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See also:

• UNESCO: Fight against Racism, Discrimination, and Xenophobia
• SPLC: What You Can Do

The advan­tages of inter­net radio con­tinue on.

They, they always try to blame it on the blacks
But it’s really those in power that stab you in the back Newtown Neurotics, Living With Unemployment

So I’m lis­ten­ing to an older clip from CNN, and I have to say this. To ask George Allen whether he is Jewish or not is a scum­bag ques­tion. The “he’s just a celebrity” excuse is lam­en­ta­bly lame, and I for one got the impres­sion that Arianna Huffington would just as soon the per­son who said it stop help­ing her. However, Ms. Huffington’s defense of the ques­tion as a “test of honesty” — while pass­ing a basic credulity test — does not quite stand up to the exam­ple given by David Frum, that of Clinton’s infi­delity. To my mind, at least, lying about cheat­ing on your wife is at best a few hairs­breadths away from lying about your Semitic her­itage in Virginia, not coin­ci­den­tally because both are done to save your polit­i­cal ass from igno­rant bigots.

Which is the real point about this story: can­di­dates from both par­ties are actively court­ing what amounts to the KKK vote: George Allen calls an Asian-Indian kid a mon­key like it was noth­ing; a reporter outs Allen as a Jew.

It’s the most vile, dis­gust­ing debase­ment of pol­i­tics that I’ve seen in my adult life, and there is no excuse for it. It’s 2006, gen­tle­men, scarcely con­cealed racist crap as an elec­toral strat­egy is like, sooo 1988. As a good friend of mine used to say when con­fronted with that kind of shock­ing, throw­back racism: They still make peo­ple like you?

Apparently so, and they’re still thick as theives in Virginia.

To add a rather quaint, pre-Internets layer to the story, party hacks up here (i.e. the North) are mak­ing hay by paint­ing the other team’s player as a bigot — an obvi­ous embar­rass­ment to their party. So far the Democrats have had bet­ter luck at this than the Republicans, in part because Webb appears to be smart enough to know what “plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­ity” means — have peo­ple not linked to you actu­ally do the dirty work — whereas Allen’s big­otry tends to come out of his own dum­b­assed mouth.

Yesterday, I read Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse. On the one hand, it’s nice to know that I intu­itively under­stood the neo-conservative inva­sion plan and rea­son — the so-called “Plan B” — well enough to describe it as “glob­al­iza­tion by force” in a paper I wrote for a Political Economy course. It’s also nice to know the vaunted-but-ignored State Department plan was, essen­tially, the oil indus­try plan, and not all that much less fan­ci­ful (an “inva­sion dis­guised as a coup that would be over in three days” — sure).

The cli­mate chaos unleashed by find­ing large new reserves would make the mere col­lapse of indus­trial civ­i­liza­tion look like a sideshow bagatelle¹

On the other hand, it’s some­what dis­ap­point­ing to have my belief in Peak Oil skew­ered so expertly. The issue is not so much that I believed in it, but rather that there is so much petro­leum in the world as to make both extreme cli­mate change and fur­ther impov­er­ish­ment of the U.S. poor and mid­dle classes essen­tially inevitable.

I don’t, how­ever, sub­scribe to his hand-waving dis­missal of the petrodol­lar the­o­ries for the inva­sion of Iraq, if for no other rea­son than he does the stan­dard “only on the Internet” shuck-n-jive in lieu of any actual counter argu­ment. Yes, Bush wants to devalue the dol­lar against the Euro. That does not include throw­ing the global econ­omy into chaos by let­ting over three bil­lion dol­lars sit idle each day — or worse, come back to the Federal Reserve as coun­tries dropped their dol­lar cur­rency reserves, no longer requir­ing them to trade oil? Because that is what a switch from the dol­lar to the Euro would entail.

Americans really don’t care about free­dom; they don’t really care about lib­erty; they don’t care about any of that.²

After that, the book reaches into the var­i­ous vot­ing scams which allowed Bush to steal the office, again. It cov­ers quite a bit of infor­ma­tion, from Ohio to New Mexico, from the more mun­danely racist lists of vot­ers to chal­lenge to the more “sexy, Hollywoodish” (the book’s term) machine hack­ing. On page 243, I read the fol­low­ing, from an African American who was ille­gally denied the right to vote in 2000 in Tampa, and would have been again in 2004 had Palast’s film­ing crew not shown up to do a story on him:

I went into the place to vote and I was with my son and there were about 40 to 50 other peo­ple around and I got up there to vote and they told me I was a con­victed felon. I told the young lady that I had never been arrested. I’ve never been arrested in my life. I I was in the mil­i­tary for four years and have been in the med­ical field ever since. You can’t even work for a hos­pi­tal being a con­victed felon… I was in the Persian Gulf War in ’91. It’s pretty screwed up how they did me, but what can I say?

I was upset, I was ashamed — with 40 peo­ple around — it made me feel real bad. And I’m just hop­ing I get a let­ter stat­ing, hey, you can vote again, Willie.

I really feel it was bad for African-Americans — but hey, what can we do some­times? What can we do?

At which point I col­lapsed out of my chair with a colos­sal fuck­ing headache behind my left eye­ball. After lying down for a few min­utes to get my bear­ings back (an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence in itself, BTW), I con­tin­ued read­ing, even­tu­ally com­ing across another cou­ple gems from New Mexico: Governor Bill Richardson (the only Latino gov­er­nor in the U.S.) is the son of a Citibank exec­u­tive and a woman who hails from Mexico City, and the only greater pre­dic­tor of how worth­less your vote is than race is income.

The resis­tance is just wait­ing to be orga­nized³

When this is all finally sorted out, the mid­dle class in gen­eral, and white peo­ple in par­tic­u­lar will have a lot to answer for. It may be us, the younger-types in the work­force today ask­ing for the account­ing. It may be our kids. People will turn back to the last few gen­er­a­tions and ask them: why did you let them get away with all this? Why did you keep your head down, try­ing to not fight them.

We’re all so busy scrap­ing, just try­ing to hang onto our own toys, that they can get away with these kind of colos­sal crimes they’ve been get­ting away with. And while you’re busy try­ing not to get fired, they lynch the black guy next door. And that’s just the progressives/liberals/left.

The self-described “con­ser­v­a­tives” will have more. One thing I don’t want to see, after the fight has been won, is some kind of phony “heal­ing process” where all the bosses get to pre­tend they had noth­ing to do with it — to pre­tend they weren’t right there at the table, waited on by starv­ing peo­ple. Where none of the police can quite remem­ber who was in the K-9 units, and none of the mil­i­tary men can recall who was killing fam­i­lies and rap­ing women in some desert hut, 12,000 miles away.

Ever notice how they never can find the racist cops in those civil rights doc­u­men­taries — the cop who was sic­c­ing the dog on the kid, or the fire­man man­ning the fire hose? That’s what I mean.

1. Robert Newman’s A History of Oil
2. Aaron McGruder, on C-SPAN
3. Ani DiFranco, Millennium Theater

I recently IM’d some­one who sounded inter­est­ing on an unnamed quiz/dating site, and was pleas­antly sur­prised to find some­one who made me feel dumb. Not that feel­ing dumb is good, just that it’s eas­ier to see the next plateau when there’s some­one there wav­ing at you.

Unfortunately, reach­ing that plateau involves track­ing down a par­tic­u­lar essay by Gayatri Spivak, pro­fes­sor of Post-colonial Studies at Columbia University. The essay itself is from 1988 1985, and it’s not on the web anywhere.

Which is the real mes­sage to pro­fes­sors every­where: if you want your writ­ing to be read by peo­ple other than your­self, your col­legues, and your grant com­mit­tees, please put them online, for free. Yes, Chomsky has a cadre of fan­boys to do such things for him (or at least, that’s my under­stand­ing), but he is also prac­tic­ing what he preaches regard­ing the respon­si­bil­i­ties of intel­lec­tu­als. He may have a cushier job than most aca­d­e­mics, but to my mind that sim­ply means that you should spend a few hours a week wrestling with a com­puter instead of, for exam­ple, a kiln or bag­gie of psy­clotrop­ics. Make web design/publishing your hobby until you get decent at it, then put your shit online so any­one with a net­work hookup or a lap­top can read it.

What I’ve man­aged to glean from reviews of Spivak tends to mir­ror my thoughts any­ways. As a bit of back­ground, I was intro­duced to rad­i­cal pol­i­tics through black nation­al­ism and white anti-racism, so what she’s quoted as say­ing regard­ing the essay doesn’t seem to be any­thing open for debate — par­tic­u­larly regard­ing those known within civil rights his­to­ries as “white lib­er­als,” and their inabil­ity to speak for any­one but them­selves. White peo­ple telling every­one else what they need to be doing, osten­si­bly for every­one else’s ben­e­fit. Where have we heard this bull­shit before? (Hint: It’s the same old racist “White Man’s Burden” that under­girded the whole global colo­nial enter­prise.) White rev­o­lu­tion­ists (love that term, Emma) can’t tell every­one else how to run their rev­o­lu­tion. Yeah, no shit.

But any­ways, with­out get­ting my hands on an actual copy of the damned essay, any read­ing I can come up with is just me rant­ing and rav­ing out of my ass, by turn, so to all you pro­fes­sors: put your stuff online so peo­ple like me can grok it, mmmkay?

Seriously, if you got into acad­e­mia for the money, you really fucked up some­where — prob­a­bly in think­ing that some­thing with zero repro­duc­tion cost can (or should) be commodified.