Entries by Suren Moodliar

Short note: Today, I parsed my way through 2 decades of Globe and Herald coverage of the Boston Water and Sewer Commission in addition to some on the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. Not fun! But some themes seem to repeat themselves: these are public entities with massive responsibilities and oversized mandates; the main instances of media coverage occur in cases of failure; and, the Boston Harbor clean up will be with us for a long time. In the case of the Herald, almost all coverage is simply critical and/or cynical. Howie Carr, as one would expect, has nothing positive to say about these non-private entities... Whiffs of scandal, a burst pipe, a backup...these set fingers flying across keyboards...

To write that Bush's brain is about to retire would be an anachronism: surely it did that a long time ago. Today we read that Karl Rove is about to retire and write a book on the Bush presidency. This is not something that I either welcome or disdain; like other uber-strategists, Dick Morris or James Carville, Rove embodied the amoral ethos that one should win at any cost. Constituencies are simply there to be activated and wielded for the benefit of this or that campaign.

Several election cycles ago, there was a Washington flap over whether or not China was a "strategic partner" of the United States. Echoing old racist language, National Review labelled the Clinton administration's self-characterization of its China policy, "inscrutable." By the time of 2000 US presidential election campaign, candidate George W. Bush rejected the idea of a partnership, framing China instead as a competitor. In a matter of months, with Bush now at the helm of the American government, China and the US were taken to the brink of confrontation over the downing of a US airplane allegedly in Chinese airspace. That was then!

Neither smart nor filled with answers, I humble myself here by thinking aloud about antiwar strategy. I also want to clearly state some of starting points. My first departure point may reduce my readership by half!  It is that masses of people—self-organizing networks and communities—mostly acting independently of the parties remain among the most decisive forces for ending and preventing wars. Yes, masses of people, not well-positioned elites, not savvy strategists, not self-sacrificing organizers, but ordinary folks reacting to their sense of what's right and wrong remain the bellwether.

Writing as someone who has helped organize events that featured Cindy Sheehan, I want to support her declaration concerning the Democratic Party’s relationship to the antiwar project. I also want to extend my sympathy to and express my solidarity with Cindy Sheehan and the tens of thousands of grassroots organizers who are the fabric of the antiwar movement. In reviewing the first wave of responses to the “Resignation Statement” (RS), I have come to ask more questions about the state of our movement.

Earlier today, fretting under the weight of a report that Senator Ted Kennedy was in a meeting with George W. Bush and Republican lawmakers to discuss immigration reform, Kim Foltz and I departed from our usual workday to join a delegation organized by the Anti-Displacement Project (A-DP, Springfield, MA), the Irish Immigration Center and the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition (Boston, MA) to visit with the senior senator's staff. There was a single, consistent theme to the meeting: migrants rights are workers rights. Here's a decidedly idiosyncratic account of the action.

The more than 2 million viewers of Web anthropologist Michael Wesch's "Machine is Us/ing Us" learn that a new blog is born every half second! For Mass Global Action and, no doubt, hundreds of other activist groups, the utility of the blog form as a means of communication and therewith a gateway for challenging the ruling ideas has yet to be established.

On the same day that Mass Global Action joined with nearly 50 other protestors, from the Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, to protest Henry Kissinger and his troupe of war criminals at the Kennedy Library in Boston, we learnt of the death of Slobodon Milosovic. While the death of the Balkan Butcher leaves us cold, we can't help notice the curious symmetry by which the powerful cheat justice. If death was Milosovic's escape, it is the hipocrisy and indifference to international law of the US political establishment that allows Kissinger, Haig, and Clark to go untried for their crimes.

Forget about soaring trade deficits, volatile energy prices, and assorted attempts to inflame religious civil wars! Forget also about the slowest economic recovery in recent US history. Forbes magazine reports that the number of billionaires around the world has soared by 102 to 793! Cumulatively our billionaires are now worth $2.6 trillion. Interestingly, the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) help explain this 15% surge in the numbers.

Not too long ago, anthropologists and other scholars looked to primate behavior to gain insights into human nature. Chimpanzees, assorted other apes and even monkeys, after all, are closely related to human beings and so it was assumed that common behaviors between them and us are probably hard wired into our genes. Feminists soon showed how the selection of species for study was used to justify theories concerning the sexual division of labor. Later, especially as scholars began to merge insights from evolutionary theory and genetics, claiming causal connections between behaviors and "human nature" came to be seen as simplistic at best. Recent studies of capuchin monkeys--whatever intention of researchers--have served to justify the current dominant economic system. Now come 2 chimpanzee studies published in Science (journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) suggest that a propensity for altruistic behavior and cooperation may help explain human evolutionary success!

The $67 billion corporation that cajoled, coerced, bamboozled and otherwise convinced medical establishments and mothers around the world to spurn breastfeeding in favor of risky infant formula, is taking on Franklin County in Maine.

Two recent research notes on immigration, one by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the other by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, provide both immigrant advocates and nativists data to support their causes. MGA, decidedly in the former camp, accepts the data adduced but believes that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the social and policy implications issuing from the numbers.

Amidst the indicments, failed nominations, body counts and tropical depressions, there is little reason from optimism, let alone gloating on the part of the progressive movement. Even in moral defeat, in the normally harsh glare of negative public opinion, the right-wing flaps on... Witness the suspension of Davis Bacon in NOLA, the issuing of vouchers for use at private schools, new initiatives to undermine foreign governments (Iran & Syria), etc. Even with the Bush Administration's failure to provide the necessary resources to strengthening international public health systems, it seems poised to revive the politics of fear with the Avian Flu threat. The surest index of right-wing success and resilience in the face of moral failure, though, is the corporate bottom line.

Here are excerpts from articles on the growing tragedy in the Gulf and New Orleans, LA (NOLA), in particular. At some later date, the American people may do a proper accounting. At that time the delayed responses and aid, the prior and continuing diversion of resources for war, and the context pressures of global warming will have to take their place alongside another matter: the calculated destruction of the public sector. For now however, please see the following selections with links that cover some of the immediate issues.

This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful; it is not aimed at presidents or prime ministers; it was aimed at ordinary working class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christians, Hindu and Jew, young and old, indiscriminate attempt at slaughter irrespective of any considerations, of age, of class, of religion, whatever, that isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted faith, it's just indiscriminate attempt at mass murder…

London Mayor Ken Livingston, 7/7/05

Early in June, a group of Yale behavioral economists published their observations on an experiment involving Capuchin monkeys. Making headlines, of course, was their unexpected and almost inadvertent discovery that a monkey exchanged sex for money. Primary investigator M. Keith Chen clearly lived up to his School of Management billing: "bringing unorthodox tools to bear on problems at the intersection of Economics, Psychology, and Biology."

The Associated Press (6/20/05) has noticed that American undergraduates are no longer see prospects of a high-income job in the tech sector as realistic. This is consistent with Gartner's research showing that 15% of tech workers will drop out of the profession by 2010.