Hey--a good idea from Washington

Representative David Obey (D-WI) is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. On 19 November he released a letter calling for a graduated surtax to pay for the war in Afghanistan:

“For the last year, as we’ve struggled to pass healthcare reform, we’ve been told that we have to pay for the bill – and the cost over the next decade will be about a trillion dollars. Now the President is being asked to consider an enlarged counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan, which proponents tell us will take at least a decade and would also cost about a trillion dollars. But unlike the healthcare bill, that would not be paid for. We believe that’s wrong,” said Obey. “Regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for.”

This sounds like a great idea to me. I don't think this legislation has a snowball's chance in hell of becoming law--hell, I'd be surprised if it even comes up for a vote, let alone passes, in the House. But it's nice to know that some of the Democratic leadership is willing to consider measures like this.

Torturing Democracy

Based on the strong recommendation from Bill Moyers, I watched "Torturing Democracy" over the weekend. It is a very meticulous and well-made documentary available free on-line that chronicles the path from 9/11 to the use of "enhanced interrogation" (i.e. torture) techniques by agents of the United States, as well as the role of high-level officials in the Bush Administration in authorizing them. While this is a story that many of us have been hearing about in bits and pieces over the last several years, it is really helpful to have it all in one place. I think it would be a good documentary for a wider audience too, including those who are not already human rights activitists. It includes interviews with former detainees, highly shocking but not gratuitiously graphic visual images, documentary evidence, and earnest testimonials from U.S. officials within the system who opposed what they saw happening. By the end of it, the case for high-level complicity in international human rights crimes seemed well established. I think every U.S. citizen--especially those who are tempted by the idea that we should put all of this behind us and move on--ought to see this film.

A New Hope (not the Star Wars kind)

Naomi Klein always seems to have a sharp eye for cutting through the usual day to day discourse and focusing on what is really happening--the big picture. Her latest analysis of the state of the Left Progressive movement vis-a-vis the Obama Presidency, just published today in The Nation on-line, is well worth reading.

There may be some who still yearn for another hope fix from above, but I, for one, am ready to join Naomi Klein's call for a new kind of hope from the grassroots. Admittedly, I have been ready since even before the Inaguration, when Obama was ominously stacking his cabinet with the same old elite "centrist" insiders.

But now that we are almost past 100 days, and just past Tax Day, maybe we are passing the tipping point on the Progressive Left. Are we ready to finally start pushing Obama aggressively from the unified grassroots, or are we going to keep arguing about whether we should just trust Obama?

Stop Flying

Should we stop flying? Ever since I read British environmental journalist George Monbiot's stimulating book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning awhile back, one of the conclusions that stuck with me most was how the air travel sector (and high-speed long-distance travel in genreal) is probably the most difficult sector for finding technological solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Monbiot argues that there is no alternative but to drastically reduce air travel. He contends that we need a new ethics to discourage frequent air travel, since it is highly damaging to the atmosphere and, moreover, since it is almost exclusively done by the most privileged people on the planet. (Poor people in developing countries, who will be the worst victims of climate change, never fly.)

It will be hard enough to curtail our air travel for business. But think of the even more difficult problem of what Monbiot calls "Love Miles," the distance that separates us from loved ones. See this video clip from Monbiot to hear more, or perhaps his article in the Guardian. I believe that we need to grapple honestly with the sobering implications of Monbiot's argument.

A Lumpenlogocrat Manifesto

Several months ago I read Marc Bousquet's sensational How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York University Press, 2008). I've been meaning to write a blog posting about this book, since in many ways it offers a manifesto for lumpenlogocrats. I keep thinking that I will find the inspiration to write a longer analysis. But it just isn't happening. So I figure I might as well just point our readers toward the book itself--and the author's website.

Himself a tenured English professor at Santa Clara University, Bousquet gained wide attention in the 1990s for his "excremental" theory of graduate education. Roughly, this interpretation holds that, especially in the humanities, Ph.D. recipients are a waste product of a system of higher education that has relied increasingly on contingent labor--including graduate student labor--over the past few decades. Needless to say, Bousquet's work is both provocative and timely, and in many ways should be an essential foundation for lumpenlogocrat consciousness.

The issue of contingent academic labor remains quite relevant during this economic crisis. Colleges and universities are often trying to increase their reliance on adjuncts and other contingent faculty even more, now that endowment spending, alumni giving, and financial aid lines in the budget are under severe pressure. Of course, Bousquet would point out that this is just one more justification among many for this shift, which has been occurring through good times and bad. It's just like the Republicans and tax policy: when times are good, cut taxes; when times are bad, cut taxes. For universities: when times are good, use more contingent labor; when times are bad, use more contingent labor.

Bousquet's indictment of higher education is strongly worded and uncompromising. And it also rings true. There is no single issue that strikes more at the heart of what is wrong with higher education today than the massive shift towards contingent labor. The shift has not been felt equally across all institutions--a small number of elite liberal arts colleges, for example, still have the majority of courses taught by tenured and tenure-track faculty, at least for those students privileged enough to be able to attend such schools--but its effects in Academia have been far more profound and consequential than any of the squabbles that regularly surface in the mass media about what is wrong with higher education.

Bousquet does not believe in the "job market." Or, more precisely, he believes that the "job market" is an idealized fiction that covers up the reality of a shift towards cheap, expendable contingent labor. It is a measure of the rhetorical effectiveness of such terms as "job market" that even those of us who understand Bousquet's critique have a hard time avoiding them.

This is the one book that all lumpenlogocrats (and those who stand in solidarity with them) should read.