall River/New Bedford area including speaking engagements, radio appearances and an interview with the Herald News in Fall River. I was aided by David Dionne, a great and tireless activist for social justice, peace, and the environment. David had setup the whole day and first on the itinerary was the interview with the Herald News.

Now March, 2002 was about five months after the US invasion of Afghanistan and one of the reporter's first questions was what would be the Green Party's alternative to invading Afghanistan. I stated that invading the country was the wrong approach and the US would have been better off in the long-term by building a nonviolent resistance movement to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda that sought the development and liberation of all of its citizens.

With President Obama's announcement that he will send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan to join the 68,000 US soldiers, 43,000 NATO-ISAF soldiers, and 68,000 Pentagon contractors, the long-term has arrived. When all is said and done, we are easily on track to have been there for a decade or more propping up a corrupt government run by warlords who share the Taliban's desire to keep women down.

According to CostOfWar.com, a National Priorities Project, the US has spent $232 Billion funding military related operations in Afghanistan since our invasion in 2001. This figure represents over $8,000 per Afghan citizen, or about $1000 a year for each person. With Afghanistan's per capita yearly GDP at about $450, this amount would represent a tripling of the income of the average Afghan. This figure is even more striking when you consider that we haven't delivered on the $5 Billion in aid we pledged to help Afghanistan rebuild.

We could have devoted a fraction of what our military has spent occupying Afghanistan on promoting economic development, education and health as well as building a native Afghan nonviolent resistance movement. Would we have overthrown the Taliban by now? Possibly. People who have enough to eat, a job with a decent income and the ability to read have much more ability to organize and use nonviolent tactics to undermine the support of their leaders. We forget when we judge the success of a nonviolent resistance that, after eight years of violent resistance to the Taliban, there is very real prospect that they may yet reestablish themselves as the rulers of Afghanistan.

By taking a long-term nonviolent approach, one that focused on economic development, education and improving the health of all Afghans, we would have left Afghanistan a far better place than we have so far. Even if a nonviolent resistance movement had not succeed by now, it would have a good chance of succeeding in the future. Obama's choice to double down on the Bush strategy doesn't look like its chance of success will be any better, but the cost in lives and debt will be immensely higher.

Economy, Government, Social Justice

German laws supporting workers helps their economy plus Utah Phillips on natural resources

November 15, 2009 James O'Keefe Leave a comment

Paul Krugman writes about how Germany is hasn't seen as high an increase in unemployment as the US has and that this is due to the laws Germany has to support employment and the subsidies to employers who reduce the hours of their workers rather than lay them off.

He goes on to suggest that the government cannot use monetary policy to get us out of the recession, and for 90% we STILL are in a recession, and the government leadership may not be willing to borrow enough to counter the demand short fall that resulted from the recession. He suggests creating a new W.P.A. to hire people and reduce unemployment (worked for one of my grandfathers, who helped build the Quabbin reservoir). He argues against the standard objections:

But these aren’t normal times. Right now, workers who lose their
jobs aren’t moving to the jobs of the future; they’re entering the
ranks of the unemployed and staying there. Long-term unemployment is
already at its highest levels since the 1930s, and it’s still on the
rise.

And long-term unemployment inflicts long-term damage.
Workers who have been out of a job for too long often find it hard to
get back into the labor market even when conditions improve. And there
are hidden costs, too — not least for children, who suffer physically
and emotionally when their parents spend months or years unemployed.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism adds a bunch of points including:

Krugman does Germany an injustice by failing to contest US prejudices
about European (particularly German) labor practices. If German labor
practices are so terrible, then how was Germany an export powerhouse,
able to punch above its weight versus Japan and China, while the US,
with our supposedly great advantage of more flexible (and therefore
cheaper) labor, has run chronic and large current account deficits? And
why is Germany a hotbed of successful entrepreneurial companies, its
famed Mittelstand? If Germany was such a terrible place to do business,
wouldn’t they have hollowed out manufacturing just as the US has done?
Might it be that there are unrecognized pluses of not being able to
fire workers at will, that the company and the employees recognize that
they are in the same boat, and the company has more reason to invest in
its employees (ignore the US nonsense “employees are our asset,”
another line from the corporate Ministry of Truth).

A different example. A US colleague was sent to Paris to turn around a
medical database business (spanning 11 timezones). She succeeded. Now
American managers don’t know how to turn around businesses without
firing people, which was not an option for her. I submit that no one is
willing to consider that the vaunted US labor market flexibility has
produced lower skilled managers, one who resort to the simple expedient
of expanding or contracting the workforce (which is actually pretty
disruptive and results in the loss of skills and know-how) rather than
learning how to manage a business with more foresight and in a more
organic fashion because the business is defined to a large degree
around its employees.

Both are useful articles and the discussion on the Naked Capitalism article is very interesting.

One last thing, the "employees are our asset" nonsense always reminds me of this Utah Philips story (called "Natural Resources") which appears the album "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere" that he did with Ani DeFranco:

I
was invited to the State Young Writers' Conference out at Cheney, which
was at Eastern Washington university. And I didn't want to embarrass my
son, you know, and I was gonna behave myself cause I had to live there
then – it was a chore. But I got on the stage – it was an enormous
auditorium; there were twenty-seven hundred young faces out there, none
of them with any prospects anybody could detect – and off to the side
of the stage was the suit-and-tie crowd of people from the school
district and the principals, and the, the main speaker following me was
from the Chamber of Commerce.

Well something inside of me snapped.

And I got to the microphone, and I looked out over that multitude of faces and I said something to the effect of:

"You're about to be told one more time that you're America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources? Have you seen them strip mine? Have you seen a clear-cut in a forest? Have
you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable
natural resource! They're gonna strip mine your soul! They're gonna
clear-cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit, unless you learn
to resist, cause the profit system follows the path of least
resistance, and following the path of least resistance is what makes
the river crooked! Hmph!"

Well there was great gnashing of teeth
and rending of garments – mine. I was borne to the door, screaming
epithets over my shoulder, something to the effect of: "Make a break
for it, kids!" "Flee to the wilderness!" The one within, if you can
find it.

There is a bit more. The whole album as well as the others he did are most worth it. He is still sorely missed.

Economy, Social Justice

Unemployment & Underemployment rate hits 17.5%

November 7, 2009 James O'Keefe Leave a comment

The big number is that unemployment, what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls U-3, reached 10.2%. However, it is worse than that since the broadest measure of unemployment, what the BLS calls U-6, is now at 17.5%. A year ago, the respective U-3 & U-6 rates were 6.1% & 11.1%. The BLS defines U-6 as:

Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.

where:

Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past.
Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not looking currently for a job.
Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent,
in December 1982.

To reiterate a point I made about the increasing inequality of the US economy, economist Paul Krugman mentioned:

Take the United States, which wasn’t damaged in the war. Take per
capita real GDP. Give hostages by taking data from 1950 to 1980, which
means including the 1980 recession, but stopping at 2007, so that the
current slump isn’t included. Then here’s what you get:

Growth in per capita real GDP from 1950 to 1980: 2.2 percent per year
Growth in per capita real GDP from 1980 to 2007: 2.0 percent per year

Oh, and if we look at real median family income instead, we get:

Growth from 1950 to 1980: 2.3 percent per year
Growth from 1980 to 2007: 0.7 percent per year

So comparing the time period from 1950 to the recession of 1980 with that of the recession of 1980 to the boom of 2007, Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush2 did worse in average terms than the previous 30 years. If you look at the median family income, i.e. those people in the middle of the income distribution, things are even worse for the Reagan+ period.

Sources:

Current Affairs, Economy, Social Justice

Financial Bubble, Rich Get Richer, Economic Bust, Rich Get Bailed Out, Repeat

November 2, 2009 James O'Keefe Leave a comment

I haven't posted much about the economy lately owing to a time: a lack on my part and the length needed for a post on such a topic. However, a couple of people have made some interesting observations that allow me to weave them together into something that is a little bit more illuminating.

Robert Oak of The Economic Populist and Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism posted both cited Nouriel Roubini's recent op-ed (here if you don't want to register) in the Financial Times. Mr. Roubini explains that the low interest rates (~0.5%) that the US Federal Reserve is offering to financial institutions is the cause of rapid increase in asset prices (stocks, commodities, etc.) More importantly, since these interest rates have caused the fall in the dollar relative to other currencies. As a result, financial firms are now able to borrow in the US where they get negative interest rates since the dollar is falling, and buy non-US assets which bids up their price. As Gillian Tett of the Financial Times reported recently:

Earlier this month, I received a sobering e-mail from a senior,
recently-retired banker. This particular man, a veteran of the credit
world, had just chatted with ex-colleagues who are still in the markets
– and was feeling deeply shocked.

“Forget about the events of the past 12 months … the punters are
back punting as aggressively as ever,” he wrote. “Highly leveraged
short-term trades are back in vogue as players … jostle to load up on
everything from Reits [real estate investment trusts] and commercial
property, commodities, emerging markets and regular stocks and bonds.“

Back to Roubini. He feels that the increase in asset prices is a new bubble over which the Fed isn't watching. Eventually, the bubble will burst when the dollar stops falling and/or interest rates go up and traders, without easy money from the Fed, find they have the sell their new assets to pay back their loans. Oh joy. Of course, without all that easy money, the financial sector would have imploded taking the rest of the economy with it. Well … more than it did at least.

All this easy money seems to have increased the bounce in the step of Wall Street fat cats such as Lord Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International, who, while speaking at St Paul’s Cathedral in London about
morality in the marketplace said the British
public should “tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater
prosperity for all” (taken from The Guardian via Tony Wikrent of The Economic Populist). Of course we tried that for over thirty years and it hasn't worked.

Mr. Wikrent (which I am cribbing from) sets out a fairly detailed description of the financial sector's pillage of the rest of the economy since the early eighties that is pretty well summed up in this graph from a July 2003 paper by Economics Professor James Crotty of the UMass, Amherst, The
Neoliberal Paradox: The Impact of Destructive Product Market
Competition and Impatient Finance on Nonfinancial Corporations in the
Neoliberal Era. The graph shows the share of the cash flow of Non-Financial Corporations (NFC) that went to the financial markets in the form of interest payments, dividends, and stock buy backs:

Yes, that is correct that 75% of NFCs' cash flow in 1989 poured out of NFCs and into the financial markets. Seems suspicious that the financial sector's pillaging of the rest of the economy peaks just before the economy tanks, but I won't take correlation for causation without more information.

For those who want a history, or is it a clarity, lesson, midtowng at The Economic Populist has a pretty good summary of the causes of our latest economic crisis. For those who don't have time to read it, here is the conclusion:

So what does this all mean? It means that the reason for the
economic crisis was the asset bubble that preceded it. The "wealth
effect" was a lie.

The reason for the asset bubble was monetary
inflation that got directed almost entirely to the wealthy. They
naturally used it to become wealthier, which means stocks, bonds, and
real estate. The trickle-down theory is a lie.

The reason why the monetary inflation was directed to the wealthy is
because free trade agreements which gutted the income of the working
class and left the nation suffering from economic disparity. The
promises made by free trade proponents was a lie.

In essence, the economic crisis that we are suffering from, and
will continue to suffer from, was caused by too much concentration of
wealth in the upper class. The country will continue to suffer from
these bubble and bust cycles until either the nation addresses the
income disparity, or the rest of the world stops offering to buy our
debt.

One thing I'll note, while I think NAFTA and other free trade agreements had an
effect on the increase in income inequality, income inequality was
rising long before NAFTA and later free trade agreements. I wouldn't
discount technological changes, the increase in the free flow of
capital and the greediness of the wealthy.

That said, the 50s & 60s era of shared advancements in income and low debt was replaced in the mid 70s with greater income inequality (50% of all income went to the top 10% in 2007) and increasing debt for the middle class and poor in order to achieve some semblance of upward mobility. After all, the rich's new found wealth needed to go someplace to gain a return.

And so I have come full circle with a new bubble on the horizon since that is the only option the "leadership" of our highly unequal economy and political system will allow us.

The musings of Jamie O'Keefe: pirate party activist, geek, father and gamer.