Advanced Search

Blog

  • Capitalism Gone Wild

    Review of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013

    This American life is a mess, argues George Packer in The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. It’s a nation fraying, with core institutions from government and finance to housing, jobs and education dysfunctional or “unwound.”

    Packer, as befits a New Yorker staff writer, is a sharp stylist with a keen eye. While he does pay homage to the American ideal of self-reinvention and upward mobility that existed imperfectly at best in the past, he focuses his seemingly infinite capacity for listening on bringing to life the stark inequalities of a society that is experiencing contrasts in wealth and poverty not seen since the late 19th century. It’s one in which billionaires and the homeless multiply while the proportion of middle-income families shrinks and where six of Sam Walton’s heirs have as much accumulated wealth as the United States’ bottom 30 percent.

    His vision of an anomic, atomized America unfolds like a well-produced slideshow. Highlights include an insider’s view of K Street swinishness, its manufacturing of “grasstop” coalitions and how lobbyists on Capitol Hill not only grease politician’s palms but write legislation in the interest of no one but their own clients.

    There’s also great reporting on the epidemic of robo-signing, mortgage and security fraud, bank failure, securities fraud and bankruptcy. His pointing to the collapse of federal regulations on bankers and traders that allowed for the Wall Street feeding frenzy is on target and a good introduction to the 2007-2008 collapse and its devastating consequences nationwide.

    Taken singly, many of the chapters are brilliant, as is his coverage of the 2012 GOP convention and the ghost subdivisions and foreclosure wipeouts in Tampa, Florida. There’s Youngstown, Ohio’s shedding of 50,000 jobs (with a population of 150,000) and the vacating of 40 percent of its housing parcels in just 10 years. There’s also devastating takedowns of the gremlin-like Newt Gingrich, the preposterous Oprah Winfrey and the weaselly Robert Rubin matched with fitting portraits of new Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and writer Raymond Carver, named “the chronicler of blue-collar despair.”

    A reviewer in The Guardian described his feelings after reading the more than 400 page tome as having “The sense of loneliness — of isolated souls, failed by their institutions, pummeled by the forces of big money — seems to seep under your skin, and to stay there.”

    My reaction was that, too; it’s a tough read when bad things happen to good people. Or when good things happen to the undeserving rich. Yet the pieces, exquisitely and intelligently drawn, don’t make for a whole picture. Not only is there no unified theory — it is, after all, journalism — there is no uniform explanation for the crises beyond hubris, the sclerosis of government and politicians unconscious when not themselves abetting crimes. We get a cataloging of malignity, venality, chaos and stupidity, as well as a growing list of victims. Like the libertarian masters of the universe in his tale, we have to do the theorizing for ourselves.

    That’s problematic because as accurate as the depictions are, they’re static. His villains may know how to network, but his victims for the most part are loners, with little social interaction outside of their immediate family. It’s as though he takes seriously the paradigm of the right — that society is a fiction — though he clearly despises the right’s politics. And if America is unwinding, when was modern life ever a coherent whole? When was it ever “wound”?

    Unfortunately, Packard’s roster of villains is circumscribed. As responsible as they were for instigating the Great Recession, Wall Street and the securities industry were not the business centers solely at fault for the lead-up to the collapse. An outsized military budget, imperial wars, the decline of unions as counterweights to corporate excesses and the flight of manufacturing overseas played their parts, too.

    At bottom, despite the thick description in Packer’s work, there’s no sense of working people as actors, only as creatures acted upon. This may be true enough for the people profiled, at least initially, but weren’t there other people in other areas who acted as their own social agents? His subjects are real enough, but they’re presented without enough historical context to understand what options they had, if any, for a fight-back.

    Here Packer could have taken the extra step of looking at the present crisis less as a failure of government to rein in the thieves — which it is — and more as capitalism unfolding in a global economy, as a process that creates not simply winners and losers but evolving social classes, learning from their mistakes and successes and — in the case of working people — rediscovering cultures of resistance.

    In Youngstown, Tammy Thomas, a black worker at the then- prominent Packard Electric and single mother of three, goes to a union meeting. She finds it pointless — two white guys arguing, she tells Packer, and her description is doubtlessly right. But why was the meeting pointless? And was it always thus? Did this local union have a history of militancy? Of accommodation?

    Thomas for one goes on to be a first-rate organizer, but that’s due to the influence of an outside organization. Similarly the good guy in foreclosure-ravaged Tampa is a feisty local lawyer, not an affected homeowner. Were there no instances of community institutions that resisted the leveling of their world?

    Packer rightly cites local critics calling the funding for exurban Tampa’s heady property-flipping a Ponzi scheme, and one with the active collusion of county commissioners, “but everything kept growing and no one paid attention,” he writes, end quote. Why no attention?

    And why, when almost all of his white characters are either moneyed Rand Paul-style libertarian ideologues or conservative Christians, does he give them such ample room to expound? Couldn’t Packer have found even one semi-employed Marxist in one of the troubled locations to balance the picture? If Packer was stuck, he could have called me.

    Packer exhibits both the strengths and weaknesses of mainstream newsgathering. Even when he refuses to sing hosannas to the rich and the ubercomfortable, instead acting as an informed and aggressive skeptic who tells oppressed people’s stories so well, he never quite pulls the trigger. Nor does he seem to know he can.

    Capitalism is about much more than conscious thievery, guilty individuals, enabling politicians and victims; it’s a system that depends on exploitation and class division. It may require exploiters to tell outsized moral tales about themselves, whether as members of yesterday’s Calvinist elect or today’s libertarians, but it’s first a system of production, and an unstable one made up of real people in a real and conflict-ridden context. Why people do or do not make common cause and fight back — and what they fight for — are as much part of the story as are the hideous conditions they endure. That’s the part Packer doesn’t tell, and I wish he had.

     

    This article first appeared in The Indypendent, Oct. 30, 2013, Issue #191.

  • Mediocrity in teacher education?

                            Bill Keller’s op/ed piece in the NY Times about the mediocrity in teacher education deserved a political rebuttal that responses in the “letters” section didn’t provide. My letter, rejected, slipped in my doctoral work at Harvard and my book on urban teaching, which in the past has allowed my radical critique to pass as credible.

     

          During my doctoral work in teacher education at Harvard in 1990, I took a seminar in which we studied policies right-wing think tanks advocated for teacher preparation and certification. Almost all of those policies have since become law, with bipartisan support. Now Bill Keller advocates for yet another change that the far-right has thirsted after for decades, destroying university-based teacher education by raising entrance requirements so that only college students from families with high socio-economic status can become teachers. This policy parallels the aim of Teach for America – another program we studied just as it was hatched. Teacher ed's crime in the eyes of these opponents is preparing prospective teachers to care about the whole child and understand the       role of schools in a democracy. I plead guilty as charged. (Lois Weiner is the author of "Urban Teaching: The Essentials")

     

                                 Keller’s article is part of a well-orchestrated  campaign to eliminate teacher education at state universities, what were once normal schools, then state teachers colleges, as this presentation by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) explains. NCTQ, like so many “non-profits” and foundations funded by far-right donors, now drives teacher education policy in the federal government and at the state level.  

     

                                 Don’t we want teachers who are well-educated themselves? Absolutely. That’s my life’s work, as well as doing what I can as a teacher educator to make sure that teachers are “dream keepers” not “gate keepers” for children who have not been given equal educational opportunity.  But as Ken Zeichner explains that’s not what the changes to teacher education are doing, especially with shoddy “fast-track” programs to plop newbies into schools to work with kids with the most needs..  How many people who are well-educated will remain in school systems that serve kids who don’t do well on standardized tests when teacher pay and evaluations are pegged to students’ test scores? How many people with other career options will work in a job with no professional supports, no job security, with low pay, where the supervisor hires and fires at will?  Not many.

     

                                 So what will happen if/when we cut off the pipeline of teachers to a trickle? Politicians will likely do what they always have when there is a teacher shortage: waive requirements to put warm bodies in classrooms.  There will likely be plenty of people in this “jobless recovery” who will want work.  It’s an outcome the World Bank points to as a model, noting approvingly that this is what occurred in Benin when teachers had the audacity to ask the government to consider a pay raise and were fired wholesale.

     

                                 In every neoliberal reform I can think of, to understand what the impact (intended or not) will be, use one of these semantic devices: invert the meaning or add “for a select few.”  Thus, the goal of “raising teacher quality” by restricting admission to teacher education program to only those who have the highest SAT scores will have the effect of “putting minimally qualified teachers into most schools” or “raising teacher quality for a select few.” So don’t be surprised that the debt ceiling legislation included a provision to allow “alternate route” teachers to bypass all the regulations for university-based programs. 

                                 I am heartened that more activists have been persuaded by my argument that this is not a conspiracy because conspiracies are, by definition, secret.  This is a global project with quite public documentation and exegesis.  The evidence is in front of us. The problem is that many liberals don’t want to face that we are in an ideological battle with enemies who aim to destroy public education and democracy. The only way to “engage” (to quote a teacher union official with whom I often tweet) with our enemies, and this includes the Democrats as well as the Republicans, is to defeat them using all our strength and savvy.

                  I invite reader responses, either to New Politics as a blog or to me directly at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. And you can follow my thoughts on teaching, schools, and education on twitter , Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

  • Socialism and Sports

    The two great loves of my father’s life were the Green Bay Packers and golf.  Every fall Sunday we worshipped at the altar of the Green and Gold.  My brother and I learned, at an early age, that we could only talk during commercials and half time.  Our Sunday routines created my love of armchair sports.  Today, in addition to following pro football, I watch college basketball and football, pro basketball, baseball and tennis.  Too often feminists and leftists dismiss the importance of sports in society and only focus on the machismo culture encouraged by professional/college athletics.  Although that culture is real to an alarming extent, I dare say it is also an elitist attitude that is not conducive to mass organizing and needs to be re-considered.

    Team sports are not just about competition and rarely about individuals but also about how talented individuals can band together and succeed.  Players and coaches recognize this — the favorite saying is “There is no I in team.”  Despite the use of hockey as an example of individual prowess, it is very much a team sport.  The six players on the ice work as a unit to score goals.  Each position has a specific assignment.  If one player plays alone, the team loses. Professional hockey is a violent sport because the owners encourage fighting as a way to sell tickets.  Fighting is rare at lower levels.

    My expertise lies more with football and basketball.  Both require players to cooperate.  Granted, there are stars on the teams but the stars succeed by meshing with other teammates.  Aaron Rodgers, considered by some the best quarterback in the league, is only as good as the offensive line that protects him for a sufficient amount of time so he can throw razor-sharp passes and score touchdowns.  In basketball, teams who play as a unit are more successful than teams who play as individuals.  The San Antonio Spurs have won four NBA championships over the past 10 years because the whole is better than the individuals.  The New York Knicks fail because Carmelo Anthony, the star, won’t share the ball.

    The life lessons that children learn through participation in team sports are to respect others, cooperate with and support each other, and to let bygones be bygones.  Young girls can get embroiled in petty arguments that may lead to bullying and certainly lead to a rigid social hierarchy where girls on the bottom feel real pain.  However, through participation in organized sports, there is less social hierarchy and less bullying.

    Those who did not grow up in a sports environment miss the community bonds which are created.  Go to any sports bar and you find complete strangers high five and hug each other after great plays.  People who attend the same bar to watch games come to know each other and find themselves talking about more than just the sport that brought them together.  Certainly, it is an opportunity to begin a discussion of working class politics because we have established our bona fides through our mutual support of THE TEAM.  Involvement in the sports culture is an organizing tool.

    Furthermore, professional sports are a microcosm of the struggle for economic justice.   On the corporate side are the team owners[1]; billionaires every one, many too stupid to recognize that they know nothing about the game they own (football:  Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys, Dan Snyder of the Washington (enter racist team name here); basketball:  Donald Sterling of the LA Clippers; Jimmy Dolan of the New York Knicks).  Then there are the owners who believe their team ownership is a sure way to maximize personal profits (David Glass, (former CEO of Walmart), of the Kansas City Royals whose claim to fame is dooming his team to be the worst in the league for the past 18 years after reducing team payroll by 50 percent when he took over). 

    And then there are the owners who believe they can feed at the public trough and get their stadiums built with tax money even though they can afford to build themselves, such as Clayton Bennett of the Oklahoma City Thunder, formerly the Seattle Supersonics.  This captain of industry, along with National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern, moved the team when they failed in their attempt to blackmail the citizens of Seattle into using tax dollars to build a new stadium; and Zygi Wilf, owner of the Minnesota Vikings, and Commissioner Rodger Goodell threatened to move the team to another locale if local state legislators did not approve using tax money to build Wilf a new stadium.  Citizens in the Twin Cities (where the team is located) had turned down two referendums on paying for the stadium in the past.  These owners[2] have little regard for the communities that support their teams, not unlike corporations or hedge funds that buy businesses, milk the profits dry and then close up shop, leaving unemployment and a reduced tax base in their wake.

    While players are paid well compared to a work-a-day guy or gal, their pay scale does not compare to the owners’ profits.  More importantly, their high salaries are achieved through collective bargaining.  The Major League Players Association[3] is the strongest professional sports union in the country.  Originally led by Marvin Miller, a former economist and negotiator for the United Steel Workers, the union raised salaries, negotiated an arbitration clause (which took the disposition of grievances away from the Commissioner (an employee of team owners) and gave it to a neutral third party.  Miller also negotiated the first free agency clause in major league sports.  An enormous victory for the players — no longer did the owners control where they worked. 

    The National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) has been the weakest, historically.  There were several unsuccessful strike efforts during the 1980’s, and the last one led to the first use of scabs.  Under the reign of Gene Upshaw, a former Oakland Raider, there was “labor peace.”  Complaints that the peace came at the expense of the players swirled.  In 2011, the league announced that if an agreement wasn’t reached by March 1, the league would lock out the players.[4]  The players were prepared and, ultimately, won. 

    First, the leadership of the NFLPA took a page out of Marvin Miller’s playbook and ensured that the best players were team delegates and alternates.  This included Drew Brees, star quarterback of the New Orleans Saints, as the most outspoken union supporter.  Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers  was an alternate delegate.  Another successful union tactic was a focus on health and safety issues instead of money.  The NFLPA made a compelling argument about the dangerousness of the sport, the short tenure of players, and the lack of retiree health benefits.  For the first time, the union spoke up for retiree rights.  A brilliant community-based strategy raised awareness.  In the settlement, the players succeeded in preventing the league from instituting an 18 game schedule — two more than the current schedule — a top management priority.  An 18-game schedule is a horrible idea for players as it exposes them to even more possible career ending injuries.

    All is not sugar and light with professional sports unions.  The National Basketball Players Association (NBAPA), also faced with a lockout, signed an agreement that gave the owners over $5 billion in give-backs.  Unlike the football players, the union focused on money.  There was no community outreach, nor were the best players in leadership roles.  This epic failure can be attributed to the incompetence of the NBAPA executive director.

    Like it or not, sports are front and center in American life for both women and men.  Given our fascination, we must recognize the potential fandom represents in educating and organizing folks to join us in advocating for social democracy.  The world of organized sports is a microcosm of corporations vs. workers and community.  This meme can also be exploited to our benefit.  We must take advantage of the opportunity! [5]

    Notes

    [1] The only community-owned team is the Green Bay Packers.  In the mid 1950’s the team offered stock in the team to raise funds.  The stocks were limited to one per person and could not be re-sold.  The money raised financed the team and improvements to the stadium.  There have been more stock sales under the same rules.  That and the NFL league money-sharing rules allow the Packers to stay in a small town market and remain a successful franchise.  Community-owned teams were banned in the early 1960’s, much to the regret of the rest of fandom.

    [2] For a more detailed account, see Dave Ziren’s:  Bad Sports, How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love.

    [3] Baseball players

    [4] A lockout is management’s version of a strike.  The good thing (if there is anything good about it) is that the employer cannot permanently replace the players.

    [5] To keep up on the latest in sports, read Dave Ziren’s column in The Nation, or subscribe to receive regular email updates. Email: edgeofsports@gmail.com.

     

    Lee Levin worked for unions for 20 years, including eight years as executive director of the Coalition of Labor Union Women. Currently, she is a full-time mom and volunteer coordinator for national DSA. This article originally appeared on the DSA blog.

     

  • Connecting the dots: The "new mindset" we confront

           One of the most deceptive aspects of neoliberal reforms in education is that destructive policies often contain one element that is seductive for progressives who care about inequality in schools. When the Dems and Republicans rewrote federal aid to K-12 schools in No Child Left Behind (NCLB) many liberal researchers were dazzled by the legislation’s requirement that schools and states report data on student achievement broken down (disaggregated) by race. This was no small change, as I learned when I analyzed student achievement in New York City for a study of school reforms being touted as a cure for underachievement.  The political price we paid for this data has been imposition of a punishing regime of standardized testing, which has provided the rationale for massive school closings and privatization of education. What we should have learned from NCLB is to connect the dots, to look at the entire picture, understanding that the rhetoric obscures the aims, and any real benefit is tangential to the project’s purpose.

           When I talk to audiences about the neoliberal project, I use the 1999 quote from “The book of knowledge,” a Merrill Lynch report that calls for a “new mindset” that sees schools as “retail outlets,” parents and students as “customers,” and school boards as “customer service departments.”  It is this “new mindset” that we must defeat. When we look at the evidence, when we connect the dots, especially the global picture, what’s apparent is that we face a project that aims to create a new, global system of education that will synchronize education with capitalism’s economic demands.  In every case the language and result of the policy contradict its effects.

           Proponents of this project use the rhetoric of making schools more equal to increase inequality in outcomes.  The public sector is subject to staggering regulation and starved of resources while private programs (funded by right-wing “vulture” philanthropy) are freed from the most minimal oversight.  The project cites lofty goals of improving teacher quality to deskill and deprofessionalize teaching,  pushing Teach for America, a program that puts minimally prepared novices into the schools that require the best-trained faculty.  Slogans about holding all students to “world class” standards to push adoption of a national curriculum (Common Core)  mask the effects this will have.  Without massively increased funding, not even a well-tested curriculum (which Common Core is not) would fail.  Developed by a private consortium supported by the Gates Foundation, without parent, teacher, or citizen participation, the Common Core will be a disaster used to justify further privatization.  Poor test scores based on this uniform new curriculum will be the excuse to fire thousands of teachers and push tens of thousands of young people of color out of schools, into a jobless future or prison and convict labor.

           Connecting the dots clarifies that we have to defeat this project.  It’s a tsunami created by wealthy elites that aim to destroy public education and with it the ideals of public education that support a democracy.

           I invite reader comments, either on this website or to me directly at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. And you can follow my thoughts on teaching, schools, and education on twitter , Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

  • Wasting money on educating the masses and "fear of elitism"

    When I speak to teachers and education activists about my research, I am often told that the vast, well-organized project I describe could not exist without our knowing about it and that what I am describing sounds like a conspiracy.  No, it’s not a conspiracy because conspiracies are, by definition, secret. And as evidence of the global nature of policies becomes more apparent, more activists are learning about the aims and actual effects of "free market" reforms, available for decades in prospectuses from transnational corporations developing new products and reports from the World Bank. 

                      Now a breathtakingly frank report from an adviser to the Minister of Education in the UK lays out the thinking behind the global project and the UK’s educational policies: Education should not be wasted on the masses, who are genetically inferior, he writes, and to say otherwise capitulates to a foolish “fear of elitism.” Cummings’ rhetoric about improving the quality of schooling and his blistering attack on the mediocrity of education is intended to justify introducing gross inequality into the UK’s educational system.

                       For wealthy, powerful elites who control business, media, and government, public expenditures on educating workers beyond the skill level needed for low paying jobs is wasted.  Since most jobs being created require no more than an 8th grade education only a handful of people need to acquire the sophisticated thinking and skills to manage and control the world’s productive resources. Minimally educated workers need only minimally educated teachers. Oversight of lowered expectations for educational outcomes can be achieved through exclusive use of standardized testing. Therefore, a well-educated (and well-paid) teaching force is a waste of scarce public money.

                      What’s behind release of Cumming’s straightforward description of the ideological premises of the project to make schooling more unequal? My hunch is that the successful joint job actions of England’s two largest teachers unions has forced the government’s hand. Public opinion is shifting to a more critical view of neoliberal educational policy and much of the negative publicity has focused on the inefficiencies and corruption of Gove’s policies. To contest the view that he is inept, Gove is clarifying the real aims of his policies to show that he is getting the job done: basing educational policy on pseudo-Darwinian theories to destroy the promise of quality education for all children.  Cummings’ report exposes this rationale and explains the tools being used:  eliminating the national pay scale for teachers so that communities pay what they can for teachers; introducing “free schools” so as to further disempower local communities through control of the school authorities.

                      England’s teachers go on strike October 17. (Half the country conducted a one-day work stoppage on Oct. 1; the other half goes out tomorrow.) The first action had significant support from US teachers, from which strikers took heart.  (Being on strike can be lonely and frightening, even when you know what you are doing is righteous.) I’m supporting England’s teachers with messages on social media, tweeting with the hashtag #teachrroar. You can follow this strike and other actions of teachers and students around the world at www.teachersolidarity.com

             Defending England’s teachers is a vital step to creating the international solidarity we need to turn back this global project.  Their project is global and so must be our resistance.

             PS – Tomorrow, October 17 I’m speaking in Providence RI and Friday, October 18 at University of Mass. Dartmouth about the role of transformed teachers unions in struggles to save public education.  If you’re in the vicinity, please join us.

                            I invite reader comments, either on this website or to me directly at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. And you can follow my thoughts on teaching, schools, and education on twitter , Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

     

  • What can retired teachers do to help?

    Welcome news: The strike last week of England’s two largest unions was highly successful, gaining strong favorable publicity on social media and rallies. (Mea culpa: I was corrected by a Scottish comrade about my use of “UK” – Scotland has an independent government and educational system. Wales didn’t strike because its government nudged a bit on contract issues). Many teacher activists in the US now have  personal contact with UK activists, and the President of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis, made a trip to the UK, presumably to share information and insights.  Last August the current President of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) joined a new network of US teacher union activists meeting in Chicago. We’re seeing creation of a new network of activists internationally, supported by work a former NUT President, Mary Compton, does through her updated website.  (If you want to know what’s happening globally with teachers, her site is a must-read.  You can follow her on twitter too.)

                            What’s the role in this growing new social movement of teacher activists asks Cam Kilgour, a Toronto District School Board teacher who describes himself as “retired and wanting to do anything I can to support our schools here and around the planet” ? I include myself in this category, since I began my highschool teaching and union activism in the early 1970s, leaving to become a college professor fifteen years later.  

                            I think those of us who are no longer working members of preK-12 teachers unions have a great deal to contribute.  We have time and energy for union-related activity that teachers who are working full-time do not. We understand what it means to have a strong union presence in a school, how the union can support teachers’ professional autonomy and their right to teach free from the fear that characterizes so many schools today. Our historical memory is immensely valuable, and we need to share understandings and information about what has been successful with a new generation of activists. 

                            At the same time, our experience was, for the most part, not in unions that were social movements. The culture and organization of teachers unions since shortly after their rebirth in the 1960s were seriously flawed by “business unionism” which defined “the union” as staff and elected officials.  The unions in which we participated were not what we need today.  I think we need to acknowledge that and to let this new generation of teachers forge a different model. In union elections that allow retirees to vote, we can organize other retirees to support candidates who want unions that are not afraid to fight for what’s needed and right (rather than what officials cast as “practical”).  We can organize to educate retirees about the fact that their financial security and the well-being of their grandchildren depends on this movement’s growth and success, its challenge to the model of unionism that has weakened the profession and allowed our opponents to win public support for its disastrous policies of privatization.

                            The role of retirees is to support this new movement, help mentor and develop leaders, not be the leadership ourselves.  We are outsiders now who should be counted on for help, intellectual and organizational. There’s more than enough work to be done!

                            I invite reader comments, either on this website or to me directly at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. And you can follow my thoughts on teaching, schools, and education on twitter , Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

  • Another International Labour Movement is Necessary

    [New Politics readers will be interested in the following article by Dan Gallin, who advocates social justice unionism, international solidarity and the need for workers' movements that actually move. Dan Gallin is the former general secretary of the Geneva, Switzerland-based International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF), a "union of unions" comprising 388 trade unions in 124 countries, including its eight major U.S affiliates. His standing and experience should help spark the widest discussion. Gallin delivered these remarks to the Global Labour Institute – Athens Network, June 18-19, 2013.]

     

    Comrades,

    I want to open a discussion on our crisis, the crisis of the labour movement, because I believe that the multiple crises we are facing in society are ultimately the result of the failures of our movement, and that we cannot effectively deal with those economic, social and political crises unless we overcome our own crisis first.

    I also believe that resolving our crisis is our most direct responsibility, that it depends on us alone and that it is a task we must immediately address because time is short.

    There was a time when the term "labour movement" had a precise meaning: it meant the movement of the working class with a political and an industrial wing: the party and the union, which, together with an array of auxiliary and flanking organizations, had a common aim: the emancipation of labour and the establishment of a socialist society. That, at any rate, was the dominant concept up to the second decade of the 20th century.

    The present situation could not be more different. The historical alliance of the trade union movement with a mass party representing the working class has broken down. This did not happen suddenly, it was a long process, over several decades, with many lost battles, for reasons too long to go into here.

    I want to focus on the outcome of this process, our present crisis, which has several basic elements.

    The first is the crisis of social-democracy in Western Europe and elsewhere (India, Japan). The social-democratic labour movement emerged from World War II superficially strong, actually greatly weakened by its losses under fascism and in the war, and far more dependent on State support than it had been before the war. The socialist transformation of society was no longer on the agenda.

    In the context of post-war capitalist reconstruction in Europe and Japan, and the division of the world into two power blocs led by the US and the USSR, many nominally social-democratic and labour parties abandoned their identity as class parties of labour, claimed to represent wider popular interests and adopted policies detrimental to the working class, dictated by their historical enemies.

    Today, there are very few countries in Europe where relations between the trade union movement and its former historical allies are not fraught with difficulties. In effect, the trade unions have lost their political allies.

    The second element is the loss of our periphery. The historical labour movement had created a powerful network of auxiliary organizations, covering most aspects of social life: culture, education, social protection, human rights, equality, a workers' press, even military self-defence. These were meant to be the building blocs of an alternative society.

    Much of this was lost in the post-war period, where unions retreated to what they believed to be their core business: collective bargaining, leaving society to the State. Because the State, by its nature, cannot substitute itself to society, other social movements have occupied the space left vacant by the labour movement. In that sense, these social movements are the illegitimate children of the labour movement. We need to recognize them as our own.

    The third element is the hugely destructive impact of Stalinism. Russia had three or four years of revolution, followed by seventy years of counter-revolution. The countries of Eastern and Central Europe occupied by Russia at the end of World War II had forty years of Stalinism. Hundreds of thousands socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, dissident communists perished in the "purges" and in the labour camps of that regime, or were assassinated elsewhere in the world, our best people. Together with them the memory of what had been the labour movement in one fifth of the world was obliterated.

    Worse yet: Stalinism corrupted and discredited the very concept of socialism, not least with the help of the conservative propaganda. Both sides colluded in this operation, the Soviet side, with its self-described "socialist countries", seeking to legitimise its system as an embodiment of historical socialism, and the conservative side, totally agreeing that the so-called "socialist countries" were indeed socialist, rather than the opposite of everything socialism had ever stood for, seeking to discredit the concept of socialism by equating it with Soviet reality.

    When that regime finally collapsed under its own weight, without any workers anywhere rising in its defence, on the contrary, it left a bureaucratic ruling class recycled as a new capitalist class, as corrupt and lawless as it had ever been, and it also left a weak and disoriented labour movement, trying to find its bearings with difficulty, against enormous odds.

    Before I leave this survey of the wreckage of the political movements that claimed to represent labour, I should also recall that there have always been dissidents, independent socialists, revolutionary syndicalists, who resisted. There were not many of us, but we fought and lived to fight another day, and that day is today.

    I believe that we know what we now have to do. The issues are at the same time ideological, political and organizational.

    Firstly: today's labour movement is essentially the trade union movement, that is what we have and that has to be our starting point. We have lost to a large extent our traditional political allies, but the trade union movement needs a political dimension. Everything we do is political.

    We therefore must recover the politics which are naturally ours, taking as the sole point of departure the interests of our members, which are also the general interests of society.

    Socialism remains our goal but, instructed by experience, we know that the meaning of socialism must be radical democracy: real power, democratically exercised, by real people, at every level, not by any substitutes, no vanguard parties, no so-called "progressive" authoritarians. We welcome all reliable political allies, but we cannot delegate the fight for the emancipation of labour to anyone else.

    As a socialist, I would not want my party to control any trade unions. As socialists, our role should be to support the independent organizations of the working class, controlled by their members.

    As socialists, we must also break with all forms of sectarianism. Those of us who are Marxists will remember what the Manifesto said: "The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interest separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which they shape and mould the proletarian movement."

    Too much damage has already been done by those who place the interests of their party or their sect above the interests of the movement. They need to be left to their own isolation.

    As a trade union movement, we must break with the ideology of "social partnership", which has long since been abandoned by our ruling classes. We have no "social partners", what we have is social counterparts, and that is not the same thing. Rather than lamenting the demise of "social partnership" and "social dialogue", we need to rebuild power relationships in our favour wherever possible by all means available to us.

    Secondly, we need to respond to the changes in the nature of work and to reconstruct the identity of our class, the working class. In today's world, a majority of workers are in unstable, precarious, informal forms of employment, and unemployed for much of their working lives. Many are immigrants. All of them are part of our class.

    Unions must develop effective structures to organize these workers. We must move beyond a narrow definition of the interests of our members and move towards class responses in new organisational forms and renewed organisations, reflecting the long-term general interest of our members and of society.

    This is also an ideological and political task because it requires an inclusive approach to what we believe the working class to be and to the unions as a social movement.

    Thirdly, and in the same order of ideas: we need to remain aware that women represent a huge proportion of the as yet unorganised working class, with enormous reserves of energy and courage, much of it still untapped and dormant. Despite some progress, the trade union movement remains heavily male dominated. Without a proactive policy of integrating women workers all the way to the top leadership level we deprive ourselves of an essential resource and are left fighting with one hand tied to our back.

    Fourthly, there is an issue of structure. Greece, a small country like my own, has some 150 trade unions, between GSEE and ADEDY. That is far too many. Far too many general secretaries. As long as this structure dominates, it will be impossible to create a movement supported by its members alone, without State subsidies collected through taxes. What, today, is to stop the State from shutting you down, like they shut down your television, or your public hospitals?

    Yours will remain a fragile and vulnerable movement unless it becomes the means through which the workers collectively rise and exercise their power. Power is not demonstrated by the ability to call 24-hour strikes. Power is demonstrated when the capitalists lose control over the State.

    Comrades:

    The European labour movement is today the target of an onslaught not experienced since the 1930s. This is not a passing phase. There will not be a return to what was considered normal social relations in the thirty years after the war. The project of contemporary capitalism is the destruction of the labour movement, in Europe, in North America and eventually everywhere else. Their project is the reorganisation of world society without organised labour. What they want is a society of slaves.

    Greece has become the crucible of this process. Your ruling class is preparing for war. The Golden Dawn nazis are the shock troops of capitalism. You have an army that has a history of military coups whenever democracy inconvenienced your ruling class.

    But you have also tremendous opportunities because everything is in flux, there is nothing to lose and everything is possible. Gramsci described the crisis of his time as: the old is dying and the new cannot be born. Our duty in our crisis is to be the midwives of the new: to make sure that the new can be born. There is nothing to stop you from rebuilding your movement to be the most powerful force in your country, as it potentially always has been and as it easily could become.

    Do not look to the European trade union movement for inspiration or examples. They have nothing to teach you except how to retreat. Rely on your experience and your imagination and don't be afraid of radical solutions. In our situation, radical solutions are the realistic solutions. Is a general union for all workers imaginable in Greece? Could the GSEE and ADEDY become a single union, One Big Union?

    Comrades:

    We would welcome the creation of a Greek Global Labour Institute as a partner of our GLI International Network. We have created a free space for discussion and action, and this free space is expanding. We are inviting you to join. You will be joining an invisible International. We have no heavy structures, we do not seek bureaucratic hegemony. We are a network of autonomous and self-determined trade union activists working together, and working with others, with a common purpose: help rebuilding the international movement that the workers of the world need and deserve.

    We recognise in you, our comrades in Syriza, the democratic and revolutionary approach which we believe to be the one our movement most needs at this time. We are here today to demonstrate our solidarity and we will stay together until every battle is won.

  • German Lessons

    Passionately watching last week’s election returns* at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s office in New York, without ever having been to Germany or learned more than a half-dozen German words, was an unusual experience. It was easy enough to orient my sympathies — as an American socialist they stood with the Left Party.

    My initial disappointment said a lot about how much further developed the struggle for a socialist alternative is in even the core of Europe than in the United States. 8.6 percent was less than the strong showing from four years ago, not quite the 9 or 10 percent that the more optimistic among us had been hoping for, and still leagues away from running the country. But it did show, once again, that the party had a stable base of support and indicated the possibility of a broadly progressive majority in even affluent and triumphant Germany.

    It’s also an electoral result more astounding than any the North American left has pulled off in a century.

    The legacies of state socialism, the rise of xenophobic parties of the Right, and the pressures of globalization plague the European left, but being an American socialist is an even lonelier, more difficult errand. Our center-left is dominated by the Democratic Party, a social liberal formation with little structural tie to the working class. It’s in a sense the final result that Third Way reformers in the British Labour Party or the German SPD seek to achieve.

    The language of class barely comes out in American election cycles and when it does, it’s diluted in a narrow identity category, meant to categorize a shrinking minority of white workers clinging to factory jobs in the Rustbelt, rather than an ever growing and diverse pool of “precarians”, as they have come to be called — from nannies to day laborers to fast food workers — united by common exploitation. When the Left is bold enough to run a Third Party candidate, like Ralph Nader’s bids a decade ago, they’re on a weak left-populist platform and the “socialist” label remains taboo.

    Many blame this development on America’s first-past-the-post voting system. But more broadly, it must be recognized that the U.S. has more of a “no-party” system than a “two-party” one. The growth of highly organized, mass membership political parties was a development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, starting first in Germany. It was a conscious advance by workers. That the Democratic and Republican Parties retain a looser political structure than their counterparts elsewhere finds reflection in their relatively inchoate, and at times self-contradictory, politics. They are only parties in the broadest sense. Open to all, they have no ideological requirements for membership. Anyone can register as either a Democrat or a Republican and no one can be expelled, making them little more than coalitions of social forces within which various groups contest for influence.

    By comparison, even a system like the German one (despite the 5% threshold required to enter parliament) seems infinitely more coherent and democratic. The American Left, even if it were to resurrect beyond expectations, would find little platform in Congress comparable to the bully pulpit the German Left has established in the Bundestag.

    But looking abroad, either in envy or awe, has for too long been the sustenance of American socialists. Our task is simple: to organize and expand our small minority, to establish a visible and openly radical opposition. In the heart of empire, even triumphs this modest can have wide ramifications, allowing our allies abroad more space to advance their programs. There is a parallel to the vital role the German Left can play aiding social movements in Greece and elsewhere in the European periphery.

    And lest these dreams seem too distant, there are some signs of hope. A Pew Research poll from 2011 shows that more Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 have a favorable opinion of socialism than of capitalism. We don’t know exactly what they mean by “socialism,” but at least it reflects a discontent with what’s on offer in the political mainstream.

    Demographics, needless to say, won’t by themselves save the American Left. It’ll take political action, and as one of my country’s great socialists, A. Philip Randolph, was fond of reminding his audiences, “At the banquet table of nature there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything; and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.”

    DIE LINKE is the type of organization that can win advances for the working class — and without eliding the difficulties that it too faces, that’s reason enough to occasionally sneak a peek abroad for lessons, and, dare I say, a little inspiration.

     

    *Editorial Note: On September 22, Germany elected a new Bundestag. Angela Merkel’s CDU scored a major victory, receiving – together with its Bavarian “sister party” CSU – 41.5% of the votes. The Social Democratic Party got 25.7%, widening the gap to the CDU/CSU. Surprisingly, DIE LINKE (The Left) came in third, with 8.6% of the votes and 64 elected representatives. While the Greens scored 8.4%, the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) – part of Merkel’s governing coalition – lost 10% and fell below the 5 percent threshold, meaning the party will not have any representatives in the new Bundestag. The newly founded right-wing populist Alternative for Germany came in just below 5% as well.

     

    Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin, a senior editor at In These Times, and a board member of New Politics. This article was originally posted on Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Oct. 5, 2013.

  • Jobs vs. the Environment

    Is there a fundamental conflict between a healthy environment and a healthy economy?

    There has been a lot of concern lately about damage that we humans are inflicting on our small, beautiful Planet Earth.  Waste CO2 from our way of life has been dissolving in the oceans, increasing the acidity of the water and making it very hard to, among other problems, raise Willipa Bay Oysters. Apparently, the delicious baby oysters can’t make an adequate shell for themselves in the acidic seawater. And so I’m left to wonder if I will live to see the end of a special part of the Pacific Northwest that my family and I love.

    Carbon Dioxide in the upper atmosphere acts like glass in a greenhouse. It allows sunlight to come in, but doesn’t let as much heat escape back out to space, so the earth warms up. That’s why it’s referred to as a greenhouse gas. Since the 19th century, when the industrial revolution really got going, the CO2 content of our atmosphere has climbed by about a third. There has been a corresponding increase in average world-wide surface temperatures, which has melted a lot of ice that scientists say would be much better if left frozen. Apparently, there is a danger, if the increase in CO2 continues, that the enormous glacier covering Greenland could disintegrate. That catastrophic ice melt would result in a rise in sea level of 20 feet or more, which would swamp many of the world’s major cities, like New York and Miami. According to the Smithsonian Institution, “Since we have been keeping weather records, nineteen of the twenty hottest years ever have happened since 1980.”

    Besides rising sea levels, there’s a lot to worry about from increasing levels of CO2. The increased temperatures will lead to horrific draughts and decreased harvests where millions, and perhaps billions, will starve to death. Tropical diseases will move beyond the equator, causing people to catch malaria, maybe as far north as San Francisco. Ironically, dilution of seawater from ice melt will probably disrupt the Gulf stream enough to result in horribly cold and long winters for a while in Europe, possibly a mini-ice age as far south as Northern Italy.

    All in all, it would be in the best interests of humankind if we were to come up with a plan to actually decrease atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Many climate scientists agree that a level of 350 parts per million (ppm) is the maximum safe level. We’re at a little over 380 ppm right now, which is the highest it’s been in the last 10,000 years. Bill McKibben, the founder and leader of the environmental group 350.org, thinks we can get the CO2 down to 350, but it’s going to take some real effort. We need to stop using coal to produce power, and we need to quit refining the filthy oil from Canadian Tar Sands. We need to vastly increase public transit and insulate our buildings, and then we need to help people in other parts of the world, especially China and India, do likewise. Quite a tall order, but worth it, if you consider the grim alternative.

    McKibben doesn’t just talk a good game. He acts on what he believes. Under Bill’s leadership, 350.org has staged a series of national demonstrations against something called the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if built, will vastly increase the amount of dirty, CO2-rich tar sand oil being refined and burned. The February 2013 rally against the pipeline drew 40,000 people to our national mall in Washington DC. I hope these gatherings continue, because I think that public gatherings like these are the best way to begin to shift public sentiment in favor of producing less CO2. Abraham Lincoln once said, and I completely agree with him, that “public sentiment means everything” in these matters. Go Bill!

    But let’s take a look at the movement to fight climate change from another angle. Since the consequences of allowing atmospheric CO2 to continue to climb are so dire, why isn’t the movement bigger? Why not 400,000? Heck, why not 4 million at the national mall to rally against the destruction of our beautiful climate?

    I happened to catch the Melissa Harris Perry show on MSNBC the day after the big demo. Perry seemed delighted with the accomplishment of 350.org from the day before. While she was in complete agreement with the goal of reducing CO2 to a safe level, she was compelled to offer a warning to McKibben and his group. Perry reported on a recent national Fox News poll taken to determine how much opposition there was to going ahead with the Keystone XL pipeline. The results should serve as a warning to the 40,000 who rallied in DC. According to the poll, opposition to Keystone XL among Americans hovers around 25%, and support for building the pipeline is at about 70%. Now, we all know how polls can be skewed by the questions asked, but still! As a matter of fact, Fox managed to tie the question of building the pipeline to holding U.S. gasoline prices down. It might have been a little different, if the poll just asked for a straightforward yes or no on the pipeline.

    But why are we losing so badly in the battle for the hearts and minds of the American People? Why can’t we get 400,000 at the mall? Don’t people realize what’s at stake here?

    As a matter of fact, I don’t think most people want to realize what is really happening, and therein lays the dilemma of Jobs versus the Environment.

    Here in the Pacific Northwest, there is an issue of comparable magnitude to Keystone. Peabody Coal wants to build a coal export terminal in Bellingham, Washington, something that would vastly expand the amount of coal being exported from the American Mountain West to China. As I understand it, we’re talking 9 trains a day, each 1.5 miles long and loaded to the gills with CO2-rich anthracite, to be burned in China, with a lot of the pollution coming back here to the West Coast of the United States.

    As one might expect, a considerable amount of opposition has emerged to these “death trains.” The Sierra Club has led a good fight against the coal shipments, including organizing thousands to attend federal hearings in Seattle on whether the new terminals should be built. To its great credit, my union, the UFCW, was on the side of the angels at the Seattle hearing, where they handed out, free of charge, hundreds of lovely red “No Coal Trains” t-shirts.  We’ll see, later this year, if President Obama was listening or not.

    What interested me greatly was the counter campaign that was waged in favor of building the terminal and running the trains. Apparently, a number of unions (not mine!) joined with Peabody Coal to try to convince the public that coal trains are a good idea. Their main argument was, you probably guessed it, JOBS! The TV and print campaign that the pro-coal forces put on was incredibly slick. Every TV ad that I saw featured working class folks like you and me, calling for the terminal to be built and promising 20,000 new jobs if their side prevailed. Who can say “no” to 20,000 jobs in this economy? Probably not unemployed construction workers in Bellingham, WA!

    Jim Cramer, the host of the CNBC show “Mad Money,” was recently on “Meet the Press” as a member of the morning’s “powerhouse” panel. At one point in the discussion around lingering unemployment, Cramer weighed in forcefully to say that President Obama should approve the Keystone pipeline immediately. Cramer informed viewers that oil pipelines have been the largest generators of jobs in the U.S. for the last 3 years, and construction of Keystone would mean 60,000 jobs this year!

    How can this “Jobs versus the Environment” conundrum be solved? In a capitalist jobs market, where it’s not possible to turn to the government for help, a decent job means everything. A life of dignity and respect, a healthy family, a nice place to live, all are possible with a good job. Without a living wage job, you join the growing ranks of life’s losers. This is why working people often shy away from the environmental movement. Just about anything that affords everyday people a better shot at a good job makes them say, “Let’s do it!” Doing things to protect the earth may be the right thing to do, but that always seems to mean fewer jobs.

    And remember; vague talk about “green jobs,” to come at some undetermined point in the future, pales in comparison to 60,000 high-pay jobs this year, if we build Keystone.

    So what can we do about it? To answer this question we need to go back into our history a little. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s final state of the union address called for a right to a job for every American. This talk is often referred to as his “Second Bill of Rights” speech. It contains a call for the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation. After 12 years as the American President, he had come to the conclusion that the U.S. government should guarantee a job to all who are able and willing to work. If private industry can hire everybody, fine. If not, the federal government should step in as a back up. And if Roosevelt thought we could have Jobs for All in 1944, I say we can have Jobs for All today.

    With a decent job no longer a worry, working people will be free to join us in the environmental movement, and help us stop global warming. Without a government job guarantee, everyday people will remain under the threat of job loss, and every time they hear about a new super storm or drought or rise in sea level, they’ll say, “I wish I could help, but I need to work, you know?”

    Jobs for All will mean creation of government programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA.) The WPA offered millions of jobs to the unemployed in America at the height of the Great Depression. And these jobs were, for the most part, green jobs, created long before the need to protect the environment was understood like it is today. Jobs in a new WPA would probably be almost entirely green. Replanting forests, insulating homes and buildings, taking care of national parks, daycares, libraries, live theater groups, etc, etc, etc.

    There are many differences between the idea of “Jobs for All” and calls for just “jobs” or “green jobs.” When we don’t say “for all,” working people wonder if they will be included. If everyday people don’t trust a government jobs program to include them, they will not join a movement to pressure Congress for the program. If we want to have a mass movement in support of our calls for more jobs, we have to say “for all” or “everybody.” This is why current proposals for more jobs don’t get too far.

    Another concept of considerable importance to the environmental movement is something referred to as “Just Transition.” This idea usually refers to the provision in a union contract to provide equivalent jobs to workers who are laid off as the result of closing down a business like a dirty coal burning power plant. If just transition can be worked out, it seems like a fine idea to me. But we should keep in mind that the whole working class, including the unemployed, needs to be covered by just transition. That would be Living Wage Jobs for All.

    So, when we achieve “Jobs for All,” we will have ended forever the problem of “jobs versus the environment.” Then we can welcome working people into the environmental movement. One thing I’d like to see is placing a tax on burning fossil fuels, a carbon tax. James Hansen makes a proposal for such a tax in his book, Storms of Our Grandchildren. An intriguing part of Hansen’s idea is that he would have all the money collected from the tax refunded, in equal shares, to everybody in America. Gas would cost a lot more for cars, as would heating of buildings, but people could use the money they receive for transit and insulation. Everybody could relax because of the government guarantee of a decent job, and the CO2 in the atmosphere would start to go down, instead of up. Global warming would slow way down. It would be very cool!

     

    Brian King is a retired respiratory therapist who’s been working with 350.org on global warming and with DSA on “Jobs for All.”

  • COIN of the Realm: Sprawling Police State Brings the Wars Home

    Review of Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency, ed. by Kristian Williams, William Munger and Lara Messersmith-Glavin (AK Press, 2013); and Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America, by Matt Apuzzo & Adam Goldman (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2013).

    Anyone who spent 10 minutes at an Occupy encampment knows that the police response was intense, invasive, unconstitutional and bordered on the deadly. In New York, Oakland, Boston and in hundreds of other locales nationwide, the police were not there to serve and protect nonviolent protesters, let alone the general public. To quote Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s infamous words during a week-long police riot against anti-war protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, his cops were there “not to create disorder but to preserve disorder.” Who can improve on Daley? Life During Wartime tries. I think it fails, though the trying is well worth the effort.

    A ponderous book that’s impossible to read in one sitting, or even 10, it’s filled with much-needed information on counterinsurgency efforts at home and abroad. It chronicles mainstream institutions such as the media that serve to legitimize the existing social order and cool out, co-opt or crush dissent. It examines everything from state violence to an Orwellian manipulation of language. It also speaks to the capacity of social movements to act smarter in response. The breadth of its examples and the understanding of its 15 contributors of the depth of manipulation alone makes the book necessary reading. That’s where it succeeds.

    Where it fails is in its broader thesis, which asserts that every element of the social order is implicated not only in reproducing conformity and compliance and in legitimating its own power but in naming counterinsurgency (or, COIN) as its principal method of social control.

    Co-editor Kristian Williams writes that Prussian military theorist Carl von Clauswitz’s famous maxim, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” can usefully be reversed to read that politics is war — in the present case counterinsurgency — by other means. At the end of this book counterinsurgency is not only treated as political but the preferred and dominant form of class maintenance in the United States.

    That's a correction to the standard Disney-like understanding of bourgeois democracy, where all would be right with the democratic system if only more citizen activists and excluded groups engaged in electoral politics. But everyday social controls don't constitute counterinsurgency and dissident work or community cultures absent organization don't in themselves constitute resistance. Using “counterinsurgency” as a circus tent covering every aspect of class rule explains little about the actual nature of the state, the multiple choices an elite has in tactics, the sometimes feral differences elites have among themselves or the numerous ways oppressed groups can fight back.

    Using counterinsurgency as the definition of class politics flattens the possibilities not only for a ruling class but for its subalterns, too. Still, given how much material the authors marshal, reading this book is worth the slog. Even if the contributors don’t present a seamlessly persuasive master plan, it’s better to know what’s lurking in the dark.

    A book that succeeds, if only because its is so much more theoretically circumscribed, is Enemies Within. There’s no master narrative offered by the authors, both Associated Press reporters. And while this book could use one, it manages to tell the necessary story about just how stupidly and thuggishly the New York Police Department operated in its mission creep to ferret out potential terrorists in the years following 9/11.

    The villains are clear: Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence David Cohen. If there are any “good guys” in this story (and in any other context they would not be mine), they are the FBI agents and state police officers who did not surveil whole communities, including New York’s some 700,000 Muslims (a process Cohen called “zone defense”).

    The FBI's relative restraint did not rub off on the cowboys at the NYPD who routinely treated constitutionally protected speech, whether publicly expressed, written or in casual conversation as a precursor to terrorism.

    Despite its aggressive surveillance and a soaring counter terrorism budget, the NYPD failed to net a single legitimate terrorism suspect in the post-9/11 decade. And when the single most dangerous terrorist plot to take shape in that time did crop up, New York's Finest were caught unawares.

    This conspiracy — hatched by one Najibullah Zazi, a young Queens resident of Afghani descent who sought to bomb subways in New York in 2009 — is at the center of Enemies Within and gives the book its mystery novel quality.

    Zazi received explosives training in Pakistan from al-Qaeda and later recruited a pair of former high school friends from Flushing to join him in carrying out his intended “martyrdom operation.” Zazi's plans were uncovered by the FBI, which had put him under surveillance. The NYPD's contribution was to come charging into the case at the last minute and unwittingly give away the investigation to an informant at Zazi's mosque in Queens, who they grilled and who in turn alerted Zazi that he was being watched. Zazi fled New York and was subsequently nabbed by the Feds.

    In the authors’ retelling of this tale, the NYPD emerges as a mendacious band of Keystone Cops. To this day, Bloomberg and Kelly continue to insist that the NYPD remain free of any external oversight lest New York become “a more dangerous place to live.” Meanwhile, the Intelligence Division operates with 600 officers on a $60 million budget, and Muslim residents, even those once favorably disposed to helping the police, are — as one rights attorney said — living in fear. For them, New York is less safe, thanks to the NYPD.

    While Enemies Within makes clear that the NYPD has and is continuing to pursue its own private “war on terror,” the book’s narrow scope leaves out what movement activists and civil libertarians already know from experience: the New York police force is not only monitoring Muslim communities but proactively harassing a wide array of left-wing activists in the city, too. If neither book offers a synthetic explanation of the complex relationship between police or military practices and the needs of the capitalist state and the corporate class, their capacity for telling useful stories that contribute to developing that synthesis is invaluable.

    [This review first appeared in The Indypendent, Sept. 27, 2013.]

  • You Want MORE?

    Fewer than two weeks before the US House of Representatives brought on the government shutdown, it voted (9/19/13) by a slim margin to cut $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, over the next 10 years. Now, $4 billion a year may not seem like much, given the enormous figures our "leaders" play with, but it will mean that a great many families as well as individuals will not have enough to eat.

    Remember in the public TV film of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, when Oliver's stomach is calling out for a little supplement to the skimpy bowl of gruel he was given? Oliver asks, "May I have more, sir?" The very well fed overlord of the kitchen indignantly says, "You want MORE?" How dare a child want adequate nutrition!!!

    For some strange reason, mothers and fathers want their little children to have enough caloric intake, of the right sorts of things, for their brains to develop adequately (and their muscles and their growth hormones). Without that happening, we're going to have millions of kids who won't be able to stay focused in class, who won't be able to think properly or quickly, whose growth will be stunted and whose muscles remain pretty slack.

    In the meantime, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, along with the rest of the one percent, will have billions of dollars from which to feed their own children. Why, they could fly themselves and their kids to Shanghai if they suddenly develop a craving for dim sum!! Then they could fly them right back to the edges of Wall Street for a New York-style bagel, with some cream cheese and lox. The following day, Dimon and Blankfein and their oh-so-fortunate ilk could fly them to Barcelona for some paella or Tel Aviv for some falafel and hummus! 

    There's something very wrong with this picture. Adjusting the volume or the focus won't help. It's the stark contrast between that picture and our founding ideals that's the problem. If "all men are created equal" and "equal justice under law" are realities, and not just oh-so-pretty words, how come one kid can't focus or think fast and another develops a tummy ache from too many pot stickers? How come a young Black man who steals an I-Phone to afford some decent food goes to jail and Dimon or Blankfein, who stole billions of dollars from old people's 401(k)s by their reckless CDO and derivatives gambling fly their families to the Pearl River Delta?

    It's because those who are on top of the societal pyramid care very little if at all for the rest of us who are at its base.

    What's the solution?

    We've got to get enough of us together, from the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, La Raza, the NAACP, NOW, AARP, GLAAD and the hundreds of millions of us who live in the same communities as each other, to gather our figurative pitchforks and our torches, and walk vigorously, with songs of freedom and equality bursting forth from our lungs and larynxes, to the gated neighborhoods of our "betters." Maybe we could liberate a drone and an APC or Humvee or two or three and burst our way into those walled communities.

    What follows will be a reckoning. The walls will come tumbling down, the coffers reluctantly opened and many millions of kids will eat well for maybe the first time in their lives. We'll have upended the pyramid. Those on the bottom will now be on top, and our society's values and practices will radically change. There might be freedom, justice and equal opportunity for all for really the first time in our country's history. The daughters and sons of former slaves will sit down at the table of personhood and plenty with the daughters and sons of former slaveholders.

    There is not "just" chattel slavery. There is economic slavery. It must end and a genuinely new era begin. If we want more, we can have more. There is plenty. It just needs to be apportioned far better than it's been.

     

    Greg King is a labor activist and long-time City of Boston worker. He has been actively engaged in politics since the Vietnam war era.

     

  • AFL-CIO Charts a New Course

    [Originally posted on the Indypendent, Sept. 27, 2013]

    LOS ANGELES — At the time of its merger in 1955, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) represented one third of all American workers. Once called “Big Labor” by critics, it was rightly credited with winning the sorts of concessions that allowed working people to enter into what was identified as a rising and broadening middle class. Today, less than one in eight workers is unionized. Organized labor is no longer “big.” It even borders on the powerless when it comes to reversing soaring levels of inequality and beating back the decades-long corporate attack on its own members’ living standards, let alone being a champion for the rest of the workforce. That’s been the case at least since the 1980s, regardless of which party controlled the White House.

    With the prospect of its own extinction now recognized even by itself, the AFL-CIO — the nation’s largest labor federation, with 57 affiliated unions and 13 million members — gathered in early September for its quadrennial convention in the City of Angels seeking something of a miracle.

    In the weeks and months leading up to the convention, AFL-CIO president and former miners’ leader Richard Trumka emphasized that it was no longer possible for the Federation to continue with business as usual. This once-insular labor federation decided to throw open its doors — announcing that it would aim to organize much of the 89 percent of the U.S. workforce that is not in a labor union and do so in tight, mutually beneficial coordination with non-traditional worker organizations that do not engage in collective bargaining. It pledged to work with movements of feminists, youth, people of color, the LGBTQ community and the lowest paid members of the workforce, who even many of the Federation’s own affiliated unions traditionally ignore.

    Welcome Words

    “The labor movement consists of all workers who want to take collective action to improve wages, hours and working conditions,” reads the key resolution adopted at the convention. “Our unions must be open to all workers who want to join with us.”

    One hopeful observer in attendance, the National Organization for Women’s Terry O’Neill, called the effort “not just transactional, but transformational.”

    Certainly the rhetoric is bracing and welcome. If you go by a strict reading of the resolutions passed, this is a solidly progressive organization ready to speak with brio for all working people and not just its current members and retirees. Calls were made for a smooth transition to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, rejecting the politics of austerity, organizing and acting in solidarity globally with other workers, transforming Obamacare into health care for all, ending mass incarceration, organizing the anti-union South and supporting workers of all sexual preferences.

    It’s come a long way from the cretinous public remarks of former AFL-CIO head George Meany, who in 1972 said that the “Democratic Party had been taken over by people named Jack, who look like Jills and smell like Johns.”

    Hopeful too are the plans to build up state and local labor federations as active community organizations with an eye toward cooperating with militant social movement organizations on their goals as well. One more indication of the changing times: the AFL-CIO no longer calls itself “the” labor movement but a part of the labor movement. Admitting that alone is refreshing.

    The selection of Tefere Gebre, 45, the charismatic, Ethiopian-born leader of the Orange County, Calif. Federation of Labor, as the Federation’s new executive vice president at least symbolizes the change in direction.

    Many Hurdles

    Despite all the positive signs, the effort to revitalize the AFL-CIO faces many hurdles. The largest one is the unremitting hostility of corporate America toward all but the most servile unions. But other challenges flow from the contradictions built into the Federation’s “big tent” structure, which includes more conservative elements such as unions that represent workers in the construction, energy and armaments industries. They hold jobs in the most politically conservative sectors of corporate capitalism, which employ a correspondingly lower proportion of females and people of color — workers that have been most closely touched by the progressive movements of the last four decades.

    Predictably, Trumka’s “y’all come” call is garnering opposition from key elements within the Federation that bridle at being yoked to environmental groups like the Sierra Club, which has opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, coal-fired power plants and more.

    “These groups have no equity with the work,” groused Laborers International Union of North America President Terry O’Sullivan, a vocal supporter of the Keystone XL pipeline, which could create thousands of temporary construction jobs in the Great Plains states where it is slated to be built. “I grew up believing you didn’t get in each other’s way … but these groups are taking food off our table.”

    At this point, the concerns of the AFL-CIO’s “Old Guard” seem overstated. Despite press reports that the Sierra Club and the NAACP are already part of the effort, no pact has been made to bring them on board as affiliated organizations. The only group of national note that can be pointed to is the National Organization for Women. The eight other announced organizations — including Make the Road New York and the Blue Green Alliance (a longstanding coalition of unions and environmentalists chaired by the heads of the Steelworkers Union and the Sierra Club) — suggest only the potential of an inclusive strategy.

    Old Habits

    On political action, myopia still prevails. The Federation’s preference remains for insider politicking over the kind of mass campaigning that has been a hallmark of recent efforts by fast-food and Wal-Mart workers to win a living wage and union representation (see page 15). President Obama, perhaps the worst Democratic chief executive since Woodrow Wilson, sent a lackluster three-minute video message to be played during the Convention and was praised repeatedly for keeping the door open to union lobbyists. Open it is, but not in any way answerable.

    A senior staffer told me that the Federation isn’t looking back much further than the 2010 election debacle or ahead to more than the 2016 election cycle. And while there is some interest in grooming explicitly labor candidates to run in Democratic Party primaries, there will be no jump-starting of insurgent independent campaigns that would challenge officeholders from both parties.

    Sadly, the Federation’s newfound feistiness appears to stop at the proverbial water’s edge. There was a cathedral-like silence hanging over any discussion of the Obama administration’s then-anticipated Syria bombing plans. The AFL-CIO also refused to take a position on the bloated military budget, even tabling a Wisconsin state federation resolution to do so. Rationalizing the silence on military spending, another senior staffer told me that the group’s leaders didn’t want the Obama administration caught in “a pissing contest with the GOP over what to cut in the federal budget.”

    The AFL-CIO wants to reinvent itself, and it should, but too much of the convention had an air of rebranding if not magical thinking. Still, the Federation remains the largest institutional actor on the left, with hundreds of millions of dollars in its war chest and a clear self-interest in forming alliances with movements for social change, in order to turn back the wave of attacks coming not just from the far right but from corporate America, too. Succeeding here means more than talking a better talk; it means artfully putting into practice its stated commitment to social justice unionism for all working people, not just for its own members. It also needs to ensure that its affiliates are on board so that cooperation with allies is transformational and not just a series of tactical, momentary alignments.

    Michael Hirsch blogged daily from the AFL-CIO convention for The Indypendent. He is a longtime labor and political writer. A member of the National Writers Union, he has worked for four unions as a writer and organizer, served on the executive board of two and taught labor education and sociology in Massachusetts, Indiana and New York.

  • Far more than a struggle over pay and pensions: Why the Oct. 1/17 UK teacher strikes matter

                            Both teachers unions and headline-writers seem to agree that the NUT (National Union of Teachers) and NASUWT (National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers) joint strikes that start Tuesday 1 October are over pay and pensions. They’re wrong.

     

                            Yes, the dispute is related to pay and conditions but the real story, missed by the media as well as the unions in their public outreach, NASUWT more so than the NUT, is Gove’s intention to re-organize UK schools in line with “corporate school reform” in the US and policies the World Bank has imposed on Asia and Africa. The World Bank’s goal is to refashion teaching as work, replacing career teachers with a rotating door of minimally-trained, short-lived employees who teach what’s on standardized tests.  Demands of Michael Gove, who heads education, (equivalent of Arne Duncan in the US), advance this same strategy.

     

                As Kenneth Saltman explains in The failure of corporate school reform, Right wing foundations and think tanks supported by the super-wealthy are quite straightforward that they want to replace public education with a privatized national system of schools that compete with one another. When one group of profit-seekers fails, a new school or network will replace it, as occurs with clothing stores or delis. Privatization advocates like this “creative destruction” or “churn,’ which they see as essential for efficiency and innovation. 

     

                            In contrast to the US, the UK and most other countries pay teachers on a uniform national salary schedule.  Gove’s push to end the national pay scale is intended to inject competition into the job market for teachers. Eliminating national pay will give employers who run profit-making schools the freedom to pay teachers as little as possible. It will also inject new inequality in UK schools. Eliminating national pay supports teacher churn, experienced teachers migrating to schools that are higher-paying and whose students are easier to teach, as occurs in the US.  Without national pay requirements, UK schools serving low income students, whose parents cannot supplement the school budget, will end up with the least experienced teachers.

     

                            Gove’s policies mirror the project to transform education globally.  Critics often call these project an “experiment,” but as Saltman demonstrates, their project is driven by ideology, a quasi-religious belief in “free markets,” not empirical evidence.  The reasoning of the wealthy elites who head this project is that since most jobs being created require only minimal education, governments waste valuable money educating workers beyond what they will need.  Minimally educated workers require only teachers who are themselves minimally educated. Teachers with significant education are a liability because they are costly to employ, the largest expense of any school system. Only a small portion of the workforce will be educated for highly-paid jobs that require critical thinking. Therefore, we can make do with “good enough” teachers who are measured and paid based on students’ standardized test scores.

                            The UK’s national pay scale and teacher pensions are barriers to this plan being realized. In striking, NUT and NASUWT are defending teaching as a profession and the dignity of teachers’ work.  The unions are protecting children’s rights to have a quality teacher in every school, a professional who exercises his or her judgment about what each child needs. The upcoming industrial action is a battle over much more than pay and pensions.  The struggle is over the future of the nation.  Let NUT and NASUWT know you support them and that this is a strike for the teaching profession and public education internationally.

                You can tweet support with the hashtag #teacherroar and follow the strike on the NUT website. As I find out more about how you can express solidarity, I’ll blog and tweet this information.   We have to rely on social media because globally the corporate media carry the message of the social engineers. A case in point: The Guardian has some excellent reporting – but not on teachers unions. So share this message.

    Note: I invite reader comments, either on this website or to me directly at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. And you can follow my thoughts on teaching, schools, and education on twitter , Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

     

  • Here's why UK teachers are striking

                            UK teacher Rob Price explains in this FB post why we should care about and support the upcoming joint strikes of the country’s two biggest teachers unions.  (My post tomorrow will discuss why this is a strike over much more than pay and pensions.) You can tweet messages of support to @nutonline with the hashtag #teacherroar.

                                 I work in a beautiful old Victorian school. Every day I climb three flights of stairs to my classroom. Hundreds of members of my profession do this. Here I heft tables around before personally greeting up to a hundred teenage students. At break times and lunch we supervise a busy playground which this government would probably like to turn into housing for foreign investors. We will do this until we are 68, and in the last five years we have taken a 15% pay cut. In the meantime some estimates reckon on 25% of London children not having a school place by 2016; the Local Education Authorities can do nothing, as the government have removed their powers to open new schools and given them to private, non accountable boards. I have witnessed the confusion of parents and teachers alike shut out of the future of schooling; most are too exhausted by their responsibilities to ask where their power went. Meanwhile the UK is sold off to the highest bidder. To all my brothers and sisters here and worldwide: support our strikes.

  • Pope Francis – Where is the Catholic Church Headed?

    In the six months since Jorge Mario Bergoglio, an Argentine cardinal, became Pope Francis, it has become clear—particularly from his recent interview—that he is a reformer who intends to turn the Catholic Church away from some of the rightwing attitudes and elitist style of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI. Through his posture and attitude, Pope Francis is attempting to create a new more positive and open image of the church intended to overcome past scandals involving the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, irregularities at the Vatican Bank, and above all the rigid orthodoxy of his precursor that alienated so many Catholics and others.

    Yet, despite the press play and the public perception, it would be a mistake to think that his reformist rhetoric and positive gestures represent a move toward fundamental change in the Catholic Church. Nor should we think that it will lead to a resurgence of the Theology of Liberation that once flourished in Latin America. Pope Francis is committed to limited reforms intended to make the church more successful in addressing the challenges of contemporary life, not to changing the theology or basic institutions of the church. He is a mild reformer, not a radical innovator, and certainly not a revolutionary, though it is not impossible to imagine that his initiatives might lead the church to more significant reforms than those of any pope since John XXIII convened Vatican II in the 1960s.

    Francis’s rise to pope is in many ways remarkable. His antecedent, Pope Benedict, became the first pope in 600 years to resign, because, “God told me to,” thus making way for Bergoglio. Francis is the first Jesuit pope, the first Latin American pope, and the first pope from the Global South. He has become pope at perilous moment in church history, taking command of an institution shaken by moral and institutional crises and challenged by the accelerating tempo of technological change and post-modern intellectual and cultural fragmentation. He becomes the head of a church challenged by feminism, the gay rights movement, by rival Evangelical churches in Latin America, and by pervasive secular humanism in Europe. He also becomes pope as governments continue to deal with the effects of the greatest world economic crisis since the Great Depression.

    The pope’s liberal and reformist rhetoric alone will have an important impact, but he question is: How much of a reformer is Pope Francis and how will the Church change under his leadership?

    The Son of Immigrants

    Pope Francis’s populist rhetoric owes something to his plebeian origins. He was born on December 17, 1936 in Buenos Aires, the son of Italian immigrant parents, his father an accountant and his mother a housewife. They fled fascism in Italy only to suffer through the Great Depression in Argentina. He attended a Catholic grammar school and a public technical secondary school where he earned a diploma qualifying him to work as a chemical technician, which he did briefly before entering the Immaculate Conception Seminary.

    After a brief flirtation with a young woman, he went off as a Jesuit novice to study humanities in Santiago, Chile. He earned a B.A. in philosophy at a college in Buenos Aires, and subsequently taught literature and psychology in Catholic high schools in different Argentine cities. After he became a priest in 1969, he studied philosophy and theology in Argentina and then finished his education in Spain. Returning to Argentina he quickly rose to become Provincial Superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina in 1973. He continued studies of philosophy and theology in Germany in the 1980s and was named cardinal in 2001.

    In many ways, Pope Francis represents the classical Jesuit, the intellectual and highly educated fighter for the Catholic faith. Originally founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1534, the Society of Jesus, “soldiers of God,” became the shock troops of the counter-reformation, a league of intellectual priests whose job was to counter the arguments of Martin Luther, John Calvin and other protests theologians who had broken from Rome and created independent churches.

    The Jesuits not only fought back against Protestantism in Europe, they also engaged in missionary expeditions to Russia, the Americas and Asia, particularly China. In Latin America they created a virtually independent theocratic and quasi-socialist state in Paraguay and Brazil. Threatening the interests of other Catholic orders the papacy itself, they were suppressed in 1773 and not restored until 1814. The Jesuits returned to the bosom of the Catholic Church chastened, contrite and became Catholic conformists.

    Throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, as the most important teaching order of the Catholic Church, the Jesuits represented religious orthodoxy: monasticism, medieval Thomistic theology, Catholic dogma and rigid personal rules of behavior. When John XXIII convened Vatican II in 1962 and began to reform the church, the Jesuits embraced the new reformed and more popular Catholicism enthusiastically. In Latin America, where the Vatican II reforms led to the development of the radical Theology of Liberation, the Jesuits also became advocates of the new theology’s “preferential option for the poor.”

    Thus, within a few years, the Jesuits moved from the right to the left of the Catholic Church—though still remaining very much Catholics. In the United States, Latin America and parts of Asia over the last forty years one could find the Jesuits involved in progressive popular and labor movements, including putting themselves in harm’s way for the cause. Bergoglio was part of that trend. Though never a radical himself, he was sympathetic to Liberation Theology and focused his work on helping the poor in the Argentine slums.

    A number of years ago, Bergoglio was falsely accused in court and in the press of having cooperated with the Argentine military dictatorship in the kidnapping of two priests who were disappeared and tortured, though in fact he had tried to protect them. As one of the two priests later explained, a colleague of theirs who had become a guerrilla had under interrogation provided their names to the military, leading to their arrest. Bergoglio, he said, had no involvement in the affair.

    Why did the cardinals choose the 76-year-old  Bergoglio to be the new pope? First, he was an outsider untainted by connections to the Vatican and the alleged financial corruption and cover-ups of sexual misconduct. Second, he was from the church’s fastest growing and increasingly important region, the developing world of the southern hemisphere. Third, he was a quietly charismatic man whose modesty and humility represented an apparent antidote to the poisonous atmosphere created by Benedict’s pomp and dogmatism. While the Italian cardinals arrived at the conclave in their Mercedes Benz limousines, he walked across town.

    In his remarks in Italian to the cardinals during their meeting to choose the pope, Cardinal Bergoglio talked about the need for reaching out of the church toward the “peripheries,” a word in Italian suggesting the poor, and he called for a “new evangelizing.” Ultimately he was backed by a coalition of Latin American, African, American, and European cardinals and he proved acceptable even to the conservative “Ratzinger bloc,” that is, the followers of the retiring Pope Benedict XVI. (1) He chose the name “Francis” after Francis of Assisi so long identified with the poor.

    A Popular Pope

    From the moment he was elected, Pope Francis began to create an image altogether different from his predecessor and the long tradition of papal luxury. Instead of living in the sumptuous papal suites, he decided to stay in the rooms of a modestly furnished religious guest house. He also continued to drive his 1984 Renault 4 automobile. Instead of always moving through crowds in the pope-mobile, he gets out of the car and walks among the people. When he received an interesting letter from a young man, he called the man on the phone to thank him and talk with him, and has made similar calls to others. Most important he argued in several informal conversations and then in a lengthy official interview for a different set of priorities for the Catholic Church.

    In the interview, published in English in America: The National Catholic Review, Pope Francis declared that the Church must not be focused on the hierarchy or on the church bureaucracy, and must not be guided by rigid rules, but must instead emphasize the spirituality and salvation through Jesus. The interview makes clear that he admires Pope John XXIII and the Vatican II reforms and places himself in that reformist tradition. He believes that the Church is made up not only of the Pope, the Bishops, but also of all of the people of the Catholic faith. “We should not even think, therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the Church.”

    Pope Francis calls for a new openness, writing, “If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing….Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith become an ideology among others ideologies.” As opposed to such doctrinal rigidity, Pope Francis argues that we must “seek God in every human life,” including those whose lives has been destroyed by vices or drugs.

    The new pope’s idea of the Church is popular, that is, based on the faith of the common people. “I see holiness in the patience of the people of God: a woman who is raising children, a man who works to bring home the bread, the sick, the elderly priests who have so many wounds but a smile on their faces because they served the Lord, the sisters who work hard to live a hidden sanctity.”

    “This Church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal Church to the nest protecting our mediocrity,” says Pope Francis.

    Comparing the Church to a field hospital after battle, the pope says, “It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars. You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds….and you have to start from the ground up. The Church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The importing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you.”

    A Change in Style–or in Substance?

    We see this new rhetoric and style in the pope’s discussion of homosexuality. Pope Francis said on the flight back from his visit to Rio de Janeiro, “If a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.” In the recent interview he elaborates: “A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person.’ We must always consider the person.”

    “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent,” says Pope Francis. “The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently….We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”

    Yet, it is clear that Pope Francis is talking mostly about a change in style not a change in substance. He says, “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in context. The teaching of the Church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the Church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.” [My italics. – DL]

    Pope Francis continues to uphold the Catholic doctrine that homosexual acts, sex outside of heterosexual marriage, the use of contraceptives, and the practice of abortion are all sinful, are prohibited and are condemned by God. Though, it is interesting to note that in Argentina during a debate over the question of marriage rights Cardinal Bergoglio, while opposing gay marriage, supported civil unions. As pope, under pressure from Catholic conservatives, Pope Francis recently condemned abortion.

    The pope is not an advocate of full equality for women in the church. Women, for this pope, have “a different make-up than a man.” He accuses some or what he calls “female machismo,” presumably referring to the aggressive demands of women for equality in the church and in society. For this pope, woman is essential for the Church, but not in roles that would make her the equal of men. On the question of celibacy priests and women religious, a spokesman for the pope says that that is open for discussion. This reflects a realistic and pragmatic outlook intended to address the church’s shrinking number of priests.

    The Pope’s Views of Contemporary Capitalism

    On economic issues, Pope Francis said in a speech in the Vatican, “We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.”

    Pope Francis maintains the Catholic position of supporting capitalism, but calling for economic regulation. As he said, “Ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good.” He continues, “There is a need for financial reform along ethical lines that would produce in its turn an economic reform to benefit everyone,” he said. “Money has to serve, not to rule.”

    This position is fully consistent with Catholic social teaching from Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 to John Paul II’s encyclical Laborum Exercens of 1981 and represents no new or radical departure. The Catholic Church accepts and supports the capitalist system, but calls for a more just sharing of the wealth between the capitalists and the workers; it supports the rights of workers to organize unions in order to win a larger share of the wealth and a working life of greater dignity.

    Will Pope Francis’ reformist rhetoric, populist style and gestures encourage the existing remnant movements of the old Theology of Liberation of the 1970s in Latin America or will they lead to a new religious liberation movement? At present this seems unlikely.

    The Theology of Liberation arose in Latin America, including Mexico, at particular moment, not long after the Cuban Revolution, simultaneousy with the Sino-Soviet split, and not long before as the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, that is, it arose at a time of great social ferment and political upheaval. The Theology of Liberation of the 1970s in several countries, and in particular in Nicaragua, became a kind of Christian socialism, with some priests and many Catholic lay people becoming involved in organizing working class communities, forming labor unions, and even in guerrilla movements and revolutionary upheavals. While the left shift in Latin America—Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, the Kirchners in Argentina—is certainly significant, it is not the same sort of dramatic change as represented by the era of the 1960s and 70s.

    Yet, it is possible that a new generation will take Pope Francis’ reformist rhetoric more seriously than he does himself, creating a new more radical Catholicism. The rise new reformist currents in Catholicism under the impact of the new pope’s rhetoric, should that occur, could help to encourage progressive developments not only in Latin America, but throughout the developing world. Even so, Catholic support for capitalism and its notion of sharing the wealth between capitalist and workers will be a barrier to be overcome by more radical Catholic activists.

    (1) See the excellent article on the choice of the new pope by Stacy Meichtry and Allesandra Galloni, “Fifteen Days in Rome, How the Pope Was Picked,” in The Wall Street Journal.

  • Media, TFA, and the Vietnam War "body counts"

                            During the war in Vietnam, I heard Frank Bardacke (honored recently for his wonderful book on union democracy in the Farmworkers), give a short speech at a rally laying out how all three national TV networks and major newspapers had carried exactly the same analysis of a battle. The coverage publicized the Defense Department’s “body count” –  numbers of combatants and civilians slain on both sides. In doing so the media had propagated the government’s narrative, contested by the anti-war movement, that the US was winning the war without harming civilians.  Fairly simple math showed the numbers couldn’t be accurate, and yet all of the media had reported the figures, without questioning them. Frank observed that the unanimity in coverage couldn’t be explained by lazy reporting. An ideological struggle was occurring and the media had taken the side of those pursuing the war.

                             I was reminded of Frank’s speech and the “body count” phenomenon when I read media coverage of a new study purportedly proving that Teach For America (TFA) recruits do a superior job in boosting students’ math scores on standardized tests.  Media, online and print, have jumped to publicize the US Dept. of Ed. claim that the research is “rigorous” without providing any substantiation of this claim, nor doing what a journalist (as opposed to a PR agent) does, seeking at least one opposing viewpoint.

                            Meanwhile, researchers who are independent of neoliberal and corporate think tanks, as well as the astounding number of foundations  and “centers” they fund, have pointed out the study’s deficiencies as well as its “miniscule” positive effects.  More solid research now disputes TFA's grandiose claims, and more personal narratives are appearing by TFA members who explain why the model is flawed. We should note and take heart at the appearance of a small but growing critique of TFA and corporate ed reform.  Space for this counter-narrative has been created by grassroots agitation among teachers, students, and parents opposed to testing and school closings, seen in its most courageous and consistent form in struggle in Chicago, supported by the Chicago Teachers Union and union reformers, now in their second term as union leaders.

                            At the same time, critical voices are being heard more because damage to children and education is becoming so evident.  While forces and voices of resistance are growing globally, (teacher strikes this past week in Spain’s Balearic Islands, Mexico, and Greece) so is the audacity of our opponents, who are showing in Philadelphia and Detroit (as they did in New Orleans) their real goal is to dismantle public education and disempower (arguably destroy) communities of color.

                            I think the movement is at a new juncture, with promise and danger. In my forthcoming Jacobin review of Diane Ravitch’s book “Reign of Error” I’ll discuss her solutions and mine.

    Note: I invite reader comments, either on this website or to me directly at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. And you can follow my thoughts on teaching, schools, and education on twitter , Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

  • MEXICAN TEACHERS WIN MORAL VICTORY—STRUGGLE CONTINUES

    Since school began again on August 19, tens of thousands of teachers have been engaged in strikes and demonstrations throughout Mexico—including seizing public buildings, highway toll booths, and border crossing stations, occupying public buildings and city plazas, and blocking foreign embassies—actions taken against the Education Reform Law and the new Professional Teaching Law and over local demands linked to wages and working conditions. While these are traditional tactics, these are the largest and most militant teachers’ union demonstrations in Mexican history.

    The National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE), an opposition caucus within the Mexican Teacher Union (el SNTE), leading about 200,000 of the nation’s 1.2 million teachers, appears to have won a moral victory, even if it has not yet succeeded in its goal of  overturning the new laws. As commentators have suggested, he dissident teachers of la CNTE have largely been successful in discrediting and delegitimizing the unilaterally imposed education reforms as well as in moderating their impact through small concessions granted by the government. Yet at the same time, it is not clear where the teachers’ strikes are going. It is not clear how long these strikes and protests can continue without exhausting the teachers and their parent and student supporters if there is not some intermediate goal short of overturning the new education laws.

    The Largest Teacher Protests in Mexican History

    Driven by opposition to the education reforms based on teacher evaluations linked to student performance on tests, the traditional annual protests of tens of thousands of teachers from Oaxaca, Chiapas, and the Federal District (Mexico City)—that have taken place for the last forty years at the beginning of every school year—grew this year to include large numbers of teachers from the states of Michoacán and Veracruz as well as from about 20 other of the country’s 31 entities. Throughout the country teachers received support from some students and parents, from university employees, and from a few independent labor unions.

    For a few hours on September 13, it seemed as if the Oaxaca teachers’ occupation of the zócalo, the national Plaza of the Constitution in the center of Mexico City, might lead to violent repression of the movement. But violence was averted when teachers voluntarily abandoned the zócalo for the Mexican Independence Day celebrations. Still, the teachers’ demonstrations continue in Mexico City, choosing new targets—public spaces, private corporations, foreign governments—every day.

    Yet, while the teachers have won a moral victory, the entrenched political system they have been fighting for four decades, as well as the recent reforms that threaten their employment security, continue in place. President Enrique Peña Nieto’s Education Reform and the Professional Teaching Law remain in place, the president’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) continues to have a plurality in both houses of Congress (a majority with its small satellite parties); the president, of course, controls the federal Secretary of Public Education; and the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) remains loyal to the PRI-government. While the protest demonstrations by approximately one-sixth of the teachers have been spectacular, they have not succeeded in having the national political impact that the teachers desire.

    As the teachers have been engaged in these impressive nationwide strikes and protest demonstrations, no other section of the labor movement has gone into motion either over its own issues or in sympathy and solidarity with the teachers. Controlled by the churros, the labor bureaucracy loyal to the PRI and to the government, both public sector and private sector workers have quietly gone about their work. Surprisingly, not even a single section of the public sector workers has rallied to the teachers’ union’s call for opposition to Peña Nieto and the PRI.

    The teachers remain engaged in an impressive and at times spectacular struggle, but it is one taking place in relative isolation form the rest of the labor movement which remains inert. While the dissidents remain a minority within the teachers union—even if an impressively large minority—and while the rest of the labor movement remains quiescent, there appears to be little chance of the teachers’ forcing the government to backtrack on its education policy. 

  • Is the Tea Party Taking the Government Hostage?

    That is the affirmative  conclusion one might reasonably come to by listening to the Democrats and their MSNBC and Nation magazine echo chambers. Far right monies bundled together by conservative “social welfare” groups are said to be defying a hapless public powerless to thwart the House Republicans from exercising veto power over the budget process, in their effort to impose more austerity and defund the Affordable Care Act.

    Yet this is a very curious hostage taking. The budgetary victim is not exactly chained to some metaphorical basement pipe; and the front door, rear door and all the widows of this kidnapping enclave have been left wide open and unguarded. The Democrats need only take the hostage by the hand and lead the way through any of the myriad points of egress. Their abject failure to do so, to even suggest that it can be done, testifies to the unlikely suspicion that the Democratic establishment are utter fools or, more likely, willing accomplices to the entire process with their own distinct ruling class agenda that this entire drama plays into. Meanwhile its media amen corner tirelessly gins up outrage from a complacent and resigned public.

    How the Democrats relish sharing their concocted nightmare about the “full faith and credit” of the United States being at stake. Who, they ask, will fund the government, if the state defaults on its obligations? The liberal commentariat continues to play into that cracker barrel wisdom so supportive of ruling class interests – and so erroneous – that links public financing to the elite tax base and good graces of party donors, who, if betrayed, may let the entire fiscal scaffolding collapse around them. Oh the horror of what the teabot nutwing is foisting on this teetering economy!

    Back on planet earth, however, the debt ceiling is both a functional anachronism — a vestige of a time in which the dollar was linked to gold — and an economic MacGuffin. Since Nixon severed the link, the dollar has been a fiat money created at will by the state. The state crowds out every other form of money, including precious metals, by the simple fact that it enforces payment of taxes in its own currency and only in its own tender. Taxing doesn’t “finance” state operations; it suppresses private demand so that real resources may be shifted from the private sector to the public sphere. The Fed engages in buying and selling treasure bills, “debt instruments,” to regulate interest rates in the private sector, and thereby expand or contract the scope of private sector borrowing and lending.

    The government budget requires outlays to the private sector triggering the treasury to write checks against its “account” with the Federal Reserve. The Fed, in turn, credits private bank accounts to satisfy the contractual obligations of the state. It effectively creates this money ex nihilo.  At no point does the private sector “fund” the state.  By law, the state reconciles its internal accounts with the Fed by levying taxes and, where this falls short, by “borrowing” back a part of the monies it itself – through the Fed — injected into the private sector. It swaps out a noninterest bearing vehicle  — money — for an interest-yielding asset — treasury bills. This is a bookkeeping operation. Functionally, the capitalist state could dispose of the entire process as long as there are idle productive assets, were it not for its episodic and rare need to suppress inflationary pressures through taxation and to prevent the cost of private sector borrowing being reduced to zero, where it would otherwise settle given that state money, unlike gold, is a freely expandable “instrument.”

    All of which brings us back to how the Democrats could, were they so motivated, circumvent the entire budgetary debt limit and spending crisis that the Republicans have imposed on the state. The key to ending this hostage crisis is to locate legal means of augmenting state spending that does not incur additional debt obligations. And these exist or can be created even within an existing legal framework that exercises prior restraint on the operations of fiat money. Perhaps the most obvious means, and one that Tea Party darling Ron Paul once even endorsed, is having the Fed’s holding of treasuries negated. The Fed currently holds $2 trillion in government bonds, which, if cancelled would free sufficient spending power to circumvent the entire process.

    Another means is for the state to finance its spending in excess of taxes by issuing “perpetual bonds” known as consols. These are not redeemable, but issue a steady stream of interest in perpetuity. Because the principle is never paid off, they do not add to the accumulation of state debt. There is nothing new here. The British used these instruments to pay off debts incurred to finance the Napoleonic Wars.

    Jack Balkin, a professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School, has proposed that the state could “sell the Federal Reserve an option to purchase government property for $2 trillion. The Fed would then credit the proceeds to the government’s checking account. Once Congress lifts the debt ceiling, the president could buy back the option for a dollar, or the option could simply expire in 90 days.”

    Then of course, the President, a constitutional lawyer himself, might have mobilized the Justice Department to challenge the debt ceiling by invoking the authority of the 14th Amendment, which ostensibly renders contractual obligations of the federal government legally inviolable.

    The point is this. The Democrats have no desire to challenge, much less supplant a budgetary process that legally tethers the state to the constraints of an outmoded and functionally superfluous appropriations process. To do otherwise would open the possibility that an informed electorate could demand a breadth and sweep of services and public goods that undermines social discipline, impedes profitability and threatens the system’s legitimacy.

    As it plays out, the Democrats are using this crisis to burnish their reputations as the ruling class’s good cop, while evading responsibility, demonizing the Republicans, and selling their softer version of austerity — of clawing back public resources to the private accumulation process — as the more reasonable and measured alternative.

    It is a cynical game and one the left should internalize when next we are urged to engage with the Democratic Party as a meaningful alternative to Republican neanderthalism.

     

  • Remembering Marshall Berman

    Marshall BermanThe death of Marshall Berman—City University of New York political theory professor, author of books including the seminal All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Dissent editorial board member, and one-time professor of mine—caught me quite by surprise, as I’m sure it did many.  I’d last seen him in person at a Dissent holiday party and last talked to him on the phone some months ago.  Although, in all honesty, Marshall never looked to me like he was ever in the best of physical health, it never occurred to me that he was “due” for a heart attack. That he’s now gone is something that my mind has yet to fully accept.

    Marshall’s death has led to eloquent tributes, none of which I can hope to “compete with.” Aside from various online articles, including one on the Marxist art critic Meyer Schapiro which appeared in the first issue of New Politics that I ever read, the only book by Marshall that I ever read was All That Is Solid—which, of course, is brilliant, and about which I have nothing uniquely insightful to add. Further, I only ever took one course with him, in the Fall of 2001 (and, yes, the class was made more interesting—for want of a better word—after the 9/11 massacre, which makes Marshall’s passing on 9/11/2013 all the stranger for me). The class was on Modernism and Post-Modernism, and my final paper for it, slightly altered, ultimately found its way into the pages of Jacobin, ten years or so later. So I suppose I should belatedly again thank Marshall for that.

    I attended Marshall’s funeral on September 14.  Had I given the matter a moment’s thought I would have expected it to be as overcrowded as it was. Various people whom I had expected to see there did show up, but I was pleasantly surprised to see and hear Robert Christgau, self-proclaimed “Dean of American Rock Critics” and whose no-longer-published Consumer Guide for the Village Voice I started reading in high school, offer a moving remembrance.  I had forgotten that they were good friends and shared cultural tastes.

    And this was what I loved most about Marshall—his aesthetics.  Yes, we had Marxism in common, but it’s not as if many Marxists of Marshall’s vintage could speak about my favorite hip-hop acts (Public Enemy, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest) in an informed way, or even do so at all.  We both loved comics writer Harvey Pekar, also gone too soon.  And we both loved New York, although of course he loved it in a much more personal and knowledgeable way than I—he born of the South Bronx and living in the Upper West Side, me a transplant from the NYC suburb otherwise known as Stamford, Connecticut.

    In retrospect, I wish that Marshall and I had talked more—about music, about New York, about the state of the Left at home and abroad, about Judaism (I go to services under duress—Marshall went with enthusiasm), about any number of other matters.  Like so many others who were touched by him and his work, I miss him.

    R.I.P., comrade.

     

  • Stalin, the Soviet science wars, and “junk science” selling marketizing of education

                         One of the most glaring contradictions in policies being foisted on public schools (charter schools are generally exempt from these regulations) is that research on which they are based is fundamentally flawed. Ethan Pollock’s examination of “Stalin and the Soviet science wars” (Princeton University Press, 2006) teases out the complex relationship between science and ideology. The book provides a window on why research produced at the World Bank, the nerve center of the global project that aims to marketize education and convert teaching to contract labor, (to use a non-scientific term), stinks.

                            Pollock analyzes Stalin’s personal interventions in scientific debates and the shifting modus vivendi in which the Party both supported scientific research and attempted to control its conclusions. We do not (yet?) have a figure or body that directs educational researchers on what their conclusions should be, which Pollock explains Stalin did as  “the coryphaeus of science” (leader of the chorus, with Soviets scientists singing “in rhythm to the commanding movements of his baton”). At the same time, educational research has become chillingly captive to ideology, as it was during the Cold War. Neoliberal assumptions currently drive both the premises of research at the World Bank (WB) and its conclusions.

                          Elaborate speculation, often based on data the researchers acknowledge is inconclusive or tangential, is used to force privatization and deprofessionalization of teaching on countries who want aid. Vouchers, for example, have been favored by the WB for years. Typical of the research supporting vouchers is the study conducted by Harvard economist, Michael Kremer, who evaluated the worthiness of a scheme (the study's poor construction doesn't make it worthy of the label "experiment") in Colombia by examining the projected incomes students who won a lottery for vouchers to attend private schools. The study never questions the predictive reliability of the income projections, which assume that Colombians will face the same job market and economy in a decade. The study assumes a study based on 300 students (that is, at its start, by completion the size had dropped) is large enough to drive a nation’s education policy. Nor does Kremer's study explore implications of his finding that voucher payments did not keep pace with increases in school tuition, which caused some students to drop out of the program. 

                            However, the most significant  flaw in the evaluation is his acknowledgment that pupils left behind in public schools may have been hurt by the departure of motivated classmates for private schools, a factor that his study cannot measure. Yet, Kremer concludes this negative effect can be ignored because the positive effects for winners of the lottery are so “clear cut.” While this is the kind of logic the pharmaceutical industry uses to pursue drug approvals, we still require medical researchers to address possible negative effects of treatments. That should be the standard we demand of research used to support privatization.

                            Pollock notes that during the 1920s the sciences were relatively free from Bolshevik intervention. Lenin defended “bourgeois technical experts” and the contribution bourgeois scientists could make to the society and state. Lenin would have rejected the kind of research conducted by the WB as ideologically driven, harmful to the nation’s future. What we’re seeing isn’t just “junk science.” It’s science used to endorse social engineering to put profits first.

                            Note: I invite reader comments, either on this website or to me directly at drweinerlo@gmail.com.  Is there a subject you want me to tackle? Let me know. And you can follow my thoughts on teaching, schools, and education on twitter , Facebook, as well as my blog here at New Politics.

  • Urgent Action: Colombia

    Update 9/14/13: There is now a petition available here!

    Ricardo Esquivia, the Colombian human rights and peace activist whose work is world reknowned and whom we interviewed in the pages of the last issue of New Politics has been targeted and threatened with death on the false accusation of being an organizer for the FARC guerrillas. We urge you to read the information from Lillian Hall of Sembrandopaz below and to take action that could save his life and the lives of those with whom he works closely. 

    Sembrandopaz works for social justice, integral human development, peace and reconciliation. It is a community that respects human dignity and creatively transforms itself into a restorative space through the pedagogic education of learning through doing, based on non-violence, spirituality, solidarity, dialogue, democracy. and respect towards the environment, seeking to generate wealth through the integral development of people so that they can contribute to a more just and happy society.

    Subject: political persecution of Ricardo Esquivia and community leaders in Colombia happening NOW

    Some background:

    Political persecution in Colombia happening NOW: Ricardo Esquivia, and community leaders of the peace movement that we at Sembrandopaz have been accompanying and nurturing in the Alta Montana of Montes de Maria on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia are under attack. Ricardo is being targeted by Colombian military intelligence for supposedly being a FARC leader who is organizing peasants in our area of Montes de Maria for an eventual return of the FARC. At the same time, several of the peasant leaders we accompany, and with whom we did the April peace march, have received written death threats. Four days ago, one was arrested on trumped up charges of homicide, extortion, criminal conspiracy and other serious (and unfounded) charges. And Immigration opened investigations on two of our Mennonite accompaniers two months ago to see if they are violating their religious visas by participating in peace marches. We now see that these are not isolated incidents, but in fact part of a coordinated plan to isolate Ricardo and the community leaders and decapitate this grassroots peace movement. (You can find out more on Sembrandopaz' facebook page).

    Having the Colombian military against you is serious business and we need your help!

    The military colonel who is behind this (according to our contact) apparently said: ´Ricardo Esquivia is an old guerrilla who we have not been able to capture for lack of proof, but we are going to get him- and the gringas who accompany him´.

    In the style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a native of this area, we are calling it “The Chronicle of an Announced Detention” as everything our contact forewarned us of is, in fact, happening in the order predicted.

    We are convinced that this is a real threat to Ricardo, our community leaders, and the peace movement we have been accompanying and nurturing in the Alta Montana of Montes de Maria on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia.

    Yesterday we videotaped our source spelling out the military plan to arrest Ricardo and some of the community leaders in order to dismantle this peace movement of formerly displaced peasants who have been victims of this conflict by the different armed actors in Colombia. In a country where civil protests are often violent, this peasant movement, commited to non-violence is a shining light that the Colombian officials should be grateful for. It is a sad commentary that, instead, they hope to crush it.

    We are asking that people contact:

    • their ambassadors in Colombia
    • the Colombian ambassador in their country
    • the State Dept or its equivalent in their country (who should then, in turn, order their ambassadors to pressure the Colombian authorities)
    • human rights organizations
    • and these Colombian officials (in order Juan Manuel Santos, President of the Republic, Eduardo Montealegre, General Attorney, Andres Villamizar, National Protection Unit, Juan Carlos Pinzon, Minister of Defense)

    Juan Manuel Santos Calderón
    Presidente de la República
    Carrera 8 No. 7 -26, Palacio de Nariño, Bogotá, D.C.
    Fax: (+57 1) 596 0631
    E-mail: buzon1@presidencia.gov.co

    Eduardo Montealegre
    Fiscal General de la Nación
    Diagonal 22B No. 52-01, Bogotá, D.C.
    Fax: (+57 1) 570 20 00 Ext 1113; (+57 1) 414 90 00
    Email: luis.montealegre@fiscalia.gov.co, contacto@fiscalia.gov.co,  denuncie@fiscalia.gov.co, ricardo.gonzalez@fiscalia.gov.co

    Andrés Villamizar, Director, Unidad Nacional de Protección
    Dirección de correspondencia: Avenida Calle 26 No. 59-41/65 Bogotá D.C. Colombia
    PBX: (+57 1)426 9800
    Email: andres.villamizar@mininterior.gov.co
    twitter: @villamizar

    Juan Carlos Pinzón Bueno
    Ministro de Defensa
    Avenida El Dorado con Carrera 52, CAN, Bogotá D.C.
    Tel: (+57 1) 222 1874,  (+57 1) 315 0111 Ext 3301, (+57 1) 266 1003

    Demanding the following:

    • the immediate and complete protection of the lives and well-being of Ricardo Esquivia Ballestas, Jorge Luis Montes Hernandez and the other peasant leaders of the Alta Montaña of Montes de Maria, and the staff and volunteers of the Asociacion Sembrando Semillas de Paz, 'Sembrandopaz'.
    • the release of Jorge Luis Montes Hernandez from the maximum security prison where he is being held without concrete evidence in what is clearly an attempt to decapitate this peasant movement.
    • an immediate investigation into the current political and religious persecution of Ricardo, the leaders, and others which has been seen in the form of written death threats to the community leaders, the capture of Jorge Luis Montes Hernandez on trumped-up charges, and the plot to arrest Ricardo Esquivia Ballestas for allegedly being a guerrilla leader in this region.
    • a face-to-face dialogue with the perpetrators of this persecution to put an end to these false allegations.
    • a cessation of harassment against foreign volunteers of the Mennonite Church working with Sembrandopaz as part of their faith as members of a historic peace church.

    Given that today is Friday, we would like personal letters to go to these officials before the start of the weekend. At this point, things can change at a moment's notice and we are very concerned for not only Ricardo, Jorge and the other leaders, but for the courageous person, who we cannot name publicly, who at great personal risk confided this nefarious plan to Ricardo and others.

    I am profoundly moved by this person's valor and love and respect for Ricardo.

    And I am profoundly grateful for all of you whose solidarity I know we can count on.

    peace and light,
    Lillian Hall
    Sembrandopaz
    Sincelejo, Colombia