I cite

What happened to the anti-war movement?

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, particularly the giant February 15, 2003 demonstrations, there seemed a great deal of energy in opposition to Bush's war. As the war continued, so did the protests, from the marches in the streets, to the reading of the names of the American soldiers who were killed, to the marking of significant counts--1000 dead, 2000 dead. There has been attention to the troops' lack of adequate provisions, the horrors at Walter Reed hospital, the cuts in funds for veterans. Just a few days ago I heard on the radio about activists arrested at a port in WA for placing an antiwar banner. And it made me wonder: how is it that a war that arose coterminously with its own opposition has continued for over five years?

Is it the case that the anti-war movement is more visible in more urban settings than the places I've spent most of my time the past six months? Or has it been assimilated into the media stream, just another current of upheaval and opposition within a large flow of entertainment and outrage? A year or so ago I started to get the impression that anti-war had morphed into a generic 'peace' and that this diluted its focus, message, and outrage.

Did a large segment of the anti-war crowd blend in with the Obama campaign such that electing him is now their primary objective? Did the surge and the production of a fantasy of success around it coat war discussions in an ooze so that it's increasingly difficult for the anti-war movement to retain a grip or gain a toehold?

What's particularly odd: over 80% of the country agrees we are on the wrong track. 62% disapprove of Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. On the one hand, it appears that the anti-war movement has been successful in turning opinion against the war. On the other, it appears that the movement is a miserable failure in that the administration and the congress continue to fund and fight the war despite public opposition to it. Differently put, it appears that the movement doesn't matter because public opinion doesn't matter. The Democrats have been quite clear that public opinion doesn't matter: they continue to roll over and do the bidding of a president with the smallest approval rating in US history (and, let's not forget, Congress's approval rating is even lower--could it be because they fail at every step to impeach the bad guys, tax the rich, provide health care, restore the infrastructure, protect the poor from evil finance capital, cap gas prices and oil profits, etc. The Democrats compromise and give in when they don't need to--unless they realize that voters don't matter. They appeal to unity and moving beyond partisanship--as if the problem were not the astoundingly corrupt Republican party.

Could it be that we are in a post-movement situation? One where pressures on elected officials from 'civil society' are so ineffective that the only opposition is forcibly removing these officials?

Glenn Greenwald on Obama and spying

If Obama is as against basic constitutional protections as are the Republicans, why should we think he's any better than McCain? Is it a difference that matters? Link: Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com.

Rather, the insultingly false claims about this bill -- it brings the FISA court back into eavesdropping! it actually improves civil liberties! Obama will now go after the telecoms criminally! Government spying and lawbreaking isn't really that important anyway! -- are being disseminated by the Democratic Congressional leadership and, most of all, by those desperate to glorify Barack Obama and justify anything and everything he does. Many of these are the same people who spent the last five years screaming that Bush was shredding the Constitution, that spying on Americans was profoundly dangerous, that the political establishment did nothing about Bush's lawbreaking.

It's been quite disturbing to watch them turn on a dime -- completely reverse everything they claimed to believe -- the minute Obama issued his statement saying that he would support this bill. They actually have the audacity to say that this bill -- a bill which Bush, Cheney and the entire GOP eagerly support, while virtually every civil libertarian vehemently opposes -- will increase the civil liberties that Americans enjoy, as though Dick Cheney, Mike McConnell and "Kit" Bond decided that it was urgently important to pass a new bill to restrict presidential spying and enhance our civil liberties. How completely do you have to relinquish your critical faculties at Barack Obama's altar in order to get yourself to think that way?

The issues implicated by this bill -- government spying, lawbreaking, manipulation of national security claims for secrecy and presidential power, the extreme privileges corporations inside Washington receive -- have been at the very heart of progressive complaints against the Bush era for the last seven years. The type of capitulation and complicity which Jay Rockefeller and Steny Hoyer embraced is exactly what progressives have spent the last seven years scathingly attacking.

All of that magically changed for many people -- by no means all -- the day that Obama announced that he supported this "compromise," when these issues were suddenly relegated to nothing more than inconsequential, symbolic distractions, and complicity with Bush lawbreaking magically morphed into shrewd pragmatism. It's the same rationale that the dreaded Blue Dogs have been using since 2001 to justify their complicity which is now pouring out of the mouths of Obama defenders (we need to win elections first and foremost, and can only do that if we don't challenge Republicans on National Security and Terrorism).

the test: Kucinich Introduces Impeachment Articles Against Bush

Anyone who does not support this measure is a fascist. I mean this seriously and literally. The true measure of where the US as a country is is now before the House.

Link: t r u t h o u t | Kucinich Introduces Impeachment Articles Against Bush.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush late on Monday during a speech on the House floor.

Better to serve the country

Currently, there's a lot of attention to Scott McClellan's new book, particularly his statements about the media.

The mainstream media didn't live up to its watchdog reputation. "If it had, the country would have been better served."

This has all the 'news value' of most of what passes for news these days (although this term 'news value' could be part of a more interesting discussion affiliated with use value, exchange value, shock value, surplus value such that 'news' is purely a type of commercial indicator/qualifier). Who denies the fact that the msm failed totally and miserably in the run up to the Iraq war?

Nonetheless, there might be more to McClellan's statement. Namely, he might be understood as telling us something about the Republicans' understanding of the media and the Democrats (and their unholy union, the liberal media). The Republicans fight like vicious attack dogs because they presume antagonism. They presume political warfare, political struggle. The failure of the Democrats and of the msm is to hold up their end of the struggle.

Since the Nixon administration, a staple of the Republican position has been an antagonistic position vis-a-vis the press. We forget this because of Reagan's teflon coating, but that criticism didn't stick doesn't mean is wasn't leveled. The Republican premise, though, is of a fight with the media so they wage it as best they can. When the media just gives in, roles over, sucks up, accepts its terms, goes to bed with it and all that, then they don't have a struggle.

The same holds for the Democrats. The last eight years of Democratic rolling over and pissing themselves has been frightful. The Republicans should be sending them flowers "we couldn't have done it without you!" But their premise is of course not unity but fight, fight to the death (of the Democrats). Again, that the Democrats have fallen for it, and the pathetic acceptance that 51 is not a majority in the Senate is but one example here) simply means that they have been beaten. The Republicans have played a political game that somehow the Democrats have not understood themselves to be playing (and Kennedy's brain tumor is a sign that we may be losing the last Democrat who knew what was going on but was smart enough to play this game and to govern--get legislation through--at the same time).

McClellan's comment tells us about the Republicans. Their game has been premised on the presence of adversaries also out for blood. But the media and the Democrats gave up, gave in, and didn't play. And it seems, then, that maybe the Republicans were a little shocked and little over their heads when they got what they wanted and more. They needed adversaries, barriers. Victory doesn't taste like much when one's opponents don't put up a fight. So really, they were served up the country without much spice or flavor.

It could have been better served.

Message force multipliers

The true highlight of the statement of the obvious news of Pentagon-organized and defense industry profitting former generals shilling for the Bush administration by pushing for war with Iraq and lying about military 'progress' there is the notion of 'message force multipliers.' It's a wonderful insight into the politics of drive in the circuits of communicative capitalism.

The term can be accented in at least two ways: the force multiplication of messages or the multiplication of message forces.

The force multiplication of messages seem tres militaristic, like adding lots and lots of forces, sending in more and more troops. It's like spam for television (and this is not the same as propaganda; the term isn't useful in an add of constant media, ever present advertising, unavoidable spin). And, what makes it particularly great is that it is spam that is requested, "please, sir (Mr. Bush), I want some more!" It's the ultimate perverse relation to media, wherein the msm are positioned so as to ask to be bearers of the regime's message, they want to be its tools, its instruments. They are the means/medium for it, after all. That's their role, instruments/media for disseminating messages. Force multiplication makes them all the more effective. It enables them to better do what they do, better to serve man (citational gesture to old "Twilight Zone" or "Outer Limits" episode).

But the multiplication of message forces may be even better. This suggests a concrete awareness of the affective dimension of media in communicative capitalism. Of course, the Bush administration has excelled in excepting itself from the signifying aspect of language and relying instead on affective. It knows full well that repetition exerts a force, a compulsion, that it has effects independent of any meaning of what is repeated. The impact comes from the repeating.

Likewise, the Bush administration knows how to tie together seemingly stable meanings in ways that rely on these meanings, disrupt them, and generate affects from the tension surrounding the combustion of meaning and non-meaning. One of the most noticed early examples of this was the term "axis of evil." John Stewart mentioned another term last night "non-Iraqi terrorists responsible for 9/11." At any rate, the idea of multiplying message forces is useful because it fully acknowledges that the message is the carrier of a force, an affective force. The goal isn't just 'getting our message out there.' That's so old school, as if people read, think, consider, and understand. The goal is spreading and intensifying the message force. The generals were excellent vehicles for this spreading and distributing. Message force genbots.

A horrible list

1.   Climate change. I read the NYT magazine today. One of its reminders--that US gas mileage is pathetically worse than that in Japan and the EU. That the structure of our communities around driving is killing the environment. It may be that little nudge that pushes me to start a vegetable garden although I hate gardening. There are good reasons for this: I will be changing my practices, decreasing my carbon footprint, all that stuff. But I'm really doing it because I think that the society is so close to the abyss that I need some skills and some kind of provisions for the calamity to come.

2.    Economic collapse. With no Soviet Union to keep it in line, capitalism has accelerated and intensified unbearably. I can't get over the fact that 50 hedge fund managers (combined) made over 20 billion dollars this year. And that the numbers of workers making 20 dollars or more an hour has declined to levels below where they were in the seventies. The greed is mind-boggling. The 'oh well, there's nothing we can do' attitude is unbearable. There has been a massive counter-revolution in the US since the 70s, brought on by finance capital, its corporate allies, and conservatives in the wake of the unrest of the 60s (this was what makes Reagan so popular, the not quite human face of counter-revolution in the guise of greed is good and sex is bad). And the thing is, people have gone for it, swallowed what was screwing them whole. Cheap credit, tons of consumer goods, constant entertainment and socially acceptable prescription drugs. Who needs economic equality when we've got You Tube? We are all creative. We entertain each other and let the rich take more and the environment collapse.

3.   That the Bush administration will get away with torture (waging aggressive war, undertaking illegal surveillance). How could the NYT have ignored the White House torture story for more than a week and then only produce one editorial on it? The editorial was pathetic, saying things like we need more information and we won't get the information and using the Orwellian euphemisms for torture promulgated by the White House. Isn't it their job to dig up this information? Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats are pathetic, too weak and spineless (and I include both presidential candidates here) to call for resignations, press for indictments, and all the rest (maybe if folks had been giving each other blowjobs in the Oval we'd have a case...). The sickness will fester, continuing to kill the Constitution until it rots away completely (or is just the building blocks of children's toys Agamben evokes). Do we have anything to offer in its place?

Addition: Global food riots, shortages, and massive price increases, the flipside of American obesity (think corn syrup).

Anything goes

I've been in a muddle over the Yoo business, particularly in connection with the defense of war criminals I mentioned yesterday. Part of the problem is I can't formulate the problem.

On one hand, there is the decline of symbolic efficiency. Anything goes. Any interpretation is possible. The administration asserts success in Iraq as the media say failure. The president says economy is strong as economists say it's the end of the world. The situation is actually worse than 1984 because of the presence of multiply contradictory claims: it's not that people receive one message that is false. It's that we receive multiple messages that intersect, clash, overlap, inflect, permeate, undercut, and support each other. Anything is possible. Really, it's no wonder that Clinton has repeated her Bosnia story over and over; she's repeating the political pattern of the last eight years.

Paul has written a paper on Yoo that I read, in part, as rendering Yoo emblematic of the current situation (I hope Paul will write some posts here or at Long Sunday about it). In Yoo's hands, the Constitution can be read as allowing for absolute executive power and torture if the president decides torture is necessary.

Similarly, the video I linked to yesterday (This is what justice requires) features victims of torture describing not only how they were tortured, but the fact that they were arrested and held on nonexistent charges. Particularly chilling, though, is something barely hinted at in the video: that this is the core of the defense of the former head of the Chilean secret police. Apparently, he is charged with "permanently disappearing" people. But there is no such crime in Chilean or international law. Victim and torturer are identified and this identification enables a switch such that the torturer is now the victim.

On the other hand, Jack Balkan says, wait a minute, the legal system always involves competing positions:

Lawyers can make really bad legal arguments that argue for very unjust things in perfectly legal sounding language. I hope nobody is surprised by this fact. It is very commonplace. Today we are talking about lawyers making arguments defending the legality of torture. In the past lawyers have used legal sounding arguments to defend slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, rape (both spousal and non-spousal), Jim Crow, police brutality, denials of habeas corpus, destruction or seizure of property, and compulsory sterilization.

Likewise, the program my former student was involved in was one working to bring the adversarial legal system to Chile. In an adversarial system, the bad guys are entitled to a defense.

The Balkan passage above fudges the matter with the phrase "legal sounding" language. It's not the case that arguments defending slavery, Jim Crow, etc simply sounded legal but were not. Rather, they were legal at two levels: as established law (for a while) and as allowed for in an adversarial system. The more complex part seems to be the latter: the way the adversarial system relies on the repetition of arguments the adoption of which would destroy it. These arguments aren't exceptions. They are the Constitutional fuel.

Balkan argues that the system as a whole can withstand bad arguments. I'm not convinced, yet, but he might be right. I'm not convinced for at least two reasons. First, the costs of the adoption of the interpretations offered by bad arguments are very high. The system might survive, but it survives as an unjust system. Second, viewing system survival as a happy outcome seems to presuppose an underlying notion of improvement and progress: slavery was overturned, women can vote, rape is a crime. The notion of language as open and alterable which seems to underpin Balkan's view, though, doesn't guarantee that changes in meaning will be progressive. A system can rot from within and have to have its remnants defeated and dismantled.

Are there limits to the badness or extent of the arguments that are the Constitutional fuel? Are some beyond the pale? Completely destructive with no redeeming value, poisoning all meaning and argument?

War Made Easy

I received a link to the following documentary. It looks very good. Link: War Made Easy

"War Made Easy" reaches into the Orwellian memory hole to expose a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. Narrated by actor and activist Sean Penn, the film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations.

Huckabee as Laibach

Huckabee is the best thing that could happen to the Democrats. He can split the Republicans, rupture the ideological consensus on which the party has relied. How? By taking them at their word.

The Republicans have claimed to be pro-life, family values, Christian. They have claimed that the evangelicals are a crucial element of their governing coalition. Huckabee believes all these claims and takes them seriously. He says, yes! We are evangelical Christians and this means that we have care for life from conception beyond death into eternity!

The cynical Republican establishment rubs its eyes, confused. What do you mean? You can take this values stuff seriously! What about our money? What about our wars?

The sincere, believing Huckabee, by identifying with their words, forces the obscene supplement to the fore--the  Republicans have to distance themselves from their own slogans and claims, their compassion. They try to stain him with the l-word, liberal. But that's a hopeless gesture.

Does this mean that leftists should support Huckabee? Of course not. It means that the Republicans can destroy themselves and that leftists should pursue the hard task of bringing something new into being (a task perhaps made a bit easier by the fact that over 40% of the people in the US claim to want major, substantial change).

Sorry losers

Link: Senate GOP Blocks $50 Billion War Funding Package.

Senate Republicans yesterday blocked Democrats' latest effort to end the Iraq war, rejecting a $50 billion military funding package that would have required President Bush to begin withdrawing U.S. troops.

    The 53 to 45 vote in favor of the bill fell seven short of the 60 votes needed and signaled that the contours of the war debate, now nearing its first anniversary, have barely changed. An alternative GOP proposal, which would have provided $70 billion with no strings attached, was rejected outright, 53 to 45.

Yesterday on NPR I heard one of these Republicans criticize the Democrats' initiative as sending the message to the troops that they are "losers." The tone of his statement indicated that he thought that there is something deeply wrong in sending such a message, in telling the troops that they are losers. On one hand, he is simply repeating a meme that has been circulating on the Right since the summer. On the other, why this is a problem and what it might mean is worth considering.

Does he mean that the Democrats are making explicit the fact that the war in Iraq has been lost? That they are telling the big Other that it's lost? That even if we know that the war is lost, we have to keep this knowledge secret, prevent it from exerting an effect? His actual remark suggests otherwise--the problem is not that 'we' are losers but that the troops are losers. This doesn't make sense, though. Historically, blame for failed military campaigns is placed on the generals and political leaders, not the troops. So his statement displaces blame from the Republicans/administration/neoconservative militarists onto the troops. They are literally protecting the administration from a confrontation with the truth. They are an occupying force, but they occupy a site of displaced responsibility. To be losers then means to fail to occupy this site and thus to compel the Republicans and the administration to confront their loss and failure.

Maybe he really is worried about the troops. After all, there has been quite a bit of news in the last weeks that could have inflected/conditioned his manner of speaking. 1 in 4 homeless people are veterans. Veterans commit suicide at over twice the rate of the general population. Veterans from the so-called war on terror commit suicide at even higher rates. The Democrats' proposal explicitly involves bringing troops home; if this is what they have to look forward to--unemployment, homelessness, mental illness, suicide--then, yes, the proposed legislation involves ending the myth of heroes and confronting the reality that returning soldiers encounter back in the US.

No wonder the charge of calling the troops losers is so fraught, so intense. They protect the country's way of life: a way rooted in allowing political leaders to avoid accepting political responsibility for the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands, the destruction of societies and economies for the sake of the enrichment of the few; and, a way rooted in the worse forms of neoliberal individualism that allows millions to live in poverty, without basic supports, as thousands consume and accumulate at a heretofore unimaginable scale.

The troops are fighting to support the American way of life--extreme lies, extreme inequalities. Once they no longer occupy this position, both will attack us with overwhelming force, the Real wmds.