Radio Open Source: Graham Robb's Paris -- 18 Arrested Explosions

Graham Robb's Paris: 18 Arrested Explosions
By Chris Lydon
Radio Open Source



Graham Robb is making France and the French irresistible again. With an entirely unconventional gift for historically-informed tale-spinning, his Parisians delivers nearly a score of long anecdotes about famous people in real scenes beyond imagining.

Here is Hitler on a tourist sweep through depopulated boulevards of Paris at dawn on a weekend in June, 1940 — thinking out loud with Albert Speer about how the Paris effect might be reproduced in Berlin.

There are Miles Davis and the singer Juliette Greco in love in 1949, and in guileless conversations about “existentialisme” with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Cafe de Flore.

Then there is the assassination attempt that Francois Mitterand stage-managed against himself in 1957 — perhaps in a sort of homage to the “miracle” that saved Charles de Gaulle from great bursts of gunfire inside the Cathedral of Notre Dame in 1944. Mitterand, who liked being known as “the Fox,” survived even the exposure of his own hoax — because, Graham Robb suggests, the French like a trickster and a touch of criminality at the top.

My favorite Robb character, from the 1830s, is the arch-criminal and escape artist Vidocq, a master of disguises who hid himself on Paris streets as a trash pile, who conspired with the cops and built the first private detective agency known to the world.

What is Graham Robb up to? In his fragmentary episodes, he seems to be telling us something of the non-linear course of events in general. His “explosive fragments,” I observe, remind me of David Shields’ ideal for the modern “lyric essay”: an explosion on every page. Yes, but no, Graham Robb rejoins:

Yes, it’s nice to have explosive fragments, but it’s also nice to just arrest the explosion at a particular moment and see exactly what’s going on at the moment of impact, the moment of destruction, and just take a lot more time to look at things which are just flashing past. It’s not a search engine kind of history. It’s almost the opposite. It’s the single fragment kind of history, and how much you can discover in one particular thing if you stop and look at it and go into it as deeply as possible, instead of skimming over the surface and collecting impressions.

Parisians extends the project of Robb’s breakthrough, The Discovery of France, the fruit of 4 years and 14,000 miles on a bicycle, in which Robb reintroduced France as, until yesterday, anything but a single, sovereign culture. He found a new planet at every bike resting spot, “a vast encyclopedia of micro-civilizations” in sum. His France is a nation of villages where, when the Eiffel Tower went up in 1889, only about 20 percent of the population spoke French. The short form of Parisians is: out with old notions of order, majesty and the grandeur of Paris; in with the ragged, the jagged, the forgotten personal perspectives, the violent and the out-and-out weird. Robb’s stress on fragmentation seems deliberately set against the national impulse in President Sarkozy’s politics — against Sarko’s famous contempt for the riotous, car-burning brown-skinned racaille, or scum, of Paris’s near suburbs.

It’s a bit ironic that Sarkozy started a debate on a national identity, because he is stressing the rifts that there are in French and Parisian society. He’s a very Parisian president. The biggest rift in France is between Paris and the provinces…. And there is also the rift between bourgeois Paris, white Paris and so-called immigrant Paris which very often isn’t immigrant at all, they’re French too. Sarkozy’s exploited that old fear that probably goes way back to the time of the Gauls… It’s the fear of what lies beyond in the hinterland, and that fear is more virulent than ever in Paris. And even today, if you tell some Parisians that you’ve been to Clichy-sous-Bois or one of the other northern suburbs, they won’t believe you. They won’t believe that you can go there and talk to people and come back alive.

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Radio Open Source: David Bromwich Channels Edmund Burke -- "America is out of itself"

Bromwich Channels Edmund Burke: "America is out of itself"
by Christopher Lydon
Radio Open Source (Watson Institute for International Studies)



David Bromwich is channeling the lost conservative voice of Edmund Burke, the missing wisdom on our mad Afghanistan misadventure. This is what Yale’s Sterling Professors of Literature are for, now and then: to recalibrate commentary to the cadences of immortality

In my long-ago Yale time, Burke was the voice of God for aspiring right-wingers in the school of Bill Buckley and the National Review; he was Buckley’s model of judgment, custom, continuity, restraint, “the wisdom of our ancestors” and the notion that “to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

In his own Parliamentary time (1765-1794), Burke had preached conciliation, not war, with the rebel colonies in America. He wrote the book on France “out of itself” in the Jacobin riot of revolution. More instructive for us, Burke was the conscience of the British Empire who drove the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the abusive, plundering chief of the East India Company, for “the great disgrace of the British character in India.”

Our Burke bumper-sticker today is that he “loved liberty and hated violence.” As Jedediah Purdy read Burke in his admirable post-911 reflection, Being America, “Enough violence always destroys liberty; mutual respect is the best stay against violence. Moreover, the two appeal to opposite parts of human nature: violence to self-righteousness and the taste for domination, liberty to forbearance and a love of everyday life.” For Professor Bromwich, a modern man of classic letters, Burke remains “the greatest political writer in the English language.”

Burke stands, in Bromwich’s estimate, for the exemplary role of government “in showing the self-government of the powerful themselves, which means the self-restraint of the powerful, which means the resort to violence only as a last resort, and the responsibility of those who rule not to try to break the human personality or character or texture of any of the societies they come into contact with.”

I am asking David Bromwich as he finishes an intellectual biography of Burke for an American version of the great man. Closest approximations: the late Reinhold Niebuhr, Andrew Bacevich of The Limits of Power or Chalmers Johnson of The Sorrows of Empire. I am pestering David Bromwich for a Burkean view of the American predator drone strikes on Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example. He is observing that President Obama, who grew up with a global perspective, has fallen short not least as a teacher in office. He dubs Barack Obama “the Establishment President” in the London Review of Books this spring. In our conversation he muses that Obama…

…is a kind of academic character that I feel I’m familiar with. The strongest, most formative environment that he grew up in was academic and professional. He’s been around vaguely left-liberal but also corporate moneyed types, people like his Chicago crowd in Hyde Park, but also like Michael Froman, Jason Furman, Geithner, Summers, etc. He’s been around people like this for much of his life. And somebody like that thinks that the good people, the thinking people have hold of a lot of power already, and the plan of good sense should just be to make them rule in the right way, and to begin by speaking in a moderate tone… His sense of power being in roughly the right hands—it needs calibration and adjustment but not too much change, and it needs a push with the right attitudes more than force or distinction of policy—that seems to me who he is from my academic acquaintance with people like that. Now, the great exception to this would seem to be what he’s done with health care, but I think the way he did it tells more about him than the actual contents of what he has done. Health care was the mainstream left-liberal Democratic Party domestic policy that people wanted to see something done with for the last 50 years, and he decided to make his mark with that at some risk. It was a very peculiar decision, but in one sense the decision of a very conventional mind…

[Barack Obama] is a very fatherly parent in charge of a family that he doesn’t come home to that often. He thinks that his word goes, but he doesn’t watch too closely what follows when he says, “This is what I demand.” So, for example, on the closing of Guantanamo, he made that the first big pitch of his administration. It was very important, but there was apparently no follow-up pushed by him within his administration. Time was given for his political opponents, which includes the whole Republican Party, to rally against him, and now here we are almost a year and a half later: Guantanamo is not only still open, but there is no sign of it being near closing. He spoke with a tone of command, but the command was not followed, and he himself didn’t back his command with action.

If you pursue that again and again and again in one policy after another, you gradually become a leader who talks rather than acts, and you are known for that.

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Remembering the 100th Anniversary of the Shirtwaist Triangle Factory Fire and its Role in Labor History

Remembering the Triangle Fire, 100 Years Later
By JOSEPH BERGER
The New York Times

In the arts and academia, on television and on a Greenwich Village street, the 146 victims of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire will be remembered over the next few weeks in an outpouring of events marking the centennial of the workplace tragedy.

The events, which started last month — roughly 100 in New York City and another 100 elsewhere in the nation — seem on a scale unmatched in New York since the nation’s bicentennial in 1976 or the Statue of Liberty’s 100th birthday party in 1986. And those were celebrations. This commemoration will have a more mournful, reflective tone.

“It’s amazing, the passion that has come out for this,” said Sherry Kane, a spokesman for Workers United, the union that today represents garment workers. “I think it speaks to people because it’s about immigrant issues, women’s issues, workers’ issues, so it’s all these communities and it feels very important to them.”

The lineup of events planned around the anniversary on March 25 include documentary films, art exhibits, plays, dance recitals, a requiem, a soliloquy, a slide show, an oratorio and lectures and panel discussions.

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Art * Memory * Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/">Grey Art Gallery (New York University)

One hundred years ago, on March 25, 1911, 146 people, mostly young women from Jewish and Italian immigrant families, perished in a tragic and avoidable fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which was located on the top three floors of the Asch Building (now NYU’s Brown Building), on the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. The fire broke out on the 8th floor and quickly spread to the 9th and 10th floors. With many of the stairways blocked, only some of the workers managed to escape; others climbed out the windows, leaping to their deaths, or perished on the factory floor. Although it was extinguished in less than half an hour, the Triangle Fire was New York City’s largest workplace disaster before 9/11.

The exhibition results from an innovative collaboration between the Grey Art Gallery and graduate students in NYU’s Programs in Museum Studies and Public History. Divided into four sections, it begins with the ladies’ garment workers’ strike of 1909, then chronicles the fire itself, the display of bodies at the morgue, press coverage, and funeral processions and other memorials, including legislative action. Section two records the fire’s legacy during the New Deal era, noting the rise of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and examining its representations in journalism and mural painting. The third section explores activities surrounding the fire’s fiftieth anniversary in 1961, including commemorative ceremonies, scholarly publications, interviews with survivors, and landmarking.Demonstrating renewed interest in the fire’s legacy today, the final section investigates contemporary memorial activities, both on site and in the form of visual representations in community projects and performance art—along with works of scholarship, film, music, and literature, including children’s books.

Art ● Memory ● Place concludes with a call for continuing vigilance and political action to protect the rights of garment workers, both in the U.S. and worldwide. The exhibition is dedicated to the fire’s victims and survivors, and their descendants. Documenting a century of commemorations, it traces the many social and political advances inspired by the tragedy, and the myriad ways in which its memory has been claimed, contested and re-invigorated.

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Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (1911)
The New York Times

It was Saturday, March 25, 1911. The work week was ending at the Triangle Waist Company factory in Lower Manhattan, and the men and women who operated the sewing machines and cut the cloth were pushing away from their tables, with some anticipating a night on the town and all looking toward their one day of rest.

On the 8th floor, flames suddenly leaped from a wastebasket under a table in the cutters’ area.

While workers frantically struggled with pails of water to douse it, the fire hopscotched to other waste bins and snared the paper patterns hanging from strings overhead.

The fire spread quickly — so quickly that in a half hour it was over, having consumed all it could in the large, airy lofts on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the Asch Building, a half block east of Washington Square Park.

In its wake, the smoldering floors and wet streets were strewn with 146 bodies, all but 23 of them young women.

The Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, as it is commonly recorded in history books, was one of the nation’s landmark disasters, a tragedy that enveloped the city in grief and remorse but eventually inspired important shifts in the nation’s laws, particularly those protecting the rights of workers and the safety of buildings.

The tragedy galvanized Americans, who were shaken by the stories of Jewish and Italian strivers who had been toiling long hours inside an overcrowded factory only to find themselves trapped in a firestorm inside a building’s top floors where exit doors may have been locked. At least 50 workers concluded that the better option was simply to jump.

To Access Original News Reports, Retrospective Historical Pieces, and Photo Archives

To the Best of Our Knowledge: Caveman

Caveman
To the Best of Our Knowledge (Wisconsin Public Radio)

SEGMENT 1:



A recent study of DNA from Neanderthal bones changed everything we thought we knew. Paleo Anthropologist John Hawks tells Steve Paulson the new information reveals that modern humans are one to four percent Neanderthal. And Brian Fagan tells Jim Fleming the rest of us is something else - Cro-Magnon. In his book "Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans," he argues that they were just like us - anatomically modern humans.

SEGMENT 2:



Sir Ian McKellen is heard first, reading from the novel "Wolf Brother" by Michelle Paver. It's part of her "Chronicles of Ancient Darkness" series, set 6000 years ago. She tells Anne Strainchamps how she got interested in the Stone Age.

SEGMENT 3:



Not all cavemen are in the past. The Modern Caveman Movement involves men in urban gyms, grunting and sprinting on all fours, lifting heavy stones, and running barefoot. They're eating a Paleolithic diet of meat, often raw, with no grains or beans or bread or dairy. 72 year-old Arthur De Vany is an economics professor whose physical accomplishments could awe a 20 year-old. He tells Anne Strainchamps it's all about mimicking what our cavemen ancestors would have done. Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham says the big question is WHEN did we become human? He tells Steve Paulson it's clearly when we started cooking. Otherwise we would never have survived.

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Joan Baxter: How corporate tax breaks hurt humanity

How corporate tax breaks hurt humanity. Truth be told: taxation is only certain for the ordinary law-abiding citizen, the non-rich
By Joan Baxter
Rabble (Canada)



Benjamin Franklin once wrote that nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes. That was in 1789. Mr. Franklin might be surprised to learn that today his axiom no longer holds, at least not for the rich and powerful among us. Truth be told -- as it is in British investigative journalist and author Nicholas Shaxson's meticulously researched and riveting book, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World -- taxation is only certain for the ordinary law-abiding citizen, the non-rich. The wealthy and the ultra-wealthy can quite easily get by paying little or even no tax, thanks to the shadowy spider webs of tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions that span the globe.

Shaxson's aims in the book, he says, are to challenge the common idea that it is acceptable for a place to get rich by undermining the laws of other places and to offer a lens through which to view the history of the modern world. "Offshore business," he writes, "is, at heart, about artificially manipulating paper trails of money across borders." It is not a "colourful outgrowth of the global economy, but instead lies right at its centre." It's not about efficiency or any genuine production or real economic growth -- it's about people and corporations making vast amounts of money through tax evasion.

Hiding the world's wealth

This book is a jaw-dropper of an exposé of how the moneyed elites use offshore to hide and grow their wealth and of how this affects the rest of humanity. Shaxson travels the world and delves into archives and financial reports to offer up some mind-boggling facts and figures. More than half of world trade passes, at least on paper, through tax havens. The balance sheets of small island finance centres alone add up to 18 trillion dollars, about a third of the world's GDP -- and that is probably an underestimate. Wealthy individuals hold over 11.5 trillion dollars offshore. That's about one quarter of the world's wealth.

It seems that just about everyone who is anybody is in on the act. Media baron Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (which owns Fox News, HarperCollins, MySpace and Sun newspapers), for example, uses 152 offshore subsidiaries and so pays an estimated rock bottom six per cent tax rate. Even Bono, writes Shaxson, who "browbeats western taxpayers to boost aid to Africa, shifted his band's financial empire to the Netherlands [an important European tax haven] in 2006 to cut its tax bill." Eighty-three of the U.S.'s 100 biggest corporations have subsidiaries in tax havens. The Tax Justice Network, an organization that works to research and raise awareness of the secretive world of offshore finance, discovered that 99 per cent of Europe's hundred largest companies used offshore subsidiaries, and the largest users of those were banks.

Shaxson takes an extremely complex issue, how vast amounts of money are shifted into tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions where no one can tell who really owns the shell banks and corporations, and renders it all comprehensible, with lively, precise and sometimes very witty prose. It can be agitating reading about how multinationals, banks and the global oligarchy (including not just despots who have robbed their own countries but also some of the world's most respected and prominent citizens) use the offshore system to hide their wealth to avoid paying their share of taxes, which our governments, our schools, our universities, our healthcare systems, our institutions and ordinary people, so sorely need. It can be an especially disturbing read for those of us struggling right now to fill out our tax forms.

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Vicente Rafael: Translation in Wartime

(via Unwelcome Guests)

Vicente Rafael - Translation in Wartime
Arcade (Stanford University)

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington. Renowned for the reach, breadth, and robust cosmopolitanism of his scholarship, Rafael works across three languages and three centuries of modern empire. The author of numerous books, including The Promise of the Foreign (2005), White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (2000), and Contracting Colonialism (1993), Rafael focuses on modernity, nationalism, colonialism, and post-colonialism in global history and for the global present.

Rafael’s lecture will inquire into the historical, political, and pragmatic relationship between translation and empire. Drawing attention to the complex ethics of translation practices, he examines how iterations of translation consolidate and confound imperial projects. Through a consideration of the language initiatives and policies attending the so-called War on Terror, Rafael probes the ways in which the demand for translation induces and intensifies the war of meanings, the confusion of address, and the crisis of identities in U.S.–occupied Iraq.

This talk was delivered on January 31, 2008 at the University of Washington. This file is made available courtesy of the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.

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Immanuel Wallerstein: Structural Crisis in the World-System -- Where Do We Go from Here?

Structural Crisis in the World-System: Where Do We Go from Here?
by Immanuel Wallerstein
Monthly Review

...

A second major cyclical rhythm of the capitalist world-economy is that involving the interstate system. All states within the world-system are theoretically sovereign but actually highly constrained by the processes of the interstate system. Some states are, however, stronger than others, meaning that they have greater control over internal fragmentation and outside intrusion. No state, nonetheless, is wholly sovereign.

In a system of multiple states, there are rather long cycles in which one state manages to become for a relatively brief time the hegemonic power. To be a hegemonic power is to achieve a quasi-monopoly of geopolitical power, in which the state in question is able to impose its rules, its order, on the system as a whole, in ways that favor the maximization of accumulation of capital to enterprises located within its borders.

Achieving the position of being the hegemonic power is not easy, and has only been truly achieved three times in the five-hundred-year history of the modern world-system—the United Provinces in the mid-seventeenth century, the United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century, and the United States in the mid-twentieth century.4

True hegemony has lasted, on average, only twenty-five years. Like quasi-monopolies of leading industries, quasi-monopolies of geopolitical power are self-liquidating. Other states improve their economic, and then their political and cultural, positions and become less willing to accept the “leadership” of the erstwhile hegemonic power.

Premise No. 3 is a reading of what has happened in the modern world-system from 1945 to 2010. I divide this into two periods: 1945 to circa 1970; circa 1970-2010. Once again, I summarize what I have argued at length previously. The period 1945-circa 1970 was one of great economic expansion in the world-economy, indeed by far the most expansive Kondratieff A-period in the history of the capitalist world-economy. When the quasi-monopolies were breached, the world-system entered a Kondratieff B-downturn in which it still finds itself. Predictably, capitalists since the 1970s have shifted their focus from the production arena to the financial arena. The world-system then entered the most extensive continuous series of speculative bubbles in the history of the modern world-system, with the greatest level of multiple indebtednesses.

The period 1945 to circa 1970 was also the period of full U.S. hegemony in the world-system. Once the United States had made a deal with the only other militarily strong state, the Soviet Union (a deal rhetorically called “Yalta”), U.S. hegemony was essentially unchallenged. But then once the geopolitical quasi-monopoly was breached, the United States entered into a period of hegemonic decline, which has escalated from a slow decline into a precipitate one during the presidency of George W. Bush.5 U.S. hegemony was far more extensive and total than those of previous hegemonic powers, and its full decline promises to be the swiftest and most total.

There is one other element to put into the picture—the world-revolution of 1968, which occurred essentially between 1966 and 1970, and took place in all three major geopolitical zones of the world-system of the time: the pan-European world (the “West”), the Socialist bloc (the “East”), and the third world (the “South”).6

There were two common elements to these local political uprisings. The first was the condemnation not only of U.S. hegemony but also of Soviet “collusion” with the United States. The second was the rejection not only of dominant “centrist liberalism” but also of the fact that the traditional antisystemic movements (the “Old Left”) had essentially become avatars of centrist liberalism (as had mainstream conservative movements).7

While the actual uprisings of 1968 did not last very long, there were two main consequences in the political-ideological sphere. The first was that centrist liberalism ended its long reign (1848-1968) as the only legitimate ideological position, and both the radical left and the conservative right resumed their roles as autonomous ideological contestants in the world-system.

The second consequence, for the left, was the end of the legitimacy of the Old Left’s claim to be the prime national political actor on behalf of the left, to which all other movements had to subordinate themselves. The so-called forgotten peoples (women, ethnic/racial/religious “minorities,” “indigenous” nations, persons of non-heterosexual sexual orientations), as well as those concerned with ecological or peace issues, asserted their right to be considered prime actors on an equal level with the historical subjects of the traditional antisystemic movements. They rejected definitively the claim of the traditional movements to control their political activities and were successful in their new demand for autonomy. After 1968, the Old Left movements acceded to their political claim to equal current status for their demands, in place of deferring these demands to a post-revolutionary future.

Politically, what happened in the twenty-five years succeeding 1968 is that the reinvigorated world right asserted itself more effectively than the more fragmented world left. The world right, led by the Reagan Republicans and the Thatcher Conservatives, transformed world discourse and political priorities.

The buzzword “globalization” replaced the previous buzzword “development.” The so-called Washington Consensus preached privatization of state productive enterprises, reduction of state expenditures, opening of the frontiers to uncontrolled entry of commodities and capital, and the orientation to production for export. The prime objectives were to reverse all the gains of the lower strata during the Kondratieff A-period. The world right sought to reduce all the major costs of production, to destroy the welfare state in all its versions, and to slow down the decline of U.S. power in the world-system.

Mrs. Thatcher coined the slogan, “There is no alternative” or TINA. To ensure that, in fact, there would be no alternative, the International Monetary Fund, backed by the U.S. Treasury, made as a condition of all financial assistance to countries with budgetary crises adherence to its strict neoliberal conditions.

These draconian tactics worked for about twenty years, bringing about the collapse of regimes led by the Old Left or the conversion of Old Left parties to adherence to the doctrine of the primacy of the market. But by the mid-1990s, there surfaced a significant degree of popular resistance to the Washington Consensus, whose three main moments were the neo-Zapatista uprising in Chiapas on January 1, 1994; the demonstrations at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, which scuttled the attempt to enact worldwide constraints on intellectual property rights; and the founding of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2001.

The Asian debt crisis in 1997 and the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble in 2008 brought us to our current public discussion of the so-called financial crisis in the world-system, which is, in fact, nothing but the next-to-last bubble in the cascading series of debt crises since the 1970s.

Premise No. 4 is the description of what happens in a structural crisis, which the world-system is in at the present time, has been in at least since the 1970s, and shall continue to be in until probably circa 2050. The primary characteristic of a structural crisis is chaos. Chaos is not a situation of totally random happenings. It is a situation of rapid and constant fluctuations in all the parameters of the historical system. This includes not only the world-economy, the interstate system, and cultural-ideological currents, but also the availability of life resources, climatic conditions, and pandemics.

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Gabriella Coleman: The Anthropology of Hackers

The Anthropology of Hackers
by Gabriella Coleman
The Atlantic

A "hacker" is a technologist with a love for computing and a "hack" is a clever technical solution arrived through a non-obvious means. It doesn't mean to compromise the Pentagon, change your grades, or take down the global financial system, although it can, but that is a very narrow reality of the term. Hackers tend to value a set of liberal principles: freedom, privacy, and access; they tend to adore computers; some gain unauthorized access to technologies, though the degree of illegality greatly varies (and much, even most of hacking, by the definition I set above, is actually legal). But once one confronts hacking empirically, some similarities melt into a sea of differences; some of these distinctions are subtle, while others are profound enough to warrant thinking about hacking in terms of genres or genealogies of hacking -- and we compare and contrast various of these genealogies in the class, such as free and open source software hacking and the hacker underground.

Since 2007, I have taught an undergraduate class on computer hackers at New York University where I am Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication. The class opens a window into the esoteric facets of hacking: its complicated ethical codes and the multifaceted experiences of pleasures and frustrations in making, breaking, and especially dwelling in technology. Hacking, however, is as much a gateway into familiar cultural and political territory. For instance, hacker commitments to freedom, meritocracy, privacy and free speech are not theirs alone, nor are they hitched solely to the contemporary moment. Indeed, hacker ethical principles hearken back to sensibilities and conundrums that precipitated out of the Enlightenment's political ferment; hackers have refashioned many political concerns -- such as a commitments to free speech -- through technological and legal artifacts, thus providing a particularly compelling angle by which to view the continued salience of liberal principles in the context of the digital present.

To Read the Description/Outline of the Course

History for the Future: Jeff Biggers on Coal in the Heartland

Jeff Biggers on Coal in the Heartland
History for the Future



Jeff Biggers discusses the history of coal mining in Illinois, and the nation. Biggers is an award winning journalist and author of the book Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, just published this year by Nation Books. This study asks readers to consider the true cost of coal by exploring the toll its production has taken on people and the environment throughout American history. On the show, Biggers talks about his book, the myth of “clean coal,” and his hopes for a truly clean energy future.

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History for the Future: Marcus Rediker on the Slave Ship

Marcus Rediker on the Slave Ship
History for the Future



Marcus Rediker, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, and author of many books on capitalism, labor, and race in the Atlantic world, including The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (with Peter Linebaugh), and most recently, The Slave Ship: A Human History. On HFTF Rediker discusses the origin and nature of the slave ship as a critical, and violent, institution in the construction of Atlantic capitalism from the 16th to the 19th century. Toward the conclusion of our interview Rediker also describes his latest project — a new history of the Amistad Rebellion.



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Julie L. MacArthur: From Fenians to financiers -- James Connolly and the Irish meltdown

(Originally read a revised edition "Mortgaging Ireland: Financial Crisis & Socialist Resistance" published in the March 2011 issue of Monthly Review)

From Fenians to financiers: James Connolly and the Irish meltdown
By Julie L MacArthur
Rabble (Canada)

A spectre is haunting Ireland -- the spectre of James Connolly.

Connolly was executed by a British firing squad for his role in Ireland's 1916 Easter Rising for home rule. Celebrated as a hero of Irish independence by political parties of both the left and right in Ireland, his socialism is all too conveniently overlooked.

It is vital, however, to consider it, for the Irish struggle is one that speaks to the challenges of independence, sovereignty and democratic freedom, both at that time and now. And it is significant for the people of Ireland and of all countries. What value is formal political independence if it is not backed up by economic control; if the real decisions of public policy are made in boardrooms and backrooms rather than main streets and parliaments?

For Connolly:

"If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole army of commercial and individual institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs." (Socialism and Nationalism, p25)

Now back to present-day Ireland.

A who's who of global finance descended upon Dublin in November to "hoist their flags," from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB), to the Rothschild investment bank, Merrill, Barclays, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. These power brokers arrived to prevent "contagion" from the financial crisis in this small country of 4.5 million people by lending the Irish state billions of euros to recapitalize insolvent banks and shore up the country's finances.

Unfortunately for the Irish, these actors came armed with the same ideological and policy tools that caused the crisis: a commitment to neoliberal growth models, open markets and the primacy of financial interests over those of labour, sovereignty or independence. Moreover, alternative ideas and paths are lacking from elites in Ireland's two major parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, as both are proven devotees of this free-market fundamentalism. It was their desire, proclaimed loudly through the 1990s and 2000s, to be "closer to Boston than Berlin" in regulation and finance.

Debt: to infinity, and beyond

The reasons for Ireland's economic collapse have been well covered by the global press in recent weeks. These include: an unsustainable growth model built on extremely low corporate taxes (12.5 per cent) and multinational inward investment, a property bubble fueled by cheap international credit, and politicians far too cozy with domestic banks and developers to regulate them sufficiently.

What is rarely highlighted in the press is the fact that Irish public spending was the casualty -- not the cause -- of the crisis. When Lehman Brothers investment bank collapsed in 2008 and credit markets seized up, Ireland's property bubble burst. As a result, a significant portion of bank assets became worthless and the country's construction and property sectors came to a standstill. The Irish government recapitalized banks with government bonds (totaling more than 176 per cent of GDP in 2009) in return for worthless property assets.

Dublin announced the deepest spending cuts in the history of the Republic to meet the conditions of the Nov. 28 €85 billion IMF and European Central Bank (ECB) loan. The state plans to raise income and sales taxes by €5 billion and cut spending by €10 billion by: reducing welfare payments by €3 billion, eliminating 25,000 public sector jobs and raising sales taxes by two per cent (to 23 per cent) by 2014.

According to economists Simon Johnson and Peter Boone "each Irish family of four will be liable for €200,000 in public debt by 2015." In all, €20.7 billion from the public pension fund was funneled to the banks over the last year and a half.

Perhaps most significantly, the Nov. 24 national budget plan outlined no change in the corporate tax rate of 12.5 per cent (one of the lowest corporate tax rates in Europe) "under any circumstances."

There were alternatives. The government could have required creditors to bear a share of the costs by allowing defaults and some bank failures. They could also have required the companies who have benefitted for years from the corporate tax policy to pay an equal share. Google, for example, reportedly saved $3.1 billion in taxes over the last three years by setting up in Ireland.

More recently, calls to withdraw from the European Monetary Union (EMU) have emerged in order to follow Iceland's lead of currency devaluation (an option denied Ireland). They chose to draw from the public purse instead.

While the IMF is asserts that its work pushing austerity in Ireland is ‘technical not political' the Irish public disagrees, and so do I. What could be more political than the socialization of bank debts and transfers of public wealth in to private hands?

Popular backlash

As the costs of propping up corrupt officials, developers and international bankers becomes increasingly unpalatable, politics in the Republic is shifting left; according to a Dec. 2 poll, Sinn Fein - "we ourselves" in Irish -- is two points higher than the ruling party Fianna Fáil. They won a historically unprecedented by-election seat in Donegal on Nov. 25 and their support in the south has doubled in the past month, from 8 per cent to 16 per cent. Political heavyweight Gerry Adams is giving up his seat in Westminster to run in the Republic's early 2011 election. These gains have opened up the possibility of a coalition with the Irish Labour Party in the New Year. This represents a colossal swing in post-independence Irish politics dominated by 60 years of rightist Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Political opposition to the status quo also transcends electoral politics. On Nov. 27, 2010 close to 100,000 people (the equivalent of 785,000 in Canada) marched through the streets of Dublin. The banners and placards quoted Connolly and other heroes of Irish independence. These protests have been growing in size and frequency over the past year.

Such political developments may be short lived. Free-market party Fine Gael is also gaining politically as more conservative voters swap one establishment party for another.

Furthermore, nearly one in three Irish youth are predicted to leave the country in coming years, to make ends meet in countries like Canada and Australia, thus eroding some momentum for change. Finally the Congress of Irish Trade Unions (CITU) -- the organizer of the largest and most recent rally -- is seen as tainted by years of "social partnership" with ruling parties. Taken together, these factors may undermine the development of a cohesive and coherent political countermovement.

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NPR: Coal Reignites A Mighty Battle Of Labor History

Coal Reignites A Mighty Battle Of Labor History
NPR

A Coal-Fired Country

West Virginia's been called the Saudi Arabia of coal. It produces more than a third of all the coal mined in the U.S. More than half the energy Americans use is powered by burning those black rocks. The lights in your house, your TV, maybe the computer you're reading this story on — they all work thanks to coal.

The other thing about West Virginia is its poverty rate, one of the highest in America, even though coal prices just hit a 15-year high.

Almost a quarter of the people in Logan County live below the poverty level. They're people left behind by the changes in technology and technique that have allowed coal companies to earn more money and hire fewer miners.

This story, though, is only partially about jobs. It's really about history — the battle over what to remember and whether to remember it at all.

A Firefight To Organize

No one has the exact details of what happened here in late August/early September 1921, but the basic story says around 10,000 coal miners took up arms against the private militias employed by West Virginia's Stone Mountain Mining Co. For five days they fought for the right to organize — to join unions.

The Baldwin-Felts detectives hired by the coal companies in West Virginia were referred to as the "Death Special" by miners.

"From all the artifacts found here, there had to be hundreds of men up here," King says. "I mean, there's probably thousands of shell cases scattered around here."

As many as 100 men died in the fighting. It got so bad that President Harding sent a detachment of federal troops to crush the rebellion.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Tension had been building for years. Just a year before, union-busting mercenaries, who worked for a private agency called Baldwin-Felts, shot and killed the pro-union mayor of the nearby town of Matewan.

At the time, most states had laws against organizing. It didn't help that Harding's administration was decidedly anti-labor.

The worry was the unions would bog down industry and put the brakes on America's rapid economic growth.

The problem for the wage earners, at least in Logan County, was that they didn't have a whole lot of options.

A Company Town

"They had the yellow-dog contract which said that, basically, if you took a job at this mine, you could not associate with anyone in the union, you couldn't join," says Doug Estepp, a local historian who runs tours of the area. "You were basically fired, blacklisted and evicted — and probably beaten on the way out by the guards just for good measure."

The coal companies owned your house, they paid you in credits that could only be spent on highly inflated food at the company-owned store, and if you complained about safety, you were fired.

The private security men from Baldwin-Felts would threaten, beat and sometimes murder agitators — all with impunity.

And so it all came to a head in late August 1921. The miners of Logan and Mingo counties had had enough.

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Ian Urbina: Politics Seen to Limit E.P.A. as It Sets Rules for Natural Gas

Politics Seen to Limit E.P.A. as It Sets Rules for Natural Gas
By IAN URBINA
The New York Times

When Congress considered whether to regulate more closely the handling of wastes from oil and gas drilling in the 1980s, it turned to the Environmental Protection Agency to research the matter. E.P.A. researchers concluded that some of the drillers’ waste was hazardous and should be tightly controlled.

But that is not what Congress heard. Some of the recommendations concerning oil and gas waste were eliminated in the final report handed to lawmakers in 1987.

“It was like the science didn’t matter,” Carla Greathouse, the author of the study, said in a recent interview. “The industry was going to get what it wanted, and we were not supposed to stand in the way.”

E.P.A. officials told her, she said, that her findings were altered because of pressure from the Office of Legal Counsel of the White House under Ronald Reagan. A spokesman for the E.P.A. declined to comment.

Ms. Greathouse’s experience was not an isolated case. More than a quarter century of efforts by some lawmakers and regulators to force the federal government to police the industry better have been thwarted, as E.P.A. studies have been repeatedly narrowed in scope, and important findings have been removed.

For example, the agency had planned to call last year for a moratorium on the gas-drilling technique known as hydrofracking in the New York City watershed, according to internal documents, but the advice was removed from the publicly released letter sent to New York.

Now some scientists and lawyers at the E.P.A. are wondering whether history is about to repeat itself, as the agency undertakes a broad new study of natural gas drilling and its potential risks, with preliminary results scheduled to be delivered next year.

The documents show that the agency dropped some plans to model radioactivity in drilling wastewater being discharged by treatment plants into rivers upstream from drinking water intake plants. And in Congress, members from drilling states like Oklahoma have pressured the agency to keep the focus of the new study narrow.

They have been helped in their lobbying efforts by a compelling storyline: Cutting red tape helps these energy companies reduce the nation’s dependence on other countries for fuel. Natural gas is also a cleaner-burning alternative to coal and plentiful within United States borders, so it can create jobs.

But interviews with E.P.A. scientists, and confidential documents obtained by The New York Times, show long and deep divisions within the agency over whether and how to increase regulation of oil and gas drillers, and over the enforcement of existing laws that some agency officials say are clearly being violated.

Agency lawyers are in a heated debate over whether to intervene in Pennsylvania, where drilling for gas has increased sharply, to stop what some of those lawyers say is a clear violation of federal pollution laws: drilling waste discharged into rivers and streams with minimal treatment. The outcome of that dispute has the potential to halt the breakneck growth of drilling in Pennsylvania.

The E.P.A. has taken strong stands in some places, like Texas, where in December it overrode state regulators and intervened after a local driller was suspected of water contamination. Elsewhere, the agency has pulled its punches, as in New York.

Asked why the letter about hydrofracking in the New York City watershed had been revised, an agency scientist who was involved in writing it offered a one-word explanation: “politics.”

Natural gas drilling companies have major exemptions from parts of at least seven of the 15 sweeping federal environmental laws that regulate most other heavy industries and that were written to protect air and drinking water from radioactive and hazardous chemicals.

Coal mine operators that want to inject toxic wastewater into the ground must get permission from the federal authorities. But when natural gas companies want to inject chemical-laced water and sand into the ground during hydrofracking, they do not have to follow the same rules.

The air pollution from a sprawling steel plant with different buildings is added together when regulators decide whether certain strict rules will apply. At a natural gas site, the toxic fumes from various parts of it — a compressor station and a storage tank, for example — are counted separately rather than cumulatively, so many overall gas well operations are subject to looser caps on their emissions.

An Earlier Reversal

The E.P.A. also studied hydrofracking in 2004, when Congress considered whether the process should be fully regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act.

An early draft of the study discussed potentially dangerous levels of contamination in hydrofracking fluids and mentioned “possible evidence” of contamination of an aquifer. The final version of the report excluded these points, concluding instead that hydrofracking “poses little or no threat to drinking water.”

Shortly after the study was released, an E.P.A. whistleblower said the agency had been strongly influenced by industry and political pressure. Agency leaders at the time stood by the study’s findings.

“It was shameful,” Weston Wilson, the E.P.A. whistleblower, said in a recent interview about the study. He explained that five of the seven members of that study’s peer review panel were current or former employees of the oil and gas industry.

“The study ended up being the basis for this industry getting yet another exemption from federal law when it should have resulted in greater regulation of this industry,” Mr. Wilson added.

Some E.P.A. scientists say this pattern may be playing out again in the national study of hydrofracking that Congress will consider as it decides whether drillers will have to operate under stricter rules.

Internal documents from early meetings, obtained through public-records requests filed by The Times and provided by E.P.A. officials who are frustrated with how research is being handled, show agency field scientists demanding that certain topics be included in the study. And earlier versions of the research plan indicate that many of those topics were to be included.

For example, the study was to consider the dangers of toxic fumes released during drilling, the impact of drilling waste on the food chain and the risks of this radioactive waste to workers.

But many of these concerns, cited by field scientists in earlier documents as high priorities, were cut from the current study plan, according to a version of it made public on Feb. 8.

Earlier planning documents also called for a study of the risks of contaminated runoff from landfills where drilling waste is disposed and included detailed plans to model whether rivers can sufficiently dilute hazardous gas-well wastewater discharged from treatment plants.

These topics were cut from the current study plan, even though E.P.A. officials have acknowledged that sewage treatment plants are not able to treat drilling waste fully before it is discharged into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream from drinking water intake plants. While the current study plan clearly indicates that the agency plans to research various types of radioactivity concerns related to natural gas drilling, this river modeling, which E.P.A. scientists say is important, has been removed.

In interviews, several agency scientists and consultants, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals, said the study was narrowed because of pressure from industry and its allies in Congress, as well as budget and time constraints.

Brendan Gilfillan, an agency spokesman, said that the plan remained broad and that the agency had taken additional steps to investigate the impacts of drilling, including recently issuing a subpoena against the energy services company Halliburton to force the company to provide fuller disclosure about its drilling operations.

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History for the Future: Rick Wolff on Housing and the Economy

Rick Wolff on Housing and the Economy
History for the Future



This week, guest Richard D. Wolff returns to HFTF. A professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and most recently the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What To Do About It (2009), Rick was on the show in April discussing the economic crisis and the changes that have taken place in the way capitalism works since the 1970s. In this new episode Rick talks about the origins and significance of the housing crisis facing the United States.

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Fresh Air: Dirk Vandewalle Peers Inside Qaddafi's World

Dirk Vandewalle Peers Inside Qaddafi's World
Fresh Air (NPR)

Dirk Vandewalle, an Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, gives an inside look at Qaddafi and his 42 year long rule in Libya. Vandewalle has studied and written about Libya since the 1980s. In 1986 he lived in Libya for 14 months, as the only Western scholar at the time.

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Dave Zirin: Not Just a Game -- Power, Politics & American Sports

Not Just a Game: Power, Politics & American Sports
Dave Zirin
Media Education Foundation

We've been told again and again that sports and politics don't mix, that games are just games and athletes should just "shut up and play." But according to Nation magazine sports editor Dave Zirin, this notion is just flat-out wrong. In Not Just a Game, the powerful new documentary based on his bestselling book The People's History of Sports in the United States, Zirin argues that far from providing merely escapist entertainment, American sports have long been at the center of some of the major political debates and struggles of our time. In a fascinating tour of the good, the bad, and the ugly of American sports culture, Zirin first traces how American sports have glamorized militarism, racism, sexism, and homophobia, then excavates a largely forgotten history of rebel athletes who stood up to power and fought for social justice beyond the field of play. The result is as deeply moving as it is exhilarating: nothing less than an alternative history of political struggle in the United States as seen through the games its people have played.

Sections: Introduction | In the Arena | Like a Girl | Breaking the Color Barrier | The Courage of Athletes

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On the Media: Closing the Book on Bloody Sunday

Closing the Book on Bloody Sunday
On the Media

Reporters rarely get a second chance to correct the record. But British reporter Peter Pringle did in 1998 when the British government decided to reopen the inquiry into Bloody Sunday, the 1972 massacre that took place in the city of Derry, Northern Ireland. In 2002 Brooke took a look at this tragic event and the role reporters played in revealing the truth. She also caught up with Peter Pringle again this week after the long-anticipated Saville Inquiry's report was finally released and the British Prime Minister apologized.

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History for the Future: Wendy Goldman on the Purges in the USSR

Wendy Goldman on the Purges in the USSR
History for the Future

On this brand new episode of HFTF, Wendy Z. Goldman, professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses the dynamics of the Purges that gripped the Soviet Union during the 1930s. In doing so she gives HFTF a sneak peak at her latest work on the early history of the Soviet Union, a book due out next year titled Intimate Betrayal. This account of the purges utilizes a unique set of sources: stenographic reports of the denunciations that sit at the heart of this tragic social phenomenon. Goldman is also the author of three other fascinating works on the Soviet Union: Women, the State, and Revolution; Women at the Gates; and Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin.

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History for the Future: Heather Steffen on the Labor of Universities

Heather Steffen on the Labor of Universities
History for the Future

This week on History for the Future, I interviewed Heather Steffen on the structure of the labor force at American universities. We discussed the increasing use of the casual labor of adjunct teachers, the crisis in the tenure system, and highly exploitative world of student internships. Steffen pointed to the ways that recent changes in the university may serve as a “canary in the coal mine” for broader developments in U.S. capitalism.

Heather Steffen is a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon University in Literary and Cultural Studies where she is writing a dissertation entitled, “The Struggle for the University in the Progressive Era.” She also serves on the delegate assembly and the committee on the status graduate students in the profession for the Modern Language Association, and was recently featured in an forum in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the future of graduate education in the humanities

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Taylor Sparrow: Thinking More Than The State Allows -- Radical Politics In These Troublingly Quiet Times

Thinking More Than The State Allows: Radical Politics In These Troublingly Quiet Times
by Taylor Sparrow
People of Color Organize!

What is in a life?
How can a life be understood, as you continue to make meaning along the way?

Stories. Hints. Scraps.
Little bits of evidence that lead in possible directions.

Our lives are made up of all the choices that we make, or do not make. Choices made visible, but not chosen. Choices made, but not understood, or not re-evaluated later, or regretted and carried like a weight.

The work of studying history is – whatever else historians might claim — quite simply the study of human choices. We learn from other people’s life choices so that we can choose how to live.

Our lives are quite messy, and perhaps even more so if we are living in opposition to an established order, against armies and ideas that try and constrain us. We do not really live our lives ‘in order,’ so the attempt to make a clean chronology from the outside is futile and pointless. We live our lives more in the form of a collage — or multiple collages layered on top of each other — rather than in a simple linear progression from birth to death. We are constantly connected to ideas and people and places and memories and dreams and plans, in an endless web that has a coherent logic only if enough of the connecting threads are visible at once.

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