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Today's
Stories
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The Coming Elections and the Future
of American Global Power
March 11, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Bedtime
for Democracy
Bill Kauffman
Hey,
Ralph! Why Not Another Party of the People?
James Hollander
Slaughter
in Madrid: Consolidating an Ally?
Norman Solomon
They
Shoot Journalists, Don't They?
Patrick Gavin
The Salvation of Dan Quayle: Family Values Return
Becky Burgwin
You're
Messing with the Wrong Generation
John Sugg
The FBI is on My Trail
March 10, 2004
Hammond Guthrie
Read
This Book!: "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Chris Floyd
Operation Enduring Sweatshop: Another
Bush Brings Hell to Haiti
Elizabeth Corrie
Remembering the Death of Rachel Corrie
Mike Whitney
US Press Torpedoes Aristide
M. Junaid Alam
An Anti-Civilizational War?
Bob Feldman
The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934
John L. Hess
An Overload of Crises
Gary Leupp
On Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
March 9, 2004
Greg Weiher
The
Zarqawi Gambit, Part 2
Ben Tripp
Word Up! Let's Have a Conversation
Tom Barry
Neo-Cons Target Syria
Sharon Smith
The Hypocrites in the Catholic Church
Robert Fisk
The Same Old Iraq
Doug Giebel
The Bush Strategy: Laughing All the Way
Ralph Nader
Pension Rights, the Trail of Broken Promises
Daniel Estulin
In Memory of Ricardo Ortega: a Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
Dave Lindorff
Martha Stewart's Cloudy Day
Saul Landau
Will the Filthy Rich Dump Bush?
Website of the Day
Imperial Armies in the Garden
March 8, 2004
Amy Goodman
An
Interview with Aristide
Eric Ruder
An Interview
with Robert Fatton on the Coup in Haiti
Robert Jensen
The Presidential Library Terrorist
Connection
Mike Whitney
Expel the US from the Security Council
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistan's
Nuclear Proliferation
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Why is Apartheid Touted as a Solution?
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
Derek Seidman
Radical Continuity: an Interview with Paul Buhle
Steve Perry
Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush
Website of the Day
Patriot
Act Game
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
March 12 / 14, 2004
Loïc Wacquant
Against
a Sociodicy of the American Prison
By JUSTIN E. H. SMITH
It was alarming to learn, after the publication
of my first article in Counterpunch on January 19 and the flood
of messages that arrived in response, how many bigots count themselves
among this fine newsletter's regular readers. Some were, curiously
enough, right to point out that I had left the question of race
entirely out of my assessment of the current situation of the
US penal system. Reader John Kundrat, for example, observed that
"the mean Black IQ is 85," and wondered in light of
this, "what hope is there of education let alone reeducation?"
I have long asked myself: why is it that
only people of the most obviously unexceptional intelligence
are so keen on carrying on about IQs? Why is it that not one
influential author or scientist or artist or trendsetter of any
sort, not one in the past 100 years of manic quantification of
all human capacities, has ever laid one bit of faith in the numerical
value attached to his or her own intelligence? Why is it only
the self-congratulatory and irrelevant, neither well-educated
nor innately good at anything, who are able to recite their test
scores on command and who believe that Mensa truly attracts the
best and brightest?
I for one am convinced that the IQ testing
now offered free of charge at the New York Times Web page, with
that banal and unsightly icon of Albert Einstein sticking out
his tongue, is programmed to churn out a score of 120 -not quite
genius, but nothing to be ashamed of- no matter how the test-
taker responds to the questions. Its main purpose, which has
evidently been achieved, was only to get people talking around
the water cooler, and joining the new Tickle online personal
network for which it serves as bait. All this talk, it seems
to me, is what the late Pierre Bourdieu might describe as a distinctly
middle-brow pastime, like Three Tenors concerts, pilgrimages
to the Smithsonian, or a cozy Sunday morning with the Times.
Mensa, for its part, the self-advertised
organization of geniuses, announces repeatedly in its promotional
literature that it "is non-political and free from all racial
or religious distinctions." The protest is coughed up in
advance of the accusation, as if they can hear it coming. And
with good reason are they concerned. For however politically
correct they may be in the awkward way they introduce themselves,
a quick trip to the library would be enough to convince any yokel,
no matter how small his forehead, that the IQs that bring Mensa's
members together are nothing more than a vestige of late-19th-century
pseudoscientific racist conjury, deserving the same fate as craniology,
or those custom-made tongs German colonial doctors in the bush
outside Windhoek brought along to determine, in cold hard numbers
and in the name of science, just how much larger African women's
breasts were than those back home.
Of course, Kundrat is minimally correct
to observe, as he does, that any analysis of the US prison system
today that does not mention race is irrelevant. And, for better
or worse (or, more precisely, worse), the uses to which IQs and
other convenient numbers are put are of central importance in
understanding how the prison system and its government and media
supporters use what look like cold hard facts in order to make
the demographics of imprisonment look inevitable. Beyond this,
IQs are of no interest. There are, though, some numbers that
are of tremendous interest if we are genuinely concerned to figure
out what's going on in our prisons, and Loïc Wacquant, a
sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has done
a great job of communicating these numbers in his recent book,
Prisons de la misère (the English translation, Prisons
of Poverty, will be appearing later this year, as will another
work, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of Neoliberal Penality
).
However au courant he may be of all things
American, though, Wacquant, a former student of Pierre Bourdieu,
is, alas, French, and eo ipso whatever he may have to say is
no doubt for many Americans disqualified in view of pedigree
alone. I would like to think that this should not matter for
readers of Counterpunch, but if there are racists among these,
then why not defensive isolationists as well?
I myself, while firmly and happily planted
in the Francophone world, continue proudly to display my American
passport at border crossings and - during visits stateside without
that de facto internal passport euphemized as a "driver's
license"- when purchasing booze. So I hope that I still
have some American cred, and that in relating and affirming Wacquant's
primary theses I may help to nativize them, and thus help, as
he insists must be done, to change the terms of the debate about
prisons in the US.
Wacquant has argued that the emergence
of a system of mass incarceration in the past 30 years, in which
more than half of the prisoners are African- American even though
these make up only 12% of the population, can be seen as the
unforeseen outcome of the confluence of three independent factors.
First, there were transformations in the system of social-welfare,
most importantly the rise of workfare, which Wacquant identifies
as a novel form of forced labor. Secondly, there were changes
in the labor market, stemming, most importantly, from massive
deregulation. Finally, there were changes in the penal field
and in the broader culture, sketched out in my article of January
19, which brought it about that the criminal justice system lost
its autonomy from the general political culture of the US, and
in particular from advantage-seeking politicians and media.
The disastrous mixture of these three
factors was aggravated by the simultaneous "collapse of
the ghetto," an institution which had dominated as the primary
mechanism of ethnoracial domination from the early 20th century,
and collapsed in part as a result of the protest movement of
the mid-1960s, as well as of the simultaneous shift from an urban
industrial economy to a suburban service-based one. During that
large chapter of the 20th century, black ghettos were locked
in a position of economic and social marginality, while, to the
extent possible, thriving as communities replete with churches,
some control of media, business associations, etc.
>From the late 1960s, Wacquant believes,
the ghetto was transformed as it came to share more of the responsibility
for "extract[ing] black labour while keeping black bodies
at a safe distance" with the rapidly growing prison system.
The ghetto and the prison effectively merged, with results now
well known in American popular culture.
Pants inflation skyrocketed throughout
the early 1990s, as word spread that belts were prohibited in
prisons and that prison uniform bottoms were consequently prone
to sagging. How much we can learn from fashion! As a teenager
in the 1980s, I came of age in an era of denial, in which even
the most hardcore members of the various countercultures, black
and white -even Eazy E, Ice Cube, and fellow members of N.W.A,
on the cover of their first twelve-inch in 1987- wore their tightly
pegged pants as if in outward sign that we are all self-made,
that the onus is on us to keep our pantlegs from getting out
of control, and if we just follow this and similar simple rules,
nothing, no matter how "structural," can bring us down.
Tellingly, Death Row Records was founded in 1991, the year I
noticed that pantlegs were loosening (and thereby came to learn
that I had become, and would forever remain, sartorially out
of the loop).
Fashions were coming to reflect what
has appropriately been described as the "reality" of
ghetto life. The prison was introduced into the landscape of
the ghetto when the ghetto ceased to function effectively as
what Richard Sennett calls an "urban condom" toward
the end of the 1960s. A generation later, the prison showed up
in ghetto music and fashion as a verisimilar reflection of what
the ghetto had become, just as railroads and coal mines showed
up in an earlier current of American folk music.
On the most pessimistic reading of this
account of late-20th-century racial politics, one could suppose
that it was precisely as a consequence of blacks having gained
the freedom to leave the ghetto, as a result of the civil rights
struggle, that something more coercively segregative had to move
in to take its place. This is a rather bitter pill, as it makes
the most laudable and progressive aspirations appear doomed in
the face of a system built on rigid structural inequality, capable
of adapting with new mechanisms for self-preservation whenever
it comes under serious threat. But one would have to strain,
it seems to me, to explain how the incarceration of African-Americans
could have increased so much more rapidly in the past 35 years
than that of other Americans, if the "tough on crime"
rhetoric of the post-corrective era weren't at least to some
extent an epiphenomenon of a new social policy in the US fundamentally
concerned with perpetuating the racial inequality that is coeval
with the settlement of the new world.
What, in view of this evident determinism,
is a progressive to do? As Wacquant recently insisted to me,
it would be irresponsible to abandon the fight against the prison
industry simply on the assumption that some other institution,
perhaps even more sinister, would move in to fill its vacuum
were it ever succesfully dismantled. The prison industry must
be fought against, without illusions as to the true reasons for
its existence, rooted as these reasons are in a long history
that vastly predates the institution itself.
This is what it would be, as he insists
must be done, to change the terms of the debate: to stop pretending
that the growth of the prison system over the past few decades
is a natural response to spontaneous changes for the worse in
the habits of criminals, to stop pretending that the various
numbers adduced to make the disproportionate imprisonment of
blacks look inevitable are any more objective, any less subject
to debate, than any other secretion of system-preserving ideology.
These numbers, IQ among them, all serve
to constitute what Wacquant calls "sociodicy" (on the
model of Leibniz's neologistic "theodicy"), whereby
a society seeks to vindicate itself against accusations that
it is inexcusably unjust with the plea: but it could not be otherwise.
Leibniz vindicated God with the peculiar argument that all this
suffering and ugliness is an unavoidable consequence of the greater
cosmic need for a vast variety of entities of vastly varying
degrees of moral and aesthetic perfection. Let the plagues and
earthquakes continue!
But the Baroque era is over, and with
it, hopefully, the mad desire to discern order and meaning in
all that looks, prima facie, like a chaotic and detestable travesty.
Today, if it looks like a travesty, this may very well be because
it in fact is one. Besides, Leibniz was concerned primarily to
make cosmic sense out of the misfortunes about which we are powerless
to do anything, all the things that are, as he might have said,
in God's hands. But society is in our hands, at least on a very
broad understanding of that possessive pronoun's reach, and so
needs no vindication, but rather needs only, where deficient,
change.
Or maybe I'm missing something that could
easily be cleared up with an intelligence test. I confess I've
never got around to this, and that a small and irrational part
of me still buys into the modern mythology of IQ and fears the
humiliation that would come with a mediocre score. I was thus
delighted when Wacquant told me recently that he as well has
"never taken an IQ test and [doesn't] even know what it
would look like." Perhaps a kind member of Tickle or Mensa
might write in to let us know.
Justin E. H. Smith teaches philosophy at Concordia University in
Montreal, Canada. He can be reached at: justismi@alcor.concordia.ca
Weekend
Edition Features for March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
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