I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.
When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.
As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.
Jill Abramson, the editor of the paper, disagrees with this assessment. ”In our newsroom we are always conscious that the way we view an issue in New York is not necessarily the way it is viewed in the rest of the country or world. I disagree with Mr. Brisbane’s sweeping conclusions,” she told Politico.
He makes it seem as if it’s a bad thing, also this is the same paper that gives a platform to great progressives voices like David “Turd” Brooks, Nicholas “I couldn’t even be more racist if I tried” Kristof and Thomas “How do I still have a job?” Friedman. Yes that’s sarcasm. I’d rather magazines have a progressive voice than a “Ron Paul” or Tea Party narrative. Jesus.
The New York Times today has a fascinating story of a town in Mexico where women have taken over in an armed occupation. They report that the people of Cheran, in the state of Michoacan, had been harassed by armed, illegal loggers for years:
On the morning of April 15, 2011, using rocks and fireworks, a group of women attacked a busload of AK-47-armed illegal loggers as they drove through Cherán, residents said. The loggers, who local residents say are protected by one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal organizations and given a virtual free pass by the country’s authorities, had terrorized the community at will for years.
Cherán’s residents said they had been subjected to multiple episodes of rape, kidnapping, extortion and murder by the paramilitary loggers, who have devastated an estimated 70 percent of the surrounding oak forests that sustained the town’s economy and indigenous culture for centuries.
What happened next was extraordinary, especially in a country where the rule of law is often absent and isolated communities are frequently forced to accept the status quo. Organized criminal syndicates, like the drug cartel La Familia, created in Michoacán, act like a state within a state, making their own rules and meting out grisly punishments to those who do not obey.
But here in Cherán, a group of townspeople took loggers hostage, expelled the town’s entire police force and representatives of established political parties, and forcibly closed the roads.
The piece goes on to mention the idea of community rule isn’t new to the area. In fact, in the Fault Lines episode above we explored the issue in the neighboring state of Guerrero. (Warning: The show contains some footage that it pretty hard to watch.)
This reminds me of a recent story out of southern Colombia where indigenous people took over a mountain, kicking out both the Colombian military and the FARC.
I’ve covered war for many years. One of the first realities you learn when covering conflicts is that no matter what the fight is for, or where in the world it is, those that suffer war’s horrible effects the most are the people caught in the middle. I now find it heartening that at least in a few quiet corners of the globe that some of those people are starting to take back what should have been theirs all along.
The words on a sign placed in front of President Barack Obama’s campaign office in downtown Oakland by undocumented students who refuse to leave until President Obama’s administration halts their deportations. (h/t: Michelle)
The sit-in is part of a national campaign to disrupt Democratic campaign offices. Protesters want an executive order from Obama halting deportations of young people brought to the country illegally when they were minors.
Students took over Obama’s Denver campaign headquarters in a similar protest last week, sparking a round of sit-ins now erupting in Los Angeles, Michigan and Ohio.
O’Brien, Matt. “Undocumented students occupy Obama’s Oakland headquarters”. Inside Bay Area. 14 June 2012. Web. [source]
I was recently invited by the collective members of Indig-nación; a Spanish language newspaper for the Occupy Wall St. movement, written and edited by Latin@s to create a poster for the the print and online editions of the publication.
I was tasked with creating a poster that would inspire people to mobilze and get out into the streets on May 1st 2012. Occupy Wall Street is urging people around the world to join in on the day of action:
Worldwide, May 1st is traditionally a ‘Workers’ day – a day of Labor Solidarity, and a public holiday. It’s a day to celebrate and march in support of im/migrant rights. In protest against the corruption of the worldwide marketplace, which has led to illegal foreclosures, mass unemployment, low wages, high taxes and a penalization of all those who do not own the ‘99%’ of the world’s resources, and in solidarity with the im/migrant movements of May 1st, we decided to declare May 1st, 2012 a People’s General Strike. Instead of calling upon unionized Labor to make a specific demand (illegal under Taft-Hartley), we are calling upon the people of the world to take this day away from school and the workplace, so that their absence makes their displeasure with this corrupt system be known.
As I reflected on how to best create an image that might galvanize people to action I began to “arm myself with knowledge of the past” by studying historic May Day posters. I finally found one that really caught my attention that was designed by Nikolai Kochergin. Kochergin was among the first artists to start to design Soviet political posters. The poster “I-oe maia goda” (May 1, 1920) has three central figures striding over the symbols of the old regime. Read more here: http://dignidadrebelde.com/blogpost/view/359
The Occupy Movement and the Ethics of Care
From matryoshhka,
In her article for The Nation, Sarah Seltzer discusses an incident in one Occupy movement in Cleveland where a woman claimed to have been raped by someone with whom she shared a tent in accordance with the leaders’ living arrangements. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the leadership of the movement as well as other members distanced themselves from the incident and expressed that they had no role in it and thus were not required to take responsibility for the incident. Seltzer claims that this contributes to an “unaccountable environment” wherein sexual assaults and other misogynistic behavior can occur, and that such an environment greatly inhibits the full and active involvement of women. This situation demonstrates that it is insufficient to consider rights and justice as self-sufficient in ensuring overall well-being and that to remain entrenched in a model that requires only noninterference is to ignore many causes of injustice. In fact, noninterference in this case is harmful and contributes to the neglect and alienation of individuals. It drastically limits accountability and depletes a community of good will and cohesion.
Annette Baier, in the “The Need for More than Justice” alludes to Gilligan and argues that noninterference, particularly for those who are at the disadvantaged end of a power differential, ultimately culminates in neglect and harm of the vulnerable (Baier 246) and in the case of this rape incident, adherence to a system that postulates moral responsibility as basically noninterference had the unfortunate result of mitigating an individual’s access to justice.
This incident might be specific, but Baier would argue that there are omnipresent power differentials, and that the Kantian moral system, in ignoring this, does not acknowledge the suffering that results from these differentials. Baier argues that possessing full rights is not incompatible with suffering and thus they do not provide sufficient safeguards against such suffering. Furthermore, suffering is not always from acute causes such as in the case of the rape incident, but rather such suffering derives from “misery whose causes are not just individual misfortune and psychic sickness but social and moral impoverishment” (245). One example of a delocalized power differential that appeared on the Occupy Wall Street radar was that power differential experienced in instances of racism, colonial power, and sustained oppression. In discussing a prospective mission statement, one proposal was to describe the protesters as members of a singular unified human race that had previously been delineated along ethnic lines. While the sentiment of unity was well-intentioned, some women of South Asian descent rejected this mission statement proposal, because, they believed, unifying the membership in such a way was harmfully artificial. It was harmful in that it dismissed the very real presence of historical racism and colonial oppression that these women felt characterized their experience in an important way. Though the movement was committed to justice, it failed to take note of these relationships and of historical contexts because it was only committed to justice and not to the ethics of care and relationships. Furthermore, there was debate within the movement regarding whether such concerns need even be included in the discourse. Many people felt that focusing on these things divided the movement and impeded the overall solidarity, but many of these women and members of minority groups felt that focusing on these issues was necessary to overall solidarity. Instead of dividing the membership, they felt that they were, in asserting their concerns, merely making the movement equally viable for the diverse membership (Seltzer).
Baier argues that prevailing liberal morality ignores these power differentials and thus places a great disadvantage on some groups. In this case, the pretense of equality veils real inequality and hinders the ability of the group to address these inequalities (Baier 249). The objections of the minority members illustrated that they experienced inequality and that to erase their experiences would be to mitigate their access to equality.
Occupy Economics?
The perfect compliment to the NYT article I linked to yesterday, what’s going on with the C-word?
Concerns about the impact of growing economic inequality fit neatly into a larger critique of mainstream economic theory and its deep faith in the efficiency of markets.
Many unbelievers (including me) insist that we inhabit a global capitalist system rather than an efficient market. Willingness to use the C-word (capitalism) often signals concerns about a concentration of economic power that unfairly limits individual choices, undermines political democracy, generates financial and ecological crises and limits access to alternative economic ideas.
We can’t address these concerns effectively without a wider discussion of them.
Seventy Harvard students dramatized dissatisfaction with the economics profession when they walked out of Prof. Gregory Mankiw’s introductory economics class on Nov. 2, protesting, in an open letter to their instructor, that the course “espouses a specific — and limited — view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.” (Professor Mankiw, a periodic contributor to the Economic View column in the Sunday Business section of The New York Times, discussed the protest in an interview with National Public Radio.)The event prompted online discussion of conservative bias in introductory economics textbooks, including an anti-Mankiw blog set up by Daniel MacDonald, a graduate student in my own department. Prof. John Davis of the University of Amsterdam and Marquette University posted a video arguing that economic researchers, like fish, engage in herd behavior in order to minimize individual risk.
Similar themes were explored at the recent meetings of the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics, a forum for a remarkable variety of dissenting views deploying the C-word. I participated in a session discussing blogs maintained by David Ruccio of Notre Dame, Perry Mehrling of Barnard College, Tiago Mata of Duke University and Tim Wise of Tufts University, as well as an independent blogger, Peter Radford.
At the final plenary session of the conference, titled “Ethics and Economics,” participants discussed an “Economists’ Statement” in support of Occupy Wall Street that has been posted online at Econ4, a new site aimed at popular economics education. As of Nov. 27, the statement had gotten more than 220 signatures.
In other words, let’s talk about Capitalism again as some economists begin to unite with OWS under the “this sucks and we need to rethink some things” flag. Read The NYT blog post here.
h/t: @moorehn [tumblr here]
Occupy L.A. receives offer to decamp: Protesters could get downtown office space and farmland if they leave City Hall.
Los Angeles officials have offered Occupy L.A. protesters a package of incentives that includes downtown office space and farmland in an attempt to persuade them to abandon their camp outside of City Hall, according to several demonstrators who have been in negotiations with the city.
The details of the proposal were revealed Monday during the demonstration’s nightly general assembly meeting by Jim Lafferty, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who has been advocating on behalf of the protest since it began seven weeks ago.
Very interesting offer. What do you think?
Photo: Jim Lafferty, who has been negotiating with city officials on behalf of Occupy L.A., addresses protesters. Credit: Robert Lachman / Los Angeles Times
Let me get this straight, I have the option between sleeping outside on the ground in a roughed up tent that can barely keep the Santa Ana winds at bay or I get a plot of land to farm upon as I please & my own living quarters in the increasingly relevant downtown Los Angeles area?
I’ll take sleeping in a tent in front of city hall every time.
