Category: Uncategorized

Notes on Misplaced Autonomy

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / Global Resistance Network /
Dissident Voice

SouthWest Border Vigilantes say gringos should drop everything they are doing and go stand shoulder to shoulder at the Mexican border to prevent anybody from walking North.

In response, I’m not saying gringo vigilantes are altogether stupid people, because there are most likely many areas of life where they display dignity and intelligence. The sooner they return to those areas the better.

Yet suppose for the sake of peacemaking that we find common ground with vigilantes in their pure anxiety about the border. What they are worried about is a swamped labor market where more people share fewer jobs and declining pay. That anxiety has some basis in reality.

But it is misleading to see the chief cause of the labor problem along an imaginary line that separates the USA from Mexico. Blame America’s problems on Mexicans? The battle cry of the border vigilante is evidence that we live in desperate and confused times.

Where border vigilantes should look is toward the tallest skyscrapers of their hometown cities, up to the penthouses where business plans are being hatched to pay ever fewer American workers ever smaller paychecks. There is where the vigilantes should stand shoulder to shoulder not letting anyone down the elevators until a national labor plan is laser printed and signed by each and every penthouse occupant and posted on the internet in pdf format.

Not only will a national labor plan manage existing American workers toward peak participation, but it will also show how immigrant workers will continue to be integrated (or re-integrated) into an expanding labor market.

America has always been able to do this for gringo immigrants — work them in. And so the sons and daughters of gringo immigrants should demand a plan to “work in” immigrants yet to come. Do unto others, etc.

It is just plain sick to see gringos standing at the Mexican border as if their own gringo forefathers walked the Bering straits or paddled the great oceans to get here 10,000 years ago, got to know all the plants and animals, bred corn and tapped pulque, discovered tomatoes and tortillas. Inhospitality however is a gringo specialty and the sickness we are quite used to seeing, even when they have their mouths stuffed with fajita enchilada specials. For shame.

We must remind border vigilantes that unemployment was nowhere to be found in America prior to gringo arrival which means essentially that gringos have to figure out how they are going to take responsibility for solving at least one problem they carry with them everywhere they go. Because now that everyone has adopted the advanced gringo economic scheme that is never offered as an option, unemployment has spread like smallpox.

Blaming Mexicans for the effects of a poorly managed USA labor policy is a sign of intellectual and moral weakness, as if the leading question asked by the vigilantes is not who is most responsible for this mess but who can we most easily pick on.

But those are the easy truths to face, because they are all rooted in the past. More difficult truths of labor anxiety reach into the future, because gringo nation for the first time in history is about to get old. This is the truth of the social security crisis.

As gringo nation prepares for old age, it will have more to figure out than where to get its retirement checks from. Because retirement checks must be spent. And in order for there to actually be an economy in which to spend the retirement checks, old gringo nation is going to have to figure out how to get some youth into its economy — youth that gringo nation cannot itself provide.

Nor will the cure be found in proposals to deport lower paid immigrants in a dim-witted attempt to raise the average taxable income of an aging nation. Gringos who offer this plan seem not to be aware that where there are no lower paid workers there cannot be any higher paid ones. This systematic failure of their economic comprehension arises most naturally from gringo assumptions that wealthy people make themselves rich.

And yet, we have to sympathize a little with gringo illiteracy in economic theory, because they are just repeating what they are taught in schools. They are taught for instance that gringos themselves made gringo nation rich. And so they assume that gringo nation will be richer without lower paid Mexicans. The logic is as deluded as it is explainable once you see what gringo nation really means by excellence in education.

Now you could unionize the lower paid immigrants and get their paychecks raised up to a living wage. But if you do away with the labor that lower paid workers provide you would have what Douglas Turner Ward called a “Day of Absence” (1965) more recently dramatized in “A Day without a Mexican” (2004). What gringo ideologues tend to forget is that so-called menial labor gets done because without it no fortunes can be built. If you deport all the immigrants who do that work, someone will have to be found to take their places. If it’s a higher average income that you want, why not raise the wages?

So when gazing across the economy from penthouses high atop the USA, planners will have to tell us, are they capable of solving this problem of working in immigrants as usual — just like they did for their own gringo selves — or not? If not, then gringo vigilantes will have found a proper place to lose their tempers.

Where planners won’t do their planning, that’s where activism is needed, autonomously creating the economy that planners have abandoned.

But for the time being, it turns out to be a very handy exercise to have gringo vigilantes standing at the borderlands where they can look around. Because just to their South bubbles the fountain of youth that their aging economy needs. It will come as a gift if they let it in.

As they stand there looking around at the great crossing grounds that is their last best hope for a grateful old age, they can ask, what do we need to build here as welcoming mats?

And I have no doubt about it, as soon as the gringo vigilantes begin to work out answers to the “welcome mat” problem, we’ll see how intelligent and creative they can be. They will still be gringos, God bless them, but they won’t be vigilantes anymore.

* * *

Note: by way of full disclosure, the author is a recovering gringo.

Listening to Alex Jones, May 27

By Greg Moses

By happenstance Friday I tuned into Alex Jones via live internet stream as he took a call from a Hispanic woman who expressed tearful confusion over opinions that were being broadcast about MEChA and LULAC.

In response, Jones seemed to treat these Hispanic civil rights organizations as the moral equivalent of white supremacist groups such as the Klan.

When Jones asked the caller to talk about her own experience, she said that she has experienced enough discrimination to the point that she cannot trust any white person — “but I don’t want to see you killed.”

At this point Jones called attention to the alleged racism of the comment and spoke of his own experience facing anti-white sentiments during his youthful years in Dallas. On this topic, he promises more programs in the future.

Jones is an interesting and important player in the InfoWars of our times. He has an encyclopedic mind and a visceral instinct for liberty. I classify him as a libertarian. On the basis of today’s program, I subscribed to the radio program at a cost of about $10 per month. In the notes that follow I intend no disrespect to the man.

But I do take issue with his portrayal of Hispanic civil rights groups as the moral equivalent of white supremacists. On this issue, everything follows from where one begins.

Analysis at the Texas Civil Rights Review proceeds from a general assessment that white supremacy continues to have powerful effects in the history that we share. This is a structural assessment that when all the facts are added up, demographic trends for hundreds of years have trended in the direction of white power.

The thesis does not deny that (1) within the structures of white power, there are also class wars or that (2) bigotry against white folks is not real.

However, when a Hispanic caller speaks about patterns of discrimination that she has faced, and when Jones replies with his own experience of being called a honky or being mugged by a Black man, we have already a mismatch in the kinds of claims that are being made.

On the one hand, the two testimonials seem to be logically equivalent. The caller has experienced bigotry, and so has Jones. Therefore, bigotry may fall upon anyone’s head.

But the universal experience of bigotry does not address a quite different question: does one perceive in the patterns of bigotry a structure of racialized power such that trends of bigotry tend to fall in a direction that favors white power?

On the broader structural question, no one’s single experience – neither the experience of a single Hispanic caller nor the experience of a single Alex Jones – can be decisive. To make a structural assessment, one must cast a wide net around a multitude of facts and experiences.

For example, when the Hispanic caller says that she has been made to feel ashamed of her Spanish language, is she pointing to a pattern that is “representative” of “collective” relations between English and Spanish speaking citizens of Texas?

On this point, Jones began to affirm the validity of the caller’s complaint when he observes briefly that when it comes to Spanish speaking citizens of Texas, powers of the state do not want to invest much money in teaching excellent skills in English. In this comment, Jones helpfully acknowledges that a structure of power may be discerned in the Texas system of education. Attention to this structure of power is what remains decisive.

In the end, I wonder if the Texas Civil Rights Review will be able to find a common logical ground to discuss the problem of civil rights within a libertarian framework.

For libertarians, reality is overwhelmingly an individualized affair. According to this logical framework, it is difficult to find any categorical status for collective patterns of experience. Therefore, we will find very little ground to recognize the qualities of life that make race and racism most significant.

On the other hand, social democrats bring to the table a significantly different framework of analysis. For social democrats, collective analysis confers categorical status to social groups and classes.

In the conversation between libertarians and social democrats, there is little to be learned in tit for tat debates on issues like racism. The libertarian will continue to privilege the conclusions that follow from an individualistic framework, and the social democrat will follow a quite different path of analysis.

The debates over affirmative action, for example, are overwhelmingly disputes between logical starting points. Yet the debates are so fruitless because neither side stops to discuss the difference in framework.

From a social democrat point of view, when I’m listening to a libertarian, I ask myself, what is this person teaching me about the things that can be learned from reality if we take it from a fundamentally individualized point of view? In my own emphasis on the social structures of realty, how does the libertarian help me see what I may be missing?

We see in the testimony of Alex Jones that there is a pain to the experience of bigotry that is not completely numbed out by structures of white power. He remembers being called a honky and he remembers quite clearly that the man who attempted to mug him was Black. He also seems to take some delight in reporting that the attempt was turned back.

But also as a social democrat I would like the libertarian to consider the ways that individualized logic fails to learn important facts about individuals.

Especially among white individuals, there seems to be an assumption that group structures among people of color are simply mirror images of group structures under white power. Therefore, if people of color get together to fight white power, they must be coming from a place no different than white supremacy itself.

This is how civil rights advocacy falls under the charge of hate speech when civil rights advocates speak plainly about the problem of white supremacy. But if I am fighting white supremacy, to what extent am I attacking white people as such? In fighting white racism, how am I diminishing the humanity of white folks per se?

On the other hand, if I am advocating white supremacy, the enunciation itself is an attack on the humanity of people of color.

MeChA and LULAC are struggling toward parity. The Klan is struggling toward disparity. The moral difference between these collective projects is decisive. It is the difference between civil rights and anti-civil rights.

Now let’s carefully re-introduce Alex Jones pleasure in reporting that he turned back an attempted assault by a Black man. The pride and pleasure are expressed in his tone of voice. When you face an aggressor, there is pleasure in self-defense.
There is some bravado. If we listened to someone bragging about BEING an aggressor, it would be much more difficult to share in the pleasure. With Alex Jones, we can share a little in the pride and pleasure of self-defense.

Likewise, among struggling groups of color, one sometimes discerns a pride and pleasure of self-defense bravado. Malcolm X was a master of the art. Jose Angel Gutierrez is a great Texas example. Ramsey Muniz also expresses a kind of pride and pleasure envisioning a day when the conquest will have been turned back.

From a libertarian, individualistic framework, the pleasure and bravado of self-defense struggle can be mistaken for aggressive initiative. Perhaps it would be better if self-defenders did not fall for the pleasure of counter-assault, but when they do, who can blame them? It is after all an assault that has been turned back. And this is the raw material of every action movie that spreads the thrill of counter-assault to ticket buying audiences across the globe.

Should Alex Jones apologize for his pride and bravado at turning ba

ck an assault? When he mentions that the assailant was Black is he confessing to a racist motivation for his pleasure? On both counts, I answer no. Pride and bravado in self-defense is humanly understandable. Identifying the race of the assailant need not be an expression of bigotry. In the case of Alex Jones, I believe that he is not a bigot.

But if we take the moral qualities of self-defense bravado and apply them to collective struggles in a world of collective injustice, then we have the key for helping Alex Jones understand the difference between MEChA and LULAC on the one hand and the Klan on the other. One side is in a struggle of self defense. The other side is addicted to a tradition of supremacist aggression.

Part One: Weeks 1-9
Privatization, Knowledge Management,
And a Mappable Future Like You Wouldn’t Believe

By Greg Moses

It is the perfect coincidence. The Texas State Employees Union all dressed in black t-shirts and divided up by senate districts are occupying the North plaza of the state capitol as I walk up. Of course, they want a pay raise, and I hope they get a big one. But they also want to explain why it is a bad idea for the state to shut down offices for Health and Human Services (HHS), lay off state workers, and replace the whole network with privately contracted call centers.

As I shuffle through the tall but narrow doors of power in a crush of unionists who are funneling through, I think about the grim trend of privatization and how it touches on the project that I have come to study this afternoon, a $12 million dollar deal with private contractors to build and maintain a statewide voter registration and election management system known as project TEAM (Texas Election Administration Management).

As I type out the results of things that I found while reading 21 weekly reports filed by the Secretary of State’s (SOS) project manager, I’m going to grumble along with the unionists’ mood of anti-privatization. For instance, I wonder why the existing staff and resources of the Texas Voter Registration System were not placed more fully in control of the project to upgrade and extend the system that they had already been running for the state.

For one thing, as we will see, the existing SOS elections division staff is essential to the project. They know the registration system and they are close partners in developing the system. I have never spoken to any of them, but in the circumstances of their work life, I imagine they must feel like many state workers these days who are enlisted to provide the essential expertise needed for high-powered privatization of public functions.

For another thing, just like the private call centers that will be doing state business for HHS, the functions of the election project are entirely public in their significance, and should be open to the usual processes of public accountability. But when private vendors start handling crucial public functions, like social services and elections, lines get drawn in self-contradictory ways. As I come across documentary trails that lead in the direction of IBM or its chief subcontractor in this project Hart InterCivic a significant shift of terrain takes place.

As a journalist I am very much in the habit of picking up the phone, calling public employees, and asking them questions. And as public employees they are generally helpful and responsive. Just a few days ago a fairly well-placed manager in the Texas bureaucracy took down my question, found the answer and called me back in about five minutes time. Are employees of IBM or Hart InterCivic prepared to follow suit?

The question gets stickier the more unfriendlier the reply. For instance, if a public employee refuses to answer questions about public business, there is a structure of appeals, including open records requests. These systems are not always as responsive as they should be, but at least we can press the question of what should be the public’s right to know.

In the case of private contractors who are doing public business, what should be the public’s right to know?

In the hefty contract for the TEAM project, Hart InterCivic holds the state legally liable for guarding its proprietary secrets. No details of the Hart software are to be discussed with or released to the public without prior written approval.

On the one hand, Hart can argue that software developers anywhere have some rights to their private property. Let’s say a software company is licensing spreadsheet software to the state for bookkeeping purposes. Shouldn’t the state respect the property rights of that software? But here’s the rub. In the development and maintenance of election management software, there are nothing but public functions at stake. Why shouldn’t these technologies which will regulate the heart of the voting process be specially reserved for public development by public interests, such as the existing elections division at the SOS?

In the case of this voter database project in Texas, there is some consolation in the fact that the private function has a specific scope and time limit. After Team IBM puts the database system together, the state will operate it, and after four more years of service contracts with Hart InterCivic, the state will have the option to buy back the database system at “fair market value.” So this privatization project is not as grim as others you see around town today, such as the plan to permanently close HHS offices and replace them with contract vendors forever. But we’ll come back to the question later. Now for some facts.

As of April 1 (I don’t pick the dates, I just report them) Team IBM had reported ten thousand billable hours into the database project, or about 27 percent of the total hours that are scheduled. And the state has accepted from them 35 of the “deliverable” items or about 12 percent of the 291 items due by next February, the revised completion date of the project. In return for what the state has received, Team IBM has been paid $220,000 since November, 2004. (Although the report is dated April 1, the number of hours reported is carried over from the March 25 report, so the final April 1 hours will be higher. Stay tuned.)

“The poor start has been corrected,” writes the project manager, “and the project is running much more smoothly.” About that poor start, we’ll soon see what the documents have to say. Shall we start at the beginning?

Way back on Nov. 8, the Monday after the elections, Team IBM was welcomed to the “billable” part of the project. The first thing they asked for was a filing cabinet that locks. The first thing the state asked from Team IBM was a weekly report to be handed in every Tuesday covering the prior week.

Already by this point, Texas was leading other states in the development of its database. The project manager proudly showed off plans in College Station on Nov. 16 to a meeting of County Tax Assessors (who double as voter registrars), held a conference call to share his experience with Arizona, and on Nov. 19 convened the kickoff meeting for the TEAM system.

The trouble began during week three, when IBM delivered its first “deliverable.” Although the file was labeled “Detailed Requirements Specifications” state staff said it was not what they expected to see, and the state’s project manager called the file “incomplete.” And it is here that the knowledge of state staff enters into evidence versus the expertise of a privatized vendor. In exhibit number one, state staff simply had higher expectations than the private sector was delivering. And this is what privatization really feels like, time after time.

As November and December tugged at week four, Team IBM delivered its first deliverable that the state would accept: Deliverable D.1 aka Initial Project Workplan. Not a bad month’s work.

Also during week four, TEAM held its first group organizational meeting and invited a speaker. Cathy Cioffi is overseeing the overhaul of a statewide Crash Records Information System (CRIS). The project weighs in at $14.1 million involving two state agencies (DPS and TxDOT) and a private giant (Northrup Grumman).

A quick google on Cioffi yields an interesting article about Knowledge Management or KM in which Cioffi is quoted as saying, if you want $14 million for something, don’t call it KM: “We could not have gotten funding at the state level for something classified as a KM project,” says CRIS Project Manager Cathy Cioffi. “We had to show the business links–and where the value is–because we’re using taxpayer dollars.”

In an age of privatization Cioffi’s quote is nicely done. If you want to spend public money, focus on the business links. Well, she didn’t invent the times she’s living in, but she does express them very well.

But what if we take Cioffi’s hint that this is really Knowledge Management that we’re talking about? The article by Alice Dragoon at CIO Archives stresses that the way you do KM is incrementally, because folks who don’t know KM won’t support you otherwise. Consider another KM strategist: “He would start with a series of small, discrete KM initiatives that would quickly demonstrate value, then gradually build on those successes, creating a knowledge-enabled organization one layer at a time.”

It’s a great strategy no doubt this layering where one thing at a time you make your whole world datafied. It appeals to my inner geekness, my own database dreams of struggle. But it also whispers a cautionary hint. These data projects that we are funding all around us have a great potential to add up to something. Are we thinking ahead?

In our business oriented public life, no law gets considered for adoption without a fiscal note. This helps lawmakers avoid the mistake of passing a law that on its face has no budget but in consequence will really cost a lot of money. Cioffi’s hint about the politics of Knowledge Management suggests that something like a fiscal note might be considered for KM. If KM projects are going to be sold in our business-oriented world in terms of fiscal efficiency, then how are we going to flag the need for discussing their actual KM implications in public life?

Week five finds our subcontractor in election affairs Hart InterCivic down at the Department of Public Safety, figuring out how best to tap into everything your state troopers have to offer. And this is just the sort of occasion that calls for a growl. What could be more public in function than records kept by your friendly state troopers? At this point, the interface between two very public functions is being funneled into proprietary private software. In the voting system of the future, there will be a real-time interface between voting rolls and criminal records, between voter registration applications and drivers license records. In the meeting between Hart and DPS are we enabling the privatization of interfaces that have nothing but public uses? And what rights do we have to even ask Hart what they might be up to?

Meanwhile during week five our project manager meets with subcontractor GeoDecisions to get oriented on the possibilities of graphical mapping. The project includes mapping because voter information will be mapped to street addresses and street addresses will be mapped to voter precincts. In addition, census data will be overlaid onto precinct maps. Not only will voters have the ability to find out where they should vote, but political strategists will be able to call up reports that show which streets tend to vote in Democratic primaries, with names and addresses attached.

The mapping meeting also raises new issues about the brave new world of data interfacing. Imagine the day coming when Hart InterCivic will sell software that interfaces mapping with state trooper criminal records? Want arrest records by street? Maps of criminal histories?

When Texas hired their project manager, they went and got the guy who wrote a textbook on project management so watch out, he’s into the concept, very much. During week five he sorts through your three basic project categories: Deliverables (the things that can be finished and turned over at a specific point in time); Working Documents (that have to be kept updated and are therefore subject to change and never really finished); and Assumption Items (what you assume to be true about parameters, capabilities, partners, and other forms of reality). And when he’s finished going through all these things, he makes a note: “found 117 items to exchange categories.” I don’t know about you, but that kind of thing makes me go wow, this guy really knows how to KM! Makes you wanna peek at his desktop, too. Or when you move something from assumption to deliverable, what kind of move is that?

Note to self: during week six the project manager goes to Cooper Consulting’s “monthly project managers meeting” on December 14. Now what is Cooper Consulting up to exactly? Please don’t forget to ask. Meanwhile, Team IBM after six weeks work and two deliverables down (I don’t know what the second one is) has logged 2,386 billable hours.

Weeks seven and eight should be holiday weeks for sane people. But right at the beginning TEAM holds a Focus Group meeting for 20 representatives from 12 counties, then the project manager lines up his empty files to be filled later by all the signed docs. That sounds like a reasonable way to work during the holidays. Get your filing system set up for the New Year. I may be WASP, but there are days you have to relax a little.

Week nine is the first week of the New Year. The project manager touches base with the Legislative Budget Board about getting permission to do the computer development in Austin rather than West Texas where all state computer work is supposed to be done in facilities managed by Northrup Grumman.

Do you wonder just a little if IBM and Hart trust Grumman to keep all these proprietary secrets during the coming year? I want to label parts of this paragraph as abject speculation, but while spell checking Northrup Grumman against their website, they informed me that their next generation pilotless killer airplane just took off for a test. Now you put that thing together with a mappable DPS database of troublemakers and you’ll long for the good ol days of tasers I assure you.

On Jan. 7, the project manager reports three new deliverables, places a purchase order, and heads off to South Padre for a conference on election management. It’s good to be king.

series to be continued

Former State Representative Glen Maxey of Austin will lead the effort
to defeat the Texas constitutional amendment prohibiting recognition of civil
marriage or civil unions between persons of the same gender which the
Legislature has placed on the November, 2005 statewide ballot.

"I’m eager to use my experience to bring a broad coalition of
fair-minded Texans together to say ‘No’ to this nonsense in November," said Maxey in a Tuesday press release from the Lesbian /
Gay Rights Lobby of Texas.

"With public education, health care access, and rational and fair tax
policy languishing, the Legislature spent their time and our tax
dollars enacting this divisive, unnecessary amendment. They now are
asking Texans to rubber stamp their efforts to deny many Texans the
basic civil rights to protect their relationships and their family’s
property and inheritance rights, hospital visitation, and the hundreds
of other rights and responsibilities brought by a civil marriage or
civil union."

Maxey, 53, is a native of Baytown, Texas and holds a Masters Degree in
Education and a B.S. in Social Rehabilitation and Social Services from
Sam Houston State University. He has a 35 year career in political
activism, campaign management, and public policy. He has participated
in hundreds of electoral campaigns ranging from municipal, county and
school elections to Presidential campaigns and issue referendums. He
was instrumental in the historic grass roots effort that helped elect
Governor Ann Richards in 1990 and was the Texas statewide coordinator
for Gov. Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004. He has been an integral part
of statewide campaigns for over three decades. His leadership in 2004
resulted in a historic voter turnout in Travis County local elections.

Lesbian Gay Rights Lobby of Texas Press Release