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I Wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I See Its Premise As Flawed |
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Friday, 20 December 2013 14:31 |
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Powell writes: "The anger that motivated the writing of the Cookbook blinded me to the illogical notion that violence can be used to prevent violence. I had fallen for the same irrational pattern of thought that led to US military involvement in both Vietnam and Iraq."
Powell: 'The continued publication of the Cookbook serves no purpose other than a commercial one for the publisher.' (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
I Wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I See Its Premise As Flawed
By William Powell, Guardian UK
20 December 13
When I penned the book, I was angry and alienated. Today I realize that violence can't be used to prevent violence
 orty-four years ago this month, in December 1969, I quit my job as a manager of a bookstore in New York City's Greenwich Village and began to write the Anarchist Cookbook. My motivation at the time was simple; I was being actively pursued by the US military, who seemed single-mindedly determined to send me to fight, and possibly die, in Vietnam.
I wanted to publish something that would express my anger. It seems that I succeeded in ways that far exceeded what I imagined possible at the time. The Cookbook is still in print 40 years after publication, and I am told it has sold in excess of 2m copies.
I have never held the copyright, and so the decision to continue publishing it has been in the hands of the publisher.
I now find myself arguing for it to be quickly and quietly taken out of print. What has changed?
Unfortunately, the source of my anger in the late 60's and early 70's - unnecessary government-sanctioned violence - is still very much a feature of our world. The debacle of the US invasion of Iraq is yet another classic example. It still makes me very angry. So my change of heart has had less to do with external events than it does with an internal change.
Over the years, I have come to understand that the basic premise behind the Cookbook is profoundly flawed. The anger that motivated the writing of the Cookbook blinded me to the illogical notion that violence can be used to prevent violence. I had fallen for the same irrational pattern of thought that led to US military involvement in both Vietnam and Iraq. The irony is not lost on me.
To paraphrase Aristotle: it is easy to be angry. But to be angry with the right person, at the right time and to the right degree that is hard - that is the hallmark of a civilized person. Two years ago, I co-authored a book entitled Becoming an Emotionally Intelligent Teacher. Although written for educators, the book serves as an implicit refutation of the emotional immaturity of the Cookbook. The premise is that all learning takes place in a social context, and that teachers with a high degree of emotional intelligence construct relationships with students that enhance learning. I continue to work hard, in an Aristotelian sense, to be more civilized.
For the last 40 years, I have served as a teacher and school leader in Africa and Asia, working in some of the poorest and least developed countries of the world. Together with my wife, I have been involved in supporting schools around the world in becoming more inclusive of children with learning challenges. We have written books on the subject and speak regularly at international conferences. In 2010 we founded, together with other colleagues from international schools, the Next Frontier: Inclusion, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping schools be more inclusive of children who learn differently - children with developmental delays, dyslexia, ADHD, and autism.
I suspect that these children have taught me a great deal more than I have taught them.
So what is the connection between the needs of these children with learning disabilities and my wish to see the Cookbook go out of print?
For one thing, children with learning challenges are often ostracized; sometimes informally by peers, sometimes more formally by schools that deny them admission, and sometimes by teachers who fail to understand their academic, social and emotional needs. No child should have to earn the right to belong.
The Cookbook has been found in the possession of alienated and disturbed young people who have launched attacks against classmates and teachers. I suspect that the perpetrators of these attacks did not feel much of a sense of belonging, and the Cookbook may have added to their sense of isolation.
Schools need to be safe places. Students and teachers need to feel physically and psychologically safe. Learning is greatly inhibited when fear pervades the schoolhouse. Learning is also greatly inhibited when children and young adults do not feel a sense of belonging.
I do not know the influence the book may have had on the thinking of the perpetrators of these attacks, but I cannot imagine that it was positive. The continued publication of the Cookbook serves no purpose other than a commercial one for the publisher. It should quickly and quietly go out of print.
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FOCUS | Barack Obama Is Not George W. Bush |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=10204"><span class="small">Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Friday, 20 December 2013 13:00 |
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Chait writes: "By the end of 2005, George W. Bush had seen the promise of his presidency collapse from justifiably lofty heights. At the end of 2013, Obama stands at just about the same place he began his term."
President Obama with former President Bush. (photo: AP)
Barack Obama Is Not George W. Bush
By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
20 December 13
 as Barack Obama turned into George W. Bush? This terrible fate, desperately hoped for since the outset of Obama's presidency by the Bush administration veterans as a kind of vindication fantasy, has become a new conventional wisdom. It has been floated, with varying levels of certainty, by Chuck Todd, Chris Cillizza, Bill McInturff, Ron Fournier, and Politico.
It is certainly true that Obama's approval ratings have fallen to Bush-2005 levels. It's also entirely possible they'll fall further still: The administration's panicky preparations for January suggest the first month of actual Obamacare coverage may be just as chaotic and unpopular as the onset of Medicare Part D. Yet the Bush comparisons state, or imply, broader forces at work than mere sagging approval ratings. They suggest a presidency that has hit a new inflection point beyond which its credibility is severed and its agenda broken. And that conclusion falls apart because it completely misses how power works in the Obama era.
If you measure the power of Obama's presidency as the ability to move his agenda through Congress, his presidency has been dead since Republicans took control of the House in January 2011. If you measure it by his ability to use his popularity to force the opposing party to cooperate, it has literally been dead from the outset. In Obama's first few weeks, with approval ratings in the seventies, he could not persuade a single House Republican to support a fiscal response to the most dire economic emergency in 80 years.
Bush's power worked very differently. He enjoyed control of Congress for most of his first term and the first two years of his second. What's more, his opposition party genuinely feared being seen as obstructionist. Substantial minorities of Democrats decided to vote for elements of Bush's agenda on the calculation that being seen as bipartisan, and winning narrow concessions, made more political sense than opposing Bush. A dozen Democratic senators voted for the Bush tax cuts, and another seven abstained. Democrats supported the porky energy bill, and could have blocked Medicare Part D through a filibuster but decided not to.
Republicans like to blame Hurricane Katrina for fundamentally breaking Bush's presidency. It's a handy rationalization both for Bush loyalists, who can blame his failure on a single freak event, and for conservatives, who can avoid implicating conservative ideology. (They also throw in Republican corruption scandals.) McInturff, a Republican pollster, repeats this mythology in his Bush-is-Obama memo, in which he argues, "Hurricane Katrina is rightly remembered as a dividing point in the Bush presidency."
Here's a chart of Bush's approval ratings. See any "dividing point"? I don't:
Now, Bush's approval ratings did fall more steeply in 2005 than at other points. What happened in 2005, before Katrina, is that Bush devoted the entire year to using his popularity to sell the public on a plan to privatize Social Security. Americans loathed the idea, but Republicans thought that if Bush spent enough time selling them on it, he could win them over. Instead both the policy and Bush grew less popular.
Of course, Iraq was also spiraling into dysfunction at the time. But Social Security privatization represented a real break point for Democrats in Congress. Faced with a radical challenge to their governing philosophy (and a genuinely awful proposal), they had to decide whether to continue working with Bush in return for marginal concessions or to oppose him en masse. Social Security privatization flipped their political calculus. Then the 2006 midterms handed control of Congress to Democrats. The first two years of Bush's second term successively cost him a pliant opposition, and then turned that opposition into a majority.
Obama, by contrast, faced an opposition party that began in the place Bush's opposition party ended. The political insight of the Republican Congress, and Mitch McConnell in particular, was the recognition that Democrats under Bush had the politics backward. Their path to self-preservation – show America they were willing to reach across the aisle – not only failed but backfired. It made the president more popular, made public opinion more favorable to his party, and thus made them more vulnerable. Since most Americans hold the president responsible for what happens, the opposition party has an incentive to withhold support for anything, making the president seem partisan. As McConnell put it, "It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out."
Obama's agenda since 2011 worked very differently. He hasn't lost power the way Bush did, because he never had it - at least not after his first two years. The prospect of Republican cooperation on his agenda was always phantasmal. Unlike Bush, he never had any hope of getting GOP support for major reforms, either by horse trading or by public campaigning. In January, I wrote a column outlining what a successful second Obama term might look like. The most promising avenue for his agenda lay in the use of executive power, especially on climate change. Obama did stand a chance of passing immigration reform.
Almost one year later, the prospects appear about the same. Immigration reform is weaker, but not yet dead. And its weakness has nothing to do with Obama's popularity - its fate rests on the internal calculus of the House leadership weighing the risks of long-term demographic decline against an immediate conservative revolt.
Obama's prospects for executive action are actually stronger now. The main impediments to an aggressive regulatory agenda were twofold. First, Republicans could stop regulations by blocking nominees for major agencies. Second, they held a functional majority on the D.C. Circuit Court, and stood poised to block Obama's environmental and financial reforms. Republicans understood full well the importance of that court to Obama's second term. (McConnell, again, identified the crucial dynamic: Obama's second-term agenda, he said, "runs straight through the D.C. Circuit.") That's why Republicans took the extraordinary step of declaring a full blockade on any nominee for the court's three vacancies, however ideologically moderate.
And it's why the Senate Democrats' decision to abolish the judicial filibuster looms so large. With a stroke, they eliminated the strongest leverage Republicans have to gum up the president's second term. Obama has managed to seat nominees to the Federal Housing Authority and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And the odds that the court will overturn new regulations have diminished sharply.
Additionally, Obama has neutralized the most aggressive, confrontational Republican tactics in Congress. In my column from last January, I wrote that Republicans could, through sheer nihilistic confrontation, sow destruction: "They can shut down the government, they can block administrators, they can begin impeachment - to create the kind of political and economic chaos that would make any progress vastly more complicated." Almost as important as changes in the Senate is Obama's success at defeating those tactics. In a series of confrontations, he turned Republican threats to shut down the government and default on the national debt against the GOP, persuading its leadership that over-the-top confrontation was self-defeating.
The conventional wisdom – propounded by many of the same pundits now equating Obama with Bush – held that Obama's hardball tactics would backfire. Obama needed to negotiate over the debt ceiling, and didn't dare change the Senate's rules*, argued, to take one example, Ron Fournier. To fail to placate conservatives would only enrage them more. This analysis turned out to have it backward. Congress managed to pass a budget for the first time in three years precisely because Obama defeated the GOP's extortion tactics, forcing Republicans to actually trade policy concessions rather than demand a ransom.
The prospects for Obama's second term remain constricted. Not many deals beckon in Congress. The Obamacare rollout was surely a political disaster, but the administration has three more years to get the law up and running. By the end of 2005, George W. Bush had seen the promise of his presidency collapse from justifiably lofty heights. At the end of 2013, Obama stands at just about the same place he began his term.
Update: Fournier did not oppose the nuclear option. I was thinking of other centrist pundits. Mea culpa.
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Sarah Palin's Impressively Incoherent 'Duck Dynasty' Comments |
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Friday, 20 December 2013 09:20 |
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Taibbi writes: "Palin's inability to grasp the difference between a first-amendment violation and corporate calculation is amazing because she literally just published a book on the subject."
Sarah Palin speaking at the 2013 CPAC convention. (photo: AP)
Sarah Palin's Impressively Incoherent 'Duck Dynasty' Comments
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
20 December 13
 miss Sarah Palin. I was bummed when she decided not to run for president the last time around. It would have been hard to find a challenger to Barack Obama less funny than Mitt Romney (notwithstanding Barrett Foa's outstanding "I Believe" Romney-musical spoof), and because the president himself isn't exactly a barrel of laughs, we ended up with one of the unfunniest (and also angriest) White House races in history.
That opportunity is lost, but it's still fun when Palin injects herself into the news. She's done so this week by jumping to the defense of Duck Dynasty's patriarch Phil Robertson, who remarkably got himself suspended from his own smash-hit reality TV show by extolling the virtues of the vagina over the anus in the pages of GQ (in an interview by the always-excellent Drew Magary). Robertson was professing, one might even say over-professing, his ignorance as to the appeal of gay sex - he put it this way:
It seems like, to me, a vagina - as a man - would be more desirable than a man's anus. That's just me. I'm just thinking: There's more there! She's got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes . . . But hey, sin: It's not logical, my man. It's just not logical.
There's more there. Take that, anus! Robertson went on to provide a less bizarre, more Biblical explanation for his opposition to homosexuality. Then, in a separate piece on the GQ site, he also offered a 20th-century America version of Holocaust denial.
He said that as a young person in pre-civil rights Louisiana, he "never . . . saw the mistreatment of any black person" and that black people were happy (happier?) back then:
Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.
After all of this came out, A&E suspended the show more or less immediately amid a blizzard of "That guy we just spent years turning into a rock star sure as heck doesn't represent the views of our ad-sales department!" denials. This of course immediately inspired howls of protest from Duck fans and conservative politicians alike.
Sarah Palin, ably staying in character in her new role as a professional media ambulance-chaser, was one of the first to rush to Robertson's defense. She posted a photo of herself with the Robertsons and tweeted the following:
Free speech is endangered species; those "intolerants" hatin' & taking on Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing personal opinion take on us all
Conservatives have always had trouble grasping the difference between public censorship and private enterprise. With a few exceptions, like whistleblower laws and National Labor Relations Board protections against being fired for off-site discussions about work conditions (exceptions that, in almost every case, conservatives bitterly opposed), there is no legal or constitutional right to free speech on private property.
You can be fired for calling your boss a dick, and you can just as easily be let go by a profit-seeking media company for imperiling its relationship with advertisers. And incidentally, this is the way true conservatives, and especially true hardcore speech advocates, have always wanted it.
Could you imagine the uproar if someone passed a law saying that Martin Bashir couldn't be bounced from a broadcast job for saying Sarah Palin was a good candidate to have feces shoved in her mouth? Now that would be censorship.
Remember, nobody heard a peep from Sarah Palin about free speech after that episode. Bashir earlier this year tiptoed across the line in an angry diatribe about Palin's invocation of slavery imagery, which she had somewhat amazingly used to describe the suffering (presumably white) middle Americans will feel when they are forced to pay for the "free stuff" the Obama administration is handing out, i.e. health care:
Our free stuff today is being paid for today by taking money from our children and borrowing from China. When that money comes due and, this isn't racist, so try it, try it anyway, this isn't racist, but it's going to be like slavery when that note is due. Right? We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.
She elaborated:
And it is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control.
Palin's mind is amazing. Slavery was purely a private-enterprise abomination. It had nothing to do with being subservient to the government. It was the opposite of that, actually. She was also wrong in the sense that the health care program isn't "free stuff" (even those who will receive subsidized care will be paying in one form or another for their policies).
So she pulled off a Friedman-esque anatomical impossibility there, getting three feet in her mouth at the same time.
First, she was wrong about slavery. Then she was wrong about health care. Then, thirdly, she was almost insanely insensitive and inappropriate in her use of the word slavery at all, comparing white middle class angst over having to partially subsidize health care for their poor (and mostly nonwhite) neighbors to being whipped and tortured across generations of institutional racist terror.
Bashir reacted to this by telling a story about slaves who were forced to defecate in each others' mouths, and then suggested that Palin, having "scraped the barrel of her long-deceased mind," was a "good candidate" for the same treatment. Soon after, he was essentially forced out of the network.
Again, Palin had no problem with that. In fact, Palin lauded the network once Bashir was out:
It was refreshing to see though, that many in the media did come out and say, 'Look, our standards have got to be higher than this . . .'
The thing is, Robertson's ouster by A&E was exactly the same sort of move - a network sucking it up and distancing itself from an on-air figure because of controversial speech. But because Robertson's views were ones Palin apparently agrees with, suddenly she wasn't talking about anything being refreshing, but instead cried that "free speech is an endangered species."
Palin's inability to grasp the difference between a first-amendment violation and corporate calculation is amazing because she literally just published a book on the subject. Her newly-released War-on-Christmas diatribe, Good Tidings and Great Joy, is all about the efforts by evil Jesus-hating atheists to sue the Christmas out of our public lives. (It's one of the funniest things ever written, by the way. I would write a review but I don't think I could make it all the way to the end without a cardiac episode).
In writing this new book, Palin presumably spent the whole of the last year or so staring right at the issue of what may be said on private property versus what may be said on public property - the difference between putting up a nativity scene in front of a courthouse and putting one up on your lawn. Yet as this latest controversy shows, the underlying issue is still a total blur to her.
Of course, Palin has a long history of getting things not just wrong, but exactly wrong. In the book, for instance, she describes buying her husband Todd "a nice, needed powerful gun" in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings and resulting anti-gun fervor. She described this warm act as a "small act of civil disobedience" that was "fun."
As Alex Falcone for the Portland Mercury noted in this humorous review, this gets the term "civil disobedience" perfectly backwards:
Not only is that a hilarious re-purposing of a term with a noble history, it's also a perfect misuse of BOTH WORDS. Buying guns is both legal and dangerous, making it an act of uncivil obedience.
Anyway, this whole episode speaks to a bigger dilemma facing the Republican Party. Like Palin, the party itself hasn't seemed to grasp the fact that the country's broad rejection of its base's more extreme views on things like race, class and gender isn't some injustice to be railed against, but plain demographic truth.
If your "moderate" presidential candidate from 2012, the guy who was bashed by the party base for being insufficiently hardcore, is a guy who essentially said, after a failed speech to the N.A.A.C.P., that all black voters want is "free stuff," then you're just not going to win a lot of elections in a country that's going to be majority nonwhite within a few decades.
Similarly, if your party's political rhetoric is full of suggestions that poor people are poor because they don't like to work, well, you're not going to win a lot of votes from poor people, who also happen to be increasingly many in number. That's not a misunderstanding or an injustice, that's just a fact.
Whether or not Robertson and his entertainingly hairy family should have been fired is beside the point. The point is that A&E realized there was no way to make the numbers work if they had a guy who thinks black people were happier before civil rights as a front man.
It surely wasn't personal, but just a business decision, and not a terribly hard one, either. It's weird that the Republican Party has such trouble making the same kind of call in choosing its leading characters.
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Open Letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7118"><span class="small">Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Thursday, 19 December 2013 15:30 |
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Gibson writes: "Your callous response to the deeply troubling series The New York Times did on Dasani, the homeless child in Brooklyn, highlights everything that's wrong with your style of leadership."
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks to the media during a news conference. (photo: Reuters)
Open Letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News
19 December 13
 our callous response to the deeply troubling series The New York Times did on Dasani, the homeless child in Brooklyn, highlights everything that’s wrong with your style of leadership. As mayor of the largest city in the richest country in the world, the conditions she described, like standing guard outside a dingy shower while her mother bathed to protect her from sexual assault, and having to use toilets clogged with vomit, should prompt you to take action.
"City and state inspectors have repeatedly cited the shelter for deplorable conditions, including sexual misconduct by staff members, spoiled food, asbestos exposure, lead paint and vermin. Auburn has no certificate of occupancy, as required by law, and lacks an operational plan that meets state regulations. Most of the shelter’s smoke detectors and alarms have been found to be inoperable."
-New York Times, Invisible Child
Any decent human being should be horrified about such conditions and want to do everything in their power to change them. And many people of much lesser means than you do so. But your response to her troubles was simply, “That’s the way God works.” I’m not sure if you’ve studied the Bible much, but I have, and I’d love to tell you a little bit about the way God actually works.
In Luke, Chapter 3, verse 11, Jesus instructed his disciples, “If you have two coats, give one away. Do the same with your food.” You own a $7 million, AgustaWestland SPA AW109SP helicopter through your company, and The New York Times mentions how you keep it with your private jets. Jets, as in more than one. If you have more than one private jet AND a helicopter, why not sell off all of your flying vehicles except one, and use the money to create more spaces for homeless families like Dasani’s?
Another one of Jesus’ parables – in Matthew, Chapter 25, verses 31 through 46 – is another example of how God really works. In the parable, Jesus tells the story of a king who says to his people that when the good ones fed the hungry, clothed the cold and healed the sick, they did the same to him, and would be blessed with eternal life. The king likewise tells the wicked among his people that when they did not feed the hungry, clothe the cold or heal the sick, they also didn’t do those things for him. The wicked are then condemned to eternal punishment. Regardless of your religious beliefs, I think it’s safe to say that your decision to stop food donations to homeless shelters in your city qualifies you to be among the wicked.
In Mark, Chapter 10, verses 17 through 25, Jesus is approached by a rich ruler, who proudly tells Jesus that he’s followed all the commandments and seeks eternal life. When Jesus tells him to give away his possessions to the poor, the rich man leaves sadly, refusing to part with his wealth. Jesus then reminded his disciples that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Under your leadership, New York City became the city with the highest income inequality in the United States. One in five people in your city are below the federal poverty line, even though the median income in New York is over $60,000. That means in a city of approximately 8,000,000 people, roughly 1,600,000 of them are starving and desperate.
You could take a lesson in how God really works by looking to the examples set by Pope Francis. In November, he blasted the worthlessness and greed of financial speculation, the profession your city is perhaps best known for, and the source of your billions of dollars. He wrote:
“As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.” -Pope Francis
As one of your last acts as mayor, you could impress the hell out of me and everyone else if you would lift your ban on food donations to NYC shelters, come out in favor of tighter regulations on Wall Street, and support a financial transactions sales tax that would raise billions, dedicating that new revenue stream to more spaces and aid for the homeless population of your city.
Kicking the most vulnerable when they’re down isn’t how God really works – that’s how bullies work. Will you be remembered as a former class warrior who repented and worked to help the less fortunate, or as a greedy bully who fed the overfed by starving the masses?
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Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at
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, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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s the day went on, I heard an unfortunate number of progressive friends address the issue of the suspension of the crackerfamilias with the flat assertion that the First Amendment doesn't apply to corporations and that therefore, A&E was within its rights to suspend the guy. (Which, as Steve M. points out, 
