You may have already read this interview of Zinn by Ziga Vodovnik over at the COUNTERPUNCH website, but if not, I thought it worthwhile to post this excerpt:

Ziga Vodovnik: From the 1980s onwards we are witnessing the process of economic globalization getting stronger day after day. Many on the Left are now caught between a “dilemma” – either to work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global capital; or to strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of globalization and that is equally global. What's your opinion about this?

Howard Zinn: I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization. In a certain sense the movement towards globalization where capitalists are trying to leap over nation state barriers, creates a kind of opportunity for movement to ignore national barriers, and to bring people together globally, across national lines in opposition to globalization of capital, to create globalization of people, opposed to traditional notion of globalization. In other words to use globalization – it is nothing wrong with idea of globalization – in a way that bypasses national boundaries and of course that there is not involved corporate control of the economic decisions that are made about people all over the world.

ZV: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once wrote that: “Freedom is the mother, not the daughter of order.” Where do you see life after or beyond (nation) states?

HZ: Beyond the nation states? (laughter) I think what lies beyond the nation states is a world without national boundaries, but also with people organized. But not organized as nations, but people organized as groups, as collectives, without national and any kind of boundaries. Without any kind of borders, passports, visas. None of that! Of collectives of different sizes, depending on the function of the collective, having contacts with one another. You cannot have self-sufficient little collectives, because these collectives have different resources available to them. This is something anarchist theory has not worked out and maybe cannot possibly work out in advance, because it would have to work itself out in practice.

ZV: Do you think that a change can be achieved through institutionalized party politics, or only through alternative means – with disobedience, building parallel frameworks, establishing alternative media, etc.

HZ: If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even now in the US, where people on the “Left” are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals. So I think a way to behave is to think not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of electoral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become strong enough to eventually take over – first to become strong enough to resist what has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to actually take over the institutions.

ZV: One personal question. Do you go to the polls? Do you vote?

HZ: I do. Sometimes, not always. It depends. But I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. Sometimes the difference between two candidates is an important one in the immediate sense, and then I believe trying to get somebody into office, who is a little better, who is less dangerous, is understandable. But never forgetting that no matter who gets into office, the crucial question is not who is in office, but what kind of social movement do you have. Because we have seen historically that if you have a powerful social movement, it doesn’t matter who is in office. Whoever is in office, they could be Republican or Democrat, if you have a powerful social movement, the person in office will have to yield, will have to in some ways respect the power of social movements.

We saw this in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing.

When some people ask me about voting, they would say will you support this candidate or that candidate? I say: ‘I will support this candidate for one minute that I am in the voting booth. At that moment I will support A versus B, but before I am going to the voting booth, and after I leave the voting booth, I am going to concentrate on organizing people and not organizing electoral campaign.’

An excellent interview that should be read in its entirety, especially for Zinn's insight as to how the direct action principle of anarchism has significantly influenced American social movements, such as the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

In regard to the excerpt posted here, Vodovnik has elicited a candid response from Zinn as to one of the most fundamental dilemmas facing an anarchist: when should one participate in existing social structures and processes, such as elections, and when should one not? Apparently, it is only possible to muddle through as best as one can, based upon one's subjective perception of external perils and opportunities, and hope that one does not unintentionally legitimize, and thereby prolong, a system that one hopes to someday transform.

Labels: American Empire, Anarchism, Elections, Neoliberalism

Every now and then, less and less frequently, unfortunately, there are days when you just can't help being proud of where you live. In California, today is one of those days. Earlier this morning, the California Supreme Court released a 4-3 decision to the effect that same sex marriage must be permitted under the California Constitution. Predictably, gays and lesbians responded with tears of joy.

At last, my gay and lesbian friends will no longer be implicitly ostracized as social inferiors because they cannot receive the respect that we show for straight couples. Even so, I can't resist expressing my contempt for Justices Chin and Corrigan. Both dissented on the ground that such a decision should have been left to the voters of California. Indeed, Justice Chin, we should have left it to the voters of California to decide whether people can exclude Chinese people from owning property. Indeed, Justice Corrigan, we should have left it to the voters of this state as to whether women should have opportunities in the workplace equal to those of men. Cowardice is as easily found in the California judiciary as it is within the state's political system.

Finally, on a more personal note, congratulations to Shelly and Ellen, the affection and integrity of your relationship, something that many of us experienced all along, has finally been legally recognized. I remember interviewing Shelly several years ago on KDVS, and she off-handedly did something that must have been difficult. She described how she came out by merely raising her hand to donate $20 to the effort to defeat the Briggs Initiative, a measure that would have prohibited the employment of gays and lesbians as teachers, after being exhorted to do so by Harvey Milk in 1978. That was it, I was out, she said. After the accumulation of millions of other similarly brave decisions, the world changed.

Labels: California, Civil Rights, Same Sex Marriage

I guess that I shouldn't be surprised by anything anymore, but I was taken aback by this article in the Washington Post:

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

"Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac," says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was "dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose," according to an airline crew member's written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards "taking down" a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse's account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, "Nighty-night."

Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 -- the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.

The drugs are apparently administered by nurses hired as medical escorts:

If the government wants a detainee to be sedated, a deportation officer asks for permission for a medical escort from the aviation medicine branch of the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS), the agency responsible for medical care for people in immigration custody. A mental health official in aviation medicine is supposed to assess the detainee's medical records, although some deportees' records contain no evidence of that happening. If the sedatives are approved, a U.S. public health nurse is assigned as the medical escort and given prescriptions for the drugs.

After injecting the sedatives, the nurse travels with the deportee and immigration guards to their destination, usually giving more doses along the way. To recruit medical escorts, the government has sought to glamorize this work. "Do you ever dream of escaping to exotic, exciting locations?" said an item in an agency newsletter. "Want to get away from the office but are strapped for cash? Make your dreams come true by signing up as a Medical Escort for DIHS!"

Perhaps, the drugged detainees should be lucky that they are still alive. An earlier article in this series exposed the frightening lack of medical care provided to detainees:

Some 33,000 people are crammed into these overcrowded compounds on a given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay here.

The medical neglect they endure is part of the hidden human cost of increasingly strict policies in the post-Sept. 11 United States and a lack of preparation for the impact of those policies. The detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But they are not terrorists. Most are working-class men and women or indigent laborers who made mistakes that seem to pose no threat to national security: a Salvadoran who bought drugs in his 20th year of poverty in Los Angeles; a U.S. legal U.S. resident from Mexico who took $50 for driving two undocumented day laborers into a border city. Or they are waiting for political asylum from danger in their own countries: a Somali without a valid visa trying to prove she would be killed had she remained in her village; a journalist who fled Congo out of fear for his life, worked as a limousine driver and fathered six American children, but never was able to get the asylum he sought.

The most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor care and no care, with panic and coverups among employees watching it happen, according to a Post investigation.

The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers.

Federal officials who oversee immigration detention said last week that they are "committed to ensuring the safety and well-being" of everyone in their custody.

Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years. The deaths are the loudest alarms about a system teetering on collapse. Actions taken -- or not taken -- by medical staff members may have contributed to 30 of those deaths, according to confidential internal reviews and the opinions of medical experts who reviewed some death files for The Post.

According to an analysis by The Post, most of the people who died were young. Thirty-two of the detainees were younger than 40, and only six were 70 or older. The deaths took place at dozens of sites across the country. The most at one location was six at the San Pedro compound near Los Angeles.

Immigration officials told congressional staffers in October that the facility at San Pedro was closed to renovate the fire-suppression system and replace the hot-water boiler. But internal documents and interviews reveal unsafe conditions that forced the agency to relocate all 404 detainees that month. An audit found 53 incidents of medication errors. A riot in August pushed federal officials to decrease the dangerously high number of detainees, many of them difficult mental health cases, and caused many health workers to quit. Finally, the facility lost its accreditation.

The full dimensions of the massive crisis in detainee medical care are revealed in thousands of pages of government documents obtained by The Post. They include autopsy and medical records, investigative reports, notes, internal e-mails, and memorandums. These documents, along with interviews with current and former immigration medical officials and staff members, illuminate the underside of the hasty governmental reorganization that took place in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The authors of the series, Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest, imply that these abuses are associated with immigration policies implemented after 9/11. I'm dubious. The predecessor to ICE, the INS, La Migra, was known for its notorious treatment of detainees as well. Consider this New York Times story about beatings at an INS facility in New Orleans in 1999. Or the inhumane conditions of detention described in this 1999 Human Rights First report. Sadly, a lot of Americans, once they have classified someone as illegal, have no concern with how they are treated.

Labels: 9/11, American Empire, Immigration, Sadomasochism

Check out this excerpt from Binoy Kampmark's article about the global food crisis:

. . . A narrative of catastrophe is gradually building – stockpile or perish. The Wall Street Journal (April 25) was one of the first to issue the clarion call: ‘Start Hoarding Food Americans!’ The paper had various suggestions. Stock up on some products – dried pasta, rice, cereals, canned products. Buy them all in bulk to save. Sit the children down give them a good talking to – no, not about the birds and the bees, but about ‘how our generation and the two behind it, screwed their world into a death spiral through greed and predatory capitalism.’

Solutions suggested by such economists as Jeffrey Sachs, somewhat patchy yet desperately needed, are forthcoming: allow easier access for sub-Saharan African farmers to fertilizers; reduce the amount of crops going into bio-fuel development; shore-up climate change policies. Sachs, in his work Common Wealth, also advocates the abolition of states in the face of a crowded planet. But it was state regimes besotted by neoliberal economics that brought us here. They can take us back and remedy the damage. Abolishing them would simply absolve their regimes.

Say what!? Sachs, in his work Common Wealth, also advocates the abolition of states in the face of a crowded planet?? The same Jeffrey Sachs responsible for shock therapy in the Eastern bloc after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Apparently, he's created a new socioeconomic way of evaluating society: neoliberal anarchism. Anyone know more about it?

Labels: Anarchism, Neoliberalism

From the USA Today:

Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

Can't get more obvious than that, can you?

Labels: Barack Obama, Elections, Feminism, Racism. Hillary Clinton

. . . by suppressing the black vote. Killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis just didn't get the job done.

Labels: Barack Obama, Elections, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Racism

Rarely does one come across an article that encapsulates so much of the challenging reality of American family life. The victim, Zachary Caltado, a first grade student at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School in Oakland, suffered a skull fracture after being attacked while waiting for his day care provider after school:

Zachary's father, Anthony Cataldo, is a single father who works as a receiver at a Safeway store in Oakland and has had to take the week off to be with his son.

"We're covering for his salary," said Isaias Dominguez, the store's assistant manager. "We have about 200 employees, and everyone is contributing so he doesn't get penalized for being out.

"I found out what happened this morning, and it's extremely horrible. (Zachary) is a nice kid. A really nice kid."

Zachary was standing in front of the school waiting for a ride on Monday afternoon when, as he tells it, "a fifth-grader picked me up, and he body-slammed me into a tree."

His father said Piedmont Avenue Elementary lacks adult supervision before and after school. That was confirmed Wednesday by Denise Saddler, an administrator with the Oakland Unified School District, who said that at elementary schools throughout the district, only students enrolled in special programs receive supervision.

Assemblyman Gene Mullin, a South San Francisco Democrat who heads the Assembly's Education Committee, said Thursday that he will consider whether a "safe-zone requirement" is needed in state law that would require schools to supervise children for a reasonable period before and after school.

"The fact that they have no adult supervision is troubling, quite frankly," Mullin said. "And if there's a reasonable expectation that youngsters could be in harm's way, it would seem that the school district has some responsibility."

At Piedmont Avenue Elementary, where records show that 97 of the school's 344 children were suspended for violent incidents last school year - nine of which involved weapons - school officials acknowledged that children could be in harm's way.

Saddler said Wednesday that district officials are well aware of the danger.

"We monitor the data regularly," she said. "It's a major concern."

The incident that sent Zachary to the hospital was the third time he had been assaulted at Piedmont Avenue Elementary, his father said.

When Zachary was in kindergarten last year, an older boy spun him around and then let go, the elder Cataldo said. Zachary lost four front teeth and suffered a large red laceration on his chin, a photo shows.

Three months ago, a student kicked Zachary in the stomach, his father said, adding that his complaints apparently fell on deaf ears.

Other parents also are angry about violence at Piedmont Avenue Elementary, according to reviews of the school posted on www.greatschools.net.

"Piedmont has a lot of bullying and violence - my daughter has been a victim on many occasions," an unnamed reviewer wrote in July, adding that it was frustrating that school officials have done little to stop the violence.

Wrote another reviewer: "Bullying and violence is a constant issue."

Meanwhile, Cataldo said school officials did little to protect Zachary after each bullying incident. He said his son recently confided that he'd changed his behavior after being kicked in the stomach this winter.

"Zachary told me that for some time, he'd have to hide in the bushes waiting for his day care provider" after school, Cataldo said. "This really broke my heart."

As police investigate the case, which began with a hospital-room interview of Zachary on Tuesday morning, Cataldo has mixed feelings about the fate of the boy he believes slammed Zachary against a tree.

"Of course I'm mad," Cataldo said, adding that the same boy had tripped a girl from Zachary's day care several months ago. When the girl asked why he'd tripped her, "He punched her in the eye," Cataldo said.

"Obviously, someone's hurting him," said Cataldo, suggesting that any child who goes around hurting other children may be a victim of abuse himself.

"Of course I feel bad, but he hurt my only son. And I'm afraid he's going to hurt someone even more seriously. It's a delicate situation. I definitely believe his parents need to be involved."

Piedmont Avenue Elementary appears to be a school of last resort in the Oakland district, one where your child ends up if you are still standing when the music stops. Once there, getting your child transferred to a safer school is about as probable as escaping a French tropical penal colony.

After all, if school district officials transfer your child, how can they explain not transferring the other 247 students with no record of violence? Of course, as previously reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, the district is now willing to consider whether Zachary should be transferred after Cataldo sought legal representation.

Meanwhile, the state of California is facing a budget deficit in excess of 10 billion dollars, so any solution will require that the parents of the children at Piedmont Avenue Elementary and throughout the Oakland school district organize themselves to protect their children. And, in the meantime, we should all ponder what we could do with all that money being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. Provide funding for school districts to hire security for when the school day ends? Provide resources so that violent children can be encouraged to promptly change their behavior or be removed from schools where they prey upon others? Just a thought.

It is, however, the social dimension of this article that is most compelling, Anthony Cataldo, a single father who works for Safeway, trying to raise his young son as best he can, saddened to hear his son describe how he hides while waiting after school for his day care provider. Despite the attack, Cataldo refuses to demonize the perpetrator, recognizing the possibility that it may be indicative of a broader pattern of abuse.

Labels: American Culture, American Empire, Education, School Violence

From today's New York Times:

Chafing at ties between American intelligence agencies and Ecuadorean military officials, President Rafael Correa is purging the armed forces of top commanders and pressing ahead with plans to cast out more than 100 members of the American military from an air base here in this coastal city.

Mr. Correa — who this month dismissed his defense minister, army chief of intelligence and commanders of the army, air force and joint chiefs — said that Ecuador’s intelligence systems were “totally infiltrated and subjugated to the C.I.A.” He accused senior military officials of sharing intelligence with Colombia, the Bush administration’s top ally in Latin America.

The dismissals point to a willingness by Mr. Correa, an ally of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, to aggressively confront Ecuador’s military, a bastion of political and economic power in this coup-prone country of 14 million people. Mr. Correa’s moves mark a clear break with his predecessors, illustrating his wager that Ecuador’s institutions may finally be resilient enough to carry out such changes after more than a decade of political upheaval.

The gambit also poses a clear challenge to the United States. For nearly a decade, the base here in Manta has been the most prominent American military outpost in South America and an important facet of the United States’ drug-fighting efforts. Some 100 antinarcotics flights leave here each month to survey the Pacific in an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with drug traffickers bound for the United States.

But many Ecuadoreans have chafed at the American presence and the perceived challenge to the country’s sovereignty, and Mr. Correa promised during his campaign in 2006 to close the outpost.

So far Ecuador’s armed forces, arbiters in the ouster of three presidents in the last 11 years, have bent to the will of Mr. Correa, a widely popular left-leaning president who has sought to assert greater state control over Ecuador’s petroleum and mining industries while challenging the authority of political institutions like the country’s Congress.

More specifically:

Still, tensions persist over his clash with top generals, which emerged after Colombian forces raided a Colombian rebel camp in Ecuador last month. The raid against the rebel group, the Marxist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, put Ecuador and its ally Venezuela on edge with Colombia. Twenty-five people were killed, including Franklin Aisalla, an Ecuadorean operative for the group, known as the FARC.

The face-off between Ecuador and Colombia ended at a summit meeting in the Dominican Republic, but it has begun again over revelations that Ecuadorean intelligence officials had been tracking Mr. Aisalla, information that was shared not with the president, but apparently with Colombian forces and their American military advisers.

The leak became evident when video and photo images surfaced in Colombia and Ecuador showing Mr. Aisalla meeting with FARC commanders.

“I, the president of the republic, found out about these operations by reading the newspaper,” a visibly indignant Mr. Correa said last week during an interview in the capital, Quito, with foreign correspondents. “This is not something we can tolerate. He added that he planned to restructure the intelligence agencies to give him greater direct control over them.

Boy, it's not the 1980s down south anymore, is it?

Labels: American Empire, Colombia, Ecuador, Hugo Chavez, Latin America, Venezuela