Tuesday, January 7th, 2014 
Deliberately Considered has suspended the publication of new posts. I am now turning my full attention to a new project, Public Seminar. I thought I might be able to work on both DC and PS, but alas it is not possible. The new project is a seminar that has its roots in my intellectual home, The New School for Social Research, and in my experience here at Deliberately Considered.
The mission statement of the new project:
P.S.
“Confronting fundamental problems of the human condition and pressing problems of the day, using the broad resources of social research, we seek to provoke critical and informed discussion by any means necessary.
We use short form posts and long form essays, audio and video reports and discussions, and links to provocative materials of critical public interest anywhere we can find them. We are committed to creating a distinctive intellectual community, suspicious of clichés, informed by diverse experiences, theoretically heterodox, politically plural, worldly.
We work in the tradition of critical scholarship and public engagement of the original New School for Social Research (1919) and its University in Exile (1933). We seek to open the discussion of experts to broader publics, in the United States, and crucially far beyond, in the tradition of Charles Beard, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Emil Lederer, Max Wertheimer, Frieda Wunderlich, Hans Speier, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.
Public Seminar is an extension of The New School’s legendary ‘General Seminar,’ founded by the original exile scholars. Through it, we are constituting a public seminar for the 21st century.”
It is my hope that Public Seminar will continue and extend the work of Deliberately Considered. I developed Deliberately Considered with an understanding that more and more political, cultural and private life was developing in and through new media, and with a sense that this presented both great opportunities and great dangers. It opened public expression and discussion. More people could express themselves and a broader range of perspectives are expressed. Global conversations now occur. It is possible for the politics of small things to become . . .
Read more: Deliberately Considered: 2010 – 2013
Saturday, October 19th, 2013 
The threat of a shut down of the federal government put a crimp in protests planned for DC, but it didn’t shut them down. On Tuesday, October 8, 10,000 people came to demand immigration reform. Backed by major unions, the rally and march had been in the works long before anyone thought a small group of Republican House Members would force the federal government to close in order to compel a delay in the start of the Affordable Care Act.
As the clock ticked on passing a continuing resolution to pay federal bills, permits were in place and everything was set to go. Several hundred people had signed up to be arrested at the foot of Capitol Hill in order to demand that the bill passed by the Senate in June be voted on in the House. Plans were thrown into turmoil when the deadline passed and numerous federal employees were told not to report to work on October 1. Parks all over the country were closed, including the Mall. There is no fence to actually keep people off the Mall, but the shutdown did affect uses requiring a permit, such as the erection of a sound stage. Rally permits were revoked at the last minute. 
The organizing committee didn’t cancel the rally; instead it negotiated with the National Park Service and the US Capitol Police, whose personnel were among those furloughed. At the last minute, it was agreed that events could go on, including the planned civil disobedience at the foot of Capitol Hill, with some adjustments.
For many years civil disobedience in the nation’s capitol has been negotiated and choreographed somewhat like a stage play. Fifty years ago, when large protest resumed in DC after a hiatus of several decades, such actions were spontaneous. Police cracked down to discourage future disruptions. This did not work. It just made the cops look bad. The resulting court cases, both criminal and . . .
Read more: While the Government Shut Down, Immigration Protests Continued
Wednesday, October 16th, 2013 By Yana Gorokhovskaia | 
On Sunday October 13th, the Moscow neighborhood of West Biryulevo became the site of a large anti-migrant riot. The riot ended with four hundred people detained by police, several over-turned and torched cars, and the looting and destruction of a small shopping center. It began as a meeting of residents with police to demand action in the murder investigation of Yegor Sherbakov. Sherbakov, a twenty-five year old local resident, was stabbed to death on Thursday night while walking home with his girlfriend.
People in the neighborhood speculated that the assailant might have worked at one of the many local outdoor fruit and vegetable stands or he might have been a taxi cab driver. The one thing that everyone is sure of is that the assailant was a foreigner, one of many migrant workers, or gastarbeiters, that are now living in Russia.
This riot is the most recent in a series of incidents evincing a growing tension surrounding migration from the “near abroad,” a term used in Russian to describe the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan. It comes two months after officials in Moscow set up pre-deportation detention camps for migrant workers detained en masse after a police officer was injured by the relatives of a migrant worker while trying to make an arrest at an outdoor market. Recent sweeps for migrant workers in Sochi prompted Human Rights Watch to demand that the International Olympic Committee make a statement condemning the detention and deportation of migrant workers in an Olympic host city.
It is difficult to ascertain the real number of migrants in Russia today, but estimates vary from between five and twelve million. Most migrants are employed as unskilled laborers on construction sites, as janitors, mini-bus drivers, or operate small commercial stands selling fruits and vegetables. They are extremely vulnerable to abuse by their employers, who withhold pay or confiscate passports, and by the police, who regularly conduct “document checks” and demand bribes.
While rising food prices, unemployment, or corruption are perceived to be the . . .
Read more: Migrant Workers in Russia: Going After Fruit Sellers
Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013 
Well, I’m currently out of work. Rent is due today.
But what if I refuse to pay the rent UNLESS my landlord agrees to change the lease, lower the rent, give me my security deposit back, allow for pets and let me borrow his car once a week to pick up groceries? Better yet, no rent will be forthcoming unless he immediately cancels the lease, sets it on fire and allows me to decide how much rent I feel like paying each month. No? I simply won’t take no for an answer, even if it means I’ll be evicted next month.
I’m really tired of being thrown under the bus by these backward-thinking extortionists in the House of Representatives. Today America is really, literally broken. Still, I hope that congressional leaders and the president do not appease the hostage takers. That would be a very bad precedent to set for future congresses and presidents. Paying the ransom would only encourage the hostage takers to exact more demands the next time rent is due, no matter how unrealistic or unrelated the demands may be. The DC gridlock would continue indefinitely. It’s BAD FAITH to include the same poisonous pills in what should be routine legislation to keep the government running and pay the bills that are already racked up.
Who cares about election results? Who cares what the Supreme Court says? If you don’t agree to X, Y and Z, we will blow up the government and force the first default in American history! What kind of governing is that? Is that a democratic way to resolve disagreements?
House Speaker John Boehner refused to let the House vote to temporarily keep the government open at the current sequester levels, with no other strings attached, just to buy time to negotiate an actual budget. But because this approach would not destroy Obamacare, the Tea Party has instructed Boehner to block it. Why won’t Boehner allow the democratic process to play out in a full House vote, like the Senate did? Because the simple stop-gap bill would pass with BI-PARTISAN support, throwing the . . .
Read more: Shutdown! Shut Out! Reflections of a Federal Government Worker
Friday, September 27th, 2013 By Maria Turovets | 
 Prisoners and suspects
Two years have passed since the unexpected appearance of a protest movement in Russia. Today the movement has declined. White ribbons, a symbol of the democratic movement, are out of fashion. And most of 28 participants of the peaceful oppositional meeting of the 6th of May 2012 that were arrested during the authorized demonstration in Moscow are still in prison. Ordinary people and activists have been accused in riots and violence against police during anti-Putin meeting. The meeting was much more peaceful in comparison with protests in Greece or Turkey. Experts from the President’s Council in Human Rights have even declare the guilt of officials in several cases of violence at the demonstration. But the prisoners remain in jail and a mechanism of repressions is turning around. “The Investigative Committee—a structure accountable only to president Putin—has constructed the case as a wide-ranging conspiracy stretching from rank-and-file street protestors to established politicians.”
In May 2012, many provincial activists have organized discussion camps for all interested in politics. Well-known politicians with rank-and-file activists participated. Homes of ordinary provincial activists were checked a year after. Police was searching proofs of preparation for overthrow of the state regime during the 6th May demonstration in Moscow. However many of the pursued activists were far away from Moscow on the 6th of May 2012. Nevertheless, even interest in politics was criminalized. It would be frightening, if it weren’t so absurd. Most of those activists are young, moderate and not very experienced. Police came to their homes in early morning, frightened them and their parents, took some agitation materials from authorized demonstrations and… did nothing after this. Activists just have got their taste of fear, and the Investigative Committee continued to search for clues of anti-Russian global conspiracy among trade-union activists in Yekaterinburg, and participants of political discussion camps in Chelyabinsk and Perm. Provincial activists witnessed this, but were not arrested. However 28 ‘prisoners of the 6th May’ are still absurdly accused of rioting, and many are in . . .
Read more: Notes on Movements and Protests in Russia
Monday, September 23rd, 2013 
In May 2013 one of Italy’s leading newspapers, La Repubblica, published an article entitled “Nimby effect on renewable energy – Italy allergic to biomass electrical generation.” Living in an agricultural area where green energy subsidies have boosted the production of biomass power stations over the past few years, I couldn’t help laughing at a similar condemnation of protests against the economical power games that lie behind green economy policies, and in which I have gotten increasingly involved over the past year. Yes, many of the people involved in the numerous bottom-up committees are worried about what is going on in their back yard, but perhaps that’s also because local politics have no interest whatsoever in defending those back yards. Moreover, a sound collaboration among various committees and associations that operate both locally and on a regional and national level prove that this is more than a group of residents concerned about their neighborhood. So it’s not all that simple. Hiding behind the ever so popular green economy business, in these times of crisis, it is easy to put off any criticism of biomass electrical generation as plain nimbyism. Yet the threat is real.
Other than the discomfort for residents, i.e. the stench and the frequency of heavy vehicles passing continuously (and often without considering speed limits) on the narrow country side roads to transport corn, grain and grass to the power plants, there are a number of very serious risks, problems and ethical issues involved.
Health: experts have demonstrated that these plants produce noxious gas that may cause cancer and birth defects. Medics, university professors and scientists have sound the alarm on more than one occasion, participating in counter-informative events and protest demonstrations, but local governors – with some minor exceptions – and media have remained indifferent to their criticism.
Profit: the presence of a relatively high number of power plants in small areas, producing energy not for the purpose of disposing biological waste in return for energy but for the sole purpose of gaining subsidies, . . .
Read more: Going Against the Grain of the Green Economy
Thursday, September 19th, 2013 
 Aristide Zolberg was a leader in our shared long standing intellectual home, The New School for Social Research, as he was a path breaking, broad ranging political scientist. Today the New School is celebrating his life and work. To contribute to the day, I am re-posting a piece we put together last April.
Ary was, crucially, a good man. In this post, Kenneth Prewitt, Michael Cohen and Riva Kastoryano join me in remembering a great scholar and gentleman. -Jeff
He started his career as an Africanist, whose work on the Ivory Coast stands as a classic in the field. Aristide Zolberg became famous as a stellar essayist, whose sharp creative insights could illuminate in elegant strokes great puzzles of the human condition, including perhaps most significantly his “Moments of Madness,” a deeply learned piece reflecting on the telling question he posed: “If politics is the art of the possible, what are we to make of the moments when human beings in modern societies believe that ‘all is possible’?” And then there is his great achievement: A Nation by Design, his magnum opus. It is both a crucial account of an under examined part of the American story, while it is rich with comparative insights, as Riva Kastoryano describes in her reflections. It is a classic for reasons that Ken Prewitt underscores.
Ary was a disciplined scholar, as Michael Cohen highlights, who crossed disciplines freely, a tough – minded empiricist with great imagination. He was also a man who experienced a great deal, both the good and the bad life offered in his times. A Holocaust survivor, whose memoirs of his childhood await publication, he was married to the great sociologist of memory and art, Vera Zolberg. (For my appreciation of my intellectual relationship with Vera click here)
Ary and Vera, co-conspirators, together for sixty years, they were a beautiful team, and as a team they contributed to family (their children Erica and Danny and many more), . . .
Read more: Aristide Zolberg, June 14, 1931 – April 12, 2013
Tuesday, September 17th, 2013 
“We must confront and defeat the ugly stain of separatism seeping through the Union flag. […] Better an imperfect union than a broken one. Better an imperfect union than a perfect divorce. […] Together, we are stronger. […]Together, we are safer. […]Together, we are richer. […] Stronger. Safer. Richer. Fairer… Together.”
The above sentences come from a speech delivered by now Prime Minister and then the Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, in December 2007. Over the last six years, Mr. Cameron has stated his case repeatedly, in December 2012 and in April 2013. In all those speeches on the benefits of international cooperation, the PM referred to Scotland and its status within the United Kingdom. Rather unsurprisingly, he has never applied the same line of argument when discussing the United Kingdom’s position within the European Union.
Distorted image
Over the last four decades, numerous publications sought to explain the complexity of British relations with the uniting Continent. While many factors are undoubtedly at play, their influence eventually seems to depend on yet another one, namely, a distorted image Britain has, not so much of the European Union, but of itself. Let’s take just one example.
In the coming years, Britain’s position within the Union will be conditioned to a large extent on its economic performance. So far, the anti-EU campaign in Britain was presented as a crusade lead by energetic free marketers against an overblown European state – a millstone round the economy’s neck. This narrative will be more and more difficult to sustain should major continental economies come out of the crisis sooner and more vigorously than Britain: a very likely scenario, given the fact that, after three years in power, Mr. Cameron’s government is now in charge of a smaller economy than the one it inherited in 2010.
Yet, the course of British economy, and consequently, the country’s political leverage, may change significantly as soon as the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement with the United States is signed. The new opening between the EU and the U.S. might shift the balance of power . . .
Read more: Britain and the EU: In Need of a Mirror?
Thursday, September 12th, 2013 By John Shattuck | 
As an American, but one very familiar with Central and Eastern Europe, I believe that integrated Europe is extremely important for several reasons. First of all, it is important for maintaining peace and stability, and thus, for overcoming terrible legacies of the Second World War, so devastating to Europe and the rest of the world. Secondly, European Union plays a crucial role in creating economic opportunities for all of its members. The current crisis should not make us forget how prosperous Europe is and can still be. Thirdly, European integration might be a driving force behind a process of creating broader sense of political identity. Europeans have so many different cultures and nationalities and there is a need to bring them together, so that they have some shared sense of community. Any European project has to take this into account, but at the same time create means for people to cultivate their own national identity at the local level.
The process of European integration has gone through a number of changes since the early 1990s. Some of them were very encouraging, and some problematic. The first dramatic change occurred right after 1989, when the long-lasting Soviet domination over a large part of the continent collapsed and many nations suddenly had to reinvent their states, drawing upon their own democratic traditions. In Poland or Czechoslovakia, as it then was, i.e. countries with some history and strong feelings for democracy, this transformation proceeded quite smoothly. In other states it was less clear on what traditions new institutions should be built. In Hungary, where I now live, there have been strong democratic traditions, but also strong authoritarian traditions, dating back to the Habsburg era. The same is certainly true of Romania, Bulgaria and other countries in the Central and Eastern Europe. These were the initial challenges, later developing in the 1990s.
At that time there were two major steps, Eastern Europeans were eager to take in order to revive and develop their democratic traditions. The first one was the NATO accession. Joining the . . .
Read more: European Integration Must Not be Reversed
Sunday, September 8th, 2013 
Last week, I intended to write my reflections on President Obama’s speech at the commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Instead, I offered my ambivalent thoughts on Obama on Syria. Summarized in my opening: “Two Cheers for Obama.” The potentially tragic decisions of the week overshadowed, in my mind, the enduring accomplishments and challenges of decades. Obama is not only threatening Assad. Assad is threatening Obama. A march to war overshadowed a poignant remembrance of this historic march of 1963.
I closed my reflections by expressing my fear that this overshadowing may become emblematic of the Obama presidency: significant work on jobs and freedom challenged by questionable military and national security adventures, including not only the potential attack on Syria, but also drone warfare and heightened domestic and international surveillance. Unlike the President’s full-throated critics on the left and the right, I am not convinced that his positions have been simply wrong. Yet, I too sense that there is a pattern here that is troubling, especially so since the ideals which Barack Obama embodies, symbolizes and has acted to fortify are of such crucial importance to the vigor and health of the American body politic, revealed in his speech commemorating the great civil rights march and its most powerful leader, Martin Luther King Jr.
Obama’s talk, like King’s, is not cheap. His words often act. He is the only man to have been elected President of the United States based on a speech, (William Jennings Bryant was nominated but not elected), and his speeches, in form as well as content, continue to be consequential. This was my hope when I watched and then read the text, despite recent events in Syria, and the possibility of an American attack. Obama’s words on jobs and freedom, and the people who marched on Washington, tell us something about who we are, where we are going, and by what means, and as I see it, even offer interesting insights into the Syrian dilemmas.
The speech revolved . . .
Read more: Obama on Remembering Jobs and Freedom: Three Cheers for Obama?
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