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  • U.S. Gay Rights Movement Mobilizes, Wins Victory against Discrimination

    ImageThis article was originally written for the Swiss socialist newspaper solidaritéS for which I am a correspondent with the goal of giving activists there some sense of the recent fight for marriage equality in the United States. – DL

    The U.S. gay rights movement won a tremendous victory in early April as governors and the state legislatures in Indiana and Arkansas were forced to back down and revise laws that would have discriminated against gay and lesbian couples.

    The controversy was over religious freedom versus gay rights. With more and more states passing marriage equality laws—37 of 50 states and the District of Columbia now have such laws allowing same-sex couples to marry—some conservative state governments reacted by attempting to pass religious freedom laws, ostensibly to protect religious rights, but actually to allow religious conservatives to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

    The current batch of religious freedom laws are based on a U.S. federal statute called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 that was originally intended to protect Native Americans whose religious practices involved sacred lands or using drugs such as peyote.

    Conservatives then decided to pass similar laws at the state level not to protect the indigenous peoples’ right, but to protect Evangelical Christians who oppose same-sex marriage. Under such laws, private individuals or businesses would not have to serve LGBT folks, for example, a baker could refuse to make a cake for a gay wedding. Some 19 states passed such religious freedom laws intended to build an impermeable wall between Evangelicals and the gay movement.

    But it is clear that times have changed. When the Indiana legislature passed and Governor Michael Pence signed a religious freedom law that would have allowed private parties to discriminate, the LGBT movement spoke out and organized against it at once. At about the same time Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas was signing a similar bill passed by the Arkansas legislature, with a similar reaction from gay rights groups.

    Gay organizations called the new laws “a license to discriminate” and immediately organized protests in Indiana and Arkansas as well as turning the issue into a national debate. LGBT organizations, Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Human Rights Campaign joined together in legal and lobbying efforts, while many local LGBT organizations and grassroots activists went into motion.

    What was astonishing in this political fight was the enormous amount of public support from around the country for the LGBT movement and for marriage equality. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which is based in Indiana and organizes all university sports events, expressed its concern about how LGBT athletes might be treated in Indiana. The NCAA was joined by the National Basketball Association, and the Women’s National Basketball Association.

    Many major corporations, under pressure for years now from the threat of LGBT boycotts, came out against the bill and after it passed, demanded that it be revised to ensure no discrimination against gays and lesbians. In Indiana, Apple, Angie’s List, Eli Lilly, and Anthem were among nine major corporations that came out opposing the religious freedom law as originally proposed. In Arkansas Acxiom, Apple, and Wal-Mart—the country’s largest retailer—joined in opposing the religious freedom law for discriminating against gays and lesbians.

    Under pressure from the LGBT movement, the corporations, and the public at large, the governors Pence and Hutchinson and the Indiana and Arkansas legislatures revised the legislation to protect LGBT rights. The strong reaction and rapid retreat by conservatives probably means the end of any similar bills during this legislative season.

    This stunning victory is the latest expression of what has been a decade of successes by the marriage equality movement. It was only in 2004 that the first legal gay marriage in the United States took place; today more than two-thirds of the states permit gay marriage. In 2004 only 30 percent of Americans supported same-sex marriage; today the figure is 59 percent according to a recent poll. Support for gay marriage, though still less than a majority, has even risen significantly among conservatives and Republicans, while some 74% of Democrats support same-sex marriage. About three-quarters of young people (18-35) support same-sex marriage.

    Many on the left in the LGBT movement have criticized the emphasis on marriage equality laws, arguing that they play into the most conservative views about marriage, nuclear families, and religion.

    Still there is no denying that the LGBT marriage-equality movement has had an enormous impact on American society, winning in the last decade legal rights and political influence comparable to the black civil rights movement at high tide in the 1960s and the women’s movement’s accomplishments in the 1970s. Gay marriage rights have now been institutionalized in laws, court decisions, and in changes in public consciousness that will make it difficult to turn back the clock.

  • Baja Farmworkers Strike Stalled; Results Mixed; Struggle Goes On

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    The strike by farmworkers in the San Quintín Valley of Baja California, which began on March 17 stopping production and shipments on 25 farms and costing the companies tens of millions of dollars, has been stalled as the Alliance of National, State, and Municipal Organizations for Social Justice (AONEMJS or Alliance) which leads the movement faces challenges from the state government, the employers, and corrupt labor unions.

    Whether or not the mostly indigenous farmworkers will be able to come out of the struggle with a genuine labor union, a contract, and real gains in wages, benefits, and conditions remains to be seen.

    The Alliance, made up of indigenous groups from several Mexican states, began brilliantly with a strike combined with blockage of 80 kilometers of the Tranpeninsular Highway over which all truck traffic carrying produce to the U.S. border must move. The strike paralyzed production and quickly brought the state government and employers to the bargaining table. The Alliance produced a list of demands, at the top of which was the removal from the equation of the  Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) and the Regional Confederation of Workers of Mexico (CROM), both corrupt organizations affiliated with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The Alliance also asked for a raise from the miserable US$6.64 dollars per day they have been paid for the last twenty years under the old union contracts to $300 pesos or US$20.25 per day.

    After about 30 hours of strike and highway closing, state and federal police as well as the Mexican Army moved into reopen the highway, establishing checkpoints where vehicles are searched. The state government, the employers, and the old unions first stalled negotiations for several days, ostensibly so that the bosses could come up with a common contract proposal, but effectively starving out the workers who live on their meager wages from day to day. On March 28, the union felt forced to end the strike and workers returned to the fields, but as one of their leaders, Fermín Salazar, said, they did so under duress and under protest.

    At about the same time Governor Francisco “Kiko” Vega de Lamadrid together with his cabinet made a tour of the fields, announcing that production was at between 85 and 90 percent of normal. In a widely distributed press release printed in papers throughout the country, Vega de Lamadrid said that the unions and the companies participating in the Agricultural Council of Baja California had come to an agreement on 64 points among which was a wage increase of 15 percent.

    The Alliance, which had initiated the strike, refused to recognize the agreement because of the involvement of the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) and the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC), both affiliated with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Fermín Salazar said that the political parties and their unions were attempting to take control of the movement, and that they workers would not permit it.

    While many workers have returned to work, it was unclear how many had received the 15 percent wage increase or any wage increase for that matter. Driscoll’s of the Americas, recognized as one of the better employers in the region, announced that it had given workers raises of 20 to 40 percent. Berrymex also announced pay increases for its employees.

    So the strike seems to have had mixed results. Workers have won wage gains, but the government and the employers are clearly trying to marginalize the Alliance while supporting the corrupt labor unions affiliated with the PRI.

    Workers have continued to protest, carrying out a march to the state capital of Mexicali and a variety of other protests. As Alliance leader Salazar said, “For us, the struggle goes on.”

  • Treyf Pesach

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    Hilton Obinzenger is a poet and a long-time informed critic of Zionism and Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. His new poem, Treyf Pesach (Dirty Passover), is a blunt speaking and not unhumorous effort to ask fellow Jews how they can celebrate the slave insurrrection in Egypt millennia ago and yet be struck dumb by the Israeli government's dissembling and bloody practices  toward "the stranger in our midst" today. You can read Obinzenger's smart, snappy work here, and visit his website here.

  • What’s Next for Greece? Debating Syriza’s Options

    ImageIn the weeks following its historic victory in the Greek elections on January 25, 2015, Syriza has been engaged in a bitter struggle. Syriza wants to implement the anti-austerity program it proposed to the Greek people during the election campaign; European elites have declared this to be impossible, and have thrown roadblocks in the way of even the most minimal of the party’s promised reforms—going so far as to challenge Syriza’s right to give food and restore electricity to the poorest sector of the population in the midst of the country’s profound humanitarian crisis.

    As the conflict between Greece and the International Monetary Fund, European Commission and European Central Bank (the three formerly known as “the troika,” now renamed “the institutions”) has deepened, Syriza’s popularity within Greece has soared. At the same time, however, an intense debate is emerging among Syriza members and supporters as to what strategy to follow in light of the relentless pressure from European leaders, with no immediate prospect of a positive change. The New York–based Campaign for Peace and Democracy, which has been actively engaged in support for the Greek anti-austerity struggle since 2012, organized a public forum held on February 6, 2015, titled “After the Greek Elections: The Future of Austerity in Greece, Europe and Beyond,” with speakers debating different perspectives.

    CPD now follows the forum with further discussion of Greece’s options, beginning with Syriza’s 2014 Thessaloniki Program, the basis on which the party campaigned for the January 25 elections, and an overview by Sarah Leonard that provides context for the policy debate, plus nine selected articles representing differing viewpoints. The first by Tom Walker is followed by interviews conducted by Sebastian Budgeon with Stathis Kouvelakis and Costas Lapavitsas. Next are articles by Michael Roberts, Kouvelakis, Barry Finger, James K. Galbraith and Maria Margaronis. Each article is preceded by a brief introduction and summary. We are grateful to Barry Finger for preparing this introductory material. The articles are followed by links to the report of the Hellenic League for Human Rights documenting the horrific human rights abuses produced by the austerity crisis, and to an extensive ongoing reference list on the Greek situation provided by the Canadian Socialist Project.

    Readers may find it helpful in understanding the array of technical terms and references to consult a glossary provided here that was featured in The Wall Street Journal.

    * * *

    Syriza’S Thessaloniki Programme (September 2014)

    Both an election platform (statement of priorities) and a governmental action program for national reconstruction by the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), the Thessaloniki Program, released in September 2014, is a set of policy proposals designed to reverse austerity, relieve the humanitarian crisis, deepen democracy and revive the Greek economy within the formal context of a balanced budget. The program calls for a European New Deal, a European debt conference to write off part of the existing debt and to restructure remaining debt obligations based on future growth. It calls for expanded public investment financed off-budget (free from the restrictions of the Stability and Growth Pact) by the European Investment Bank. It was declared to be “not negotiable” by Syriza’s party leader, Alexis Tsipras (Greek Reporter, Jan. 12, 2015).

    Sarah Leonard, “How Greece Put an Anti-Austerity, Anti-Capitalist Party in Power”

    The author reconstructs the social and economic backdrop behind the rise of the first anti-capitalist party to attain power in postwar Europe. Leonard describes the Greek debt crisis as nothing less than a hostage situation, in which the Greek people are being commanded to submit not only to having their resources appropriated but also to having their futures pulled out from underneath them by the demands of the German banks. The humanitarian crisis is depicted in graphic detail both at the macro and the personal levels. Syriza’s success is analyzed not as a fluke but as the culmination of protracted roiling unrest and resistance rippling throughout society—an atmosphere of pervasive defiance giving rise to a broad Social Solidarity movement. But, Leonard warns, socialism arising from the depths of despair also has a grim doppelgänger. For waiting in the wings, should Syriza falter, will not be the discredited forces of the political center, but neo-fascist reaction. And this dynamic of left-right polarization is being paralleled throughout the eurozone, with much now hinging on Syriza’s success.

    Tom Walker, “No, Syriza has not surrendered”

    Walker navigates between opposing assessments of Greece’s agreement with the banking elites: that Syriza has suffered a major defeat against those who celebrate it as a “decisive step, leaving austerity, the bailouts and the troika.” He asserts that the government negotiated an agreement that, most importantly, staved off an imminent economic collapse. It cancelled the previous government’s planned cuts to pensions, scrapped VAT rises on food and medicine and carved out a framework permitting an increase in public spending if paid for by a more vigorous enforcement of taxes. The agreement is, on balance, a compromise rather than a rout. Syriza is unlikely to move forward, however, if left to struggle in national isolation.

    Sebastian Budgeon and Stathis Kouvelakis, “Greece: Phase One”

    In interview format, Stathis Kouvelakis, a member of the central committee of Syriza and professor of political theory at King’s College London, acquaints the reader with the meteoric rise and internal complexities of the Greek far left, including the origins and background of the forces that coalesced to form Syriza, as well as those that remain external to it such as the Greek Communist Party (the KKE). This interview took place before the elections, but at a time when the likely results were already apparent. Kouvelakis argues that the strength of Syriza resides in its hybridization of the traditions peculiar to the Greek Communist movement with the novel forms of spontaneous resistance that have emerged in the fight against austerity. Particular emphasis is given to the Left Platform forces within Syriza, which see accessing governmental power not as the culmination of social mobilization but as a means of igniting struggles from below. Kouvelakis foreshadows arguments that rapidly rose to prominence after the latest disappointing rounds of negotiations over the debt memoranda, namely that those not ready to break with the eurozone, tie their hands in advance.

    Sebastian Budgen and Costas Lapavitsas, “Greece: Phase Two”

    Costas Lapavitsas, a renowned Marxist economist formerly associated with SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), currently a member of the Greek parliament elected on the Syriza list (though not a party member), clarifies his differences with the Syriza leadership in this wide-ranging interview. He explains why he is skeptical of the prospects of ending austerity and writing off the Greek debt while remaining within the confines and restrictions of the European monetary union. Political advancement, he argues, requires changing the institutional arrangements that straightjacket the Syriza government. Since a reform path is not possible within the eurozone, control over fiscal policy through rupture (i.e., Grexit, leaving the eurozone) according to Lapavitsas, is the only path forward if socialists are to fulfill their election commitments. He calls for a negotiated, consensual exit and suggests that this should be the focus of the next round of negotiation.

    Michael Roberts, “Greece: Keynes or Marx?”

    This is a reply to the Lapavitsas interview, “Greece: Phase Two.” Roberts argues that a Grexit should not begin and end with controls over capital flows, legal in any case under current EU rules, and bank nationalization. He suggests that renewed mastery over fiscal policy resulting from a break with the eurozone will not be sufficient to place Greece on a firm growth path. He notes that Argentina, as a case in point, broke from its dollar denominated currency in 2001 only to find itself with a short-lived recovery made possible by an export-led boom, not applicable to Greece. Roberts suggests that a replacement of big capital, not just banking, with public ownership and workers’ control presents a more dynamic alternative, particularly because Greek capitalism, suffering from a massive over-investment relative to profits, is in no position to turn the economy around.

    Stathis Kouvelakis, “A Reply to the Sophists”

    Reposted as “The Reality of Retreat”

    According to Kouvelakis, the sophists in question are Étienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra, and their sophistry consists in two propositions. The first is that Syriza has no mandate to quit the eurozone, but instead has two affirmative interlinked mandates—to break with austerity and to do so precisely while remaining in the European Monetary Union. The other sophistry is the contention that any assertion of national sovereignty (Grexit) as a more propitious arena for struggle by Syriza, will also isolate and weaken other progressive forces, such as Podemos, within the eurozone. Kouvelakis argues in answer to these assertions that remaining in the European Monetary Union will only strengthen the troika, while fragmenting the alliance that brought Syriza to power and sapping its power to resist. It is a struggle that remains on enemy territory, in an iron cage as Kouvelakis has elsewhere characterized it. Conversely, an exit from the existing framework which makes a democracy accountable to its citizenry impossible would embolden other forces who already are in or might initiate the process of “hegemonizing” the national terrain as the focus of struggle. Real internationalism cannot be disconnected from the concrete realities of struggle, argues Kouvelakis. It is the troika (the institutions) that has colonized the member nations. By asserting sovereignty and giving expression to the popular mandate to end austerity, Greece will be sustaining the spirit of rebellion and resistance in a “democratic, popular, non-nationalist sense, open to the outside world.”

    Barry Finger, “Can Greece Defy the troika?”

    The author acknowledges that efforts by the Greek government to reorient the debt architecture towards supporting economic growth and recovery have failed for lack of a cooperative partner in the troika. If it wished to, the European Central Bank could readily internalize outstanding debt, recapitalize the banks and support the spending decisions of the new government. Instead, the monetary union presently exists as a bankers’ bludgeon to shrink the welfare state and bring the eurozone in line with the far less worker-friendly economic frameworks of the United States and China. There are, nevertheless, stopgap measures that Syriza can pursue that might allow at least part of its program to be realized. It can securitize anticipated taxes and spend them internally as a parallel currency pegged to the euro. With it, Greece can support infrastructural investment, pay public servants and maintain health services. It can jumpstart the economy and reduce the debt to GDP ratio by expanding its tax base. More importantly, it can free euros for the importing of food, fuel and medicine. It can transform the eurozone from a monetary union into a looser monetary federation.

    James K. Galbraith, “Reading the Greek Deal Correctly”

    Galbraith presents a stark assessment of the negotiations prospects. “The only choices were an agreement with conditions, or no agreement with no conditions.” And Greece was under the gun. It had to come to terms with the troika or face a collapse of the Greek banking system, and, by extension, the economy. The final agreement extends the “Master Financial Assistance and Facility Agreement,” which was the framework for past assistance. The bulk of this, argues Galbraith, consists of provisions concerning taxation enforcements and modernization of the public sphere that are not problematic for Syriza. Both sides always understood the commitment to a 4.5 percent primary budget surplus as a nonstarter. And Syriza is in compliance with the International Labor Organization (ILO) with regard to labor reform, which puts it on firmer legal ground than its adversaries. As for privatizations, Syriza does not oppose them per se, but only those that create private price gouging monopolies and/or those whose terms of sale are giveaways that add little to the public coffers. If Greece is to stay in the eurozone, expansion can only come through better tax collection, from private investment or from the European Investment Bank. A large scale Keynesian stimulus was never realistic. The Greek government achieved what it needed to do under the circumstances. It extended its scope of maneuver while building the prospects of its anti-austerity eurozone allies in Spain, Ireland and Portugal.

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    Maria Margaronis, “After Last Week’s Deal with the troika, What Next for Syriza?”

    The author sees the four-month agreement that the Greek government signed with the “institutions” as fraught with creative ambiguity. Syriza extracted a crucial reprieve from the requirement to run a 4.5 percent primary surplus (taxes minus spending net of interest payments on the national debt), permitting room for fiscal expansion. It also won the right, subject to approval, to design its own reforms. She nevertheless also acknowledges that neo-liberal labor market revisions and privatizations approved by previous governments, but repudiated at Thessaloniki, remain as points of contention. Margaronis shares the opinion of others that Syriza’s mandate is to end austerity and restore lost rights, while remaining in the eurozone. But she also suggests that the agreement is, on balance, a modest victory for Greek socialists who applied a democratic wedge to pry open doors heretofore locked by the banking autocracy. In so doing, Syriza provided hope to democratic oppositionists and anti-austerity activists throughout Europe.

    For further research and information, check out Downgrading rights: the cost of austerity in Greece published by the Hellenic League for Human Rights, which gives an extensive account of the economic, social, social, cultural, civil and political rights violations caused by the years of Greek austerity, and the Canadian Socialist Project’s very helpful ongoing listing of articles on the situation in Greece and Europe.

    [This article was originally published by The Nation.]

  • My Deeply-Held Religious Convictions

    Dedicated to Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act

    prevent me from
    upholding,
    condoning, or
    tacitly tolerating
    any form of
    assholery whatsoever,
    in any way, shape,
    or form.
    Therefore, as a
    Hoosier professing these
    deeply-held
    religious convictions,
    I hereby declare that
    I will
    in no way
    tolerate,
    serve,
    or pander to
    any type of
    asshole
    whatsoever,
    under any
    circumstances,
    while I reside
    in the
    State of Indiana;
    but will
    deliberately
    discriminate against
    any and all
    assholes
    I come into
    contact with!
    No exceptions!
    (And no,
    no exception
    for you,
    Indiana
    Governor Pence—
    or for
    any member
    of the
    Indiana
    General Assembly
    who made
    this legal atrocity
    the law of the
    Hoosier land.)
     

    George Fish is a socialist writer living in Indianapolis. This poem first appeared on his blog.

  • Challenging "labor imperialism" AFT-style

    Image            It’s encouraging that US unions are acknowledging the deep crisis facing labor and even the need for union democracy, as Labor Notes contributor Mark Brenner observes in his March 2015 column about the conference organized and hosted by the Albert Shanker Institute, an arm of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).  At the same time, the project to destroy unions is global, and to push back successfully our movement needs to learn with and from workers in other countries. Part of that process is our challenging the Shanker Institute’s public, close ties with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Though the Shanker Institute makes no secret of its relationship with NED, what it doesn’t explain is how the NED works as a junior partner with the US government to suppress independent workers’ movements throughout the world. The AFT itself sponsors projects that undercut militant, independent unions, as two researchers noted using “teacher training as labor imperialism.” 

                 Workers elsewhere pay dearly for the AFT’s and U.S. labor’s support for U.S. foreign policies that sabotage popular movements challenging control of wealthy elites. A 2014 World Bank report about educational reform in Latin America and the Caribbean (stay tuned for a response Mary Compton and I are writing) urges governments to destroy the power of teachers unions.  This report provides a rationale for the repression of the unions, as is currently underway in Mexico and shows the urgency of our making waves about the Shanker Institute hosting a conference about building the labor movement at home while allowing its suppression abroad.

                Efforts to win gains for U.S. workers at the expense of workers in other countries are doomed for the same reasons it has been suicidal for U.S. unions to cast U.S. workers’ self-interest as being separate from and even at odds with non-union social justice issues at home. A strong, mobilized labor movement at home has to be rooted in ideals of democracy, social justice and equality that we understand and act on as universal.

    A shorter version of this letter appears in the forthcoming print edition of Labor Notes. The print publication contains lots that’s  valuable that does not appear elsewhere.  I subscribe. I hope you do too.

    You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook. Still in the works: a critical analysis of that World Bank report about teachers in Latin America and the Caribbean.

  • First We Take Manhattan…

    ImageSince the pressures of international financial capital and its subservient political elites will continue with the same if not greater intensity, it is also certain that a new cycle of social mobilization in Greece and the rest of Europe will begin again. Today, when social movements are “internationalized” mainly through the internet, what role could the communities of the Greek diaspora play in faraway cities, such as New York, cities of great importance for the flow and concentration of financial capital that are registered in our collective imaginary for every possible reason other than their role in the history of social movements?

    Since the elections of 2012, the meteoric rise of Syriza has generated a wave of enthusiasm – at home and abroad – expressed by the proliferation of grassroots groups and organizations rallying in Syriza’s support, against the rise of fascism in Greece and Europe at large and the authoritarian practices of the Greek government such as the overnight shutdown of ERT (Greece’s public broadcasting network). In what felt almost like a chain reaction, nearly every European capital appeared that it would get its own Syriza branch while smaller Greek radical left parties such as Antarsya (Front of the Greek Anticapitalist Left) followed suit organizing marches, protests, conferences and open public discussions in universities and other forums.

    On the other side of the Atlantic

    The  organizing force behind all these rather small groups has been diaspora Greeks who have either lived and worked abroad for decades or migrated recently as a result of the economic pressures back home. The phenomenon has been repeated even across the Atlantic. In February 2012 a gathering at Zuccotti Park in New York City, in response to what was meant to be an international solidarity action under the cry “We Are All Greeks” gave rise to the establishment of three different groups: AKNY (Left Movement NY) – Greece Solidarity Movement, Syriza-NY and Antarsya-US.

    The impact these groups, as collective subjects, may have in the broader fight for social change is certainly unclear. Yet, it appears as if they work like small centripetal forces around which various fragments of the European and American Left flock, inspired by the historical possibilities the rise of a Left party in power brings. Similar are the effects of the rise of Podemos which, transcending the local and particular circumstances of Spain, has generated trans-national networks and organizations enabled by the presence of Spaniards abroad. Whether these groups – all rather diverse in their practices, organizational structure, ideological orientation and immediate goals and objectives – will be able to galvanize greater movements back home or abroad remains to be seen. Some facets of their particular conditions, however, beg for more attention: the diasporic aspect, already mentioned, as constitutive force of their organization, and a strong urban element which, on various levels, plays an important role in the emergence of a new global political geography.

    In our day, social movements’ actions and radical political changes, thanks to the internet and the social media, rapidly reverberate across large geographical scales. The movement of the squares of 2011, encompassing the indignados in Spain and Greece and Occupy Wall Street in the US, the Egyptian Revolution and the Turkish uprising, the revolts in Tunisia and Syria, the Hong Kong or Sao Paulo protests, the rise of Podemos in Spain and Syriza’s ascendance to power are all closely interconnected in our political imaginary. A global struggle for real democracy is taking place and in the process a global change of consciousness is well under way, extending far beyond the political, geographical and ideological spaces of the cities which first ignited it.

    The urban element and the Global Cities according to S. Sassen

    The historically-proven importance of the urban element in constituting social movements once again appears to play a great role. Global cities – a term largely popularized by sociologist Saskia Sassen in her 1991 book The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo – recognized as such primarily for their importance as nodes in the global economic system, constitute also relational conduits where movements connect and develop. Global are the cities where not only financial capital meets and decision-making institutions are located but also sites where new actual physical social relationships are forged and in which potential protesters, activists and radical scholars are implicated. Athens, Cairo, New York, Istanbul or Madrid set a new global political agenda and for that reason alone can be indexed as ‘global cities.’

    Diasporic communities and social movements

    Global cities occupy a central position in the transnational social, cultural and political networks, networks which are made up of nomadic social actors, various kinds of diasporas – small-minded nationals as well as internationally-minded professionals, workers, scholars, researchers, activists and so forth. Transnational social movements, as well, are enabled by electronic networks and weak-tie connections which facilitate the transmission of information but are enacted by social actors on the ground, individuals in direct contact forging actual relationships and strong ties while connecting and coordinating their actions. Individuals and groups moving within and between large urban centers form nodes in relational networks that can connect struggles over distant lands.

    AKNY, Antarsya-US, and Syriza-NY, organizations with which I am most familiar, are diaspora-based organizations working not only to popularize the struggles of the Greek people back home but to build connections and solidarity with organizations, groups and individuals that fight similar fights in New York City and the US. New York, home to a large Greek diaspora, is also home to various forces of the American radical Left which have been closely following the recent political developments across the Atlantic. Greece has ignited the Left’s political imagination around the world, often to the astonishment of the people of the Greek Left who may be more reserved or more cautious in their optimism at the moment. From New York City, the epicenter of world capitalism and source of tremendous symbolic power, modest diasporic networks can capitalize on the prestige that the city emanates, increasing the visibility of their struggles, expanding their influence and potentially building strong counter-hegemonic organizational structures. If nothing else, the results of the recent negotiations between the Greek government and the Troika suggest that international solidarity and mobilization may be key to not only avoiding further capitulation but to developing a strong front against the continuous onslaughts of finance capital in Greece and beyond.

    New York, for instance, thousands of miles away from any European city, for a long time loomed large in European’s imagination, mostly as a hub of high lifestyle, high culture and conspicuous consumption. Yet, the several hundred people who, in 2011, gathered, rather spontaneously, at the small ‘privately owned public square’ of Zuccotti – formerly called Liberty Plaza Park – reminded us at whose expense that lifestyle was forged and specified exactly how few people it concerned. Symbols, along with changing consciousness, or probably because of it, are subject to change as well. On January 22nd, when Pablo Iglesias, the General Secretary of Podemos addressed Syriza’s supporters at the party’s preelection rally at Omonia Square by opening his speech with Leonard Cohen’s: “First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin…” might have had in mind something along these lines.

     

    Note: This article was previously published in Greek in Ενθέματα Αυγής, https://enthemata.wordpress.com, March 15, 2015.

    Despina Lalaki is a Sociologist and Visiting Research Fellow at The Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work, CUNY, The Graduate Center.

  • Zen and the Art of Social Movement Maintenance

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    [This article was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.]

    Angela Davis, revolutionary activist and philosopher, is a committed yogi. She began practicing in prison when a doctor working with the Black Panther Party passed along a book on yoga to help her deal with chronic headaches.

    The poses worked, and many years later Davis continues with her sun salutations. She currently practices under the guidance of Oakland-based yoga teacher Naushon Kabat-Zinn, daughter of medical researcher and mindfulness popularizer Jon Kabat-Zinn. Kabat-Zinn, the elder, defines mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” The most common form mindfulness practice takes is sitting meditation. Mindfulness can be applied more broadly, however, as the recent spate of books on everything from mindful sex to mindful politics suggests.

    In January, Angela Davis shared an Oakland stage with Kabat-Zinn as part of a sold-out fundraiser for the East Bay Meditation Center, or EBMC, which is a leader in efforts to integrate mindfulness practices and social justice. Kabat-Zinn is no stranger to social justice, having been an activist in the anti-war movement at MIT in the late 1960s, and being the son-in-law of the late social movement historian Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States.” Kabat-Zinn is also a spiritual friend to Silicon Valley giants, regularly giving talks to Google and Facebook. He is on the vanguard of what Time recently called the “Mindful Revolution,” a mainstreaming of mindfulness practices being powered by new research illuminating the health and cognitive benefits. Kabat-Zinn’s “Mindfulnness-based stress reduction,” a secular training program based on Buddhist principles, is currently being taught to school children, U.S. marines and corporate employees.

    Angela Davis’ Marxism, and Kabat-Zinn’s cheerful embrace of corporate America, are not an easy match. Indeed, Kabat-Zinn’s work appears to vindicate Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Western Buddhism as a supplement to neoliberal capitalism: “It enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it.” But Davis has seen the benefits of mind/body practices and is not so swift to dismiss them. How can mindfulness genuinely support social justice? This was the basic question she kept returning to in Oakland.

    “In a racially unjust world,” Davis earnestly asked Kabat-Zinn, “what good is mindfulness?” He responded by noting how the heightened awareness enabled by mindfulness practice can progressively uproot the greed, hatred and delusion that cause so much collective suffering. Davis, however, was not satisfied with his response, emphasizing that racism is not simply a set of personal attitudes, but a whole system. How can practices focused on personal habits of mind generate lasting systemicchange?

    Near the end of the evening, Davis offered an answer to her own question. She noted how mindfulness might become a revolutionary force if embedded in social movements that target oppressive systems. But what forms can that integration take? What does a true mindful revolution look like?

    While the brief discussion between Davis and Kabat-Zinn remained abstract, actually existing experiments at the intersection of mindfulness and social change are blossoming. Several organizations are now focusing their efforts on the fold between subjective and social change: the Center for Transformative Change, Generative Somatics and the Movement Strategy Center are three leaders. At the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit in 2010, activists from these groups passed a resolution that read: “We acknowledge that we as agents of change, having been deeply affected by our conditions of oppression, need a deep and abiding commitment to embody the revolutionary change we seek … Revolutionary, systemic change is needed internally, in our relations and in our external conditions.”

    Embodied practices from singing and dancing, along with spiritual forms like prayer and ceremony, have been central to all successful social movements. But the integration of mind/body practices like meditation and yoga into secular and multi-faith movements in the West, is a recent and growing trend. This trend was exemplified during the Occupy Wall Street explosion of 2011. Practices like yoga and meditation were woven throughout Occupy, and were integral to its endurance and impact; they were not a sideshow. This is a part of the Occupy story that remains untold, and yet holds vital lessons for the growing body of activists and mind/body practitioners wondering what good mindfulness can do in an unjust world.

    Strategic meditation

    Meditation and yoga came to Occupy through multiple sources. Meditation Flash Mob, or MedMob, a grassroots organization that began in 2011, had conducted their own public meditations in the financial district in the summer months prior to Occupy. Meditation flash mobs are a form of culture jamming that aim to constructively interrupt daily life in urban centers, and perform the benefits of mindful awareness. Once Occupy began, many MedMob participants joined the encampment, naming a tree in the northwest corner of the park “The Tree of Life,” which quickly became a focal point for spiritual practices of all kinds.

    Along with members from MedMob, the Interdependence Project, or IDP, an organization that offers secular Buddhist study and practice, helped facilitate daily meditations in Zuccotti Park. Adreanna Limbach was coordinating the activism branch of IDP at the time, and was eager to support the new movement. The initial intent of Limbach and IDP was to provide a service to Occupiers, to offer space and time for centering amidst the bustle of the park. But during her engagement with Occupy, Limbach noticed how divisions along the axes of race and class that the movement was seeking to transform were being replicated in the very geography and interactions of the encampment itself. For example, the northeast side of the park was primarily inhabited by middle class white people, and came to be called “The Upper East Side Sacks.” The southwest side, however, was largely black and Latino.

    “About three weeks into my experience at Occupy,” Limbach explained, “I began to think of meditation practice less as a service, and more a strategy, since we are bound to recreate structures of injustice in our daily interactions if we are not working with internal belief systems, and how they are shaped by power, privilege and positionality.”

    Meditation and yoga, however, do not automatically nurture an anti-racist and egalitarian ethos. If they did, Western practice communities would be sanctuaries from what bell hooks calls “imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.” As hooks has noted, based on her experience as a Buddhist and a woman of color, exclusions along multiple axes of oppression — such as race and class — continue to shape the dissemination of meditation and yoga in the West.

    These exclusions were apparent during Occupy itself. Tashy Endres, who offered training in nonviolent communication during the encampment, told me a troubling story about how a difficult conversation regarding race got railroaded. It happened during a meeting where everyone was asked to join in a collective chant of “Om,” which effectively drowned out a black woman who was sharing her frustrations with the group. Endres remains committed to mind/body practices as supplements to social justice work, and integrates body awareness exercises into her nonviolent communications work. She does not, however, see them as guarantees of compassionate or just action.

    “It is important to combine structural analysis with spiritual practice,” she said. “Otherwise, you are likely to replicate oppressions and exclusions no matter how many hours you meditate.” When embodied practices are combined with social justice work, Endres explained, they can allow for a deeper incorporation of radically egalitarian values than is possible through solely intellectual exercises, like education and debate. “For me, when struggle and mindfulness are combined, both can flourish.”

    In an essay called “Buddhism and the Politics of Domination,” bell hooks provocatively notes how mindful awareness can be skillfully used to “release the attachment to dominator thinking and practice.” Other activists agree that the integration of mind/body practice and anti-oppression work is rich with potential. Joshua Stephens, an activist and author who blogged from Occupy Wall Street for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, explained, “If you look at the general mechanics of anti-oppression discourse and training, it is observing how socialization and social structure speak through us, and then finding points of intervention so that we can make deliberate decisions about our agency rather than just moving through racist, patriarchal, colonial inertia. It is a form of meditation.”

    Similarly, angel Kyodo williams, author of “Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace,” spoke with me about how meditation can help people notice transphobic, racist or sexist thoughts as they may move through our bodies. According to williams, this observing and examination of our own unconscious prejudices, can start to rewrite the oppressive scripts circulating in our cultures and communities. Furthermore, as williams explained, mind/body practices can also help heal the embodied wounds to dignity inflicted by systems of domination. Meditation, yoga and other somatic techniques can nurture self-acceptance from an internal and primal place, untouched by the systems of domination that work to belittle particular humans in the service of privileging others.

    “There is a place that we find when we look deeply into ourselves,” williams writes in “Being Black,” “that allows us to be completely free of our histories, our stories, our hang-ups … We actually have a freedom spot in our brains.” Time spent connecting to this freedom spot through mindfulness practices can be profoundly healing for those of us who have been systematically pushed to doubt our dignity.

    Organizations that do anti-oppressive training to build movement power, like theCatalyst Project based in San Francisco, have begun integrating embodied awareness and mindfulness practices into their organizing work. In general, however, the tactical integration of mind/body and anti-oppression work is underdeveloped; it remains a site of great transformative potential.

    The General Assembly: Touching Occupy’s heart

    Occupy Wall Street’s radically democratic vision was most clearly enacted through the General Assembly decision-making process, a forum in which everyone could participate. Because the assembly operated by consensus, participants needed to work through objections to any proposal until the entire group could agree. The process could become challenging and tedious. During conversations with Occupy activists, I learned that, while short meditations like moments of silence were used by assembly facilitators in the early days of the camp, the practice became more common as the occupation continued, and challenges intensified.

    “As decision-making processes began breaking down,” facilitator Marisa Holmes explained to me, “with more disruption coming from within the camp, from the state, from all angles, we used these practices more and more.”

    Why did facilitators turn to mindfulness-based activities in response to intensifying conflict? I asked Leslie Booker, who explained the transformative potential of these practices in the context of Occupy’s general assemblies. Booker, who had worked with a New York-based group called the Lineage Project to teach yoga and meditation to incarcerated youth, was completing mindful yoga training at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California when Occupy began. She returned to New York and became a core organizer of the daily meditations. Based on her work organizing daily sits in the park, Booker was invited to a facilitators meeting.

    “I had been to almost every general assembly,” she explained, “and they could be really violent and aggressive.” Booker instructed facilitators on how to start all assemblies with grounding exercises. (She was careful not to call these practices “meditations” because she believed that word might have religious or spiritual connotations that could potentially alienate participants.) These practices were brief — under 10 minutes — and had participants focus attention on their breath prior to setting a collective intention for the meeting.

    “Setting an intention before we started really shifted things,” Booker reflected. She reported how consensus process became less aggressive after regular grounding exercises were introduced. A number of individual working groups — smaller teams of activists focused on aspects of the occupation like facilitation — began incorporating their own grounding practices.

    “It was cool to see people do it in a way that makes sense for them,” Booker noted. “We don’t have to get into dogma or into dharma, it was just as simple as how can I take a moment to ground myself.”

    Occupy Manifest: Retreating to advance

    While grounding exercises helped ease aggression and facilitate communication among Occupiers, they could not stop the violent eviction executed by the New York Police Department in November 2011. They were also unable to transform debilitating internal conflicts that weakened the occupation. At the root of these conflicts, many activists believed, was the fundamental disagreement over whether and how Occupiers should engage with structures of power, including more established institutions on the left, like unions. According to activists I interviewed, this failure to find a place between uncritical engagement, and a blanket refusal to engage more established institutions for fear of cooptation, was a fundamental barrier to the movement’s progress.

    “I think a lot of mistakes resulted from the inability to engage with power, interact with it and build strategies around how to shift it,” said journalist Nathan Schneider, who is an editor-at-large for Waging Nonviolence and the author of “Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse.”

     

    The ability to engage strategically with power structures, some activists came to see, required that they first develop a strong internal set of values. “My hypothesis is that a lot of fears around movement cooptation were actually fears about personal cooptation,” said Brooke Lehman, a veteran in the New York activist scene who offered direct democracy training during the encampment. Many Occupiers were new to political organizing, and had not yet deeply rooted themselves in their values. If Occupiers could gain a firmer sense of their politics and life purpose, Lehman believed, they might reduce their fear of being coopted and therefore feel more comfortable working with people with different political beliefs.

    Lehman’s theory attracted her to work that fellow activists Kobi and Michael Badger were doing to organize leadership trainings for Occupiers called Occupy Manifest. The trainings involved multiple weekend retreats, a number of which were held at theWatershed Center, a retreat space Lehman helped create for activists, located on a farm two hours north of New York City. A key goal of the Occupy Manifest gatherings, which began shortly after the encampment ended, was to provide activists with the space to collectively reflect on their deepest values, and to use tools like meditation to begin embodying those values as fully as possible.

    Many of the participants in Occupy Manifest became leaders in the Occupy Sandy relief effort after the superstorm hit New York on Oct. 29, 2012. Occupy Sandy was tremendously successful in its response, using social media to quickly raise over $1 million and mobilize 60,000 volunteers — four times the number of volunteers engaged by the Red Cross. A key element of Occupy Sandy’s success was participants’ willingness to work across political differences, coordinating activities with churches, FEMA and other relief organizations that didn’t necessarily share Occupy’s values and horizontalist style of organizing. According to Kobi, who was involved in both Occupy Manifest and Occupy Sandy, the training provided activists with the tools needed to cooperate across political differences without giving up non-negotiable principles. For Kobi, the deeper trust in self that the trainings facilitated for activists was integral to Occupy Sandy’s flexibility, openness and overall success.

    Planting seeds for collective liberation

    Occupy Wall Street is not a complete answer to Angela Davis’ question of “What good is mindfulness in a racially unjust world?” But it revealed important ways mind/body practice can support collective struggle: from improving anti-oppression training to facilitating alliance formation across political differences. The intersection of personal and political transformation remains pregnant with potential.

    During their dialogue, Jon Kabat-Zinn noted his original skepticism towards Davis’s radical stance on prison abolition. “But then you gave me your book, ‘Are Prisons Obsolete,’ and I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s a fantastic idea.”

    Mindfulness alone will not spark a political revolution, but when joined by actual revolutionaries, it might expand all of our possibilities for freedom.

     

  • IMPORTANT STRIKE IN MEXICO; FARM WORKERS PARALYZE BAJA FARMS

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    Thousands of farmworkers in the San Quintín Valley of Baja California, just 185 miles south of the U.S. border, struck some 230 farms, including the twelve largest that dominate production in the region, on March 17 interrupting the picking, packing, and shipping of zucchini, tomatoes, berries and other products to stores and restaurants in the United States. The strikers, acting at the peak of the harvest, were demanding higher wages and other benefits to which they are legally entitled such as membership in the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), the public health system. While there have over the last two decades been several large scale protests by workers in San Quintín, usually riots over the employers failure to pay their employees on time, this is the first attempt by workers to carry out a such strategic strike.

    The farm workers reportedly succeeded within three days in negotiating with employers and the government an agreement of the existing unions, the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) and the Regional Confederation of Workers of Mexico (CROM), both corrupt organizations affiliated with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had colluded with employers to keep wages low. The agreement reached on March 20 will give the workers the right to create their own union and negotiate directly with the owners. If this agreement holds, it represents a tremendous achievement for these workers and establishes a precedent for other workers throughout Mexico who would like to get rid of their corrupt government- or employer- controlled unions. The strike and negotiations over wages and other issues continue.

    While there is peace in the valley at the moment, the Mexican government has for decades deployed the army and police against miners, electrical workers, telephone workers, and any others, and it is altogether possible that they will send in large forces to break this strike. The ability of these workers to hold their ground will depend upon solidarity from other workers in northern Mexico particularly in Baja California and Sonora.

    Indigenous Organizers

    The strike was organized by the Alliance of National, State, and Municipal Organizations for Social Justice (AONEMJS or Alliance) made up of indigenous groups from Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and other areas whose members work in the San Quintín Valley. The Alliance combined a call for a general strike in the valley’s fields with the blocking of the Trans-Peninsular Highway that leads north to San Diego, California. Creating roadblocks and burning tires along a stretch of some 120 kilometers of the highway, they succeeded for 26 hours in stopping the delivery of the ripe produce to markets in the United States, with immediate repercussions for grocery stores and restaurants. Costco, for example, reported that its shipments were down. Strikes also seized government buildings and a police station.

    The Mexican government sent hundreds of federal police and soldiers to open the highway, which they did using tear gas and rubber bullets as well as clubs and curses. Strikers responded by throwing stones at the police. Reportedly 200 were arrested. Baja California Governor Francisco Vega de Lamadrid traveled to San Quintín to begin negotiations with the employers and with the Alliance.

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    San Quintín – The Cornucopia

    The San Quintín Valley has over the past couple of decades been transformed into one of the most productive agricultural regions of Mexico where large scale irrigation systems, modern buildings, and large scale truck transportation have been combined by employers with low wage indigenous workers to produce an abundance of fruit and vegetable for American consumers—hundreds of thousands of tons of berries, tomatoes, and vegetables each year—and to make fortunes for the transnational and Mexican companies that own and manage the farms.

    Many Baja California and Mexican government officials are actually owners or investors in the twelve largest farms as well as in some of the smaller one. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón, for example, is an investor in one of the companies. The near fusion between corporate executives and the Baja California government has made it difficult for workers to achieve even the minimal wages, benefits and conditions to which they are entitled under the law. Last December The Los Angeles Times published a series of articles and produced video revealing workers’ onerous conditions in San Quintin in December. As a result of those articles, Wal-Mart and the Mexican government announced joint program to improve farm workers lives, but apparently the workers thought they should take matters into their own hands.

    Some estimate that there are as many as 80,000 workers in the valley, though other estimates put the number at closer to the 42,000 registered permanent workers. According to one report only 11,000 of those workers, mostly employed by the transnational companies, have enjoyed IMSS health benefits. BerryMex, for example, which is affiliated with the American Driscoll company, registers 100 percent of its employees.

    Under employer contracts with the CTM and the CROM first negotiated in 1994, most workers are paid only 100 pesos or US$6.64 dollars per day. Wage rates have not improved for years. One of the causes of the strike appears to have been the falling value of the peso vis-à-vis the dollar, while at the same time many basic necessities are rising in price. The negotiators are discussing other demand such as Sundays and holidays either off, overtime pay, seniority, and other benefits. The Alliance demands include:

    1.      Revocation of the agreement signed by the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) and the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) with the Agricultural Association of Baja California, especially regarding “agreed upon wages.”

    2.      Respect for seniority.

    3.      Affiliation with the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS) from the first day of work at a company and medical coverage for both the worker and his or her dependents.

    4.      Payment to workers of all benefits due under the law.

    5.      After eight hours of work, double pay for each addtional hour and tripe pay after more than 10 hours.

    6.      Maternity leave for six weeks during pregnancy and for another six weeks after birth for pregnant workers.

    7.      Five days of paid paternity leave for men.

    8.      Measure against sexual assault by “foremen” or “engineers.”

    9.      Measures against reprisals toward workers involved in protest.

    10.   Payment of all benefits of the law to workers (one day of rest per week, holidays, and other benefits).

    11.  Establishment of a state minimum wage for agricultural workers of 300 pesos per day.

    12.  An increase of pay to 30 pesos for each box of strawberries (since 2001 workers are being paid 10 or 12 pesos per box). Double pay on Sundays and holidays.

    13.  An increase to 17 pesos for bushels of blackberries, double on Sunday.

    14.  An increase to 8 pesos for a bucket of tomatoes.

    Strikes have promised to continue their strike until March 25 when negotiations are scheduled to resume. The spokesmen for the farmworkers—Fidel Sánchez Gabriel, Bonifacio Martínez, Fermín Alejandro Salazar y Justino Herrera Martínez—said that negotiations had stopped because Alberto Muñoz, the representative of the employers had asked for time to speak to consult with the bosses about the workers’ wage demands. The workers said that if the companies suffer a loss of production it the result of the incompetence of the government.

    Dan La Botz is the editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis as well as a co-editor of New Politics. This article draws from reportage in La Joranada, The Los Angeles Times, Los Ángeles Press, and other publications.

  • Texts and Updates from Greece Panel Discussion Available

    New Politics has previously posted a video version of a Feb. 6 New York City panel discussion sponsored by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD) entitled “After the Greek Elections: The Future of Austerity in Greece, Europe and Beyond.”

    CPD has now posted text versions of the talks, along with separate updates by each of the speakers.

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    Photo by Despina Lalaki. Speakers from right to left: Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison (Co-Directors of the Campaign for
    Peace and Democracy, who chaired the forum); Natassa Romanou,Alan Akrivos, Nantina Vgontzas, Iannis Delatolas, and Aaron Amaral

  • Model or Sui Generis? Comrade Kshama Sawant is Likely Both

    ImageI’m still frozen in the moment. Has it really been 15 months since revolutionary socialist Kshama Sawant brought her unique brand of municipal socialism back to a major American city after winning an at-large seat in Seattle’s nonpartisan City Council race? A well-respected activist with a reputation gleaned from her highly visible and capable role in the local Occupy effort and the fight to raise the city’s minimum wage, Sawant didn’t just adeptly mount the bully pulpit—no mean feat—but used her elected position to win palpable things. She didn’t do either alone; she had partners, including Socialist Alternative, her small Trotskyist cadre group with its trademark commitment to electoral politics. She also had the sometime help of SEIU Local 775 President David Rolf who spearheaded the  city’s “$15 living wage ordinance” campaign. Even the mainstream Seattle Times—the city’s sole general print news venue—noticed.

    A recent Times story, “Kshama Sawant: Militant with a Soft Side,” led with this:

    “When a number of City Council members trekked last October to a mountain resort for the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce’s annual leadership conference, Kshama Sawant ripped into her colleagues. She accused them of taking their marching orders from corporate executives.

    “But the next month, the council adopted a new budget peppered with Sawant-sponsored amendments—including an immediate wage hike for city employees, money to support tent encampments and a commitment to study a possible excise tax on millionaires—and the opposite seemed just as accurate: Sawant’s colleagues were taking marching orders from her.”

    The Seattle Times is not a proletarian paper. It’s not much of a liberal paper, either. So why the praise? Maybe it’s Gandhi’s saying: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”

    Or maybe it’s that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, illustrating what is alleged to be Tammany Hall sachem Big Tim Sullivan’s brag (or P.T. Barnum’s, or Mae West’s—nobody is sure) that “I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.”

    And maybe it’s not all good news. The headline, which changed on-line within days to “Kshama Sawant: Action-Now Approach Gains Influence,” still retains in the body the phrasing about her anomalous “soft side,” as if she were a frisky, two-headed goat or the mystery of the proverbial pig in the bottle (how did that get in there?)  Whatever she is, she’s an atypical radical.  As if to prove the point, the paper cites her as “a fan of the Seahawks,” and one who hosted “a Super Bowl party with vegan cake.” She also “has two pet husky dogs, Ché and Rosa.”

    Imagine, a Marxist with a life!

    Sawant is aware that focusing on her as an avatar (my word, not hers) “serves the establishment agenda to isolate one person and make that person look like a fist-raising robot rather than a human being.” It also serves the establishment’s interest to portray her as an isolated improvement over the rest of us strident, sordid, alienating lefties.

    This November she has to run and win again. If what the Seattle Times says proves true, “she should win again.”

    So far Sawant is polling favorably in both citywide and district surveys. An October 2014 poll by EMC research showed her in a virtual tie among council members for top favorable citywide recognition, and ranked her far and away the highest when considered by voters in her new district. It also found her with the largest unfavorable rating of any council member.

    “That may not be a surprise, considering her loud and proud tax-the-wealthy agenda,” the paper said.

    So how effective has she been, as advocate for the 99% on the council or off? As a spokesperson for social and economic justice and an articulator of real grievances, she seems invaluable. As a mover and shaker on the council, maybe less so. “This is a progressive city and council. They agree with a lot of what she wants,” said Christian Sinderman, a mainstream political consultant. “How much is she driving the dialogue? Less than she thinks.” Certainly more than Sinderman, an operative for other candidates, thinks.

    She’s even taken brickbats from self-styled progressives, with SEIU leader Rolf claiming that rather than being a catalyst she merely piggybacked on his $15-an-hour minimum wage fight, though there’s no question that she was a magnet for attracting support for the proposal.

    The Oakland Socialist, a professionally and thoughtfully done website of undetermined left ideological origin (at least I can’t determine its paternity at this moment), critiques the $15 minimum wage campaign regularly, writing that the proposal as law “opens the door to all sorts of diversions—training wages, exceptions for exactly some of the low price leaders as far as low wages (franchises like McDonald’s), encourages businesses to hire and fire repeatedly, etc.,” but that despite knowing that and saying as much early in the campaign, “Now, however, Sawant is saying this ‘shows leadership for the rest of the country.’”

    In another article, they note “that the ballot initiative was intended as a way to pressure the Democrats, not to actually build an independent movement,” a charge they back up with examples that have more to do with criticisms of Sawant’s and her organization Socialist Alternative‘s alleged thralldom to local labor leaders. 

    There are also miscellaneous criticisms by establishment figures, reports the Seattle Times, that she is not a logroller (so what!) and is less attentive to local issues and more to “jett[ing] to New York and Minneapolis to talk minimum wage and climate change, things that  point to her political reach and ambition.”

    That’s a serious observation about any local official who by definition is judged by district voters first on their constituent services record. Though made in the article by the hardly objective head of the local Chamber of Commerce, it’s the sort of smear that could disenchant supporters, frame the nature of an endorsement and gin up funding for opponents in the November election.

    It’s also a peculiar argument to make about any member of Socialist Alternative, a Trotskyist organization spawned by transplanted British comrades who were once members of a group primarily known by its weekly paper, Militant. The group distinguished itself on the sceptered isle’s radical left by holding the orthodox (“degenerated workers’ state”) view on the USSR and the decidedly unorthodox view that electoral politics necessarily meant “entryism,” or activism and constituent mobilizing in the British Labour Party. They were successful enough to win control of Liverpool’s city council (again, no small feat), elect a handful of supporters to parliament, and by the 1970s win support from a majority of members of the Labour Party Young Socialists. They even had a supporter named to its National Youth Organizer spot in 1976—until expelled by the party leadership in the 1980s. First national attack from outside the party: the Observer’s inelegant 1975 headline “Trot conspirators inside Labour Party.” That was on a par with coverage from the U.S.’s all-time sleaze writer Victor Riesel, who false-alarmed readers about a genuine democratic effort, calling it "a deliberate conspiracy to infiltrate and take over Britain’s second major political party,” and one that “couldn’t have succeeded as swiftly as it has without the support of some British unions.” Brits, hide your kids!

    By 1991, after a nearly two-decades long witch-hunt and a series of expulsions under then-Labour leader Neil Kinnock—this while Maggie Thatcher went effectively unchallenged by Labour—the group exited and soon fragmented, though its progeny are still active in the British left, especially in Scotland. (More than you needed to know, I know.)

    Why this tip-toeing through long-dead Trotskyist tulips? The thing to remember is this—the various incarnations of “entrists” operated as open left-wing socialists in mass organizations. Rather than painting themselves into a corner or acting as Bolsheviks on the wrong bus, they spoke in a language ordinary people could empathize with and which, in the U.S., Sawant is so far doing well. Forget their “line”—an old Maoist friend used to say “lines are like buttholes, everyone’s got one”—and their capacity for frenzied recruiting to their organization. Case in point: Sawant’s insistence at last spring’s Labor Notes conference that not only was it important to campaign as an open socialist but what was crucial was advertising yourself as a promoter of a particular, even parochial organization. In Sawant’s case she ran under the Socialist Alternative Party banner; so much for united fronts in practice.

    Forget her belief that a particular Leninist brand is necessary at this time or that her good work is ineluctably linked to a line on Ukraine or such. Watch what she does. Her voters will, and so far they like what they see.

    Sawant is also one of the key endorsers of the Solidarity-organized May conference in Chicago on building an electoral alternative to the two mainstream corporate-enabling parties.  For the revolutionary left to talk about common goals instead of sanctifying differences and prizing one’s own insular network (read: sect) is a good thing. I’ve endorsed it, I’ll be there, I hope it succeeds, and you should be there too. It’s worth trying again, but it’s still the longest of long shots.

     

    Michael Hirsch is a New York-based labor and political writer and a New Politics editorial board member.

     

     

  • Electoral Action Conference: Building Alternatives to the Two-Party System

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    Activists and candidates from around the country will come together on May 2-3 in Chicago to share their experiences and to launch a network for future cooperation at the Future of Left/Independent Electoral Action Conference.

    The past few years have seen a significant uptick in independent political initiatives on the left, from election campaigns to new local electoral and social movement formations, to referenda campaigns.

    Kshama Sawant’s November 2014 election to the Seattle City Council captured the attention of leftists across the country, but a number of other exciting campaigns have also been path breaking, including the Jackson Plan of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and Richmond Progressive Alliance’s David and Goliath fight against Chevron in the East Bay. Many recent political developments have brought organizers building alternatives to the two-party system together with those using direct action and referenda to help win gains against fracking, for a $15 minimum wage, and other important initiatives.

    "There has never been a more critical time in history to come together to discuss independent left political action,” said Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond Progressive Alliance.  “Using my experience in Richmond as a gauge, it is clear people are eager to continue participating in a bold movement for social change.  There have been breakthroughs in other places as well.  Movements are starting to bubble up throughout our nation.  But as long as we remain isolated, the two-party system will continue to weaken our democracy. We need to learn from one another's experiences, and not fear conflicts or differences among us, in order to break through that isolation.  There is no time to lose and this conference offers us an exciting beginning!”

    “So much impressive political work has been done around the country, but not enough people know about it” said conference endorser Dan La Botz. The Future of Left/Independent Electoral Action Conference is intended to encourage dialogue amongst those who are committed to left politics outside of the two-party system, to share experience and reflections of campaigning, to discuss the purpose of running and challenges once in office, and to explore the relationship between social movements and elections.

    This initiative, which was first proposed by Solidarity in the summer of 2014, gained ground after an uptick of left electoral activity throughout fall of 2014. Following the November elections, Socialist Alternative made a public call supporting such conferences in 2015. The conference, which is supported by Solidarity, Socialist Alternative, the International Socialist Organization (ISO), and other left groups, focuses on third-party and independent candidates and grassroots organizers. Over fifty individuals and organizations have endorsed the call or joined to work on organizing the May conference in Chicago.

    The conference will promote independent political action, build issue-based coordination among disparate movements, candidates, and left/progressive parties, and develop and adopt a means for continued networking, conversation, and mutual support. The organizers hope to gather experienced candidates and organizers representing the social movement sectors, people of color, youth, women, LGBTQ, and individuals with disabilities to have strategic dialogue of left electoral strategies and tactics. It will have a mix of plenary sessions, theoretical panels, inspirational talks, and practical workshops. The end goal is to use the conference to build and ongoing support network around electoral issues.

    To endorse the call to the conference and be placed on a low-volume announcement listserv, please send your name and affiliation to leftelect@gmail.com.

    Endorsers of this conference as of Feb. 28, 2015 include: Gayle McLaughin+ (Richmond City Council; former Mayor, Richmond CA ); Tim Meegan (2015 Independent candidate for alderman, 33rd ward, Chicago), Bruce Dixon (Managing editor,  Black Agenda Report and co-chair of the Georgia Green Party),  Kshama Sawant + (Seattle City Council), Howie Hawkins (Candidate for Governor of New York , Green Party*), Jorge Mújica (2015 Socialist candidate for alderman, 25th ward , Chicago), Ellen David Friedman (Vermont Progressive Party*), Dan LaBotz (Co-founder Teamsters for a Democratic Union; Editor, New Politics; Socialist Party* Candidate for U.S. Senate, OH 2010), Mike Parker (Co-author Democracy is Power; Coordinator, Richmond Progressive Alliance*), Gloria Mattera (Co-Chair, Green Party of New York*), Eduardo Martinez + (Richmond City Council), Lance Selfa (author of The Democrats: A Critical History), Bhaskar Sunkara (editor of Jacobin), Angela Walker (Candiate for Milwaukee Sheriff, 2014), Kali Akuno (Cooperation Jackson*, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement*), Jess Spear (Climate scientist and 2014 Socialist Alternative candidate for Washington State House); Jovanka Beckles + (Richmond City Council), Cindy Sheehan (Anti-war activist, 2012 vice-presidential candidate, 2012, Peace and Freedom Party*), Rosa Clemente (Hip hop activist, Vice-Presidential Candiate, 2008, Green Party*), Jill Stein (Presidential Candidate, 2012, Green Party *), David McReynolds (Socialist Party* candidate for President 1980, 2000), Glen Ford (Journalist, Black Agenda Report),Marsha Rummel+ (Madison WI Common Council. Progressive Dane*), Ty Moore (Socialist Alternative candidate for Minneapolis City Council, 2003), Debra Reiger (State Chair, California Peace and Freedom Party), Mimi Soltysik (Socialist Party USA Male Co-Chair, 2014 candidate for CA State Assembly), Joanne Landy (Co-Director, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Editorial board member, New Politics), Art Kazar (Local Executive Committee Member, Chicago Socialist Party), Robert "Gabe" Gabrielsky (Green Party* candidate, New Jersey Second Congressional District in 2000, for State  Assembly in 2001 and for State Senate in 2003) , Ann Menasche (Disability rights activist and attorney, Green Party* candidate for Secretary of State 2011), Jason West + (Mayor of New Paltz, NY, Green Party*), Todd Chretien (International Socialist Organization; Candidate for U.S. Senate (California), 2006), Ian Schlakman (Green Party candidate  for Congress MD 2014), Linda Thompson (Co-Chair, Green Party of CT), Margaret Kimberley (Journalist, Black Agenda Report), Bill Onasch (kclabor.org; Previously served on the Labor Party’s Interim National Council and Electoral Policy Commission), Isa Infante (2014 Candidate for Governor, Green Party of TN), John Halle (Green Party, previously New Haven Alderman), Nicole Deane (Dan Siegel for Oakland 2014 volunteer coordinator), Carroll Fife (Dan Siegel for Oakland 2014 campaign coordinator),  Mike McCallister (Secretary, Wisconsin Green Party), Ellis Boal (Green Party MI*), Steve Early (author and labor journalist), Joanna Misnik (Treasurer, Chicago Socialist Campaign; Solidarity), Bryan Koulouris (Socialist Alternative), Rick Kissell (past candidate for Milwaukee Treasurer, past president of the AFL-CIO Translators' and Interpreters' Guild), Robert Caldwell (Ebarb Tribal Council, Louisiana 2011-2013), Karl Belin (Socialist Alternative), Thomas Harrison (Co-Director Campaign for Peace and Democracy*), John Strinka (Socialist Party USA Male Vice-Chair, 2012 Socialist Party USA candidate for IN House of Representatives), Leon Bailey, Ph.D. (Department of Sociology, Roosevelt University), Ian Swanson (2014 GP MI candidate for the U. of Michigan Board of Regents and ISO), Mark A. Lause (Board member, The North Star), Marilyn Langlois (Coordinator, Richmond Progressive Alliance)

    Against the Current (http://solidarity-us.org/atc), International Socialist Organization (http://www.internationalsocialist.org/), Campaign for a United Socialist Party, Chicago Socialist Campaign (http://www.chicagosocialistcampaign.org/), Chicago D.S.A., Chicago Socialist Party (http://chicagosocialistparty.org/) eMerge (http://www.emergeleft.com/) Jacobin (www.jabobinmag.com), New Politics (http://newpol.org/_), The North Star (http://www.thenorthstar.info), Ohio Green Party (www.OhioGreens.org), Peace and Freedom Party (http://www.peaceandfreedom.org), Socialist Alternative (http://www.socialistalternative.org/), Red Wedge magazine (redwedgemagazine.com), Socialist Action (http://socialistaction.org/), Socialist Party of Texas, Solidarity (http://solidarity-us.org/)

    Bold+ indicates sitting elected official; * organizational listing for identification purposes of the individual endorsers only

     

  • Can Greece defy the Troika?

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    The agreement signed between Greece and the EU after three weeks of negotiations is widely lamented on the left as a setback, if not a defeat, for Syriza. The two sides emerged from the agreement, if that is an accurate description, with different interpretations of the memorandum, signifying perhaps that no real deal was made after all. Greece obtained brief reprieve. Its banks will remain liquid for the next few months. The next phase will not be about what can be extracted from the troika, as much as what Greece can do despite and in defiance of the troika. That is what will be discussed here.

    The immediate political problem for Syriza and Varoufakis is to create "fiscal space" to generate a countercyclical momentum. They have to increase government spending to more than offset the declines in the nongovernment sectors. But the Greeks are caught in a straightjacket. By agreeing to join the Eurozone, Greece, like all other member states, effectively ceded their fiscal sovereignty. They no longer have a unified central bank and treasury to call upon to support their spending decisions. So if there is to be fiscal expansion, within the confines of the EU's rules, Greece has to find ways to increase state spending without adding to its cumulative debt. It can tax idle savings. But this is only going to take them so far. And that distance is not far enough. In any case, these personal savings have probably been long squirreled away in Switzerland, where they are not touchable anyway. It can, as well, levy a draconian wealth tax, but the well goes dry after these funds are spent.

    So the Greek Finance Minister needs to find work-arounds that allow increased state spending without technically adding to the Greek state's debt. This requires changing the current debt structure by swapping out existing debt for other forms of obligations. Varoufakis is proposing two things: the first is a GDP-linked bond (growth bonds). This is a perpetual bond that comes attached with a variable interest payment obligation pegged to the growth in the economy. This holds the possibility for a modest inflation premium for the Greek state. What is crucial is that Varoufakis is aiming to craft a debt swap by means that no longer oblige the Greek state to repay principal. Because there is no obligation to repay the principal, such bonds do not add to the debt. Greece can, by this artifice, remain in technical compliance with EU rules, while vigorously financing an economic turnaround. Willingness on behalf of EU bankers to put skin in the game would signal a common class commitment to a Greek recovery.

    The second type of bond is technically called "consols." It was created by the British government in the 18th Century and used to pay off the Napoleonic war debt. It too is a perpetual interest bond, paying, in contrast to the growth bonds, a fixed rate of interest, again with no principal repayment. Again, because of the last provision, it doesn't enlarge the Greek deficit, and therefore does not add to the debt..

    What we have seen in the last week is that Greece's creditors are unwilling to go for this. A perpetual period is a long commitment to carry credit risk on banking balance sheets. There is no obligation to repay principal even if Greek socialists eventually turn the economy around. So this is a permanent concession. If forced to service interest payments or pay for health care down the line, socialists are going to opt for the latter (we hope), which is precisely what bankers fear. So in case of failure, bankers get neither principal nor interest. And if the Syriza government is wildly successful in its negotiations and the troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the IMF) funds these perpetual bonds, the banking system may be forced to accept returns below the market rate of interest.

    And not just here. For if dispensations can be made to Greece, why not Italy, Portugal and Spain? Why not France? What credibility would Merkel have with German workers who have complacently accepted job rationing in lieu of wage growth for fear of imperiling German industrial competitiveness?

    Syriza was swept to power on a wave of democratic discontent. The future of the government critically hinges on its success in terminating the austerity regime imposed by the troika. But Syriza and the troika are not merely approaching the same problem by differing class methods.

    If European elites were actually interested in jumpstarting Eurozone capitalism in a reactionary way, they could have taken a page out of Obama’s playbook. The massive TARP recapitalization of Wall Street calmed panicky elites and softened their opposition to a modest $800 billion 3-year fiscal stimulus bill. This was far less than what was called for, but sufficient to put a floor under the economic collapse. Flagging capitalist sectors, most notably the automobile industry, were then subsidized and placed into temporary receivership. Union contracts were rewritten; public union contracts shredded. Social welfare provisions were slashed. Corporations and cash-strapped state and local governments were encouraged to ransack pension funds, while the government’s pension fund insurer was deliberately short-changed. What was left of the underperforming pensions was turned over to hedge fund managers with the desperate hope that risky betting could eliminate shortfalls. The Feds obliged this end by stimulating a stock market boom by means of quantitative easing. Toxic housing assets were removed from balance sheets, stimulating a financial asset bubble, which, in turn, prompted an upsurge in consumer spending.

    The Obama recovery took shape, in short, as a painfully protracted economic uptick with weak job growth, stagnating wages, lax labor markets, and burgeoning profits and gains concentrated almost exclusively at the top. Absent a ripple effect in the form of induced private sector investment the Obama recovery remains fragile. But it is nonetheless a recognizable economic stabilization.

    Even this overwhelmingly class-biased recovery has proven to have little attraction for the troika. If for no other reason, Varoufakis was successful in calling them out and exposing the troika for what it actually wants. They are patently uninterested in jumpstarting a recovery, even a reactionary recovery. Rather, they are hell-bent on perpetuating the restructuring of the Eurozone initiated by the Great Recession. They see the social welfare state as a looming hindrance to competition with the US and China that must be decisively removed. Since that cannot be eradicated through the democratic process, it must be imposed on that process by an unelected and unaccountable elite.

    The ECB is a very peculiar institution. A properly functioning central bank spends money into the economy to support financial decisions made by the government it serves. Eurozone governments are, in starkest contrast, subordinate to the ECB. The latter, like any other central bank, has an endless supply of money and is not constrained by the Eurozone’s tax base. Private banks lend money into existence against collateral, both tangible and financial and make money on the spread between what they may need to borrow, in the last resort from the central bank to maintain required reserves, and the interest they get back in return. The private banking system under capitalism is, in either case, always problematic. They are backstopped by the nations’ central banks, which must insure adequate business liquidity, but they are answerable to their shareholders. Without government oversight, private banks are simply—no, literally—given a blank check to engage in whatever reckless behavior they can get away with in full knowledge that the central bank has no alternative but to recapitalize them if they fail.

    The ECB and the Eurozone captures all these frailties. What it is purposely designed not to do, in contrast, is to support the spending decisions of the constituent democracies. These decisions must be made good from taxes and from loans issued by private banks secured against the nation’s public assets. Constituent states must, first of all, demonstrate adequate constraint against inflation lest bank profits be threatened. They must agree to operate in a context in which there is a scandalously inadequate surplus-recycling mechanism. Revenue sharing in the US, for instance runs to 10% of GDP. So, if the South in effect runs a balance of trade deficit with the North, the federal government returns a larger portion of the nation’s taxes to the South in compensation for that which is drained through trade. The European Social Fund and the Common Agricultural Policy recycle, in comparison, about 1% of Eurozone GDP to the entire periphery. The entire Eurozone framework is a prior constraint against democracy and the public interest, both because it effectively will not recycle surpluses (from Germany and the Eurozone north to the "PIIGS"—Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) except through unsustainable lending arrangements (and foreign investment) because it withholds support for needed public spending decisions, including countercyclical emergency decisions.

    It is therefore entirely wrong to attribute a “debt” problem to Greece. It does not have a debt problem. It has a liquidity problem. It cannot finance the spending decisions needed to put the unemployed to work, to pay pensions, to maintain a public health system, to fix its infrastructure, to offset its current account imbalance and to offset spending cuts in the private sector resulting from the global recession. It has an austerity problem, because it has a liquidity problem.

    It is the banks that lent money to Greece that have a debt problem, as a result of Greece’s illiquidity. Their asset base consisting of sovereign debt is worthless. But because they are fully insulated against failure by the ECB, this debt problem presents a mere technicality, a mere technicality with an immense human price tag. For the ECB could, in principle, simply recapitalize the banks directly, including Greece’s central bank, such as it is. The Greek central bank could, in turn, support the spending decisions of the Greek government up to the inflation barrier of full capacity employment.

    Instead, Greece has been used as a dummy corporation for the laundering of funds to the banks, and the various private and national central banks have been forced to accept a “haircut” as a penalty for their reckless past support for democratic decisions. For its service as a holding corporation, the ECB has “generously “agreed to pay Greece a small service fee sufficient to operate a bare bones government; further payment of which being contingent on Greece surrendering untold public assets and beating its workers into penury.

    Again, it is not the debt that presents a problem. The ECB can always internalize the debt and place toxic assets on its balance sheets in exchange for Euros through quantitative easing. And this is exactly what the ECB is now doing—but not for Greece. It may or may not otherwise be in Greece’s interest to renege on its “debt” and exit the Eurozone, but this so-called nuclear option is, in any case, a hollow threat and provides Syriza with absolutely no negotiating leverage. Any negative economic consequence of default can be readily mopped up—if hasn’t already been—and neutralized by the ECB, before becoming a contagion. The only threat of bank run insolvency in the event of a Grexit, will be against Greek banks.

    The problem remains: an unaccountable ECB monopoly over the creation and mobilization of money that allows it to dictate a social program antithetical to the needs and interests of Europe’s workers.

    What Varoufakis and his ministry have tried to do is to raise the service fees by changing the bond structures. They tried to create wiggle room through negotiations. Having failed, Syriza must find other ways, if Greece is to remain in the Eurozone, to break the stranglehold of the troika and gain fiscal space. In either case, it needs to demonstrate to the workers of Greece and Europe that defiance is not a losing strategy.

    It has become patently obvious that the only measure Greece could carry out and command the full respect and attention of the ECB would be to dissolve itself as a country and reconstitute itself as a bank, declaring its citizenry co-equal shareholders and the former nation’s businesses to be bank assets.

    In the nonparallel universe where Greece actually resides however, there are still some limited stopgap measures and work-arounds that may buy Syriza some time. They have committed themselves to ramping up the intensity and efficiency of tax collection. This is probably the only place where Syriza and the troika agree. When the necessary institutional changes are implemented, the Greek government can begin to generate a parallel currency for internal transactions by securitizing future taxes and issuing scrip based on revenue anticipation. This scrip can be an electronic entry into accounts, personnel and corporate, with which the government has business. Or it can be issued in small denomination bills intended for day-to-day purchases. It is denominated, in either case, in Euros with an exchange rate of parity. Euros will remain the unit of account, but scrip can be introduced as an additional means of payment. This parallel currency should be acceptable for settlement of private sector tax liabilities and must be transferrable within the nation and to foreigners who have business or pay taxes in Greece. It is precisely scrip’s acceptability to extinguish tax liabilities that assures its ability to circulate. It is in effect a short-term loan granted by the citizenry to the government. And because it is perpetual without a defined maturity date requiring repayment of principal, it would not increase the public debt-to-GDP ratio.

    Numerous state governments in the US and elsewhere around the globe have employed this mechanism. It is a form of short-term credit cheaper than that offered by financial markets. The maintenance of parity with the Euro means that it comes with a built-in safeguard against inflation in compliance with EU guidelines.

    Socialist economist Michael Burke has pointed out that Greek business claims the highest share of national income of the entire OECD at 56%. Of this, only 11.3% of the national income is actually invested. There is no reason why the remainder cannot provide a firm platform to securitize taxes for countercyclical activity. With adequate capital controls, Syriza is in a position to present business with a Hobson’s choice: either invest this savings now or it will be confiscated and spent by the state later. In the meantime, these savings will be securitized as scrip for immediate relief.

    Scrip can pay civil servants and support the expansion of public services. With it, Syriza can fund infrastructural improvements and R & D needed to earn additional Euros for Greece through improved trade and import substitution. And, at the same time, it frees Euros for the large-scale import purchases of food, medicine and fuel.

    But neither is this a sufficient plan B. Even if the fiscal restraint imposed by the Eurozone limiting primary deficits to 3% of GDP were not in effect, the Greek economic recovery would still be restrained by its tax base. The advantages to this parallel currency is that it permits a path through which the tax base, once securitized, can pump a self-expanding loop through the system generating additional incomes to tax. Nevertheless, the type of robust recovery needed is still unlikely given these dual limitations. According to one estimate, Greece needs to run a primary deficit of 10% to return it to a full recovery growth path.

    With a socialized European central bank, as has been argued previously, Greece and the other member nations would not be so constrained. A socialized ECB could disregard the deficit position of the collective national treasuries and directly support the spending decisions of the constituent governments up to full economic capacity. And it could do away with government “borrowing” as an unnecessary subsidy to private investors.

    What such stopgap measures can do is to transform the Eurozone from a monetary union to a looser monetary federation. It can chip away at the power of the troika and provide hope and encouragement to similarly-minded insurgencies such as Podemos, and trade union militants eager to break with or move existing mass workers’ parties to the left. By stoking the anti-austerity brushfire, any success by Syriza, no matter how modest, would mobilize an emboldened left to ask larger questions about the structure, design and necessity of this Bankers’ Federation.

    More immediately, it can provide Syriza with the space to properly deliberate over the risks and prospects that await Greece were it to opt out of the Eurozone.

  • American Communism and the Communist International – A Review

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    Jacob A. Zumoff. The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929. Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2014. 443 pages. Bibliography. Hard Cover $167.

    Jacob A. Zumoff has written an impressive scholarly tome that is perfectly described by the title: The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929. He makes a reasonably convincing case for a novel thesis that attempts to reframe the major question: the relationship between the Soviet and American Communists. Yet, in my view, he fails to address the central question, the Soviet domination of the Communist International, including its domination of the American Communists in the 1920s.

    “Why do we need another book about the Communist International and the Communist Party of the United States,” asked Zumoff when he presented his book recently at the ongoing Seminar on American Communism at the Tamiment Library located in the Bobst Library at New York University. After all, he said, we have Theodore Draper’s two volume history The Roots of American Communism (1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period (1960). And in addition we have the writings of the “revisionists” led by Maurice Isserman, author of Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party during the Second World War (1982). Not only do we have these books, but we have the great debate that resulted from their different views.

    Draper, himself a former Communist who once wrote for the Communist Daily Worker, argued that the Soviet Communist Party tended to dominate the American Communist Party and set the line on all really important questions, while Isserman and other “revisionists” argued that the Communist Party of the United States was a genuine American party whose members reflected the experience of the American working class and who made their own decisions by and large. Draper and Isserman and other revisionists fought out these questions in a brilliant debate in the pages of the New York Review of Books in the 1980s (all still available online, but only to subscribers). Given the way that Draper and his critics seem to have covered the territory, is there really room for a new position and do the sources exist to support it?

    Zumoff replies “Yes.” to both those questions. Zumoff believes that Draper and the revisionists are not so much polar opposites as two sides of the same coin, reflecting the Cold War and New Left environments in which they developed. Zumoff contends that the Communist International (CI) and the American Communist Party (CP) engaged in a dynamic dialogue that had shaped the most important decisions of the party’s early years. Moreover, he insists, the collaboration between the CI and the American CP leaders led to some of the most significant and meaningful work of the young party. The CI, he argues, had a positive impact on the American CP. Zumoff brings to the support of his thesis new sources, most important the archives of the Communist International that resided for years under lock and key in the Soviet Union until they were finally which opened in the 1990s and later copied and made available at research libraries around the world. He also uses other sources, especially memoirs, and has a command of all of the relevant secondary literature.

    Zumoff’s list of the CI’s positive interventions in the American CP in collaboration with its American members includes: unifying the several original Communist Parties into one; convincing early Communists to give up their fetishization of illegal work and also to create a legal party; persuading the party, which had been principally based in the foreign language groups, to build an English-speaking, native-born American working class party; and, finally, to get the Communists to commit to working in the conservative American Federation of Labor. All of these, the author believes, turned the CP in the right direction. (The CI was also instrumental in getting the American CP to take the “Negro Question” seriously, though Zumoff is not happy with the end result of that intervention. By the late 1920s, the CI had convinced the Communists to see American Negroes as a people who in the South might constitute a nation and whose right to self-determination should be respected. Zumoff, however, links this position to the Stalinization of the American CP.)

    With the exception of the CI intervention on the Negro Question, most of these developments had taken place by mid-1920s. The CI’s intervention in the American CP in the second half of the decade was largely a disaster. The CI’s agent Joseph Pogány, or Pepper as he was known in America, pushed the Communists into trying to take over the Farmer-Labor Party, leading to a split in which the Communists in the end found themselves isolated. Then, with Grigory Zinoviev in command, the CI carried out its policy of “Bolshevisation,” which aimed at creating a monolithic, centralized party with no factions, which Zumoff to his credit recognizes was a disaster, laying the basis for the party’s later degeneration into Stalinism.

    The great problem of the later 20s was factionalism, the struggle between CP’s rival leaders and would-be American Lenins, particularly Charles Ruthenberg, Jay Lovestone, and William Z. Foster. Yet the factionalism was magnified many fold by the CI’s constant intervention either in favor of or against one or another of the American leaders. All of this leads us to question the general thrust of Zumoff’s argument, namely, that the CI’s intervention in the 1920s was generally positive. Well, maybe, but not after about 1923. (With the exception of the Negro Question, in my view, but that is a longer discussion than this review can encompass.)

    The problem with Zumoff’s admirably researched and clearly written book is that it fails to engage what seems to me to be the central issue, the issue which made Draper’s books such classics, even if one disagrees with their anti-Communist thrust. That central issue is the question of Soviet domination of the American CP. How did such domination come about? The Russian Revolution of 1917, the first successful (even if only very briefly successful) workers revolution in history. Socialists, anarchists, and syndicalists around the world suddenly wanted to emulate the Russian Communists and their Bolshevik and soviet revolution, though nobody, as Victor Serge has written, had the slightest idea what Bolshevik and soviet meant. Lenin and the Russian Communists had prestige and used their authority to establish the Communist International. The creation of a new revolutionary international after the capitulation of the Socialist International to the war was an absolutely necessary step foward.

    In the Communist conclaves, however, two dynamics took place: the Russian Communists, convinced that they had found the theory, organizational form, and political practice to make revolution, wanted to impress their model on others; while at the same time other socialists wanted to follow the Russian example and also wanted the Soviet imprimatur stamped on their party. While initially, given the reformist character of the European socialist parties, a reformism which in the test of revolution frequently became counter-revolutionary, the Russian Communist role may have been salutary, overtime it became an unhealthy tendency on the party of the Russians to dominate other political parties. The Communist International was theoretically a congress of equals, even if Russia was from the first primus inter pares, but by the mid-1920s the Russians had become the undisputed masters of the International. Zinoviev’s Bolshevization campaign, aimed at turning all of the Communist Parties in Europe and elsewhere into obedient clones of the Russian Communists was the second step in this process. Stalin’s counterrevolution in Russia, which overthrew whatever remained of workers’ power, put a new ruling class in power, and turned the International into an arm of its foreign policy was the final step.

    But where, we might ask was the first step? Was it not in the Communist International’s intervention, sometimes well intentioned but misguided intervention, in the factions in the American CP as well as in other parties? One may argue that the revolutionary situation in Europe from 1918 to 1925 did not permit the Russians the luxury of a more democratic and fraternal engagement with the socialists, syndicalists, and anarchists of Europe and America at the time. Perhaps not, but the end result then was a more authoritarian and hierarchical international. 

    Zumoff’s book belongs in all research libraries and in big city public libraries. Professors who want to use it for a class or leftists who want to look back into our history will do better to wait for the Haymarket paperback edition which will be available at a reasonable price.

  • Debt Forgiveness: Who Owes Whom for What?

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    The lion’s share of indebtedness in this world is invalid and immoral. Forgiveness is not what is called for; it’s liberation.

    Talk of a “debt jubilee” leaves open whether the debts are valid or not, but talking about debt forgiveness raises the question of whether a debt is valid from a moral point of view.

    By definition, calls for forgiveness imply wrongdoing by the one being forgiven. For this reason, forgiveness is seen not as a moral obligation but rather as an act of generosity. The God who forgives sinners is a God of love and compassion, not a vengeful God. But what if nothing wrong has been done? A prisoner who has been wrongfully convicted is exonerated, not forgiven. And if a person has indeed violated a law but the law is unjust, then forgiveness is not the relevant concept. Thus, to ask whether an act should be forgiven inevitably raises the question of whether the act was morally wrong.

    Most debtors in the world today—including those in debt bondage, in medical debt, in education debt, and more—have committed no wrongs, so what is called for is cancellation and liberation, not forgiveness.

    Building consciousness against the validity of debt in the world today is essential to building a movement that can force the powers-that-be to rescind the debt or at least restructure it in more favorable terms. It is also important psychologically for the indebted. We are raised to believe we ought to obey the law, including paying our debts, and hence we feel guilty, ashamed, or embarrassed if we do not. Whole countries are in thrall and made to beg for relief. Rejection of the validity of our debts can at least relieve the psychological burden of those burdened by debt and can help to build a movement against them.

    Immoral Debts

    There are many situations in which debts clearly lack moral validity. One particular egregious case involves debt bondage. Only desperately poor people agree to loans forcing them to work for a lender for extended periods of time. Though recognized as a modern form of slavery, often passed through generations, and illegal in most countries, it is nevertheless pervasive throughout the world, even in the United States. Obviously, debtors in this situation need liberation, not debt forgiveness.

    Whole countries are in similar straits due to exorbitant loans by powerful countries that reap the bounty of these countries’ resources. Through structural adjustment programs (loans from the International Monetary Fund that come with coercive strings attached), debtor nations are required to enact harsh austerity measures to pay their debts to international lending agencies, which have been likened to loan sharks. Again, only desperately poor countries would agree to such conditions. Moreover, the causes of their poverty are in most cases inextricably tied to racism and imperial domination, both historically and in the current period.

    These examples are extreme and may seem irrelevant to most people in the United States who are in debt. But their very extremity helps to bring out the core idea expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “A man in debt is so far a slave.”

    The majority of Americans are in debt for two reasons: medical bills and loans to pay for higher education. Even public universities today cannot be financed by most people without loans, and even middle class people are a major illness away from financial disaster. Medical bills are the cause of 60 percent of bankruptcies in the United States, but bankruptcy cannot save those burdened by student debt who can never escape their debt. Are medical and student debt and the suffering they cause simply unfortunate for the individuals? Or should the debts be forgiven? Or, rather, shouldn’t they be seen as invalid in the first place? Every human being ought to have the medical care and education they need as basic rights. Medical care is a matter of life and death, and education at all levels is necessary for a better life both for individuals and for the society as a whole. The development of human capacities is essential for an advanced society and for any democratic one. Our global economy and the global ecological challenges we face make it all the more imperative. 

    Mortgage debt is another huge contributor to Americans’ indebtedness. Due to predatory and fraudulent loans, and harsh loan terms, home foreclosures are often the consequence. The economic downturn, for which workers are hardly responsible, may have made them unable to make their mortgage payments. Or perhaps they could not pay their taxes because they were public employees whose financially strapped municipalities reneged on their contracts. In one case contracts are sacred; in the other, they are not. Home ownership happens to be the most significant financial asset for black women, who are also disproportionately public employees. So who owes whom for what here? Randall Robinson’s The Debt argues powerfully that the United States owes reparations to descendants of slaves whose labor created the wealth in the United States.

    Climate Debt

    One could go further in challenging the moral legitimacy of debt than I have done so far. The act of declaring most debts invalid does not fundamentally challenge capitalism, which rests on the idea that a society based on unlimited private property is the morally best system. (Some defend capitalism in explicitly moral terms, while others claim it is the only possible system, and therefore moral criticisms are otiose.) Reformers of capitalism advocate limits on private property and the provision of basic incomes to everyone so no one need go into debt, but these reforms have not taken hold: indeed, the more capitalism has developed throughout the globe, the more unequal it has become.

    Going further, if we recognize that private property rights by definition are rights of exclusion, then we could advocate common property as the moral norm for a society, but with personal property (that is, property for personal consumption—thus distinguished from private property) as a core element of a good society. All humans are morally equal and should share whatever is shareable, starting with the basic resources of the planet.  

    Establishing universal access to planetary resources as a moral norm leads to a very different understanding of debt. Individuals’ debts pale, exposed as invalid, and instead we begin to countenance a colossal, unpaid, and morally valid debt: climate debt. By this I mean the debt owed by the richest countries (which have stoked climate change with their carbon emissions) to some of the poorest countries in the world, which are suffering the most from global warming, even though they did nothing to cause it. This debt ought to be paid but is rarely even acknowledged by those who owe it.

    From desertification in Africa, to flooding in Bangladesh, to the loss of fresh water in Bolivia due to glacial melt, the damage is staggering. Ecological refugees now outnumber refugees from war and violence. And if countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia must restrict their development for the sake of the planet, they should be compensated by those who have benefited from the unsustainable economic system that has caused the crisis. Ironically, many of the countries that are owed compensation for ecological damage are “debtor nations,” in thrall to global capitalist institutions. But who really owes whom?

    Changing Consciousness

    The facts are clear. The problem is political: how to build a worldwide movement that can force countries to adopt more sustainable and equitable models of economic life and to reverse the dominant understanding of who owes whom for what. As with all social movements, there are both intellectual and practical tasks. We need to break the hold of the dominant ideas, which justify the status quo—no easy task, given the corporate hold over the media in this country. These dominant ideas are moral but also empirical, in the broadest sense.

    In fact I think there is often more agreement on fundamental moral principles than it seems. For example, regarding poor countries’ indebtedness: if we ask most Americans whether we should give more in foreign aid, probably most would say no. However, I have found throughout my years of teaching, that my students were enormously more generous than United States foreign aid is. Most thought we should be giving around 20 percent of GDP in (non-military) aid, thought we were giving maybe 5 percent and were deeply shocked to know that in fact we give less that 1 percent. Add the historical information as to why certain countries are poor in the first place and the argument is even more compelling that their debt should be exonerated.

    Similarly I think most people in the United States are appalled by the fact that the financial institutions that caused the Great Recession were not punished, while poor people are losing their homes. Hypocrisy is deplored universally. Our religious traditions predate capitalism and have powerful resources to challenge the validity of most contemporary indebtedness. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, said that if a poor man takes from a rich man to feed his family, then strictly speaking that is not theft.

    But ideas change not primarily by good counter-arguments, but by the sense that other worlds are possible. And this sense develops through political struggle. The history of the labor and poor peoples’ movements in the United States, as documented by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in Poor People’s Movements, shows that people have to be willing to disrupt the status quo to make changes. Sit-ins to prevent evictions are one strategy; debt refusal is another. But individual refusal is fragmented, complicated, and risky. Instead, we have to figure out how to make this protest collective. Protests against austerity measures enacted to meet debts that were taken on by public bodies, whether in Detroit or Athens, are one kind of collective refusal. The use of eminent domain to acquire houses threatened by foreclosure and then sell them back to their owners at affordable prices is another. People in Richmond, California, have actively considered this creative use of eminent domain.

    In struggle for the recognition of climate debt, the first step to building a movement is to nurture—on the most profound level—an appreciation of what we are losing and what needs to be done to save ourselves. As Evo Morales and others in the developing world have said, we have enough resources for all to live a good life, but not for everyone to lead the rich life of the well-to-do in the developed world. While I do not believe that kind of radical change is possible within capitalism, I believe we must demand support for any measures or experiments that point us in that direction. A revitalized democratic labor movement that fights for the long-term interests of working people is also crucial to both struggles.

    Religion has a vital role to play in this struggle as well. Although indigenous and Eastern religious traditions have the most ecological understanding of humankind’s relationship to the rest of the natural world, adherents of all religious traditions should be outraged by our ecological crisis. To see this beautiful planet of ours as God’s creation, given to humankind, and then to see it trashed should feel sacrilegious as well as self-destructive.

    This piece was first published in Tikkun.

    *Nancy Holmstrom is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Rutgers University. A lifelong activist, she has written on core political-philosophical topics, including freedom, alienation, rationality, and human/women’s nature. She edited The Socialist Feminist Project and co-authored Capitalism For & Against: A Feminist Debate.

  • On Cafes

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    Cafes bring memories of the unpleasantly bleak days of my undergraduate studies in which I sought my peace of mind in the rough and stormy sea of Jean-Paul Sartre’s world, his philosophy and his novels shining light on the notion of loneliness for me. And I lived inside his books and through the characters he created. However, the more I grew critical, the stranger I found Sartre’s intellectual legacy.

    Agitated, the philosophical underpinnings of Sartre went up in smoke for me in the next few years. However, his charismatic intellectual figure has remained a revered model for my ntellectual roaming, rambling, and gypsy soul that wanders hither and yon to find a safe shelter.. I am beholden to Sartre, for he taught me that philosophy could occur everywhere, especially in cafes, which were sources of many examples for his philosophical discussions in Being and Nothingness. His book coloured my moments of loneliness when I was a fresh-off-the-boat student, and also defined cafes for me, standing out among so many other places in which one can philosophize!

    Sartre teaches us to bridge our thinking to crowded places such as cafes so that we no longer can snub others and learn how to think in the presence of other people; how to think of them and see them as the extensions of our thoughts, selves, and beings. “Hell is other people” is often quoted from Sartre, to prove his philosophy ignores others due to its being overly self-centric. It is true and this is why I have kept my intellectual distance from him for many years. Ironically enough, although Sartre never centred his philosophy on the notion of otherness, how could he have elaborated the concept of bad faith without his examples inspired by cafes in which he spent hours thinking and observing? Imagine reading Being and Nothingness without Pierre, a waiter of a café whose name is repeated over hundred times in the book; what do we get out of the notion of negation? Whether Sartre’s ideas are still tenable or not, his ways of philosophizing in crowded places, where people are socially engaged, can still speak with us and inspire us at best.

    Twenty-five years after Sartre’s demise, I am pondering what Sartre could have possibly thought of franchise branded cafes and their patrons. I really long to obtain some answers to these questions: what could Sartre possibly observe in one of the franchise branded cafes such as Starbucks? How could he add a new chapter to his widely hailed masterpiece while spending time in one of these cafes? Where could he find his Pierre, the beloved woman and her lover, and patrons? In this figment, could Sartre hear the echo of his experience of cafes from years ago? Are cafes still sites of socialization or have they simply become the sites of isolation and forgetfulness?

    Seeing many people in cafes-who keep busying themselves with their laptops, cell phones, or iPads–with their eyes glued to the screens– never ceases to keep me wondering. The more my eyes ramble around to meet with the wandering others aimlessly and curiously observe people, the more I grow dismayed. Cafes used to be sites of the haphazard socialization of people from different backgrounds, to share their insights together. The fact that Sartre, like many pioneer writers of the twentieth century, was tied to the crowded cafes of Paris has taught me that if we cease to see the face of others, we lose our ability to think and write. How can one write when s/he does his/her best not to be exposed to random conversations with strangers, who ever-increasingly are considered potential sources of danger and threat in our age?

    Any writer needs to keep her/himself floating in the surrounding atmosphere to stay current on society, the ways people behave with different characters, the varied stages of laying out details, and generally how things truly are and why. Many in-depth intellectual discussions, which left tremendous impacts on many souls, were triggered in cafes where people like Sartre or Andre Gide submerged themselves, either as curious observers or active participants in discussions. But ever-increasingly, we are losing these socially oriented cafes and stepping towards isolated ones, which are anything but idea-inspiring.

    Cafes are not unique but are typical and reflective of our age in which we are wedging ourselves into our small and thick shelters to avoid seeing and knowing, armouring ourselves against any possible external danger. We are lonely; it saddens me that we delight to be alone not because we are happy in our isolation, or shells, but because we are unable to decide in the spur of the moment to live otherwise. What if our isolated souls can trample our Aristotelian legacy as social animals? If we lose the social aspect of our nature, then we are left alone with the animal part of it. Isolated human beings are not far away from dehumanized animals, which lack any idea of society. Are we losing our humanity then?

    My friend, who is American, once unveiled why he has been living outside the country for more than fourteen years. He told me that in the States, many people believe that they are the happiest people in the world and think that other people from other parts of the planet are longing to enjoy the same happiness. It never occurs to them that happiness could exist in any other places! But when he moved down to Mexico he realized that there are many jubilant people, who are enjoying not-yet-neo-liberalized happiness. Neo-liberalism is devouring our imagination, and in its place, rents out its own perception of happiness to us. The black-and-white dichotomy of happy western people versus non-western “backward,” “miserable,” “resilient,” and unhappy people who are in need of western charity- either humanitarian aids or interventions- to enjoy the same happiness is ubiquitous. Neo-liberalism engineers our happiness through images of McDonald’s, Starbucks, Walmart, Tim Horton’s, and countless other franchises, underneath these images we can only celebrate our isolated happiness.

    I had the same experience towards cafes where I used to spend hours of my days or nights back in Iran. Cafes are smoke-free zones in Iran. I have enjoyed groups of my companions and my intellectual friends in cafes, and was enthralled by their genuine thoughts. I had so many random discussions with people who I barely knew. Cafes were sites of socialization for me and for many of my friends, and we found our resistance against imposed political and social restrictions inside crowded places such as cafes where we read poetry, discussed new philosophical and social ideas, and theorized about almost every single detail of our daily lives. Cafes were sites of resistance against the oppression of everyday life for us. It was not absurd and pointless to me to go to the cafes and spend hours with my friends there. Significant parts of my intellectual life were shaped inside these cafes, among other people. This is why the more time goes by, the less I can go to one of the branded cafes such as Starbucks and bother myself by seeing the ever-increasing isolation.

    Yes! There is a plenty of happiness in the world, as it is much more diverse than we (or neo-liberalism) imagine it to be. Frantz Kafka brilliantly said, “ There is plenty of hope in the world, but not for us”. I am in favour of Gorgio Agamben’s interpretation of this quote (in his book Profanations, written with Martin Rueff) where he maintains that Kafka meant that plenty of hope and happiness in the world exist, but not in places that are already defined as our sites of happiness by capitalism (p. 20). We need to find such places outside of our defined and engineered portion of happiness. In the past couple of decades, happiness was separated from socialization and we are disciplined to individually enjoy our happiness but not collectively. We are losing our social aspect in this isolating system and becoming more and more dehumanized. But we are not turning out to be animals. There is no animal in the world that can live up to such a degree of loneliness. We are the loneliest animals on the earth, as we are dehumanized ones! By the way, who is calling the shots?

  • #Flood11 Collective Statement

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    [Eds.: On Monday, March 2, 2015, in New York City a trial begins for eleven activists who are refusing to plead guilty to disorderly conduct and pay fines for taking part in a climate sit-in in Manhattan's Financial District last September. The Flood Wall Street Eleven plan instead to use their trial to illustrate that the bankers who finance climate change are the real harbingers of disorder. Below is a collective statement from the group. You can sign a petition in their support here.]

    In order to solve a problem, you must first identify its’ source. . . 

    On the day after the Peoples’ Climate March, facing a disaster of planetary proportions, we sat down on Broadway and Wall St. to carve out a space at the source of our destruction, and to highlight the central role that Wall Street plays in fueling climate change. After holding the street for eight hours, police arrested over one hundred people – including a polar bear and two Captain Planets – and charged us with two counts of disorderly conduct. These charges carry maximum penalties of 15 days in jail and $500 in fines.

    We could have taken the State’s usual script for people who engage in civil disobedience – dropping the charges in return for a promise to be quiet and not directly inconvenience capitalism for six months. Given that our “leaders” have failed to seriously address climate change since it was first brought to public attention a quarter-century ago, we collectively decided to continue our action in court by pleading “not guilty” and pursuing a necessity defense. Standing up to those who threaten our existence is not disorderly, but a responsibility as citizens of this planet. The corporations who are perpetuating the climate crisis should be on trial not the people who try to stop them.

    Thanks to the work of scientists, we now know that there have been five mass extinction events in Earth’s history – all but one of which coincided with increases in global temperatures and in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In the two centuries since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels have spiked by 42 percent and are now at 400 parts per million (ppm), the highest level in more than three million years. If we stay on our present course, CO2 levels could blow past 500 ppm by mid-century and push us further toward a hellishly hot future.

    Despite this, Wall Street continues to bankroll oil, gas and coal companies that pursue increasingly extreme projects for bringing fossil fuels out of the ground. Wall Street also finances politicians from both major parties who refuse to do anything about climate change. When Wall St looks to the future, it sees trillions of dollars in future profits to be reaped from the continued drilling, mining, transporting, refining and burning of fossil fuels. We see our planet put at grave risk of catastrophic rising global temperatures caused by the release of more than 30 billion tons a year in heat-trapping greenhouse gasses. Wall Street’s blind drive for profit leaves us careening toward a world in which we will see more intense droughts and storms, melting ice caps, disappearing island nations, failed crops, the migration of hundreds of millions of displaced peoples and the loss of much of the Earth’s biodiversity due to species extinction.

    Here in New York, we learned from Hurricane Sandy that climate change is not only a future threat to faraway lands, but also a present and growing danger to our own city. When Sandy hit two years ago, it destroyed the homes of tens of thousands of our friends, neighbors and co-workers, left hundreds of thousands without power for weeks and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. Sandy’s surging waters also came within less than a half-mile of the steps of the very courthouse where we face trial. There’s no reason to think we won’t face similar dangers again.

    If you went Jacob Riis beach this summer, you undoubtedly noticed the view obstructed by an offshore oil rig, part of a Williams Transco project that, once completed, will run a high-pressure liquid natural gas (LNG) pipeline along beaches, and right under Flatbush Ave. in Brooklyn. This oil rig is not only an eyesore, but drilling fluids from the construction are deposited on the ocean floor. The new higher-pressure pipeline threatens Brooklyn residents’ safety, as gas pipelines sometimes explode.

    Our action was justified and we would do it again. The latest news from Lima, Peru where U.N. climate negotiators are currently meeting and once again failing to adequately address the climate crisis reminds us all that we cannot stand idly by when so much is at stake. Meanwhile from Massachusetts to Michigan to Manhattan, climate justice activists have invoked the necessity defense in the past 12 months. We expect this to become an increasingly common practice in the years ahead.

    In our case, we urge the Judge to listen closely to the arguments we are ready to make about the existential threat Wall Street poses to the climate. Beyond what happens in the courtroom, we hope to inspire others to act boldly and take action to ensure our survival.

    Business as usual is no longer acceptable.

    [The image comes from https://flic.kr/p/p5ugKw.]

  • Mexico: Crisis of Human Rights Becomes International Issue as Violence Continues

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    Militant protests by teachers, students, and others, some of them violent, continue in Guerrero on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast where the state government seems to have completely lost control. Since six students were killed, 25 wounded and 43 kidnapped in Iguala, Guerrero on September 26, 2014–with the 43 still remaining still not credibly accounted for—there have been nearly continuous protests. Teacher protests over other issues have also taken place in Mexico City and in other parts of the country and have been militant, but not violent.

    Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto argues that while most of the country is safe, only three specific areas have problems with violence: Guerrero, Michoacán, and Tamaulipas where there has been a recent spate of drug killings. But the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students has led to protests throughout the country and abroad, has become a national political crisis, and this month also an international human rights concern at the United Nations and the European Union Parliament leading to much criticism of the Mexican government by international organizations and in the press.

    Guerrero Out of Control

    The continuing protests have been driven by two causes: first, the demand by their families, fellow students, and the public for the return alive of the 43 kidnapped students and second, the State Coordinating Committee of Education Workers of Guerrero (CETEG), a caucus of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) calling for an end to the government’s education reform. The students of the State Teachers Colleges and the CETEG teachers have been at the center of the protests that have included violent confrontations with the police. But there are several other actors with other agendas.

    In Guerrero, shortly after the 43 Ayotzinapa State Teachers College students were forcibly disappeared last September, protestors burned down the town hall in Iguala and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) headquarters in Chilpancingo. More recently protestors have seized public buildings, such as the state Secretary of Finance offices, taken over highways and toll booths, and violently attacked a military base. (Many believe the Mexican Army was aware of and possibly involved in the killings and kidnappings of the students.) When three teachers were arrested during recent protests, other teachers kidnapped two Coca-Cola company employees and eventually exchanged them for the teachers being held by the state police.

    While protestors have taken control of the city government in several Guerrero towns, others have been taken over by the Federal Police (PPF). At the same time the drug cartels and other gangsters continue their murders and kidnappings in both small towns and in the resort city of Acapulco where five were recently killed execution style in just one day, February 21. Also operating in Guerrero and in the neighboring state of Michoacán are armed several community self-defense organizations, some of which arose out of indigenous communities and others out of ranchers’ organizations, while yet others are alleged to have ties to the drug cartels, and some which have affiliated with state police organization.

    New Forced Disappearances: Miners

    Meanwhile, as protests over the forced disappearance of the students continue, eleven miners at the Canadian owned Media Luna mine and the mayor of the town of Cocula, Guerrero were kidnapped on February 7. Some sources say that as many as 15 people were kidnapped by an armed group, though there has been no official confirmation. There were suggestions by local townspeople that the kidnapping had been carried out by La Familia Michoacana, a drug cartel. Cocula is the town where according to the Mexican authorities the bodies of the 43 kidnapped students were incinerated. Altogether more than 20,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in Mexico since 2006, while another 100,000 plus have been killed.

    Guerrero’s government has been in disarray since the Iguala killings and kidnappings. The former governor, Ángel Aguirre of the PRD, stepped down a month after the Iguala killings and kidnapping and was replaced by Rogelio Ortega Martínez, also of the PRD, who became interim governor. Now the Mexican government has accused former governor Aguirre of having embezzled US$19 million, but strangely it has not charged him; the government has, however, arrested his brother, his nephew, his former deputy, and five of the deputy’s family members for their alleged involvement in the crime.

    Some Mexican politicians and some in the media have argued that the state has become ungovernable and have called upon President Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to have the federal government take over administration of the state. Why hasn’t he done so? The reason may be that national elections and several state elections, including that of Guerrero, will be held in June and the president doesn’t want to see them interrupted or stopped. Some media commentators suggest that the deeply troubled PRD which governs Guerrero and Peña Nieto and the PRI which control the national government have arrived at an agreement hoping to perpetuate themselves in power, the PRD in Guerrero and the PRI n the federal government, keep out the conservative National Action Party (PAN). Activists in Guerrero and elsewhere, arguing that the entre political system has become corrupt, have called for a boycott of the coming state and mid-term elections.

    Andrés Manuel López Obrador, leader of the Movement of National Regeneration Party (MORENA), infuriated many Guerrero activists and others when he declared that anyone who called for abstention in the elections was either “naïve or linked to the existing regime.” López Obrador fears that the left-of-center MORENA party, only recently recognized by the government and participating in its first elections this coming June, could be politically damaged by an abstention movement. But he has now antagonized the student activists, teachers, and others involved in the human rights movement in Guerrero and other states, and that could cost him in the end.

    United Nations and European Union Critical of Mexico

    The crisis in Guerrero and in Mexico generally also became an international issue in February as appearances before international bodies undermined the Mexican government’s reputation. In two separate instances, a United Nations hearing and a meeting with parliamentarians of the European Union, representatives of other governments expressed incredulity and astonishment as they asked hard and questions of Mexican government regarding its handling of the killings and disappearances of the Ayotinzapa students. The Mexican government for more than two months has asserted that the local mayor and his wife ordered police to detain the students and that the police then turned them over to a gang called Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors) which killed them an incinerated their bodies and declared the case closed.

    The European parliamentarians appeared to be shocked that the government had so rapidly investigated and closed such a complex case. They expressed their horror and indignation that Mexico could have more than 120,000 cases of deaths or disappeared persons because of a regime of impunity. The EU parliamentarians called upon the Mexican government to carry on an exhaustive investigation, to support the parents, and to establish relations with the Mexican people. Similarly the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances, dealing with the Ayotzinapa and other earlier kidnappings, noted the “context of generalized disappearances” and expressed its “concern” over the government’s lack of exact information about the missing. The rapporteur expressed shock at mass graves found in the state.

    The hearings at the U.N. and the E.U. lifted Mexico’s human rights issues out of their usual North American context, where the United States government is dominant and firmly supports the Mexican government, and placed them on the world stage. President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government, still with a firm grip on the government bureaucracy, the Federal Police, and the Mexican Army, and has the support of the Mexican media, and most Mexicans states do continue to function without disruptive social protest. Still the recent hearings do weaken the Mexican president, his party, and his administration. What exactly the impact will be cannot be foretold.

  • Le Guin Blasts Corporate Publishers

    ImageTo the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long — my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

    Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.

    Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

    Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

    Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

    I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

    Thank you.

    Ursula K. Le Guin

    November 19, 2014

    [This text may be quoted without obtaining permission from the author, or copied in full so long as the copyright information is included: Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin. The photo is by Marian Wood Kolisch. This text and photo originally appeared on Ursula Le Guin's website.]

    Spiral

  • HUGH MASAKELA PLAYS FREEDOM SONGS, TALKS OF SOUTH AFRICA TODAY

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    Hugh Masakela, the great South African trumpet player was joined by Vusi Mahlasela, the guitarist and singer in a “Twenty Years of Freedom” concert at Queens College on February 19, 2015. They played many of Masakela’s classics of the 1960s and 70s such as the lovely 1968 hit “Grazin’ in the Grass,” the joyful and inspiring“Bring Back Nelson Mandela”, and the sad “Stimela – the Coal Train”, to an audience many of whom had been supporters of the freedom struggles against apartheid in South Africa until its overthrow in 1994. 

    Now 75 years old, Masakela remains one of the world’s great musicians, and Mahlasela’s magnificent voice—he sang his moving “Say Africa”—was the perfect complement. They were backed up by Francis Fuster on the conga drums, Ian Herman on drums, Abednigo Sibongiseni Zulu on bass guitar, and Mongezi Ntaka on guitar, a fabulous team.

    Before the concert, Masakela spoke to an audience of professors, students and community members about the relationship between art and social movements. Asked about the situation in South Africa today, Masakela told the audience, “We fought for freedom and we got democracy—and we’re still trying to understand what that is.”

    While careful not to mention the ruling African National Congress (ANC) government—telling the audience “I hope you have bail money”—he was clearly critical of the current regime. The freedom movement, says Masakela, gave way to administration, and administration became a “private preserve.”

    “We’ve got this democracy, but what is it? The poor of South Africa are still there as they were in apartheid times.”

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    “The views of the artists of the freedom struggle don’t sit well with the new administrators, because these artists still focus on injustice,” he said. And there is still injustice in South Africa, Mandela suggested and alluded to the massacre at Marikana where the South African government’s security forces killed 44 striking miners on August 16, 2012. He compared the situation in South Africa to that in the United States after the civil rights movement, saying that even after great movement that “the police still shoot and kill African people in the streets of America.”

    “Very often after liberation, the liberation movement’s leaders become the new dictators, though we don’t have that in South Africa," he said ironically. "In the underbelly of South Africa, nothing has changed. The rich are still rich and the poor are still poor and little trickles down.”

    Yet, said Masakela, he still had hope for the future, both because the South African people had fought for over three hundred years against the Europeans who tried to take their country and because the government of South Africa is still young.

    Masakela and Mahlasela are continuing a heroic tour, having performed with Dave Mathews in October 2014 at Carnegie Hall while in that same month Masakela give the Steve Biko Foundation Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics, an edifying and inspiring discussion of the South African freedom struggle that continues today.

  • Newark students seize Cami Anderson’s office

    A small group of Newark high school students Tuesday night seized the office of state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson in a protest timed to coincide with her imminent re-appointment to another year, her fifth,  as head of the state’s largest school district. The action, which is continuing through the night, stands in stark contrast to the failure of Anderson’s older–and, theoretically, more powerful–critics to do anything to dislodge her from her post.

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    Charlotte Hitchcock, NPS counsel, tried to shoo students from Anderson’s office. The students set up their broadcast center.

    The operation was executed with an efficiency that has eluded Anderson’s control of the district. The dozen students and a few adult advisers pulled off the occupation of the suite of offices on the eighth floor while a public school board meeting droned on two floors above on the tenth floor. The students had attended the meeting and some spoke, hinting broadly they were about to do something, and then left in a group–but they weren’t going home to do their homework.

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    Newark students sprint down long eighth-floor hallway to get to Anderson’s offices ahead of security officers.

    The dozen or so students crammed into an elevator and pushed the 8th floor button, then sprinted to Anderson’s office, expecting all the while to be met with resistance from security officers. Instead, the office site was wide open and empty except for a puzzled janitor who, while mopping the floors, cautioned the students not to slip on the wet tiles. “Be careful,” he said, not quite sure of the intent of the visitors.

    The students–many of them from the city’s vaunted Science Park High School–set to work establishing what amounted to a communications center where they broadcast their demands that Anderson resign immediately–for, among other reasons, her failure for a year  to attend board meetings, including the one the students had just left.

    Within a few hours, the students were live-streaming appeals for support like a band of revolutionaries whose first target was a government-controlled television station.

    At first, top administrators of the Newark schools were not amused–although it did take at least a half-hour before they realized their offices were under the control of their critics.  Charlotte Hitchcock, Anderson’s chief attorney, stormed into the occupied office followed by her security director, Eric Ingold, and demanded the students leave. They were “trespassing” on “private property,” she told the public school students in the leadership suite of New Jersey’s largest public school system.

    Hitchcock testily tried to prevent a photographer from taking her picture at that moment–resulting in a photo that shows the hubris of the Anderson administration with the added benefit of depicting students setting up their live-streaming apparatus and ignoring her and her pomposity.

    “Thank you,” a student said to her after she delivered her warning.

    The angry nature of the initial reaction did cause some concerns among the students, some of whom openly spoke about what might happen if the  Newark police tried to arrest them. At the same time, Hitchcock and her security crew refused demands from Newark school board members to go to the site and meet with the students.

    Something obviously clicked in the minds of Cami’s assistants because, in about 45 minutes, the same Hitchcock reappeared at the offices and sweetly assured the students they would be provided access to bathrooms and food would be delivered.

    (Pizzas later arrived, delivered by none other than assistant superintendent Roger Leon, often thought to be the next superintendent if  Anderson can ever be pried loose from her hold on the $300,000 job. They were, however, purchased by school board member Marques-Aquil Lewis. Sounds like something Leon would do.)

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    A mellower Hitchcock promises food and access to bathrooms.

    “Our main concern is the safety of the students,” Hitchcock told the students, just an hour after she warned the students her main concern was their audacity in trespassing on the inner sanctum of the Newark public school administration.

    Soon, the students were welcoming school board members and others, including Middy Baraka, the chief of staff and brother to Mayor Ras Baraka, who posed for a picture with the occupying students. Thai Cooper, the mayor’s chief policy adviser, called the students and her remarks about “standing in solidarity” with their cause were loud-speakered across the room.

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    Board members were finally allowed in to meet the students after 10:30 pm

    Board members who arrived expressing their support included Antoinette Baskerville-Richardson, Marques-Aquil Lewis,  and Donald Jackson. The board members gave live-streamed interviews endorsing  the students’ demand that  Anderson be fired.

    “Can you imagine that we were not even allowed to enter the school administration’s offices?” said Baskerville-Richardson, whose husband, Essex County Freeholder Wayne Richardson, also came to show support for the students. “This is what it means not to have local control.”

    This was the second sit-in staged by roughly the same group of students in less than a year. Last May, they took over a school board meeting and sat in. On that occasion, then mayor-elect Baraka came personally to support them. As of midnight Wednesday morning, the mayor had not contacted the students directly.

    The student occupation of Anderson’s office was more than just a bold act by some of the city’s most talented students–it also was a reminder that the adults who are supposed to be leaders have been helpless in preventing Anderson from being re-appointed to another year as superintendent.

    The mayor has demanded her resignation and so have a legion of other elected officials. She has been denounced by virtually every member of the Essex County legislative delegation and a slew of union leaders. But Anderson survives–because only one man decides whether she will stay.

    And that is Chris Christie.

     

    Bob Braun wrote for The Star-Ledger in Newark, NJ, for nearly 50 years. He served as its education editor for almost 30 years and then became its senior news columnist. He now writes the "Bob Braun's Ledger" blog, where this article first appeared.