Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism |
|
May 3, 2024: The Week in Review
An Elemental Rising:
Youth as a Critical Force Pointing a Way Forward
|
|
Elemental Risings that embody a just cause do not occur every day in any society. Six months ago, hardly anyone would have predicted what we are seeing unfold today. And it has yet to reach its peak.
We're reminded of the line from our generation's bard and his 'Ballad of a Thin Man, 'Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.'
If we didn't know, we're learning quickly. The brief Hamas incursion into Israel last Oct 7, with all the evils existing alongside justified claims, took some 1200 Israeli lives, military and civilian, then returned to Gaza with some 230 hostages. Some claim it was the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. It's a bit of a stretch to compare 1200 souls to the 6 million but set that aside for the moment. One thing is becoming clear: the Hamas strike was 'overdetermined,' to use a fancy word for punching a hole in a hornet's nest.
Everything is now turned upside down. So far, the IDF has killed some 35,000 Palestinians residing in Gaza and seriously wounded 200,000 more while destroying hospitals and access to medical supplies. Today, relief officials report some 750,000 children in Gaza are in various stages of starvation. Even if we discount, say, 15,000 of the dead as Hamas militants, it still means sixteen Palestinians dead for every Israeli, IDF or not, and the disproportion is rising. And it's far worse when you consider that Israel, with its 'Iron Dome,' has not, in recent memory, seen anything like the wreckage and carnage of Gaza. The two UN-initiated world courts are well within reason to be considering charges of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes against Israel's Likud government.
But early on, two groups in our society had moral clarity. The Palestinian and Muslim youth in their campus organizations, and Jewish youth, organized as Jewish Voices for Peace, and their campus allies. Together they evolved far beyond their initial reach into what we now can call an insurgent critical force, a concept and analysis first developed by Mike Klonsky back in 1968.
The critical force rises as a prophetic but militant minority of young people holding up a mirror to the wider society. They challenge them to look into it and ask, 'This is what you have become. Is this what you want to be?' In 1968 it meant seeing violence unleashed against Blacks seeking voting rights. It meant seeing over 1 million dead and poisoned in Vietnam. It meant seeing Chicano farmworkers deported and denied union rights. It meant women and LGBTQ people denied justice against rape, arrests and other abusive mistreatment.
Today the mirror reflects the events in Gaza. And for good reason. Without ongoing U.S. military support, Israel would have to see and work on a different future for everyone living within its borders. It would have to release all the best Palestinian advocates for a just solution that it now holds in its prisons. And it would have to stop the KKK-like treatment of residents of the West Bank and Jerusalem at the hands of 'settlers,' largely far-right fascists from Brooklyn.
Today's critical force of the young has challenged us with two main demands: immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and self-determination for Palestinians throughout Israel, where Arabs are kept in second-class status or worse. There are others that follow from these, such as demanding their universities not profit from investments in Israel, that the U.S. cut off military funds to Israel, and amnesty for all in the face of police violence. They are also focusing their demands on the one person currently in a position to do something about them, President Biden. The pressure on Netanyahu will largely have to come from the electorate in Israel.
All this makes today's politics exceedingly uncomfortable for the Democratic Party and much of its current leadership. So far, the Justice Democrats, aka 'The Squad,' and some of their House allies, Bernie Sanders in the Senate and the Young Democrats nationwide have all rallied to the cause of the students and are especially opposing any violence used against them. The media call this a 'split.' It may come to that, but it is certainly a dynamic tension, meaning it cannot be ignored or thwarted. It demands a just resolution.
This is where we have to consider the other side of the critical force analysis, i.e., what is the main force? When all is said and done, the critical force is an insurgent minority but not yet the main force. What is the latter? The main force today is the anti-fascist majority of the population, especially a majority of all workers of various nationalities, and all oppressed peoples facing battles for wider democracy. We can say that this 'main force' is largely 'in itself', but not yet fully 'for itself' (to borrow a bit of dialectics from Hegel).
But we can see the beginning. Shean Fain of the UAW, along with the National Nurses Union and others, have this week declared they are standing on the side of the students. If Biden clings to the Likud, and ignores or otherwise dismisses these urgent messages from within his core base, he does so at his peril, and he will bear the brunt of any unintended assistance rendered to Trump. Unfortunately, this means it is not only his peril, but a great danger to us all.
This is where we hope the critical force gains wisdom and wide strategic thinking. It has to survey all the forces and the entire terrain. It must do nothing to hinder new elements from the main force awakening and taking its side. This wisdom also means understanding and adapting to the wider aims of your allies, i.e, the defeat of the MAGA fascists in November. The young critical force will gain wisdom largely from its own experience. But this does not mean the 1968 'veteran force,' for want of a better term, has nothing to offer them. We do. First, stand with them. second, listen to them deeply. Third, offer ideas to unite the many and defeat the few. Time is growing short.
|
|
|
|
 |
WE ARE INVITING FEEDBACK!
Please send us your letters, comments, queries, complaints, new ideas. Just keep them short and civil. Longer commentaries and be submitted as articles.
DIFFICULTY READING US?
|
We're going to try something new, and you are all invited.
Saturday Morning Coffee!
Started in August 2022, then going forward every week.
It will be more of a hangout than a formal setting. We can review the news in the previous days' LeftLinks or add a new topic. We can invite guests or carry on with those who show up. We'll try to have a progressive stack keeper should we need one.
Most of all, we will try to be interesting and a good sounding board. If you have a point you would like to make or a guest to invite, send an email to Carl Davidson, carld717@gmail.com
Continuing weekly, 10:30 to Noon, EDT.
The Zoom link will also be available on our Facebook Page.
Meeting ID: 868 9706 5843
Let's see what happens!
|
Shawn Fain on May Day:
“The UAW will never support the mass arrest or intimidation of those exercising their right to protest, strike, or speak out against injustice. Our union has been calling for a ceasefire for six months.
"This war is wrong, and this response against students and academic workers, many of them UAW members, is wrong. We call on the powers that be to release the students and employees who have been arrested, and if you can’t take the outcry, stop supporting this war.”
|
April 28, May 5,
May 19, & June 2
4-6:30pm eastern
1-3:30pm pacific
Suggested registration fee: $80-$330 any amount accepted
NO ONE WILL BE TURNED AWAY FOR LACK OF FUNDS
*Sessions will be recorded. Live attendance is not mandatory.*
|
|
|
|
A CONVERGENCE SYLLABUS
The strategy elaborated in this syllabus is aims to block MAGA’s bid for power and while doing so build enough independent progressive clout to start the country down the road to a robust multiracial, gender-inclusive democracy and an economy that works for all on an environmentally sustainable planet.
Convergence added a special session to this study to help participants grapple with the dramatic impact the Gaza crisis has had on US politics.
|
Naomi Klein and Yanis Varoufakis
THE WRONG LESSON
FROM HISTORY
A New Podcast
|
Thanks for reading Liberation Road!
The Need for a Progressive Mass Environmental Organization
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Liberation Road
APR 23, 2024 - Millions of people in the USA and elsewhere know that Planet Earth is burning. We have watched the fires in Maui and Canada, the bizarre (officially called “extreme”) weather, the droughts and floods.
We hear about species going extinct. And we know that something is beyond terribly wrong. People are being deluged with facts about the environmental catastrophe (let’s stop calling it climate change). But the solutions offered are often difficult to understand, and they often raise other problems, such as: How does one economically survive if so much must be changed in the way we work and live? ...Read more
|
Copy your Cinco de Mayo Posters! |
|
|
|
Last Week's Saturday Morning Coffee
|
|
News of the Week, Plus More
|
|
Graphic: Selma to Montgomery March for the right to vote, 1965. Dr. Ralph David Abernathy and his wife Mrs. Juanita Abernathy follow with Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King as the Abernathy children march on the front line: Donzaleigh Abernathy in striped sweater, Ralph David Abernathy, 3rd and Juandalynn R. Abernathy in glasses. The white minister pictured is James Reeb. Abernathy Family Photos via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Setting Our Sights On A Third Reconstruction
By Max Elbaum
Convergence
If our goal is a robust democracy and working-class power, the experiences of the Civil War-Reconstruction era and the Second Reconstruction of the 1950s-’60s provide crucial lessons for breaking out of our current impasse.
“The white riot of January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol Building is impossible to understand without reference to earlier, yet strikingly similar, efforts during the First Reconstruction period. In both cases there were attempts to violently overthrow democratically held elections won with the aid of Black votes. To fully understand the challenges and opportunities of this moment, we must take a deep historical dive, one that braids together the most crucial aspects of these three [Reconstruction] periods and the repeated clashes between the forces of redemption [white supremacy] and the forces of reconstruction.”
–Peniel E. Joseph, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 14-15.
April 25, 2024 - With a genocide underway in Gaza and the threat of a MAGA victory in November hanging over our heads, it’s hard to avoid getting trapped in a strictly defensive mind-set. But it is essential to focus on the better future we are trying to create as well as the dangers we need to prevent, and see how these two components of a “Block and Build” strategy interrelate. Grasping both the dangers and the positive potential of today’s conflict is necessary to keep our balance and to tap the energies and turn out the votes of the pro-ceasefire and anti-MAGA majorities.
Highlighting the deep patterns of US history discussed in Peniel Joseph’s book and W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America, which Joseph draws so much from, gives us one way to do that. Even a short review of the key lessons offers insights useful for staving off fascism and embarking on the path of popular empowerment and deep structural change.
Reconstructionists vs. Racialist Redeemers
Joseph explains the central thread in his argument in another passage from the introduction to The Third Reconstruction:
“For W.E.B. DuBois, ‘double consciousness’ did not refer simply to Black efforts to forge coherent identity in a country scarred by racial slavery… America itself has a dual identity, reflecting warring ideas about citizenship, freedom, and democracy. There is the America that we might call reconstructionist, home to champions of racial democracy, and there is the America we might call redemptionist, a country that papers over racial, class, and gender hierarchies through an allegiance to white supremacy.” —The Third Reconstruction, pp. 9-10
Using this lens to understand key junctures in US history sheds significant light on the ways democratic and class struggle intersect and interweave; the driving-force role of the Black laboring classes, and the synergies among electoral victories, direct action, and organizing on a mass scale. It underscores the necessity, and difficulty, of social justice partisans (“reconstructionists”) joining with inconsistent allies to defeat the outright reactionaries (self-styled racist “redeemers”) while also contending with those allies over the program and leadership of our coalition.
W.E.B. DuBois debunked the “Lost Cause” myths about the Civil War and Reconstruction, revealing the actual course of events and the underlying dynamics that shaped them. The most crucial points made by DuBois and those who built upon his work include:
- Enslaved African Americans played a decisive role both in the US victory over the Confederacy and in making emancipation federal policy. DuBois characterized the multifaceted uprising of the enslaved as a “general strike” of what was then the country’s most oppressed labor force, as well as the sector which had produced the most capitalist profit.
- The Reconstruction governments were the most progressive in US history. The pre-war plantation economy had no social services for the enslaved or for poor whites. The new governments established after the war, protected by federal troops, were anchored by enfranchised African Americans who, in alliance with poor whites, constituted a governing majority. These governments established public schools and hospitals and provided aid and care to the poor. DuBois spoke of these governments in terms of “abolition democracy,” frequently characterizing them as a “dictatorship of labor” and even at times a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
-
Abraham Lincoln was not part of the abolitionist movement, which was the grassroots force driving opposition to the “slave power” before and during the Civil War. Abolitionists including top leaders like Frederick Douglass harshly criticized and consistently pressured Lincoln. But abolitionists simultaneously saw his election to the Presidency in 1860, and his re-election in 1864, as crucial for advancing their cause. Asked what to make of Lincoln’s 1860 win, Frederick Douglass said: “Not much, in itself considered, but very much when viewed in the light of its relations and bearings…. It has taught the North its strength and the South its weakness. More important still, it has demonstrated the possibility of electing, if not an Abolitionist, at least an anti-slavery reputation to the Presidency of the United States…. Mr. Lincoln’s election breaks the enchantment, dispels this terrible nightmare, and awakes the nation to the consciousness of new powers and the possibility of a higher destiny than the perpetual bondage to an ignoble fear.” —Life and Writings, vol. 2, p.528
- The abolitionists and the enslaved who anchored the “general strike” were the fiercest opponents of slavery and as such contended for leadership in the broad coalition needed to win the Civil War and shape its aftermath. As the dynamics of war pushed all defenders of the union to the left, the Radical Republicans gained influence and became the dominant force in Congress. As such, they played the crucial role in winning the “Reconstruction Amendments” which provided legal basis for the Reconstruction governments and set a new bar for further advance of democracy and equality still used today.
This process is a textbook example of how strength gained in the fight to block the “slave power” produced the capacity to build anti-racist and pro-working class governing power during Reconstruction.
Civil Rights Movement drives a Second Reconstruction
Reconstruction was overturned by a self-identified force of white “Redeemers” using a combination of racist terror and disenfranchisement of African Americans. They were able to do so largely because key sections of the coalition that had won the Civil War—northern industrialists and all too many whites of the middle and working classes —abandoned the fight for Black rights.
Almost a hundred years of Jim Crow followed. Then, building on fights for equality during the 1930s workers’ upsurge, the double “V” campaign during World War II, and fresh stirrings of activism right after the war, a sustained Civil Rights offensive began in earnest with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. The dynamics of this “Second Reconstruction” paralleled the first in several ways:
Black America—particularly the overwhelmingly working-class Black population in the states of the former Confederacy—was again the driving force of what became a society-wide political flow.
As in the First Reconstruction, the gains made for Black equality and enfranchisement expanded democracy for all and tilted strongly in favor of workers and their families. While driving the end of Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement broke the back of McCarthyism, ended racist immigration quotas, and played a powerful part in opposing the Vietnam War. The energy from the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles drove the launch of Medicare and revitalized freedom movements among Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. It inspired second-wave feminism and the modern LGBTQ movement.
The 1964 landslide victory of Lyndon Johnson over anti-Civil Rights Act candidate Barry Goldwater was an important factor in winning the passage of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. The complicated relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and the Johnson administration (epitomized in the contend-and-agree, agree-and-contend see-saw between Johnson and Dr. King) was one of history’s “rhymes” with the unity-struggle relationship between abolitionism and the federal government under Abraham Lincoln.
Direct line from the racist redeemers to MAGA
Once again, a backlash against every hard-won gain took shape. Well-financed by the elite forces at its core and utilizing a sophisticated combination of electoral action and grassroots organizing, it moved from Nixon’s Southern Strategy through the Reagan era rise of neoliberalism to the Tea Party reaction to the country’s first Black President. In 2013 it achieved one of its paramount goals when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.
That backlash has now reached its most intense phase with a MAGA-controlled GOP bidding for total federal power in the 2024 election. It is no coincidence that its banner—“Make America Great Again”—is a reworking of the “Redeem the Country” slogan under which the First Reconstruction was overturned. There is a direct line between the redeemers of the 1870s, the practitioners of “Massive Resistance” to de-segregation in the 1960s, and the MAGA bloc we face today.
A Third Reconstruction to expand on the first two
Many things have changed in the US and the world since the 1960s, not to mention the 1870s. Changes in demographics, the structure of the working class, gender relations, and the cataclysmic crisis of climate change loom especially large for formulating goals and strategies. But the structural dynamics that underlay the development and the overturn of First and Second Reconstruction have not disappeared. Combining an appreciation of those patterns with the adjustments mandated by changed circumstances brings several key points to the fore:
Just as broad fronts that extended far beyond abolitionists, the enslaved. or the Civil Rights Movement were necessary to defeat the slavocracy and then the segregationists, a broad front extending well beyond progressives and the Left is required to beat the MAGA “redeemers” today. That front manifests itself mainly in the electoral realm.
As in past periods, sustained, militant action by peoples located at the intersection of class exploitation and racial oppression and their allies is essential both for defeating the main enemy and for winning significant gains. The Black community remains the most consistently progressive and combative constituency in US politics. (It is worth stressing that there, alongside Arab and Muslim communities, is where internationalist sentiments and sympathy with the Palestinian struggle is strongest.) But changing demographics have heightened the importance and clout of Latino/a, Asian American, Arab and Muslim and Native peoples; and the political “gender gap” first noted in the 1970s and ‘80s has increased substantially in the era of MAGA.
As Frederick Douglass, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and the movements they helped lead have shown, the impact from radical movements is greatest when they project a compelling narrative that that offers direction to all those claim allegiance to democracy. Appealing to our common humanity and shared self-interests while denouncing the injustices of the current system is the path to gaining both the political and moral high ground.
Most concrete programmatic elements needed by a modern-day Reconstructionist force have already been thrust into the mainstream by social movements and progressive elected officials: the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a Green New Deal, the Women’s Health Protection Act, the PRO Act labor legislation, a blueprint for “A Revolution in US Foreign Policy,” and more. With a central focus on voting rights and expansion of democracy in general, the framework of a Third Reconstruction can bind these together and project a vision in which the whole becomes more than the sum of its individual parts. (For a detailed treatment of a Third Reconstruction program and strategy, see Bob Wing, Introduction to “Toward Racial Justice and a Third Reconstruction.”)
Already the Third Reconstruction framework has moved from the work of historians and scholars into popular movements. Rev. William Barber, Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival, used the Third Reconstruction concept in his book The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Monday Movement Is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear. The Poor People’s Campaign works to popularize the idea in its ongoing work. An approach with deep roots in US history and centered in the Black experience, it is increasingly present in the wave of recent materials exploring the real history of US racism and the fight against it, including the widely discussed 1619 Project.
The call for a Third Reconstruction resonates in the layer of society most opposed to MAGA and most likely to drive progressive change in the next decade—the inter-related block and build tasks facing the Left. As both narrative and a guide to mass organizing and electoral action, the Third Reconstruction perspective holds great promise. ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Police move against students at the University of Texas in Austin.
Anti-Gaza War Encampments Keep Growing,
With Over 2100 Arrested in U.S. Alone
By Rod Such
Special to LeftLinks
The second week of student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which began April 18 at Columbia University in New York City, saw the protests spread to many new campuses nationwide with arrests more than doubling and reaching 2,100 by May 2.
More than 120 universities and colleges have now seen student encampments or building occupations in solidarity with Palestine.
Among the new protests within the last week were a number in the Southwest, including three campuses in Arizona (Arizona State, Arizona University in Tucson, and Northern Arizona), the University of Colorado, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Utah.
New protests sprouted up in the Midwest, including the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, the University of Madison in Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio.
In the South, protests erupted at Tulane in New Orleans, three public universities in Florida, the University of South Carolina, the University of Georgia, and three campuses in Virginia.
Protests spread in the Pacific Northwest with encampments or occupations at Portland State University, the University of Oregon in Eugene, private colleges such as Reed and Lewis and Clark in Portland, and the University of Washington in Seattle.
On the East Coast, Dartmouth completed the Ivy League’s participation, joined by the universities of New Hampshire, Buffalo, N.Y., Connecticut, and Fordham University in New York.
The geographical sweep of the country was nearly complete with only six states in the Great Plains and a few in the South remaining outliers.
The Major Battlegrounds
The biggest arrests occurred at Columbia and City College of New York with more than 300 and at the University of California at Los Angeles, where more than 200 were arrested and where provocateurs also attacked students physically. Police violence was prevalent with tear gas, rubber bullets, or mace used in Los Angeles and in Portland, Oregon, following similar attacks at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and at the University of Texas in Austin. At Washington University in St. Louis, police assaulted a faculty professor who suffered cracked ribs that emergency room physicians said could have been life-threatening due to the proximity to his lungs.
President Joseph Biden finally weighed in, saying students have “the right to protest, but not a right to cause chaos,” mischaracterizing the protests which have been peaceful and for the most part nondisruptive, as they rarely interfered with students’ education or the functioning of the college. Biden said the protests would not change his views on the U.S.’s Middle East policies. The Intercept reported that when Biden was a law student he regarded students protesting the Vietnam War on college campuses as “a bunch of assholes” and that he was never morally opposed to the U.S. war in Vietnam.
His May 2 press statement vilifying the protests only added to the profile of someone out of touch or deliberately manipulative in order to buttress his support for Israel.
Despite Biden, Encampments Gain Wide Support
In contrast, the HuffPost reported that more than 185 human rights and social justice organizations issued an open letter commending the student protests for raising “awareness about Israel's assault on Gaza,” while assailing an “overwhelming atmosphere of pressure, intimidation, and retaliation” against the students. Among the groups signing onto the letter were the Working Families Party, Young Democrats of America Black Caucus, the IfNotNow Movement, the Sunrise Movement, Movement for Black Lives, Jewish Voice for Peace, MPower Change, and the Unitarian Universalist Association. Top United Nations human rights officials, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed concern for “heavy-handed steps taken to disperse and dismantle protests.”
Student protests have already yielded some results. At Brown University students decided to end their encampment after the university promised a referendum on whether the university’s investment portfolio should divest from corporations supporting Israeli apartheid.
A similar pledge was made at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. And the president of Portland State promised a “pause” in the university’s relationship with Boeing, makers of the so-called “smart” bombs used in Gaza and a manufacturer of drones used by military forces in the Philippines. At Rutgers University in New Jersey students ended their protest after the university agreed to most of their demands, including continued negotiations over divestments from Israel’s apartheid system.
Even before the encampments began, Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, home of the martyred Rachel Corrie, had become the first U.S. college to divest fully from Israeli apartheid.
Repressive Liberalism and Its Corporate Roots
But in nearly every other case repressive corporate liberalism like that at Columbia prevailed. After New York police arrested more than 100 protesters on April 18, a second wave of students encamped on the quad. Columbia administrators then rescinded the suspensions of the original group of arrested students and promised to negotiate with the second wave of campers. This occurred after hundreds of faculty members set up a defensive perimeter around the encampment and pledged support.
But pressure from wealthy donors to Columbia and the right wing of the Democratic Party, along with Republican pressure, apparently played a role in the second round of repressive arrests carried out by New York City police, according to Axios. Two members of The Squad–Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez–visited the Columbia campus and afterwards defended the students, particularly from charges of antisemitism made by Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Dan Goldman. "The provocative images painted by Republicans and antisemitic white supremacist platforms could not be further from the truth," Bowman said in a statement.
New York Mayor Eric Adams and the corporate media charged that “outside agitators” were involved in the protests, echoing the claims made by Dixiecrats against civil rights activists in the South in the 1960s. Some of the worst examples of corporate journalism included the New York Times, which liberally insinuated that antisemitism was rife in the protests without reporting a single concrete example, and the New York Post, which doxxed a community supporter of the Columbia encampment as a “serial anti-Israel protester,” naming him, publishing his photo, and identifying his occupation and neighborhood.
Comparisons between the 1968 Columbia uprising and other student protests against the Vietnam War continued to be drawn. Democracy Now’s co-anchor Juan Gonzalez, who was a student leader in the Columbia rebellion in 1968, noted the “moral bankruptcy” of university presidents then and now, although he drew special attention to the fact that university presidents have said nothing about Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Gonzalez also expressed concern that unlike the 1960s, today’s student protests are largely multiracial and led by Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students.
“This is a marked change in the actual composition of the American university that we're seeing in terms of the leadership of these movements,” Gonzalez said. “And I think the willingness of these administrations to crack down so fiercely against this protest is, to some degree, they find it easier to crack down on Black and Brown and multiracial students than they did back then, when it was largely a white student population.”
Rod Such is a former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is active in Palestine solidarity campaigns.
|
|
Photo: Students resisting after the first round of arrests at Columbia
Students on the Right Side of History
– the Distortion of Campus Protests Over Gaza
By Helen Benedict
TomDispatch via Portside
May 2, 2024 - Helicopters have been throbbing overhead for days now. Nights, too. Police are swarming the streets of Broadway, many in riot gear. Police vans, some as big as a city bus, are lined up along side streets and Broadway.
Outside the gates of the Columbia University campus, a penned-in group of pro-Israel demonstrators has faced off against a penned-in group of anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian protesters. These groups are usually small, often vastly outnumbered by the police around them, but they are loud and they are not Columbia students. They’ve been coming every day this April to shout, chant, and hold up signs, some of which are filled with hateful speech directed at the other side, equating protests against the slaughter in Gaza with being pro-Hamas, and calls to bring home the hostages with being pro-genocide.
Inside the locked gates of the campus, the atmosphere is entirely different. Even as the now-notorious student tent encampment there stretches through its second week, all is calm. Inside the camp, students sleep, eat, and sit on bedspreads studying together and making signs saying, “Nerds for Palestine,” “Passover is for Liberation,” and “Stop the Genocide.” The Jewish students there held a seder on Passover. The protesters even asked faculty to come into the encampment and teach because they miss their classes. Indeed, it’s so quiet on campus that you can hear birds singing in the background. The camp, if anything, is hushed.
The Real Story on Campus
Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside — the same kinds of students Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th — are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early hours of April 30th, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)
As a tenured professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, I’ve been watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7th, and I’ve been struck by the decorum of the protesting students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she was sitting in my class.
Given how horrific this war is, it’s not surprising that there have been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from the students have been “Bring back our hostages” on the Israeli side and “Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians” on the antiwar and pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different direction and protect the innocent.
Unfortunately, instead of allowing students to have their say and disciplining those who overstep boundaries, Columbia President Shafik and her administration suspended two of the most vocal groups protesting Israel’s war on Gaza: the student chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. This only enraged and galvanized students and some faculty more.
The Right Seizes and Distorts the Narrative
Then the right got involved, using accusations of widespread antisemitism to take eyes off the astronomical death toll in Gaza — more than 34,000 reportedly dead as I write this, more than 14,500 of them children — while fretting about the safety of Jewish students instead.
The faculty of Columbia takes antisemitism seriously and we have methods in place to deal with it. We also recognize that some of the chants of the protesters do make certain Jewish students and faculty uncomfortable. But as a group of Jewish faculty pointed out in an op-ed for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, it’s absurd to claim that antisemitism, which is defined by the Jerusalem Declaration as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews,” is rampant on our campus. “To argue that taking a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term,” we wrote. “Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness.”
Sadly, that’s exactly what the right has succeeded in doing. Not only is the slaughter in Gaza getting lost in the growing fog of hysterical speech about antisemitism on American college campuses, but so is the fact that Arab and Muslim students are being targeted, too. Some students even reported they were sprayed with a mace-like material, possibly manufactured by the Israeli military, and that, as a result, several protesters had to go to the hospital. My own students told me they have been targeted with hate mail and threats over social media. I even saw a doxxing truck sponsored by the far-right group Accuracy in Media driving around the Columbia neighborhood bearing photographs of Muslim students, naming them and calling them terrorists. Again, it’s important to note that most of the harassers have been outsiders, not students.
No, the real threat to American Jews comes not from students but from the very white nationalist MAGA Republicans who are shouting about antisemitism the loudest.
Then came the Republican hearings.
The Congressional Hearings
Having watched the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania stumble and fall in the face of MAGA Representative Elise Stefanik’s bullying accusations of antisemitism in December, Columbia President Shafik did all she could to avoid a similar fate when it was her turn. But when she submitted to four hours of McCarthyite-style questioning in Congress on April 17th — one Republican even asked if there were Republicans among the faculty — Shafik cringed, evaded, and caved.
“I agree with you” was her most frequent phrase. She never pushed back against the characterization of the Columbia campus by Republican Representatives Virginia Foxx and Stefanik as riddled with antisemitism. She never stood up for the integrity of our faculty and students or for the fact that we’re a campus full of remarkable scholars and artists perfectly capable of governing ourselves. She never even pointed out that who we suspend, fire, or hire is none of Congress’s business. Instead, she broke all our university rules by agreeing to investigate and fire members of our own faculty and to call in the police when she deemed it necessary.
The very day after the hearings, that’s exactly what she did.
Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza was never even mentioned.
A Pandora’s Box
Shafik’s craven performance in front of Republican lawmakers opened a Pandora’s box of troubles. The student protesters swelled in numbers and erected their encampment. Faculty members wrote outraged opinion pieces condemning Shafik’s behavior. And when she called in the police to arrest students, more students than ever joined the protests all over the country.
Then, on April 24th, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson visited Columbia with Republicans Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, and Anthony D’Esposito (and even Foxx from North Carolina), acting as if some kind of terrible riot had gone on here. Standing at the top of the steps in front of the grand facade of Low Library, a century-old building meant to symbolize learning and reason, and surrounded by heckling students, Johnson declared that some Jewish students had told him of “heinous acts of bigotry,” characterized the protesters as “endorsed by Hamas,” and called for Shafik to resign “if she cannot immediately bring order to the chaos.”
“What chaos?” said an undergraduate standing next to me on the steps as we listened.
“He’s saying a bunch of 20-year-old American college students are in cahoots with Hamas?” another asked incredulously.
Johnson then escalated the threats, claiming the National Guard might be called in and that Congress might even revoke federal funding if universities couldn’t keep such protests under control.
I looked behind me at the encampment on the other side of campus. In front of the tents on the grass, the students had erected a sign listing what they called “Gaza Encampment Community Guidelines.” These included: “No desecration of the land. No drug/alcohol consumption. Respect personal boundaries.” And most significantly, “We commit to assuming the best intentions, granting ourselves and others grace when mistakes are made, and approaching conflict with the goal of addressing and repairing.”
Designated faculty and students stood at the entrance to make sure no outsiders got in, and that nobody entered the encampment unless they had read and agreed to that list of commitments. The noisiest people on campus were the thronging media. But nobody and nothing was out of control.
The Weaponization of Antisemitism
Sadly, despite the reality on the ground at Columbia, the right’s wild narrative of virulent antisemitism here has been swallowed whole, not just by Republicans but by a long list of Democrats, too, including President Biden and Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, not to speak of New York Representatives Hakeem Jeffries, Jerry Nadler, Dan Goldman, and Adriano Espaillat. They have all publicly condemned the supposedly rampant antisemitism on campus without, it seems, bothering to check their facts.
Meanwhile, MAGA Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht posted on X that “Columbia has been taken over by radical Pro-Hamas protesters.”
Back in the real world, the right’s hysteria over such supposed antisemitism hasn’t really been about protecting Jews at all, as many faculty members (including us Jewish ones) have written and spoken about. Rather, the right is weaponizing antisemitism as a way of furthering its campaign to suppress the kind of freedom of thought and speech on campus that threatens its authoritarian goals of turning this country Christian, conservative, straight, and white — not to mention their urge to suppress support of Palestinian autonomy.
When Students Don’t Feel Safe
My students tell me they feel perfectly safe on campus. They may not like some of the chants they sometimes hear. I myself have caught a few that chilled me as a Jew. I’ve also heard chants that sicken me on behalf of my Muslim friends. But those have been rare. And campus is a place where everyone should be free to debate, disagree, express their opinions, listen, and learn. We have to remember that free speech does not mean speech we agree with.
No, where my students do not feel safe is out on Broadway, where extremists on both sides gather. They don’t feel safe when the false narratives of Republican politicians draw far-right angry mobs to the campus gates, something that is happening just as I’m writing this piece. Most of all, they don’t feel safe when police arrive on campus with guns in their holsters and zip-ties hanging from their belts.
I stood and watched that day the police came. Four huge drones hovered overhead, along with those eternally buzzing helicopters. Dozens of police buses were lined up on West 114th Street on the south side of campus as if prepared to deal with some massive, violent riot. Then, in came the police, some in riot gear, to tie the hands of more than 100 students behind their backs and march them onto police buses.
Not a single student resisted. Even the police were quoted as saying they presented no danger to anyone. As NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said, “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
Not long later, those arrested students were suspended and the ones who attend Barnard were locked out of their dorms. Faculty and friends had to offer their couches and spare beds to save those young women from being homeless on the streets of New York. One of them is in my building staying with a colleague downstairs. “Nobody told our parents that we were being evicted,” she told me in my lobby.
Faculty Response
Many faculty were so shocked by these events that on Monday, April 22nd, some 300 of us gathered on the steps of Low Library, holding up signs that said, “Hands Off Our Students” and “End Student Suspensions Now.” Several professors gave impassioned speeches praising those students for their courage, demanding that academic freedom be protected, and castigating Shafik for throwing us all under the bus.
Still, Gaza was not mentioned. It seemed as if the genocide occurring there was disappearing in the fog.
“I’m worried that the message of our protest is getting lost,” that suspended student told me as we spoke in the lobby. “Everyone’s talking about academic freedom and police repression instead.”
Indeed, not only is the protest against Israel’s pathological spree of murder in Palestine and on the West Bank being drowned out in this debate, so are the student protesters’ demands, so let me reiterate them here:
- That Columbia divest of all investments that profit from Israel’s occupation and bombing of Palestine.
- That Columbia sever academic ties with its programs at Tel Aviv and other Israeli Universities.
- That the policing of the campus be stopped immediately.
- That the university release a statement calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
The other day, on New York’s National Public Radio station, WNYC, I heard a caller who had been a campus protester in 1968 say something like, “It’s funny how the protesters of 50 years ago are always right, but the protesters of today are always wrong.” The people who demonstrated for civil rights then were demonized, beaten, even murdered, but they were right, he pointed out, as were the people who demonstrated against the Vietnam War. (I would say the same for those who protested against the Iraq War and for the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.)
One day, the students who are protesting the genocide in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians today will be seen as on the right side, too. History will prove it. Until then, let’s turn the discussion back to where it belongs: an end to the war on Gaza.
Final Note: This piece was written before the president and trustees of Columbia called in the riot police on the night of April 30th, against the advice of many faculty, to arrest the students in the encampment, as well as those who had occupied Hamilton Hall. Videos show considerable police violence against the students. What happens next remains to be seen.
[Helen Benedict, who is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author most recently of the novel The Good Deed, has been writing about war and refugees for more than a decade. A recipient of the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, she has also written 13 other books of fiction and nonfiction.] ...Read More
|
|
Image by Robert Reich
What's Really Motivating the Protests?
By Robert Reich
robertreich@substack.com
MAY 3, 2024 - Friends, I’ve been spending the last several weeks trying to find out what’s really going on with the campus protests. I’ve met with students at Berkeley, visited with faculty at Columbia University, and talked with young people and faculty at many other universities.
My conclusion: While protest movements are often ignited by many different things, and attract an assortment of people with a range of motives, this one is centered on one thing: moral outrage at the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people — most of them women and children — in Gaza.
To interpret these protests as anything else — as antisemitic or anti-Zionist or anti-American or pro-Palestinian — is to miss the essence of what’s going on and why.
Most of the students and faculty I’ve spoken with found Hamas’s attack on October 7 odious. They also find Israel’s current government morally bankrupt, in that its response to Hamas’s attack has been dispro-portionate. They do not support Palestine as such; most do not know enough about the history of Israel and Palestine to pass moral judgment.
But they have a deep and abiding sense that what is happening in Gaza is morally wrong, and that the United States is complicit in that immorality. Unfortunately, many tell me they are planning not to vote this coming November — a clear danger to Biden’s reelection campaign.
I have sharp memories of the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, in which I participated some fifty-five years ago. I remember being appalled at the unnecessary carnage in Vietnam. I was incensed that the First World — white and rich — was randomly killing Third World people — non-white and poor. And at the stupidity of college administrations that summoned police to clear protesters — using tear gas, stun guns, and mass arrests. The response added fuel to the flames.
The anti-Vietnam War movement became fodder for rightwing politicians like Ronald Reagan, demanding “law and order.” The spectacle also appalled many non-college, working-class people who viewed the students as pampered, selfish, anti-American, and unpatriotic.
History, as it is said, doesn’t repeat itself. It only rhymes. The mistakes made at one point in time have an eerie way of reemerging two generations later, as memories fade. ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Sen. Bernie Sanders is photographed in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee hearing room in the Dirksen Senate building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, May 1, 2024. Sanders is the Chair of the committee.
Bernie Sanders Worries Young People Are
Underestimating the Threat From Trump
The Senator differs with Joe Biden on Israel but says progressives need to live in the 'real world' when it comes to the choice they face in the 2024 election.
By Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy
USA TODAY
May 2, 2024 - WASHINGTON – Sen. Bernie Sanders has always been a political maverick, but these days the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history is not afraid to show his pragmatic side.
In an exclusive interview with USA TODAY on Wednesday, the senior senator from Vermont spoke about topics including the Israel-Hamas war, antisemitism, college protests, and President Joe Biden’s record. One throughline that quickly became apparent was that Sanders would not let his differences with Biden on some issues get in the way of confronting something more urgent: the threat of former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
He believes a policy change by Biden on Israel is long overdue, but also worries that young people are underestimating the true threat that Trump poses and in their anger over Israel and other issues, may not recognize that Biden is better on their side – even if he is not where they want him to be on Israel.
Look At Everything
"We can be extremely upset at the Biden administration for their policies with regard to Israel and Gaza, but the difficulty is that in the real world that you live in, you've got to take a look at a whole lot of things," he said, sitting in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee hearing room on Capitol Hill. "On the other hand, I would hope that most of the young people and protestors do not want to see Donald Trump, who is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe who doesn't acknowledge the reality of climate change, become elected president of the United States."
The 82-year-old lawmaker was a favorite among young voters when he ran in 2020 but ultimately endorsed Biden and became a powerful surrogate. His comments about young people and Trump come at a time when the self-described Democratic socialist is taking a more active role in messaging directly to Democrats, and also as polling shows Biden's support waning among a critical voting demographic that helped the incumbent president win the White House nearly four years ago. Sanders has built his career on his pledge to fight the powerful – including big corporations and lobbyists – to help the working class.
"I think the president has much to be proud of in terms of what he has already accomplished. I don't know if he gets credit for it," he said.
Sanders praises Biden's work on health care access, infrastructure
As chair of HELP, Sanders talked about the work he’d done with Biden to take on the pharmaceutical industry. Last month, he appeared with Biden at the White House for an event with health care advocates that focused on lowering the costs of inhalers to $35 a month, along with other Democratic efforts to expand health care access.
"For the first time in history, you'll have Medicare negotiating prices. That is a big deal for health care in general," he said.
He then proceeded to rattle off a list of the Biden administration’s accomplishments including the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law that passed to rebuild the country’s crumbling roads, bridges, and water systems as well as addressing climate change and canceling "a lot of" student debt.
He also praised Biden for being the first president in American history to be on a picket line with United Auto Workers in Michigan, making it clear that he was "pro-union and pro-worker."
One area where Sanders is strongly at odds with the Biden
administration’s "unfettered military aid" to Israel as it conducts its war on Gaza after Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages in southern Israel on Oct.7. Sanders has been highly critical of the way Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prosecuting the war and holds him responsible for the humanitarian crises in Gaza.
More than 35,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Beyond the death toll, a March 18 U.N. report said a famine is "imminent" and humanitarian groups estimate more than 2 million people are threatened with famine.
At odds with policy on military aid to Israel
A Gallup survey released on March 27, a day before the Biden campaign’s fundraiser, showed 55% of all Americans disapprove of Israel’s military action. That includes 75% of Democrats, up from the 63% who said the same last November.
Biden signed a $95 billion foreign aid bill in April, which includes $26 billion in funds for Israel and humanitarian aid for Gaza and other places. Sanders voted against the measure.
Sanders said while the money has been approved by Congress and signed by the president, it has not been released yet.
"The president needs to tell Netanyahu ‘you're not going to get a nickel unless there is a huge and significant increase in humanitarian aid, that the potential of famine is ended tomorrow," he said. "You stop the terrible actions of the settlers on the West Bank and that we begin serious discussion about a two-state solution. If you want the money, these are the things you got to do."
Pro-Palestinian protest movements have sprung up around the country since police first tried to end an encampment at Columbia University in New York nearly two weeks ago. There have also been numerous instances of antisemitism recorded on campuses since the start of the war.
At the same time, student protestors have expressed concern that politicians often conflate criticism of Israel’s government with antisemitism. Netanyahu recently described the college protestors as "antisemitic mobs."
“I reject very strongly the suggestion that if people are concerned and raise strong concerns about the military that makes one anti-Semitic. That is just not the case,” Sanders said. "I really find it outrageous that Netanyahu wants to hide the outrageous military behavior of his government behind the terrible image of antisemitism."
Just as criticizing the government of Italy or Ireland does not make one anti-Italian, or anti-Irish, criticizing the government of Israel doesn’t make one anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic, he added.
But at the same time, Sanders acknowledged that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are on the rise.
“I would say to any protestors whether it is anti-Semitism or racism against Muslim students, Black students or gay students is unacceptable. It is not what a peace movement is about,” he said. “And I strongly condemn it.”
'Solution is to mobilize the American people'
Biden has described himself as a Zionist, but these days that has become a loaded word. Some say they are not antisemites, but they're anti-Zionist. As a Jewish lawmaker himself, how does Sanders define Zionism?
"I don't sit around worrying about what the word means. All I know is that right now in Israel, you have an extreme right-wing government, which includes some out-and-out racists, period," he said. "Hamas is a terrorist organization that started this war. Israel had the right to defend itself, but it does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people."
With polls showing that many segments of the Democratic party, such as young voters, Black voters, Arab, and Muslim American voters are feeling disenchanted with Biden's stance on Gaza, what does the president need to convince these voters? "I think for a start, changing their policy to Netanyahu and Israel would be a good step forward," he said. "I think that would be the first order of business. So I think the time is long overdue to change that."
Sanders, the de facto leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic party, who has endorsed Biden says that however disenchanted the voters are the solution is not to elect a president "who admires authoritarian leaders like Putin, who's trying to undermine American democracy."
"The solution is to mobilize the American people, working-class people, Black, white, Latino, Native American, whatever they may be, to come together, to fight for a government, which represents all of us, and not just the few."
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @SwapnaVenugopal ...Read More
|
|
Why the Rust Belt May Be Biden’s
Best Reelection Hope Against Trump
By Alex Henderson
Alternet.org
May 01, 2024 - Stuart Stevens, a Never Trumper and veteran conservative strategist/consultant, has predicted that incumbent President Joe Biden will enjoy a major surge in support as November draws closer. In Steven's view, support for Biden will soar when voters realize just how dangerous presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump is.
But so far, this is shaping up to a close election. Some polls released in late April showed Trump with small leads; others showed Biden slightly ahead. A Morning Consult poll released on April 29 found the race to be a dead heat.
In 2020, Biden flipped five states that Trump had carried in 2016 — three in the Rust Belt (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) and two in the Sun Belt (Arizona and Georgia). Journalist Steven Shepard, in an article published by Politico on May 1, stresses that the Rust Belt is crucial to Biden's reelection hopes.
"Joe Biden's path to reelection has become increasingly clear: It's the Rust Belt or bust," Shepard explains. "The alternative route to the White House he appeared to break open in 2020 — winning Arizona and Georgia on the strength of changing Sun Belt demographics — would be far more challenging this time."
Shepard adds, "While polls broadly show Biden continuing to fall behind former President Donald Trump in swing states across the country, they consistently show the older, whiter states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as the most competitive for Biden. Trump has larger leads in the Sun Belt states, in large part owing to Biden's loss of support with younger voters and voters of color."
In late April, polls conducted by The Hill and Emerson College showed Trump ahead of Biden by 2 percent in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and 1 percent in Michigan compared to 4 percent in Arizona.
Shepard notes that Biden "can win" in November if he "holds all three Blue Wall states" — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and "captures at least four electoral votes from Maine and Nebraska." But the Politico journalist emphasizes that for Biden, there is a "clear divide between the Blue Wall states" and "the Sun Belt states."
"Biden isn't yet writing off the Sun Belt," Shepard reports. "His campaign continues to advertise in the same core, seven states it's targeted for months: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin." ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Officer Tim Artoff handed Terry Goodloe an order to vacate at Baker Park in Grants Pass, Oregon, in April 2024. Photographs By Jordan Gale For The New Republic
Usual Cruelty: The New Sundown Towns
As Grants Pass, Oregon—and the nation—await a Supreme Court ruling on just how far cities can police the homeless, a volunteer mayor and her unhoused constituents try to weather the backlash.
By Tracy Rosenthal
The New Republic
April 30, 2024 - On July 24, 2018, Debra Blake was banished from every park in Grants Pass, Oregon. She added the exclusion order to a growing pile of violations—for sleeping, sitting, camping, and trespassing, a mix of civil and criminal charges that accrued late fees, bench warrants, and jail stints, wrecked her credit and job prospects, and made her a known entity to police.
At 59, Blake had lived in Grants Pass for almost 15 years, seven without a home. She didn’t qualify for a bed in the town’s only shelter, and there was no place she could legally rest outdoors. “It seemed like everywhere she camped she would get tickets,” a friend of hers told me. “Every night. Everywhere. Anytime the cops caught her, she was in the wrong place.”
In fall 2018, Blake sued the city for violating her constitutional rights. Friends described her to me as “motherly,” “selfless,” and “a force to be reckoned with.” By then, Blake owed the city $4,000 in fines. “I am afraid at all times in Grants Pass that I could be arrested, ticketed, and prosecuted for sleeping outside or for covering myself with a blanket to stay warm,” she testified in the lawsuit.
She wasn’t alone. “I have met dozens, if not hundreds, of homeless people in Grants Pass,” she said. “They have all had similar experiences.” In September 2019, her debt cresting $5,000, Blake was banished from the parks a second time. She sought refuge beyond city limits, in places she feared were “not physically safe … far from food and other services.”
Banishment of unhoused people was the point, her class-action suit argued. Ahead of the tourist season in spring 2013, officials had held a roundtable on the city’s “vagrancy problems.” Meeting minutes rehearse now-standard talking points in our national homelessness crisis. A councilman explained the utility of punishment: “Until the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of changing, people will not change.”
The deputy police chief suggested a “sobering center” that would house people in “a jail cell with steel doors.” Other officials urged banning food distribution (“If you stop feeding them, then they will stop coming”) and posting “zero tolerance” signs at all entrances to the city. Grants Pass redesigned its municipal code to incorporate these ideas.
“The point,” one councilman said, was “to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.”
Blake won her case. As Ed Johnson, Blake’s lawyer at the Oregon Law Center, told me, Grants Pass had managed to design a “set of ordinances that made it illegal to survive on every inch of public land 24 hours a day.” In 2020, the Oregon District Court ruled that the imposed fees were excessive, that exclusion orders violated due process, and that blanket criminalization constituted cruel and unusual punishment against those “engaging in the unavoidable, biological, life-sustaining acts of sleeping and resting.”
Blake passed away before she could see the results: an injunction that allows homeless people to rest in Grants Pass parks for 24 hours at a time, as long as there is nowhere else for them to go. Her friend said it felt as if unhoused people “didn’t have to hide anymore.”
But the city appealed—all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Gripped by a right-wing supermajority, that court has already restricted abortion, undermined the Environmental Protection Agency, curtailed affirmative action, and voided pandemic eviction moratoriums. Last fall, a flood of official briefs urged the court to take up the case. Their authors included business improvement and sheriffs’ associations, archconservative think tanks like the Goldwater Institute, the liberal cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat.
Homelessness policies that fail drive electoral success, and politicians can claim an empty sidewalk—and an unsolved crisis—as a political victory.
Now a town of fewer than 40,000 people may get to rewrite the scripts of homelessness policy for the entire United States. When the court rules, likely in late June, unhoused people could lose the Eighth Amendment as a bulwark against widespread criminalization and encampment sweeps. But Grants Pass’s current practices, even under the injunction, suggest cruelty is rarely unusual.
The embattled Oregon town is a microcosm of the drama now playing out among politicians, their constituents, and the fast-growing number of people who live in public space. In this bipartisan production, homelessness is portrayed as something police can deter and rehabilitation can cure. Homelessness policies that fail drive electoral success, and politicians can claim an empty sidewalk—and an unsolved crisis—as a political victory.
Grants Pass’s mayor, Sara Bristol, often wears an expression of amused exasperation. The day we met, she’d tried to dispel a Facebook rumor that nonprofit warming shelters would house undocumented immigrants. She often finds herself disputing the claim that homeless people in town are outsiders. Born in Grants Pass, not registered with either party, Bristol was elected just as the injunction settled into place, turning new clusters of tents—on green spaces abutting the Rogue River, on muddy dirt by the ball fields, on the grass strip of a road median—into Bristolvilles. In fall 2023, a group of residents campaigned for her recall, gathering signatures under signs that read TAKE BACK OUR PARKS. Bristol maintained her mandate.
Like all members of City Council, Bristol is an unpaid volunteer. Early this March, I rode shotgun in her SUV, which beeped for an oil change. She took detours to point out tents and camper vans, two back-to-back hills she sped down for thrills as a teen, and a mural on D Street, a scene of downtown painted by her father, who also served as the city’s mayor: Her father’s likeness steps out of a movie theater; her uncle walks his dog.
Residents of Grants Pass call its single six-story structure “Tall Building.” Since the timber industry collapsed in the 1980s, real estate and tourism have helped revive the economy. Travelers seek the Rogue River, which cuts the city in half. Californians cash in their property values and fund their retirement in the city. Restored brick facades along the 18 square blocks of historic downtown lure passersby to tapas restaurants and antique shops. Over the last 20 years, Grants Pass nearly doubled in size. Almost a third of renters spend more than half their income on rent. The most recent “Point in Time” count logged more than 500 homeless people, a number that the count’s coordinator said was certainly an underestimation, conducted at the height of winter, when people seek shelter anywhere they can find it. Many don’t want to be found.
The city is an odd estuary of lawn-sign liberals and flag-flying conservatives. During the 2020 uprisings against police violence, an open-carry guard convened at the 140-foot American flag on Union Avenue, patrolling the roof of the local Baskin-Robbins. The county boasts the lowest property taxes in the state and hosts two secessionist movements: the State of Jefferson, which aims to save red, rural southern Oregon and Northern California from the grip of blue urban centers... ...Read More
|
|
Digging Deeper into the Current Conjuncture: |
|
|
Immigrants Are Saving The American Economy
By Judd Legum
And Tesnim Zekeria
Popular.info
MAY 02, 2024 - In his 2024 campaign, like his previous campaigns, Trump is pitting native-born Americans against immigrants. Sometimes, this is expressed through rank bigotry.
Trump has claimed repeatedly that undocumented immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country," a phrase with a dark history. In other instances, Trump makes more specific claims about the impact of immigrants on the American economy.
In a February rally in Michigan, Trump told the crowd that immigrants coming into the country are "going to take your jobs." During his presidency, Trump imposed significant restrictions on legal immigration, arguing that new arrivals displace American workers and reduce wages.
New data, however, confirms that these claims are false. Rather, immigrants have powered the remarkable recovery of the US economy after the shock of the pandemic.
In 2023, the US economy grew at a 2.5% rate, "outpacing all other advanced economies." The US is on track "to do so again in 2024." This is only possible because of a substantial increase in immigration.
Since February 2020, there has been no net job growth among native-born Americans. One reason is that the native-born workforce is flat or shrinking. Baby boomers are retiring, and birth rates remain low. But there has been substantial job growth in the US since February 2020 because more immigrants are working.
A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) reveals that contrary to conventional wisdom, the immigrant workforce in America benefits native-born workers. The study concluded that "immigrants raise wages and boost the employment of U.S.-born workers." This is especially true for native-born workers with less education. The study found that "immigration, thanks to native-immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6% on wages of less educated native workers, over the period 2000-2019 and no significant wage effect on college educated natives."
Giovanni Peri, one of the study's authors, explained this phenomenon. According to Peri, "[w]hen immigrants work in manual labor jobs, U.S.-born workers often specialize," moving into jobs with higher wages. The "complementarity" of immigrant workers means they are filling openings in sectors with labor shortages, like health care and hospitality, facilitating the hiring of native-born workers in those sectors at higher salaries.
A similar point was made by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell during a February 2024 interview with CBS' 60 Minutes:
60 MINUTES' SCOTT PELLEY: Why is immigration so important to the economy?
JEROME POWELL: …[O]ver time…the U.S. economy has benefited from immigration. And, frankly, just in the last, year a big part of the story of the labor market coming back into better balance is immigration returning to levels that were more typical of the pre-pandemic era.
PELLEY: The country needed the workers.
POWELL: It did. And so, that's what's been happening.
Further, Peri notes, "[i]mmigrants are not simply workers but consumers." With immigrants adding to the total number of consumers, there is "greater demand for labor and thus increased wages and employment in the economy."
|
|
|
|
The Heritage Foundation’s Racist Origins and What That History Tells Us
How Project 2025 will Destroy Public Education and Multi-Racial Democracy
By Nancy MacLean
Washington Spectator
Apr 30, 2024 - What will the prescriptions in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 mean for parents, public schools, and multiracial democracy? The law professor and social critic Kimberlé W. Crenshaw interviewed historian Nancy MacLean recently at a “Homeroom” webinar of the Freedom to Learn Coalition, which plans a nationwide series of events on May 3. The following slightly reformatted and expanded text is adapted from their exchange.
CRENSHAW: These wars on curricula are not new, of course; they go far back in our history. What folks might not know is that the Heritage Foundation, the main convenor of Project 2025, cut its teeth on curricular wars in the 1970s. Can you tell us about this formative history and what it reveals about the sort of organization Heritage and its 2025 partners are?
MacLEAN: The Heritage Foundation today is the 800-pound gorilla on the radical right. With an annual budget of over $100 million, and a huge, multistory office complex in Washington, D.C., it is one of the top agenda-setting organizations on the right, if not the dominant one, so it’s not surprising that it took the lead in creating Project 2025.
What people need to know is that—unlike some other groups on the right—from its outset the Heritage Foundation blended the toxic cocktail that today’s right is gulping in large doses to achieve its goals: libertarian economics; Christian nationalism; and the weaponization of racism, gender anxiety, and parental fears about sex.
Back in 1974, a year after its founding, Heritage had a staff of five people in a rented office above a garage. That’s when its co-founder, Paul Weyrich, sniffed a big opportunity in West Virginia—in a textbook fight brewing in Kanawha County, home of the state capitol in Charleston. As Weyrich said later: “The alliance between religion and politics didn’t just happen.”
Heritage worked hard to make it happen. Heritage’s then-tiny team inserted itself in a fight opened by Alice Moore, a school board member, and the wife of a fundamentalist minister. She didn’t like the new multicultural language arts textbooks the district was adopting that including some 300 titles she had not read but objected to.
First, she complained about literature that had any dialogue, whether Appalachian or “ghetto,” that was not “correct” English. Then it was that the books were “filthy, disgusting trash”— also “unduly favoring blacks.” Then it was that The Autobiography of Malcolm X, an option for high school seniors, disrespected Christianity.
As with today’s culture wars, this one had interested backers from the beginning. Moore was already in the orbit of the John Birch Society and received counsel from Mel and Norma Gabler, the Texas-based couple who were transforming textbook adoption in states like their own by claiming bias over what they viewed as offensive content, such as evolution rather than creationism. Moore soon traveled to address the Christian Crusade of Tulsa on the theme “Public Schools Undermine God’s Law.”
All the while, the fledgling Heritage Foundation provided training, publicity, and links to potential allies. The result? The most violent textbook battle in U.S. history to date. Over the ensuing months, parents of one-fourth of the students in the county had kept them home to boycott the schools, some set up private “Christian schools,” gunshots were fired, Moore’s allies physically attacked ... ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Photo: The record 4,700 conferencegoers were riding the energy of many breakthroughs won and new campaigns launched—above all, last fall's Big 3 auto strike. Photo: Jim West/jimwestphoto.com
Pulsing with Life: 2024 Labor Notes Conference
By Alexandra Bradbury
Labor Notes
April 26, 2024 - Four women in red scrubs, of various races, stand, all masked, raising their fists in the air, some clasping one another's hands. They are at the front of a large crowd in the ballroom.
The 2024 Labor Notes Conference pulsed with life—with a record turnout of 4,700 people, and a rising note of optimism because of the many breakthroughs won and new campaigns launched.
Since we last gathered, Starbucks baristas have forced their employer into national bargaining. UPS workers won a big raise and wiped out driver two-tier with a strike threat. Graduate workers are organizing by the tens of thousands. Independent unions are spreading in retail and tech. Inspired by the Auto Workers and the Teamsters, demands for more democratic unions are spreading too.
Above all, conferencegoers were riding the energy radiating from last fall’s six-week escalating Stand-Up Strike against the Big 3 automakers. Spirits surged further still as news broke Friday night that 4,000 Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, had won their union in a 3 to 1 vote—the first domino in the United Auto Workers’ massive new organizing drive.
In the conference finale, UAW President Shawn Fain brought a packed house to its feet, declaring that immigrant workers are our union family and not our enemy.
He called the Labor Notes book A Troublemaker’s Handbook his “other bible.” He hinted at an impending strike at Daimler Truck. And he insisted that the power to beat back corporate greed rests not in any union president but in “a united working class. That’s how we’re going to win.”
Italian metalworkers union leader Michele da Palma, whose foes include one of the Big 3, Stellantis, made a similar point. “Nobody will come to save us,” he said. “Elon Musk is thinking of leaving Earth and flying to Mars. It is us who, with our work, build the society in which we live.”
FULL TO BURSTING
The conference featured 300 workshops, panels, and meetings—and most were full to bursting. Many covered practical skills like bargaining, grievances, job actions, and organizing. Others dug into how unions are fighting on major issues like two-tier pay, short staffing, privatization, A.I., and mental health.
A dozen workshops dealt with climate change—how it’s hitting us in the workplace and how we can take it on in our organizing. Four workshops and a meeting focused on Palestine, and many speakers across the conference highlighted the urgent need to put labor’s muscle behind the demand for a ceasefire and justice there.
Forty sessions were offered in Spanish or with Spanish interpretation, allowing the participation of many immigrant workers as well as representatives of Mexico’s growing independent union movement. Main session speaker Cesar Orta, from an independent Mexican union of auto workers at Audi, talked about the need to raise Mexican auto workers’ wages and to “keep U.S. jobs in the U.S.”
PUTTING THE MOVEMENT BACK IN
Union reformers were everywhere, from rank and filers just getting started forming caucuses and slates to those who have won office and are turning their unions’ focus and resources to member organizing.
Many workshops focused on how to build a caucus and how a democratic union operates. A hundred building trades workers met to discuss how to build more member-led unions that stand up to management. Railroad workers (BMWE) are pushing for one member, one vote elections, and letter carriers (NALC) are building momentum for member involvement in their contract fight. Grocery workers (UFCW) kicked their campaign for a fair vote on convention delegates up a notch, announcing a lawsuit against their international union.
Reformers spoke in many main sessions: Portland Association of Teachers President Angela Bonilla, coming off a four-week strike; Des Moines Teamsters Local 90 President Alano De La Rosa, whose union built a bottom-up strike threat at Pepsi; Canadian commercial actor Kate Ziegler, part of a rank-and-file caucus battling a lockout; and Minnesota Nurses Vice President Shiori Konda-Muhammad, whose reform slate grew out of a massive contract campaign at 16 hospitals.
ART AND FILM
The Great Labor Arts Exchange teamed up with Labor Notes once again to weave music and culture throughout the weekend, with electrifying performances in the main sessions—starting with the Chicago Women in Trades Drum Line marching us in on Friday night—and workshops on using songwriting, poetry, visual arts, and theater in your organizing.
Conferencegoers enjoyed special preview screenings of two new documentaries, about Starbucks and Amazon organizing, each followed by a Q&A with filmmakers and the workers involved.
The Saturday fundraising dinner featured this year’s Troublemaker Award recipients: Massachusetts teachers for their illegal strike wave, the worker center Pescando Justicia (Fishing for Justice), and the UAW Stand-Up Strikers.
Many participants on their way into town for the conference stopped by rallies for the flight attendants at O’Hare Airport or for Trader Joe’s workers in Chicago, and buses took others to a Saturday lunchtime rally with Portillo’s restaurant workers in Rosemont.
PRESS COVERAGE
Here’s a taste of press coverage of the conference so far:
-
The Nation: “The “Troublemakers” of the Labor Movement Gather in Chicago” (Ella Fanger)
-
The American Prospect: ”Where Militant Unionists Come to Plan” (Nelson Lichtenstein)
-
The Chief Leader: ”At Labor Notes conference, a sense of mission and solidarity” (Duncan Freeman)
-
Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung: “Report from the 2024 Labor Notes Conference” (Florian Wilde)
-
Labor Radio-Podcast Weekly: “Live from Labor Notes with the Labor Radio Podcast Network”, “(Many) Voices from Labor Notes”, and “Labor Notes speaks!” (Patrick Dixon, Chris Garlock, and Harold Phillips)...
Alexandra Bradbury is the editor of Labor Notes.
|
|
Would 'Dictator' Trump Kill His Rivals?
By Thom Hartmann
The Hartmann Report via Portside
May 1, 2024- TIME magazine reporter Eric Cortellessa spent hours interviewing Donald Trump, producing a shocking cover story this week. Converting one of his opening paragraphs into bullet points for readability, he summarized that Trump fully plans:
- “To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.
- “He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.
- “He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers.
- “He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding.
- “He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury.
- “He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense.
- “He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”
While each and every one of Cortellessa’s points gleaned from Trump’s admissions and brags have the potential to transform America into a nation more closely resembling Russia or Saudi Arabia than anything seen here since the violence of the Confederacy, the reporter failed to ask Trump about his most troubling threat: to use assassination as a political weapon the way Putin and MBS do routinely.
Along those lines, CNN and the rest of America learned this past weekend that Bill Barr heard Trump repeatedly call for the murder of people he dislikes, but Barr says he thinks it’s all just bluster. Like that January 6th “bluster” that almost led to Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi ending up dead, and killed at least eight other individuals, including police officers.
Historians will tell you that dictators throughout history started just this same way, making vague threats to whip up their followers and engaging in “bluster.” And then, when the blood starts flowing, people realized, too late, that they should have been taking that all rhetoric seriously.
Killing his political rivals has been a theme with Donald Trump for years, and now that he’s promising to be a “dictator on day one” and to engage in “revenge” and “retribution” it’s past time to take him seriously.
Back in 2016, he bragged that he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and his followers would still vote for him.
In 2020, when it was revealed that somebody in the White House had leaked the fact that Trump had fled to the White House bunker when Black Lives Matter protestors were down the street from the presidential residence, Trump flew into a murderous rage. As Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender wrote in his 2021 book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election:
“Trump boiled over about the bunker story as soon as they arrived and shouted at them to smoke out whoever had leaked it. It was the most upset some aides had ever seen the president. ‘Whoever did that, they should be charged with treason!’ Trump reportedly yelled. ‘They should be executed!’”
After calling our soldiers who died at Normandy “suckers” and saying John McCain was a “fucking loser” for getting shot down over Vietnam, Trump turned on General Mark Milley when he refused Trump’s request for his soldiers to shoot Washington, DC Black Lives Matter protestors “in the legs.” When Milley’s book telling the story was published six months ago, Trump used his Nazi-infested, money-losing social media site to call for Milley himself to be executed, saying he deserved “DEATH!”
Last month, before his current New York trial started, Trump said his supporters would riot and kill people if he were criminally charged for paying off a porn star to hide his moral failings before the 2016 election. He gleefully predicted “death & destruction,” adding that “such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country.” (Only a tiny handful of people have showed up to support him at his trial.)
Similarly, Trump also tried to get Mark Esper, his acting Defense Secretary, to authorize the military to shoot protestors with live ammunition; Esper, horrified, wrote about it in his book A Sacred Oath.
In the few weeks leading up to President Biden’s swearing in, Trump broke a 130-year tradition of not executing people during the presidential transition period: he killed so many federal criminals during those few weeks that the BBC led with the headline “In Trump’s Final Days, a Rush of Federal Executions.”
In a desperate effort to salvage the economy he thought would determine his re-election in 2020, Trump and Kushner decided it would be “an effective political strategy” to let Black and Brown people in Blue states die of Covid while blaming their deaths on Democratic governors.
That “strategy,” according to the British medical journal Lancet, led to at least 450,000 unnecessary American deaths from the grisly disease. Trump, in other words, killed almost as many Americans as did the Civil War because he thought it would work to his political advantage. He not only never apologized for all those deaths and shattered families; he continues to claim that his response to the pandemic was “perfect.”
Last month, Trump violated his bail by re-posting a video of President Joe Biden hog-tied with an apparent bullet hole in his forehead, laying dead or helpless in the back of a pickup truck. Just a few weeks later, his lawyers told the Supreme Court that he could assassinate his political rivals during a second term. After all, why pass up an opportunity to legally kill people when it’s so much fun?
At least he didn’t have a dog he could shoot in the face.
Levity aside, the issue of Trump wanting to kill his “enemies” came up again last weekend when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins interviewed Bill Barr, who’d apparently witnessed several of Trump’s murderous rages.
Barr, who corruptly helped George HW Bush avoid prosecution for Iran/Contra crimes and then buried Robert Mueller’s report on the Trump campaign’s many ties to Russia, brushed Trump’s threats aside, arguing that Joe Biden’s “socialist agenda” is more dangerous to America than having a man who aspires to be a stone-cold killer in the White House.
Imagining Trump as a murderous dictator is apparently a bridge too far for most of America’s mainstream media: they’re too often busy normalizing him and his campaign. But the simple fact is that every authoritarian in history has not only used imprisonment, torture, and murder as a tool of governance, but most delighted in killing their enemies.
Mussolini brought the death penalty back to Italy specifically for political “crimes against the state,” sentencing 43 people to death by firing squad between 1927 and 1943 (26 executions were carried out).
Hitler delighted in the torture and murder of people he believed had wronged him. Sixteen months into his reign, on the Night of the Long Knives, he ordered the murder, among others, of Ernst Röhm and other leaders of the Sturmabteilung (“Brownshirts”); the last chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Kurt von Schleicher; his own 1932 right-hand-man in the Nazi Party, Gregor Strasser; ; the rightwing former Bavarian Prime Minister Gustav von Kahr; Von Pappen’s speechwriter and conservative firebrand Edgar Jung; and the leader of the rightwing Catholic Action group, professor Erich Klausener.
After several members of his military tried to assassinate Hitler with a bomb, he had them tortured and finally killed by hanging them from meat hooks punched through their flesh while alive and awake. He made a movie of their murder for distribution among his Nazi followers.
Putin has anybody he thinks is disloyal executed or thrown out a high window, and most recently murdered his chief political rival, Alexi Navalny. Viktor Orbán tried to defy the European Union and bring the death penalty back to Hungary.
The men Trump most envies and admires — Hitler, Putin, Xi, MBS, and Kim — are all famous for dispatching their opposition with poison, torture, prison, and bullets.
MBS even had an American journalist for The Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi, murdered, hacked into pieces, and his body disposed of. Instead of backing away from the ruthless dictator, Trump’s family took $2 billion from him and Trump himself is swimming in MBS’s cash from his LIV Golf Tournament.
George W. Bush set the modern precedent for American presidents ignoring due process and engaging in extrajudicial torture and murder. Between Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo (along with dozens of other dark sites), America tortured and murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prisoners without any semblance of due process; neither Bush nor any member of his administration was ever held to account for it, which has to have given Trump encouragement in his plans for violence and revenge.
Trump brazenly invited an armed mob to attack the Capitol on January 6th, demanding that his security people not make them go through magnetometers because he knew the weapons they carried presented a threat to Pence, Pelosi, and members of Congress rather than him. Five people died and several police officers later passed away from injuries they sustained on that day: Trump reportedly watched the violence on TV in the White House with delight and fascination.
Now he brags that he’s going to bring violence to America if his will is thwarted in this fall’s election, and his former chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, Kash Patel, recently warned the American media that a second Trump administration would be coming for you and me.
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” The New York Times quoted Patel as saying. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
We — and the mainstream media — need to take Trump and his cruel factotums seriously. Bill Barr’s bland assurances notwithstanding, the next time won’t be anything like the last time: Trump has unleashed his inner psychopath and if he wins this election it’s going to get uglier here in America than most people today can imagine. ...Read More
Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author of 34 books in 17 languages & nation's #1 progressive radio host. Psychotherapist, international relief worker. Politics, history, spirituality, psychology, science, anthropology, pre-history, culture, and the natural world.
|
|
New Journals and Books for Radical Education...
Use Changemaker for Your Holiday Gifts,
Thus Lending Us a Hand, Too!
|
|
From Upton
Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University
Essays on the Ongoing Transformation of Higher Education
Paperback USD 17.00
This is a unique collection of 15 essays by two Purdue University professors who use their institution as a case-in-point study of the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education' from 1923, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then and brought it up to date with more far-reaching changes today. time. They also include, as an appendix, a 1967 essay by SDS leader Carl Davidson, who broke some of the original ground on the subject.
|
|
The Man Who Changed Colors
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
When a dockworker falls to his death under strange circumstances, investigative journalist David Gomes is on the case. His dogged pursuit of the truth puts his life in danger and upends the scrappy Cape Cod newspaper he works for.
Spend a season on the Cape with this gripping, provocative tale that delves into the
complicated relationships between Cape Verdean Americans and African Americans, Portuguese fascist gangs, and abusive shipyard working conditions. From the author of The Man Who Fell From The Sky.
“Bill Fletcher is a truth seeker and a truth teller – even when he’s writing fiction. Not unlike Bill, his character David Gomes is willing to put his life and career in peril to expose the truth. A thrilling read!” − Tavis Smiley, Broadcaster & NY TIMES Bestselling Author
|
|
VVAW: 50 Years
of Struggle
By Alynne Romo
While most books about VVAW focus on the 1960s and 1970s, this photo-with-text book provides a look at many of actions of VVAW over five decades. Some of VVAW’s events and its stands on issues are highlighted here in stories. Others show up in the running timelines which also include relevant events around the nation or the world. Examples of events are the riots in America’s urban centers, the murders of civil rights leaders or the largely failed missions in Vietnam.
Paul Tabone: This is a must read for anyone who was in the war, who had a loved one in the war, who is interested in history in general or probably more importantly for anyone who wants to see how we repeat history over and over again given the incredible idiot and his minions that currently occupy the White House. To my fellow Viet Nam veterans I say "Welcome Home Brothers". A must read for everyone who considers them self an American. Bravo.
|
|
|
A China Reader
Edited by Duncan McFarland
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project & Online University of the Left
244 pages, $20 (discounts available for quantity orders from carld717@gmail.com), or order at :
The book is a selection of essays offering keen insight into the nature of China and its social system, its internal debates, and its history. It includes several articles on the US and China and the growing efforts of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
|
|
|
|
Taking Down
White Supremacy
Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project
This collection of 20 essays brings together a variety of articles-theoretical, historical, and experiential-that address multi-racial, multi-national unity. The book provides examples theoretically and historically, of efforts to build multi-racial unity in the twentieth century.
166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
|
|
|
|
Photo: Foreground, a four-story flat-roofed apartment building being demolished, with a bulldozer sitting on a pile of rubble. Background, a lower building still standing
The Right Reads Gramsci:
Project 2025 and Neo-Fascism
'We need to understand fascism as a dynamic and revolutionary movement. It is not a conservative political force safely embedded in US institutional power. It has a radical vision of power and reconstruction that Project 2025 gives voice to.'
By Jerry Harris
Convergence
April 24, 2024 - It may come as a surprise, but the Right has been studying the work of Antonio Gramsci for years—and his ideas on the importance of culture and ideology have made a big impact on them. They concluded the Left has been following Gramsci’s lead ever since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and captured the press, the universities, civil society, and most government institutions. To counter that, they have built their own media and think tanks, cultivated an institutional base in Christian churches, and developed a narrative focused on attacking abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrants, and the civil rights advances since the 1960s.
This “war for the soul of America” is central to Project 2025’s “Mandate For Leadership” report, which presents a blueprint for MAGA and a strategic plan for the use of power should Trump win in 2024. According to its logic, left-leaning elites who promote human rights, racial justice, gender equality, and environmental protection are enemies of the people—that is, the hardworking (white) Americans for whom the ruling elites show contempt.
Referencing Gramsci, the report states: “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.” Anyone who adheres to leftist ideology is a member of this elite, dominating most major institutions of American life: the media, big tech, education—and “nothing less than a counter-revolution will save the nation.”
Understanding how the ruling class rules
Gramsci explained how leading elements of the capitalist class build hegemonic blocs to create a ruling consensus. The bloc establishes commonly accepted forms of accumulation and political rule, as well as cultural and ideological domination, or ideas that become accepted as “common sense.” The main components are accepted by both major political parties, although there may be policy differences that exist within the scope of the broad consensus. The bloc, essentially a coalition of ruling class factions, forms a mass base by both repressing the opposition and creating political support among other sections of the population. They build that support mainly by using the tools of culture and ideology to support their political and economic project, but economic success and stability also play an important role.
From about 1932 to today there have been two major hegemonic blocs in the US. The first was the Keynesian bloc developed during the Roosevelt administration, which lasted into the late 1970s. It included social welfare, the acceptance of unions and civil rights reforms for women and people of color, measures to raise living standards, an economically active state sector, nation-centric economics, repression of the Left, building the military-industrial base, and imperialism abroad. It was replaced in the 1980s by neo-liberalism, which included the globalization of production, vast cross-border financial flows, broad-scale attacks on unions, precarity, deindustrialization, undermining the social contract, free-market ideology, expanding the military-industrial complex and imperialism, while militarizing policing and promoting the carceral state.
Ruling class splits
The deep economic crisis of 2008 began to unravel the neoliberal hegemonic bloc. A rapidly growing crisis of legitimacy disrupted politics, with social movements developing to the left and right. Significant sectors of the ruling class concluded they needed to form a new consensus to stabilize capitalism and reestablish political support for the system. Two different power blocs have formed, although neither has yet achieved hegemony.
The neo-fascist bloc seeks stability through repression, and creating a mass base through religious fundamentalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. The neo-Keynesian bloc seeks stability and renewed political legitimacy through neo-Keynesian reformism, and economic expansion through the green modernization of the means of production. Both still pursue imperialism and maintaining military dominance.
This is a deep split within the ruling class over internal policies, different from the McCarthy era in which the ruling class and both political parties were united in purging the Left and expanding the US empire. The current splits may be beneficial to the Left in forming a common project to defend and expand democracy and protect civil society. That would entail aiming our main blow against the neo-fascist bloc, building the socialist core, working closely with progressives, and pushing the center to the left.
There are numerous important issues that unite a broad array of political forces: defending abortion rights, defending the queer and trans community, expanding voting rights, teaching about institutional racism in our public schools, defending public libraries and access to books, promoting more environmental legislation and regulations, maintaining a pro-labor National Labor Relations Board, defending Social Security and greater taxation on corporations. The list could go on. These issues encompass questions of race, class, and gender as well as democracy. Even within this common project socialists need to maintain independence and initiative, particularly in opposing US imperialism
The movement behind Trump is a coalition of reactionary and conservative forces. Its major organized elements are Christian Nationalists, reactionary Catholicism, laissez-faire capitalists like the Koch network, tech libertarians such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, right-wing think tanks, and neo-fascist militias. It’s important to see beyond Trump and understand the social/political movement which has gathered around him. This movement desires to coalesce as a long-term ruling hegemonic bloc, turning the US into an authoritarian Christian country, end bourgeois democracy, and severely curtail civil society.
Project 2025: a fascist vision for the U.S.
Project 2025 was initiated and published by the Heritage Foundation, the most influential rightwing think tank, and the one closest to the power centers of the Right and the Republican Party. It has united much of the conservative movement, their think tanks, activists, and lobbying groups with the goal of installing a much more effective, more ruthless right-wing regime. It comes with tremendous funding and the backing of much of the political Right and believes there is a socialist plot in the highest echelons of American power. It sees a vast conspiracy with enemies everywhere, and that un-American forces have overtaken every institution.
Project 2025 is a major policy and ideological projection. It is a fascist document and puts forward a strategic path to create an authoritarian Christian-dominated society through control of the state. There are other statements from within the authoritarian bloc with somewhat different formulations and viewpoints. Project 2025 is the most developed, and has been signed by over 100 groups and think-tanks. They want to be the ideological and policy brain behind Trump, who is useful as a mass fascist leader, but lacks the intellectual capacity to carry out a strategic project.
Donald Trump is not part of the “ruling class” (a term often used by the right to describe the elite). Instead, Trump is characterized as an outsider, a business maverick who disdains elite language and the club of Washington insiders.
China, globalists, political and academic elites, the left, socialists, communists–-for Project 2025 it is all just one enemy. “Today, nearly every top-tier university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high school football game.” Moreover, America’s corporate and political elites, are fully in cahoots with the nation’s foreign enemies, and against the “real America made up of humble, patriotic working families.”
“Every hour the Left directs federal policy and elite institutions, our sovereignty, our Constitution, our families, and our freedom are a step closer to disappearing. Conservatives have just one shot to get this right. With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost. This is the last opportunity to save our republic.” The solution to all the above problems is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. … “We solve them by ripping out the trees—root and branch.”
We need to understand fascism as a dynamic and revolutionary movement. It is not a conservative political force safely embedded in US institutional power. It has a radical vision of power and reconstruction that Project 2025 gives voice to. As Trump has stated, he plans to rid the country of “left vermin.”
The Right’s unified plan and committed cadre
The Project outlines what the Right wants to do with the executive branch and the state apparatus immediately upon returning to power, department by department and agency by agency. Including purging 50,000 federal employees. Following is an examination of the Project’s nearly 900-page document, with much of the following content based on quotes.
Executing a president’s agenda requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it. “We need to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day 1 to deconstruct the administrative state and to use the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.” Interviews are already being conducted. Accepted are only those who agree that the 2020 election was stolen.
The president’s “needs,” “goals” and “desires” are always consistent with the law. And the president is the “personal embodiment of popular will.” Mussolini and Hitler would be particularly pleased with this section.
Plans to transform the state
-
Purge Left Elites in Major Departments. According to the Project, large sections of the State Department’s work force are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative president’s agenda and vision. And the Department of Justice (which oversees the FBI) “has been captured by an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical left ideologues who have embedded themselves throughout its offices and who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda.”
-
Reverse Gains in Gender Justice. Women’s and gender rights are targets that generate a particular degree of fear and hatred. Project 2025 advocates the abolishment of the Gender Policy Council, and it wants to delete a host of terms such as: sexual orientation, gender identity, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights and diversity, equity, and inclusion out of every federal rule, internal agency regulation, contract, grant, public regulation, and piece of legislation that exists. Every U.S. state should be required to report exactly how many abortions take place, the gestational age of the child, why the abortion took place, and the mother’s home residency.
-
End Environmental Justice and Protection Projects. When it comes to environmental science and regulations, the Project takes the same extreme approach. It wants to abolish the Office of Domestic Climate Policy, the Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it “constitutes one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It goes on to state that environmental extremism serves to undermine the strength of the US. “It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.”
-
Dismantle Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiatives. As for confronting racial inequality and discrimination the Project wants every department from the Department of Labor to the U.S. Agency for International Developmentto be scrubbed clean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (“DEI” is a policy adopted by many corporations, universities and government agencies), and treat the “participation in any critical race theory or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives as grounds for termination of employment” as they violate constitutional and moral principles. The government should prohibit the collection of employment statistics based on race or ethnicity. Illegal immigration should be ended, the border sealed. Furthermore, bureaucrats at thDepartment of Education “inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into classrooms.” And “critical race theory and gender ideology should be excluded from curriculum in every public school in the country, because they poison our children.” This coincides with Trump calling immigrants “animals” that “poisons the blood of our country.”
-
Restore Traditional Values Through State Action. All policies should be guided by traditional values. According to Project 2025 the pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family — marriage, children, and above all, in religious devotion and spirituality.
This is serious
For those who say there is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans, or that the U.S. is not a democracy, or that we are already living under an authoritarian government, please take Project 2025 seriously. We are facing a well-organized, very well-financed, highly motivated, and ideologically rigorous enemy. As leftists we exist in civil society. We use the political tools of free speech, free press, free association, and the right to assemble and protest to organize for our ideas, our cause, and to create a working-class mass base. There are always tensions, limitations and violence within bourgeois democracy. But what we have today is qualitatively different from the strategic plans of the neo-fascist movement.
There is an anti-fascist majority in the US, but it is unorganized and centrist Democrats are incapable of giving it full expression or leadership. I believe the role for socialists is to unite the many and aim our main blow against the most reactionary and dangerous enemy we currently face. We need to block MAGA as a national movement over a broad front of combat, as we build the capacities of left forces to move us toward a progressive future. It’s not just about a presidential election, but that is one aspect of the battle.
Recommended:
DANGER FROM THE RIGHT DEMOCRACY DEFENSE
‘We Build Democracy Through Grassroots Organizing’
By Molly Shack and Stephanie Luce
ISRAEL/PALESTINE CHRISTIAN ZIONISM
Christian Zionism, Christian Nationalism, and the Threat to Democracy
By Steven Gardiner
ORGANIZING STRATEGY BUILDING POWER
Building Governing Power to Make the World We Need
By Dan McGrath
and Harmony Goldberg
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jerry Harris is National Secretary of the Global Studies Association of North America. He is the author of Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy (Clarity Press, 2016). His articles have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Slovak and Czech. ...Read More
|
|
CHANGEMAKER PUBLICATIONS: Recent works on new paths to socialism and the solidarity economy
Remember Us for Gift Giving and Study Groups
Interested in Studying Gramsci? In a Serious way? We have a group that meets Sundays via Zoom, 11am-12:30pm, facilitated by Piruz Alemi. We go paragraph by paragraph, even line by line, reading aloud, then discussing, through The Prison Notebooks, using an online PDF. If you are interested contact Carl Davidson at carld717@gmail.com
|
|
Treat someone to a wonderful book.
And treat yourself, too!
Powerful stories, wonderful gifts.
As they stand up, slow down, form unions, leave an abusive relationship or just stir up good trouble, the characters in this multi-generation novel entertain and enlighten, make us laugh and rage, and encourage us to love deeply, that we may continue the fight for justice.
"So much fiction is about escape and fantasy, but these powerful Tales of Struggle will enrich our real and daily lives." ─ Gloria Steinem
“What a wonderful story of class, class struggle and regular people. The story is about struggle and change, but also about joy and humor. Great work! ─ Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of Solidarity Divided
Price: $15.00
|
|
Photo: Guevara is pictured right of centre in dark fatigues
History Lesson of the Week: When Che Guevara came to Gaza
The iconic revolutionary visited Gaza to inspire a popular uprising against Israeli dominance, writes Yousef al-Helou.
Since the explicit Israeli colonization of historic Palestine in 1948 supported by colonialist and imperialist powers, namely Britain and the US, the Palestinian struggle has become a global cause. Resistance was a natural response to the invasions and incursions better known as "the ethnic cleansing of Palestine".
Even before then, as the military occupation entrenched itself at the hands of pre-state Zionist militias and paramilitary units, massacres and forceful expulsion were committed, leading to the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophe, of the loss of the Palestinians' homeland. The 1967 Naksa, or "set back", followed with the defeat of Arab armies.
Displaced indigenous Palestinians were forced to live in refugee camps in makeshift tent cities in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, relying on food hand-outs provided by UNRWA.
At first they assumed that they would one day return to where they had been driven out by force. During the Nakba, some 500 towns and villages were wiped off the map as they were looted. Today, 70 years later, the displaced and dispossessed are still waiting for the implementation of that dream - "the right of return".
Amid all the developments at the time, a sense of revolt began to emerge among Palestinians to defend their land. ...Read More
|
|
The Goal at Casa Obrera: Class Consciousness!
Mexico Solidarity Project from May 1, 2024
|
|
Miguel Rodriguez worked 20 years in the graphics industry and picked up new skills along the way that have helped him focus on helping build the labor movement. Israel Cervantes started working at GM’s Silao plant in 2006 and co-founded the rank-and-file group that challenged the plant’s corrupt CTM union.
Esmeralda Alonso Ibarra, the proud daughter of a GM Silao worker, believes worker struggles succeed when worker families participate in them. Arturo Bravo Guadarrama has been an activist ever since his student and faculty days. All four are now building worker power as staffers at the Casa Obrera del Bajío. We spoke with them all just before May Day, 2023.
When did you first learn about the May 1 International Workers Day?
Israel Cervantes: It wasn’t until I was a worker myself that I learned about the 1886 Chicago general strike for the eight-hour day. I learned that the demonstrators had been fired upon and that four of them had been executed. Some 140 years later, at General Motors in Silao, the bosses imposed 12-hour shifts on us. We know those hours hurt our health. We still struggle for an eight-hour day.
Miguel Rodriguez: In the past on May Day, a national holiday in México, you were obligated to march if you worked in a plant with a CTM union. But the CTM never explained the day’s significance. This year, all of us at the Casa Obrera will march in the city of Irapuato to support telephone workers fighting to get rid of a corrupt charro union.
Esmeralda Alonso Ibarra: Taking to the streets on May Day couldn’t be more important. Demonstrating shows how united our working class is becoming. We’ll struggle united, on behalf of each other, because we know that workers in all jobs, regardless of the sector where they work, face labor injustices that must be eradicated.
Arturo Bravo Guardarrama: My first knowledge of May Day as Labor Day came in elementary school. Then in high school I saw a parade where workers from the CXTM, CROM, CROC — unions closely affiliated with the government — applauded government authorities. Later, as my political understanding grew, I realized that the march organizers had no real clue about the origins of May Day. In 2003, I was a leader of a public sector union, and we got the bureaucracy in our city of Queretaro to state that the May Day march aims “to commemorate those who bequeathed us our rights, at the cost of their lives.” ...Read More
|
|
New Liberation Road
Booklets supporting the Mexico Solidarity Project
By Bill Gallegos
Liberation Road is the only major US revolutionary socialist organization that has a developed position on Chicano Liberation, and one of the few that understands and works to build solidarity with the socialist movements and revolutionaries of Mexico. Now we have something that explains those positions - a series of Liberation Road pamphlets entitled Adelante! (Forward!). The pamphlets were developed collectively by several comrades, with support from comrades outside the organization.
The articles are enhanced and enriched by the powerful art and culture that is a major component of the pamphlets. While Adelante! was introduced at the recent Mexico Solidarity tour of the Mexico Solidarity Project they are meant as important resources for all comrades of Liberation Road — to better understand our strategic perspectives on Chicano Liberation and Mexico Solidarity (internationalism), and to help us promote those perspectives in all of our mass and red work.
This has always been an important task for our organization, but now more than ever as the New Confederacy seems to have made immigration the center of their attack on democracy, equity, and social justice. In order to support comrades in understanding and advancing our strategic perspectives we are going to be conducting at least one webinar to discuss our line and how to integrate Adelante! in your work. Adelante! is a product of love comrades, an expression of the spirit element that Che Guevarra insisted is at the heart of every true revolutionary’s work. A link to download the booklets will be available by next week. Meanwhile, contact Bill Gallegos at billg4@gmail.com
|
|
|
Our Amazing Resource for Radical Education
From the settlers to the present, and how its consciousness is conflicted. Prepared by Carl Davidson and Rebecca Tarlau,
with some help from the DSA Rust Belt group.
|
There are hundreds of video courses here, along with study guides, downloadable books and links to hundreds of other resources for study groups or individuals.
Nearly 10,000 people have signed on to the OUL for daily updates, and more than 150,000 have visited us at least once.
Karl Marx's ideas are a common touchstone for many people working for change. His historical materialism, his many contributions to political economy and class analysis, all continue to serve his core values--the self-emancipation of the working class and a vision of a classless society. There are naturally many trends in Marxism that have developed over the years, and new ones are on the rise today. All of them and others who want to see this project succeed are welcome here.
|
|
|
|
Video for Learning: Jewish, Palestinian, and Arab American Students Discuss the War in Gaza...5 min
|
|
Harry Targ's 'Diary of a Heartland Radical' |
This week's topic:
ANTISEMITISM CHARGES ARE USED TO CRUSH DEBATE
Click the picture to access the blog.
|
|
Tune of the Week: Johnny Cash & Joe Strummer - Bob Marley's 'Redemption Song' ...4:00 min
|
|
Book Review: Libby Frank Presente! – Meet This Extraordinary Activist for Middle East Peace
Jewish activists who support the cause of the Palestinians will take particular interest in her growth from a girl who grew up in a traditional Jewish family, active in the young Zionist movement, to a fierce fighter for peace in the Middle East....
By Marilyn Albert
PORTSIDE
May 2, 2024 - Leading American Middle East peace activist Libby Frank and member of the Committees of Correspondence passed away in December at age 95.
I knew Libby for decades, as she was one of my parents’ oldest friends, going back to their youth in anti-racism and Left movements in Cleveland, Ohio.
Life of Libby: Chasing Peace & Justice
with Humor, Guts, & Passion
By Libby Frank and Heather Shafter
Kate Butler Books; 210 pages
Paperback: $14.99
ISBN-10 1962407292
So I was happy to see the new book, “Life of Libby: Chasing Peace and Justice with Humor, Guts, and Passion”, published just after Libby’s passing. This inspiring memoir was co-written by one of Libby’s younger co-workers, Heather Shafter.
Jewish activists who support the cause of the Palestinians will take particular interest in Libby’s narrative of her growth from a girl who grew up in a traditional Jewish family, active in the young Zionist movement in the 1940s and 50s, to a fierce fighter for peace in the Middle East and true freedom for the Palestinians.
Part 2 of the book is titled, “Zionist to Peace Delegate”. In it Libby tells of her involvement during the 1940s in various Zionist groups of young people, explaining why she and others were attracted to Zionism at that time. In 1947 she was involved in planning a conference called the Palestine Youth Conference, which was intended for Jewish youth. A workshop at the conference was titled, “Arabs Live There Too”. Libby was proud to be promoting this consciousness at a time when Palestine was talked about as a “land without people” by Zionists.
In the 1970s Libby started working full time in the anti-Vietnam war movement. It was during this period that she was hearing from some activists, “It’s not good what Israel is doing.”
As director of the local Peace Center, Libby immediately said, “Let’s have a public meeting about it.” The meeting took place with longtime pacifist and anti-war leader Dave Dellinger as the featured speaker. It was controversial and some people walked out.
Later as a longtime activist in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Libby asked to be on the WILPF Middle East Committee. But there was no such committee, so Libby started one. In 1974, she organized support for Yasser Arafat’s appearance at the United Nations, amid Jewish organizations’ opposition to him. Shortly thereafter, as she became more involved in the struggle for peace in the Middle East, she met a Palestinian for the first time.
From that point in 1974, for the next 50 years, Libby Frank was a leader in the fight for peace in the Middle East, always focusing on the role of the United States in funding Israel’s policies against the Palestinians. It was largely through personal contact with Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Israelis, and many others through her participation in international delegations that Libby’s positions supporting Palestinian liberation and achieving lasting peace evolved to the same viewpoints we see in groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and the militant student movement now growing on American college campuses.
Other aspects of Libby’s life—her suggesting to Pete Seeger to change the words to “If I Had a Hammer,” raising two children while being a full-time activist, gently fighting male supremacy in the movement whenever she encountered it, and a marriage based on equality and common commitment with Dr. Mort Frank, who passed away shortly before Libby did—all enrich this book and make it worth buying and reading. ...Read More
|
|
Film Review: An Enhanced Interrogation of an American Shame
In “I Am Gitmo,” French director Philippe Diaz recreates the torture rooms inside the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.
By Carrie rickey
Truthdig
April 26, 2024 - Four months to the day after 9/11, on Jan. 11, 2002, the United States Naval Station in Cuba opened the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, known around the world as “Gitmo.” Nearly 800 men and boys, all of them Muslim, were brought there in handcuffs and shackles.
By designating these “unlawful combatants” as “detainees,” the Bush Administration obscured the fact that Gitmo is not a detention center; it’s a prison. Its inmates were never entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions. They were interrogated, tortured and otherwise dehumanized within an inch of their lives, some for as long as 20 years. Many of the reported “suicides” that took place inside are believed to have been the result of a a technique known as dryboarding, which involves stuffing rags down the throats of subjects to induce asphyxiation.
In “I am Gitmo,” French filmmaker Philippe Diaz reenacts the reality of the prison in the style of a documentary procedural. Its focus is the degrading and shameful treatment of Gamal Sadek, an Egyptian mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. When the Soviets retreated, he stayed in Kandahar, married and became a schoolteacher. After 9/11, he was arrested, suspected of being a member of the Taliban, and a confederate of Osama bin Laden.
One article of evidence used against him is a grainy photograph of bin Laden surrounded by his men. Using facial recognition techniques, American intelligence identified Sadek as one of them. In exchange for bounty money from the U.S., Sadek’s imam also told U.S. investigators that the Egyptian was involved with the Taliban. When Sadek pleads innocence, he is tortured. When he maintains silence, he is tortured even more rigorously. He is routinely denied food and water. When those techniques fail to yield a confession, Sadek is subjected to what the Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques” — another way of saying he was tortured.
Given the powerful emotional charge of the material, it is a shame that Diaz’s storytelling is so inconsistent. It begins as the alternating parallel accounts of a U.S. military interrogator John Anderson (Eric Pierpont), and Sadek (Sammy Sheik), each explaining the origins of their standoff at the detention center. Due to Sheik’s commanding and charismatic performance, Sadek swiftly emerges as the movie’s central figure, a stalwart of faith, victim of mistaken identity and of overzealous corporal punishment.
As the interrogator, Anderson is an old-school military man uncomfortable with the idea that torture will result in confession. While Anderson finds that “enhanced interrogation” protocols to be questionable, he does not question the intelligence against Sadek. While aware of the various ways of how the American military is trying to make Gitmo detainees confess, never do Anderson or his colleagues conclude that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is one definition of insanity.
Dry-boarding. Water-boarding. Sexual abuse. Shoving prisoners’ heads in toilets and repeatedly flushing. Hanging them from meat hooks. Psychological abuse, such as placing prisoners in coffins and nailing them shut. Forced feeding. Sensory deprivation. I barely survived the film’s simulations of this abuse. How did the victims survive the real thing?
The film takes its title from the prisoners who, bruised and abused, go on hunger strike and like the followers of the freedom fighter in ”Spartacus,” say to the authorities, “I am Gitmo.” The film left me shaken and in agreement with the American guard who tells Sadek, “Many of us feel ashamed about what’s going on here.” Even if “I am Gitmo” is too narratively choppy to be a great movie, it is an effective and necessary reminder that after 23-plus years, Guantanamo is still open. And for that, we should all feel ashamed. ...Read More
|
|
522 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-6637
|
|
|
|
Is the content of this email relevant to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
