Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism |
|
April 19, 2024: The Week in Review
Palestine, Free Speech, and
Academic Freedom in Our Time
|
|
Some political lessons, it seems, are not learned once and for all.
Our right to free speech, save for the relativity high bar of 'fire in a crowded theater,' seems to be one of them. What's more, its connection with academic freedom and tenure is also at issue.
We find it utterly bizarre, for example, that the president of Columbia University is called on the Congressional carpet to undergo an absurd series of questions about whether she had cracked down hard enough on any students or faculty who held pro-Palestine views. At the same time, Congress was listening to rants from Alabama Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green urging the use of 'Jewish space lasers' to drive immigrants from our southern borders. The 'space lasers,' she argued, were invented for the Rothschild's, to start forest fires in California. Couldn't they be put to better use against immigrants? We kid you not.
We'll give you only one guess about who gets called on the carpet for anti-Semitism here, and who does not. According to the ancient Chinese curse, we live in interesting times.
Those of us old enough to remember the Army-McCarthy hearings, headed up by the drunken Senator from Wisconsin and his sinister sidekick, Roy Cohn, will immediately recognize what's going on in Congress. Our misnamed 'Freedom Caucus' has found a new path to red-baiting. First, you put Palestine in the dock as the immediate source of evil, then you burrow down to find 'communism,' 'socialism,' 'feminist witches,' Black brutes' and whatever other demons might be summoned to get everyone to shut up, with the exception, naturally, of our Taylor-Greens.
Our left and its wider progressive allies would do well to stand up to this reactionary nonsense and knock it down for another 50 years. But to be at all effective, we need to assert two propositions. First, it is not anti-Semitic to favor Palestine and its right to self-determination, especially in the middle of the genocidal onslaught against Gaza. We would be standing with most of the world if we did so, and we should do so anyway, even if it's unpopular. There's also nothing wrong with adding the slogan, 'from the river to the sea.' There's nothing there stating Palestinians need to be the only people there. Of course, some may have a guilty conscience about the Likud slogan, 'from the sea to the river,' where they do mean pushing out the Palestinians.
The second point is that it's also not anti-Semitic to demand an end to apartheid in Israel. This does not call into question 'Israel's right to exist' any more than calling for an end to apartheid in the American South or South Africa. The South African state, where apartheid has been largely dismantled, continues to exist and move forward. Some may object that this means Jews wouldn't have special rights, over and above others. Indeed it would, but in that case, Israel could still exist side-by-side with a sovereign Palestinian state in the same wider territory. Either might by difficult, but no solution in Israel is going to be easy.
It is precisely these issues, however, that are being used against those who favor Palestine, as our cartoon above suggests. What's worse is these false claims are not only used by GOP Joe McCarthy wannabees in Congress. You'll also find them on the editorial boards of our top newspapers and TV shows. You can get an earful nearly any day of the week on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe,' not to mention Fox News.
This doesn't mean we can't find an idiotic soul somewhere who wants to paint a swastika on an Israeli flag. There are real anti-Semites in our country, and we should call them out and oppose them as they appear. Ms. Green is a case in point.
But we must firmly reject the frame some would like to impose on us, even if they might be allies in other matters. We don't expect a majority of Americans to be pro-Palestine at this point, but we have a rather large militant minority that is. What that militant minority needs to work on is developing a wider progressive majority demanding a cease-fire and aid to Gaza, and an end to money and arms to Israel to make it so. We will also find it worthwhile, in our local districts, to survey where all of our neighbors stand, and then work on both educational and action campaigns to move the needle in our direction.
|
|
|
|
 |
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!
|
The Return of John Brown:
Abolitionist Comes Back
to Life in New Musical
The first show will debut on April 26 in Baltimore, followed by a show on April 27 in Washington, DC. The next weekend on May 4 and 5, the play will be featured at the Kennedy Farm, the Harpers Ferry location where John Brown staged his famous anti-slavery raid.
Director: Jayne LaMondue Price
Musical Director: Glenn Pearson
For more information email Returnofjohnbrown@gmail.com.
|
We’ve officially launched our NEW documentary, BEYOND BARS, and we’d like you and your community to host a screening for free! During an election year with over two million Americans currently incarcerated, BEYOND BARS exposes the continuing impact of white supremacy, all through the powerful story of former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin and his family. Organize and mobilize with us!
|
ON THE IMMIGRATION 'PROBLEM'
The webinar features Anne Lewis and David Bacon
April 22, 2924,
9 pm Eastern, 6 pm Pacific
Presented by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project's
4th Monday Webinar
Woody Guthrie wrote his famous song "Deportees" in 1948, decrying that "All they will call you will be 'deportees.'" And "they chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves."
Woody wrote at a time when the US political economy depended upon temporary immigrant labor. Since the 1940s and the globalization of the economy, people faced increased violence and repression, largely involving United States interference
People also faced growing income and wealth inequality and poverty, climate catastrophes, and the rise of repressive regimes everywhere. Emigration has increased.
The United Nations has estimated that "the number of international migrants has been robust over the last two decades, reaching 281 million people living outside their country of origin in 2020, up from 173 million in 2000 and 221 million in 2010.
David Bacon, below
|
Currently, international migrants represent about 3.6 percent of the world's population." And today, they represent a large and growing percentage of the agricultural and manufacturing work force.
Now, 'the immigration problem' is the issue dominating campaign and election debate. Both parties conceive of immigration as a problem. Is it? What are its causes? What role have immigrants played in America's economy? How should the left respond to the vicious attack on immigrants and the draconian proposals made by political candidates to address "the problem."
|
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.*
|
|
|
|
Slim Coleman, Presente!
1943-2024
BY Mitch Dudek
Chicago Sun-Times
Walter “Slim” Coleman, a dyedin-the-wool radical activist of the 1960s who for decades harnessed the power of the city’s poor to challenge its power structure and achieve social justice goals, died Tuesday after a long bout with illness.
He was 80.
One of his biggest accomplish-ments was helping to organize a voting drive in Chicago’s poor white communities that helped elect Mayor Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor.
Mr. Coleman moved to Chicago from Cleveland in 1966 to continue his work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a mostly Black, student-run civil rights group. After the organization dissolved, Mr. Coleman began working with Students for a Democratic Society, which had headquarters at 1608 W. Madison, a short distance from the headquarters of the Black Panther Party.
Mr. Coleman became close with Black Panther leader Fred Hampton as a result.
After parting ways with the Students for a Democratic Society over what he viewed as racist conduct within their ranks, Mr. Coleman created the People’s Information Center in Lincoln Park, which functioned as the white arm of the Black Panther Party and aided thousands of poor whites and Latinos who lived on the city’s North Side.
After Hampton was killed by police in 1969, Mr. Coleman established the Intercommunal Survival Collective of the Black Panther Party in Uptown, which was also home to impoverished white families.
Its purpose was to begin the same kind of survival programs in the white community — providing food, education and legal assistance — that the Black Panthers started in the city’s Black neighborhoods.
The group evolved into the Heart of Uptown Coalition.
One of the radical activists that Mr. Coleman recruited to help in the effort was future 46th Ward Ald. Helen Shiller.
In the 1970s, Mr. Coleman became more active politically and worked to unseat Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan, who was in command of the police officers who killed Hampton and fellow Panther leader Mark Clark in the 1969 raid. Mr. Coleman later registered voters to support Washington’s eventual path to the mayor’s office and served as an informal adviser to Washington.
Mr. Coleman was vehemently opposed to what he viewed as the city’s racist Democratic machine that stood against Washington during the “Council Wars” of the 1980s.
Congressman Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther leader who counted Mr. Coleman as one of his best friends, credited Mr. Coleman with helping shape Chicago and the country.
“There would not have been a Harold Washington, there would not have been a Carol Moseley Braun, there would not have been a Barack Obama if not for the singular contribution of Slim Coleman,”
Rush said in a statement. “His life will always be a beacon to those who seek a more just and equitable life, and nation.”
Mr. Coleman created the “Fair Share” organization with his future wife, Emma Lozano, to fight gentrification in the West Town and Bucktown communities.
Mr. Coleman later became pastor and headed up Adalberto United Methodist Church in Humboldt Park.
He made national headlines in 2006 when he housed undocumented immigrant Elvira Arellano at the church so she could avoid deportation by federal authorities.
Mr. Coleman was born Aug. 20, 1943, and grew up in a conservative household in Lubbock, Texas.
His view of the world changed when he was 16 and attended a Bo Diddley concert, where he was one of the only white people in the audience and befriended a Black college student who was a radical activist.
Mr. Coleman attended Harvard University on a scholarship but dropped out shortly before graduation to begin his life in activism (although he later finished his degree).
Mr. Coleman, tall with his slicked-back hair and a Southern drawl, became a recognizable protest leader.
He was a champion for the poor whites in Uptown, many of whom had Appalachian roots and were pejoratively cast as the hillbillies of the North Side.
Michael Klonsky, a friend who served as national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, called him a “supreme organizer.”
“Slim believed the real power was in organization, putting people in the streets and packing people into government meetings, and building alternative institutions that served people and put pressure on mainstream institutions to reform, or otherwise face the fear that radicals like Slim would defeat them,” Klonsky said.
Mr. Coleman also served as an immigration policy aide to former U.S. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez.
Helen Shiller’s son, Brendan Shiller, a political policy consultant, remembers growing up in the presence of Mr. Coleman and other activists.
“He was a very smart dude who ended up being around a bunch of other smart dudes during a time and period when it was easy to become radicalized, and when you’re that smart, it’s hard not to have an ego, and he had a huge heart and big brain and lot of ego, and that combination makes you a very driven person,” he said.
An obituary released by his family said that Mr. Coleman left behind a “legacy of community leadership and activism in Chicago on behalf of justice for people and communities fighting for fairness and access to resources and power.”
Mr. Coleman, who died at his home next to the Lincoln United Methodist Church in Pilsen, loved music — mostly country, blues and folk, and playing guitar.
He is survived by his wife, Emma Lozano, and children Robert Rico, Anita Rico, Tanya Lozano, Joline Lozano and Roberto C. Lopez, and six grandchildren.
Services are pending.
|
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.
|
Bernie Sanders: I am excited to announce that, this week, I am launching a new podcast. In it, we discuss my recent book, It's Ok to Be Angry about Capitalism.
If you'd like a copy of the book, you can make a contribution today — of $12 any amount you can afford —at berniesanders.com/book and we'll send it to you in the mail.
|
This featured story are reflections by labor and community activist Jeff Crosby, son of Harry Crosby, a prominent character in the Apple TV series “Masters of the Air.” The series depicts the courage of young men who risked, and often sacrificed, their lives to defeat fascism during World War II. The non-profit group Greater Lynn Senior Services (GLSS) interviewed Jeff about his father and his experience with the making of the series.
|
|
|
|
Last Week's Saturday Morning Coffee
|
|
News of the Week, Plus More
|
|
University of Southern California Bans Valedictorian from Speaking. Why? Being Muslim and Pro-Palestine Might Cause Trouble.
This should have been a time of celebration for my family, friends, professors, and classmates, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian voices have subjected me to a campaign of racist hatred because of my uncompromising belief in human rights for all.
By Asna Tabassum
CounterPunch via Portside
I am honored to have been selected as USC Class of 2024 Valedictorian. Although this should have been a time of celebration for my family, friends, professors, and classmates, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian voices have subjected me to a campaign of racist hatred because of my uncompromising belief in human rights for all.
This campaign to prevent me from addressing my peers at commencement has evidently accomplished its goal: today, USC administrators informed me that the university will no longer allow me to speak at commencement due to supposed security concerns. I am both shocked by this decision and profoundly disappointed that the University is succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice.
I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred. I am surprised that my own university—my home for four years—has abandoned me.
In a meeting with the USC Provost and the Associate Senior Vice President of Safety and Risk Assurance on April 14, I asked about the alleged safety concerns and was told that the University had the resources to take appropriate safety measures for my valedictory speech, but that they would not be doing so since increased security protections is not what the University wants to “present as an image.”
Because I am not aware of any specific threats against me or the university, because my request for the details underlying the university’s threat assessment has been denied, and because I am not being provided any increased safety to be able to speak at commencement, there remain serious doubts about whether USC’s decision to revoke my invitation to speak is made solely on the basis of safety.
Instead of allowing the campaign of hatred to define who I am and what I stand for, let me therefore take this opportunity to tell you about myself.
I am a first-generation South Asian-American Muslim whose passion for service stems from the experience of my grandparents, who were unable to access lifesaving medical technology because they had been displaced by communal violence.
I am a biomedical engineer who learned the meaning of health equity through developing low- cost and accessible jaundice for babies whose darker skin color conceals the visual yellowing of their complexion.
I am a proud Trojan who loves my campus that has enabled me to go from building a walker to shipping medical gowns to Ukraine to writing about the Rwandan Genocide to taking blood pressure measurements for our neighbors in Skid Row.
I am a student of history who chose to minor in resistance to genocide, anchored by the Shoah Foundation, and have learned that ordinary people are capable of unspeakable acts of violence when they are taught hate fueled by fear. And due to widespread fear, I was hoping to use my commencement speech to inspire my classmates with a message of hope. By canceling my speech, USC is only caving to fear and rewarding hatred.
My identities and experiences inspired me to think outside the box—a mindset I cultivated at USC, and it is this very quality that contributed to my selection as USC Valedictorian.
As your class Valedictorian, I implore my USC classmates to think outside the box—to work towards a world where cries for equality and human dignity are not manipulated to be expressions of hatred. I challenge us to respond to ideological discomfort with dialogue and learning, not bigotry and censorship. And I urge us to see past our deepest fears and recognize the need to support justice for all people, including the Palestinian people.
[Asna Tabassum is the University of Southern California’s Class of 2024 Valedictorian.]
|
|
Isra Hirsi with pro-Palestine protesters from Barnard demonstrate near Columbia University on February 02, 2024 at New York City. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
Columbia Suspends Ilhan Omar’s Daughter
Day After Omar Grills Its President
Omar had grilled Shafik about her characterization
of pro-Palestine protests as antisemitic.
By Sharon Zhang
Truthout
April 18, 2024 - Isra Hirsi, pro-Palestine activist and daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), announced on Thursday that she was one of a handful of activists who have been suspended from Barnard College, a partner college of Columbia University, amid a mass student protest over Columbia and Barnard’s investments in companies that support Israel and its genocide of Gaza.
“I’m an organizer with CU Apartheid Divest [with Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine], in my 3 years at [Barnard] I have never been reprimanded or received any disciplinary warnings. I just received notice that I am 1 of 3 students suspended for standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing a genocide,” Hirsi wrote on social media on Thursday morning.
Hirsi’s suspension came as Columbia and Barnard and the New York City Police Department (NYPD), at the behest of university administrators, began cracking down more severely on university students’ protests.
Though no other suspensions have been formally announced as of Thursday afternoon by the protesters, Columbia President Minouche Shafik has said that “all University students participating in the encampment have been informed they are suspended” in her letter authorizing the NYPD to crack down on the protest, per The Intercept’s Prem Thakker.
It’s unclear how closely the school has monitored the identities of the students in the encampment, but the crowd of protesters at some points numbered in the thousands, some observers said. Hirsi and other Barnard students’ suspensions appeared to be separate from the sweeping order from Shafik, and Hirsi told The Intercept that Omar’s line of questioning on Wednesday, as well as Hirsi’s strong presence in the movement, was “a pressure” for the university.
On Wednesday, students had set up what they deemed a Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia’s main quad, erecting tents and vowing to stay until Columbia divests from all corporations financially profiting from Israel’s genocide and occupation of Palestine.
The protest was modeled after demonstrations during the Vietnam War era in which student protesters set up a “liberated zone” that similarly demanded divestment from a think tank supporting the slaughter in Vietnam.
Mid-day on Thursday, the university began sending in police to arrest students in the camp, arresting dozens after having spent much of Wednesday threatening students with punishments like suspension or arrest and having arrested at least one person supporting the protest outside of campus. Hundreds, if not thousands, of protesters and students showed up on and off campus on Wednesday to join the movement.
“Those of us in Gaza Solidarity Encampment will not be intimidated. We will stand resolute until our demands are met,” said Hirsi.
Due to the suspension, Hirsi and classmates Maryam Iqbal and Soph Dinu are not only going to lose access to their schooling, but are also being evicted, and will lose access to food and health services, according to a press release from Columbia University Apartheid Divest and posted online by journalist Talia Jane. The three suspended students were all also victims of the chemical attack on pro-Palestine protesters that students say was done by assailants with ties to the Israel Defense Forces.
Students had timed the beginning of the encampment for the same day that Shafik was slated to testify before the House in a hearing, perhaps ironically, set by Republicans for Shafik to address supposed “rampant antisemitism” on campus — referring, in large part, to the pro-Palestinian protests that Shafik and her administration have been working vehemently to suppress, sometimes at the cost of the university’s students’ safety.
During that testimony, Omar had grilled Shafik about her characterization of pro-Palestine protests and the use of phrases like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as antisemitic, pushing Shafik to admit that pro-Palestine protests aren’t about being anti-Jewish, but rather about the liberation of the Palestinian people.
“Have you seen anti-Muslim protests on campus?” Omar asked. “Have you seen one against Arabs? Have you seen one against Palestinians?”
“No, I have not,” Shafik answered.
“Have you seen one against Jewish people? Have you seen a protest saying ‘we are against Jewish people’?” Omar responded.
“No,” Shafik said.
Omar went on to question Shafik over the university’s previous suspension of six students who participated in a protest with Students for Justice in Palestine and allegations that one of the university’s professors, Shai Davidai, had been harassing students over their support of Palestinian rights. Shafik clarified that the university was investigating Davidai over dozens of complaints the university had gotten and that the assailants in the chemical attack had been suspended. ...Read More
|
|
Marjorie Taylor Greene Demands
Space Lasers To Combat Migrants
Newsweek
Apr 18, 2024
Greene's office has been contacted for comment via email.
It comes after Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that the chamber will vote this weekend on three separate bills providing aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
He was met with immediate pushback from Greene—one of the most vocal critics of the U.S. continuing to provide aid to Ukraine amid its war against Russia—as well as other members of his own party, who have held up supplemental funding for months. Greene has said funds set aside for Ukraine should be used domestically, including to strengthen security at the southern border. Green said:
- Israel has some of the best unmanned defense systems in the world.
- I’ve previously voted to fund space lasers for Israel’s defense.
- America needs to take our national security seriously and deserves the same type of defense for our border that Israel has and proudly uses.
|
|
Photo: Corner of 23rd and 12th in the Vedado district of the capital. Bill Hackwell
April 16: Three Glorious Cuban Anniversaries on One Date
By Alejandra Garcia
on April 16, 2024 Resumen from Havana
Every April 16, Cuba celebrates three glorious anniversaries. First, the declaration of the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution. Second, the Day of the Militiaman. And the third, the founding of the Cuban Communist Party. These three events are nourished by a single root: patriotism, unity, and the people’s willingness to defend the Revolution at any cost.
Sixty-three years ago, on April 16, 1961, the island bid farewell to seven Cubans who had lost their lives on the previous day, victims of the U.S. bombing of the airports of Santiago de Cuba, Ciudad Libertad and San Antonio de los Baños, a precursor to the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961. In the busy avenues of 23rd and 12th, in the capital’s Vedado district, Commander in Chief Fidel Castro proclaimed that the newborn Revolution of 1959 would be patriotic, democratic and socialist, of the humble, by the humble, and for the humble.
With their fists and rifles raised, the militia people swore to defend the Revolution that Fidel described at whatever cost. In every corner of the country, the armed people were ready to defend the revolutionary work and the socialist ideology.
Those who witnessed that day remember April 16, 1961, as if it were yesterday. The combatants of the 148th battalion of the National Revolutionary Militias were part of that crowd gathered with rifles in hand at the corner of 23rd and 12th. The emotion multiplied after Fidel’s words, which were immortalized in newspapers and radio stations of the time: “Fellow workers and farmers, this is the socialist and democratic Revolution of the humble, with the humble and for the humble”.
After his words, the notes of The Internationale, the official anthem of the workers of the world and of the majority of the socialist and communist parties, were sung. Hours later, the militiamen present there fought alongside Fidel on the sands of the Bay of Pigs.
That disposition materialized in combat, when the militia, along with the Rebel Army and the National Revolutionary Police, fought the invaders, annihilating them in less than 72 hours. Every inch of land in the country became a trench. And in honor of that victory, April 16 was chosen as Militia Day, celebrated every year, as a tribute to the men and women who fought the mercenaries or were willing to do so throughout the country.
Many witnesses of that struggle are the same ones who in 1965 joined the ranks of the Communist Party of Cuba, which took April 16, 1961, as its founding date, given the symbolism of that occasion. The protagonists of that struggle will relive today the emotion of those April days, in a political tribute that will take place in the same avenues of 23rd and 12th this afternoon.
Today, Fidel’s words will resound once again: “The people of yesterday, semi-literate, with a minimal political culture, were capable of making the Revolution, defending the Homeland, later attaining an extraordinary political consciousness, and initiating a revolutionary process that has no parallel in this hemisphere or the world. I say this not out of a ridiculous chauvinist spirit, or with the absurd pretension of believing ourselves to be better than others; I say it because the Revolution that was born on January 1st, 1959, by chance or destiny, was subjected to the hardest test to which any revolutionary process in the world has ever been subjected to.”
Those words do not lose their validity, nor does the Revolution, which frightens the reactionaries in the world so much, which today stands as a lighthouse before the eyes of the world. This hardest test of ours continues but we are aware of the enormous responsibility we have to the peoples of the world, and we will always know how to be up to that responsibility.
|
|
When the settlers attacked this home in Qusra, a group of 50 to 60 came, shot into the property, cut the power lines, and set the car on fire. When residents came to help the family; four members of the community were killed and 20 others wounded. Photograph by David Lombeida
Israeli Settlers, Soldiers ‘Wiping Palestinian Communities off the Map’ in the West Bank
'While the attention of the world is focused on Gaza, abuses in the West Bank, fueled by decades of impunity and complacency among Israel's allies, are soaring.'
By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams
April 17, 2024 - Israeli soldiers have either passively watched or participated in the uprooting of at least seven communities in the West Bank since October of last year, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday in a new report documenting surging settler violence in the occupied Palestinian territory.
The rights group interviewed dozens of eyewitnesses and examined video footage showing harassment and other abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank "by men in Israeli military uniforms carrying M16 assault rifles."
Following the Hamas-led October 7 attack on southern Israel, the Israeli military drafted more than 5,000 settlers into "regional defense" units in the West Bank, Haaretz reported earlier this year. The Israeli newspaper noted that "alongside this large-scale mobilization, the [Israel Defense Forces] has distributed some 7,000 weapons to the battalions as well as to settlers who were not recruited into the army but received them as civilians whom the army considers eligible to carry military arms."
HRW's investigation found that "armed settlers, with the active participation of army units, repeatedly cut off road access and raided Palestinian communities, detained, assaulted, and tortured residents, chased them out of their homes and off their lands at gunpoint or coerced them to leave with death threats, and blocked them from taking their belongings."
"Israeli settlers and soldiers are literally wiping Palestinian communities off the map," said Omar Shakir, HRW's Israel and Palestine director.
The new report comes days after Israeli settlers—escorted by IDF soldiers—went on their latest destructive and deadly rampage in the West Bank, killing at least two Palestinians, injuring dozens, and setting homes and vehicles ablaze. At least 20 households were displaced after Israeli settlers burned down their homes.
The wave of settler violence came after a missing 14-year-old Israeli boy was found dead in the area around the West Bank city of Ramallah. The Israeli military said the boy was killed in a "terrorist attack."
Since October 7, according to the United Nations, Israeli settlers have launched more than 720 attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, displacing at least 206 households comprised of 1,244 people—including 603 children. Israeli soldiers in uniform have been present at many of the attacks.
"Settlers and soldiers have displaced entire Palestinian communities, destroying every home, with the apparent backing of higher Israeli authorities," Bill Van Esveld, associate children's rights director at HRW, said in a statement Wednesday. "While the attention of the world is focused on Gaza, abuses in the West Bank, fueled by decades of impunity and complacency among Israel's allies, are soaring."
HRW's new report examines five West Bank communities that have come under attack by Israeli settlers, including one in which uniformed Israeli men armed with assault rifles entered tents and destroyed or stole people's belongings, abused residents, and threatened to kill them if they didn't leave the area.
"One man in uniform kicked me in the back of my neck," a Palestinian mother told HRW. "They said, 'Go to the valley, and if you come back, we will kill you.'"
None of the families forcibly evicted from the five communities examined in the HRW report have been allowed to return home. ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Hundreds of Pomona College students and students from the other Claremont Colleges at a Pomona divestment rally on April...
GENARO MOLINA/GETTY IMAGES
Student Arrests, Expulsions, and Evictions
at Colleges Across the US Over Palestine Protests
In advance of an April 17 Congressional hearing featuring Columbia University's president, schools are increasingly penalizing student protesters.
BY Lex McMenamin
Teen Vogue
APRIL 16, 2024 - College students have been at the forefront of the movement for a ceasefire in Palestine since Israel's ongoing incursion of Gaza after the October 7 Hamas attack.
As soon as organizing for that movement began, there was backlash against it, including doxxing and harassment at Harvard, attempted state-level bans of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters in Florida, and also the banning of protests and SJP chapters at other universities. In Vermont, Palestinian college students on a walk, wearing kuffiyehs, were shot at during Thanksgiving break. (The reported shooter, who has pleaded not guilty to attempted second-degree murder, remains in jail as the case proceeds.)
Over the past few weeks, several student protesters have received criminal charges, expulsions, suspensions, and campus bans due to their involvement in protests for Palestine. This includes students at Columbia, who say they are being scapegoated before an April 17 congressional hearing to investigate Columbia University over campus antisemitism. (After a similar proceeding in December, the president of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania each stepped down.) According to Inside Higher Ed’s reporting, "some observers have described [the April hearing as] a political trap set by Congressional Republicans critical not only of campus leaders’ response to antisemitism but also of higher education in general.”
The apparent suppression on campuses, while currently intensifying, isn’t new or recent: For the past several years, the organization Palestine Legal has represented and supported student organizers facing similar backlash. A representative for Palestine Legal tells Teen Vogue that, since October, the group has received “over 720 reports of suppression of Palestinian rights advocacy on campuses across the country.”
Meanwhile, the movements for ceasefire and Palestine are credited with reanimating student organizing, as well as pushing President Joe Biden’s policy stance on US support for Israel. That outcry has manifested in Uncommitted campaigns that have built momentum in presidential primaries across US states, and may also be pushing Biden to shift his policy.
But these same organizing movements are seeing pushback on forms of protest that are historically common on campuses. Some students have been suspended or arrested for occupying campus buildings. In other instances, the backlash comes after students pushed to hold student body votes on divesting university funds from Israel or Israeli companies; at Vanderbilt, Ohio State, and Harvard, attempted referendum votes on the matter were canceled, suspended, or indefinitely postponed.
Vanderbilt University
In protest of the decision to remove the vote on divestment from student ballots, Vanderbilt students occupied a campus building; on April 5, three Vanderbilt students were expelled, 22 were put on probation, and one was suspended over the action. (During that same sit-in, a local Nashville reporter was also arrested.) These students were given 10 days to appeal the decisions.
Among the three students expelled from Vanderbilt is Jack Petocz, who, in 2022, was honored by Teen Vogue and them for his organizing as a high school student against Florida’s Don’t Say Gay policies. “Vanderbilt is afraid of student organizing on campus,” Petocz, a freshman who expects to be the first in his family to receive a bachelor’s degree, tells Teen Vogue a few days after receiving his expulsion notice. “I believe that I got into Vanderbilt on the merits of my past organizing, but now I’m being suppressed for using and finding community in activist circles at Vanderbilt.”
Petocz says he’s been denied access to his dorm and to campus dining halls, where Vanderbilt has a mandatory meal plan. “They're trying to pin me as the leader of this collective, a leaderless collective, just because I'm incredibly vocal on social media and my past," he says. "I feel like I'm being discriminated against.”
Vanderbilt student Ezri Tyler is among the 22 students put on probation, who, she says, are being denied the ability to apply for campus jobs and RA positions, hold club-leadership positions, and to study abroad. “Free speech [at Vanderbilt] very much has limits; speech is only free if they like what you're saying,” Tyler tells Teen Vogue. “Understanding that this is a purposeful tactic to try to isolate, divide, and make us feel fearful is really powerful and important, and then ultimately strips a lot of the power of what this suppression is meant to do.”
In an email to Teen Vogue, a Vanderbilt spokesperson cites federal privacy laws in declining to comment on the students' individual cases. An April 5 statement from the university about the punishments reads in part, “The gravity of this situation and these outcomes weighs heavily on those of us charged with carrying out our responsibility as leaders; we fully understand that student choices and decisions can lead to serious and costly consequences.”
Pomona College
At Pomona College in California, 20 students were arrested by riot police on April 5 after they occupied a campus building in response to the removal of a pro-Palestine art installation from campus. Amanda Dym, a student at Scripps, one of Pomona’s sister colleges, was among those arrested, which they describe as a “brutal show of force.”
“I was obviously very upset and angry at the school's decision,” Dym tells Teen Vogue. The protesters want the school to divest from weapons manufacturers and disclose all of its investments. “Rather than listening to these demands, which were fortified in a referendum vote on campus where [78%] of students voted in favor of divestment, they chose to militarize campus in this way.” Since the arrests, Dym has been banned from Pomona’s campus, where they are currently taking two courses.
In a public letter, Pomona College President Gabrielle Starr alleged that the organizers refused to identify themselves and “verbally harass[ed]” staff. Starr confirmed that any participants who were Pomona students would be subject to immediate suspension, and those from other colleges in the Claremont consortium would be “banned from Pomona’s campus and subject to discipline on their own campuses.”
In response to Teen Vogue’s request for comment, a Pomona spokesperson directed attention to a statement on the Pomona site, which refers to “masked, unidentified individuals who refuse to identify themselves” and later describes as “eight Scripps College, seven Pomona College, and five Pitzer College students.” The statement reads in part:
“What happened at Alexander Hall on Friday, April 5, was not peaceful protest, as masked individuals pushed their way past the president and other campus employees to occupy the president’s office and refused to leave despite repeated warnings to do so…. While we understand that disruption is a goal of protest, we also need to ensure the safety of our community due to the risk caused by unidentifiable individuals protesting on our campus.”
Columbia University
At Columbia, at least four students were suspended indefinitely and evicted from university housing in relation to a Resistance 101 teach-in; a representative for the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition said the number is currently five.
Columbia’s campus has seen months of controversy and conflict, including an alleged chemical attack against pro-Palestine students during a January protest. According to Inside Higher Ed’s reporting, these most recent suspensions come as “the university’s response to campus antisemitism is under investigation, not only by the House committee but also by the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which is also investigating numerous other institutions.”
In a public statement, Columbia University president Minouche Shafik called the Resistance 101 event “an abhorrent breach of our values,” claiming the event “featured speakers who are known to support terrorism and promote violence.” Students have not made any public comment on the nature of the event.
“It's no coincidence that they started ramping this up just two weeks before the congressional hearing,” Columbia social work student Aidan Parisi, who received a suspension, tells Teen Vogue. “The reason we are suspended is not because of any event, it's because we're refusing to participate in an arbitrary and distasteful investigation.” ...Read More
|
|
Words and History: The Trouble With 'Genocide Joe'
Ascribing personal responsibility to Biden for the carnage in Gaza takes our eyes off the prize, which is the structure of imperialist oppression, on the one hand, and building the broadest possible movement to fight it, on the other.
By Fred Glass
Stansbury Forum via Portside
April 15, 2024 - "History is more or less bunk.” This quaint expression, uttered by Henry Ford in 1921, reveals that words, like history, can mean more than meets the eye. Taken out of context his comment can signify almost anything, like the classic Sam Cooke song lyric, “Don’t know much about history”. Ford’s actual remark came in reference to railroad labor struggles, with the billionaire apparently expressing his displeasure with workers remembering past battles between labor and capital.
It’s my hope that people engaged in the righteous struggle to stop the genocidal Zionist war machine in Gaza, contra Ford, will remember some relevant context and history when they consider the coming presidential election.
I am troubled every time I hear someone referring to Joe Biden as “Genocide Joe.” Ascribing personal responsibility to the president for the carnage in Gaza is not entirely wrong. But it is, in fact, mostly wrong: the personalization takes our eyes off the prize, which is the structure of imperialist oppression, on the one hand, and building the broadest possible movement to fight it, on the other.
The president of the United States is a two-headed beast, as noted in an earlier column. He is the imperialist-in-chief on the international front, regardless of wearing a donkey or elephant pin. As such, his support for the Israeli apartheid regime, planted for three-quarters of a century next to the largest oil fields in the world, is reflexive. Joe Biden, the person, is irrelevant to this function of the presidency. Should we pressure him to pull US aid to Israel? Of course. But we’d have to do that no matter who’s in the White House.
United States domestic policy is a different story. For instance, the president appoints judges. We are today living with the consequences of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments in the form of the evisceration of women’s right to control their own bodies, among other tragedies. Trump’s misogynist base was fortunate he occupied the presidency when vacancies arose, and all the rest of us were unfortunate that a Democratic president wasn’t doing the appointing instead.
The president also appoints the heads of powerful federal agencies, like the National Labor Relations Board. In an unprecedented move, on Biden’s first day in office, he fired Trump’s NLRB chair, a viciously anti-union lawyer, and replaced him with pro-labor attorney Jennifer Abruzzo.
Without Abruzzo and Biden’s NLRB majority there would have been, for instance, no Starbucks Workers United successes on the scale they have occurred. Under a Trump administration the baristas’ organizing would have been greatly slowed and probably stopped dead through lengthy procedural delays and adverse Board decisions. Who is president matters for the American working class and its ability to act collectively on its own behalf.
A singular focus on the international scene, shorn of accounting for the dual role of the presidency, means that the legitimate desire to stop the genocide in Palestine—if it leads to sitting out the 2024 election—can quite possibly prevent us from creating the conditions for stopping future events like it. Such conditions almost always require a strong, militant progressive movement, with labor playing a big role.
Note that this is precisely what has occurred over the past several months, as a powerful anti-war movement has shifted public opinion and the center of gravity within the Democratic Party and organized labor. Note too, that this has transpired within the political space overseen by a Democratic administration.
Compare and contrast with the onset of the second Iraq war in 2003, where a massive but brief anti-war movement crashed and burned against the brick wall of the right-wing Bush administration.
What the performative enunciation of “Genocide Joe” misses, in its virtue signaling, is the practical consequence that will follow a defeat of Joe Biden in November. Throughout the long reign of capitalism as world system it has assumed a number of political forms. It has demonstrated on any number of occasions that it can easily shed a democratic skin and replace it with an authoritarian one.
Trump is very clear: this is his plan. When the next Gaza arises—and given American imperialism, it will—the space for a mass movement to oppose it will be tightly constrained and likely violently crushed by the repressive force of a police state under far-right Republican control.
Building socialism is always now
At a recent meeting of my East Bay DSA chapter the comrades narrowly defeated a resolution that sought to make opposition to Trump official DSA policy. Since there is no chance that DSA will be endorsing Trump, the vote foreclosed the possibility of the chapter officially working on behalf of Biden. Two of the people arguing against opposing Trump used the term “Genocide Joe.” One seemed to make the phrase itself his main argument, repeating it several times.
The derogatory “Genocide Joe” enunciation plays in the same sandbox as Trump, who loves elementary schoolyard level nicknames for his opponents. Referring to Biden this way—or anyone else—corrodes reasoned political discourse and tends to end, not engage, rational discussion of the issues.
Part of building a socialist movement is the modeling of socialist human relations, to the extent that that is possible within a capitalist culture. In the late twentieth century we called such modeling “prefigurative politics.” It was a new twist that socialist feminists placed on the concept the Industrial Workers of the World had already promulgated a century ago when it called for “building a new society within the shell of the old”.
Words have meaning, and so does history
Is history predictive? Sometimes. Marx’s idea that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, isn’t the way it always works, although it happened to in the situation he described. Closer might be Mark Twain’s “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. At the very least we might agree that while history doesn’t necessarily provide a guide to the future, we ignore it at our peril.
It would be in this spirit of informed suggestion, rather than certainty, that we might ask: what do events in 1933, 1968, and 2021 tell us about the coming election and its likely outcomes?
First, in reverse order, January 6, 2021 is an easy one. Trump has repeatedly told us that he won’t accept any outcome except victory. We can expect a more organized insurrection this time around if he loses. He and his lieutenants have had four years to ponder what went wrong, to plan differently, and stoke the resentments and grievances that fueled an attempted coup once before. Although we can’t know how that will turn out—presumably public security forces have also learned from January 6—what Trump will do if he wins is not in question. If he has his way, the democratic experiment called “the United States” will become a memory, and Trump will do his best to distort and extinguish the memory itself.
Second, for someone my age who lived through 1968 as a more or less sentient being, I find it remarkable that some people today think that installing Trump in power, with the accompanying repression of democratic liberties, will awaken the masses and hasten the coming of socialism. Consider the repetition or rhyme: a slice of the anti-war left in 1968, disgusted with Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey’s support of the Viet Nam War, tried hard to believe a Nixon presidency would bring on the revolution. How did that work out?
Marx’s tragedy repeating as farce? Sure, except a Trump presidency will be no joke, and Trump in power a second time will make Nixon in retrospect look like Eugene V. Debs.
History isn’t inevitable until it has already happened. We still have time—although not much—to prevent a fascist America. But we have to make the right choices based on all the factors in play, not just one elevated above all the rest.
Hitler’s rise to power depended on the split between the KPD (Communist Party) and SPD (Social Democratic Party). Together the two left parties held more seats and polled more votes than the Nazis; that numerical superiority was short-circuited by the Communists’ suicidal belief that the Social Democrats were as bad or worse than the Nazis. Calling the SPD “social-fascists”, the Communists refused any overtures to work together.
What did this lead to? Six million Jewish dead, which became the ideological justification for the Zionist state; fifty million World War II dead in all; and the German Communists were the first to be rounded up for the concentration camps. Divide-and-conquer tactics work best when enthusiastically embraced by the divided parties themselves.
“Genocide Joe” is a contemporary linguistic rhyme for “social-fascists”—an insult that divides people who need to be united and obscures the bigger picture with schadenfreude masquerading as politics. It’s tempting, I know. But please don’t. There’s too much at stake.
Fred Glass is the author of From Mission to Microchip: "A History of the California Labor Movement" (University of California Press, 2016). He is a member of the state committee of California DSA, and the former communications director of the California Federation of Teachers. ...Read More
|
|
Digging Deeper into the Current Conjuncture: |
|
|
No Contest
When it comes to health, Biden's and Trump's records while in office offer a stark contrast -- and a warning to everyone concerned about our national well-being
Merrill Goozner
GoozNews
APR 16, 2024- A version of this article appeared in the latest issue of the Washington Monthly.
The health care records of Joe Biden and Donald Trump reveals the chasm between the two major presidential candidates as much if not more than any other issue.
As President, Trump appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, and in so doing created immediate danger and new risks to the reproductive health of American women. President Biden is working to minimize those risks while maximizing the chance that GOP politicians, including Trump, pay a price.
Biden has successfully advanced the Democratic Party’s 75-year-long campaign to use government to ensure that everyone has health insurance. During his four years in the White House, Donald Trump led a traditional GOP effort to roll back such coverage—and failed.
Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic was shambolic and disastrous, except for his vaccine development efforts. Biden’s was orderly and successful, though it may have erred in not recommending an end to school lockdowns sooner.
Biden signed legislation that, for the first time, negotiates some drug prices and caps most senior citizens’ out-of-pocket prescription drug costs. Trump rhetorically supported similar efforts but accomplished little.
Reviewing Biden’s and Trump’s accomplishments and failures while in office leaves little doubt where either man will take the country over the next four years when it comes to health.
Abortion rights & reproductive health
On October 19, 2016, during the third and final debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, the Republican nominee vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion throughout the U.S. He did. Then they did, despite having pledged fealty to stare decisis during their confirmation hearings.
Since the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe, nearly two dozen states have imposed abortion restrictions. They range from a total ban on the procedure (including in cases of rape or incest) to setting time limits that are long before fetal viability (23 or 24 weeks) or, in some cases, even before a woman knows she is pregnant. Republican-run states and courts have also attempted to give fetal rights to frozen embryos, ban the importation of morning-after drugs, restrict women’s health clinics, and make criminals of medical professionals and their patients who include abortion as part of their reproductive health care. The U.S. has joined Malta and Poland as the only countries in the 38-member OECD that ban abortion within their borders.
While these “victories” have solidified Trump’s hold over the nation’s anti-abortion vote, his party has paid a political price. Every time abortion has been on a statewide ballot, protecting abortion rights has won. Most analysts agree it was the reason why Republicans won only a bare majority in the House in the 2022 midterms, when the opposition party usually makes major gains.
Yet in this election cycle, Trump is doubling down with a proposal that would impose restrictions on abortion access in every state in the union. In February, The New York Times reported that the presumptive Republican candidate now backs a national ban on abortions after 16 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest, and to protect the life of the mother. If Republicans win control of Congress, he will be able to impose that limit on the 30 states that still allow abortions after 16 weeks. It would also open the door to further national restrictions.
Biden, on the other hand, has promised to sign legislation that protects abortion rights. If he faces a Republican Congress, he says he will veto any legislation that includes a national ban. Though his single nominee to the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, arrived after the Dobbs decision, she has already penned a dissent in a Missouri case where the high court reversed a lower court decision that said a minor had the right to seek an abortion without parental consent. ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Illustration by João Fazenda
Donald Trump’s Very
Busy Court Calendar
The first criminal trial of a former President starts this week. After all the legal posturing, the action will finally get real—that’s the theory, anyway.
By Amy Davidson Sorkin
The New Yorker
April 14, 2024 - The mass of motions, hearings, arguments, and gag orders related to the four criminal cases against Donald Trump can feel like a pile of jigsaw-puzzle pieces. They all fit together somehow, but the arrangement is unclear. In Florida, in the case involving Trump’s alleged hoarding of classified documents, Judge Aileen Cannon and Jack Smith, the special counsel, have been engaged in a bitter fight over jury instructions—even though there is as yet no jury, let alone a trial date. Meanwhile, the selection of actual jurors in the case related to a hush-money payment to the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels is due to begin on Monday in Manhattan. Once sworn in, that jury—the first to be impanelled in a criminal trial of a former President—might at last give some fixed form to the jumbled legal picture. Trump, as the defendant, must be present in court. After all the legal posturing, the action will finally get real.
That’s the theory, anyway. But the focus will not only be on New York. In a ten-day period beginning on Tuesday, the second day of jury selection, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases—Fischer v. United States and Trump v. United States—that could each undermine another indictment that Smith brought in Washington, D.C., involving Trump’s actions in the lead-up to the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The Fischer case will be heard first, on April 16th. It is a challenge to the Department of Justice’s use of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in hundreds of January 6th cases. That statute, which originally targeted corporate fraudsters who obstructed official proceedings by destroying records or other evidence, is the basis of two of the four charges against Trump in D.C.
Then, on April 25th, the Court will consider Trump’s outrageous assertion that, as a former President who was never convicted in a Senate impeachment trial, he is immune to criminal charges arising from acts within the “outer perimeter” of his official duties—a line that he believes encompasses his role in the events of January 6th. As an example of how confoundingly intertwined the cases are, a brief that Smith filed last week in the April 25th immunity case includes a footnote contending that, even if the Justices decide in the April 16th Fischer case that Sarbanes-Oxley can’t be used against most January 6th defendants, he should still be able to use it against Trump. (Smith’s argument is that Trump’s alleged solicitation of fake electoral certificates in seven states counts as classic meddling with evidence under Sarbanes-Oxley.)
And so, at the same time that Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the New York trial, will be going through a list of forty-two questions with prospective jurors (What podcasts do they listen to? Have they ever been to a rally for Trump? How about to one for an “anti-Trump group”?), the Justices will be asking whether the D.C. trial should be gutted, or should even take place at all. One jury forward, two oral arguments back. It’s hard to know which way to look.
There is not so much a split screen as a tessellating one. Before the month is out, there will doubtless be more developments in Florida, too, and in the fourth criminal case against Trump, in Georgia, in which he is charged with conspiring to overturn the election results in that state. And there are the various ongoing civil proceedings, in which Trump is appealing orders that he pay more than half a billion dollars in damages and interest to New York and to the writer E. Jean Carroll.
Still, despite an almost constant frenzy of legal action, it can seem as though very little has actually happened. The New York trial is first because the other criminal cases are moving so slowly. Trump, who denies all wrongdoing, has, unsurprisingly, made use of whatever delaying tactics he can. (The Times recently calculated that he has already racked up more than a hundred million dollars in legal fees, which have largely been covered by donors and pacs.) ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Biden’s Gaza Policy Could Create a Replay of Chicago ’68
Unconditional aid to Israel could prompt a clash of demonstrators and cops at this summer’s convention, boosting Trump’s prospects.
By Harold Meyerson
The American Prospect
APRIL 15, 2024 - One year ago this month, when the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago as the site of this summer’s quadrennial national convention, the last thing they probably had in mind was the possibility of a replay of the disastrous convention the Democrats held in Chicago in 1968.
Today, unless the Biden administration stops its unconditional military aid that enables Israel to destroy Gaza, that may be just what the Democrats get.
The divisions within the Democrats’ political universe are by no means as fundamental as those that wracked the party (and the nation) over the Vietnam War, of course. But they are now reaching a level where the possibility of a convention catastrophe cannot be dismissed.
To be sure, the Vietnam War directly affected Americans in a way that Israel’s war in Gaza has not. More than half a million young Americans were sent to fight that war; hundreds of thousands of them were draftees. Some 56,000 of them were killed in the fighting.
But the war now and the war then have had some similar effects on American politics, particularly within the Democratic Party. To begin, the rationales for U.S. policy in both cases have failed over time to convince American liberals of their merits. That’s partly because the bloody havoc that both the Vietnam and Gaza wars have inflicted on civilian populations have been visible to all: on television in Vietnam, on television and social media in Gaza.
In both instances, it’s been the Democratic base that turned against the policies. In 1968, only a handful of states chose their convention delegates through primaries or caucuses; most delegates were simply appointed by governors or the remnants of political machines. But in 1968, it took only two primaries—in New Hampshire and Wisconsin—to convince Lyndon Johnson that he’d lost the support of the party’s rank and file, which led him to announce he wouldn’t seek re-election. (That announcement came two days before Wisconsin voted, but the reports he’d received convinced him he’d be clobbered by anti-war Democratic candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy, which he was, by a 2-to-1 margin.)
And despite the fact that the vast majority of the delegates who came to Chicago later that year were not elected by rank-and-file Democrats and were answerable only to party machines, more than one-third of the delegates voted for a “peace plank” demanding a cessation of the mass aerial bombardment of Vietnam and the withdrawal of our troops. Most of those delegates also voted to nominate Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, as that year’s standard-bearer, but a nontrivial number of them had already made clear that even they thought the administration’s war policy (from which Humphrey declined to deviate until mid-October, which proved to be too late for him to defeat Richard Nixon) was a loser.
Biden’s Gaza policy is rejected by a wide margin among younger voters, whose support Biden desperately needs if he’s to prevail in November.
In 2024 as in 1968, it’s the Democratic mainstream, not just the left, that is increasingly appalled by the administration’s war policy—in this case, of unconditional military aid to Israel. Last Thursday night, organizations that embody the mainstream of the party establishment, including the Center for American Progress, the SEIU, and the National Education Association, joined such more overtly progressive groups as the Working Families Party and Move On in a letter to President Biden calling on him to stop military aid to any nation that denies humanitarian assistance to, in this case, the starving civilian population of Gaza. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who is nobody’s idea of a leftist, is circulating a letter calling on Biden to stop the incremental transfer of arms to Israel. And last week, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) signed a similar letter to Biden, along with 37 of her House colleagues.
That’s called losing the center of your party. (The 1968 convention floor fight over the “peace plank” amendment to the party’s platform, by the way, was led by Pelosi’s predecessor congressmember from San Francisco, Phil Burton, who also was the person who got her started in California politics.)
And what about the left? In 1968, despite countless anti-war demonstrations and the primary victories of both McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, whose assassination ended whatever prospect there was of actually nominating an anti-war candidate, the war raged on with no discernible prospect of an American withdrawal. That brought thousands of demonstrators to Chicago during the party’s convention, whose frustration and anger was palpable and required no explanation.
Some but by no means all of those demonstrators had a flair for revolutionary rhetoric and theatrics, which was enough to trigger a violent, club-swinging reaction from the Chicago police, confident that Mayor Richard Daley, every bit as pissed as they that his beautiful city’s convention was being defaced by the presence of these punks, had their back.
The “police riot” (as a governmental commission later termed it), which the TV networks periodically documented as they cut away from the presidential nominating speeches, therefore resonated within the hall as well as without. In nominating Sen. George McGovern (who’d stepped up as a standard-bearer for the delegates who’d been elected to support the late Robert Kennedy), Connecticut Sen. Abe Ribicoff said that if McGovern was president, “we wouldn’t have these Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” At that point, the TV cameras turned to Mayor Daley himself, sitting in the convention hall’s front row, whose response, clearly visible to lip-readers, was “Fuck you, you motherfucking Jew!”
Well. Chicago today has a progressive mayor who not only would never make such an utterance but would not have his police officers’ backs if they ran as fully amok as they did in ’68. But are Chicago’s current cops really all that different from their forebears? And if we’re still providing unconditional aid to an Israel laying waste to what’s left of Gaza, will the demonstrators who do show up be any less frustrated and angry than those of yesteryear?
To be sure, the parties have put in place safeguards to make sure there is never a 1968 again—not by moderating their war policies, but by forcing protesters further and further away from delegates and cameras. Already, protesters who have sought permits to march in Chicago have been given locations that are nearly four miles away from the United Center, the convention site. Protesters were similarly marginalized at the 1996 Chicago DNC, and pretty much every convention thereafter. Groups have called on Mayor Johnson to intervene and ensure a more prominent presence for them.
But the protest location provided, in a bit of symmetry, is Grant Park, where the police riot took place all those years ago. Surely some reporters with cameras, and protesters and passers-by with cellphones, will find their way out there, and document whatever happens.
Moreover, could the convention delegates themselves fight over a peace plank, as they did in ’68? Given their fear of weakening Biden’s prospects in the race against Donald Trump, that probably won’t happen. But if the Gaza war continues as is, and if our aid to Bibi’s legions continues as is, a fight inside the convention hall can’t be ruled out, either.
As they staggered away from their convention in Chicago, the Democrats of ’68 found themselves in a deep political hole. Nominee Humphrey trailed Republican Richard Nixon by double digits; tens of thousands of would-be Democratic precinct walkers were determined to stay home; and for many, the loathing that the two camps of the Democrats felt for their rivals overwhelmed any fear of losing the November election. It was not until Humphrey bestirred himself in mid-October to say he would stop the bombing of Vietnam that he began to close the gap with Nixon, in the end losing the popular vote by just one percentage point.
Today, polls tell us that Biden’s Gaza policy is rejected by a wide margin among younger voters, whose support Biden desperately needs if he’s to prevail in November. If the dynamics in and around the 2024 party convention bear any resemblance to those that were there in 1968, whatever rifts are weakening Biden’s prospects now will only be magnified.
If Biden is serious about defeating Donald Trump—and he is—he needs to realize that he places his efforts at great risk if he continues his policy of unconditional aid to Bibi’s war machine. Right now, he’s inviting a replay of Chicago ’68. That would be a catastrophe, for Biden, the nation, and the world. ...Read More
|
|
'Afraid and intimidated': Trump Trial
Juror Targeted by Fox News Dismissed
By David Badash
Alternet
April 18, 2024 - One of seven jurors selected to serve on the New York criminal trial of Donald Trump has been dismissed after telling the judge she became concerned about her ability to remain impartial. That concern came after too many identifying details about potential jurors this week were reported by the press, leading the judge to admonish the media Thursday morning.
“Although the jurors’ names are being kept confidential, the woman, a nurse, ‘conveyed that after sleeping on it overnight she had concerns about her ability to be fair and impartial in this case,’ New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan said before calling her into the room for questioning,” the Associated Press reports. “The woman said her family members and friends were questioning her about being a juror.”
Judge Merchan, after he had questioned the juror, chastised the media, specifically directing reporters to “abide by common sense” and not report jurors’ identifying information, as some in the press had done as soon as jury selection began.
“As evidenced by what’s happened already, it’s become a problem,” Judge Merchan said.
“We just lost what probably would have been a very good juror,” he noted. “She said she was afraid and intimidated by the press, all the press.”
Alexander Panetta of Canada’s CBC News adds, “Merchan wants changes in the juror info that gets out to the public. He says jurors’ employer name will be redacted from court records.”
But he also reports the now-excused juror “says family and friends [said] that she had been easy to identify, based on publicly available info about her from the court. She said she definitely has concerns now.”
Merchan also “lamented that media reported another juror has an Irish accent. He asked media in the room to be more careful.”
Responding to the loss of the juror, The Atlantic’s David Drum remarked, “[Trump] juror intimidation gets results.”
The dismissed juror had been targeted by Fox News’ Jesse Watters on Tuesday (video below).
“I’m not so sure about Juror No. 2,” Watters told Fox News.
Trump on Wednesday, appearing to violate his gag order, had targeted the jurors.
Former state and federal prosecutor Ron Filipkowski, the editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch Network, commented, “Fox & Trump are coordinating to intimidate jurors.”
Mediaite reported, “Donald Trump appeared to violate the gag order set forth by Judge Juan Merchan.”
“On Wednesday, Trump took to Truth Social and quoted comments made about potential jurors by Fox News host Jesse Watters on The Five Wednesday night.”
Trump quoted Watters, posting: “They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury.”
“That post appears to be in direct violation of Merchan’s gag order, a reality highlighted by JustSecurity’s Ryan Goodman,” Mediate added.
On Wednesday Watters had gone even further and presented biographical and identifying details of all seven jurors. That video is currently at the top of a pinned post on the Fox News website. ...Read More
|
|
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 :
|
|
|
|
Colonization And Surplus:
The Origins Of Race And Class
By Zara Jemuel
Links International
“Oppression follows logically from exploitation so as to guarantee the latter.” — Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
April 12, 2024 - In Ceremonies of Possession Patricia Seed describes how the various colonizer nations introduced themselves to Indigenous peoples. The Spanish declared war by literally reading aloud a formal declaration. The French held elaborate processions with settlers dressed ornately in loudly dyed bejeweled clothing. Walking in order of rank, they carried a large wooden cross, which they planted before asking the Indigenous to swear fealty to god and king.
The British built houses, cultivated gardens, and constructed physical barriers like walls, fences, and hedges. They also heavily populated the land, often through force and coercion. Most early British settlers were indentured servants and convicts who were not given much of a choice. They lived in villages not unlike the ones in their native land, some of which had been standing for a thousand years or more. British elites successfully reproduced their society on North American shores by establishing cultural hegemony through social life in the form of communal agrarian societies.
Planting a stone pillar as other Europeans did was primarily an indicator to other colonizers and to a lesser extent the Indigenous that legally speaking the land had been “discovered” by this or that monarchy. But Britain was the first to truly colonize the continent. Others sought to establish trade or go to war, but Britain put down roots on stolen land. For that reason, they became the dominant imperial power not only in North America but globally for centuries.
Religion alone was not enough to gain cultural hegemony as France and Spain learned, although they did find converts for example among the Tupi people of Brazil. Britain, however, seized and held land. They became the first masters of the agricultural means of production. Just as the last vestiges of the old slave society were dying off in Europe, held over through feudalism, a new form was emerging, driven by the rising market value of agricultural output in the colonies.
Early Portuguese voyages to Africa were for trade and diplomacy, seeking to form alliances against rival monarchies, but as colonies produced more for joint-stock companies, the drive for profit increased, and the need for labor along with it. Portugal first told the white supremacist lie to justify African enslavement. Being a slave among African societies usually meant having been captured in war and was not hereditary. Europeans introduced the human hunting method and raised it to an industrial scale. Sugar, tobacco, and cotton were behind the voracious European appetite for enslavement known as the Atlantic trade. Land and labor were the sources of more wealth than had ever existed in human history, just as they had been in all previous modes of production.
Theft of land and exploitation of labor have also been the source of human oppression since the advent of surplus production around 10,000 years ago, when many human societies became sedentary farming communities. The elevation of spiritual leaders and warriors along with the denigration of slaves and women hailed the near simultaneous emergence of class and patriarchy. Race dawned around 1500 as a justification for the subjugation of enslaved Africans and was legally codified after Bacon’s Rebellion 1676-1677.
Walter Rodney writes that Europeans enslaved Africans not for racist but for economic reasons — “so that their labor power could be exploited.” Given the extermination of Indigenous peoples, colonizers needed a source of cheap labor to make conquered land productive. Race and white supremacy are historically synonymous with capitalism. There would be no capitalism without white supremacy upholding the racial order of chattel slavery, which drove both initial industrialization and financialization.
Saying class predates race bears clarifying that for the vast majority of humanity’s existence, we have had neither. Nor does putting race relative to class on a timeline at all measure the historical significance of either. Class existed before race the way fire did before the sun.
Manning Marable explains that race, like class “is not an abstraction but an unequal relationship between social aggregates, which is also historically specific.” Race is not natural, inherent, or inevitable as we see from all the effort needed to enforce it. It is not timeless. In this dimension, anything with a beginning has an end.
Class is the spectrum of a person’s proximity to either surplus or production. Proximity to one or the other measures one’s relative class position. Elites own the surplus end of the spectrum and relegate workers to the production end. Race is a social division of labor, setting Black people further from the surplus end, and white people closer, while most of both are on the production end.
Legal, political, and social advantage decreases moving from the surplus end to the production end, but for whites it persists regardless to a degree, i.e. privilege. Meanwhile, being placed closer to the surplus end still does not protect middle strata Black people from manifold social disadvantage and discrimination. Working class whites still get privilege rooted in the surplus end. Upper and middle class Blacks still get oppression rooted in the production end. While Black people joining the ranks of the economic elite does not necessarily indicate racial progress, the fact there are only 8 Black billionaires is a reflection of white supremacy.
A person’s proximity to either surplus or production juxtaposes racially. Centuries of enslavement carried over degradation to present US conditions. Chattel slavery was an extreme devaluation of labor that, even as many have defended it, white workers continue to suffer from. The source of exploitation for Black and white workers is the same, only for white workers, it is also conversely, and deceptively, the source of their privilege.
Race is defined socially, enforced politically, and implemented economically. Black Americans and other racialized groups are “divorced from the levers of power” as Marable says, so their “ability to produce commodities” can be “systematically exploited, chiefly through abnormally low wages.” Importantly, Black people are also “denied ownership of the major means of production”. The racial wealth gap is an historic disparity in resource access.
As Marable continues, “To be ‘white’ in racial terms essentially means that one’s life chances improve dramatically over those of nonwhites, in terms of access to credit, capital, quality housing, health care, political influence, and equitable treatment in the criminal justice system”.
Oppressive political, social, and economic conditions of race are also those of class, corresponding in a power imbalance to the socioeconomic basis of the ruling class — white capital. Yet depending on race, a person’s access to resources reflects one end or the other of the surplus-production spectrum. Having whiteness means access to the owners’ hoarded surplus whereas Blackness marks a person for deprivation and servitude.
Racialization is a hegemonic process taking place at the heart of capitalism. European elites conceptualized cultural superiority while dispossessing their continental neighbors long before the invasion of Africa. Anti-Jewish pogroms, crusades against Muslims, and Britain’s subjugation of the Irish all contributed to building capitalism's racial core.
The thirteenth century pan-European burglary known as the Spanish Reconquista targeted mainly Muslims and Jews for expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. This arguably partly laid the groundwork for the political construction of race, but the social and economic components would not fully consolidate for another couple hundred years. That said, anti-Jewish violence in Europe precedes the Reconquista by centuries and was often economically motivated. Like earlier crusades, the Reconquista was a quest for property. Crusaders asserted their right to claim land based on white Christian supremacy.
With Portugal’s invasion of Africa immediately followed by Spain’s bloody introduction to the western hemisphere, race became a dominant global force. European notions of property, class, and gender were heaped onto the conquered. European colonizers invented whiteness as a marker of proprietary superiority over colonized labor.
Similar to how owning a business today elevates a person’s class status, owning land then, a productive asset, elevated a person’s colonial economic status toward whiteness. Mixed race people born of European and African parents in what is now Haiti could reach whitened social prestige if they bought land. Owning property after being property, or having parents who were enslaved, moved a person from Black servitude toward white proprietorship. The colonial exploiter-exploited relationship was permanent in pigment, but periodically it could be circumvented through capital.
International plunder markets controlled by Europeans got more competitive, profitable, and labor intensive. When Europeans found mineral and agricultural wealth beyond prior measure on conquered land, kidnapped Africans became the imperial labor base for its extraction. Chattel slavery was a colonial venture, exploiting a foreign resource for domestic profit.
A specialized labor market developed where bosses could buy not only labor-power, but laborers themselves, enabling vastly accelerated exploitation. Sugar, cotton, and tobacco became the most profitable commodities in the world except one — enslaved labor. Making labor captive, without regard for wages, rest, or free motion, ensured the full value produced with each day’s work went directly to enslavers.
Plantations made export-scale production possible in conditions too brutal for free labor. If an enslaved African dropped dead from heat exhaustion it was no real concern for the master. Financial loss from purchasing a new slave could be recouped in a single day’s work.
In supposed attempts to maximize output, planters brutalized the enslaved, physically and psychologically, using poor and middle whites for the bloodiest work. Overseers maintained hyper-exploitative relations at the point of production. Slave patrols policed the master’s empire, enforcing white rule for planter profit.
The enslaved had no right to the fruits of their labor. No right to bargain over working conditions. No right to be treated fairly or with respect by the boss. No right to choose their workplace. No right to quality housing, nourishing food, or clean water. No right to free expression or a voice in public affairs. No right to decide. No right to exist, except on the master’s terms.
Black people in the United States sweated and bled under a one-hundred percent rate of exploitation governed through legal dehumanization for over three hundred years. Black Americans now are twice as likely to fall below the federal poverty line than whites, thirty percent less likely to own a home, and on average earn thirty percent less in yearly income.
Colonialism was a global exploitation system based on racial labor hierarchies with Europeans at the top. The colonial mode of production developed on that basis into the capitalist mode. Colonialism cohered the elements of a socially constructed division of labor which capitalism solidified. Capitalism’s white supremacist roots run as deep as its colonial origins.
Since the colonial period, race has co-defined labor stratification along with gender. The colonial racialization of labor was a vehicle for transitioning feudalism to capitalism. Colonialism’s racial labor hierarchy now serves capitalist accumulation.
Social control systems grew throughout imperial expansion, while private sector elites seized the land and raw material needed for increasing production to a capitalist scale. Centuries old processes of primitive accumulation gathered the initial wealth of capitalists today.
Settler-colonialism is the primitive accumulation founding the United States. Through genocide, Europeans dispossessed Indigenous peoples of land, denied them self-determination, and robbed them of resources.
That bloody opening made space for slave-based agriculture. Industry followed extermination west with mining, infrastructure, and commercial markets. Mechanized and agrarian production cultivated sick symbiosis between industrial exploitation and feudal-like enslavement. Theft of land and labor supplied the bricks with which the ruling class built its twisted US kingdom.
Slavery found permanent soil in the American south. Southern servitude conditions set in the country’s seedbed stunting progress for four hundred years and counting. The incongruous state of American labor in Black captivity but white freedom foreclosed the collective exercise of power as a multi-racial majority essentially up until 1965 with brief interruptions and constant backsliding.
Enslaved labor fed factory-ready goods north for mass production. Robber barons invested the profits to become the masters not just of industry, but also finance, fueling new imperial expansion. American capitalists positioned themselves as rulers of the country before setting eyes on the world.
Growing into oligarchs beyond anything old monarchy ever dreamed of, they became a new type of ruling class, granting themselves royalty by capital decree. Today, they constitute an authoritarian clique of private sector despots. Electoral democracy is their concession, but absolutism is their preference. Kings bow to them because they hold the reins of corporate power. ...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: The Library Company reading room on Juniper Street in Philadelphia c. 1935, one of the group’s main locations from 1880 to 1935.
History Lesson of the Week: How Ben Franklin Invented the Library as We Know It
Books were rare and expensive in colonial America, but the founding father had an idea
By Elizabeth Webster
The Smithsonian
Founding father Benjamin Franklin knew better than most the benefits of self-education. In 1727, he established the Philadelphia-based discussion group known as the Junto, which sought “mutual improvement” through intellectual dialogue.
Yet while Franklin enjoyed the Junto’s spirited—and secret—debates on matters moral and scientific, he became convinced that the group needed an authoritative library to referee basic facts. Books were rare and expensive in colonial America, but Franklin had an idea.
He conceived of a library with a subscription fee, the Library Company of Philadelphia, which he founded in 1731. The Library Company allowed members—at first, largely male artisans of modest means—to purchase shares in the library at a low cost. Members also built a sort of intellectual wealth with their shares, as they could be passed down from generation to generation.
Since Franklin wished to ensure access to useful books, he favored volumes in English that could be more widely understood. The Library Company’s catalog would respond to readers’ fervent interests—and those readers kept multiplying: After early successes, the Library Company soon began allowing non-shareholders to borrow books, too, requiring only a small fee as collateral. This innovative structure quickly inspired imitators, and by 1800, there were more than 40 lending libraries throughout the United States. During the same era in Britain, philanthropists donated books to libraries for community enrichment, but only among the stacks; these libraries did not generally circulate books. In some instances, books were chained to bookshelves to prevent theft.
By 1771, as the Revolution neared, Franklin reflected in his autobiography on the lending library’s crucial role in fostering democracy: “These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans” and “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” From the Revolutionary War until 1800, the Library Company served as the first de facto Library of Congress while the federal government was in Philadelphia.
Still supported by shareholders, the Library Company today stands as an independent research library, free and open to the public. Some of its earliest holdings, such as Franklin’s original copy of Logic, or, the Art of Thinking by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, are preserved in its vast, non-circulating collection. Though the Library Company currently specializes in American history before 1900, its mission remains the same. “[The founders] knew that democracies were inherently fragile and that the only way you could sustain a democracy was by having an educated populace,” says Michael J. Barsanti, who served as director of the Library Company until this past February. “That’s one of our first, most important roles as an institution, and it’s one that we still have today. … We are trying to remind people, using the Junto as our inspiration, that … we learn best when we learn together.” ...Read More
|
|
Mexico’s 3-Month Presidential Campaign
from April 17, 2024
|
|
Mexico City native Diego Alfredo Torres Rosete lived in the US as an undocumented immigrant for 20 years. After returning to Mexico, he worked in the AMLO government’s Secretariat of Mexicans Abroad and International Affairs. He’s now the Coordinator of the Frente Amplio de Mexicanos en el Exterior (Broad Front of Mexicans Abroad), which defends and serves the needs of all migrants. He’s also an independent journalist and a Morena activist.
Mexico only allows presidential candidates to campaign for three months?!
That’s right. The campaign is conducted in three time periods. In the first, each political party selects its candidates. The second is a one-month period to investigate the people’s main concerns. In the last one — from March first to the June election — they tell the public, “I heard what you want, and I now have developed a program.” Only in these last three months can they go out and ask people for their votes.
Three candidates are running for president: Claudia Sheinbaum from Morena, Xóchitl Gálvez from the conservative PRI/PAN/PRD coalition, and Jorge Álvarez Máynez from the Movimiento Ciudadano party.
Parties are largely publicly financed. Does that make elections fairer? And what about media time?
The National Electoral Institute (INE) allocates public money to the parties for regular party business. The amount is proportional to the number of elected positions won in the last election. That, of course, favors the ruling party. The old PRI government invented the formula; they never expected an opposition party like Morena to benefit from that rule! The INE then allocates even more money specifically for electoral campaigns, not just for the president but also for governors, senators, representatives, and others.
INE organized in-person voting for 2023 in Canada and the US
AMLO thought that spending so much government money was a waste, and he proposed to cut it, even though Morena would have been the loser. This kind of cut is what he means by “republican austerity.” But his proposal did not pass in Congress.
By law, the media must give equal time to the parties for 30% of the time; the other 70% is apportioned the same way as the funding. Of course, since the main media outlets are conservative, even though they must cover everyone, how they present them can still be slanted.
What’s the process for the national debates?
The INE decides the number of debates, and their process. They scheduled three debates for the coming June election. Each party can send a proposal as to who they want as moderators, but the INE makes the final choice. For this first debate on April 7, the INE selected Denise Maerker and Manuel López San Martín from two giant TV stations, Televisa and Tele Azteca, owned by wealthy conservatives.
Citizens submitted 24,000 questions for the debate through social media. The INE hired a company to group them by category and to whittle them down to 108. The topics were health and education, corruption and transparency, violence against women and discrimination. The moderators chose the final 30 questions. ...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: NPEC Presents: Media and the Left: Past, Present, and Future, with Carl Davidson, Lee Artz, and Michael Crown ...90 min
|
|
Harry Targ's 'Diary of a Heartland Radical' |
This week's topic:
RACISM, CORRUPTION, MASS INCARCERATIONS, SUPER PROFITS FOR A SHRINKING BUT MORE POWERFUL ECONOMIC RULING CLASS, MILITARY SPENDING, AND MASS MURDER AND STARVATION ALL ACROSS THE GLOBE
Click the picture to access the blog.
|
|
Tune of the Week: Paul Revere & the Raiders - 'Indian Reservation'...3:38 min
|
|
Book Reviews: Rural Voters and Rural Rage
An Honest Assessment of Rural White Resentment Is Long Overdue
By Paul Waldman, Tom Schaller
The New Republic
April 11, 2024 - We say very clearly that rural America is hurting. But we refuse to justify attitudes that some scholars try to underplay.
Something remarkable happened among rural whites between the 2016 and 2020 elections: According to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, as the rest of the country moved away from Donald Trump, rural whites lurched toward him by nine points, from 62 percent to 71 percent support. And among the 100 counties where Trump performed best in 2016, almost all of them small and rural, he got a higher percentage of the vote in 91 of them in 2020. Yet Trump’s extraordinary rural white support—the most important story in rural politics in decades—is something many scholars and commentators are reluctant to explore in an honest way.
When we wrote White Rural Rage, we knew that our provocative argument and book title would arouse ire on the far right. We were not disappointed. But we have been surprised by the ferocity of the criticism we have received from scholars of rural politics. Their response has made clear that there are unspoken rules about criticizing certain Americans—rules that get to the heart of the very case we have tried to make about the deep geographic divisions in our politics at this fragile moment in our nation’s history.
Pillorying Donald Trump is fine. Thundering against the MAGA movement is acceptable. Deep-dive analyses of the votes and voices of “downscale” whites? Sure. But if you dare to criticize the rural whites who are among Trump’s most devout followers, you’ll be met with an angry rebuke.
And so we have, in an article in Politico by Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist who co-authored his own book, The Rural Voter, that was released a few months before ours; and another in The Atlantic by Tyler Harper, an environmental studies professor who has made it a personal crusade to attack us and our book. These pieces illustrate some of the very pathologies so common in the way scholars and pundits alike treat rural whites.
Shouts and Whispers
In recent years, research from political scientists showing some disturbing patterns of opinion among rural voters, especially rural whites, has begun to accumulate. But there is a clear discomfort with the implications of that research, even among some of these researchers. For instance, consider this quote: “Clearly, though, even when we account for composition effects related to race [i.e., the fact that rural America is whiter than the rest of the country], we see that racial resentment is higher in rural than in urban America.” That appears not in our book. It’s found on page 296 of Jacobs’s The Rural Voter.
Soon after, Jacobs and his co-author write, “On a range of race-related questions, responses from rural residents veer from those of other Americans—and even from other Republicans—in significant ways.” As you might have guessed, “veer from” is the euphemism they deploy to say that rural whites express more racist attitudes. “And yet,” they go on, “for many rural residents, attitudes about races are intimately linked to perceptions of hard work, self-reliance, a disdain for government handouts, and the dangers of elites.” What they’re arguing, then, is that it’s not that many rural whites (to reiterate, not all, but many) are racist per se, it’s just that they think nonwhites don’t work hard, aren’t self-reliant, and are the clients of nefarious “elites.”
Given the important place hard work holds in the rural ethos, we find that result to be troubling, and we believe it deserves further discussion. In fact, as Katherine Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, the most oft-cited book about rural politics of recent years, told us when we interviewed her, if she were to write her book over again, “I would have written more about how racism is present even when people aren’t talking about it.”
Here is another quote, from a journal article that appeared after our book was finished: “We find that, contrary to popular belief, rural Americans may actually be less likely to support political violence [i.e., against fellow citizens] than their non-rural counterparts. Importantly, however, we find that some rural individuals—namely those who harbor higher levels of rural resentment—are more likely, on average, to support violence against the state.” The lead author of this piece is Kal Munis, another of our vocal critics. To our knowledge, nowhere outside this journal article has Munis mentioned this finding about rural support for violence against the state. With Donald Trump making clear once again that he will not accept an election he does not win, a position that led to a rather notable incident of violence against the state that took place on January 6, 2021, this seems highly relevant.
We call this phenomenon the “shouts and whispers” approach to social science discourse about rural whites. Find no difference between the political attitudes of rural whites and other Americans, or show that they have admirable values? Shout it from the rooftops. Uncover transgressive political beliefs among rural whites? Whisper it at a conference panel with a dozen people in attendance and no media to be found.
We wonder what would happen if rural politics scholars took to the online pages of places like Politico and The Atlantic to describe their more troubling findings. Actually, we don’t have to wonder: Their inboxes would be filled with the hateful and threatening emails we are receiving.
When it comes to rural resentments, again and again these scholars insist that if rural whites are mad, it’s only because they have good reason to be. We are hardly unaware of the sufferings of rural America, many of which are born from late-stage capitalism. In fact, we dedicate the second chapter of our book to the causes and consequences of declining economic opportunities, outmigration of ambitious young people, hospital and pharmacy closures, and other very serious problems that pervade rural American communities, white and nonwhite alike. In our reporting, we heard many moving stories about the challenges rural communities face.
What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
And yet, the response to our book has been not just angry but personal at times. Harper delivered a torrent of abuse at us on social media, calling us “idiots” and “intellectual lightweights who wrote a dumb screed.” He also called us “soft-handed elites” and claimed that our book says that “white rural people are evil scum,” which of course it does not; that was one of many distortions of what we wrote that he sent out to his followers before penning his Atlantic article.
The positively obsessive attention our critics have given to one chapter in our book has located a few errors, which we’re happy to correct in future editions. Unfortunately, their legitimate criticisms are buried in a pile of personal insults, factual inaccuracies, and apologetics for rural whites.
Most importantly, our critics refuse to seriously grapple with rural whites’ place in Trump’s movement as it grows increasingly authoritarian. In rising to the defense of their subjects, the scholars discount or ignore the disturbing beliefs many (though not all) rural whites hold and work hard to justify and validate their resentments. Not unlike how journalists trooped to “the heartland” after the 2016 election to give a respectful hearing to every Trump voter they could find, scholars of rural politics bend over backward to avoid saying anything that might reflect poorly on rural whites—even when it means downplaying their own research.
Rather than explore Trump’s rural white support, they offer facile explanations for it, preferring instead to blame liberals for rural resentments whose roots date back decades. They insist that Democrats must do more to cater to rural whites, while giving Republicans compliments for their political skill (“Republicans are the political party that has figured out how to speak to that rural identity effectively,” writes Jacobs). And they don’t acknowledge one of our core arguments: Republicans are winning rural votes but doing almost nothing to improve rural Americans’ lives.
There Is No One Definition of “Rural”
“The most obvious problem with White Rural Rage is its refusal to define rural,” a less bellicose Harper wrote in The Atlantic; Jacobs also criticizes us on this score. But the reason we didn’t offer a single definition is that there are many (various federal agencies use more than a dozen), and we cited polls employing a variety of definitions. Some polls sort people by county; others ask respondents to self-report what kind of community they live in. Some analyses use two categories (metro/non-metro), while others use as many as nine. Jacobs uses census blocks to sort each county by rurality, which is a good approach, but even his definition leaves huge numbers of people who live in rural areas within urban-designated counties and vice versa. And there’s still the matter of those who were born and raised in cities who retain their urban consciousness despite, say, retiring to a rural community, or young rural folks who retain their rural consciousness despite leaving home after graduation to live in a city. Even Jacobs and his co-author write of their own definition, “We are not arguing that ours is the best—just the best for our purposes.” ...Read More
|
|
Film Review: An Iranian Woman Finds Her Might, in 'The Smallest Power'
Both the subject and the makers of this animated short discover their identities and a new love of their nation.
Animation by Naghmeh Farzaneh
Film by Andy Sarjahani
Text by Robin Wright
April 17, 2024 - In “The Smallest Power,” the filmmaker Andy Sarjahani captures the power of an individual act of resistance amid the chaos of nationwide disorder. The animated short is a product of his own circuitous journey to understand his dual identities.
Sarjahani’s mother, Tammie, is a Baptist from the American South. His father, Ali, was born a Shiite Muslim from Iran. They met in the library at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, married in 1978, and eventually settled in Russellville, Arkansas. “I grew up in the Ozarks, so I didn’t have a deep connection to my Iranian heritage,” Sarjahani told me. His family had Christmas trees and celebrated Easter but also marked Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
An ordinary homelife was “complicated by geopolitics,” he reflected. Members of his mother’s church regularly visited to try to convert his father. As a kid, Sarjahani was embarrassed. “What’s wrong with my dad?” he wondered. He distanced himself from his heritage, playing high-school football and hunting deer to fit in. He had a shotgun and has appeared in his videos in overalls. “My features are Iranian,” he once wrote about himself. He has an elegant Persian nose and dark eyes. “But my twang is all Arkansas.”
Sarjahani began to experience an internal pivot after the 9/11 attacks, in 2001. “The way people felt about Iranians or Middle Easterners, just speaking very transparently in front of me, I was like, Wow, this is the community that I grew up with, and this is how people feel about the other half of me,” he said. His friends and even his extended family were cheering to bomb Iran.
In 2016, Sarjahani made a pilgrimage to the land of his ancestors. “There was a deep hunger for me to just connect with my dad’s side of the family,” he explained. He travelled back and forth for two years. He worked on new films and developed a network of friends in Tehran. He went hunting for wild boars with cousin Ebrahim, just as he did with his childhood friend Bubba, in Arkansas. He found commonalities.
Sarjahani was in Iran during the protests against the theocratic regime in Tehran that spilled over from 2017 into 2018. After he left, he kept in touch with new family and friends. Many of them reached out to him when the nationwide Woman, Life, Freedom protests erupted, in 2022, over female dress restrictions and infringements on personal freedoms. For weeks, young Iranians led a rebellion after the death of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested and reportedly beaten for revealing some of her hair, a violation of Iran’s mandatory-hijab law. Sarjahani was inundated with stories that his Iranian connections wanted him to amplify. “I was a lifeline,” he told me. He decided to take one of the dispatches and turn it into a film.
“The Smallest Power,” which premièred at Sundance in January, recounts the experience of a young woman who became fluent in English and earned a medical degree so that she could abandon Iran for a freer life in Australia. She said that, when the protests erupted, security forces harassed the chief medical resident from the hospital where she worked for wearing a black wristband in sympathy. He suffered a heart attack during the encounter. When plainclothes police tried to roll his bed from the intensive-care unit into an unmarked ambulance, the young woman described nurses and doctors sitting on the hospital floor and refusing to move. “We were committed not to letting those guards take him away because he was one of us,” she explains, in her own voice, in the film. Hundreds were dying during the protests and thousands were arrested. “I don’t have the power to do anything about a child being killed in another city,” she explained. “But I have yet the smallest power.”
Sarjahani was moved by the nonchalance of her courage. “She was, like, ‘Duh, this is what needs to be done,’ ” he recounted from one of their several conversations. He was struck even more when she changed her mind about leaving. “The first time she said that she saw Iran as her country, a country worth fighting for, it gave me chills,” he said. Sarjahani decided to use animation, which was directed by Naghmeh Farzaneh, to protect the woman’s identity in the film. Farzaneh was born and raised in Iran and moved to the U.S. when she was twenty-four. During the Green Movement of 2009, Farzaneh had a similar experience to the medical student, so listening to her story was both “nostalgic and triggering.” Farzaneh said, of the stark animation, “The black-and-white style with the red accents reflects the intensity of the story. Brightness competes with darkness. The darkness takes over at times, while reds reflect the terror that is wrapped around each moment.” The composer, Fared Shafinury, is also Iranian American.
Sarjahani has begun making his mark as a filmmaker. He was a cinematographer for “The Barber of Little Rock,” which was nominated for an Oscar this year. His films—including “Wild Hogs and Saffron” and the upcoming “Iranian Hillbilly”—straddle his identities. For Sarjahani, the latest film was his “own small power to be able to do something tangible” for an identity and country that he, too, now fully embraces. ...Read More
|
|
522 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-6637
|
|
|
|
Is the content of this email relevant to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
:focal(524x409:525x410)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/01/d6/01d64905-b6fa-4ddc-84de-d0d95be7396d/aprmay2024_b08_prologue.jpg)
