Media Bites – Axe sells Sexualized Gender norms for Charity
In this week’s Media Bites we look at a new Axe body products commercial, which passes as a promotional piece for a new Axe charity challenge for college students.
The video invites colleges to participate in a competition to donate clothing, but the images continue to normalize sexualized gender roles and male fantasy. The reality for college campuses is less about sex and more about sexual assault, a fact which will not sell scented body spray.
(This article by Devon G. Pena is re-posted from Dissident Voice.)
Let us begin with a “defining moment,” courtesy of the Oxford World Dictionary:
Commissariat (kɒmɪˈsɛːrɪət)
Definition: chiefly Military department for the supply of food and equipment.
Origin: late 16th century (as a Scots legal term denoting the jurisdiction of a commissary, often spelled commissariot): from French commissariat, reinforced by medieval Latin commissariatus, both from medieval Latin commissarius ‘person in charge’, from Latin committere ‘entrust’
How does this relate to the news cycle? Well, on January 20, Wal-Mart announced plans to reformulate the ingredients of their in-house or private brand processed foods. An estimated 60 percent of the company’s annual grocery revenues are currently tied to the sale of processed food items. It is therefore expected that this formula change will place pressure on other private suppliers to follow suit.
This is perhaps the single most significant news story emerging in the corporate agrifood business sector with implications for food sovereignty and food justice movements across the world. Indeed, the company is touting its plan as a response to Michelle Obama’s call on the agrifood industry to clean-up its act of poisoning our nation’s children with highly processed foods. She has specifically called on companies to reformulate processed foods by reducing sugar, sodium, and fat content. Apparently, the company is making much of its efforts to listen to critics.
Wal-Mart executives announced they plan to reduce the sodium content of processed foods by a quarter and eliminate all added sugars across many selected items in their private brand lines of processed foods by 2015. They also announced a plan to eliminate all remaining trans-fats in their private brand lines. These would include items like luncheon meat, yogurt, salad dressing, and juice and soda products. Of course, critics — including Marion Nestle — already note that these reductions will still largely result in unhealthy amounts of sodium and sugar in processed foods. The reformulations will still exceed the recommended daily intake of these additives by 50 to 70 percent when seen in the context of three meals per day.
The First Lady has also been calling for increased access by all consumers to fresh fruits and vegetables. This is widely seen as representing an effort to mobilize support to address the role that “food deserts” play in the nation’s unequal geography of hunger and malnutrition in both urban and rural areas. The social science community has been studying food deserts at least since Robert Gottlieb first used the term in a 1996 report prepared for the University of California Transportation Center on strategies for food-related transportation in low-income, transit-dependent communities. Food deserts can be defined as residential areas that lack grocery stores, farmers’ markets, or other places where residents may shop for – or grow their own – fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, and other unprocessed foods. Food deserts are characterized by a preponderance of cheap and unhealthy fast foods or mini-market and convenience stores that sell processed foods at inflated prices. Finally, food deserts are also typified by a lack of privately-owned cars and limited public transportation. There is no easy way to get fresh healthy food to the mouths of the people living in a food desert.
Wal-Mart’s plan includes changes in new store locations that would allow it to operate in urban core or inner-city neighborhoods that are currently harmed by food desert conditions. There has been widespread opposition, at least in Southern California, to the opening of ‘mega-stores’ in the inner-city. The ecological footprint would have to be greatly down-sized for these stores to become acceptable in many communities. The Wal-Mart supply chain would seek to source and stock more local fruits and vegetables. How it will do this and also address social justice concerns of farm workers and the protection of endangered small farms with heritage and heirloom crops remains unclear.
Wal-Mart stores are predominantly located in suburban or rural areas and, according to my own estimates, their current revenue from sales of fresh fruits and vegetables relies on national or globalized commodity chains for at least 80 percent of all perishable fresh foods on their shelves. Over the past 2 to 3 years, Wal-Mart has featured ‘local foods’ as seasonal niche products in some stores including one in Alamosa, Colorado that I have personally visited. The past two summers (in 2009 and 2010), that store was selling English peas produced and supplied by organic acequia farmers from the San Luis, Colorado area located about 45 miles away. Locally-sourced corn, potatoes, Mexican calabacitas, and other seasonal vegetables are also sold at the Alamosa store.
Wal-Mart executives clearly want us to see their plan as an honest and thoughtful effort to address the geography of environmental racism in the agrifood system while turning as much as possible to local sources and suppliers. They claim to recognize the disparate nature of the conditions in food deserts and thus aim for policies tempered by the fact that food deserts are predominantly located in low-income and/or people of color communities.
Several critical issues are at stake in making sense of the Wal-Mart plan to reformulate processed foods and transform its supply chain toward more local sourcing of fruits and vegetables as well as meat and fish. One issue is differential access to fresh food and commodity prices. Marion Nestle noted in a recent NPR interview that the price of processed food has decreased by 40 percent since 1980 while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent during the same period.
How Wal-Mart goes about cutting prices for fruits and vegetables, reversing the trends of the past thirty years of marketing and sourcing, is also a puzzle. What will this mean for small farmers? What is local? What about social justice? None of the proposals in the plan addressed the continued exploitation and suffering of marginalized farm worker communities or the survival of small family farmers. Moreover, no matter how serious and honest Wal-Mart may be in pursuit of this initiative, the sort of change required will have to occur in other organizations that shape, constrain, and control the agrifood system. First and foremost is the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which must expand its commitment to shifting from global to local food systems. This would require radical restructuring of the subsidy, research, rural development, resource conservation, credit market, and other facilities in its purview that will be reauthorized in the 2012 Farm Bill.
Yet even this is not the end of the story. Food and nutrition are important, but eating and dietary practices are constrained and shaped by cultural practice and social class position. We need, in short, a paradigm shift — one that recognizes that having access to fresh fruits and vegetables will not mean much if no one is around to prepare, serve, and share the food. We may do well to recall that so-called ‘convenience’, ‘processed’, and ‘fast’ foods were developed because capitalism intensified and expanded the labor time it demands from workers and consumers. ‘Power’ lunches are not a proletarian perk. Like a black hole, capital bends and warps the gravity of our living time, converting as much of it into working time that produces profit. Capital seeks to trap all our time inside the singularity of work time. Escaping that singularity must be a principle of a well-grounded movement for food sovereignty.
There are many reasons to remain constructively engaged yet skeptical of these efforts. Wal-Mart’s plan in the long term must eliminate processed foods altogether and it must downsize individual store footprints. My strongest objection, frankly, is that the last thing the democratic and grassroots food sovereignty movement needs is for Wal-Mart to become the centralized Local Food Commissariat. Local sourcing of food is a good principle, but it matters who controls the process. It also matters how the process is organized; namely, whether it is top-down or bottom-up. Increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables in food deserts and low-income communities is also a good principle, but many of these are working-poor families in which parents have to work two or three jobs just to avoid homelessness.
Lacking living-wage jobs and affordable transit options, when are working poor parents to find time and resources to shop for fresh ingredients when they still can’t afford to prepare wholesome meals for their families on a daily basis? Too many of these are single-parent families, mostly headed by women in such circumstances with multiple jobs and marginal earnings. The demands of the local food movement are insufficient as the basis for any sort of deeply transforming and wider reorganization of the nation’s political economy of food and agriculture. We need to be asking ourselves: How do we create an economy where people do not live to work but work to live? In other words, how do we create an economy where people have the option to work less and play, pray, learn, cook, and share the table to eat together more?
Living-wage and 35-hour work week laws may help to resolve this problem by making it possible for people to work at single well-paid jobs instead of wasting their lives trapped in 60+ hours a week spread over three menial part-time and low-paying jobs that still keep families at bare subsistence. If people can earn a just, living wage, this may reduce the length of the work day and week, creating more free time and opportunities for people, including those families trapped in food deserts, to enjoy local shopping, cooking, and conviviality. Is not freedom from work the necessary precondition for people to enjoy sharing wholesome food at the dinner table with their loved ones and friends?
The path away from food deserts must also run along the road toward economic justice and workplace democracy. The goal of food sovereignty is ultimately not possible without these other values. Wal-Mart’s plans to moderately improve their food quality and become the Local Food Commissariat may yield some benefits, but they do not appear poised to achieve genuine food sovereignty.
The local branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is calling for solidarity with farm workers this Friday by supporting the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) campaign.
FLOC has been engaged in a campaign to get people to divest from JP Morgan Chase banks because of their financial support for the tobacco giant RJ Reynolds. The campaign is based upon the working conditions and wages of workers who are employed on tobacco farms in North Carolina.
According to FLOC the work conditions are horrendous, where workers are subjected to long hours, harassment at work, abject poverty, miserable housing in the labor camps and denial of basic labor and human rights conditions. FLOC also states, “Adequate shower and laundry facilities are often lacking, making it difficult to wash off pesticide residue. Each year, thousands of workers suffer from Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS), which is caused by a high level of nicotine absorption through the skin. Short term effects include dizziness, nausea, and dehydration, which can lead to more serious health problems such as heat stroke.”
Tobacco giant RJ Reynolds makes at least $2 billion a year in profits, but those profits do not translate into just wages for migrant workers who pick the tobacco. FLOC has been pressuring the company for over a year, with a campaign that includes targeting the tobacco giant’s largest financial lender, JP Morgan Chase.
We reported last June at the US Social Forum about a protest march in Detroit where members of FLOC and supporters went to the main branch of JP Morgan Chase to demand that they discontinue doing business with RJ Reynolds until the workers demands are met. JP Morgan Chase bank is the lead bank in a consortium of Reynolds American creditors, lending Reynolds American $489 million in funds.
The divestment campaign that FLOC initiated on Labor Day of 2010 is asking people to not bank with JP Morgan Chase bank. Many people have already pulled their accounts with JP Morgan Chase bank, but FLOC states that more people need to divest from the bank in order to put enough pressure on Reynolds America.
The Grand Rapids branch of the IWW will be one of 200 actions across the country this Friday, February 4 as a show of solidarity with farmworkers fighting for justice in North Carolina. IWW spokesperson Shannon Williams said, “We are participating in this action because the IWW believes that an injury to one is an injury to all. It is important for workers to act in solidarity with other workers when they are being exploited.”
The IWW plans on being at the 1100 Michigan Avenue branch of the JP Morgan Chase bank in Grand Rapids from 4:00pm til 5:30pm this Friday. They are inviting anyone to join them with signs and they will be handing out an informational flyer to bank customers during their solidarity action.
Indy News & Analysis on popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia
What is happening in Egypt and Tunisia is both inspiring and instructive for those of us who live in the US. It is inspiring in that is shows the power of social movements and political struggle from the ground up.
People in Egypt and Tunisia are taking great risk to challenge both the current power structures and to advocate for what kind of a future they want for themselves and their children.
These social uprisings are instructive in that this is a moment in which people in this country must come to terms with US policy in the Middle East. Is it common knowledge that the US has provided Egypt with $2 billion dollars in military aid every year since 1979 (making Egypt the 2nd largest recipient of US aid behind Israel)? Do we know that the US government has been supporting the Mubarak regime in Egypt for decades, despite consistent human rights violations?
These kinds of basic questions or background information are not part of the reporting from most commercial news agencies in the US. In fact, these same media outlets often defend the dictatorship in Egypt and the US support for that dictatorship.
However, the amount of independent reporting from both Tunisia and Egypt has been amazing. Independent journalist Robert Fisk, who has been doing some of the best reporting from the Middle East for 30 years, is reporting daily from the streets of Cairo. His most recent article is entitled Egypt: Death throes of a Dictatorship.
Democracy Now! has been providing sound analysis for several days now and also has a reporter on the ground in Cairo, with an excellent report entitled The Rebellion Grows Stronger. Al Jazeera has also been provided excellent up to the minute coverage of the uprising in Egypt, despite the efforts of the Egyptian government to shut them down. The Institute for Public Accuracy has also compiled a list of good online resources, particularly Facebook and twitter feeds.
Al Jazeera reports that the Egyptians are calling for a million people to come to Cairo to protest the government regime. These kinds of actions are infectious and are providing inspiration to people around the world.
GVSU Student Organized Solidarity Action this Wednesday!
Locally, students at GVSU have organized a solidarity action at the Allendale campus on Wednesday, February 2nd from 10am – 2pm. The students write, “A free Egypt is the key to justice throughout the Arab world. Come join students and stand in solidarity with Egypt and other countries in political unrest to raise awareness about the international and historical significance of the struggles of the Arab world.”
For some good analysis of US Policy and the current uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia watch this interview with Phyllis Bennis on The Real News Network.
The Importance of Relational Organizing: a workshop at GVSU
Yesterday Suzanne Pharr & Paulina Hernandez facilitated two sessions on importance of organizing as part of a series of workshops and forums that the LGBT Resource Center at GVSU is hosting over the next several months.
Both of the women talked about coming from 2 different places and histories of the south. Paulina, who is an immigrant from Mexico and Suzanne, who grew up in the rural south both work with Southerners on New Ground (SONG). Both of them talked about how they identify in terms of race, gender and sexuality and why that is important for doing organizing work.
SONG originated in 1992 at an LGBT conference and began with an emphasis on inter-sectionality. Inter-sectionality is the idea that issues like race, gender, sexual orientation and class inter-sect and that people who organize for social justice need to constantly understand this and make the connection apparent in order to deepen the transformative power of social justice work.
One of the first questions that SONG tackled was around economics and class issues, because people felt like there was too casual of an assumption about LGBT folks when it came to economic issues.
When they started there were 3 White and 3 Black lesbians. You could not be a part of the leadership of the leadership team as a White lesbian unless you had a history and track record of anti-racist work. They decided early on that they did not want to just work on homophobia, but to include racism, classism and other anti-oppression factors.
This work had two main strategies. First, they would bring people into the conversation in order to prepare people for doing organizing work, within the LGBT community. Part two of their strategy was to then work with civil rights groups to get them to partner on and work towards LGBT justice, which would not only transform those organizations, but create a greater possibility of larger alliances and movement building.
Some of this work involved the making of music and art, since they believed that you can’t do social justice organizing without cultural organizing. Part of their work was to fight against the propaganda of a film from the Right that was trying to divide the LGBT community and the Black community, claiming that the LGBT community was asking for “special rights” that were won beyond the black community.
When Clinton was elected in 1992, they began to explore the issues of economic justice in the south, which they knew very little of. They brought in people to do some training and then began to do cross border education by taking people to see the maquiladoras in northern Mexico near the US border.
The next project was held at the Highlander Center to see what the LGBT community saw as primary issues. What they discovered is that gay marriage was way down the list and issues like jobs and other economic justice issues were more of a priority for most people.
As they were planning for their future, the Katrina disaster happened, which radically changed where their emphasis would be. They asked themselves a question, which was what do you all wish that SONG had in place the day before Katrina? Overwhelmingly, people said that they wished they had 100 organizers. Thus the rebuilding of their organization began.
Paulina said that one thing the organization realized is that what has happened with Katrina and the BP oil spill is that disaster capitalism takes advantage of undermining the economic structures of the south. In contrast, what people in the south are increasingly desiring is for groups and organizations to develop as autonomous entities. One manifestation of the autonomy is for people to organize where they are instead of migrating to the cultural centers of power such as Atlanta.
The demographic changes in the south have determined some new focus and strategic work around the idea of space. The first space that SONG identified is Capitalism. They believe this is where we all are no matter what we do, we are all living in the midst of a Capitalistic system and all of its negative consequences. The second space is doing the anti-oppression work that reacts to the realities of this system of Capitalism. However, it is not enough that we just fight this system. We can’t remain in a reactionary mode. Therefore, the third space that Paulina and Suzanne talked about is asking the question of what do we want, what is our vision of the world we want to live in. This third space incorporates new language and ideas about what we want and what we are going to do, especially around long-term movement building strategies.
The other main area that was discussed was looking at organizing models. Suzanne presented four models: Alinsky style organizing, electoral organizing, moral organizing and relational organizing.
Many people are familiar with the Alinsky style of organizing, which can be confrontational but very effective in terms of organizing people who are most disaffected with the current economic system. Another model of organizing is Electoral organizing, where the goal is to mobilize as many people as possible to turn out and vote. The problem with model is that after people vote they are often left with little direction and in many ways encouraged to just go about their business and let the politicians take care of things.
A third model of organizing is what they called Moral organizing. Moral organizing is when people organize around the principle of trying to get others to change by appealing to a sense of morality. People even use moral organizing in order to appeal to people in power such as CEOs and politicians with the thinking that if you can get them to see the moral wisdom of their actions that can get them to change.
The final model that the presenters discussed was what they called Relational organizing. Relational organizing comes out of movements such as the anti-rape movements, where people who have been victims of rape came together to challenge male violence against women because of their common experience. These women would tell their stories about oppression as a means to connect.
Once those relationships are established people can then identify commonalities and analyze root causes of their oppression. People will then identify where change might be possible, do education and outreach and eventually develop a strategy. Once a strategy is developed people will share skills to meet those strategies and take collective action. The presenters also emphasized the importance of evaluating the group actions, reflect on those actions and talk about what worked and what didn’t work and why. Once evaluations have been done the group can then move to the next strategy.
Both Suzaane and Paulina shared with the group that we need to do this work outside of the traditional non-profit models, since these models are too connected to Capitalism and often has those of us at the grassroots level competing for the same limited financial resources.
More importantly, the presenters stressed that in doing anti-oppression work we need to do it with a sense of joy and love. Suzanne cited Dr. King’s essay The Beloved Community and the importance on doing this work with a sense of joy and love for each other. She also cautioned us against political purity and said that it is important to see that none of us are perfect and that every step we take towards liberation is a liberating step.
The Grand Rapids Press Editorial Board’s Position on Haiti and Other “Unwelcome Distractions”
It seems there is a possibility someone on the Grand Rapids Press’ Editorial Board read this writer’s recent article on the mainstream media’s terrible coverage of recent events in Haiti, and mistook the list of criticisms for a how-to manual. This writer is well aware the obvious middle-school come back to this is “Don’t flatter yourself, Joe.” The obvious response is “I guess it is asking a lot of a newspaper to research an editorial before they publish it when ads don’t sell themselves.”
If the few responses on MLive’s message board are at all indicative of the level of real information the Press is able to convey to its readers, it is clear the editorial piece published on January 26, titled “What we need to do to help Haiti recover” is just the latest in a legacy of misrepresenting the situation in Haiti; this type of misrepresentation contributes to a media chorus supporting American apathy and ambivalence to tragedies in places lake Haiti that range from desecration of democracy to economic degradation to a degree that forces terrifying habits like diets dedicated to geophagy.
Before earthquakes or hurricanes even enter the picture, Haiti and discussions concerning it all have real and potentially terrifying consequences for the Haitian people. Answering questions about Haiti’s economy can effect how many Haitians starve to death while eating cakes of dirt to not feel their insides eating themselves. Talking about who is allowed in the country’s borders and what parties are allowed to run in elections ultimately will determine whether or not the world’s first successful nation-wide slave revolution has been reversed.
With so much at stake it is disconcerting to see Mlive.com’s commenters posting things like :
“They” the Haitians need to learn to help theirselves and quit begging like dogs for a handout…that doesn’t do anything but go to a bunch of corrupt mobsters running things in that country. “
and:
“Personally, I would withhold all aid until Haiti changes its constitution to aid a resolute protection of private property rights. With a strong protection of private property, Haiti will eventually climb out of its poverty and be able to fund hospitals and culturally-specific schools all on its own.”
The Grand Rapids Press is not solely responsible for either the ignorance or the borderline to blatant racism displayed by the people that comment on MLive’s forums, but the tragedy lies in the realization that these opinions are not far from the narrative the mainstream media has been spinning since Baby Doc’s return brought Haiti back into the news cycle’s spotlight. The easy story for the media to perpetuate is all Haitian Presidents are kleptocrats, that all aid to Haiti is tossed into a furnace of corruption, and that the free market and privatization can save the country. The problem is not all Haitian Presidents are created equal, neither is all aid, and parceling up the land and selling it off only results in foreign corporations owning all of the land and expropriating all of Haiti’s goods and resources at the expense of the already poor Haitian people.
Upon Jean-Claude Duvalier’s return to Haiti less than two weeks ago, this writer analyzed some of the initial media coverage available concerning this event. While that article is linked here, the quick version is the media has made some crucial mistakes in its overall coverage of Baby Doc’s return. The Media treats Haiti like it did not exist before the Earthquake. The Grand Rapids Press demonstrates this in the most cliché way imaginable in the first line of their editorial: “A year after a massive 7.0 earthquake, pain, suffering and death remain realities for Haitian children and families.“
As a corollary to the media’s story of Haiti’s non-existence prior to last year, Baby Doc’s history as a promoter of torture, rape, murder, drug running, intimidation, thuggery, and stealing from aid marked for the poor gets glossed over as he is simply referred to as a “dictator” or “ex-president.” If his crimes are at all mentioned, they are in terms of him stealing money from aid funded by U.S. and European interests, or delivering drugs that harmed American streets. The G.R. Press calls Duvalier a “dictator” and an “unwelcome distraction.” Calling the return to Haiti of a man who ordered the Ton-ton Macoute to execute hundreds if not thousands an “unwelcome distraction” is an unwelcome moral disgrace. Glossing over the crimes he committed is an attempt to avoid uncomfortable questions concerning the support given to him and his father by the Nixon and Reagan Administrations under the guise of combating global communism.
The other corollary is former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide gets either ignored, or grouped with Jean-Claude Duvalier and rapidly dismissed. The G.R. Press does the latter and calls Aristide’s potential return an “unwelcome distraction” as well. This helps the Press ignore over a decade of U.S. meddling in Haiti that at every point championed the interest of corporations and global Capitalism at the expense of real democracy and the lives of the poorest citizens of one of the poorest countries in the world. Baby Doc is not Aristide. Aristide is widely popular among almost all Haitians, and was democratically elected in fair elections multiple times, yet the U.S. is blocking his return to Haiti, while giving the murderer, Duvalier, a wink and a nod. This writer can not determine which is worse, the fact that the G.R. Press used the phrase “unwelcome distraction” as a euphemism for “rape, murder, drug running, and torture,” or the fact that the Press grouped a democratically elected liberation theologian with that torturing, drug running, murderer.
When the editorial board declares: “The (Haitian) people deserve a legitimate, effective government to ensure a better future.” immediately after blowing off any chance at Aristide’s return, they are ignoring events that happened less then a decade ago, like the 2004 removal of Aristide from the Presidency at gunpoint by U.S. agents authorized by the Bush Administration. (See Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup) This writer can think of no reason why the Editorial Board of the Grand Rapids Press would find it necessary to comment on a situation in a foreign country like Haiti, but lack the will to follow through with a total reporting of the facts.
Yes, it goes against the mainstream media narrative to say a Haitian leader like Aristide was actually a force that promoted wonderful things like democracy, and the U.S. hasn’t always been the best help to the people of Haiti in terms of their human rights and economic well-being. But, the job of an independent press, especially in an editorial situation where more leeway is given to express an individual (and, ideally, well-informed) opinion, is not to continually go over the same knots on the counting rope. Those who get their news from independent media have no problem getting access to knowledge like the enormous differences between Baby Doc and Aristide. Why does the Press’ Editorial Board refuse to present those easily obtainable facts to its readers?
New Media We Recommend
Below is a list of new materials that we have read/watched in recent weeks. The comments are not a “review” of the material, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these books are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.
All Labor Has Dignity: Martin Luther King Jr., edited by Michael Honey – This book is a collection of speeches that Dr. King gave over the years that focuses on economics and labor issues. Many of them are being made available to the public for the first time. The editor does an excellent job of providing some context to each of the speeches, many of which gave before labor groups and working class people fighting for economic justice. The speeches are divided into three themes: the importance of a labor/civil rights alliance, challenging the racism within the labor movement and the Poor People’s Campaign. The book even includes a CD with audio recordings of Dr. King’s speeches. All Labor Has Dignity is an important contribution to reclaim the radical Dr. King.
Mountain Justice: Homegrown Resistance to Mountaintop Removal for the Future of Us All, by Tricia Shapiro – Beyond the information about the ecological and human health consequences of mountaintop removal, this book provides readers with stories an solid documentation about the campaigns being wage against this environmental catastrophe. People who read this book will no doubt be inspired by the actions of people from the Appalachians and those who have come to stand with the locals to fight against one of the most insidious forms of corporate plunder in recent decades within the US. Must reading for anyone who thinks that direct action is ineffective.
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, by Ira Katznelson – When people hear the phrase affirmative action they often associate it with policies put in place in the 1960’s that were designed to provide greater opportunities for women and people of color. However, as the author of When Affirmative Action Was White so eloquently documents, the federal government in the US didn’t start affirmative actions in the 60’s, they began in the 1930’s. Katznelson argues that many of the New Deal policies and particularly the GI Bill were designed to provide greater benefits to Whites, while often excluding racial minorities. An important contribution into the history of institutional racism in the US.
Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968 (DVD) brings to light one of the bloodiest tragedies of the Civil Rights era after four decades of deliberate denial. The killing of four white students at Kent State University in 1970 left an indelible stain on our national consciousness. But most Americans know nothing of the three black students killed at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg two years earlier. This scrupulously researched documentary finally offers the definitive account of that tragic incident and reveals the environment that allowed it to be buried for so long. It raises disturbing questions about how our country acknowledges its tortured racial past in order to make sense of its challenging present.
Media Bites – How Children Influence Adult Spending
In this week’s Media Bites we look at a series of ads, which are part of a campaign for the Toyota Highlander. The campaign uses child actor Riley Thomas Stewart to sell the company’s new line of SUV’s.
This ad campaign uses a child to pressure parents to purchase products based on what is cool. According to the documentary Consuming Kids, children under the age of 12 influence adult spending to the tune of $700 billion a year and this campaign is just one example of how influential children can be in adult consumer spending.
Newsweek and Grand Rapids: Who get’s asked the question?
First, I want to say that I am not a fan of Newsweek Magazine. Newsweek is fundamentally an elite publication that acts as an apologist for the US government and for the economic elites in this country.
Their story about the Top 10 Dying Cities in the US is not an exercise in journalism, rather it is a statistical play on words. Using census figures to make determinations about the quality of a city can be useful, but it is most certainly incomplete.
Having said that I find it interesting how people have responded to the Newsweek story and what evidence they use to refute the idea that Grand Rapids is a dying city.
Grand Rapids Press Business reporter Julia Bauer responded on January 21st to the claims of Newsweek by listing “evidence” at the bottom of her article showing that Grand Rapids was alive and well. The list included – DeVos Children’s hospital, Laughfest, ArtPrize, ticket sales at Van Andel arena, museum ticket sales and Meijer Gardens.
On Monday, the GR Press ran a follow up story where they sought responses from people in Grand Rapids who disagree with Newsweek’s assessment. The story cited GR Community Foundation President Diana Sieger, the creation of Facebook pages challenging the magazine’s claim and a video interview from WZZM with a local hotel manager.
The Monday Press story was accompanied by a photo gallery providing more evidence that Grand Rapids is thriving. The photos were all of downtown Grand Rapids except for a picture of the Meijer Gardens and the re-developed Kent County Airport.
Yesterday, the Press ran another story based on a letter that Mayor George Heartwell send to Newsweek, which was read at the Tuesday morning City Commission meeting. In his letter Heartwell cites as evidence that the city is alive and well items such as ArtPrize, the new JW Marriot hotel, the 92 downtown bars & restaurants, Van Andel arena events and all the LEED certified buildings in the area.
While all of this response certainly speaks to new development projects, entertainment opportunities, the “medical mile” and restaurant options it is interesting that virtually all of the responses deal with downtown Grand Rapids and not GR neighborhoods.
However, a more important point that I think is worth making here is who gets asked to respond to the claims made by Newsweek? The people who are cited in the Press articles are people who are privileged, both in terms of money and status. We hear from the Mayor, the JW Marriot manager and the President of the GR Community Foundation.
In contrast, what sort of reaction would one get if the Press had sought out the voices of people who live in the Black Hills neighborhood of Grand Rapids or the Senior Citizens housing center on Division and Delaware? What would happen if working class families and individuals who work two jobs to make ends meet or people who are facing home foreclosure were asked what they thought about the Newsweek article? How about the people standing in line at the unemployment offices or those who use the services of the soup kitchen?
The question is not so much is Grand Rapids a dying or thriving city, rather who is thriving and who is being left behind?
“We need to stop this culture before it kills the planet” – A conversation with Derrick Jensen
(This interview between Mickey Z. and Derrick Jensen is re-posted from Dissident Voice.)
As you begin reading this interview, take a look at the nearest clock. Now, dig this: Since yesterday at the same exact time, 200,000 acres of rainforest have been destroyed, over 100 plant and animal species have gone extinct, 13 million tons of toxic chemicals were released across the globe, and 29,158 children under the age of five died from preventable causes.
Worst of all, there’s nothing unique about the past 24 hours. It’s business as usual, a daily reality—and no amount of CFL bulbs, recycled toilet paper, or Sierra Club donations will change it even a tiny bit.
As you do your best to convince yourself of the vast chasm between the two wings of America’s single corporate party, I suggest you listen carefully to hear if even one of the politicians mentions any of the following:
Every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic
Eighty-one tons of mercury is emitted into the atmosphere each year as a result of electric power generation
Every second, 10,000 gallons of gasoline are burned in the US
Each year, Americans use 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides
Ninety percent of the large fish in the ocean and 80 percent of the world’s forests are gone
Every two seconds, a human being starves to death
This is just a minute sampling, folks, and sorry, but your hybrid ain’t helping. That reusable shopping bag you bring to the market has zero impact. Your home composting kit is not gonna start a revolution.
In fact, even if every single person in the US made every single change suggested in the movie An Inconvenient Truth, carbon emissions would fall by only 21%—in contrast to the 75% emissions decrease that scientific consensus believes must happen…now.
None of this, of course, is news to Derrick Jensen. He is the author of essential works such as A Language Older Than Words and Endgame. His worldview has nothing to do with party politics, incremental reform, leftist in-fighting, corporate compromise, or anything that seeks to tweak but ultimately maintain the ongoing global crime we call civilization.
“My loyalty,” he told me, “is with the nonhuman and human victims (or targets) of this culture, and my work is toward stopping this culture’s assaults on nonhumans, on the land, on the planet itself, on women, on indigenous peoples, on the poor.”
If you’ve grown weary (and wary) of the entrenched Left and all the words left unspoken, you owe it yourself to read the rest of our conversation below. Afterwards, you just might start realizing that you also owe to the planet to get busy.
Our exchange took place during the week of January 17 and went a little something like this…
Mickey Z.: We’re starting this conversation as another MLK Day is observed. Not much of a chance that we’ll hear this Dr. King quote—”The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be”—mentioned much by the corporate media, huh?
Derrick Jensen: Just today I read an article stating that, no surprise, industrial-induced global warming will be far worse than estimated, and if carbon emissions continue as expected, could render much of the planet uninhabitable within 100 years. Even now, 150-200 species are driven extinct every day. This culture extirpates indigenous peoples. The oceans are being murdered. And today I saw a study of rates of fire retardant in every fetus. And on and on. And yet those of us who are working to stop this planetary murder are sometimes characterized as extremists.
I think the real extremists are the people who value capitalism over life, the people who value civilization over life. I cannot think of any more extreme position than valuing this insane culture over life.
MZ: Not surprisingly, another major African-American figure from the 1960s—Malcolm X—had some positive words for extremism in the name of toppling that insane culture. Using Hamlet as a springboard, Malcolm wrote:
Hamlet) was in doubt about something—whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—moderation—or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built and the only way it’s going to be built with—is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone—I don’t care what color you are—as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.
DJ: I think the key has to do with wanting to change this miserable condition.
I try to be fairly inclusive of the people I would work with, but I’ve realized over the past many years that I’m not working toward the same goals as many of the environmentalists who are explicitly working to save capitalism or to save civilization, rather than the real world. In talks and interviews I often ask what all of the so-called solutions to global warming or the murder of the oceans, or biodiversity crash, etc, all have in common. And what they all have in common is that they all take industrial capitalism as a given, and the natural world as that which must conform to industrial capitalism. That is literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. I mean, look at Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0 to Save Civilization. What does he want to save? Could he be any more explicit? He wants to save civilization. But civilization is killing the planet. It’s like writing a book about how to save a serial killer who is murdering so many people he’s running out of victims. We see this attitude all the time. When people, for example, ask how we can stop global warming, they’re not asking how we can stop global warming; they’re asking how we can stop global warming without changing the physical conditions (burning oil and gas, deforestation, industrial agriculture, and so on) that lead to global warming. And the answer to that question is that you can’t. Likewise, when they ask how we can save salmon, they aren’t really asking how we can save salmon, they’re asking how we can save salmon without removing dams, stopping industrial logging, stopping industrial agriculture, stopping industrial fishing, stopping the murder of the oceans, stopping global warming, and so on.
A question I keep asking is: with whom (or what) do you identify? Where is your loyalty? Whom, or what do you want to save? And if what you really want to save is this “miserable condition”—capitalism, civilization, what have you—at the expense of the planet, then we’re not really working toward the same goal, are we? My loyalty is with the nonhuman and human victims (or targets) of this culture, and my work is toward stopping this culture’s assaults on nonhumans, on the land, on the planet itself, on women, on indigenous peoples, on the poor.
MZ: It’s a testament to the power of propaganda how even well-meaning folks will choose the options—both public and private—that work against their own interests. Gay rights activists are currently applauding the alleged repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In the name of promoting diversity and inclusion, they are celebrating the ability to volunteer for an institution that exists to violently crush all diversity and inclusion.
The conditioning is so interwoven throughout every aspect of our culture that even respected Leftist thinkers simply cannot comprehend your comment, “civilization is killing the planet” and resort to retorts about “misanthropy.”
So, the question must be asked, Derrick: Can these people be reached with the message that we can’t have industrial capitalism as a given without all the murderous side effects?
DJ: There’s a great line by Upton Sinclair about how it’s hard to make a man [sic] understand something when his [sic] job depends on him not understanding it. I think that’s true even more for entitlement. It’s hard to make someone understand something when their entitlement, their privilege, their comforts and elegancies, their perceived ability to control and manage, depends on it.
So much nature writing, social change theory, and environmental philosophy are at best irrelevant, and more often harmful in that they do not question human supremacism (or for that matter white supremacism, or male supremacism). They often do not question imperialism, including ecological imperialism. So often I feel like so many of them still want the goodies that come from imperialism (including ecological imperialism and sexual imperialism) far more than they want for these forms of imperialism to stop. And since the violence of imperialism is structural—inherent to the process—you can’t realistically expect imperialism to stop being violent just because you call it “green” or just because you wish with all your might.
Here’s another way to say this: as I say in Endgame, any way of life that requires the importation of resources will a) never be sustainable and b) always be based on violence, because a) requiring importation of resources means you are using more of that resource than the landbase can provide, which is by definition not sustainable (and as your city grows you’ll need an ever larger area to harm); and b) trade will never be sufficiently reliable, because if you require some resource (e.g., oil) and the people who live with or control that resource won’t trade you for it, you will take it, because you need it. It’s inherent. One of the many implications of this is that if you don’t question imperialism itself, the solutions you present will be absurd, and either irrelevant or harmful.
Here’s a story. A couple of weeks ago a tree fell down in a storm and knocked down an electric wire in this neighborhood. My neighbor told me about it, and when I saw the downed tree I looked and looked and looked for the stump, to see where the tree came from. I couldn’t find it. I’ve looked again every time I’ve gone by that place. Well, today I was walking and I saw where it came from. The top of a big tree had broken off. It was really obvious when I looked up instead of down. Point being (instant aphorism): You can search as thoroughly as is possible, but you’ll never find what you’re looking for if you’re looking in the wrong place.
This applies to everything from personal happiness to solutions to global warming.
But the problem is worse than mere entitlement. RD Laing came up with the three rules of a dysfunctional family:
Rule A is don’t.
Rule A.1 is Rule A does not exist
Rule A.2 is Never discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A.1, A.2
This is as true of dysfunctional cultures as dysfunctional families. So we cannot talk, for example, about the fact that this culture is only one way of living among many, that this way of living is based on conquest and the acquisition of power, that this way of life systematically destroys landbases, other cultures, and on and on. Systematically, functionally.
But it’s worse than this. In the 1960s a researcher attached electrodes to people’s eyeballs to track where they looked, and then showed them pictures. What the researcher found is that if the photo contained something that threatened the person’s worldview, the person’s eyes would not even track to it once: they would evidently see it out of the corners of their eyes, and know where not to look. So far too often you can make the point as reasonably as you can, and the person will have no idea what you are talking about.
MZ: Considering the glacial rate by which most humans – myself very much included – recognize and address destructive or self-destructive patterns in their personal life, it’s difficult to imagine a lot more humans allowing their eyeballs to focus in on global crises and their obscured causes. High Noon is approaching and it seems most of us don’t even know how to tell time.
Speaking of High Noon, I recently watched the classic 1952 film and found myself focused on the moment when Amy (Grace Kelly), the pacifist wife of Marshal Kane (Gary Cooper), shoots and kills a man to save her husband’s life. Earlier in the film, Amy had declared: “My father and my brother were killed by guns. They were on the right side but that didn’t help them any when the shooting started. My brother was nineteen. I watched him die. That’s when I became a Quaker. I don’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. There’s got to be some better way for people to live.”
However, she not only ends up shooting a man, she also fights off the main villain, which allows Marshal Kane to finish him. Now, before some readers run and tell Gandhi on me, what I’m proposing as the lesson is that when faced with the clarity a crisis can sometimes inspire, we can recognize that those clock hands are inching towards noon and surprise ourselves (as Grace Kelly’s character did) with our ability to take things to a new level.
If not, what chance do we (the animals, the trees, the eco-system, etc.) have?
DJ: Very little chance. Even if people don’t care about nonhumans, recent estimates are that billions, literally billions, of humans will die in what is beginning to be called a climate holocaust. This is if the temperature rises 4 degree Celsius.
And the most recent estimates are revealing that global warming is far worse than previously believed (have you ever noticed how the previous estimates were always low?), and could go up 16 degrees C within 90 years, rendering much of the planet uninhabitable (“Science stunner: On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter—Paleoclimate data suggests CO2 ‘may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models’”). This means that there are young people now who will die in this climate holocaust. And there are too many people who prefer this wretched, destructive way of life over life on the planet, and literally over their own children. We need to stop this culture before it kills the planet.
MZ: Although I feel there’s way too much hand-holding in the realm of activism and far too many progressives sitting idle as they wait for a leader to give them direction, I must ask you this: What types of immediate direct action might you suggest to those reading this interview, in the name of stopping this culture before it kills the planet?
DJ: I think the important thing is that they start doing some form of activism. I can’t tell people what to do, because I don’t know what is important to them and I don’t know what their gifts are. But the important thing is that they start. Now. Today.
So how do you start? The problems are so huge! Well, the way I started as an activist was the result of the smartest thing I ever did. When I was in my mid-20s I realized I wasn’t paying enough for gasoline (in terms of including any of the ecological costs, etc), so for every dollar I spent on gas I would donate a dollar to an environmental organization (never a national or international organization, but rather local grassroots organizations), but since I didn’t have any money I would instead pay myself $5/hour to do activist work, whether it is writing letters to the editor or participating in demonstrations. My first demos were anti-fur demos and anti-circus demos. And don’t let your perceived ignorance stop you: I had no idea what exactly was wrong with circuses, but I knew they were exploitative of nonhuman animals and so I showed up, and other people handed me signs. If anyone asked me, What’s wrong with circuses? I just pointed them to the person standing next to me. I went from there to other forms of activism, including filing timber sale appeals, and so on. The point is that I started. At the time it cost $10 to fill my tank with gas, and if I filled it once a week, that meant two hours per week. And I started having so much fun with the activism that I stopped keeping track of how many hours I was doing activism, and just did it. But the important thing is that I got off my butt and started doing something.
It’s also important that when people do activism, that it not simply be personal stuff: environmentalism especially has gone down the dead end of lifestylism, where people think that changing their own life is sufficient. Just today I read an article that said, about water, “First of all, turn off the water when you don’t need it. It’s that simple. I don’t want to sound too preachy, but, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, lack of access to clean drinking water kills about 4,500 children per day. The water won’t magically travel from our taps to someone in need, but creating a mind-set of conservation will certainly help. There is absolutely no purpose served by letting water you are not using run down the drain.” This is just absurd. Yes, lack of access to clean water kills 4500 children per day, but it’s not because of my own water usage. 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. So all these environmental pleas for simple living are tremendous misdirection: these children (and what about the salmon children, and the sturgeon children, and so on) aren’t dying because I brushed my teeth: they’re dying because agriculture and industry are stealing the water. Just yesterday I read that Turkey is sacrificing all nature reserves to put in dams. This is not so people can have showers. It’s for agriculture and industry.
I live pretty simply, but that’s because I’m a cheapskate. I turn off the water while I brush my teeth, too. Big fucking deal. That is not a political act. There are no personal solutions to social problems. None.
So when I say that people should do some activism, I mean do something good for your landbase. Stop destructive activities. Do rehabilitation. Or if your primary emergency is violence against women, then do work against domestic violence, or against pornography, or against the trafficking in women. Get started.
Like Joe Hill said, “Don’t mourn, organize.”
MZ: I like to tell people that we live in the best time ever to be an activist. We’re on the brink of economic, social, and environmental collapse. What a time to be alive. We can take part in the most important work humans have ever undertaken. How lucky are we? In this era of “hope and change,” I say action is always better than hope. Or, as Rita Mae Brown said, “Never hope more than you work.”
DJ: Yes, I get so tired of people saying they hope salmon survive, or hope this or hope that. But what is hope? Hope is a longing for a future condition over which we have no agency. That’s how we use the word in every day language. I don’t say, “Gosh, I hope I put my shoes on before I go outside.” I just do it. On the other hand, the next time I get on a plane I hope it doesn’t crash. After I get on the plane I have no agency. Think of this: if a parent says to an eight-year-old child, “Please clean your room,” and the child says, “I hope it gets done,” we all know that’s ridiculous. I asked an eight-year-old what would happen if she said that to her parents, and she said, “Someone has to clean the room!”
That kid is smarter than a lot of environmentalists. It’s ridiculous to say we hope global warming doesn’t kill the planet when we can stop the oil economy that is causing global warming. I’m not interested in hope. I’m interested in agency, and I’m interested in people no longer waiting for some miracle to solve their problems. We need to do what is necessary.
MZ: When you first began writing and speaking about civilization and the eventual collapse, did you ever truly imagine that you’d be around to see things as bad as they are right now?
DJ: No. And even though I wrote in The Culture of Make Believe about the ways in which economic collapse can lead to more and more over brownshirt-ism and fascism, I’m still kind of stunned at the way it is happening here. But more to the point, even though I’ve written something on the order of fifteen books about this culture’s insanity, I still cannot believe this isn’t all a bad dream, with this frenzied maintenance of this culture as the world is murdered. I keep wanting to wake up, but each time I awaken this culture is still killing the planet, and not many people care.
MZ: I’m sure you can’t even calculate how many times you’ve been interviewed but I’m wondering if there’s a question you always wished you’d been asked but so far, no one has done so. If so, by way of wrapping up, please feel free to ask and answer that question.
DJ: Four questions:
Q: You’ve said many times that you don’t believe that humans are particularly more sentient than other animals. Where do you draw the line?
A: I don’t draw the line at all. I don’t see any reason to believe anything other than that the universe is full of a wild symphony of wildly different voices, wildly different intelligences. Humans have human intelligence, which is no greater nor less than octopi intelligence, which is no greater nor less than redwood intelligence, which is no greater nor less than flu virus intelligence, which is no greater nor less than granite intelligence, which is no greater nor less than river intelligence, and so on.
Q: How did the world get to be such a beautiful and wonderful and fecund place in the first place?
A: By everyone making the world a more beautiful and wonderful and fecund place by living and dying. By plants and animals and fungi and viruses and bacteria and rocks and rivers and so on making the world a better place. Salmon makes forests better places because of their existence. The Mississippi River makes that region a better place because of its existence. Bison make the Great Plains a better place because of their existence.
Civilized humans do not make the world a better place because of their existence. They are collectively and individually making the world a less beautiful and wonderful and fecund place. How can you make the world a better place? What can you do to make the landbase where you live more healthy, more beautiful, more fecund? And why aren’t you doing it?
Q: What will it take for the planet to survive?
A: The eradication of industrial civilization. Industrial civilization is functionally, systematically incompatible with life.
The good news is that industrial civilization is in the process of collapsing.
The bad news is that it is taking down too much of the planet with it.
Q: So if industrial civilization is collapsing, why shouldn’t we just hunker down and make our lifeboats and protect our own, and basically take care of our own precious little asses?
A: I would contrast the narcissism and cowardice of this attitude with that expressed by Henning von Tresckow, one of the members of the German resistance to Hitler in World War II. When the Allies invaded France in 1944, anybody paying any attention at all knew that the Nazis were going to lose: it was just a matter of time. So some members of the resistance suggested that they stop working to take down the Nazis, and instead just protect themselves until the war was over, basically hunker down and make their lifeboats and protect their own. Henning von Tresckow responded that every day the Nazis were killing 16,000 innocent civilians, so basically every day sooner they could bring down the Nazis would save 16,000 innocent civilians.
There is more courage and wisdom and integrity in that statement than in all the statements of all the craven lifeboatists put together.
Between 150 and 200 species went extinct today. They were my brothers and sisters. It is not sufficient to merely hunker down and wait for the horrors to stop. Salmon won’t survive that long. Sturgeon won’t survive that long. Delta smelt won’t survive that long.
Here’s another way to say all this. I would contrast the narcissism and cowardice of the lifeboatists with the attitude expressed by my dear friend, and the person who really got me started in environmentalism, John Osborn. He has devoted his life to saving as much of the wild as he can, through organized political resistance. When asked why he does this work, he always says, “We cannot predict the future. But as things become increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure that some doors remain open.” What he means by that is that if grizzly bears are around in 30 years they may be around in fifty. If they are gone in 30 they are gone forever. If he can keep this or that valley of old growth standing, it may be standing in 50 years. If it’s gone now, it will be gone for a long, long time, maybe forever.
As you said, Mickey Z, we are living at a time when we have perhaps more leverage than at many previous times. Any destructive activity we can halt now may protect that area until the collapse: people couldn’t realistically say that in the 1920s. I believe it was David Brower who said that every environmental victory was temporary while every loss was permanent. I think we are quickly reaching the point where every victory can be permanent.
One final thing: the single most effective recruiting tool for the French Resistance in WWII was D-Day, because the French realized once and for all that the Germans weren’t invincible. Knowing that this culture is collapsing should not lead us into narcissism and cowardice, but should give us courage, and should lead us to defend the victims of this culture.
