John B. Cannon's blog

A Great Variety of Morbid Symptoms, Seen in the Reflecting Pool Yesterday

Submitted by John B. Cannon on August 31, 2010 - 3:45pm

New York Times: Glenn Beck Leads Religious Rally at Lincoln Memorial

I watched / listened to most of Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally while doing laundry and cleaning the house. The cheesiness of the voice-overs and unevenness of the speeches lend themselves to easy mockery, but the far right's ability to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, DC yesterday means that this is no laughing matter.

First, on the media coverage of the event: I'm struck by the extent to which the notion of "politics" is becoming largely incoherent; the NYT reports, with a straight face, that this event was about religion, history, or nationality rather than "politics." While speakers stayed away from the strictly partisan, this event was entirely about articulating and mobilizing a politics, both in the narrow sense (firing up the base for the mid-term elections) and the broad sense (laying out an ideology which can serve cohesive and expressive functions for a politics).

Oakland on the eve of the Mehserle verdict: between "Do the Right Thing" and "What is to be Done?"

Submitted by John B. Cannon on July 7, 2010 - 7:32am
After a number of delays, the jury in the trial of Johannes Mehserle, the BART police officer who killed Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland in January 2009, is scheduled to begin its deliberations over again today, in Los Angeles.

The case has collective resonance because of a long history of systematic disregard for and collective punishment directed at Black and Brown communities in the East Bay by various police agencies. This is the underlying question to which we must return. However, public discourse has strayed a long way from this, in that the prospect of protests, upon acquittal or a manslaughter conviction rather than a second-degree murder conviction, have been put forth as a public safety crisis in and of themselves. This post is an attempt, along with many others, to analyze this manufactured crisis and to articulate the question of action which is part of it.

March 4 Actions to Defend Public Education: a Partial Report and a Preliminary Rumination on Next Steps

Submitted by John B. Cannon on March 6, 2010 - 12:59am

I’m writing this while recovering from a good, long, and successful day on the picket lines at UC Santa Cruz, where, over the course of the day, more than a thousand students, workers, and teachers

Resources - Follow the CA Student Movement Online

Submitted by John B. Cannon on February 25, 2010 - 5:27pm
This page, which we'll continue updating from time to time, is an attempt to aggregate sources of information that will help you keep up with what's happening in California university struggles.

When occupations, strikes, and major protests are in progress, the best way to follow them from afar is often through Twitter or Facebook. If you're on twitter, you can follow the following lists:

ca-education-struggle list - maintained by a (G)SOC supporter

cacrisis list, maintained by Angus Johnston, a student movement historian who also writes the studentactivism.net blog

Twitter hashtags are also a useful tool for following what's going on in the movement moment-by-moment. If you're logged into Twitter you can click on this search and save it for yourself. If you've been hiding so far under a rock that you don't have a Twitter account, here's a collection of hashtag searches in a very readable format. (You will have to refresh periodically.)

For daily writeups, movement strategy, and analysis, it's time to move past Twitter into the wilds of the blogosphere.

University Students and Prisoners: Are We All in the Same Boat?

Submitted by John B. Cannon on January 24, 2010 - 7:59pm

In California today, we are facing an onslaught of austerity capitalism in the form of privatization / private accumulation, funding cuts, and neoliberal prioritization that effects public goods in

The Healthcare Debate of 2009: the Role of the Left

Submitted by John B. Cannon on August 31, 2009 - 9:27am

The US Left has a few different tasks in regards to situations of national political importance; among them are 1) putting out our politics about the situation, including a critique of the current

Vigilantism of the Few and the Many; the Darkness of Democracy in The Dark Knight

Submitted by John B. Cannon on August 14, 2008 - 8:05am
The Dark Knight is the pre-eminent summer action-superhero blockbuster of 2008, and will probably soon become the second grossing film of all time, behind

Elliot Spitzer's "Corruption"

Submitted by John B. Cannon on March 19, 2008 - 11:44pm
I'm trying to figure out whether I think Elliot Spitzer actually did anything that we should call "corrupt."  I'm sure he broke his marital vows, quite repeatedly it seems, and I get what the folks are saying that Silda shouldn't have stood by her man, literally, and looked crushed - she should have issued a statement dumping his ass.  Then, at the same time, I feel like that kind of decision is between her and her God and her shrink and so forth and giving a feminist seal of disapproval to her actions seems kind of weird to me.  Of course it seems even weirder that I should be in a position to comment on feminist seals of disapproval, so I might as well just work my way out of this particular thread.

Obama's pastor was right

Submitted by John B. Cannon on March 17, 2008 - 10:47pm
Has anyone noticed how Obama and Clinton have been rushing to outdo each other in "rejecting and denouncing" controversial figures associated with their campaigns?  First it was Obama, with Farrakhan.  I was disappointed to see Obama "reject and denounce" Farrakhan himself - rather than rejecting and denouncing his anti-Semitic statements, which are worthy of being rejected.  But I figured it was par for the course.  Farrakhan has always been a lightning rod of presidential politics; Obama was really just distancing himself (again) from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  Then there was Samantha Power, who is an annoying apostle of human rights liberalism, I believe, and I wasn't sad to see her go.  Then there was Geraldine Ferraro, on the Clinton side, who doesn't seem to have aged gracefully, making remarks which might have had some core sense to them but were expressed in basically openly racist terms.

"Two Buck Huck" and Class in the Republican Presidential Race

Submitted by John B. Cannon on February 19, 2008 - 3:52pm
Mike Huckabee is not going to be the Republican presidential nominee.  Though he’s still in the race, Republican insiders have started endorsing John McCain by the droves.  This includes many Republican leaders who don’t like McCain much (criticizing his “liberal” stances on immigration, tax cuts, and campaign finance), and some who have a lot of affinities with Huckabee’s base, such as Oliver North.  Pundits who have been very critical of McCain, such as Rush Limbaugh, have been asked to tone it down in the name of party unity.