“Haiti doesn’t have a voice. It doesn’t have an identity. We, Haitians, need to take back the role of storytellers and tell our own history.” This was one of the reasons for filmmaker Raoul Peck to follow the reconstruction efforts in his home country after the earthquake in January 2010. Peck emphasizes that he was not planning on filming crying women and dead bodies in the streets. His goal was to challenge the country’s role of victim and turn the cameras on those who normally do the storytelling and the observing.
The result is the documentary “Fatal Assistance” (Assistance Mortelle), a painful 100-minute exposé on how international development and humanitarian aid have gone bad. It is a story about well-intentioned donors and aid organizations that have lost themselves in rituals of red tape, having become the inefficient players of a rudderless multinational aid-industry. Last week the documentary had its American premiere during the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in cooperation with the Margaret Mead Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival. Peck himself was available for questions after the screening and I had access to an earlier interview that Peck had given to a crew from Haiti Reporters before the film’s first screening in Haiti.
Peck has documented the efforts of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) that was created shortly after the earthquake. With the Haitian prime minister Jean Max Bellerive and Bill Clinton as its co-presidents, the IHRC was tasked to oversee the spending of billions of dollars of international assistance in a way that was in alignment with the concerns of Haitians and the Haitian government. It was not new to see that after more than two years of “reconstruction,” too many Haitians are still living in extremely poor living conditions. Or, to quote a man who has lost his house in the earthquake, “in houses that the donors wouldn’t even let their dog live in.” It was . . .
Read more: “Fatal Assistance” in Haiti: Reflections on a Film by Raoul Peck
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 8th, 2012 
In Reinventing Political Culture, I argue that there are four components to Barack Obama’s project in reinventing American political culture: (1) the politics of small things, using new media to capture the power of interpersonal political engagement and persuasion, (2) the revival of classical eloquence, (3) the redefinition of American identity and (4) the pursuit of good governance, rejecting across the board condemnations of big government, understanding the importance of the democratic state. I think that there is significant evidence for advances on all four fronts. The most difficult in the context of the Great Recession was the struggle for good governance, but now the full Obama Transformation, responding the Reagan Revolution, is gaining broad public acceptance.
The election was won using precise mobilization techniques. Key fully developed speeches by the President and his supporters, most significantly Bill Clinton, defined the accomplishments of the past for years and the promise of the next four. Obama’s elevation of the Great Seal motto E pluribus unum (in diversity union), defining the special social character and political strength of America, has won the day. And now, the era of blind antipathy to government is over.
The pendulum has finally swung back. The long conservative ascendancy has ended. A new commonsense has emerged. Obama’s reinvention of American political culture is rapidly advancing. The full effects of the 2012 elections are coming into view. The promise of 2008 is being realized. The counterattack of 2010 has been repelled. The evidence is everywhere to be seen, right in front of our eyes, and we should take note that it is adding up. Here is some evidence taken from reading the news of the past couple of days.
It is becoming clear that Obama’s tough stance in the fiscal cliff negotiations is yielding results. The Republicans now are accepting tax increases. Signs are good that this includes tax rates. A headline in the Times Friday afternoon: “Boehner Doesn’t Rule Out Raising Tax Rates.” A striking shift in economic policy is apparent: tax the rich before benefit cuts for the poor, government support for economic growth. . . .
Read more: The Reagan Revolution Ends! Obama’s Proceeds!
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 21st, 2012 
Just about all observers seemed to agree that the Democratic Convention, with the speeches by Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton highlighted, was an unqualified success, especially when compared to the Republican convention and the speeches of Ann Romney, Congressman Ryan and Governor Romney. Post convention polls and political events confirm this assessment. A narrative was set up by the Democrats, establishing expectations for the President and the Governor, and in the past couple of weeks, they each have been following the Democrats’ narrative, suggesting electoral success, with the prospects for a strengthened Obama Presidency. The political conventions were significant theatrical performances. The Democrats had a hit, apparently with lasting effects.
Romney the unsteady parochial plutocrat, who doesn’t understand the daily struggles of ordinary Americans or the complex and difficult global challenges: witness the private Boca Raton fundraiser and the response to his response to the crisis in Egypt, Libya and the Muslim world. Obama the elegant warm leader, carefully calibrating American response to the crisis in North Africa and the Islamic world and understanding the concerns of “the middle class,” a man who responds to the Romney gaffes with well timed amusement and understated criticism.
But Obama’s acceptance speech received mixed reviews. It was judged to have missed the mark, by the left, right and center, and has been overlooked as it contributed to the convention’s success. The criticism came from all angles: not enough specifics about how the second term would differ from the first, on the one hand, too much like a State of the Union address (i.e. too policy oriented, not inspirational enough) on the other. And then there was David Brooks, who truly irked me, complaining that Obama lacked a clearly identifiable singular political project that would define his second term as healthcare defined his first.
The responses indicated to me less about critical judgment of the President’s address, more about the conflicting expectations Obama faced and, I believe, successfully addressed. This was substantially represented by the false choice Brooks asserted Obama had to . . .
Read more: Obama’s Acceptance Speech: Deliberately Re-Considered
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 6th, 2012 
The Democrats in the first two days of their convention manufactured news. But I think it is important to understand that it wasn’t propaganda or an infomercial, as many overly cynical academics and commentators would suggest, from Noam Chomsky to Joe Nocera. Rather, like the Republican Convention last week, it was a modern day media event, a televisual combination of demonstration and manifesto, revealing, or as my friend and colleague Daniel Dayan would put it “monstrating,” where the party stands, who stands with the party, how it accounts for the past, present and future. The first two days were particularly about the past and the present, identifying the party. Today, Obama will chart the future. This, at least, is how I understand the storyline. We will know, soon enough, if I am right.
The structure of the presentation, thus far, has been interesting and informative. There was a clear understanding on the part of the convention planners. Before 10:00 PM, without the major networks broadcasting, with a much smaller audience watching, was the demonstration slot. It was the time for showing the stand of the party and demonstrating who stands behind it. Between 10:00 and 11:00 PM, with the full prime time audience watching, the manifesto was presented by the major speakers: on Tuesday, Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio and First Lady Michelle Obama, on Wednesday, Massachusetts Senate candidate, Elizabeth Warren, and former President Bill Clinton.
The coherence of the Democrats’ presentation was striking. This contrasted with the Republican convention, in which candidate and platform were in tension, and the personal qualities and not the political plans of the candidate took priority, and the speeches didn’t add up. The worst of it was Eastwood’s performance piece. It represented accurately the state of the party, with its pure ideological commitments and tensions, as I have already discussed here earlier during the primary season.
The Democrats revealed some differences of opinion, in symbolic floor scuffle on God and Jerusalem (pandering nonsense it . . .
Read more: The News from Charlotte: The First Two Days of the Democratic National Convention
By Richard Alba, April 16th, 2012 
It’s sometimes said that presidents don’t control the economic weather but rather it controls them. We have reached the moment, however, when magical powers are going to be attributed to the presidency, and the current incumbent, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, will be charged with incompetence in using them. One manifestation of this thinking is the Romney campaign’s recent claim that women have suffered more than 90 percent of the jobs lost since Obama became president, a blatant attempt to undermine his lead among women voters. This claim involves two distortions; and most of the mainstream media have caught what I view as the smaller one—namely, that the claim ignores the full history of the recession and the huge job losses borne by men when George Bush was president.
The larger distortion has generally gone unnoticed, indeed, it has been mostly accepted. According to it, some 740 thousand jobs have been lost on Obama’s watch. This claim is another expression of the Republican mantra about a “failed” presidency. And it involves some statistical crafting to fit the data to the argument, manipulating data in a way that we are likely to see a lot more of as the campaign proceeds, especially given the huge amounts of money available to hire “researchers” to come up with “facts.”
The Romney campaign arrives at the estimate by attributing to Obama all of the job losses since February 1, 2009, even though he had barely taken office at that point and there was not enough time for any of the new administration’s policies to have an impact. To understand how much timing matters in this case, recall that Obama entered the White House when the labor market was already in a swoon, and the number of jobs lost that February was more than 700 thousand, on a par with the losses for the final months of Bush’s second term. If we tally the jobs record of the current administration from March 1 instead of February 1, then the jobs deficit under Obama shrinks dramatically to 16,000 and, with any luck, will be erased in coming . . .
Read more: Phony Data on Jobs and the Obama Administration
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 21st, 2012 Most studies of the politics of collective memory assume a kind of enlightenment prejudice. Confronting the memory of a collective trauma or accomplishment is seen as being the precondition of some sort of progressive action. Examples I have thought about, both as a scholar and a citizen, include: the Jewish and specifically Israeli confrontation with the Holocaust as a political precondition of “never again.” And in a parallel fashion, the German confrontation with the genocide understood as a requirement for a decent democratic society in the shadows of the Nazi regime. The need to “re-remember” the trauma of slavery in the United States, as Toni Morrison put it in her classic novel, Beloved, as a way of addressing the enduring problems of race and racism in America. The need of Poles to remember their history apart from communist ideology as a way of developing an independent democratic movement in the 70s and 80s, contributing to the great events of 1989.
An example of a memory project left undone: I remember talking to a visiting scholar from China. He was studying the Cultural Revolution with the American journalist and student of recent Chinese history, Judith Shapiro. He admired the Jewish memory work on the Holocaust and wondered why there was no similar work being done in China, confronting the atrocities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He asked me once: was there something about the Jewish and the Chinese political culture, or, at least, their distinctive collective experiences that explained these different approaches to collective trauma? The supposition was that to remember was to set one free.
Poland
Then there is Adam Michnik, Poland’s leading intellectual opposition leader in the 70s and 80s, and later after the changes of ’89, the editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. And also importantly for me a personal friend and a friend and colleague of many at my university, the New School for Social Research, a frequent visitor since he received an honorary degree from us at the 50th anniversary of the University in Exile. He is memory worker, although he calls himself a historian. He uses history in . . .
Read more: For and Against Memory: Poland, Israel-Palestine and the United States
By Gary Alan Fine, September 26th, 2011 
On September 21, 2011, two American men, both in their early 40s, were put to death by order of their state government. One death provoked much discussion; the second was widely ignored. However, it is that second death that matters should we as a nation – or as a collection of states – decide to eliminate the death penalty for good and for all.
Outside of Georgia’s Jackson Prison, opponents of the death penalty gathered to hope, pray, and pay witness to the long death of Troy Davis. Mr. Davis was convicted of killing a police officer, Mark McPhail, in 1989. Whoever the killer was did a dastardly deed. And Mr. Davis was, according to the courts, that man. Over the years there came to be real doubts as to whether he was, in fact, guilty. The case depended largely on eyewitness testimony, and since the trial most of those eyewitnesses changed their stories. Perhaps Mr. Davis was not guilty of this crime.
No one, whatever stance they take on the legality of the death penalty, wishes for the state to kill innocent men, letting the real killer go free. Still, Mr. Davis had twenty years of appeals, and he never found a judge or parole board that was persuaded of his innocence. Shortly before his death, the Supreme Court, without dissent, refused to stay his execution. And it was done. Perhaps we must establish a more robust level of proof and be more modest in our certainty. Without doubt Mr. Davis came to be an impressive advocate for his own innocence. He wanted to live. However, shortly after 11:00 on the night of September 21st, he was put to death by lethal injection. CNN’s Anderson Cooper covered the death watch with inspiring intensity, raising issues of Mr. Davis innocence and also the justice of the death penalty.
Eight-hundred miles west of Jackson, in Huntsville, Texas, another death occurred, quietly and without . . .
Read more: Two Deaths
By Michael Corey, August 26th, 2011 
On Monday, August 22nd, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D. C. was opened for visitors. The official dedication of the memorial was scheduled to take place on Sunday, August 28th (indefinitely posted by Hurricane Irene), the 48th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom before over 200,000 people. The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation notes that this is the first memorial on the National Mall “to honor a man of hope, a man of peace, and a man of color.” The memorial, according to the project’s mission statement, honors Dr. King for “his national and international contributions to world peace through non-violent social change.” A virtual tour of the memorial is available on the Foundation’s website.
The 120 million dollar memorial is located on the Tidal Basin adjacent to the FDR Memorial, and its line of sight connects it with the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials. The project was launched in 1996 when President Clinton signed a resolution to build a memorial in honor of Dr. King. Groundbreaking for the project took place on November 13, 2006. The origins of the idea for memorial is traceable to January, 1984, when George Sealy met with four fellow Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity brothers to develop a proposal for building a national King memorial. As with most projects of this type, it origins were small and informal. It then had to proceed through numerous associational and institutional gates as public and private support for the project was developed. The bureaucratic and procedural steps involved were formidable; and the long process had many controversial elements, including its design, the selection of Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin, the use of Chinese granite, and the $800,000 of licensing fees charged to the Foundation by the King family for the use of Dr. King’s words and image in fundraising materials. McKissack & McKissack/Turner/Gilford/ Tompkins are the design-build team. All the principals are American, and many have strong connections with businesses owned . . .
Read more: Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial: “I Have a Dream”
By Gary Alan Fine, May 26th, 2011 
For a dozen years I have taught a freshman seminar at Northwestern University, entitled “Scandal and Reputations.” When I first selected the topic “Bill and Monica” it was the topic du jour, filled with phallic cigars, hypocrisies and conspiracies. I had planned the course to capture that sour, if momentarily historic, time.
Over the years I have never been without subject matter. I could pick and choose among the birthers, the deniers, the earthers and the truthers. Would we discuss churchly pedophiles or Abu Ghraib? DUI or DNA? Tiger Woods, Charlie Sheen, Britney, Paris or OJ Redux? Always some claim of conspiracy or scandal emerged that would capture the attention of students.
This week demonstrates that whether we run out of oil, we won’t run out of oily elites. The case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and prominent French socialist politician, is instructive. (Yes, yes, innocent until proven…). Mr. Strauss-Kahn is currently holed up in a snug government-supplied suite on Riker’s Island (a neo-socialist dream of free housing for all). Mr. Strauss-Kahn has been arrested and accused of having attempted to rape a hotel maid in his self-paid suite at New York’s Sofitel. No doubt several of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s new compatriots will be happy to turn the tables on their new friend. DSK, don’t drop your soap in the shower.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn was apparently naked in the bathroom when the maid arrived. As a prominent economist, he surely figured that since he was already naked, intercourse was simply a matter of structural efficiency. Perhaps he saw her as “my cute little Portugal.” Never having interned at the IMF, she had not been adequately educated in recognizing how the powerful organize the lifeworlds of the powerless. Metaphors gone wild.
But the tawdry events at a slick hotel reveal something more. First, they remind us that often what makes bad behavior scandalous is when it emerges outside the local domain in which “everyone knew” of its likelihood. As more evidence appears, it seems that Strauss-Kahn’s colleagues were aware that he was a sexual predator. Possibly they were surprised . . .
Read more: Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the Charmed Circle of Scandal
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