Wednesday, July 08, 2020

Supreme Court Ruling Denounced as 'Dangerous and Serious' Attack on Women's Right to Contraceptive Care

"No employer is welcome into the exam room when I talk to patients about their contraception options, why should they be able to dictate the method from their corner office?" asked one physician.

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Supporters of women's health rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, March 23, 2016, as the Court hears oral arguments in seven cases dealing with religious organizations that want to ban contraceptives from their health insurance policies on religious grounds. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Reproductive rights advocates vowed to continue their fight to protect women's access to contraceptives in the U.S. on Wednesday after the Supreme Court ruled that employers can refuse to provide birth control coverage for workers on religious or moral grounds.

The 7-2 decision in Trump vs. Pennsylvania—in which Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented—could leave 120,000 women without coverage for birth control, more than five decades after the birth control pill became legal nationwide.
Under the ruling, companies can be shielded from abiding by the Affordable Care Act provision which requires employers to cover preventative care for employees, including contraceptive care.  In the opinion for the majority of the court, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Trump administration had "the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption." 

Planned Parenthood Action tweeted that Wednesday's ruling crystallizes the fact that right-wing attacks on reproductive rights are focused on more than access to legal and safe abortions, and that advocates must prepare to fight for full reproductive justice.
Former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards—now a leader of the women-focused mobilization group Supermajority—appeared on MSNBC shortly after the ruling was handed down, detailing the benefits that have been afforded to women in the U.S. under the Obamacare birth control provision.

"One of the biggest successes of the Affordable Care Act was the coverage for 63 million women in this country for birth control... We've had a record low of teenage pregnancy, a 30-year low for unintended pregnancy across the board... So this is a real unfortunate development for the health and safety of women." —Cecile Richards, former Planned Parenthood president
"This is a bad decision for women's health," Richards said. "One of the biggest successes of the Affordable Care Act was the coverage for 63 million women in this country for birth control. And this decision essentially now takes away that commitment. We've had a record low of teenage pregnancy, a 30-year low for unintended pregnancy across the board. It's a very popular benefit and it crosses party lines... So this is a real unfortunate development for the health and safety of women."

Alexis McGill Johnson, current president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, called the decision to further limit Americans' access to basic healthcare "egregious," particularly during the coronavirus pandemic.

"The dual public health crises of Covid-19 and systemic racism and violence are pushing people, our healthcare system, and our economy beyond their limits, and yet today, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to make essential healthcare even more difficult to access," said McGill Johnson. "Restrictions like this target Black and Latinx people who are more likely to be low income and for whom basic healthcare has always remained out of reach, because of historic and continued underinvestment in access to affordable care."

On Twitter, the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for women's reproductive rights, wrote that the ruling "could set a dangerous precedent for allowing religion to be used as justification for policies that encourage discrimination."
Dr. Daniel Grossman, director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), called the ruling "a dangerous and a serious violation on workers’ freedoms, privacy, and healthcare access."
Richards expressed hope that the Supreme Court ruling would galvanize women ahead of the 2020 presidential election. 

"I think it only serves to reinforce that this administration has done everything they can to eliminate healthcare access, and particularly for women—we know during Trumpcare they tried to get rid of maternity benefits," Richards told MSNBC. "I actually think this decision and women understanding that they just lost a benefit and....their boss can now determine whether they can get birth control, that's going to energize women even more, and they're already the most energized group of voters in the country."

McGill Johnson vowed that the Supreme Court decision would not be the end of Planned Parenthood's fight for access to reproductive freedom.

"This is not over," said McGill Johnson. "We will do all we can to ensure those who need birth control and other sexual and reproductive healthcare can access it. And we will not stop until that is a reality for everyone, no matter who you work for, where you go to school, how much money you make, or the color of your skin. You have the right to make your own decisions about your body, your healthcare, and your future, and we will never back down from this fight."
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UN Special Rapporteur: US Drone Strike Killing Iranian Gen. Soleimani Was Unlawful


Not only was Soleimani’s killing unlawful, it set a very bad precedent.

WAR CRIME 

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Trump was acting as judge, jury and executioner and arbitrarily killing someone he didn’t like the looks of. (Photo: CC)
Agnes Callamard, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has concluded in a new report that the Trump administration’s killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport on January 3 was unlawful. Callamard has the responsibility to report on killings by drone.
Anna Germoni of the Italian TPI.it site interviewed Callamard about her findings.
Callamard noted that her own particular remit is arbitrary murders, and that Trump’s whacking of Soleimani was a first:
“The targeted killing of General Qasem Soleimani is the first case of a drone attack against the representative of the armed forces of a state. Until now, all drone kills that I am aware of have targeted non-state targets, particularly individuals associated with acts of terror.”
That is worth underlining. Trump did something that had never before been done, and which is very dangerous. He used a drone on a high-ranking general in a foreign army of a state—a state with which the United States is not formally at war.
Callamard admitted that there could be circumstances when such killings were justified, if it really was a matter of self defense:
“Killing in self-defense is allowed as a last resort, to protect one’s own life or that of others. The United States would have to demonstrate that it encountered an imminent threat to lives and that, in order to protect those lives, there was no other choice than to use lethal force. So far, no such justification has been demonstrated.”
President Trump initially announced that Soleimani had been coming to Iraq to kill Americans. But the then Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdulmahdi, said it was he who invited Soleimani to Baghdad, since he was trying to mediate between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Soleimani came on a commercial flight and checked through security with his diplomatic passport.
Trump never provided a shred of evidence for his allegation. When the Pentagon did up its own report on the incident, it did not include the charge that Soleimani had intended to kill Americans.
Germoni pressed Callamard on this issue, and she answered:
“As for the legality of the U.S. strike against General Soleimani, the information made available by the U.S. authorities does not, in my view, allow us to say that the murder was legal under international law . . . For a drone attack to be legal, it must meet the legal requirements of all applicable international legal regimes, namely: the law governing the use of force between states (ius ad bellum), international humanitarian law (ius in bello) and international human rights law (Ihrl). I believe that, in itself, the ius ad bellum is not sufficient to guide the use of extra-territorial force but that other legal principles apply."
This is an interesting point. Although the strike on Soleimani has tended to be viewed in the light of the law of war, which focuses on proportionality and questions of self-defense, Callamard is saying that human rights law is also relevant to the taking of life and should be entered into the calculation.
In particular, she says that the criterion of imminent threat is crucial. You can’t kill a convicted murderer who served his time, because of past deeds. That would be vigilanteism. Only if the murderer is trying to choke you out and you feel he is trying to kill you or someone else can you blow him away. Callamard says,
“The justifications put forward by the United States have largely focused on Soleimani’s past activities and the serious crimes for which he is held responsible. And there is much evidence linking Soleimani to serious human rights violations in Iran, Syria, Iraq and other countries. But under international law his past involvement in human rights violations or acts of terror is not enough to make his murder lawful . . . Do we have to accept that any country with adequate power and advanced tools to carry out drone or targeted kills can proceed at any time, at its discretion, to strike anyone considered a threat to their interests?”
Callamard concludes that not only was Soleimani’s killing unlawful, it set a very bad precedent. Trump was acting as judge, jury and executioner and arbitrarily killing someone he didn’t like the looks of. But what if that became standard practice? Wouldn’t US officers be in danger of being droned? This consideration had given previous presidents pause when they considered such a course of action. Not Trump.
Juan Cole
Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His new book, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East (Simon and Schuster), will officially be published July 1st. He is also the author of Engaging the Muslim World and Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (both Palgrave Macmillan). He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.
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GOP Has Unhinged Meltdown After Ilhan Omar Makes Simple Call to 'Dismantle All Systems of Oppression'

"Just to be clear, Ilhan Omar is under attack by the right wing media machine for statements that are utterly normal and totally uncontroversial when they're delivered by white, non-Muslim politicians."

Eoin Higgins, staff writer Wednesday, July 08, 2020 Common Dreams

Rep. Ihan Omar (D-Minn.) speaks during a press conference on systemic racism on July 7, 2020 in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Rep. Ilhan Omar pushed back Tuesday night on Republican attacks after her remarks calling for the "dismantling" of U.S. systems of racism and oppression were characterized as un-American and dangerous by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and other right-wing extremists.

"It is telling that a black woman discussing systematic oppression is so triggering to the right," Omar tweeted as performative conservative outrage over her remarks increased through the evening.

“As long as our economic and political systems prioritize profit, without considering who is profiting and who is being shut out, we will perpetuate inequality.”

It is telling that a black woman discussing systematic oppression is so triggering to the right. pic.twitter.com/chJtgp5OzP
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) July 7, 2020

Omar's remarks, made at an outdoor press conference on systemic racism Tuesday in Minnesota, called for an ambitious approach to addressing myriad issues of oppression and inequality that pervade the American system.

While policing in America is a major issue of concern, Omar said, it is far from the only factor that explains why large percentages of Black people in the U.S. are relegated to poverty and unequal outcomes. Pushing back on those systems, the Minnesota Democrat said, will take more than simply changing law enforcement.

"We can't stop at criminal justice reform or policing reform," said Omar. "We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, in the air we breathe."

Republicans reacted with anger, with Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) tweeting that the remarks were evidence that "Omar and her Marxist comrades are a threat to our Democracy" and calling on the Minnesota congresswoman to resign—comments that Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald called "moronic."

This is completely moronic. Calling for the dismantling of systems which a member of Congress believes to be unjust is precisely what the job entails.

What motivates this fixation on depicting @IlhanMN as a "threat" to America is easy to see, and it's supremely ugly. https://t.co/iptnm9DTwb

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 7, 2020

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) also expressed outrage, charging that Democrats wanted to destroy the country.

Jamaal Bowman, Democratic nominee for Congress in New York's 16th District, opined that the GOP seized on and knowingly mischaracterized Omar's comments in order to distract the public from ongoing inequality and injustice.

"They want Americans to hate Black women, Muslims, and refugees more than the people in power benefitting from a system that causes the majority to suffer," tweeted Bowman

Like @IlhanMN, I support “dismantling the whole system of oppression."

Why is the GOP and FOX News so outraged?

Because they want Americans to hate Black women, Muslims, and refugees more than the people in power benefitting from a system that causes the majority to suffer. https://t.co/WvyK0I6CFO

— Jamaal Bowman (@JamaalBowmanNY) July 8, 2020

Carlson, on his 8pm Fox News show, attacked Omar and Sen. Tammy Duckworth (R-Ill.) for what he described as attacking the fundamental values of America.

"We have every right to fight to preserve our nation and our heritage and our culture," Carlson said.

President Donald Trump on Twitter amplified Carlson's critique, retweeting the comments.

jesus christ pic.twitter.com/E1sEKWNxf0
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) July 8, 2020

As the New York Times reported, going after Omar and other prominent politicians of color is nothing new for the two men:

Nativist attacks on Democratic women of color in Congress are hardly new for Mr. Carlson and Mr. Trump. Ms. Omar was one of four Democratic women who were the target of "send her back" chants at a Trump rally in North Carolina nearly a year ago. She is also, along with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, featured in a scores of Republican television ads and political mailers as examples of what the party’s candidates are fighting against.

"They're telling on themselves," tweeted Briahna Joy Gray, journalist and former press secretary to the 2020 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Prominent progressives came to Omar's defense.

"Ilhan Omar is the truth teller in Congress we have been waiting for," activist Linda Sarsour said on Twitter. "She speaks inconvenient and necessary truths. You may not agree with her but this country must come to terms with her."

Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of Indivisble, noted the right-wing's use of outrage to stir up anger over Omar's comments despite the fact that they are hardly outside the mainstream of political discourse.

"Just to be clear, Ilhan Omar is under attack by the rightwing media machine for statements that are utterly normal and totally uncontroversial when they're delivered by white, non-Muslim politicians," Greenberg tweeted. "As usual."

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AMERICAN MYTH OF SOCIAL SECURITY 

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE PENSION?

On the one hand, we have less financial security in retirement. On the other, we’re less trapped in our jobs than we used to be.

Once upon a time — like, until the 1980s — lots of employees could spend their lives working for a company, then enjoy a cushy, well-funded retirement beginning around age 60. That’s because they had pensions waiting for them at the end of the rainbow — which was once a pretty common company benefit.

So, what happened to it? What was it actually like? How’d it work? Will it ever come back? Alongside Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, associate professor of economics and research fellow at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, we drew some answers.
HOW COME NOBODY IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR GETS OFFERED A PENSION ANYMORE?

There are two views of what happened, according to Sanzenbacher, though it’s hard to tell what’s more true. One is that the tax code changed in 1978, allowing for the existence of 401(k)s, in which the employee pays into their own retirement fund (with contributions from their employer). As you can imagine, 401(k)s handed more risk and responsibility to the employee and took a lot off the hands of the employer, so it was better for the companies to offer this rather than a pension.

The other view, Sanzenbacher says, is that employees gradually became more mobile, and therefore a pension — which takes decades to accrue serious benefits that only really build up toward the end — was becoming sort of obsolete. In other words, earning a decent retirement meant you had to work somewhere for a very long time (more or less your whole working life), which is something people have wanted to do less, and thus the 401(k) is better for an employee, too.

“Those are the two different stories that are out there, and we’ve never really been able to figure out through research which one it is, because those two things were happening simultaneously,” Sanzenbacher says. “My guess is it’s probably a little bit of both, but that employers really valued the opportunity to take risk off their book.”
SO PENSIONS ARE PRETTY MUCH ALL GONE?

They’re around for public employees — usually city, county and state workers. Federal employees have a hybrid system, according to Sanzenbacher, that includes a pension but also a 401(k)-type plan called a Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). Employees hired before 1987 got a pretty generous pension. After 1987, they got a less-generous pension but also the TSP, which is quite generous, he says — together it adds up to something roughly equal to the old days.
IN THESE OLD DAYS, DID EMPLOYEES HAVE TO PAY ANYTHING INTO IT, LIKE PEOPLE HAVE TO WITH THEIR 401(K)S?

Generally, no! At least not directly — they may have been earning less in wages to make up for it, but they didn’t have to put in their own money. How much you earned in retirement each month was a function of your salary, your retirement age and how long you were with the company. In public sector pensions, employees typically do pay into them now.
HOW RARE ARE PENSIONS NOWADAYS?

Check out this graph from the Center for Retirement Research and see for yourself (“Defined Benefits” means pensions and “Defined Contribution” means a 401(k)-type plan). They’ve basically inverted since 1983. Only 12 percent of all workers with retirement plans had a pension in 2016.
HOW MANY PEOPLE HAD A PENSION IN YE OLDEN DAYS?

Sanzenbacher says it wasn’t like everyone had one — about half of all workers did, which holds kinda true today: about half of all employees have a 401(k) plan.
WERE PEOPLE REALLY ABLE TO RETIRE COMFORTABLY ON A PENSION?

With a pension and Social Security checks, generally, yeah. It’s tough to say because, to get a good pension payout, you had to stay at the same job for a long time and work till your 60s, and Sanzenbacher says there’s not much data on how many people were able to pull that off. But if you did? Yeah, your golden years were pretty cush.

“It’s always important to remember that, that wasn’t everybody even back then,” Sanzenbacher says. “Like everything, it was unequal, and the people with better benefits would typically be higher-income to start with. But in general, the people who stayed at their job a long time would be in good shape.”
WHAT’S THE CURRENT STATE OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEE PENSIONS?

Not great! They vary widely from decent to terrible shape, though right now, on average, they’re vastly underfunded. This sort of thing tends to correlate with the economy (until recently). So for example, in 2007, about when the economy got shitty, they were, on average, funded at 86.5 percent. But back in 2000, at the crest of an expanding economy, they were funded at 102.7 percent.

Here’s the bad news: Right before COVID, at the end of a long, red-hot economic expansion, when you’d expect pensions to be well-funded, they weren’t: They were at 72.8 percent. “We had a 10-year expansion before 2000 and everything looked great,” Sanzenbacher says. “We just had a 10-year expansion and everything looks bad! So that’s not exactly encouraging for the future.”
HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?

Maybe because the Trump Administration and Congress gave corporate Amer- whoops, I mean “the middle class,” one of history’s largest tax cuts in the middle of an economic expansion in 2017, for some deeply mysterious, forever-unknown reason.
UGH. SO LIKE, WITH A PENSION, YOU’D BASICALLY GET A PAYCHECK TILL YOU DIED?

Yes! And possibly also survivor’s benefits for your spouse. This is another reason pensions dried up: People’s life expectancy has soared. It’s one thing to live a few years after you stop working; it’s another to keep on keeping on for decades, getting paid every 30 days and draining your old company’s pension fund.
SOUNDS AMAZING, THOUGH.

It probably was — Sanzenbacher would like to see 401(k)s have more of an annuitized structure like pensions, as most people suffer from a bit of paralysis in retirement: They’ve saved and contributed to their 401(k) for so long that they become emotionally attached to it and hesitate to spend it. We get conditioned to receiving a paycheck every month for decades and spend/saving accordingly, but then, when we need to ration out a chunk of money for an unknown amount of time, with unknown expenses on the horizon, that’s a totally different skill!
ARE PENSIONS EVER GONNA COME BACK?

Nah, probably not. Sanzenbacher points out that they used to serve a couple purposes for employers that no longer apply so much. One thing they did was retain employees, encouraging people with company-specific knowledge to stick around. That’s one reason pensions are so heavily back-loaded, accumulating value toward the end, in a nonlinear fashion. But then, since many jobs used to be more physical and involved manual labor, employers didn’t want workers sticking around forever, past the peak of their productivity. So the value of one’s pension also stopped accruing at some point; that allowed workers to retire and claim their full benefit without the need to work anymore. All of which is to say that pensions retained employees for the right amount of time, and also got them to leave at the right time.

But now that dynamic has changed: Employees don’t want to necessarily stick around for that long (nor, perhaps, should they), and companies realized that pensions are both a risky and expensive way to retain employees (in its place, helloooo ping-pong tables, all-you-can-eat snack bars and relaxed dress codes!). Instead companies realize they can still seem generous enough by offering a 401(k) — which is nice indeed! But it’s not quite a pension.

So while, on the one hand, you’re more on your own than ever when it comes to your retirement someday, at least you no longer have to dedicate the only life you have to a job you freaking hate in order to live the last of it in comfort.


Adam Elder is a writer in San Diego. He hates author bios, so this is all you get.
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A MARXIST ANALYSIS OF ‘PAUL BLART: MALL COP’    

 Kevin James’ everyman hero is just a tool for an inequitable system of labor and capital

The aughts in America have loaded us with regret. Mistakes were made: everything from the show Entourage up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the bright spot of the decade — the election of our first Black president — now feels too distant to improve our recollection of the time. In so many ways, we’d like to forget it all. But a specter is haunting us, even now.

The specter of Paul Blart.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop is a 90-minute, PG-rated “action-comedy” starring Kevin James, best known for the sitcom The King of Queens. It was released on January 16, 2009, four days before Barack Obama was sworn into office, at the very terminus of George W. Bush’s lame-duck period. It is, you should know, an exemplar of Hollywood economics: a small-scale movie produced “cheaply” (it cost $26 million to make), released in a fallow month so it can quickly outgross its budget and seize the top spot at the box office. Poor quality is no problem when you have no competition, and this prescription for bottom-line success was particularly effective: Paul Blart had the second-best opening for a movie on the MLK Jr. holiday weekend, and even now, it holds eighth place in that category. It was a triumph of meager expectations.

Even Roger Ebert gave it three stars, pleased by its chubby “nice guy” protagonist, who goes from lovelorn loser to alpha male by foiling a heist of the mall on Black Friday.

Goodmorning to the 88 percent of people that liked mall cop pic.twitter.com/VzvYowoXRa
— Paul Blart (@BetOnBlart) June 30, 2020

But how nice is Blart, really?

Begin with this: He desires power, and, more than that, to become an instrument of state power. His fondest dream is to join the New Jersey State Police, and so enforce the laws by which the bourgeoisie keep the proletariat at a disadvantage, materially and politically. He would be accepted for this role as class traitor, we’re led to believe, if not for his hypoglycemia: When his blood sugar gets too low, he crashes.

Nevertheless, he more than meets the requirements for a job as security guard at the fictional West Orange Pavilion Mall. (I am compelled to note, as someone who grew up the next town over, that creating the mirage of a luxury shopping center where none exists is a way of shaming residents for insufficient consumerism.) As a mall cop, Blart receives little respect but steady disdain from retail employees, customers and his colleagues, but he does enjoy two perks: the use of an officious-looking Segway and an intimate, camera-augmented knowledge of his territory.

As the film’s narrative purports to reveal how Blart has been underestimated, so should we not discount the hallmarks of petty authority as somehow trivial. I sent a brief synopsis of Paul Blart and some theories about the character to Dr. Dennis Dworkin, chair of the history department at University of Nevada, Reno (and proud dad of MEL‘s Sam Dworkin), whose work has grappled with Marxist theory and class struggle.

“What I see in your brief description,” Dworkin replies, “is the classic issue in Marxism. Why is it that working people identify with the ruling class when it’s clearly not in their material interests? In this case, why is it that this poor schlep who is probably paid something on the order of minimum wage risk his life for people (that is, capitalists) who exploit him?”

According to Marx, Dworkin tells me, “the prevailing ideas of any given society are the ideas of the ruling class, which to extend this are circulated through their dominance or control in education or the media or the church. If that’s the case, workers are living in ‘false consciousness,’ which seems to fit your protagonist. He doesn’t understand his own best interest.”

This rings true to me from the outset of the movie, long before Blart has to put his life on the line. What’s more, his insistence on riding the Segway, and his unethical use of security feeds — in accordance with his vow to “detect, deter, observe, report” — may place him in proximity to what the author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism.”

Blart is not an internet giant commodifying personal data for profit, but he does collect ambient information, undetected; no sooner has he developed a crush on Amy, the new vendor of a hair-weave kiosk, than he’s back in the control room, zooming in on her face via CCTV, the poor woman unaware of this invasion of privacy as she goes about her own labor. Zuboff connects the Marxist image of capitalism as a vampire to the parasitism of Facebook, Google and the rest of Silicon Valley, which “feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.” Studying Amy’s movements in secret, Blart does likewise. (It is the criminal “villains” of the movie who will destroy this tool of oppression.)

Yet the Marxist notion of a “false consciousness” that automatically allies Blart with our techno-capitalist overlords “doesn’t give much credit to working people, which after all Marxism is supposed to be in the service of,” Dworkin notes. He raises a different, related concept from W.E.B. Du Bois’ account of Reconstruction following the Civil War. Du Bois “tried to develop an explanation for why the white working class in the south, despite being exploited by the plantocracy, identified with them rather than the Black working class,” Dworkin explains. “His famous answer is that they were paid ‘the wages of whiteness,’ meaning that their identification with the white ruling class was a sort of psychological wage although not a material one. Thus the [mall] cop who goes above and beyond what’s expected undergoes a similar sort of experience. His feeling good about himself as he defends ruling-class values is a sort of dividend.”

This is an even better description of Blart’s attitude from the very first frame to the last: He measures success by the flourishing of the mall itself, which Dworkin refers to as “the temple of pure capitalism,” just as “the Acropolis is the symbol of Greece, and the cathedral is the symbol of medieval Europe.” To uphold the mall is to reinforce the system that created it.

Now onto the Segway, the focus of roughly 60 percent of the film’s humor (the other 40 percent is fat jokes, a sort of meta-punishment for anyone whose appetite for distraction is so great and palate so deeply undiscerning that they find themselves watching the cinematic equivalent of a bag of pork rinds). The makers of Paul Blart: Mall Cop could not have known that a British businessman would buy the Segway company later in 2009, then die the following year when he piloted one of the devices off a cliff. Nor were they predicting a halt to production of the “personal transporters” a decade hence.

The Segway gags are a shallow, extended ripoff of superior physical comedy in Arrested Development, hinging on the “dork factor” of such a conveyance. That Blart keeps it in a small home garage and drives it to and from work, as well as around the mall, is another jab at his social status; he is lesser for not having a car, for not taking up more space and burning fossil fuels, and therefore clings more desperately to his expensive toy as way of literally elevating himself above the masses. Early on, in a slapstick bit of foreshadowing, he crashes the Segway into a pristine minivan with a gift ribbon on it — the future prize of a sweepstakes winner. Toward the climax, when he has to assert his command of a crisis, he ditches the scooter for the van, plowing it through a wall to the outside world.

But if you’re wondering how a schlubby loser like Blart might get the girl in the end, well, it’s a simple matter of proving he can protect some brands when thieves show up to rob a centralized hub of commerce. This is the logical conclusion of his proactive spirit — while the other guards adopt a laissez-faire approach to their crummy jobs, Blart sees the safety and integrity of corporate hierarchy as a civic matter, and the mall almost as a sovereign nation, built on conspicuous consumption.

He is, in other words, a soldier of capital, and stays to defend it in a hostage-heist scenario lifted from Die Hard. His nemesis is Veck Simms, a guy who infiltrated Blart’s dominion as a security trainee (again, instruments and a position of surveillance turned toward personal enrichment), leading a crew that is coded as more ethnically diverse and “street” than the squishy, middle-class mall-goers and staff: I’m not joking when I say that these characters are doing parkour basically whenever they’re on screen, or zooming around on skateboards and BMX bikes to threatening effect — threatening to a white, suburban sensibility, that is.

Veck is the financial realist of the picture, having orchestrated his plan around the busiest shopping day of the year, and creating the appearance of a bank robbery when in fact he is out to steal credit card codes from individual stores, a far more lucrative idea. (More shades of Zuboff: Privileged information is better than money.) Obviously, there is no plot if Blart elects not to fight the gang on his own, but it’s remarkable that we’re prompted to root for someone who puts innocent lives at hazard to prove himself a noble defender of data.

The mission of taking out the thieves has parallels to the social critique inherent to zombie films: Blart goes “shopping” for all the gear and gizmos necessary to dispatch these bad guys, and more than once, he poses as a mannequin to get the drop on someone. By accident, he also receives an unwanted spray tan.

Contrary to the subversive cynicism of a George Romero, these adventures in looting are both an endorsement and the natural zenith of product placement; Blart could not protect anything or anyone, it seems, without access to commodities that reinforce their own branding: He kicks ass in a New Jersey Devils jersey; he snares the attention of a robber with a Sharper Image robot; and when he breaks into a Hallmark store to get Amy a birthday card, it’s meant to be heartwarming. He doesn’t have a scratch on him from all the broken glass, either. Blart isn’t stealing, he’s borrowing — a bloodless, inoffensive act. He’d never take what belongs to these franchise businesses; he only trusts in their generosity.

I asked Dr. Dworkin if all this jibed with the Marxist take on commodity fetishism. The parallels are there, he says, “as what Marx meant by it is that the prominent role that should be given to labor and laborers was instead given to the objects that they created. So we lived in an inverted world, one in which the objects took on a magical form, here symbolized by the role that they take in thwarting the robbers, while the workers who made them are forgotten. In the [Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844], Marx refers to this as alienated labor, that is, the objects that we make, which should be a representation of who we are, become foreign to us and external, objects enjoyed by others. Rather than us creating them; they seem to have created us.” Indeed, the figure of Paul Blart as MacGyver-like hero is created by the various items he employs to outwit his foes. Even the Segway is conscripted for service as a decoy; Veck impulsively shoots at it, as if Blart and his scooter are one and the same.

Yet it is still Blart, the lowly wage slave, who gives everything, most of all his body, which absorbs punishment as readily as workers bear inhuman conditions and the indirect burdens of a cruel, abstracted market. We hear a lot these days about the end of malls; after he’s saved the day, Blart rejects the offer to finally become a cop, preferring to stay in a retail bubble destined to be hollowed out by Amazon. In superseding his actual duties, he committed to a delusion of his importance, and the glories of the temple he is assigned to patrol — and he probably still can’t claim any overtime pay.

“Workers produce surplus value beyond the going wage, but are never enumerated for it,” Dworkin says. And despite the trauma he’s been through, Blart still believes in the virtue of profit for those already much wealthier than him, ultimately reverting to a humble, aw-shucks pose that would have us conclude that his effort to save the shops was simply the correct moral choice. In fact, it was selfish (his love interest was one of the hostages), suicidal (he was outnumbered, unarmed, untrained) and it led to his daughter being captured as well. Nevertheless, the movie asks us to see this foolishness as all-American valiance. He stood his ground and protected his mall, along with everything the mall represents.

This returns us to Dr. Dworkin’s most critical question, which Paul Blart: Mall Cop has no real intention of answering: Why does Blart risk everything for those who exploit him?

“Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist party, developed the idea of ‘hegemony’ to understand how it is that ruling class ideas come to become the values of the working class in certain historical circumstances,” Dworkin says. “He developed a vocabulary for dominance in which institutions like the church, the schools, and the media broadly conceived distribute what [he] calls ‘common sense.’ In other words, they develop ways of explaining working-class experience that resonates with them by providing explanations that have direct emotional appeal.” Dworkin gives one example of hegemony as Gramsci outlined it: a politician blaming the problems of the working class on China and Mexican immigrants to deflect from capitalism’s failures.

But where it comes to emotional appeal, a movie certainly gets the job done, and we can justifiably accuse Paul Blart: Mall Cop of a hegemonic function: it tells us that we feel sad, small, uncool, unsexy and powerless because we have not reached our full potential as warriors for the financial market. (And to think we’re shocked when conservatives on TV argue for a return to work despite coronavirus — that civilians will have to die to save the billionaires’ portfolios.) In a credit sequence, Blart and Amy are married in the mall, each on their own Segway, the last gesture of their devotion to the economic pyramid scheme that trapped them there to begin with. Of course the sequel is set in Las Vegas. The house must always win.




Miles Klee is MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert. He’s also the author of the novel ‘Ivyland’ and a story collection, ‘True False.’
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WEST VIRGINIANS ARE CAMPAIGNING TO REPLACE CONFEDERATE STATUES WITH MOTHMAN

 Not only is Mothman a hero for the working people — he can absolutely get it, too

Jay Sisson, a 30-year-old teacher who’s lived in West Virginia his entire life, makes a point to decorate his ninth-grade classroom with storied champions of the state’s past. The brave but often misunderstood heroes pinned to the walls represent a certain rugged individualism and perseverance that inspired him as a child, and he hopes they do the same for his students.

It’s also no coincidence that they’re all cryptids: Sasquatch, the Flatwoods Monster and — most importantly — Mothman.

“I want my students to love their home, to make it better despite the problems that exist here. I want them to see the good that exists here,” Sisson tells me. “I want our community to beat the odds, and the Mothman can embody that spirit because it’s ours. It’s a symbol for something bigger.”

Not surprisingly, then, Sisson has joined the growing chorus of West Virginians demanding the state replace all of its Confederate statues with Mothman statues instead.

“As a West Virginia native, I’d like to think we’re all spiritually connected to him,” explains Brenna, the 24-year-old who spurred on the movement with this viral tweet:

starting a petition to replace every confederate statue with mothman pic.twitter.com/jIv7Vt9VO2
— Brenna (@HumanBrennapede) June 8, 2020

pic.twitter.com/x9R6DxQZ3J
— Rage of Devils (@RageofDevils) June 7, 2020

Tear down the Stonewall Jackson statue and replace it with another statue of West Virginia’s own mascot and son the Mothman. Repeat indefinitely until all Confederate monuments are replaced. This is the way. pic.twitter.com/MBzXZkRhAs
— Jay Sisson (@jaysisson) June 10, 2020

It’s not just some flash-in-the-pan shitpost, either. To many West Virginians, Mothman carries more significance than any Confederate general. In fact, the legend originated in the town of Point Pleasant, when locals spotted a “man-sized bird creature” prior to the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse that killed 46 people. “Mothman was blamed and retroactively seen as a bad omen that foreshadowed the disaster,” Brenna explains. “From there, the story of the Mothman spread across the country and became an urban legend of sorts.”

As Mothman continued to appear around major disasters (e.g., the 1999 Russian apartment bombings) and attracted Hollywood interest (e.g., The Mothman Prophecies, which starred Richard Gere and Laura Linney), West Virginians officially accepted the winged giant into their hearts. Point Pleasant held the first Mothman Festival in 2002, unveiled a 12-foot metallic Mothman statue in 2003 and opened the Mothman Museum and Research Center in 2005. And now, in 2020, they’re advocating for the cryptid to replace all nine Confederate statues in the state.

“These monuments aren’t ‘celebrating history’; they were specifically created to intimidate Black Americans,” Brenna says. “Statues aren’t needed to ‘remember the past’ when so many are still experiencing the repercussions today. Therefore, all monuments honoring the racist and oppressive history of the Confederacy should be removed. And who better to replace them than the Mothman?”


Reasons why mothman is better than the confederate statues:
1. Not racist
2. Not explicitly a symbol of white supremacy
3. Not a symbol of slavery
…
1007. Mothman has a thicker ass than any confederate general.

— The Problem Clown (@mecasloth) June 8, 2020


here have a mothman fancam pic.twitter.com/TkXbbf3UBM
— heather ‎⎊ 💘 (@schwifts) June 12, 2020

“We have certain stories, oddities and bizarre pockets of the state that are unique to our region, and we find a sense of comfort in sharing these things together,” Sisson adds. “I don’t have a full explanation as to why, but it probably has something to do with the fact that we live in a state with a small population and one that’s suffered years of economic depression and population loss. These circumstances have bonded our population, especially the younger generation, very tightly together.”


Mothman is literally an icon to all the queers in West Virginia. I'm not even joking.

(Ps: look up what the statue looks like from behind)
— Go Trig Boy (@2ndbaseboy) June 9, 2020

To that end, 22-year-old Gray created a Mothman bot account on Twitter that now boasts more than 24,000 followers. He says the Babadook-esque appreciation for Mothman might come from a shared sense of “feeling othered or isolated.” Plus, he explains, “in a lot of depictions he looks so soft and furry you can’t help but think of him as a friend who would protect you from all kinds of terrible people.”


Mothman is real and he's 50% moth, 50% man, 100% boyfriend material
— mothman (@mothmanbot) June 11, 2020

Or as Brenna puts it more bluntly, “According to the statue, he has a six-pack and an objectively good ass. Unfortunately, I haven’t been so lucky to have seen him in real life, so for now, my ‘I Sucked the Mothman’s D*ck in Point Pleasant, WV’ graphic tee will have to do.”

Quinn Myers is a staff writer at MEL. He reports on internet culture, technology, health, masculinity and the communities that flourish within.
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RADICAL CATHOLIC BOOMERS ARE RISING UPThe Catholic Worker Movement and Plowshares belong to a long tradition of radical religious activism in the U.S. Now, in response to the protests spreading across the country, they’re reckoning with their complicity in racism and police violence

PROJECT PLOUGHSHARES IS BIG IN CANADA 
AS A BROAD BASED COALITION


After nearly four long weeks, 75-year-old activist Martin Gugino is out of the hospital and on his way to rehabbing the brain damage that makes it hard for him to walk and speak normally.

Gugino became an unlikely symbol amid the protests that rocked America after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. All it took was 20 seconds of video of the Buffalo, New York, native stepping into the path of marching riot police during a demonstration, only to be savagely shoved to the ground. He was trying to confront law enforcement with questions about their response to a peaceful event.

Instead, he became the stuff of viral nightmares. Everyone saw the image of Gugino getting pushed, stumbling backward and slamming his head on the concrete. No one could forget the image of him bleeding from his ear, crumpled on the ground, with officers blithely marching past, nary a care for the senior citizen at their feet. It wasn’t the same as Floyd’s murder, but it emphasized the horror of it all.


Martin Gugino, who was returning a police helmut, is still hospitalized in serious condition, with a fractured skull. pic.twitter.com/fk8xSSZPur

— Ty 💋
 
(@Farleyfan) June 23, 2020


The two officers responsible for the shove, Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski, have been suspended from the force and charged with second-degree assault. For so many white people stuck on the fence about whether the police really were as violent as Black Lives Matter claimed, the visage of Gugino being struck down served as a tipping point. (For the rest of us fed up with endless, careless police violence, watching 57 Buffalo cops resign in bitter solidarity with their punished peers proved, once again, that it really was a culture war rather than a few bad apples.)

The batshit garnish on the whole fiasco was President Donald Trump desperately claiming Gugino could be an “antifa provocateur.” He’s not, of course. Instead, Gugino is a follower of the Catholic Worker Movement and the Plowshares movement, both of which were born in the 20th century as a reaction to growing wealth inequality, wars with foreign nations and worker exploitation. His previous life as an activist provides a glimpse into the fascinating world of older white Boomers who have been standing staunchly against state violence for decades. They belong to a long tradition of radical Catholic activism in the U.S. And they’re now reckoning with their complicity in racism and police violence, even despite their dedication to social change.

The Catholic Worker Movement was, in many ways, an anarchist group — complete with decentralized leadership, autonomous agendas and a dedication to supporting communities through civil disobedience, direct action and mutual aid. It was born in 1933 as the brainchild of leftist journalist Dorothy Day and French worker-scholar Peter Maurin, who founded a newspaper, Catholic Worker, to serve as a manifesto amid the Great Depression and escalating global tensions. The duo created “houses of hospitality” to take care of the poor, sick and cast-off, believing that people on the margins of society needed the most direct help. Over time, the number of houses grew, as did the number of believers. Many of them had recovered in a “house of hospitality,” and devotees often committed themselves to a life of “voluntary poverty,” in order to focus on mutual aid and nonviolent protests against government sins.

Day and Maurin called for “a new society within the shell of the old — a society in which it will be easier to be good.” And they envisioned that their teachings could inspire a world with no economic exploitation, war and discrimination. They saw that extremes of wealth and poverty, built upon endless state violence, were killing working people.

A half-century later, eight men gathered and decided that the ultimate fulfillment of the Catholic call would require a far more aggressive dedication to nonviolent intervention. Led by brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, the men called themselves the “Plowshares Eight.” They vowed to stand in the way of America’s nuclear armament programs, by whatever means necessary. It referred to a radical idea borne from the Book of Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

The eight snuck into a General Electric site where critical parts for the Minuteman III missile were manufactured, damaged missile nose cones with hammers, poured their own blood on company documents and awaited arrest. And despite the fat stack of federal convictions levied against the men, the Plowshares Eight inspired others to use direct action to vandalize and damage military property while shedding light on the endlessness of war.

A priest and two veterans broke into an E-9 Minuteman missile facility in North Dakota and painted the words “It’s a sin to build a nuclear weapon” on the silo in 2006. In 2008, Plowshares activists in New Zealand infiltrated a base and deflated a dome in protest of the country’s involvement in the Middle East. (One of the men, Friar Peter Murnane — a self-described “shy introvert” — was previously caught painting a cross of his own blood into the carpet at the U.S. Consulate in New Zealand, in protest of the Iraq War.)

In 2012, three Plowshares activists (ages 82, 63 and 57) made national headlines when they waltzed into a high-security Department of Energy facility in Tennessee, hung banners, poured out their own blood and spray-painted the walls. The federal government basically prosecuted them as terrorists, despite the incident proving the activists’ point about how dangerous and poorly run these facilities are. And most recently, a group of seven activists dubbed the Kings Bay Plowshares broke into a naval base in Georgia, causing about $30,000 in damage, hanging banners and, yes, smearing human blood around the place. The ages of the activists ranged from 57 to 79, and many of them had lengthy histories of civil disobedience.

Despite this history, however, many involved in radical Catholic activism are facing a reckoning on the whiteness of the movements — and their blind spots on ideas such as anti-Blackness and how everyday people perpetuate white supremacy. Some have asked whether the Catholic Worker Movement is “inherently racist” because of its relative inaction on issues its supporters claim to support, namely racial justice.

Things are slowly changing, evidenced by how a number of white Catholic activists are listening to Black and Brown organizers and collaborating rather than merely staying in their own lane. In Minneapolis, Catholic Worker activists teamed up with Black Lives Matter and the Black Liberation Project to block access to a Twins baseball game. The cause was twofold: calling on stadium sponsor Target to end exploitation of Black and Brown workers, and to criticize Minneapolis police for the shooting of Jamar Clark, an unarmed young black man.

“Prompted in large part by the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the movement began to challenge itself to look at the way we have been not only ignoring the war on Black people in our own cities, but even perpetuating racism within our predominantly white communities,” wrote one of the protesters, Brenna Cussen Anglada, a farmer and co-founder of the St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm in southwest Wisconsin.

And many of the perceived problems were laid bare in a letter the Midwest Catholic Worker published in fall 2017. Titled “Lament. Repent. Repair. An Open Letter on Racism to the Catholic Worker Movement,” the letter pointed toward specific deficiencies in perspective and action, noting that the whiteness of the movement was a problem in and of itself. “Those of us who have committed our lives to social justice work often believe racism is a problem we have ‘solved’ in our personal lives and thus fail to explore the experiences and realities of whiteness. Without seeing whiteness, we ignore our continued complicity and participation in racism,” the editorial board wrote.

It will take more than this small sect of Catholics to unravel the sins of the church itself, which stretch back centuries thanks to a lineage of racist, oppressive policies and leadership. There are glimmers that mainstream Catholicism can and will confront racism again — the 2018 publication of a pastoral letter on race, the first in 40 years, was some small form of progress. Activists, meanwhile, are realizing that their biggest cause isn’t just nuclear armaments, but everyday violence that Black and Brown people cannot escape.

“Dr. King spoke of ‘the triple evils’ of racism, poverty and war, and that they’re tied together,” Clare Grady, one of the Kings Bay Seven, said in an interview last year. “Nuclear weapons are state-sponsored violence, and they’re above the law. Our action and the court trial are stages to examine the legal justice system and what it actually protects. Part of our witness is to bring to light what’s hidden in plain sight.”

You can replace “nuclear weapons” with “police killings,” and the parallels still remain. It’s no wonder that Gugino felt a drive to show up at the protest. His resistance, and the brutality he experienced as a result, is a small but vital act that helped paint a picture of irredeemable policing in America. Amid all the chaos and entropy, radical Catholic Boomers are learning how to be better allies — and showing us that the work never truly ends.

Eddie Kim is a features writer based in Los Angeles, covering social and cultural issues for MEL.
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Conference of States Parties to the Open Skies Treaty discusses U.S. intent to withdraw from the Treaty

VIENNA 7 July 2020

Newsroom

VIENNA, 7 July 2020 - Canada and Hungary, as the Depositaries of the Treaty on Open Skies, convened a Conference of States Parties to the Treaty on 6 July 2020. This Conference was organized following the receipt of the notification of intent to withdraw from the Treaty by the United States of America on 22 May 2020.
Due to the restrictions introduced to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 worldwide, the Conference was organized as a video-teleconference. The online event brought together 188 representatives and experts of the 34 States Parties from the different Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Ministries of Defence, Arms Control Organisations and Vienna based Delegations.

As stipulated by the Treaty, the Conference provided States Parties with the opportunity to share views on the effect of the withdrawal of the United States of America on the Treaty. During extensive discussions, which offered a broad range of views the Delegations assessed, inter alia, the overall impact on operational functionality of the Treaty, the impact on the allocation of observation quotas and on financial arrangements within the Treaty, and other potential effects on the Treaty.

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‘End police brutality’ with new forms of union solidarity

By Ed Childs and G. Lechat posted on July 8, 2020

A rally and march against police brutality called by UNITE HERE Local 26 — a union representing hotel, casino and school dining hall workers — drew upwards of 500 to the Commons in the center of this working-class immigrant city on June 26.

A former manufacturing center that fell on hard times, Lynn is home to Lantinx, Black and white workers. Many labor in the hospitality and institutional food services industries that Local 26 represents. The Lynn Police Department, on the other hand, is disproportionately white in composition.

Lynn, Mass., June 26.

When the Lynn cops brutalized two Black Local 26 members who work in the dining halls at Tufts University on June 15, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprising, their racist motives seemed obvious.

June 15 was the same night that Victor had moved into the apartment where he and his friends were sitting on their front porch to finally eat the housewarming dinner they had been preparing for hours. Under the pretense of responding to a noise complaint, cops coming out of 13 Lynn Police Department vehicles assaulted Victor and Alex, as well as their friend Scott.

Cops beat the three workers, failed to inform them of their rights or of any charges. Then the cops further injured them with a “rough ride”in a police van as the cops deliberately made them fear for their lives. Ultimately they were charged with assault on a police officer. They were detained for hours before finally being bailed out.

Local 26 responded to the racist attack on its Black members with a petition that has collected about 5,000 signatures and the June 26 rally that ended in a march and sit-down occupation that blocked traffic in front of the police station for about an hour.

Labor actions during this 2020 BLM rebellion have joined union, Black and anti-police brutality issues in a way rarely combined since the days of the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in the 1960s. The Seattle Longshoreman’s union held a one-day strike in solidarity with BLM on Juneteenth (June 19) and the Seattle Labor Council passed a resolution to expel the city’s cop organization this year.

First union rapid response

Local 26 may be the first union that has led a rapid response to defend against a racist attack on its own members. This may be a unique action, but it should be repeated whenever members experience such injustice.

This is certainly the first time that every member in the approximately 10,000-strong local received an urgent text. It notified them to show up in defense of the two members and to oppose the police. Local 26’s action represents an important leap forward for the labor movement.

In contrast to past times where perhaps the union president made a bold statement or a petition was drawn up by a few of the rank and file, this time, as soon as the leadership learned of the incident, they coordinated the entire union to provide urgently needed solidarity. Local 26 also instituted an excellent practice: Union members should absolutely call their union when they have been unjustly attacked.

Many in the crowd, union members and officials, backed the call to expel police “unions” from labor bodies like the AFL-CIO. Leaders from United Steelworkers Local 8751, which represents the Boston School Bus Drivers Union, floated the idea — which got a friendly reception — of drafting a statewide resolution to kick cops out of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. Their goal is to make this resolution a model for a national campaign.

Besides Local 26 leaders and hundreds of members, there were strong showings from Lynn Teamsters; IUE workers from the nearby General Electric plant, where workers are primarily white and Lantix; Service Employees; and Communication Workers. The North Shore Labor Council brought its banner and a contingent of area teachers, nurses, firefighters and emergency medical technicians.

There was also tremendous solidarity from dozens of Tufts’ students. Two of them said that Local 26 members belong as much to the Tuft’s community as students do. Community groups fighting against police brutality locally and the statewide Mass Action Against Police Brutality gave speeches on Lynn Commons and in front of the police station.

MAAPB leader Hope Coleman told of calling an ambulance for Terrance, her disabled adult son, in 2013 only for him to be murdered by the Boston Police who responded. The police department considered the murder “justifiable.” Coleman’s story was a powerful reminder of how dangerous every police interaction is for people of color.

This was especially true for young Black people like Terrance, as well as Victor and Alex from Local 26. Speaking out right in front of the LPD building was a risk, said Alex. As the crowd took a knee and raised a fist, he said, “This will make me a target, but that’s OK. I was born a target.”

(Photo: Ed Childs)


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