alias Bruce.

The chaos now surrounding the American "deal" to release dissident Chen Guangcheng to the Chinese government

is a surprise only to the willingly blind. The accounts in today's NYT, including this one and this one, help to show why. This latest from CNN, though, also shows that Chen refuses to go quietly, and he is determined to put Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the American government on the spot just when they thought they had sidestepped this inconvenient problem.

It is clear that the U.S. wanted to squirm out of the Chen situation as quickly as possible so as to protect its shaky relationship with its creditor and cheap-labor-supplier China. In America's China policy, human rights rank well below the needs of the corporate and financial players who underwrite and steer our foreign policy. We all know this, although polite corporate media will not explicitly say it. Moreover, this has been true for many years, despite current Republican rants about the Obama administration's cowardly rush for an excuse to ditch dissident Chen. You can bet that a Republican administration would have been equally or more eager to find a quick way to dump Chen in the interest of business and finance, since both the Dems and the G.O.P work for the same employers.

Only an American policy team desperate to avoid a business-unfriendly fight would have believed (or pretended to believe) China's lame assurances that Chen and his family would not suffer further retaliation after his release back into Chinese hands. Chen himself seems to have panicked into accepting the deal, and now that reality is setting in he is, rightly, afraid and angry. Yes, he reportedly went along with it at first. But his current claim that Americans pressured him and failed to tell him all the facts appears to have some veracity. And in any case, when a panicked, injured, persecuted dissident shows up at an American embassy after a car chase, cooler heads have an obligation to assess the situation in the interest of justice.

To give you an idea of just how bad things had gotten for Chen by the time he reached the U.S. embassy, here is a short excerpt from one of the NYT pieces:

Although there were no legal charges pending against the couple, local officials had decided to turn their home into a makeshift prison with high walls, well-paid guards and sheets of metal to cover their windows.  The local government’s goal was twofold: to prevent Mr. Chen from engaging in his legal work against coercive family-planning policies and to keep the couple cut off from the outside world. When the Chens broke the rules — by trying to sneak out messages or secretly detailing their mistreatment in a homemade video — they were viciously beaten.

For the U.S. to then turn around and concoct a flimsy deal to drop Chen like a hot potato is, tragically, business as usual. In the aftermath of the dirty deal, we see handily-choreographed stances on both sides: China demands an American apology for its temporary sheltering of Chen. And the U.S. grandly refuses to say it is sorry. Everybody gets to protect their own flank. Except Chen, that is, whose ability to generate international outrage and pressure may determine his fate.

Meanwhile, the bloody economic gears keep turning.

After having read Mike Daisey's March 25th blog post about his Apple monologue disaster,

and after having listened, in its entirety, to the March 19 talk he gave at Georgetown University about the scandal; and having listened, also in their entirety, to the original show he did on This American Life and the later TAL retraction show on which he was doggedly questioned about his looseness with facts, a few things appear clear to me:

1.) Mike Daisey is a mess. I think he'd be more than willing to admit this. In fact he pretty much does admit it, especially in the Georgetown talk and on the TAL retraction show. I think most of us, in his situation, would be a mess. He has been all over the place in his responses to the scandal: he was shell-shocked and in denial in the TAL grilling on the rules governing his art; he was defiant and disingenuous in his March 19 blog post about how it was "art," not lies, that moved his audiences (I have only heard the monologue portion that aired on TAL, but the parts I found most emotionally moving – such as the anecdote about the man with the ruined hand and Daisey's story about his personally having met 12-year-old workers – now appear to have been fabricated or exaggerated); he is earnest, repentantly self-effacing, and politically passionate about the untold stories of Chinese workers in his Georgetown talk; and now, in his March 25 blog post – faced with a quote from one of his past interviews in which Daisey clearly lays out the rules for theatrical truth-telling – he openly admits how he broke them in his Apple monologue and he seems to have let go of the need to artistically defend the license he took. His trajectory seems to be toward acknowledgement of what he did and calling even more insistently for addressing the much greater cause of justice and media attention for Chinese workers. He clearly got in way over his head with TAL, and I'd advise pundits to take care in trashing him. You know what they say about glass houses.

2.) Daisey didn't need to lie or misrepresent his experience in order to succeed with his monologue. That's the awful irony of all this. Between the things he actually experienced on his trip and the known facts about incidents and outrages in Chinese manufacturing for Apple, Daisey could have constructed and performed a monologue that was riveting, devastating, and, as TAL asked of him, bulletproof against the predictable attacks and questions from Apple and corporate media. In his Georgetown talk, Daisey says about his panicked deception of TAL's producers, "I should have been wiser. There must have been a path that would have worked [in being able to air the monologue without misrepresentation]. I don't know what it would have been, though." I could be all wrong, but I have a suggestion: had Daisey been honest with TAL, they might have instead constructed a show about how a gifted writer and actor with a compelling story found himself getting carried away with the telling of the story, and how he finally came clean about this under the pressure of doing a national radio broadcast. And Daisey could have performed a monologue, on TAL, about what he truly saw in China and what he didn't see, and how and why he had gotten carried away in some of his monologue lines, and what is actually documented as happening in Chinese factories, and how as an apolitical privileged American techno-geek he found himself devastated, disoriented, and evangelicized by the raw power of what he witnessed and what he learned from others about where his iPhone comes from. Sure, maybe that idea wouldn't have flown. All I can say is, as a TAL listener I'd certainly tune in to a show like that. But in any case it's water under the bridge. What is clear, and what Daisey clearly knows, is that his monologue doesn't (and won't) need misrepresentations in order to work as theater.

3.) Daisey is a great talker. He is a brilliant talker. He is such a good talker, in fact, that, given the glibly convincing way in which he represented untruths as real events in his monologue, I am not sure I believe much at all of what he now says. I'm not sure I believe his explanations for things he still insists he saw in China that his translator says didn't happen. I am not sure I believe his tortured account of why he did what he did and how he now feels about it. I am not sure, actually, that I believe anything Mike Daisey says. This is a real problem for me; there is much of what he now says that I want to believe. But I'm having a lot of trouble doing so. I don't know what to do with this. But I needed to say it.

4.) When Daisey says that he should not be the big story – that Apple and China should be the big story – he is absolutely right. I do think he understands that his dishonesty in the telling of such a heart-rending, high-stakes human story has become a hugely emotional public event partly because his story itself so deeply rocked our world as spoiled American gizmo-users, and partly because a lot of us, including me, feel an angry sense of his having betrayed and manipulated both us and the issue of workers and Apple. But Daisey is correct when he says it's an atrocity that the news cycle is dominated by his scandal rather than by the human suffering embedded in electronics built for us by people in China who we will never see.

That is why, as Daisey suggests, you need to read the New York Times series on Apple's suppliers, and listen to the NPR story about an explosion at an iPad plant that workers say happened just hours after Apple inspected the plant, and look at the research by NGOs  regarding cruel working conditions and worker suicides at Apple supplier plants in China.

And that is why, unless there is something of huge public importance related to him in the future, I will not blog about Mike Daisey again.

No matter what you think of Obama, this image nails Rush Limbaugh's role as a decoy paid to divert attention from what is destroying people's lives:

Of course, President Irrelevant is only a convenient bit player in this sucker act. Rush's underlying pitch to angry white Americans is: You, my fellow pissed-off white Americans, should be the rulers here, and you would be if it weren't for government. Don't be angry at corporations and their hired politicians or at rich folks like me who can buy great health coverage and dodge taxes. Be angry at that White House nigger who is bossing you around!

That's The Rush Limbaugh Act, brought to you by a tiny group of people who will never have to stand in line for anything.

The job-creators talk shop.

Thanks to Shawn Terrell.

Agony, Art, and Apple.

It is a cliché that artists are among the last-ditch truthtellers in a society. It is also true.

These days, for example, as corporate journalists become less willing and less able to contradict the ruling script of American life (e.g., there is no alternative to 21st-century monopoly capitalism as a way of running our country or organizing the world), it is increasingly the artists who help break the actual news about what is wrong and what change is possible.

Who is passionately exposing lies and delusions on the part of both the Obama corporatists and the dog-whistle right? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert -- comedians, for God's sake. Who wrote a famous open letter to Laura Bush declining her dinner invitation with the explanation that Ms. Bush had chosen to live in quiet harmony with a murderous and criminal regime? Internationally-celebrated poet Sharon Olds.

And who, now, is sending chills down corporate and consumer spines with his little one-man show about the people who actually make your iPhone? An overweight, nervy actor and monologist named Mike Daisey, whose theatrical monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," has brought audiences the story of Chinese workers leaping to their deaths from factory complex roofs to escape a wretched life in service to Apple. The New York Times and other corporate media have since picked up pieces of the story of how the electronics industry runs horrifically dangerous, hellishly abusive, city-sized factories. But it was a solo guy with a touring one-man show who told it.

It's one more reason why artists should have way more societal stature: they are among our default sources of truth when the official tellers choose to shut up.

Read on Daisey's blog how Apple is now acting very, very afraid of these revelations. And listen here to an edited live performance of Daisey's monologue aired on the radio show This American Life.

I'm making changes

to this blog.

You may have noticed it's been more than two months since I last posted. I'm just not into continually opinionizing right now. There is an entire online culture that opinionizes in the continual present tense: "Here is what I think about what just happened in (insert political entity here)." I don't see it doing us much good. Certain things are true, and they will remain true until we act to change them, and until we do, opinionizing once a week about the same truths is like shouting at each other weekly that the sky is blue.

Truth: The United States is a corporate monarchy in which the state has been purchased in service of monopoly capitalists.

Truth: Elections will remain a sham as long as private money is allowed to dominate them.

Truth: Privilege and continued combat among we non-plutocrats -- by race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability and other distinctions -- is the best divisive tactic the ruling class has at its disposal. If not for this, we'd have stormed the Bastille long ago.

We know these things. What we need to do is change them. There is more than enough repetitive stating of the obvious already. That's one reason I'm changing the blog.

Another reason is that my life has grown. I'm a working musician, a perfoming poet, an author working on my next book, and a person like you who walks around seeing and hearing stuff I sometimes want to share because it helps me become more aware of life, period.

So you'll see a lot more here than you've seen before. Sure, it will include political opinions, but it will also go further.

I can't tell you yet where this will go. But in the coming weeks you and I will both start to find out.

The video of police pepper spraying peaceful students at UC Davis

 

doesn't require a lot of commentary: an overweight, battle-outfitted cop following orders and flexing his flabby sense of power over a group of passively sitting demonstrators because somebody told him he should or could. The message is clear: The ruling class understands that OWS is ripping the scab off the suffering of the working and middle class and the poor, and the elites are afraid of the truthful and disciplined anger cultivated by the OWS movement, and they are determined to shut it down before it spreads into anything like a mass uprising against corporate monarchy. The bosses' chief weapon, to paraphrase the hysterical enforcer in the old Monty Python "Spanish Inquisition" sketch, is fear: fear that if you protest you will be injured, fear that your dissent will place you in personal physical danger, fear that gathering in public against a Wall Street dictatorship will put you more at risk than you can possibly afford. You can be angry, is the message, but you'd damn well better keep your anger at home and not make public trouble for us.

This may well be an explicitly coordinated strategy. We know, for instance, that the mayors of many cities with active OWS movements have shared ideas in large-scale conference calls about how to respond. We also know that law enforcement has both the national means and the motive to share recommended methodologies for cutting off OWS participants at the knees.

In any case, the plutocrats are scared, and police are being called upon to kick serious ass. This isn't at all new in poor communities of color, where illegal and humiliating public body searches and sodomy attacks and cold-blooded murders by police have been going on for decades as a tool of terror and control. But it is new for today's generation of college-aged and twenty-something mostly-white Wall Street occupiers and protesters, accustomed as they are to freedom from rampant police abuse. Further, this kind of explicitly political national movement of young people (of all colors) against capitalist injustice is something the United States has not seen for nearly a half-century. And so police at places like UC Davis, and Oakland, and Portland, are now being called upon to review the DEFCON pages of their manuals, to pull on their riot gear, and to report for Conan the Barbarian duty.

White kids being brutalized by swaggering over-armored cops doesn't play well on national television. The courage and discipline of a crowd of students who responded by peacefully forcing the storm troopers to retreat while they chanted "Shame on you!" and "You can go!" also makes a strong impression on national TV. Just as powerful (see video below) was the ruthlessly silent shaming of weak UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi by a sea of students who drowned Katehi in their deafening silence as she slunk though them to her car after unsuccessfully begging for their understanding after the pepper-spraying attack. The UC Davis faculty and many others have called for her resignation.

The War on Drugs provided a pretext for militarization of police in low-income communities of color. The culture of police thuggery, having been honed in places like the Bronx and South Central Los Angeles, is now being brought to bear against a potential national anti-corporate movement that taps into popular grievances. We'll see how this plays out. My bet is that OWS and the evolving ideas and actions it has set into motion will give the rich a run for their money.

 

Welcome to the 2011 Days of Rage.

In the past day alone, mass Occupy Wall Street actions, as chronicled here and here, give us a hint, just a hint, of what can happen when a too-mad-to-be-denied constituency hugely outnumbers the blue-clad and helmeted enforcers who are paid to subdue them.

The most eloquent statement I have yet heard from the decentralized OWS movement came from one of its New York City leaders, who said on the radio that OWS actions, spectacular and dramatic though they are, serve as but a vehicle for a kind of colossal public education on the way the American and global capitalist economy really works -- and on the massive power that can be unleashed when popular awareness merges with popular rage.

It is worth repeating again and again: although most Americans are not part of OWS, most do agree with its stated positions against income inequality and the rule of the rich. When was the last time you saw those explicit and widespread public grievances forced onto the front pages and the anchor desks of the corporate media?

Greetings from the Occupation.

While in Portland, Maine to give a talk on race and social justice at First Parish Portland Unitarian Universalist Church, I visited on Sunday with Occupy Wall Street participants (above) who have camped out at a downtown park. It was an unseasonably warm day, their spirits were high, and my sense was that they are highly organized (e.g., they have a media coordinator) and that they feel very connected with Occupy Wall Street groups elsewhere.

I went from Portland to NYC, where I visited Zuccotti Park today (above). It was strangely peaceful this afternoon: police everywhere, and the palpable sense that the NYC enforcers might do anything at any time, but, again, a beautiful day with a calm, almost casual, feeling in the park. It's clear that the elites are confused about what to do about the Occupation movement: drastic actions make martyrs of the participants and are also increasingly difficult in NYC with the thousands of supporters who show up when the encampment is threatened; at the same time, allowing the Occupation to continue enables a dangerous reinforcement of anti-corporate American sentiment.

Among the NYC Occupiers I talked with were Ilya and Maggie (above), who have been in Zuccotti Park for weeks and consider the cooperative spirit of the Occupation community (e.g., food and other necessities provided for all) to be a model for American society; and a person working at the encampment's recycling and composting depot who worries that the self-focused excesses of some homeless or pathologically reckless participants may taint the public-interest image of the Occupation. In truth, of course, these things highlight the central grievance of the Occupy Wall Street movement: that America is not taking care of needy Americans.

As I've said before, this broad explosion of anger, backed up by opinion polls on such issues as a Millionaires' Tax, is hugely important. We've not seen such widely explicit expressions of class clashes since the Great Depression.

All photos by Bruce A. Jacobs

This just in: Mayor Bloomberg has backed down

and called off (the official word from the owners of the park was "postponed") the planned police eviction of people at the Wall Street occupation. This was basically because thousands of additional people had gathered there in support of the occupation. MoveOn.org has video of the announcement of the good news to the crowd here.