Psyche, Science, and Society

Boomers: Something is happening here…

Bob “Bobbo” Simpson, who describes himself as “an old fashioned labor socialist,” has an interesting piece on his blog, The BobboSphere, where he calls upon us boomers to return to our roots and join the younger generation of activists. While I echo the sentiments in general, sometimes I wonder when the younger generation will join. But, like Bobbo, I can feel a change and think “The Times They Are a Changin.”

In poor taste, I will post his conclusion:

Many of today’s young generation grew up on the Harry Potter books. They know that Harry and his pals could never have taken down Lord Voldemort and his legions without the help of Dumbledor and the other older characters. They also know that while not everyone comes out alive in a fight for freedom, doing the right thing no matter what the personal cost is always the right choice. Not only is J.K Rowling a pretty good story teller, but she’s also a pretty shrewd political analyst.

“There’s a storm comin,” as Rubeus Hagrid said, but no one should face it bereft of support and solidarity.

Now go read the whole piece.

Add comment May 30th, 2008

NYC 8th graders boycott standardized test, teacher fired

Any parent of a public school child or a teacher today knows that there are far too many standardized tests these days. While there is legitimate debate about the value of these tests (I actually support them when appropriately used),there can be little doubt that too much emphasis is placed upon them. They seem to have become the only goal of education. Other goals — like fostering love of learning, or creativity, or critical thinking, or acquiring the knowledge and and understanding required of an informed citizen — are quietly ignored in pursuit of better test scores, so that the school and teachers can look good.

Personally, I would love to be involved in an effort to develop an appropriate policy for use of standardized tests.

Meanwhile, 8th graders in a South Bronx middle school have had enough. Over 160 of them boycotted yet another practice test. The principal appears to have gone berserk, firing a social studies teacher for allowing open discussion in his class. If this account from the New York Daily News has any validity, there is an excellent teacher in NYC who must be rehired and a principal who should look for another line of work.

New York 8th-Graders Boycott Practice Exam But Teacher May Get Ax

by Juan Gonzalez

Students at a South Bronx middle school have pulled off a stunning boycott against standardized testing.

More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx - virtually the entire eighth grade - refused to take last Wednesday’s three-hour practice exam for next month’s statewide social studies test.

Instead, the students handed in blank exams.

Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education.

“We’ve had a whole bunch of these diagnostic tests all year,” Tatiana Nelson, 13, one of the protest leaders, said Tuesday outside the school. “They don’t even count toward our grades. The school system’s just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams.”

According to the petition, they are sick and tired of the “constant, excessive and stressful testing” that causes them to “lose valuable instructional time with our teachers.”

School administrators blamed the boycott on a 30-year-old probationary social studies teacher, Douglas Avella.

The afternoon of the protest, the principal ordered Avella out of the classroom, reassigned him to an empty room in the school and ordered him to have no further contact with students.

A few days later, in a reprimand letter, Lopez accused Avella of initiating the boycott and taking “actions [that] caused a riot at the school.”

The students say their protest was entirely peaceful. In only one class, they say, was there some loud clapping after one exam proctor reacted angrily to their boycott.

This week, Lopez notified Avella in writing that he was to attend a meeting today for “your end of the year rating and my possible recommendation for the discontinuance of your probationary service.”

“They’re saying Mr. Avella made us do this,” said Johnny Cruz, 15, another boycott leader. “They don’t think we have brains of our own, like we’re robots. We students wanted to make this statement. The school is oppressing us too much with all these tests.”

Two days after the boycott, the students say, the principal held a meeting with all the students to find out how their protest was organized.

Avella on Tuesday denied that he urged the students to boycott tests.

Yes, he holds liberal views and is critical of the school system’s increased emphasis on standardized tests, Avella said, but the students decided to organize the protest after weeks of complaining about all the diagnostic tests the school was making them take.

“My students know they are welcome in my class to have open discussions,” Avella said. “I teach them critical thinking.”

“Some teachers implied our graduation ceremony would be in danger, that we didn’t have the right to protest against the test,” said Tia Rivera, 14. “Well, we did it.”

Lopez did not return calls for comment.

“This guy was far over the line in a lot of the ways he was running his classroom,” said Department of Education spokesman David Cantor. “He was pulled because he was inappropriate with the kids. He was giving them messages that were inappropriate.”

Several students defended Avella. They say he had made social studies an exciting subject for them.

“Now they’ve taken away the teacher we love only a few weeks before our real state exam for social studies,” Tatiana Nelson said. “How does that help us?”

jgonzalez@nydailynews.com

Add comment May 22nd, 2008

38th anniversary of Kent State massacre

Today is the 38th anniversary of the Kent State massacre of four antiwar students by National Guard troops. One seldom hears about those troops, but I suspect that, like the protesting students and their families, they still have nightmares on this day. They should never have been sent to a college campus fully armed. Those who sent them bear the major responsibility for the murders.

[h/t Crooks and Liars.]

Add comment May 5th, 2008

Review of School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas

The journal Latin American Politics and Society had an interesting review  by J Patrice McSherry of a fairly recent book by Lesley Gill on the infamous School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. A few excerpts:

A notable contribution of Gill’s study is its theoretical framework, which places the school squarely in an analysis of U.S. hegemony and what Gill calls the U.S. imperial project. Gill argues that through the SOA and other training schools, institutions, and programs, Washington transformed the Latin American security forces into “extensions of its own power in Latin America and internationalized state-sponsored violence in the Americas” (p. 7). The SOA shaped Latin American militaries into proxy forces under U.S. control, Gill posits, thereby extending U.S. control of political developments throughout the region.

Gill thus argues that the SOA is one of the instruments through which Washington imposes its political will and pursues its economic interests in other countries. Seeking political, military, and cultural domination, she writes, the U.S. government also has established a constellation of military bases worldwide, an enormous defense budget, a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, and a system of ongoing alliances with repressive regimes. U.S. imperialism, Gill contends, means more than military interventions and intrusive economic policies: it is a “way of life,” a means of exercising power through indigenous military, paramilitary, and security forces as they “enforce the systems of order required by dominant groups to manage different kinds of people” (p. 4).

And:

U.S. officers at the SOA depict Latin American military brutality as intrinsic to the Latin American nature, while any U.S. role in the region’s dirty wars and human rights violations is never mentioned. Thus, Gill argues, the history of U.S. involvement in Latin American repression is “disappeared.” Army commander Colonel Glen Weidner, for example, refers in a speech to “a strain of incomprehensible violence in Guatemalan rural society” (p. 55). (Weidner, the SOA commander, seems to dedicate most of his time to public relations and managing the school’s image.) Gill observes that the “millions of dollars of military aid and decades of counterinsurgency training in U.S. schools [are] believed to play no part in the creation of murderous security forces” (p. 32); yet one of her interviewees openly discusses lessons learned at the SOA in the torture and killing of prisoners (p. 99). [Emphasis added]

Some of the material may be particularly important in light of the radical political/social movements that have recently won electoral victories in a number of Latin American countries. One of the major dangers they face is the threat of coups from a military that has greater loyalty to Washington than to their own elected governments:

Another strength of the book is Gill’s analysis of the school’s efforts to break down nationalist barriers and weld the Latin American militaries into a transnational anticommunist (and currently, counterterrorist) force under the leadership of the United States. The SOA and other such U.S. schools have been crucial settings for the creation of U.S.-dominated military networks, along with secret programs, such as Operation Condor, the Cold War-era intelligence operations network that “disappeared” and executed hundreds of leftist activists-a conclusion confirmed in this reviewer’s own research.

Gill nicely captures important nuances. Some Latin American officers, she notes, accepted without comment views expressed by U.S. officers that were unintentionally arrogant or that betrayed double standards. In one such case, one Latin American officer told her cryptically, several months later, that some of the things he had heard had made him “want to pull out his hair” (p. 130). The Latin Americans generally knew their place, however, as junior partners to their wealthy and powerful sponsors.

This book looks like a important resource to help in understanding both US torture policy and the history and potential future of US intervention in Latin America, which has frequently overthrown popular regimes to keep local oligarchies and transnational elites in power.

Add comment May 4th, 2008

Remembering Marla Ruzicka

Today is the third anniversary of the death of Marla Ruzicka in Iraq. Antiwar activist Marla founded the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), which is still active. Her life is described in Sweet Relief: The Marla Ruzicka Story.
Here is the short film A Glimpse of Marla , by the FullMonte. Read more about Marla at this blog devoted to remembrance of her.

Add comment April 16th, 2008

Amy Goodman: A Torture Debate Among Healers

Amy Goodman, in her weekly column, writes of the Reisner campaign for the American Psychological Association presidency. In the nomination stage, Steven got 32% of the votes, topping the field of five nominees by a wide margin. While certainly an uphill battle against the entrenched forces in the APA, Steven’s victory in the final round of voting is certainly possible. The only way we can win is to create a massive grass-roots campaign that, like the Obama Presidential campaign, brings in many of those who usually don’t vote in what seems to many to be an irrelevant election. In order to make this possibility a reality we need every APA member, and even non-members to organize, reaching out to friends and colleagues and explain the critical importance of this election in righting the ills of our profession, which has played its assigned role designing and implementing Bush’s torture policies with the active or tacit help of the top APA leadership.

That leadership appointed an “ethics” task force composed largely of members of the military-intelligence establishment. Many of those members came from precisely those chains of command accused of committing abuses against detainees. The APA leadership still cites the report produced by this thoroughly compromised and corrupt task force as a sign of the “ethical” thinking of the Association. To learn about all thse sordid details read our comments on the APA’s FAQ on its policies.

Here is Amy Goodman’s article:

A Torture Debate Among Healers

By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate

Imagine, a candidate for president who, a year or so ago, no one would have considered electable. Now the person is the front-runner, with a groundswell of grass-roots support, threatening the sense of inevitability of the Establishment candidates. No, I’m not talking about the U.S. presidential race, but the race for president of the largest association of psychologists in the world, the American Psychological Association (APA). At the heart of the election is a raging debate over torture and interrogations. While the other healing professions, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, bar their members from participating in interrogations, the APA leadership has fought against such a restriction.

Frustrated with the APA, a New York psychoanalyst, Dr. Steven Reisner, has thrown his hat into the ring. Last year, Reisner and other dissident psychologists formed the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology in an attempt to force a moratorium against participation by APA members in harsh interrogations. During the initial phase of this year’s selection process, Reisner received the most nominating votes. He is running on a platform opposing the use of psychologists to oversee abusive and coercive interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo, secret CIA black sites or anywhere else international law or the Geneva Conventions are said not to apply.

The issue came to a head at the 2007 APA annual convention. After days of late-night negotiations, the moratorium came up for a climactic vote. We saw a surreal scene on the convention floor: Uniformed military were out in force. Men and women in desert camo and Navy whites worked the APA Council of Representatives, and officers in crisp dress uniforms stepped to the microphones.

Military psychologists insisted that they help make interrogations safe, ethical and legal, and cited instances where psychologists allegedly intervened to stop abuse. “If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die!” boomed Col. Larry James of the U.S. Army, chief psychologist at Guantanamo Bay and a member of the APA governing body. Dr. Laurie Wagner, a Dallas psychologist, shot back, “If psychologists have to be there in order to keep detainees from being killed, then those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing to do is to protest by leaving.”

The moratorium failed, and instead a watered-down resolution passed, outlining 19 harsh interrogation techniques that were banned, but only if “used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm.” In other words, this loophole allowed, you can rough people up, just don’t do permanent harm.

Immediately after the vote, Reisner spoke out at a packed town hall meeting: “If we cannot say, ‘No, we will not participate in enhanced interrogations at CIA black sites,’ I think we have to seriously question what we are as an organization and, for me, what my allegiance is to this organization, or whether we might have to criticize it from outside the organization at this point.”

Reisner and others began withholding dues. Prominent APA members resigned, and the best-selling author of Reviving Ophelia Mary Pipher, returned her APA Presidential Citation award. After several months of bad publicity and internal negotiations, an emergency committee redrafted that resolution, removing the loopholes and affirming the outright prohibition of 19 techniques, like mock executions and waterboarding.

When I asked Dr. Reisner, the son of Holocaust survivors, why he would want to head the organization that he has battled for several years, he told me: “If I have this opportunity to make a change, I have a responsibility to do it. I never had the intention of being involved, but the only way to ensure this be changed was by claiming the democratic process in the name of human rights and social-justice issues. I was hoping that mass withholding of dues and mass resignations would shame the APA to come to its senses. It made them take a big step but didn’t go far enough.”

He expanded: “American people are sick of the reputation of the United States as torturers, as people who abuse prisoners. American people want to see a restoration of values from war to health care. I think what happens in the APA should point to a direction for the whole country.”

The APA’s annual meeting is this summer, in Boston. Expect interrogation to be the major issue confronting the members gathered there. Final voting for the APA president starts in October. The APA and the United States will determine their next presidents at about the same time. In both elections, a thorough debate on torture should be central.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

Add comment April 13th, 2008

The Obama Speech

If anyone hasn’t seen Obama’s speech on race today:

1 comment March 18th, 2008

Phil Zimbardo on the transition from good to evil

Noted psychologist Phil Zimbardo has had a busy week. On Thursday he spoke at an elite conference in Monterey, California. At the conference he showed some never before seen and profoundly disturbing photos from Abu Ghraib.  Yesterday he was in Britain. The British press gave major coverage. The Guardian had an article by Zimbardo: Our inner heroes could stop another Abu Ghraib. And the Independent had a lengthy aricle based on an  interview: Maverick academic Philip Zimbardo says we are all capable of evil. Is he right? Here are the first few paragraphs of the Independent’s article:

On 28 April 2004, Philip Zimbardo was in Washington for a conference. The TV was on in his hotel room and photographs of the abuses carried out in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by US servicemen and women flashed across the screen. The images are ingrained in our psyche now, but then they were new. Naked men stacked in a pyramid with soldiers grinning alongside. A female soldier leading a prisoner around on a dog lead. Prisoners forced to simulate sexual acts on each other. A prisoner in a hood balancing precariously on a box in the belief he would be electrocuted if he moved. Like millions of others, Zimbardo was deeply shocked by what he saw, but for the professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, California, there was a disturbing element of familiarity.

“I had taken similar images myself 30 years earlier,” he says. “And by similar, I mean prisoners with bags over their heads, prisoners stripped naked, prisoners made to do sexually degrading activities. It was very disturbing. [The scenes at Abu Ghraib] recreated emotionally the horrible things I not only saw but that I allowed to continue to happen.” ‘ The images he is referring to came from one of the most infamous episodes in American academic history, the Stanford Prison Experiment – a study Zimbardo led in 1971 into the psychological and behavioural effects of imprisonment that swiftly descended into scenes of cruelty and degradation.

Zimbardo hoped he would never see Americans behave so abominably again. The shock of the Abu Ghraib scandal three years ago dashed that hope – and prompted the then-71-year-old to come to the defence of one of those accused of the terrible crimes committed in the Iraqi prison.

In the last several years, Zimbardo has been relentless in reminding us how capable of evil almost all of us are. Yet he also points to those heroic few who go against the grain and act against the evil around them. We need to learn a lot more about those personal and situational factors that lead to doing good against the tide. This is perhaps one of the most important issues facing society today and is one where psychology has a potential to play a major role. It remains to be seen if the profession will take up this task.

Zimbardo’s work also should remind psychologists that we are not immune to the situational pressures  that lead to “evil” among others.While psychologists may learn about the Stanford Prison Experiment in class, there is no evidence that that learning makes us any more likely to resist obedience to authority or atrocit-creating situations.

The American Psychological Association is an object lesson in deference to authority. All too many members were willing to close their critical faculties as the association provided cover for abuses in the war on terror. As far as we can tell, no one in the leadership defied the pressures to get along and say “Stop! This is wrong!” If the leadership of the APA, with so little truly at stake, could not stop abetting abuse, why should we believe that military-intelligence psychologists, with so much more at stake, and under so much stronger pressures, are likely to act against the systematic abuse that is the Bush administration detention policy?

Perhaps that is why there is only one example in the public record of a psychologist opposing systemic detainee abuse. The APA’s claim that psychologists make interrogations “safe, legal, and ethical” goes, not only against the public record, but against what we psychologists have painstakingly learned about human behavior in atrocity-generating conditions. Surely our obligation is to both get our colleagues out of those situations, and to change the situations themselves.

1 comment March 2nd, 2008

Remember Rachel Corrie

On March 16, it will be 5 years since American nonviolent activist Rachel Corrie was deliberately run over by a bulldozer as she tried to prevent Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes. Anti-Palestinain forces in the US have tried to destroy the memory of Rachel Corrie, just as they have tried to get the world to turn away from the suffering of millions of Palestinians. Thanks to YouTube, here is a memorial for this martyr for peace:

Billy Bragg sings The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie

Interview with Rachel Corrie by the Middle East Broadcasting Company on March 14th, 2003, two days before she was murdered by the Israeli Defense Forces.

This section of the British Channel 4 documentary The Killing Zonegives background on her death:

My name is Rachel Corrie | Remember Rachel Corrie

For more information, go to www.rachel-corrie.com or www.rachelcorrie.org.

1 comment January 31st, 2008

Greg Palast explains South Carolina politics

Greg Palast explains:

The South Carolina You Won’t See on CNN
South Carolina Primary Colors: Black and White?

by Greg Palast

South Carolina 2000: Six hundred police in riot gear facing a few dozen angry-as-hell workers on the docks of Charleston. In the darkness, rocks, clubs and blood fly. The cops beat the crap out of the protesters. Of course, it’s the union men who are arrested for conspiracy to riot. And of course, of the five men handcuffed, four are Black. The prosecutor: a White, Bible-thumping Attorney General running for Governor. The result: a state ripped in half - White versus Black.

South Carolina 2008: On Saturday, the Palmetto State may well choose our President, or at least the Democrat’s idea of a President. According to CNN and the pundit-ocracy, the only question is, Will the large Black population vote their pride (for Obama) or for “experience” (Hillary)? In other words, the election comes down to a matter of racial vanity.

The story of the dockworkers charged with rioting in 2000 suggest there’s an awfully good reason for Black folk to vote for one of their own. This is the chance to even the historic score in this land of lingering Jim Crow where the Confederate Flag flew over the capital while the longshoreman faced Southern justice.

But maybe there’s more to South Carolina’s story than Black and White.

Let’s re-wind the tape of the 2000 battle between cops and Black men. It was early that morning on the 19th of January when members of International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422 “shaped up” to unload a container ship which had just pulled into port. It was hard work for good pay. An experienced union man could earn above $60,000 a year.

In this last hold-out of the Confederacy, it was one of the few places a Black man could get decent pay. Or any man.

That day, the stevedoring contractor handling the unloading decided it would hire the beggars down the dock, without experience or skills - and without union cards - willing to work for just one-third of union scale.

That night, union workers - Black, White, Whatever - fought for their lives and livelihoods.

At the heart of the turmoil in South Carolina in 2000 then, was not so much Black versus White, but union versus non-union. It was a battle between those looking for a good day’s pay versus those looking for a way not to pay it. The issue was - and is - class war, the conflict between the movers and the shakers and the moved and shaken.

The dockworkers of Charleston could see the future of America right down the road. Literally. Because right down the highway, they could see their cousins and brothers who worked in the Carolina textile mills kiss their jobs goodbye as they loaded the mill looms onto trains for Mexico.

The President, Bill Clinton, had signed NAFTA, made China a “most favored nation” in trade and urged us, with a flirtatious grin, to “make change our friend.”

But “change,” apparently, wasn’t in a friendly mood. In 2000, Guilford Mills shuttered its Greensboro, Carolina, fabric plant and reopened it in Tampico, Mexico. Four-hundred jobs went south. Springs Mills of Rock Hill, SC, closed down and abandoned 480 workers. Fieldcrest-Cannon pulled out of York, SC, and Great America Mills simply went bust.

South Carolina, then, is the story of globalization left out of Thomas Friedman’s wonders-of-the-free-market fantasies.

This week, while US media broadcasts cute-sy photo-ops from Black churches and replay the forgettable spats between candidates, the real issues of South Carolina are, thankfully, laid out in a book released today: On the Global Waterfront, by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger.

Erem and Durrenberger portray the case of the Charleston Five dockworkers as an exemplary, desperate act of economic resistance.

Thomas Friedman’s bestseller, The World is Flat, begins with his uplifting game of golf with a tycoon in India. Erem and Durrenberger never put on golf shoes: their book is globalization stripped down to its dirty underpants.

While Friedman made the point that he flew business class to Bangalore on his way to the greens to meet his millionaire, Global Waterfront’s authors go steerage class. And the people they write about don’t go anywhere at all. These are the stevedores who move the containers of Wal-Mart T-shirts from Guatemala to sell to customers in Virginia who can’t afford health insurance because they lost their job in the textile mill.

And the book talks about (cover the children’s ears!) - labor unions.

South Carolina is union country. And union-busting country. But who gives a flying fart about labor unions today? Only 7%, one in fourteen US workers belongs to one. That’s less than the number of Americans who believe that Elvis killed John Kennedy.

Think “longshoremen” and what comes to mind is On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando, the good guy, beating up the evil union boss. The union bosses were the thugs, mobbed-up bullies, the dockworkers’ enemies. The movie’s director, Stanley Kramer, perfectly picked up the anti-union red-baiting Joe McCarthy zeitgeist of that era of - which could go down well today.

Elected labor leaders are, in our media, always “union bosses.” But the real bosses, the CEOs, the guys who shutter factories and ship them to China … they’re never “bosses,” they’re “entrepreneurs.”

Indeed, the late and lionized King of Union Busters, Sam Walton, would be proud today, were he alive, to learn that the woman he called, “my little lady,” Hillary Clinton, whom he placed on Wal-Mart’s Board of Directors, is front-runner for the presidency. She could well become America’s “Greeter,” posted at our nation’s door, to welcome the Saudis and Chinese who are buying America at a guaranteed low price.

So what happened those five union men charged felonious reioting in 2000? Through an international union campaign, they won back their freedom - and their union jobs - after the dockworkers of Spain, the true heroes of globalization, refused to unload the South Carolina scab cargoes.

Erem and Durrenberger ask themselves why they were so drawn to a story of five Carolina cargo-handlers put in prison a decade ago. Maybe it’s because the Charleston Five show how courage and heart and solidarity can lead to victory in the midst of a mad march into globalization that threatens to turn us all into the Wal-Mart Five Billion.

**************
See video of the dockworkers’ uprising and read more from the book, On the Global Waterfront, by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger (introduction by Greg Palast) at http://www.ontheglobalwaterfront.org/.

Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-sellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. View Palast’s investigative reports for BBC Television on our YouTube Channel (Link).

Add comment January 25th, 2008