People Before Profit blog

Cinco de Mayo, USA-style

Tue, 05 May 2015 16:00:00 +0000

Millions of Mexican Americans, mexicanos, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, white Americans — Americans of all kinds — will take part in Cinco de Mayo events across the United States.

The holiday is celebrated more in the Southwest, but increasingly in other parts of the country as well.

It is as American as tamale pie, almost as much as May Day, the international workers’ day, but more popular with the media and government.

The celebration of Cinco de Mayo in the U.S. precedes that of May Day. The victory of the meztizo/indio Mexican troops over the French at Puebla in 1862 predates the attack on the workers in Chicago’s Haymarket Square by well over a decade. One of my great-grandfathers was helping organize Cinco de Mayo events in Tucson by the early 1880s.

Cinco de Mayo is now recognized as a day for Mexican Americans, a sort of St. Patrick’s Day for Mexicans. Indeed, David Sanchez, who during the days of the Chicano movement was head of the Brown Berets, is urging Mexican Americans to wear brown this May 5 like green is worn on St. Patrick’s Day.

May 5 in the U.S. may be more popular among Mexican Americans (though maybe not mexicano immigrants) than Sept. 16, celebrating Mexican independence from Spain. Historically, Sept. 15-16, 1810, was when Mexico and other Latin American lands declared their independence from Spain. All this is now commemorated as part of Hispanic month.

Cinco de Mayo has significance for Mexican Americans because its deeper historic meaning resonates with their experience of racial and national oppression here in the United States. The French-led invasion of Mexico came in large part because the victory of the democratic reform movement — led by Benito Juarez against the authoritarian government based on a social hierarchical racist caste-like system and strong clericalism — was threatening France’s investments in Mexico. The defeat of the French at Puebla helped rally the Mexican people to struggle against foreign intervention and for democratic rights and equality. A full-blooded indigenous Zapotec, Juarez, led this reform movement.

The democratic reformist Juarez is more popular with Mexicans and Mexican Americans than the Spanish-born cleric Father Hidalgo who gave the call to start the Mexican revolution against Spain. The brown-skinned Virgen de Guadalupe, in whose name Hidalgo declared independence, is more popular than both Juarez and Hidalgo and is also an icon of racial equality.

The contributions to our democratic heritage from immigrants began with the English, of course. The German, French and Irish strengthened the freedom of religions traditions.

The San Patricios were Irish American immigrants who deserted the U.S. forces invading Mexico during the Mexican War and joined the resistance. To Mexicans, they are heroes. Immigrants were among the martyrs of Haymarket. Sacco and Vanzetti and many other 20th century martyrs were immigrants. Cinco de Mayo celebrates in some ways the mexicano immigrant contribution to our democratic traditions in the U.S., if we go beyond the commercialized version of it.

One way to acknowledge this is to combine the commemorations of Cinco de Mayo with May Day. In some ways, the support for Cinco de Mayo by the powers that be developed here as an attempt to detract from May Day. Celebrating the international workers’ day was one of the traditions Mexican immigrants brought here from their homeland. That’s all the more reason to celebrate democracy on both days.

This commentary was originally published in April 2005.

Photo: Cinco de Mayo celebration in Denver, Colo. (Obie Fernandez/CC)

Ecuadorians oust president with mass protests

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 05:59:00 +0000

News Analysis

Ecuador, an impoverished country of 13 million people, is emerging as a major headache for the Bush administration. The people of this oil-rich nation just ousted their third president within seven years and show little sign of accepting the status quo.

In response to a massive outpouring of popular protest, President Lucio Gutierrez fled the presidential palace in a helicopter on April 20. He made a dash to the Brazilian Embassy, where he received political asylum.

Ecuador, located on the northwest coast of South America, is an important supplier of oil to the U.S. market. When we think of oil, we usually think of the Middle East. But many of the strategic oil reserves on which the U.S. economy relies are much closer to home in Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador.

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is upholding his nation’s sovereignty and demanding a fair price for its oil, much to Bush’s chagrin. Colombia is gripped in a civil war, with some of the most oil-rich areas smack in the middle of the combat zone. Mexico is in turmoil, and could elect a left-wing government next year. And now comes the upheaval in Ecuador.

It is not clear if Gutierrez’s successor, former Vice President Alfredo Palacio, will be any more successful in meeting popular expectations. But if Palacio follows through with his promises — including to hold a referendum on the Free Trade Area of the Americas pact and to possibly pull out of the U.S.-backed “Plan Colombia” — it seems likely that one more resource-rich Latin American country will be opposing the pro-corporate policies of the U.S. government.

The overthrow of Gutierrez was not surprising. He had betrayed his popular base.

Gutierrez came to power as the result of a movement — originally based in Ecuador’s large indigenous Indian community, but also involving labor, civic organizations and junior-grade military officers — that repudiated neoliberal policies of “free trade,” privatization and austerity. After participating in an interim regime, Gutierrez was elected president in 2002. Almost instantly he moved sharply to the right and lined up with big business interests. Poverty engulfs at least 40 percent of Ecuador’s population.

In December of last year, Gutierrez’s legislative allies removed the Supreme Court and replaced them with judges who ruled that former president Abdala Bucaram, widely perceived as corrupt, be allowed to return from exile and not face prosecution for his crimes. This fanned popular discontent. Subsequent moves by Gutierrez to again tamper with the Supreme Court’s makeup caused the pot to boil over.

In addition to the indigenous Indian and working-class opposition, many “middle class” people and students now poured into the streets. The demand was not only that Gutierrez, but also the members of Congress, “go.” (“Que se vayan todos! Out with all of them!”)

The throngs also demanded the evacuation of a U.S. military base from Ecuador and the restoration of the nation’s currency (the economy runs on the U.S. dollar now), two demands that have yet to be addressed by Palacio.

A good omen for Ecuador’s national sovereignty is the fact that when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for new elections in Ecuador, Palacio’s government told her to back off. There is also talk in the new cabinet of renegotiating Ecuador’s foreign debt and eliminating a law that ties up oil royalties in debt payments.

However, the situation remains very unstable. The forces that pushed Gutierrez out are disparate and not all equally progressive.

Apparently a good portion of the army brass resented having to take orders from Gutierrez, a mestizo and a mere colonel. On the left, the main indigenous Indian group that mobilized to oust Gutierrez’s two immediate predecessors, the Pachakutik Movement for Multinational Unity, has held back from joining the new government because the latter has not yet agreed to some of their demands.

Many Ecuadorians want Gutierrez to be tried for ordering his security forces to fire on the demonstrators, killing two. They are disappointed that Brazil or any other country might give him asylum.

One thing is clear. Unless Palacio moves quickly to meet popular demands and to challenge the pro-U.S. status quo, he, too, will find his days in office numbered.

Bushs hypocrisy on Cuba becomes starker

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 05:56:00 +0000

News Analysis

On April 21 in Geneva, Switzerland, the UN Human Rights Commission (HRC) rejected a watered-down Cuban resolution asking the United States to let an HRC team check on the widely reported mistreatment of U.S. prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

The vote was 22 votes against the resolution, 8 in favor, with 23 abstentions. European Union nations voted as a bloc against the resolution. Ironically, the European Parliament had only recently demanded a similar investigation. The Dutch ambassador, speaking for the EU, suggested such a resolution was unnecessary because the UN is seeking Washington’s permission to send investigators to Guantanamo. That request has gone unanswered for 16 months.

The week before, with EU support, the HRC narrowly passed a U.S.-sponsored resolution calling for UN monitoring of alleged Cuban human rights abuses. That’s how Washington characterizes Cuba’s jailing in April 2003 of paid foreign agents engaged in anti-government activities. According to Felipe Perez Roque, Cuba’s foreign minister, the U.S. government pushes such resolutions each year to secure diplomatic cover for its economic blockade of the island.

The caving-in by the EU to Washington’s strong-arm lobbying on these resolutions prompted Perez Roque to characterize the Europeans as “capitulating, servile and hypocritical.”

Meanwhile, this month’s arrival of Luis Posada Carriles in Miami has brought into focus the two-faced nature of the U.S. war on terrorism.

Posada is an admitted terrorist. He reportedly bombed a Cubana airliner in 1976 killing 73 people and engineered Havana hotel bombings in 1997, killing an Italian tourist. In 2000, he and three others were caught in Panama before they could kill a visiting Fidel Castro.

The 77-year-old terrorist now is safe in Miami. Posada’s lawyer filed an application April 12 for asylum in the U.S. on the grounds of his past CIA services. On April 11, Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.) asked the House International Relations Committee to investigate Posada’s entry into the country as “a dangerous failure to secure our borders. … The fundamental credibility of the war on terrorism hangs in the balance.”

Fidel Castro has demanded that Posada be tried by an international court or be extradited, as requested, to Venezuela, where he is a citizen. In 1985, Posada escaped from jail there during the appeals process for his trial on terrorism charges. On April 20 the National Lawyers Guild also called for Posada’s immediate extradition.

Commenting on Posada’s arrival, Eugene Robinson wrote in the Washington Post, “An accused mass-murdering terrorist has sneaked into the United States illegally and is skulking around. … You’d expect the Bush administration to ramp up to Threat Level Red. … But, no, it turns out that this is the drill only when the suspect’s name is Mohammed. When his name is Luis Posada Carriles, and he’s Cuban, and his alleged terrorist career was aimed at toppling or killing Fidel Castro, the procedure is different.”

Ivy League graduate teachers strike

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 05:52:00 +0000

News Analysis

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Refusing to be silenced by the Bush administration’s National Labor Relations Board, graduate student teachers at Yale and Columbia went on strike last week in the first ever Ivy League coordinated job action.

The extraordinary week of actions in opposition to last July’s ruling — that graduate teachers are not workers and, therefore, do no qualify for unionization — has received national and international support.

“If they don’t teach,” John Wilhelm, president of the Hospitality Division of UNITE HERE, said at a rally on the New Haven Green April 19, “the educational process grinds to a halt.”

Wilhelm emphasized the contribution that graduate teachers can make to the labor movement.

“The labor movement needs your energy, your ability to teach about unions in this country, your ability to reach out across the globe and become a global labor movement. You need us and we need you,” he said.

Solidarity took on new meaning as organized workers at Yale expressed their appreciation to the Graduate Employee Student Organization (GESO) for support during their own strike in 2003. Members of UNITE HERE Locals 34 and 35 boarded buses during their lunch breaks to attend daily strike rallies, along with retirees, workers seeking recognition at Yale New Haven Hospital and community residents demanding a benefits agreement from the hospital as it seeks to expand.

Perhaps the highest level of solidarity came from the graduate teacher organizations of 14 countries that held support actions April 22 and sent letters protesting the refusal of union rights for their U.S. counterparts.

“We condemn this clear violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which declares that the right to form a Union is a basic human right,” a Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations statement said.

“You are changing the common sense of the university,” said American Studies professor Michael Denning, praising the strikers’ courage.

The strike was successful in bringing the cause of graduate teachers to the national foreground. Unions at campuses across the country, as well as AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and the presidents of UNITE HERE, the United Auto Workers and American Federation of Teachers, along with elected officials, have signed a “declaration of principles” related to collective bargaining at universities.

“We are particularly alarmed that access to affordable, quality higher education has diminished and that the right of workers in higher education to unionize and bargain collectively for a living wage has eroded,” the declaration stated.

At a joint rally held at Columbia University on April 20, Sweeney praised strikers for “drawing a line against higher education greed” and said that “jobs in higher education should be real, full-time jobs that workers need to live.”

Linking the strikes to the attacks on workers rights by the Bush administration, Jesse Jackson received cheers at Yale April 21.

“If you spend $5 billion a month in Iraq for killing and then preserve the tax cut permanently for the top 10 percent, then there is no money to pay workers,” Jackson said. “I say let’s reinvest in America, let’s pay workers, let’s end poverty. That’s our fight.”

Black youth resisting military recruitment

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 05:48:00 +0000

News Analysis

According to a U.S. Army study, unprecedented numbers of African American youth are refusing to join the Army and they are doing so for a very clear reason — opposition to the Iraq war.

But you may not see this story on the front page of your local paper. The Pentagon has moved to squelch it. The report had been posted on the Defense Contracting Command web site but has since been removed after news stories came out about it.

The study, based on interviews with more than 3,000 youth 16-24, found that Army recruitment of Blacks has fallen 41 percent since 2000 and has been steadily decreasing.

In 2000, for example, 23.5 percent of Army recruits were African American. By February of this year, that figure dropped to 13.9 percent.

The Defense Department has attributed the sharp decline to the unpopularity of the war in Iraq among African Americans and their general philosophical differences with Bush administration policies.

African Americans “have strong concerns relating to mistrust of the military and recruiters,” bemoaned Lt. Col. John Keeter of the U.S. Army Accessions Command in a December meeting of recruiting researchers, according to the Associated Press.

African American and Hispanic youth are more concerned than whites about ending up in combat “particularly for a cause they don’t support,” he said. For many years African Americans, who are only 12 percent of the nation’s population, comprised a disproportionate share of Army recruits — upwards of 25 percent — more than twice the general population.

Army research found that one of the biggest obstacles to African American youth recruitment is the influence of moral figures such as parents, guidance counselors, members of the clergy, coaches and teachers. The study found that African American and Hispanic parents have less trust in the military than whites.

The AP reported that last September, while the rest of the nation was almost evenly split on the war, 72 percent of Blacks disapproved of the war, according to a Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies survey. And a Gallup Poll one year after the invasion of Iraq reported that while 78 percent of whites supported the war, only 29 percent of Blacks did.

Moreover, Black youth did not believe that important people in their lives would support their decision to join the military. This has broad implications because, according to the military’s own research, Blacks’ attitudes toward the military are significantly influenced by their support systems.

“Whites were less influenced by extended family, teachers and guidance counselors than blacks and-or Hispanics,” the survey found.

Women also generally oppose the war for similar reasons as African American youth and are also joining in fewer numbers. Eighty percent of Blacks and 71 percent of women reported that the war made them less likely to join the military, the study said.

For the first time in five years, the Army missed its recruiting target of 7,050 by 26 percent. ROTC and the National Guard are having similar troubles. The Marine Corps fell slightly short of its recruiting goal in January, the first month that had happened in nearly a decade.

So concerned is the Army that they are conducting intense research and honing advertising strategies to affect the trend. The Army, which employs several major marketing agencies to promote recruitment efforts, has been stepping up activities in Black communities where unemployment is disproportionately high.

The Army claims that another reason for recruitment drop-off among Black youth is a stronger economy and, thus, more jobs. But official Black unemployment was 10.6 percent in the first quarter of 2005 — double the overall 5.3 percent for whites — and a quarter of Black households remain below the federal poverty line, so it is hard to see how this argument applies.

Generous enlistment bonuses to prospective recruits and an increase in the number of recruiters have failed to turn the tide. Some experts say the lagging recruitment raises the specter of the Pentagon turning to the reinstatement of the draft.

The middle class and the working class

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 02:49:00 +0000

People Before Profits

What is the middle class and why is it periodically given a status of high exaltation by the ruling class?

To answer the second part of the question first: the ruling class seeks to fool the working class into believing that it has common interests with the ruling class. This is especially aimed at higher-paid workers. Thus, this so-called “middle class” is called upon to act against its own best interests.

The use of the phony concept of including millions of workers in the “middle class” is a major ingredient and destroyer of collective thought, action and struggle. It is the basic ideology underlying George W. Bush’s “ownership society” and privatization of Social Security.

But it was Harry Truman, a Democrat, who promulgated the “rugged individualism” society. It was Truman who helped split the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Truman’s policies led to the weakening of the cohesiveness of the New Deal coalition forces. He vented his spleen most fiercely against the left, progressives and Communists.

It was Marxist political economists who defined classes in society as stemming from their relationship to the means of production. The capitalist class owns the means of production in all of its varied forms. Workers who work in the factories, mines, mills and other jobs necessary to the production process are the working class. They have no common class interests with the capitalist class.

There is no class between the working class and capitalist class. The “middle class” is really a stratum. The middle strata are self-employed. They create no surplus value. The workers are the only ones who create the wealth. In the struggle for ideas, the ruling class propagates and uses such terms as “middle class values” which conjures up visions of living in “nice houses in nice communities.”

To answer the first question I put: “What is middle class?” Capitalist propagandists say it is someone who has income of, say, for example, $75,000, $100,000, $125,000, no matter how their income is derived. The aim is to cover up and deny the existence of workers as a distinct class.

Phil Murray, president of the CIO, bought into this pro-capitalist, anti-communist Cold War propaganda in the 1950s. He declared, “There are no classes in the U.S.” What did Murray get for speaking boss propaganda? The steel workers had to endure a 116-day strike in 1959.

The last two presidential election campaigns were rife with expressions of endearment by the candidates on all sides for the “great middle class.”

By artificially establishing a dollar-denoted “middle class,” proponents of this view leave out, by definition, all those who fall below the given threshold. Among those who are left out you will find, for example, the working poor, the poor, the super-exploited immigrant workers and the bulk of the African American people. The capitalist “middle class” creation is racist and discriminatory to the core, not only in its application at home but also around the world.

During the period of the rise of liberation theology, Pope John Paul II was sharply critical of the transnational/financial oligarchy and industrial powerhouse nations for neglecting the poverty of millions in the Southern Hemisphere, in particular. An expert on the papacy said John Paul II wanted to “elevate the poverty-stricken up to the middle class.”

Progressives have a big responsibility to educate and organize among the masses. They can do so confident in the knowledge that the working class will learn to reject capitalism’s phony ideological wedge. As Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”