People Before Profit blog

NBA made the right call on banning LA Clippers owner

Wed, 30 Apr 2014 12:07:00 +0000

I'm a fierce defender of free speech rights for a number of reasons, one of which because I am part of political and social traditions which, in many ways still face persecution today, so I tend to be sensitive to even the slightest threats of censorship. Say all the racist things you want; I think "no platforming" is terrible for free speech not simply because silencing people is terrible for learning and dialogue, but because it also denies the listener the right to hear the speaker and form their own opinion on it. The NBA nonetheless made the right call.

I've been in situations to observe folks who are comfortable enough with each other to make certain jokes or trade certain words folks wouldn't normally with strangers because that's how they are with each other. I'm not interested in policing barracks, or locker room talk or the interpersonal relationships of friends, but let's not pretend that's all that happened here. What happened was that public figure who owns a professional sports team, comprised mostly of Black players, in one of the largest cities in the U.S., got caught saying that Black people (like the ones who make him tons of money) aren't fit to be in the company of himself or his (ironically) Black/Hispanic biracial girlfriend. This should be problematic for every obvious reason.

If he owned a team called the LA Klansmen in some third rate semi-pro league which tolerates it, he would be free to drop racial slurs as many times as the day is long and we have the right to form and voice our own opinions on that. But in the NBA, many folks have been growing tired of Donald Sterling for years, this was simply the last inch of rope that pulled the noose taut on his involvement in the league.

Whatever you think of sports, (and I love me some football #GoTexans) as long as the Clippers are a franchise of the National Basketball Association and enjoys its privileges, the NBA, (though I'd also argue that the players and residents of Los Angeles have this right) do not have to allow that man or anyone else who does what he did to be the public face of professional basketball in LA.

Fortunately the NBA has a process to remedy this and did exactly that.

Photo: Longtime Clippers owner Donald Sterling, shown in 2010, has been banned by the NBA. Mark J. Terrill/AP

After Supreme Court decision, "Being Black at U of M" just got harder

Tue, 29 Apr 2014 15:35:00 +0000

Over a week ago, I was packing my bags to return home to Michigan after spending four months interning at the progressive think tank, Center for American Progress, in Washington D.C. As I nostalgically tucked away my belongings and zipped my suitcases, tears began to roll down my face, stinging my cheeks. After a few minutes, I wiped the tears away and smiled to myself, as I thought about being able see my family and friends for the month before I would be returning to the nation's capital to work for the Congressional Black Caucus.

As I stepped off the plane after only an hour and fifteen-minute flight, I was hit by a cold gust of wind, a rather fitting reminder of the unpredictable Michigan weather I was able to escape from the past few months. A few days later, I started my mornings as I always do; I reached for my iPhone to turn off my alarm and began to read through The New York Times. While scrolling through the morning's headlines, my eyes froze on what I did not believe to be true: the United States Supreme Court upheld Michigan's ban on colleges and universities to use race and ethnicity as one of the factors in admissions review in the case Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. A pit began to form in my stomach as I thought about what the effects of this would mean for minority students like me.

Upon stepping foot in my first political science class at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2011, I quickly realized something -- I was only one of a handful of African American students in a lecture of nearly 200 students. Over the course of my time at U of M, I have become even more aware of the racial issues facing one of the world's most prestigious public universities.

In my political science and philosophy courses, the topic of affirmative action is almost always addressed by professors and graduate student instructors. In one class in particular, Law and Philosophy, the rather touchy subject became even more difficult to discuss when my class was placed in small groups to discuss Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger. While it would have been easy to sit back in my chair and remain quiet and let my white peers share their feelings about the university's history of affirmative action cases, I knew I could not let the class period go by without sharing the feelings I often harbored inside in fear of being labeled the "token" black advocate. I spoke in a matter-of-fact tone as I began to share my opinion on the issue; however, I knew my voice alone would not be a catalyst for change.

Last October, the university's Black Student Union began a social movement on Twitter, #BBUM, Being Black at the University of Michigan, that quickly began to make local and national news headlines. The BSU's work has been applauded and supported by many, as its executive board, members, and supporters have been advocates for advancement, accessibility, and acceptance for minority students. Through tireless work with Michigan's leaders and administrators, the BSU has revitalized the conversation on what steps the university ought to take in order to increase African American and Latino enrollment. Unfortunately, the ruling in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is likely to make the process of increasing minority student enrollment more bureaucratic and complicated.

After reading several news articles about the ruling, I became increasingly frustrated at the majority decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy attempted to turn the conversation away from race and towards a voter's rights issue, which is not surprising, as many conservatives in the United States take the same approach when discussing public policy issues that disproportionately affect America's marginalized groups. While I obviously am opposed to the court's decision, I have made a conscious effort to remain positive and keep a clear perspective.

My experiences of being a black student at Michigan, working at CAP, and being raised in a blended family that is politically-involved in progressive movements, has taught me valuable lessons I will carry with me my entire life. One of the greatest is that when faced with adversity, it is imperative to understand all sides of an issue, regardless of your personal position on it. I have been particularly inspired by the U of M's Black Student Union for they have worked to tackle an issue impeding many students with courage, grace, and humility.

As I return to campus for my senior year at Michigan, I intend to share the many lessons I learned while in Washington D.C. with my peers in an effort to continue to promote change, despite what happens at the local, state, and federal levels of government. In doing so, I will keep one of my favorite quotes by Mark Twain in the back of my mind, "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

Photo: President Barack Obama is shown at a campaign event with University of Michigan students last year. AP

Union offers hope for this student writer

Tue, 29 Apr 2014 14:03:00 +0000

We seem to be entering a new era in the job market. Applying for jobs is not like it was 10 years ago or even before 2009. As a young student writer I have faced challenges in finding work. Whether it's writing articles or even just finding an unrelated job to support myself, the odds are stacked against people like me.

This is an era of temporary workers, anti-union "right to work" laws, and declining job security, driven by politics. Unionized workforces have not been immune to these changes.

Labor union membership has declined over the past few years. This decline along with state-led conservative efforts to impose "right to work" laws, combined with outside political interference in union organizing, has bolstered corporate resistance towards unionization and union membership.

Increasingly, employers find ways around federal labor laws to increase profit by avoiding hiring full-time workers and using independent contractors and temporary workers instead. Journalists and others have been laid off by traditional newspapers and magazines and are forced to resort to freelance work to pay their bills.

I rely on my writing to support myself, pay my bills, and cover my tuition costs for school. As a freelancer I am considered an independent contractor with little protection. As a lonely independent writer, I am faced with contracts that are overwhelmingly in favor of the publication in question, not the writer.

This past year after being given the runaround by several publications I was frustrated and considered taking a break from writing. I daydreamed: if only there was a union for non-traditional workers such as myself.

Then I discovered hope. A writing friend of mine sent me a link to a union called Guild Freelancers. Guild Freelancers is a unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, which is part of the Communications Workers of America and the AFL-CIO.

The Guild's mission is to support freelance writers and journalists of all kinds. The "About" page of its website spells out the need for such a union:

"Our unit uses the power of numbers to directly support the needs of independent writers and journalists in all media, including hundreds of workers laid off by Northern California media outlets this year."

Using the power of mutual aid, the Pacific Media Workers Guild has given a voice to those of us who have been unable to find full-time writing work, have been laid off, or work for multiple publications as freelancers.

Like the Guild Freelancers, other unions are finding creative ways to organize non-traditional workers and independent contractors. For example, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance organizes New York cab drivers who are considered independent contractors. The Alliance's most notable victory was the successful launch of a health and disability insurance trust fund for its drivers.

Organizing temporary workers has been harder. But a good example of a successful campaign happened in March this year in Oregon, when the Oregon Employment Relations Board ruled that temporary park rangers employed by the city of Portland could join a union.

As a member of the Guild Freelancers, I have access not only to contract advice, grievance assistance, and job listings but also to health, dental, and vision insurance coverage. As a member of a CWA local, part of the AFL-CIO, I also gain access to the Union Plus program that offers discounts and financial products to union members.

Despite greedy employers who seek to maximize their profits and avoid hiring full-time workers, freelance and temporary workers and union organizers are finding creative ways to organize.

One freelancer alone is not very powerful. But a group of freelancers and temporary workers organized with a union have the power and ability to stand up for their rights to be treated fairly and to have a decent contract.

Photo: Guild Freelancers Facebook page.

Cuba, culture and the battle of ideas

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 16:50:00 +0000

Editor's note: Cuba is in the middle of a number of economic and political changes aimed at responding to the problems it confronts. A wide debate is occurring on how to meet the country's challenges. The article below is indicative of a wide ranging debate including the nature of socialism, Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union and its past. We invite readers to comment.

Cuban President Fidel Castro in 2005, while denouncing corruption, asked University of Havana students whether or not they thought Cuba's revolutionary process would survive. "[T]his revolution can be destroyed," he said, answering his own question, but not by outside forces. "[T]oday we are the ones who can destroy it." Cuban leaders presently are insisting that current economic changes will strengthen Cuban socialism. Yet President Raul Castro is suggesting that values and culture will ultimately determine the revolution's future.

His speech on January 1 marked the 55^th anniversary of the victory of the revolution. There are attempts, he said, to "discredit national values, identity, and culture in favor of individualism, egotism, and mercantile interest above moral interest. They deceitfully busy themselves in selling to the very youngest the supposed advantages of dispensing with ideologies and social consciousness so as to induce a break between the historical leadership of the revolution and new generations, and promote uncertainty and pessimism."

Others are talking about culture. On January 10 philosophy professor Fernando Martinez Heredia devoted a long, detailed speech to the subject. First Vice President Miguel Díaz Canel did likewise, more recently. He was speaking to the 8^th Congress of the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC).

Heredia is a July 26^th Movement veteran. The title of his presentation to the Journalists' Union was "Revolution, Culture, and Marxism." He announced that, "Marxism has been almost absent in Cuba for a long time." The Soviet Union was an unsatisfactory mentor for Cuban socialism, he suggests, for two reasons. One was the "tragic end of the Bolshevik revolutionary process in the USSR in the 1930's." The "second ill-fated missed opportunity" came about, because "in regard to changes, the USSR after 1953 failed to go beyond making readjustments in its [own] system, in the arena of European relations, and in political organizations it led on a world scale."

Another development from that era impinges more directly on national culture. After 1945 "world capitalism was forced to readjust its system in important ways." One of those changes was "democratization of cultural consumption," instigated under U.S. leadership. But Cuba's 1961 literacy campaign itself "transformed ... cultural activity and communication," he asserts.

Agreeing that "the uniting of national liberation and socialism was a great revolutionary achievement," Heredia suggests that Soviet-style socialism "was unable to serve liberation purposes." And, "real socialism ought to critique the bourgeoisie's characterization of modernity." For Heredia, "economic subjugation to the USSR" led to a "profound bureaucratization of Cuba's revolutionary institutions and organizations that persisted even after the Rectification Campaign" of the late 1980's. The Soviet bloc fell and Cuba entered the Special Period, yet "no ideological struggle developed to confront the worldwide discrediting of socialism and defend Cuban socialism."

"[S]tructured thinking, a basic ingredient of Cuban socialism, was gone. Since then, a great cultural swath has existed in the country that is far removed from the Revolution." Heredia observes progressive "de-politicization" through which Cubans find "legitimacy in individual activity, the professions, and their offices and groups." He fears that a supposed "turn to normality" may lead to "conservative middle class ideology."

"This cancer," he adds, is a "close relative to another corrosive evil ... the enormous consumption of North American cultural products." This U. S. campaign is directed at "familiarization with the values, bustling about, models of conduct...the famous artists, policies, the entire life and spirit of the United States - without living there or seeking a green card."

Concluding, he calls for "a new culture different from and superior to that of capitalism." And, "[W]e must strengthen and develop the alliance between culture and a political power that stays strong and subjects itself to a participative socialist project." Culture is "a main feature of national life." He calls for formation of an "inter-generational bloc."

Speaking on April 13, First Vice President Miguel Díaz Canel was clear: "To maintain the coherence of Cuban political culture is a priority." He praised UNEAC's "ratification of the idea that culture accompanies the effort to augment productive forces." He called for "promotion of authentic values of Cuban culture among the youngest as among teachers, for the sake of enriching everyone's spiritual life." He reminded listeners that "imperialism counts mainly on dominating culture and on control of information." It uses the "entertainment industry and media machinery" to promote "cultural colonization."

The imperialists target "intellectuals and artists to separate them from all social concern and effort." Their "motion pictures and theater reflect and exalt the lowest human sentiments, the most perverse and noxious ideas, and every type of immorality." We must "defend our socialism and its perfection as the only alternative to save culture... The choice is between socialism and barbarism."

Diaz Canal urges the "artistic vanguard" to "defend our truths without shame and be unafraid of accusations of speaking for officialdom." He objects to "our publications and social networks giving space to 'personalities' who wink opportunistically at the enemy." He calls for "unity of intellectuals and revolutionary artists" so that "we never leave political culture in the hands of the market." "The unalienable principle is for political culture to be applied coherently in whatever scenario, state or non-state."

In the end, explains Heredia, "Colonization of people outlives territorial colonization, and lasts even after cessation of neo-colonial domination." Havana city historian Eusebio Leal, closing the UNEAC meeting, pointed out that "this nation has had to face, and does face, attacks and aggression. This country, like any true revolution, also has had to overcome its own deviations."

Photo: Caravanistas and members of the 44th Venceremos Brigade worked side by side in Santiago de Cuba to help in the construction of the San Pedrito Housing Complex. Together they assisted in the collection of debris from the ongoing reconstruction work. The housing being built is intended those who lost their homes in Hurricane Sandy. Summer 2013. Pastors for Peace Facebook page.

Mike Giocondo, 85: Fighter for justice at home and abroad

Wed, 23 Apr 2014 13:52:00 +0000

Mike Giocondo has died in the Community Hospice of Northeast Florida in Jacksonville one week after being admitted for heart failure.

Giocondo was a member of the Camden 28, the group that broke into Camden, New Jersey's Federal Building in 1971 to destroy draft board files they said would be used to prosecute the unjust war in Vietnam.

At different times in his life Giocondo was a journalist in the mainstream media, a Catholic brother, a labor reporter for the Daily World and later the Peoples World, a union organizer and a member and supporter of the Communist Party USA. Throughout all those years he was a fighter for peace and justice. For 36 of those years he was the loyal husband and comrade of Carroll Krois, whom he married in 1978.

He is survived by Carroll, his brother Gerald Giocondo of Warrenton, Va., his niece Janice Beaucar of Middletown Conn., many nephews, several grand and great grand nieces and nephews and two sisters-in-law. He was preceded in death by his sister Gloria Whistler.

Mike, the second of three children of Michael and Virginia Sposato Giocondo, was born and grew up in Syracuse, NY, attended LeMoyne College there the first year it opened and completed his bachelors degree in journalism at the University of Maryland in the mid-1950s. He worked three jobs at a time to pay his way through school.

Giocondo's first job as a reporter was with the Post in Frederick, Md. Then he moved back to Syracuse and worked as a night reporter for the Post-Standard.

Mike entered the Conventual Franciscan Friars in Syracuse, passing his novitiate year in Watertown, N.Y. He served in Washington, D.C. at a Franciscan House affiliated with Catholic University.

He asked to be stationed at a mission outside the U.S. and was sent to San Jose, Costa Rica at a Franciscan school where he taught English. Many of his vacations in Costa Rica were spent visiting missions outside the city where he would have preferred to have been stationed. Wanting more meaningful work, Mike planned to leave the Franciscans but was persuaded to go to a parish in Camden, N.J. to work with the Latino, predominantly Puerto Rican community. He helped obtain a grant to found El Centro, a social service agency and published the Center's newsletter.

Mike left the Franciscan Order in the early 1970s and began to train as a substance abuse counselor with the State of New Jersey. He was fired from this job when he was arrested inside the Camden Selective Service Office as a member of what is now known as the Camden 28.

Their story is told in the award winning documentary, The Camden 28 : "In 1971, a group of 28 people," wrote Liz Larabee in a review, "including four Catholic priests, one Lutheran minister, and 23 Catholic laypeople, ranging in age from 20 to 46 organized a break-in at Camden, New Jersey's Federal Building to destroy draft files, in hopes of wrenching an unjust system out of commission 'in the name of that God whose name is peace.'"

The Camden 28 were members of what the media then called the "Catholic Left," one of the most persistent and inventive forces in the anti-war movement. Between 1967 and 1971, the Catholic Left raided over 30 draft boards and destroyed almost 1 million Selective Service documents, and the Camden 28 were seeking to continue those tactics in that summer of '71.

After the group's acquittal, Giocondo traveled to the Soviet Union and then began covering the labor movement for the Daily World in 1974, working primarily in New York City.

In 1978 he married Carroll and in 1979 they moved to Chicago so she could attend graduate school in social work. Mike continued to write for the Daily World from Chicago, calling in his stories daily for transcription in New York until a huge "portable" computer was delivered to his apartment.

Eventually Mike stopped working at home and began to work at the Peoples World and CP of Illinois offices. Throughout the 1980's Mike traveled in the Midwest covering the struggles of coal miners, steel workers and meat packers among others. He was thrilled to cover Harold Washington's winning Chicago mayoral campaign.

Mike retired from reporting at age 62 and began his final career as a teacher of English as a Second Language at outposts of Olive-Harvey College, finally working at the South Chicago Center from which he retired at age 77. He was an active union and board member of his local.

He retired in large part due to a diagnosis of Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus, NPH. Mike's primary care physician had never diagnosed NPH in anyone previously, but his recognition of it gave him seven additional years of active intellectual life. Mike very much wanted people to be aware of this little known condition, which, without a shunt leads to dementia. NPH is highly reversible if caught early and is recognized by serious problems with one's gait. A simple spinal tap is used to diagnose NPH.

Mike and Carroll discovered Amelia Island in Florida in the winter of 2013, bought a condo, and left in December, 2013 to spend the winter. Mike's heart disease worsened and he had two more bouts of pneumonia before he was hospitalized on March 16, dying a month later. His interest in social justice and human rights remained intense even during his last illnesses.

Long after his retirement, Mike Giocondo occasionally sent in articles from time to time. Here are links to some of his writing for Peoplesworld.org:

Progressive alliance charts new course for Latin America

Secret-spiller Assange appears in public

Elderly vent anger over flu shot crisis

Bill Hogan, peace and justice activist

Photo: Mike enjoying a wonderful summer afternoon with family, neighbors and friends at a Chicago backyard fundraiser for the People's World. Roberta Wood/PW

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, unique even among corporate crooks

Tue, 22 Apr 2014 15:02:00 +0000

Meet Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors. Even among the top 100 compensated CEOs of last year - as disclosed on the AFL-CIO's latest Executive Paywatch - he's unique.

Musk, you see, is the perfect argument for why these corporate crooks don't deserve one red cent, or even their jobs.

Last year, according to its own filings with the federal government, Tesla, a maker of supposedly "green" vehicles, had $2 billion in revenue. It also lost $74 million. You would think that with a record like that, Tesla's board would show Musk the door, with or without a "golden parachute." And you would be wrong.

Instead, the paywatch report notes, Musk earned - if that's the right word - a combined $78.15 million in pay, bonuses and compensation. In other words, had Tesla paid Musk his true value - zero - it would have turned a profit.

Musk is only the most extreme example of the overcompensated corporate crook running U.S. companies. The list of the top 100 such bozos is on the paywatch website.

(It doesn't include leaders of non-profit associations and organizations, however. Otherwise, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell would finish 12^th on the paywatch list: He took home $44 million.)

Musk isn't the only malefactor. There are others:

McDonald's CEO James Skinner earned $27.74 million. He's among the top 100. McDonald's workers get paid the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour - if they get paid at all.

McDonald's workers took to the streets of Manhattan and 30 other cities last month to protest the firm's "wage theft" - the fast food giant's denial of correct wages and refusal to pay overtime when they toil more than 40 hours a week. Seven groups of McDonald's workers in New York, California and Michigan are suing the firm in class action cases for such wage theft.

Then there's Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase - yes, one of the big financial institutions that brought us the 2008 crash, and that we bailed out with taxpayer dollars. Dimon took home $18.72n million last year. The bank netted $35.6 billion on revenues of $106.28 billion - a 33 percent profit. Sounds great for investors, right?

Well, not if you look at how JPMorgan Chase did it. In just the latest instance of its lawbreaking, the bank, in February, had to settle for $300 million in fines in New York courts. It seems JPMorgan Chase was taking kickbacks in exchange for steering homebuyers into overpriced mortgages they couldn't afford. Those were the mortgages whose collapse triggered the crash.

James McNerney of Boeing earned $23.26 million. All he did was openly break labor law by deliberately moving production of the 777 Dreamliner to anti-union, anti-worker South Carolina in retaliation against the Machinists for sticking up for their members in the Pacific Northwest. The NLRB had to go after Boeing.

All of this, plus the outrageous gaps in pay between the CEOs and the rest of us, tells us two things. The first is that Dimon, Musk, McNerney, Goodell, Skinner and their ilk aren't worth a penny.

But the second is that the whole system is rotten. A process that rewards corporate crooks who leech their loads of cash off the backs of those who really produce the goods, services and profits that make this country go is a process - and a system - that must be overhauled, if not totally scrapped.

Gabo lives

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 11:15:00 +0000

Novelist Gabriel García Márquez died on April 17, 2014 in Mexico City. His 1967 novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" gained him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982. He authored novels, short stories, and books and articles reporting on Latin American realities. According to an admirer, he "was often compared to Hispanic literature's other titan, "Don Quixote" author Miguel de Cervantes.

From 1955 on, García Márquez, widely known as "Gabo," lived in exile from his native Colombia. El Espectador newspaper that year, having learned that dictator Rojas Pinilla's government objected to his reporting, assigned him to a story in Switzerland for safety reasons. Subsequently García Márquez lived and worked in Europe, Venezuela, and Mexico. Leery of imprisonment under Colombian President Julio Cesar Turbay's Security Statute, García Márquez in 1981 settled permanently in Mexico City with his family.

In addition to being a novelist, García Márquez was a journalist. In particular, he founded, wrote for, and helped fund the Colombian Magazine "Alternativa," published in Bogota from 1974 through 1980. A recent commentator regards it as "one of the most innovative, modern, and revolutionary publications of the left in Colombian history ... Gabo contributed not only his credibility as a writer, but also his work as reporter, the beautiful craft he never wanted to give up, and as permanent advisor to the editorial team. He did stories and interviews on "Chile under fascism, socialist Cuba, Vietnam triumphant over U.S. imperialism, de-colonizing Africa, and Portugal boiling over."

Indeed, Gabriel García Márquez was a hero for the worldwide left. In 1957, in Venezuela, he reported on dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez' expulsion. He went to Havana shortly after January 1, 1959 to report on the victory of the Cuban revolution. He stayed for two years helping to establish the Prensa Latina news service. Later he served the Russell Tribunals' investigations of human rights abuses. He promoted negotiations between the Colombian government and insurgents groups. For three decades García Márquez was barred from entering the United States.

García Márquez and former Cuban President Fidel Castro were friends for half a century. Castro often reviewed the author's novels prior to publication. In 1998 he chose García Márquez to carry a message informing U.S. President William Clinton that Cuba would share intelligence about U.S.-based terror attacks against Cuba and the United States. An FBI delegation visited Havana to collect the material. Afterwards, however, the FBI went on to arrest Cuban agents providing the intelligence. They became the Cuban Five political prisoners.

Writing in Revista Cambio in 2002, García Márquez extolled his recently deceased friend Gilberto Vieira, longtime secretary general of the Communist Party. He "never abandoned his convictions" and "will remain in the memory of the country as a thinker and an intellectual." He has Vieira's daughter Constanza testifying to her father's "respect for the ideas of others." Years earlier, the author visited Vieira living in concealment, his party having been declared illegal. Their conversation proceeded only with Vieira rocking the cradle of baby Constanza, crying then but later a distinguished journalist.

The novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" tells of generations of the Buendía family and of obsessions, myths, and ghosts. There is history too, especially that of the United Fruit Company banana workers on strike in 1928 near Santa Marta, close by, as it happens, to the author's fictional Macondo.

One family member was "the colorless José Arcadio Segundo," who "gave up his position as foreman in the banana company and took the side of the workers. ...The great strike broke out...José Arcadio Segundo was in the crowd that had gathered at the station ... [T]he army had set up machine-gun emplacements around the small square... The captain gave the order to fire and 14 machine guns answered at once. Several voices shouted at the same time: "Get down! Get down!" The people in front had already done so, swept down by the wave of bullets. The survivors, instead of getting down, tried to go back to the small square, and the panic became a dragon's tail as one compact wave ran against another ... When José Arcadio Segundo came to he was lying face up in the darkness. He realized that he was riding on an endless and silent train and that his head was caked with dry blood... he made himself comfortable on the side that pained him less, and only then did he discover that he was lying against dead people."

Photo: Miguel Tovar/AP

When I say the word "capitalist"

Wed, 16 Apr 2014 17:25:00 +0000

When I say the word capitalist, I mean a certain kind of person: not a small-business owner or a start-up entrepreneur, although they, too, fall under the broad umbrella of that definition.

Who I'm really talking about are people whose lives are based on the pursuit of profit by any means possible - and who fight creating a moral and democratic basis for that wealth.

A restaurant manager, a gun store owner, a small farmer, a used car salesman, a realtor, a motorcycle mechanic, and a pharmacist are all, narrowly speaking, capitalists.

They're out to make a sale, to support themselves and their families, and often they want to expand their business. Some would like to eventually leave their business to their children.

This is one reason why it's such a misconception to claim that socialism and communism are about taking and then redirecting all profit and all wealth. After all, many of the businesses mentioned above and others like them are under considerable pressure today from huge corporate competitors. Big Business receives tax breaks and legal advantages not available to ordinary people. Small businesses have more in common with their employees than they may realize.

Any business, large or small, faces the same challenge of how to best utilize their work force and their resources. As with referees in a close basketball game, when they blow the call, more than the single player is impacted.

A farmer, for instance, who has access to a large amount of groundwater, may have the legal right to sell as much as he wants to drilling interests. But in states such as California and Texas, that right ends up harming the farmer's neighbors and surrounding communities. In a time of chronic droughts, that farmer is hurting the greater good, and eventually himself and his family. Maybe he's under pressure because the giants of agribusiness have pushed so many small farmers into a financial corner.

Whatever the reason, the farmer's choice changes him from being an ordinary small businessman into a profit addict. He didn't properly value the needs of his family and his community. He's become a toxic kind of capitalist.

Opposing that type of business practice isn't only socialist and communist thinking, it's common sense. You're looking after your neighbors as well as yourself.

If your workers are genuinely involved in the decision-making process, if you're providing a safe workplace, if you welcome labor unions, and if you're wisely using natural resources at your disposal, then you're still a capitalist-but the healthier kind.

Socialism and communism are not based on theft. They're not about targeting every business owner for takeover. At heart, they're about allowing those responsible for making profits a role in deciding how those profits are used.

Capitalism is a flame that flickers wildly. Sometimes it goes out, or sometimes it burns down a field. In the current system, in an "anything goes" business climate, letting a farmer drain his well might seem like a decision best left to him-until you're his neighbor, desperately trying to put out a fire.

That's why, when you use the word capitalist, make sure the person to whom you're talking knows what kind of company you're describing.

The larger the company, the more opportunity for risk to the community, and the more chances for people getting burned - which requires more vigilance by the workers involved and their neighbors, who, after all, are selling them the products and services those workers need.

Apologists like to claim that corporations are people, yet the ones making critical decisions are a bare handful at the top of the ladder, while those impacted by those decisions number in the millions. The few rule the many.

When I say the word capitalist, I don't mean devil or vampire. Basing your life on making profits has a moral meaning beyond yourself and your family. Your failure or success at ethical bookkeeping tells me what kind of capitalist you are: toxic or healthy.

Yet, even if you're playing by both the moral and legal rulebook, the current system can still snuff out your candle or burn down your field. Making millions of people pay for your failures - as with the 2008 banking meltdown - shows us that at its heart global capitalism hates government except when it's in trouble; hates taxes unless the money goes to its pet interests; despises improving public works unless the project directly helps its company.

Do you work at a healthy place? Whether the workplace is big or small, the same question, and the same solutions: worker participation, responsible management, and a healthy environment for both its workers and neighbors.

Image: The Capitalist by George Grosz, labeled for non-commercial re-use with modification.

Socialist and journalist Carl Bloice dies at 75

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 12:40:00 +0000

Journalist and civil rights activist Carl Bloice died from cancer April 12 in San Francisco. He was 75. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, he spent most of his adult life in "The City by the Bay" that he loved best.

As a teenager, Bloice participated in civil rights activities as a member of the Liberal Religious Youth, the Unitarian Universalists youth organization in Los Angeles. For a time, Bloice planned on entering the ministry of the Unitarian Church. His involvement in the early civil rights movement brought him into contact with many others, including members of the Communist Party, which he joined in 1959 when he was 20.

Soon after he moved to San Francisco to participate in the civil rights movement in northern California. He then joined the staff of the People's World, the west coast progressive newspaper, which included on its staff both Communists and non-Communists.

In 1962, Bloice along with others, founded the first chapter of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, an multi-racial youth organization, composed of both students, working and unemployed youth, that shared the socialist vision of the great civil rights leader for which it was named.

Later in 1962, Bloice went south to cover the civil rights movement for People's World, becoming the first northern journalist to report from the south on a full-time basis for this epic movement in our country's history. On the night of May 11, 1963, Carl was in the room in the A. G. Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Ala., when the Ku Klux Klan bombed it in an attempt to murder the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the "Birmingham campaign."

Bloice was founder and co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, founding moderator of Portside, editorial board member and frequent contributor to Black Commentator, Bloice's prolific, professional, insightful, Marxist style of political journalism - understated but devastating - soared above all rivals. He was widely published throughout the political left and mainstream liberal opinion outlets.

He worked for 10 years for National Nurses United Union in communications. NNU Director Rose Ann DeMoro writes:

"I am horribly sad and shaken that Carl Bloice passed away today. For those of you who know Carl, you know how profound and wonderful this man has been throughout his life.

Carl worked with us for many years in communications and was an incredible resource for our organization. More importantly, he was a beautiful human being whom everyone loved."

He focused his daily and weekly and monthly journalistic production on economics, on the struggle for equality, on youth, especially African American, Latino and Asian youth in his hometown, on internationalism. He loved jazz, good wine, and food-he could whip up a mini-gourmet, Mediterranean meal in 20 minutes. He mastered the art of speaking and plumbing the truth through diverse sources and voices, adding powerful resonance to the key messages. He liked vacationing in Mexico. He read voraciously.

Pat Fry, co-chair of CCDS with Bloice, writes:

"To his last days, Carl kept up his enormous capacity and energy for reading and writing. His columns for the Black Commentator were circulated in Portside and CCDS Links. His daily selection of the Quote of the Day and the Toon of the Day poignantly captured the political moment."

On a personal note, during the 43 years of our friendship, every conversation I had with Carl included a dispute. But, we agreed on everything.

Carl's idea of good conversation was almost Zen-like, wanting to challenge, tease, object and question until, with enthusiastic friends help, everyone would learn something new, acquire a deeper understanding, and have a clearer purpose. He had a curious, acerbic and disinterested way of disputation that never became mean spirited. It provided him, and we who loved him, considerable amusement along with the potential "improvement of impaired faculties." I once sent him an email with a masked quote of a previous email of his own. As usual, he took issue with it just to keep the thread interesting!

I can't list all that needs to be said about Carl Bloice here. I offer instead a verse by Naomi Shihab Nye, which captures my thanks to Carl for the hand he reached out to me many years ago.

He was not a parent. But he was a teacher.

There were only a few hours, at the end, when he could no longer "make a fist". Carl is gone but we are still here. I promise to keep "making a fist," as long as I can, Carl, until the questions of the dead, can be answered.

Making a Fist

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

I felt the life sliding out of me,

a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

I was seven, I lay in the car

watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.

My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"

I begged my mother.

We had been traveling for days.

With strange confidence she answered,

"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,

the borders we must cross separately,

stamped with our unanswerable woes.

I who did not die, who am still living,

still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

clenching and opening one small hand.

Thank you to Pat Fry and Jay Schaffner for their contributions to this article.

The mysteries of human capital

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 13:25:00 +0000

To most people, capital means a bank account, a hundred shares of IBM stock, assembly lines, or steel plants. These are all forms of capital in the sense that they are assets that yield income when employed with human labor to create useful commodities.

But such tangible forms of capital are not the only type of capital. Education, specialized experience, physical gifts, natural talent, expenditures on medical care, and even attending lectures on effective organizational skills, punctuality, or on the virtues of simplicity, honesty, community, loyalty/solidarity, and conflict resolution, are also capital. That is because they have the potential, when appropriately applied, to make labor more creative and effective, improve health, or add to a person's good habits over much of his lifetime. Therefore, such expenditures are considered investments in human capital because people cannot be separated, cannot be alienated (to use Karl Marx's term), from it in the way they can be naturally separated from their financial and physical assets, or products.

Human capital is typically undervalued. (If the "investors" were all private, perhaps not.) However, a giant slice of the "investment" in human capital is public, or public-funded education and health care. We can count up the line items in a city, state or federal budget and get a COST of these investments. But because they are public goods, they have no market price that can denote VALUE. Some public investments typically dependent on degrees of corruption are "bridges to nowhere" and may be said to have a negative VALUE. But most public investments generate many times their cost in economic value over a long period of time.

Human capital is not as fungible (mutually interchangeable) as cash, nor as durable or secure as a drill press investment.

Suppose you were to propose to your employer:

"In addition to my salary, I believe I am owed, or, my parents, or, my country (as my investor) is owed, a return on the investment in my human capital, in exchange for your using it, and for my commitment to take proportional ownership and responsibility for the mission in which it is employed."

The employer responds:

"Investment gets no collateral, and assumes the risk of failure."

You reply:

"I understand that invested capital must be subject to a risk. So, I will take stock, please, in exchange -- vested appropriately, of course, but not unilaterally subject to dilution. You pay for other capital inputs with cash or stock. Why not human capital?"

Your employer argues:

"Human capital, like other intangibles, is too squishy and transitory to get any more than the standard labor market is prepared to spend in salary."

"OK," you say. "Agreed. Squishiness should deserve some depreciation perhaps. But, like other capital inputs, human capital requires maintenance, renewal, and even reproduction and re-investment! Salaries are not keeping up with those needs. Yes, the worker can walk out the door with his human capital. The big drill press cannot. But while you got the human capital --- as serious stakeholders -- they are deployed and motivated too. There should be a return!! There needs to be a law!"

The boss calls the cops! All the human capital files suit for a fair share of the returns.

Photo: Walmart employee wraps cardboard boxes to be recycled. Walmart uses taxpayers to underwrite their operations instead of investing in human capital. The multi-billion dollar corporation pays low wages, forcing employees to apply for public assistance like food stamps and Medicaid. (CC)

Millennials see Keystone as more than just a pipeline

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 13:02:00 +0000

The Keystone pipeline proposal has hit a Nebraska stop sign, but it has deeper problems than right-of-way issues across the United States. After all, the controversial proposal for transporting Canada's tar sands was never just about the pipeline. Just ask the thousand students who rallied in front of the White House recently and were willing to be arrested to make their point.

Frustrated and angry over a lack of political action on climate change, our Millennial Generation is not tolerating an ineffectual Congress or president. This 18-34 year old group in the United States is 74 million strong and when the worst happens will suffer the most from climate change. With little representation in Congress, where the average age is 60, they are looking to civil disobedience as a strategy to create the political will to address this threat. This will happen not only in our nation's capitol but on the streets of major cities across the nation.

The fight over Keystone is really about a generational shift in our energy paradigm and how we will survive the 21st century. It concerns the wealth and jobs that the fossil fuels industry creates, how it has weaved itself into all of our lives and pulled us into a formidable dependency. With a growing foreboding, however, we are sensing our carbon lifestyle may be lethal to future generations and if they are to survive it is incumbent on us to accelerate efforts to develop other energy sources.

From Washington, D.C. and Nebraska courts, this conflict now swings to Canada, where the Alberta government owns 81 percent of its oil sands and has a long list of investment partners. Besides multinational corporations, one of its biggest sources of investment capital for mining is China, our planet's largest producer of greenhouse gases. Alberta looks to collect $1.2 trillion in royalties from its oil sands over the next 35 years, but has increasingly drawn the world's attention because of the massive girth of pollution from the mining and burning of bitumen tar.

Canada also faces a disenfranchised youth, who feel their voices and futures have been diminished by the enormous profits bitumen tar sands portend. They are joined by First Nations aboriginal tribes who share the same political paucity and frustration. Despite the economic benefits of bitumen tar mining on their lands, First Nations people are taking a grim view of irreversible health and cultural damage. It is a seminal decision for First Nations to continue its relationship with Canadian oil interests and on a larger scale, analogous with our world's factious accord on reducing the role of fossil fuels in our lives.

The world's climate scientists essentially agree that if left unchecked, anthropogenic CO2 will worsen extreme weather, raise sea levels and create mass extinctions from a profuse array of environmental changes. Many acknowledge that climate deniers are fed propagated ignorance by fossil fuel strategists as part of a misinformation campaign, creating a set of beliefs not easily changed. It creates a polarized electorate, leaving the issue to develop worst-case scenarios before action is taken.

In moderation, fossil fuel usage might not have posed a serious threat, but we have moved well past that threshold. Our burning of fossil fuels produces around 33.4 billion metric tons of CO2 per year and world energy needs are expected to rise about 40 percent over the next 20 years. CO2 has reached proportions in our atmosphere not seen for about 15 million years and many scientists warn it may already be too late to mitigate damages.

There is a way forward. In time, renewables can generate jobs lost in the fossil fuels industry and will sustain our lifestyles. We can consider Generation IV nuclear energy, reportedly much safer than existing technology. Some strategists look to a carbon fee and dividend system that can increase the viability of new renewable energy sources, as well as a carbon import tax on products from other countries.

As Keystone falters and tar sands mining provokes mounting protests, our nation is compelled to end political bickering and accede Millennials a more powerful voice on climate legislation. President Obama must grasp the significance of this moment, deny the Keystone permit and tell the world his decision has nothing to do with the pipeline and everything to do with leadership.

Jeffrey Meyer is a writer and volunteer for 350.org and Citizens Climate Lobby.

Photo: Students rally in front of the White House in March demanding that President Obama stop the Keystone XL pipeline.

Ukraine, U.S., and big bad Putin: Who's the bully?

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 12:30:00 +0000

If the world breathed a sigh of relief when the Cold War wound down in the late 1980s, it started trembling as U.S.-Russia relations took a dangerous turn over Ukraine and Crimea. This is a very troubling development. If it continues in the present direction, the result will be damaging on a range of issues - nuclear weapons proliferation and elimination, Iran, Syria, terrorism, climate change, and domestic politics in the two countries, to mention a few.

If you listen only to the mainstream media and both Republican and Democratic politicians you get the impression that the perpetrator of this sharply negative turn is the power-hungry Putin, and that the trigger was Russia's heavy hand in the Crimea.

For example, New York Times columnist Peter Baker wr ote, "The decision by President Vladimir V. Putin to snatch Crimea away from the Ukraine ... threatens to usher in a new, more dangerous era."

The Times editorial board, not to be outdone, opine d, "But Mr. Putin should be made to understand that his authoritarian rule and imperial illusions are the problem, and not some perceived slights (my italics) from the West."

Similar or more strident interpretations have echoed from newsrooms around the country. Contrary or at least more sober opinions were nearly absent in the corporate-controlled media and the corridors of political power.

But are they right? I don't think so and here's why.

First let's be clear that Putin is no angel. He employed strong-arm tactics in the dispute over Crimea. And under his leadership Russia is plagued by the worst of "free-market" capitalism, corrupt oligarchies, election manipulation, and appeals to reactionary nationalism.

But as far back as elementary school I learned that a bully doesn't always throw the first punch. Just as likely those who are bullied will strike the first blow in response to reoccurring violation of their dignity and threats to their physical well-being.

In the recent events in the Ukraine, Putin, notwithstanding his authoritarian disposition and stained political record, was the bullied party. His actions were a response to a provocative policy hatched and executed in Washington.

The West's broken promise

When President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev agreed to lower the curtain on the Cold War in 1986, in Reykjavik, Iceland, they committed their countries to a new era of peace, disarmament, and cooperation. Around the world, most people expected or at least hoped these two most powerful and heavily armed states would wind down the arms race, end brinkmanship, and ease tensions globally.

When Germany was re-unified in 1990, Gorbachev, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and other leaders agreed that the formerly socialist Eastern European countries would not become part of NATO - the Cold War military alliance of the U.S. and Western Europe.

This understanding, however, was soon set aside in Washington, even though successive presidents from Clinton to Bush II to Obama repeated the mantra of a new era of strategic partnership with Russia. The U.S., with the complicity of Western European leaders, began to systematically absorb every Eastern European country into NATO.

Significantly, this was accomplished at a much faster pace than these countries and client governments were welcomed into the European Union. Filling a military vacuum was clearly of greater geostrategic consequence and far less burdensome to the U.S. and Western Europe than integrating these countries on an economic level. Neither Brussels, Bonn or London were eager to absorb the burdens and costs of states that were less developed and switching at breakneck speed to what eventually proved to be disastrous deregulated capitalism.

The U.S.-led "humanitarian intervention" in Yugoslavia

The only outlier was Yugoslavia. Its government wasn't socialist, but it was less compliant to western interests and it retained ties to Russia. But the leaders of Yugoslavia soon found out that such "independence" wasn't permissible in the new, post-Soviet world order. Instead they were demonized by the U.S. and the other western powers. Nationalist secessionist movements in the federated Yugoslav state - often including fascist elements - were encouraged, financed, and armed by the West, and as a coup de grace a fierce U.S.-led bombing campaign under NATO auspices turned a multi-ethnic, multi-national state into a historical bygone. All this was legitimized in the language of humanitarian invention and the right to self-determination.

NATO looks further east

Once NATO brought "freedom and self-determination" to the peoples of the former Yugoslavia and finished the integration of the older Eastern European states into its military orbit, it looked further east - to the new states that emerged out of the breakup of the Soviet Union.

First on deck were the former Baltic Soviet republics Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, who became NATO members in 2005. Other new states on Russia's border were courted too.

Of course none of this went unnoticed in Moscow. Even Boris Yeltsin, whose obsequiousness to the Bush I and Clinton administrations knew few limits, expressed some displeasure. His successor Putin frequently objected, sometimes in strong language, and dispatched Russian troops to Georgia, a new former Soviet state on its borders, when it appeared that western maneuvering might threaten Russia's security and the well being of Russian nationals living in Georgia.

That sent an unambiguous message to NATO and U.S. strategists that Russia had some red lines, which if crossed, would result in Russian countermoves.

But that message was either ignored or, more likely, considered a risk that strategic policy planners were willing to take. How else can we explain the brazen actions of the Obama administration and State Department, which actively encouraged, funded, backed, and to a degree choreographed the anti-democratic, illegitimate takeover of the Ukraine by an unelected government that is hostile to Russia and includes far-rightists and fascists in important positions, sitting on a long stretch of Russia's southern border?

They had to know that the Russian government wouldn't sit on its hands and do nothing in the face of this. Why? Because its national security interests were threatened, its history trivialized, its intimate centuries-old ties to Ukraine ignored, and its national feelings humiliated (once again).

And who could blame Putin if he thought that the turbulence in Kiev today could well move on to turbulence in Moscow tomorrow and that instead of the duly elected president of the Ukraine running for his life, it could be him?

U.S. policy makers roll the dice

In any case, somewhere at the top of the U.S. decision-making chain it was decided to throw the dice.

What followed was predictable: the Russian government, with broad popular support and a growing nationalist movement insisting on action, threw a punch.

I don't defend it, but it must be understood as a reactive and defensive punch - a counterpunch - to the real bullies in this crisis, namely, successive U.S. administrations - Bush the elder, then Clinton, then Bush the younger, and now Obama - all of whom have, with some small differences, pursued an aggressive, reckless, expansionist policy in Eastern Europe that Russia can only find threatening.

Thus, the Ukraine crisis is not the first provocation of Russia by U.S. and Western powers, but only the latest in a series of provocations that go back to U.S. and Western European leaders breaking their promise not to expand NATO beyond German borders.

And there is little reason to think that the U.S. has learned a lesson and will turn the off switch on this aggressive strategy. After all, this latest provocation, risky as it was, achieved its objective. For U.S. policy makers, despite their pious declarations, the loss of Crimea was a small price to pay for a foothold in Ukraine.

A larger imperial project

On the other side of the Eurasian land mass, the encirclement of Russia has its counterpart in the Obama administration's "p ivot to Asia." Its purpose is much the same, that is, to geopolitically surround China and cut down its role regionally and globally.

Moreover, these policies are at the core of a larger aggressive imperial project of encircling, isolating, cutting down the sphere of influence, and changing the behavior of regimes that challenge even in muted form the dominance of the U.S. at the global (China potentially) or regional level (China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc.).

Where necessary (and possible), such regimes are overthrown.

This policy is complemented by U.S. efforts to form a network of client states as well as proxy armies and military alliances and bases in every region of the world that will do its bidding. Despite Washington's almost rotelike invocation of democracy promotion, the actual degree of democracy in these client states is secondary to their willingness to accept a subordinate status and uphold U.S. interests, (including, in most instances, U.S. military presence on their soil) in the new global order.

In the 20^th century, the Soviet Union constituted a formidable competitor to U.S. imperialism at the global level. Other states were competitors regionally. But with the Soviet Union's collapse and the ebbing of the movements against colonial and neo-colonial rule, the institutionalization of a U.S.-dominated unipolar world with no global (and regional) competitors for the full length of the 21^st century became the operative goal of the makers of U.S. foreign policy and the White House, no matter who the occupant.

Not everyone agreed with those plans. Other voices around the globe and a small minority here said that the world must increasingly turn on a multi-polar axis as humankind moved deeper into this century. Not surprisingly, elite circles in the U.S. were quick to dismiss this vision, which included a redistribution of power and assets to rising states, regions and peoples.

Obama and America's role in the world

In the elite view, a multi-polar world is unpredictable, uncontrollable, and not a safe bet for promoting U.S. capitalism and a supposedly "liberal democratic" global order.

Only the U.S., they argue, can act as the guarantor of stability, secure global markets and, let's not forget, democracy and freedom, and, in particular, defeat both states and non-state actors that challenge the U.S.-led capitalist world order on a global and regional scale. This role is, so say the designers and organizers of our global grand strategy, a uniquely American role.

President Obama and his advisers have some important differences with the neoconservative wing of the foreign policy establishment and right-wing militarists like John McCain - on hard power vs. soft power, unilateralism vs. multilateralism, diplomacy versus military engagement.

Nevertheless, Obama and his advisers clearly share the elite worldview.

Obama, like his predecessors, wraps this policy in the rhetoric of national security, democracy, freedom and human rights. I don't think this is a cynical sleight of hand on his part. It's quite likely that he, and even previous presidents and many other Americans, really believes in the freedom, democracy and peace mission of Pax Americana - deriving inspiration, as he notes in some of his speeches, from our nation's "unique" founding and traditions, "civilizing" impulses, and divine anointment to do "God's work" in this troubled world.

The underbelly of U.S. foreign policy

But this rationale conceals - whether deliberately or naively - the coercive, exploitative, racist, exclusionist, violent, and undemocratic underbelly of so much of U.S. foreign policy. It hides the reality that for the most part this policy has two essential functions:

One: as the dominant or hegemonic power, the U.S. has to secure the world of capital for its subordinate partners as well as itself (and it is truly a world system for the first time in history) from any systemic challenges from socialist-oriented countries, as well as from security threats, destabilizing economic trends, and new challenges.

Two: the policy seeks to project the specific interests of U.S. (big) capitalism and its state in a world of deepening economic contradictions and other competing capitalisms and states (such as Germany, and, yes, Russia) and socialist-directed systems and states like China.

Obviously, changing U.S. foreign policy is a tall order. It will only happen in the course of building a transformative movement that has the ideological and practical capacity to mobilize and unite millions in suburbs and rural communities as well as cities, in red as well as blue states. Only a rainbow movement of the immense majority - including big sections of white people as well as people of color - acting in the interests of the 99 percent and in close alliance with peoples and states worldwide will turn swords into ploughshares.

What to do about Ukraine?

Right now, it is imperative that peace- and justice-minded people tell the Obama administration to turn away from its confrontation with Russia - stop the punishing and isolating moves as well as rein in an even more bellicose Senate and House. Instead, here are the paths the U.S. needs to pursue:

Just as the U.S. and other governments claim security interests in other countries, the U.S. and its western allies must recognize the legitimate security interests of Russia in Crimea and its near neighbors.
A diplomatic path must be found for Crimea to live side by side with Ukraine. The rights of Tatars and other minorities must be protected.
A process of understanding and reconciliation between Ukraine's east and west must be promoted, perhaps by means of a federal or co-federal status.
The coming Ukraine elections must be free and fair, without foreign intervention (take note, U.S. State Department) and with outside observers.
A joint U.S., European and Russian aid package should be constructed to help Ukraine climb out of its deepening economic morass.
Ukraine should be politically nonaligned, with relations with Russia as well as the West, including a guarantee that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.
NATO military operations in the Black Sea and elsewhere should be permanently suspended. Construction of nuclear missile "shields" in Eastern Europe should be canceled.
NATO's expansion to the east should be rewound to its old borders. Soon thereafter NATO itself should be abolished - it serves no constructive purpose.

I urge readers to press for these positive, constructive actions.

Photo: In a less confrontational mode, President Obama meets with Vladimir Putin, then Russia's prime minister, at Putin's dacha outside Moscow, July 7, 2009. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

EcoWatch founder featured at PW Hangout (updated with video)

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 13:56:00 +0000

Did you catch the People's World-sponsored Google+ Hangout on the Keystone XL pipeline? Stefanie Spear, CEO of EcoWatch, and Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen Climate and Energy were featured participants. Spear has been publishing environmental news for over two decades, and works to unite and mobilize people to engage in activism to protect the environment. Slocum is an advocate of affordable renewable energy for working families, seeking to move people away from the nuclear, coal, and oil industries.

This month's topic was on the Keystone XL pipeline and its impact on the environment and public health. The Hangout is part of the buildup to big national demonstrations in Washington, D.C. on April 22-27. Check out the official event page, where the Hangout was be broadcast, by clicking here to view comments and watch the entire event, or simply watch the YouTube video below!

Photo: AP

Cesar Chavez film is excellent addition to labor history

Thu, 03 Apr 2014 11:44:00 +0000

Anyone who drives down California's Highway 99 is familiar with the vast and alien tracts of farmland that constitute our state's richly profitable agricultural industry. Portrayals of farming in popular film in the U.S. usually conjure up bucolic images of red barns, rows of corn, and warm, friendly farming families. However, agriculture in California largely skipped this yeoman farmer stage so ingrained in American mythology, and went straight to large-scale, one-crop agri-business on an industrial scale. Director Diego Luna sets his new film, Cesar Chavez, against the backdrop of this harsh, beautiful, and intimidating landscape.

Cesar Chavez tells the important details of the life of the inspiring hero of labor and social justice for Chicanos. The filmmakers also utilize care and attention to the labor movement and its history in the U.S. to create a detailed portrait of the birth of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union in Delano, Calif.

Farm work in California was a pitchblende of all the worst aspects of unorganized labor: child workers, long hours, starvation wages, and grim armed encampments, with no rest, water, shade, or bathrooms provided to pickers. Carey McWilliams' Factories in the Field, published in 1935, describes the unique labor needs that an agricultural industry largely dominated by fruit cultivation required, and the tactic of the large growers in recruiting waves of workers of different nationalities so as to derail any nascent organization against the brutal conditions. Growers fostered racial animus between the workers, and this combined with their political hegemony in the towns, helped prevent the formation of a farm workers union until Cesar Chavez began his grassroots efforts nearly three decades after the passage of the Wagner Act.

The biopic begins by describing the sea change that the Wagner Act and the NLRB brought to workers during the worst throes of the Great Depression. A green light was given to laborers to organize in nearly every industry-but not for farm workers.

Chavez, portrayed by Michael Pena (Crash), realizes he and his wife Helen (America Ferrera) will have to leave the organizers office and move into the fields of Delano, living alongside the challenges created by grueling farm labor. They are soon followed by Dolores Huerta (Rosario Dawson), and the three of them join forces and form the organizing committee, creating a structure that helps out with the day-to-day needs of farm workers. This includes forming a credit union funded by donations from workers, which solves the immediate problem of poverty during the winter months when there's no picking work.

The fledgling organization attracts the attention of the local power structure, and the Sheriff of Delano confronts the crowds gathering at the operations headquarters, demanding to know what they are doing and if they are Communists. Although Chavez and the others deny being Communists, the growers and local law enforcement decide the new farm worker alliance, which is also printing a weekly labor paper berating the excesses of the growers, represent a probable Communist threat.

In alliance with law enforcement, and in defiance of the actual law of the land, the growers assault and terrorize the striking workers. Chavez holds the fragile alliance of Chicano and Filipino forces together, demanding they uphold the principle of non-violence in response to the repressive tactics. In response, the growers illegally bring in more workers from Mexico, undercutting the strikers.

The organizing committee realizes the growers are too powerful to take on all at once, and aim all of their energy at one company, Victore. The action moves from Delano's fields and into the public, hitting churches, supermarkets, and community groups with one united message: boycott.

Weeks of thorough leafleting and media coverage hits directly at the company's profits, and the CEO of Victore is the first domino to fall, giving the boycott its first success. Although the then-Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, proclaims the strikers "immoral", the strikers have won the moral argument in the media with their peaceful tactics and the message that it is immoral to allow the people who put food on the nation's tables to starve. This leaves the next tier of growers in a vulnerable state.

Senator Robert F. Kennedy arrives in Delano to mete out public rebukes to the growers for their reactionary and unconstitutional maneuvers in repressing the workers. Kennedy's political influence, however, fades away when he's assassinated in Los Angeles.

Radiating subdued glee, the grower Bogdanovich, portrayed by a reptilian John Malkovich, receives a phone call from the newly sworn-in President Richard Nixon, who has a cunning plan: circumvent the boycott by selling the grapes to Europe, allowing the Department of Defense to simply purchase the remaining fruit.

Chavez travels to Europe and personally makes a case to the workers of Europe, and is welcomed by major trade unions in Great Britain. In a move reminiscent of the weavers of Manchester refusing to work with slave-produced cotton during the Civil War, transport and dockworkers in Great Britain refuse to unload the US-grown grapes.

Back in California, a harried Dolores Huerta gets an unexpected phone call: the growers have totally capitulated as their crops rot in the fields, and tell her they are ready to sign a contract with the workers. On July 29, 1970, growers and workers gather to sign the history-making contract in a scene that evokes a military surrender on the part of the owners.

It would take another five years for the UFW to be granted a charter and the right to organize.

The film ends on this somber note, in contrast to other labor pictures that often roll credits on the eve of victory. It is an interesting artistic choice, which reflects the personal toll this battle took on Chavez and his family, and also foreshadows the fact that the work he started continues even now.

Photo: Cesar Chavez and Larry Itliong (of the Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee) holding the AFL-CIO charter for the United Farm Workers in 1971.

Supreme Court extends attack on democracy with McCutcheon decision

Wed, 02 Apr 2014 16:29:00 +0000

In its ruling announced today in the case of McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court struck down limits on overall contributions to political parties and candidates.

Contributors must still abide by limits on how much money they can give directly to any one candidate in a two-year election cycle. However, they can now make that same maximum donation to as many candidates as they wish.

The McCutcheon decision extends and consolidates the victory won by the 1 percent in the infamous Citizens United decision. It marks a new phase in their brutal attack on the basic rights of working people, especially women, people of color, and immigrants.

What happened?

Shaun McCutcheon is an Alabama businessman with a history of financial support for ultra-right candidates. In 2011 and 2012, he donated money to 16 Republican candidates at the federal level. He wanted to donate to 12 additional candidates but could not because of limits on aggregate contributions in a given electoral cycle.

McCutcheon brought suit in federal court, saying that the aggregate limits on contributions violated his First Amendment rights, notably free speech and free association.

The District Court dismissed the suit and McCutcheon appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on October 8, 2013. On April 2, the high court handed down a 5-4 decision in favor of McCutcheon, saying:

"The government may no more restrict how many candidates a donor may support, than it may restrict how many candidates a newspaper can endorse... To require one person to contribute at lower levels because he wants to support more candidates or causes is to penalize that individual from 'robustly exercising' his First Amendment rights."

Freedom of speech... for whom?

The McCutcheon v. FEC decision is the latest version of the ultra-right's usual ploy, taking a deeply reactionary decision and cloaking it in the language of freedom.

It relies on the undemocratic idea that money is a form of protected political speech, a legitimate way of participating in the political process.

It turns a blind eye to the fact that the vast majority of voters can only speak in words and actions. To most of us, cash is a foreign language-and not one we're likely to learn.

Chief Justice John Roberts explained the ruling in these words from the bench:

"If the First Amendment protects... funeral protests and Nazi parades - despite the profound offense such spectacles cause - it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition."

His words sum up blatant anti-democratic thrust of the McCutcheon decision: just as we protect virulent homophobia and open fascism, we must protect the wealthy few from "popular opposition."

Storm clouds of the perfect storm

As dangerous as the McCutcheon decision is in isolation, it is only one piece of a much larger onslaught against the democratic institutions of the working class.

Since the Citizens United decision, which recognized corporate political spending as protected speech, labor unions have been the only organizations with the resources to make significant contributions, on behalf of their members, to candidates who support the working class.

However, several recent and pending developments hamstring labor in its fight to protect working people.

Scott Walker's successful attack on public-sector workers in Wisconsin has provided a template for similar measures in other states and launched Walker as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination.

Right-to-work laws, which prevent labor unions from collecting dues, have now reached north into Indiana and even into a labor stronghold like Michigan.

Finally, the McCutcheon decision suggests how the Supreme Court will rule in Harris v. Quinn, a pending labor case.

In ruling on Harris v. Quinn, the justices will decide whether unions may continue to collect "fair share" payments from non-members covered under a contract. As the name suggests, these payments represent an employee's "fair share" of the cost of negotiating and executing a contract with an employer.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the appellant, as seems probable, organizations like the Chicago Teachers Union will have to provide services for free to employees who choose not to join or pay dues... a further drain on our collective resources.

Together, these developments represent a concerted attempt to defund organized labor and lock the working class out of the American political process.

They pave the way for an ultra-right lockdown on government at all levels, which will mean:

the intensification of campaigns to privatize and deregulate every aspect of our economy;
deep cuts to social welfare programs like Head Start, Medicaid, and Social Security;
acceleration of fossil fuel extraction and global climate change; and
an escalation of the war on women, immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQ people.

In the elections of 2014 and 2016, the working class is fighting for its survival. We have always known that we can't outspend the 1 percent ... so we have no choice but to out-organize, out-phone bank, out-canvass, out-picket, and out-rally them.

The 1 percent will lock us into feudal serfdom if they can. Solidarity is our only defense; concerted action is our only weapon.

Photo: Cornell Woolridge of Windsor Mill, Md., took part in a demonstration in October last year outside the Supreme Court as the justices heard arguments on campaign finance. (AP)

UPS fires 250 workers: class struggle, NY-style (with video)

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 15:03:00 +0000

Did you know UPS fired 250 workers for standing up for a fellow worker? Unfortunately, the answer is probably no. I have not seen any news written about it in the mainstream press. What is going on here? My guess is that it is part of an orchestrated effort to keep these unfair labor practices away from a public that has grown more class conscious in recent years.

Witness the attack on New York City's newly elected mayor. Mayor Bill de Blasio who was elected by a clear majority of New Yorkers. Using his mandate, he has tried to follow through on his campaign promises like enacting universal PreK and ending "Stop and Frisk," the NY Police Department racial profiling policy. And then there is the attack on him from the hedge fund operators of charter schools.

So now the 1 percent is pulling out all the stops. Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot and major GOP donor said of populist appeals, "I hope it's not working ... because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don't survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy."

Langone claims that the mayor is dividing the city into classes; well, yes that's exactly the case except it's not de Blasio who gave voice - although his campaign talked about the tale of two cities - it was Occupy Wall Street that brought the class voice to the table.

I bring this into the UPS labor dispute because the firing of the entire work force in Maspeth, N.Y., is akin to when a one-time president who in 1981 fired some 11,000 Air Controllers. Remember that? President Ronald Reagan sent a message to the entire labor and people's movement that he was the union-buster-in-chief with that move. It matters what side elected officials are on.

On Feb. 26, UPS fired a 24-year UPS worker and union activist who was protesting the grueling 12-hour days during a bitter winter, and the company's unwillingness to reach an agreement addressing the issue; 250 UPS employees from Teamsters local 804 walked off the jobs in support. The company retaliated by firing all 250 union members.

Several local representatives have made statements including past Labor Secretary Robert Reich in support of the workers, "Support Growing for UPS Teamsters in NYC." (Story continues after video.)

NYC Public Advocate Letitia James made her position known: "I stand in solidarity with UPS drivers who are being threatened with firings for protesting in support of a fellow employee. New York's workingmen and women deserve respect. I urge UPS to work with the drivers' labor representatives in good faith to address any underlying issues."

Local 804 members are holding parking lot meetings and circulating petitions to support their brothers and sisters. These actions will continue throughout the week and will cover every building in the local. Local 804 has been in talks with UPS management to try to resolve the dispute and address the underlying problems that led to it.

"Teamster members have joined our fight and are collecting signatures at UPS buildings across the nation, Chicago Local 705 Business Agents and members are busy building solidarity."

At this time, all 250 drivers and loaders have returned to work, Local 804 is waiting on UPS representative(s) to determine the standing of their union brother who was initially fired without due representation.

Tell UPS that it's not okay to retaliate against their workers. The drivers are committed to negotiating a fair resolution-why can't UPS do the same? Click here to sign an online petition to support the drivers.

UPS is a billion dollar corporation; according to their 2013 Annual Report, UPS net income was 4.3 billion dollars.

UPDATE: The 250 employees are BACK to work but under the threat of suspension.--which means that they are being watched carefully for any infringements of their contract. The fellow who was fired originally, is Not BACK!

Photo: Screenshot from Teamsters Local 804 video of union members and supporters protesting the mass firings and delivering 100,000 signatures to UPS in support of the workers. (PW)