Trayvon in the Alps

It has been disorienting to be out of the country while a social explosion erupts back home over the murder of Trayvon Martin and the indifference of the American state to its own racism that criminalizes all Black men and boys.

I’ve been on a speaking tour about Occupy and U.S. Politics Today throughout Switzerland all week, traveling from German to French and finally Italian-speaking cantons of this unimaginably pristine island of prosperity amidst a world rocked by economic implosion. I’ll leave it for another post to explore the museum-bank of capitalism that is Switzerland.

For me, the backdrop of my train rides past medieval forts and castles, through vineyards and alpine magnificence has been the news of Trayvon’s murder. Each evening I stand before a new crowd of workers and students — in Zurich, Geneva and last night here in Bellinzona — to describe not only the features of Occupy, but the 30 years of neoliberal restructuring that has hollowed out every aspect of American society. Workers and students sit in rapt attention as I attempt to explain the social retrogression of the American Empire. I begin my talks with Trayvon.

Last night was a little different. This breathtakingly beautiful village tucked into the foothills of the Swiss-Italian Alps was rocked by a factory occupation in 2008 when 400 or so railway maintenance workers facing privatization and outsourcing occupied their factory and won their month-long strike. The leadership of that factory occupation attended last night’s meeting and we spoke afterward of how despite their victory they did suffer losses, including 130 workers who are no longer employed by Swiss Railways.

In commemoration of their loss, workers hung 130 pairs of orange work pants on the wall of the factory. Each section of the factory flies the flag of their magnificent strike. It is a testament to their ongoing militancy that to this day management is unable to take down those pants or flags and can only dream of removing statements posted on factory walls by strike leaders. Three managers have been sacked in as many years, each one incapable of smashing the workers’ resolve.

I got to thinking about the importance of memorializing victories and losses, about how memory in a society that aims to wipe away our past is a form of resistance in itself. And so this morning when I awoke to a gorgeous spring day, I went for a stroll and looked for a bag of Skittles, the candy Trayvon had purchased right before he was gunned down for snacking while Black.

Not surprisingly, this tiny Swiss town doesn’t seem to have any Skittles, but I did find Mentos. I started up the footpath that leads high up above the forts and churches and impeccably maintained gardens and homes of this town. Everywhere spring is in bloom here and clean river water has begun to rush down the rocks from the snow-capped peaks all around me. I hiked for a couple of hours until I found a serene place where purple and yellow flowers were already growing up from the mossy rocks. Someone made a bench of tree trunks here to sit and stare out at the peaks, which is where I decided to make a little memorial for Trayvon.

I’m not a religious person, but when you are surrounded by extraordinary natural beauty it seems even the most pragmatic Marxist is given to moments of soulful contemplation. I dug a little hole near the log, poured the Mentos in, placed a rock on top and said a few words in commemoration of a young man who probably never saw the Alps. 

It wasn’t really a prayer, I suppose, but a hope and a promise that I would do whatever was in my power to ensure that some day racism and the structures that require such brutality and ignorance to divide and crush us would be undone.  

And in a sunny spot beneath a rock, in full view of beauty more permanent than the crass stupidities of our society, lies a sweet memory to a young man whose resistance will live on through others. 

Next week I’ll be speaking in Florida. 

Wednesday, March 28th at a community college in Melbourne, FL

Thursday, March 29th at Univ. of Florida in Gainesville

Friday, March 30th at University of South Florida in Tampa

Israel’s Chutzpah: Using a Black Icon to Sell Apartheid

Hucksters for Israel attempt to make up for in chutzpah what they lack in facts.

On opening night of the eighth annual Israeli Apartheid Week at NYU — at an event featuring Omar Barghouti and Noura Erakat, leading Palestinian figures in the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign — apologists for Israel’s crimes showcased one of their more curious myths. Defenders of Israel repeatedly argued in the Q & A section that America’s foremost Black icon, Martin Luther King Jr., was an arch defender of the Jewish state.

Let’s explore the evidence.

Pro-Israel Web sites, politicians and campus activists often reference the source of their claim about MLK’s defense of Israel by citing King’s “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend,” supposedly published in an August 1967 edition of  the Saturday Review. Here’s the quote they cite:

“… You declare, my friend; that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely ‘anti-Zionist’ … And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God’s green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews… Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.”

This quote even made its way into an excellent exposé of Israel’s deadly decades-long relationship with apartheid South Africa, Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s  The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. In fact, I repeated part of the quote in my own review of the book, much to my regret. Later I discovered that the MLK letter was a hoax.

Antiracist activist Tim Wise published an article on Znet in 2003, “Fraud Fit for a King,”  in which he documents the fact that no such letter appears in any of the 1967 issues of the Saturday Review.

The alternative source provided by Zionists for this apparently nonexistent letter is a nonexistent book by King, This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. According to the authors of Electronic Intifada’s 2004 piece that further details this bamboozle, “Israel’s Apologists and the Martin Luther King Hoax”: ”No such book was listed in the bibliography provided by the King Center in Atlanta, nor in the catalogs of several large public and university libraries.”

Electronic Intifada goes on to discredit another “patchwork of plagiarism” attributed to King, this one by Dr. Andrew Bostom, a Brown University medical professor who wrote an article for Front Page Magazine in 2003 citing yet another fictitious quotation from King.

In fact the only credible statements made by King regarding Israel are recounted as hearsay in the San Francisco Chronicle by former civil rights activist, Congressman John Lewis. Lewis, who was friends with King, writes  in his 2002 op-ed that a few days before MLK’s assassination in 1968 King defended Israel at an appearance at Harvard, saying, “I solemnly pledge to do my utmost to uphold the fair name of the Jews — because bigotry in any form is an affront to us all.”

Here again, stubborn facts get in the way. As the Harvard Crimson reported in April 1968,  “The Rev. Martin Luther King was last in Cambridge almost exactly a year ago — April 23, 1967.”

Setting aside the pesky historical record of fabricated quotes from imaginary speeches and phantom texts, what if MLK really did support Israel back in 1968?

What if at a dinner in Cambridge, as has been suggested, King did defend Israel  decades before the first and second intifadas, before the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatilla, before the construction of hundreds of miles of apartheid walls with militarized checkpoints, before Israel’s soldiers who killed 1,400 Palestinians in Operation Cast Lead were even born, before the murder of 9 unarmed civilians on the humanitarian aid flotilla and before contemporary, irrefutable documentation by human rights organizations of Israel’s racist apartheid practices?

If King did say or write anything to the effect that Lewis recounts, then King — who never claimed to be a Middle East scholar — was ill-informed. What’s more, he not only lived in an era before widespread exposure in the U.S. of Israel’s crimes, but he was organizing in the context of domestic disputes about multiracial, Black and Jewish organizing in the civil rights movement. Might he have had a totally separate question in mind when commenting on Jews and a Jewish state?

Notably, statements attributed to King about the Arab world go unremarked upon by Zionists. For example, this snippet also cited by Congressman Lewis:  “At the same time the great powers have the obligation to recognize that the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony.”

Surely the man who called the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” might be referring here to the American Empire, if not its Israeli vassal, as one of the entities imposing “poverty and backwardness” on the Arab world.

And finally, is it conceivable to any but the most blinkered defenders of Israel that MLK, who gave his life fighting inequality, would stand by a nation that has turned 69 percent of its indigenous population into refugees? No one but a craven ideologue for the indefensible would insist that King could cheer on Israel’s system of separation, discrimination and domination.

It appears that defending ethnic cleansing and Israel’s genocidal policies in the wake of Occupy and democratic Arab upheavals is not the cakewalk it once was. The question of justice for the world’s 11.2 million Palestinian people, according to latest census figures, is no longer the third rail of American politics among a growing swath of the population, including greater numbers of Jews. That some apologists have turned to fabricated quotes and pure slander of an icon to justify the unjustifiable is yet another sign that leading Zionists are desperate liars.

After all, they see the writing on the wall. Though Israel openly frets about the growing Palestinian population as a “demographic threat,” the rising numbers of Arab-Americans, Jews and others who are adhering to the spirit of King’s call for civil rights by joining together in the BDS movement are the real demographic threat to apartheid Israel.

I’ll be speaking on Pinkwashing: Israel’s Queer Propaganda War, Friday, March 2, Temple University, Philadelphia, 3PM, Anderson Hall. FREE.

Wally Shawn: My Favorite Bourgeois Marxist

Whether you know it or not, you know Wally Shawn. He’s that funny, round-faced guy in Woody Allen’s Manhattan and a hundred other movies like The Princess Bride, My Dinner with Andre, Clueless and TV shows like The L Word and Gossip Girl.

His signature nasal voice, which elicits peels of laughter even if he’s just reading a menu, brings to life Rex the dinosaur in Toy Story movies, the diminutive boss in The Incredibles and characters in so many other kids’ flicks.

Wally is the quintessence of a great character actor. He can morph into any part and manage to steal a scene with a nod or a look — equally magnificent as a space alien or a Hollywood producer, or perhaps they’re not so dissimilar. He is that rare artist-actor who more famous names pretend to be on chat shows and more pretentious fare like The Actors Studio.

I first met Wally in the audience sitting next to author Arundhati Roy at St. John the Divine cathedral in Manhattan listening to a discussion about the antiwar movement and the elections with Naomi Klein and my editor at the International Socialist Review, Ahmed Shawki, in 2004.

It wasn’t at all surprising to see him there because to watch him in movies and on TV you know immediately that this is not some vacuous Hollywood twit. His humor is too deep and biting, his smile is playfully ironic in that way people who are taking it all in seem to project. He was immediately likable.

I’ve gotten to know Wally over a few late-night conversations at the ISO’s annual Socialism conference in recent years where he’s become a regular attendee, whether he’s speaking or not. Wally’s as avid a participant in discussions on LGBT liberation as he is at the talks on Jackson Pollack or Leninism. Mostly he asks questions, and he appears to absorb the responses as the philosopher-playwright that he, in fact, is.

Last night I saw him read his Obie Award-winning play, The Fever, in a packed small theater whose audience included Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History co-author/producer Anthony Arnove, Capitalism Hits the Fan author Richard Wolff, Zinn’s son Jeff, several leading members of Jewish Voices for Peace and an assortment of New York’s left-wing theater crowd, as well as a good bunch of young Occupiers.

The Fever gripped me in a way few plays do. Not just because Wally manages to   thread Marx’s theory of “commodity fetishism” and musings on guerrilla war tactics into an hour-and-a-half-long Kafkaesque meditation about class privilege and its discontents. But because there’s something mesmerizing about a self-conscious bourgeois reckoning with the contradictions of his life — and the system that makes his lifestyle possible.

Growing up the Manhattan-dwelling scion of The New Yorker editor, William Shawn, Wally is a don of the literary New York bourgeoisie. I’m glad he rejected his intended life’s course as a diplomat after Oxford — Wally would have made a terrible professional equivocator. But then, don’t they all?

Now in his late sixties, Wally occupies a unique position in the world of the 1%’s intelligentsia. Whereas most self-reflection of that caste tends toward the moral imperative of charity, Wally’s performative musings lead us to broader social conclusions. He is a man of privilege whose aim is to question the entire edifice that allows privilege to rule the world, or even exist.

No wonder the New York Times critic Charles Isherwood thought The Fever was a “corrosive exercise in theatrical conscience-baiting.” Incapable of delving beneath moral indignation — the plague of the self-conscious rich — Isherwood refuses to acknowledge the scathing critique of a system, not just the roles of individuals in it.

A systemic critique is far more dangerous to the rich than a personal one — individuals can alter their behaviors, but a system based on inequality can only be uprooted to cut out the pervasive cancer. In essence, that’s what Wally is talking about. And he even throws in nods to MLK as well, with a Why We Can’t Waitesque indictment of the limitations of reforms. Not just their snail’s pace, but the fact that their realization must be the work of the powers that be.

In The Fever, Wally has an interesting insight on Marx, also born the son of a Jewish bourgeois. He notes, Marx became a follower of the poor, not the other way around, as it’s usually perceived. One-percenters flatter themselves by presuming the top must precede the bottom; Wally grasps the essence of Marxism lies in that biblical incantation: The first will be last and the last will be first.

The self-satisfaction of the arts is even taken down a peg. Wally writes that this play will change nothing, that shifting consciousness alone will change nothing. That until ideas take on a material force, they are just ideas. It is a humble acknowledgement that this wonderful play will change nothing at all.

Well, except to remind us how some of the best cultural works can make us feel and think in ways that embolden us to act. And for that Wally Shawn is my favorite bourgeois Marxist.

You can catch Wally’s next NYC performance on Saturday, March 3, 7PM, when he reads from his book Essays on “Why I Call Myself a Socialist.”

I’ll be speaking Thursday, Feb. 16, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 8PM Angell Hall Auditorium of Pinkwashing: Israel’s Queer Propaganda War

Equality’s Racism: Using LGBT Rights to Veil Apartheid

Imagine the magazine Good Housekeeping awarding the Texas Department of Corrections its seal of approval for the cleanliness of its death row — pristine conditions, though the seating’s a bit clunky!

There is something obscene about an organization devoted to equality planning to feature at its national summit a theocratic police state whose existence is founded on the expulsion and ongoing repression of its indigenous population.

Equality Forum, a nonprofit organization whose mission “is to advance national and international lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights through education,” is hosting Israel’s ambassador to the United States as their keynote speaker and featuring Israeli artists at their May conference in Philadelphia. Its celebration of Israel’s purported LGBT civil rights is truly an elaborate expression of totally missing the point.

Even the international human rights expert UN Special Rapporteur Miloon Kothari condemns the policies of the Israeli state that systematically discriminates against its non-Jewish population: “the basic theocratic character of the Israeli legal system establishes ethnic criteria as the grounds for the enjoyment of full rights.” In other words, the oppression of 20 percent of Israel’s population who are Palestinian — LGBT and straight — as well as the dispossession of the millions who are virtually imprisoned behind hundreds of miles of militarized walls in the Occupied Territories, expose the lie of Israel’s supposed democracy.

Despite Israel’s ongoing defiance of international law in the service of its 64-year occupation of Palestine, its institutionalized brutalization and daily humiliation of its native population, Equality Forum is embracing a campaign by Israel’s marketers known as pinkwashing. According to Palestinian LGBT activists, “‘Pinkwashing’ is the appropriation of queer voices in order to shift focus from human rights and international law violations committed by the State of Israel, to an image of Israel as progressive, tolerant and ‘gay-friendly.’”

If Equality Forum goes ahead with this vile charade, they will not only play into the hands of those who wish to cleanse the crimes of Israel by extolling the virtues of having openly gay soldiers crack Palestinian heads, but they will make themselves the target of an international boycott campaign.

I wrote to Equality Forum’s director, Malcolm Lazin, as soon as I read of their selection of Israel as their “featured nation” this year. Mr. Lazin replied by listing Israel’s LGBT reforms, that in reality only fully exist for Jewish LGBT citizens, and he cited Tel Aviv’s status as “Best Gay City of 2011,” according to GayCities.com. He concluded, “Like the U.S. and other nations, Israel has not fully realized its promise of equality to all its citizens. These important issues and others are being debated under freedom of speech, press and assembly in Israel and elsewhere.”

I suppose “not fully realized its promise of equality,” could refer to the “apartheid regime” which “discriminates daily against Israeli Arabs and other minorities,” according to Jewish-Israeli politician, Roman Bronfman. Or it could be interpreted as “a political arrangement that limits democracy to a privileged class that keeps others behind military checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls,” as former head of the American Jewish Congress, Henry Seligman, puts it.

But that would surely be the most inexplicably polite way of describing a nation which has been under an official “state of emergency” since its founding in 1948. This allows for extra police powers in order to do things like arrest and detain hundreds of children, many as young as 12 years old, for throwing stones at tanks and armed soldiers, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem. Israel launches frequent bombing raids into the Gaza Strip, under the pretext of security — attacks punctuated by outright massacres, as in Operation Cast Lead in 2008–09, when more than 1,400 Gazans were murdered; whereas 13 Israelis died, mostly soldiers, 4 from friendly fire.

It is a sad reflection of the primitive consciousness of a swath of the LGBT movement that the Equality Forum would justify highlighting Israel’s LGBT rights despite growing international exposure of that nation’s racist policies, including from LGBT voices within Palestine.

As Palestinian LGBT activist Haneen Maikey explains, “It doesn’t matter what the sexual orientation of the soldier at a checkpoint is, whether he can serve openly or not. What matters is that he’s there at all.” Sami Shamali, also a member of the Palestinian LGBT group, Al Qaws, agreed, “the apartheid wall was not created to keep Palestinian homophobes out of Gay Israel, and there is no magic door for gay Palestinians to pass through.”

A recent delegation of LGBT activists, artists and cultural workers from the United States traveled to Israel-Palestine and published a poignantly detailed eyewitness account of their trip in an open letter. To the great credit of this delegation, they rise above the aggressively narrow viewpoint lauded by Equality Forum, which appears to judge human rights through the lens of sexuality issues alone.

In one sentence they skewer the implicit racism and colonial mindset behind pinkwashing’s attempt to shine a light on LGBT rights in Israel versus the homophobia of some Arab societies. They write, “It is our view that comparisons of this sort are both inaccurate — homophobia and transphobia are to be found throughout Palestinian and Israeli society – and that this is beside the point: Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine cannot be somehow justified or excused by its purportedly tolerant treatment of some sectors of its own population.”

Bravo to the sisters and brothers who penned these words!

In Malcolm Lazin’s e-mail to me, he noted that there is a healthy debate about these policies in Israel and elsewhere. Unfortunately, that’s not true. Equality Forum’s own program, in fact, makes no mention of the devastated lives of Palestinians, queer and straight, and, not surprisingly, there is no Palestinian speaker on the program to expose these harsh truths.

I believe the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which aims to expose and punish Israel’s criminal behavior and demand an end to their apartheid policies, should put out a call to boycott Equality Forum’s conference in May 2012.

More than anything right now, Israel fears “delegitimization,” especially in the eyes of Americans whose government finances the apartheid state to the tune of at least $3 billion every year. Yet Israel’s own actions delegitimize that state in the eyes of anyone with a whiff of social conscience.

It is up to activists — Jewish lesbians like myself, straight gentiles, everyone who cares about social justice — to stand up to Israel’s racist policies and those who help to veil them.

Sherry Wolf, author of Sexuality and Socialism, will be speaking on pinkwashing alongside Palestinian activists at the UPenn BDS conference Saturday, February 4, 2012. Wolf is available as a public speaker on Palestine, sexuality, socialism  and many other issues.

Lessons Learned From the Occupy Movement

I was invited to speak on Lessons From the Occupy Movement at Grand Valley State University near Grand Rapids, MI, on January 23, 2012. Before the evening’s event, I was asked to stop by for a chat with veteran activist and videographer, Jeff Smith. His video of our conversation about Occupy is posted below.

In two frenetic days of discussion, debate and meetings I came away with even greater hope for the Occupy movement. Not because radicals don’t face enormous challenges ahead of us, we do.  But because even in small cities where political life is dominated by hard-right fanatics, there are often groups of organized radicals — anarchists, socialists, social democrats and budding rebels of every sort. They rarely make it into the media, but they are among the stars in a global struggle for justice.

Huge thanks to the inspired organizing work of the gang in and around Grand Rapids, especially Colette Seguin Beighley who leads GVSU’s LGBT Center. People like Colette and her Change U crew are debating and organizing to make the world fit to live in. Thank you.

NY’s Deadly Deal with Apartheid

A DEADLY drone, modeled on the dragonfly insect, with a 9-inch wingspan. Four-wheeled mini-robots with panoramic video-imaging capabilities that perform surveillance without risk of harm to their human monitors. Unmanned armored bulldozers that can demolish property without exposing their distant operators to retaliation.

These are just a few of the weapons in an arsenal developed or under development by New York City’s newest partner–the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

A few days before Christmas last year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans for a $2 billion research campus to be constructed in partnership with Cornell University, Technion and the City of New York.

Proclaiming that “New York City’s goal of becoming the global leader in technological innovation is now within sight,” Mayor Bloomberg pledged $100 million in taxpayer money for the new venture. It will be added to a $350 million gift to Cornell from alumnus Charles F. Feeney to fund construction of the 2 million-square-foot state-of-the-art research institute to be built on Roosevelt Island, which lies in the East River between Manhattan and Queens.

New York’s media, including its “paper of record,” the New York Times, ran with the giddy story of the estimated 20,000 construction jobs, 600 new businesses, billions in projected revenue and 30,000 permanent jobs that will supposedly result from the research campus. Touting sophisticated environmental standards of construction and energy use, press releases have also heralded the educational opportunities this campus could offer not just experts, but budding scientists in New York’s public schools.

With rare exceptions like WBAI’s Law and Disorder and the website Mondoweiss, the media neglected to mention Technion’s extensive military and political connections to apartheid Israel. Shir Hever, an Israeli researcher, explains that Technion “has all but enlisted itself in the [Israeli] military.”

Technion is a sort of MIT and Harvard rolled into one. Founded in 1923, before the state of Israel, Technion’s first palm tree was even planted by none other than Albert Einstein. The Haifa-based university schools the military and academic elite of Israel.

According to Montreal-based social justice collective Tadamon, 80 percent of Israel’s NASDAQ companies and 74 percent of its electronic companies are run by Technion graduates. Active-duty Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, officers and reservists are granted a range of perks by the university–none of which are available to Palestinians, who do not serve in a military that largely exists to maintain and extend Israel’s 64-year occupation of Palestinian land.

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UNDER THE anodyne classification of “applied sciences,” Technion’s research accomplishments read like a what’s what of science fiction, full of unmanned drones, pilotless surveillance gizmos and driverless bulldozers.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Technion’s D9 unmanned armored tank performed so magnificently during Israel’s massacre of 1,400 Gazans in the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead that the IDF doubled its order.

Journalist Max Blumenthal reported about the drone plane based on the dragonfly, with a 9-inch wingspan and 8-inch body. According to a quote Blumenthal cited from the American Technion Society website, “The plane’s relatively low speed enables it to easily enter rooms through small windows and to send back photos from a miniature camera.”

Technion personnel have worked on means to track human eye movements–in collaboration with Elbit, a key developer of Israel’s apartheid wall, illegal under international law, that slices through the occupied West Bank.

Technion is also a global expert in developing mini-robots capable of traversing rubble and planting bombs, as well as building “surveillance snakes”–whose goal is to explore the tunnels that are crucial for transporting desperately needed banned goods into blockaded Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians barely scrape by.

In this era of neoliberalism, Technion’s invention of clever military gadgets that require minimal labor is a budget-cutter’s dream come true.

Not surprisingly, Palestinians aren’t the only victims of Technion’s “applied sciences.” North America’s own apartheid wall along the U.S.-Mexico border uses surveillance technology developed by Technion. And stealth drones that the U.S. has used to such deadly effect in Pakistan are also developed by Technion.

With U.S. unemployment still devastatingly high–even the right-wing New York Postadmits real unemployment is 15.6 percent–it’s hardly surprising that news of this enormous construction and research project is widely viewed as a boon to New York’s economy.

But under the guise of research, this deal would cement a lucrative bond between the financial capital of the U.S. empire and Israel’s military-industrial complex.

Protest against this deal has already appeared from the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). Calling on Cornell to scrap its joint campus project with Technion, the USACBI argued:

They provide the knowledge that undergirds Israel’s ongoing colonial project. Technion, like all Israeli academic institutions, is deeply complicit with Israel’s military, providing it with the technological infrastructure to maintain and expand its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land.

Is it any wonder that an institution best known for stealth technology is hiding its real actions, in cahoots with the billionaire mayor and other city officials, beneath a cloak of academic respectability?

What is true of Cornell’s collaboration with Technion is also the case for New York City. Since New Yorkers are being asked to pay $100 million toward this deal, we should at least be able to debate whether we want to bankroll apartheid’s wars and ghettos.

We have to question the reason for this research in the first place. Why must there be unmanned contraptions used to spy on and target a hungry, dispossessed population? Why are billions of dollars and great mental effort being directed toward developing machines that kill or maim–or help to do so–surreptitiously anywhere in the world?

True, many major research institutions have contracts with military and espionage outfits the world over. But the architects of this colossal deal, which would use significant public funds, have been mute about the nefarious activities of one of its partners.

Why? If they have nothing to hide, let them pitch the deal for what it is–a contract with apartheid’s enforcers.

Why, we have to ask, in a city known the world over for its multiculturalism and diversity, is a research institution that will serve ethnic cleansing even tolerated?

New York City is home to the world’s largest Jewish community living outside of Israel–around 2 million people. It is also home to one of the largest Arab communities in the U.S.–more than 370,000, according to U.S. Census figures.

It would be a sick tribute to the militarized profit system if America’s foremost urban symbol of ethnic diversity and cosmopolitanism, New York City, winds up home to an institution devoted to stealth warfare to achieve ethnic segregation.

This article originally appeared in SocialistWorker.org. 

The Subway’s Biggest Rats

The financial capital of the U.S. empire cannot function without its subway system, which is the savior and curse of every New Yorker’s existence.

More than 5 million people ride it on an average weekday. Though it can be maddeningly packed, filthy, delayed or suddenly stalled anywhere along its 842 miles of track, the Americas’ most extensive and busiest subway will take you pretty much anywhere in the city’s 5 boroughs, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.

It is a marvel of 19th-century engineering, which forces a degree of social interaction among office workers, homeless people, tourists and Occupiers in a way that few American cities can match. The subway is a hygienist’s nightmare, and an anthropologist’s delight. Today it is facing a hidden crisis.

The disgusting infestation that’s inspired Spot the Rat games among riders cooling their heels on platforms across the city may grab headlines, but the more troubling rodents aren’t making off with a pizza crust along the third rail. Like the culprits of the housing crisis, these rats wear Armani.

Michael Stewart from the grassroots community coalition, United NY, in co-sponsorship with the Center for Working Families and the Strong Economy for all Coalition, has prepared a 20-page report called “Money for Nothing: How interest rate swaps have become golden handcuffs for New Yorkers.” In detailed charts and blessedly jargon-free prose, the report explains how New York’s taxpayers are being legally bilked out of billions of dollars. Our storied transit system is being gutted to appease Wall Street’s insatiable lust for profits.

In essence, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), a public company which runs the city’s subways and buses, entered into agreements with Wall Street’s biggest banks in hopes of protecting itself against financial instability. Instead, the very banks that engineered the global crisis and were later bailed out by taxpayers, have trapped the MTA “in a web of toxic swaps,” writes Stewart.

As someone barely capable of balancing a checkbook, I’m hardly qualified to explain complicated financial doings in the lingo of economists, though Stewart’s report does an admirable job. “Money for Nothing” details how Wall Street will collect hundreds of millions of dollars more from taxpayers through these swap deals than it paid out to the MTA in the first place.

The scam lies in the fact that the economic turmoil created by the banks, which led to a dramatic drop in interest rates, is what turned the MTA’s financial planning into a windfall for Wall Street. It amounts to a second bank bailout, in this case, from the riders, workers and all the rest of the taxpayers of the city of New York.

Like a Third World nation that appeals to the IMF for desperately needed aid and later finds itself starving its population to service the debt, the MTA is in  hock to men for whom inconvenience is having to actually walk between their limo and private jet.

Today, 16 percent of the MTA’s revenue goes toward servicing this debt. That means that nearly $17 of what a straphanger pays for a $104 monthly MetroCard goes toward paying off a set of financial products that will cost at least $1.3 billion by the time they expire — in 2030.

In a deal the envy of a Soprano, the MTA would have to pay $714 million in termination fees to stop the hemorrhaging, an amount that went up more than 40 percent in just three months this past fall.

To grasp the enormity of this boondoggle — currently padding the pockets of 1%ers at AIG, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and others —  “Money for Nothing” lays out the impact of swap payments in 2010, the year of the deepest cuts and most layoffs in decades of the transit system.

The MTA’s net swap payments in 2010 alone, if spent on transit instead of payments to banks, could have spared the riding public from deep subway and bus service cuts and cleaning reductions, as well as 1,012 MTA workers at New York City Transit from layoffs and the elimination of 749 positions associated with these cuts — with over $40 million to spare.

The Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 is facing a contract deadline January 15, 2012. Workers are told they must agree to steep givebacks that, in the union’s words, “would cost the average transit worker thousands of dollars per year and significantly degrade the quality of work life.” None of this is necessary.

As the report itself concludes, deals can be renegotiated. Just as the federal government upended what was perceived as financially possible to save the banks’ profits in 2009, workers and riders, who are, of course, also largely workers, can force a new deal on these institutions.

Occupy Wall Streeters are planning solidarity actions to stave off these cuts, including a possible day of action where riders will refuse to pay. These bankers — most of whom never deign to ride the subway — cannot be allowed to hijack the budget of the nation’s largest transit system, and certainly not without a fight.

As the union’s campaign slogan to save subway maintenance workers’ jobs goes, “New Yorkers deserve a rat-free subway.”

Hide the good china, protect the kids, I’m back in action for 2012 and will be speaking on my book, Sexuality and Socialism, as well as on lessons so far from Occupy Wall Street at Grand Valley State, Michigan, Jan. 23rd and 24th.