Recent Events from Around the Horn

Over the last few months, weeks or days I've been following a few stories from afar. These include:

The riots by and attacks on undocumented African migrant workers in Rosarno, Calabria, southern Italy (photo at left, EPA). The workers, paid almost nothing for their work and living in slave-like conditions outside the town, protested by rioting after a Togolese immigrant was shot at, with a pellet gun, by an unknown gunman or gunmen. A number of the immigrants, as well as many locals, were injured in the subsequent conflagration, which rocked the streets of Rocarno. Some locals beat the protesters with tire irons, and another tried to run over an immigrant with a bulldozer. (Rosarno is just across the Straits of Messina and up the Italian coast from where C and I were in Sicily.)

Update: The Africans have either fled or been out of the town to immigrant detention centers, and locals are celebrating. According to the New York Times, the mafia are suspected culprits.

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The deadly attack by separatists against the Togolese soccer team, in Cabinda, an oil-rich breakaway region of northwestern Angola (that I have written about in some of my fiction, strangely enough), just before the start of the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament, which has not been canceled. (The World Cup will take place in neighboring South Africa later this year.) Three Togolese have died, and eight members of the team have been injured in the attack, in which separatists machine-gunned the Togolese buses as they were passing through the area. Team captain and international star Emmanuel Adebayor, pictured above, was not injured but was badly shaken along with the rest of his teammates. Bizarrely, the CAF (African Football Federation), along with Angola's president Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, are saying that tournament games will still be held in the Cabinda region.

Update: The Togo team has, unsurprisingly, withdrawn from the tournament, which will neither be postponed nor canceled. According to NBC Sports, "In a telephone interview with AP on Sunday, Tiburcio Tati Tchingobo, minister of defense in the self-declared Federal State of Cabinda, denied his Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda forces, or FLEC, were responsible for the ambush. He said that whoever was responsible was sparked by a level of frustration that could lead to more violence."

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Unde the current economic crisis the funding situation for higher education is increasingly grave at a number of institutions, especially public ones, which has led some academic officials to push for increased privatization and neoliberal policies. Faculty and students have not taken it sitting down.

-Faculty members were on strike at Oakland University.
-UC Berkeley faculty and students led a 3-day strike that faculty and students across the UC system signed onto and the Governator's threats against California's once trend-setting system are being taken very seriously.
-Students at UC Santa Cruz occupied a building to protest tuition hikes and budget cuts.
-Protesters occupied a building at San Francisco State University.
-Graduate students went on strike at UIUC.
-There is a New School in Exile site to address ongoing problems at the New School University

In addition, students at the University of Maryland protested the ouster of a popular diversity official; Howard University students protested slow paperwork that has led to problems; University of Pittsburgh students protested the G20 summit taking place in their city; and students and faculty at the University of Vienna have protested funding and other issues, sparking solidarity protests across Europe.

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This drama about Harry Reid's reported comments on Barack Obama's candidacy. Though inartfully stated (off the record, no less), I don't think Reid was being racist nor was he incorrect, and certainly I had heard many black people I know say similar things. ("Negro dialect" is a bit antiquated, though, Senator Reid.) Seriously and unfortunately for me to put it so bluntly, but if Obama spoke even like Jesse Jackson, say, and were dark-skinned, I think he'd have had a harder time as a candidate. I should add, however, that I think the larger issue of Americans' increasing comfort with politicians of color, especially black and mixed-race politicians, and Obama's political and oratorical skills, cannot be understated, and it's a tribute to the American people that we took a tremendous leap throughout the 2007-8 primary season and, most importantly, in November 2008. As to where it's gotten us is another question.

Update: Of course now the GOP's chosen and currently out-of-control minstrel, Michael Steele, is trying to exploit these remarks. As did Liz Cheney this morning. I say consider these rancid sources; no more needs to be said.

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Commercial real estate in New York is finally meeting Great Recession reality. There are "920 football fields" worth of office space sitting unused. Meanwhile, as I witnessed all fall, longtime stores and restaurants (including the 92-year-old Café des Artistes and Manhattan's oldest soul food restaurant, The Pink Tea Cup) are being shuttered because landlords refuse to lower rents or cut deals. New York has been through this scenario before: some refuse to learn.

Also, the Stuyvesant Town boondoggle has collapsed. What was to be the transfer of Manhattan's largest pocket of middle-income housing into the hands of the luxury market is now an official FAIL. My questions include what is going to happen to the 20,000 tenants now?

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Buy me, I'm going to be better than the rest!

Apple very well may be launching yet another pace-setter with its iSlate (iTablet?), which is allegedly slated to appear on January 27. There are all sorts of predictions about what its specs are, what it'll look like and what software it'll possess, and though it's unlikely I'll be getting one anytime soon, both because I usually like to wait until Apple gets these things right, cool as they always are, and because I can't afford another new gizmo, I am dying to see one up close. By which I mean, pick one up, play with the screen, and be mesmerized by yet another offering from the Apple product family. Given the suggested debut date of this delightful device, I'll have to go to the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue before my graduate class that night to inspect one, though something tells me that store will be more mobbed than it usually is. That is, if it really does appear in Apple Stores that day. We can hope, can't we?

Point and Fire, Please

There still seems to be a lot of talk about the whole Christmas Day attempted bombing debacle that went on that Northwest flight over Detroit. The thing is that with all of the talk that is going on, the one thing that I don't hear being talked about is who is going to be fired and when. Clearly, this is an incident that has firing potential, isn't it? Shouldn't someone have been fired by now? (Or at the very least, had their head placed on a pike of some sort? Oh, wait. That wouldn't really be the "least", but probably rather the "most", wouldn't it?)

Since no one has been fired yet, I was at least hoping for things to evolve to the point where someone would be fired. After all, how many people lost their jobs after the September 11 attacks? Heads had to have rolled then, right? So how many was it? 50? 100? 10? Oh, that's right. None. ::: sigh ::: Am I supposed to expect that this is going to be any different? I think I'm supposed to expect that, but tell you what...I don't think that I'm going to expect that. Just for kicks. Just this once. Just this once I'm not going to expect anything and then I'll see how that works for me. I'm guessing it's going to work pretty well.

Here's what President Barry had to say in his little press conference dealio about the whole Undiebomber ordeal:

"I will accept that intelligence, by its nature, is imperfect. But it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That's not acceptable and I will not tolerate it. The information was there. Agencies and analysts who needed it had access to it. And our professionals were trained to look for it and to bring it all together. The US government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and to potentially disrupt the Christmas day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots. We have to do better, and we will do better, and we have to do it quickly. American lives are on the line."

First of all, are there "dots", plural? It seems to me like there might just be "dot" singular. I mean, what more do you need to act on than the guy's Dad going to a US embassy and saying that his son is a radical nutjob who wants to attack the United States? That seems like a dot. I don't know that you need another dot to connect it to, really. It's not even a very small dot. Seems like a pretty big dot to me.

Second, the part about having to do better and having to do better quickly. Um, since September 11, 2001, haven't we been spending so much money on this that it would make your head spin and never stop spinning? (Nancy Pelosi is excluded from answering that question, as I'm pretty sure that her head spins around on a fairly regular basis.) We've been spending money on this and trying to get good at this for over eight years! What exactly does he mean by "quickly" in the sense that he used it in? I would have thought that they'd have it down by now, but apparently, not so much.

Some other highlights of President Barry's response to this matter include: "While there will be a tendency for finger pointing, I will not tolerate it." Huh. See, I for one, I would like to see a little finger pointing. I could tolerate that. Because in reality, someone screwed up. And if you ask one person who screwed up and they point to someone else and say that they are the screw up, then you check that out. Maybe the person screwed up and maybe they didn't, but you have to follow the direction that the finger is pointing in to get some sort of an idea as to who was the incompetent moron who let this guy on a plane with a load of explosive strapped to his grundle, don't you? I think you do!

Fine, you don't want to point fingers? How about some head nodding? Just nod your head in the guy's general direction and we'll know what you mean.

Robert Gibbs, the usually snarky and sarcastic (he's snarkastic) press secretary said something along those same lines when he said Tuesday that "The president will not find acceptable a response where everybody gets in a circle and points at someone else. The American people won’t accept that.” Uh, Gibbsey? Yeah, as one of those American people that you mention there, I should tell you that I will accept finger pointing, but I will not accept men with TNT-laden genitals on board my aircraft. That's what I won't accept. Point all the fingers you want, but just keep guys with explosive laden genitalia off of the planes. OK. Thanks.

Oh! I almost forgot the other highlight of President Barry's talk (which had the "I'm deeply disappointed in you" tone that you received from your parents when you screwed up as a teenager). He said "In the days ahead, I will announce further steps to disrupt attacks, including better integration of information and enhanced passenger screening for air travel." Enhanced passenger screening for air travel? Good Lord, man. Now what?! Seriously. We already have it to a point where we practically have to disrobe completely in order to make it through airport security. We can't carry anything that resembles a gel or a liquid or a concentrate. At any given point in the process we're made to stand shoeless, beltless, scarfless, and hatless. And for the purpose of what? Because let me just remind folks of something. All of this passenger screening that we're doing right now has never caught and thwarted an attack. Surprise!

Think about it. Has there been anything that has come out of having us do all of that? No, there hasn't. No one has been stopped at security because they were made to take off their hat and there was a ticking time bomb underneath it. (And to think that in that scenario, they would have made it through if it weren't for those meddling security screeners!) That's never happened. No one has ever had their evil plan thwarted at the security checkpoints. I don't know what that means, but it means something. Feel free to let me know what that is if you happen to know.

President Barry can say whatever he wants to about making sure that we do better and that we're going to do better, but I don't think that I am going to feel better unless someone (and I'm thinking more than one someone) gets fired. The guy's dad told us that his son was a lunatic who wanted to attack the US. THAT isn't enough to get the guy on a no-fly list or at least on some sort of watch list? (I have NO idea what the watch list does, by the way. What are we watching them for, exactly? Sudden movements? Loins full of gunpowder? I don't get it.) Whoever it was that took that message, I want that person fired. Whoever it was that didn't do anything about it, I want that person fired. I kind of want Janet Napolitano fired for saying "The system worked" after all of this had first gone down. (The system didn't "work". The system didn't do anything, you pinhead.) Once I see some finger pointing, some head nodding and some people getting fired, then we can talk about how safe we are. Because until the same people (who were responsible for allowing all of the puzzle pieces to fall into place in order to almost doom nearly 300 people to a bomb-y death over God-forsaken Detroit) are fired and are not allowed to continue to do their job in the most crappy manner possible, no one is safe. Besides, why wouldn't you want to fire them?

Obama & Huckabee Win Iowa

Change, change, change. That's the word adorning all the Obama campaign posters, and the charge heading out of the Hawkeye State (though political balance" is the frame). Congratulations to Mr. Change & Balance himself, Senator Barack Obama (at left, from obama.senate.gov), who won the delegate count in the Iowa Democratic caucuses by an 8 point spread, 38% to second-place winner former Senator John Edwards's 30%. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton finished third, at about 29%. Together they and the other Democrats drew over 220,000 participants, almost double the 2004 turnout of 125,00, and more than double the Republicans' total this year. Many of the Democratic caucus-goers were first-timers, and Obama's supporters comprised younger voters (57%), a huge number of independents and even some cross-over Republicans. He also led among female (35%) and male caucus-goers. Both Joe Biden and Chris Dodd barely registered, and both have dropped out of the race. Dodd, though he barely drew much attention, had shown considerable political courage in recent months. As for Clinton, I imagine she's going to soldier, but tonight's poor showing cannot help her, either with potential primary voters or the generally hostile mainstream media, going into New Hampshire. Obama's victory speech tonight (around 11:15 pm) actually managed to do what people like George Lakoff and Drew Westen have been urging of all the Democrats, which was to eschew the usual Democratic laundry list. Instead, he sketched a narrative of hope and change, in soaring rhetoric that thrilled his vast audience. It was typically vague and yet quite energizing, like him.

Overall, a great night for the Democrats, and for populist, (semi-)progressive rhetoric.

The Republicans handily selected the Baptist preacher from Hope, Arkansas, Mike Huckabee (at right, from siu.edu) but then 60% of the Republican caucus-goers were self-described "evangelicals." Huckabee received 34% of the vote, well head of his main competitor, the plasticene former Massachusetts governor and multimillionaire Mitt Romney who finished second at 25%. Ardent racist Pat Buchanan seems pretty happy about Huckabee's win ("consanguinity," you know), though the Republican hierarchy seems ready to explode. (C and I switched over to the Fox News Channel, which was like watching a cross between the Twilight Zone and the Addams Family, without the humor, and Juan Williams was blathering on about how Obama couldn't win the general election. I was waiting for him to start uncontrollaby barking "Muslim," but we switched the channel before he could get going.) Decrepit actor Fred Thompson edged media favorite John McCain, whom the talking heads are still telling us is
"in great shape"--the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson just blurted this out, almost as if he didn't know what he was saying--because he's already won New Hampshire (?), or is ahead there, or doing well, there, or something. (?) (I was sort of amazed that Thompson did this well; I know he appears on TV and so on, but still, he telescopes his lack of interest in the campaign.) Libertarian Ron Paul finished fifth, well ahead of Rudy Giuliani, whom I hope is out of the race by the end of the month. Huckabee is the Republican id in material form, so it's fitting that the Iowa caucus-goers ended the longstanding charade, and selected one of their own.

(Can someone PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE get the old tired rich conventional Washington-wisdom spewing gasbag punditocracy--the Chris Matthewses ("he [Obama] was delivered to us, from Indonesia..." and "he's almost Third World"--???), the Wolf Blitzers (Huckabee's win "helps McCain"), the Andrea Mitchellses (Clinton's gathering was "dirgelike"-?), all of them--off the air and bring in some new commentators? (Okay, Rachel Maddow was decent and actually challenged Matthews.) And it would especially great if the new commentators were unafraid of shouting down the gasbags--with compelling arguments, that is.)

Cosas Generales

I was going to type that I almost couldn't believe that the new year was underway, but then I realized I'd been waiting for it for a while. Still, there are times when I can't believe that 7 years have passed since 2001 and the turn of the millennium, which was, you'll remember, preceded by a year of frenzy when 2000 rolled around. Often I can recall the 90s, especially the years from 1995 through 2000, vividly, whereas much of the 2000s are a blur. Nevertheless, here's to what I hope is a lively and enjoyable year, personally and for all, even though some of the major economic signs, at least, appear exciting but not in a good way.

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Tomorrow promises ones of the biggest public excitements of the new year, the first (quasi-)primary in the 2008 presidential election calendar, the Iowa caucuses. (I'm glad someone on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer walked me and other viewers through these klatsches-over-kaffee-with-votes-thrown-in yesterday.) Truth be told, what a ridiculous means for selecting anything beyond wall colors for a community center. Not only is Iowa unrepresentative on so many counts in terms of the overall makeup of the US, but this system itself is both hyperdemocratic and at the same time, because so many Iowa voters might not be able to participate in it, undemocratic. It, and the whole Iowa-and-New Hampshire first mindset, should be scrapped.

I think the parties should designate 5 regions of the country, say: Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain, and Midwest, and have a monthly randomly-selected round robin set of primaries, on the same day, in at least one state from each region, with two others selected at random from different regions, for about 7-8 total. 8 would bring the primaries to June, 7 to July. The four largest states, California, Texas, the ever-shrinking New York, and Florida, would be included in the mix. Thus, January's primaries might include: Rhode Island, Georgia, Nevada, Washington, and Missouri, plus Wyoming and Maryland; or Maine, Alabama, Arizona, California, and Wisconsin, plus New Mexico and Michigan. Or something along those lines. These primaries would be one-person one-vote, open, and tallied by paper ballot (in person or via mail). Every state would eventually have an opportunity to gather the early attention, money and swag, the candidates would have to tailor a national platform more quickly, and the execrable national media might have to really do some work for a change. Will it happen? I doubt it, but one can only hope.

I'm not going to make any predictions and the whole "horse race" and money-raising focuses drive me up the wall, but I can say that I have received more emails and calls (thank the Lord they haven't turned to text messaging yet) from the Obama campaign, despite the fact that I've responded harshly both online and in yet another letter, which I sent out today. One of the most annoying email came several months from Michelle Obama, one of which carried the casual and aggressive subject line "Hey." That was it. "Hey" is supposed to make me want to support her husband, whom she recently said has "deign[ed]" to enter the race? Why, thank you. Most of the Obama missives center on campaign strategy, the evils of the other Democratic candidates, and fundraising, which are the last three things I want to hear about. In fact, I would much rather that Obama offer a concrete progressive platform for his proposed administration and address current and long-term political issues, even in a more philosophical, less specific way, while also explaining his frequent invocation of empty post-bipartisanship discourse and use of rightwing frames and rhetoric, which are going to be thrown right back at him or any of the Democrats (along with the anti-Muslim smears that are being steadily churned up). But I gather his campaign advisors don't care about this, since they are already wooing independents and some liberal Republicans, and they just may win Iowa, and New Hampshire. Or not. Oh well, either way, I'm curious to see the outcome tomorrow night. Ultimate, he, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, and the other Democrats, save Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are fairly close in terms of politics and policies, and will have to be ready for the fights of their lives against the Republicans, the mainstream media, and general public ignorance, in the general campaign.

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I haven't commented on the ongoing electoral crisis in Kenya, but I had a strong feeling in the days leading up to the presidential election there that incumbent Mwai Kibaki was somehow going to be declared the victor despite articles and polls I'd read suggesting that opposition candidate Raila Odinga had the edge. There have been a number of rather sketchy presidential and governmental elections across the globe over the last few years, from Mexico to Nigeria to Russia to Pakistan to, yes, the USA, all of which underline the fact that in many countries rulers and ruling elites that are intent on holding on to power will readily do so under the pretext of "democracy," or some flimsy version thereof, and dare anyone to challenge them, while also seeking international sanction to legimitize and normalize the chicanery, unless their hands are forced.

I mention the US in particular, because the present administration perhaps feels it cannot simply refrain from commenting on the situation in Kenya, and yet it's really the height of irony for anyone from this gang to be uttering a word about voting irregularities, fraud, or working with the opposition. I guess Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, along with all the shenanigans leading up to and after both elections should be completely forgotten. (Have most people simply blanked on both?) Maybe the most powerful thing would be for Condoleezza Rice simply to state publicly that the W Gang knows a thing not only about misgoverning and pitting groups against each other, but also about engineering and stealing elections, and Kibaki didn't do such a good job at it, but, like Musharraf, they've (still) got his back. It is, really, a mess. Gukira's inimitable take(s) are here.

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Amidst the news and ramblings in today's New York Times was this Sarah Kershaw piece, on how HIV seroconversions are falling overall in NYC, but still rising among young gay men. The rise is comparatively highest for young African-American and Latino men. Sewall Chan links to the piece in today's Times City Room Blog, and notes that Kershaw identified several important co-factors, including "higher rates of drug use among younger men, which can fuel dangerous sex practices, optimism among them that AIDS can be readily treated, and a growing stigma about H.I.V. among gays that keeps some men from revealing that they are infected." Yet another that she glosses and which a younger (in his 30s) friend mentioned to me a few years ago was a certain fatalism and belief that he was sure to seroconvert no matter what he did, that he expected to do so. He was, in a word, fated to become HIV positive. I've posted about this before, so I ask: thoughts? Responses?

RANDOM PHOTO

Crèche scene, on Houston Street, last month