Welcome to Spring 2011, hopefully by the time you are reading this some of the snow we have gotten should have melted. If not, wear an extra sweater and hope for the best. I would like to start off with a bit of musing on Islamophobia. Many of you probably remember or still see last semester’s issue (or more importantly its cover floating around on campus) so please pick one up and read. I’ll wait. Ok, we good? Let’s get on with the show. Now, if you look at our cover, the phrase racist, Tea Party, Republican, racist propaganda comes to mind. It is to my understanding that this cover may have upset a number of people. To that I say; bully, grow an appreciation for satire, that we regret not making our position clearer with the proper context. On the surface one could take the cover as an endorsement for racist feelings; it is not. Sad to say we failed at our attempt at satire, since it only works if you don’t have to explain the joke, as I will shortly. I feel that you can’t lay all the blame on us, satire has been dead since they gave Kissinger a Peace Prize, but I digress. In fact, this whole thing has reminded me of an incident during the 2008 election when the New Yorker printed a cover depicting President Obama fist bumping the First Lady while wearing a turban and burning the Constitution.
I will admit that I was a bit incredulous at the time, when I first saw the cover, I had missed the joke completely. I allowed a knee jerk reaction to rule my thought process against something that I did not know the complete story of. This is of course something I’m loathe to admit, but mea culpa. What the New Yorker was pointing out was how truly absurd all the rumors were (and still are) circling around Barack Obama. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.” To the people who suspect the President of the United States is a secret Muslim- socialist-communazi- Marxist- Maoist- Stalinist- fascist- Hitler reborn, who wasn’t born in the United States, they’re insane. The only proper response when people start gibbering on about nonsense and self contradicting conspiracy theories (ala Glenn Beck), is with a helpful dose of calling “bullshit” and ridiculing them for being the cranks they are.
It was with this in mind that we went to expose the inanity of, the stupid for what they are: stupid. It was in a fit of brilliance that one of our members came up with and drew this; it’s a damn funny cover. For this I will not apologize. It is so absurd for people to believe that building a community center 3 blocks away from the site of the former World Trade Center is “what the terrorists wanted”. It makes them look like, colossal ignorant jack-asses. The building is the Muslim equivalent of a Jewish Community Center (a JCC), whose purpose is to help the community and to put out an olive branch of understanding, so that we can stop equating the actions of the few to the whole. What did many people do in response? They formed mental images of things akin to our cover, seeing the whole affair as a larger action to subvert America via weekend terrorist cooking classes or some such nonsense.
It was not till after we had gone to print that we realized that maybe we had not made our position clear that we are against hate. I dissented and figured that anyone who had read the magazine and the position of many of the staff would have realized what our stance was. This lead to a discussion of why people are Islamaphobic, to this I responded with: why are people racist in general? There is something to say about the way the media hypes and frightens us (especially a certain “news” channel that is only fair and balanced if you are somewhere to the right of Mussolini). Far too many Americans are convinced that the people of the Arab world (a better word is needed since many non-Arab countries get lumped into that, Iran is a notable example) are villains right out of Fu Manchu.
That is why we did the cover, if you believe something like what is depicted on it… you should be ashamed for believing something incredibly ridiculous and for holding racist orientalist feelings. In the mid 1950s the Ku Klux Klan was enjoying a surge of popularity when the nascent Civil Right’s movement began to heat up. Besides the various Counter Intelligence Program (or Co-Intel-Pro) operations that the FBI performed against them, one notable superhero did as well, Superman. At the time Superman had a radio play (which were very popular and I sadly miss in our modern world) and in one episode, Superman fought the KKK. The radio play accurately presented concepts the KKK believed in and terms like Klavern, what a local chapter of Klansmen are called and that the leaders of these various chapters are called Wizards. After this particular episode aired, there was a notable decline in membership in the KKK. How did Superman actually harm the Klan in real life? By presenting how ridiculous and terrible they really were. With this in mind I will not apologize for our cover, nor should any member of Third Rail; if you saw the cover and were offended by it, and didn’t actually read the magazine to gain the context, you are the one who is wrong.
I would like to switch gears now, and make a correction in regard to our previous issue. We carried an article that was on, yet another unintelligible proposition, “Anchor Babies”. The facts in the article are wrong, just ashamedly so, much to my great embarrassment that I allowed it to be printed. Immigration into the U.S does not work that way and is hardly as easy as people think it is. For one: illegal parents who give birth to a baby born in the US who then gained citizenship, by the same way many of us got it (being lucky to be born here) don’t get to stay and are often either deported back to where they came from with or without their child. There is much that needs to change when it comes to US immigration policy, and a corner stone of that is amnesty. Let’s face it, there are an estimated twelve million illegal immigrants in the United States. We lack the resources, facilities, and manpower to “round them all up”, which if you did not get the subtle hint, would require the infrastructure of a concentration camp system. Which, no matter what, is always wrong (Good God how far have we fallen that this has to be stated)? Now some people have recommended a repeal of the 14th Amendment in order to stop the phantom threat of anchor babies, which is about as good an idea as shooting yourself in the head. This notion is so goddamn absurd, short sighted, historically uninformed, insane, ridiculous, idiotic and so very, very, very stupid that these people should have been laughed out of a mental asylum. Instead they are elected to Congress, which may or may not be the same as a mental asylum. These people are treated as proper statesmen, instead of having the stupid beat out of them. We’re screwed.
With that thought in mind let us return to the present (or as such it is as the time of this writing). We have seen a great many shocks occur in the world over the last few months. In December, a young college educated man living in Tunisia, looking at the despair of his life as an underemployed educated person tired of living in horrid economic conditions, killed himself by setting himself on fire. This one incident, this one single incident sparked civil unrest across North Africa and the Middle East, from Morocco to Bahrain, from Syria to Yemen, people have swarmed to the streets. They protest and demand an end to the autocratic regimes that have long oppressed them and gained wealth by exploiting them.
Most notable is the revolution in Egypt. It has driven out a US backed dictator that has held power since the early 1980s. The regime has been driven out by the people tired of poor economic conditions, of being repressed and a desire for democracy. Protestors took to the streets and battled the State Internal Security, while the army was racked with their own internal conflicts of who to back. The army after deciding that the situation could go on no longer took action and forced Mubarak to step down.
Egypt isn’t in the clear just yet. With the military in control, and every single leader of Egypt since Nasser having come from the military, we have to wonder how democratic the new Egypt will be. At this time it is unknowable, but the determination that the people of Egypt have shown in their strive for democracy, I have high hopes for them and the rest of the world. The Arab autocracies across the region are trying to readjust and mitigate their problems, which isn’t working too well, since (as of this writing) ‘good old crazy Uncle Mummar’ doesn’t look like he’s going to be holding onto Libya for very much longer. The people of Bahrain clash with the police in the street, though the king has offered everyone a yearly five thousand dollar bribe. In response to the wave of democracy attempting to sweep away the autocrats: the dictators, despots, and butchers of Africa have been trying to crack down on revolts before they can start there too. With all the vigor I can muster, I hope they fail. Every regime from the Congo to China, to Latin America, and Europe, wherever despots may call home and try to keep it that way, they will fail. The tide of democracy can not be kept back for long and the tighter the autocrats squeeze the more of them will break upon the will of the people yearning for freedom.
I would like to quickly talk about America’s role in this. America should not be the center of attention, as we oft like to make ourselves. These are still domestic issues that these countries have to deal with. We should be questioning the continuing of the despicable Cold War policies that have led us to support and in cases install, these despots. While the people of these nations wish to break free from oppression, people fight and die in the streets for their freedom and human rights. Many Americans and pundits proclaim that these people aren’t ready for democracy! Aren’t ready for democracy!? Such bullshit lines can only come from the borderline racist American conservative pundits. To tell these people, who want to decide how they live and enjoy freedom that they aren’t ready for democracy because they might elect people who aren’t friendly to Western exploitation; is not defending democracy, its promoting imperialism. Many people in America wonder why so many people around the world hate us, well maybe if we changed our foreign policies to stop openly supporting dictators who oppress, murder, and torture their own population maybe we wouldn’t be so reviled.
It does make me think though, in the Middle East and the rest of the world, people are reacting to these harsh economic times, and disasters wrought upon us by Neo-Liberal free market economics by opposing austerity and taking to the street. In London, students ransacked the Tory party headquarters at the idea of increasing tuition. What have we done in the US? We’ve had protests defending the ‘right’ of the Capital class to exploit the Working class, to undermine the proletariat in the gains we have made by trying to drive the final nail in the coffin of Unions, and advocating reducing democracy by repealing the direct election of senators. While the average American worker feels the increasing pinch of these times, the Capital class and its minions have sought to further their agenda by cutting needed social programs, while expanding the already bloated Military-Industrial Complex. Though the Tea Party is allegedly putting defense up on the chopping block as well, that remains to be seen. With the way conservatives are in this country, money that’s devoted to caring for wounded and mentally-disturbed veterans would get cut, while weapons programs designed to fight a country that doesn’t exist anymore go ahead unimpeded.
All one has to do is look at the debacle surrounding the F-22 Raptor, the first actual stealth fighter/bomber. It is a plane that could be used to support ground troops in battle, but couldn’t fly at night or in any bad weather and that makes it just about useless. But trying to get the program scrapped or even to cut the number of planes ordered has been like pulling teeth. Meanwhile, cutting federal funding to Planned Parenthood and other health services, education, NASA, the National Endowment of the Arts, the sciences (the NEA and NES respectively) and PBS has been….well, its been so easy I lack a simile or metaphor to properly describe it.
I have written this before, but it bears repeating. The problems City, State and Federal governments are going through aren’t ones of bloated budgets but are revenue problems. For the last thirty years we have been following the Grover Norquist model of government is that government should be so small, it can be drowned in a bathtub. If we keep electing people who think that government has no place in society, should we be surprised that we have seen a dramatic decrease in the ability of government to function? When one staffs the National Labor Board with people who think the only rights Labour has is to shut up and take whatever management decides to give you, is it a surprise that we see that people are faring economically worse then they were thirty years ago? When we staff government with people who think that taxes are always evil no matter what, and should never be raised, should we be surprised that Americans have a worse social safety net and worse social mobility than our counterparts in Europe? We have seen the wages of American’s stagnate or decline since the mid 1970s, the cost of living has skyrocketed to about 3 times that in 1976. This means that people are still making just about, if not a little less, today then in 1976. Meanwhile everything costs more so people have less and less money to spend. This problem was neatly hidden for the last twenty years by how easy it is to get credit. Right now the only sector of the American economy that is growing is low paying service sector jobs. The US has the military of a Superpower, but the economy of a Third World Banana Republic.
This is of course out of the norm, since the New Deal wages had roughly kept pace with the cost of living. As the push for deregulation and Reganonomics gained steam, we see a reversal of this trend. As of right now (early 2011) America has such a disparity in the distribution of wealth that we haven’t seen since the heyday of the Robber Barons and the Gilded Age. There are many things that need to be done, but the two that I’ve been trying to get at are wages and taxes, wages need to be readjusted, the only way to do this is to bring jobs back to the US and away from the cheap slave labour markets of East Asia, Central and South America. By raising tariffs on imported goods, end NAFTA, and strengthen the labour unions to advocate for workers rights, we can bring back jobs. The second thing, is to raise taxes (by a hell of a lot on the rich) but at varying degrees for everyone, so that we can properly fund our social safety net and the programs that benefit everyone, not just the wealthy.
Why would we want a properly funded social safety net? Without getting into the moral question of is it ok for one to sit in the lap of luxury while millions starve in the streets, not having one negatively affects all of us. Our lack of a universal healthcare system, like every other First World industrialized nation in the world, has lead to American workers being unhealthier then their counterparts elsewhere. American’s “pay to play” healthcare system is far more expensive while delivering “fewer bangs for the buck” than universal healthcare systems. Businesses are able to operate more freely and profitably since they do not have to provide for the healthcare of their workers (even with the higher taxes).
Ok, so Universal Healthcare may not be a direct care for you, the 18-25 year old student who is going to live forever. If I may remind you, the College of Staten Island is a CUNY, a City University of New York. Meaning a vast majority of our funding comes from the City, followed by State and Federal funding, with the tuition we pay making up a small fragment of it, well relatively small. But if the City, State and Federal government cut funding to CUNY, it will require a raise in tuition in a bid to cover the budget gap. This means it costs more to come here, which means less and less people are able to afford an education, i.e. us, the students. This is why we have so many issues here at CSI and (well I can’t speak from experience only from extrapolation) other CUNY’s.
If you head over to the south side of campus at night, in between buildings 2S and 3S is one light post what is noticeably brighter than the (few) ones around it. The difference between this lamp-post and the others around it is it is lit by high-powered LEDs. LED lights are much brighter than standard bulbs used for these types of purposes as well as thirty percent more energy efficient and have a longer usage life. The downside to these LED lights is that they are expensive. The lights would make the campus after dark safer, and save the school money since less energy has to be expended to actually sufficiently light the campus. Let’s not discuss the maintenance issues on campus, from buildings falling apart with gaping holes in their ceilings, to broken emergency doors and roofs that leak like a sieve in the slightest of rainstorms; hell, these are full blown articles all by themselves.
The condition of CSI is a microcosm in the United States; our infrastructure is falling apart. The only way to fix this is by resisting the neo-liberal economics pushed by the conservatives in this country and fight for one that functions. Maybe we as Americans should be looking to the Middle East to fix our crumbling democracy.