for love or money

Yesterday, the NYPD announced the launch of Operation TORCH, a new initiative bringing police with submachine guns and bomb-sniffing dogs into the subway system. Today, in Queens, Judge Cooperman ruled that the officers involved in the killing of Sean Bell are not guilty on all counts. It’s hard to believe the timing was coincidental - the images on the news of huge men decked out in black uniforms with submachine guns and dogs are a not so subtle reminder of the power of the NYPD, just in case anyone got it into their heads to get up in arms, so to speak, about the ruling in the Bell case.

But let’s give the NYPD the benefit of the doubt. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that the timing was coincidental. Never mind that the funds for the program were authorized by the Department of Homeland Security back in February, according to news reports - my guess would be as part of the Transit Security Grant Program mentioned in this February 1st DHS press release. If the timing of the TORCH squads isn’t intended to intimidate potential Bell protesters, the timing is at minimum thoughtless.

This Newsday article says that the guns are MP5 submachine guns. While the article doesn’t specify the make of the guns, Heckler & Koch make the MP5 submachine guns, whose website details the specs of the MP5 line. With three officers just acquitted in a 50-shot incident, does it really seem like a good time for the NYPD to announce the deployment of weapons that can fire 700 to 900 rounds a minute?

Just to put that into perspective, the five officers involved in the Club Kalua shooting fired 50 shots in 12 seconds, according to some estimates. Just one of these MP5 submachine guns could fire 140-180 shots in that same amount of time.

Torch is also an incredibly poor choice of names for this Operation. This New York 1 report suggests that TORCH is an acronym for Transit Operational Response Canine, and Heavy Weapons teams, the W being silent, one has to assume. The naming teams over at the NYPD may not realize that Operation Torch was the code name for the Allied invasion of French North Africa, in WWII. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one too - they’re not paid to be students of history. But someone could have pointed out that naming the TORCH teams after a white army invading African nations may conjure up some associations the NYPD might want to avoid. Or maybe not - maybe the NYPD is totally comfortable with the link between the Allied operation and their own forces, with the association between our streets and subways and a colonized nation. And after all, with its 40,000 officers, the NYPD is the 6th biggest standing army in the world, as mentioned somewhat ironically in this report from the Attorney General’s office on the NYPD’s Stop and Frisk procedures. Yes, the world.

In the verdict handed down today, Officers Isnora, Oliver, and Cooper got the benefit of the doubt quite literally. According to this article in the Times, Judge Cooperman said that “The people have not proved beyond a reasonable doubt” that the officers were not justified in the shooting. And I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt too. Maybe they really thought someone in Bell’s party had a gun. Maybe they were scared and confused, and thought they were in danger. But that’s the job. That’s what you sign up for when you become a police officer. One of the key quotes in the trial is this one, from assistant DA Charles A. Testagrossa. “We ask police to risk their lives to protect ours,” he said in his closing arguments. “Not to risk our lives to protect their own.” That’s the job.

The officers at Club Kalua didn’t give Sean Bell, Joseph Guzman, and Trent Benefield the benefit of the doubt on the night of November 25, 2006. As this Newsday article notes, “Police officers are trained to shoot until they are sure there is no longer a threat.” But, the article continues, “sources say investigators do not feel Oliver ever paused to properly assess to assess (sic) the situation.” Officer Oliver fired 31 shots, the most fired by any officer at the scene. It’s the job of officers like Isnora, Oliver, and Cooper to ask questions first, and ideally not shoot at all. But it seems to have become standard operating procedure for the NYPD to shoot first and ask questions later, or never. If officers aren’t going to give us New Yorkers the benefit of the doubt, maybe we shouldn’t be giving them guns that can blast off up to 900 rounds in 60 seconds flat. The officers at Club Kalua chose to reload. The inevitable next time, they won’t have to.

I was reading an article about Sean Bell the other day, on the CBS 2 News website. Accompanying the story was this image:

It’s a pretty ambiguous image. The text says “Police Shooting” at the top, not specifying whether Sean Bell shot the police or was shot by them. He looks sort of grim - not smiling, alone, almost like a mug shot. And did you notice that the right side of his head looks a little weird? Flat, maybe?

Yeah, that’s because that’s where someone at CBS edited out his wife. That shot of Sean Bell is actually taken from this image:

That’s Sean Bell, his wife Nicole Paultre-Bell, and one of their daughters. Presents quite a different, well, picture than the top image, doesn’t it? A family man, with his beaming fiancee and chuckling little girl.

Flicking through the channels, if you saw the words “Police Shooting” over the shot of the somber, unsmiling Sean Bell, you might assume that he shot a cop, and keep on clicking to something more entertaining. If you saw the words “Police Shooting” over the shot of him with his family, you (a) would not ever think he did the shooting, and (b) you would be sad. You would think oh, what a shame, that nice family man was killed by police. Just remember that when you’re watching the news. They could have used this picture instead.

At the rally and march for Sean Bell today, I saw filmmaker Byron Hurt, who made the great documentary Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which aired earlier this year on PBS. I asked him why he was there, and he said that as a Black man, he feels like it could be him next. And he talked about the fact that the media paints Black and Latino men as violent and as criminals, and that these representations puts fear into the head of the police. Fear that leads them to see guns where there are none, and to shoot unarmed men.

I teach media literacy, so I think about the power of images a lot. But seeing the doctoring of Sean Bell’s image, and talking to Byron Hurt, I was reminded that portraying Black and Latino men as criminals, as threats, isn’t just wrong. It’s lethal. Maybe its time we start demanding accountability from and community control of the media, as well as the police.

I had the opportunity to speak at last weekend’s Left Forum (formerly the Socialist Scholars Conference), on a panel called “Doing Independent Reporting: A Tribute to Brad Will.” Given that frame, in preparing my remarks I considered the reporting on Oaxaca, where Brad was killed, and the recent coverage of popular uprisings in Mexico. I also wanted to offer a critique of the independent media, and think through what we can be doing better. And that brought me to thinking about Atenco.

Like the mainstream media, the independent media is episodic. We focus on the breaking news, the arrest, the murder, the riot. I like to think that at Wakeup Call, the morning news program for which I am a producer, and at other independent media outlets, we dig deeper into the root causes of these flareups. But even when we manage to do that, we rarely follow up on a story until the next big flareup. Atenco is a case in point.

On May 3rd of 2006, there was a confrontation between flower vendors in Texcoco and the police - the police wouldn’t let them sell their flowers in the town square. They called for help from their neighbors in Atenco, who blocked the road the runs along Atenco and leads to Texcoco. The police came to move the blockade, and couldn’t, despite intense violence. A fourteen year old boy was shot and killed by police.

The next day, May 4th, allies flooded into Atenco, along with reporters from the mainstream and independent press. So did more than 3,000 police. After a second day of intense police violence against reporters and protesters, there were some 300 plus arrests. At least five women were raped by police, on the busses where the arrestees were being held, in front of their fellow protesters and reporters.

Allow me a momentary side note. Some news reports say that 5 women were raped, some news reports say nearly 50. In talking to people who were at Atenco, and others who are close to the story, they say that this disparity in numbers comes from a difference between how the women on the ground define rape, and how it is defined by human rights organizations. Not all of the nearly 50 women in question were penetrated by a penis. Dozens were stripped naked, beaten and touched and penetrated by fingers - to me, and to the women in Atenco, this is rape. Anyhow, quibbling about the numbers is asinine. I just wanted to preempt any doubts about the validity of the stories from Atendo, in case you investigate the story further, as you should.

As the news started to filter out from Atenco, about the arrests, beatings, hospitalizations, and rapes, there was an outcry from the independent media, in the US and all over the world. From NarcoNews to Wakeup Call to Democracy Now! to the BBC, the story of the murder and the rapes spread through the internet and the airwaves.

The attacks at Atenco raised the consciousness of people in the US, at least, about the diversity and continued struggle of the popular uprisings in Mexico. Of course, many people on the US left were familiar with the Zapatista movement. The beautifully written declaraciones, and the glamour of the masked rebels in the jungle, fed the North American need for inspiration. The Zapatistas do what most of the US left has not managed to do; they are creating their own systems and alternatives, fighting for self-determination, for the right to be left in peace. Their example has sparked some much-needed reflection in the US left about our work, and its often reactive tendencies.

It also sparked a lot of Zapatourismo, young and idealistic people visiting the revolution on summer break. Some great work has come out of that exchange, and so have a fair number of problems. I’m not going to go too far into that now. Point being, the attention on Atenco raised awareness about groups besides the Zapatistas that stand in opposition to the government, including the Frente del Pueblo en Defensa de La Tierra in Atenco. Essentially, Atenco reminded people in the US about Mexico.

And then attention shifted from Atenco to Oaxaca. The Associacion Popular del Pueblo de Oaxaca, or APPO, was fighting a pitched battle of ideas, and battle in the streets, seeking the ouster of Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. The conflict in the streets drew many independent reporters, including Brad Will, an American videographer and friend of mine who was killed by paramilitaries in Oaxaca. Professor Emilio Alonso Fabián and Esteban López Zurita were also killed in Oaxaca that day, October 27, 2006. Brad’s murder brought an astonishing amount of media attention to Oaxaca. It was also used as a pretext for an invasion of Oaxaca by the PFP, or Federal Preventative Police, and rachetted up the repression of organizers, activists, peasants and journalists living and working in Oaxaca.

Now, it’s nearly a year since the attacks in Atenco. There are 9 women, arrested at Atenco, five of whom were raped by police, still in jail in Santiaguito. Last May, the attention of the global activist community, the global independent media community, was focused on Atenco. And in Santiaguito, people were protesting outside the jail every day. But the prison is far from town, and the visitors have dwindled away. Now, the 9 women prisoners from May 4th are essentially alone, and feel forgotten. And it pains me to say it, but they mostly have been.

The conflict in Oaxaca continues. Journalists and organizers are living underground or in exile, moving from house to house with their children in the dead of night. The people who continue to work and speak and fight are doing so at great, very real risk to their lives. And they too have been forgotten.

Why? I could say that it’s a question of resources. Because there are relatively few progressive, independent media outlets, we often feel as if we have to tell every story, and that doesn’t allow for much follow up. I could say that it’s a question of time. We talk at Wakeup Call about doing a regular segment called That’s Old News, following up on what we were covering last year, or six months ago. It’s a good idea (if I do say so myself), but we don’t have the staff to make it happen. But more than anything, I think, its a question of habit, the gut urge to cover the breaking news. That’s important, to cover the breaking news that most media outlets ignore. But we also need to teach our audience to stick with a story. Speaking as a newsmaker, I hope you ask that of us, and push us to give you the consistent information needed to stay with a story and demand change.

——

On May 4th, it will be a year since the nine women arrested at Atenco will be in prison. They have yet to be sentenced, and are essentially still awaiting processing. When they are given the rare opportunity to go before a judge, the very police officers who raped them are in the room. In October, Amnesty International condemned the sham investigation into the rapes and violence at Atenco, and demanded a federal inquiry. We are all still waiting, and our nine sisters are waiting in prison.

As of today, it has been more than ten months that they are in prison. Think of what your life was like ten months ago. Think of all the people you have met, the conversations that have changed your life, the places you have been, the meals, the walks, the dreams. Now imagine that you spent all those months in one room.

At the Left Forum panel, Brandon Jourdan said that we as independent media makers must learn to fight the battle of the story, and not just cover the story of the battle. We are not doing that well enough. We report from a different perspective than the mainstream media, and often cover different stories, but we too often fail to construct a narrative that we choose, rather than one dictated by the dates on which our people die or disappear.

I don’t want to be like most of the press and leave you without a job to do or an action to take. I am waiting for friends closer to the Atenco story to give me information on:

• government officials to whom you can write;
• how to donate funds to their case and their commisary, and;
• the addresses of the prisoners so you can write them and let them know we remember their names.

While you’re waiting for those action points, you can come out on Thursday March 15th to a night of videos, discussion and food:

In honor of the March 15th international day of action against police brutality the Amor y Resistencia and In Our Hearts Collectives, present videos and speakers featuring:

Maka, an activist from Mexico City who was involved in media projects in Oaxaca during the uprising.

Videos about the Uprising in Oaxaca, and the seizing of the media by Oaxacan Radical Women in 2006.

Legacy of Torture: A documentary about the case of the “Panther 8″, eight former Black Panthers arrested January 23rd, 2007 on charges related to the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. Similar charges were thrown in 1973 when it was revealed that police used torture to extract confessions.

Representative from “Friends and Family of Daniel McGowan” speaking about the recent FBI crackdown on Environmental Activists known as “the Green Scare”.

Vegan Mexican Food and home brewed soft drinks, courtesy of the ‘Brewing up Trouble Action Faction”.

$5.00 Suggested Donation. (money raised will go to mexican anarchist collectives supporting political prisoners in Oaxaca no one turned away for lack of funds)

Come early for food and drinks!
Thursday, March 15th, 6pm at:
Ad Hoc Art space,
49 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY.
(’L’ to Morgan Ave. Bogart Exit)

www.adhocart.org (for directions)

Like the Zapatista sisters say, abajo y la izquierda, con todo el corazón.

So not quite a real post, but I spun some ladies music on WBAI 99.5 FM the other day, as part of the station’s two days of programming celebrating International Working Women’s Day. You can listen to the set online, if you’re so inclined.  Featuring Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae, Me’shell Ndegeocello, Feist, Jolie Holland, Mirah, and a whole bunch of other great women artists.

Two Seton Hall students were sentenced today to five years in prison for setting a fire that killed three of their fellow students.  Three deaths, five years.  The two young men, Joseph Lapore and Sean Michael Ryan, could be out on parole in as little as 16 months.

Daniel McGowan is also going to serve prison time in an arson case.  He participated in an two arson attacks at a tree farm and a lumber company.  He didn’t kill anyone.  Yet the shortest sentence he faces is longer than the 5 year maximum term that the two Seton Hall students will serve.

I am not someone who thinks that prison is a place that teaches people lessons, and I don’t think that the Seton Hall students should be thrown in prison for life and the key tossed away.  But I do think that their sentencing highlights the political motivations behind the prosecution of McGowan and his fellow defendants allegedly affiliated with the Earth Liberation Front.

McGowan is an environmental activist from New York, known to many for his work as a spokesperson during the Republican National Convention in 2004.  In December 2005, McGowan was arrested for his role in two arson attacks that took place in Oregon in 2001.  His arrest came as part of a series of arrests around the country, targeting environmental activists alleged to be part of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front.  He faced a trial that could result in him spending the rest of his life in prison.  He has now reached a plea agreement with prosecutors that will give him a sentence of somewhere between 8 years and 63 months, aka 5 years and 3 months.

So how does this compare to the Seton Hall students?  Well, the actions of Lapore and Ryan killed three people: John N. Giunta, Aaron Karol, and Frank Caltabilota, Jr.  More than 50 other students were injured, including some who were severely burned.  Lapore and Ryan set a paper banner on fire in their dorm, celebrating a victory by the Seton Hall basketball team.  The banner caught a sofa on fire.  Rather than run through the dorm banging on doors, alerting sleeping students to the fire, the two fled.  The three students that died were killed by smoke inhalation, deaths that could have been prevented.

There were no sprinklers in the dorm; the deaths led to a New Jersey law requiring all dorms to have sprinklers installed, the first of its kind in the nation.

Lapore and Ryan have said that the fire was a “prank that got out of hand,” a claim rejected by family members of the dead.    Phillip Giunta, father of John, told ABC News  “I don’t think it was an accident. I don’t think it was a prank. I think that’s bull.”   Lapore and Ryan, in their plea agreement, acknowledged that they had tried to cover up their role in the fire, convening a group of students at a local Dunkin Donuts the day after the fire and encouraging them to lie to investigators.

McGowan, in contrast, has never said that the fires he was involved in were anything as frivolous as a prank.  In a statement to the judge when entering his plea agreement, McGowan said in part “I hope that you will see that my actions were not those of terrorist but of a concerned young person who was deeply troubled by the destruction of Oregon’s beautiful old-growth forests and the dangers of genetically modified trees. After taking part in these two actions, I realized that burning things down did not fit with my visions or belief about how to create a better world. So I stopped committing these crimes.”

The young man who harmed property only, perhaps misguided but certainly principled, will serve at least 5 years and three months.  Prosecutors are seeking the full 8 year sentence, with a possible “terrorism enhancement,” according to a website coordinated by McGowan’s supporters.   The two young men who got drunk after a basketball game, lit a banner on fire, fled the scene, killed three and injured dozens, could be out of prison in 16 months.

Last week, Mark Fisher wrote an article for the New Yorker Magazine about WBAI Radio host, Bob Fass, and his legendary show, Radio Unnameable. The piece, called “Voice of the Cabal,” showcased the worst of the New Yorker - the facile, elitist gloss, and the unthinking, casual racism.

The premise of the piece is that Bob Fass, who has been the host of the on-again, off-again Radio Unnameable since the 1960s, has been slighted by the new regime at the station. Radio Unnameable came on the air in 1962, broadcasting on the overnights 5 days a week with an eclectic freeform mix of talk, sound clips, music, callers, and ramblings. As the article notes, Abbie Hoffman and Bob Dylan were regulars on Fass’s show for years, and Fass attracted a loyal following of listeners and callers, known as the cabal (hence the article’s title).

Now Fass is on one night a week. And Fisher insinuates, although doesn’t quite have the balls to come out and say, is that the “balkanized schedule” of shows now on the station has forced him out. Fisher cites, as proof of this balkanization, the names of several shows on WBAI: First Voices Indigenous Radio, Out-FM, Joy of Resistance (”multi-cultural feminist radio), Beyond the Pale (”progressive Jewish politics”), The Largest Minority (”issues affecting people with disabilities”), Afrikalidoscope, and Asia Pacific Forum. He then says “Fass’s show is one of the few on the station seeking a broad audience.”

Fisher’s snarky parentheticals suggest that he didn’t take the time to listen to any of the programs he names, but chose to read their titles and one sentence descriptions and decide that those programs are narrowly targeted, not seeking a broad audience. Had he taken the time to listen, Fisher would have learned that those shows seek to educate people inside and outside of the communities that produce the shows (women, First Nations people, or people with disabilities, for example) about the issues in those communities. That’s not narrow targeting, it’s education. Also, the Asia-Pacifica region is certainly not small, nor is the entire continent of Africa. And unfortunately we still need to remind people like Fisher that women are not a narrowly focused balkanized audience, even if a feminist radio show were only trying to address that half of the population.

Therein lies the racism of the article. Fisher assumes that a show by a white man tied to the Greenwich Village community was a show with a broad appeal, while the shows he names are “factionalized” and esoteric. It’s as if whiteness, white maleness, is the blank slate on which all other identities can be grafted. Fass with, without a doubt, an innovator and a pioneer. Much of the rambling talk radio now on all the airwaves can be traced back to Fass (but don’t blame him, it’s really not his fault). But not everyone wants to listen to “experiments with noise and silence,” “an improvised melange of live music, speeches, and random phone calls.”

Fisher writes that “much of the station’s white, liberal audience has drifted away,” while “managers and program hosts went at one another with lawsuits, personnel purges, and fights over race, ideology, and how to appeal to the city’s growing Black, Latino, and Asian populations.”

It’s true that there have been years of infighting at WBAI, and the Pacifica Network overall. I should know, I’ve been an unpaid producer at the station since 2000, six years that sometimes elicit a laugh from the people who’ve been in those trenches since the sixties. And it’s great to see the station featured so prominently in a magazine that I love despite myself. It’s certainly never been known for its down to earth sensibility. I love it because the New Yorker regularly features some of the country’s best narrative non fiction from people like Katherine Boo, the grim environmental reporting of Elizabeth Kolbert, and yes, the investigative work of the irascible Sy Hersh.

This piece by Fisher, however, will not be entering my personal pantheon. To conflate WBAI’s broadening of its content and the diversity of its producers with its downturn from its 60s heyday is outrageous. WBAI isn’t the only place that’s changed since the 1960s. The politics of the country have changed just a little too. Many devotees of Abbie Hoffman and Bob Dylan now listen to NPR, where, incidentally, Bob Dylan’s recent album has featured prominently in recent fund drives. And a lot of them probably don’t want to listen to freeform sound collages.

Meanwhile, the media hasn’t changed enough. Although you might not know it from most of the mainstream media, there are thousands of serious, hardworking, creative and dedicated journalists and broadcasters of color out there. In 1962, there were few on them on WBAI. 44 years later, there are many. WBAI should be commended for doing what almost no other broadcast outlets does: truly representing the city whose airwaves it uses, at least demographically. Radio newsrooms are just 6% people of color nationwide. There’s a story.

Radio is an amazing, creative and stimulating thing. It’s one of the greatest joys in my life, to listen to and to create. I am truly appreciative of people like Bob Fass who might have made radio that doesn’t appeal to everyone, but who made radio that was weird and different and and not like anything else. And I’m appreciative of all the people past and present working their asses off for no pay to keep community media outlets like WBAI alive and kicking. Just think of all the untapped ideas out there, all the freeform crazy creative innovations that the women and people of color out there will bring to the airwaves when we finally bust those doors down.

When I was out working on a story today, the woman I was interviewing was asking what WBAI is like now, and said she listens to NPR these days. And she mentioned Radio Unnameable, and how it was just IT. I hope that someone’s reminiscing about Wakeup Call 40 years from now. I hope that I can contribute to something that’s as incredibly indelible as Radio Unnameable. But I hope that person is still listening to WBAI, and I hope some young person is in master control, making a kind of radio that never, ever crossed my mind.

The other night, every single channel had a dead woman on it. The local TV stations were showing their 10 o’clock news, and they were all covering a story about a woman who had been kidnapped, or raped, or murdered. The other stations were showing the CSI sort of shows, or Law and Order, or one of those other ones where the death is pretty and solved. Even PBS was showing a special about Judy Garland and how she was mistreated by the industry.

Many if not most of the women I know are survivors of some sort of sexual abuse - a date rape, an abusive relationship, even raped by strangers, which is by far the most unusual of those horrible circumstances. And while I wouldn’t presume to speak for all of us, I, for one, am so sick of looking at broken, beaten, raped and bleeding dead women on TV. As a recent episode of Studio 60 said, “half the shows in prime time start with two strippers getting strangled after a lap dance.”

I’m starting to think its some sort of conditioning program. I was reading an article in Rolling Stone recently, called The Killing Factory, about how the Army has worked very hard to train soldiers to kill. This training has also been covered in the Christian Science Monitor in 2004 (in a linkable but less snarky article). Both explore a problem faced by the military: people are naturally resistant to killing other human beings, which has come in handy evolutionarily. So the army has worked very, very hard to condition that natural resistance out of people. The main way they do that is to make the people they’re killing less real, less human - shooting at person-shaped blobs rather than pictures of people. And the campaign worked well. In WW2, just 15-20% of soldiers fired their weapons. That “firing rate” went up to “55 percent in the Korean conflict and 95 percent in Vietnam.”

I think that’s what TV is doing. It’s making it seem okay for women to be dying. It’s making it seem okay for women to be raped or beaten. Normal. And when aberrant behavior seems normal, that bad behavior can increase. That’s what a study by Arizona State University Professor Robert Cialdini found. He did his research in Arizona’s Petrified National Forest, where people were taking the petrified wood and crystals from along the paths. The forest service put up a sign saying “Because so many people are stealing petrified wood and crystals from the forest floor, the integrity of the forest is being threatened.” Which made the stealing sound popular, even common and normal.

Cialdini did a test - he left that sign on one path, put no sign on another, and put a sign that talked about the cost to the environment on the third. Then he seeded the sides of the paths with marked bits of wood. Here’s what he found: on the path with the sign that made the stealing seem normal, people took three times as much wood as they did on the path with no sign at all. As Cialdini writes in science-speak, the problem is that “within the statement “Many people are doing this undesirable thing” lurks the powerful and undercutting normative message “Many people are doing this.” In other words, all the shows that have tons of people killing and raping women give the idea that that is normal behavior, even though they do communicate that its bad behavior. Within the statement “Many people are killing and raping women, and its bad” lurks the powerful and undercutting normative message, “Many people are killing and raping women.”

The absurd omnipresence of violence against women on TV also serves the useful purpose of reminding women to be afraid. From watching TV, you’d think that women being raped and killed by strangers lurking in shadows is happening every single day, all the time. And it does. But what’s by far more common in real life is sexual violence perpetrated by women’s dates, boyfriends, or husbands. A study recently published in the British journal The Lancet studied partner violence. The authors spoke with almost 25,000 women at 15 sites in 10 countries, and found that (as the NYT reports) “rates of partner violence ranged from a low of 15 percent in Yokohama, Japan, to a high of 71 percent in rural Ethiopia.” So the *lowest* number of women who have experienced violence from a partner was 15%.

You do see shows where women are killed by their dates or partners. You even sometimes see shows where women are raped by a date, or beaten by their partner, and those men are hunted down by the police. That’s the big fiction of these cop shows - that police departments invest all their forensic and human resources to prosecute violence against women.

In actuality, police response to violence against women can be, and often is, grossly inadequate. A recent study by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department concluded that there was a “clear and pervasive pattern” of departures from departmental policy when dealing with domestic violence cases. In only one-third of the domestic violence calls to the DCPD did an officer take photographs or ask about prior abuse. Only 17% of the victims were asked about a restraining order, and 83% were provided no printed information with contact information or resources.

And police themselves are often abusers - according to the National Center for Women and Policing, an estimated 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence. That doesn’t bode well for women trying to get the police to take assaults seriously.

Many women who suffer domestic or sexual violence don’t involve the police. National estimates of the proportion of rapes that are reported range from 16 to about 30 percent. So in a city like New York, where there were 3,636 reported rapes in 2005, that could mean that more than 22,000 women were actually raped. In terms of domestic violence, 600,000 reports of assault by intimates are officially reported to federal officials each year. But the most conservative estimates suggest two to four million women are battered annually in the US. That’s a lot of women who aren’t getting the CSI treatment.

In a moment when YouTube can get slammed for posting lockpicking videos because they contribute to delinquency, why can’t we control what gets broadcast on TV? I’m not advocating censorship, but as I’ve talked about before, local communities should have way more say in what they get via the public airwaves. I’d rather hear the word fuck than see a dismembered body of a woman every time I turn the TV on. Wouldn’t you?

The elections Tuesday really give the lie to the whole Red State Blue State “divide”. What the results show is that people voted one way in 2002, maybe a similar way in 2004, and now in 2006, as the economy and the war changes (and as September 11, 2001 fades a bit) people voted a different way.

It’s true, in 2004, the nation was really very red.

And two years later, the blue has spread quite a bit.

Obviously, there are regional trends in voting, and New England will probably be backing the Kennedy dynasty for quite some time, while Texas sticks with the Bush clan. But this is nothing new - the color of each Congressional District has been changing election to election for more than 40 years, as this map shows. We’ve always been purple.

In the change from 04 to 06, it’s not that tons of liberals from Berkeley and Boston moved to Ohio, Montana, or the Dakotas. It’s that people actually do seem to vote based on (gasp) ideas and positions rather than party. That is, insofar as they can actually figure out what anyone’s position is from their superficial, substance-less ads.

And, I have to say, I think these election results are also attributable to the fact that many people who were once Republicans have become Democrats not because their politics changed but that the whole political spectrum moved right while they were standing still. As extreme conservatives pulled the Republicans ever further right, many centrist Republicans found the party had left them behind.

And of course, the spineless Democrats moved right to fill in the gap, picking up centrist Republicans but leaving left-leaning Democrats essentially without a party. I say, with Dems like former Reagan Secretary of the Navy James Webb, or pseudo-former-Dem Joe Lieberman, who needs Republicans?

I know, I’m supposed to be all excited about the Democrats gaining control. I do think there are real differences between the two parties, and I hope that this sets up the Dems for 08. But obviously, when its one set of (mostly) rich (overwhelmingly) white people battling for power in a system that’s actually controlled by corporations, we’re going to have to hold everyone’s feet to the fire while we work to change the whole setup.

There were some little tidbits of underreported good news this morning. Rhode Island granted voting rights to felons on parole or probation. And my home state of Massachusetts has finally booted it Republican Mormon governor (Blue state? I mean, what?) and elected Deval Patrick, the second African-American governor in US History. Like I said though, we might be red, blue, or purple, but until there’s more Black and Brown (or Green, for that matter) up in the seats of power, I’m not getting too excited.

Because I spend a lot of my evenings working at home and reading up on the day’s news, I watch a fair amount of TV. Or rather, I hear a lot of TV in the background of my room, staying half tuned in to the sitcoms and news shows. The other night, I was half-watching a special on Hurricane Katrina, and while it was nothing I didn’t know already, it hit me hard.

Working in the news media, I’ve been pretty acutely aware that the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina was approaching. Like every other media outlet, my show has been planning its coverage for the big day, although I do think we haven’t covered it the way others have. We have reports from around the world, comparing the earthquake in Gujarat to the flooding of New Orleans. We have the voices of evacuees displaced by the storm mixed with stories of street vendors displaced by the World Trade Center bombings. I think these illustrate the idea that Katrina and its mismanaged aftermath, to borrow a phrase, was an extreme example of the current disaster we’ve been in for decades - the disaster of racism, classism, and environmental mismanagement.

But as the TV flickered in the background, I was pulled away from work to the screen by the images that hit me so hard a year ago. The desperation. The mothers begging for water to give their thirsty babies. The old people sleeping on the baggage carousel at Louis Armstrong airport. The thousands sleeping pell-mell on the floor at the Superdome, the clogged toilets and mountains of garbage and sheet-covered bodies outside what was supposed to be a safe haven.

And while I’ve been planning our reporting on the hurricane, I had managed to forget the feelings I had watching those images a year ago. The shame, anger, despair, and devastation - those had faded.

And that’s an outrage. I suppose we can’t live in a constant state of shame, despair, and fury. But a year on since the Hurricane, the “national conversation” about race and class that we were supposed to have? I’m still waiting, and if Katrina wasn’t going to spark it, I don’t want to be around for whatever disaster will finally make America face up.

The NBC special had Brian Williams saying “When you walk by a body lying face fown on the street outside the Superdome, you know that something has come unravelled.” Oh, that’s when you know? You didn’t have a hint when all the faces drawn and desperate at the Superdome were black. You didn’t get a clue when the schools were failing, when the unemployment rates are through the roof, when working people can barely make enough to survive.

The NBC special aired the 28th, the day before the storm hit. On the actually Katrina anniversary, I was really struck by the near-total lack of coverage on the major TV networks. That day being a Tuesday and thus a work-night, I tuned into PBS, which was showing a new documentary not on Katrina, but much more topically, on the current disaster. It’s called Waging A Living, and its about how impossible it is for working people to live in America. And it profiles three women and one man, living not on the brink of poverty but well underwater, despite their superhuman efforts to survive.

It particularly killed me that these were women, all with children, all so proud and strong and fierce, and so damn familiar. They are the women who follow the rules, love their kids, work ungodly hard, even make time for school. And all they get for it is massive credit card debt, high blood pressure, and deep, deep grief at not being able to hold up the sky.

One woman is raising five kids; she works for child services, and she herself was sexually and physically abused as a kid. When, after four years at $8.25 an hour, she gets a raise to $11, she loses food stamps and Medicaid benefits. One child is sick; she can’t afford his $191 prescriptions (for 2 drugs) with her new salary. Her rental is subsidy is cut, raising the rent by $149 - more than the total amount of the raise. As she says, the harder she works, the harder it gets. Hustling backwards.

Another is a waitress, going through a divorce. She’s losing her home, her car, and her kids are losing it too from the stress and the crisis. You see the direct line between the financial precarity and the family breakdown. Family values is economic justice, plain and simple.

I know this isn’t the most radical position, but I do actually believe in the promise of America. For all its terrible flaws, for its slave-holding origins, America was founded - even if just in name only - on the whimsical notion that the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental right. Brian Williams didn’t specify just what had come unravelled when he saw the body in the street, but it’s something very fundamental - it’s America’s own idea of itself. For the people dying in the streets, on their roofs and in their attics, the pursuit of happiness was irrelevant; it was the pursuit of life itself, and the American government failed them. But as Waging a Living illustrates so intensely, that failure did not by any stretch of the imagination start late last August.

Much has been made of the media coverage of Katrina and its aftermath. And I could join the chorus and go on forever about the media’s misrepresentations and obfuscations of who is responsible for the abuse of New Orleans’ residents. But that’s a straw man. It’s like saying Survivor is bad because it split people by race. No. Survivor is bad because its a ridiculous waste of our public airwaves that too rarely make time (or funding) for riveting human relevant stories like the one on PBS tonight.

The women in this movie are so goddam cheerful and strong, and there are millions of them all over the place, and the closest we’ve come to showing them on TV in the last 15 years is Roseanne and then the Katrina coverage. I used to work on economic policy issues, and sometimes I wonder whether I should have stayed there, because working in the media feels far from the real world sometimes. But then I see TV programs like this, and I remember why the fights for a media justice matter the hell out of the damn thing. It’s because with a just media, we would not be able to hide from the current disaster.

One woman in this movie says that the best part was when she got evicted, and then social services came through for her, her adult daughter with cancer, her four grandkids, and her own young child. The best part, she said, was that someone finally heard that I needed help. Just to be clear, she is saying that the best part was when her whole family lost their family home. Yeah.

For thousands in New Orleans, no one heard the requests for help - during the storm, before, or since. And I say requests on purpose. It’s not a plea, it’s not a desperate wail. These requests for help, from the people in New Orleans and the working poor all over the country - they’re a demand of people who believe in themselves, a battle cry of people fighting hard to live.

The waitress mom in Waging a Living encapsulated in four words the way I feel about life in America right now. “I’m independent. I’m not free,” she says. I certainly consider myself to be strong and independent. But with our rights to communicate, control our bodies, live in a half-affordable home, and earn enough to feed our families all under attack, this doesn’t look like freedom. It’s more like we’re all hustling backwards.

For a while recently, I was feeling irritable and kind of down. And being generally a cheerful person who likes herself as much as people do, if not more, it took me a while to realize what the problem was. It took some working out, but here is it: I was feeling lonely.
Me being me, I started to tell all my friends: hey, guess what I figured out? I’m lonely! And most of them said yeah, me too. I think I said that to maybe one person that didn’t have that lonely feeling too.

So I thought well, if we’re all bloody lonely, why aren’t we all spending more time together? Little things like cooking meals together and sitting around working together, besides big things like picnics and nights out and whatnot. Part of the issue here in New York City seems to be gentrification and the crazy cost of living - that everyone is so spread out, and hustling so hard to make outrageous rents that no one can afford the hour it takes to go across town for a cup of tea.

My mum said it’s this age. I think she meant the number of years ago that I was born, that people in their late 20s and early 30s are just kind of lonely. But I wonder if it’s this age, as in this era, this moment in time. This age of death and destruction, civil wars and the world is controlled by lunatics and despair, just despair. I was listening the other day to a story on the radio about an evangelical preacher who stopped believing in hell after he had a vision from god where god told him hell is here on earth. What else does hell look like besides (in his example) Rwanda, or (in mine) Qana? While that radio piece was actually pretty uplifting (and amazing), it’s a valid question. Plus, it’s hot as hell here in NYC.

Is that why we feel lonely - because we’re all feeling isolated in our grief and hopelessness? That’s a pretty grim vision, and not really my experience of life. I do work that I love, and try to be a good person who works damn hard for a better world. I don’t feel beaten yet. But I also don’t think that this many people who love each other and the world can feel lonely without it being related to the chaos in the headlines (and out of it).