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The Farce Of UN Statehood For Palestine

There are a host of legitimate, substantive reasons to censure the recent Palestinian Authority (PA) application for statehood at the United Nations. Some observers have accused PA President Mahmoud Abbas of using the statehood bid as a cynical ploy to bolster his moribund popularity. Legal experts have asserted that the ramifications of the application could lead to a situation where diaspora Palestinians lose their internationally recognized right of return, codified in United Nations General Assembly resolution 194.

But perhaps the most trenchant criticism is the most simple: so what? Even if the Security Council voted in favor of the resolution, what change would it impact on the ground?

There is reason to laud the PA for this enterprise—without the approval or sanction of the United States—and asserting their own agency in the peace process. Although there are risible claims being regurgitated by the Israel for-right-or-for-wrong crowd that this is a “unilateral” maneuver, this is a very meaningful effort at internationalizing the conflict. In effect, the PA is attempting to move the conflict and the negotiations outside the penumbra of United States and Israeli control. Moreover, even if the Palestinians were to simply receive “observer status” through General Assembly ratification, they would have access to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. If anything, this could at least begin to bridge the massive differential power dyad between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The diplomatic and media brouhaha over the application demonstrates two points: 1) The two-state solution paradigm is obsolete; and 2) the United States will support nothing but a Israeli controlled and dictated Palestinian state. As I have written previously, Palestinian self-determination, following in the footsteps of their Arab brethren, will only truly be achieved through mass nonviolent civil resistance. Unfortunately, the PA is either unwilling or incapable of coordinating the already manifold efforts of nonviolent resisters. In early September, I heard a panel of PA representatives exhorting the participants of the discussion to accept and promote the statehood bid. When asked “what if it fails? What type of collaborative efforts is the PA engaged in with civil society?”, their answers were couched as though they were talking to US or Israeli officials. “We have informed demonstrators to remain within certain boundaries and not provoke,” they quickly retorted.

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The Karl Rove Of Russia

The Article: Putin’s Rasputin by Peter Pomerantsev at the London Review of Books.

The Text: The next act of Russian history is about to begin: Putin and Medvedev will pop off-stage into the Moscow green room, switch costumes, and re-emerge to play each other’s roles. Putin as president, again, Medvedev as PM. It’s the apotheosis of what has become known as ‘managed democracy’, and the ultimate triumph of the show’s writer-director, Putin’s chief ideologue and grey cardinal, Vladislav Surkov, the ‘Kremlin demiurge’. Known also as the ‘puppetmaster who privatised the Russian political system’, Surkov is the real genius of the Putin era. Understand him and you understand not only contemporary Russia but a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than the 20th-century strains.

There is something cherubic in Surkov’s soft, smooth face, something demonic in his stare. He trained as a theatre director then became a PR man; now his official role is ‘vice-head of the presidential administration’, but his influence over Russian politics is unsurpassed. He is the man behind the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’, in which democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms, the man who has turned television into a kitsch Putin-worshipping propaganda machine and launched pro-Kremlin youth groups happy to compare themselves to the Hitler Youth, to beat up foreigners and opposition journalists, and burn ‘unpatriotic’ books on Red Square. But this is only half the story.

In his spare time Surkov writes essays on conceptual art and lyrics for rock groups. He’s an aficionado of gangsta rap: there’s a picture of Tupac on his desk, next to the picture of Putin. And he is the alleged author of a bestselling novel, Almost Zero. ‘Alleged’ because the novel was published (in 2009) under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky – Surkov’s wife is called Natalya Dubovitskaya. Officially Surkov is the author of the preface, where he denies being the author of the novel, then makes a point of contradicting himself: ‘The author of this novel is an unoriginal Hamlet-obsessed hack’; later, ‘this is the best book I have ever read.’ In interviews he has come close to admitting to being the author while always pulling back from a complete confession. Whether or not he actually wrote every word of it he has gone out of his way to associate himself with it.

The novel is a satire of contemporary Russia whose hero, Egor, is a corrupt PR man happy to serve anyone who’ll pay the rent. A former publisher of avant-garde poetry, he now buys texts from impoverished underground writers, then sells the rights to rich bureaucrats and gangsters with artistic ambitions who publish them under their own names. The world of PR and publishing as portrayed in the novel is extremely dangerous. Publishing houses have their own gangs, whose members shoot each other over the rights to Nabokov and Pushkin, and the secret services infiltrate them for their own murky ends. It’s exactly the sort of book Surkov’s youth groups burn on Red Square.

Born in provincial Russia to a single mother, Egor grows up as a bookish hipster disenchanted with the late Soviet Union’s sham ideology. In the 1980s he moves to Moscow to hang out on the fringes of the bohemian set; in the 1990s he becomes a PR guru. It’s a background that has a lot in common with Surkov’s, the details of which were barely known until an article in Novoye Vremya earlier this year set the record straight. He was born in 1964, the son of a Russian mother and a Chechen father who left when Surkov was still a young child. Former schoolmates remember him as someone who made fun of the teacher’s pets in the Komsomol, wore velvet trousers, had long hair like Pink Floyd, wrote poetry, was a hit with the girls. He was a straight-A student whose essays on literature were read aloud by teachers in the staff room: it wasn’t only in his own eyes that he was too smart to believe in the social and political set-up around him.

In the 1980s and early 1990s Russia was experimenting with different modes at a dizzying rate: Soviet stagnation led to perestroika, which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal euphoria, then economic disaster. How to believe in anything when everything around you is changing so fast? Surkov abandoned a range of university careers from metallurgy to theatre directing, put in a spell in the army, went to bohemian parties, had regular violent altercations (he was expelled from drama school for fighting). Surkov, it said (or allegedly said) in one of the US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, had always thought of himself as an unrecognised genius, but it took him a while to find his metier.

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The Counter-Intelligence Of Third Party Movements

As the American presidential election looms in the not-so distant future, political polarization has thrust formerly functioning parties into the depths of dysfunction and replaced them with vengeful factions that are fueled only by the other’s failure. It is not about fixing the economy anymore; it is about fixing the stage for the next election. While our economic fate may have already been sealed due to the political paralysis that has dominated the legislative scene, its exacerbation or amelioration hinges on the results of the 2012 Presidential election.

Heterogeneous and drawing from a panoply of activist groups, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has gained formidable power since its inception in mid-September. Despite Obama’s efforts to identify with OWS and mimic their fervor in his stump speeches, gravity has pulled the Obama Administration from campaign ambitions and dragged down Obama’s popularity in the polls. The fear, as John Nichols so aptly stated in a column in The Nation, is that the “movement might well develop into a virtual primary challenge for Obama.”

Because of Obama’s limited powers to enact the changes the OWSers so adamantly demand, bipartisan disenchantment and manifested outrage concerning current problems have largely distracted the left from how much worse things could be in the future. Thus, the stage is set for the emergence of appealing third party candidates at a juncture of extreme uncertainty. If history is to serve as any kind of guide, casting votes to emergent third parties leads only to the opposite of what political break-aways want.

1844 marked one of these pivotal Presidential elections. Largely divided on the issue of slavery, a sect of northern abolitionists did not seek to gradually abolish slavery; they demanded it then and there. With roots in the Second Great Awakening scene in New York, the Liberty Party canvassed the city and used then-modern media like the printing press to champion their cause throughout the state. Analogous to the Occupy Wall Street movement, Liberty Party members were often subject to violence throughout their work.

Despite being dubbed the “Great Compromiser” by many and an “ideal man” by future president Abraham Lincoln, the Liberty Party was disenchanted with Whig Henry Clay’s moderate stance on slavery. To them, he was not active or vehement enough in abolishing slavery in spite of the inconvenient reality that the executive branch at the time had little constitutional power to combat the issue directly. Thus the Liberty Party’s unrealistic goals of immediacy resulted in a significant vote for James Birney, which, as many speculate, cost Clay the state of New York and the election as a whole.

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Inequality, Economic Growth, And The Capitalist State

The Article: Born Poor? by Corey Pein in the Sante Fe Reporter.

The Text: Consider these two numbers. Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz.

The first number is 3,500.

The second is 32.

The first is how many jobs Santa Fe County lost in 2009, according to the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions.

The second number is how many jobs the state Economic Development Department claims to have created in Santa Fe last year.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that something is wrong with this equation.

But Samuel Bowles is a genius—or, at least, a certified smart person. Bowles heads the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute, which is home to dozens of big brains imported from all over the world. If he’s right, those troubling job numbers are only the start of New Mexico’s problems.

Indeed, if Bowles is right, the state needs to completely rethink the way it does economic development.

“Bowles is a very well-educated guy with a real interesting background. He’s not of the ilk of most economists up in Santa Fe,” Kim Posich, executive director of the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty, says. “His ideas are not always run-of-the-mill.”

With haves becoming have-nots at an alarming rate, now is a terrible time for run-of-the-mill ideas.

Like most states, New Mexico’s economic policy is aimed at attracting corporations—and the bigger the better. In his Jan. 19 State of the State speech to the New Mexico state Legislature, Gov. Bill Richardson promised to “oppose any tax increase that hurts our efforts to keep the state economically competitive and create new jobs—such as increasing personal income taxes, rolling back our capital gains tax cuts or decreasing business tax incentives.”

He isn’t far out of step with President Barack Obama who, in his State of the Union speech nine days later, called for the elimination of “all capital gains taxes on small business investment” and a new “tax incentive for all businesses, large and small, to invest in new plants and equipment.”

There is brainpower behind both arguments.

“Most economists would support the argument the governor has made,” Tom Clifford, chief economist for the Legislative Finance Committee, tells SFR. “Sam Bowles would probably disagree.”

In so many words, yes. Bowles steers clear of politics, but his findings—gleaned from decades of poring over demographic surveys, other economists’ research and in-person visits to places like the slums of India—have obvious relevance to lawmakers’ debates within the Roundhouse.

Especially when it comes to how those thousands of out-of-work New Mexicans might regain respectable livelihoods.

As becomes evident within a few minutes in his company, Bowles is a man in demand—at least by his SFI comrades. Institute staff, students and fellow faculty stop him every few minutes to ask about this upcoming meeting or that piece of data.

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The Rise Of The Sleep Over Rebellion

They wanted the Mayor to sleep over.

For one night. In the park. Sleeping bag and all. They wanted the park renamed after Troy Davis, a Georgia man put to death in September. And finally, Occupy Atlanta wanted a promise no one would be arrested.

No chance on the name change, Mayor Kasim Reed replied. Or the no arrest guarantee. But the Mayor would pray on the sleep-over decision.

The protesters chalked it up as a victory anyway. Yes, Bank of America still raked in too much money. And sure, many of them still did not have jobs. But, at the very least, they were relevant.

They had done it. That scruffy gaggle of un- and under- employed but, thanks to sympathetic local delis, over-fed youths had seized the media spotlight. They would be on the evening news after the game. The Mayor’s PR team spent an entire afternoon crafting the pros and cons of a camp slumber party because of them.

Occupy Wall Street marks an inflection point long overdue. The crystallization of a shattered ideal for millions of Millennials. They are a generation coming to grips that America’s best days may truly lie behind it. An America where politicians serve to get elected, not to govern. A generation that will not be more successful than their parents but will move back in with them.

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