Historical Image of the Day
Pro-Medicare button, 1965
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
Decoration Day
I was going to write a longer post about the origins of Memorial Day, but I have no right to do so when David Blight does it instead:
The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.
After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”
The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.
After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.
The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.
Despite the size and some newspaper coverage of the event, its memory was suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day. From 1876 on, after white Democrats took back control of South Carolina politics and the Lost Cause defined public memory and race relations, the day’s racecourse origin vanished.
I will only say to you that rather than think of this holiday as a general "remember the soldiers" day, recall the valiant soldiers of the Union in the Civil War be they white or black and whether they fought to save the Union or to end the institution of slavery.
And if you feel like waving the bloody shirt a bit today, well, who could blame you.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Pollitt on French Sexism, Racism, and Hypocrisy
Katha Pollitt unloads on French hypocrisy over Strauss-Kahn's rape of the hotel maid, finding it shockingly depressing that French women are reacting just as awfully as French men.
Of course, the French (and a lot of Europeans at large) are complete hypocrites when they say bad things about America given their own history of racism, colonization, and inequality, not to mention excuses for rape. And it's when she moves beyond DSK that she delivers my favorite line:
A word about race: for decades, France, you've prided yourself on your lack of racism. But really what that means is you like African-American jazz musicians and writers. You're actually quite racist toward your own ex-colonized immigrants of color, most notably Muslims from North Africa. The way you talk about Muslim immigrant women, you would think France was a gender-egalitarian paradise for everyone else, and the biggest feminist issue was whether or not to ban the burqa.
Best thing I've read today.
Environmental Causes to Lower Crime Rates
One of the recession's biggest surprises is the continued drop in violent crime. Via Drum, it seems likely that one major reason is that children no longer suffer from lead poisoning:
....There may also be a medical reason for the decline in crime. For decades, doctors have known that children with lots of lead in their blood are much more likely to be aggressive, violent and delinquent. In 1974, the Environmental Protection Agency required oil companies to stop putting lead in gasoline....A 2007 study by the economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes contended that the reduction in gasoline lead produced more than half of the decline in violent crime during the 1990s in the U.S. and might bring about greater declines in the future.
While not the only reason suggested, it is quite telling. The larger lesson is that environmental regulations that supposedly cause business money almost always pay for themselves in the long run. And as Republicans want to tear down each and every one of these regulations to return to the Gilded Age, I for one expect this period of time to be a sort of high point in protecting our children from environmental hazards. Future generations of Americans may suffer from the hellish hazards of lead poisoning as workers do in China today (global capitalism--it's all benefits!!!) and as Chris Sellers has explored in his superb work on the rise of environmental health science and the suffering of white lead victims in the Progressive Era, Hazards of the Job.
Zelaya's Return
Much to my surprise, former Honduran president Jose Zelaya has returned to his nation, nearly 2 years after Latin America's first coup in 26 years. It seems that President Porfirio Lobo has worked to lessen tensions in his nation after his post-coup election, implementing the changes in the Constitution Zelaya hoped for and now letting him back in the nation. Given this has happened quietly, I'm sure the Honduran elites are on board with this and feel they control the process. Zelaya's return allows Honduras to return to full membership in the OAS and receive increased foreign aid, desperately needed in this very poor country.
Why Guestworker Programs Don't Work
A commonly stated solution for the problem of undocumented immigration is to implement a guestworker problem. Immigrant rights activists routinely note the fundamental problem with this--workers have no rights. The bracero program of the mid-twentieth century saw migrant workers suffer all sorts of abuse. Guestworker advocates say that such abuses couldn't take place today. That's just flat out not true. Mike Elk:
Last year, the leaders of the U.S.-based foreign labor and supply company Global Horizons were indicted in what the Department of Justice considered the biggest human trafficking case ever brought by the federal government. They were charged with holding 400 Thai guest farm workers in the United States against their will in conditions that essentially amounted to slavery.
The workers were given guest visas to work in the United States under the H-2A visa program. They were kept under brutal conditions under armed guard in Hawaii and forced to live in substandard conditions in hot shipping containers "with no carpet, beds, furniture, indoor plumbing, kitchen or air conditioning," according to federal investigators. They were under constant threat of violence from gun-toting guards, and on one occasion a guard told the workers they would be shot if they tried to escape.
Several company officials have already pleaded guilty in plea bargain deals and several others are expected to stand trial. In 2006, when the workers' maltreatment was discovered, the Department of Labor also debarred Global Horizons from participating in the H-2A agricultural guest worker program for the mandatory three years; it issued an additional three year debarment in 2009. Last week, a judge upheld the three year debarment after Global Horizons appealed it.
I don't know if you believe in the power of the modern government to regulate farms so that worker abuse doesn't happen. With our severely hampered and underfunded government, I absolutely do not. After all, what regulations in this country are properly followed? Food safety? Labor? Environmental? None of the above. Even under Democratic administrations, employers and polluters are in control of the regulatory process.
Moreover, our farms are in out of the way places. How many readers have visited farms with migrant workers? Even among progressive groups, how many are active on these issues. There are some, such as the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in North Carolina and the PCUN in Oregon (sadly, the UFW is basically defunct). But even these worker rights groups and unions are heavily underfunded, under reported in the press, and have virtually no power to stop farm employer abuses.
Guestworker programs will lead to more abuses like this one in Hawaii. These must be opposed as part of any immigration legislation.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Short-sighted Fisheries Policy
NOAA has stated that while bluefin tuna populations are declining rapidly, there's no reason right now to place list the fish as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
Perhaps NOAA policymakers are receiving pressure from the fishing industry and/or Obama Administration not to suggest protecting the bluefin. Or perhaps NOAA is just engaging in short-sighted policies, given that the bluefin is probably only a couple of years of needing that protection.If NOAA is engaging in number counting and won't list the bluefin before it reaches a certain point, it isn't doing a good job of thinking about long-term fishery management and the need to protect a species before it goes extinct.
Andrew Revkin suggests in the linked piece that if the goal is to sustain the fishery that the ESA is the wrong tool. I don't necessarily disagree with this. In my own work, I write about how the ESA was probably the wrong tool for protecting the northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest. However, I also argue that at the time, it was the only tool in environmentalists' tool box. Without court orders to stop old-growth logging in national forests, the rest of those forests would have all been logged by now (nearly all of them were planned for logging operations by 2000). Today, those forests are saved for the time being, even as the fate of the owl remains dicey.
Given the anti-environmental attitudes in Congress and among much of the public, do environmentalists have another tool in the toolbox other than using the ESA if they want to save the bluefin and other species from oblivion? I'm not so sure they do. So I'd like to see Revkin explain what other realistic possibilities are out there for people concerned with fish populations. He suggests some ideas here, but changing values are unlikely and just admitting that species are going to go extinct is not useful.
Dana Rohrabacher, Moron
I've said many times before that intelligence is absolutely not a requirement or even a desired trait to be in Congress. While there are some very smart people in Congress, there's little connection between intelligence and who gets leadership positions, nor is intelligence rewarded by voters, the media, donors, or one's colleagues.
See for instance California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who astounded everyone today by making the argument that cutting down the rainforest would help fight climate change:
“Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rain forests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?” the congressman asked Mr. Stern, according to Politico.
“Or would people be supportive of cutting down older trees in order to plant younger trees as a means to prevent this disaster from happening?” he continued.
Forestry experts were dumbfounded by Mr. Rohrabacher’s line of questioning, noting that the world’s forests currently absorb far more carbon dioxide than they emit — capturing roughly one-third of all man-made emissions and helping mitigate climate change.
“He’s seriously confused,” said Oliver Phillips, a professor of geography at the University of Leeds in Britain and an expert on terrestrial carbon storage. “He’s just got half of the equation. Natural things decay, of course, but they also grow.”
The idea that cutting down forests would result in a net reduction of emissions is “crazy,” Dr Phillips added. “The need is to reduce deforestation.”
Beverly Law, a professor of forest science at Oregon State University, found another hole in Mr. Rohrabacher’s logic. Roughly 75 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from the natural world come not from above-ground biomass, but from the soil, she said. “You don’t even want to give this guy another wacky idea, but he forgot about soil,” Dr. Law said.
Moron. Complete freaking moron.
Historical Image of the Day
The first food stamps, 1939
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Andrew Cuomo: The Nation's Worst Democratic Governor In Decades
Revolting.
I think George Pataki might be more progressive than Cuomo. To find a worse Democratic governor, one might have to go back to the segregationist governors of the 1960s.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Our Darkening Film Screens
Roger Ebert on the literal darkening of American movie theaters due to 3-D.
I know Ebert hates 3-D with deep passion, which I more or less agree with even though I could see theoretical artistic advantages to the technology. But the fact that these projectors simply don't project 2-D light effectively is an enormous problem. No doubt the public won't care, or if they do, it'll be to demand more 3-D. Will art theaters soon become known for showing films at full light?
Ugh
Ed Schultz should be canned for calling Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut."
Why do the big name lefty media voices have to be as big of assholes as right-wing bullies? I'm thinking of Olbermann, Maher, now Schultz. Maybe it's the nature of the media. But that's unacceptable behavior for a MSNBC host.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Civil War and Film
Kevin Levin is less than optimistic about the upcoming Ridley and Tony Scott film version of Gettysburg.
Will this movie really highlight what was a “visceral, terrifying, and deeply personal experience?” Wasn’t Ted Turner’s Gettysburg an example of just such a movie or is the difference here that the special effects will set the Scott production apart? I guess in the end I have trouble believing that any Civil War movie can strip away “the romanticized veneer of the Civil War” entirely. Our memory of Gettysburg is wrapped up in all kinds of romantic memes from “Brother v. Brother” to “A Battle that Decided the Fate of a Nation.” We don’t have a Civil War apart from our romantic notions that define its continued significance and meaning.In a sense we have come a long way in our memory of the Civil War. We now center African-Americans in the experience. Historians almost all call slavery the primary reason for the war. Yet somehow this has not created space for new tales of the War to be told on screen. With the arguable exception of Glory, which still managed to tell a tale of heroic soldiers fighting for what they believed in, our Civil War films have not progressed too much in the last half century. Filmmakers are still as wary of offending Southerners as they were in 1926, when Buster Keaton switched the story of The General from a Union to a Confederate officer in order to appease southern sensibilities. The films aren't as openly racist as Birth of a Nation or even Shenandoah, but they tend to still tell tales of two armies fighting for their beliefs without judgment of their ideology. The message is the glory and valor of putting up a strong fight rather than treason in defense of slavery.
This version of Gettysburg is going to have 3 elements:
1. Gritty war scenes.
2. Manhood defined through war
3. Ideological vacuity
Can we not tell stories that move beyond 19th century battle reunions? I guess not, even when employing our most famous directors.
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