My review of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times, the crucial new book by James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, is in the new issue of the Indypendent.

“One of the things that’s so exciting about this book is that it comes at a time when the left has largely ceded the white working class to the right. Many of the activists profiled in this book believe that the failure of the white left to build power with working-class whites was a “fatal flaw” that could have changed the course of American history. The right has spent the past 30 years courting the rural working class on issues of individual rights, security and family values, all while building a base that has allowed them to shift the conversation in catastrophic ways. We make a mistake in believing that the Tea Party speaks for all poor whites — but that’s why we need Hillbilly Nationalists so badly. This book digs up a long and vibrant history of radical working-class resistance that we can still tap into if we understand it better.”

There’s an impressive Flickr Archive of funny signs from this weekend’s Rally/ies to Restore Fear/Sanity.

And I think they’re amazing, hilarious, awesome, etc. ”Up With the Mild-Mannered Majority.” “Impeach Churchill.” “OMG SNAKE!” “I’m With That Guy of Probably Average Intelligence.” “I have a really big sign.” “This is a sign.”

And I think action is always a good thing, any time people get away from their computers and hit the streets and start making noise.

But the noise itself is a separate question. There’s good (”effective”) noise, and then there’s noise. Part of me is worried that the content of these rallies is EXACTLY why the political spectrum has been moved so far to the right that we’re talking about selling off state highways to corporations to solve budget crises, instead of raising taxes on the rich, and the most progressive conversation we can possibly have is over allowing LGBT folks to serve as international ambassadors of US violence and military supremacy and corporate hegemony (from my queer perspective a deeply problematic and conservative conversation). Because the left - “the left that wants a reasonable health care system, fair taxation, the end of wars of occupation and aid to war criminals in Israel,” as my friend Josh describes us - is too busy being smart and ironic.

I’m all for countering rage with intelligence and wit and maybe even irony. And yes, it’s a fact that the populist rage that Glenn Beck etc are whipping up is hypocritical - that it’ll be used precisely to fuck over the very folks who are attending their rallies - the seniors whose Social Security will be privatized and then slowly hacked away - the working class folks whose jobs will evaporate faster, as corporations get more and more incentive to lay people off and further exploit workers and resources in developing nations. But all of that doesn’t mean the anger isn’t real. To quote Josh again: “people on the “left” have reason to be angry- reason to join together for common purpose- reason to be pissed off. Stewart, as much as I love him, lumps together leftist anger and right wing anger, and casts both as equally irrational and dangerous, which I don’t think is the case. “Left” anger is based in reality.”

One sign said: “I Prefer Facts and Nuance and Intellectual Debate.”

Yeah, sure, me too. But how well do you think it will go, when you say to the folks beating us with sticks “I prefer facts and nuance”? Political discourse is miles away from intellectual debate, and as long as we keep on thinking we’re smarter than everybody, as long as we believe that we can focus on countering the idiocy of Right Wing pundits instead of really developing a radical alternative, we’re going to be scratching our heads wondering why laid-off workers aren’t on our side.

And to quote Chris Hedges, as he was quoted by my amazing friend Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: “As long as the liberal class speaks in the dead voice of moderation it will continue to fuel the right-wing backlash. Only when it appropriates this rage as its own, only when it stands up to established systems of power, including the Democratic Party, will we have any hope of holding off the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.”

The right is still setting the tone. And we’re responding to the tone and the lies, instead of saying what we want and need.

(photo rights reserved under a Creative Commons License, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/thekellyscope/)

My hometown paper (the surprisingly good Register-Star) just ran a solid article about the state of homelessness in the county where I grew up.

The prompt for the article is a forthcoming report on that subject, from William Moon, “the Social Services Commissioner of Delaware County, who has over 35 years of experience in the field.” On principle, I disapprove of this methodology - an “expert” agency bureaucrat who (presumably) has no direct personal experience of the problem he’s studying, developing an analysis and set of recommendations for how to deal with it. Unless he’s incorporating extensive, substantive involvement from the homeless men and women of Columbia County, I believe his report will have a lot of blind spots. But I like a lot of what he says, and he minces words only the slightest bit when it comes to the cause of the problem - rich folks moving in:

“For years there had been an adequate supply of cheap housing in the city of Hudson,” the report states. “In the 1990s, this pattern began to shift as older tenement houses in Hudson were bought by individuals more interested in classic architecture than in using them as rental housing on the low end of the housing market.”

And if Hudson takes this guy’s advice in one important area, it will be light years ahead of New York City:

“Moon does not recommend the county open a shelter, citing capital costs and staffing/support costs to run it that may actually increase costs per person…  “…homeless persons should be provided emergency housing in a congregate setting leased and/or owned by the county.”"

The “shelter-first” model in New York City has led to the creation of a big, bloated, expensive shelter-industrial complex - spending $856 MILLION last year, to house an average of 38,000 people a day. New York City is a very different landscape than rural Columbia County, but one important factor is absolutely identical: people want housing, not shelter.

…. massive amounts of perfectly-good delicious terrible starchy sugary treats, salvaged from the garbage.

One of our Board members, who spends a lot of nights in Grand Central Terminal, frequently comes in in the morning dragging a big sack of pastries from Zabar’s and Junior’s and Hot and Crusty and all the other vendors in the station, who have to throw their leftovers away at the end of the day, even though it’s in really good condition.

And I always say I won’t eat any. And I always do. And it’s always delicious. And it always makes me feel fat.

(this week)

Yesterday, I was honored to attend a protest of New York State Governor David Paterson, who vetoed important legislation that would have capped rent for people living with AIDS in subsidized housing at 30% of their income. Organized by the fabulous NYCAHN/VOCAL, it was full of beautiful people and beautiful rage.

My photos are here.

I go to a lot of protests, although in truth not nearly as many as I’d like to go to, and this was the best I’ve been to in a long time. The logistics were tight, the chants were hot, and the folks weren’t afraid to put their selves on the line. Five people got arrested for blocking the entrance to the building. As a movement we’ve gotten away from this edgy, risk-taking kind of action, and it did my cold cold heart good to be a part of it.

From NYCAHN’s listserv announcement, summarizing their work on this campaign:

HIGHLIGHTS OF MEDIA COVERAGE

Associated Press / MSNBC (and over 40 other outlets): NY governor vetoes popular AIDS, HIV housing bill (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39257961)

The New York City AIDS Housing Network said the veto will leaves 11,000 people with AIDS “teetering on the brink of homelessness.” They plan a Monday morning rally. [also quotes campaign leader Jim Lister]

Observer: Nobody (But Bloomberg) Happy About AIDS Rent Veto (http://www.observer.com/2010/real-estate/nobody-bloomberg-happy-about-aids-rent-veto)

“Even though I’m in a rental assistance program, I’m constantly forced to rob Peter to pay Paul. One month I pay the gas and telephone bill and the next month I pay the light bill, all the while hoping that nothing gets shut off,” James Dean, who pays 62 percent of his monthly disability income toward rent.

Wall Street Journal: Paterson Veto Blocks a Cap On Rent for Ill (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704416904575502102440795416.html)

Sean Barry, director of NYC AIDS Housing Network, denounced Mr. Paterson for opting to “stand with Mayor Bloomberg and his failed policies around HIV/AIDS and homelessness in New York City. This is a missed opportunity to save New York money and, far worse, it means thousands more people living with HIV/AIDS and their families will be in the shelter system,” he said.

NY1: Paterson Vetoes Bill To Aid AIDS Patients With Rent, Utilities (http://www.ny1.com/content/news_beats/politics/125717/paterson-vetoes-bill-to-aid-aids-patients-with-rent–utilities/)

Wanda Hernandez, a resident of Belmont, Bronx [and NYCAHN/VOCAL Board member], is one of approximately 11,000 city residents who the governor’s veto directly affects. For the past 15 years, Hernandez has lived with HIV. She survives on Social Security checks, but after paying her rent, she has little remaining money to make ends meet. ”Every single month, I have no money left,” she said. “If I get to pay four bills, that’s a lot.”

Gay City News: Paterson Vetoes AIDS Rent Cap Bill (http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2010/09/20/gay_city_news/news/doc4c980a6fad215586802000.txt)

James Dean, 58, a NYCAHN board member and HASA client, said he pays 62 percent of his monthly disability toward rent. “Governor Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg have no idea about the difficult choices I make every day to make ends meet and still pay my rent,” he said. “One month I pay the gas and telephone bill and the next month I pay the light bill, all the while hoping that nothing gets shut off. I do things like skip laundry and buy groceries on credit just to hang on to my home.”

Gothamist: “Protesters Rally Over Paterson’s HIV/AIDS Rent Protection Veto” (http://gothamist.com/2010/09/20/protesters_rally_over_patersons_hiv.php)

Director Sean Barry said in a statement, “Governor Paterson knows this bill would have immediately begun saving our state money by keeping people in their homes and out of HASA’s expensive shelter system…Tragically, he instead caved to misguided pressure from Mayor Bloomberg, whose administration utterly lacks credibility on these issues.”

Campaign leaders were also interviewed on NBC New York Nightly News and WBAI radio.

I’ve been reading a lot about the housing crisis in China. (also here and here, and a billion other places).

And since I majored in Russian, I have vivid memories from my Soviet history courses of memoirs and other primary sources that described the acute housing crisis that plagued the Soviet government for pretty much the entirety of its existence (not that the preceding or following system did a much better job of it). Collective flats, with five families to an apartment, seemed to be the best they could do - and it wasn’t very much fun for anyone, and it still required a massive and agonizing government bureaucracy to keep people in place.

So I’m wondering: does anyone know of any examples of a socialist system that was able to deal with this problem?

I’m not saying this to be critical of communist or socialist economic systems. I ask this as someone who feels strongly that alternatives to and/or radical restructuring of capitalism is necessary. I just find it interesting that this fundamental problem that most radicals in the West (including myself) attribute to the free market, did not go away in the absence of the free market.

And while I know the principles are similar, I am NOT talking about land reform. I know there’s lots of examples of a socialist government taking land away from rich/foreign/noble landlords and redistributing it to the agrarian working class. That seems to work out a lot better.

I’m talking about housing in an urban setting. The same thing we talk about here in New York when we talk about homelessness and the high cost of housing and the staggering, bewildering, depressing power of the real estate lobby in controlling the political process.  The same thing we think would be fine, just as soon as we can take it out of the clutches of the free market…

And for my Marxist/economics friends out there, are there any great analyses of WHY some of the most iconic socialist governments failed to tackle this fundamental indicator of inequality and injustice?

Interactive mapping is about more than just fun and games and Grindr-style hookups and helping me find the best subway line to take to get to a morning meeting on time.

Crowd-sourced mapping has the potential to impact people’s lives in truly transformative ways. Ushahidi was developed as a way to help people document and keep themselves safe from ethnic violence in Kenya, in the wake of a disputed election. In the Bay Area, when a police officer was convicted of manslaughter even though he shot and killed an unarmed, handcuffed Black man named Oscar Grant who was lying on the ground on his stomach, and the police prepared a riot squad response in anticipation of an uprising, protesters developed an open map at OscarGrantProtests.com, so that peaceful demonstrators could avoid the violence of overzealous cops.

Picture the Homeless is betting that the power of crowd-sourced mapping can go deeper than that. We think it can get progressive legislation passed, and forever change New York City housing policy. We recently deployed an Ushahidi-based open map called VACANT NYC that will help us get an accurate count of vacant property citywide.

For years, homeless people have been demanding action from city government around the massive numbers of vacant buildings and lots in New York City. While the city spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on providing shelter to the homeless, perfectly good property languishes in the hands of private landlords and city agencies. That’s why homeless folks drafted Intro 48, a city council bill that would empower the city to conduct an annual count of vacant buildings and lots.

But government officials say vacant property is not a problem… and even if it was, there’s no money to count these properties. To prove that vacant property is still a huge problem in this city, and that a census of these buildings and lots can be accomplished without breaking the bank, we’re turning this project over to the public. VACANT NYC lets New Yorkers send a text message or an email or fill out an online form, every time they see a vacant building or lot anywhere in the five boroughs.

Our little map is already getting big buzz. It was featured prominently in a recent article documenting the fight for Intro 48. This was subsequently picked-up as a featured story in the Housing and Land Use News Digest of NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

Other allies in the housing struggle have covered the map, including the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights: http://restorehousingrights.org/?p=1093

If VACANT NYC can prove that this is still a major problem, and that an accurate census of under-utilized property can be cost-effectively accomplished through participatory mapping, it’ll be a major revolution in the way that open-source technology impacts public policy.

So please - help us out! If you see something, say something. Tell us about vacant property in New York City. Publicize VACANT NYC on your own blog/website/Facebook/Twitter/Whatever. We are re-making the world as we map it; let’s make sure we map the kind of world we want to live in.

At the gym I break my own rule about never ever watching any cable news programs, not on purpose, but because the least bad thing on the wall of televisions (The Two Towers) is on a commercial break, and my eyes move from monitor to monitor while I push and pull the elliptical trainer back and forth, and on Telemundo it’s some Spanish-language Survivor equivalent, with impossibly-tanned men sweating and scheming deliciously, and on TBS it’s Michael Douglas doing stupid things because he’s anxious about getting old, moving his hand through thinning hair…

… and then on CNN it’s a series of business-suited men talking about Afghanistan, a new report or handful of casualties requiring the talking heads to start spinning again.

These three, they could be the same white man at 30 and then at 45 and then at 60. They work for the Wall Street Journal or the Council on Foreign Relations; they went to Harvard and West Point. They disagree on little things and agree on the big ones. Like we need to be in Afghanistan.

Before commercial we cut to the handsomest man at the table, who says that yes, sure, of course, there are lots of reasons why the war is a big terrible mess, but that if we pull out of Afghanistan, “there will be human rights abuses that will shame us.”

From this, we cut immediately to the sharp blue star logo of Lockheed Martin, and the words WE NEVER FORGET WHO WE’RE WORKING FOR.

Who are they working for, exactly? And who is CNN working for? And who is that handsome man, who by virtue of his handsomeness becomes the one whose words matter most, working for?

This is the same day that Wikileaks makes what it is calling the “largest intelligence leak in history,” six years/91,000 documents/200,000 pages worth of reports and documents by soldiers and analysts. These pompous grave-faced men on CNN are telling us how pulling out of Afghanistan would undo all the hard work that our deal beleaguered vital ally Pakistan is doing… even though, according to these astonishing leaked documents, “Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service guides the Afghan insurgency that fights American troops, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion in U.S. aid.”

To me, this is perfect evidence of how hard mainstream media works to keep you from understanding the realities behind the war. But then again, I already believe that this is the case, so it’s easy for me to see it. I wonder what someone who didn’t would see. They would probably see handsome confident men saying things they desperately want to believe are true.

The ever-thought-provoking Jim Johnson has an interesting analysis of some of the rhetoric surrounding war photography, which does a good job at getting at some of what makes me uncomfortable around the way journalism and media discourse frames and discusses the war and the folks wrapped up in it.

Jim asks: “If we can decry the way politicians and the print media consistently trade in (verbal) euphemisms (as I have done here repeatedly) isn’t it possible to see the ‘human interest’ approach to war photography as a form of visual euphemism?”

So much war photography serves to suck us up in the human drama, the pathos of real people in intense situations, that we lose sight of the bigger picture. We forget about the policies and the greed and the politics and the land-mine manufacturer executives and the babies buried in the rubble.

He uses the phrase “visual euphemism,” to link war images with the way we understand war journalism - as something with a fundamental underlying dishonesty, as something built up out of deliberate obfuscation and the parroting of lies - with the end result that we walk away from each piece understanding the conflict a little less.

I see an unmistakable eroticism to the way soldiers are depicted in war photography. Young, strong, brutal men, occupying a weird moral space where the normal rules do not apply. The exhibit under discussion in this post includes a series of photos of “Soldiers Sleeping,” their shirtless tattooed bodies and open guileless mouths bespeaking simultaneous innocence and heroism. This follows a long tradition in representational art, going back to The Dying Gaul and beyond (at the time of that sculpture’s creation, nudity connoted heroism, and his representation in the nude in a Roman sculpture was an uncharacteristic “memorial to their bravery as worthy adversaries”).

We respond to stories. Stories help us understand otherwise unimaginable things - the unthinkable suffering of war, for example, becomes real to us through our relationship to Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad. And we respond to sex, to desire. To fear. To quote a poem I quote way too often:

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart

My theory is that we are socialized to respond to these images, to men who exemplify strength and violence and brutality. That we fetishize these men who are, depending on where you stand, heroes or hooligans or cannon fodder. That we start from fear and eventually reach a sort of Stockholm Syndrome thrall to these men whose sacrifice and slaughter help keep the game going, the wealth and the poverty and the profit and loss.

Santa Claus came early, and he brought unmanned aerial drones.

These flying robots, semi-autonomous and semi-remote-controlled, pumped out by aerospace/defense contractor Northrop Grumman, are bringing joy and happiness to the American heartland.

Over at Alternet, the brilliant Laura Flanders is reporting on recent mega-million-dollar contracts to create “drone base controls”; it’s hyped as a sure-fire job creator, and local communities in Wisconsin and Missouri and South Dakota are rejoicing. It’s nice that folks can get jobs, but it would also be nice if there was money to create jobs that didn’t in turn create “the charred flesh of children killed by accident, by remote.”

Meanwhile, the US Department of Homeland Security “will deploy additional Border Patrol agents, ICE investigators, two drone aircraft and other technologies to its border with Mexico as part of a new effort to combat organized crime and illegal immigration…. In the Texas-Mexico border, two additional Predator drones will patrol the area and nearby areas in the Gulf of Mexico region, once Congress approves the 500 million dollars President Barack Obama has requested for such purpose.”

500 million dollars for two Predator drones? Those are some expensive robots!

These border deployments amount to a proxy war between defense contractors and drug cartels, with the government handing out massive wads of cash. Corporations and organized crime - these are the new epicenters of power. Fiscal insolvency is leading to the “erosion of the nation-state’s power to protect/advance the well being of its citizens;” an abandonment of political power for the sake of financial power. That’s the point of the Bush tax cuts and Reaganite policies in general; to take away the power of government to help people (de-funding and demolishing public education, housing, health care, unemployment, etc), and turn government into a funnel for money - out of taxpayers’ pockets and into the hands of businesses and foreign militaries and the “right kind” of global insurgents, the ones resisting governments we don’t like, the ones who probably hate us but will take the cash and weapons we throw at them and then use them on us ten or twenty years down the line.

At the U.S. Social Forum there’s a workshop on “Challenging Robotic Empire.” I’m sad I’m not in Detroit to check it out, but it’s good to see that anti-militarism folks in the US are already thinking through the ways in which military robotics will change the nature of warfare, and therefore the nature of our response to it. I’m hopeful that as we learn how to respond to the new challenges posed by soldier-robots, we take it as an opportunity to take radical anti-militarism work in a new direction…

Looking at oppression and resistance on the global scale, it’s tempting to look at a nation like Haiti and think that poverty and oppression are a consequence of lack of resources. But then, looking at other nations - particularly in Africa - it’s the exact opposite.

In Impact Lab’s recent “20 Failed States Report,” I found this fascinating quote: the Democratic Republic of Congo is “blessed with perhaps the world’s single most abundant, diverse, and extractable supply of minerals.” Yet the country has “one of the world’s most desperate humanitarian situations,” with millions dying from disease and conflict.

And when I visited the Dominican Republic in 2008, after hearing stories from Dominican immigrant friends about how impoverished the country was, I was shocked to see an incredible richness of produce: plantains and mangos and bananas and rice everywhere you looked, growing in astonishing abundance. Poverty and hunger were very real and very obvious, even among so much food production.

The open market turns resources into a liability. The Congo’s richness attracted brutal colonialist exploiters for centuries, and after the colonialists came corrupt local government and violent insurgents and corporate parasites, leading to a brutal war that’s still raging. Farmers in the Dominican Republic are like any other merchant; they’re going to sell their goods wherever they’ll fetch the highest price. And US corporations can pay a lot more than their own neighbors.

So what are we going to do about it? How can the poor flip the script of global exploitation and underdevelopment? The deck is so clearly stacked against outright revolution or non-compliance with market capitalism, going back to Haitian independence - the big powers have a lot of weapons and long memories - if anything, developed nations and major corporations are eager for domestic instability, as it gives them an excuse to take by force what they had formerly needed to haggle and barter and bribe away.

But what disruptive opportunities are created by new technologies? Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about John Robb’s theories around deviant economies, networked tribes, coercing organizational hierarchies, and resilient communities; including some speculations on “potent coercive tools for non-violent protest (in a post-Gandhi world).”

I’ve got nothing particular to add, except that us community organizers and activists in the developed world need to start reading a lot more blogs and talking to a lot more folks, from all corners, from corporate consultants to hill-country insurgents to hackers. All voices in the choir, as James Baldwin said.

Exciting day today - I helped organize this phenomenal direct action…

“This morning, homeless people and community allies took over a vacant building in El Barrio/East Harlem. The target was a beautiful two-story building at the corner of Madison Avenue and 116th that has been vacant for decades…”

Blog entry:

http://picturethehomeless.org/blog/node/84

Flickr photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27985255@N05/

Article in the Indypendent:

http://www.indypendent.org/2009/03/19/east-harlem-residents-and-housing-advocates-rally/

All photographs are from the Flickr stream, and were taken by Camilo Rayo.