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  • Sanders and Black Lives Matter: The Great Debate of Our Time

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    For the first time in decades a great debate about the priorities and the program of the American people is taking place not among small groups of leftists but in society at large. The debate between Sanders and Black Lives Matter—on social media, on TV and radio, in the newspapers, and on the street—is one of the most important discussions of our time and could if it is deepened help us all to find a way forward against both capitalism and racism. What appears to some only as conflict could lead to the construction of a new analysis and lay the basis for a new and broader social movement. We should all become involved in this debate and help to further it toward the common goal of a society of equality, democracy, and solidarity.

    While many people on the left—both Sanders supporters and BLM activists—have sometimes seen this confrontation of opinions as conflict alone, it is in reality a progressive development, even if also sometimes painful experience, out of which could come a common understanding of a need for both economic and racial justice in America. The debate is only beginning and we have a long way to go, but how we interpret and approach this most important discussion could well influence its outcome. We should view this new national discussion as a positive development. We should support Black Lives Matter in pressing Sanders, while at the same time embracing the Sanders’ supporters who oppose economic inequality. And the debate remains incomplete until Sanders supporters also decide challenge him to change his position on the U.S. military, U.S. foreign policy, and Israel. We should work to bring this critique into the debate.

    Remember Where We Were Five Years Ago

    What has happened already is really remarkable. Think where we were five years ago when the Tea Party dominated the political conversation until Occupy Wall Street drove it off the scene, turning our national discussion. Then Bernie Sanders, for years the independent and self-styled socialist from Vermont, decided to run for president as a Democrat on a program aimed to fight economic inequality and the role of money in politics. He also addressed the environmental catastrophe and the status of women in America. His demand for higher wages, for free public education, and for universal health care represent a challenge to the Republicans and to the Democrats who have spent the last few decades shredding social programs and subsidizing the corporations and demanding austerity. Hundreds of thousands of people around the country responded to Sanders’ campaign turning out in massive numbers for rallies and house meetings and providing in small, individual donations, millions of dollars to finance his campaign.

    But at first he had little to say to African Americans, though the Black Lives Matter movement, a phenomenon much like Occupy, had begun only a few months before. The Black Lives Matter movement as we all remember began about a year ago after the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The pain and anger of those and several other police killings fueled a powerful new Black liberation movement. Black Lives Matter set out to challenge America’s institutional racism, particularly in the legal system, the courts and the police. But Black Lives Matter activists also spoke out against institutional racism in housing, education, and health care.

    When Sanders launched his campaign, Black Lives Matter began to challenge him because his political program had virtually nothing to say about racism in American society. Black Lives Matter disrupted Sanders’ rallies on two occasions, insisting that he and his supporters recognize the significance of racism in American society and speak to it. Sanders, who had been a member of CORE and SNCC and who had one of the most progressive voting records on civil rights issues, responded positively to the challenge of Black Lives Matter by publishing a racial justice platform that speaks to the issues raised by Black Lives Matter.

    The Sanders campaign and Black Lives Matter are now engaged in one of the most important debates about political movements and social program in modern American history. There has been nothing like this either in terms of the national scope or the depth of the discussion since the early 1970s. We have had social movements, but no really significant discussion about the future of our country for over 50 years. Neither Sanders nor Black Lives Matter has so far produced a political program for the American people, but now in their debate–which is taking place among millions of working class Americans of all races–this clash of ideas could begin create a program for all of us: economic equality, gender equality, and racial justice.

    The confrontations have sometimes been painful for both sides as Black Lives Matter activists felt that they had to shout to be heard, even by the left, and some Sanders supporters went on the defensive while others felt that their candidate should move more quickly to recognize his problem in dealing with the new civil rights movement and deal with it. Some, apparently including Sanders, would like to shutdown the Black Lives Matter interruptions of his rallies, as indicated by the Sanders’ campaign’s development of a new chant to drown out protestors. Hillary Clinton’s security guards kept Black Lives Matter activists from interrupting one her rallies, though afterwards she shrewdly attempted to charm a group of the Black activists in a private meeting. These attempts to stop or to attenuate the debate will surely fail. The debate will continue until not only the candidates and their parties but most American people recognize our society’s racist character—which is to say the debate will go on until we sweep this social system away.

    This debate is limited by the fact that it is taking place around Sanders’ primary campaign in the Democratic Party, a party that represents the American corporations and the capitalist system, a party that can never resolve the issues of economic inequality, racism, militarism and imperialism. We have to say that to Sanders too, demanding that he break his promise to support the Democratic Party nominee, most likely Hillary Clinton, if and when he loses in the primary. We will only ultimately make progress when we fight free of the Democratic Party. Still, this debate presents, the movements for social justice and the American people at large a wonderful opportunity to think through the program needed by our society and particularly by its working people, women, African Americans and Latinos, and other people who suffer discrimination.

    Interestingly, while Sanders is a Democratic candidate, this debate is not taking place principally within the Democratic Party (though it is having some impact there) but rather among leftists, among social movement activists, among rank-and-file union members, and in the American public at large. The other Democratic Party candidates will be forced to take up both the economic and racial issues—though we should have no hope that they will actually do much about them, certainly not while there is no mass movement pressuring them. Our job should be to take this discussion into our workplaces, social meeting places, schools and colleges, and places of worship. We want all Americans involved in this debate.

    Division or the Struggle for Unity

    Arun Gupta has argued that the Sanders campaign is leading to divisions in the movement, and drawing people toward the elite and away from the movement. Gupta apparently sees only division and no possibility of reconciliation and eventual unity between those who have emphasized economic programs and those who have prioritized the fight against racism. Yet, we could be witnessing the beginnings of a synthesis of these different points of view and of the movements they have historically represented—labor and the Black and Latino movements principally.

    Once has, of course, to be realistic about this. The debate between Sanders and Black Lives Matter will not be able in several months to overcome hundreds of years of both institutional racism and widespread racist attitudes and behavior. Overcoming the long, exploitive and violent history of racism in America will require a powerful social movement, new social policies, and radical, fundamental change in American society. The Sanders campaign in the corporate-dominated Democratic Party is not the ideal interlocutor in this debate. And the young Black Lives Matter movement has yet to cohere into a national organization with its own recognized leadership and program that might put forward a more systematic analysis and program. Nevertheless, both sides have put forward clear enough positions and the debate as we have it represents a tremendous step up in American politics.

    We should be contributing to the debate to push it forward. As many of the left have suggested, this is still not sufficient. Sanders need to take a position against U.S. militarism and imperialism and to break with support of Israel. Most important, we should approach this debate positively. We may be at the beginning of building a new movement that combines the fight for greater economic equality with the demand for racial justice, perhaps a movement for socialism.

  • Puerto Rico and the Philippine Example

    ImageIn a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Nelson Denis describes the horrendous economic situation in Puerto Rico and compellingly shows the source of the problem to be the continuing colonial exploitation of the island by the U.S. government acting on behalf of key U.S. corporate interests. The long-term solution, says Denis, is independence. Puerto Ricans needn't be afraid of breaking from the United States, he reassuringly advises:

    A gradual transition to independence (like that of the Philippines in 1946) would allow both island and mainland to adjust to a sovereign and self-sustaining Republic of Puerto Rico. It is the only way to end this colonial tragedy.

    The Philippine example, however, is one that should be used by social justice activists with considerable caution. Two points in particular should be kept in mind. First, although the Philippines became formally independent on July 4, 1946, U.S. economic and military domination remained. Second, the immigration situation with the Philippines is very different from what it is with Puerto Rico.  

    Trade relations between the United States and the Philippines were governed by the 1946 Philippine Trade Agreement that specified that

    1. U.S. exports would be admitted into the Philippines duty-free, with no limitation on quantity, for a period of 8 years. Then the tariffs would be incrementally increased over the next quarter century until at the end the full duty was being paid. Philippine exports to the United States would follow the same pattern, except that there would be absolute quotas — a limitation on the amount that could enter the United States whether paying full duty or not — sugar and other major Philippine exports. Given that the Philippines had been devastated during World War II and that the United States had emerged from the war with the strongest economy in the world, justice would have demanded that Philippine exports receive more preference than U.S. exports; but the opposite was the case.
    2. If the U.S. president determined that any Philippine export was coming into competition with U.S. products, the president could unilaterally impose a quota on it. No comparable authority was given the Philippine president.
    3. The Philippines was prohibited from imposing export taxes; the United States was similarly prohibited, but this was already prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.
    4. The Philippines was prohibited from changing the value of its currency relative to the dollar or imposing any restrictions on the transfer of funds from the Philippines to the United States, except by agreement with the U.S. president.
    5. The existing Philippine constitution had provided that operation of public utilities and ownership of natural resources be restricted to firms that were at least 60 percent Filipino-owned. Now the "parity" provision of the trade agreement required the Philippines to amend its constitution so that American citizens and companies had the same rights as Filipinos. This gave U.S. corporations rights in the Philippines that corporations of no other country had.
    6. The U.S. president had the authority to suspend all or part of the Trade Act if he or she found that the Philippines was "in any manner" discriminating against U.S. citizens or business enterprises.

    The Philippines agreed to this trade agreement, but under duress. If the parity provision were not accepted, war damage payments would be sharply limited. (During the war, U.S. officials had promised rehabilitation aid. The Philippines had suffered terrible destruction during World War II, with Manila the most completely devastated capital city in the world after Warsaw, and much of the damage had been caused by the U.S. military in its reconquest of the islands from the Japanese.). But even then, the parity provision would not have made it through the Philippine Congress but for the fact that nationalists and leftists were ousted from the legislature.

    U.S. military interests in the Philippines continued and were expanded after independence. The United States acquired the huge Clark Air Base, Subic Naval Base, and numerous other facilities for 99 years, rent-free. These bases were not for protecting the Philippines from foreign threat — U.S. officials knew that there was no such threat — but for projecting U.S. power into Asia. (These bases played a major logistical role in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.) In return, the Philippine elite received military aid and military advisers that were designed to protect the elite from the radical and impoverished peasantry.

    Over the years, the terms of these agreements were modified in various ways to mollify nationalist criticisms. Sometimes cosmetic changes were made (e.g., parity was made reciprocal, so that Washington could not discriminate against the negligible Philippine investment in the United States) and sometimes the changes enhanced U.S. privileges (e.g., parity was extended to cover not just public utilities and natural resources, but all business activity). But the basic pattern of the neocolonial relationship remained: despite formal independence, U.S. elites were able to maintain their economic and military interests by forming an alliance with the Philippine elite at the expense of the well-being of the Philippine people.

    So what happened to the Philippines in 1946 should hardly be considered a model for what one would like to see happen to Puerto Rico.

    The second thing to note about the Philippine experience is that its formal independence was so much easier than would be the case with Puerto Rico. In 1934, there were some 150,000 Filipinos in the United States — most of these in Hawaii, which wasn't a state at the time — compared to a population in the Philippines of 14 million. In that year the U.S. Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act providing for the independence of the colony after a 10-year Commonwealth period. But the Act specified that during the Commonwealth period only 50 Filipinos would be allowed to enter the United States as immigrants per year. (The motives for the passage of this Act included some anti-colonial sentiment, along with the desire to keep out Philippine competition to American agricultural products and the desire to keep out Filipinos, against whose presence there had been race riots on the West Coast.) So in 1946, the number of Filipinos in the U.S. was quite small compared to the population of either the Philippines or the United States. And, given the distance involved, those who had left the Philippines generally did so on a permanent basis.

    In the case of Puerto Rico, on the other hand, the island's population today (3.4 million) is actually a bit smaller than the number of Puerto Ricans living in the United States (3.6 million). And many of these people have ties and lives in both jurisdictions, often moving back and forth as economic conditions change. Thus whereas a clean break between the Philippines and the United States in 1946 caused little dislocation to individual Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, for Puerto Rico today any break with Washington would have to address the complications of many Puerto Ricans having connections to both the mainland and Puerto Rico. Would the United States grant dual citizenship to all those living in an independent Puerto Rico? To their descendants? Would an independent Puerto Rico want all its citizens to also be citizens of the United States? These problems are not insoluble, but any advocacy of independence for Puerto Rico needs to seriously engage with them, and these problems did not exist in the Philippine case.

    In the modern world, global capitalism makes sovereignty a rather contested notion, especially for small countries. Is sovereignty the path to social justice? Is it even possible? Can a country like Greece make it on its own, apart from the European Union? These are questions that the Puerto Rican left, and the international left more generally, will have to confront, questions that the Philippine experience of 1946 does not help us answer.   

     

    Stephen R. Shalom is on the editorial board of New Politics. He is the author of The United States and the Philippines: A Study of Neocolonialism (1981) and co-editor of The Philippines Reader (1987).

  • Ecuador’s New Indigenous Uprising

    Ecuador’s Indigenous movements have launched an uprising to challenge the government’s opposition to bilingual education and its support for an extractive-based economy.

    On August 2, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) began a march from the southeastern Amazonian province of Zamora Chinchipe that will arrive in the capital city of Quito on August 13. Upon its arrival, the Indigenous march will join a general strike called by the Workers United Front (FUT) in opposition to the government’s labor policies.

    The CONAIE march and FUT strike are separate actions from conservative protests that the wealthy and previously dominant oligarchy organized in June 2015 against proposed increases in inheritance and capital gains taxes. In that situation, Ecuador’s leftist president Rafael Correa backed down in the face of the right wing’s defense of their class interests, and called for dialogue rather than protest.

    The CONAIE declared that during his almost decade in power Correa had never shown an interest in talking to them and that the time for dialogue was past. Rather, they said it was time for action.

    Correa has denounced the Indigenous uprising and general strike as an attempt to destabilize his government. The activists deny that this is their intent, but instead claim that their goal is to make the government more responsive to social movement demands.

    Although politics can make strange bedfellows and introduce opportunistic alliances, for the most part the left and right opposition to Correa’s government follow different strategies and seek different goals.

    Some conservatives have made open calls for a coup against Correa. Any such extra-constitutional move against the president is unlikely to succeed without the military’s support. At present it appears that the army prefers the social gains and stability of Correa’s government to the disruptions that a conservative government would introduce.

    The left opposition to Correa, on the other hand, appeals to the government to implement the promises of the progressive 2008 constitution to defend the rights of nature and the plurinational nature of the Ecuadorian state. These are not demands that appeal to conservatives.

    Some radicals accuse Correa of governing as a conservative, and of defending entrenched economic interests. They would like to replace him with a true leftist, and have run candidates against him in presidential elections. In most cases, principled leftists refuse to ally with conservatives and do not want to return to previous neoliberal governments.

    Moderates in Ecuador, as well as Correa’s international supporters, contend that the global capitalist order constrains the Ecuadorian government from taking more radical action. Correa’s supporters argue that if he attempted to implement the left’s political agenda it would destabilize the country and threaten to undo the dramatic socio-economic gains of the last ten years.

    A history of protest
    In the 1980s, the FUT organized a series of powerful general strikes against conservative governments that implemented neoliberal economic policies that shifted public resources from the poor to the wealthy. In 1990, the CONAIE brought the country to its knees with a powerful uprising in support of rural land demands.

    In the 1990s, the CONAIE emerged at the head of well-organized social movements that removed a series of unpopular conservative governments from power. One of the CONAIE’s most significant gains was control over the country’s bilingual education programs, an agreement that the Correa administration later rolled back.

    Social movement protests created political space that Correa used to win election as president in 2006. Correa quickly had a falling out with the CONAIE over the question of whether the executive or social movements should define the policies that the government would implement.

    In office, Correa overturned previous neoliberal economic policies as he shifted significant resources to previously marginalized and impoverished sectors of society. Dramatic increases in social spending significantly lowered poverty and inequality rates, and increased access to social services. His success earned him the highest approval ratings of any chief executive in the Americas and repeated reelection to office.

    Social movement activists complain that Correa’s success has been due to a continued reliance on extractive industries, in particular petroleum and gold mining, to fund social programs. Such policies, according to the activists, harm the environment and require vast amounts of water that would otherwise be used to meet human needs. In addition, the extractive policies fail to break from a capitalist mode of production.

    Since Correa took office almost ten years ago, the CONAIE has organized a series of protests against extractive enterprises and in support of water rights. The current march departed from an area that has been the site of intense protests over gold mining. Over the past year, the FUT has also organized a series of strikes against Correa’s proposed revisions to the sacrosanct 1938 labor code. None of these actions, however, has gained the size or public presence of previous protests in the 1980s and 1990s.

    Divisions
    Correa claims that the CONAIE does not speak for the majority of the Indigenous masses in Ecuador, and instead has allied with discredited conservative politicians against his leftist government. In reality, Indigenous movements are rent with divisions that have always been present, both within the movement and between the bases and their leaders. It is a mistake to think that Indigenous communities, as with any group of people, would speak with a single voice.

    Even in the 1990s when the CONAIE held a dominant position in social movement organizing, despite its best intent it never gained a hegemonic voice. Rather, the CONAIE leaders generally staked out a center-left position generally associated with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and liberation theology influences in the Catholic Church.

    The CONAIE occasionally collaborated and sometimes competed with three other Indigenous organizations. The Ecuadorian Federation of Indians (FEI) is the oldest federation and worked closely with the communist party. The National Confederation of Peasant, Indigenous, and Negro Organizations (FENOCIN) was identified as a more “peasant” organization associated with the socialist party. The Council of Indigenous Evangelical Peoples and Organizations (FEINE) often takes more conservative positions in line with its religious orientation, but also has collaborated with the other Indigenous federations around common economic interests.

    On occasion Correa turns to other federations, in particular the FEI and the FENOCIN, to claim that Indigenous communities support his policies. Correa has also attempted to create new organizations with dissidents from the CONAIE, a strategy that previous conservative governments also implemented in an attempt to undermine independent social movement organizing efforts.

    Despite Correa’s efforts to defeat the CONAIE, it still remains the largest and best organized Indigenous federation, even though it has never achieved its goal of speaking for all Indigenous peoples and nationalities with a single united voice. At the same time, very clear political divisions have emerged within the CONAIE.

    In a break from previous declarations that Indigenous movements would never collaborate with their historic enemies in the oligarchy, a conservative wing in the CONAIE has engaged in opportunistic alliances with Correa’s opponents on the right. They viewed these alliances as the best option to challenge the president’s authoritarian and anti-democratic policies.

    The conservative wing condemned a competing left wing for their openings to the Correa administration. Some leftist activists have called for a “third line” approach in which they criticize Correa for his policy failures even as they are open to collaborating with the president on his positive policy initiatives. While this position does not have majority support among the CONAIE leadership, if polls are to be believed it is perhaps a more common position among the bases in rural communities.

    In a July assembly at which the CONAIE decided to organize a mobilization against the government, the leadership condemned both those who collaborated with the conservatives and those who were open to working with Correa. Rather, the federation decided to continue a policy of open opposition to the government’s policies on bilingual education and extractive industries.

    Other demands that the CONAIE and the FUT are making of the government are to archive a set of constitutional amendments that would expand executive power including permitting Correa’s reelection, limit pensions for retired people, limit free access to higher education, expand oil drilling in the Yasuní National Park, and challenge the rights of nature.

    Meanwhile, the FUT no longer has the power it had in the 1980s, and the CONAIE has lost much of the coherence and force it enjoyed in the 1990s. Neither organization is likely to be able to shut down the country as they previously were able to do.

    At the same time, despite the presence of a conservative tendency within the diverse Indigenous movements, Correa is wrong in attempting to paint all opposition to his government with such broad strokes. Correa has excelled at making electoral calculations that assure his continued hold on power, and is unlikely to be removed from power.

    Rather than representing a threat from a resurgent rightwing, as was the case with the June protests against inheritance and capital gains taxes, the current protests illustrate that a leftwing government and leftwing social movements often operate at divergent and incompatible sets of logic and policy objectives.

    Marc Becker is an associate professor of Latin American Studies at Truman State University. He has worked with indigenous movements and has written widely on social and indigenous movements in Latin America. He is the author of numerous books including Pachakutik: Indigenous Movements and Electoral Politics in Ecuador (2012).

  • Bernie Sanders' Racial Justice Program

    I don't support Bernie in the Democratic Party because I believe the key question in U.S. politics is building a political party that can defend theImage needs of the vast majority of the American people. As more and more people on the left agree, the Democratic Party is not and cannot be such a party; to my mind this constraint makes paramount the political independence of candidates, no matter how progressive their program.

    But whether or not one supports Bernie as a Democratic Party candidate today, the pressure on him to move to the left programmatically is a positive step, as his current racial justice program, certainly adopted in response to demands from Black Lives Matter and its allies, shows below. 

    Such pressure should extend to foreign policy issues (as Norman Solomon convincingly argues) and, beyond program, to calling on Sanders to support an independent progressive candidate in the very likely event that he is defeated in the race to become the Democrats' presidential candidate. We should not passively accept Sanders' position that a third-party campaign would simply serve as a "spoiler."  Such a campaign can serve as a declaration of independence, a declaration that we simply will not accept the retrograde options offered to us by both the Republican and the Democratic Party presidential candidates.

    Here is Bernie Sanders' new racial justice program as posted on his website:
     

    Bernie Sanders on Racial Justice

    We must pursue policies that transform this country into a nation that affirms the value of its people of color. That starts with addressing the four central types of violence waged against black and brown Americans: physical, political, legal and economic.

    Physical Violence
    Perpetrated by the State

    Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Samuel DuBose. We know their names. Each of them died unarmed at the hands of police officers or in police custody. The chants are growing louder. People are angry and they have a right to be angry. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that this violence only affects those whose names have appeared on TV or in the newspaper. African Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police.

    Perpetrated by Extremists

    We are far from eradicating racism in this country. In June, nine of our fellow Americans were murdered while praying in a historic church because of the color of their skin. This violence fills us with outrage, disgust, and a deep, deep sadness. Today in America, if you are black, you can be killed for getting a pack of Skittles during a basketball game. These hateful acts of violence amount to acts of terror. They are perpetrated by extremists who want to intimidate and terrorize black and brown people in this country.

    Addressing Physical Violence

    It is an outrage that in these early years of the 21st century we are seeing intolerable acts of violence being perpetuated by police, and racist terrorism by white supremacists.

    A growing number of communities do not trust the police and law enforcement officers have become disconnected from the communities they are sworn to protect. Violence and brutality of any kind, particularly at the hands of the police sworn to protect and serve our communities, is unacceptable and must not be tolerated. We need a societal transformation to make it clear that black lives matter, and racism cannot be accepted in a civilized country.

    • We must demilitarize our police forces so they don’t look and act like invading armies.
    • We must invest in community policing. Only when we get officers into the communities, working within neighborhoods before trouble arises, do we develop the relationships necessary to make our communities safer together. Among other things, that means increasing civilian oversight of police departments.
    • We need police forces that reflect the diversity of our communities.
    • At the federal level we need to establish a new model police training program that reorients the way we do law enforcement in this country. With input from a broad segment of the community including activists and leaders from organizations like Black Lives Matter we will reinvent how we police America.
    • We need to federally fund and require body cameras for law enforcement officers to make it easier to hold them accountable.
    • Our Justice Department must aggressively investigate and prosecute police officers who break the law and hold them accountable for their actions.
    • We need to require police departments and states to provide public reports on all police shootings and deaths that take place while in police custody.
    • We need new rules on the allowable use of force. Police officers need to be trained to de-escalate confrontations and to humanely interact with people who have mental illnesses.
    • States and localities that make progress in this area should get more federal justice grant money. Those that do not should get their funding slashed.
    • We need to make sure the federal resources are there to crack down on the illegal activities of hate groups.

    Political Violence
    Disenfranchisement

    In the shameful days of open segregation, “literacy” laws were used to suppress minority voting. Today, through other laws and actions ­ such as requiring voters to show photo ID, discriminatory drawing of Congressional districts, not allowing early registration or voting, and purging voter rolls ­ states are taking steps which have a similar effect.

    The patterns are unmistakable. An MIT paper found that African Americans waited twice as long to vote as whites. Wait times of as long as six or seven hours have been reported in some minority precincts, especially in “swing” states like Ohio and Florida. Thirteen percent of African-American men have lost the right to vote due to felony convictions.

    This should offend the conscience of every American.

    The fight for minority voting rights is a fight for justice. It is inseparable from the struggle for democracy itself.

    We must work vigilantly to ensure that every American, regardless of skin color or national origin, is able to vote freely and easily.

    Addressing Political Violence

    • We need to re-enfranchise the more than two million African Americans who have had their right to vote taken away by a felony conviction.
    • Congress must restore the Voting Rights Act’s “pre-clearance” provision, which extended protections to minority voters in states where they were clearly needed.
    • We must expand the Act’s scope so that every American, regardless of skin color or national origin, is able to vote freely.
    • We need to make Election Day a federal holiday to increase voters’ ability to participate.
    • We must make early voting an option for voters who work or study and need the flexibility to vote on evenings or weekends.
    • We must make no-fault absentee ballots an option for all Americans.
    • Every American over 18 must be registered to vote automatically, so that students and working people can make their voices heard at the ballot box.
    • We must put an end to discriminatory laws and the purging of minority-community names from voting rolls.
    • We need to make sure that there are sufficient polling places and poll workers to prevent long lines from forming at the polls anywhere.

    Legal Violence

    Millions of lives have been destroyed because people are in jail for nonviolent crimes. For decades, we have been engaged in a failed “War on Drugs” with racially-biased mandatory minimums that punish people of color unfairly.

    It is an obscenity that we stigmatize so many young Americans with a criminal record for smoking marijuana, but not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy. This must change.

    If current trends continue, one in four black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during their lifetime. Blacks are imprisoned at six times the rate of whites and a report by the Department of Justice found that blacks were three times more likely to be searched during a traffic stop, compared to white motorists. African-Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police. This is an unspeakable tragedy.

    It is morally repugnant and a national tragedy that we have privatized prisons all over America. In my view, corporations should not be allowed to make a profit by building more jails and keeping more Americans behind bars. We have got to end the private-for-profit prison racket in America. Profiting off the misery of incarcerated people is immoral and it is immoral to take campaign contributions from the private prison industry or its lobbyists.

    The measure of success for law enforcement should not be how many people get locked up. We need to invest in drug courts as well as medical and mental health interventions for people with substance abuse problems, so that people struggling with addiction do not end up in prison, they end up in treatment.

    For people who have committed crimes that have landed them in jail, there needs to be a path back from prison. The federal system of parole needs to be reinstated. We need real education and real skills training for the incarcerated.

    We must end the over incarceration of nonviolent young Americans who do not pose a serious threat to our society. It is an international embarrassment that we have more people locked up in jail than any other country on earth – more than even the Communist totalitarian state of China. That has got to end.

    We must address the lingering unjust stereotypes that lead to the labeling of black youths as “thugs.” We know the truth that, like every community in this country, the vast majority of people of color are trying to work hard, play by the rules and raise their children. It’s time to stop demonizing minority communities.

    We must reform our criminal justice system to ensure fairness and justice for people of color.

    Addressing Legal Violence

    • We need to ban prisons for profit, which result in an over-incentive to arrest, jail and detain, in order to keep prison beds full.
    • We need to turn back from the failed “War on Drugs” and eliminate mandatory minimums which result in sentencing disparities between black and white people.
    • We need to invest in drug courts and medical and mental health interventions for people with substance abuse problems, so that they do not end up in prison, they end up in treatment.
    • We need to boost investments for programs that help people who have gone to jail rebuild their lives with education and job training.

    Economic Violence

    Weeks before his death, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a union group in New York about what he called “the other America.”

    “One America is flowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality,” King said. “That America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. . . . But as we assemble here tonight, I’m sure that each of us is painfully aware of the fact that there is another America, and that other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.”

    The problem was structural, King said: “This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”

    Eight days later, speaking in Memphis, King continued the theme. “Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day?” he asked striking sanitation workers. “And they are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. These are facts which must be seen, and it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.”

    King explained the shift in his focus: “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”

    But what King saw in 1968 ­ and what we all should recognize today ­ is that it is necessary to try to address the rampant economic inequality while also taking on the issue of societal racism. We must simultaneously address the structural and institutional racism which exists in this country, while at the same time we vigorously attack the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality which is making the very rich much richer while everyone else – especially those in our minority communities – are becoming poorer.

    In addition to the physical violence faced by too many in our country we need look at the lives of black children and address a few other difficult facts. Black children, who make up just 18 percent of preschoolers, account for 48 percent of all out-of-school suspensions before kindergarten. We are failing our black children before kindergarten. Black students were expelled at three times the rate of white students. Black girls were suspended at higher rates than all other girls and most boys. According to the Department of Education, African American students are more likely to suffer harsh punishments – suspensions and arrests – at school.

    We need to take a hard look at our education system. Black students attend schools with higher concentrations of first-year teachers, compared with white students. Black students were more than three times as likely to attend schools where fewer than 60 percent of teachers meet all state certification and licensure requirements.

    Communities of color also face the violence of economic deprivation. Let’s be frank: neighborhoods like those in west Baltimore, where Freddie Gray resided, suffer the most. However, the problem of economic immobility isn’t just a problem for young men like Freddie Gray. It has become a problem for millions of Americans who, despite hard-work and the will to get ahead, can spend their entire lives struggling to survive on the economic treadmill.

    We live at a time when most Americans don’t have $10,000 in savings, and millions of working adults have no idea how they will ever retire in dignity. God forbid, they are confronted with an unforeseen car accident, a medical emergency, or the loss of a job. It would literally send their lives into an economic tailspin. And the problems are even more serious when we consider race.

    Let us not forget: It was the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street that nearly drove the economy off of the cliff seven years ago. While millions of Americans lost their jobs, homes, life savings, and ability to send their kids to college, African Americans who were steered into expensive subprime mortgages were the hardest hit.

    Most black and Latino households have less than $350 in savings. The black unemployment rate has remained roughly twice as high as the white rate over the last 40 years, regardless of education. Real African American youth unemployment is over 50 percent. This is unacceptable. The American people in general want change – they want a better deal. A fairer deal. A new deal. They want an America with laws and policies that truly reward hard work with economic mobility. They want an America that affords all of its citizens with the economic security to take risks and the opportunity to realize their full potential.

    Addressing Economic Violence

    • We need to give our children, regardless of their race or their income, a fair shot at attending college. That’s why all public universities should be made tuition free.
    • We must invest $5.5 billion in a federally-funded youth employment program to employ young people of color who face disproportionately high unemployment rates.
    • Knowing that black women earn 64 cents on the dollar compared to white men, we must pass federal legislation to establish pay equity for women.
    • We must prevent employers from discriminating against applicants based on criminal history.
    • We need to ensure access to quality affordable childcare for working families.

     

     

  • Why I #StandWithPP

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    I wanted to write and let you know why I support the doctors and clinic workers of Planned Parenthood who help people obtain abortions, often at great personal cost.

    The current call to defund Planned Parenthood has been coordinated with attack videos that are highly edited in order to demonize the doctors who were filmed. As David Cohen and Krysten Connon document in their book, “Living in the Crosshairs,” the personal nature of political attacks on abortion in this country have led to harassment, stalking, and violence against providers and their families.

    In Kansas, Dr. George Tiller’s acquittal, after years of investigations by anti-abortion state officials, so enraged one of the trial spectators that he later led pickets outside Dr. Tiller’s clinic and church, and then shot and killed him in front of his family and congregation.

    This summer, during Operation Save America’s national convening in Alabama, a doctor who at one time was a medical director at Planned Parenthood sent the following message to friends to assure them that he was all right:

    “I ask you to share my sense of perspective on the attempts to intimidate women and those of us who support their assertion of their human rights,” wrote Willie Parker, who now travels to perform abortions in Alabama and other states where there are no doctors to provide the service.

    “I am fine here in my home state,” he wrote. “I am aware of the critics and that some of them are dangerous, just as Dr. King and others in the civil rights movement always knew that the Klan was around and sometimes they showed up at the church during the meeting… Here is the bottom line: I am going to stay safe, women are going to be served, hate speech and mob behavior cloaked in the facade of constitutional rights will not prevail, and I hope that the appallingly silent good people will wake up and speak up.”

    Last year, Planned Parenthood provided health care for over 2.5 million people — including abortion care, routine exams, life-saving cancer screenings, contraception, and testing and treatment for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. It served another 1.5 million people through sex education programs.

    Fetal tissue has been used in research since the 1930s, leading to the development of critical advances including the polio, rubella, and varicella vaccines. Some Planned Parenthood affiliates across the country participate in fetal tissue donation programs, which are legal – but 89 percent of abortions are performed so early that there is no opportunity to donate tissue.

    The current attack on Planned Parenthood is not about basic health care, or the ethics of tissue donation, which notably is supported by people across the political spectrum, including those opposed to abortion. It is an attack on the right to abortion itself. And tainting the doctors who provide them is not a tactic to spur political discourse. It is a tactic to incite violence. Most abortions are performed in standalone clinics, leaving both clinic workers and patients seeking care vulnerable to exposure and harassment. In 2011, 84 percent of clinics experienced some form of anti-abortion harassment; 53 percent of clinics were picketed 20 times or more.

    What was edited out of the attack videos is how deeply Planned Parenthood doctors and other providers care about the patients they serve, and that they continue to work in the face of such harassment and violence. And that for many of their patients, abortion care is part of basic, and sometimes life-saving, comprehensive reproductive health care.

    In solidarity,

    Mia Kim Sullivan
    Director
    Civil Liberties and Public Policy Center

    Letter originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on August 4 2015

     

  • Why We Commemorate August 9th and the Ferguson Uprising

    As those committed to social justice in St. Louis prepare to mark the August 9th killing of unarmed teen Michael Brown Jr. by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, we know that many in the region would like us to just go away. Enough already, they say. Why commemorate something so sad and wrong, anyway? Let’s just move on. But we’re at the beginning, not the end of this struggle. It’s not time to move on, and this day calls for reflection. We want to remember Brown’s life as well as commemorate the uprising of resistance against police misconduct generally, and the killing of Black people in particular. We will remember and grieve with the Brown family. Families of countless people who have been killed by police violence grieve alone every day. This August 9th, we will remember Michael Brown and all lives lost to police violence. We have not forgotten Kajieme Powell or Vonderitt Meyers or countless others. We will honor those in the Ferguson community who said no more to police violence and took action to stop it. Their courage and perseverance has inspired millions around the world. And we will celebrate the activism of the St. Louis Region demanding long overdue and much needed change in how Black people are treated and perceived by police, the courts and the St. Louis community as a whole. We will celebrate as we plan and prepare to keep up the struggle. We know we face a long and difficult struggle. But we will not give up because we know that change will not come by itself, and we can no longer endure the status quo. To live, we must make the change that we seek. Finally, we will commemorate the day to remind the St. Louis Region and the world that the movement for Black Lives is dynamic, creative and ready for action. We will not go back to a time when a Black person killed by law enforcement was only a headline, without scrutiny or accountability. We understand the system will not stop killing us unless we make it. We will see this struggle through, for we have nothing to lose but our chains, and everything to gain. We seek a world where we don't have to say Black Lives Matter. We call on all people who want to see a peaceful and just world to join the movement for change. Don’t stand on the sidelines observing the struggle for Black Lives. Our community can only heal if we work together. The fight to end racism and the legacy of slavery is far from over. To end police abuse, economic inequity and racist laws is not a win for Black people, it’s a win for all of us. We are a better nation because of slavery’s end and the Civil Rights movement’s relative success. We are a better, safer and more prosperous nation when all people receive fair and just treatment at the hands of government and fellow citizens. In commemorating Michael Brown’s death, we are redoubling our efforts to secure a world in which black lives really do matter. Now is the opportunity to be part of the change, on the right side of history. Michael McPhearson is Executive Director of Veterans For Peace, based in St. Louis, MO, and co-chair of the Don’t Shoot Coalition. Don’t Shoot formed in the direct aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson.

  • The Sun, the Rain and the Whip

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    Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2014. 528 pages. Paperback, $19.

    “Changes that reshaped the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants stood, or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled…Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.”
    — Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told

    This vital and enthralling book reveals how U.S. capitalism was built on the torture of enslaved people. Edward Baptist quotes a Mississippi overseer telling his friends that “the whip was as important to making cotton grow as sunshine and rain.” The whip “might open deep gashes in the skin of its victim, make them 'tremble' or 'dance'…but it did not disable them.”

    Women who didn't pick cotton fast enough were forced “to kneel in front of their baskets,” Baptist writes. “Shoving their heads in the basket, [the overseer] would pull up their dresses and beat them until the blood ran down their backs.”

    Torture wasn't an aberration–it was the basic means of extracting ever more production from enslaved people. One man named John Brown recalled that “as I picked so well at first, more was required of me, and if I flagged for a minute, the whip was applied liberally to keep me up to my mark. By being driven in this way, at last I was able to pick a hundred and sixty pounds a day” after starting at a minimum requirement of 100 pounds.

    Enslaved people were given a quota to pick. Anyone who didn't make their quota was whipped. As soon as they made the new quota, a new higher one was required, again on pain of the whip.

    This torture compelled enslaved people to constantly innovate in the desperate drive to produce ever more cotton. Baptist writes that this “repeatedly accomplished the enslaver's ongoing goal of forcing enslaved people to invent, over and over again, ways to make their own labor more efficient and profitable for their owners.”

    The cotton extracted by this forced labor fueled the growth of U.S. capitalism. The first modern factories were textile mills to turn cotton into cloth that could make clothing. Northern financiers invested directly in slavery. They bought from and sold to slave owners. Bankers and investors even bought bonds secured by the title deeds to enslaved people whose labor was now a commodity. As Baptist writes:

    Cotton became the dominant driver of U.S. economic growth. In 1802, cotton already accounted for 14 percent of all the value of U.S. exports, but by 1830, it accounted for 42 percent–in an economy reliant on exports to acquire the goods and credit it needed for growth.

    Baptist, however, believes that “all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people.” It's true that the profits from slavery made jobs in the new textile mills possible. But the women and children working in those mills 12 hours a day, six days a week, for starvation wages, were hardly benefiting from the new industrial order built on enslaved people's labor.

    Slavery’s Contradictions

    Slavery had its own contradictions that eventually proved fatal. Like capitalism, it had to continually expand. King Cotton exhausted the soil wherever it went. The huge profits slave owners demanded largely precluded crop rotation or allowing fields to lie fallow.

    By 1820, slave masters in the Old South of the Carolinas, Virginia and Maryland were selling enslaved people to work in the cotton fields of the Lower South. These sales enabled them to raise large sums of money quickly to offset their dwindling income. In The Political Economy of Slavery, Eugene Genovese writes:

    The sale of surplus slaves depended on markets further south, which necessarily depended on virgin lands in which to apply the old, wasteful methods of farming…The steady acquisition of new land could alone guarantee the maintenance of that interregional slave trade which held the system together.

    The Half Has Never Been Told describes the human cost of slavery's extension to the South and West. “Hurrying in lockstep, the 30-odd men came down the road like a giant machine,” writes Baptist. “Each hauled 20 pounds of iron, chains that draped from neck to neck and wrist to wrist, binding them all together.” In the words of Baptist:

    Expansion was marked by vast suffering. In it, hundreds of thousands of people died early and alone, separated from their loved ones. Millions of people were lost by millions of people. By the water's edge they parted.”

    Enslavers had to control the federal government to ensure that slavery could continue to expand into new territories. Slavery was written into the U.S. Constitution, with every slave counting for three-fifths of a free man toward a state's delegation in the House of Representatives.

    In the decades leading up to the Civil War, slavery's expansion haunted American political life. One “compromise” after another–from the Wilmot Proviso to the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Compromise of 1850–appeared to resolve it, while perpetuating slavery's steady expansion. But each time, the debate resumed in a more intense and bitter way.

    The South Controlled the White House

    Until Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860 on a platform of ending slavery's expansion, the South controlled the White House. Five of America's first seven presidents owned slaves. They were succeeded by “Northern men of Southern principles,” pledged to support the expansion of slavery.

    Enslavers chose secession and war rather than remain in a country whose president was resolutely opposed to slavery's expansion. They started something that finally led to the end of U.S. slavery.

    Baptist demonstrates that it was slavery's expansion, not the existence of slavery itself, which precipitated the Civil War. But once the war began, slavery was doomed. Enslaved African Americans forced the issue by fleeing en masse to Union lines, later enlisting to fight for their own liberation.

    The Half Has Never Been Told belongs on every socialist's bookshelf. It deserves to be read, re-read, pondered and debated. It is especially essential because Baptist tells the story very largely from the point of view of enslaved people, relying heavily on interviews done for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s:

    Frances Frederick told of the morning he started his forced march from Virginia to Kentucky. He saw men and women “on their knees, begging to go with their wives or husbands.” He recalled that the begging was “of no avail.”

    Something died in Lucy Thompson when she was sold from Kentucky to New Orleans and separated from her mother. Years later, she remembered her zombie days. And she never forgot the men who called to her…Liza, they sang. Lucy raised her head. Tears flowed down her face, and she opened her mouth. ‘I got happy,’ Lucy Thompson remembered 80 years after her resurrection ‘and sang with the rest.’

    Charles Ball had left his family behind in Maryland when he was sold to South Carolina where “he adopted a trade-orphaned little boy ‘the same age [as] my own little son whom I had left in Maryland; and there was nothing I possessed in the world I would not have divided with him, even to my last crust.’

    The slavery they endured is gone, but U.S. capitalism's super-exploitation of Black labor has never ended. In 2011, with Barack Obama in the White House, white households made $27,415 more a year than African American households.

    The Half Has Never Been Told is a clarion call for the full emancipation of African Americans. Yet it also demonstrates that it will take the final abolition of U.S. capitalism, which began oppressing Black people in 1619, when the first slaves arrived in Virginia, and continues today, to achieve that aim.

    This article originally appeard in Socialist Worker. Thanks to Sandy Boyer and Socialist Worker for permission to republish.

     

  • On the Puerto Rican Debt Crisis: A Reply to Krugman

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    Paul Krugman’s analysis of the Puerto Rican debt crisis has subtle problems, but with big policy implications. Overall, his piece hits key points that other economists continue to miss: 1) Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis is closely related to its economic depression, 2) the government patched up the problem with borrowing, instead of going to the root of it, 3) Puerto Rico’s low rate of labor force participation is not necessarily a result of welfare, 4) the situation is exacerbated by the Jones Act, 5) too much austerity can be self-defeating, and 6) it would be a terrible idea to give the hedge funds what they want (destroying the island’s education system in the name of fiscal responsibility). All of these points demonstrate Krugman understands the Puerto Rican case better than many Puerto Rican policy makers and economists. However, the subtle problems in his piece should be further discussed.

    First, the idea that the island was doing well as a manufacturing center is not necessarily true. GDP Per Capita might have grown, but the fact most manufacturing profits were repatriated to the US, led to GNI Per Capita growth being much less impressive. Furthermore, poverty and inequality have remained historically high, even during the manufacturing “boom.” Research focusing on the linkages between US manufacturing capital and the Puerto Rican economy suggest the latter actually benefited relatively little from this period. Second, the idea that Puerto Rico is simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time” is a pat in the back for the government, as it suggests there was little they could actually do. On the contrary, economists within and outside Puerto Rico have been arguing in favor of alternative development strategies that take into account the new conditions in the world economy for decades. The problem was not that the government was slow to adjust, as Krugman suggests. The problem was that the government did not adjust at all.

    Third, the idea that Puerto Rico’s colonial situation is somehow a blessing, where the only tradeoff is a high minimum wage, is particularly off the mark. Puerto Rico’s economic history since the U.S invasion in 1898 is a history of economic obstacles sent down to the colony from the metropolis (see for example the classic “Economic History of Puerto Rico” by James Dietz). Again, we should avoid relieving the Puerto Rican government of its role in the crisis; but the role of the U.S. should also be emphasized. While it is true the poorest Puerto Ricans benefit from the federal safety net, this does cancel out the US government’s role in the historical political and economic crisis of Puerto Rican colonialism. Finally, Puerto Rico is much more than a collective of U.S citizens who happen to live on a Caribbean island, which can be simply transferred to the mainland if the island is not working out, as Krugman suggests. Puerto Rico is a collective of communities with a historical, geographical, and economic link to this particular island. “Pack up and leave your home” cannot be the main policy recommendation.

    The policy recommendation is big government, as Krugman suggests, but a particular kind of big government. Puerto Rico needs a government that develops an industrial policy, a development state, equality-led growth, etc. In other words, Puerto Rico needs a government focused on sustainable growth and development. In this sense, the main economic problem in Puerto Rico is a political one: the two traditional parties (the PNP and PPD) are evidently unable to build such a government. For those of us who want to stay and fix the Puerto Rican economy, the first step might be voting differently.

    *Ricardo R. Fuentes Ramírez is Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez and Staff Economist in the League of Political Economy of Puerto Rico. 

  • Online Attack against May First/People Link

    May First/People Link is the organization that hosts the New Politics website. But it is more than a hosting platform: it is a membership-based political community that tries to use the Internet to advance progressive causes. It has now come under attack by rightwing anti-abortion hackers because it hosts the National Network of Abortion Funds. We express our solidarity with May First/People Link and with the National Network of Abortion Funds. Below is the statement sent by May First/People Link to its members on August 4.

       Attackers continued their assault on May First/People Link operations Monday evening shutting down the organization's website at https://mayfirst.org. All other services continue operating.
       The Denial of Service attack targeted the website but, as collateral damage, much of May First's hosting system was paralyzed for a short time about 11:00 pm Monday evening. May First technologists restored all services except May First's own website, the specific target, by 11:30 pm.
       The attack follows several days of Denial of Service attacks on May First servers, targeting specifically May First member the National Network of Abortion Funds whose website, http://fundabortionnow.org was down for almost a day last week. That attack appears to have been part of the campaign aimed at the pro-choice movement which included the attacks last week on Planned Parenthood and various pro-choice websites.
       Today's action is the first time the attackers have targeted the May First/People Link website specifically.
       "We consider our organization attacked when one of our members is targeted so we've been under attack for several days now," according of Jamie McClelland, MF/PL Leadership Committee member. "But the targeting of our website means that these people are not just focusing on the issue of abortion or trying to repress communication about it but punishing an organization that allows that communication. This isn't about choice specifically, this is about May First/People Link and, because of who we are, it's about an entire movement in two countries."
       Technologists continue working to return the website to service. No other services are affected at this time.
       May First/People Link is a political progressive membership organization specializing in Internet work and the sharing of services with most members in the United States and Mexico. It is the largest organization of its kind in either country.

     

  • What's the Big Deal?

    ImageOf course Congress should endorse the Iran deal. The renunciation of the agreement by Congress would have disastrous consequences for the Middle East, empowering warmongers everywhere, but especially in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran.

    There are three motives driving opponents of the deal.

    The first is the desire to maintain the neocons' hegemonic vision of a New American Century, even if this risks war, and in some cases because it means war. Thus Joshua Muravchik declares that war is "our only option." And Norman Podhoretz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explains:

    "I remain convinced that containment is impossible, from which it follows that the two choices before us are not war vs. containment but a conventional war now or a nuclear war later."

    The second motive is partisan opposition: Republicans oppose on principle anything President Barack Obama does — some denouncing the deal even before they had read it. Even Rand Paul, who claims to reject foreign interventionism, toes the GOP party line. It doesn't matter that President George W. Bush offered Iran what was in some respects a better deal or that some key Bush administration diplomats have endorsed the current agreement: if Obama's for it, today's Republican politicians are against it.

    The third motive is to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's regional hegemonic designs and his efforts to distract from his government's failure to address the occupation and Israel's domestic problems. Iran has been an obstacle to Israeli domination, supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. Anything that weakens Iran, thereby gives Israel a freer hand to pursue the occupation. Even without nuclear weapons, Israel wants a weak Iran. As former CIA analyst Paul Pillar explained, if Netanyahu were concerned about an Iranian nuclear weapon, he would be supporting this agreement, which makes an Iranian weapon less likely. "Clearly he has other motivations." His career has been based on fearmongering about Iran, which he has used to great effect against his domestic political opponents. "[R]epeatedly invoking Iran as the 'real threat' in the Middle East serves to divert attention and change the subject whenever people start to talk about things, such as the occupation of Palestinian territory, that Netanyahu’s government would rather not talk about."

    As always, supporting the Israeli government is not the same as "supporting Israel." Not all Israelis oppose the Iran deal. Aside from the Israeli peace movement, the deal is backed by many Israeli national security experts, not to mention the overwhelming majority of Palestinian Israelis.

    The deal is widely supported within Iran, but in particular by Iranian dissidents and human rights activists, and who — apart from welcoming the reduced risk of war and the end to the economic suffering that the sanctions have caused — have always viewed the sanctions as strengthening regime hardliners and undermining their own democratic struggle.

    In the United States, polls initially showed that the public, and especially Jews, backed the agreement. But vast amounts of money are being poured into blocking the deal. The major groups opposing the agreement have at least five times the resources of the groups in favor. The rightwing Israel Lobby led by AIPAC and the Zionist Organization of America, has hugely more funds than the smaller, liberal pro-Israel pro-deal groups J-Street and Americans for Peace Now. The intense advertising blitz has led to much more mixed poll results (though Jewish support seems to be holding).

    But the opponents of the deal have a very tough road. They need to not only pass a bill opposing the agreement in both houses. But then they need a two-thirds vote in both houses to override Obama's promised veto. To do that they need to get lots of Democrats to cast a vote against the president, against the views of Democratic voters, and against the political prospects of their party, let alone against common sense and the views of many experts and diplomats. (These diplomats are not anti-imperialists, but they understand the realistic limits of U.S. power.) Many business interests also stand to gain from the agreement (including the arms industry). The bookies think the deal will survive.

    For AIPAC, Iran has served for years as its major foil for fundraising, and it is going all in on its opposition to the deal. This could have a silver lining. As Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss put it, "the great thing about the Iran deal going through over the opposition of AIPAC and the feverish Jewish community is that it is going to lead to open and vocal opposition to the lobby inside the Establishment." In particular, if the deal's opponents fail to derail it in Congress that will represent a decisive defeat for the rightwing Israel lobby and will weaken its clout among liberal Democrats. The lobby's image of invincibility (often exaggerated) will be dealt a strong blow.

    The Downside

    But despite all these benefits of the agreement, it is important to understand what's wrong with it.

    First, most of the sanctions against Iran that are currently in place and scheduled for lifting under the terms of the agreement are sanctions that should never have been imposed in the first place. Thus, to cheer Obama's having achieved this deal is to endorse the use of deeply unjust means. We don't endorse agreements reached by using torture on an individual; so too we shouldn't endorse agreements reached by torturing a whole society.

    The administration has frequently claimed that the sanctions aimed only at Iran's leaders and its nuclear program and were "not intended to hurt the people of Iran." In fact, however, the impact of the sanctions on ordinary Iranians has been devastating. In the words of a leading expert on sanctions, Joy Gordon, the measures "affect Iran's economy, infrastructure, and civilian population in a way that is deeply damaging and indiscriminate, affecting even food security, access to health care and education." (Gordon, "Crippling Iran: The U.N. Security Council and the Tactic of Deliberate Ambiguity," 44 Geo. J. Int'l L., 973, 975.) (Hillary Clinton told Congress back in 2009 that she would seek "crippling" Iran sanctions.) By asserting that the oil industry supports the Iranian nuclear program, U.S. officials rationalized cutting off the country's main source of revenue, its banking system, and its international commerce. This has undermined Iran's health care system, access to medicines, airplane safety, and so much else that affects the well-being of the population.

    Obama of course was under strong pressure from Republicans in Congress to impose these harsh sanctions. But he was hardly dragged along kicking and screaming. When he signed the 2010 "Iran Sanctions Act," Obama did not express any reservations or criticize legislators for overzealousness. In fact he said,

    "I’m pleased to sign into law the toughest sanctions against Iran ever passed by the United States Congress — the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act.

    "I want to thank all the members of Congress who worked on behalf of this legislation, including another tireless person, but who never seems to break a sweat — the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.  I want to thank Representatives Steny Hoyer and Eric Cantor for doing outstanding work. Although they weren’t able to join us, I want to acknowledge Senators Harry Reid, Jon Kyl and Richard Shelby.  And I want to thank those who led the effort to forge a final bill that received overwhelming bipartisan support — Senator Chris Dodd and Representative Howard Berman.  Thank you for your good work." 

    In 2011, early 2012, mid 2012, and in 2013, Obama issued executive orders — meaning on his own authority — tightening the sanctions in ways not focused on Iran's nuclear program. The 2011 executive order imposed "penalties on foreign companies with sales to Iran of more than $1 million for equipment and services related to its oil industry, or sales of more than $ 250,000 of goods or services for Iran's petrochemical production." (Gordon, p. 984) The July 2012 order placed "extensive sanctions on any company that purchases oil or petrochemical products from Iran." (Gordon, p. 984)

    There is nothing wrong with blocking the sale to Iran of items that are actually part of a nuclear weapons program. Nor should we object to the imposing of various diplomatic sanctions against Tehran's leaders for their gross violations of human rights — which Iranian dissidents have supported. (Though of course, U.S. officials do these things for their own reasons, and hypocritically — only penalizing leaders of enemy states while giving friendly human rights abusers a free pass.)  But the dissidents have strongly objected — and we should as well — to those sanctions that, in violation of international humanitarian law, impose collective punishment on the Iranian people.

    In addition to the sanctions being unjust, they were also unnecessary. In 2010, Brazil and Turkey negotiated a deal with Tehran whereby Iran would send most of its enriched uranium out of the country. Rather than welcome this confidence building measure and building on it, the Obama administration pressed forward with sanctions. Both the head of the IAEA and experts from the Federation of American Scientists assess that this was a missed opportunity to settle the dispute without any need for sanctions.

    The second problem with Obama's Iran deal is that it represents the wrong way to go about reducing the danger of nuclear weapons. Iran does not have nuclear weapons, says it does not intend to acquire nuclear weapons, and is believed by the U.S. intelligence community not to be engaged in a nuclear weapons program. Nevertheless, the United States has continually declared, despite the clear obligation under the UN Charter to refrain from using or threatening force, that "all options are on the table" — a not very subtle way to threaten military action.

    In 2006, Pres. George W. Bush was asked explicitly whether the United States might use nuclear weapons against Iran. He replied "All options were on the table." In the words of two experts writing in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Bush "directly threatened Iran with a preemptive nuclear strike. It is hard to read his reply in any other way." In 2010, the Obama administration issued its U.S. Nuclear Posture Statement, which, while maintaining the U.S. position that Washington reserves the right to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict against other nuclear powers, declared that it would henceforth not use them first against non-nuclear powers that were parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and in full compliance with their NPT obligations. However, since the International Atomic Energy Agency has said that Iran has violated some of the safeguard agreements it had reached with the agency, the United States considers Iran not to be in full compliance, and thus the Nuclear Posture Statement explicitly indicated that its no-first use policy does not apply to Iran. Note that if the United States had wanted to create an exception to cover the possibility that Iran (or some other country) was a member of the NPT but had illicitly developed nuclear weapons nonetheless, it could easily have worded its policy as allowing nuclear first use against any country possessing nuclear weapons. To threaten Iran with military attack contrary to the UN Charter is bad enough; but to threaten nuclear attack against a country that doesn't have nuclear weapons is simply outrageous.

    U.S. intelligence believes that while Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, it seeks the ability to build nuclear weapons, "if it chooses to do so." That is, it wants to have peaceful nuclear technology — as permitted by the NPT — that in the future could be quickly redirected to military purposes if it becomes necessary. This is a plausible assessment of Tehran's thinking. (It may be the thinking of some other countries as well: for example, Japan.) U.S. intelligence estimates that "Iran does not face any insurmountable technical barriers to producing a nuclear weapon, making Iran’s political will the central issue." But if one wants to influence Iran's political will, then threatening a military strike, aside from being morally and legally unjustified, provides exactly the wrong kind of incentive, encouraging rather than discouraging the development of a nuclear deterrent.

    The United States has not just threatened Iran with the use of force; it has also used force. The Stuxnet cyberattack, almost certainly developed by the United States and Israel, was, in the words of a legal study commissioned by NATO and authored by a broad spectrum of international law experts, an act of force and of intervention. Presumably if the Chinese government deployed malware that destroyed scientific facilities in the United States, we would not restrict our commentary to admiration for the technical expertise involved. (Israel, of course, probably went further than computer viruses, running an assassination program against Iranian nuclear scientists, despite the fact that — again, according to U.S. intelligence — there is no nuclear weapons program.)

    The NPT is a treaty that sets up two classes of states, privileging those that already have nuclear weapons. According to the Congressional Reference Service, "Whether Iran has violated the NPT is unclear." Moreover, the "U.N. Security Council has never declared Iran to be in violation of the NPT." However, the IAEA Board of Governors has issued a "determination that Iran has violated its safeguards agreement." This doesn't mean, however, that Iran is building nuclear weapons. The 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate "assessed that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003; subsequent U.S. official statements have consistently reiterated that Tehran has not yet decided to build nuclear weapons."

    But if Iran has failed to live up to its NPT obligations, it is not the only one. One obligation that the treaty imposes on the nuclear-weapon states (Article VI) requires those countries to make good faith efforts to move toward nuclear disarmament. But, as noted above, the United States still refuses to declare a no-first-use policy and explicitly threatens to use nuclear weapons against some nonnuclear states. Washington continues to modernize its nuclear forces, adding new military capabilities. At an international conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons in December 2014, the U.S. representative stated that his government “does not support efforts to move to a nuclear weapons convention, a ban, or a fixed timetable for elimination of all nuclear weapons.”

    Of course the irony of the NPT is that the treaty only binds those states that have ratified it. Three countries that have not done so have acquired nuclear weapons — India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea — and North Korea withdrew from the treaty, as the treaty permits in Article X. But even though these nations are not in violation of the NPT, there is a U.S. law (the Symington amendment) which prohibits most U.S. economic and military aid to countries that develop nuclear weapons. When India and Pakistan went forward and built nuclear arsenals, the United States imposed sanctions, but offered frequent waivers and exemptions. When the Bush administration signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with India in 2006, India — and then Pakistan — were able to increase their unsafeguarded uranium- and plutonium-production capability, with obvious military applications.

    In the case of Israel — which obtained its arsenal with a combination of theft and deception — the United States hasn't formally waived the Symington amendment. It has simply pretended that Israel doesn't have nuclear weapons, though in fact U.S. officials have known about Israel's nuclear arsenal for many decades. As the debate rages about whether Iran might obtain enough fissile material for several atom bombs, Israel is thought to have between 80-100 nuclear warheads, with fissile material for up to 200. And, of course, the planes that might deliver those Israeli nukes are provided by the United States (violating at least the spirit of the NPT's prohibition on assisting other countries' nuclear weapons programs).

    The Alternative

    So if Obama's approach was not the proper way to address the possibility of Iran's developing nuclear weapons, and if going to war or continued sanctions was not the way either, what is the alternative?

    Some commentators have suggested that if Iran developed a nuclear weapon, it wouldn't matter very much: nuclear deterrence would kick in and there would simply be a stand-off between Iran and Israel, with neither party seriously thinking of using their nuclear weapons. After all, the argument continues, mutually assured destruction kept the United States and the Soviet Union from a nuclear war throughout the Cold War.

    It is certainly true that an Iranian nuclear weapon does not mean an automatic Iranian attack on Israel (just as Israeli weapons have not led to nuclear strikes on Iran). But the fact that we survived the Cold War should give us very little comfort. As Seth Baum, executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, has pointed out, "The historical record contains several near-misses in which nuclear war was narrowly avoided due in no small part to luck." Alan F. Philips has listed "20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War." No, more nukes is not the way to protect us from nuclear war.

    Here is a far more just (and fruitful) approach to addressing Iran's potential nuclear program:

    • Stop threatening Iran with attack, which encourages it to acquire a means of deterrence. As Israeli military analyst Martin van Creveld wrote back in 2004, after the United States attacked Iraq for no good reason, "Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy." And, of course, the same goes for Israeli threats.
    • Support a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East that includes all states, including Israel. No one anywhere should have nuclear weapons, but least of all in such a volatile area of the world.
    • Make real progress toward disarmament, rather than trying to lock in U.S. military dominance.

    The international conference to review the NPT that was held this past spring illustrates how far we are from this better approach. The conference ended without issuing a consensus document. As Cesar Jaramillo of Project Ploughshares reported, the nuclear weapons states insisted on removing "any language alluding to specific and effective measures to implement nuclear disarmament." And the call for a conference to pursue a nuclear free zone in the Middle East was blocked by the United States, Britain, and Canada on the grounds that Israel didn't agree — and Israel wasn't even a participant at the review conference because it is not a party to the NPT.

    So by all means, let us urge Congress to support the Iran agreement: it will reduce the risk of war and make the world safer, benefit the Iranian people and especially Iranian dissidents, and defang the Israel lobby to some degree. But let us also make clear that we need a fundamentally new U.S. foreign policy, one that doesn't seek to protect Washington's nuclear arsenal and that of its ally Israel, and one that doesn't use crippling sanctions and military threats to get its way.

     

  • Jill Stein on Why She's Running for President – A Radio Interview

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    Jill Stein is campaigning as a Green Party candidate for the 2016 presidential race. She says we need real solutions for the economic, social and environmental crises we face. But the broken political system is only making things worse. It's time to build a people's movement to end unemployment and poverty; avert climate catastrophe; build a sustainable, just economy; and recognize the dignity and human rights of every person.

    She argues that independent politics are the best way to build progressive power, that the Democratic Party is the historic graveyard of progressive movements, and that people currently supporting Sanders will need a progressive alternative, a Plan B, as the Democratic Party Establishment will do everything possible to prevent Sanders from becoming their party's nominee.

    It would be tragic to waste an upsurge where folks are coming together around an anti-corporate, anti-austerity program by ending with the whimper of voting for Hillary or some other corporate Democrat and calling it a day.
    Listen at: http://www.equaltimeradio.com/2015/jill-stein-on-why-she%E2%80%99s-running-for-president

    Equal Time Radio 
    WDEV 550AM/96.1FM – 244-1777 or 1-877-291-8255
    Mon-Tues 1-2pm
    http://www.equaltimeradio.com/

    Have a show idea, email: Traven.L@gmail.com

    Missed our show? Find the audio from past shows on our website at:
    http://www.equaltimeradio.com/

    Traven Leyshon
    55 E. Bear Swamp Rd.
    Middlesex, VT 05602
    tel: 802- 223-4172; 802-522-3484 (cell) 

  • Resisting the Marginalization of Democracy and the Fetishization of “the Candidate”

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    In the United States, even more so since the advent of twenty-four hour news channels, there is a consistent fetishization of political candidates. Who is viable? Who is trust-worthy? Whose ideas best fit with the prevailing public opinion polls on certain issues at a given time? Who has the most attractive haircut or family? Who has the right skin color, gender, or business experience to win over key demographics?

    Though few of us are under any illusions that this country is or has ever been a genuine democracy, it seems that even those people who are not convinced by the patriotic rhetoric of the purity of American democracy too often acquiesce to the “all of our hopes rest in a single individual or political party” approach to politics. If socialism means anything beyond mass resistance to capitalism, it should be resistance to this mindset. When we fetishize the candidate we marginalize true democracy, the cornerstone of socialism.

    Sanders, “the Candidate”

    The media is as much to blame as we are. Nearly every political article published by mainstream Right, Center, or Progressive “Left” outlets is hyper-focused on candidates. We are conditioned daily—or hourly now—to believe that politics is inherently channeled through a small coterie of elites in suits (whether of the pant or three-piece variety). It is precisely this glorification of “the candidate” that undermines socialism from below—and this can be especially problematic when we are deciding whether to support the ostensibly democratic socialist platform of Bernie Sanders.

    Bernie Sanders may or may not be a genuine democratic socialist. His economic and social platform calls for a more comprehensive welfare state where higher education and health care are fundamental rights. He wants to pay for these programs through greater taxation on the rich, especially the super-rich. Sanders has compared his vision of “socialism” to the social democracies of northern Europe. Regardless of the tenuous association these social democracies have with a more egalitarian and participatory version of socialism, what is enduringly important is the political message Sanders is spreading.

    Sanders’ pragmatic decision to run as a Democrat will certainly hamper his radical potential, as there could be few things more status-quo oriented than organizing a campaign through one of the two major parties in the US. That notwithstanding, what Sanders seems to be calling for is much more than popular support for a conventional political campaign as we saw with Barack Obama in 2008.

    We see this message in Sanders’ many replies to questions about how he is different from other more mainstream candidates. He repeats the similar refrain: “We need a genuine political revolution in this country; one that extends beyond the campaign. We need a political revolution by millions of people becoming active and speaking out, that is carried out through the governing process” (the wording varies somewhat, but this is the consistent message).

    Whether Sanders can accomplish this is entirely the wrong question (though we can still be skeptical as to whether his rhetoric is not itself a ploy to garner electoral support). The question is whether the people, whether we, will ensure that these words become a reality. If they do, who Sanders is and what he believes in becomes irrelevant. What he is calling for could become a Presidency where the executive is merely a managerial place-holder for the voices of the people, for the voices of on-going popular movements—as opposed to the current version where the Presidency seems to function as an empty shell populated by the interests of corporations and imperialist war-hawks.

    A Revolutionary Message?

    In this country there has rarely been any significant or consistent democratic control over political institutions or public policy, never mind over its economic capacities. Sanders might not be a theoretically consistent socialist, but he is certainly a champion of democracy, and in the United States, that might just be a genuinely revolutionary position.

    There have been vital popular movements in our history, whether this was the labor movement in the early twentieth century, the anti-war and civil rights movements in the 60s, or the women’s rights and environmental movements of the 70s and 80s. These movements have had a lasting effect on our political system, but they all fell short of radically reorganizing our politics. When we fetishize or hyper-focus on particular candidates or leaders, to the point where other dimensions of politics seems secondary or even irrelevant, there is little hope in maintaining a democratic movement from below.

    The US government has always represented the class-interests of the bourgeoisie (or the white, male aristocracy in the early years) and thus the maintenance of the capitalist mode of production. A genuine popular movement would certainly disrupt this over two-century-long trend of anti-democratic governance.

    Sanders is certainly not a revolutionary in the sense of advocating violent resistance to the existing order of things, but I wonder if, given the Right-wing status-quo in this country, what Sanders is advocating isn’t a kind of revolution (regardless of how much we read into the fact that his campaign is selling “HONK for a Political Revolution” bumper stickers).

    The goal of socialism from below is to give all people equal social power over and within the relevant political and productive forces that shape their lives. Sanders is not advocating this, but if his radically democratic message is more than just words, what he is calling for—and has thus far been successful in inspiring, based on the record breaking turn-out at his campaign events—could certainly lead to a more thoroughly democratic politics. This kind of authentic, bottom-up politics could then, over-time, appropriate the means of production for rational, egalitarian ends.

    Though I am not sanguine about the likelihood of this, the message is important. The messenger is not, but it is true that having a more trustworthy-than-average candidate calling for such a movement does give it some credence it certainly wouldn’t have if say Donald Trump—in-between racial slurs of course— advocated a grassroots political movement.

    Sadly it seems socialism is still too radical for the conservative forces of the American electoral mainstream at the moment, though it certainly has more popular support than it has in the past forty years in this country. This is why liberal progressives populating the pages of Salon.com and the airwaves of MSNBC are sparing no energy explaining precisely why Sanders isn’t really a socialist. This also precisely why the supporters of socialism from below in the US must be especially cautious of Sanders. He could move further to the Center at any time. We need to focus on the movement—our movement—not the man.

    When we rigidly focus on who the candidate is or what their specific views on issues are to the point that nothing else seems relevant to an election or to politics in general, we lose sight of our politics, of our political potential, and of our movement. This is the fetishization of “the candidate.”

    The Case for Supporting the Message (and for now, the Candidate)

    The mainstream Progressive argument boils down to this: people should support Bernie Sanders precisely because he is firmly within the capitalist paradigm. For democratic socialists, the argument should instead be this: we should support Bernie Sanders because he is calling for a non-candidate centered campaign and of all of the other electorally-viable candidates in both parties are Right wing neo-liberals. Thus Sanders’ campaign seems like it is the best hope any semblance of a Left agenda has given this status quo—even though Sanders’ campaign platform is rooted in traditional post-WWII welfare-state social democracy, as opposed to something more radical.

    If (and this could not be a bigger IF) Sanders keeps his promises and maintains a thoroughly democratic grassroots campaign through and beyond the primaries, through and beyond the general election, into his (our) governing strategy, he should retain the contingent, strategic, and skeptical support of the socialist Left in the United States. This tactical support should never extend to a rigid support for a single candidate nor to the Democratic Party.

    We should not support the man because of his views (though they are certainly the best ideas I’ve heard coming from someone under the Democratic Party banner in my lifetime), but rather we should contingently support his campaign for what he claims to stand for: a genuinely democratic political movement that places everyday people collectively in control of regulating the means of production. While this would still fall short of true socialism if it stopped at mere regulation, the democratic element is worth supporting for its radical potential to become more than just mere regulation.

    We need not trust the candidate, but the voice of a single candidate is important in our electoral system—for better or worse (it’s certainly for the worse). However important candidates remain in our system, regardless of who the candidate is, what matters above all else is the grassroots movements that compel any candidate, in this case Bernie Sanders, to live up to their promise of fighting to facilitate the reorganization of our politics and institutions in such a way that mass participation results in true popular efficacy in all aspects of our collective lives. The goal is to make genuine democratic power the norm, not the exception.

    The fact that Bernie Sanders is bringing this potentially revolutionary message back into the mainstream through the consistently corrupt Democratic Party should make us very hesitant. It will either work or it won’t, but our support of him need not be and should not be unconditional. After all, Jill Stein and the Green Party, along with a whole host of other smaller Left parties and organizations like Solidarity, will be there with open arms if Sanders loses to Hillary Clinton or deviates from his democratic promise.

    When you fetishize the candidate, you marginalize democracy. This marginalization of democracy through candidate-centric politics is what we must get away from in order to sustain a practicable radical Left in the United States and beyond.

  • Sanders for President: a Political Phenomenon that Challenges all Preconceptions

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    Last night more than 100,000 people attended 3,500 meetings in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to watch a video-cast of Bernie Sanders and to begin to organize his on-the-ground campaign. Some of the meetings in various parts of the country had as many as 200 people in attendance. The meeting I attended in Crown Heights, Brooklyn was attended by 25 people, most in their 20s, with background working for social justice NGOs, in media, and in the arts, as well as a few graduate students.

    These are young idealist people who are attracted to Sanders because he calls for a “political revolution” against the billionaires, and because they believe in public health care for all, free higher education, and improving the lives of working people. By and large, those in attendance had no interest in the Democratic Party and a few suggested it would have been better had Sanders run as an independent. The organizer of the meeting suggested that we could build a mass movement and take-over the Democratic Party, but nobody in the meeting seemed particularly to think that possible or to care.

    What has become clear from the Sanders’ rallies and meeting is that no one is supporting Sanders because he’s the “lesser evil.” After all, that’s Hillary Clinton. People back Sanders as a protest against economic inequality and against the power of money in politics. Sanders is the Occupy Movement’s political expression. Not so much a Democratic Party candidate as the voice of the underdogs.

    A Marginal Candidate

    When in late April Bernie Sanders, the independent Senator from Vermont who had long called himself a socialist, announced that he would run for president in the Democratic Party primary no one had any idea what the response would be. After all, Sanders is Senator from the small state of Vermont with a population of just 625,000 (only Wyoming has fewer inhabitants), a state which is virtually all white (95.2%), and whose largest city of Burlington (of which Sanders had been mayor) is only a small town with a population of 44,000.

    Sanders name was well known only in his own state and in neighboring New Hampshire. If he had any national reputation, it was chiefly because he was a strange bird: the only independent in Congress and the only national public official who called himself a socialist. Only progressives knew him for his pro-labor voting record. What would happen if such a marginal figure ran for president?

    Huge Spirited Crowds

    The response to Sanders candidacy has been nothing short of phenomenal. After rallies of hundreds or a few thousand in his home state, Sanders hit the road. In the historically liberal city of Madison, Wisconsin on July 1 some 10,000 people turned out to hear Sanders decry the billionaires and call for greater economic equality. Perhaps that was to be expected in a city where 100,000 had occupied the state capitol building to oppose Republican Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation back in 2011. After all, Sanders was speaking there to Democrats, union members, and University of Wisconsin professors and students. And the Sanders rally of about 8,000 in Portland, Maine could be attributed to local support for a New England candidate.

    Would Sanders be able to rally support in Republican red states of middle America as well? Well that question was answered on July 18 Sanders attracted a crowd of 11,000 in Phoenix, Arizona and then again on July 19 when 8,000 people showed up for a rally in Dallas, Texas. The groundswell continued on July 26 when 4,000 turned out in the smaller city of New Orleans, Louisiana. Everywhere the Sanders’ crowds have been exuberant By comparison, Hillary Clinton’s largest rally so far attracted 5,500 people to park in New York in June.

    Why have such phenomenal crowds appeared to hear a man who appeared to be such a marginal candidate? There are several reasons. First, many agree with Sanders fundamental message, that banks and corporations have taken over the political system and made it serve their interests. These people are supporting Sanders as a protest against the corporate agenda of both the Republican and the Democratic parties.

    When Sanders typically asks his audiences, “Why are we living in a society in which for the last 40 years the middle class in this country has been disappearing and almost all of the wealth and income are going to the people on top?” They nod yes, thinking themselves, “Why are we?” The answer he suggests is the corporate dominance of America and the beating down of the labor movement and the living standards of working people.

    Second, many Democrats deeply resent the idea that almost automatically Hillary Clinton would become the party’s candidate without any political alternatives being presented. Progressives in the Democratic Party wanted not another neoliberal Democrat, but someone who raised their issues of jobs, wages, health care, and education. When Senator Elizabeth Warren declined to run, Sanders stepped in and became the champion of all those to the left of Clinton.

    Labor for Bernie

    Since then, not only has he drawn large crowds, but he has also done surprisingly well in other ways. While not as popular in the polls as Hillary Clinton, he has good approval ratings compared to other candidates in both major parties, and they are rising. He also has a strong rank-and-file labor following, Labor for Bernie, with some 5,000 rank-and-file members and local leaders supporting him as well as the small Vermont and South Carolina AFL-CIO councils.

    Larry Cohen, past president of the Communications Workers of America and now a volunteer working on the Sanders' campaign says, “Our strong and growing grassroots movement shows that Bernie shares our values and beliefs.  Workers are fed up with business as usual. This campaign is about putting a stop to the corporate assault on our kids, our country and working families!”

    When the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers—whose president Randi Weingarten hopes to become Secretary of Education—endorsed Clinton without holding local meetings to consult the members, hundreds of angry teachers rebelled and signed up with Labor for Bernie. There has been such a reaction that the AFL-CIO leadership has decided to postpone its endorsement, which will give Sanders an opportunity to seek greater labor backing.

    In terms of fundraising, Bernie is not nearly as strong as his opponents, but the favored candidates’ campaigns and Sanders’ are hardly comparable. Clinton and Republicans such as Jeb Bush have the backing of big financial donors—banks, corporations, and the 1% of the very wealthy, while Sanders has received mainly small donations from individual donors. In the first quarter Republican Jeb Bush has raised $103 million, Clinton $47.5 million, while Sanders has remarkably raised $15 million in first quarter of 2015.

    Sanders and Black Lives Matters

    Sanders initially failed to speak out strongly in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement and blundered when confronted with black protesters as the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix, Arizona. In his earliest statements he had tried to be for both cops and black people, an untenable position. The black movement, continuing police killings like that in Cincinnati recently, and, one could say, reality itself, have forced Sanders to move toward the black movement.

    In fact, Sanders has an outstanding record as an opponent of racism and an advocate of civil rights dating back to his participation in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the1960s. In recent campaign appearances he is reasserting his opposition to racism and police violence. Speaking in New Orleans he told the crowd, “Black lives do matter, and we must value black lives.”

    The problem is that Sanders emphasis on economic equality for all failed to take into account the issues of racism, discrimination, exclusion, and violence that faced some. His program does not mention African Americans. He did not put black issues at the center of his politics. But he is changing.

    In a talk at a reception organized by leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership conference, one of the historic civil rights organizations, one could see the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on Sanders as he said, “Anybody who saw the recent Sandra Bland tape understands that tragically, racism is alive and well in America,” referring to a black woman who was found dead in a cell in a Texas jail. When an African-American woman gets yanked out of her car, when we all know that would not have happened to a middle-class white woman, we know we need some serious change in criminal justice in this country.”

    Speaking to SCLC conference as a whole, Sanders talked about “the need to simultaneously address the structural and institutional racism which exists in this country, while at the same time we vigorously attack the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality which is making the very rich much richer while everyone else – especially the African-American community and working-class whites – are becoming poorer.” The SCLC speech—which is well worth reading—showed the depth of Sanders’ knowledge and commitment to black Americans’ fight for racial justice. These recent speeches and comments show that in reaction to criticism, he has begun to make a shift, moving black issues toward the center, though, as sympathetic critics have pointed out, he and his organization still have a way to go.

    Sanders the Organizer

    Vermont labor organizers friends of mine talk not only about Sanders as a supporter of labor, but as a man who used his office to help unions and workers to organize, for example, by calling a meeting with unions to encourage unity and struggle for improved conditions in his home state. One sees this aspect of Sanders now in this campaign. Speaking with Katie Couric on Yahoo News, Sanders called for students to march on Washington:

    “My view is that the only we can bring about an agenda that works for working families is if millions of people are actively involved in the political process. If a million young people march on Washington they to the Republican leadership, we know what’s going on, and you better vote to deal with student debt. You better vote to make public universities and colleges tuition free, that’s when it will happen.

    “We’re already seeing that with the minimum wage. Do you know why the minimum wage is going up around the country? Because workers are going out into the street, so we need a political revolution, in my view, where people begin to stand up and fight and take on the big money interests. If we don’t have that, no president, not the best president in the world will ever be able to accomplish anything.”

    If Sanders supporters want to really build a new social movement for both economic and racial justice, they will have to find a way to bring the Black Lives Matter movement and the rank-and-file labor movement together and to keep them together beyond Sanders campaign. Such a connection between the labor movement and the black and Latinos movements is the historic aspiration of the best of the socialist left.

    Sanders Foreign Policy: A Big Problem

    For those of us radicals on the left, Sanders greatest weakness is his foreign policy. While it is true that Sanders voted against war to “liberate” Kuwait (the first Iraq war) and voted again against the Iraq war resolution of 2002, on the other hand, he supported President Bill Clinton’s airstrikes on Kosovo and the war on Afghanistan in 2001 and voted that same year for the Authorization for the Use of Military Force against terrorists, the law used today by President Obama to attack ISIS in various countries. In 2003 he voted for a bill that gave President George W. Bush support in Iraq and in the war on terror. Sanders has voted for the military appropriations bills about as often as he had voted against them. In the Middle East he leans toward Israel against Palestine, though not without reservations.

    What this record makes clear is that Sanders has no consistent and principled position against U.S. imperialism. While his program calls for reductions in military spending, he does not call for dismantling the hundreds of U.S. bases around the world, for ending the war on terror, for stopping the use of drones, and so on. Sanders’ program makes no mention of the military.

    While he calls himself a socialist, Sanders’ foreign policy and military policy remain in line with corporate capitalism, militarism, and imperialism. The central issue for those concerned about world peace is the Middle East region (from Algeria to Afghanistan)—and in that region his position in support of Israel, rather than with the Palestinian underdogs, places him on the wrong side. Sanders is not an aggressive hawk like Hillary Clinton, but he is no dove of peace and no ambassador for internationalism. Despite these crucial foreign and military policy failings, Sanders’ campaign poses a challenge to the left.

    The Socialist Left and Sanders

    The Sanders campaign has posed a serious challenge to the thinking of the far left in the United States. Over the years, a variety of socialist groups have pursued different strategies to build a radical political party in the United States. Some left groups, particularly the Communist Party, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and Maoist groups such as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization have historically worked in the Democratic Party and see no problem with that. They have hoped to build a peoples’ movement both within and without the party. They may have supported Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s or Dennis Kucinch in the 2000s, but these groups can generally be called upon in the end to support the Democrat’s nominee against the Republicans, rejecting candidates like Ralph Nader and parties like the Greens. While they are both boosting Bernie now, the CP and the CCDS are likely to go on to support Hillary—or who ever is the Democratic Party candidate—in the national election.

    The Democratic Socialists of America, originally founded as an organizing committee by Michael Harrington in 1973, had as its strategic objective the “realignment” of the Democratic Party. Socialists, Harrington argued in his book Socialism, would drive the Dixiecrats and the corrupt big city machines out of the Democratic Party, leaving the labor unions as the dominant bloc and revealing that the Democrats were in reality a labor party. The DSA working with officials of the United Auto Workers and the International Association of Machinists pursued Harrington’s realignment strategy up to the end of the twentieth century when it was clear that though the Dixiecrats and most big city machines had withered away, the corporations not the unions had taken over the Democratic Party. In recent elections, DSA did not endorse Barack Obama and very likely will not endorse Clinton. Younger DSA members no longer see realignment of the Democratic Party as the way forward.

    Some other socialist groups, including old-line Debsian socialists such as the Socialist Party USA and various Trotskyist groups, have generally been opposed on principle to any work in the Democratic Party, arguing that the Democrats are the party of the banks and corporations and that working people needed their own party. The Debsians called for the building of a Socialist Party. Other socialists of this ilk have historically argued that the AFL-CIO and other unions should give up lesser-evilism, “break with the Democratic Party,” and form a labor party.

    In 1996 it seemed that after decades of arguing for the “break with the Democrats” the dream was being fulfilled when Tony Mazzocchi, a leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, brought together the United Mine Workers, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the American Federation of Government Employees, the California nurses and hundreds of locals from various unions to found the Labor Party. The problem was that while those unions wanted to form a party, they didn’t want to run candidates who might take votes away from the Democratic Party, so for several years there was an ongoing fight between the union leaders and small socialist groups over the issue of elections, paralyzing the party. The party suspended operations in 2007, though by then there were only a few functioning local chapters.

    The Labor Party experiment having failed, some activists went on to join the Green Party that had been formed in 1984 as a federation of several state Green Parties. Between its founding and the 2000 election the Greens evolved from simply an environmental party to a party that was concerned with the environmental as well as economic, social, and racial justice issues. The Green Party’s influence peaked in 2000 with the controversial campaign of consumer activist Ralph Nader who won 2.7 percent of the vote—leading him to be accused of having been a “spoiler” who had taken votes from Democratic candidate Al Gore, allowing George W. Bush to win the election. Howie Hawkins, a socialist, ran as the Green Party candidate for New York Governor in 2014 winning 5 percent of the vote. Sanders has for the moment overshadowed Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate for 2016; but as she says, “I’ll actually be on the ballot in November.”

    Of all the far left groups, the International Socialist Organization had been the most critical of and hostile to the Sanders campaign—and for all the right reasons: his caucusing with Democrats, his foreign policy, and above all the belief that Sanders will be an obstacle to building an independent left movement and political alternative. The issue is whether these principled objections should keep us from working closely with Sanders’ supporters, while at the same time maintaining our own political independence.

    Where Does Sanders Fit?

    For Sanders campaign doesn’t fit neatly into the historic categories of the far left. Sanders is virtually the only person in national politics who calls himself a democratic socialist and who advocates the kind of social democratic policies—free health and education, strong unions, a comprehensive social safety net—such as existed in Scandinavian nations for decades. The debate over socialism in America, which began with the Tea Party attack on Obama’s Affordable Care Act, has with Sanders’ campaign become part of a broader national conversation. In a nation once dominated by anti-Communism, red-baiting, and the common jeer at leftists “Go back to Russia!,” socialism is now on the table if not yet on the agenda.

    As far as the Democratic Party question, his entire political career Sanders has been an independent—though he caucused with the Democrats–never a Democrat until now, and never argued for a strategy of realigning the Democratic Party. This is quite different, for example, than the careers and strategy of people like Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich who systematically worked to reform the Democrats. Sanders has never suggested that the Democrats could be reformed and is not now.

    And Sanders’ supporters aren’t fundamentally lesser-evilists. They support Sanders precisely because he appears to be the alternative to the lesser evil of the Democratic Party leaders’ choice of Clinton. On the other hand, Sanders has promised to support Hillary Clinton if she is nominated, thus thrusting his supporters into the arms of the corporate-controlled Democratic Party that they resent and reject.

    Given the Republican alternatives of a rightwing union-buster like Scott Walker or a racist like Donald Trump, most of Bernie Sanders followers today will probably cast a vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election. They will not be doing this because Bernie has tricked them and rounded them up for Hillary, but because they fear the Republican reactionaries. They will do that simply because they all along intended to vote to stop Scott Walker or some other anti-working class, racist, or anti-women’s rights Republican from winning.

    Where Do We Fit?

    Okay, that is lesser-evilism of a sort. But many will be looking for a way to build a political alternative when the primary campaign is over. So, some on the far left—in groups like Socialist Alternative and Solidarity—have decided that they will work among Sanders supporters, while still declining to either become Democrats or to endorse him. What can such groups—I myself am a member of Solidarity—do in and around such a campaign? We can bring into the campaign all of the issues—environmental, women’s, LBGTQ, black—on which we are working. We can bring our point of view that while the Bernie Sanders campaign represents a fundamentally progressive development, but that taking the movement into Hillary’s campaign would be a mistake. Most important, we can argue that out of the campaign we must build a movement that becomes part of a new era of social struggle in America.

    Some Sanders supporters, once money and the media have made Clinton the Democrats’ nominee, may come out of this experience so disgusted with the Democrats that they vote for the Green Party’s candidate Jill Stein or go on in the future to organize the working class alternative that the far left has dreamed of. Or is it possible to think that Sanders, now 73 years old and with nothing to lose, might attempt to launch an independent campaign—hard to do under the 50 different state electoral laws—or perhaps endorse or join with Stein of the Greens. Who knows? We can only hope.

    What the Sanders campaign may accomplish is to popularize a program of social democratic reforms, to deepen the discussion about socialism, to bring together labor, black, female, and LGBTQ activists into a movement with enough cohesion, energy, dynamism, and excitement to continue to build something after the election. The Sanders campaign could contribute to the launching of a new period of social movements and upheavals with a higher level of political consciousness and if it does that, it will be a great contribution.

    So, while remaining a registered Green and planning to work for Jill Stein in the election, I plan to work with the Sanders campaign in the primary period, hoping–like other Sanders supporters–that out of this experience we can build a new, stronger, left in America.

  • UAW Local Calls on AFL-CIO to End Ties to Police Unions

     

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    United Auto Workers Local 2865 representing 13,000 teaching assistants and other student workers throughout the University of California system, called on the AFL-CIO to end its affiliation with the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA) in a resolution passed by its governing body on July 25. This is the union’s resolution passed by the union:

    Statement:

    We, UAW Local 2865, call on the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) to end their affiliation with the International Union of Police Associations.

    It is our position that this organization is inimical to both the interests of labor broadly, and Black workers in particular. Historically and contemporarily, police unions serve the interests of police forces as an arm of the state, and not the interests of police as laborers. Instead, their “unionization” allows police to masquerade as members of the working-class and obfuscates their role in enforcing racism, capitalism, colonialism, and the oppression of the working-class. We ask that the AFL-CIO recognize this history and take steps to serve the interests of its Black workers and community members.

    Background:

    The AFL-CIO’s official mission is “to fulfill the yearning of the human spirit for liberty, justice and community; to advance individual and associational freedom; [and] to vanquish oppression, privation, and cruelty in all their forms.” This, we argue, is the calling of a union to be a force for advancing the lives of workers. Within this framework, police unions fail to meet the criteria of a union or a valid part of the labor movement.

    While it is true that police are workers, and thus hypothetically subject to the same kinds of exploitation as other laborers, they are also the militarized, coercive arm of the state. It is the job of the police to protect capital and, consequently, maintain class society. How can there ever be solidarity between law enforcement and the working class when elites call upon police and their organizations to quell mass resistance to poverty and inequality? The police force exists solely to uphold the status quo. Their material survival depends on it, and they hold a vested interest in the preservation and expansion of the most deplorable practices of the state.

    Present Day:

    We have seen this vested interest manifest itself very visibly over the past year. By calling themselves a union, police have utilized union resources to defend brutality and anti-Blackness. Police unions channel resources towards upholding racist practices in a few key ways:

    1. Lobbying to oppose independent oversight by civilians and other governmental entities.
    2. Campaigning for political actors who support limited police accountability.
    3. Defending officers’ crimes of racist brutality in court.  

    These elements have clearly shaped the context that enabled the tragic circumstances of Freddie Gray’s death and speak to the contemporary moment in which Black lives are considered less important than job protection for police. Advocated for by the police union, The Maryland Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBoR) aims to protect the rights of officers above the needs of the community. In cases where police misconduct is reported, such as in instances of “rough rides,” police officers do not have to answer questions until 10 days have passed and a lawyer has been consulted. Subsequently, the overall review process outlined by the LEOBoR empowers a hearing board of fellow officers to have final approval over any penalties imposed upon accused officers—this has resulted in the preservation of employment for nearly all accused officers despite the 3,048 complaints have been filed against 850 Baltimore PD officers (30% of its police force) since 2012.  If complaints do manage to make it past this extra layer of due process, union legal resources are used to defend the officers against charges of racist misconduct in court. By unconditionally insulating officers accused of brutality from facing consequences, police unions maintain the status quo of racial violence that upholds the exploitation of Black communities in particular, as well as other communities of color.

    Historical Evidence:

    We recognize that these are not isolated incidents, but arise from a long history of policing as a profession. Police unions in particular emerge out of a long history of police intervention in labor politics and its complicity in racial violence. The modern U.S. institution of the police has roots in the repressive demands of powerful white capitalists. Overseers and slave patrols in the South evolved alongside the growing need to maintain “order” in early urban areas in the North. In fact, armed “night watches” mirrored policing practices by being a front line of defense against Native American raids on colonies. Policing in the U.S. has always served the needs of colonialism, racism, and capitalism by protecting the property of those who would steal land and exploit the labor of others. Neither the property of indigenous people nor the products of the labor of both workers and slaves has ever come under protection of the institution of the police. It has only ever been the property of the powerful that the police protect. Maintaining this system of relations is the so called “order” that police have sworn to defend.

    In fact, early attempts by labor to organize and fight for rights and better pay and working conditions have historically been met with violence. These instances are many: from picket line fights to police enforced lock-outs; from crackdowns on rallies, like the Thompson Square “riot” of 1874 at a rally for the unemployed in New York City, when police indiscriminately brutalized men, women, and children; to massacres committed by private police, like the two dozen men, women, and children killed in the Ludlow Massacre; and by public police, notably during the Haymarket Massacre we commemorate every year on May Day.

    Modern examples exist as well: police played a significant role in defending Jim Crow segregation. We have all seen the images and video of police siccing dogs on Black protesters, shooting them with water cannons, or billy clubbing them. Racist violence was not confined to the pre-Civil Rights South; Philadelphia police bombed the headquarters of Black radical organization MOVE in 1985, killing 11 people, including children. Recall also the assassination of Fred Hampton, leader of the Black Panther Party, by the Chicago PD in collaboration with the FBI. Very recently, the nationally-coordinated effort to crack down on and ultimately destroy the Occupy movement involved police departments across the country working in unison to stop the most effective modern social movement in opposition to economic inequality. American police as an institution have historically been and continue to be the violent supressive force used to maintain a white supremacist capitalist system on settler colonial land. If labor is to ever truly exert its power and challenge the corporate rule of the U.S., we will need to break the illusion that the police are part of the family of unions that make up organized labor.

    Conclusion:

    The AFL-CIO is an organization truly concerned with issues facing the laborers of America today. The history of policing and its use of union resources to silence those who are harmed by police brutality runs contrary to this mission statement. As Shawn Gude recently put it, to become agents of progressive change and labor solidarity, police unions would need to work actively to negate their own power and abolish the police. We endorse this position, and call on the AFL-CIO to do so as well. As a union, we argue that the International Union of Police Associations fails to adhere to the goals of the Federation, and therefore should not be included in the list of unions which are fighting for worker’s rights.

    This resolution came to our attention through In These Times.

     

     

  • A Report on the Crises in Greece

    While in Athens, I have gotten into the habit of ending the day by enjoying an iced coffee with cream in an outdoor cafe in a park about one mile from my hotel. It is there that I have been writing these dispatches. As I remarked in my first report, the park the cafe is in is filled with children, teenagers, young couples, the middle-aged, and old people until quite late. The cafe does not start to empty until after midnight.

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    Yesterday I slept through breakfast at the hotel and, needing coffee, walked to the cafe in the late morning. While I sat under a canopy shielded from the broiling Mediterranean sun, poor people made their rounds. They came to each table asking for a handout or trying to sell whatever trinkets they had managed to acquire: an old man was selling cheap watches, a boy of around ten hawked packages of syrupy liquid that could be frozen to make ice pops, and so on. A young woman with a depressed and semi-vacant expression moved around the tables asking for money so she could get something to eat. I gave her my last two-euro coin, and she proceeded to the next table. When she asked the middle-aged Greek couple seated there for a contribution, the female partner reached into a small paper bag and withdrew a breakfast roll that she handed to the beggar. The young woman took the roll and proceeded to the next table. There is a visual joke from a Marx Brothers' movie where a bum asks Harpo for a dime so he can get a cup of coffee. Harpo reaches under his dilapidated trench coat and, grinning his maniacal grin, brings out a steaming cup of coffee resting on a saucer of China. The bum reacts with a look of shock and disappointment. What he wanted, of course, was the dime, not the coffee. There was no such look on the young woman's face when the older woman handed her the breakfast roll.

    Early in the morning of July 16, the Parliament of Greece passed the first round of laws necessary to continue discussions with the Troika on new loans enabling the country to continue making payments on its debt. There was a twenty-four hour strike of the public employees’ union, a mass demonstration outside Parliament, and a battle between anarchists and police in which they exchanged Molotov cocktails, tear gas, and stun grenades. All of the Left Platform MPs (around forty) within Syriza voted against their own government, but the legislation still carried overwhelmingly. Tsipris engineered the capitulation, but retained his political honesty. He said that he did not believe in the deal imposed by the Troika and in fact thought it was irrational but that, given the banking crisis, the Greek government had no choice but to accept it. He had to depend upon the discredited opposition parties to pass the laws. Tsipris carried the vote by a razor thin margin of members of his own party, just two more than necessary to prevent the opposition from calling for new elections in accordance with Greek electoral practice. All of the Syriza ministers who voted against the legislation have now resigned from their ministerial posts, but have kept their seats in Parliament. There are rumors that Costas Lapavitsas, economics professor at the University of London and a leading member of Syriza's Left Platform, may walk out of Syriza and form a new party to its Left. The rumors may be false since Lapavitsas recently said he would stay in Syriza and fight to return the party to its radically anti-austerity origins. According to him, the Left Front was the only group within the Party that kept faith with the democratic will of the people expressed in their resounding No! to the Troika in the July 5 referendum.

    I had dinner with three friends yesterday evening and then went with them to do some sight-seeing at the Acropolis. Afterward we took a cab to the anarchist neighborhood, Exarchia, for drinks. The cab driver was a highly intelligent and friendly man in his late 50s. He told us that he normally voted for the right-wing parties but that, in the last election, he voted for the Left. He also voted No! in the referendum. But like the rest of Greece, he was betrayed by Tsipris, and he vowed never to vote for Syriza again. He quoted Gianni Agnelli, the politically lucid Italian president of Fiat during the tumultuous 1970s, who said that is sometimes necessary to vote for the Left to implement measures that are painful for workers and the lower middle class. According to the driver, that is precisely the role Syriza has played. We asked for his opinion of the Greek neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn. He said that the Greek people are not Nazis, but that some vote for Golden Dawn to protest the negative effects of immigration, especially rising urban crime rates. He told us with a note of both realism and regret that Golden Dawn is now the third largest party in Greece.

    The most worrisome consequence of the betrayal of the referendum by the majority of Syriza in Parliament is that it will give new impetus to the rise of the neo-Nazi Right. Golden Dawn has been quiet recently as a result of the indictment of some of its leaders for responsibility in the murder of immigrants. But Hitler was once jailed for his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch. In times of severe crisis – the Great Depression of the 1930s, the current Depression in Greece – the road to fascist power is opened when the Parliamentary Left takes on the role of managing a crisis on behalf of the capitalist class that cannot be successfully managed. It amazes me that so many Left professors, inside and outside Syriza, have failed to see that.

    The agreement between the Troika and the Greek government will someday be remembered as a colossal economic and political farce, but a farce that will end in tragedy unless the Left plays the cards it has left very carefully. No one – the Troika and the government least of all – believes that the deal can be implemented, let alone succeed. The parliaments of Northern Europe will never make the promised 80 billion euros available to Greece over the opposition of their own voters. On its part, Greece will not be able to find 50 billion euros of public assets to privatize, as the agreement requires. It is also unlikely that the government will be able to implement a host of other reforms under the agreement because of its lack of control over the state apparatus. Corruption and clientelism are so rampant in Greece that many candidates run for political office solely to get jobs for their relatives.

    Greece might as well have been defeated in a war, because it has now surrendered its national sovereignty. It has been forced to rescind all of the legislation the government had passed in its five months in office. In addition, under the agreement, the Troika has the right to veto any new law that it judges will adversely effect the ability of Greece to pay off its debt. The agreement also demands that the government set aside past judicial decisions that conflict with the interests of the Troika. To add insult to injury, the Troika will now set up its physical headquarters in a building in Sytagma Square. Tsipris is right that the Troika's demands are irrational economically. They will deepen the depression in Greece, depriving the state of the revenues necessary to pay back the loans. But the Troika is not stupid – it knows very well that this is the case. It is operating in accordance with a different, specifically political rationale. Quite simply, it wants to crush Greece as an object lesson to Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, all of which face debt crises. Golden Dawn will take note.

    There are three categories of crime under which the Nazi prisoners were tried in Nuremberg: crimes against peace, crimes of war, and crimes against humanity. By refusing to live up to its constitutional responsibility to provide liquidity to the Greek banking system, the European Central Bank launched an economic war against the Greek nation. It is guilty of crimes against peace. By targeting the civilian population, the ECB and the other two members of the Troika are guilty of war crimes. Even before the ECB brought down the Greek banking system, the Greek department of health released data showing that one-third of all Greeks are under-nourished. Some hospitals have already closed and more will certainly follow. People will die of malnutrition and lack of medical care. The Troika is guilty of crimes against humanity. We need a new version of the Nuremberg trials. At the very least, Merkel, Shaeuble, Draghi, Holland, and the rest ought to be brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague. If the Court is unable to achieve justice in the case of the People of Greece vs. the Troika, then the idea of Europe as anything other than a pack of ravenous wolves and a flock of helpless sheep is indeed doomed.

    In a war of the wolves and the sheep, the most aggressive wolves win. Golden Dawn and its counterparts in the rest of Europe are waiting to enter the fray.

    Gary Zabel is a professor of philosophy at UMass Boston. He has been visiting Greece for the conference, Democracy Rising, and has been writing a series of reports about his trip for Open Media Boston. This report concludes the series. To see the other reports see openmediaboston.org

  • July 25,1898: INVASION OF PUERTO RICO & THE EMERGENCE OF U.S. IMPERIALISM

    For the many people who have engaged in the struggle for Puerto Rico’s independence, July 25 has a special significance. On that date in 1898, U.S. troops invaded Puerto Rico, beginning a period of U.S. colonial domination on the island that continues to this day. The United States invaded Puerto Rico, along with the Philippines, Guam and Cuba, in the setting of the Spanish-American War. That war was the opening of what would be the menacing role and predatory nature of the U.S. capitalist class in the Caribbean, Latin America and the entire world. The seizure of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam and the Philippines by the United States signaled the quest of the U.S. capitalist class to become a world power. European powers had pursued a policy of colonial acquisitions since the end of the 15th century. But only in the late 19th century had the mature and developed capitalist powers virtually colonized the entire planet. The projection of U.S. power outside of the North American mainland signified a rush not to be left behind in this global division of markets. Imperialism was transforming from a policy into a global system. No capitalist power could stand on the sidelines. Eventually this scramble and competition for colonies led to the first “world war” in human history, from 1914 to 1918, involving all the major capitalist powers. V.I. Lenin (leader of the Russian socialist revolution) noted this trend in the very first sentence of his classic 1916 work “Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” “During the last 15 to 20 years, especially since the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), the economic and also the political literature of the two hemispheres has more and more adopted the term ‘imperialism’ to describe the present era.” Until the Spanish-American War, capitalism in the United States was focused on expansion within North America. The expansion came from the push west and the seizure of the land of the Native American population and the theft of nearly half of Mexico’s territory in the 1846-1848 U.S.-Mexican War. Following the end of chattel slavery and the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, industrial capitalism was able to grow rapidly. Facilitating trade and the transfer of raw materials, railroad track was laid throughout the entire stretch of the U.S. territory. Mining of raw materials increased. Factories, ports, bridges and dams were constructed at a greater pace. Beneath this supposed progress in U.S. society, there was a tremendous cost in human suffering. The consolidation and expansion of capitalism in the country could be measured by the genocide of the indigenous people—Native Americans. By the late 1890s, Native people were virtually annihilated within the territories of the continental United States with the close of the so-called “Indian Wars.” Eventually the dynamism of capitalism meant that the home market was insufficient. New markets, raw materials and cheaper labor were increasingly required for continuation of a vast increase in productive forces. Capitalist development began to be propelled in the direction of a new kind of expansionism, aimed at subordinating the economies of other lands. THE COMPETITION BETWEEN THE US AND SPAIN The more benefits that U.S.-based companies derived from economic investments made in the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico before the war—amounting to $50 million in 1897—the more that U.S. manufacturers and bankers desired direct control of these markets. Throughout the 1890s, there was a growing war fever among the U.S. ruling class. Prominent bourgeois figures, politicians, journalists and the clergy encouraged hostilities and openly called for the military seizure of Spain’s remaining colonies. “Democracy” and “freedom” became the banner for all sorts of demagogic warmongers. Militarism and arrogance, nurtured by capitalist expansion in the centuries of campaigns to expel Indigenous people from their lands and enforce a genocidal system of slavery, were now utilized to justify imperialist expansion. The use of brutal force against people in the invaded lands was justified as “divine will” or “manifest destiny.” With mounting tensions between Washington and Madrid, the U.S. Navy targeted and harassed any vessel flying the Spanish flag in the open sea. U.S. Navy warships were instructed to stop Spanish freighters, carry out searches, and in many cases seize the cargo. This was despite the fact that a state of war did not yet exist. Spain was a crumbling feudal power facing severe internal political strife. It no longer had the empire status that it enjoyed centuries ago. The Spanish government was not in a position to engage in hostilities with any country—especially the United States, which was demonstrating its industrial might and was obviously eager to test its military ability. A PRETEXT FOR WAR On the evening of Feb. 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded while docked in the harbor of Havana, Cuba. While 266 sailors were killed as they slept in their quarters, the ship’s captain and his close officers were not harmed. Washington officials were quick to blame the Spanish government, claiming that the explosion was caused by a floating mine. The fact that many eyewitnesses saw the force of the explosion coming from within the bow of the ship did not matter to U.S. investigators. Later investigations discounted the possibility of a mine explosion altogether. Whatever the cause, the Spanish government was in no way responsible. Despite Spain’s repeated diplomatic efforts and willingness to compensate for the loss of life and the destroyed ship, the U.S. government exploited the situation as a perfect excuse for war. On April 25, 1898, President William McKinley, with the consent of the U.S. Congress, made his infamous declaration of war against Spain. The United States would now be recognized as a world imperialist power. The military campaigns that followed impacted the lives of millions of people in the Philippines, Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico. They were now to become subjects of a new colonial oppressor. On July 25, 1898, 26,000 U.S. soldiers stormed the shores of Guanica, Puerto Rico—the stepping-stone to the invasion of the entire island nation. The invasion was led by the notorious Gen. Nelson Appleton Miles—a reliable servant of U.S. capitalist expansion in the western U.S. states. Miles was infamous for his role in the suppression of the Pullman strike and other labor struggles. He was also known for his capture of Native leaders like Geronimo and Sitting Bull after hard fought resistance battles waged by Native people. But Miles’ most outstanding crime was the Dec. 29, 1890, massacre of 300 Indigenous men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. As the U.S. Army marched through the mountains of Puerto Rico, they encountered peasants who had been forewarned of the invasion’s brutality. These mountain people, armed solely with machetes, valiantly attacked the invaders. Those captured by the invaders were often bound to trees and shot. That resistance today symbolizes the beginning of the ongoing Puerto Rican resistance to U.S. colonialism. The U.S. military occupations in the Philippines, Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico were the opening shots of a wave of imperialist invasions over the next decades in the Western Hemisphere and other parts of the world. U.S. troops were sent to Nicaragua in 1898 and again in 1899, 1907 and 1910, and from 1912 through 1933; to Panama from 1901 through 1914; to Honduras in 1903 and again in 1911; to the Dominican Republic in 1903; to Korea in 1904; to China in 1911; to Mexico from 1914 through 1918; to Haiti from 1914 through 1934; to Cuba in 1906 to 1909, 1912 and again from 1917 through 1933; to the Soviet Union from 1918 through 1922; and to Guatemala in 1920. The list continued throughout the 20th century. With hundreds of military bases around the world today, U.S. military interventions are a constant feature of world affairs. CONTINUED ANTI-COLONIAL STRUGGLE The big business mass media make every effort to disguise the foreign subjugation of Puerto Rico. But events take place that push the truth about the U.S. occupation to the surface. The FBI assassination of Machetero leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios in September 2005 and the struggle to stop U.S. Navy bombing on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques in 2000 were two recent cases. Despite the many U.S. claims about Puerto Rico’s “progress,” the island’s people never asked to be invaded and colonized, have economic hardships imposed upon them or be forced to uproot and emigrate to the colonizing country. Within the United States, Puerto Ricans are among the poorest nationalities. The U.S. invasion of July 25, 1898, is why today Puerto Ricans have no say in any fundamental matters pertaining to the economic and political life of their homeland. The U.S. government’s colonial policy denying the Puerto Rican masses their right of self-determination and independence accounts for the continued people’s resistance there. QUE VIVA PUERTO RICO LIBRE Y Socialista! FREE OSCAR LOPEZ RIVERA, NOW!

  • The Value of Protest

    As a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, my first reaction to hearing about the Black Lives Matter protest at Netroots Nation was disappointment. This looks bad, I thought. Bad for Bernie, who is the only presidential candidate with any chance of challenging structural injustice. And bad for Black Lives Matter, who could easily be interpreted as shutting down progressive discussions about immigration and economic inequality to make people focus on their priorities. I’ve had my share of mistakes during protests, as have all the activists I respect most, so I certainly had some sympathy. But I thought their protest was just that: a mistake.

    Then I watched the video of Sanders responding to the protest, or should I say, failing to respond and instead just speaking over and past them. He tried to just continue with his stump speech and seemed annoyed with the disruption. Several times he looked at moderator Jose Antonio Vargas as if he expected Vargas to control these women, once asking, “Are you in charge here?” The closest he came to discussing policing issues directly was mentioning his success with community policing in Burlington, VT, a city that was pretty much all white and pretty much irrelevant to the discussion of racist policing.

    As black women, those activists are people who have always been systematically locked out of the public discourse, and they were making their voices heard even if it ruffled some feathers. In theory, Bernie’s campaign platform is all about the way ordinary citizens have been locked out of the political discourse and the need to make those voices heard. But when the very thing he says he is looking for appeared right in front of him, he didn’t see it. As my dad says, if it was a snake it would have bit him. And this time, it did.

    Others have written thoughtful reflections on what this protest meant for challenging white privilege. The value for me personally was in what the protest exposed in Bernie Sanders, and by extension, myself. When asked directly about white supremacy and police violence against people of color, Sanders responded by talking about fixing the economic system and providing more jobs. He didn’t explicitly connect unemployment with getting killed by police, but the implication was that if a black person doesn’t have a job, we can pretty well expect that he’ll get gunned down by a cop. Bernie was focused on Big Ideas, and derailing that to talk about one woman, or even one certain segment of the population, seemed like a frustrating distraction.

    The thing is, this specific protest was in honor of Sandra Bland, who had a job when she was arrested for not using a turn signal and died in custody. In fact, she moved to Texas for her job, but her pursuit of a career didn’t save her. On the other hand, the 31% of unemployed white high school graduates mentioned by Sanders don’t get killed by police at anywhere near the rate of the 51% of unemployed black high school graduates. In retrospect, Bernie’s response to the BLM disruption looks like an exercise in avoiding the obvious fact that race matters.

    Like Sanders, my tendency is to zoom out from the personal and look at things structurally and systemically instead. When I think about anti-racism, I tend to focus more on changing institutionalized inequality than on challenging individual attitudes. In the past I’ve worried that the BLM movement’s focus on the names of specific people killed by police might simplify the need to dismantle complex systems into a perspective that considers justice done when specific killer cops are prosecuted. The most disappointing part about watching Sanders yesterday was the degree to which I recognized myself in him.

    But the BLM protestors chanted “Say her name!” in reference to Sandra Bland because Bland’s particularity demonstrates that increased economic opportunities alone will not solve the problem. We also have to actually confront racism. Bernie never did say her name, and his failure to depart from his script to validate the particularity of Bland’s life is inseparable from his failure to really see the particular living black women standing right in front of him as the embodiment of everything his campaign strives to be.

    I think Bernie Sanders can actually win the presidency, but to do so he needs the energy and grassroots organizing of the Black Lives Matter movement on his side. It’s early enough in the campaign that with some serious reflection and humility, he can learn from this and earn the trust of the movement. And importantly, when he is president, this learning experience will make him far better at dealing with the reality of racism and other kinds of oppression that plague our country.

    The BLM protest revealed the deficit not only in Bernie’s campaign, but in the approach of folks like myself who would rather avoid the particular lived experience of individuals who suffer from oppression. An exclusive wide-angle view on structures is just as much of an oversimplification as an exclusive narrow focus on individuals. Like any oversimplification, it compromises our ability to find adequate solutions to real world problems. Avoiding the particular also blinds us to our real allies when they are right in front of us.

    Some might say that people like me could have been taught these lessons without disrupting a critical dialogue with Jose Antonio Vargas and possibly damaging Sanders’ campaign. Maybe so. But that would have required people like me and Bernie Sanders to really see and listen to these people, which was exactly the problem. Part of the point is that the lived experience of black women is excluded from the public discourse. It’s never going to be their turn to have their voices heard, so they have to create the opportunities to make their voices heard. Protests are always criticized as being at the wrong time because those who need to protest are never the people writing the agenda. That’s the value of protest.

    Bernie Sanders rightly recognizes that all of us are increasingly excluded from the political discourse that shapes our country. If his campaign is to realize its revolutionary potential, we would do all well to follow the lead of the women of Black Lives Matter who made their voices heard at Netroots Nation.

     

    Tim DeChristopher, as Bidder 70, disrupted an illegitimate Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction in December of 2008, by outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah. For this he served 21 months in jail. This article first appeared on his blog.

  • After Greece, Puerto Rico: Another Crisis Created by Capitalism

    ImageOn Monday June 29, the Governor of Puerto Rico, Alejandro García Padilla, delivered a live message to the people of Puerto Rico stating that the government’s $73 billion debt is unpayable. The governor stated, “The public debt, considering the present level of economic activity, is unpayable”.
     
    Several analysts in the corporate media, and also on the liberal left who are not very familiar with Puerto Rico, have stated that his message came as a shock to the country. This is not true. Articles and editorials in El Nuevo Día, El Vocero and Primera Hora, the country’s three major newspapers as well as television and radio broadcasts in the days subsequent to the Governor’s message express the general consensus that the people of Puerto Rico were not surprised by his words.
     
    What did shock many was the payment of almost $1 billion two days later to pay off debt fees. An article in El Vocero July 3 goes into this matter.
     
    This is a fabricated crisis.
     
    The colonial government of Puerto Rico is simply bowing to the demands of international financial forces which, like in Greece, have been demanding that taxes on working people be increased, that the labor rights enjoyed by some be eliminated and that remaining productive sectors still in hands of the government be privatized.
     
    Since the privatization of the Puerto Rico Telephone Company in 1998, the people of Puerto Rico and in particular the working class have been resisting countless efforts by the two ruling political parties, the Popular Democratic Party and the New Progressive Party, to eliminate labor and democratic rights in order to tighten the screws of neoliberal economic policy and maintain wealth accumulation for a small predator elite.
     
    Similar to the Greek peoples’ long struggle against austerity, two years ago teachers and other public sector workers and supporters occupied the Legislature building of Puerto Rico in response to the government’s decision to reduce the benefits for retirees. Videos and pictures of the dramatic takeover electrified the country as an example of popular resistance and indignation (see picture).
     
    Instead of supporting the people, Governor Padilla has been telling the country that the way to solve this crisis is to implement the recommendations in the Krueger Report, developed by a group of economists headed by Ann Kruger, a former bureaucrat for the IMF (the International Monetary Fund) the same financial institution that the Greek people rejected in their recent NO vote.
     
    This Report proposes that Puerto Rico:

    1. Reduce the number of hours worked by government employees;
    2. Privatize government owned agencies specifically the electric company (Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica), the water resources company (Autoridad de Aqueductos y Alcantarillados), the State Insurance Corporatio (FSE) and the public  education system;
    3. Reduce the minimum wage which is now $7.25 an hour;
    4. Reduce the number of sick days;

     
    In addition, the July 11 edition of El Nuevo Día says it has confidential information that the government intends to fire public sector employees. The previous governor already fired 20,000 workers.
     
    As evidence of the preference by elites to attack workers via "disaster capitalism" and Puerto Rico's inability to remedy its economy due to its lack of sovereign power, the colonial governor said, as quoted by El Vocero on July 3: “We will not get Puerto Rico out of this mess by taking sun on the beach.” With these words he was referring to his intention of reducing the number of vacation days won by public sector unions. However, regarding the corporate sector he has a different tone, putting forward a plan to grant multinational corporations even more tax breaks.
     
    This is what capitalism is, a plan of attack by Wall Street, by the hedge fund investors who profit off these debts and the misery they cause and by the international capitalist financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank to dominate the economies of many countries thru imperialist debt.
     
    In his book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins states: “Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign ‘aid’ organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization."
     
    He explains in detail that the goal of these hitmen is to first sink countries in debt. Then since the debt is not payable, the international loan agencies takeover and privatize a country’s public sectors and are also granted access to mineral deposits and given other corporate incentives or privileges.
     
    In a nutshell, that is what Wall Street, the banks and international finance institutions are attempting to implement in Puerto Rico. But our fight has just begun!

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    Last week several labor leaders met with the governor. After the meeting, Pedro Maymi, President of the Puerto Rican Workers Central Union, declared that they have already given back all that they can. The new President of the Teachers Federation Mercedes Martínez urged teachers to prepare for a renewed fight against the privatization of schools in August.
     
    In the long run however, Puerto Rico, which was invaded by the USA in 1898, must break the chains of colonial capitalism. Puerto Rico is covered with shopping malls and fast-food chains. These corporations make more than $60 billion annually in profits and pay no taxes, unlike its low-wage workers who, contrary to capitalist myth, pay many local and sales taxes (just not federal).
     
    These corporations also receive many government subsidies. Capitalism makes billions in profits from the colonial status of Puerto Rico. That is why Puerto Rico is a colony of the USA: to transfer wealth from the people to the capitalists. This is why Puerto Rico needs independence.
     
    We believe resistance is the only solution. Only a militant and united fight back against the international capitalist gangsters who prefer profits instead of democracy can stop this corporate offensive against people and the planet. We therefore urge solidarity among all working people.
     
    We support the Greek and Black Lives Matter movements for dignity and life.
     
    Puerto Rico owes nothing.
     
    We will not pay. We will fight. #PuertoRicoDignityoverDebt

    Saulo Colón and Daniel Vila for the NYC Committee for Dignity over Debt in PR

  • “What Happened in Ukraine” by Sam Friedman

    ImageNew Politics readers will be interested in this ZNet article “What Happened in Ukraine” by Sam Friedman, an HIV/AIDS researcher who spent time in Ukraine for many years before the recent upheavals in the country. The article is based on Friedman’s interviews with friends who were participants in the Maidan events, and is posted on the ZNet site. Footnotes are available from the author at sam4wp@netscape.net.

    As is clear from the outset, Friedman frames the Maidan and its aftermath very differently from the way that either the mainstream media or most progressives have understood the Ukrainian crisis. His article begins:

    Ukraine went through mass mobilizations and a political revolution during November, 2014 – February, 2015.  In this it resembles struggles in Tunisia and Egypt since 2010, and as in the Egyptian case, the outcomes of these struggles (to date) have sorely disappointed most of the left in the United States and, indeed, internationally.  Unlike the Egyptian and Tunisian struggles, however, from its outset the struggles in Ukraine were seen in remarkably contrasting ways by different parts of the left. Some have viewed the Maidan struggles as an illegitimate movement that supported US (or US/EU) imperialism and should thus be opposed. Others have viewed it more favorably.

    Far too much of the discussion on the left and in progressive publications, in my opinion, has focused on the geopolitical aspects of the struggles in Ukraine. Far too little has focused on the failures of those movements that did succeed in ousting their governments in Ukraine but also in Egypt and Tunisia to bring about governments that moved away from supporting austerity, belt-tightening, and support for neo-liberalism. Most importantly, far too little discussion has focused on the failure of left currents in any of these movements to create serious efforts to bring about a socialist, anarchist, environmentalist or horizontalist reorganization of the economic and social order of society.

    In this article, I first try to clarify what happened in Ukraine, focusing primarily on events in the Kyiv Maidan movement but also addressing what has happened since.  I base what I say on the words of friends of mine who took part in it.  At the end of the paper, I will also address several important analytical questions: 1. Why the government that developed from a politically-amorphous popular revolution has been so right wing; 2. why no mass movement has developed to oppose from the left the austerity that has drastically reduced living standards in the months since this revolution; and 3. what are the implications of these events for the actually-existing lefts in the “post-Communist” countries and in the rest of the world.

    Unlike most Americans who write and speak about these events, I had several good friends in Ukraine before these events began.  I had met them because I have conducted research (and assisted in activism) around HIV/AIDS since 1983, with a considerable amount of this research focused on people who use drugs and their communities. In the 1990s, after the USSR broke up, HIV began to spread among Ukrainian drug users and sex workers…. [complete article]

  • Puerto Rico’s Debt: A Conjunctural Overview

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    In this brief essay we offer a general and immediate overview of the socioeconomic situation in Puerto Rico. We do it while recognizing that such an analysis is incomplete if the historical, institutional, and political dimensions within the uneven development of capitalism are left out. In this particular case we do not explicitly deal with the colonial relationship of the island with the United States or provide a structural analysis of the economy (these dimensions will be treated in a forthcoming comprehensive article). 

    Our immediate purpose here is to present a conjunctural picture that can serve as a starting point for those interested (i.e. activists, academics, party militants) that want to approach Puerto Rican reality and insert themselves in the debates surrounding potential solutions

    An Economy in Crisis

    The economy of Puerto Rico entered its ninth year of contraction━with the expected negative effects on government revenues, public spending, and public debt as the result of a variety of factors:  the collapse of a construction bubble, the dismantlement of the industrial model of development, and the approval of the CAFTA-DR. The situation was aggravated by the financial crisis of 2008, which led to the reduction of credit for small and medium firms, many of which had to cease their operations given the cancellation of their lines of credit and their inability to engage in self-financing. The Gross National Product fell dramatically (on average -2.0% annually for the past 8 years), 270,000 jobs have been eliminated, crime reached record levels, and migration to the United States became the immediate alternative to those wishing to escape the crisis.

    Expansive Austerity

    In 2009 a conservative administration of the New Progressive Party entered government and argued that the economic problem of Puerto Rico was based on the “distortions” generated by the public management of the economy that, according to them, limited the competitiveness and productivity of the local “factors of production.” This new government anchored its public policy on the private entrepreneurial sector, both domestic and foreign, that had demanded a better environment for business and private investment. This petition from the private sector was accommodated with structural adjustment policies like the firing of 30,000 public employees (Law # 7 of 2009), favorable tax reform for the highest incomes, increases in the fee for public university registration, the privatization of public assets, etc.

    The policies applied did not have the desired effect. Part of the problem with their application in Puerto Rico, apart from the well known theoretical issues, was that the economy is characterized by being peripheral and dependent on the economy of the United States. Various instances exist of wealth being extracted and not reinvested. The most illustrative example can be seen in the disequilibrium in the balance of payments caused by the repatriation of profits of manufacturing firms to the United States, which amounts to approximately a third of the GNP (close to $35 billion).

    Public Debt

    The cuts in public spending had a negative multiplier effect in the economy given that they did not have a counterbalance with an increase in private sector investment. The deepening of the crisis led the government to issue $16 billion in debt, which represented 22% of the total debt and the gross domestic product. In other words, more than one fifth of the total debt of the country was constituted by bonds and lines of credit opened by the public sector to contain the economic free fall that was in effect created by the same government who applied expansive austerity.

    It is also important to point out that, apart from the debt, that government had access to $6 billion dollars (8.6% of GNP) assigned via the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and to liquidity injected to the local banking sector to prevent its decapitalization. The most conservative estimates calculate that around $25 billion were injected into the Puerto Rican economy, which leads us to believe that the austerity policies could have had worse consequences.

    Degradation of credit: Increase in the debt service

    In 2013, the conservative government of the New Progressive Party was substituted by an administration of the Popular Democratic Party that at the time seemed to have more of a socio-liberal bent given that it had promised to stop laying off public employees. Still, it had left everything else (collective bargains, wage increases, consolidation of agencies) on the negotiation table. With the arrival of the new administration, immediate degradations of credit by Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch followed, which provoked the closing of doors in primary debt markets to Puerto Rico’s government and a fall in the value of its bonds in secondary markets. Apart from this, many of those bonds contained “acceleration clauses” that complicated the outlook given that this particular debt that matured at the moment of degradation was not considered in the books as an expense. Rather, it had a direct effect on the budget, given the impossibility of refinancing the debt with a new issuance of bonds.

    The debt service doubled from one year to another; its  effect was a reduction in public spending. In the meantime, debates were taking place over the possibility of either restructuring the debt or continuing to pay it under the original conditions agreed upon with the creditors. From these debates, proposals by new political parties and bills were developed to provide the government in turn with the necessary powers to declare a moratorium on the payment of the debt, audit it, and to renegotiate it. Of these, the only one that was turned into a law was the bill pushing for the declaration of local bankruptcy, in which a legal and institutional framework would be created so that Puerto Rico could decree the renegotiation without the need to appeal to federal forums. This law was declared unconstitutional on July 6, 2015 under the argument of “preemption”, given that the federal law for bankruptcy was explicit in excluding Puerto Rico and its municipalities from the federal protection to restructure its debt.

    The strict and literal interpretation of the law leaves Puerto Rico with few options to maneuver around its high public debt and its low economic growth. In the current conjuncture, the threat of default is the only viable alternative to convene creditors for a renegotiation of the terms of the debt. The problem with this mechanism outside of the protection of the law is that it will, in all probability, end up in a lawsuit in the federal courts. This is so because the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (article 6, section 8) clearly states that the debt will have privilege in the order of payments, and if it is not done, it would enter into contradiction with the clause of contractual obligations. It is well known that the argument regarding impairment of contractual rights was used by hedge funds in the case of the restructuring of the debt of Argentina to require compliance with what was agreed upon and to not accept the terms of the renegotiation. In Puerto Rico, a significant part of the debt is in hands of hedge funds, which could take the same course of action, as they did in Argentina, and try to force more cuts in spending and ask for tiered increases in the payment of the debt.

    Proposal from IMF

    Given the multiple failed attempts at renegotiating and restructuring the debt via legal and institutional mechanisms that require a specialized third party, the government of Puerto Rico commissioned  a study that was prepared by three advisors associated with the International Monetary Fund. The proposals of the study followed a “supply side economics” approach, where measures of structural adjustment were recommended, such as: the reduction of costs of production (mainly labor costs), tax reform with more weight on real estate property and indirect taxes (direct taxes would be eliminated), and the continued cutting of the budget of the general fund. The conclusions are standard, given that they establish that these proposals would bring the economy closer to a market equilibrium and to a convergence in terms of payments to its “factors of production,” outcomes that are said to have positive effects in the medium run and to bring welfare in the long run.

    The current discussion of the report has focused on the fact that the majority of the proposals to reduce production costs (decrease in the minimum wage, reduction in labor protection law, coastal trade) are under the coverage of federal laws, which have applied in Puerto Rico via Law #600, which was approved in 1950 by the Congress of the United States. This limitation in what the local government can or cannot do determines the range of constrained alternatives, which implies that reaching the desired “market equilibrium” of the study is impossible. Still, and more importantly, the problems of the debt and the economic depression have continuing direct effects on the country’s workers and firms.

    Conclusion

    The depression that has characterized the economy of Puerto Rico during the first decades of the twenty-first century is the result a variety of short-run, medium-run, and long-run factors, that span from the failure of industrial policy to the intrinsic limits of operating within the legal framework of the United States as a territory. All of these dimensions have given form to an economic model based on the extraction of wealth, where salaries do not move evenly with productivity, a substantial amount of the wealth produced and profits derived in the island is repatriated and not reinvested in the country, and where debt is used to loot the wealth that does remain in the country. Under these conditions it is not surprising that the economy has followed a downward spiral with a significant social burden.

    The different political parties that have come to power throughout the years have demonstrated continuity by proposing and applying policies of a neoliberal bent that have contributed to amplifying the fiscal crisis and have undermined any potential for economic recovery. The attack on the public sector is the most noticeable outcome of these approaches and one would usually expect a social backlash, but the different escape valves available (emigration, federal transfers, informal economy, etc.) and the violence of the state have mitigated the type of mass protest that other countries, like Greece, Argentina, and Spain, have experienced in the last years. Still, more and more progressive voices of citizens against austerity policies have emerged, voices that want social spending to be prioritized over the payment of the debt. The question then is if under the current structure of relations of power can such claims be accommodated. Given the recent history, we believe that they cannot.

  • Awakening to Climate Change

     

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    I awoke Saturday morning to rain on the roof. I am staying at my sister’s place in my hometown of Imperial Beach at the southwest end of San Diego County on the Pacific Ocean and the Mexican border. I could not at first identify the sound, the crackling of the rain on the awning of the patio just outside my bedroom window. Half asleep, I wondered at first if there might be a fire, then if some machine was running, finally I recognized that it was water and speculated that something might be leaking; perhaps there was a broken pipe. It never occurred to me that it could be raining because when I grew up here from the late 1950s until the late 1960s, it only rained in December and January. Now there is rain in July.

    My wife Sherry and I got up and walked a few blocks to the estuary of the Tijuana River in the virtual miracle of a light summer shower in San Diego. Now the estuary park, when I was a boy in high school we called it “the sloughs.” The sloughs contain a fascinating environment of plants that must live in both fresh and salt water as well as in the arid climate of San Diego. The bizarre plants seem to combine elements of seaweed and cactus, of sagebrush and swamp weeds. Though it occasionally became polluted by the Tijuana sewer system, I and the other high school boys sometimes swam in the Tijuana River, accompanied by little sand sharks. The mouth of the river emptied into the Pacific on the U.S. side of the border where in winter there could be and often still are huge breakers.

    Walking along the sidewalk in Imperial Beach I remembered how fifty years ago when it rained—and then it only rained in December and January—one would immediately find tadpoles in the gulley alongside the dusty paths that served as sidewalks in our town. In the winter frogs abounded. Now there are none. Also gone are the horny toads as we called horned lizards that raced through the brush in the sloughs and the sand dunes on the beach. The demise of those critters was not the result of climate change, but of other developments that affected the environment: the laying of sidewalks and culverts, the increase in population density, herbicides and pesticides used on lawns, and who knows what other threat to the delicate balance of sun, sand, and salt and sweet water.

    When Sherry and I got down to the beach we heard booming, which I presumed was cannon fire from the U.S. Navy ships off shore engaged in training exercises. But looking toward the Island of Pilón de Azúcar which sits off the coast toward the south, we could see lightning and realized that the booming was thunder. I had never in the many years I lived in and later often visited the San Diego area seen a storm accompanied by lightning and thunder. By afternoon, when we drove to Chula Vista to see a movie, the rain had become a full-fledged thunderstorm. Shopper and moviegoers jumped, startled by the thunder and gawked at the lightning, incredulous.

    The latest storm was the result of a hurricane, one of a few this year that have powered up the coast from southern Mexico, then along the Baja California peninsula to the San Diego area. Ironically, the rain, which woke me up and led me to think about climate change is the opposite of the real problem in southern California and throughout much of the Southwest, which is drought.

    Los Angeles is losing trees at an alarming rate. Laura Baurenfeind, principal forester for LA's Department of Recreation and Parks, says the city's parks have lost an estimated 14,000 trees in the last year due to the drought. Regulations intended to reduce water used for watering lawns threatens residents’ trees and bushes.

    While I was surprised by the rain motorists driving through the Riverside National Forest on highway 15 were shocked and terrified when a forest fire jumped the highway and set their cars on fire. Motorists abandoned their flaming trucks and autos and ran from them in terror. “I've never seen anything like this before,” California Highway Patrol Officer Steve Carapia told the Los Angeles Times.

    San Diego, dominated for years by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps and the aerospace industry, is a very conservative town. Fox News may be the biggest influence on public opinion here and some of its commentators are climate change deniers. So it’s good to see that the San Diego Foundation issued a report that suggests that in the next 35 years it is likely that:

    ·      Sea level will be 12-18 inches higher.

    ·      San Diego’s climate will be hotter and drier.

    ·      We will face a severe water shortage.

    ·      Wildfires will be more frequent and intense.

    ·      We will not be able to meet our energy needs.

    ·      Native plant and animal species will be lost forever.

    ·      Public health will be at risk, especially among our elderly and children.

    The Foundation’s report contains a number of suggestions of measures to be taken to respond to this critical situation, but mostly it presumes that nothing can be done to stop climate change. So build your house on higher ground, farther from the shoreline, for the salt water will be rising as fast as the fresh water table is falling.

    Local residents seem most aware of this issue, the water problem: drought, dry riverbeds, falling water tables, and deeper wells. Walking through my old hometown I see that some of my sister’s neighbors have replaced lawns with gravel, concrete, or cactus gardens. Clearly some of these people have an environmental consciousness.

    That environmental consciousness was demonstrated in the last election when Imperial Beach residents elected a transnational environmental activist, Serge Dedina, as mayor. Dedina, a surfer, has spent years explaining environmental issues and advocating for conservation of natural habitats on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. His election in a conservative area where Fox News reigns and climate change deniers advocate laissez-faire policies represents a positive development.

    Still many San Diegans prefer to ignore the more serious problem, the central problem of climate change, which is the increase in greenhouse gases because of the constantly increasing number of cars on the road, as described in another San Diego environmental report by Tanaka Research and Consulting. While the Tanaka report proposes measures to reduce greenhouse gases from auto emissions, much like the San Diego Foundation report, it has nothing to say about the need to change the system that brought us to the environmental catastrophe that we, our children, and grandchildren will face.

    The problem is not the symptom that rain falls out of season or that it doesn’t fall at all. The problem is not simply the growth in greenhouse gases produced by automobiles. The problem is that capitalism has proven to be a system that grows and expands at the expense of the environment. As environmental activists have been saying, what we need is system change if we are to stop climate change.