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  • Naomi Klein Breaks a Taboo

    The fact that global warming is man-made and poses a grave threat to our future is widely accepted by progressives. Yet, the most commonly proposed solutions emphasize either personal responsibility for a global emergency (buy energy-efficient light bulbs, purchase a Prius), or rely on market-based schemes like cap-and-trade. These responses are not only inadequate, says best-selling author Naomi Klein, but represent a lost opportunity to confront climate change’s root cause: capitalism.

    This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Klein’s much-anticipated new book, is both surprisingly hopeful and deeply personal as she deftly weaves in her story of struggling to conceive her first child while researching the potential collapse of the natural world. In the book, Klein challenges everyone who cares about climate change to strive for a seemingly impossible redistribution of political and economic power. This, she argues, is both necessary and offers the prospect of living in a more just and humane society than the one we know today.

    John Tarleton: When it comes to the climate crisis, capitalism is often the elephant in the room that goes unacknowledged. Yet you zero in on it, starting with the title of your book. Why?

    Naomi Klein: I put the connection between capitalism and climate change up front because the fact that the life support systems of the planet are being destabilized is telling us that there is something fundamentally wrong with our economic system. What our economy needs to function in a capitalist system is continuous growth and continuous depletion of resources, including finite resources. What our planet needs in order to avoid catastrophic warming and other dangerous tipping points is for humans to contract our use of material resources.

    The science of climate change has made this fundamental conflict blindingly obvious. By putting that conflict up front, it breaks a taboo. And sometimes when you break a taboo, there’s sort of a relief in just saying it. And that’s what I’ve found so far: This is something that people know. And it’s giving permission to just name it. It’s a good starting point, so now we can have a real discussion.

    Why has that taboo of talking about capitalism and climate change in the same breath become so entrenched here in the United States?

    I think it’s primarily because capitalism is a religion in the United States. But also because the Left in the United States is extremely Keynesian, though Keynes himself questioned economic growth. But the translation of Keynesian thought we are seeing in this historical moment is a debate about the distribution of the spoils of economic growth. It’s not about some of the core facts about blanket economic growth. 

    In the book I talk about selective de-growth. There are schools of thought on the Left that dismiss all forms of growth. What I’m talking about is managing the economy. There are parts of our economy that we want to expand that have a minimal environmental impact, such as the care-giving professions, education, the arts. Expanding those sectors creates jobs, well-being and more equal societies. At the same time we have to shrink the growth-for-growth’s-sake parts of our economy, including the financial sector, which plays a large role in feeding consumption.

    You say that the Left needs its own project for addressing climate change in a systematic and transformative manner that breaks with free-market orthodoxy. What would that look like?

    The industrialized nations have to start cutting their emissions by about 8 to 10 percent per year, which is incompatible with capitalism. You cannot reconcile that level of emission reduction with an economic system that needs continual growth. The only time we have seen emissions reductions on that level was during the Great Depression of the 1930s. How we transition from our current status quo sets the parameters for how we want to organize society. A healthy transition would entail huge investments in the public sphere, public transit, housing, all kinds of infrastructure and services in order to prepare for the extreme weather that’s already locked in and also to lower our emissions.

    Progressives should seize the reins of this project because it’s an opportunity to make this transition equitable and to have a better economy on the other side. You could also allow your economy to crash and burn, which is a terrible idea and would hurt enormous numbers of people.

    The latter option would make a good starting point for a Hollywood movie.

    It’s striking to me that when we envision the future it’s just a more brutally cleaved world between haves and have-nots than the one we have now. This is so much a part of our culture that we think all we’re capable of doing is becoming like the societies portrayed in Snowpiercer, Elysium or The Hunger Games. It’s actually not controversial to say this is where we are headed. The question is, can we imagine another way of responding to crisis other than one of deepening inequality, brutal disaster capitalism and mangled techno-fixes, because that seems to be where people agree we’re headed.

    The alternative project you have in mind envisions a large role for the state. Yet, many on the Left have deep qualms about holding power of any kind, much less “seizing the reins,” as you say, to affect systemic changes.

    There has been a backlash in our generation of leftists against the centralized state socialism of previous generations. This is for obvious and understandable reasons. Since the 2008 economic crash, I see more appetite among the younger generation to engage with policy and to try to change power. You see it with the Indignados movement in Spain forming its own party and running in elections, in Iceland post-crisis, with outsiders going inside on their own terms. You see it at the municipal level with the minimum wage in Seattle.

    Where the pendulum swung really hard against any sort of engagement with formal politics, I see it swinging back where it’s like, “No, we’re not going to replicate those centralized structures but things are too urgent and too dire to ignore institutions of various kinds, including lawmaking. But we’re going to try to change it and build our belief in decentralization into the way we engage.“

    Has this approach made a significant impact anywhere on energy and climate-related policies?

    A really great example is the energy transformation that has been going on in Germany. Thirty percent of the electricity produced there is now coming from renewable resources, mostly wind and solar and mostly through decentralized, community-controlled ventures of various kinds, including hundreds of energy co-ops. You also have large cities like Munich voting to reverse their electricity privatizations and become part of this energy revolution.

    What’s interesting about Germany is it really shows how you need strong policy to make a transition like that happen. It’s not about, “Hey, let’s start an energy co-op.” No. That kind of fetish for very small-scale initiatives won’t get us where we need to go. What Germany has is a bold national policy. That’s how you get to 30 percent renewable electricity in such a short time, and they may very well get to 50 to 60 percent by 2030. It also shows you can design smart policy to systematically decentralize.

    What got you started on this book? Was there a specific moment when you realized you wanted to write a book on climate change?

    I decided that I was going to immerse myself in this subject in 2009 when I was covering a U.N. antiracism conference in Geneva. An earlier conference held in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001 saw a growing debate about whether the United States and Europe should pay reparations to African nations for the harm done by the slave trade and colonialism. The issue vanished from public discussion after 9/11 and it was clear by 2009 how much ground had been lost.

    At that 2009 conference I met Angélica Navarro, a trade negotiator from Bolivia who was doing some really interesting work about climate and reparations and how to really push the concept of climate debt within the U.N. climate negotiations. And I had a moment in which I realized that the science is so clear on the historical responsibility for climate change that it could be used as a tool for realizing justice goals for which social movements had been fighting for a very long time.

    Your book strikes a hopeful note on what can be a grim topic. 

    I find it really hard to write when I feel hopeless. It took me five years to write this book in part because initially I didn’t feel so hopeful. Then, there really started to be an explosion of resistance to extractive projects such as fracking and oil pipelines and coal export terminals. It’s being done in a truly global and networked manner that reminds me of the early days of the so-called anti-globalization movement.

    That shift made me really excited that there is a growing movement and that the book can be part of that movement. I feel like we’re on the verge of a coming together of economic justice movements and a new sort of kick-ass grassroots anti-extractivism movement. When people are fighting fracking or they’re fighting a big pipeline, generally they’re not driven by concerns about climate, they’re driven by a love of place. Often the protection of water is the primary motivation, as well as concerns about the health of their kids. But climate change definitely adds another layer of urgency to keeping carbon in the ground and not putting it into the atmosphere.

    You became a parent for the first time a couple of years ago. How did that experience affect the way you see climate change? Did the prospect of dire climate change taking effect in this century cause you to be hesitant about becoming a parent?

    I was 38 when I decided I wanted to have kids and to start trying. That’s pretty late. I would have this conversation with my husband where I’d say that the more I read about climate change, the more I felt that having a child was condemning this kid to a Mad Maxian future of fighting with their friends for food and water. This was the sort of dystopic future that I was imagining. And I was having trouble imagining anything else.

    I think that seeing some of these signs of hope were part of the process of me deciding to become a parent: being able to imagine other futures than the one playing on repeat at the moment. But I’m really wary of this sort of, “I care more about the future because I have a baby” thing. As somebody who didn’t have kids for a long time and had trouble getting pregnant, I really hated when people did that, because it felt really exclusionary to me. I understand, as a parent, why people say that, because when you hear that we’ll be at x degrees warmer by 2050, you can’t help but do these mental calculations of, “Okay, how old will he be then?” But I cared about the future before my son Toma was born just as some of the most caring people that I know don’t have kids. So I want to be careful about that.

    There’s a tremendous organizing effort taking place here in New York for the People’s Climate March. Why do you think this particular protest matters, and what are the chances it will have an enduring impact?

    Climate change has gone from being an issue that will affect our grandchildren to a right-now issue. The difference over the past few years is that the climate movement has jettisoned its astronaut’s “eye in the sky” view of a shimmering blue-and-white dot set against the darkness of space in which no people are visible, and it has come down to earth.

    It’s connecting with people who are driven by basic justice demands such as clean air for their kids and water they can drink. The People’s Climate March will be much more diverse and it’s going to be angrier than previous climate protests. That anger is a really important and powerful tool. So I think we’re going to see a different kind of climate movement. It’s already there. I think Seattle 1999 was a coming-out party for the global justice movement, and I think this will be a coming-out party of sorts for a new climate movement.

    There have been other moments over the past two decades, from the Rio Earth Summit to Al Gore’s movie to Hurricane Sandy, that have seen climate change briefly capture the public imagination only to fade out again. 

    In the past the climate movement was incredibly elitist. There really was a belief that you did not need a grassroots movement if you had all the celebrities and the billionaires and a former vice president like Al Gore on your side. I think that is what has made the issue so ephemeral. If your strategy is just to get a bunch of celebrities and billionaires on your side, guess what? They change their minds, and they move on to other things. Vanity Fair launches their annual green issue and it lasts for two years. Fashions change.

    This is the first time climate change has had a grassroots movement behind it in North America. And that’s what is going to give it staying power. The whole point is that it has roots now. The problem with the top-down strategy is that it has no roots. And when you don’t have roots, you can blow away.

    For more, see thischangeseverything.org.

    This article is reprinted with the permission of The Indypendent, a New York City-based newspaper, where it first appeared.

  • Teachers in British Colombia are on strike and deserve our help

            

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     Teachers in British Columbia  are waging a fierce struggle for public education in their province. Their union, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) needs our help. Many supporters of the fight for public education in this country don’t realize that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators) and the subsequent rebirth of teacher unionism in the US owe much to the BCTF. The involvement of the BCTF in international work has been a model for unions around the world. It's safe to say there would be no Trinational Coalition without the BCTF.  (The picture shows activists at a Trinational convention in Chicago emonstrating dlast May.) It’s time for us to repay the debt.

             Teachers in BC have been on strike for two weeks. They have voted to send the current strike to arbitration and immediately open classrooms for the new school year as soon as government says yes. Briefly, the BC Supreme Court has twice ruled that the legal rights of BC teachers were violated when the government in 2002 brought in legislation that eliminated provisions from the teacher collective agreement. The government is appealing the judgement in order to force the BCTF to give up its rights. Since rotating strikes started in May, teachers have lost a full month of salaries and received only $200 in strike pay. Teacher unions in Ontario provided $1.5 million to support BC teachers.  Funds for a hardship fund have come from other donations, including some from teachers donating their strike pay for others who need it more. While the union has received support from other unions in the BC Federation of Labour, the government is taking a hard line.

                What we can do: The BCTF is asking for letters and messages to be sent to the government.

    A BC Federation of Labour rally in downtown Vancouver on Friday drew several thousand teachers, families and friends—enough to block the road in front of the provincial government offices.

                Email can be addressed to Christy Clark, Premier of British Columbia (premier@gov.bc.ca) and Peter Fassbender, Education Minister (peter.fassbender.mla@leg.bc.ca). Copy Jim Iker, BCTF Presidend (CC: (jiker@bctf.ca). 

                You can follow strike news on a  Livestream channel which carries briefings for members and the media.

    Lois Weiner

    Dear Premier and Education Minister:

    I write in support of the request of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation for the BC Government to agree to arbitration of the collective agreement.

    Teachers have been on strike to put in place conditions that we know from years of rigorously conducted research improve educational outcomes. The advantages in learning that accrue from reduced class sizes and resources to improve the ability to successfully integrate students with special needs into classrooms are well-documented.

    It is in the best interest of the children, parents, and citizens of your province for the government to end this strike by agreeing to the BCTF's proposal to arbitrate the dispute. This will allow schools, teachers, and students in BC to  commence with their education and for the differences the government has with your teachers to be settled by an impartial hearing.

    Each day the government delays in submitting this dispute to binding arbitration is a day lost to children's learning. I and many others concerned about education globally are watching news of this dispute and hoping for its speedy, just resolution.

  • Reply to Bennett Muraskin on Gaza Protest Blog

    Bennett Muraskin complains that a blog post of mine — a report on a demonstration in Newark protesting the blank check given by NJ senators Menendez and Booker for Israel's crimes — is missing "full recognition of Hamas' war crimes and vile ideology."

    Muraskin's charge is muddleheaded on several counts.

    First of all, not all things one believes have to be stated in all articles. What is the relevance of Hamas's war crimes and ideology to my report? Do these in some way justify Israel committing its (vastly larger) war crimes? Do they justify the U.S. government providing the military and diplomatic wherewithal that enable Israel to commit its war crimes? International humanitarian law clearly states that the war crimes of one side do not legitimate war crimes by the other (as I've discussed elsewhere). Likewise, someone's ideology, let alone the ideology of a ruling party, has no bearing on the permissibility of attacking innocent civilians, and no bearing on the permissibility of other governments providing support to those who attack innocent civilians.

    Now in fact, as Muraskin acknowledges, I did offer a judgment on Hamas's conduct, calling its rocket fire "unjust." But this is not enough for Muraskin. How come I only refer to the six civilian deaths and not to the broader impact of the rockets? There is no doubt that the rocket fire caused much trauma in southern Israel, unjustifiably. But when I mentioned the toll of the Israeli assault on Gaza, I failed to describe the terrible trauma suffered by the people of Gaza —  eliciting no comparable complaint from Muraskin. I suspect that the trauma to the two populations (Israeli and Gazan ) was in the same proportion as the deaths that occurred in each place. That is, the people of Gaza were victimized by war crimes causing death, injury, destruction, and trauma on a scale hundreds of times greater than that suffered by the Israeli civilian population.  

    Muraskin says I failed to mention the tunnels Hamas "built under the Israel/Gaza border for the sole purpose of attacking civilians." Sole purpose? This is a Netanyahu talking point, but hardly convincing. In fact we know that every time Hamas militants emerged from one of the tunnels on the Israeli side they attacked military targets. No civilian was even injured by use of one of these tunnels. To be sure, the tunnels could lead to an attack on civilians, but in that respect they are just a smaller scale version of Israel's F-16s. Both are weapons that can be used to attack military targets, but that could also be directed at civilians (though the tunnels have not yet been so directed, while the F-16s have). The tunnels' mere existence is not a war crime.

    Muraskin says Hamas praised "the abduction and murders" of the Israeli teens. In fact, however, Hamas praised the abductions, but not the murders. Many Palestinians approved the abductions because they hoped it would lead to the release of some of Israel's 7,500 Palestinian prisoners, several hundred of whom were being held without charge and were in the midst of a hunger strike. Others were supposed to be released as a result of a deal Netanyahu agreed to with Abbas and Kerry, but on which the Israeli prime minister had reneged. This doesn't make the abductions justified, but Muraskin saying that Hamas cheered the murders is inaccurate.

    Muraskin then goes through the usual litany of the Hamas Charter, Hamas's previous record of terrorism, and its position on a settlement of the conflict. I've discussed these issues at length in the past; Muraskin adds nothing new to the conversation, so there's no need for me to respond here.

    Just one point: Hamas's anti-Semitism is clear, but Muraskin offers a misleading summary of The Forward interview with Mousa Abu Marzook. Yes, Marzook did refer to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but when told by the interviewer that the book was a forgery, he replied that he didn't know that and asked the interviewer to "help me about this" and send him an article on the subject because it was widely believed in the Muslim world. So he was hardly "vouch[ing]" for its authenticity.

    Muraskin quotes assessments by B'Tselem and Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery that Hamas's conduct violated international humanitarian law and says he thinks "if pressed, Shalom would admit that he accepts" their views. This is obnoxious; I have long been on record condemning Hamas's ideology and conduct — without having had to be "pressed" by Bennett Muraskin. Muraskin goes on to say in the same sentence "yet there is something about the pro-Palestinian movement in the US that cannot openly admit that Hamas commits war crimes." So why write to me rather than to someone who takes that position?

    There is much to condemn about Hamas, but one would hope that a proper sense of proportion would lead those who condemn Hamas's crimes to direct much greater condemnation toward Israel's far greater crimes, on behalf of a nearly fifty-year occupation. And toward the U.S. government that makes those far greater crimes possible.

     

  • Response to Stephen Shalom’s Blog on Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza

    There is something missing from Stephen Shalom’s blog post on Israelis crimes in the recent Gaza conflict and it is full recognition of Hamas’ war crimes and vile ideology.

    Stephen Shalom mentions in passing the “unjust” nature of Hamas’s rocket attacks and mortar fire on Israel, but reduces the harm they did to “six civilian deaths.” In reality, they made life in southern Israel unlivable for many thousand Israelis.  He also fails to grasp the indiscriminate nature of these rocket attacks, every one meant to kill civilians, be they Jews, Arabs or foreign residents of Israel. He also ignores the tunnels Hamas built under the Israel/Gaza border for the sole purpose of attacking civilians on the Israeli side. 

    What does B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organizations, say about Hamas’ conduct? 

    Hamas did, indeed, violate international humanitarian law (IHL) during the fighting: its operatives fired at civilians and civilian locations within Israel, concealed weapons in civilian buildings and institutions in the Gaza Strip, and even fired from locations close to civilian structures or from within such structures. In doing so, Hamas endangered civilians within Gaza, forcing the civilian population to be a part of the sphere of fighting. Such conduct is unlawful, as B'Tselem has repeatedly stated and wishes to underscore once more.

    And here are the words of Israeli’s greatest peace advocate Uri Avnery:

    The war deteriorated into an orgy of killing and destroying, with both sides "dancing on the blood", blessing every bomb and missile, completely oblivious to the suffering caused to the human beings on the other side. And still without any realizable aim. 

    I expect that if pressed, Shalom will admit that he accepts B’Tselem’s findings and Avnery’s conclusion, yet there is something about the pro-Palestinian movement in the US that cannot openly admit that Hamas commits war crimes.

    Consider the way the conflict began.  Local Hamas operatives, acting on their own, abducted and then murdered three Israeli teenagers living on the West Bank.  Hamas’ response was to disclaim responsibility but to praise the abduction and murders.  Does this justify the Israeli rampage on the West Bank that killed 12 Palestinians?  Of course not.  But what does it say about Hamas that it relishes in the murder of Israelis?

    What is Hamas’ record?  Hamas was responsible for numerous suicide bombings inside Israel that took the lives of hundreds of Israeli civilians.  Although there have been no such atrocities recently, Hamas has not repudiated this tactic and expresses no remorse. In fact, it refuses to draw any distinction between Israel soldiers or civilians. They are all fair game.

    To this day Hamas’s charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews.  To this day, it claims it cannot agree to a two state solution because Islam forbids the ceding of Muslim land to infidels.  From time to time, Hamas officials claim the organization is willing to sign a long term “truce” with Israel, but a truce is a far cry from normal relations and Hamas would only sign one if all Palestinians (not just those living in the West Bank and Gaza) approved it and its terms guaranteed the unqualified right of Palestinians to return to pre-1967 Israel. This is a nothing like the two-state solution advocated by most progressives and even a left-wing Israeli government would never agree to it.

    Hamas is overtly anti-Semitic. In an article that appeared in the April 27, 2012 issue of the Jewish newspaper the Forward, based on an interview with Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzook, Marzook is quoted as saying that he has nothing against Judaism as a religion or Jews as individuals, but in the next breath he vouches for the accuracy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious forgery circulated by anti-Semites for over a century, in which Jews are depicted in the ugliest possible terms.

    Lifting the Israeli blockade is a worthy goal.  Shalom is right to point out that it has kept out products essential to the Gaza’s economy and the well being of its population.  But what about the cement that did get in?  If Hamas was sincerely interested in improving quality of life of the people it was elected to represent, it would have used the cement for civilian purposes, not for building tunnels to attack Israel.

    Stephen Shalom is the director of Gandhian Forum for Peace and Justice.  Hamas’s reactionary philosophy and violent conduct is the antithesis of Gandhi’s teachings.  Shalom should say so loud and clear.     

  • Ebola : A Virus in the Heart of Darkness

    ImageFiloviridae Ebola is a virus made up of ten proteins that was first identified in 1976 in Zaire, today the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). While today five types of the virus are recognized, they are all believed to be mutations of the first known strain, which one finds today in western Africa.  (Gire et al., Science, August 28, 2014). Sub-Saharan African fruit bats are without doubt the principal source [of the virus]. These flying mammals transmit it to monkeys and other animals, but also directly to human beings. This pathogenic agent provokes recurrent epidemics with a deadly fever, of which the first symptoms are flu-like, followed by weakness, diarrhea, vomiting, and often hemorrhages, symptoms that can easily be confused with other diseases. It leads to death within ten days in more than half of all cases. 

    Since the first eruption of Ebola in the DRC some twenty epidemics have affected ten countries, first in the Congo River basin—Ebola is the name of one of its tributaries—then in West Africa, in particular in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and most recently in Senegal.[1] Yet certainly the current West African epidemic will take more victims than all of the recent epidemics up until now. From 1976 to 2013, Ebola caused 2,345 deaths, while the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates conservatively that some 20,000 people will fall victim to the current pandemic. Some epidemiologists believe that these figures could be at least five times higher (Mediapart, September 2, 2014). Indeed, for the first time it has followed a new path into important urban centers, among them Conakry, Guinea; Monrovia, Liberia; and Freetown, Sierra Leone. Finally, note that it is women who bear the brunt of this virus, because it is mostly women who are caring for the patients.

    Ebola and Land-Grabbing

    How can we explain the transmission to human beings of this virus which has previously been confined to the wilderness? It stems from the more and more intense exploitation of the African savannah, a vast zone of some 1.5 million square miles from Senegal to South Africa, which the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank portray as the new agricultural El Dorado of the world.[2] The decline of small-scale peasant agriculture to the benefit of export agribusiness has, as is well known, led to the uprooting of millions of small, poor producers and the concentration of land in great multinational corporations. This “accumulation by dispossession” is booming in the countries that have been touched by the Ebola virus. Such dispossession leads to the clearing of vast areas of land and creates precarious rural communities that hunt game, game that had previously no contact at all with human beings.

    Of course, monkeys, small mammals, and the bats have long been part of the traditional food of the peoples of these regions. But their growing need for proteins has led them to consume more and more of this bush meat, which exposes them to new emerging pathogens.[3] Furthermore, disruption of ecosystems resulting from large-scale land clearing in recent years has contributed to increased contact between infected animals and human groups. In particular, the deforestation of 15,500 square miles in sub-Saharan Africa between 2000 and 2010, that is, almost a third of the world’s deforestation, together with global warming have accentuated the aridity and the duration of the dry season, two factors favorable to the outbreak of epidemics, to such a degree that they push the animal carriers of various viruses out of their traditional ecological niches.[4]

    In the recent period, the countries touched by the ongoing epidemic have been particularly favored by international investors because of their abundance of “available” cultivable land, the vulnerability of their small peasants dedicated to subsistence agriculture, and favorable political conditions (the promotion of free enterprise and the decline of the state). It is in this way that big Italian (Nuove Iniziative Industriali) and American interests (Farm Land of Guinea) have set their sights on Guinea. One also finds Malaysian investments (Sime Darby) in Liberia, as well as Swiss companies (Addax) and Chinese-Vietnamese ventures in Sierra Leone. They control the production of biofuels which is rapidly expanding.

    A small peasant talked about the social consequences of the control of the Malaysian company Sime Darby over thousands of acres of land in Liberia: “Now we have lack of food, no food and no hospital. No school. We are not working… It’s hard to pay the teachers…So they go away.”[5] Land grabbing by foreign private companies has come on the heels of decades of structural adjustment, which has literally destroyed public infrastructure, including education and health, in the poorest sub-Saharan African countries. Today, Ebola will exacerbate this endemic poverty by causing a specific food crisis in the most affected areas as a direct result of quarantine imposed, disrupting farming and trade and provoking the increased prices of staple foods. (USA Today, August 28, 2014).

    Ransom from Poverty

    The first outbreak of the current epidemic seems to have developed, in December 2013, in the villages surrounding the town of Guéckédou, south of Guinea, a city that has seen its population nearly tripled in the decade from 2000 to 2010 following the influx of refugees from civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Its public infrastructure is of course incompatible with the basic needs of its people, and the authorities are totally discredited. As expected, its medical staff, few and underequipped, does not have the means to cope with the influx of patients and protect themselves from infection, turning its very fragile health institutions into centers of propagation of the epidemic.

    Under such conditions, where there is still no test available on site to determine if a person has been infected (this requires sending samples to Europe or North America), the epidemic quickly escaped control. Little by little it touched the surrounding communities, especially Guéckédou, which is the seat of an important regional market, and then moved on to the capitals of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. It is important to realize that, according to epidemiological investigations, each patient may have had contact with on average 20 to 40 people, whom it would theoretically be necessary to identify and track for 21 days (Le Monde, August 5, 2014).

    In Europe or North America, it would not be difficult to stop the contagion of a disease that is mainly transmitted through direct contact with body fluids of patients (saliva, sweat, vomit, urine, feces, semen, blood , etc.), although the possibility of infection by inhaling the virus does not seem excluded (American Thinker, August 24, 2014). Indeed, unlike AIDS, the Ebola incubation time is short (ten days on average) and those affected are contagious only during the brief period when they have symptoms. So one just needs to have the health infrastructure to support patients safely (use of gowns, gloves and effective masks, clean needles, etc.), keep them from having unprotected contact with their families, and also be able to inform and track people who had contact with them.

    However, in countries that have less of a doctor for 50,000 inhabitants, “Aid workers on the ground…don't have access to the basics to protect themselves and their patients. Many of their hospitals are dilapidated, there's limited infection control and almost no capacity for contact tracing.” (Vox, August 9, 2014). In total, according to WHO, nearly 8% of victims of Ebola have been doctors and nurses. (The Spokesman-Review, August 31, 2014). “In Sierra Leone, in the town of Kenema, eighteen doctors and nurses who had been working in the Lassa/Ebola ward have contracted Ebola, and at least five have died….Some Ebola nurses had stopped coming to work: they had been working twelve-hour days, in biohazard suits, and they were supposed to be earning an extra thirty dollars a week in hazard pay, but the government of Sierra Leone had not provided it….In Liberia, parts of the medical system have effectively collapsed….The hospitals of Monrovia, the capital, are full of Ebola patients and are turning away new patients …infected bodies are being left in the streets : the outbreak is beginning to assume a medieval character. » (The New Yorker, August 11, 2014)

    Popular Mobilization is Indispensable

    An effective fight against the epidemic implies more resources, but above all it requires a popular mobilization along with the public health professionals, particularly to prevent the ill from being hidden by their families and to make sure that funeral ceremonies are safe—the dead are particularly contagious—as well as to disinfect the homes of the death, but also and above all to demand a health policy that meets the needs of the endangered populations.

    Such conditions are missing in many of these communities that have good reasons to mistrust their authorities. The more so since the later would rather criminalize families who hide sick relatives in order to take care of them privately, and deploy soldiers to keep people from moving, rather than increasing financing for health and encouraging collective health management (E-International Relations, 26 juillet 2014 : Le Monde, 1er août 2014).

    Moreover, why should the inhabitants of the countries under discussion trust stranger stakeholders who are overwhelmingly white (WHO, MSF, UNICEF, Red Cross, etc.), deployed on the ground dressed in spacesuits, and who snatch their dead and place them in plastic bags? Given the role of international financial institutions in the imposition of structural adjustment programs deadly last thirty years, all the ingredients are present that fuel the conspiracy theories of those who suspect racist and neocolonialist interests have deliberately caused outbreaks of AIDS and Ebola to appropriate again the wealth of Africa?[6]

    The spontaneous initiatives of artists, singers and actors and also of bloggers to alert their fellow citizens and encourage them to protect themselves from the illness, as well as the involvement of the survivors in prevention campaigns suggest what might be a first attempt at a preferable method. (NPR, August 19, 2014; ABCNews, August 26, 2014). However, a true grassroots organization of resistance to the epidemic requires the recognition of basic democratic rights and their translation at the organizational level, things incompatible with the preservation of enormous privileges of the local bourgeoisies and their international mentors.

    Finally, on the international level, the belated and hesitant reaction of the WHO seems all the more ridiculous. The budget at its disposal to deal with the crises of epidemic outbreaks has been halved over the past two years: from $469 million in 2012-2013 to $228 million in 2014-2015. It is a sign of the time that the World Bank has allocated $200 million for this emergency to make up for the shortcomings of the UN agency (The Lancet, September 2014). Similarly, the non-governmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders (MSF), or religious orders such as San Juan de Dios—the order to which a Spanish priest who recently fell victim to the epidemic belonged—have been at the forefront of intervention on the ground[7]. This is a vivid picture of the privatization of essential tasks, increasingly neglected by governments and international organizations.

    The Moral Bankruptcy of Capitalism

    Since WHO declared quite late, on August 8, that the West African epidemic had become an international health emergency, the most advanced pharmaceutical start-up companies involved in the development of vaccines or antivirals, such as Tekmira, Sarepta, BioCryst, NanoViricides, Mapp Bio, ZMapp (a cocktail of three antibodies successfully administered to two exposed U.S. humanitarian aid workers, but that failed on a Spanish priest and a Liberian doctor), saw their rising shares trading wildly. These companies have developed substances, albeit in experimental quantities, which are almost ready for testing on humans (Reuters, August 8, 2014; Forbes, August 29, 2014).

    According to Prof. Daniel Bausch of the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the principal obstacle to the production of these effective medication is not scientific or technical but economic: “Pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to pour research and development dollars into curing a disease that surfaces sporadically in low-income, African countries.” (nakedcapitalism.com, August 2014). This is why Dr. John Ashton, president of the British Public Health faculty speaks publicly of the “moral bankruptcy of capitalism.” (Independent on Sunday, August 3, 2014).

    So far, Ebola has managed to interest the military in the name of preventing bioterrorism. But major pharmaceuticals have had funding denied for essential and very expensive clinical trials. So far the WHO has forbidden the testing of vaccines on human subjects, given the very high fatality rate of the viruses. It is urgent, says the world-renowned Belgian researcher Peter Piot, one of the co-discovers of the Ebola virus and founding member of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM), that, “Once the epidemic is complete, there be more investment efforts in research on treatments and vaccines. Otherwise, when a new outbreak occurs, nothing will have been done. After the 1976 outbreak, the WHO had said that it wanted to put together an international intervention team. But that never took place”. Piot has called for development aid to finance research and to provide free care under the responsibility of the WHO for those suffering from the disease. (Le Monde, August 7, 2014).

    The tragic ongoing epidemic shows how the unbridled pursuit of private profit is incompatible with public health, especially that of the poor masses of the oppressed countries. The French far-right leader Jean-Marie only pushes the logic of such barbarity to its extremes when he states that “Monseigneur Ebola” has the means to stop the global population explosion in three months. To go beyond the legitimate indignation and really change the course of things, we must indeed break with the current world disorder. First, public health should not be separated from our ecosocialist objectives, because our health depends upon our living environment and our society’s productivism constantly promotes the emergence of new somatic and psychological pathologies, which capitalism then sloughs off on society, whatever the cost. The pharmaceutical industry and research will not meet the needs of humanity, especially of its poorest groups, if it doesn’t give up the practice of limiting the distribution of their products to paying customers instead of addressing the democratically defined social needs of the populations concerned. For that purpose, they should be socialized and funded by the public sector. Couldn’t this begin by transforming the parasitic and pharaonic public debt service paid by the peoples of the South and the North, and using this money to fund health care?

    Translation by Dan La Botz

     


    [1] An epidemic with a shorter timespan also broke out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) last July, likely linked to another strain of Ebola.

    [2] Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant – Prospects for Commercial Agriculture in the Guinea Savannah Zone and Beyond, World Bank, 2009.

    [3] These kinds of mechanisms have recently been studied in a global fashion by David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, W. W. Norton, 2012).

    [4] Daniel G. Bausch and Lara Schwarz, “Outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease in Guinea: Where Ecology Meets Economy,” PLos Negl Trop Dis, 8(7), July 31, 2014; Wired, August 18, 2014; Calestous Juma, “Africa Ebola Outbreak: How to Prevent It?” Al Jazeeera, August 13, 2014.

    [5] The Globe and Mail, « Land Grabs in Africa : Liberia” www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R6mLsSIXb4

    [6] See in this regard the statement explaining the reasons for the petition launched by the mathematician Pascal Adjamagbo, Dr. Guy Alovor and Kanyana Mutombo which calls on the African Union, in association with the Security Council of the UN, to set up a commission of inquiry into the origins of AIDS and Ebola. (http://www.petitions24.net/petition_a_lunion_africaine_sur_le_sida_et_lEbola_en_afrique).

    [7] This religious order is partially funded by revenues of the public bonds of the Spanish State (La Jornada, August 17, 2014). That is to say, that the Spanish health or education budget may have to be reduced to support these private organizations.

     

  • Authors dynamite neoliberalism's ed reform narrative

    Review of

    This is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class and Education
    By José Luis Vilson
    Haymarket Books, 2014

    Badass Teachers Unite: Reflections on Education, History and Youth Activism
    By Mark Naison
    Haymarket Books, 2014

    It’s not news that public education is taking a beating from corporate America. In a now-familiar narrative, it’s teachers and schools who are to blame for failing students — and not poverty, hunger, the lack of health and social services, high rates of family homelessness and all the other challenges created by rampant inequality.

    These assumptions drive an emphasis on punishing teachers and schools whose students do poorly on standardized tests for literacy and math. It is the cornerstone of President Obama’s education policy, and is supported by both major parties. For the Democrats, it is a quick and cheap fix to seeing that every child — at least polemically — is in a position to receive an equal education. For the GOP, it’s pure butter, one more way to turn out obedient workers without the capacity to question, let alone challenge, the existing order. 

    This toxic state of affairs is sparking a torrent of critical writing by teachers and educators who know their way around a classroom much better than the corporate reformers. Out of this ferment come two important new books that tell a different story about what teachers do, what parents want and what children need.

    José Luis Vilson is a nine-year veteran math teacher in Upper Manhattan with a degree in computer science. He writes in his highly readable, witty and incisive This is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class and Education that education specialists touting uniform standards for all students are really “data maniacs” who can only do harm by peddling “outcomes-based” education that relies on standardized test scores. For Vilson, traditional “drill-and-fill” teaching, as well as the new blame-the-teacher-first model, are both anathema to real education. He insists that quality education can’t be achieved by imposing a curriculum that means more test prep and less art, music and sports. That’s a recipe for failure. 

    He also thinks his fellow teachers can’t leave it at griping about impossible school conditions to their colleagues in the teachers lounge or to their families at home, or even be known solely as critics, but must go beyond “voice” and assume “leadership.” Instead of complaining about why teaching sucks, he says, “let’s talk about why we stay.” He always puts children first. 

    The book also does yeoman’s work — without once invoking the term identity politics — in drawing out the living links between students’ class, education and race. 

    In Badass Teachers Unite: Reflections on Education, History and Youth Activism Fordham historian and African American Studies professor Mark Naison can’t speak as a public school teacher, but as a scholar who has spent some 40 years visiting Bronx schools, getting students and teachers interested in the rich vein of local borough history as a way of rediscovering themselves. Like Vilson, Naison knows that teaching the children of the poor takes more than knowledge of subject matter or even lecturing expertise. Educators must forge real connections with each student. What Vilson does in math (yes, math) Naison masterfully does with social studies students and teachers by taking the seemingly abstract and linking it to everyday life in class society. 

    As Naison puts it, that connection is forged “not by insulating schoolchildren from the forces surrounding them and educating them to escape the neighborhood, but by engaging them in a democratic community planning process along with their teachers, their parents and their neighbors, and by making a problem-centered pedagogy part of the school curriculum.” He wants schools to return to a function they fulfilled to some degree in the past, when they served as centers of their communities. 

    If that sounds like wisdom ripped from Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, you would be right, but it’s no one’s warmed-over cant. 

    Both Naison and Vilson come with years of experience bringing schooling alive for children whose unstable home lives and disadvantaged communities leave their mark and make traditional education not just a luxury but a dead end. These authors understand that youth can make decisions as rational actors and conclude that what Naison calls “gravitating to the underground economy” offers tangible rewards, while “schooling from above” and non-stop testing in the absence of jobs can have — with the rarest exceptions — no positive effect on their lives. 

    With a new school year just around the corner, we are fortunate to have educators like Vilson and Naison who understand deeply the reality of struggling urban schools. Their writing can help us see beyond the cookie-cutter solutions of the corporate school reformers to the more difficult path of transforming our public schools one student at a time.

    Michael Hirsch is a New Politics editorial board member. This posting originally appeared in the August 12-Sept.8 issue of The Indypendent .

     

  • Labor Day and the right to be lazy – at all ages

                         This Labor Day, let’s celebrate “the right to be lazy.” Let’s play, dream, and imagine what a world without alienated labor would be. In a short book by the same name, written from a French prison in 1883, Paul Lafargue argues passionately that workers have been bamboozled by the church, the bourgeoisie, and politicians to believe that their back-breakinglabor is virtuous and unavoidable. It’s a belief that is, literally, killing them and civilization.

             Lafargue denounces capitalism’s values as a “pitiful parody on Christian ethics.” Capitalists strive to suppress the worker’s “joys and his passions and to condemn him to play the part of a machine turning out work without respite and without thanks.” The proletariat’s acceptance of capitalism’s values permits the cycle of overproduction and makes manufacturers “travel the world over in search of markets for the goods which are heaping up. They force their government to annex Congo, to seize on Tonquin, to batter down the Chinese Wall with cannon shots to make an outlet for their cotton goods… Thousands of young and vigorous men reddened the seas with their blood during the colonial wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

             Education’s role in suppressing the desire for pleasure in life is clear to Lafargue, who opens his book with a critique of an 1849 French commission on primary education. He understood that capitalism’s ethos must be taught. Mass public education has always been expected to prepare the next generation of workers, but in capitalist democracies it was also assumed to educate citizens to their political responsibilities. The two functions have often conflicted, but now we see that tension erased by measures that aim to reduce schooling to preparation for work without voice, unemployment, and prison.  Teachers all over the world see this alteration and are battling governments, powerful elites, even their own unions to protect a different vision of education.  One of the most heated battles is over the Common Core, a national curriculum that imposes a “rigorous” course of study that will make even 4 year olds “college and career ready.”  Enforced by standardized tests, the Common Core is  poised to squeeze play and pleasure even out of early childhood education.  Early childhood teachers, almost exclusively women and a group not known for their workplace militancy heretofore, have been roused by the Common Core and the testing regime to mobilize.  Perhaps without realizing it, their agitation draws  on Lafargue’s idea about the “right to be lazy” – at least until third grade. And as in so much, the Chicago Teachers Union leads the way among US teachers unions with its statement opposing the Common Core.

             Lafargue’s furious rhetoric may sound extreme to some readers.  But I read his essay after reeling from news about Ferguson Missouri, Gaza, Iraq, Syria. So much violence from state-sponsored terrorism! Such brutal acts by individuals consumed by rage at injustice! In contrast to the ferocious anger evidenced in  uploaded photos and videos of beheadings, Lafargue is polemical but reasoned. The violence sickens. Who doesn’t want peace? But we cannot have peace without justice, and we cannot have justice if we accept a status quo of inequality, oppression, and poverty, byproducts of, or embedded in our (capitalist) social system.

             What of the proletariat, which has not yet rejected the work ethic that Lafargue argues is the basis of social ills? I think Lafargue would concur with Kim Moody’s early reading of neoliberalism that in its drive to make workers in every society inter-changeable, capitalism has created the conditions for a new international working class to emerge. The challenge we face is one of political ideas and leadership, and in teachers unions at least, a new generation is emerging that “gets” the importance of international solidarity, fighting for the dignity of the profession, and for social justice,  against politicians who say we have no alternative. (If we just add “play” to that list, I think Lafargue would approve.)

             Early childhood educators often defend time for play in the school day by saying that play is children’s work, and much empirical research supports that play lays a cognitive and social groundwork that later schooling taps. Like Lafargue I’d rather defend play for play’s sake, for all of us. This Labor Day let’s celebrate our human right, children and adults alike, to be joyous, to play, and to remember that unions and the working class have to fight like never before to get it. 

             An adapted version of this Labor Day essay appears in The Jacobin. ( I contribute to The Jacobin and New Politics and hope on this day celebrating workers' struggles you will too. )

    Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. And you can follow me on twitter  Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

  • Thirteen arrested as protesters tell Senators Menendez and Booker: ‘No more blank check for Israel’s crimes,’

    Image
    Outside the Gateway Center, where Menendez and Booker have offices. (Photo by Tom Bias.)

    [This article was first published on Mondoweiss.]

    On Tuesday August 26, 2014, more than 50 demonstrators protested outside the Newark, New Jersey, offices of U.S. Senators Robert Menendez and Cory Booker demanding that the legislators stop providing a blank check for Israel’s crimes. Thirteen demonstrators were arrested inside the building as they read out the names of some of the nearly 500 Palestinian children killed in Gaza.

    (When B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, had tried to run a radio ad merely listing the names of five of the hundreds of children killed, the Israeli Broadcast Authority banned them from doing so.)

    The U.S. Senate has played a shameful role during the recent Israeli assault on Gaza, twice voting 100-0 to give its full support to Israel, saying nothing about its violations of international humanitarian law (indeed, condemning the United Nations’ Human Rights Council for deigning to investigate war crimes), nothing about the blockade of Gaza, and nothing about the occupation, while promising Israel still more weapons.

    All this, while more than 2,100 Gazans have been killed, with civilians constituting 85 percent of those whose status has been determined thus far. Families were blown to smithereens in their homes. More than 100,000 people lost their homes. UN refugee shelters were repeatedly struck. Artillery was used in densely populated areas, leveling entire neighborhoods. High-rise buildings were demolished. Water and power facilities were struck.

    Image
    The cell in which some of the protesters were held. (Photo by Olivia Hazin.)

    Israel says it was acting against rockets and tunnels. Projectiles have led to a total of six civilian deaths in Israel—tragic and unjust, but inevitable as long as Israel maintains its illegal and unjust occupation and as long as it enforces its cruel blockade on Gaza, a collective punishment in violation of international humanitarian law.

    “We support Israel’s right to self-defense,” the Senators intoned.

    But of course it’s not self-defense when you kill 500 children.

    It’s not self-defense when you have someone in a chokehold and the victim is flailing about in desperation—and make no mistake, Israel has had Gaza in a chokehold for 7 years, with a brutal blockade. Before the current round of fighting, the blockade ensured that conditions in Gaza were horrendous: 41 percent unemployment, power outages of up to 12 and even 16 hours per day, 90 percent of the water from the Gaza aquifer unsafe for human consumption, 90 million liters of partially treated sewage discharged daily into the Mediterranean. Moreover, Gazans have been denied basic freedom of movement; people needing urgent medical care have died while waiting for exit visas and Palestinian couples, where one partner is from Gaza and the other from either Israel or the West Bank, have to either live apart or in live Gaza.

    Israel says the only purpose of the blockade was to keep out weapons, but this is a gross lie. The blockade has blocked exports from Gaza, which obviously has nothing to do with weapons. The blockade has at various points blocked imports of coriander and notebooks.

    The real aim of the blockade has been openly acknowledged by Israeli officials: not so tight as to cause starvation, but just enough to—in the felicitous words of senior Israeli government advisor Dov Weisglass—put Gaza’s one and three quarter million people “on a diet.” Former Israeli President Shimon Peres once expressed bewilderment as to why Palestinians didn’t turn Gaza into another flourishing Singapore; he apparently forgot that becoming a trade entrepôt requires that you’re allowed to trade. To become a Singapore you need to be allowed to establish a seaport and an airport.)

    So there’s long been an easy way for Israel to defend itself without having to kill 500 children: end the blockade.

    It’s also not self-defense when you hold a people under occupation for nearly five decades, an occupation that is not getting lighter as time goes on, but is continually expanding, stealing Palestinian land and building new Israeli settlements.

    There’s long been an easy way for Israel to defend itself—end the occupation.

    But the U.S. Senate just says it supports Israel, no matter how many people it kills.

    But as bad as the Senate has been, New Jersey’s Senators Menendez and Booker have been especially awful.

    Menendez and Booker are the Senate’s two leading recipients of campaign contributions from pro-Israel PACs. Menendez, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, has played a leading role in supine support for Israel. One of the key co-sponsors of both of the Senate resolutions relating to Gaza, he has also (following Israel) been outspoken in attacking Obama for being soft on Iran.

    Image
    Outside the Gateway Center, where Menendez and Booker have offices. (Photo by Tom Bias.)

    Booker, called by analyst M.J. Rosenberg “AIPAC’s Number One Puppet in Congress,” considers Rabbi Shmuely Boteach a close friend and adviser. Boteach is the Chabad rabbi and TV personality who ran for Congress as a Republican and who, with Eli Wiesel, has been publishing vile pro-Israel ads in leading newspapers. Booker’s recent Senate speech on Gaza charged that Hamas, “in order to build their tunnels and to advocate and advance their independence,” was willing “to deny their people food” and “to deny medical supplies.”  Somehow Booker forgot to mention who was actually blocking Palestinian “independence” or cutting off food and medical supplies.

    What is striking about Menendez and Booker’s rabid support for Israel is how their views contrast with those of the people who elected them. We have no New Jersey polls, but there’s suggestive data from a July 22-23 national Gallup Poll. Asked whether Israeli military actions were justified, among Democrats 47 percent said “unjustified” compared to only 31 percent who said Israel was “justified.” Among Independents it was 46 percent who said “unjustified” compared to 36 percent “justified.”

    In other words, the plurality of people who elected Senators Menendez and Booker stand on the side of basic decency, while Menendez and Booker stand on the side of slaughter.

    Among non-white Americans, it was two to one who considered Israel’s actions unjustified—49 percent to 25 percent. These were the groups who voted overwhelmingly for Senators Menendez and Booker. Yet the Senators ignored their constituents’ views and backed Israel’s crimes.

    Other polls have shown Democrats to be more divided in their sentiments, but nothing could warrant Menendez and Booker being so oblivious to Palestinian suffering and so fawning to the desires of the Israeli government.

    The demonstrators on August 26 issued the following demands of their Senators:

    • Rescind S. Res. 498, July 17, 2014, co-sponsored by Sens. Menendez, Booker, and 77 others, passed unanimously, which supported Israel’s military actions in Gaza, condemned Hamas, and made no mention of the horrendous toll on Gaza’s civilian population of the Israeli attacks.
    • Rescind S. Res. 526, July 29, 2014, co-sponsored by Sen. Menendez and 6 others, passed unanimously, again supporting Israel’s military actions, condemning the UN’s Human Rights Council for deciding to investigate human rights violations, and calling for more military aid to Israel (not just for Iron Dome).
    • Introduce legislation rejecting all military aid to Israel (as urged by Amnesty International), which has enabled the commission of war crimes.
    • Call for an end to U.S. diplomatic actions designed to block the United Nations and the International Criminal Court from trying to obtain Israel’s compliance with international law.
    • Demand the immediate lifting of the blockade of Gaza, a collective punishment imposed in violation of international law.
    • Insist that the United States government not support Israel’s continuing settlements and its ongoing occupation.

    In short, the demonstrators demanded no more blank check for Israel’s crimes.

    The demonstration was endorsed by NJ Peace Action, Essex/Passaic County Green Party, NJ Labor Against War, NJ Progressive Democrats of America, Labor Fightback Network, Central NJ Coalition Against Endless War, Coalition 2 Save Our Homes, Princeton for Palestine, Green Party of Monmouth County, Socialist Party of Northern NJ, People’s Organization for Progress, and Anakbayan-NJ.

    One of the news reports of the demonstration, though neglecting to mention the 13 arrests, ended on this telling note:

    “We reached out to Sens. Menendez and Booker today. Both offices said the senators would have no comment, adding that the senators would let their records speak for themselves, to which demonstrators here say, ‘exactly.’”

     

    Stephen R. Shalom is a co-editor of New Politics and a member of New Jersey Peace Action. He teaches at William Paterson University in NJ, where is director of the Gandhian Forum for Peace & Justice.

     

     

  • Interview with Sam Gindin on 'The Making of Global Capitalism'

             Sam Gindin, former Research Director of the Canadian Auto Workers union and co-author with Leo Panitch of “The making of global capitalism” graciously agreed to answer questions from NP board members about his book when he and I participated in a conference at the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The interview, lasting under 30 minutes, is broad-ranging and clarifies and expands ideas in the book.  Thanks to Samir Sonti for his help in arranging the filming.

  • Ferguson, Militarization, Federal Jurisdiction in Police Brutality

    [We re-post here a statement by Howie Hawkins, Green Party candidate for Governor of New York.—eds.]

    Staten Island, Syracuse, Ohio, and Ferguson. Garner, Grant, Crawford, and Brown. Add these locations and names to the long list of young black unarmed men (and women) who are racially profiled and injured or killed at the hands of Police Departments around the country. From every corner of the US there are daily reports of police brutality and misbehavior.

    As Chris Hedges recently wrote, being the object of unwarranted deadly force by police officers is part of what it means to be black and poor in America. But no matter how much blacks raise their voices against indiscriminate police violence “the killings keep coming.” The police have always been the primary means of social control. But now we are witnessing the increasing militarization of the police force, with tanks and tear gas rolling through the streets of Ferguson.

    The poor, especially people of color, are unjustly targeted and victimized by our criminal justice system. From stop and frisk and broken windows, to police misbehavior, to the lack of adequate defense, to sentencing disparities, and post-conviction collateral consequences, the criminal justice system is deeply racist. The era of mass incarceration of mostly black and brown people is the backdrop of recent protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

    Multiple reports and eye witnesses have sworn that Michael Brown, a young black unarmed man just days away from his first day of college, was shot 6 times, twice to the head, by a member of the Ferguson Police Department while on his knees and with his hands up in the air. He was then left to bleed for four hours where he was gunned down.

    The response of the community was a rising anger and frustration but also a bold and courageous protest. We applaud the citizens of Ferguson for coming together in huge numbers, marching and chanting “Hands up, Don’t shoot.” The response of the Ferguson police to the protesters exemplifies the erosion of civil rights and American democracy. Officers militarized in riot gear and armed with tear-gas, sniper rifles, rubber bullets, and armored vehicles responded violently to unarmed and peaceful protesters. The Mayor of Ferguson declared a state of emergency and instituted a curfew from 12am-5pm. The Governor of Missouri called in the National Guard.

    The Hawkins-Jones campaign extends their condolences and regret to the Brown Family for the loss of their son and stands in solidarity with the people of Ferguson. Howie Hawkins and Brian Jones unconditionally defend the First Amendment right of the people of Ferguson to protest and demand change. Michael Brown’s killer, Officer Darren Wilson, must be charged with murder and brought to justice immediately.

    The Hawkins/Jones campaign calls for an “independent investigation” with the Department of Justice taking jurisdiction in these cases like Garner and Brown. To effectively hold police officers accountable to the law, federal prosecutors must be appointed who are not tied to the local “old boys’ networks” in the local justice system. Whenever the police kill, brutalize, or otherwise violate a citizen’s civil rights, the US Department of Justice should be brought in to investigate and file charges if warranted because the DA’s and police are constant collaborators. The Attorney Generals are also too connected to the local police and political establishments.

    The recent police killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island is similar to the police murder of Syracuse resident Jonny Gammage in a Pittsburgh suburb in 1995. Syracuse Greens were active in a campaign for a law for federal jurisdiction in these cases. Jonny was suffocated to death by suburban Pittsburgh police during a routine traffic stop much like Garner was. The proposed Jonny Gammage Law would mandate:

    • appointment of a federal prosecutor by the US Attorney General whenever a law officer is accused of violating the civil rights of a human being, including bodily injury or death;
    • US Department of Justice investigation of whether prosecution is warranted for all charges of civil rights violations and brutality by police officers by credible public or private sources, such as Citizen Review Boards, Human Rights Commissions, and civil rights organizations;
    • removal of jurisdiction over such cases from the local and state justice system, including the grand jury, to the US Department of Justice and the federal courts;
    • the immediate suspension of an officer charged until the case is resolved.

    In addition to demilitarizing the police, our campaign calls state funding for a statewide public defenders’ office, an end to the War on Drugs, an end to solitary confinement, educational opportunities for prisoners, “ban the box” on criminal history in employment and college applications, and alternatives to incarceration. We want the establishment of a Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation commission to examine the impact of the war on drugs and mass incarceration on communities of color in our state.

    For More Information.

    The Jonny Gammage Law: Federal Prosecution of Police Brutality, by Rev. Larry Ellis, Syracuse Greens, http://www.greens.org/s-r/23/23-06.html

    “Equal Justice Under Law” Platform of Howie Hawkins and Brian Jones, http://www.howiehawkins.org/platform

     

  • Michael Brown and Ferguson—Stop the Killing of Black Men

    Another young blackImage man has been shot and killed by the police in an American city. Michael Brown’s killing forms part of a national pattern that is a horror for the African American community, an outrage against humanity, and a disgrace to our country. It is a pattern that must stop but which can only be ended by changing the entire social and economic situation of African Americans in America, a situation which has led to the systematic and relentless humiliation and victimization of black men and boys. Ending incidents such as the killing of Brown in Ferguson will require not simply changes in the behavior of police, better community relations, and more poverty programs—though it will certainly require those and we must join together to fight for them. It will require a reconstruction of the American social system so that it provides affirmative action and reparations for African Americans and a decent life, with civil rights, secure employment, guaranteed health care, decent housing, and democratic control of the police, for all who live in America.

    The immediate reaction to Brown’s killing was typical of what has happened in other similar police killings of black men. The police protected their own. Police refused for days to release the name of the officer who had shot Brown and while relieving that officer from active duty did not immediately act to investigate and did not indict him for manslaughter or murder. The community also reacted as had happened similarly in other cases, rushing into the streets to protest what they perceived as another police murder of a black man, protests which turned briefly into violence and looting.

    The looting became the pretext for a massive display of military-type police force, and it is this unprecedented level of repression that has made this case different from others and brought it national attention—repression that is shockingly reminiscent of state violence in Syria, Egypt, Ukraine, and Palestine, where we have recently seen the police and military crush peaceful protestors. Ferguson has forced Americans to ask: Are we really as different as we like to think?

    Brown’s killing brought not only protests in Ferguson, but also demonstrations in solidarity in dozens of cities across the United States. The killing has also led to a renewed national discussion about racism and to a new debate about the U.S. government’s policy of pushing military equipment—$37 billion worth of it—on large cities and even small towns in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The federal government ostensibly armed local police to fight terrorism, but the tanks, guns, and tear gas grenades have been used instead against the country’s poor communities of color and against social and political protestors. The combination of increased police surveillance of the citizenry together with militarized police forces represents a trend that if it continues would turn America into a police state.

    Why Ferguson?

    Ferguson is a small town on the outskirts of St. Louis, Missouri, a major American city that sits on the Mississippi River. The town has a population of just 22,400 people, 53% African American and 45% white. The median household income is $37,134, lower than the national median income of $45,000. Some 22 percent of the town’s residents live in poverty. While Ferguson is a small and usually quiet town—with its own history of racism—St. Louis, Missouri and East St. Louis, Illinois are cities with a long history of racial segregation, racial discrimination, and violent incidents. The St. Louis area has been badly hurt recently by the closing of many industrial plants, among them two Chrysler auto plants in nearby Fenton, Missouri. The closing of those plants took 15 billion dollars out of the regional economy as well as eliminating 6,400 jobs. As factories began to close in the St. Louis area in recent decades, some African Americans began to move out of the city into the surrounding suburbs such as Ferguson.

    While the population in Ferguson gradually changed from white to black, the power structure remained virtually all white. Only one of six city council members is black and the police are 94 percent white. The school board is white and an African American superintendent had recently been suspended by the school board. The hold-over white leadership did not represent the city’s new population which was young, poor, and black. The combination of poverty, unemployment, and a lack of representation of African Americans in government form the specific backdrop to the incidents in Ferguson, though similar conditions also affect millions of other African Americans in other states and cities throughout the country. African American unemployment remains, as usual, twice that of white Americans, and even better educated black workers have higher unemployment rates than similarly educated whites. Whites have far more financial assets than African Americans; white families are 6.1 times as wealthy as black families. The combination of capitalism and racism work to severely limit African Americans in the struggle for a decent life, for success, comfort and happiness in the United States. Some 76 of every 100,000 black men between 25 and 34 were killed in a homicide in 2010, a rate nine times higher than that among white men in the same age group. (Neil Irwin, Claire Cain Miller, and Margot Sanger-Katz, “America’s Racial Divide Charted,” New York Times, Aug. 19, 2014.)

    The criminal justice system also works to crush African Americans and particularly black men. The United States has 2.3 million people in prison, a larger proportion of its population (743 per 100,000) than any other nation in the world. While the U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population, it has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. U.S. federal and state governments spend an enormous $60.3 billion on prisons. But there is in the United States a movement against what has come to be called the “prison-industrial-complex.” Of the 2.3 million in prison, 1 million are black. One of every six black men in the United States has been incarcerated. While African Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population, they comprise 40 percent of the prison population; similarly 16 percent of the U.S. population is Latino, but they make up 21 percent of the prison population. At the same time, in 2009, African Americans made up about 41 percent of those on death row, Hispanics 11 percent, others 2 percent; that is 54 percent of those awaiting the death penalty were people of color. Some 32 of country’s 50 states have the death penalty, and there are at any one time about 3,000 prisoners on death row, and as many as 30 prisoners are executed each year.

    The political establishment reacted swiftly to the events in Ferguson. President Barack Obama expressed sympathy with Brown’s family, calling for transparency on the part of the police, but also condemning vandalism, looting, and violence. And the president sent Attorney General Eric Holder and a team of FBI agents to Ferguson to investigate the incident.  Missouri’s Democratic Governor Jay Nixon sent in the state police to take responsibility for security in Ferguson, replacing the local police force, an act that was greeted at first with celebration by the town’s African American population, though since then the repression has continued. Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton, both close to the Democratic Party leadership, have played their usual role of speaking out and attempting to lead the movement in order to contain it.

    Still, government leaders and politicians have been unable either to stop the continuing protests in Ferguson or the spreading national demonstrations in solidarity. African American youth and  their Latino and white allies are everywhere in the streets, crying out against this latest incident of racial injustice and against the government’s policy of militarizing the police. Many organizations with long histories of struggle for justice have joined the movement in Ferguson and around the country. We place ourselves on the side of the protestors who are demanding justice for Michael Brown, an end to the militarization of the police, and a more just American society for all. We hope that we are at the beginning of a new era of struggle for civil rights and social justice.

  • The Koch Bros: Libertarians for Daddy

    Review of Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty
    By Daniel Schulman
    Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group, 2014

    There is a specter haunting liberal America. It is Koch Industries and its tag team brothers Charles and David Koch. The septuagenarian pair from Wichita, Kansas, are fabulously wealthy energy barons whose massive money contributions to right-wing causes are responsible for the spread of Tea Party hegemony in the already business-friendly Republican Party.

    The Kochs (pronounced like “smoke”) are not the first deep-pocketed reactionaries to dabble in politics. But, as Mother Jones staff writer Daniel Schulman’s new book, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty, makes clear, these two MIT-trained engineers are doing something unique and more or less effective in politics. In contrast to the far right’s loonyness and the left’s penchant for short-term thinking that rarely looks beyond the next protest or election cycle, the Kochs are sticking to a 35-year game plan (or long con, in their case) for promoting a strategic political agenda that is turning social Darwinism into accepted policy, where government intrusion into corporate life is the bogeyman while greed and capital’s inherent irrationality are simon-pure.

    With their lavish funding of a sprawling network of conservative advocacy groups, think tanks and libertarian-leaning academics, the Kochs have nurtured every present-day reactionary movement from voter suppression and union-busting to climate change denial. Their actions reflect a class-wide planning the United States did not encounter from older generations of plutocrats whose interests often stopped at the door of their own enterprises. It’s their militancy, patience and money that makes them provocative if not always successful — note their 2012 presidential and congressional election overreaching when they spent $400 million of their own money and got little in return.

    Inside-the-beltway chatter has it that they plan to spend upwards of $290 million on their libertarian hobbies this year, including injecting $100 million into congressional and state campaigns.

    Family Values

    How do the boys do it? Schulman’s book is a quarry of information on what they do as well as a page-turner in its rendering of the decades-long dynasti feud between Charles, David and their two brothers over stock ownership in the family-run corporation. What isn’t clear from Schulman’s telling is why they do what they do, when other businesspeople tend toward the pragmatic if thoughtless.

    There is some telling evidence, though. All four brothers were born into wealth, but an emotionally distant Fred Koch treated them more like groundskeepers than dynastic heirs. They didn’t grow up as playboys on the family estate outside Wichita, but as proverbial hewers of wood and drawers of water, and with a predisposition to think they were self-made men. Schulman’s narrative reads like a tale of overachievers with daddy issues.

    When Fred Koch died in 1967, he left his sons shares in Koch Industries, the family-owned business, largely in oil refining, with a net value in the high millions. Today it’s the second-largest private U.S. corporation (exceeded only by Cargill) with sales of $115 billion in 2012. It’s involved not just in transporting energy but in numerous related ventures. It may be facile to see politics as a necessary outcome of one’s position either as a holder of immense wealth and power or as one of the wretched of the earth, but in the Kochs’ case, policy and ideology perfectly mirror interest.

    What is Libertarianism Really About?

    Nonetheless, Schulman takes the Kochs’ libertarian thinking at face value; it’s just a point of view like others, with a rich history dating back to the Austrian school of economics under Frederic Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, and whose theories were said to be instrumental in reinforcing the prejudices the brothers got from their virulently anti-communist father. But there’s no explanation of what libertarianism is or its internal logic, let alone any critique. If socialism, as Hayek said, is indeed “The Road to Serfdom,” how so? And despite Schulman’s plea not to see an instrumental correspondence between laissez-faire ideology and the Kochs’ holdings in a giant energy corporation heavily dependent on petroleum distribution and retailing, what is “libertarian” about lavishly supporting front groups that slander environmental scientists as liars, or aligning with the religious Right?

    The Kochs’ success is based not just on inherited wealth, hard work, and, last of all, brains and personality, but on gutting workers’ and consumers’ power along with a wolf-like penchant for wasting competitors. It’s also a sales job for an idea that can only benefit a handful. How many rich people can there be?  And if libertarianism is more than naked self-interest bathed in smoke, aren’t its ideas worth at least a kitchen tour? Is all you need to know about this capitalist mindset that less government is more and federal regulations destroy initiative? That’s all Schulman has the Kochs offering.

    Michael Hirsch is a board member of New Politics. This review first appeared in The Indypendent, # 199, July 16-Aug. 11, 2014.

     

  • An open letter to Frank Bruni about tenure for NYC teachers

    Dear Frank Bruni,

                I enjoyed your restaurant reviews in the NY Times. Reading your descriptions of the food and ambience allowed me to experience vicariously many restaurants. We seem to have a similar sensibility — about food.  You seemed not to allow  restaurant publicity and PR to influence your ratings or judgment, maybe because you know good food and the restaurant business thoroughly enough so that you could see through hype.

                But that’s not the case in your columns on educational issues, in particular your analysis of tenure, which reads like the talking points from Teach for America and Students First, groups funded by billionaires who aim to transform schooling in ways they think best – that is, best for them and profits. 

                All of us who have attended schools have some knowledge of education. This is a good starting point for participating in a democratic debate about what schools should be in our society. However, our experiences as students provides us with knowledge that is partial. Evidence and ideas from researchers, parents, community members, citizens, teachers are all needed in this debate. Unfortunately, those driving US education policy have embarked on a project to destroy the school system that has existed for more than a century, replacing it with one that is based on “free market” principles, mandating reforms that have not succeeded in equalizing educational outcomes anywhere in the world. In fact, when we look at the global south where these ideas were field-tested by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, we see shocking declines in literacy rates and other educational outcomes.

                Although I can and will provide research supporting the arguments I make in this letter, since you use anecdote to explain your case, I'll draw on my own experience as a teacher to explain why tenure as it exists in NYC and NY state is essential to provide students who most need high-quality schools and teaching what they deserve. I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with honors in journalism.  I received my MA in teaching English from Teachers College at Columbia University, attending on a full scholarship for a select number of experienced teachers. I taught for five years in CA and two years in NY suburbs, including one of the wealthiest in the nation. My teaching references were stellar and I was by any objective measure used in evaluating teachers a superior, even extraordinary teacher of English. I won the job in the elite public system over more than 500 applicants to an ad in the NY Times.

                I wanted to be NYC teacher because this is where the real challenge is for many of us committed to social justice, racial equality, and teaching.  So I took a 35% pay cut and taught in two NYC schools, both of which were considered “failing.”   In 9 years of city teaching I worked under 6 principals.  Without the protections in the union contract (and state law), I would have been dismissed by 4 of my principals, although my department heads considered my performance superior. Why? Because I was an independent thinker and, if I may be frank, much better educated about pedagogy and more analytical than my principals.  I was always able to point to research that supported my teaching decisions. Moreover, I was admired and respected for my dedication and skill by students, colleagues, and parents. I had superb credentials. My expertise and confidence made me a serious threat to administrators who were pressured by their superiors to enforce regulations that were damaging to our students.

                Need an example of these policies that sabotaged good teaching and student success? How about ten? I have so much to say about this I could write a book – and did. In fact, two.  My first book, based on my doctoral work at Harvard, won one the most prestigious awards in educational research. The second is used in urban teacher education programs throughout the country.

                As a high school English teacher and reporter for my college newspaper,  I volunteered to advise our school newspapers. In that role I wouldn’t have permitted my student writers to publish a piece with as little background work as you did in your tenure column.  They had to do research, consult with people who had contradictory opinions and were considered experts in the field. Had you done your research you would have learned that the assault on tenure is as well-orchestrated and as spurious as the overblown publicity for those luxury restaurants you pilloried.  You’ve fallen for the disinformation campaign and in publishing your column have done harm to kids who most need good teachers who will protect them.

                I encourage you to investigate why so many researchers support laws that provide teachers with due process, protection from administrators’ spurious complaints, and tenure. You’ll be surprised at how much you’ve missed.

  • A Comment on the East Bay Mayoral Campaigns

    In the past few weeks, New Politics has published two valuable commentaries on the role of socialists and the Left in local electoral campaigns, first a broad overview by Dan La Botz and then a response by David Judd specifically on Dan Siegel’s campaign for Mayor of Oakland. Both of these contributions come from a starting point that I think is valuable for the Left—that even though the capitalist system cannot be reformed through elections, the Left still can use electoral campaigns to build the struggles of the working-class and the oppressed. If the media is going to shower candidates with attention, there might as well be one candidate with good politics. But there must be a caveat here. The key question, as La Botz writes, is this: “Can these political campaigns begin to interact with the social and labor movements in such a way as to inspire a virtuous circle of rising movements with militant strategies and more political challenges raising left political visions and programs?”

    I agree with this sentiment and would take it a step further—the purpose of Left electoral campaigns should not be to win an election, but first and foremost to build struggles from below.  Winning should never be the primary goal if you don’t think electoral victories themselves can change much. Some will join these efforts with the sole purpose of winning—fine, but we shouldn’t let them shape the politics of the campaign. Victory itself can also be a disaster, as a Left candidate with no social movements behind them will simply feel pressure to carry out the same austerity measures they are supposedly against. Suddenly, a small but growing movement can turn into its exact opposite once placed into power. This genuine danger is rarely discussed in these campaigns—after all, how dare you suggest our candidate might sell out!—though La Botz does a good job of pointing out how this dynamic played out in Jackson, Mississippi, for example.

    The role of Left campaigns should be to build struggles first and win election as a distant second, so distant that in most cases it is not even remotely a goal at all and there is no illusion that winning office can change much. If you really think that winning a seat is going to have a big impact, your social movement strategy can be vastly distorted, if there even is one. It is not “ultra-left” to take this view—it is simply a good social movement strategy. Putting winning first is a bad social movement strategy, as it will ultimately assume the movements should be subordinate to the campaign and not vice-versa. Campaigns with this strategy can even be quite harmful, no matter how many “opportunities” we see dangling before us.

    The discussion around Dan Siegel’s campaign for Mayor of Oakland is a useful starting point for considering this. La Botz is fairly critical of Siegel’s campaign, stating that his pro-investment rhetoric could come from any Democrat or Republican. Judd disagrees, pointing to many of Siegel’s platform issues, such as a $15/hour minimum wage and public broadband Internet. But he gets to the critical point when he says, “The question is whether Siegel’s radical ideas will get highlighted, and with luck capture the imagination of large numbers of people in Oakland and sweep an activist mayor into office.”

    I agree with the first point—although I think Siegel’s campaign has come up short—and disagree with the second. The point, to get back to La Botz’s quote, which Judd also quotes approvingly, is whether or not Siegel’s campaign can strengthen social movements and various acts of struggle and resistance to the status quo. I believe that it could, as do many activists I know and respect in Oakland who are involved in this campaign, including those that Judd and I worked with alongside Siegel and the family of Alan Blueford, an African-American teenager killed by the Oakland police.

    Unfortunately, so far, the campaign has retreated from radical politics and has missed important opportunities to strengthen social movement organizing and give voice to the oppressed.

    On August 4, 23-year-old Jacorey Calhoun was killed in East Oakland by an Alameda County Sheriff's deputy in circumstance strikingly similar to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. According to reports, the deputy stopped Calhoun, suspecting he was involved in a robbery, and when Calhoun ran he was shot in the head and killed even though he was unarmed. The Calhoun killing has been completely ignored by the entire political establishment in Oakland including every candidate for Mayor—including Dan Siegel. There are probably a number of reasons for this, among them the extensive work and planning in place by staffers and volunteers which cannot be easily unwound. The real problem is that shedding light on police violence and giving a voice to the people in East Oakland who deal with law enforcement as an occupying army every day should have been the entire point of the campaign in the first place. Apparently, it was not.

    Had Siegel not been running for Mayor, there is no doubt in my mind that he would have been an outspoken critic of this killing, as he has in the past. For example, during the Blueford campaign, Siegel wrote that the Oakland Police should be dissolved. He is the first person I ever heard use the phrase “police abolition,” congruent to how some discuss prison abolition. During the Blueford campaign, he regularly and publically said that the cop who killed Alan Blueford was “just doing his job,” pointing out that the job of the police is to terrorize the Black population. This was Siegel at his best. But now he argues that the Oakland Police can do a perfectly good job as currently constituted with a bit of reorganization that would put more police on the streets. The point here is not to insist that Siegel arbitrarily insert far-left rhetoric into the campaign. Perhaps the term “police abolition” is a bit abstract, but the idea that the cops are an “occupying army” would not be lost on anybody in East Oakland. The point is that the logic and realpolitik of electoral campaigning promotes a retreat from radical politics and resistance to austerity and oppression in order to appeal to moderate voters.

    It is hard not to believe that the campaign’s reluctance to do anything around Calhoun’s case is a result of this retreat. This should be a serious problem for the Left, again, not simply because Siegel has crossed some line with his political terminology. The problem is, rather than creating a platform for these issues, the campaign has convinced people who have tirelessly spent hours and hours of their lives fighting this sort of injustice that they should now prioritize doing other things like having house parties and putting up door-knob hangers about their candidate. Part of the problem is organizational, but part of it is almost certainly political—that it is based on the idea that Siegel speaking out about this now would hurt his chances to really do something about it as Mayor.

    Siegel could potentially transform the election by making Calhoun’s case a central issue. Just as every politician in Oakland was quiet about the murder of Alan Blueford due to their unwillingness to rock the OPD boat, Siegel could put this killing at their doorstep and force them to deal with it. It could create a small crisis for City Hall and for most of the candidates for mayor—one of whom is the current Mayor and two others are on the City Council. These three are the main contenders in the race. None of them will criticize OPD or the Sheriff's office as they want their support in the race. Putting Calhoun’s killing at the center of the campaign would be a controversial move that would probably alienate a lot of voters, not to mention some supporters deeply involved in the campaign who really just want Siegel to be a mainstream liberal who is a bit better than the current mayor.

    Judd hints at this, pointing out that there is disagreement about how to win in Oakland’s ranked-choice voting system, where voters can rank the candidates in order of preference. The second and third choices of voters come into play if no candidate wins a majority in the first round. Judd’s conclusion is fine—that some in the campaign incorrectly want him to appeal to a broad mass of “second place” and “third place” votes and therefore tame his radical politics. However, I disagree with Judd’s assertion that this is about appealing to voters who want to rank Siegel as their first choice. The math of ranked-choice voting is completely irrelevant. Ultimately, this is a political question about what sort of campaign this should be. Appealing to “first place” voters will likely lose the election and we should not argue otherwise, as there are currently fifteen candidates in the race and there is little likelihood that anybody will win in the first or even the second round. The real issue—the only issue—is the politics of the campaign, and whether these politics and strategies directly further the goals of social movements and weaken the status quo.

    There are two visions for this campaign, one that the Left could get behind and the other which should be rejected. It is not too late for Siegel to shift his campaign, but there is not much time left either.

    It is, however, too late for Mike Parker’s campaign to become Mayor of Richmond, California. La Botz documents many positives about Parker, a lifelong socialist and member of the Green Party and Solidarity. Richmond is a city just north of Berkeley, whose largest employer is the Chevron oil refinery, where a Green has held the Mayor’s office for the last eight years. At the last minute, however, Richmond City Council member and Democrat Tom Butt entered the race and Parker dropped out. The result is a mess that only further discredits the Green Party in one of its only strongholds, a city filled with Black and Latino residents who face not only deep racism and economic inequality but regular environmental pollution from Chevron.

    As Parker says, “My supporters and I determined that in this race the progressive vote would likely be split.” The thinking was that he should not “split the vote” between himself and Democrat Tom Butt, thereby allowing Democrat Nathaniel Bates, who is heavily backed by Chevron, to win. Yet the real spoiler, when the Mayor is currently a Green, is Butt. Imagine the day when the Democrats step aside so as not to spoil the opportunities of the Left! It simply will never happen, especially when the Left gives up so easily. If the goal was to build an alternative to the Democrats then this should have never happened. That, apparently, was not the goal. We cannot complain that working people are not attracted to a Left that cannot even fight for itself. They are right to be distrustful and skeptical of Leftists who cannot even carry through with their own stated plans. It would be a disservice to working-class people to try to convince them otherwise when the evidence before them is so clear.

    All too often, when Leftists gain some prominent role or position, they suddenly decry how they are handcuffed by their limited options and suddenly have to quietly go along with every austerity measure or sellout because there is nothing that can be done. The Left is handcuffed all right, by its own failed strategies. Usually, being “handcuffed” involves having an abundance of opportunities, but taking one of these opportunities and actually doing something useful with a momentary position of power would forestall better opportunities down the road. There is always a hypothetical future opportunity that handcuffs us now. Unfortunately, the future never arrives.

    There has been a vast disparity between the failure of the Left and the resistance of working-class people from below over the past week. Just as the candidates were quietly mulling their limited options, Black people in Ferguson have launched a rebellion against the police shooting them down in the streets and against the military occupation of their neighborhoods. None of the people rebelling in Ferguson are worried about sounding too radical or splitting the vote. On the contrary, the revolt is a consequence of the fact that the entire political establishment has failed them.

    The Left could learn something from this revolt and, at the very least, worry less about spoiling its future and more about the battles in front of us today.

     

    Scott Jay is a writer and activist living in Oakland, CA.

  • Is It Time To Be Outlaws Again?

    Only large-scale civil disobedience will make our leaders address economic injustice.

    In 1989, Bob Dylan recorded a song titled “Everything Is Broken”. That song seemed to go largely ignored, perhaps because it seemed to be only a pessimistic lament that offered no suggestions for how to go about fixing the “everything”.

    But as with many of his songs, it was prophetic. Lately, many Americans are  experiencing the feeling that everything is broken, but people in many other countries have had this feeling for a long time.

    While it is not useful or necessary here to document exactly when the US decline began, it can be generally and safely assumed that for a substantial part of our population, which Occupy called  “the 99%”, the most dramatic part of the decline began with the near total economic collapse of 2008.

    Although it was the banksters and their partners in crime known as hedge funds who created the crisis, it fell to the taxpayers to bail those banks out of their looming bankruptcy, thereby saving capitalism from itself.

    This bailout, while actually guaranteeing greater profits for the banks already large enough to swallow smaller institutions, also allowed the banks to metastasize like a rapidly growing cancer into previously unattained power, both economic and political. This growth, despite the claims of our elected officials at every level, did little to relieve the working class, the 99+%, from continuing economic and political decline.

    Let’s look at some of the facts about the current economy in the United States:

    ·         Income inequality   US now 4th worst in the world.

    ·         Productivity vs wages   Real wages up 5% since 1979, productivity up 75%

    ·         Poverty  About 16% (over 50 million) of US in poverty, worst since 1993

    ·         Status of children   One out of 6 on food stamps, 20% in poverty

    ·         Average CEO vs average worker   240 to 1 in 2012, 20 to 1 in 1965

    ·         Wealth controlled by 1%   Top 1% control 36%, top 10% control 75%

    ·         Jobs    7 million with multiple jobs, 2.6 million can only find part-time jobs

    ·         Home ownership    Almost 20% living with mortgage greater than value of home

    These figures above should be enough for anyone with even a shred of moral conscience (never mind political consciousness) to realize that we are, in truth, living in a nation that not only violates much of traditional capitalist doctrine, but the very core of our beings, our morality, our ethics, and our belief (present in almost all of us) that we bear some collective responsibility for each other’s well-being.

    Putting morality aside, a massive and continued decline of general living standards is not only unhealthy for YOUR family, but for our entire society, our larger family, and poses great and continuing danger for our children’s futures.

    And so the question looms before us of how to fix the damn thing. Is it by continuing to count on an electoral process that clearly is not only dominated, but almost completely controlled by the banksters? Should we, every 2 or 4 years, simply be electoral activists who try to persuade our neighbors and friends that “this time it will be different”? Can we honestly expect voters to believe that electing one corporate funded (and therefore owned) candidate over another will make a difference?

    Or shall we look back at our history and realize that, in fact, REAL change, the kind of change that threatens to topple the status quo, the change that makes ordinary people proud of ourselves, aware of our power, convinced that we CAN create a world that lives in peace, feeds the hungry, provides jobs for most if not all, and prevents those in power from continuing to rule our lives, THAT change only comes about by people taking action, by resisting, by making clear that we are willing to risk all to gain all and that we really have no other choice.

    Yes, some will continue to argue that in a democracy, we can make that change via the ballot box, but to believe that, one must totally ignore the fact that what we called  “democracy” has been hi-jacked by those with the money to finance not only the electoral campaigns, but the life styles of those legislators,with  promises of future board and lobbying jobs when they retire from office, and thereby effectively purchasing those officials.

    No real change, the kind of change that creates a humane culture and world, will come about by voting, although electoral politics, especially centered around radical 3rd party candidates, can sometimes work to aid that resistance.

    Instead — and again — we must revisit the lessons learned from various human rights struggles of the past.

    Unions, which  helped to abolish wage slavery and the inhumane working conditions suffered by so many, became recognized and legal by the actions of millions of workers across the US who defied existing laws, resulting in  many being jailed, beaten, or even murdered.

    Slavery was ended not by the rule and proclamations of one man, it took rebellion by both slaves and abolitionists that tore the nation apart before slavery (at least in name and by law) was abolished.

    Women’s suffrage was not gained by sitting home and trying to elect sympathetic representatives, but by women taking the streets, demanding support from their partners and openly rebelling both in word and deed.

    Civil rights, with all due credit to King, Malcom X, and others, were hardly won by electing “fair-minded” officials. Rather, industry and society, as a whole, was brought to its knees by open rebellion, deliberate violation of existing laws,  and the beatings, deaths, and arrests of thousands of committed persons joined together in a power which ultimately became greater than the power of the state.

    The same has been true in one degree or another of every other struggle for human rights, including but not limited to the movement for Gay Rights and the Vietnam anti-war movement that finally ended an unpopular war so decimating to both nations.

    During all of those struggles, people began to realize that voting, marching, writing letters, petitioning, and teach-ins were just not enough. People realized that to make government move, we had to move it ourselves, that no one could or would do it for us, that there were no “saviors” except ourselves.

    As Dr. King pointed out, unjust laws, that is, laws that fail to uphold human dignity, need to be broken.

    As our history shows, oppression spawns, every time, the determination by citizens to act in violation of the law. We must deliberately and consciously resist the power of the state, to become aware again of our power when we organize for revolution.

    And, sad to say, that is where we are today. We are without other recourse because we are without democracy. We are without law and reason, because the law is designed to protect the interests of those in power, and those in power are without reason.

    Our world, the world our children are inheriting is in danger as never before. The danger is not only from the massive accumulation of wealth by a handful of people who now have more power than many nations of the world, but also what they do with that power. These people care about nothing other than continuing to gain and gather power by any means necessary. They are without ethics, without morals, without any compulsion other than continued accumulation.

    It’s what they do with their accumulated power and wealth that makes them so different, so criminal, so undeserving and unworthy of respect. It’s the trading of stocks, the hoarding of  “commodity futures” to drive up prices, the deliberate excessive profit taking, the funding of wars from which they profit, the plundering of the earth’s resources that brings them profit and our planet closer to environmental destruction that make them different from you and me. We are not like them, and we must glory in that.

    And so, we are left with little choice, at this point in our history, but to use the power we have, legally and illegally, to combat this continued destruction of our world.

    They are not about to create any more jobs than they absolutely need to make a profit. They are not about to cease convincing our officials to push for more fossil fuel extraction even though the results are already proving disastrous. They are not about to support greater taxation on their already bloated profits, even though they are now taxed at a lower level than at anytime in recent history. They are, to put it simply, not about to stop.

    It is up to us to stop them, to create the conditions in which we can once again, be neighbors, be friends, be supportive of each other, be the society in which we do not cast aside those born into a poorer economic background, to stand up, collectively and say that we will do whatever is necessary to end this disaster.

    Along with legal activity we must be willing to break the law, stand and be arrested, stuff the jails when possible, be proud of “going to jail for justice”, understand once again that we, those who created this wealth, have a right to feed our families, to work, to not worry about losing our homes, to see our children educated to their maximum potential, and, simply….to live without fear.

    In 1976, a country western singer named James Talley, recorded a song titled “Are They Gonna Make Us Outlaws Again”. Like Dylan’s song quoted at the start of this article, it was prophetic and the last verse reads:

    Now there’s always been a bottom

                And there’s always been a top

                And someone took the orders

                And someone called the shots

                And someone took the beatin’, Lord

                And someone got the prize

                Well, that may be the way it’s been

                But that don’t mean it’s right.

     James Talley was correct. It’s NOT right, and we have a moral and ethical responsibility to do something about it. So do it.

    Mel Packer is retired from health care after earlier life occupations as a Teamster truckdriver and activity with TDU. He has a life history of involvement in social justice struggles, mostly in PIttsburgh, PA. He can be contacted by email at melpacker@aol.com. This article originally appeared in Vox Populi.

  • Israel and Imperialism

    I would like to thank Bennett for his kind and appreciative comments on my artcile and use the opportunity presented by his letter to answer some essential points of contention.

    Bennett correctly notes that I defend a two-state solution. A two-state transition might be a more accurate summary. But what he omits is equally critical. The Israel that I advocate — the Israel that can breakdown the island – ghetto walls that separate it from the Arab world — cannot be based on its present Jewish chauvinist structures. It requires a revolutionary struggle to de-Zionize Israel and replace the existing foundations with one that balances and democratizes the relationship between the Jewish and Palestinian communities that constitute it. It requires, in other words, repudiating the colonial project of Zionism and re-building Israel on an equal, bi-national footing. These are the preconditions for resolving the larger Palestinian issue and bisymmetrically allying Israel with the broader democratic aspirations in the Arab world.

    But the larger difference I have with Bennett is that he recognizes only two out of three central aspects of the Zionist state – the ongoing colonial settler aspect and the creation of a new national community that arose from it, later to acquire an independent existence. What he fails to appreciate, what he in fact vehemently denies, is the imperialist-agent aspect of the Israeli state.  Payments for services rendered to American imperialism underwrite and sustain Israel’s ongoing colonizing project. And it is this partnership, and the revenues that flow from it as military aid and tax-exempt charitable contributions, that keep a lid on Israeli social conflicts by allowing Israeli capitalism to confer special material privileges to Jewish workers. And this closes the loop.  For these subsidies create a mass reciprocal social base within Israel that identifies with the aims and interests of the US.  As long as this nexus is not disrupted, there is little prospect that internal social conflicts will acquire an anti-Zionist let alone a revolutionary character. Imperialist aid is the glue that causes the Zionist structure to adhere.

    Is it “flying off the rails” to describe Israel as a bulwark against the Arab democratic upsurge?

    Israel has always assumed a watchdog role as defender of American and British interests, not only in the Middle East but in Africa and Central America as well. I will refrain from reiterating the broader litany of charges against Israel in this regard and confine my remarks to the Middle East. Every challenge there to American regional interests — whether from radical nationalists of the Nasserite or Baathist stripe, Shi’ite and Iranian empowerment or mass democratic upheavals — are an equal call to concern and action for Israel. All feed a well-justified fear for the health of the status quo that benefits elite American interests. The fear of Arab democracy compounds these concerns not only in its own right, but also for fear that it creates a wedge for jihadist populism.

    Israel has permitted the US to stockpile arms, fuel, munitions and other supplies on its soil to be accessed whenever America needs them in the region. Israel is a port of call for troops, ships, aircraft and intelligence services. It is a testing ground for missile defense systems and counter-insurgency weapons and tactics. Representative Steve Rothman has even argued that “without the American partnership with the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), the Unites States might need to have 100,000 or more additional troops stationed permanently in that part of the world to make up for the protection of US interests and vital intelligence provided by Israel to the United States.”(The Hill, June 3, 2008).

    Pertinent to the immediate context is the well-publicized convergence of interests in regional stability between Israeli ruling circles and the Arab regimes, in particular those targeted by revolution in the wake of the Arab Spring. The Egyptian coup had no greater ally than Israel, who lobbied relentlessly on its behalf with Washington. And Israel had no better regional allies than Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia during its current war on Gaza. Those regimes now threatened, with the exception of Syria, are all long-term American regional assets.  And a declawed Syria, freed of its chemical weapons, is valued as a reliable enforcer of Israel’s northern borders.

    The NY Times (July 30, 2014) reported with some insight, that

    “(t)he dynamic has inverted all expectation of the Arab Spring uprisings. As recently as 18 months ago, most analysts in Israel, Washington and the Palestinian territories expected the popular uprisings to make the Arab governments more responsive to their citizens, and therefore more sympathetic to the Palestinians and more hostile to Israel.”

    But instead of becoming more isolated, Tel Aviv has emerged as the “unexpected beneficiary” of a resurgent conservative order.

    This de facto Israeli-Jordanian-Saudi Arabian-Egyptian- Emirates alliance is the Maginot Line of American imperialism. And it is this line that would have to be broken when the revolutionary Arab Spring reorganizes.

    Those who seek a de-Zionized Israel and its integration into the region have a vital stake in the success of a revived mass revolutionary Arab breakthrough. A victory for Arab democracy would change the regional balance of power by decisively transferring control of the regions resources to the Arab masses. In so doing it would render Israel’s watchdog role – and its further usefulness to an American imperialism in retreat — obsolete.

    How long thereafter until Israeli society mutinied at the prospects of directly shouldering the dead weight of Zionism’s colonization projects in the Occupied Territories? And with that chapter closed, Israeli capitalism, no longer able to sustain the caste privileges of Jewish workers from without, would revert to normality.

    Zionism would then be on the road to anachronistic irrelevancy as, incidentally, it was before the Six Day War revived it.

  • Coal Miners Are Mad…and Scared. And They Have a Right to Be

    In 1968, the Mannington Mine in Farmington WV owned by Consol Coal, caught fire, blew up, and 78 miners were buried, many likely alive.

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    In 1972, a Consol mine in Blacksville, WV, caught fire and 9 miners were buried (again, likely alive) when Consol sealed the mine off to stop the fire and save the coal.

    I remember those well, having been involved in labor struggles as a working Teamster truck-driver back then with friends in the coal fields.

    In the very early ‘70s, a militant movement of rank and file union coal miners called the Miners for Democracy was born, threw out corrupt leaders, and rebuilt a union that was militant, demanded safe working conditions, and knew who the enemy was, and still is — the owners of those coal companies like Consol.

    I knew and worked with some of them. I even worked in the mid ‘70s to try and persuade some folks to revive the MFD as it had now dissolved and some of the militancy and class-consciousness was fading.

    But at its founding, the MFD knew what it was about, knew that the coal companies were evil, and knew miners had to stick up for each other as workers…or die.

    Yesterday, I stood on a sidewalk outside of this building holding a sign calling for reduced carbon emissions while a thousand or so miners and famil members marched by supporting those same companies that have brutalized and exploited the communities of Appalachia for decades.

    What happened to make union coal miners support the companies that buried some ancestors alive, gave most of the survivors black lung and then tried to deny them benefits, and laid them off by the tens of thousands as the companies opened non-union mines and began ruining the “almost heaven” hills and valleys of WV with mountain to removal which employs few, if any, union miners.

    Why are union miners falling for the company line that there’s a “war on coal” when the coal and gas companies are really making a war on ALL of us, on our planet, on our children’s futures and certainly on those very miners who are marching on behalf of the coal companies?

    BECAUSE THEY’RE SCARED TO DEATH OF THE FUTURE.

    Last year, I traveled thru some of the same mining communities where friends lived and worked in the early 70’s, towns like War and Welch that were once friendly, solid, working class towns, places you’d be proud to live. When I was there last year, I couldn’t even find a pizza shop open on a Sunday and most businesses were boarded up.

    MINERS ARE SCARED!

    I saw poverty on that trip in those hidden Appalachian valleys that I’d not seen since the Kennedy-Johnson era and the War on Poverty days.

    MINERS AND THEIR FAMILIES HAVE A RIGHT TO BE SCARED.

    Why? Not because there’s a “war on coal”, but because those very same coal companies that fund their protests, pulled out of their communities once the easy-to-get coal was gone and went to mountain-top removal or tar-sands oil or fracking and left those miners and their families out in the cold, jobless, and desperate for easy answers.

    I saw anger on the faces of those marching coal miners yesterday, but I smelled fear on every one of them, fear of further social and economic devastation, of hungry children with lousy schools and no way out, of old houses without money to keep them up, of the addictions people turn to when they’re desperate for relief from the social pain of unemployment that just keeps coming every time your kid looks in your empty pockets for lunch money.

    Those angry and fearful miners aren’t stupid, they’re as smart as anyone else, but they’re desperate. They know what’s coming, about climate change, of looming environmental disasters already too late to avoid…but they still need to feed their kids.

    Those miners and their families have fueled this nation with their labor and their lives for countless decades. They, like everyone else displaced in this Wall Street “recovery” but working class disaster, need jobs, good jobs with dignity, union protection, and living wages. Jobs that leave us with some sense of pride at the end of the shift, knowing we somehow contributed to the common good, and that ain’t gonna come from the coal companies, not now, not ever. They’ve used those miners and their families up and now they’re sitting them out, while using them one last time for their own interests.

    And so I come to the proposed regulations, weak as they are, and certainly to be weaker once Congress gets done working for the coal companies. But they are still urgently needed and strengthened if we are to even begin getting off our self-destructive path paved by the fossil fuel industry.

    But while we debate those rules, we must also create good jobs for those who will be, correctly, displaced from the mines.

    Does anyone dare to tell me that a working miner would not rather have a good, clean, union job building solar panels or wind turbines? Or that a human being would choose black lung over a clean environment that allows comfortable retirement, a job where the roof doesn’t fall and kill you, a job where you might wind up being buried alive to save the coal?

    If you dare to answer “yes” to those questions, I’ll refer you to a good psychiatrist for a sanity check.

    In closing, I urge the EA to do the SANE thing by rewriting your proposed carbon reduction regulations to not only increase the rate at which the reductions are achieved, but to demand that Congress provide the funds to put those who lose coal jobs back to work in fully funded renewable energy jobs and save the communities that have been destroyed by the coal companies.

    Government cannot serve two masters. It either works for us, the working people, or for the fossil fuel companies. I know which side I’m on. How about you?

    *Mel Packer is retired from health care after earlier life occupations as a Teamster truckdriver and activity with TDU. He has a life history of involvement in social justice struggles, mostly in PIttsburgh, PA. He can be contacted by email at: melpacker@aol.com.

    These remarks were delivered as a comment at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Public hearing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on August 1, 2014 about proposed new regulations. This statement was first published in Vox Populi.

     

     

      

     

      

     

     

  • Kshama Sawant on Gaza Solidarity: End the Brutal Violence and Killings

    [Because Kshama Sawant is at the moment the leading elected socialist official in the United States her opinions carry a weight far more important than those of many other socialist groups and activists. We print below Sawant's recent statement on Israel's attacks on Gaza made in the Seattle City Council and reprinted on the Socialist Alternative website. – Eds]

    Transcript of statement by Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant:

    “This Saturday I attended the weekly peaceful protest in Seattle against the violence being inflicted by the Israeli state on the people of Gaza.

    It was really gratifying to see a strong and defiant spirit at the protest at Westlake, and the solidarity from progressive people in Seattle, regardless of ethnicity and national origin. I was especially struck by the energy of young political activists, something that should be encouraged and fostered in the interest of social justice.

    This horrific war purportedly began as a response to the death of three Israelis. Since then, according to Al Jazeera news sources, at least 1,830 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 9,406 others injured. Sixty-three Israeli soldiers have also died, along with two Israeli civilians and a Thai worker.

    Israel yesterday attacked a United Nations school sheltering some 3,000 displaced people in Rafah, in southern Gaza, The Seattle Times reported on this today on the front page (PDF), which killed 10 people. The U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the attack as both “a moral outrage and a criminal act.”

    Rocket attacks by Hamas against Israelis also must be condemned. When they hurt anyone, they hurt innocent civilians and give an excuse for Israel’s ruling class to further unleash their war machine.

    In this current war, the Israeli “Iron Dome” system has intercepted almost all rockets with an identified potential to hit civilians. It is not by accident that only one of the three civilians in Israel who lost their lives was killed by a rocket, and that he was a Bedouin from the south of Israel who, like tens of thousands of Bedouins in the south, was denied any right of protection due to the racist policies of the Israeli state.

    All killing of innocent people, women and children especially, should be condemned. And the last month of killings of Palestinians in Gaza is not only stomach-turning, it is only one in a long and documented series of war crimes stretching over decades. This has been happening with the tacit or overt complicity of US imperialism and I think we as elected officials have to have a statement describing the role that the U.S. Congress and Senate have played.

    The New York Times has reported that nearly 60,000 people have lost their homes in Gaza, and the number of people taking shelter in schools is nearly five times as many as in 2009. The cost to Gaza’s already fragile economy will be significant: the 2009 conflict caused losses estimated at $4 billion — almost three times the size of Gaza’s annual gross domestic product. That gives us a sense of the scale of the damage.

    It is the responsibility of elected officials everywhere to openly speak out to stop the humanitarian catastrophe, and to condemn it in the strongest possible terms.

    Next Saturday, there will be the weekly protest from noon to 2:00 PM protest at Westlake. On Thursday at 7:30 PM at Seattle Central Community College, a pots and pans noise brigade against the violence in Gaza. I invite everyone to join us there.”

     

    Councilmember Tom Rasmussen: “May I say something?”

    Councilmember Sawant: “Yes, please.”

    Councilmember Tom Rasmussen: “I want to say that you do not reflect my views. These are your personal views. And I respect that. I personally abhor the war, and the violence that is occurring in Gaza and in that area in general, but I believe that it is wrong to condemn one party alone. And so you may use your podium as you wish, but I do not share your views in terms of condemning one party alone. But I do share your view in terms of abhorring the war and the violence that’s occurring.”

    Councilmember Sawant: “Thank you for expressing your views, Councilmember Rasmussen, I really appreciate it. Just for the record, I would like to remind everyone that in my statement I condemned both sides, and I don’t condone violence of any kind. That is my opinion. Again, I think it is necessary for us to acknowledge the complete lack of proportion between the violence that Hamas is capable of, and the violence that has been inflicted by the Israeli state on Palestine. That’s my view. We all should express our views and I really appreciate you engaging in the discussion.”

  • Response to Barry Finger on Israel-Palestine

    I wish to commend Barry Finger for his analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict dating back to the establishment of 1947 UN Partition Plan. (Finger makes a minor error in calling it the “1948 partition.”)

    It is rare for someone on the left to admit that “both sides” in the war that followed “practiced ethnic cleansing.”   He correctly notes that the UN Partition Plan was unjust in that it allotted the Jewish state 55% of Palestine, but the problem was not that “the Arab population would represent almost half of the population,” but that the Arabs, who outnumbered Jews by 2:1, were allotted only 45% of the land for their state.  This was a legitimate issue, but rather than propose a more equitable division of the land, or to join the minority of Zionists who were proposing a bi-national state, the Arab side rejected partition or bi-nationalism in principle, refusing to recognize the right of Jews in Palestine to establish any political entity.

    Furthermore, had the Arabs the foresight to accept the partition plan despite its unfair division of the land, the fact that the Arab population left inside the Jewish state was so high would have given it extraordinary political leverage.  Instead, by launching a war against the Jewish population, the Arabs gave the Zionist forces the opportunity they were looking for to expel most of the Arab population.

    It is also rare for leftists to admit that the Arab nations “subsequently cleansed [their Jewish population] in retaliation for the Palestinian catastrophe.” Not only was this a gross human rights violation, but it was incredibly stupid from the Arab nationalist perspective because it generated millions of new immigrants to Israel, who have remained on the right wing of Israeli political spectrum to this day.

    Finger also argues that “Israel, as currently constituted, is functionally incapable of integrating itself into the Middle East.  It cannot and will not accept peace proposals—whether by the Arab League, the Palestinian authority, or Hamas…”  This is not exactly the case.  Given the current and past state of the Middle East—characterized by dictatorships, monarchies, Islamic insurgencies etc., who have often used anti-Jewish rhetoric — it is not exactly a welcoming place.  Nevertheless Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and came awfully close to a final agreement with the Palestinian Authority in 1999-2000.  Its current enemy, Hamas, has failed to make a peace proposal that includes recognition of the state of Israel.  Finally, unless and until the Palestinians give up the “right of return” there will be no peace agreement with any Israeli government, left or right.   For the Palestinians to insist on both an independent Palestinian state on territory occupied by Israel since June 1967 and the right of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel in its pre-1967 borders is absurd.               

    Finger’s argument challenging the typical leftist claim that Israel is another South Africa is right on point.   Israeli Jews are a nation.  Many of its Jewish citizens are refugees from one of the worst genocides in human history.  They may look like white Europeans, but white Europeans almost exterminated them. . Based on this experience, they are not going to give up political sovereignty in the short or medium term.  Further a large minority of its population are not white Europeans in any sense, but immigrants or descendants of Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, where they experienced varying degrees of discrimination, culminating in ethnic cleansing.

    Yet Finger insists on using the term “apartheid” to describe Israel, based on a very broad definition that applies to lesser forms of discrimination.  Apartheid’s worst features were strict limits on the residence and movement of Black South Africans through “pass laws” and the denial of Black citizenship including the right to vote.  Palestinian citizens of Israel experience housing segregation but are free to move throughout the country. They have the right to vote, have formed political parties and participate in the political process. The term “apartheid” is better suited to describe the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

    To those leftists who call for a single state encompassing Israel and the occupied territory, where Jews and Arabs will somehow live as equals, Finger has the appropriate response.  “…They cannot specify a present path by which both Palestinians and Israelis could agree to this outcome through free will or choice.” 

    Finger brilliantly exposes a fundamental flaw in the demand for boycott, divestment and sanctions aka BDS.  “Israeli capitalism is not the principle obstacle to Palestinian national rights.”  A successful BDS movement will not cause solidarity among the oppressors to crack as it did in the case of South Africa, but strengthen the authoritarian and fascist tendencies in Israeli society.

    Finger’s alternative proposal is to demand an end to all US aid to Israel—and I would add diplomatic support. These proposals should have more appeal with Americans sick of foreign interventions and has the potential of forcing Israel to abandon its habitual reliance on military force when it realizes that it will not be bailed out by the US.      

    However, Finger flies off the rails by describing Israel as a “viral bulwark against the Arab democratic upsurge.”  Has Israel undermined the struggles for greater democracy in the Arab world?  Where?  In Egypt where the military is back in power?  In Syria, which is in the throes of a bloody civil war between the Assad dictatorship and Islamic fanatics?  In Iraq, where radical Sunnis are on the offensive against a corrupt Shia-dominated regime?  For that matter, I do not understand Finger’s claim that the Arab Spring has been “momentarily checked by United States and Iranian intervention.”

    It seems that the Arab Spring has turned into an Arab winter without any help from Israel, the United States or Iran.  Iran has aided Syria against the rebels, but neither side in that conflict promotes democracy.  Iran has exerted some influence in Iraq, but it has not been successful judging from the military success of the radical Sunni Islamists.  I do not see why Finger singles out Iran when Saudi Arabia has done far more to promote authoritarian rule in the Middle East.

    In sum, despite these disagreements, I believe Barry Finger had done a great service in articulating a cogent defense of the two state solution.  It is indeed only the viable basis to any just, peaceful and democratic solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, precisely because it recognizes the national and human rights of both peoples.

    This is something that the “Free Palestine” crowd has had trouble understanding.  Nothing rankles more than so-called international socialists in the US and Europe wearing Arab keffiyehs. 

  • Bacevich on the Betrayal of U.S. Soldiers

    ImageReview of Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.  New York, Metropolitan Books, 2013.  238 pages.  Endnotes.  Hardcover $26.  Paperback $16.  Kindle $11.04

    Although Andrew Bacevich had already published by 2003 two major critiques of what he was comfortable referring to as “The American Empire,” it was in 2008 that he managed to distinguish himself still further.  While supporting Barack Obama for president as a lesser evil to John McCain, whose expansionist polices he regarded as hopeless from his own, self-proclaimed conservative point of view, he took exception to Obama’s claim that the U.S. armed forces were too small.  As Bacevich saw it, the problem was that the foreign policy was too large.  Nothing has happened since to change his mind and Bacevich has emerged as one of the most vehement opponents of neoconservative, globalist foreign policies, whether put forward by Republicans or Democrats alike.  While Madeleine Albright, the Clintons, and many others have identified the U.S. as the one “indispensible nation,” Bacevich has in effect cried out, stop this world, I want to get off.

    Bacevich has regularly identified himself as a conservative, a Republican and even a believer in original sin as well as having had a long career in the military, having fought in Vietnam and the First Gulf War and retired at the rank of colonel (and having lost his son in the war in Iraq).  Not the usual story of someone to be put in a place of honor among the readers of New Politics.  But don’t let any of his personal details put you off, go and read the books and catch him on TV and YouTube.

    A major issue for Bacevich is the elimination of the draft, which he calls “Dick’s Trick.”  [A]lthough Nixon had run for the presidency, vowing to end the Vietnam War, eliminating the draft permitted him instead to prolong it.”  Furthermore, Bacevich argues that it caused the antiwar movement to lose steam and ultimately to induce public apathy toward war, creating in his view a form of “civic decay.”  “The conversion of military service from collective obligation to personal preference [became] irrevocable.”  Although there have been calls for a broadly constructed “national service,” from which the military would be drawn, sometimes even from liberals, this part of Bacevich’s inclination is sure to stimulate a great deal of debate.

    Since the end of the Cold War there has not been the “peace dividend” that some had hoped for, but instead the advocates of the extension of American power have been “searching for dragons to slay.”  Iraq became the poster child for the new category of “rogue states.”  Where formerly the byword was containment, viewed as a negative aim, it was now to be replaced by a positive aim, “to promote democracy, regionally stability, and economic prosperity,” as one of the acolytes of the projection of American power promised.  Consequently the slogan to “support our troops” becomes dominant and the public is discouraged from asking what purpose the troops might actually be serving and encouraged to remain passive.

    After the conclusion of the Cold War the ideological foundation for globalism was momentarily absent but it came roaring back after 9/11 with the focus on terrorism, Islamism, or some variation thereof. America “is still out there doing God’s work.”  Despite the denials that the U.S. is functionally an empire, Bacevich sees “global leadership” as an attempt to emulate such efforts as those in past years of Rome or Great Britain, merely hiding behind the cover of being Albrght’s indispensible nation or Hillary Clinton’s already announced desire to restore the U.S. to its proper leadership role in the world.

    Bacevich seizes upon General George Marshall as the kind of leader to bring the country back to limiting its military to what is sufficient to protect itself and “its most important interests.”  But there’s the rub, because it’s not that hard to transform this into the quest for “national security” which is already built into the name of its leading practitioner, the NSA.  Thus the enshrinement of preventive war or a “kill list” that allows the president to order the long distance assassination of purported enemies of the U.S., even including its own citizens.  The net result of all of this is that: “A people once profoundly suspicious of militarism tacitly embrace military power as a central element of national identity.”  He argues that both neoliberals and neoconservatives are “committed to maintaining world-dominant military capabilities.” 

    Bacevich quotes historian Charles Beard in 1939 that “America is not to be Rome or Britain,” and comments that this has a quaint sound to it.  “Global leadership” is exactly what the power advocates aspire to and what the notion of American exceptionalism has brought us to.  “Support our troops” as a dominant slogan helps maintain a level of public passivity that can most likely bring us to rack and ruin.  In his series of related books Bacevich has issued a clarion call for the American people to get involved and reject the dominant strain of foreign policy before it is too late.  It is important that there are conservatives speaking out along with the left.

     

    Jack Stuart is retired from teaching at Cal State Long Beach and lives in Minneapolis.

     

  • Michael Walzer's Defense of Israel's Crimes

    ImageThere is so much wrong with Michael Walzer’s brief essay on the New Republic website, supporting Israel in its latest onslaught, while criticizing “a little uneasily” some of the excessive civilian deaths, that it is hard to know where to begin.

    Walzer says he suspects Hamas “is awful and deserves all its trouble,” but he is no fan of Netanyahu’s.

    “One might well want to say, a plague on both their houses! But now they are at war, and choices have to be made.

    “We should choose Israel—because Israel is a democracy where it is possible to imagine the political defeat of the rightwing nationalists who are now in charge; it is possible to imagine a government that would work toward Palestinian statehood—Israel has had governments of that sort in the past, under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Olmert….”

    First of all, it is the height of hypocrisy for Israel to complain about Hamas's lack of democracy. When Hamas won the democratic Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, the United States and Israel backed a failed coup attempt by Fatah to overturn the election results by force.

    More generally, in most anti-colonial struggles it has often been the case that the colonial power was the more internally democratic society. Does that lead us to support France (with its Rights of Man) against the Algerians or the Vietnamese who were seeking independence? The British of the Magna Carta against India or Kenya? The democratic Belgians as they oppressed the Congolese? The Germans, with their universal male suffrage, as they committed genocide against the Herero people in Southwest Africa? The most perfect internal institutions in the world don’t justify external conquest and massacre. No matter how egalitarian its kibbutzim, or gay-friendly its policies (though both of these are exaggerated), a state has no right to occupy others. And those who are occupied are pursuing a just cause as they struggle to end their occupation.

    In any event, Walzer’s characterizations of both Israel and Hamas are seriously flawed. Rabin, famous for ordering the breaking of Palestinian bones during the first intifada, never supported a Palestinian state. In his last Knesset speech before his assassination, he made clear that what he wanted to see was a Palestinian “entity which is less than a state,” with Israel’s security borders located in the Jordan Valley, with a united Jerusalem including the huge settlement blocs Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev under Israeli sovereignty, and the inclusion of additional settlement blocs, including those yet to be built. And Olmert, who waged criminal wars against Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008-09, though going further than Rabin in his negotiations with the Palestinians, always insisted on Israel keeping the major settlement blocs, which would mean dissecting the West Bank into essentially non-contiguous cantons, cut off from East Jerusalem, and thus leaving them with no real state at all.

    Regarding Hamas, Walzer says: “Like the present Israeli government (or, better, its leading members), Hamas doesn't believe in a Palestinian state alongside Israel.” “Hamas has never deviated from its absolute opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.” But in fact Hamas’s willingness to accept a two-state arrangement has been clear for some time. In Khalid Meshaal’s recent interview with Charlie Rose he repeated what Hamas officials have stated many times before: that they needed to have a state “emerge on the borders of 1967,” something that “all the Palestinians factions have agreed upon.” “The occupation and the siege are the problem. We have to stop the occupation. We have to stop the siege and then we can have security and peace in the region.” “If Gaza lives without occupation, without aggression, without blockade, without closing of the crossings, without starvation, then we — then this will be fine. And this applies actually to the West Bank as well, because Gaza and the West Bank are two parts of the Palestinian abode. And we are one nation. We want to live without occupation in the West Bank and in Gaza.” And these were not just words. As Meshaal noted, Hamas had joined a unity government committed to a state on the borders of ’67.

    Walzer’s failure to acknowledge that the Palestinian struggle to end the almost 50-year occupation is a just cause, and that the blockade of Gaza is an illegal collective punishment leads him to write that “There has to be a just, or justifiable, way of responding to indiscriminate rocket attacks.” But there’s an extremely just way of responding: namely, end the occupation and end the blockade. Indeed, ending the blockade alone – though short of justice, which demands the end of the occupation as well – could have stopped the rocket fire. The 2008 lull could have been extended if Israel had lifted the blockade (as it ought to have done on moral grounds in any case). The 2012 ceasefire ended with an Israeli commitment to ease the blockade, which it didn’t do, and so there were periodic rocket launches (though Hamas itself fired no rockets until the Israeli rampage against Hamas on the West Bank in June 2014). In the current crisis Hamas has made clear that there would be no rocket fire if the blockade were ended.

    A state engaging in an illegal occupation has no right of self-defense; it has an obligation to withdraw. A state enforcing an illegal blockade likewise has no right of self-defense, only an obligation to end its blockade. But Walzer ignores all this, wondering only how Hamas can be attacked without killing quite so many civilians.

    One can argue about what the moral responsibility of individual soldiers is for killing enemy soldiers as part of an unjust war, but there is no debate among just war theorists that the leaders of a state act unjustly when they order the killing of soldiers or civilians in the pursuit of an unjust cause. So every Egyptian soldier killed in, say, the Israeli-UK-French attack on Egypt in 1956, was a crime. In the same way, since the current Israeli assault is part of an effort to maintain an unjust occupation and unjust blockade, every Palestinian death — whether armed militant or noncombatant infant — is a war crime.

    However, even if we go along with Walzer and disregard the broader rights and wrongs of the occupation and the blockade, his argument is morally unsustainable. He argues that while Israel should not be bombing the homes of Hamas members, the "primary responsibility" for civilian deaths in Gaza falls on Hamas because they are fighting from homes and schools and crowded streets.

    Walzer's reference to schools is a little grotesque. The Israeli government has pointed to the discovery of rockets in some school buildings, but those rockets were found stored (not being launched) from abandoned schools. As UN officials noted, schools that the UN relief agency UNRWA was forced to abandon were sometimes occupied by either Palestinian militants or Israeli troops. UNRWA deplored this, but it could not control the schools in which it was not physically present in the building. But when it was present, it could assure that the building was "free of weapons" and that no one with arms was allowed in the school. The Israeli attacks that have elicited outrage were not those aimed at the abandoned buildings, but at schools converted by UNRWA into shelters for refugees — some of the 475,000 desperate Gazans who had fled their homes on instructions from the IDF — and whose exact location and humanitarian status was communicated to Israeli forces many times.

    Before considering the human shielding issue, note the deaths Israel has caused that don't raise the human shielding issue at all. First, there are the deaths in homes which Walzer agrees are war crimes — though he never uses the term. Then there are attacks on civilian members of Hamas; as Human Rights Watch has noted, "Israel has wrongly claimed as a matter of policy that civilian members of Hamas or other political groups who do not have a military role are 'terrorists' and therefore valid military targets." They are no more legitimate military targets than are the civilian members of Likud or the other parties in Israel's ruling coalition. Then there are the deaths due to the use of artillery and other indiscriminate weapons in urban areas. As Amnesty International reported:

    "It is inevitable that the repeated use of artillery in densely populated civilian neighbourhoods will lead to the unlawful killing and injury of civilians and destruction and damage to civilian buildings, regardless of the intended target. Israeli forces have used such reckless tactics before, including in Operation 'Cast Lead' in 2008/9, when some 1,400 Palestinians were killed, the majority of them civilians." 

    And then there are the cases examined by Human Rights Watch where investigation revealed no military target at all. “Israel’s rhetoric is all about precision attacks but attacks with no military target and many civilian deaths can hardly be considered precise,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Recent documented cases in Gaza sadly fit Israel’s long record of unlawful airstrikes with high civilian casualties.”

    These deaths probably account for the bulk of the civilians killed. What then of those civilian deaths that did involve human shielding. Investigations in previous Israeli assaults have found IDF claims of human shielding to be vastly overstated (Human Rights Watch in Lebanon, 2006; Amnesty International, Gaza, 2008-09), as have investigations of the current conflict by respected journalists (Sengupta, Bowen). Human Rights Watch noted that an Israeli military spokesperson reportedly told a journalist regarding an IDF strike on a hospital, “We’ve seen a lot of launches of rockets that came from exactly near the hospital, 100 meters near.” HRW commented: "Given the precision weapons available to the Israeli military, a target 100 meters from the hospital provides no justification to hit the hospital."

    But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there are many cases of human shielding by Hamas in Gaza. (And let us put aside the fact that Israel puts its defense ministry in downtown Tel Aviv or that runways at Ben Gurion International Airport are shared by the military and civilian traffic, etc.) What follows from that?

    International humanitarian law is quite clear:

    "…the attacking party is not relieved from its obligation to take into account the risk to civilians, including the duty to avoid causing disproportionate harm to civilians, simply because it considers the defending party responsible for having located legitimate military targets within or near populated areas. That is, the presence of a Hamas commander or military facility in a populated area would not justify attacking the area without regard to the threatened civilian population."

    Consider an example. If a felon fled into an apartment building, would anyone think it justified for the police to level the building, using the argument that any resulting deaths to innocents are the responsibility of the felon? Would we applaud the police who did this as "the most moral" police force in the world?

    Moreover, "even if military forces misuse a medical facility to store weapons or shelter able-bodied combatants, international law specifies that the attacking force must issue a warning that sets a reasonable time limit and can attack only after such a warning has remained unheeded." But what about cases where it's not just storing or sheltering but actually firing rockets at Israeli civilian areas?

    To answer this, we need to briefly discuss just war theory. Walzer explains that according to just war theory and international humanitarian law it is impermissible to intentionally target civilians, but it is permissible to kill civilians if you are aiming at a legitimate military target and if the harm caused is not disproportionate to the value of the military target. Pacifists may cringe, but there is a moral logic to this position that I think most nonpacifists would accept. Consider these examples. If you were under attack from a Nazi blitzkrieg and you realized that the only way to stop it was to call in airstrikes on the invading tanks, but that the airstrikes might kill some civilians, you might regretfully order the airstrike. The moral benefit of the strike — saving your country from a murderous Nazi conquest — would outweigh the unfortunate cost of some civilian lives. On the other hand, if an enemy soldier were hiding in a filled-to-capacity football stadium, calling in an airstrike — which would kill the soldier plus thousands of noncombatants — would clearly be disproportionate.

    Walzer notes that he "along with many others" has "argued for another rule: that the attacking forces must make positive efforts, including asking their own soldiers to take risks, in order to minimize the risks they impose on enemy civilians." This is a good rule, but it is a rule that is in addition to proportionality. But when Walzer summarizes his conclusion, he omits proportionality entirely. He says, if some risk "is taken, then I think that the major responsibility for civilian deaths falls on the insurgents." That's it. No further reference to proportionality.

    But notice what happens when we consider proportionality, even a proportionality that elides the fact that in an unjust war no military target in Gaza has moral benefit. If Hamas were about to take some military action that would cause major civilian loss of life in Israel, then proportionality might say that in order to prevent Hamas from taking that action Israel would be justified in acting in such a way that posed some risk to Palestinian civilians. But if all that Hamas were threatening to do was take an action that represented a tiny danger to Israeli civilians, then proportionality would rule out Israel's acting in a way that posed serious risk to Palestinian civilians. The latter hypothetical is the actual situation prevailing in Gaza. Hamas has fired thousands of rockets and yet has only killed three civilians. Whether the explanation is Iron Dome, Israel's civil defense measures, or the inaccuracy and low payload of Gazan missiles, the fact is that the chances of an Israeli civilian getting killed by one of these rockets is very small. The three civilian deaths almost prove the point. One was a civilian who intermixed himself with troops on the border (human shielding?). A second was a Bedouin, who is prohibited by Israeli law from building a bomb shelter and who, the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled, need not be provided with a bomb shelter by the state. And the third was a foreign worker who didn't go into the bomb shelter when the alarm went off. (Note incidentally, that all three Israeli civilians killed were males of military age [see here, here, and here]. Israeli apologists have argued that the civilian death toll in Gaza is being overstated because many of the alleged civilians are in fact males of military age. But women, children, and the elderly are not the only civilians. If one were permitted to target not just soldiers but all males of military age, then almost two million Israeli males would be fair game.)

    So how many Palestinian civilians is it permissible to unintentionally kill in an effort to stop rocket fire that kills one civilian for every thousand rockets fired? Surely the proportionality principle would dictate that Israel's behavior in Gaza, even if every dead civilian could be attributed to a case of human shielding, is illegal, unjust, and criminal.

    A war that could be avoided by ending an illegal occupation and an illegal blockade cannot be a just war. And a war that so blatantly violates the principle of proportionality cannot be a just war. It is sad that one of the world's leading expositors of just war theory can't get this right.

     

    Stephen R. Shalom is one of the editors of New Politics.