Solidarity blogs

March for Equality: Nationwide Protests Against Proposition 8

2008-11-13T14:11:33-06:00

There are protests in dozens of cities across the United States against the California state Proposition 8 which banned gay marriage.

Here is a page that is a clearing house for the nationwide protests: Join the Impact

The War(s) at Home: the Iraq War in movies

2008-11-03T16:38:59-06:00

I teach in a working class suburb, not too far from Oakland, whose political character is very, very different from that in the city itself. Many of my current students have relatives who are in the military (which, despite the economic draft, had not been true in West Oakland, while I worked there). My school says the Pledge of Allegiance each morning, which sends shudders up my spine, and I am grateful that I've never yet been observed not leading it. Few of my fellow teachers have any trouble with the Pledge, for example. Some of them are Republican, even, which is fairly unusual in the greater Bay Area, and among teachers.

This Fall, I read one book and watched four films and discussed them with fellow teachers in some cases, and one or two students, in others. I watched, in order: Jarhead, In the Valley of Elah, Control Room, and Stop-Loss. I read The Road to Ar Ramadi by Camilo Mejia.

Jarhead
Jarhead is the movie adaptation of Anthony Swofford's memoir of his involvement with the Gulf War in 1991. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal as the main character who joins the Marines and is pretty much the equivalent of Charlie Sheen's character in Platoon, or Tim O'Brien's literary self in The Things They Carried, by which I mean he is an Intellectual, and a Sensitive, Thinking soldier who does not fit into the gung ho tradition of the Marines but suffers through a dehumanizing boot camp à la Full Metal Jacket to emerge as a trained killer whose rifle is "part of him".

One thing the movie does extremely well is record the very strange history of Desert Storm; I'd forgotten that the troop build-up in Saudi Arabia took so very long, and that units were there for months and months, more and more of them, before the actual, brief and overwhelming air war of January 1991.

Thus, the movie concentrates on the creation of killing specialists and their unreleased tension, where a better movie, Three Kings focuses on the absurdist aftermath of these brief, completely out-of-scale hostilities, where American military might dwarfed anything in the region, and reduced most Americans' perception of the war to an elaborate video game.

The lack of a political pronouncement on the war was quoted in lots of reviews in one line: "Fuck politics. We're here. The rest is bullshit." Weirdly, that was the sentiment I ran into over and over again in 2003, once the war began despite the global protests of millions. Teacher after teacher told me: "Well, I was against the war before it began; I demonstrated... but now we're there, and we have to do it right and get the job done." The pathos and tragedy in that phrase is tremendous, five years later.

In the Valley of Elah
The second movie I watched was about this Iraq War, though it concentrated on the brutalizing effect of the war on a regular infantry soldier. In the Valley of Elah was recommended to me by one of my fellow teachers who has multiple family members in the military, whose family is Republican, whose cultural context is one in which the military is an honorable choice. But she told me about the film with her voice shaking, almost in tears. The simple symbolism of the American flag in the movie, charted through how Tommy Lee Jones explains how an immigrant custodian should never let it touch the ground, and raise it right side up -- that reversing it has a very specific meaning -- that symbolism affected her deeply, as well as other people I talked to who saw the movie.

Roger Ebert says that In the Valley of Elah is not a movie against the war in Iraq. I respect him all to hell, but I disagree. It's more a movie against WAR, period, and against the dehumanizing and brutally gender-linked effects of war, but it is also a movie whose brutalities are based in the war we are currently in, and that's the war in Iraq. Also the war in Afghanistan, but more on that in a minute. If you haven't seen In the Valley of Elah, you really, really should. Apart from anything else, it could spark a discussion about how war and gender roles are related.

Control Room
After those two movies, I needed something that was very, very different. No one recommended this documentary to me, but I remembered my former student's faith in the news, and decided to rent Control Room. It's a long series of linked interviews with employees -- technicians and journalists and the managers and proxy owners -- of Al Jazeera, the independent 24 hour Arabic news channel based in Qatar. Rumsfeld decried this station as lying pro-Iraqi propaganda, but one of the central moments in the film is when Al Jazeera's cameras pull back in downtown Baghdad to show the staged fakery of a small group of Arab men ("who don't even have Iraqi accents" one journalist explains furiously) pulling down that famed statue of Saddam Hussein. No one else is present in the square. It is an entirely falsified bit of "history", created by the American military.

One of the fascinating parts of this documentary was the transformation in one of CentCom's (Central Command; the unified western military command in Iraq) main press liaisons, Lt. Josh Rushing. At first, he clearly believes his mission, and his clear-eyed full-faith honest responses to Al Jazeera interviews is something amazing to see. Over the course of the documentary, it is somewhat astonishing that he is able to listen to what these Arab journalists say to him -- they make no pretense at being "objective", instead insisting that there are different perspectives and all should be heard, not just the American point of view -- and that he begins to doubt. After the completion of the film, Rushing was ordered by the Marines not to comment, ever. He abandoned a sixteen year military career and became an English-language reporter for Al Jazeera.

Stop Loss and The Road to Ar Ramadi

Finally, I watched Stop-Loss, which seems a bit like a dramatized and fictionalized movie version of the reality documented so movingly by Camilo Mejia in his memoir The Road to Ar Ramadi. The two are very different -- Mejia was political from the start; his parents were Sandinistas and he had doubts early on -- but the protagonists in both stories are caught in this dreadful political and military reality which is the Stop-Loss provision passed by Congress once it became clear that an all-volunteer military with limited enlistments could not provide enough bodies for the war.

When soldiers join any branch of the military now, their enlistment of four or six years is not the actual term they commit to, contractually. Because of "stop-loss", they are liable to be recalled to service, against their will. It is entirely unclear what the limitations are to the length of time one can be involuntarily retained in active service. I know personally at least two servicemen who separated from service -- whose enlistment periods were completed -- who have been called up for further tours of duty to Iraq and/or Afghanistan. It is an extremely common maneuver, along with the use abroad of National Guards units more normally serving only in the United States, to shore up the exhausted and depleted numbers of military personnel on active duty in combat zones. Iraq Veterans Against the War has been very active in protesting these policies, which amount to the reimposition of the Draft under another name, but a Draft which disproportionately affects underemployed youth of color.

Students in my school engage with this movie the most. Many of them have older brothers and sisters or cousins who are in the military now. Many of them are terrified of what could happen to their relatives. Four years ago when I first started working there, I saw car after car with yellow ribbon sticker decals, saying Support Our Troops. I couldn't go into a local coffee shop without hearing mothers discussing their children's military careers. Talking about the war at school was a chancy subject, one that I had to approach very tentatively. Now families seem worn out. They want their children back.

My students are ardent Obama supporters -- we have a Student Council election this coming Tuesday, November 4th, and there is a mock Presidential election on the ballot as well, though only featuring the Democratic and Republican candidates, along with two of the major California propositions: Prop 8, Yes on which will ban gay marriage, and Prop 4, Yes on which will require parental notification for abortion. I have no doubt about the outcome of the mock presidential ballot, but consciousness is uneven to say the least, so I am very curious about how the propositions will come out -- IF the administration does not intervene to quash the ballots. The teacher who organized this did it somewhat in stealth mode.

Over all, what I think is useful and important with these films and others is to watch them and engage with people about them, where they are. Someone who is affected by the transformation in In the Valley of Elah is someone whose politics are in motion. Someone outraged by Stop-Loss is someone who may be able to move towards anti-war activism. Organizing tactics like house meetings centered on a movie showing can be very effective -- not too demanding to start with, but mobilizing nevertheless.

(I hesitated about titling this review of four movies. First of all, I'm not a well-versed film critic or anything. Second of all, I feel that the plural "wars" OUGHT to include Afghanistan, but the titles I plan to concentrate on do not. Therefore the plural refers to the first Gulf War, and this one. I also be detoured into a few other films and books. There, caveats duly noted.)

Revolutionary Work in Our Times

2008-11-03T12:07:10-06:00

By Stephanie and Karin

Something took place in New Brunswick, New Jersey this August that you don't see everyday. A handful of revolutionary organizations came together at a summer school they had jointly planned. They treated each other as comrades, even across organization lines. They emphasized points of unity, instead of points of disagreement. And they decided to continue the process of working together and explore how to expand their relationship after the school was over.

We're not saying this is the seed of the new upturn that will lead to the great revolutionary movements of the 21st century, let alone the next and final world revolution. Although how can you tell? But it certainly seems to be the sort of thing that's needed instead of the splintering and stagnation within the left that we've been seeing since the late 20th century.

The school was sponsored by five organizations and collectives: Solidarity, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, the New York Study Group, and the LA Crew. These groups had already worked together at the US Social Forum, and wanted to broaden their circle to include social movement activists and representatives from other left organizations who shared common perspectives:.

Capitalism cannot be reformed; we believe that revolutionary transformation is both necessary and possible.
Our analysis must incorporate the central importance of race, class and gender.
An International analysis is both important and necessary.
Left organizations are necessary, but we need to focus on their relationship with social movements.
We need to take a non-dogmatic approach to revolutionary theory and practice.
We need unity on the left.

The school was built primarily around plenary sessions which covered questions such as the history of left movements, the current economic conditions and implications for organizing, theories of revolutionary change, and “who’s in the lead?” of revolutionary movements. Participants could also attend elective sessions on topics such as labor, queer theory, urban struggles, left regroupment/refoundation and Black liberation movements.

Most participants felt the school was a success in bringing together a diverse group of people and creating a feeling of optimism and energy. The majority of participants were women and about half were people of color. A third were queer-identified. Most participants were under age 35 to 40, but the age range was wide, allowing for a cross-generational dialogue.

The weakness of the school was that we were not able to get as deep into political education and discussion as many hoped. We tried to involve many speakers and points of view in long plenary sessions, but that didn’t allow for enough depth. We also learned that there coming from different groups and traditions, we don’t share the same knowledge or terminology or assumptions. It will take time to develop that.

Almost everyone at the school expressed an interest in continuing to find ways to work together. Since the school, the initial five groups have met to evaluate the process and look for new opportunities for joint work. The planning committee has invited more organizations and collectives to participate, and provide representatives to the process.

This fall after the election, we plan to host a series of forums across the country. These will be a place for revolutionaries to come together and figure out areas of common work post-election. We’ll post notices about these forums on this website.

We will also continue to meet across organization to discuss other common work, such as another summer school in 2009, workshops at the 2010 US Social Forum, and perhaps joint study and analysis.

More on FMPR: Beating the Odds, Independent PR Teachers Union Trounces SEIU in Representation Election

2008-11-02T11:15:25-06:00

The Puerto Rican Federation of Teachers (FMPR) has done the near-impossible: solidly defeating one of the world’s most powerful labor organizations in an election for representation of Puerto Rico’s 42,000 public school teachers.

In results from the election, which took place over the course of several weeks in October and announced on October 23rd, just 14, 675 teachers voted in favor of representation by the U.S.-based Service Employees International Union (SEIU), while 18,123 voted “no.” Because of its legally proscribed strike activities, FMPR was banned from participating, and instead orchestrated a “Vote No” campaign. Given estimates that some 2,000 “no” votes were stolen, the big plurality to reject affiliation is a stunning defeat for President Andy Stern and the rest of SEIU’s international leadership.

The conflict between the two organizations began almost a year ago and since then has only become more intense, culminating in the recent elections. Last fall, before SEIU stepped onto the scene, members of the FMPR voted at a mass meeting of more than 7,000 members to authorize a strike. The teachers had suffered through more than two years without a contract and had had enough: “Contract or Strike!” they told Puerto Rico’s Secretary of Education Rafael Aragunde in November.

The response of the government was swift and unusually harsh. On January 8, before the teachers had even begun their strike, the Public Sector Labor Relations Commission of Puerto Rico and the island’s governor, Anibal Acevedo Vila, recently indicted on 19 criminal counts of corruption, unilaterally decertified the Federation, invoking Puerto Rico's Law 45, which grants public employees the right to bargain collectively but denies them the right to strike.

Enter SEIU. While the leadership of the FMPR prepared to fight their decertification in court and the union’s rank-and-file prepared to fight for their contract demands in the street, SEIU’s international leadership was busy rolling out its own plans for Puerto Rico’s teachers. As Juan Gonzalez subsequently revealed in the New York Daily News (2/29/08), Dennis Rivera, an SEIU international vice-president and one-time member of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), had met secretly with Acevedo Vila on multiple occasions while negotiations between the island’s government and the FMPR were ongoing. As reported by Gonzalez, the governor told Rivera prior to the strike that the Federation is “yours to take.”

It comes as no surprise, then, that almost simultaneously with the FMPR’s decertification, SEIU announced the affiliation of the Teachers’ Association of Puerto Rico (AMPR), the island’s association of school principals and supervisors – itself a longtime rival of the Federation – and its intention to replace the Federation with an offshoot of its new affiliate, the Puerto Rican Teachers’ Union (SPM).

At a time when the leadership of SEIU should have expressed its solidarity with the striking teachers, Stern, Rivera, and company chose instead to strike a deal with the government-employer and forge with them a company union in an effort to cut the ground from beneath the feet of the FMPR. Stern’s top-down approach to unionism and his strategy of union-member accretion at all costs have been roundly criticized by democratic reformers and rank-and-file activists in the labor movement, but his bid to raid the FMPR reaches new lows. Gonzalez called the raid “a shameful betrayal of solidarity.” Labor journalist Steve Early told Democracy Now! (10/27/08) that the raid “tarnish[ed] the image, not only of SEIU, but all unions.”

At a time when the labor movement is extremely weak, it is imperative that unions be able to count on the support of other unions in fighting their real enemy: the boss. Apparently, however, this logic is lost on the leadership of SEIU. Rather than remaining true to their commitment to organize the unorganized, they opted in Puerto Rico for a policy of reorganizing the already organized, something that has done little for either the strength or the unity of an already fractious labor movement, whether on the island or the mainland.

But despite the betrayal of SEIU’s leadership and their best efforts to undermine the FMPR, the Federation has persevered, winning several important concessions from Acevedo Vila and Aragunde in their February strike and dramatically defeating SEIU in their recent head-on confrontation in the elections for representation. The strike, which paralyzed Puerto Rico’s public school system for 10 days, drew unprecedented support from parents, students, and local communities sympathetic to the teachers’ struggle for a just settlement of their grievances and the improvement of public education on the island.

As a result of this critical support and the determination and militancy of the teachers and their union, the government was forced to accept several of the strikers’ key demands, including an immediate raise of $250 per month for all teachers, a freeze on the government’s plans for privatization of the public education system, and a pledge from the governor to slowly but surely increase teachers’ starting salaries to $3000 per month. In the scope of both its demands and its base of support, the strike, by its end, had become a small social movement – and its success was a victory not only for the FMPR but also for defenders of public education.

The implications of the FMPR’s electoral victory against SEIU, however, are much greater still. In the first place, it is important to keep in mind that the FMPR is a militant and democratic union of the rank-and-file and that its sitting president, Rafael Feliciano of the Commitment, Democracy, and Militancy (CODEMI) caucus, is an avowed socialist. In this context, SEIU’s raid was not simply an attack on the Puerto Rican teachers and their union, but also on the ideals of militancy and democracy, which the FMPR – and, in particular, CODEMI – upholds. SEIU sought by its raid not only to replace FMPR as the teachers’ representative, but also to replace FMPR’s style of militant and democratic unionism with its own brand of top-down, management-friendly unionism.

The rank-and-file’s rejection of SEIU, therefore, also represents a rejection of bureaucratic unionism as such – and an embrace of union militancy and democracy. The battle between SEIU and FMPR thus forms part of the much larger war of ideas now raging in the U.S. labor movement and the victory of militancy over cooperation is in fact a victory for those among us who believe securing the future for labor and working people depends on recreating a fighting movement for democratic, social justice unionism.

The FMPR’s victory also points to the possibility that a relatively small but extremely dedicated band of labor activists and reformers can make headway against a much larger and more powerful foe. FMPR spent approximately $60,000 – half of it borrowed – on the election and fielded a small staff made almost entirely of volunteers. SEIU, in contrast, is estimated to have spent upwards of $10 million and fielded a staff of approximately 300 professional organizers. This is a classic case of David and Goliath, and SEIU’s loss at the hands of the FMPR might also be likened to the US defeat in Vietnam, where a much larger, technically superior invading U.S. force was defeated by a smaller but extremely dedicated opponent. Only time will tell if the recent conflict in Puerto Rico will serve as corporate unionism’s Vietnam.

The analogy to Vietnam reveals another important aspect of the FMPR’s victory over SEIU: the strong rejection by the Puerto Rican teachers of North American labor imperialism. In voting against SEIU, the teachers not only opted for union militancy and democracy over corporate unionism; they also asserted their independence from the North American labor movement and sent a clear message to North American unions that, while their solidarity is welcomed, attempts to manipulate or control Puerto Rican unions and unionists are not.

Perhaps SEIU has now learned an important lesson about meddling in the internal affairs of foreign labor movements. Either way, their actions in Puerto Rico have certainly raised concerns as to their plans for the rest of the Americas, and with good reason: the AFL-CIO’s uncritical support of rightwing US foreign policy in the region in the 1970s and 1980s, which earned it the moniker “AFL-CIA,” remains a sore subject for Latin American unionists today.

SEIU is engaged in important solidarity work with the persecuted trade union movement in Colombia; and just this past July Stern called on the Bush administration to grant visas to the wives of the Cuban Five, five Cuban nationals accused by the U.S. of spying and whose spouses have thus far been barred from visiting their husbands in prison. There is no doubt, then, that SEIU does some very good solidarity work. The question is at what cost: What will the union ask – or demand – as the price for its support? The FMPR has drawn a line in the sand. A true and equal partnership between North American and Latin American labor organizations cannot be built on a basis of labor imperialism; the independence of Latin American unions from North American domination is the prerequisite for any meaningful joint work.

FMPR’s victory over SEIU in the recent elections is a heartening development, but it represents the beginning, rather than the end, of the struggle between the two organizations and the different models of unionism which they offer to the teachers of Puerto Rico. By voting ”no” in the recent elections, the teachers have rejected SEIU’s labor-imperialist effort to install a management-friendly union in the Puerto Rican public education system and have expressed their continued support for the FMPR, which has served as their exclusive bargaining representative for the past 40 years. At the same time, however, the “no” vote victory comes at a cost. The prospects for an FMPR return to official bargaining status have been improved by the ”no” vote, but Puerto Rico’s teachers are still without a bargaining representative or agreement.

While the FMPR remains decertified, SEIU took out a paid ad in the San Juan daily, El Vocero, asserting that the employer, and not the Federation, won the elections and declaring their intention to continue to struggle for representation of the island’s teachers. A new and daunting challenge lies ahead: to see the FMPR re-elected within the next 12 months as the exclusive bargaining representative of Puerto Rico’s teachers and the return to the teachers of their full labor rights as unionized workers.

Howie Hawkins Press Release

2008-10-29T15:32:49-05:00

(There will be a post-election interview with Howie Hawkins on Solidarity Webzine. Hawkins is a longtime third party activist who is running as a "Green Populist Candidate" for the 25th District of New York in the 2008 Congressional election)

Howie Hawkins for Congress
25th District, New York
www.howiehawkins.org

Media Release
For Immediate Release: Wednesday, October 29

For More Information: Howie Hawkins, 315-425-1019, hhawkins@igc.org

Hawkins Says It’s Time to Spread the Wealth in America – From the Bottom Up

Calls for Hike in Minimum Wage to At Least $10 an Hour

and Mandatory Paid Vacations for All Workers

Howie Hawkins, the Green Populist candidate for Congress in the 25th District, showed he is willing to go where Senator Obama and the Democrats fear to tread today when he called for Congress to support a redistribution of wealth in America in order to provide a decent standard of living for all Americans.

"Workers need a raise and a vacation," Hawkins said, in calling for amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that would raise the minimum wage to a living wage and mandate four weeks paid vacation for all American workers.

“The federal government has taken the side of corporate elites since the early 1970s to make the rich richer at the expense of the rest of us. The Orwellian doublespeak by the two major parties - but especially Sen. McCain – in denying what they have done is breath taking considering the real facts of 35 years of upward redistribution of income and wealth. Their solution for everything, even after the recent financial shenanigans, is more tax cuts and subsidies for the rich. Whether it’s McCain’s extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich or Obama’s $3000 a year wage subsidy to business for new jobs, it’s always corporate welfare. The truth is that since 1973, wages have been stagnant for middle income workers and declined for bottom 40% of workers, while wealth and income has concentrated at the top,” Hawkins noted.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the share of national after-tax income going to the top 1 percent of households more than doubled between 1979 (when it stood at 7.5 percent) and 2005 (when it reached 15.6 percent). If wages had kept pace with productivity gains since 1973, as they did between after World War II until 1972, the average wage today would be $26 an hour, instead of $16, which is the same as it was in 1973 in real terms. 45 million workers make less than $10 an hour, which is below the poverty level for a family of three working full time

“The federal minimum wage should be raised it immediately to $10 an hour, to what it was in real terms in 1968, and then to $15 an hour within 5 years,” Hawkins added. Hawkins would also index the minimum wage to the cost of living.

Hawkins noted that the progressive income tax was intended to help reduce the inequalities of income by having the rich paying a higher percentage of their income to fund government. But in recent decades, the progressivity of the income tax has been reduced, while regressive payroll taxes have increased.

Numbers released by the CBO in 2005 showed the gap between the wealthiest Americans and everybody else had grown to its widest point since at least 1979. The top 1 percent of households received 70 times as much in average after-tax income as the bottom one-fifth of households in 2005 — the widest such income gap on record, with data available back to 1979. In 1979, by comparison, the richest households made 23 times as much as the poorest households. The average income of the top 1 percent of households was more than 21 times that of the middle one-fifth of households. This, too, was the widest such ratio on record.

Labor’s share of national income had declined from 59.3 percent in 1970 to 51.6 percent in 2006, the lowest share since records began in 1929. Profits in 2006 were 13.8% of national income in 2006, the also highest share since 1929. In a $14 trillion dollar economy, that represents about a $1 trillion a year shift of income from workers’ wages to owners’ profits.

Inequality of income and wealth is now the most unequal since good records began with the institution of the income tax in 1913, with the single exception of 1928, the year before the Great Depression began. The top one percent now receives more income than the bottom 50 percent and owns more wealth than the bottom 96 percent.

“It should be the express goal of government to achieve a fairer distribution of wealth and income and power. The ridicule of wealth redistribution by the McCain and the Republicans and the denial by Obama and the Democrats that they intend to redistribute wealth demonstrates that differences between the economic policies offered by the corporate-sponsored parties are negligible. In fact, both supported wealth redistribution from working people to the richest financial elites when they supported the Wall Street bailouts,” Hawkins said.

“Wage-led, demand side, bottom-up economic development is what we need now for economic recovery. But the emphasis from the major party candidates is on more tax cuts for business for the supply side, trickle-down approach that has sent us into the present economic tailspin. Obama’s rhetoric against trickle-down economics is not matched by his proposals, or his actions with respect to the bailouts of financial speculators, or the economic advisors he has chosen like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. And we have heard nothing from the major party candidates in this congressional race that distinguishes their approach from the economic policies of their own parties’ presidential standard bearers,” Hawkins said

In addressing the argument of business lobbies that they need incentives in order to take risks on expansion and new products, Hawkins said, “Today’s business leaders are the laziest cohort of business leadership in our history. They constantly whine that they can’t make new investments without corporate welfare to guarantee returns. They won’t do business without special tax breaks, subsidies, and loan guarantees from the government. Meanwhile, the top executives take home outrageous compensation packages even when their companies lose money. Corporate CEO compensation today amounts to over 400 times the wage incomes of their average employees, up from 40 times in 1980 and 8 times in 1946. European and Japanese CEO’s do business with salaries in the range of 10 to 12 times of their average employees wages.”

Hawkins said the alternative to state-guaranteed profits for timid business leaders was to democratize economic enterprises. “If business leaders won’t take the risks on the business opportunities that higher wages and more consumer demand will open up, then it’s time to socialize the risks through public banking where the public shares in the risks and rewards, the losses and the gains, from business investments, and to target public bank investments to worker-owned cooperatives where income is shared among all the firm’s workers in proportion to their labor contribution.”

“Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was right when he said, ‘We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.’ I would add that we need economic democracy to fully realize political democracy,” Hawkins said.

Hawkins noted that October 24th was the 70th anniversary of 1938 adoption of the FLSA, also known as Wages and Hours Bill, which set federal minimum wage, abolished child labor, set the 40 hour work week and time and a half for overtime.

Hawkins said that making the minimum wage a living wage is not only the right thing to do ethically, so no working families are in poverty, it would also help stimulate the economy far more than throwing trillions at big bankers to buy their bad loans and securities, finance their acquisition of other financial firms, and pay themselves billions in salaries and bonuses.

"Wage-led, bottom-up economic recovery will work better than the failed trickle-down policies of tax breaks for the rich," Hawkins asserted. "We should also mandate at least four weeks of paid vacation. Mandatory paid vacations was part of the original draft of the Fair Labor Standards Act. President Roosevelt brought it up again in his 1944 State of the Union address outlining his proposed Economic Bill of Rights, which included the right to recreation. Mandatory paid vacations for all workers is a long overdue reform which all of Europe already has. Americans put in more hours at work than any other industrial nation, including the notoriously workaholic Japanese, but it is seriously impairing out physical and civic health."

Medical and poll-based evidence indicates that we seriously need relief. Work-related stress can lead to sudden heart attacks, obesity, anxiety, and depression. Americans average nine more weeks of labor per year than Western Europe, where workers in every county there get at least 20 paid days of vacation each year. Finland tops the list of vacation-supporting industrialized nations with 30 paid vacation days per year after the first year of work, plus 14 paid national holidays, according to a July 2007 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Canada and Japan are near the bottom of that list, with a legal minimum of 10 vacation days. The US is the only industrialized nation that does not have a mandatory minimum of vacation time. Of the world's 195 independent countries, 137 have some kind of vacation/annual leave legislation in place. 52 percent of working Americans received less than a week of paid vacation in the past year and more than half of those received none. 65 percent of American workers received less than two paid weeks off.

A survey by Take Back Your Time of more than 1,000 U.S. adults found that more than two-thirds (69 percent) of Americans support the passage of a paid vacation law. Most enthusiastic about vacation-time-legislation were people under 35 (83 percent); African Americans (89 percent); Latinos (82 percent); people earning low incomes (82 percent); women (75 percent, versus 63 percent for men); and families with children (74 percent).

In addition, Hawkins said FSLA should be amended to also provide for:

A 32-Hour, 4-day Work Week

A Double-Pay Minimum for All Overtime

An Hour Off with Pay for Every Two Hours of Overtime

One Year Paid Leave for Every Seven Years of Work

Twelve weeks paid family leave for each newborn or adopted child, and for taking care of ill family members.

"Taken together these proposals will create millions of new jobs and allow us the free time we need to care for our families and to participate in our communities. More family time and more community participation should be the fruit of the increased labor productivity we have achieved over the last 35 years," Hawkins added.

Hawkins added that the FSLA must be amended to cover agricultural, domestic, and other excluded workers, which is a legacy of 1930s racism which wanted to keep black labor in the South and Chicano and Asian labor in Southwest and West cheap and segregated. FLSA must also be amended to ban the use of prison labor to produce goods and services for public markets, Hawkins said.

Hawkins noted that his proposals for amendments to the FSLA were adopted at Labor Party convention to which he was a delegate in June 1996 in Cleveland. The convention was composed delegates from labor unions representing some 6 million workers, including the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, United Electrical workers, International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, American Federatation of Government Employees, United Mine Workers, Farm Labor Organizing Committee, and California Nurses Association, as well as delegates from local chapters of the Labor Party.

"Unfortunately, most of the unions did not follow through on their declaration of political independence in Cleveland. Unions have contributed over $10 billion to the Democrats since 1980, yet demands such as these are nowhere to be seen in platforms of Democratic candidates. Labor support is taken for granted by the Democrats because labor never threatens to support its own party. On the other hand, independent labor parties in Western Europe achieved most of these demands decades ago. The lesson is clear. Workers need their own party, independent of the corporate-sponsored Democrats and Republicans," Hawkins said.

Puerto Rico's Teachers Show the Way; SEIU Learns the Meaning of "No"

2008-10-24T14:16:25-05:00

When last seen on the picket-line, Puerto Rican teachers were fighting their way through police barricades to appeal to fellow workers from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), at its lavishly funded convention in San Juan in June. (See my article in CounterPunch, June 3, 2008.)

The message of the Federacion de Maestros de Puerto Rico (FMPR) was simple: please stop SEIU President Andy Stern from colluding with the indicted governor of the island to replace FMPR with a “company union.”

At SEIU’s convention, only a handful of delegates dared to challenge Stern on this issue. When eight rank-and-file members from California tried to distribute a leaflet asking why the “top leadership has sided against the teachers of Puerto Rico in a gross case of ‘colonial’ unionism,' ” SEIU staffers threatened several of them with reprisals. “They told us that this is a betrayal and that we could be suspended from the union if we continued handing out the fliers,” delegate Brian Cruz, from Local 1021 in San Francisco, explained to The San Juan Star.

Most of the 3,000 delegates and guests simply cheered when Stern and SEIU vice-president Dennis Rivera, a native of Puerto Rico, introduced their good friend, Anibal Acevedo Vila, the Popular Democratic Party governor. Acevedo Vila is still awaiting trial on federal corruption charges and it was his administration that precipitated a ten-day, island-wide public school strike led by the FMPR last winter. As The Star reported June 3, SEIU used its convention and the governor’s appearance to promote a rival organization, “which is hoping to become the new union representative for an estimated 42,000 public school teachers.”

In the view of SEIU and Acevedo Vila, teachers needed a new SEIU-affiliated union because FMPR no longer had legal recognition after its walk-out over wages, classroom size, and the threat of privatization. This month, however, the teachers themselves disagreed that it was time for a change. By a margin of 18,123 to 14, 675, they voted on Thursday (10/23) against joining the SEIU-backed SPM (Sindicato Puertorriqueno de Maestros), which is closely aligned with another SEIU affiliate, the Association de Maestros de Puerto Rico, an organization of school principals and administrators.

The “Vote No” campaign was orchestrated by the FMPR which, as further punishment for its “illegal” strike, was denied a spot on the ballot. (FMPR was even barred from having observers at teacher polling places.) Prior to the start of the election, FMPR presented evidence to the labor relations commission showing that it still had voluntary financial support from 12,000 members (who have continued to pay union dues even though automatic deductions from all teachers’ paychecks were discontinued when FMPR was “decertified.”) Although SEIU favors “employee free choice” on the mainland and assured critics here there would be a multiple choice ballot, Stern and his local allies limited Puerto Rican teachers to just one union option, which they then rejected.

The defeated SPM has almost no dues payers so SEIU had to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into this losing effort, much of it spent on advertising. As one FMPR supporter reported, SEIU had “paid staff at each school giving out free t-shirts and coolers and the media and the government were clearly in its favor but still they couldn’t impose their union on us.” FMPR activist Edgardo Alvelo, who teaches at a vocational school in Rio Piedras, estimates that his union spent only “$50,000 on the whole campaign.” According to Alvelo, “that money was very hard to obtain, but it was enough to win. It was our people in the schools that did the job. Today, we are celebrating and tomorrow our struggle will continue in all our schools.”

The representation vote turnout was extremely high. Of the 36,000 teachers eligible to participate due to their permanent status, 33,818 actually voted, with a thousand of those ballots being challenged or voided. FMPR now faces the task of continuing to function as what’s called a “bonafide organization,” under P.R. labor law. While still deprived of the full collective bargaining rights it had before the strike, FMPR retains a strong shop steward structure, the ability to represent members, and mobilize around educational policy issues and day-to-day job concerns.

FMPR supporters in New York, California, and elsewhere aided the successful “Vote No” campaign by raising money to help keep this militant independent union afloat. (For more information, see http:// mysite.verizon.net/ or the FMPR’s own website) On October 14, some protested outside the Manhattan headquarters of United Healthcare Workers-East (the former SEIU/District 1199 long headed by Rivera), where they denounced Stern’s raid on FMPR as an insult to New York hospital workers “proud history of fighting for justice and dignity.”

During an August visit to the mountain community of Utuado, one New York Solidarity Committee member, Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, brought money that was collected for FMPR members disciplined for their union activity. Reports Sheridan-Gonzalez, a registered nurse:

“The union, in collaboration with students and parents, had developed a progressive, inclusive curriculum that was extraordinarily successful. This collaborative structure was unilaterally dismantled by the government/school authority in 2007 and 17 teachers were suspended when they fought back. They stood firm even without an income and the class of 2008 in Utuado even dedicated their graduation speeches to these teachers. Their energy and commitment was inspiring and reminiscent of the spirit of U.S. unions in the 1930s and Puerto Rican labor in years past.”

That same feisty spirit was on display in this month’s island-wide union vote, which gave SEIU an expensive lesson in the meaning of “No.”

Growing movement wins another stay of execution for Troy Davis!

2008-10-24T13:10:26-05:00

This morning's "funeral for justice" ended with joyful laughter and hugs as local activists celebrated the second stay of execution for Troy Davis in two months. Bearing a casket marked "JUSTICE," human rights activists walked the rainy streets of downtown Atlanta to deliver 140,000 petitions and a letter signed by over 100 clergy members to the Georgia Parole Board. A few minutes after entering the capitol, they emerged with the good news.

Last night, October 23, nearly a thousand supporters of Troy Davis rallied on the Capitol steps, just days before his scheduled lethal injection. The rally was part of a global day of action drawing attention to the case, which has become notorious around the world. Prosecutors lack physical evidence linking Davis the the 1989 murder of a Savannah police officer, and 80% of witnesses recanted their testimony, citing harassment and pressure for a speedy conviction for the murder of Mark MacPhail. The injustice of the Davis case highlights general problems with the death penalty.

Even before the stay was announced, spirits were high and the crowd was militant. Outrage about the Troy Davis case has stirred general opposition to the death penalty and other aspects of the criminal justice system. Even more importantly, the success of the mass mobilizations has energized the beginnings of a grassroots movement. In Atlanta, the movement to save Troy Davis has reached mass proportions - on the train home from the demonstration, passengers who saw my button and "I am Troy Davis" nametag were eager to hear the latest news.

The most powerful moment of the rally was a stirring speech delivered Troy's sister, Martina Correia. Marina has added an eight year battle with cancer to her ongoing struggle against the system that has kept her brother on death row. I recorded her speech, but several parts are inaudible becuase of cheers to the crowd, so what follows is a rough, edited transcription. Correia and Troy's mother, Virginia, were introduced by local rapper Michael Render, aka Killer Mike. Afterwards, Laura Moye of Amnesty International delivered a phone message from Troy. (Coincidentally, today is Laura's birthday, so the stay of execution was a nice present.)

Martina Correia

"It is amazing to me that Troy's name is heard around the world. Today is a global day of action for Troy Davis in more than fifteen countries around the world and more than forty cities in the United States. And not just today. This has been going on all week long. And it will continue!

They say that we are defeated. They say that we have not won. But if Troy's name is being heard in Madagascar, we have won! If his name is heard in Finland, we have won! If Troy Davis' name is heard in England, we have won! If Troy Davis' name is heard in New York City, we have won! It is heard in Detroit, South Carolina, California - we have won! The name "Troy Davis" is ringing in Savannah, Georgia.

And I'm going to tell you something. The whole Chatham County courthouse is shaking. Because they know they are lying, and they are coming down. That's why [Chatham County prosecutor] Spencer Lawton is spouting all those lies in the newspaper. They don't have any evidence against Troy Davis! They needed a bunch of children who were afraid, and bullied for hours and hours, to say that it was Troy Davis. They used people who had criminal records and threatened them with life in prison to say it was Troy Davis. But you know what? These people stood up against against a system that was breathing down their necks and said, "No! We lied against Troy."

That Parole Board [across the street from the Georgia Capitol] heard witness after witness tell the truth about why Troy Davis is not guilty. There's people like Garland Hunt on the Parole Board. Garland Hunt said, "We know all Black men carry guns. We know all Black men, you know, 'homeboys' are criminals." That's what Garland Hunt said to a preacher in this community.

Every chance they get, they butcher Amnesty International. But this is not just about Amnesty. The NAACP, National Action Network, Southern Center for Human Rights, Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, citizens all over, Campaign to End the Death Penalty. We got universities out here! We got clergy out here, from all faiths. This is about people, this is about human rights.

When you say "I am Troy Davis" you better take that seriously. Because if you don't have money, if you're a certain color, if you're accused of killing a certain color person - in the justice system, you could be Troy Davis. They say that the death penalty is not racist. But there are only three people on death row for killing Black people. How many Black people lose their lives, all the time? How many poor white people lose their lives all the time? And how many rich people are over there on death row? None!

The Department of Corrections is not a corrective system. It is a system of vengeance and violence and destruction.

Seven out of nine eyewitnesses! Never in the history of Georgia. Seven out of nine eyewitnesses! Never in the history of the United States. No weapon. No physical evidence. Police coercion. Prosecutor misconduct.

My brother just turned forty years old. But they are going after children - thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. You should see the morale of the people in that prison, of the other inmates. They know that it is wrong; if Troy can't get justice, nobody can.

A Radical Response: Understanding the Crisis and Building a Movement

2008-10-20T14:17:49-05:00

Understanding and Responding to the Economic Crisis: Some Talking Points (version 2.0)
Download a four-page leaflet of these talking points

The Roots of the Crisis

Beginning in the 1970s, corporate profits stalled and investors began looking for new ways to make--and invent more money.
Corporate profits declined in the 1970s, ending the “postwar boom” of rising wages that existed since World War II. To increase their profits, employers shifted good-paying manufacturing jobs to nonunionized areas of the USA and overseas, as well as while reorganizing work to get more output out of fewer workers. Entrenched union officials failed to respond and accepted endless demands for concessions while corporate profits rebounded. Without an organized fight against concessions, wages stopped growing and workers' purchasing power declined. Workers maintained a standard of living through working longer hours, sending more household members to work, and buying extensively on credit. The globalization of US capitalism and growth of credit both fueled the financial sector, which provided fluid economic resources that could be quickly moved and re-invested – unlike a physical investment such as a factory or railroad.

Years of government policies favoring the rich provoked instability and sparked this year's collapse of major Wall Street institutions.
The Federal Reserve (through which the government regulates availability of credit) set interest rates at 0% for several years in a row, encouraging heavy borrowing by companies to finance new investment. Much of this easy credit was poured into new homes, which many mistakenly saw as ‘safe’ or ‘foolproof.’ But blame does not rest on individual homebuyers – the entire system of easy credit was government policy. And specific high-risk “variable rate” mortgages were specifically marketed to African Americans, even those who qualified for safer loans. The hyped-up demand for houses drove their price far beyond the actual value anyone would realistically pay for them. Holders of expensive and sometimes outright fraudulent sub-prime mortgages quickly found themselves unable to meet the payments or refinance as housing values inevitably fell. More and more defaulted on their loans. Communities targeted for deceptive, manipulative “sub-prime” mortgages – especially African Americans – were hit hardest with historic losses of wealth.

Deregulation and corporate greed made a bad situation worse.
The collapse in the housing market bankrupted the massive mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. The companies were developed in the 1930s and 1940s in part to address the housing crisis of the Great Depression and provide access to affordable housing. The collapse and government take-over of these institutions shows us just how serious this current crisis has become. During the 1930s, the government began to regulate the banking system. But these regulations were stripped away in the 1980s and 90s to provide big corporations with more opportunities to make profits. Freed from oversight, investment bankers spread the risk of “safe” mortgage debt throughout the global economy. As housing prices fell and uncertainty spread, banks and firms operating with high levels of debt were suddenly unable to borrow the amounts they needed to stay afloat. At the most basic level, banks collapsed by lending money they didn't really have.

Wall Street's collapse reveals not only corruption and shortsightedness, but problems that are a basic part of the capitalist system.
Corrupt bankers and bad government policy didn’t create this crisis; they just handled it in the worst possible way. The capitalist system requires permanent growth in profits to stay afloat. But, capitalist growth constantly undermines profitability. The president's recent speech to the nation addressing the crisis showed the bind that investors and the politicians that work for them are in; first he praised an economic policy that allowed Americans to “get easy credit” and purchase homes “sometimes for the first time,” and then lamented the “domino effect” this created throughout the economy. Of course Bush and congressional Democrats and Republicans alike have always favored the same thing, whether they call it “smaller government” or “privatization.” Each of these policies really represent the transfer of public assets and funds – which belong to all of us – directly into the hands of corporations and investors in their constant attempt to increase their own wealth. Bush, long devoted to “free enterprise” and “smaller government” now calls for “dramatic government action" in the form of the largest direct transfer of tax-payer dollars into private hands in history. Because this crisis was ultimately caused by the market, no market-based “solution” - whether “Buy American” or “support small business” or “stronger regulation” can provide a long term fix to the real problem!

We need strong social movements that fight for relief and a clear understanding that the problem lies with capitalism itself.
From previous crises, like the Great Depression, we see that capitalism constantly strangles itself - but it also has an amazing flexibility for recovery (especially by engineering a government rescue plan!) In fact, moments of great destruction for regular people can provide the perfect opportunity for power and profit among corporate investors; we've seen that happen recently in New Orleans and Iraq, and on a larger scale in Europe after the second World War. The system will not end itself; on the contrary, like weeds growing after a forest fire, destructive crises and war just open up space for new capitalist growth and bigger upward transfers of wealth. But for the sake of humanity and the planet, society cannot continue to be based on profit. The bursting of the “miracle” financial system shows the continued relevance of real, productive work in society. Imagining a world without pinstripe suited men shifting around large numbers on a computer screen is easy - but who can imagine a world without people working to produce food, clothes, shelter and other necessities; to teach and provide health care; to transport things from one place to another? Revolutionary socialists, including those in Solidarity, see the possibility of a different kind of world because of this basic contradiction. The majority of people in society have no stake in continuing the status quo - and also, if united, have the power to overthrow the small minority that profits off our backs.

What is going on Right Now?

The era of the United States as a “the world’s only superpower” is ending.
The United States economy has not been this bad since the Great Depression. US political and corporate elites hoped to retain global power militarily, through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the country’s raw economic superiority slipped. But these wars cannot be won: opposition among the occupied populations, and growing dissent within the military, prevent any victory on US terms even as the death toll climbs. In the coming years, this changing political and economic reality will shake up basic assumptions about our place in the world held by most Americans since World War II. Predicting the reaction is impossible, but there is a pressing need to educate around international issues and to counter nationalistic, "We're #1" impulses instilled by everything from schools to the media and popular culture.

The crisis is spreading: from Wall Street to the "real economy" that employs most people in the country - and from the United States to other countries.
September topped a year of layoffs with the highest monthly job loss in half a decade. Previous months' losses were centered in the shrinking housing, construction, and financial industries. September saw big drops among auto workers; retail, restaurant, and hospitality workers also suffered. The financial crisis went global: economies in Asia, Europe, and Latin America are all in serious trouble.

Fuel and food prices are rising far faster than paychecks.
The cost of groceries and transportation have grown tremendously in the United States - almost 50% in the past year. In poor countries the problem is even more acute. Many Haitians have been driven to eating "cakes" made of mud, salt, and vegetable shortening. In countries around the world, there have been riots demanding government food relief. Previously low energy prices and favorable exchange rates for the dollar made it cheap to import food into the US. Now, rising fuel costs seem likely to continue as American global power declines; not only will food prices increase even more, our car culture and suburban geography, with spread-out single family homes and miles of highway is becoming too expensive to maintain. Gas prices are making all that driving--and even heating our homes--increasingly unaffordable.

There is no money for schools, housing, health care, Katrina relief, or public works jobs – but when the rich are in trouble, $700 billion appears.
A spokeswoman for the US Treasury admitted that $700 billion was simply a made up figure, to signal that the government had the bankers’ backs – on behalf of taxpayers. The government is throwing our money into these financial black holes without even asking for decision making power. This shows that money is available - but for whom? We must be clear that, far from right-wing cries of “socialism,” this sudden intervention is really indented to temporarily stabilize the whole corporate profit system. A government controlled by corporations will never willingly bail out those who really need assistance. This $700 billion could provide completely free health care for all, paid parental leave for overworked parents, free quality childcare and education, clean and safe city parks and communities of subsidized housing, job training and infrastructure for rural areas screwed by vanishing mines, factories and farms, and countless other "utopian" needs that are ignored as congress feeds the fire on Wall Street with our money.

The economic shake-up has transformed the terrain of this year's presidential elections.
National elections are the medium through which most Americans experience and discuss "foreign policy" and "domestic economy." Voters identify the failed wars and collapsing economy with the Republican Party and its candidates. Polled support for McCain/Palin has plummeted among white voters as economic fears apparently overshadow racial loyalty to the white candidate. As a response, the Republicans have pulled out the stops, whipping campaign rallies into frenzied mobs in order to mobilize the hard right racist vote. An Obama victory would indicate a huge blow to racist ideas among white people. But on the major questions that have come to the fore, Obama has sided with big business, and his "exit plan" from Iraq would send troops straight to Afghanistan. Grassroots activists need to stay in the streets and organize for economic relief and for the end of US military adventures abroad no matter who is in the White House.

Government responses to the coming recession will ultimately favor either big business, or the working majority of the country, but not both.
Politicians and the media spun the $700 billion bailout by claiming that everyone should support a bank-robbery-in-reverse, for "the greater economic good." This kind of rhetoric is a taste of things to come and we have to be prepared to see through the spin. Politicians will try to win support for measures intended to "strengthen the economy." But a "strong economy" means different things to different people - mass layoffs usually result in jumping stock prices! Good for business, bad for people. More unemployment means more people competing for jobs. Business owners can find workers willing to work for less, and keep more of the profits those workers generate. In such a situation, badly needed reforms such as stronger unemployment benefits not only help keep bills paid and put food on the table, but strengthen the position of everyone who gets paid to work - because there is less downward pressure on wages.

How Can Activists and Organizers Respond?

Beyond the newspaper headlines of stock prices, the economic crisis has many faces for ordinary people: job loss, disappearing retirements and college savings, home eviction. We ultimately need nationwide organizing to address all of these issues within a framework that links them to each other and to the causes of the crisis. For now, the disarray of social movements and community organizations mean that the most important work will be building these struggles on a local level. In many places, grassroots organizations that fight for economic justice have ongoing campaigns for health care, housing rights, and other issues. In other areas, these types of struggles will just be getting off the ground. The list below presents some ideas for immediate organizing and broad demands in the face of economic hardship.

Hold public meetings and events to discuss the financial crisis.
The corporate media and government soundbites have provided an avalanche of information on the economy - from the point of view of the rich and powerful. We need an alternative: community forums and town hall meetings featuring the voices of grassroots activists, union members, socialists, and radical professors. Solidarity and other socialist organizations are working together to plan these kinds of events to keep people talking and to learn as much as we can about the crisis--its causes, its impact on our lives, and ways we can make a difference. We're working to develop materials and tips for developing this kind of discussion where you live. Please contact us at solidarity@igc.org or visit our website, www.solidarity-us.org, if you are interested in materials or help organizing an event.

Organize to stop foreclosures and evictions.
Some right-wing commentators have blamed this crisis on ordinary people "living beyond their means," and argued that laws designed to prevent racial discrimination in mortgage lending sent the economy spiraling out of control. In reality, its Wall Street bankers and brokers that have been living beyond our means to support their extravagant lifestyles and reckless financial decisions. Their greed has turned many people's attempts to achieve the American Dream into a sudden nightmare; losing our homes. In addition to the many homeowners that have been foreclosed on, some renters are now facing evictions because their landlords can no longer make mortgage payments. A community group in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood forced the Cook County Sheriff to halt all evictions of renters in foreclosed buildings. Organizations in other cities have also fought against foreclosures, evictions, and repossession. In our tenants' organizations, block associations and community groups we can raise the issue of evictions and foreclosures.

Demand the federal government re-write all mortgages to reflect their real value.
These kinds of local efforts must be linked to a national campaign to bail out working people and prevent a situation in which houses stand empty while mortgage holders and their tenants are forced out – destroying neighborhoods in the process. Those with crushing mortgage debt that exceeds the falling price of their homes need help. The importance of government facilitated renegotiation of mortgages is so obvious that long-time free-marketeers like Hillary Clinton and John McCain have both suggested it at different times. The Obama campaign seems to agree with the suggestion; nevertheless none of the three senators has introduced legislation to turn relief into reality. Nationwide pressure is needed to keep them to their word. At the same time, a national campaign should push for the elimination of fraudulent, high risk and discriminatory credit lending practices that prey on vulnerable communities and which helped spark the crisis.

Now is the time to extend unemployment benefits, including job training and strong affirmative action to help those most vulnerable to economic hardships.
We're headed into this crisis in a time where too many people are already unemployed and underemployed. Extending unemployment benefits will decrease insecurity in a precarious job market and help push employers to pay living wages to the workers they can't do without. Meanwhile, we need education and job training to prepare us for the jobs that are available right now. While really skyrocketing unemployment has become a possibility for everyone, African-American communities already face unemployment rates double or triple those of the population as a whole. This reality flies in the face of rhetoric about "post-racial America" that would likely be even more pronounced following an Obama presidential victory. Affirmative action is as necessary as ever to protect the right to employment and education for everyone.

Make free national health care for all a reality.
Good health should not have a price. Health care costs are a major factor driving American families into bankruptcy. Even for those who have some form of health insurance, a major health problem can quickly reveal how much care isn't covered, and force individuals and families into insolvency. For-profit health care makes money by denying patients care and services; meanwhile doctors and other health care workers are constrained by corporate red tape and paperwork. Single payer health care takes profit out of the system, driving down costs. Obama argues that health care is an area of "fundamental" difference between the parties, but his plan keeps us tied to a health care system driven by the need for profits for insurance companies, not by the need for health care for everyone. This irrational, inefficient system has to end, for our nation's financial and physical health.

Defend secure retirement for everyone.
The same corporate interests that set the stage for this crisis have been trying for years to pass legislation that would have put Social Security dollars into the stock market. If they'd been successful, the future, post-crisis, would be even more insecure as a huge portion of Social Security disappeared overnight. During the same time, corporate employers have managed, increasingly, to shift economic risk of saving for retirement onto their employees, replacing defined benefit plans with 401Ks and other defined contribution schemes. We should fight further retirement concessions in union contracts, as well as argue for legislation that would protect everyone from poverty and hunger when we become too old to work.

Help build organizations of immigrant and undocumented workers.
Pundits and politicians are already seeking to implicate and blame immigrants for the economic crisis. Recent federal raids rounded up hundreds of immigrant workers in Mississippi and South Carolina. As unemployment rises, US-born workers (especially whites) will be told to support these kinds of actions in the name of "protecting jobs." We must counter that there can be no closed borders for people in a world where businesses are allowed to move wherever they can find the cheapest labor. We can support and build organizations of immigrant workers – like workers' centers and unions– that can educate the public, fight for living wages for all workers and defend against raids and harassment. We must also organize against unfair trade agreements like NAFTA, which destroyed jobs and livelihoods on both sides of the border while lining CEO pockets.

Help build a labor movement that can fight back.
Organization among immigrant workers is crucial for transforming the labor movement we have--made up largely of stagnant and shrinking unions that have been in retreat for decades and "leaders" more focused on market share than grassroots power--into the growing , democratic social movement we need. Right now, corporate America is helping itself to our tax dollars, while at the same time fighting tooth and nail to cut wages, health care and pensions for the workers they employ. Recently some union members, working together, have managed to begin to shoot down concessionary contracts--Teamsters recently voted against a contract that applies to carhaulers nationwide, on the grounds that employers were asking for far too much. Those of us in union workplaces should take get involved in contract fights and new organizing, as our coworkers become increasingly fed up with the double dipping by CEO's and Wall Street.

Demand cuts in military spending, support soldiers organizing to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and dismantle US bases.
The government bail out of Wall Street is $700 billion; that's about the same amount that the Bush administration has spent on the needless civilian and GI deaths in Iraq. Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a moral and a financial imperative for soldiers and civilians alike. Organizations like Iraq Veterans Against the War and Gold Star Families for Peace have already been working to support resistance to the war by those able to stop it - the military ranks themselves. Its in all of our best interests to see them achieve their aims! Global opposition to the war in Iraq produced the largest coordinated demonstrations in world history. It’s more important now than ever to turn that planetary consensus into a reality.

We need a plan to rebuild a sustainable America.
Corporations and policy planners didn't need bombs to lay waste to our infrastructure; instead of sudden "shock and awe' like we saw in Iraq, our public buildings, roads, sewers, schools, hospitals, and public transportation have been devastated by neglect because of constant cuts to maintenance and development of these basic necessities over the last thirty years. Investment in basic infrastructure will not only improve the lives of all of us who depend on it day-to-day, but can create more living wage jobs, and begin the task of building the environmentally sustainable cities, farms and transportation systems we need for the future.

Create or strengthen local coalitions of established groups struggling around economic issues.
To do all this, organizers and activists have to work together. Cooperation and communication between neighborhood and tenant organizations, labor unions, students, social justice oriented religious groups, and issue-based advocacy groups (on HIV/AIDS, education, health care or the environment, for example) can provide not only the pragmatic benefit of "feet on the ground" for each struggle but the opportunity to share winning tactics and educate each other on how issues are related.

Videos of Green Party Candidate Rosa Clemente Talk at NYU

2008-10-15T21:31:16-05:00

On October 10th the Radical Film and Lecture Series organized a talk by Rosa Clemente, the vice presidential candidate for the Green Party, Hip Hop activist, independent journalist and community organizer. We held the discussion at New York University, where we do most of our work. That evening we talked about some of the big issues facing progressives today. Below are some clips from the event:

Community Organizing and Electoral Politics
Women involvement in activism and electoral politics
Rosa's political history, the Green Party, being asked to run for VP by Cynthia McKinney
The imperative of building the Green Party
Attracting young people to the Green Party
Where's radical labor?

Shared sacrifice with those who caused the economic crisis
How her family has been effected by the subprime mortgage crisis
Green Party strategy post Obamamania
Green Party fighting election theft
Defending non Greens on various issues
Who's really progressive?

Which media is not really progressive
HipHop activists co-opted
A new way of thinking, what we believe in
Katrina and the failure of the Democratic Party

Mass Civil Disobedience around the environment
Using the Patriot act to prosecute protestors as domestic terrorists

Deregulation of the Media during Clinton administration
Media Consolidation
Media is now propaganda for the government
Lazy Journalism
We must hold progressive media accountable
Media Justice must be included with Social Justice

They Globalized it, we Globalize Resistance
Young people being politically ready
Being brought up in a consumer culture.

Update on Troy Davis and a letter from Troy

2008-09-30T16:43:46-05:00

Troy Davis, the innocent man on Georgia's Death Row, is safe for now. A grassroots movement and international awareness has brought the case to the halls of the US Supreme Court. I wrote about his case previously here and here.

The Supreme Court delayed their decision on the case until October 1, escaping the execution warrant deadline this morning, 12pm September 30. Applying for a new execution warrant after Wednesday will take at least ten more days. Worst case, Troy is safe until at least October 11. At any point, the Georgia Board of Pardons could still intervene. Supporters need to continue spreading the word and sending petitions to the Board at aiusa.org/troy.

Letter from Troy Davis on the eve of his execution

To all

This is a message from Troy Anthony Davis

I want to thank all of you for your efforts and dedication to Human Rights and Human Kindness, in the past year I have experienced such emotion, joy, sadness and never ending faith. It is because of all of you that I am alive today, as I look at my sister Martina I am marveled by the love she has for me and of course I worry about her and her health, but as she tells me she is the eldest and she will not back down from this fight to save my life and prove to the world that I am innocent of this terrible crime.

As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can't even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail.

I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist.

So Thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated. There are so many more Troy Davis'. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.

I can't wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing, " I AM TROY DAVIS, and I AM FREE!

Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We will Win!

Some Talking Points on the Financial Crisis

2008-09-30T16:30:49-05:00

SOME TALKING POINTS ON THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

By Kate Griffiths and Isaac Silver

The era of the United States as a “the world’s only superpower” is ending.
The United States economy has not been this bad since the Great Depression. The rulers of the US hoped to retain global power militarily, through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the country’s raw economic superiority slipped. But these wars cannot be won: opposition among the occupied populations, and growing dissent within the military, prevent any victory on US terms even as the death toll climbs.

Beginning during the 1970s, manufacturing stalled, while government and investors focused on the financial sector: banks, real estate, and insurance.
Increasing competition, strong unions, and victories of the Black freedom movement had begun to limit the profits made by US corporations and threaten the power of the ruling class. In response, employers shifted good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas and to nonunionized areas of the USA. As wages stagnated, and workers' purchasing power declined, workers maintained a precarious hold on our livelihood through working longer hours, sending more household members to work, and buying extensively on credit. The globalization of US capitalism and growth of credit both fueled the financial sector, which provided fluid economic resources that could be quickly moved and re-invested – unlike a physical investment such as a factory or railroad.

In 2008, years of government policies favoring the rich provoked instability and sparked collapse of major Wall Street institutions.
As the cost of the basic necessities went up, and wages failed to cover them, workers' inability to buy, buy, buy became a major problem for investors. To counter this, the Federal Reserve (through which the government regulates availability of credit) set interest rates at 0% for several years in a row, encouraging large amounts of debt-financed spending at by poor and rich alike. Much of this easy credit was poured into new homes, which many mistakenly saw as ‘safe’ or ‘foolproof.’ The hyped-up demand for houses drove their price far beyond the actual value anyone would realistically pay for them. Holders of expensive and sometimes outright fraudulent sub-prime mortgages quickly found themselves unable to meet the payments, and defaulted on their loans. Communities targeted for deceptive, manipulative “sub-prime” mortgages – especially African Americans – were hit hardest with historic losses of wealth.

Deregulation and corporate greed made a bad situation worse.
The collapse in the housing market bankrupted the massive mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. The companies were charted by congress as privately owned banks with special access to credit through the United States Treasury; they were developed under FDR’s administration in part to address the housing crisis of the Great Depression and provide access to affordable housing for some Americans. The collapse and government take-over of these institutions shows us just how serious this current crisis has become. That Great Depression of the 1930s was produced by dynamics similar to those operating today, and ended partially through government regulation of investment. But these regulations were stripped away in the 1980s and 90s to buy big corporations more time during those decades’ economic scares. Freed from oversight, investment bankers created new ways of cheating the market and spread the risk of this “safe” mortgage debt throughout the global economy. As uncertainty spread, banks and firms operating with high levels of debt were suddenly unable to borrow the amounts they needed to stay afloat. At the most basic level, banks collapsed by lending money they didn't really have.

Wall Street's collapse reveals not only corruption and shortsightedness, but problems that are a basic part of the capitalist system.
Corrupt bankers and bad government policy didn’t create this crisis; they just handled it in the worst possible way. The capitalist system requires permanent growth in profits to stay afloat. But low-paid and unemployed workers cannot buy enough to keep companies profitable. Of course, from the other end, a highly paid, fully employed work force also saps profits. The president's recent speech to the nation addressing the crisis showed the bind that investors and the politicians that work for them are in; first he praised an economic policy that allowed Americans to “get easy credit” and purchase homes “sometimes for the first time,” and then lamented the “domino effect” this created throughout the economy. Of course Bush and congressional Democrats and Republicans alike have always favored the same thing, whether they call it “smaller government” or “privatization.” Each of these policies really represent the transfer of public assets and funds-- which belong to all of us--directly into the hands of corporations and investors in their constant (and just as constantly failing) attempt to increase their own wealth. Bush, long devoted to “free enterprise” and “smaller government” now calls for “dramatic government action" in the form of the largest direct transfer of tax-payer dollars into private hands in history. Because this crisis was ultimately caused by the market, no market-based “solution” - whether “Buy American” or “support small business” or “stronger regulation” can provide a long term fix to the real problem!

There is no money for schools, housing, health care, Katrina relief, or public works jobs – but when the rich are in trouble, $700 billion appears.
A spokeswoman for the US Treasury admitted that $700 billion was simply a made up figure, to signal that the government had the bankers’ backs – on behalf of taxpayers. This bank robbery in reverse shows once again that the resources for government assistance exist. But assistance for whom? We must be clear that, far from right-wing cries of “socialism,” this sudden intervention is really indented to temporarily stabilize the whole corporate profit system. A government controlled by corporations will never willingly bail out those who really need assistance. This $700 billion could provide completely free health care for all, paid parental leave for overworked parents, free quality childcare and education, clean and safe city parks and communities of subsidized housing, job training and infrastructure for rural areas screwed by vanishing mines, factories and farms, and countless other "utopian" needs that are ignored as congress feeds the fire on Wall Street with our money.

We need strong social movements that fight for a relief and a clear vision of ending capitalism altogether.
As we protest the bailout, demands to address the immediate needs of women, workers, communities of color, young people and students, LGBTQ people, and the environment must be put on the table. Individuals, households and communities already marginalized by the system will face even greater downward pressures. Identifying the real links between these types of oppression and exploitation in order to rebuild a grassroots “movement of movements” is urgent. As we build these movements, we have to be ready to point out the incompatibility of capitalism and human needs. Activists in different social justice movements, community organizations, or revolutionary groups who already share a post-capitalist vision must work together to get these views their broadest possible hearing.

Capitalism will not collapse - it has to be overthrown.
From previous crises, like the Great Depression, we see that capitalism constantly strangles itself - but it also has an amazing flexibility for recovery (especially by engineering a government rescue plan!) The system will not end itself; on the contrary, like weeds growing after a forest fire, destructive crises and war just open up space for new capitalist growth and bigger upward transfers of wealth. But for the sake of humanity and the planet, society cannot continue to be based on profit. The bursting of the “miracle” financial system shows the continued relevance of real, productive work in society. Imagining a world without pinstripe suited men shifting around large numbers on a computer screen is easy - but who can imagine a world without people working to produce food, clothes, shelter and other necessities; to teach and provide health care; to transport things from one place to another? Revolutionary socialists, including those in Solidarity, see the possibility of a different kind of world because of this basic contradiction. The majority of people in society have no stake in continuing the status quo - and also, if united, have the power to overthrow the small minority that profits off our backs.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ME?

Fuel and food prices will continue to rise. Protests against rising food prices have already broken out in countries around the world, as millions are pushed further into poverty and hunger.
Previously low energy prices and favorable exchange rates for the dollar made it cheap to import food into the US. Now, rising fuel costs seem likely to continue as American global power declines; not only will food prices increase even more, our car culture and suburban geography, with spread-out single family homes and miles of highway is becoming too expensive to maintain. Gas prices are making all that driving--and even heating our homes--increasingly unaffordable.

What about the housing market for renters?
Renters also face uncertainty as some rental properties are foreclosed on. Meanwhile, rent in the cities most impacted by soaring housing prices also increased dramatically over the last decade, and so far, have failed to return to pre-bubble rates.

If the credit system freezes up, businesses will have difficulty expanding, causing unemployment and uncertainty to climb.
At the same time regular people will also have decreased access to credit, forcing us to live off of wages that are quickly shrinking relative to the cost of the things we need to get by.

This economic turmoil will likely decrease the already sharply declining value of the dollar.
This is due to both the government bailout, which introduces much more dollars into the economy, decreasing their value, as well as the falling confidence in the economic strength of the United States globally. The United States is has trillions of dollars of debt to Japan, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. Any government bailout will be financed by even more credit from other governments.

Labor Goes to Wall Street

2008-09-30T14:33:13-05:00

It has been a turbulent week on Wall Street, and I’m not just talking about stock prices. Two demonstrations last Thursday, at noon and again at 4PM, shook up the streets directly outside the Stock Exchange as several thousand demonstrators protested against the proposed Bush bailout of big finance. First, at noon, approximately 1500 union members and staffers rallied at the intersection of Broad Street and Exchange Place, literally a stones’ throw away from the most sacred temple of American capitalism. The demonstration was called for in a hurry just a day or two before by the NYC Central Labor Council. While they might have done more and sooner – I agree with Jonathan Tasini’s comment on the Working Life blog last Tuesday that the unions should work to “put 100,000 people in the streets in each of 25 major cities” – it was nevertheless good to see the labor bureaucrats finally make a move and stand up for their members. (Also keep in mind, however, that they had little choice – a wide range of social movement and civil society organizations had previously called for demonstrations later in the day and, presumably, the collective union leadership was both afraid of ceding ground to these more radical elements and also feeling a great deal of pressure to take action from the rank-and-file within their own organizations).

The rally itself was encouraging. Speakers included Ed Ott and Gary Labarbera, both of the New York City Central Labor Council; Randi Weingarten, President of the UFT and AFT; Jim Conigliaro, Directing Business Representative of District 15 of the IAM; and John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO, among others. A wide range of unions was represented in the crowd – members from the Teamsters, Teachers, Transit Workers, UAW, RWDSU, PSC, Laborers, AFSCME, SEIU, and various construction trades were all there. Most placards carried generic slogans along the lines of “No Blank Checks for Wall Street,” “Bail Out Main Street, Not Wall Street,” and “Our Hard-Earned Pensions Are Not Up For Grabs”; some supported Obama or, conversely, attacked McCain. But there were also quite a few signs, mostly handwritten and, it seemed to me, carried by members of the various construction trades, which advanced substantially different – and more aggressive – political slogans. These included, prominently, placards reading “Impeach! No More $$$ for Lies!,” “CEOs Bail Out Yourselves,” and “CEOs Must Pay. Not Employees, Not America.” One construction worker’s sign, however, stands out in my mind above all others. Although problematic, it spoke to the depths of the class anger awakened and sharpened by discussion of a Wall Street bailout: “Why Does America Have to Bail Out These Greedy Money Hungry Scum?,” it read.

The speeches offered by Weingarten, Sweeney, and others were, not surprisingly, much closer in content to the tepid slogans advanced by the majority of the crowd rather than the more militant message put forward by the members of the construction trades. While delivered with a great deal of firey rhetoric, they typically went no farther than to call for an economic stimulus plan to bailout “Main Street” and exhorted the assembled union members to support Barack Obama in the upcoming elections. Weingarten, for example, raised “responsibility” and “accountability,” rather than social and economic justice, as catchphrases in her speech: “We know that the economic situation has to be solved,” she said, “But we want a responsible rescue, not an opportunistic bailout... and that means, just like every single boss says to me, that there should be accountability for the teachers, then there should be accountability for Wall Street.”

Sweeney was marginally more aggressive. He declared that “our country is facing the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression” and noted that “working people have been living this crisis with lost jobs, stagnant wages, crumbling schools and roads and dwindling hopes for our children and eroding health care and disappearing pensions.” Moving onto the offensive, he continued: “Now the Bush administration wants us to pay the freight for a Wall Street bailout that does not even begin to address the roots of our crisis... We want our tax dollars used to provide a hand up for the millions of working people who live on Main Street and not a hand out to the privileged band of overpaid executives on Wall Street.” His swipe at the bankers is of course appreciated; his unbridled enthusiasm for Obama, however, is not.

More militant speakers included Ott, Conigliaro, and Bertha Lewis of ACORN. Conigliaro pointed to the experience of the IAM in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when the government bailed out several airlines which then proceeded to demand various concessions from workers, as a warning for the future if the current financial bailout is approved and a veiled (perhaps accidental?) reminder that the interests of workers and bosses are diametrically opposed. He added: “I want to know when these C.E.O.’s and managers’ salaries are going to be cut... Tell Congress and the Senate that if they don’t negotiate a good deal for us, we should kick them out.” Bertha Lewis of ACORN, however, impressed me most of those speakers which I heard with her admonishment that “if they don’t give us the kind of deal that we deserve and if they don’t give us a bailout for Main Street and not just Wall Street, they’re going to be shocked when we shut this country down.” Given the politics of ACORN, it is apparent that her words are an empty rhetorical flourish rather than a substantive threat of a mass strike. But it was nonetheless heartening to hear a mainstream community and labor leader raise the notion of “shutting this country down” – language is powerful and if the labor bureaucrats and those around them are not careful when bandying about such words they may very well encourage and ultimately unleash social forces which they will be unable to contain and control.

Overall, then, the event was a success and a step in the right direction. It is important, however, to keep in mind the difference between form and substance in the speeches delivered and the slogans advanced. As a comrade from Freedom Road noted, the aggressive populist rhetoric and style – including a great deal of expletives by Conigliaro in particular – were consciously crafted to appeal to and appease angry union members without advancing any measures other than business as usual. Thus even the most fiery orators ended their remarks with appeals on behalf of Obama.

At the same time, however, the speakers did give voice to the class anger of many in the crowd, and this opening is of the greatest importance. In contrast to the second rally later in the day, which brought out approximately 1500 of the usual cast of characters from the left (including the remnants of the Yippies, with their inane slogan, “Dump Today, Jump Tomorrow”) and which suffered from various strategic and tactical problems which I will not discuss here, the AFL-CIO’s demonstration brought together a sizable number of angry workers from various unions in a protest which although its ostensible target was the Bush bailout proposal in fact served as an indictment of the economic crimes perpetrated by the financial elite in general.

In other words, the rally – as well as yesterday’s demonstration on Wall Street sponsored by 1199/SEIU and TWU Local 100 and featuring speakers including Jesse Jackson, Roger Toussaint, Ott, and Conigliaro – was, in my opinion, qualitatively different from both other union rallies and most mobilizations of the left (i.e. antiwar rallies, etc.) at which I have been present: it reached a much broader audience than most left rallies and, despite the calls for support of Obama, issued much broader demands and more aggressive slogans than most major labor rallies. The financial crisis with which we are faced and the proposed solutions to it touch all sectors of American society. The question now is how to channel the growing anger among union members and others in productive directions and demonstrate to them that neither Obama nor McCain nor, in many cases, the leaders of their own unions stand for them in this crisis. The labor leaders must continue to be pushed to the left, with union activists insisting on massive mobilizations against the bailout to be held after work hours (rather than during the work day) and jointly with social movement organizations. As for the Democrats, their support for the bailout demonstrates without a doubt to which sectors in society they are truly beholden – they have offered the left an excellent opportunity to move onto the offensive and it would be a great mistake to miss it.

Capitalist Absurdity of the Week #2 - Well, of course, the meltdown, "regulation" etc.

2008-09-29T11:21:28-05:00

In various ways, millions of people are registering their rejection of the proposed $700-billion-plus bailout plan to temporarily save capitalism. Whatever the ostensible arguments put forward from the hallowed halls of Capitol Hill, the obvious 'hump' Congress cannot climb over is that they're collectively terrified of returning to their districts and states to campaign for re-election after have approved such an clear swindle of the majority of us.

With almost every hour, the criminal venality of Washington and Wall Street is exposed in new aspects. Lessons are being learned by many of the toilers, and the false shroud of legitimacy that cloaks this system's operations is bit by bit falling away. The bourgeois press devotes page after page to this mess each day, dissecting for us the failures of capitalism and offering insight into the true character of our government.

Here's one example. 'S.E.C. Concedes Oversight Flaws Fueled Collapse' (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/business/27sec.html?em)

The article contains the following gem, a quote from SEC Chairman Cristopher Cox, which deserves to be quoted at length - "The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work. [It] was flawed from the beginning, because investment banks could opt in or out of supervision voluntarily. The fact that investment bank holding companies could withdraw from this voluntary supervision at their discretion diminished the perceived mandate" of the program, and "weakened its effectiveness," he added.

REALLY?! Oh, this is a good one folks.

Imagine an economic policy which says that there is a only a "perceived mandate" for me to pay off my credit card debt, but in which I have to "voluntarily" submit myself to such "mandate", or actively agree to pay my bills.

We learn a little about Chris Cox and the world he inhabits here. Either
1) he really believes in the words that are coming out of his mouth; in which case, he's pathetically stupid and it's makes you retch that supposedly 'regulatory' agencies are headed by dunces like this. Or
2) he knows he's spinning a bunch of bull, and is displaying the ugliness and lies that rule in Washington-Wall Street for all to see.

Either way, we've got to thank him for these words.

I invite all of you out there to share things you've read or seen that make you say "oh wow, I can't believe what they just asked me to take that seriously" in these carnival days.

Not that the new "regulations" and "oversight" being proposed for the bailout means we will have any democratic control over the finance and investment regimes currently making a hash of our economy. For the real meaning of "oversight", it's enough to watch C-Span or Congressional hearings to get a taste of festival atmosphere of glad-handing, corruption, smirkness and self-congratulation that counts for "democracy" for the ruling class.

I don't want a "bailout", but a "hollowing-out" program that would wither away Wall Street - a democratically controlled fund based on taxing the rich out of existence that would re-train all those employed in the speculative and paper-trading finance "industries" to work as construction workers to rebuild the Gulf Coast communities and as agricultural workers to work on organic farms (which would replace the corporate plantation agriculture we have today).

Thinking about the antiwar movement

2008-09-25T13:52:18-05:00

I was on a panel discussion about the antiwar movement at Wayne State University. Panelists were discussion a special Spring/Summer 2008 issue of WIN, the War Resister's League's magazine. It features a number of questions posed to antiwar organizers:

* What is lacking in the peace and antiwar movement?
* What constraints do we face in organizing?
* What are the biggest openings and opportunities for organizing today?
* How do we build a more multiracial and cross-class antiwar movement?
* What roles can veterans, soldiers and military families play in ending war?
* What is the relevance of nonviolence today?
* How do we link peace and justice issues and build alliances?
* What does base-building look like in antiwar organizing?
* Where to from here?

Each panelist addressed a couple of questions and then there was a dialogue with attendees. These were the remarks I prepared:

What roles can veterans, soldiers and military families play in ending war?

Clearly if the military refuses to fight, the war can't continue. If the military can't meet their volunteer or re-enlistment quotas, the military is in big trouble!

A bit of history: After World War II Washington didn't demobilize the army in the Pacific. There was a possibility of revolutions in the area, particularly in China. But GIs wanted to go home! A movement broke out on army bases in the Philippines. Emil Masey, who had been a UAW leader (Briggs Local 212) before he was drafted, was one of the "Bring Us Home" organizers. And the army was forced to do so.

Washington demobilized the army. The draft wasn't ended, but it was reorganized by a new act in 1947. And Washington's grip on Southeast Asia was loosened for a period.

During the Vietnam War, antiwar coalitions in the San Francisco area leafleted both nearby army bases (once even from a helicopter!) and the S.F. airport, where GIs were going to Vietnam, and coming home.

The military taught recruits that the Vietnamese were "communists" and encouraged them to think about "the enemy" in dehumanizing ways so that they would be revved up enough to kill. Getting soldiers to kill is an important part of what military training is all about.

The antiwar movement said that GIs have the right to information about the war. Since the military only provided one side, we demanded the right of GIs to hear the antiwar position and make up their own minds. Of course this was exactly what the military feared!

Around 1967 when I was leafleting at the airport I started hearing GIs talk about how they'd take votes in their unit about whether to go out on patrol. I heard about "fragging" officers (meaning something bad would happen to officers who insisted they fight). At first I thought they were just telling me what I might want to hear, but no, as I heard more stories I realized the army was beginning to crack.

I was office manager for the GI Civilian March for Peace in October 1968. This was a march led by active-duty Marines, Air Force and Navy personnel. After changing into civilian clothes a number of Marines from their base on Treasure Island would come by the office 2-3 times as week and go out leafleting. I thought Marines were the gung-ho branch of the military and asked how they'd decided to become antiwar activists. They told me, "It's our job to unload the bodies coming back."

Some of the GIs were given orders to report to another base even before the march happened, and most were dispersed in the weeks after the march of 30,000, which was led by active-duty GIs. Lt. Sue Schnall, a navy nurse, was court marshaled for wearing her uniform at the march.

Most of the activists moved on to other sites, where I'm sure they infected others with their antiwar views. The movie "Sir, No Sir" portrays a sense of that moment.

The military has studied the Vietnam War ever since. Washington made the decision to go to a volunteer army, figuring they could maintain a volunteer army by implementing three changes: increase the pay, open the military up to women and privatize many of the jobs.

They have done so, and now we have a poverty draft of a very particular sort. Look at who has died from Michigan and where they are from--overwhelmingly they are not from the urban areas, but the small towns and suburban areas where there used to be jobs for young men and women after high school; those manufacturing jobs are far fewer today.

Another interesting fact about this war is that the African-American community is opposed in large numbers. For the first time, and even given the lack of job opportunities, the percentage of African-American participation in the military continues to fall. When I go into Detroit high schools to talk about why joining the military isn't a good career option, many Black students don't even want to look at the military forms to critique them. They see even holding the forms as something that might "infect" them!

However it is important to take note of the two communities which the military has targeted for recruitment: Mexican Americans, under the assumption that they might be willing to sign up for the draft in order to obtain citizenship, and Arab Americans who speak Arabic. The military desperately needs their language skills, and will pay significant bonuses to Arab speakers. We should go out of our way to get the counter military recruitment message into these communities, and translated into Spanish and Arabic.

Clearly there are many months the military is not able to meet their recruitment and retention targets. It is being chewed up under the pressures of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is particularly true because of 16-month stays that were imposed, which increased the stress and violence GIs faced--and because of Bush's war on terror, some will respond to these pressures by inflicting or tolerating torture. All of these factors head to PTSD cases at a much higher rate than ever before.

During the Vietnam War I don't remember seeing signs about military families being against the war; it was mostly soldiers who became antiwar, and often their families supported them. I remember how my aunt, a nun, became antiwar through her correspondence with GIs she had once taught.

But during this war, from the beginning, there have been military families speaking out. One factor is the existence of the internet so that families are in much closer contact with their soldier. A second factor is that in the volunteer army, many more soldiers are married and have families.

Another difference between the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that active-duty GIs are a part of an antiwar organization, Iraqi Veterans Against the War. IVAW is setting up new chapters almost every week, and some are on bases.

What prevents the emergence of a stronger, more coordinated and strategic antiwar movement?

For people who earn a living-and for students, many of whom both study and earn a living-life is very precarious. One's job, one's benefits, one's leisure time is pretty much up in the air. When I was a student, I was able to go to a college that was virtually tuition free; when I graduated I didn't have any debt.

Today people have a host of problems they have to deal with, and the war is just one more bad thing that exists in our lives. And it's not often problem #1, or even problem #6. Most people feel it's impossible to handle most of the problems on their plate. Millions tried to stop the war in Iraq before it began, but that proved impossible. A couple of years later they went to the polls and elected a Democratic Congress, in order to stop the war. The Democrats say they are against the war, but they continue funding it.

Another factor at work here is that while most Americans are against the Iraq war (the bad war, as it were), they are for the war in Afghanistan (the "good" war) because it is supposedly a war against the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center. But both wars are wars against a civilian population, and only end stiffening the opposition of those people to the presence of foreign troops.

If we step back, we realize one big problem is that while the American people are often against particular wars that Washington starts, they somehow still feel U.S. foreign policy, and U.S. "aid" to countries, is benign. They somehow still accept the notion that Washington has the right to intervene in other countries, that the so-called enemies of Washington are the enemies of the U.S. population. They don't see that it's the corporations and the military-industrial complex that set the country's policy, and that's definitely not in our interests.

There's also identification with the fact that the United States is a military superpower. It's as if this county has the right to such enormous power and will of course wield that power justly. But the reality is that the United States doesn't have the right to this power and doesn't have the right to enjoy the world's resources at the expense of other people's needs.

Because we live in the empire doesn't mean we enjoy the privileges of the empire, except for the few. We pay, just as those in the Third World pay, but in different ways. As long as the majority of the U.S. budget goes for war and military hardware, percentage wise there is very little for schools, job creation, rebuilding our infrastructure, having quality health care and education available for all, or mass transit. I submit to you that those of us who live in the heartland of imperialism are diminished by the burdens of managing that empire.

We can only transform this empire in community with others, attempting to express our solidarity with those like ourselves who are struggling against militarism and war. That's why organization is so essential and linking our struggles is so vital.

When I first became involved in opposing the Vietnam War, I thought all I could do was be a "witness" to history, that someday historians would write that a handful of Americans opposed the war. What I discovered was that social movements begin as a minority, but have the potential to become the majority. My role didn't have to be a mere witness, but an organizer to help make change. We are free to become actors in our own story, in our own history.