&host=rt.com&uri=/usa/blogs/view-oakland-christopher-university/&via=(none)&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html))
A view from Oakland
Christopher Petrella
Christopher Petrella is a doctoral candidate in the African American Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He writes a weekly column for NationOfChange and teaches at San Quentin State Prison. In addition to his regular contributions to NationOfChange, he has written for Monthly Review, Truthout, Axis of Logic, and The Real Cost of Prisons. Christopher holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from Bates College and an M.A. from Harvard University in Religion, Ethics, and Politics. He lives in Oakland, CA with his partner
12 March, 2012, 23:22
Dismembering the War on Drugs
If wars are irreducible to elements of physical combat and drugs to their chemical composition, then the so-called “War on Drugs” is at best a slippery shibboleth, at worst, a misnomer. If war is a metaphor and if “metaphors can kill,” as U.C. Berkeley linguist George Lakoff famously reminds us, then what would it mean to find ourselves dismembered by a figure of speech? Moreover, if war can be...
24 February, 2012, 01:05
Criminalizing the poor: from welfare to cellfare
On August 22, 1996 President Bill Clinton signed into law his now infamous Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act thereby “end[ing] welfare as we have come to know it.” The Act replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). TANF establishes a lifetime limit of 60 months (5 years) for federal assistance, mandates that single...
16 February, 2012, 20:49
Revolution on an empty stomach?
In October, 2011 Slovenian-born philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, addressed a crowd of nearly four-hundred residents of Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. Zizek—revered as much for his irreverence as for his acuity—waxed poetic on the theme of social possibility. “On the one hand,” he said, “everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics…but look at the...
10 February, 2012, 21:07
Market socialism: Alaska’s most coveted export?
Less than six months before his assassination on April 4, 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. first endorsed the idea of “the guaranteed income” in his collection of essays entitled Where Do we Go From Here, Chaos or Community? King writes, hitherto now “we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing...
26 January, 2012, 00:36
Yesterday’s deception, today’s correction (How Mitch Daniels and the GOP got it all wrong)
Dear Gov. Mitch Daniels and your Republican Brethren, Your response to President Obama’s State of the Union last night was deceitful, historically tenuous, and politically unsophisticated. George Orwell once said that “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” (Follow along here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7giygZFgHY ) M.D. "The percentage of Americans with a...
19 December, 2011, 20:52
Financing our freedoms
What to the debtor is freedom? During his 1941 State of the Union Address—known most commonly as his Four Freedoms Speech— President Franklin Delano Roosevelt first enunciated his aspiration to secure a country whose citizens “are free from want.” That is, FDR aimed to advance a nation whose citizenry held the right to an adequate standard of living, one that would establish a minimum threshold...
7 December, 2011, 19:51
Reframing the Payroll Tax Debate
On Monday, November 28 a small cadre of Senate Democrats introduced legislation intended to extend and expand the payroll tax cut first introduced by the Jobs Creation Act of 2010. The Middle Class Tax Cut Act of 2011 (S.1917) – drafted chiefly by the Chair of the Joint Economic Committee , Senator Bob Casey (D-PA)— was summarily rejected by Republicans late last week. (Read the text of S.1917...
28 November, 2011, 19:18
Wal-Mart is larger than Norway: exposing the myth of capital competition
Any epoch of capitalism allegedly premised on competition is visible only from the rearview mirror. It is a leftist truism that in the process of competition, capitalism destroys competition. Competition, therefore, is transformed into its opposite: monopoly. Capitalism no longer survives by enlarging competition, but rather through its reduction. The supreme outcome of the contemporary...
22 November, 2011, 22:45
The “public” in Republican: the privatization of prisons and universities
In 1944 the great Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi penned The Great Transformation in which he vituperated conservatives for privatizing common property resources. He writes, for example, that “allow[ing] the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings” will “result in the demolition of society.” Forty years later, in 1984, I was born. I was born in 1984 and...
11 November, 2011, 01:20
Defaulting on democracy: the political economy of public higher education
In a forceful critique against the single mindedness of late-capitalism Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno once said that happiness is obsolete because it’s uneconomic, but had he lived past 1969 he may have theorized the “the public sphere” in the same way. As I have written before, “the public sphere theoretically remains a space punctuated by elements of universality, openness, and...
