My Fed Chairman, I Think I'll Keep Him

Numerous writers in the blogosphere and elsewhere have noticed the corporate media's weird distortions of the political scene. For example, when I logged out of my e-mail account tonight I saw this blurb to a link on Ben Bernanke's imperiled status as Chairman of the Fed:

Is Fed Chief's Job in Jeopardy? Ben Bernanke is up for reconfirmation as head of the Federal Reserve. Just weeks ago, his job seemed safe, but sustained anger at Wall Street and Democratic politics may bring him down.

Of course, that second sentence may just be sloppily written: is it Democratic politics that may bring Bernanke down (if only!), or is it sustained anger at Democratic politics that may bring him down? I suspect it's meant to be the latter, even though Bernanke is a Republican and was first appointed Chairman by the Republican George W. Bush in 2005. True, Obama wants to keep Bernanke on for another term, and Obama is nominally a Democrat, but that's the trouble: Bernanke represents Obama's continuity with Republican politics generally, and the Bush administration in particular. And the first politician the article cites as an opponent of Bernanke's is Democratic senator Barbara Boxer, who the writer says is "generally close to the Obama administration." But not too close, apparently, and increasing the distance since she's up for re-election this year. "Few Republicans have said they will vote for Bernanke, even as the number of potential Democrats declines." Well, there's bipartisanship in action!

The article, by Sphere's Senior Correspondent Joseph Schuman, gets generally messier as the writer tries to fit reality into his politics: "A sudden end to Bernanke's chairmanship, and the prospect of a more politicized monetary policy, would almost certainly rattle stock markets and severely undermine confidence in the dollar." As though American monetary policy weren't already politicized, but in a different direction! As though the stock market weren't always already rattling hard enough to shake out your teeth! But not to worry; if it becomes necessary to abandon Bernanke, Obama will surely be able to find another Republican to take his place.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

For today, a little story that I keep remembering for some reason. It crawled out of my memory today, so I decided to write it down here.

One of the things I like best about South Korea is its mass transit system. I spend a lot of time during my visits riding the subway. It's a cheap form of entertainment, with many people to watch, and sometimes conversation -- usually with old men or women who proudly show off their English. I know that many Americans hate that, and if I ever actually live in Korea I may come to hate it too, but for now I enjoy it.

One afternoon in the summer of 2008 I rode from one end of the Blue line to the other, from Uijeongbu-bukbu to Incheon. It's about a two hours' trip, starting out aboveground, moving below ground, and emerging again into daylight as it leaves Seoul. A few stops from Incheon, I noticed a family that was having fun, mom and dad in their 30s and a boy (about 10) and girl (about 12). When their stop came, they stood waiting at the doors next to my seat, and I noticed they were speaking English. The father noticed my surprise and asked, “American?”

“Yeah.”

“Where from?” he said with a touch of a drawl.

“Indiana. You?”

“Texas. Visiting family.”

“Have fun,” I said as the train stopped.

“So far, so good,” he said a bit ruefully as the doors opened and they got off.

I’d been fooled partly because the father and son interacted with a lot of physical play, more like Koreans than Americans. I rarely see American children that age hanging happily onto their fathers the way Korean kids often do.

That's the story.

The Way We Argue Now

Peter Hallward's piece on Haiti last week filled in most of the gaps that I'd noticed in mainstream / corporate news coverage. This one, for example:

Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.

Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.

...The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN mission's mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. Proposals to divert some of this "investment" towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the ­distribution of international "aid".

The same storms that killed so many in 2008 hit Cuba just as hard but killed only four people. Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal "reform", and its government retains a capacity to defend its people from disaster. If we are serious about helping Haiti through this latest crisis then we should take this comparative point on board. Along with sending emergency relief, we should ask what we can do to facilitate the self-empowerment of Haiti's people and public institutions. If we are serious about helping we need to stop ­trying to control Haiti's government, to pacify its citizens, and to exploit its economy. And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we've already done.

I thought that was fairly clear and entirely reasonable. But it wasn't, apparently, to some of the Guardian's commenters, who seemed bent on giving Youtube commenters a run for their money as the world's stupidest. Here, for example, is the very first one in its entirety: "I think we should stop oppressing Africa with aid as well." As you can see from what I quoted, Hallward urges us to send emergency relief. What he does consider oppressive is the regime imposed by US and other foreign interference, which twice overturned Haiti's elected government by violence. Another commenter hastened to show the same careful misunderstanding: "I was going to send some American dollars to help, but now I understand that would be classified as 'neoliberal 'adjustment' and neo-imperial intervention'." And so on, and on, and on.

Others fell back on the Let's-Not-Bother-With-the-Past-Let's-Do-What-We-Can-Now line: "You can't bring history into this." Or: "[Haiti's] problems are not our fault." Or, even more beautifully, "Are you absolutely sure that this is a good time to be scoring poltical [sic] points?" (Here and here as well.) Of course there's no reason why we can't do both, and again, Hallward was explicit about the importance of sending emergency relief now while allowing Haitians to run their own country in the future.

Another fastened onto Hallward's crimethink about Cuba: "Personally I think not having the freedom to express dissent against your goverment to be a disaster. The rest of the article is not even worth commenting upon". Later, "What the Cuban government is concerned with protecting is its own position of power. Why else would so many people want to leave the 'socialist paradise'?"

The trouble here is that Haitians didn't have the freedom to express dissent against their government for most of the twentieth century, and when they succeeded in electing a government they wanted, against terrible repression, it was overturned with US and other foreign support. The US didn't object to Castro because he's a dictator; if he were our kind of dictator -- a Duvalier, an Emmanuel Constant, a Somoza, a Marcos -- he'd have received lots of US money and training for his secret police torturers. (We insist on the secret police torturers.) The US had no objection to dictatorship in Haiti; it was democracy that it feared. And Haitians by the tens of thousands want to leave the capitalist paradise that the international community has imposed on them. The US, mindful that Haiti is a free country (unlike Cuba), regularly sends them right back so they can work in free-trade sweatshops for 38 cents an hour. It's to Obama's limited credit that, because of the earthquake emergency, he has granted a stay of deportation for Haitian refugees currently in the US. But when things return to normal -- Haitian normal -- it's a safe bet that he'll revert to continuing Bush's policy and send them back.

As Lady Augusta Bracknell sagely remarked a century ago, "Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever." That certainly seems to be the case with the commenters on Hallward's article. Their responses cast light on the way that people think, or don't think, about difficult matters.

My Mother the Television

I just read Raymond Williams's Television: Technology and Cultural Form, which was originally published in 1974. Williams had agreed to revise and update it just before his death in 1988, but didn't have time to do so; still, the book has useful ideas and information in it, and is held in high esteem by at least some contemporary scholars. In particular his rejection of technological determinism ("the medium is the message" -- he was sharply critical of Marshall McLuhan) needs to be remembered and understood. Here are some bits that I liked.

Many people who are aware of the manipulative powers of radio and television, or of its apparently inexhaustible appeal to children, react in ways which implicitly suppress all the other history of communication. Thus it is often indignantly said that television is a ‘third parent’, as if children had not in all developed societies had third parents in the shape of priests, teachers and workmasters, to say nothing of the actual parents and relations who, in many periods and cultures, intervened to control or to instruct. Against those real alternatives this switchable communication has profound attractions. Or it is said that people are exposed to propaganda by television, as if there had never been masters, employers, judges, priests [135]. ...

This explains the realities of contemporary mediation, but it explains also the apparently irrepressible search, by listeners and viewers, for other sources. Many British working-class people welcomed American culture, or the Americanised character of British commercial television, as an alternative to a British ‘public’ version which, from a subordinate position, they already knew too well. In many parts of the world this apparently free-floating and accessible culture was a welcome alternative to dominant local cultural patterns and restrictions. Young people all over Europe welcomed the pirate broadcasters, as an alterative to authorities they suspected or distrusted or were simply tired. of. The irony was that what came free and easy and accessible was a planned operation by a distant and invisible authority – the American corporations. But in local and immediate terms, as in the other cases mentioned, this did not at first greatly matter; a choice was being exercised, here and now.

Television has been a majority service for a whole generation. It has had certain intended effects corresponding to certain explicit intentions, explicitly declared by the variable character of television institutions. But it has also had unforeseen effects, among them the desire to use the technology for oneself. In the young radical underground, and even more in the young cultural underground, there is a familiarity with media, and an eager sense of experiment and practice, which is much an effect as the more widely publicized and predicted passivity. Indeed, by prolonged use of a technology which had seemed to be contained and limited to commercial or paternal or authoritarian ends, many people – we do not yet know whether they are enough people – conceived quite different intentions and uses. …

… Yet this does not mean that the issue is undetermined; the limits and pressures are real and powerful. Most technical development is in the hands of corporations which express the contemporary interlock of military, political and commercial intentions. Most policy development is in the hands of established broadcasting corporations and the political bureaucracies of a few powerful states. All that has been established so far is that neither the theory nor the practice of television as we know it is a necessary or a predicting cause [136-137].

But a community is also a real social fact: not an idealized notion but a social system containing radical inequalities and conflicts of interest [155].

The Cat With Eyes as Large as Saucers

Homo Superior links to this Quote for the Day:

The Republican party right now is largely bonkers. The Democratic party is a lily-livered hackfest of mediocrity. I remain of the view that Obama is the best thing going for this country.

And asks, "Who could argue with this?"

I could ... George ... I could. So could many others. And that's leaving out the succeeding sentences:

But between the insanity on the right and incoherence on the left, he is marooned in a lonely center. Maybe in the long run, this is a better place to be. Right now it is making governance close to impossible, at a moment when we need all hands on deck.

(Tee hee hee, he thinks that the Democratic Party is the left!)

But the thing to remember is that a few short years ago, Sullivan would have said roughly the same things about George W. Bush.

(image)

Precious

I've warned about this before --

If, or rather when same-sex civil marriage is implemented, it will be only a matter of time before we start seeing news stories about the Baptist minister, father of two, with a loving husband of twenty years at home, caught making sexual advances to an undercover police officer in a park tearoom. (Better yet, imagine him caught picking up a female streetwalker, and defending himself with the claim that he thought she was really a male transvestite.) Or about the nice Episcopalian couple in the suburbs – he’s a lawyer, he’s an accountant – whose child keeps coming to school with mysterious bruises, or worse. Or the nice Jewish lesbian couple – just celebrated their tenth anniversary -- one of whom turns up at the Emergency Room with a broken arm from “falling down the stairs” of their ranch home. How about the not-so-nice trailer-trash butch-femme couple who scream drunkenly at each other every night on the other side of your thin apartment wall – but they’re married, bless ‘em!

-- and now The Daily Show has caught up with me.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
No Gay Out
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

It reminds me, though: why are antigay bigots so fond of that trope about cramming our lifestyle / agenda down their throats? As with Pastor Rick, something Freudian appears to be going on.

Haiti: Give Sphere a Troutman, It'll Generate Spin for the Rest of the News Cycle

The earthquake in Haiti is horrifying, and I'm glad that so many people care, and that so much is being done to try to help.

Some predictable media-whoring is going on, of course. Tiger Woods, we're told, is keeping a low profile since his scandal broke, but Russell Simmons told the New York Daily News that Woods is "considering" a $3 million dollar donation to help Haiti. Well, he can certainly afford it, and if he comes through, his motives don't matter. (Update.) Rush Limbaugh argued that Haiti shouldn't receive aid. Pat Robertson said that the earthquake was God's punishment (and having read the Bible, I wouldn't put it past him) for Haitians' allegedly having cut a deal with Satan; I'm not sure whether Robertson was referring to Voudoun or to the slave uprising that won their independence in the first place, but I'm betting on the latter. Slave revolts are only the first step down the slippery slope that leads to gay marriage. President Obama has agreed to write a cover story about Haiti for Newsweek, which is sure to exhibit the same historical accuracy and depth of analysis as all of his public statements. But this sort of thing is, as I said, predictable, and not worth worrying much about.

What bothers me a little more is the absence of historical context in much of the mainstream news coverage. Again, in the short run it's not important as long as the media are drumming up concern and help, but in the long run it does matter since the earthquake is really just a cap to centuries of misery imposed on Haiti from without. Democracy Now!, whose reports I linked to at the beginning of this post, is an exception, but then they're not mainstream. Probably only DN! would feature a guest who was even aware of the irony of Obama's appointing George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to coordinate the US aid program:

RANDALL ROBINSON: Well, Amy, I’m, of course, troubled by that. I don’t think this is the time—neither the time nor the place to discuss those things that have troubled me for a long time in the history of American policy towards Haiti. Now the focus must be upon the rescue efforts that are underway to save lives.

But I hope that this experience, this disaster, causes American media to take a keener look at Haiti, at the Haitian people, at their wonderful creativity, at their art, at their culture, and what they’ve had to bear. It has been described to the American people as a problem of their own making. Well, that’s simply not the case. Haiti has been, of course, put upon by outside powers for its whole post-slavery history, from 1804 up until the present.

Of course, President Bush was responsible for destroying Haitian democracy in 2004, when he and American forces abducted President Aristide and his wife, taking them off to Africa, and they are now in South Africa. President Clinton has largely sponsored a program of economic development that supports the idea of sweatshops. Haitians in Haiti today make 38 cents an hour. They don’t make a high enough wage to pay for their lunch and transportation to and from work. But this is the kind of economic program that President Clinton has supported. I think that is sad, that these two should be joined in this kind of effort. It sends, I think, the wrong kind of signal. But that is not what we should focus on now. We should focus on saving lives.

But in the last analysis, I hope that American media will not just continue to—the refrain of Haiti being the poorest country in the western hemisphere, but will come to ask the question, why?

Most of what I'm seeing doesn't bother to ask that question, and it is not because the writers want to focus firmly on what must be done now, without fussing over the past. This writer, for example, who modestly confesses that she "traveled with an honorary title, U.N. Citizen Ambassador", laments that

Haiti was so destitute, so broken. ... The hurricanes that devastated Haiti, particularly the town of Gonaives, in 2004 and 2008 made planning a priority. The priority. But for most of its existence, Haiti has had a highly centralized government, with local authorities either invisible or impotent ... It's a problem that all the humanitarians in the country felt they contributed to: a culture of dependence. The phrase I heard most in Haiti, from everyone at every level of society was, "Give a man a fish, he eats for a day ..."

But the needs remained. Haiti's problems were complicated, old and typical. Haiti was ruled by autocrats for so many years that it seemed no one shared any sense of national identity. If the country doesn't serve you, why should you serve it?

Well, you know how it is. Haiti's problems are old. Things are bad, that's all. It's nobody's fault. The actual history that produced these problems seems to be entirely unknown to Emily Troutman (and the article as a whole is even more offensive than this excerpt suggests), especially the grass-roots political movement that showed that Haitians do indeed have "a sense of national identity" and political dedication that puts most Americans to shame. That's why they had to be stopped, and stopped, and stopped again.

I was in a chat room where Haiti was being mentioned from time to time, and one participant declared that Haiti could be "a paradise 10 years from now." I asked him who it would be a paradise for (the Haitians? tourists? multinational corporations who are in heaven when they pay workers 38 cents and hour?) but couldn't get him to elaborate. Naomi Klein did elaborate, however. The vultures are hovering, and this disaster is just the opportunity they're waiting for.

On Facebook, my old friend the minister is saying nice things, and of course urging people to help. He's properly embarrassed by Robertson's rant, of course, but why? I mean, yes, it's bad PR, but it also goes back to a question I addressed some time ago. Most people would agree that we should judge religions by their best adherents, not by their worst (though most people judge competing sects by their worst adherents). But how do you decide who are the best and who are the worst? Robertson's position is biblical enough. King David took a census, and Yahweh punished him by sending a plague that killed 70,000 people. According to 2 Samuel 24, Yahweh incited David to take the census; the Chronicler (1 Chronicles 21) solved the problem by claiming that Satan incited David to take the census, which only implies that Yahweh is Satan. If you want to argue that this doesn't count because the Old Testament God is a God of Wrath, Jesus is reported to have said that Jerusalem would be destroyed because Israel had failed to recognize him as Messiah. This doesn't make any more sense, really, because if Israel had recognized Jesus as the Messiah, he would not have been crucified and mankind could not have been saved by Jesus' saving sacrificial blood.

Beyond this, natural disasters are conventionally known as acts of God. Most modern Christians, even very conservative ones, are uncomfortable about this, but it's traditional Christian doctrine that Yahweh is not just the creator of the world but its sustainer. Everything that happens is his doing. Not even a sparrow falls without his knowledge, according to Jesus, and as an omniscient and omnipotent being Yahweh is therefore responsible for that sparrow in a way that no mere human being could ever be. It's also traditional Christian doctrine that Yahweh is a god who acts in history. The Deist philosophy -- that God created the universe but has followed a hands-off policy ever since -- is not reconcilable with Christianity, which holds that Yahweh intervened at least in Jesus' career. So in Christian terms, it doesn't really matter if the Haitian earthquake was a punishment or had some other motivation: it was still an act of the Christian God. Whether Christians should help the Haitians (who are themselves Christians, remember), or whether aid constitutes an act of rebellion against their god's will, is a question that, as an atheist, I happily don't have to answer.

P.S. It turns out that the Haitian revolution was exactly what Pat Robertson had in mind. It also turns out that Robertson didn't make the story up himself; it's been circulating for several years now. This historian provides some background (via) while still largely ignoring the direct US support for those plundering Haitian plutocrats.

Jon Stewart gets a wee bit self-righteous in this clip, pointing out all the pretty parts in the Good Book and asking why after such a disaster Robertson didn't quote any of them: passages where Yahweh reassures his Chosen (after he's hit them with yet another plague, earthquake, invasion, or deportation) that his love for them is steadfast and they can lean on him all the way. Except that it was always Yahweh who sent the plague, earthquake, invading army of deportation in the first place, which makes him like the classical abusive husband/lover: first he beats you black and blue, then he swears that he only did it because he loves you, and if you'd only stop making those deals with Satan he wouldn't have to chastise you. The prophets of Israel, including Jesus if you want to include him, were all about Tough Love, and repellent as Robertson certainly is, he stands squarely in that demented tradition.

Stewart also is displeased by a Rachel Maddow item in which she points out the USAID / US military connection. It's a good thing he didn't see Naomi Klein's warning, quoted above! Granted that the first priority right now is getting help to Haiti as soon as possible, there's no reason not to be wary of US / corporate intentions at the same time. Unless Stewart is packing his bags to go minister personally to the suffering Haitians, he can't really fault Maddow for doing her job, just as he continues to do his. (Satire? While people are dying? Jon, how could you?) Then he engages in an embarrassing interview with Tom Brokaw, which tiptoes around the history of Haiti with vague references to "corruption and oppression."

(both photos)