Reality check bounces
Topic: media criticism
What a way to end a nice vacation – listening to host Bob Smith and his guests talk around the issues rather than deal with them.

For the January 3 WXXI blatherfest, Bob spoked with new Monroe County Legislature minority leader Carla Palumbo. The second hour went to Jay Gallagher, Gannett News Service’s man in Albany and latest manifestation of the WXXI-Gannett experiment in “civic journalism” (read: public broadcasting sells out to the corporate press).

One exchange with Palumbo set me off. The discussion had moved to Medicaid and access to health care, and Palumbo made her best Democratic effort at explicating a general principle of reform. To paraphrase: she thinks what we need is simply to get people into well-paying jobs with benefits. In other words, leave the system alone, and keep health insurance subject to the magic of the marketplace.

You’d think that at this stage, any politician worth her salt would say something like this: health care is a human right, and as such it should be guaranteed to everyone – and the guarantee must be implemented by the only practical and affordable means, a single-payer national or state insurance program.

But no, we get nothing better than a pseudo-liberal version of “get a job.” Thanks for nothing, Carla.

As for the Gallagher hour, nothing much stands out in my mind. Maybe my senses were dulled by the discussion’s unexpressed but hard-as-rebar theoretical foundation – the commonplace idea that by uncovering corruption and inefficiencies in state government (Gallagher’s journalistic bread and butter) and advancing petty political reforms (say, six rather than three men in a room?) we will turn the New York economy around.

Okay, there’s plenty in Albany worth criticizing. And certainly state leaders should make some bold moves - proportional representation, a massive public-housing initiative, support for worker and consumer cooperatives, and other planks of the social-democratic platform. But our state government has been corrupt from Day One. I mean, isn’t New York the wellspring of Tammany Hall and its small-town imitators? And hasn’t the Mob been around for a while? Going further back: wasn’t the state pieced together from what were essentially land-grabs and frauds? Yet through all the vileness, New York prospered and grew pretty consistently from – to pick some convenient mileposts - the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 to the postwar boom that started going bust-ward in the mid-1970s.

They don’t call it the Empire State for nothing, with all the term implies about New York as an outstanding example of how moral flexibility breeds worldly success.

So what theoretical framework would I like to hear? For one thing, I’d like to hear some corporations indicted in the media. It’s clear that corporate abandonment, more than any other factor, precipitated New York’s fall from the top. So how come the Smiths and Gallaghers don’t go after Bethlehem Steel, GM, Ford, various auto-industry suppliers, Union Carbide, Dupont, Kodak, a whole raft of smaller metals and chemical companies, shipping firms and railroads? Are the media personalities afraid of what the CEOs and flunkies will say?

Here’s number two on my media wish-list: I’d like to hear a full, candid discussion of how racism New York-style has devastated our urban areas – and thus made a healthy economy practically impossible. (By the way, I don’t see anything healthy in the production of rich people, of whom New York seems to be increasing its share.) Is it impolite to suggest that the forces of apartheid in Rochester-Monroe County have been more than marginal or incidental to the area’s economic decline?

All I’m asking for is a real dialogue on real issues. But again I have to pinch myself. Reality is exactly what the pols and pundits want to avoid.

For Tookie Williams
Topic: poetry
For Tookie Williams
dead at the hands of
the People of the State
of California

Portland, OR.
Leave it to the western sky
to steal a scrap from the absolute,
then make good with a display
of soaked evergreens and moss.
No use. For me, these bladed ridgelines
won’t cut cleanly again
until the warmer months.

Days ago to the south,
a governor performed offstage,
and for this a good man,
not pure, but good enough, finally
so unexceptional, was strapped
down and subjected,
as an unbiased source
put it, to a “medical procedure.”
I thought of Socrates’ “beverage,”
and how sacrifice
comes to the table brewed
so strong it must be
taken at once, and in full.
But one man's sentence
is another's crime.

Historical cycles turn
toward collisions, and turn away.
The apparatus of information harvests
more and more dead weight
till the hungry drag it
to barren ground where
it rusts more with every sunset.
Too soon only questions
skitter around the wreck.

Imagine how it was
when the words gave out,
and the governor’s men
boxed the decent man
and finally discharged him.
That’s when I started
hearing metal against metal
and footsteps growing louder,
and when I found myself
newly afraid of echoes.

Have you hugged your library lately?
Topic: urban issues
Sometimes there’s actual deviltry in the details.

Take a sidebar to a recent Democrat and Chronicle story on the fast ferry. The story proper sampled public opinion about a pending $11.5 million bond-issue bailout for the ship. But I think the ancillary material really said more about our public-sector woes.

“The city subsidizes several operations,” read the sidebar. Besides the ferry, the operations named were the Blue Cross Arena (a $373,000 annual subsidy), the Riverside Convention Center (almost $770,000), and the public library system ($4.82 million).

But hold on. Do public funds for the library system constitute a “subsidy”? Yes, it’s Monroe County that has primary responsibility for the system, and so any contribution by the city – or other entities or individuals – could fall loosely into the category. But if that’s so, then city funding of street maintenance is also a subsidy. Or funding of police and fire protection, or whatever. The truth is, on almost any municipal budget line, you’ll find a mix of sources, right on up to Washington.

Yet we don’t talk about subsidies to the cops or firefighters. The money that goes to them is (rightly) considered an expenditure for vital services. The tax money flows to get the job done. In fact, as regards the police, the argument in recent years has been how to spend more and more.

Libraries are every bit as vital as these other services. And as such, they require public spending that is not optional. Without this spending – let’s call it rational investment - democracy can’t survive. How can you have a community without free sources of information and unimpeded access for everyone? How can you talk about education (and the “blah, blah, blah” never stops in Rochester, with much hand-wringing but little effective action) without thoroughly supporting its infrastructure?

America is finding out the hard way what it means to live without fully functioning libraries. Surveying the national scene, the American Library Association concludes: “Reduction in library funding has resulted in severe cuts to operating budgets, library closures, limited hours, reduced materials budgets, hiring freezes or elimination of personnel, and reduced library programming.”

There are many regions under pressure now. But the ALA zeroes in on a neighbor of ours. The Buffalo and Erie County library system, says an ALA backgrounder, “has approved closing 16 libraries, [which] will leave 36 branches open, though library officials noted those locations will operate with reductions in hours, staffing and services.” And this is happening, says the ALA, “at a time when public library activity in Erie County has reached an all-time high, with an annual circulation surpassing 9 million items.”

Here you see Rochester-Monroe County’s future. As our regional economy follows Buffalo-Niagara down the skids, and as working people take more hits from a Congress and White House inimical to every collective endeavor besides war, our libraries will accelerate their decline.

But don’t despair. The malls will keep growing (subsidized through tax breaks, etc.), the gated communities will spread further out into the greenspace (subsidies again), and the wealthy (with tax cuts in their Gucci wallets) will buy more books at Borders.

It’s enough to make you gag at the thought of cappuccino. Luckily, there’s plenty of good reading on the subject. Check out Monthly Review, for example, a fine socialist journal you can read for free at the Rochester Central Library, 115 South Avenue. See you in the stacks.

Cruel and not at all unusual
Topic: media criticism
Has The Onion taken over the Democrat and Chronicle?

We wish. But really: Can you imagine anything sillier than what the D&C editorial writers ran with this Sunday?

“Bush can improve on his candor about the war in Iraq,” the editors deadpan. They allow Bush was “arrogant” six months ago in his manner of self-defense. But now, they say, he’s “doing what he should have done” before, including “acknowledging weaknesses in America's approach since 2003.”

I’m not sure the presidential rhetoric has changed in any meaningful way. To me Bush sounds as arrogant and mendacious as ever, though after a recent political confrontation with war critic Rep. John Murtha, a Vietnam vet who doesn’t merely play tough on TV, the president’s testosterone levels seem lower.

But in any case, it’s absurd to talk of “weaknesses” when the problem is international lawlessness.
Everything Bush and his henchmen – plus quite a few members of the so-called opposition party – have done in Iraq falls within some category of war crime. An illegal war of aggression doesn’t get better with age. It just mutates into an illegal occupation, and eventually – when the killings, oppressions and humiliations become so routine that they don’t even make the back pages in the imperial press – it degrades into a mature colonial relationship.

The D&C editors are clueless about this, of course. But there’s more. Not satisfied with their own silliness, they go on to endorse torture.

By the back door, of course. Like our national leaders, the opinion leaders do their dirty work with plausible deniability.

First, the editors urge Bush to declare “there will be no mistreatment of prisoners or detainees, and [that] he will hold the military and CIA to a standard of behavior that reflects the moral values of this country while weighing the military circumstances at hand.” But in the next breath, they express their fear that, if Bush isn’t “direct and sure” on these points, “Congress could very well pass laws proscribing torture.” That, they say, could make our “intelligence effort” suffer.

What? If American military forces and agencies honestly reject the use of torture, how can the outlawing of torture affect their operations? I guess the editors really are proposing a clandestine relationship between words and actions: Bush speaks firmly against torture, and the operatives keep doing whatever they want.

Wink, wink, nod, nod. And the abuses keep piling up, along with the bodies.

If the D&C wants to urge a more honest approach to torture (and avoid tortured thinking), it might better look at the strange case of the US v. the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Passed by the General Assembly in 1966, the Covenant says “[n]o one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment…” (article 7).

The US signed the Covenant early on; the Senate ratified it in 1992. But this came with a lot of fine print attached: various weasel-worded qualifications to the text, including one meant to preserve the death penalty, and another to allow continued prosecution of some young offenders as adults.

Reading the fine print, you understand the US objective was to look good while allowing itself, not a bunch of global upstarts, to decide when and where to use strong-arm tactics.

Still, America's name on the Covenant must mean something.

Or it would mean something, if editorial writers spent their time arguing directly and surely against torture – under any circumstances, without qualification. They also might take a page from UN Human Rights commissioner Louise Arbour, who recently made a public appeal for nations, implicitly including the US, to sign and ratify the "Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment."

And while they’re at it, the high-minded scribblers also could demand the US get the hell out of Iraq.

At the very least, that course of action would make the D&C editorial’s headline – “Honesty as policy” – less Orwellian and Onionesque.

Free the CPT Four, and go in peace
Topic: antiwar
“We must be prepared to risk as much in our work as soldiers do in war.” Whatever the wording, this is an old sentiment among peacemakers, though most of us aren't put to the test.

For Christian Peacemaker Team members, though, the saying reflects daily experience as well as core beliefs. I say this from having seen CPT in action in Occupied Palestine.

My wonderful friend Kathy Kern, based in a Mennonite household in Webster, travels globally on CPT missions (here the word doesn’t have the odor of “crusade”). For a long time she lived with other CPTers in the middle of Hebron. And I do mean the middle: the group rented an upper-floor apartment above the main market street, down a few doors from a small but well-armed “settlement” of far-right Israeli Jews whose stated objective was to take all of the city and region from the 150,000 Palestinians there.

The Hebron settlers were clearly as dangerous as they were fascistic, but Kathy and the team didn’t give in to fear. Their purpose was simply to put themselves between warring factions to calm things down, if possible. Just as important, they bore witness to what was happening to Palestinians in Hebron every day: the full catalogue of oppression and humiliation. And with emails and webpages, op-eds and lectures, they let the whole world know.

Last week four CPT members - Harmeet Singh Sooden, Jim Loney, Norman Kember, and Tom Fox - were abducted in Iraq. Their captors probably don’t know how CPT has kept faith with the Iraqi people throughout the war (and through the preceding “cold war” of lethal US sanctions). Or how the group played a decisive role in revealing the crimes at Abu Ghraib, among other places. Or how the Baghdad-based team made it a point to live among the oppressed and help shoulder their burdens. (One photo now circulating of Tom Fox shows him cleaning up debris in the streets of Fallujah after the brutal, practically indiscriminate US military attack on that city.)

The captors probably, perhaps understandably, are filled with hatred toward the US, and the CPTers could be facing torture or death. Thus people worldwide are demanding that the four be released unharmed – maybe “praying for” is better than “demanding,” given CPT’s special devotion to prayer in its active, nonviolent, in-the-trenches form.

You can add your name to a petition for their release at www.freethecpt.org, and you can find all sorts of relevant information at www.cpt.org.