APRIL 8 – Congressional leaders have only hours remaining to pass a new budget or face an impending government shutdown. With this swollen leverage, Republicans have the President’s party by the proverbial chestnuts. Facing the crisis of a government shutdown, Congress has a singular opportunity to restore the conservative dream of American “sanity,” passing the most comprehensive budget cuts in recent history.

So what do they do with all this power? Undermining the overriding goal of limiting government spending as much as possible, Republicans instead consent to a virtually unchanged budget proposal which cuts a meager $38 billion next year.¹ Rather than sticking to their guns and holding the Dems to a major spending cut, Congressional Republicans throw their entire leverage into withholding federal funding from “Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortions.”²

So congrats, Republicans. Revive the “War Against Women,” fight the good fight.³ Withhold federal spending from the rape victims and the shameless women who, for no better reason than a broken condom, seek family planning assistance. Certainly, the last thing the party should do in this situation is to take a hard stand for budget reform on a significant, national scale, one that will affect millions of Americans. Personal freedom and fiscal responsibility aren’t part of our core ideology or anything, right?

In the face of this gross mishandling, we should not rationalize our representatives’ failures by embarrassingly embellishing the difficulty of the task before them: “only YOU can prevent government spending, congressman.” People do not realize is how easy it is to balance the budget. Try playing around with one of the free simulators like balancethebudget.com. Our fiscal problems are not due to unfeasibility, but simply because of chronically misplaced priorities. Congress absolutely has the ability to balance the budget, but they fail to do so because our representatives cannot agree on where to cut spending, and are flat out unwilling to cut federal funding from the greatest subsidized institutions. Consequently, Friday night should have been a shining opportunity for the Republican party, a moment when they finally had the leverage to get things done.

So why the big letdown? Clearly, social conservatives have the party’s crown jewels in an even stronger vice grip than the Republicans’ traction with the nation as a whole. Friday’s budget legislation should be a wakeup call all of us who identify as conservative. The issue is not about whether or not one agrees with abortion, its legality, or its continued usage. Rather, the issue at stake here is that time and time again, Republicans have a big opportunity to put their money where their mouth is, and instead forfeit their own goals in favor of trivial, mindless social conservatism. Rarely have I felt so strongly that to be conservative and to be a Republican are not the same thing. Six months from now, when we face the same debt we always have and the abortions are trickling to a halt, maybe the party will get its priorities straight. After all, there’s always next time…

References
1 Hulse, Carl. “Budget Deal to Cut $38 Billion Averts Shutdown.” The New York Times, 8 April 2011.
2 Herszenhorn, David M. and Cooper, Helene. “Concessions and Tension, Then a Deal.” The New York Times, 9 April 2011.
3 Cesca, Bob. “The Republican War Against Women.” Huffington Post, 10 February 2011.

At Duke, every year nearer to matriculation carries with it distinct lessons about how, where, and when to park.

Freshman year enables students to park practically on their doorsteps in the Red Zone. At least, until the lot is inexplicably full and you need to park on the other side of East Campus or face a hefty parking fine. As a sophomore, the question becomes not whether there is parking to be found but rather how many acres of Blue Zone the student must navigate to make it back to West. And for the upperclassmen and graduate students — well, we get to taste the rainbow. Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Violet: each color marks a different lot with a different parking requirement. Not to mention the HP-3, PGC-65, and other signifiers that sound more like a new brand of jumbo jet than a specific parking pass.

On its face, the parking system seems admirably organized. Each different lot, no matter how miniscule, is reserved for a specific kind of access. Law school students and employees, Trinity faculty, etc. – each group is reserved its own parking area. To appreciate how disorderly this system truly is, however, we should take a step back and question its necessity.

Who you gonna call?

Exhibit A: Trent building. As an underclassman, I chronically avoided classes in this building because it is so inaccessible from both East and West campuses. Now, as an off-campus senior, I somehow ended up with class there four times a week. So where exactly can a person park near Trent building?

Not in the gated Trent lot, even though it is perpetually empty. Not in the GC lot across from Trent building, even though it is also rarely full. Certainly not in the massive H lot, even farther away, nor in the residential lots on Yearby or Anderson streets. Definitely not in the enormous Medical Center garage on Flowers Drive, nor in the never-occupied carpool spots along the street, unless you can prove
that not only that you are driving another undergraduate to class, but that said undergrad also has a Blue Zone pass and is declining to use it in favor of carpooling. In fact, according to a private correspondence with Duke Parking, the Blue Zone is the closest legal lot to Trent building for undergraduates. If you’re a freshman with a car, you might as well walk from East campus.

Transportation Fail

Crucially, the problem is not just one of inefficiency but of, quite literally, stupidity. The point of a car is to increase mobility and ease of transportation from one location to another. But freshmen can only legally park on East Campus. Upperclassmen can only legally park on West Campus. Students are not statues embalmed in cement: they travel from campus to campus. Limiting the legal parking areas to one lot per class defeats the entire purpose of having a car at all.

Duke Parking, the only organization capable of shedding light on this quandary, was regrettably unavailable for comment, although I requested an interview with their VP of Parking no less than four times. So we must rely on conjecture. Freshmen can park on East but not West because Parking fears a massive influx of freshmen with cars parking in the Blue Zone when they go to class for the
day. They fear East Campus lots being swamped by upperclassmen driving to their classes in Friedl, Carr, and White. And, more importantly, they want to reserve specific lots so that faculty, many of whom are elderly, do not have to walk too far from their cars. These are absolutely reasonable fears. But we’re solving them the wrong way.

Parking is self-limiting

The problem with Duke Parking’s “overpopulation” hypothesis is that if students could actually park in more than one lot, any given lot would lose and gain spots at the same time. At 1:00, when the mighty freshmen are prowling the Blue Zone so that they can make their classes on West, upperclassmen would be occupying those freshmen’s spots on East. The lots don’t have to be able to hold twice as many students as they currently support; they simply need to have enough cushion to accommodate the very predictable influx and outflux of vehicles during the middle of the week.
Generally, driving from East to West is only advisable during the C-1’s most busy hours, since the Blue Zone is simply so far away from West Campus. Making driving a more feasible option by removing parking restrictions would ease pressure from the overcrowded buses in the middle of the day.

There is no credible reason to expect that off-campus undergraduates will create
parking congestion either. The only pass these students are allowed to purchase,
at this point in time, is Blue Zone access, because the commuting undergraduates
almost exclusively visit West Campus. They are too small a denomination and
their needs are being met too well right now for them to create congestion in a
total liberation scenario. Far from creating a parking nightmare, freeing up all of the lots (not just the Blue and Red Zones) would release a gargantuan number of spots that are currently unoccupied 24/7/365.25. Rooting students in place creates congestion by not allowing them to park in the most convenient lot based on their specific needs. Since different students have different needs, convenience is self-regulating.

But wait, surely I can’t be advocating total liberation? What about the lots used by graduate students, scientists, and Medical Center personnel? The most obscure lots, simply due to their obscurity, would receive the least influx of traffic under the total liberation scheme. The Law School’s lot would not suddenly become overwhelmed by undergraduates because who wants to park all the way out in the
Law School if their destination is West Campus? The lot would become accessible to students who need to park there for a justifiable, academic, short-term visit however. The most specialized lots would only see an increase in parking from the people who actually need to use those lots who are currently SOL.

The remaining question concerns the aged professor. Under no circumstances should he or she be obligated to park as far away as a nimble undergraduate. But the answer is right in front of our faces. We reserve specific parking spots all the time. Specific spots are reserved for handicap vehicles, maintenance vehicles, and other specific services which require that a minimal number of spots be reserved at all times. Faculty should get as many parking spots as they need to ensure optimal parking. But we don’t need to gate off entire lots to accomplish this. The lower Allen lot doesn’t need to remain empty 90% of the time in order to guarantee that faculty can park where they want to. 50
spaces in the Trent lot don’t need to remain vacant all the time so that a dozen faculty
can park there as needed. We simply need to provide a limited number of named
parking spaces in each lot for faculty members. So why have the colored pass
system, what does ROYGBV do for us?

It’s a trap!

It’s a Ponzi scheme, plain and simple. Parking passes are issued by Duke Parking.
They have no competition, since the university grants them a monopoly on
local parking; they can charge whatever they want for the passes. Parking fines are
administered outside of judicial oversight; they can charge what they want for those
too. Got fined erroneously? You can appeal the charge…to Duke Parking. The same
agency sells the passes, creates the parking restrictions, and collects on the inevitable
violations.

And the “no parking” restrictions are arbitrarily established and arbitrarily
enforced. The brief grace period students are afforded to park in illegal areas in order
to unload heavy baggage and for other legitimate purposes is rarely observed. Our
rent-a-cops are more likely to speed across East Campus to collect on a five minute
($200) fire lane violation than to pursue one of those actual offenders we hear about
in the frequent Larry Moneta security alert emails. But the real problem is not the
zealous employees, it is the institutional setting that allows them unrestricted and
nonjusticiable access to your wallet.

Students have no say in this process. The appeals committee purportedly contains some student participation, but those students are selected secretly at PTS’s discretion, not elected through an open application process. The parking restrictions themselves are simply outside the scope of our control. We are literally victims of a system that can fine us outrageous sums when, if, and most importantly where it chooses. We should not be complacent while this injustice continues: students should wield the
government apparatuses available to us. Take action. There is no room on this campus for tyrannical policy making.

By Trent Serwetz

The latest nationwide hullabaloo over the alcoholic drink “Four Loko” provides a poignant reminder of how quick America is to point the finger. Four Loko, for those who are unfamiliar with the beverage, is a 12% ABV drink sold in 23.5 ounce cans which also packs a hefty dose of caffeine. It’s like super-concentrated Smirnoff Ice mixed with Red Bull. The drink is sold at grocery stores and 7-11’s and comes in a variety of fruity flavors.

Last week, New York called for a voluntary ban on Four Loko distribution “for the concerned parents among us.” Since then, numerous state legislatures have considered banning the drink for fear of its health consequences. North Carolina’s Governor Purdue has called for a voluntary ban of Four Loko until its healthiness can be investigated further. Since several college students have been hospitalized after drinking Four Loko to excess, a national frenzy has sprung up condemning this drink instead of the students themselves.

There are two distinct fears which have all conflated together to indict Four Loko:

1. Fruity alcoholic beverages are more likely to induce overdrinking
2. Alcohol and energy drinks are a dangerous mix

Fruity, but hardly dangerous

“Protect the children!” the outcry against this alcoholic drink has exclaimed. With Four Loko in the world, students have access to their favorite intoxicating substance in fruit punch, cranberry lemonade, even watermelon flavors. It sure sounds dangerous, doesn’t it? Regrettably, none of the individuals currently writing about the drink’s dangerous appeal to underage drinkers seem to have actually tasted the beverage. Four Loko tastes terrible. I would personally rather down a margarita or a half-and-half than this disgusting concoction any day.

For an underage drinker aiming to get wasted, Four Loko may have more appeal than a case of Busch Light. But it has the same ABV as a bottle of wine. You can buy André at the grocery store too, it comes in fruity flavors, and it’s just as disgustingly cheap. The problem with going after Four Loko is that it is not uniquely responsible. Many drinks are fruity and designed to cause rapid intoxication at the same time. Most of them taste a lot better than Four Loko and are available at your neighborhood Kroger.

For (presumably 21) college students, beverages are available at the ABC store that are both fruitier and more alcoholic. Bacardi sells a “strawberry daiquiri mixer” which consists of ready-to-drink half and half. It’s more concentrated than Four Loko, it tastes a lot better, and it’s in the neighborhood of $15 for a whole handle. Seagram’s makes a “gin and juice” mixer which masks the alcohol so well you can chug it right out of the fifth.

On one hand, we are singling out Four Loko while there are significantly tastier and more dangerous drinks available. On the other hand, we are blaming a beverage for what are entirely human errors. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!

There is nothing more un-American than persecuting the Four Loko found in his or her hand.  If your car is hit by a guy going 95 in his Ferrari, you don’t blame the sports car for being too fast and maneuverable. You blame the driver for abusing the vehicle he legally purchased. Similarly, when a minor overdoses on Advil or some other household drug, you don’t condemn the pills for being inherently dangerous; you blame the poor choice on the child’s part and the adults who should have been better supervisors.

And, if minors are buying these things with fake IDs, we need to crack down on the 7-11’s that are taking them and the people that made the IDs. Nothing is going to be solved by blaming the Four Loko.

Alcohol, energy…not a good combination

The other putative justification for victimizing Four Loko is the drink’s built-in combination of alcohol and caffeine. Alcohol is a depressant, caffeine is a stimulant, and the combination allows students to drink potentially dangerous amounts of liquor before losing consciousness. This is not new information. Mixing alcohol and energy drinks, especially on college campuses, has been a highly scrutinized and increasingly popular practice since before I came to Duke.

There is no simple solution to this. College kids are not going to stop mixing alcohol and caffeine simply because Four Loko is taken off the shelves. In fact, Four Loko is probably safer than the alternatives. Ever chased Jager shots with Red Bull, which is readily available to over- and underage students alike? Such a combination will lead to intoxication much more efficiently than languishing through 24 ounces (two thirds of a liter!) of Four Loko.

If the goal is truly to get really wasted, there are numerous better and more readily available methods than the newly popular Four Loko. Sketchy punch laced with Everclear is available at many section parties. This is the reality of college life. What is going to be accomplished by violating Phusion Projects’ constitutional right to sell Four Loko? Didn’t we already try this during Prohibition?

Catharsis. Lawmakers can point the finger at this drink and act as if banning it will solve the woes of college drinking. If we just outlaw Four Loko, they think, kids will stop mixing alcohol with caffeine. If we just ban fruity drinks, minors will stop being hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. If we just cancel tailgate, college students will stop drinking at 9 in the morning to pre-game the day’s football festivities. This way, we can sweep under the rug the total inability of law enforcement to prevent the use of fake IDs. And the store clerks who routinely turn a blind eye in order to make the sale. And the dozens of students hospitalized every year after LDOC.

If we just ban Four Loko, the world will be a better place. In our dreams.

Edit: Nov 18, 2010. Phuzion Products, the company that makes Four Loko, has issued a statement indicating their intent to remove the caffeine, guarana, and taurine from their products, despite the company’s acute awareness that their beverage is being singled out among many others.

Edit: As of 12/18/2010, both the House and the Senate have officially voted to repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Congratulations to the LGBT community on this resounding victory!

The U.S. military’s longstanding ban on gay servicemen (and women) is over — for the moment. On Sep. 9, U.S. District Court Justice Virginia Phillips called for a “permanent injunction” barring the enforcement of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy.[i]

DADT, crafted by the Clinton Administration in 1993, is the most lenient treatment of homosexuality in the military to date. The law provides that a servicemember will be discharged if he/she has “engaged in, attempted to engage in, or solicited another to engage in a homosexual act or acts.” Additionally, discharge is required if the person has “stated that he or she is a homosexual or bisexual, or words to that effect,” or if the person has married or attempted to marry a person “known to be of the same biological sex.” The policy has been coined “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because it protects gay servicemembers from discharge, provided they are not open about their homosexuality.[ii]

In her ruling in Log Cabin Republicans v. United States, a case originally filed in 2004, Justice Phillips called for an end to the policy on First and Fifth Amendment grounds. She argued, in the memorandum opinion, that “the Act’s restrictions on speech are broader than reasonably necessary to protect the Government’s interest,” demanding that First Amendment rights take precedence.[iii] Following the trial proceedings and the filed testimony of numerous servicemembers and experts, including General Colin Powell, the court ruled that allowing gay people to openly serve in the military would neither undermine “unit cohesion” nor “military readiness.”[iv] Thus, because no overwhelming state interest in maintaining DADT can be determined, the plaintiffs’ First and Fifth Amendment rights must take priority.

This case is the latest and most potent iteration in a decade of promising reform on behalf of LGBTQ. Begun in 2003 by the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which ruled that state laws prohibiting sodomy are unconstitutional, the last 10 years have gone a long way towards ending discrimination against homosexuals. Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a District Court case decided in August of 2010, similarly ruled that California Proposition 8, a law prohibiting same-sex marriage, was unconstitutional.

The legal argumentation at work in each case is strikingly similar. All U.S. citizens are entitled to “Due Process” of law, guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Due Process means, essentially, that to take away your rights, the government has to have a good reason. The more “fundamental” the right, the harsher “scrutiny” with which the courts will inspect any policy that curtails it. In order to withstand scrutiny, any law restricting rights must serve a compelling “government interest,” otherwise it is unconstitutionally restrictive. In deciding that anti-sodomy laws, laws banning same-sex marriage, and the military’s DADT policy were all unconstitutional, the courts have simultaneously ruled that there is no government interest in continuing to support those policies.

In other words, the legal conclusion is: gay rights don’t hurt anyone. The government, as a purveyor of rights, does more harm than good by discriminating against LGBTQ. But legal reform is only half of the battle. Even though Brown v. Board of Education outlawed the “Separate but equal” doctrine in 1954, de facto segregation continued undiminished well into the 1960s and following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.

The issue in Log Cabin Republicans v. United States is not simply a question of whether gay rights are violated by open homosexuality meriting military discharge. DADT is a constitutional issue because many servicemembers were quietly persecuted for their sexual orientation, but were afraid to report the abuse to their commanding officers for fear of discharge under the policy.

One particularly compelling story cited in the memorandum opinion comes from Naval Officer Joseph Rocha. While serving in the Middle East, Rocha’s sexuality came to light when he refused to copulate with a prostitute. Labeling him gay, his commanding officer “ordered all of the other men in the unit to beat Rocha on the latter’s nineteenth birthday…had Rocha leashed like a dog…tied to a chair, force-fed dog food, and left in a dog kennel covered with feces.”[v] Rocha’s human rights were repeatedly violated during his time in office and he never reported the mistreatment, because to do so would result in his discharge from the Navy under DADT.

His story is only one of many, but as Justice Phillips points out, Rocha was not an anonymous serviceman: he was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, and the Navy Expert Rifleman Medal during his time in office. DADT, in addition to simply curtailing the rights of LGBTQ, commits them to experience discrimination in silence. But will that discrimination vanish along with the policy? And if the government has no compelling interest in subjugating gay Americans, does it not have an interest in protecting their rights?

Evidently not. President Obama, with midterm elections on the horizon, requested that Justice Phillips halt her injunction against DADT, on the basis of military readiness. On Oct. 20, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to suspend the injunction against DADT until further notice.[vi] The court’s decision that DADT does nothing to help military readiness, after extensive review of the available military documentation, didn’t faze the current administration or the federal appeals court.

Despite the fact that the repeal of DADT was one of Obama’s campaign points, he has insisted that the reform take place in Congress, and not through the courts. Democrats tried to repeal DADT legislatively in September 2010, only to be denied by a Republican filibuster. If they couldn’t get the job done in September, how does Obama plan to repeal DADT in November, with a Republican majority in the House?

Ironically, this situation pits the GOP group as the champion of gay rights against the first liberal president of the twenty-first century. The Log Cabin Republicans, founded in 1978, is the nation’s only Republican gay rights group. President Obama, on the other hand, was elected on a campaign platform demanding the “implementation of policies to allow qualified men and women to serve openly regardless of sexual orientation.”[vii] The same President Obama who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his efforts to strengthen, among other things, “cooperation between peoples.”[viii]

Admittedly, legal reform is not tantamount to comprehensive social change. Much to the chagrin of those who elected Obama in 2008, change takes time. But Brown v. Board was an important step in the right direction. Roe v. Wade was a crucial decision for women’s rights. And Log Cabin Republicans v. US should be celebrated as the current pinnacle of LGBTQ legal reform, rather than bemoaned for being ahead of its time. Sometimes, social power requires juridical power. Instead of condemning Justice Phillips for doing Congress’s job for them, Log Cabin Republicans v. US should be lauded as the most concrete evidence to date that all people are equal under the law.

References

[i] Log Cabin Republicans v. United States (2010). http://online.logcabin.org/assets/pdf/log-cabin-order.pdf.

[ii] LCR v. U.S.

[iii] LCR v. U.S.

[iv] LCR v. U.S.

[v] LCR v. U.S.

[vi] Tiron, Roxana. “Gates issues stricter rules for discharges of gay, lesbian troops.” The Hill. http://thehill.com/news-by-subject/defense-homeland-security/125339-gates-issues-stricter-rules-for-discharges-of-gay-troops.

[vii] Obama Campaign Holds Policy Briefing on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The Advocate. http://www.advocate.com/Politics/Election/Obama_Campaign_Holds_Policy_Briefing_on_DADT/.

[viii] The Nobel Peace Prize 2009 :Barack Obama. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/.

The Gothic Guardian at Duke University

1. Your participation in the Weather Underground came during a time of diverse movement politics and a certain brand of kick-ass liberals. Today, movement politics seem to have disappeared at the same time that liberalism is becoming increasingly tied to international pacifism. Where did the movement go? In your opinion, what’s different about the way college kids are learning leftist politics, and how can we bring the ass-kicking back?

We never considered ourselves kick-ass liberals. “Liberals” was a bad word, the people who gave us the Vietnam War and refused to effectively oppose racism and segregation. “Liberal” meant “hypocrite.” But your question seems to be more about being “kick ass.” Maybe that has to do with how serious and committed and willing people are to work for peace, economic justice, and to save the planet. Today there are thousands of young people who fit this category and are working; they only become apparent to the media when a mass movement develops. For the most part they’re still under the radar. Check out the latest issue of YES! magazine (print and online) if you want to see examples of young people working in a kick-ass way to develop resilient sustainable economics. The biggest job now is to figure out how to organize all the energy into a political program to complement this work, to gain the public resources of the society.

As for “international pacifism,” I believe that opposition to American wars is absolutely essential to the survival of the planet. We are the principle proponents of the global system of war. There are many much more rational means of achieving security and “defense.” The most pernicious aspect of our country’s militarism is that war becomes the default solution to what are essential internal problems such as the looting of the economy by bankers and the rape of the environment by corporations.

2. One question plaguing leftist politics today concerns the state’s efficacy as a tool for enacting positive change — to many, the state is too intertwined with (racial, gender, sexual) oppression to be a viable tool for legislating change. Years after your time with the Weather Underground, where do you stand on this issue? Have you lost faith in the power of the people, so to speak? How would you go about enacting political change today?

I can’t see any alternative to building a movement or movements for political power. No matter what the conservatives say, there’s still such a thing as the Social Contract. We join together in order to live better: the state should become, if it’s not already, the embodiment of the collective will of society. It is obviously now controlled by elite interests, but there needs to be a struggle for power. What’s at stake is the type of lives my children and grandchildren will live, your lives, as well as the ultimate survival of life on the planet. If we don’t struggle for power and just ignore the state, than the result will be war, the default solution to all problems in our society.

Many young people, as I mentioned above, are choosing to work in sustainable agriculture, which offers a positive model for the future, and tries to disregard the state. They know, quite accurately, that farmers’ markets selling organic food are much more beneficial than agricultural subsidies to corn syrup producers, which result in the crap people eat from the supermarket. That’s great, and the food is better. We’ll need to relearn how to grow food locally when the oil runs out. However, it’s more than likely that long before the current system of food production and distribution based on oil winds down, there’ll be more wars to capture whatever oil still exists. The reason is that war is what the U.S. state is set up for. So we have to work on political power, too. Another example is the movement for sustainable green energy. It can happen much faster if the vast resources of the government, which are, after all, the society’s collective resources, are used to stimulate the green economy. We should have been doing this since the Seventies, when the problem of global warming first was recognized and coincidentally oil first became high-priced. But the oil interests controlled government policy, and still do. So there’s got to be a battle for policy.

As for the power of the people, I still believe that we need to mobilize people to use the democratic mechanisms such as voting which still exist. Getting people to act in their interests is tough for a myriad of reasons, however. They’re too distracted by entertainment, too insecure to think they understand the issues, too cynical, too drunk, too beat up, too messed up to take a political stand. The political class in this country is infinitesimal in size. But that will change, as you young people get smart and start figuring out how you want to live your lives.

Penn Political Review

1. Considering your very high regard for Cuba as a political and social entity, as discussed on your website, what do you have to say about Fidel Castro’s recent comment that “the Cuban model doesn’t even work for [Cuba] anymore”?

There’s too much to say about Cuba. I’m not a fan of a one-party state. I do not support political repression. On the other hand, the Cuban revolution has been successfully giving the finger to Uncle Sam for over fifty years, a terrific accomplishment. And if you had to be at the lowest position in society in any Latin American country, the one in which your kids would have the best chance for nutrition, medical care, education, housing, and social advancement would be Cuba. Don’t be so hasty to jump on the American bandwagon. American policy has no concern for social justice. It reinforces violence, brutality, poverty, and inequality throughout the world and especially in Latin America. As for socialism in Cuba, it’s been obvious for years that it doesn’t work. Nor does capitalism in Nicaragua, for example.

2. Do you think that comparisons between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War are justified? What are the biggest parallels and what are the biggest misconceived similarities?

The fact that both were wars of choice, actually occupations of third world countries, makes them quite similar. The U.S. is not good at fighting and winning wars of occupation of ancient civilizations that don’t want us. We’d need to murder many more people than we already do to completely defeat Iraq. Actually we murdered millions in Vietnam, but we still weren’t successful. They weren’t going anywhere and the Afghans today aren’t going anywhere. In both cases our hubris over our great weapons brought us to tragedy. In both cases, almost no US soldiers knew anything at all about the language and the culture of the people they’re murdering.

Historical analogies are always imperfect. In this case, the culture of Iraq is much different than the culture of Vietnam, and the nature of the fight is different. Vietnam was basically united against first French and then American colonialism, and for socialism. Iraq is riven with factions, one of which is very pro-US (the Kurds), while we can play others against each other. On the American side, the military has learned many lessons from Vietnam, not so much in how to win, but how to keep the US public from knowing about the war of occupation. Images are highly censored, reporters are “embedded.” Soldiers are not drafted, so they don’t bring anti-war sentiment with them. The lack of a draft also means that people in the society at large don’t need to pay attention to the war. Whole units go over together and come home together, which did not happen in Vietnam, they used individual replacements. It was like a factory. Only that undermined unit loyalty. In effect, there’s now a permanent military caste, which sees war-fighting as its job. If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

It’s necessary to look at things fresh. We live in an Orwellian age, when defense means aggression, peace means war. I advise young people to study history deeply and accept no conventional explanations. Are you familiar with the story of Temple Grandin? Because of her autism, she understood nothing at all about human relationships, but she looked at animals with a completely unbiased, fresh eye. As a result she was able to ask fundamental questions which no one else did, such as why the animals in a slaughterhouse feedlot were making so much noise? She revolutionized the way we treat animals.

Columbia Political Review

1. Do you believe that the climate crisis needs a Vietnam-like collegiate coalition to engender a sense of urgency within society to act?

Absolutely. If the survival of life on the planet doesn’t produce a sense of urgency, then nothing will. We need a mass political movement to demand sane energy policy. Our current policy of full-speed ahead on oil consumption is suicidal. I doubt whether young people want to commit suicide.

2. One of the biggest problems with drawing parallels between the Vietnam war and the climate crisis is that the current crisis is not as visceral as the Vietnam war was for collegiate students (via the draft issue). How can we make the collegiate community feel like it has a stake in the issue?

I often wonder about this myself. I don’t know how to raise moral issues to the point that people feel compelled to act on them. I suspect it will take years of work and energy and agitation on the part of self-conscious organizers to mobilize a critical mass that can draw in people who are now essentially apolitical or in despair.
You’ve asked what is for me the question of the moment, how do we develop the strategy to build a mass movement?

3. Do you believe that there is any one issue in society today around which such a visceral feeling could coalesce, around which a radical reaction could foment? If no, why not? If so, what is it and why?

Having participated in several historical mass movements, and lived through others, I believe as an act of faith that such popular movements will arise again. They may take different forms, but they’ll be back. People haven’t changed all that much, they still have moral and altruistic feelings no matter how much we’re subjected to forces that try to beat them out of us. People are still rational. I don’t know if it will be working against global warming or constant war and the preparation for war, or worrying about our neighbors’ poverty, or reforming the educational system so all kids have a chance, or treating immigrants as human beings, but people are going to snap sooner or later. There’s still a survival instinct.

All of these current crises represent the triumph of small elite interests over popular interests. The problem then is how to organize for mass progressive political power. The right-wing elites are currently doing better, since they’re co-opting people’s discontent (and racism) to build a mass movement. Have you read Jane Mayer’s recent article in the New Yorker exposing the Koch brothers, who finance the Tea-party and other pseudo-populist right wing institutions? They are oil billionaires whose hidden agenda is, among other things, attacking government environmental regulation.

Brown Spectator

1. Why did you decide to pursue a violent disobedience despite the remarkable success of the non-violence protest that had taken place in the 60′s, such as the civil rights movement?

My friends and I were entranced by the heroism of Che Guevara and the Vietnamese and the Black Panthers and various people around the world who had taken up the gun to fight for freedom. We wanted to be like them. It was a losing strategy, in retrospect, but when you’re twenty years old you often choose wrong strategies, especially attractive heroic ones. As for nonviolent strategy, you’re right, it is one of the great contributions of the twentieth century to world history, and yet we underrated its achievements. “Black Power,” for example, as espoused by Malcolm X and others, seemed more radical in its tactics as well as its analysis than nonviolent integration. To us, nonviolence was “wimpy,” while “picking up the gun” had a virile, macho cache’. Twenty year old boys need to prove themselves. (so did a few young women needed).

Vanguardism was also a way to avoid the long hard work of mass political organizing. I used to say in my public speeches, “organizing is another word for going slow.” What I forgot is that there’s no other way, you’ve got to “do the work.”

2. How much did collateral damage and the safety of innocents concern you when you decided to pursue a militant form of protest?

I think there’s a distinction between militancy and violence, but I’ll let that slide for a second.

We saw ourselves as soldiers, and all soldiers consider the costs of war to be necessary. The justification for revolutionary wars is to stop a larger violence, the violence of the system. In Vietnam, our government was murdering millions of people (3-5 million, according to the American Friends Service Committee). When you’re in despair, as I was, it’s not easy to know what the exact right thing to do is to stop such a slaughter. Of course I’ve come to believe that nonviolence as a political strategy is much more powerful than violent governmental repression. However, it takes a militant nonviolent.

I would suggest that you ask this same question about collateral damage and the safety of innocents to the war planners and generals in Washington DC who are murdering thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as we talk. The French writer Jean Genet once said, when asked about the Weathermen, “The Weathermen have little bombs, the U.S. has big bombs.”

3. How would you recommend students in today’s universities go about protesting government actions?

First, study and figure out a power analysis. Who’s in charge, whose interests are being served, what should be the main lines of protest and targets? Then do mass educational work, build a base. Figure out what people’s moral and material self-interest are. From that study, strategy and tactics will flow. I should add that it’s quite worthwhile to also study successful social and political movements of the twentieth century in this country (and abroad).

At some point, as I’ve indicated above, there has to be a political movement that puts forward a program for the future. It will of necessity challenge the entrenched interests such as corporations, banks, military. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if students abandoned en masse the business schools to prepare for careers as community organizers? Studying the history and methods of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, 1961-1965, might be a lot more interesting and socially valuable than one more course in financial instruments.

Berkeley Political Review

1. Public education in California is coming apart at the seams. Among young campus leaders, there are often fundamental disagreements as to the best path to forcing Sacramento to prioritize affordable public higher education. What role do you believe movement-oriented organizing should play in this struggle? In California’s broader struggle to balance public and private interests?

I’m not in California or in touch with activists who are confronting the crisis of public higher education, so I can’t begin to evaluate the various competing strategies. However, it does seem to me that the problem stems from the larger impoverishment of the state of California, a result of the ideological and idiotic Prop 13, which cut taxes over thirty years ago. Having defined the state and taxes as the problem, the conservatives then eviscerated all public functions such as education, public health, transportation that depend on public funds. It’s insane to deny that social needs exist: is education a benefit to society or is it not? Put another way, do we want to maintain our underclass, putting our resources into police, courts, and prisons (which is what California is now doing)?
Students should be organizing around the slogan that education is a human right and a social good.

2. Many California students that participated in last year’s walkouts in support of access to public education will not do so again this fall because they feel their actions had no impact–”nothing has changed,” you hear them say. Do you find that today’s youth are more impatient than were their counterparts in the ’60s and ’70s?

It’s very easy to become demoralized because entrenched interests rarely yield when they’re hit once. Most people lack the models of long-term movement building that the civil rights and labor movements gave us. Of course the powers in charge of the UC system will just ignore protest until it goes away. Same thing happened in 2003, when the largest demonstrations in world history opposed the run-up to the Iraq war: no response from the Bush administration, which merely ignored the protests. So people got demoralized and went home. Again, they didn’t realize that the problem was how to build a movement. Again, the model had been lost. Both the anti-war demos in 2003 and the UC demos of last year were spontaneous outpourings, but they weren’t tied to a long term movement building conception in most students’ heads.

3. Looking back at your time with Weather Underground, what are you most proud of? What, if anything, do you most regret?

I’m proud of very little having to do with the Weather Underground. It was completely misguided. On the other hand, I feel privileged and proud to have been a part of the larger anti-war movement, one of millions who helped stop our country’s military aggression. When you think about it, that was a phenomenal historical achievement, a testament to this country’s democratic possibilities.

American Foreign Policy at Princeton University

1. Do you think that the Weather Underground movement was harmed by its affiliation with socialism and communism, potentially tainting its anti-war message?

By the time the Weather Underground emerged, we had already rejected “merely” the anti-war position in favor of the “revolutionary” position: we didn’t want to stop one war, we wanted to stop the system that gave us successive wars. In doing so, we harmed the more realistic, practical, and appropriate anti-war movement, by splitting it into two camps, one for nonviolence and ending the war, one for violent revolution. We did the work of the FBI for them.

We thought the alternative to militaristic capitalism was communism, a case of believing the fallacy that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. Of course our ultra-radical position diminished any chances we had of building a mass political base among normal people. It was merely self-expression, not strategic politics.

Vanderbilt Political Review

1. The Weather Underground was opposed to United States military involvement in Vietnam on the grounds that it constituted an imperialistic advance into Southeast Asia. The current conflict in Iraq has been criticized for similar offenses, and lately the Obama administration has come under fire, both for failing to fulfill a campaign promise to end the war and then for mishandling the withdrawal. Do you feel that these concerns, both about the administration and the similarities to Vietnam’s precedent, are justified, and if not, what do you feel were the forces behind the United States’ invasion of Iraq? Should we be as concerned about what this war indicates about the American mentality as you were about Vietnam?

Absolutely, we have to be concerned about our country’s militarism. There are many other ways to solve problems in the world, including the development of international law. The Europeans have been dealing with terrorism for years as a criminal matter, handled by police agencies. They don’t declare “war on terror” and invade countries, they go after the criminals. But our country’s foreign policy is based on the use of force. War is not only the means, it’s the goal. For decades, Noam Chomsky used to say that the goal of the United States is global domination. In the last decade he’s changed the formulation, now he says that the goal is global domination through the use of violence.

(I could go on at length about this question because it’s probably my main motivation for the organizing work I do, having come of age during Vietnam and seen the absolute immorality and waste of our wars. I’ll just make two points, and then move on).

First, our economy is oriented toward the production of weapons and war-making capability. Oil, a major component of the economy, is a military necessity, incidentally. The largest part of the federal budget, 48%, goes to “defense,” including intelligence and nuclear weapons and paying for past wars. (Source: War Resisters League, http://www.warresisters.org/files/FY2011piechart.pdf). So the military and the defense industry are supremely powerful. Huge weapons systems costing billions are split up to subcontractors in every single congressional district. In our debates over the cost of domestic human and social needs, such as health and education, the obvious solution would be to take money from the bloated and corrupt defense industry, yet the media never raises this point for discussion and politicians don’t dare. (Dennis Kucinich, one who does break the silence, is completely isolated, a pariah in Congress). One purpose of our periodic wars is to prove to the American people the need for this completely wasteful and unnecessary sacrifice, the “defense” budget. The goal of war is war. No wonder the American people are confused.
Second, there is a potential alternative to this war system which we’re seemingly trapped in: international law. Europe has processed the last two centuries of their miserable history to the point that they’re breaking down borders and establishing the legal framework to avoid war. The U.S. has gone in the opposite direction since 1945, seeking out wars. Most American people have never heard of the possibility of international law. A great source for this discussion is Jonathan Schell, “The Unconquerable World.” He believes, and I concur, that international law is the great challenge of the 21st century, your century. It can be used not only to avoid war and the waste entailed, but also to solve our environmental crises, such as global warming.

The simple fact that there’s so little debate and discussion in this country, especially in the media, concerning militarism and its alternatives, does indicate a problem with our “mentality,” as you suggest. We’re in complete denial, a totally irrational situation.

Concerning the current administration’s continuation of the wars, even before the election, President Obama and his advisors made a political decision not to challenge the power of the military and the corporations behind them, no matter what the desire of the American people for peace. (That desire does not have any organized political way to express itself). I like to believe that President Obama wants peace, unlike any of his predecessors, judging by his brilliant memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” but he’s trapped within this war system that controls the government and the media at every level. Unfortunately, he’s not only retained major officials from Bush’s neo-con interventionist administration, such as Secretary of Defense Gates, but he’s excluded all non-militarists from his advisors. Things would have been different had our anti-war movement been larger and more politically significant, but it’s not. Politics matters ultimately. It’s up to us to build such a movement. It’s a good learning experience, though: many of us were naive in believing that a president can change policy. Only a political mass movement can force such a thing. In short, power has not shifted since there’s no organized peace party.

2. Political lethargy has always been a barrier to activists, especially among younger people (the voting rate of college students is the lowest of any voting-eligible age demographic). However, the recent election demonstrated how powerful the involvement of American youth can be. Do you feel that this generation of college students is as politically engaged as your generation was? Is it as effectively engaged, and how does it need to grow? In what ways has your generation developed its approach to advocacy and activism, and do you expect the current youth to follow a similar trajectory as they age? Why or why not?

I’ve been pondering these questions concerning generational differences for years. There are many possible explanations for the lack of a youth movement now and the presence of one forty years ago, but I’ll try to be brief in my reply.

Young people often tell me that nothing anyone does can make a difference. So why bother educating oneself on social issues or engaging in activism if the outcome will be nothing? Better to maximize one’s personal entertainment, which appears to be the point of life anyway, judging by advertising and the actual culture young people are immersed in. The irony is that I never once heard anyone say such a thing when I was in college, 1965-1968. It would have been obviously false, since we had the immediate example of the civil rights movement in the South, which resulted in a complete revolution in laws and mores, the over-turning of legal segregation. What individuals did, when they joined with others in a movement, was transforming the world. It was of supreme importance to us, too, that the shock-troops of the organizing and agitation in the South were all young (e.g., Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi).

Another thing which the civil rights movement taught us white kids in the north was how to organize. The same methods they used in the South–building one to one relations among people, developing new leadership, an emphasis on internal education, the use of both mobilizations, nonviolent civil disobedience, and political organizing–were adopted by the anti-Vietnam war movement and subsequently by the women’s, gay-rights, and environmental movements. My organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), named “participatory democracy” as our goal and our method. The term originated with SNCC.

Much of this organizing model also came from the labor movement, which in the Sixties was still vibrant as a result of thirty years of success. Alas, there’s been a forty year break and young people now don’t have these powerful models for organizing, as we did, and so don’t know how to build a long term movement for power. So it’s predictable that people sink back into despair: they don’t have a clue about what can be done or what has been done in the past.

I’ll briefly mention a few other important cultural and material differences between then and now: the lack of a draft, which means that people don’t have to pay attention to wars if they don’t want to; the vastly more expensive cost of higher education (not even the poorest kid at Columbia University during my years graduated with anything like the level of debt that you are burdened with now); the cultural shift from civic responsibility to individual ambition; the multiplicity of forms of entertainment and the dominance of the entertainment industry in people’s lives; the lack of a single unifying moral example such as World War II, which woke many of us up to the need to oppose state immorality especially in the forms of militarism and racism. On the last point, the term “Good German” was a universally understood metaphor when I was growing up: it meant someone who conveniently ignored or denied the reality of oppression and injustice around them. NO ONE WANTED TO BE A GOOD GERMAN.

There’s a second part to your question: how to break through the lethargy (which I prefer to call resignation and despair)? You’re absolutely right that in 2008 young people demonstrated their capability to mobilize themselves politically. But the whole Obama movement, which I joined, too, proved to be built on hopes for change that were much too vague and ambiguous: Obama himself chose to return to the Clinton conservative Democratic Party program which should rightly be called “Republican lite.” No fundamental challenge to the corporate, financial, and military interests in charge. To do that will take an entire political realignment, one in which progressives offer a way out of the current crises: real governmental regulation of the financial industry, public refinancing of education, housing, medical care, subsidies for the development of clean energy and local agriculture. All of this can be paid for very easily by cutting back on the military.

Such a program can only happen if people like yourselves lead it. My generation is way too busy dying. It has to be framed and branded in a way that’s significant to young people, that speaks of the kind of future you want–meaningful work, peace, clean environment, tolerance, moral stance in the world. Important organizational decisions need to be made: can such a progressive, positive future program be carried by a reformed, rebuilt Democratic Party, or is that party so corrupt and compromised and bought by corporate power that it has to be rejected for a third party? (I have some thoughts on this matter). A realignment like this is not going to be simple or fast: this is the work of the rest of your lives. College is a good time to prepare for this lifelong struggle.

3. How was radicalism helpful and harmful to your cause as an organization? What strategies have you noticed emerging in this latest election cycle that could easily backfire, and why? Which strategies do you feel will work? And lastly, do you feel that radicalism as it existed in the 1960s and ’70s has a place in the modern political arena, or has it run its course?

I assume that what you mean by radicalism is a thorough-going critique of society, down to the roots of our problems. “Radical” = roots. How could such a thing be bad? Our big discovery, speaking of those white kids in the New Left, was that the war in Vietnam was not just a mistake made by well-meaning governmental officials. That was the liberal view. The radical view was that war and racism are central to US aims in the world. That explained continual intervention in the Third World as well as the Cold War itself. The same radical critique was made of the presence of racism as a structural component of our society. Ultimately the radical critique goes to the nature of class society, the dominance of money. (Just look at Congress and both political parties). Since the radical critique happens to be true, it doesn’t seem like a very good idea to throw it out.

However, your question on strategy does point to a real problem: those of us who went out into the streets demanding the complete overthrow of this system became isolated from our base, other students, and from the society at large, and were easily smashed. Part of Weatherman’s problems was that we thought the country was ready for revolution. It wasn’t, far from it. (Incidentally, I want to make clear that Weatherman was only a tiny portion of the much larger anti-war movement. At our height, Weatherman as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), were at best 500 people. Out of an organization of perhaps 100,000 members. And the larger anti-war and anti-racism movements involved many millions. So let’s not exaggerate Weatherman’s importance, or that of the subsequent Weather Underground, which involved at most 100-200 people. Weatherman was more of an outlier, an oddity, than representative of the mass movement).

Weatherman did represent a widespread tendency in the New Left movement to be “up front” with our politics, to not hide our radical critique. We had analyzed that as part of the problem with the Old Left. In my own history, I moved from a base-building model of organizing (e.g., Columbia University SDS to the big rebellion of the spring of 1968), to a self-expression model, which was Weatherman and the Weather Underground. Self-expression alone cannot possibly build a movement, only strategic organizing can. I could say a lot more about this difference, but let me emphasize one point: organizing is figuring out how to grow a movement, and that usually means hard work of relationship building and education and leadership development (ie., democracy) over a long period of time. The process is not short-circuited by people proclaiming they have the truth and expecting others to follow, ie., self-expression. It doesn’t work that way.

I don’t know what’s a viable successful strategy at the moment. (No one does). I suspect it will begin with opposition to the great moral wrongs of our time–for example, the obscene gap between rich and poor, the destruction of life on the planet through global warming–and will end with a bid for political power. Which moral wrong among so many that exist will mobilize the most people, I don’t know, and how to build that movement for power I don’t know either. That’s the work of the next decades. I suspect that the Republican and conservative trope “Government bad!” has to be countered with a progressive message like, “Government should represent the collective will of society; it’s the responsibility of the government to care for the well-being of the people and the planet.” Maybe that’s a little too long compared to “Government bad,” but “Government good” alone obviously wouldn’t work. Whatever it is, it’ll involve a vision of the future based on how you young people want to live. Perhaps I should turn the question back on you, since you’re closer to young people than I: what do you think motivates youth today?

4. You discuss how President Obama failed to challenge the power of the military and the corporations behind them because of a lack of an organized political anti-war movement. What do you believe hindered the anti-war movement from becoming larger and more politically active before, during, and after the 2008 election?

Many things. The worst was the U.S. people’s confusion about the wars based on the fact that we were attacked on September 11, 2001. What does a good Texas sheriff do when a crime is committed in his town? He shoots the bad guys. That’s the level of American’s understanding of the justification for war.
The lesson of Vietnam, that you can’t trust the government when they’re trying to whip up support for a war, has been forgotten over the last thirty-plus years. It even had a name, “Vietnam Syndrome,” and the war planners have crowed since 1991 that the disease has been conquered.

Within this context, the anti-war movement itself could never break out of talking to itself. Our strategy and tactics, mostly involving mass mobilizations, seemed old and tired after the initial flurry of the spring of 2003, when millions of people marched in the streets. The fact that we never figured out how to talk with people who are not like us may be a reflection of the fact that our society is much more polarized by class and race than it was forty years ago. It’s like we live in our own guarded towers (gated communities?). This latter point is reflected in the extreme polarization in Congress and the lack of communication and cooperation.

I’ve already mentioned that the skills involved in organizing a mass movement have been lost, and many people think that merely expressing their feelings will do the trick. It doesn’t.

5. Do you think that it would still be possible today to live ”underground” and hidden from the government for seven and a half years given today’s technology and the new search tactics permitted under the Patriot Act?

They say that thirteen million “illegal immigrants” plus two million more people in trouble with the law live underground in this country. But this question is irrelevant: what we need is a legal movement that uses existing civil liberties such as the right to assemble and the right to speak. This has nothing to do with an underground guerilla strategy. If the government suspends all rights by declaring social movements “terrorist,” then there will be so many people affected that the ocean in which these new fugitives swim will be vast. Let’s build the movement first.