Category: Undersung Heroes

WTFIRGO

February 8, 2012: J. Rosencrantz

I’ve been active in other domains, and so its been a while since I’ve posted here.  Weekly posts are migrating to the Freshjive Website, as part of the newly formed WTFIRGO Foundation which is raising money for social and economic justice organizations through the sale of limited edition agitprop tees. 50% of the proceeds from each months shirts will go to a different organization each month, starting with the Los Angeles Community Action Network, which focuses on the struggles of Skid Row locals. 

Cross posted here is the inaugural WTFIRGO post, with  Rick Klotz’ sketch of the first graphic:

FUCK POLITICS: Apathy and its Opposite

Our political and economic order is in crisis. Powerful corporate institutions have superseded democratic institutions in wealth and power, to the extent, for example, that nobody can reach high political office without corporate sponsorship. This puts private wealth and power in a position to dictate legislation to the legislators they sponsor, against the interests of the people they are supposed to represent.

The rich get richer, but the rest of us get buried in debt. Banks are bailed out, but families are threatened with foreclosure. Non-violent drug offenders are locked up for years, but financial and political elites are immune from prosecution for their crimes.

Merely recognizing these problems, however, does nothing to address them.

And since, despite cynical campaign rhetoric to the contrary, politicians in “both parties” are beholden to the same cluster of interests, voting for this or that corporate shill will never present any significant challenge to the system.

Establishment media’s portrayal of political campaigns as a years long horse race between fully housebroken elephants and jackasses is a distraction from the true arenas of struggle for social and economic justice.

Challenges to the status quo from within the system are safely defanged — third parties, for example, are blocked from power by way of ballot access rules, media blackouts and a winner take all system which promotes a timid “lesser of two evils” mentality.

Even the difference between these two relative evils are largely illusory — “conservative” administrations throw vast amounts of money into imperial wars while “liberal” administrations promote indefinite detention and the assassination of citizens without a hint of due process.

So fuck politics.

But to come to this conclusion is not necessarily to succumb to apathy. Recognizing the insanity of delegating one’s own political power to distant, compromised liars is at the same time to recognize one’s own responsibility.

That is why the World’s Got Problems blog is joining with Freshjive to create the WTFIRGO foundation, which will seek to bring attention to and raise money for organizations working to unfuck the world.

So starting February 8th, Freshjive will be releasing one new t-shirt graphic twice a month under the WTFIRGO label to correspond with a World’s Got Problems post. The tees will come in limited quantities and be available for purchase through the ReserveLA.net web store. 50% of the proceeds from these shirts will be donated to a different social or economic justice organization each month.

We decided to begin close to home, by raising money for an organization struggling for justice in some of the harshest conditions in the country.

Just blocks away from the Freshjive offices in downtown L.A. is the Central City East Community, better known “Skid Row”, home to one of the most heavily policed and dispossessed populations of the country.

For years the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) has been organizing Skid Row locals in the struggle for social and economic justice. If anybody can teach us a thing about taking responsibility in the struggle, it is them — and maybe we can raise a few bucks for the cause.

T-shirt available exclusively at Reserve Online.

Relative Terrorisms

July 5, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Gandhi, Assange, DeChristopher, Ruben, Mason, Alwan, Hammadi and Commander-in-Chief BushBomba

Over the weekend, the Frontline Club hosted a discusssion moderated by Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! between Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

The discussion ranged over wide territory, but in this post I want to focus on one particular theme that emerged, namely the relativity and ideological function of the term “terrorism”.

After Goodman listed and quoted various North American politicos (Gingrich, Biden, etc.) who have accused Assange of “terrorism” (some even calling for his assassination), Žižek, in his characteristically provocative way, effectively suggested that Assange embrace the designation since it puts him in a category with Gandhi. Speaking to Assange, Žižek says:

Yes, you are a terrorist! In which sense? In the sense, as I like to repeat, Gandhi was a terrorist…. In what sense was Gandhi a terrorist? He effectively tried to stop — interrupt — the normal functioning of the British State in India. And of course you are trying to interrupt the normal (which is very oppressive) functioning of the information circulation and so on.

Of course, the “terrorism” of which Žižek accuses Assange can only be understood in relation to that other type of terrorism against which it is directed.  Žižek makes this point by way of a paraphrase of “that wonderful line” from Bertolt Brecht’s Beggar’s Opera, “What is robbing a bank compared to founding a new bank?”.  Žižek:

What is your “terrorism” compared to the terrorism which we simply accept, which has to go on day by day so that just things remain the way they are? That’s were ideology holds us. When we talk about “violence”, “terrorism” — we always think about acts which interrupt the normal run of things. But what about violence which has to be here in order for things to function the way they are? So I think if (and I am very skeptical about it) we should use (in my provocative spirit I’m tempted to) the term “terrorism”, its strictly a reaction to a much stronger terrorism which is here.  So, again, instead of engaging in this moralistic game — oh no, he is a good guy (like the Stalinists said about Lenin), you like small children, you play with cats, you wouldn’t (as Norman Bates says in Psycho) wouldn’t hurt even a fly. No! You are in this formal sense a terrorist.

But if you are a terrorist — my God! — what are then they who accuse you of terrorism?

Žižek’s point can be generalized to others who have been accused of “terrorism”.

Consider, for example, environmental activism:

What is the property damage of Marie Mason or Rebecca Rubin to the ecological destruction of the institutions they targeted?

Even symbolic gestures are at risk of being legally re-framed as terrorism. But what is Tim DeChristopher’s auction sabotage compared to the coming onslaught of climate change?

Consider, moreover, the various insurgencies against the U.S. military occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

To take a specific example, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell refers to Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi as terrorists.  Their crime? Working with and supporting a domestic insurgency against a foreign army that has invaded and occupied their country.  Greenwald highlights the absurdity of labeling them terrorists:

One can have a range of views about the morality and justifiability of Iraqi nationals attacking U.S. troops in their country.  One could say that it is the right of Iraqis to attack a foreign army brutally invading and occupying their nation, just as Americans would presumably do against a foreign army invading their country (at least those who don’t share Mitch McConnell’s paralyzing fears and cowardice).  Or one could say that it is inherently wrong and evil to attack U.S. troops no matter what they’re doing or where they are in the world, even when waging war in a foreign country that is killing large numbers of innocent civilians.  Or one could say that the American war in Iraq in particular was such a noble effort to spread Freedom and Democracy that only an evil person would fight against it.  Or one could say that it’s always wrong for a non-state actor to engage in violence (a very convenient standard for the U.S., given that very few nations around the world could resist U.S. force without reliance on such unconventional means).  And one can recognize that most nations, not only the U.S., would apprehend those engaged in attacks against their troops.

But whatever one’s views are on those moral questions, in what conceivable sense can it be called “Terrorism” for a citizen of a country to fight against foreign invading troops by attacking purely military targets?

But even if it made sense to label insurgents against an occupying army “terrorists”, to return to the Brecht/Žižek question, what is arming an insurgency to a war of aggression?

Barack and Bradley

May 1, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The case of Bradley Manning  has exposed much about the hypocrisy and incoherence of the Obama White house.

After Manning had spent the better part of a year in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, much of which time stripped naked and constantly surveilled — all without trail — Obama, the former Constitutional Law professor, assured the press that he had checked with the Pentagon, which assured him that everything being done to Manning was “appropriate”.

Meanwhile, over 250 U.S. legal scholars, including Obama’s former Constitutional Law professor at Harvard, denounced Manning’s detention as torture.

It is hard not to concur with IOZ’s assessment, who characterizes Obama’s response to Manning’s pre-trial torture as “the blithe indifference of a busy manager signing off on some subordinate’s expense report”, and as Obama himself as “an asshole of the worst order” who, though he doesn’t “delight in cruelty like his predecessor”, is nevertheless “grossly indifferent to it”.

Since then, the U.S. King Commander of Chief has publicly judged Manning to be guilty without trial, in the same breath as he maintained that the U.S. is a nation of laws. This is especially disturbing because even if Manning ever gets to have a trial, he will be judged by Obama’s subordinates. Greenwald asks: “How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?”

Something about this situation reminds me of Prince Buster’s Judge Dread (as well as Megacity One’s Judge Dredd):

It is important to remember that, according to the chat logs obtained by Wired, Manning was motivated by a concern for transparency and the “public good”:

i want people to see the truth . . . regardless of who they are . . . because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

This weekend, Democratic partisans have been beaming that Obama was able to best birthers in a war of wits at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.  But after his war on whistle-blowers, and especially the pre-trial detention, torture and judgment of Manning, the funniest line might have been when the President praised the “daring men and women” who “risk their lives for the simple idea that no one should be silenced and everyone deserves to know the truth.”

Other notes:

Although Manning is now being transferred to medium security prison in Kansas, the Pentagon is planning on holding Manning in “pre-trial confinement” for the indefinite future.

The Obama White house has tried  to banish reporters from official print pools for merely reporting on a protest in support of Bradley Manning.

Here is the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg discussing Obama and Manning.

Solidarity

February 19, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

“Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers: One World, One Pain”

Found at Mother Jones, from Muhammad Saladin Nusair’s FB photo album.

!تحرير

February 11, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

إن شاء ال

Springtime of the Peoples, North Africa

January 30, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Mohammed Bouazizi, sparking a revolution.

In 1848, in the midst of economic hardships and political repression, alliances between middle class liberals and working class radicals rose up and challenged the “forest of bayonets” protecting absolutist regimes throughout Europe.

Triggered by events in Paris, news of revolutionary successes and violent repressions was transmitted with unprecedented speed by new communication technologies — telegraph, rail and steamship — which, in turn, fueled the wave of rebellion and gave rise to the “Springtime of the Peoples”

Today we see something analogous happening in North Africa: a wave of revolutionary activity that was sparked, literally, by the self-immolation of a frustrated Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohammad Bouazizi. Within weeks, copycats had self-immolated in Egypt, Mauritania and Algeria displaying the pervasiveness of North African discontent with their autocratic governments.  In Tunisia itself,  the 23 year reign of Ben Ali came to an end as he fled the country, giving others in the region hope that they too might liberate themselves.

Nowhere did this hope take root more than in Egypt, which is on the verge of toppling the 30 year reign of Hosni Mubarak.

Made in the U.S.A.

The regimes in Tunis and Egypt have both been U.S. allies, and Mubarak especially has enjoyed lavish amounts of military aid — aid which has continued under Obama.

As a matter of fact, the tear gas canisters being used to put down the rebellion in Egypt are “Made in the U.S.A” — Jamestown, Philadelphia, to be precise.  So “if the army ever decides to shoot into a crowd of unarmed protestors, it will be shooting with hardware provided by the United States.”

Meanwhile, leaders of the current U.S. administration wasted no time in offering support to their beleaguered friend, Mubarak.

Sec. of State Clinton exposed her sympathies when she asserted that Mubarak’s tyrannical regime was “stable” just as hope emerged among Egyptian people that it was not. Vice President Biden added that he “would not refer to [Mubarak] as a dictator” — on the contrary he “has been a good ally”. And Obama, whose military escalations and drone strikes continue to kill and wound many, made a plea to the Egyptians that “violence is not the answer”.

Meanwhile Wikileaks, in the wake of developments in Egypt, has released more U.S. diplomatic cables which corroborate what we already knew — that the U.S. turns a blind eye to the torture and lawlessness of its client regimes. See, for example, this cable in which a U.S. diplomat relates how, during murder investigations, it is the practice of Egyptian police to “round up 40 to 50 suspects from a neighborhood and hang them by their arms from the ceiling for weeks until someone confesses.”

One such excess in particular had become a rallying point among Egyptian protesters: the murder of Khaled Said, who was beaten to death by Egyptian police. Here are pictures of Khaled before and after his treatment by the Egyptian police, and a cartoon (by Carlos Latuff) of his afterlife as an avenging angel:

BagNewsNotes, always interesting for its analysis of news images, has discussed this photograph of the Egyptian government pissing on its citizens:

And we have to give a shout out to this guy:

A word of warning, however: In 1848, the “Springtime of the Peoples” was ultimately succeeded by a “Counter-Revolutionary Autumn” in which many of the democratic advances were reversed. According to historian Mike Rapport, this reversal was made possible in part by the unraveling of the tenuous alliance between “liberals” (who sought to retain some privileges from the conservative order) and “radicals” (who sought a more thorough transformation of society).   Time will tell if events in North Africa will follow a similar trajectory, but for now perhaps we can celebrate recent advances with this man.

MLK: Beyond Vietnam

January 16, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

From ABC news:

At an event commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Thursday, the general counsel of the Pentagon – Jeh Johnson – said that if King were alive today he would support the war in Afghanistan.

This claim is so absurd I don’t know whether to think that Jeh Johnson is more dishonest or stupid.  Instead of wasting time addressing such idiocy, I’ll just refer to King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech.  It is in this speech that King  links his struggle for domestic civil rights with the struggle against imperial war more generally.  It is the speech that got him killed a year to the day later.  As I said in the very first post on this blog, you can judge for yourself how much of this speech applies to the occupation of Afghanistan:

To review King’s points:

  • War dismantles poverty programs
  • Disproportionately large numbers of dispossessed are used to fight wars not in their interest
  • As an advocate of non-violence, he could not be silent about violence perpetrated by his own country
  • The fight for civil rights entails a fight against imperial war.
  • He is compelled to voice opposition to war as a Nobel Peace Prize winner
  • Just as he is bound by his own commitment to “the ministry of Jesus Christ”

Journalism as “Terrorism”

December 23, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Cenk Uyger asks Julian Assange if he considers himself a “journalist”,  and what he thinks about being called (by V.P. Biden and Senate Republican Leader McConnell) a “terrorist”:

And Greenwald asks: In terms of revealing state secrets, what distinguishes Wikileaks from the New York Times?

Swedish Documentary about Wikileaks

December 15, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Here is an informative Swedish documentary on Wikileaks:

View from Outside II

December 10, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

This vid from Taiwan summarizes recent wikileaks-related events quite nicely: