Archive
Posted Nov., 30, 2017, Medium.com—Weinstein & Company: ‘Big Swinging Dicks’ as Business Folk Heroes
Harvey Weinstein is at the top of not just one list but two: that of sexual harassers and aggressors but also another one of abusive, tyrannical CEOs.
Both Harvey and his brother Bob belonged to various lists of America’s toughest bosses publicized by a largely admiring business press including Fortune and Business Week starting in 1980. Journalists and editors underscored their tyrannical and abusive management styles and praised their willingness to make "hard" decisions, such as downsizing middle management, cutting wages, and ordering massive layoffs during the heady days of the go-go 1980s and 1990s of corporate raiders, leveraged-buyouts (LBOs), and company mergers.
Articles included the names of Steve Jobs (NeXT Computing), Donald Rumsfeld (G.D. Searle Pharmaceuticals), Carl Icahn (TWA), Andrew Grove (Intel), and Jack Welch (General Electric). Many of those names are still with us--and so is their management style.
July 30, 2018: "How Political Bullying and Intimidation Work — A Practical Guide"
Author’s Note: this is the second installment in a four-part series on the current public climate of fear and intimidation that since the kick-off of the last presidential campaign in 2015 has dominated national life in the United States to a degree not seen in a long while. In Part One, “The Emotional Toll of Public Bullying and Political Intimidation,” the focus was on the experience of the sheer power and psychological effects of bullying in general and public bullying and political intimidation in particular. Below in Part Two, I now look at how public bullying works as a concrete method and set of political tools: I examine specific devices and tactics that will provide readers something of a practical guide through this potent minefield and a way to anticipate future acts of aggression. As we approach the midterm elections, the hope is to provide readers with some protective mental armor against the daily barrage of assaults.
First posted Sept. 3, 2018--"2018 Elections: Political Thuggery and Party Identities"
In the wake of the tumultuous Kavanaugh hearings marked by wrenching accusations of sexual assault and extreme examples of political bullying, in Part Three I focus on the two major political parties to explore why over the years Republicans and their right-wing supporters have freely resorted to extremely aggressive political tactics and — just as important — why Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies have often failed to take seriously such acts of political violence and skullduggery by their opponents and respond accordingly. Part of the answer, I argue, lies in their respective practices of loyalty and identity, social composition, and conceptions of governing.
Podcast: "Affect & Activism in the Trump Era," Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz (52 mins.)
SUMMARY
- intimidation as a political and theoretical problem
- traumatic lessons
- taking political violence seriously
- political intimidation vs. everyday bullying
- from political tool to an entire political program & form of governing
- how it works
- affective challenges to civic action and activism
- resistance: a nimble politics of anticipation
- creating our own affective facts on the ground
THEORETICAL FRAME
My thinking has been in conversation with the work of Étienne Balibar on citizenship, globalization, extreme violence and the State, Wendy Brown’s deep inquiry into the political project of neoliberalism of “dedemocratization,” Judith Butler’s and Brian Massumi’s respective writings on lawless sovereignty, indefinite detention, and the affective politics of preemption in the endless War on Terror, and Corey Robin’s book on fear as an operative concept in the liberal political tradition.