By Daniel Dayan, February 28th, 2011
 
Saturday night the United Nations Security Council unanimously imposed sanctions on Libya and called for an international war crimes investigation of the regime behavior. This marks the end of a long period of international tolerance of Libyan excesses. In this post, mostly written before this change in the international posture, Daniel Dayan reflects on the international community and particularly France as enablers of a process that proceeded even as the regime was collapsing. Jeff
Muammar el-Qaddafi stands accused of crimes against humanity. Countless governments and nongovernmental organizations implicate him in the slaughter of his own citizens. His former Justice Minister holds him personally responsible for orchestrating the 1988 crash of Pan Am Flight 103 on Lockerbie. And thus I was amazed to see that the French media have not brought up Libya’s important and continual responsibilities as a member of the highest United Nations human rights body, the UN Human Rights Council.
The UN human rights watchdog has its own troubled history. Before the current Council replaced the Human Rights Commission (UNCHR) in 2006, Libya was one of the countries to stain the reputation of the Geneva based Commission. In January 2003, the UNCHR elected the Libyan ambassador Najat Al-Hajjaji its president. As the Associated Press reported, this happened “despite concern from some countries about the regime’s poor record on civil liberties and its alleged role in sponsoring terrorism. In a secret ballot, thirty three countries voted for the Libyan diplomat, just three opposed her and seventeen abstained.”
If this was not astonishing enough, the widely denounced behavior of the UN human rights watch dog did not improve over time. The newly reformed Council selected Libya to join the other forty six countries responsible for promoting and protecting human rights around the globe. In May 2010, through a secret ballot, Libya received one hundred and fifty five votes from the one hundred ninety two members of the UN General Assembly.
It was only this past Friday, one year . . .
Read more: Qaddafi and Human Rights
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 25th, 2011 
For the first time since we have been operating, I felt like the discussions on the blog were getting away from my editorial control. I take this to be a good sign. While there were interesting posts on the economy and economic theory, and on media and media theory, as well as on revolutionary hopes in Egypt, the focus of our discussion this week was on the issues surrounding the events in Madison, Wisconsin, moving in interesting and somewhat unexpected directions.
Anna Paretskaya opened our deliberations, with her “Cairo on the Isthmus.” She presented a bird’s eye view, including some telling photos. I actually found some of the details of her post more interesting than the elements that stimulated heated discussion. Particularly fascinating was how she understood the beginning of the movement as she reported in the opening of her piece:
“What started as a stunt by a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison students to deliver a few hundred “Valentine’s Day” cards from students, staff, and faculty to Governor Scott Walker asking him not to slash the university budget has now become national news: close to 100,000 Wisconsinites have come to the State Capitol in Madison over the past four days to protest the so-called “budget repair” bill…”
This made clear to me Madison, Wisconsin’s connection to Cairo, and Cairo’s connection to the movement I observed around the old bloc, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and to the Obama campaign and the Tea Party movement. People meet with each other, speak to each other, develop a capacity to act together, create a power that hitherto did not exist. They may or may not reach their political goal, but they change the political landscape as they act. This is what I see as being the most significant consequence of “the politics of small things.” Not only has there been regime change in Egypt and Tunisia, but the Arab world will never be the same after the wave of protests we have observed. And the Republicans may or may not succeed in their battle against public employee unions and the . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: The Wisconsin Events
By William Milberg, February 24th, 2011 
The current economic slowdown constitutes a breakdown for advanced capitalism. Its means of allocating capital – financial markets – froze up and would have collapsed completely if governments had not intervened on a massive scale. The rates of growth of output and employment in most industrialized countries are anemic and persistent. Does not the breakdown of capitalism require some fundamental rethinking of its explanation system, aka economic theory? Today’s troubles and the failure of most economists to predict them have given rise to a lively debate within the discipline about the sources of failure of economic theory and the ways in which it should be reformed. This is a good sign. But the current debate among economists is shallow and confined to a tweaking of its existing toolkit. There is no indication that this debate will produce the intellectual revolution needed to respond to the theoretical and policy challenges facing industrialized countries.
The discipline of economics has been no stranger to methodological controversy. The Methodenstreit (debate over method) among German social scientists in the 1880s, the Keynesian revolution in the 1930s, the ‘F-twist’ debate in the 1960s over the importance of realism of assumptions, and the ‘Cambridge controversy’ over the meaning of capital in the 1970s are some of the most notable debates. But not all methodological discussions are created equal. Some are profound—questioning the very structure of the reigning methodology—while others are more superficial, aiming at incremental reform or merely cosmetic change. We find that the current discussion is for the most part quite shallow, and will remain so unless certain voices in the debate are given more emphasis.
The central problem is that almost nobody dares to rethink the nature of economic life and the proper scope of economic thinking. This deeper approach is precisely what we find in the Methodenstreit and in Keynes’ innovations. On its surface the Methodenstreit was a debate over whether concrete historical analysis or mathematical modeling was better suited to explain economics. But this question ultimately rested on the question of what the realm of political . . .
Read more: Waiting for the New Keynes
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 23rd, 2011 
Alexis de Tocqueville thought, as I observed in an earlier post, that after the grand principled politics of the earliest years of the Republic, American parties and politics would be about minor issues. About dividing up the spoils, not about the definition of what democracy is and how it should be enacted. His important insight was to distinguish between two different forms of political contestation. He correctly noted that American politics would be mostly about dividing the spoils, resting upon a general consensus about fundamental principles. But what he missed is that fundamental conflicts have a way, episodically, of reappearing, sometimes quite unexpectedly, and even with a slight of hand. Such is our present situation.
This became clear to me as I was surfing the web this morning and came across a post by Jonah Goldberg at the National Review online. He openly made the move from petit to grand politics in Tocqueville’s sense.
“The protesting public-school teachers with fake doctor’s notes swarming the capitol building in Madison, Wis., insist that Gov. Scott Walker is hell-bent on “union busting.” Walker denies that his effort to reform public-sector unions in Wisconsin is anything more than an honest attempt at balancing the state’s books.
I hope the protesters are right. Public unions have been a 50-year mistake.”
Goldberg argues against the very idea of public employee unions, going a step further than the aggressive Governor of Wisconsin. For Goldberg it is all about the principle, as he supports a politician who must get on with practical political concerns. As Max Weber would put it, Walker uses an apparent ethic of responsibility, fiscal balance, to hide his ultimate ends; attacking the public employees’ unions. Walker governs responsibly, moving toward the principled goal.
But there is more than meets the eye in Goldberg’s essay, which is framed around the idea that unions in the private sector fought a valiant and historic struggle against capitalist exploitation, while public unions just stand for stealing from the public coffers. On the page where his post appears, . . .
Read more: Libertarianism versus Workers’ Rights in Wisconsin
By Esther Kreider-Verhalle, February 22nd, 2011 
During a stop on their ‘roadshow,’ two world renown media researchers, Elihu Katz and Paddy Scannell, treated an audience at The New School for Social Research to some current reflections on “media events” and long-term television developments. It was Katz and his co-author and DC regular Daniel Dayan, who started exploring these events in the 1970s when the surprising trip by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israel and the ensuing television coverage inspired them and the world. It was the start of their long and intensive exploration of ceremonial contests, conquests and coronations that were celebrated through live broadcasts on television, resulting in one of the defining books in the field of media studies, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Recently, Katz and Scannell, the founding editor of Media, Culture and Society, have been revisiting the phenomenon. Things have changed, but media events appear to be still with us.
A telling example: Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 which drew some 37+ million viewers. This once in a lifetime happening was a quintessential “media event.” The live broadcast of the meticulously scripted ceremony brought everyday life to a temporary standstill. Reporters and the vast audience were filled with awe in their celebration of the election of the first American black president. In addition to media that offered a live-streaming of the event, TVs were still the go-to medium. Television seemed to be alive, if not completely well.
As a student and collaborator of Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, Katz for many years was skeptical about the power of media to change people’s minds. But as a co-author with Dayan, he speaks in awe and fascination about the live images of astronauts landing on the moon, of the newly elected Polish Pope kissing his native soil, and of royal weddings and official funerals. He knows that the television broadcasts of these events were performative, with real and significant social impact.
Fast forward to . . .
Read more: Beyond Television?
By Hazem Kandil, February 21st, 2011 
Revolutions break our heart, whether they fail or succeed. Will Egypt’s revolution escape this grim prophecy, or will it follow the ‘human, all too human’ pattern of disappointment and betrayal that has haunted the great majority of human revolts? Cautious observers along the Nile banks and elsewhere are waiting anxiously for Egypt to recover from its revolutionary hangover and comfort them by answering a simple question: Did the Internet savvy demonstrators accidentally push the restart button? Is this July 1952 all over again?
Pessimists are certainly justified in pointing out a few chilling similarities. To begin with, Egyptians are back again on the receiving end of military communiqués issued by a tight-knit group of officers they know so little about. Also, in a way reminiscent of 1952, vocal and violent critics of the old regime were caught flat-footed when it finally gave way: after driving the country to a precipice (symbolized in January 1952 by the burning of Cairo), opposition activists had neither the stomach nor the vision to make the leap from dissent to rule. Political power, and the responsibilities that come with it, ultimately fell into the lap of the men in khaki uniforms. Liberals, leftists, and Islamists are yet again making demands, and then waiting for the military junta to call the shots. Our suspicions grow even more now that we know that high-ranking officers were the ones who finally nudged the president out of office (though in a less conspicuous way than in 1952).
Refusing to accept this unsettling analogy, optimists find recourse in one resounding difference between 1952, when the people wholeheartedly supported a military coup, and 2011, when the military was swept over by the strong current of popular revolt. Is this enough guarantee that the military will act any differently? It might be too early to judge, but there are reasons to be hopeful.
The Khaki Uniforms ought to have learned from their own history that military governance inevitably degenerates into authoritarian police rule, which can drive a country to disaster, and ultimately marginalize the military itself. Egypt’s Supreme . . .
Read more: Egypt: Hope against Skepticism
By Chad Alan Goldberg, February 20th, 2011
Yesterday Anna Paretskaya presented a report on the political standoff in Madison Wisconsin. This stimulated comments by Michael Corey and Iris, the first generally critical of Paretskaya’s presentation and analysis, the second supportive. This evening, Chad Alan Goldberg, Vice President, United Faculty & Academic Staff (UFAS), AFT 223 and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered his analysis in a reply to that discussion, which I think requires deliberate consideration as a post of its own. -Jeff
1. Dr. Corey suggests that Anna Paretskaya’s account of events here in Wisconsin is insufficiently objective and lacks a “suspension of belief.” To be sure, knowledge of the social world is always socially situated. Those of us with backgrounds in the labor movement–those of us who are public employees, like Anna and myself, whose collective bargaining rights are now threatened in Wisconsin–are indeed likely to see things differently than someone, like Dr. Corey, with a background in corporate management. However, the tradition of critical theory suggests the possibility of another kind of relationship between the observer and the events she observes. As Max Horkheimer put it, “If … the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that his presentation of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges…. His profession is the struggle of which his own thinking is a part.”
2. Much of Dr. Corey’s comment lays out the differing claims of the social and political actors in Wisconsin in a “he said, she said” manner without making any real attempt to investigate the substance of those claims. As social scientists, we are interested in facts. And the facts are on the side of the tens of thousands of protesters gathering day after day at the Wisconsin state capitol.
a. Corporate-funded right-wing propagandists insist that public employees are a new privileged class which taxpayers can’t afford. However, as the Wisconsin State Journal reported, a new study by the . . .
Read more: Workers’ Rights and Democracy in Madison
By Anna Paretskaya, February 19th, 2011 
Anna Paretskaya is a PhD candidate in sociology at the New School for Social Research and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her primary academic focus is on the study of political and economic liberalizations and the relationship between democracy and capitalism. She has a front row seat observing the developing events in Madison. This is the first of a series of reports. Jeff
What started as a stunt by a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison students to deliver a few hundred “Valentine’s Day” cards from students, staff, and faculty to Governor Scott Walker asking him not to slash the university budget has now become national news: close to 100,000 Wisconsinites have come to the State Capitol in Madison over the past four days to protest the so-called “budget repair” bill, effectively occupying the building since Tuesday, diverting traffic from the streets around the Capitol, and hindering Madison’s recent, but beloved tradition, the Winter Festival, that was to take place in downtown’s isthmus area this weekend despite unusually warm temperatures.
On Tuesday, when state legislature’s finance committee was to take up the discussion of the governor’s bill, thousands of people from all over the state descended on the Capitol to lobby against it. At the 17-hour-long committee hearing—a “citizen filibuster,” as one speaker dubbed it—hundreds of Wisconsin residents spoke, nearly all against the bill, and scores expressed dismay at the governor’s attempt to take away the right of 175,000 Wisconsin’s public sector employees to collectively bargain. It wasn’t only union activists, Madison’s aging hippies, and liberal university professors, who waited for up to seven hours to make their two-minute statement before the committee. Amid nurses and teamsters and teacher aides were several self-describe d Reaganites, fiscal conservatives, and Republicans (or newly ex-Republicans) who were just as distraught by the governor’s heavy-handedness. The UW-Madison’s teaching assistants’ union (TAA), which has been representing graduate employees for the past 40 years, expressed the prevailing sentiment best: “This bill is an affront to democracy on two important levels. First, it proposes to completely . . .
Read more: The Wisconsin Protests: Cairo on the Isthmus?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 18th, 2011 
I am old enough to still be amazed by modern media; young and open enough to not be beguiled.
This morning I had an exchange with DC contributor Andras Bozoki. Yesterday, I had sent him, along with other DC contributors, an email message, asking for a brief bio and a photo for our enhanced and updated contributors’ page. He responded to me from China, where, unbeknownst to me, he is giving a few lectures in Hong Kong, and visiting other major cities. We took care of our mundane business. He’ll get back to me with the bio and photo upon his return home to Budapest. I invited him to write something about what he is seeing in China. He told me that he is quite busy these days, and not sure he will have the time to write, but he will contribute to DC if he writes anything about the very interesting things he is seeing on his trip. Let’s hope he finds the time.
Every Saturday or Sunday, my wife, Naomi, and I in New York have a Skype visit with our daughter, Brina, and her family, husband, Michel, and son, Ludovic, in Paris. Two weeks ago, we saw Ludo taking his first hesitant steps. Last week, walking had already become his primary means of locomotion, moving fluidly around their study, picking up his toys, now with two hands, finding more problematic materials (his daddy is an artist), more easily getting into trouble. This Sunday we will celebrate Ludovic’s first birthday. They will open the present we sent via snail mail. We will sing Happy Birthday, knowing that next year he will actually understand and look forward to the festivities. One of the great pleasures I had as a father was reading the good night book. I figure around that next birthday that may become a regular ritual between Ludo and me, as it was between me and my children.
When I explain to people about DC, trying to recruit . . .
Read more: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same
By Daniel Dayan, February 17th, 2011
.jpg "Tunisian protesters with the message \"President Ben Ali must leave\"")
Until now, the current revolutions in the Arab world were a case of serious politics, momentous politics, the “politics of tall things.” To try and decipher such lofty events, analysts, including myself, have had to rely on large categories. One had to be hopeful despite the many odds, or skeptical against a climate of pervasive bliss, both expressed at DC. In either case, what was at stake was much too large to be really assessed. Events were shrouded by their very size. But something new and genuinely baffling has happened in Tunisia that has caused analysts to cast aside previous assumptions.
After what has been hailed throughout the world as the “Jasmine Revolution,” thousands of Tunisians fled their country. Flotillas sailed towards the Italian Island of Lampedusa, filled with young people seeking access to Europe. Fishermen had to spend the night aboard their boats to prevent them from being stolen by would-be emigrants. I heard of an estimated five thousand already on Sicilian soil.
Judging from television images, these refugees are not hardened members of the former ruling party. These are not officials in flight from retaliation or punishment: their group includes women, and young people. These are economic immigrants who have taken the risk to cross over to Europe in search of employment. These boat-people share the same kind of desperation as the young man whose suicide triggered the insurrection. As he chose to die by fire, they chose to risk everything at sea.
Yet, the street vendor’s sacrifice was immensely consequential. A revolution took place. The future looked rosy. Why would thousands of his brothers be running away from happiness? Why would they become refugees at the risk of drowning? One cannot just speak of an unfortunate timing, of a coincidence. 5,000 passengers cannot just happen to board dozens of boats by accident. Did they forget they had just won? Imagine 5,000 French attackers of the Bastille migrating en masse to Brazil. Imagine victorious Bolsheviks settling in Tyrol. Why bother with a . . .
Read more: A Baffling Exodus in Tunisia: Exit or Voice or Both?
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