Matt Gonzalez is Ralph Nader's VP

I am very, very excited right now. Not only are we going to get, more likely than not, a fairly charismatic Democratic presidential nominee in Barack Obama, a stodgy Republican, and Ralph Nader, the intrepid consumer rights advocate, but we are also going to have San Francisco's adopted own, Matt Gonzalez, playing a pivotal role in this years election as Ralph Nader's Vice President. I knew that Matt Gonzalez was on Nader's team for a while now, working with the campaign on who-knew-what, but now it is clear that he is going to be taking a central role in this years election. All I can say is what a great ticket. Below I am including a video of Matt Gonzalez talking about what he hopes to bring to the Nader '08 ticket.

Here Come the Issues: Ralph Nader is Running!

He's got a website too: www.votenader.org

East Timor

Leave it to wsws.org to provide the only truly revelatory insight around on the current situation in East Timor. The article by Mike Head posted on February 19th - here, read it! - for one, gives the context sorely lacking in articles by "reputable" American journalism stalwarts like The New York Times and the Washington Post. Without such context how are we to judge the benefactors of the failed assassination attempt on President Ramos-Horta and the alleged attempt on Prime Minister Gusmao. Also, without context, how are we to judge the intent of the continued and augmented presence of Australian military forces, which claim to be in East Timor to keep the peace. 

On the most superficial level, the wsws article is simply much more interesting than the simplistic articles by most media outlets. I thought that making your product interesting was fundamentally necessary in the news business. 

It is simply beguiling why our newspapers can't get it together to give readers a better idea of the situation in such hot-spots as East Timor, and why they cannot simply come out with the disturbing truths about the U.S., and in this case Australia's, long and pretty much exclusively nefarious role in world events. I am not going to go over the whole situation over in East Timor in this post. For that I urge you to check out the original wsws.org article - here. 

Kosovo Independence: It's Complicated

I wish a could write a long winded article on the current situation in Kosovo, but sadly I cannot. The truth is I don't know much about the history of the region and I don't want to sound off like an expert knowing that there is still much to know. I was not fully involved in following current events in 1999, when Clinton ordered NATO conducted air assaults on Serbia, and I haven't read any in-depth piece on the Balkans region; aside from the standard Franz Ferdinand, Black Hand WWI articles.
With that said I can confidently assure my readers that what we know about the situation over there, including all the simple good versus bad arguments that are propagated by the U.S. government/media as well as other NATO countries, is far from the whole story. I will try to catch up on my recent history and post something more balanced than what we are getting from U.S. foreign policy apologists, but such an article will not be ready for a while. Until then, feel free to read up on the Kosovo situation - I guarantee that it will be very interesting - and remember: question, question, question.

Main Issue Special Update

So I've been working on this special on Islam in Britain. Unfortunately, I am not close to done yet. I wasn't able to get all the books I wanted on the first go, so I will probably continue to work on it through this week. I hope to have it up by next Wednesday. In the mean time, enjoy my other less researched articles.
-Brett

Don't Buy the Deficit Lie

It is often very difficult to ascertain the objective truth in the U.S. through the media, due, I believe, to a skewed institutional framework that rewards conventionality and group-thinking over being the archetypal intrepid reporter. There is no clearer example of this corrosive trend than in the sphere of economic reporting - where money is on the line - and no better an example of this than in the media's constant misrepresentation of the federal deficit.

In the past I was one of those who bought, hook, line, and sinker, the media's portrayal of the calamitous nature of our trillion dollar deficit. I understood very clearly that Clinton had surpluses, while Bush has deficits - very large deficits at that. I grasped the concept of a eminently doomed social security system, and a federal budget spiraling out of control. It was quite simple really: we went from a "surplus" to a deficit of $9.2 trillion. To me, the lay-economist, that does not sound too good. And I was not alone. I had most of the media along with a myriad of guest commentators warning me of economic Armageddon if the budget "crisis" was not fixed. For example, just the other day - Feb. 15 - The New York Times ran a profile of the billionaire-cum-government-watchdog Peter G. Peterson. The piece glowingly portrayed this rich man - complete with a heroic profile picture - who, after a long life of making lots and lots of money - and being taxed at 15% - has decided to start a foundation to warn the country about the looming budget catastrophe brought on by "costly entitlement programs, ballooning government deficits and cozy tax arrangements".

This is all fine and good until one realizes that deficits are not bad, social security is a compact made between governments and workers that would be wrong to be broken, and the biggest source of woe in the "entitlement" - social safety net - program is Medicare, which is due to the fact that the U.S. health care system is in shambles. That's a lot to take in all at once, so lets start by looking at the not-so-disastrous deficit.

The truth is that a mere deficit number is completely meaningless. Yeah, sure, $9.2 trillion sounds like a lot of money, but until we compare it with the size of our economy, it is irrelevant. I'll give a quick example: say we are in a small country, Jamaica, with a GDP of $10 billion. Now if Jamaica wanted to borrow, say $9.2 trillion, they would first want to make sure their economy was creating enough wealth to pay off the interest on that loan - fund the debt. Obviously, with a GDP of $10 billion dollars it would be impossible. More realistically, Jamaica could fund a debt of maybe half their GDP - $5 billion - the interest of which could be more easily repaid - Jamaica's actual debt burden is 135% of GDP, very high. The U.S. on the other hand has debt amounting to 34% of GDP, high, but not that high. Deficit to GDP is important, because without that comparison, it is impossible to put a raw deficit number in context.

This is why all this fear mongering is preposterous. That does not mean there can not be a discussion of U.S. debt, but what I suspect is that a discussion is not what many of the people calling for steep cutbacks in government services in order to control the debt have in mind. We can go back to Peter Peterson and his critique of social security to understand their motives better.

Social Security is an agreement between the government and workers that if we pay a certain amount of our paycheck to the government in order to fund todays social security recipients, we will, when we hit retirement age, have the workers of the future funding us. A simple agreement that works remarkably well. The growth of social security payments as a percentage of GDP is actually quite modest - see here - and while some tweaking of the system may be in order, social security is projected to remain solvent with all current formulas intact through 2046.

As I hope I have shown - with the help of many liberal free-thinkers, like Dean Baker, Paul Krugman etc. - is that the problem that, truth be told, conservative fat cats are crying wolf about is not a problem after all. With that said, there is one aspect of our debt that is worrisome and does need desperately to be fixed: Medicare/Medicaid health care.

The largest ballooning cost the U.S. faces today comes from Medicare and Medicaid, due, in full, to a dysfunctional health care system. What is needed is not a little tinkering here and there - see Hillary/Obama health care initiatives - but a complete restructuring of the health care industry, from private HMO and insurance providers, to the disastrous pharmaceutical industry. Single-payer is the one and only answer to this ongoing, and dangerously expensive crisis. The fact that all of the Peter Peterson's out there are not talking about this, the main issue, is telling.

So there you have. I call upon all those who value truth to be highly critical of doomsday talk about our deficit, while all the while demanding that the one issue that needs to be addressed is health care.

Damning Tidbit on Hillary Clinton

Within a very interesting article by Foreign Policy in Focus on the hawkish foreign policy positions of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) - which can be read here - there was some damning information regarding presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton's own hawkishness in the lead-up to war in Iraq. The AFT leadership admits that their initial support for war with Iraq was wrongheaded, but, as Stephen Zunes writes in the article, they "quietly acknowledge that it was actually the testimony of Senator Hillary Clinton before a meeting of labor leaders in 2002 that played a major role in convincing them that there was still an ongoing Iraqi threat".
Now I'll admit that I never did follow Clinton's position on a possible war with Iraq before she voted to authorize the use of force, but this information implicating Clinton as not merely a duped senator, but a wholesale promoter of the war is damning. She ought to be ashamed, not running for president.

Taxi to the Dark Side

"Taxi to the Dark Side", the new film exposé of past and present U.S. torture in this ongoing "war on terror," was slated to be broadcast on the Discovery Channel. But, like many U.S. television stations before it, the Discovery Channel, which owns exclusive broadcasting rights to the film, has decided to not broadcast the film, because they find it "to controversial". Damn right it's controversial, as it should be. The film is about ongoing U.S. torture! So, as has been pointed out before, as Fox broadcasts Jack Bower on 24 torturing fictional terrorists, we are being spared the controversy of learning about our own governments sickening use of torture. This is a complete disgrace. I urge all Main Issue readers to go to Discovery Channel's contact website (here) and tell them that you either want them to broadcast the documentary, or at the least, sell it off to someone who will. If you would like, you can copy and paste what I wrote to them (below). Don't be deterred by the tedious contacting-discovery-channel protocol.

I have just heard the news that the Discovery Channel has decided to not broadcast the incredibly important documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side". This is extremely disappointing. As a company committed to educating the public, you are obligated to either show the program that you have already purchased, or at the very least, sell it to another television station so that they can broadcast this important and pertinent film. "Sitting" on the film for the three years that you have exclusive broadcasting rights is unacceptable. I hope that the Discovery Channel will do what is right for the sake of our democracy. Thank you.

West Bank Story

I don't know what I think about this Oscar winning short film, but I am putting it out there so that you Main Issue readers can have a look and make up your own minds about whether such films are helpful in their broad message of common humanity and building bridges for peace or are just noise that do not help the specific debate over justice and human rights.

Update: Unfortunately, the film was taken down from youtube, but there still remains pieces of it in this edited form along with a so-so dialog between Palestinians and Israelis at the end:

Note to State Department: Don't Ask Peace Corps Members to Spy

ABC News is reporting that a Fulbright scholar along with other Peace Corps volunteers working in Bolivia were asked by the State Department to spy on Cuban and Venezuelan nationals working in the country. The Fulbright scholar, John Alexander van Schnaick, told ABC News that he was approached by an official from the U.S. embassy in Bolivia and "was told to provide the names, addresses and activities of any Venezuelan or Cuban doctors or field workers [he came] across during [his] time [in Bolivia]." The full ABC report can be found here.
This serious and dangerous lapse in State Department protocol shows just how far the U.S. administration has decided to go to regain control in South America and thwart the popular democratic movements taking root in historically undemocratic countries like Bolivia and Venezuela.
This episode should convince the State Department that, unfortunately for them, Peace Corps volunteers have more regard for their role as peace ambassadors, and are more ethically upstanding than to spy.

Islam in Britain

A British friend of mine wrote me today wondering if I might write something about Islam in Britain. It was a coincidence because I have been mulling over the idea for a while now. I have been to Britain numerous times, and I have heard about and witnessed the social angst that is bubbling to the surface in Britain as ethnic and religious demographics change. The tension is acute and apparent, making Britain an interesting place to study what many are labeling a conflict between Islam and the West. The recent uproar over an interview on Radio 4 with Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, in which he said that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law "seems unavoidable," is just a reminder of how contentious the question of how to integrate Islam within a Western Democracy has become. The fact that the Archbishop's remarks were presented thoughtfully and intelligently within a larger discussion on Islam's place within Britain, have, unfortunately, been lost as the uproarious admonishments have spread throughout the British media. And that is why, perhaps, it is time for someone across the "pond" to do an objective article on Islam in Britain. I am going to begin working on the piece Monday, and hopefully I will have it up by the following Monday (revision: probably not; the books I need will take a little longer to get than I expected. In two weeks probably). Check back often for this Main Issue special report: Islam in Britain.

"The Democrats' Class War"

An interesting article by David Sirota on truthdig.com. The original article can be found here. Enjoy!

For all the hype about generational and gender wars in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, we have a class war on our hands. And incredibly, corporate America’s preferred candidate is winning the poorer “us” versus the wealthier “them”—a potentially decisive trend with the contest now moving to working-class bastions like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

In most states, polls show Hillary Clinton is beating Barack Obama among voters making $50,000 a year or less—many of whom say the economy is their top concern. Yes, the New York senator who appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine as Big Business’s candidate is winning economically insecure, lower-income communities over the Illinois senator who grew up as an organizer helping those communities combat unemployment. This absurd phenomenon is a product of both message and bias.

Obama has let Clinton characterize the 1990s as a nirvana, rather than a time that sowed the seeds of our current troubles. He barely criticizes the Clinton administration for championing job-killing trade agreements. He does not question that same administration’s role in deregulating the financial industry and thereby intensifying today’s boom-bust catastrophes. And he rarely points out what McClatchy Newspapers reported this week: that Clinton spent most of her career at a law firm “where she represented big companies and served on corporate boards,” including Wal-Mart’s.

Obama hasn’t touched any of this for two reasons.

First, his campaign relies on corporate donations. Though Obama certainly is less industry-owned than Clinton, the Washington Post noted last spring that he was the top recipient of Wall Street contributions. That cash is hush money, contingent on candidates silencing their populist rhetoric.

But while this pressure to keep quiet affects all politicians, it is especially intense against black leaders.

“If Obama started talking like John Edwards and tapped into working-class, blue-collar proletarian rage, suddenly all of those white voters who are viewing him within the lens of transcendence would start seeing him differently,” says Charles Ellison of the University of Denver’s Center for African American Policy.

That’s because once Obama parroted Edwards’ attacks on greed and inequality, he would “be stigmatized as a candidate mobilizing race,” says Manning Marable, a Columbia University history professor. That is, the media would immediately portray him as another Jesse Jackson—a figure whose progressivism has been (unfairly) depicted as racial politics anathema to white swing voters.

Remember, this is always how power-challenging African-Americans are marginalized. The establishment cites a black leader’s race- and class-unifying populism as supposed proof of his or her radical, race-centric views. An extreme example of this came from the FBI, which labeled Martin Luther King Jr. “the most dangerous man in America” for talking about poverty. More typical is the attitude exemplified by Joe Klein’s 2006 Time magazine column. He called progressive Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., “an African-American of a certain age and ideology, easily stereotyped” and “one of the ancient band of left-liberals who grew up in the angry hothouse of inner-city, racial-preference politics.”

The Clintons are only too happy to navigate this ugly cultural topography. After a rare Obama attack on Hillary Clinton for supporting policies that eliminated jobs, Bill Clinton quickly likened Obama’s campaign to Jackson’s, and the Clinton campaign told the Associated Press that Obama was “the black candidate.” These were deliberate statements telling Obama that if he talks about class, they’ll talk about race.

And so, as Marable says, Obama’s pitch includes “no mention of the class struggle or class conflict.” It is “hope” instead of an economic case, bromide instead of critique. The result is an oxymoronic dynamic.

Obama, the person who fought blue-collar joblessness in the shadows of shuttered factories, is winning wealthy enclaves. But Clinton, the person whose globalization policies helped shutter those factories, is winning blue-collar strongholds.

Obama, who was schooled by the same organizing networks as Cesar Chavez, is being endorsed by hedge fund managers. But Clinton, business’s favorite, is being endorsed by the United Farm Workers—the union that Chavez created.

Obama, the candidate from Chicago’s impoverished South Side, is finding support on Connecticut’s gilded south coast. But Hillary Clinton, the candidate representing Big Money, is finding support from those with relatively little money.

As the campaign heads to the struggling Rust Belt under banners promising “change,” this bizarre class war may end up guaranteeing no real transformation at all.

David Sirota is a best-selling author whose newest book, “The Uprising,” will be released in June. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network—both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.

GMO News

Two stories pertaining to the issue of genetic modification have surfaced recently that I think deserve some special attention. Both news stories reveal how problematic the issue of GM food continues to be in the U.S., years after it was found by the FDA to be safe and ready for commercial use - there remains a moratorium on GMO food in the E.U., and other countries, such as Japan, have strict food labeling rules.

The first news item involves the infamous biotechnology giant Monsanto. The AP reported on Feb. 5 that Ben & Jerry's is protesting a move by Monsanto that would ban the ice cream maker, along with others, from advertising that their products are hormone free. The back-story is that Monsanto produces a bovine growth hormone (rBST) called Posilac which it hopes to see utilized by farmers the world over. Unfortunately, many countries, including Japan, Canada, and the E.U. have banned the sale of rBST for the sake of the animals. The last thing that Monsanto would want to see is a grassroots movement against rBST in their largest market, the U.S. - sadly, for Monsanto, such a movement is already afoot. So, the best hope this GM giant has is to undermine consumer choice by having the government protect their profits. This point about a sly form of protectionism is what is really interesting about this story. It was highlighted by economist Dean Baker in his blog, Beat the Press. The point Mr. Baker makes, which is very interesting for reasons outside of the GMO debate, is that while we call governments protectionist when they move to protect certain industries against foreign competition, we refuse to label such antics as the ones outlined above protectionist.
The second story has more to do with bread-and-butter GMO objections. A recent study by a research team from the University of Arizona has found that the bollworm insect has become resistant to a toxin produced by a type of genetically modified cotton - incidentally, this cotton is produced by Monsanto and it's called Bollgard. The bollworm can wreak havoc on cotton crops, and so the creation of the bollworm resistant cotton was a godsend for farmers. What Monsanto failed to do was stop evolution, and so slowly, but, as we now see, surely, the bollworm evolved resistance to the toxin. It was really only a matter of time before it happened. Invariably the arms race between man and nature will continue. But these two stories highlight the danger of going nuclear, so to speak.

Comedy at The Main Issue

Here is a little clipping from HillaryClinton.com:

Conniving Clinton and Shady Obama

The McClatchy newspaper has an interesting article about the real history of our two Democratic candidates. They go into the most detail on Ms. Clinton's thirty-year corporate shenanigans, while leaving a few paragraphs at the end to assault Obama's upstanding facade. The article can be found here.

Endorsements... And Then On To Important Topics

On the eve of super tuesday, with the fates of the Democratic and Republican candidates still up in the air, I have decided to put it all out on the table and do endorsements (Obama, Paul). OK, now with that out of the way I can get to what I really want to discuss in this post. It involves meaty presidential politics after the Democratic and Republican nominations are sealed. 

In the last long six months or so, we have heard a lot from our Repub-Democrat presidential wannabes. We have heard them address the tough issues, from caring for our veterans to faith. We have heard them tell us how they will change the culture in Washington, how they are the candidates of change, and why they are able to change things more than the next guy or girl. We also heard about change. 

Even though it may not always be obvious, beneath all of this political showmanship and jousting, many of these candidates have staked out, more or less, positions on the tough issues facing our country other than whether they can be a change from Bush. Presenting "clear and coherent programs to voters" is what a responsible party government is all about, or at least that is what my political science textbook told me. A candidate telling an electorate that they have a secret plan to fix a problem, and that the electorate need just trust the candidate, vote for him, and then find out about the plan after the election (see Richard Nixon) is not fair, nor does it fit with the sort of democratic system we want to engender. So it is much better when candidates just tell us what they are thinking of doing when they win the election, and then let us decide who to vote for. 

I have been lucky enough to have the time to check out each candidate's issues repository on their websites. This section is constantly being augmented and changed. For example, some months ago I went onto Barack Obama's website to check out where he stands on all the important issue and I wrote this - Not very friendly, huh. Fortunately, things have changed. He now has a hundred more words on the Iraq war than on Veterans, although both are dwarfed by his section on Family (over 2,000 more words). 

All this is really beside the point though. What matters is the substance of the policy pronouncements. Quality not quantity. Now, I consider myself progressive, so I am personally particularly interested in the positions of the Democrats. Environment, tax equality, military expenditure, progressive foreign policy, corporate welfare, reinvigorating government regulation on business on behalf of the people, healthcare; all these issues and more are what I really want to hear about. I am really disheartened to say that the majority of these issues are almost completely ignored, passed over, or are illiberal. Barack Obama wants to expand the military by 92,000 troops. Hilary has a dubious past (see ABC report), an uninspiring senatorial stint (luckily we can still burn flags), and big support from corporate interests, especially Wall Street. Barack is really no better, and his relatively recent foray into politics gives the fact-checkers a lot less to check up on. 

The issues that I outlined above are at best appeased, and at worst not even mentioned. Get this: both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do not have an issue section on their website devoted to the environment (I'm not talking energy security, I'm talking national parks, wetlands etc.). The only viable candidate with such a section is John McCain, the Republican. When it comes to healthcare, Clinton offers a plan to achieve universal coverage in an awful roundabout way which includes fining people if they don't pony up and pay for health insurance. She and Barack both do not address the real endemic tragedies of our healthcare misfire, including profiteering drug companies, profit demented and empathy anemic insurance providers, and massive administration costs. 

If liberals were expecting to find a call for more regulation of Wall Street, a revamping of fundamental economic policy (monetary and trade), and more corporate oversight and consumer protection, we must have fooled ourselves into thinking that our vote mattered. In reality, the Democrats take liberals and progressives for granted, just as the Republicans pander to the religious right and then never deliver the goods. 

And then there is the arena of foreign policy. Both Barack and Hillary have a completely vapid approach to foreign policy, and that is what, to me, is the most distressing. On the Israel/Palestine issue, both Democrats forgo liberalism and support the continuation of the same old disastrous policy against the Palestinians. Both Hillary and Barack do not renounce the jingoistic foreign policy of Bush. They continue to buy into the idea that the U.S. empire is both moral and justified, while being neither. Their Iraq policy can not be summed up better than by this quote from Noam Chomsky: The opposition to the war today in elite sectors, including every viable candidate, is pure cynicism, completely unprincipled: "If we can get away with it, it's fine. If it costs us too much, it's bad." 

So, what do we do when we have been abandoned by the one party that claims to offer us a place in this democracy. First we wait until after the primary rigmarole is over. Then we look towards the oft-forgotten third-parties. Luckily this year, it looks as though we might have some choices. 

The rumor mills have been churning over a possible Michael Bloomberg run. While some see such a candidate as being another assault by the business interests of this country on the underrepresented majority (see here), I think that a Bloomberg candidate could add an interesting element to the presidential race, and allow more issues to come to the fore. 

The other possible candidate, and one who I am personally very excited about, is Ralph Nader. Mr. Nader has put up a presidential exploratory website (here) for the purpose of looking into a possible run, especially, he says, now that Edwards and Kucinich are gone, and Hillary may win. 

Now the arguments against Nader are many, and I don't hope to convince everyone on the value of having Mr. Nader run again. He is very good at laying out his own case, which you can see on a recent Main Issue blog post (Nader '08). But let me just say that for one, Nader did not loose the election for Gore, Gore lost it for himself (he was an incumbent VP, running while the economy boomed, and still lost his home state). Secondly, having Nader in the race creates a presidential contest where voters may actually be able to be educated about issues rarely discussed. This, in a functioning democracy, is a good thing, and we need a lot more of it. Lastly, a Nader presidential run, more than anything else - especially more than winning, which he is unlikely to do seeing as the system is so rigged in favor of the Demo-Republicans - could build a framework with which to mobilize people who care about fixing our democracy, and to send them off to educate and inform our cynical and apathetic population, and, hopefully, to live on to fight the good fight in the political arenas of the future. 

This is why my real endorsement goes to the to-be-announced Ralph Nader ticket. Happy voting! 

Juno

I hated the movie "Juno". Like "Knocked Up" before it, I found Juno to be an utterly empty and pointless movie with disturbing overtones. Also like "Knocked Up," I look towards wsws.org to convey with brevity what I find to be so bad about this more recent morally and politically vapid film. 

Review of Juno by Hiram Lee for wsws.org:

Juno, the new film from director Jason Reitman, has been lavished with praise and awards. Two weeks ago, it received Academy Award nominations in several categories: best picture, best director, best actress and best original screenplay. And like most of the movies nominated for best picture this year, it is not very good.

Juno is a comedy about teen pregnancy and adoption, but not a social satire, properly speaking. It is no Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944). While there are countless jokes in the film, none of them shed much light on the subject matter. Instead, Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody inject crack after crack into their story almost at random. The humor is largely imposed on the events, not drawn from exploring the real-life contradictions and relations that such events might generate. It would have been second nature to a Sturges or a Jacques Tati to uncover the absurd or ridiculous possibilities of the situation itself.

“I actually see the movie as completely apolitical,” Reitman told CanMag.com in a recent interview. This stance, in itself a political position, also says a great deal about the film. One gets the impression the director has made a point of not stepping on anyone’s toes. He has, consequently, produced a toothless and evasive work that doesn’t challenge anyone or anything.

The story begins with 16-year-old Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) staring at the chair in which she and her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) have had their first sexual experience together. Having discovered—or accepted—that she is pregnant after her third home pregnancy test in a single day, Juno decides to have her baby and put it up for adoption.

The filmmakers quickly dispatch Juno’s initial plans to have an abortion. The clinic she visits disgusts her; it’s more reminiscent of the average Department of Motor Vehicles office than a caring medical facility. A lone protester outside the building—a fellow classmate of Juno’s—disturbs her further.

On the abortion issue, the filmmakers take the easy way out. They rush through the matter as though it were an obligation that has to be overcome before they get on with the real business of their film. While it would perhaps be unfair to say that Juno is “pro-life,” it certainly renders abortion an unthinkable course of action for the intelligent girl at the center of the story. The ludicrous arguments of her classmate-protester sway her with remarkable ease.

With abortion no longer an option, Juno must tell her parents about her condition and prepare for the coming adoption. Her parents are strangely unshaken by their daughter’s announcement. “I didn’t know he had it in him” is her father’s response to learning that the shy and unassuming Paulie Bleeker is the father. That Juno’s parents—or any parents for that matter—might respond to such a situation with sensitivity and support one might be willing to accept, but these parents respond with considerable amusement, taking things almost effortlessly in stride. The response feels false, arranged to make the film “contrarian” and unexpected in an empty fashion (see Reitman’s previous effort, Thank You for Smoking).

In the back pages of a PennySaver, Juno finds the perfect couple to adopt her baby. Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa Loring (Jennifer Garner) are wealthy suburbanite professionals, people quite different from Juno and her own working class family. They are more than eager to enter into an arrangement with Juno in spite of the teenager’s brash and even patronizing behavior.

It should come as no surprise that this picture-perfect husband and wife will soon reveal themselves to be anything but perfect. Juno’s presence will awaken in Mark a desire to reconnect with his youth and his rock-n-roll past and to escape the stuffy atmosphere of his bourgeois life. This puts his marriage to the prim and proper Vanessa in jeopardy as well as the adoption itself.

Bateman’s performance turns out to be one of the few highlights of the film. While his character is certainly not a new creation, the actor is somehow able to draw a compelling and understated performance out of the well-worn material. His character is one of the few recognizable human beings in the work.

In contrast, perhaps the film’s greatest flaw is the character of Juno herself; she may in fact be the film’s least genuine element. She is quirky, like so many characters we’ve seen in this sort of comedy. We know this because she frequently has an unlit pipe stuck in her mouth, listens to The Stooges and has a telephone shaped and painted like a hamburger. Juno refuses to give a straight answer to any question put to her. Instead, every line out of her mouth is a joke, a quip or, worse, a zinger. “Being pregnant makes me pee like Seabiscuit,” she says at one point. In the same scene she points out the difference between Presidents Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt: “Franklin was the hot one with polio.” This all becomes tedious rather quickly.

Ultimately, Juno is not a real living and breathing human being so much as she is a contrivance, a mouthpiece for screenwriter Diablo Cody’s one-liners. It’s disconcerting, but not in an interesting way, to hear the screenwriter’s adult (or quasi-adult) humor and vocabulary emerge from 16-year-old Juno. The teenager can be heard to say in on scene, “I’m telling you I’m pregnant and you’re shockingly cavalier.” The words simply do not fit in her mouth.

Canadian-born Ellen Page has received numerous accolades for her performance as Juno, and there’s no denying her talent. She first gained notoriety when she appeared in Hard Candy (2005), a film about a teenage girl—an avenging angel of sorts—who tortures and terrorizes a pedophile she suspects was involved in the murder of a young girl. Essentially a right-wing vigilante picture of the most wrong-headed variety, Page, at least, was able contribute a disturbing and memorable performance.

In Juno, however, her performance fails to move the viewer. This is principally a problem of the material. It’s doubtful that any actor could have made much of it. A great deal of Page’s screen time is spent debating music and movies with Bateman’s character: what was the best period for rock-n-roll music?, was Dario Argento the greatest director of horror movies?, etc. It doesn’t amount to much at all.

As the film draws to a close, with the outcome of the adoption now uncertain thanks to the challenges facing the Lorings, the film grows increasingly sentimental. “I just need to know,” Juno will say to her father, having been changed by her recent experiences, “if it’s possible for two people to stay happy together forever.” She will go on to tell Bleeker how her baby only kicks when he’s around.

This is the basic trajectory of the film. Juno is tough and quick-witted, confident to a fault, but inside she is soft, sentimental, even scared. A banal revelation, to be sure, but all the filmmakers have to offer. For all its “offbeat” posturing, Juno is ultimately a very conventional movie. There is no reason why it shouldn’t do very well for itself at this year’s Academy Awards.

The Main Issue Manifesto, by Michel Foucault

I couldn't have described why I care about politics any better than how Monsieur Foucault described his love of politics. Without further ado, the new manifesto for my blog, The Main Issue, from the Chomsky v. Foucault debate in 1971:

Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves. 

So I can't answer the question of why I should be interested; I could only answer it by asking why shouldn't I be interested? Not to be interested in politics, that's what constitutes a problem. So instead of asking me, you should ask someone who is not interested in  politics and then your question would be well-founded, and you would have the right to say, "Why, damn it, are you not interested?"

Nader '08