The gutted university a la neoliberal

This is a rather depressing and terrifying article about the selling out and destruction of public universities in the US.  And here's a profile of a documentary that treats the subject in more depth.

Damon Young on Donald Trump

This is another funny bit from Damon Young, in his classic question-and-answer catechism format.

Brief article on protests in Brazil

Here is a brief article about the class implications of the protests in Brazil.  It cites some statistics that confirm my impression that the protesters are drawn mainly from the higher economic classes in the country.

A detailed account of the rise of ISIS

This is an in-depth article about the rise of the Islamic State.  It's a good overview for anyone who hasn't been keeping up with the story until now.

Leahy on Cáceres

Here's what Senator Leahy of Vermont had to say about the death of Berta Cáceres.

CIA, Contras, and the drug trade

This is a pretty thoughtful treatment of the allegation that the CIA promoted crack cocaine in black ghettos in the 1980s.  The short summary is that no, the CIA did not have an explicit campaign to invent crack and addict people to it in the US, but they did basically look the other way when the CIA-supported and -approved Contras engaged in drug trafficking.  For those who are rusty on their 1980s history, the Contras were a gang of largely fascist reprobates (by Jon Stewart's reckoning "an army of drug-addled jungle rapists" or something like this) who wanted to replace the center-left Sandinista government in Nicaragua with the return of the preceding decades-long dictatorship of the right-wing Somozas.  They weren't very skilled fighters and didn't have much popular support, but were kept viable for a while by intensive support from the CIA.  Once Congress and the people of the US got wise to this and made it clear that we didn't want to support the Contras' project, the CIA and the Contras had to search for other forms of financing.  These sources included donations from private individuals in the far-right aristocracy of US politics, the proceeds from the infamous sale of arms to our enemies the Iranians, and narcotrafficking.  The latter financing source was a natural choice; the cocaine trade was thriving in the 1980s, Nicaragua was right on the main route from South America to the US, and in fact many of the corrupt fascists supporting the Contras were already involved in the trade.  So indirectly, the CIA accepted or at least didn't protest the drug trafficking that everyone knew was to some extent financing their boys, the Contras.  Not as salacious a story as the CIA somehow creating the crack epidemic singlehandedly, but still pretty shameful.

Trump as anti-neoliberal

This is an article analyzing Trump's popularity as a result of his condemnation of neoliberal free-trade agreements and business offshoring.  The author feels that this is a more powerful, more relevant narrative to describe Trump's rise than the oft-trumpeted rampant racism of most of the US populace.  It's an interesting point, but I'm not sure I quite buy it.  Obama and many recent Democrat candidates  (not the Clintons) have consistently expressed anger at the irresponsible practices of US businesses and politicians that aren't loyal to US workers, but they don't get much of anywhere with angry white Middle Americans.  Yes, most of these Democrats have ended up promoting the very neoliberal policies they speak against, but that's no different from Trump's hypocrisy.  And Bernie Sanders articulates a pretty coherent critique of neoliberal economics, and has the credentials and voting record to back him up, but I don't think most white voters go wild for him like they do for Trump.  So while the article's economic, working-class reading of Trump's popularity is interesting and surely has some validity, I don't think it's a very robust explanation if you don't factor racism and xenophobia into the equation.

Lesson to schoolchildren: don't do anything, just follow orders

Here is another rather depressing little article about a teenage kid that tried to help a classmate suffering from an asthma attack.  He was suspended from school because the teacher ordered him and all others to stay still and not help.  The young man disobeyed his teacher and added in some profanity for good measure (as I would have), and was penalized for it.  This is the ultimate case of a teacher trying to instill in her students blind obedience to official protocol, instead of critical thought and solidarity with others.

Damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't homelessness

This is a quirky little story about a homeless guy who built his own home by excavating a cave to live in.  It was located in a public park, so when he was discovered, he was fined for damage to property.  Many people assume that the homeless are homeless for lack of intelligence or resourcefulness, or out of sheer sloth.  Here is a guy who went against all these stereotypes of the homeless (and it looks like he was an immigrant, to boot), tried to take initiative and improve his life, and he gets penalized for it.

Berta Caceres

Berta Caceres, Honduran environmental and indigenous rights activist, was murdered last week.  This is a really important thing.  It seems possible though that no one will be brought to justice for it.

Gun rights in Ferguson?

It's been about a year and a half since Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, Missouri, and we don't hear much about him anymore these days.  I wrote a blog post a while back about certain issues that I felt were brought up by Brown's death and the subsequent protests and repression of protests.  In that post I hinted that a big concern for me was the increasing militarization of the US, particularly the forces of law and order.

In that vein, I often asked myself, "Where are the NRA and the other militia-type whackjobs guys now?  They are always braying about the coming repression of civil liberties in the US, scifi visions of a Big Brother state in the near future, and defending rather fringe causes like the right of private individuals to abuse public land however they see fit.  But in the real, unambiguous, present-day police state that murders unarmed black youth with impunity, there's nary a peep from these self-styled defenders of freedom.  What gives?"

At some point last year I began cynically answering my own question, "Oh yeah, they're busy shooting up unarmed people in churches in South Carolina, or defending the perpetrator of same."  But my interest was piqued when I saw that there seemed to be at least one gun-rights and civil-liberties group that was walking the walk in Ferguson.  It was called the Oath Keepers.  Initially they seemed in fact to be there as part of the police repression of blacks exercising their First Amendment rights,  But this follow-up article made it seem as if, whatever their initial intent, they were realizing that yes, oppression of blacks is a real thing, and that if the Oath Keepers are serious about defending the Constitution, they need to take up the cause of Black Lives Matter.  I understand the spirit of the Second Amendment, that an armed citizenry is a natural last line of defense against government tyranny.  But it's obviously not so simple.  Should we all have the right to hunting rifles?  AK-47s?  Nuclear bombs, one for each family?  While the intent of the Second Amendment is a conceptual check on the government's monopoly on violence, it becomes totally dangerous and untenable if taken to its logical conclusion.  So I wasn't on board with the Oath Keepers detachment in Ferguson, but I admired that they were being coherent, and not using gun rights and libertarian rhetoric as a veiled way of exercising terrorist control over black people.

Then I didn't hear about them anymore.  The grand rally planned for Ferguson, in which armed blacks and whites would take the streets in a peaceful, armed protest, never seemed to happen.  I recently looked into it again, and found this fascinating account of the whole affair.  It seems that the coherent take on black rights and gun rights was not a position shared by all of Oath Keepers, just one guy within the group who was crazy enough to believe that the Second Amendment should also apply to poor black people (the guy has since resigned/been expelled from Oath Keepers).  Apparently there was a huge internal conflict within Oath Keepers, and the organization came out as most NRA-style groups do.  They are worried about a hypothetical future violation of white civil rights, but don't give a damn about real, present-day violation of black rights.

A few insightful quotes from the Rolling Stone in-depth article, and my comments thereafter:

"I told them, 'As long as you don't point the thing at anyone, nobody's going to shoot you,'" Andrews says. But the protesters were unconvinced. No matter what the law maintained, they argued, the reality was different: if one of them walked along West Florissant with a rifle on his shoulder, he'd be dead. "I must have heard it a hundred times that night," Andrews recalls. "And that's when I thought, 'Whoa, we've got a problem here.'"

It seems Andrews had an epiphany.  If only every militant white guy could go personally to the ghetto and hear firsthand from hundreds of black people about the challenges they face.  Or maybe white folks in the US could just read and listen to the plethora of black voices out there in readily-available media, and believe what they say, instead of automatically assuming that blacks are shiftless, lying criminals operating in bad faith.

"I've got more gun licenses than most two-star generals," he tells me as we eat. "So when the cops said that I couldn't carry a gun, what do you think they're doing to a bunch of black kids, in an alley, at two in the morning, when no one is around?... I am just sick of watching black kids getting killed by the cops for fucking misdemeanors."

Despite my above criticism of Sam Andrews's path to enlightenment, he really does seem to get what's at stake in Ferguson and other places like it.  He has realized that "black problems" are really "US problems", and we all need to take heed and work to solve them.  However, his efforts to get black citizens to open carry en masse in the streets of Ferguson meet with failure.  Most community members he talks to assert that, whatever the Constitution may say, they will get shot if they walk armed in the streets.

I think the best, most nuanced insights in the article come from Paul Berry III, a black gun rights advocate.  The article closes on his more considered assessment of the situation.

Ferguson's ailments go far beyond a fear [among black residents] of legally carrying guns; the local residents, especially the black ones, have been preyed upon for years, he says, by the courts and criminal justice system. Though he applauds Andrews' commitment to the Second Amendment, he is more concerned about a broader erosion of constitutional rights. ..."I don't know if Sam understands what he's asking black people to do," Berry tells me over lunch at a Subway. "Basically, the laws in affluent neighborhoods, the white ones, just don't apply the same way if you're a black person living a poor neighborhood."  ... "While the Second Amendment is important, it is only one piece of a much bigger picture," Berry says, one in which local kids cannot get lawyers and impoverished blacks are being locked away in the equivalent of debtor's prisons.

"I respect Sam and I think his heart is in the right place," Berry says, "but the issues here are way, way deeper than guns."

Development aid in wartime Afghanistan

This is a very detailed, nuanced article about the difficulties of doing development work in wartime Afghanistan.  One of the author's theses is that when government subcontracts out too many inherently governmental functions, it will always make for a bad end result.

Arguments against voluntourism

J., the anonymous author of the Aidspeak blog, is a tireless critic of voluntourism, which is to say any kind of arrangement whereby unskilled foreigners come to a country to do things that local people could do better themselves (and in the meanwhile the voluntourists divert their own and other resources into these ineffective or even detrimental projects instead of other, more worthy ones).  Here is his taxonomy of the kinds of arguments people use to defend such voluntourism schemes, and his deconstruction of each of the arguments.  And here is a firsthand account of someone who got her start in such misled voluntourism, but who has since learned some lessons directing her to more effective development models.

A flawed article on peace in Colombia that sort of gets to the right conclusion in spite of itself

This is an article about the Urabeños mafia in Colombia, and the concern of many people that they may expand as the FARC signs peace accords with the Colombian government and ceases to exist as such.  The article kind of gets at the right point.  When FARC demobilizes in the wake of the peace accords, there are many risks that depoliticized criminal groups like the Urabeños described in the article will become more powerful.  But it's not necessarily because the FARC was a huge drug trafficking organization in its own right.  It is instead because the FARC will no longer control certain areas with scant government presence, which means that criminal groups can step in and create de facto control over the area.  This would mean that the heretofore independent operators that grew, processed, and shipped cocaine under the tutelage of the FARC would now either join the ranks of larger criminal groups, or be displaced by them.  There wouldn't necessarily be more total drug production or trafficking in this case, but it would be under more concentrated control (at least after a period of bloody turf wars as different gangs battled for territory), meaning that there would be new groups consolidating power to threaten the Colombian government.  Worst of all for the common people, these new organizations will not have even a nominal concern for the poor, for justice, for economic development, as the FARC did, so they will not be scrupulous about massacring people if they see fit.  A similar thing happened as the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), an umbrella paramilitary organization, nominally disbanded and was replaced by (or evolved into) the scourge of criminal groups we have today in much of Colombia.  The AUC at least had a political agenda, and could thus be somewhat managed and reasoned with.  Not so the nihilistic criminal groups.

This brings me to another point.  There is hardly a mention of the history of paramilitary groups in Colombia (basically a footnote toward the end of the article, "Oh yeah, the leader of the mafia profiled here was a member of the AUC, which was itself a major drug trafficking organization"), which means that the article misses the key story of the very origins of the criminal groups it profiles.  And as such, it totally misses the real issues at stake with the imminent dissolution of the FARC and the possible expansion of groups like the Clan Úsuga (which everyone I know calls the Urabeños).  Likewise, the article mistakenly implies that FARC was responsible for most of the Colombian civil war's dead, when the Colombian Center for Historical Memory, the original source for the oft-cited number of 220,000 dead, says that about two thirds of those killed were at the hands of the government and the paramilitaries.  So here again the reader comes away knowing less, not more, about the Colombian conflict.

Hence when the author quotes a general saying, "We can’t be naive and think that drug trafficking will end with FARC", they are both being naive already, because FARC really wasn't the major player to begin with. The fact that a Colombian general who should know better is spouting this is indicative of a common party line in the Colombian government. This is reminiscent of the Bush government's stubborn, cynical insistence that Saddam Hussein was a major player in Al Qaeda-style terrorism, which was patently untrue but nicely fit a worldview that suited the government's momentary political purposes.

To my knowledge, FARC is not now nor has it ever been the main drug trafficker in Colombia.  It does not control most coastal regions, and in fact doesn't control a whole lot of territory in general.  As the article says, FARC has historically not been a producer of cocaine in its own right, but rather "taxes" production and trafficking occuring in territories it controls.  Given this, the article's assertions seem reasonable that FARC has often worked in cahoots with different narcotrafficker actors, including parties like the right-wing paramilitaries with which FARC was supposedly at war, since FARC's finance structure was very dependent on "taxes" on the drug trade.  But my understanding of the situation remains fundamentally at odds with the author's, since in my mental scheme of FARC's activities, you could not really consider them a narcotrafficking organization in their own right.  The fact that some FARC members did indeed become narcotraffickers does not qualify them as an organization dedicated principally to drug trafficking, any more than the involvement of many actors throughout the Colombian government in the drug trade means that the government is itself set up principally to traffic cocaine.

In contrast, it would be fair to classify the right-wing paramilitaries, and even more so their depoliticized "bacrim" (criminal band) descendants, as narcotrafficking organizations, because their primary raison d'etre was and is economic enrichment as an end in itself.  The bacrims like the Urabeños described in the article sell drugs (and engage in illegal mining and logging, and human trafficking, and palm oil cultivation, etc.) not to finance any political agenda, but rather simply for their own perpetuation and profit.  This to me is a fundamental difference, and accounts for much of my suspicion of the article's claims of FARC's prominence in the Colombian drug trade.  How could a bedraggled guerrilla movement barely holding their ground be a more effective organized crime outfit than well-oiled criminal groups dedicated solely to making money (and enjoying the tacit approval of many actors in the local and national governments)?  It just doesn't make sense.  The article admits as much, but still parrots government of Colombia claims (which I have not found support for beyond the government's constant repetition of them) that FARC accounts for some 60% of Colombia's drug trade.

Anyway, if you're interested in these topics, here is a much more informed, well-written, and nuanced treatment of FARC's involvement in the drug trade.  It seems to confirm many of my relatively instinctive impressions.