Community organizing as interfaith action

A post I wrote as a guest blogger over here.

My new all-time favourite music videos

Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill" Protest Pt 2 from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

On Wisconsin!

What is at stake in the fight in Wisconsin (and, increasingly, other states) is nothing less than the very idea of unionization in America, and thus also of the middle class in America, which will finally be wiped out if unions are. Both unions and the middle class are on the ropes. This may be shaping up to be their last stand.

Two years ago

One Family in Gaza from Jen Marlowe on Vimeo.

I will probably only ever recommend one football movie in my entire life

And this is it.

Equal parts comic and con

Our esteemed former Governor at the Chicago Comic Con: pictures.

Images from Palestine

"Trophy pictures"

Kites

My future

With any luck.

Capitalism and the economic crisis

In 11 minutes, and with fun pictures. This is kind of great.

Non-violent resistance in Palestine

"Budrus" is a documentary about a Palestinian village in the West Bank and its non-violent protest movement against the Wall. I want to see it very much.



More about the film here.

On a related note, here is some of what the Free Gaza Flotilla has sown:

Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that have long battled Israel with violent tactics, have begun to embrace civil disobedience, protest marches, lawsuits and boycotts-tactics they once dismissed.

...

"When we use violence, we help Israel win international support," said Aziz Dweik, a leading Hamas lawmaker in the West Bank. "The Gaza flotilla has done more for Gaza than 10,000 rockets."

...

After the incident, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called on supporters to participate in the next flotilla bound for Gaza. Ghaleb Abu Zeinab, a member of the Hezbollah politburo in Beirut, said it was the first time Mr. Nasrallah had forcefully and publicly embraced such tactics against Israel.

I love this story so much

In the wake of the BP disaster, we've heard powerful stories from fishermen whose livelihoods may have been destroyed for decades or longer. However long it takes for the Gulf's fish, oyster and shrimp harvests to recover, those who've made their livelihoods harvesting them will need to create a powerful common voice if they're not going to continue to be made expendable. A powerful model comes from Seattle and Alaska salmon fisherman Pete Knutson, who has spent thirty-five years engaging his community to take environmental responsibility, creating unexpected alliances to broaden the impact of their voice, and in the process defeating massive corporate interests.

It's a great and inspiring story, with some twists stranger than fiction. Read it.

My kind of Canada Day

In pictures.

A reminder why:

The G20 in Toronto (or: I want my country back)

There's a very thorough account by this guy Tommy Taylor who was arrested while walking home, ended up as a bystander near some protesters, and got thrown into a makeshift detention centre for 23 hours (without charge), all on behalf of the Toronto G20 summit. Unfortunately it's only on Facebook right now. But it is well worth the read if you can access it. It's a very detailed, heart-felt, and ultimately heart-breaking first-person account.

Here he is after about 15 hours in a cell with 39 other people, some peaceful protesters and many bystanders, from diverse walks of life:

I looked around at the screaming men, the scared kid, the huddled couple, the disgusted Germans, the confused old man, the First Nations man who didn't seem surprised at all, the guards laughing, the others dismayed. Thought about the peaceful things I saw at the park, the grandmothers with AIDS orphans, [girlfriend] Kate taken away in handcuffs, the kid with CP [cerebral palsy] roughed up, begging for water and my heart simply broke. That's the only way I can describe it. My beloved country, my city. I looked down at my t-shirt - bright blue with a big white maple leaf and in bold, caps letters below: FREEDOM.

Some of the cops crack nasty jokes. (I think I recognize that behaviour from accounts of soldiers engaged in grim business. It's a defense mechanism.) Others react differently.

The female officer who helped me aids in bringing some watery orange Tang to all the cells. We line up, quietly and broken for our drink. I find out from Kate that this same female officer broke down and cried with the women at their cell. She was sobbing and apologizing "This is wrong, you shouldn't be here. This is all so wrong". There own officers couldn't handle it, she was worn down by the injustices she was being ordered to do. This happened in Toronto.

Across from our cell Special Constable C. Smit, a short white female officer with blonde/brown hair stands guard. We nicely talk with her through the cage. "Please tell us how you can do this? We are begging for water in here. This guy is only 16 and this guy passed out. Your co-workers laugh. They are joking to us about our rights and laughing at a disabled kid. You know this is wrong, what's happening" after too much of this, with tears in her eyes she breaks "I don't know anything, no one here knows anything! I'm not even a cop.." she then leaves in a hurry. Madness.

He straggles home, well over 24 hours after being detained.

Kate's waiting outside. We hug and kiss. I'm starving, soaked, thirsty and sore. We go inside, I call my family and my friend Chris. I can't talk long, I just tell them I'm home and safe. Ben's mom hasn't heard from him, he's not answering his phone. We finally hear from him at 1:00am. They detained him and accused him of being Black Bloc. He was still in bright yellow shirt from work. Horrible things happened to him and Kate. I peel off my soaking wet Canada Freedom t-shirt. I throw it on the ground and get a lighter. I want to burn it. I don't.

* * *
Rooftop footage of the police boxing in a crowd including peaceful protesters, Tommy Taylor, his girlfriend, some tourists, some people who were just having dinner, etc., leading to their eventual arrest and detention.



Another group, at Queen & Spadina (the ending is grim):



Same scene, from the rooftop:



Naomi Klein attempts to explain:



In preparation for all of the above, the provincial government flipped the bird at the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, in writing.

* * *
Like Tommy Taylor, I'm also kinda fond of Canada. On the other hand, I don't know from Toronto. But then it hit me that the only thing stopping this from happening in my beloved Vancouver is the scheduling whims of the G20 (or other organizations of their ilk). And I can't say how that realization made me feel without making myself look like a huge sissy.

I just found out a friend of mine went through the same thing when the OAS met in Windsor in the 90s.

Combined with Quebec Bill 94, this has been a bad year for keeping up with news from back home.

Tomorrow is Canada Day. In a couple weeks I leave for Vancouver. It's not going to be the same.

We are all BP

The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is horrific beyond words. But just when you thought your heart was broken, you find out it's not done breaking. There are greater horrors still.

Because the Deepwater Horizon disaster is not very special.

The only thing that really makes it special is the fact that America is there. And that means the world, and in particular the American part of the world, is paying attention. And for this reason the shattered, ruined Gulf should count itself lucky.

HOLY SHIT, PEOPLE.

In fact, more oil is spilled from the [Niger] delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month.

[...]

"We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US," said Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International. "But in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments. The Gulf spill can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening daily in the oilfields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa.

"This has gone on for 50 years in Nigeria. People depend completely on the environment for their drinking water and farming and fishing. They are amazed that the president of the US can be making speeches daily, because in Nigeria people there would not hear a whimper," he said.

This is the business model of the oil industry. This is how it generates profits: by giving itself the liberty of destroying one part of the planet after the other, and tossing those costs (can they even be measured in dollars?) onto the poor and defenseless. It does so with complete impunity in most of the world. In the Gulf of Mexico, because the Gulf is so fucking lucky, the industry can't ignore the damage it does entirely, due to consequences so dire that they can even cause some annoyance to a CEO.

Further, this is not just the business model of BP, or the oil industry in general. It is the logic of the multinational corporation.

The UN has hired the consultancy Trucost to estimate the costs dumped on the environment by the world's 3,000 biggest public companies. It doesn't report until October, but earlier this year the Guardian published the interim results. Trucost had estimated the damage these companies inflicted on the environment in 2008 at $2.2 trillion, equivalent to one third of their profits for that year. This too is likely to be an underestimate, as the draft report did not try to value the long-term costs of any issue except climate change. Nor did it count the wider social costs of environmental change.

A paper by the New Economics Foundation in 2006 used government estimates of the cost of carbon emissions to calculate the [unpaid] liabilities of Shell and BP. It found that while the two companies had just posted profits of £25bn, they had incurred costs in the same year of £46.5bn.

Finally, this is not just how one part of the world (the corporate part) works. This is not a system which exists somewhere out there. We are a part of it. We are complicit, and committed to complicity.

Whatever the courts may find about BP's culpability the real cause is our demand for oil and our refusal to pay its true price. Right now, everyone in America wants to do something to fight the spill. However, if you suggest that perhaps we should double the price of fuel and use the revenue to rebuild our transportation network, the general response is suspicious silence.

The logic of exploitation is part of our own lives. We depend on these corporations, and so we also depend on the ability to routinely violate creation and humanity with utter indifference. We depend on the ability to devastate a community along the Gulf coast, to bestow upon a pelican a slow death in the muck, to thrust a thirsty Nigerian child's face into a poisoned stream.

Are we not yet ready to change?


Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

The flotilla and the isolation of Gaza

From Amira Hass at Haaretz. The best piece of commentary I've read so far. (Click on her name on the Haaretz site for some other great articles.)

But unknowingly, this flotilla, like its predecessors and the ones still to come, serves the Israeli goal, which is to complete the process of separating the Gaza Strip from the West Bank. The process, it will be said here for the millionth time, started in 1991 and not after the rise of Hamas rule. It's purpose was to thwart the two-state solution, which the world understood at that time as based on all of Gaza and the West Bank, and the link between them.

[...]

And what serves the goal of separating Gaza from the West Bank better than forgetting the sealed the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel, and focusing on Rafah [between Egypt and Gaza] and cement?

Long before Israel prohibited the entry of cement into the Strip, it prohibited Gazans from studying in the West Bank. While it still permitted guavas to be exported from Khan Yunis to Jordan, it forbade Gazans to enter the West Bank even via the Allenby Bridge or to meet relatives and friends. Step by step, Israel developed draconian restrictions on Palestinians' freedom of movement, until it declared every Gazan in the West Bank, now and especially in the future, an illegal alien and an infiltrator. These are the essential prohibitions that must be breached.

Lack of unity has been a constant obstacle to Palestinian emancipation. And what better way to perpetuate disunity than to make contact just plain impossible? Do that, and you needn't concern yourself with the possibility of a peace process.

Wal-Mart teaches us a lesson

It is possible to stop the world's largest public corporation from getting its way all the time.

"A Christian Perspective on Prisons"

Preach!

Getting tough on crime is just another version of an anti-Christian moral code.

[...]

Very simply, as the nation with by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, neither the public nor the mainstream news media wants to know anything about prisons. Prisons are the depositories of our social programming and education failures. "Get them out of our sight."

In the mid-70s, the American middle class began its decline as real wages stagnated and social safety nets were undermined. Coincidentally, the incarceration rate sky-rocketed shortly thereafter.

I love his music, and maybe him, too

The American economy is racist

Thought I'd be blunt about that.

Years of deregulation that led to an increase in high-cost loans is indirectly responsible for the quadrupling of the wealth gap between white and black Americans between 1984 and 2007....

"Our study shows a broken chain of achievement," said Thomas Shapiro, director of the Institute and co-author of the study. "Even when African Americans do everything right - get an education and work hard at well-paying jobs - they cannot achieve the wealth of their white peers in the workforce, and that translates into very different life chances."

More here.

The veiled on the veil

Well, it's been a while, and I've been meaning to put together some more coherent thoughts about it. But Quebec's Bill 94 continues to make me kind of fucking furious whenever I think about it.

Well, anyway. It is a curious fact—I just can't get over it—that those who attack the veil do so on the pretense that they are concerned about the autonomy of the woman who wears it... and yet in almost every case they are pretty much entirely disinterested in actually finding out about these women's lives. So: what about the women in question?

A friend of a friend speaks up about why she recently started to wear the veil, and what that has been like for her. (She does so in response to a truly grotesque attack on the burqa by a group of atheists. The video footage of it almost makes her cry—no doubt part of some clever strategy to empower her to throw off the Islamic patriarchy. I say about all I want to say about this in the comments thread.)

My name is Sayira – I am 21 years old and I recently started wearing the headscarf. I tried to wear it once before when I was a junior in high school. That did not work well for me; part of the reason was because I was treated horribly because of it. Some of my classmates asked if I had gotten married, if I was being forced to wear it, if my father beat me, if I was allowed to do anything on my own, if I had to marry a cousin – the foolish list goes on and on.

...

At this point [returning to the hijab as an adult], I had decided that I wanted to be grow more in my identity. No one forced me: not my siblings, not my parents, not my friends, not anyone in my religion – it was all my choice and mine alone to deepen my relationship with my tradition.

...

To say that all women who wear the headscarf or burka are oppressed is fallacious beyond belief. To say that showing skin is the only way of being free is taking away from the freedom of having the choice to be who you want to be. I can wear the hijib and cover from neck to toe yet still be free. Who is anyone to judge me? If you do not know me and the circumstance of why I cover my hair, how can you say that I am oppressed? Do you imagine that I am some timid woman dominated by male influence? What if I told you that I will be testing for my black belt in Karate within the year; would that change your mind? What if I told you that I will be graduating with a Hospitality Management degree this year, a major I chose all on my own and not something my parents decided for me – would that change your mind?

Well, truth be told, I'm not holding my breath for the mind-changing, but this sort of testimony can't hurt.

Incidentally, Naema Ahmed, the niqabi whose struggles to learn French sparked this whole debacle, is a trained pharmacist. This was reported fairly regularly in media coverage, but it didn't put much of a dent into the popular caricature. (Did her husband make her pursue that career, and maybe also tell her how to answer each question on her exams?)

From the BBC, a niqabi speaks up. She is told she is controlled. However:

Kenza Drider scoffs at any such notion.

Relaxing on a bench in the park in Avignon, the mother of four young children explains how she bought her niqab nearly 11 years ago and did not tell her husband until she put it on to go out shopping with him one day.

"He knew very well it wasn't up to him whether I went out like that," she says, recalling that he merely said "OK, let's go", and she has worn the niqab ever since.

And she says that for women who wear the niqab in France, the majority of them French-born and many of them converts to Islam, "it's a personal decision, it's their freedom" to do as they wish.

I don't know if anyone has done any studies of this (the sample size of niqab-wearers in the west is not exactly large), but I've heard other anecdotal evidence that agrees with this profile of women who wear the niqab in the west. They tend to be born in the west, and are more likely to be new converts. And if anything, they tend to take up the niqab against some level of resistance from the rest of their family, who would rather they dress in a way that sticks out less and would allow the family to assimilate more easily. They do what they do because they think it will be pleasing to God, and (I think often) because they want to make a maximally bold and vivid and in-your-face proclamation of their Muslim identity, in defiance of a society which they see as opposed to that identity (gee, however could they get that impression).

Anyway, as best as I can tell, this situation, where a woman (and convert) asks for advice on how to deal with a husband who resists her desire to wear the niqab, is fairly typical, as is suggested by the advice she receives:

I think before you make the final decision....

Hold on, is that a Muslim woman telling another Muslim woman that the niqab is in fact her decision? Should I be shocked?

I think before you make the final decision, you should sit down with your husband and have an honest conversation of why he does not want you to wear niqaab. Some men have issues with it because they feel their wife will stand out more, or that their family will be critical, or that it may affect your time together when you go out, as doing simple things like eating are more complicated. He may feel that the political situation in your country is such that is dangerous to be identified as a "fundamentalist" Muslim. All these are valid concerns, but as you reply to them you must not become angry or defensive. Understand his point of view and respect it.

Back to Kenza Drider, who has a few things to teach the French about the ideals professed by French society.

"The MPs who talk about liberty, equality and fraternity don't really understand the French Republic," she says back at her apartment in Avignon where, with only family and other women present, she removes the niqab and sets about making dinner for her children.

"Liberty means freedom of conscience, of expression," she says. "Equality means not judging the foreigner and fraternity means the support of French people for a French citizen."

Well, those sure sound like the words of an oppressed women, whom the patriarchy has never allowed to think for herself.

* * *

Well, this is off of the stated topic of this post, but the BBC article also includes this curious opinion from a French feminist:

By hiding your face, Mrs Badinter explains as she sips a small black coffee in her elegant apartment in Paris, you breach the principle of equality.

"She who hides her face is in a position superior to mine," she says. "She sees me but she refuses to reciprocate."

So the veil is either a sign of powerlessness, or an exercise of power—but it's definitely intolerable for at least one of those reasons!

My first May Day

I've been in Chicago for a number of years now, but today was the first time I attended May Day events. Which is a shame. Chicago is the birthplace of May Day, following the 1886 Haymarket Massacre; Chicago was also the location of the first of a series of mass demonstrations in 2006 against HR 4437, which led to the reinvigoration of May Day as a focal point of immigrants' rights activism in the US.

I have never been the biggest fan of these mass protest demonstrations, especially ones (like May Day) which are bound to attract characters of all stripes from the more and the less functional regions of the left. But this one was great.

Arizona did everyone the small favour of passing a bill or two that is not only bad, but simply grotesque. This has kicked the push for real immigration reform into a higher gear, at least for a little while. And so today the Loop was filled with thousands of people who wouldn't normally turn out to a march (by all accounts, this year's march was several times larger than last year's), which drowned out the usual suspects that make these sorts of affairs so painful: fractious socialist sects, "anarchists" making a politically impotent spectacle of themselves, etc. There was fairly good message unity, despite the wide diversity in groups who turned out. So, for example, LGTBQ groups came with their rainbow flags—on flag-poles bearing signs calling for immigrants' rights.

On the issue of immigrants' rights, I have just one thing to add to this old post, to tie in the theme of workers' rights.

You shall not abuse a needy and destitute labourer, whether a fellow countryman or a stranger in one of the communities of your land. You must pay him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets, for he is needy and urgently depends on it; else he will cry to the LORD against you and you will incur guilt. (Deut. 24:14-15)