People Before Profit blog

NY Post endorsement of Lhota so outlandish, it's crazy

Fri, 30 Aug 2013 12:47:00 +0000

NEW YORK - Reading the New York Post's endorsement of Joe Lhota in the Republican primary for New York City mayor, one can see that if he wins the primary, the Post will be backing him for mayor in the general election as well. But the endorsement is so outlandish and ridiculous that no one with any sense would want to vote for any candidate the Post would endorse. You would have to think, if the writers at the Post are as crazy as they seem to be in the claims they make about the upcoming election, who would trust their judgment as to whom to vote for.

The Post likes Lhota because he is different from "many" of the other candidates who "say we can strip the police of their powers, give giant raises to the municipal unions, and tax our way to utopia."

Really? Who are these other candidates? Not one of the major candidates, Democratic or Republican, advocates "stripping" the police of their power. Some have supported measures that allow for more civilian review of police conduct to prevent abuses by some police of their powers (especially as regards "stop and frisk," which has been found to violate the constitutional rights of New Yorkers). None of the suggested reforms strip the police of any legal powers granted to them or would in any way hamper legitimate policing. For the Post to suggest otherwise is to pervert the truth and to try to mislead those who read the paper.

The same is true about the claim regarding "giant raises" for city workers, many of whom have been working without new contracts for years. The workers demand realistic cost of living adjustments and wages that reflect increases in their levels of productivity as well. This is perfectly natural and is what collective bargaining is all about. Again the Post perverts the truth in an effort to mislead and misinform its readers.

Again, with respect to taxing "our way to utopia" - what claim could be more absurd. None of the candidates believes that New York City can be turned into "utopia" but some of them, mostly if not exclusively the Democrats, think that closing tax loopholes or modest increases on the super-rich, or on Wall Street, could go a long way to easing the strains on the city's ability to provide the best possible municipal services to the people without at the same time seriously causing distress to those whose taxes are raised. This is simply prudent governing, which the Post very well knows but would rather distort for its own political reasons.

As is well known the Post has never had a profitable year since it was taken over by reactionary billionaire Rupert Murdoch. It survives on life support by monetary transfusions from Murdoch's other sources of wealth. He keeps it alive to have a political presence in New York City, and its editorial stances function to further his business investments, as does its news reporting. The Wikipedia article on the Post, in fact, reports that, "According to a survey conducted by Pace University in 2004, the Post was rated the least-credible major news outlet in New York." This endorsement of Lhota is one of the reasons why this is still true.

Photo: Murdoch-owned New York Post reports another scoop. "Excellent news - now she can write for the New York Post," quips the photographer, Bosc d'Anjou via Flickr/CC

Jailing Manning, burying the Cuban Five

Fri, 30 Aug 2013 12:28:00 +0000

Listening to her conscience, Private Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, released U.S. military and diplomatic reports to the public. Manning's 35-year sentence is longer by far than sentences handed out to other whistleblowers. A "government secrecy specialist" told the New York Times that Manning's sentence "reflects the gravity of the case and the government's perception of the damage that was done." She will be eligible for parole in eight years.

Comparison of Manning's sentence with sentences received by the Cuban Five prisoners, whistleblowers of another sort, is revealing. Sentences and convictions are unjust on both sides. But in terms of years of incarceration, the Five seem to have caused more vexation to the U.S. government than Manning did. What did prisoner Gerardo Hernandez do to receive two life terms plus 15 years? Why life sentences (reduced on appeal) for Ramón Labañino and Antonio Guerrero?

Prosecutors charged them with conspiracy to commit espionage, not with espionage. They also charged Gerardo Hernández with conspiracy to commit murder in the shoot-down deaths of four Miami-based Brothers to the Rescue pilots on February 24, 1996. Legal observers say he was blameless.

Arrested in 1998, the Cuban Five were in Florida to monitor and report on preparations for terror attacks against Cuba, and to warn of any U.S. military attack. They targeted private Cuban-American paramilitary groups, although Antonio Guerrero did watch movements of military aircraft at a Key West Naval Air Station, where he was employed. U.S. military and intelligence officials testified at their trial that the Five posed no threat to U.S. national security interests. Convicted on relatively minor charges, prisoner Rene Gonzalez was released in 2011. Fernando González, similarly, will be freed early in 2014.

Manning's case and that of the Cuban Five are poles apart in terms of damage done to U.S. government policy interests. Yet U.S. rage, as measured by sentence length, landed largely on those who did the least. Why was that?

The fact that right-wing Cuban émigrés have a hold on U.S. policymaking on Cuba and even media coverage was one factor. Maybe, deep down, anti-communism still holds sway, despite hoopla on anti-terrorism. And Cuban social achievements, espousal of Latin American unity, and fight for national independence may have been unsettling enough for retribution, with the Cuban Five serving as proxies.

But importantly, the prosecution, trial, and sentencing of the Five took place in a void. There was no sizable popular movement at their side, nor any trace of sympathetic public opinion. The fate of Gerardo Hernández and his comrades could as well have been decided on a distant planet. At their trial in Miami, restraints were off. Vengeful, cruel instincts had charge.

Studied neglect of Cuban realities had set the stage. In general, stories of people's lives, hopes, and struggles in countries under foreign domination get short shrift in the intruding nation. U.S. media coverage and public curiosity about daily life on the island shrank once Cuba charted an independent course and worldwide criticism of the U.S. blockade mushroomed. U.S. dissidents' habitual concentration on single issues contributed to neglect of Cuba.

A movement did mobilize, however, on behalf of Private Manning, one based largely on rejection of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and admiration of Manning's courage. Jailers released Manning from eight months of solitary confinement following demonstrations. The Cuban Five prisoners endured 17 months of pre-trial isolation. While Manning's judge could have issued a 90-year sentence, she settled on 35 years, far less than the 60 years sought by prosecutors. The prospect of organized outrage may have been daunting.

Had the cause of the Five been linked to a political movement, lawyers could have widened their audience. Court proceedings can give voice to historical context and defendants' purposes. The trials of anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, for example, advanced political education. Lawyers and supporters of the Five would have had a stage for highlighting contradictions between the much-vaunted U.S. rule of law and what really happens. Not least, equal justice under the law serves to unify disparate political tendencies.

The common thread by which agitation for the Five is tied to other issues would be anti-imperialism. Their case has roots in soil giving rise to struggles for immigrant rights, racial justice, and labor rights, and against military interventions. To establish such linkages is not easy, but the Cuban Five prisoners and their families have faced a mountain of suffering and there is little choice but to begin.

Right now, the job at hand is to pressure the U.S. president to pardon the Cuban Five prisoners. As noted recently by a New York Times editorialist, "President Obama's use of the pardon power remains historically low." So he needs to be pushed.

How else but through large numbers standing up and speaking out?

Photo: Activists gather in Washington, D.C. for a five-day lobbying and protest event focused on freeing the Cuban Five prisoners, June 2013. (Earchiel Johnson/PW)

Economics is not morality play, but politics is

Thu, 29 Aug 2013 12:44:00 +0000

For socialist and progressive working-class forces, breaking out of marginalization is the key political challenge of our time. We hunger for a breakout, not just for a few weeks of a big mobilization or a single election, but permanently. A breakout that results in a sustainable political movement that redresses inequality, revitalizes democratic institutions on every level -- would be like moving from moonlight to daybreak in civilization.

The case against working class empowerment has always been that we are too uncultured and uneducated to really lead society. We need, so we are told, "Very Serious People" and "genius" CEOs to keep us from imprudent thinking and actions. Given the reckless disregard of these geniuses for prudence in recent years, more people should be laughing at the austerity crowd than yet are.

Most of the serious austerity talk is claptrap to disguise the daily robbery from our pockets. Nonetheless, it's reasonable to ask: Why is the working class a more trustworthy foundation of governance than other social classes? The reason is: while no class is completely disinterested, we are the most disinterested. How so? Because we have the least property, the biggest investment in public goods, the strongest motivation toward equality of opportunity, and the greatest interest in reward based on merit. In addition, the rising levels of education and access to scientific knowledge among working people -- propelled by vast technology-driven changes in the division of labor -- negates all the pleas of dictators, corporatists and kings about the unpreparedness of the people to govern themselves.

We have really only one addition to the ideals of the Enlightenment that founded the United States. We simply say the principles of the Declaration of Independence must be extended to all who labor -- not just white men of property, as at our founding, and certainly NOT an unlimited franchise to corporations as recently ruled by our Supreme Court.

Is there such a thing, however, as "scientific" socialism, or, for that matter, any social science that can serve as a reliable guide to solving our political marginalization on the left? Well, there is certainly more scientific, and less scientific, social science, including economic science. And it's true, for example, that if a social policy is "disinterested," making it scientifically informed is more important than "the miracle of the market" as a guide.

However it would be unscientific to say that there is a "morality" to any science, including social sciences. All who have spent time studying science have had the experience of letting values color the subject and learning nature often does not conform to our hopes; that correlation does not prove causality.

All societies -- this will be true of all capitalisms, and all socialisms -- are in both collaboration, and conflict, with nature. Science will tell you there are equilibriums that are relatively stable, that may still be offensive to a value system. For example, there is nothing unscientific about an equilibrium where we all toil building toys for the rich, and live on subsistence. And no equilibrium is permanent.

The place to insert values is not in economics, not in any "inevitability", but in politics. We do this in two key ways: one is program -- the hows, whats and whys of realizing our goals of equal opportunity, rising investments in human capital, and an equitable distribution of wealth based on merit. The class coalition in political power defines "equitable."

But there is more to winning the battle of values than program.

Values also include personal and political morality. No one in modern times exemplified this aspect of leadership than the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The most common complaint about politics heard from working people is: "They are all corrupt." Workers' lives are filled with more trials than rewards. The time available for self-organization cannot, as with the better off, be separated from the cooperative and community relationships necessary for keeping body and soul together. Except through real relationships how can workers have confidence that their leadership has the necessary virtues:

Integrity: A trustworthy leader tells the truth;
Modesty and simplicity: The trustworthy leader does not live better than those he or she represents;
Setting an example of service and stewardship;
Peace: How do you know a leader is for peace who does not practice conflict resolution;
Equality: If a political organization does not practice it, is there any chance a government led by it will?
Courage: The leader is a first responder to crisis and challenge.

A political movement which seeks to capture the hopes, confidence and highest values of working people must live, be, and exemplify, up close and personal, the society it dreams of becoming.

Photo: From a 2012 St. Louis tax day rally (PW/Tony Pecinovsky)

Big business behind Rick Perry's push in Missouri

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 16:38:00 +0000

ST. LOUIS - Rick Perry, the right-wing Republican governor of the Lone Star state, is running a spate of TV and radio ads - backed by the Missouri Chamber of Commerce - here in the Show Me state attacking Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon, for vetoing Republican-sponsored cuts to Missouri's income tax.

In the commercials Perry claims, "Vetoing a tax cut is the same thing as raising your taxes," which of course is a flat out lie.

In a visit, planned for Thursday, August 29, Perry will urge Missouri Republicans to over-ride the governor's veto - all in an attempt to make Missouri more like Texas - where, according to Perry, "businesses flourish" and "jobs are created."

The legislation vetoed by Nixon, HB 253, would reduce state tax collection by over $800 million annually (after a 10-year phase-in), give a 50 percent tax cut to business owners whose income "passes through" Missouri, lower the top personal income tax rate from 6.5 percent to 5.5 percent and lower the corporate tax rate by 3 percentage points to 3.25 percent.

As a result, funding for essential state services would be cut, the state's AAA credit rating would be jeopardized, and taxes would be increased on the elderly, as HB 253 would also impose a state sales tax on prescription medicine.

Rex Sinquefield, a far-right-wing Missouri billionaire, has poured over $2 million into the coffers of the bill's supporters with the intent of buying our democracy - all so he can pay less in taxes. Sinquefield is also the main backer and funder of the Show Me Institute, a far-right libertarian thank-tank which supports lowering the income tax and creating more tax loopholes for corporations.

Gov. Nixon blasted Perry and the Chamber, saying in part that the "Chamber should support activities that seek to strengthen our economy - not undermine it."

He added that HB 253 is an "ill-conceived, fiscally irresponsible experiment" that would "undermine our state's fiscal health and jeopardize basic funding for education and vital public services."

And make no mistake about it: HB 253 would undermine Missouri's economy, as income taxes in 2013 generated over $5 billion for the Show Me state, which is about 66.5 percent of general revenue or nearly 21 percent of the entire state budget.

Put simply, HB 253 would gut Missouri's budget - with absolutely no plan to replace the lost revenue.

Corporate / franchise taxes in Missouri in 2013 totaled only about $325 million, or about 1.46 percent of the entire state budget.

Instead of looking for ways to cut Missouri's largest source of income lawmakers should be looking for ways to grow our budget, fund vital social services and expand funding for education.

Politicians nationally are also currently debating tax policy. Democrats want revenue-based solutions, while Republicans want to continue to cut taxes, especially for the super-rich. With government employees, and the people they serve, continuing to feel the pain from sequestration and with the ongoing debt ceiling battle looming large, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently told reporters "it would be a waste of time" to enter into negotiations regarding taxes if they did not generate "significant revenue" through increased taxes on the rich and corporate profits.

Nationally, corporate profits are at a 60-year high, while corporate taxes make-up only 10 percent of federal revenue, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

Corporations and the wealthy need to pay their fair share of taxes. We can and should raise revenue from the richest Americans and the most profitable corporations.

HB 253 and Rick Perry's visit do nothing to address our state's budget needs. All it does is deepen the pockets of those who already have deep pockets. And the Republican-backed push to overhaul our tax codes does nothing to fix our fragile economic recovery. All it does is continue the failed policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

Photo: This scene during protests in Madison, Wis., could apply to Missouri as well. (People's World photo)

Newspaper Guild blasts government moves against journalists

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 12:45:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - The Newspaper Guild's executive council is blasting official government moves to crack down on journalists both in the U.S. and abroad. Crackdowns range from Detroit police hauling in a photographer covering an arrest -- and confiscating her phone's SIM card -- to the British government's seizure of notes and hard drives from the partner of the reporter who broke the story about the U.S. government's extensive data-mining of Americans' phone calls and e-mails.

And the next step in its protest, adds union President Bernie Lunzer, is to construct a "take action" alert that people can implement right now - such as contacting the White House and Attorney General Eric Holder in protest.

The Guild says governmental crackdowns on journalists have accelerated, as has the threat to the flow of information that mass media - including newspapers - provide to people worldwide to help them make informed decisions.

In the U.S., "This administration is worse than that of (George W.) Bush" in going after journalists, Lunzer said. "We need to create more pressure" to enforce a halt, he added. "With the British government smashing hard drives and everything else going on, it's getting pretty bad."

And the U.S. "should be ashamed of" the bad example it is setting for the rest of the world, the TNG council said.

"The public's right to know is in grave jeopardy as journalists - locally, nationally and globally - face shocking levels of government interference and intimidation," the council added. "The recent detention of the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald at Britain's Heathrow Airport, and seizure of his laptop, cellphone and other materials, is only the latest high-profile example of authorities' abuse of power.

"In the United States, revelations about federal authorities tracking journalists' cell phone records and even their movements have a chilling effect on reporters and potential whistleblowers. A New York Times reporter is being threatened with jail if he refuses to disclose the source of a leak.

"In cities across the country, police have become almost brazen in arresting photographers and journalists simply doing their jobs at crime scenes and public protests," the statement added.

Besides the arrest of Detroit newspaper photojournalist Mandi Wright on July 11, and confiscation of her cell phone, other incidents include Oakland, Calif., police arresting journalists who were reporting on a sweep there of an Occupy encampment last year.

"The (Detroit) police response is emblematic of a trend in this country," the union said after Wright's arrest and 6-1/2-hour detention. "Too frequently, law enforcement officers believe they have the right to stop journalists and others from recording and photographing incidents taking place in public view.

"The all-purpose excuse, 'security concerns,' is commonly used to silence journalists and trample the public's right to know," the Guild stated. The Guild and its Detroit local warned police they would not silently tolerate further infringements.

Egyptian soldiers enforcing a curfew shot dead Tamer Abdul Raouf, Beheira bureau chief of the state newspaper Al Ahram. Raouf was driving a car with an official press badge, after interviewing Beheira's governor following the army crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood on August 15 that left more than 900 Brotherhood supporters and more than 40 police dead..

The soldiers also wounded Raouf's colleague, Hamed al-Barbari, the New York Times reported. When al-Barbari, speaking from his hospital bed, started contradicting military accounts of the shooting, the military arrested him, in the hospital.

"The United States should be ashamed of the example it is setting for the rest of the world with regard to press freedoms and the public's right to know. One has to wonder if Britain would have detained Miranda in the absence of the U.S. campaign to crack down on truth-tellers," the executive council concluded.

Photo: The offices of the Guardian and its sister paper, The Observer, Aug. 19. The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, said British agents oversaw the destruction of an unspecified number of his newspaper's hard drives. Raphael Satter/AP

The power and hope of the March on Washington

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 16:17:00 +0000

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - I was a 16-year-old student at Camden High School when I traveled from New Jersey to Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963, to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In the days leading up to the march, radio programs and newspapers blared warnings of bloodshed on the National Mall. This provocation made me even more determined to attend.

My family talked for weeks about the march and its significance to ending Ku Kl ux Klan terror. We picketed Woolworth's five and dime store to protest their refusal to serve Black people at their lunch counter. We watched in horror as civil rights workers were killed and beaten. Now it was time to bring the whole civil rights movement together as one in our nation's capital.

When we arrived in Washington, the massive outpouring of people from all over the country, dressed in their Sunday best, so peaceful and respectful and looking out for each other, brought me to tears of joy. Unions handed out signs to carry. I wrote down the name of each speaker and performer on my souvenir program, which I treasure to this day.

This march was a turning point in the long, hard journey to break through Jim Crow segregation and win passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. It made an indelible impact on my life. It showed me the power of collective action, and the necessity to stand up for justice. It also showed me that the struggle for equality is ongoing. As I searched for the vehicle to forge multi-racial unity, I found my home in the Communist Party.

It was thrilling to be part of the local organizing for the 50^th Anniversary March on Washington and to travel, this time from New Haven, Conn., to Washington with a bus full of young people age 7 on up looking for hope and eager to act. Once at the march, they collected over 200 signatures on petitions for the Youth Jobs Act introduced by Rep. John Conyers and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

"Stand your ground" laws, the Supreme Court decision to gut the Voting Rights Act, and devastating unemployment brought forth an outpouring from across the country with a clear message - we won't go back! The historically progressive leadership of African American and labor organizations who had convened the original march now opened the way for everyone under attack to come together on the National Mall in a powerful display of unity.

"My question is," said one youth leader on the bus ride home, "what are we going to do after the march?" Many on the bus responded by signing up to work on the fierce campaign under way in New Haven to re-elect members of the Board of Alders who are union workers and allies to a second term so they can continue the progress made so far for jobs, youth services and safe streets.

The corporate elite do not want the power of the 50^th Anniversary March on Washington to take hold. They will use the media to minimize it. It is up to those who participated to bring the message home to every community that racism, bigotry and anti-union baiting have gotten in the way of progress for far too long.

"This shows that it is not just one city, not just one state, it is the whole country that must organize and change," declared a neighborhood leader and union activist in Washington for the first time.

The message of the march is for action, organizing, voter registration and get-out-the-vote. This is the time to demand and elect a Congress that will address structural racism and economic inequality and expand democratic rights by passing a new voting rights act that expands participation rather than blocking it; passing immigration reform with a way to citizenship; investing in massive job creation that rebuilds our infrastructure and creates an economy based on sustainability instead of war production; and investing in public education from preschool to college.

The courageous 1963 march inspired many young people to continue in the struggle for equality, peace and justice through their lives. Today, in the face of an all-out attack on working people, on Black and Latino youth and elected officials, the courageous 50^th Anniversary March can serve to inspire the next generation of leaders to build bigger and stronger unity that can carry the struggle for equality, peace and justice to a higher level.

Photo: Mikaila, age 9, getting page after page of signatures on a petition to support the Youth Jobs Act, during the 50^th Anniversary March on Washington, Aug. 24, 2013. Lisa Bergmann/PW

King's dream confronted "giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism"

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 14:56:00 +0000

After Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historic and heroic 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech, where he opposed the U.S. war in Southeast Asia, he received a barrage of criticism from editorial boards, donors and even other civil rights leaders.

Ralph Bunche (who in 1950 became the first person of color to receive the Nobel Peace Prize) told the New York Times, "[King] should realize that his anti-U. S. in Vietnam crusade is bound to alienate many friends and supporters of the civil rights movement and greatly weaken it - an ironic twist for a civil rights leader."

King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference faced both financial and political repercussions for not "staying in their lane" and just sticking to "civil rights issues."

Today some have questioned the need for the peace movement to stand up for racial equity. How, they ask, does justice for Trayvon Martin, immigrant rights or ending racial profiling contribute to changing U.S. foreign policy?

They clearly have a lot to learn from the legacy of Dr. King.

If peace activists can applaud the courage of Dr. King's linking the "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism" in 1967, then why do they not see the need to do the same today?

Unfortunately, many in today's social justice movement have lost sight of the vital links between racial equity, economic justice and peace.

Just as racism and bigotry is part of a system of maintaining power and privilege, so is militarism and a foreign policy premised on the threat of military action and nuclear annihilation.

Racism is not an accident or a happenstance of history, and neither is militarism. It is also bound to maintaining the privilege of the 1 percent and is fortified and enforced by what President Eisenhower called the "military industrial complex."

The brilliance of Dr. King's leadership is that he saw that segregation and racism prop up the system of the rich and powerful and is essential to their ability to maintain control. He knew that as long as the vast majority of people - what we have come to call the 99% - were divided, the rich and powerful would control the direction of government policy, the levers of the economy and our future.

Peace Action and many in the broader peace movement stood with those who were outraged over the murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager killed in Florida. We understand that the policies of the 1 percent seek to divide the natural allies in the struggle for a more just and peaceful community and world. We know that we must struggle for peace and justice both at home and abroad.

The peace movement has a stake today in building a movement powerful enough to challenge those who would restrict voting rights or violate civil liberties with racial profiling. Not only because it is morally right - which it is - but because it is a necessity in order to build a much broader and more powerful movement capable of ending militarism and building a new relationship between the U.S. and the rest of the globe.

On the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs, Justice and Freedom, Peace Action joins with all those who celebrate the legacy of the civil rights movement and the life of Dr. King. The organizers of the August 24, 2013, March on Washington said, "it's not a commemoration, it's a continuation." What better time to reflect on the movement building lessons of the civil rights movement.

The peace movement must help fulfill the dream of Dr. King. Fifty years later the struggle against racism, materialism, and militarism continues. It's our responsibility.

Peace Action was one of the co-sponsors of the 50^th Anniversary March on Washington.

Reposted from Common Dreams.

Judith Le Blanc is the field director for Peace Action, the largest grassroots peace group in the US. jleblanc@peace-action.org

Photo: The Rev. Al Sharpton, center, carries the banner with other civil rights and labor leaders at the 50^th Anniversary of the March on Washington to "realize the dream."(via American Federation of Teachers)

No U.S.-NATO intervention in Syria

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 11:02:00 +0000

Pressure for a direct military intervention in Syria by the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, Israel and the reactionary Gulf Arab monarchies is reaching a critical point. At any moment, we could hear about drone strikes or attempts to set up a no-fly zone and other acts of war. The American people, in public opinion surveys, have already indicated that they don't want the U.S. to go to war in Syria. Now is the time to speak up loudly, before it is too late.

The current drumbeat for intervention has been stimulated by news stories about a chemical weapons attack on Damascus suburbs, which is said to have killed hundreds of people and sickened many more. Assertions are being made, before the facts can be analyzed scientifically and objectively, that the attack came from the forces of Syrian President Bashir Assad. The Assad government rejects these accusations and claims that the rebels were responsible.

British Foreign Minister William Hague has stated that the NATO powers and allies can circumvent the United Nations Security Council and go straight into armed intervention. The Turkish and French governments are making similarly belligerent declarations. Within the Obama administration, civilian advisors are urging the president to plunge in, while apparently the military is being more cautious.

We do not defend Assad and his government. We remember how, during the Iraq war, that government was only too eager to cooperate with the Bush administration in one of its most barbaric acts, the "extraordinary renditions" and torture of people who had been convicted of no crime. And the Assad regime's political repression has evidently spurred wide domestic opposition.

However, the Syrian armed rebels, as widely reported, include people whose actions have been just as brutal and, more importantly, who threaten to set up a state which they say will repress entire social and religious groups in Syria, including members of the Alawite branch of Islam (to which Assad and some members of his government belong), Christians, Shia Muslims and others. Furthermore, the Al Nusra Front, one of the most powerful sections of the rebel force, has connections with Al Qaeda and is likely to sweep more moderate rebel forces aside very quickly if the government falls. The human rights situation is likely to worsen sharply if such people take state power. These are not friends of the American people.

An escalated war can well set the whole Middle East afire. It is already lapping over Syria's borders into Iraq and Lebanon, and threatening to involve Jordan and other states as well, including possibly Iran.

We question the motives of this sudden push for a massively escalated war. Although Syria is not a big oil producer, its central geographical location in the region makes it a crucial piece of real estate for those who want to control Middle Eastern oil resources. We find it repugnant when concern about human rights is used to promote the oil agenda of international monopoly capital. It is also hypocritical that an alliance which includes feudal despotisms such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States should claim the mantle of defending democracy, freedom and human rights. The authoritarian government of Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey is also a "strange bedfellow" for defenders of human rights.

It is noteworthy that at the point that the new accusations have arisen, the rebel coalition has been in real trouble. There has been actual fighting between its Islamist and secular branches, and between Arab Islamists and Kurdish elements close to the Turkish border. And most analysts have seen the Syrian government forces as winning at this point. Many commentators point out that it would be illogical and self-destructive for the Syrian government to create a pretext for U.S. and NATO intervention at this juncture.

But what if the chemical attacks do turn out to have come from the government side? Even in such an eventuality, we strongly oppose an escalation of the war via U.S. and NATO intervention. No matter who is to blame for the chemical attacks, an escalated war with U.S. and NATO involvement would be disastrous.

The only acceptable option is for the U.S. and NATO, working cooperatively with Russia, Iran and the UN, to apply their considerable diplomatic and economic power to negotiate a peaceful solution.

It is very late, but perhaps not too late to apply the brakes before we go over the cliff.

We urge all people of goodwill to contact the White House, the State Department and their congressional representatives to demand that the United States pull back from the brink.

Photo: Black columns of smoke rise from heavy shelling in the Jobar neighborhood, east of Damascus, Syria, Aug. 25, 2013. (AP/Hassan Ammar)

Civil rights 2013: a cautionary tale from Alabama

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 17:42:00 +0000

In July of 1963, I was preparing for my senior year at Nashville's Pearl High School. Three years earlier, Diane Nash, John Lewis and other Black college students had marched past our school on their many trips downtown to the Nashville sit-ins. They were members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group that was leading sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Some of Pearl's students were bold enough to sneak out of school to go downtown behind them. Not me.

Little Stevie Wonder's "Fingertips II" was redefining (and refining) rhythm and blues among my generation. Finding the next party with lights hung like Christmas ornaments from the backyard clothes line occupied our time when we weren't consumed with extra credit summer school classes as we aggressively accumulated points toward our coming admissions to college.

In the summer of 1963, the Birmingham demonstrations - which were nonviolent direct actions - were no longer on television, but Medgar Evers, field secretary for the Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had been assassinated in his front yard in Jackson, Miss. For me, news about the civil rights movement became an unsettling blend of darkest tragedies and heady victories.

In Craighead Barber Shop on Nashville's Jefferson Street (the main Black business and cultural artery), Black men debated the pros and cons of the actions of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Whitney Young, SNCC and others. One debate centered on whether Dr. King's coming to town again was good or bad.

I still remember the letdown I felt when the arguments began to turn on the question: What would the good white people think? On one hand, I didn't have the words to describe such deference to how others might feel and, on the other, I felt it was not yet my turn to speak my 16 years of accumulated wisdom and courage to those grown men.

It was at the barbershop that I first heard about the upcoming national "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." When I heard that the march was going to be the subject of the next mass meeting at Clark Memorial Methodist Church - a congregation that had already hosted many of Nashville's civil rights organizing activities - I went. Although, to this day, I can't recall who spoke, who sung or who prayed, I immediately got caught up in the spirit of the meeting.

The speakers talked about the significance of going to Washington, that there would be thousands in attendance and that they wanted youth participation from Nashville. And then someone said one seat was left on one of the buses for a youth. I raised my hand and, before my hand could be recognized, I was running to the front of the church saying I wanted to go.

Mrs. C. E. McGruder, then president of the Nashville NAACP, explained that I had to have my parents' permission to go on the march. No problem, I thought. Mere technicality. Excited, I ran home and breathlessly told my mom that I needed her permission to go to the "March on Washington."

My mother looked at me with a stare I had come to know over my young life of testing her patience. Trying to get ahead of the dooming stare, I told her how important the march would be and how much I wanted to go.

She listened, mostly for me to finish, and said simply, "No, you might get hurt." The decision was final. I ran, but not as fast, back to the church to tell Mrs. McGruder that my mother would not let me go.

What I did not understand at the time was that violence befalling Black folks in the South seeking change at any level and in any venue was a constant reality. What I did not understand was that when racist violence was not absolutely capricious, it was absolutely arbitrary. What I did not understand was that I was being protected by generations of Black mothers' wits against an old, cagey and dangerous foe.

The March on Washington was hailed as the largest protest in American history - and a peaceful one at that. But the glow from the nonviolent march evaporated when, less than three weeks later, four young Black girls were killed in the bombing of Birmingham's 16^th Street Baptist Church. As if to claim dominance over hearts and minds, violence struck three months after the march with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

What has Changed Since 1963?

A year after the march, it was time to go to college. I had decided to go to the University of Tennessee (UT), where I was to major in engineering physics, a five-year interdisciplinary program that combined a technical education with a heavy offering of liberal arts, basic sciences and languages. Graduates of the curriculum were expected to become project managers with companies and institutions such as NASA. The saying was scientists couldn't build anything, engineers had no vision and this profession was needed to manage the two. Vain.

In UT's new thousand-student freshman dorm, the only two African-American students were roommates. Across the hall from my room was another engineering physics major, who stood out among white students because he was friendly to me. Early in that first quarter, he asked if we could study together. I welcomed the opportunity because I loved the idea of team-tackling science and math problems.

After a couple of sessions, however, it became obvious that this teaming wasn't an even deal. I was helping him far more than he was helping me. He asked me what scholarships I had. I told him none, that I was there on educational loans. He expressed some shock, and I asked why. He replied that he was on a full physics scholarship provided by the university. Then I expressed shock. Here I was tutoring a white, out-of-state scholarship student while I was on a college loan.

More on Civil Rights

The U.S. government has filed civil rights charges to protect people from violence since Reconstruction. In 1982, Asian Pacific Islanders voiced outrage over the beating death of Vincent Chin. Civil rights charges were filed a year later. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Voting Rights Act used outdated information and gave states more authority.

It was that moment, in that freshman quarter, I lost my "glad to be here" attitude and opted for something else. By my junior year, I had co-founded UT's Black Student Union, helped elect UT's first African-American student-government president and discovered a haven for challenging my limited worldview - Knoxville's Highlander Center.

The 1963 "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom" called upon the best of the American promise. As Dr. King noted, though the arc of the "moral universe" is long, it bends toward justice. Of that, there was ample contemporary evidence as the global struggles for national liberation resonated with African-American struggles with a call-and-response, mutually reinforcing cadence.

But, looking back over the span of 50 years since the march, other, more sinister, arcs come into view. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s - its gains and the transformations it occasioned - occurred during a period of American economic growth. In addition, from World War II until around 1980, the wealth gap between the poorest American and the richest actually closed. In that economic environment, reactionary and backward reactions to demands for racial justice were heard but not heeded.

On Wages and Jobs

Today, however, with the wealth gap expanding and the middle class on the same downward trajectory as the poor, a near maniacal fear of the future is a potent weapon in the arsenal of political forces that would divide America's families for power and profit. Add the coming majority-minority nation to the mix, and it becomes a potentially toxic brew.

The upcoming March on Washington - called in the era of Supreme Court decisions gutting the Voting Rights Act, a Congress hamstrung by deliberate attempts to frustrate the interests of the people and the presidency, and open economic and political power plays by billionaires desirous of even greater democracy-bending license - has its own challenges to meet. It must address those challenges in what can be, at times, a more threatening environment than that of the 1963 March on Washington. In many ways, the 2013 march has a harder challenge.

The 1963 march carved out new ground. The 2013 March on Washington can be significant in recovering lost ground and building the foundation for a national movement that includes brighter prospects for low- and moderate-income American families, a movement in which those families work together to overcome fear and division, jingoism and xenophobia, racism and sexism.

Or as Dr. King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and declared to the nation 50 years ago this month: "We can never be satisfied...until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream."

Scott Douglas is the executive director of Alabama-based Greater Birmingham Ministries, a multi-faith, multi-racial organization that is dedicated to pursuing social justice, helping those in need and building stronger neighborhoods.

Reposted from Equal Voice.

Photo: Four young marchers singing at the 1963 March on Washington, D.C. Wikimedia Commons.

1963 March on Washington transformed my town

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 16:48:00 +0000

This is the story of one direct outcome of the 1963 March on Washington, to which I went as a member of the Huntington Township Committee on Human Relations in Suffolk County, Long Island.

Just going to the August 28, 1963, march was thrilling. Our group took the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan, and then boarded one of the trains going to Washington. My clearest memories of the trip itself are, first, the loudspeaker voice reverberating through Penn Station: "All aboard for the March on Washington," and, second, seeing the mostly Black railroad workers all along the tracks waving their caps and cheering as the train went by. I still get goose bumps just thinking of that.

The whole day was fantastic, of course, and listening to and watching King and the others, and being among over 200,000 Black and white people who were as one on that day, was surely one of the most inspiring experiences I have ever had.

Shortly after the Washington march, our Huntington Human Relations Committee decided to have our own March on Huntington Town Hall to bring a petition asking for the passage of an open housing ordinance for the township. At the time this was a huge issue, as even middle class black people had a very hard time finding housing because of racial discrimination.

Our local march later that year began with a rally at the Huntington railroad station. Our main speaker was Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the Washington march and a friend of the co-chair of our committee.

Only about 300 people were at the rally, and many of us were disappointed. But Rustin, who was a dynamic speaker in the way that King was (in the way that Black preachers are), assured us that we should not be upset. He said that the important thing is to "go with what you got, and build from there." I can hear his voice now.

After the rally, we started walking up Huntington's Main Street. It was about two miles to the Town Hall. As we walked along, other people - white as well as black - started to join us. By the time we got to the Town Hall to present the petition, there was a crowd estimated by the police at 2,000 people. Man, was Rustin right!

The upshot was that within a year, the Huntington Town Council did pass an open housing ordinance.

It is not likely this all would have happened had it not been for the inspiration of King and the Washington march.

And, yes, I will be at the 2013 March.

Free Chelsea Manning and all political prisoners

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 14:43:00 +0000

For most Americans, the phrase "political prisoner" conjures up images of shady foreign governments plucking dissidents from their beds at night, never to be heard from again. As recent months have driven home, though, political imprisonment doesn't just happen overseas - there are political prisoners here in the U.S., often convicted on the pretext of seemingly apolitical charges. The arrest, unconscionable treatment, and imprisonment of Private Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning represents the most public recent example of this type of political suppression.

Manning, who recently let the public know that she is a transgender woman, faces up to a decade or more in a military prison. She published documentary evidence of U.S. soldiers committing war crimes, revealing the footage through the website WikiLeaks, but to date none of the perpetrators of those crimes have been tried, or charged, or even detained. Neither the military nor the government has investigated the content of the leaked footage. Indeed, no national politician, military leader, or even major media outlet is on the record calling for such an investigation. According to President Obama, it was Manning who "broke the law."

Given the government's extraordinarily selective prosecution, the political motivations for targeting Manning seem undeniable. Chelsea Manning stands as the latest and most publicized in a long line of Americans imprisoned for supposedly threatening state interests. Other famous examples have included American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, and, of course, Communist Party and Black Panther supporter Angela Davis, whose arrest sparked an international movement to "Free Angela and All Political Prisoners." Manning herself has perhaps put it best in her letter to President Obama:

"If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."

Of course, there is one key difference between Manning and most political prisoners: she is a trans woman seeking hormone therapy. "The Army does not provide hormone therapy or sex-reassignment surgery for gender identity disorder," though, states an Army representative. What are her prospects in military prison, then, not just as prisoner of conscience, but also as a trans woman? According to the documentary "Cruel and Unusual," 20% of American trans women are incarcerated at some point in their lives. Most of these women, including Manning, are held in men's prisons. As Manning attempts to begin transition, she is locked up in a men's military prison, under the authority of a military and political administration that appears to consider her a traitor. Given that the Army has issued a blanket refusal to deny her the trans-specific medical care that she needs, this author doubts that she will face very good treatment while in military custody.

Political imprisonment, of course, is nothing new. However, each time the state commits it, we must organize and resist - we might recall, for instance, the Free Angela movement and how it galvanized countless people across the world against Angela Davis's racist, anti-Communist detention. Many, of course, are working on behalf of Chelsea Manning, including supporting her appeal to the White House for clemency, but as the capitalist state keeps suppressing those who threaten the status quo, we must create nothing short of a mass movement to free her, free all political prisoners, and finally free all of humanity from oppression and exploitation.

Photo: Free Bradley Manning Support Network

Three generations march on Washington

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 14:23:00 +0000

I'm very proud that my father and uncle, Joe and Dennis Mora, were both at the 1963 March on Washington, one of many demonstrations and activities they participated in during the civil rights heyday.

They went separately, my uncle on a bus organized by a Jewish organization in Brooklyn (with a "built-in governor so it didn't go above 40 mph, and needless to say, no air conditioning"); my father with other members of CORE - Congress on Racial Equality - from suburban Rockland County.

When I grew up, I followed in their footsteps - sometimes literally - attending the 20^th anniversary march in 1983 and the 30^th in 1993. And this year I'm going to the 50^th anniversary march and bringing my 16-year-old daughter.

So I called both of them to ask three questions: Why did you go to the march? What do you remember? What do you think about the situation in terms of civil rights and the struggle against racism today?

My uncle, who has a big intellect and heart (and played a big role in the anti-Vietnam war struggle as one of the Fort Hood 3), is alas, a man of few words. So I have to be satisfied with the picture he emailed as an answer to the first question. And of course a picture is worth a thousand words - and this one beautifully captures the power of the movement and its demands.

My father, also a wonderful person and one of the millions of unsung foot soldiers of both the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements, is a great storyteller. From him I got this moving, vivid memory, in answer to the second question:

"I had been to other marches before, but this one, the subject, the person - Martin Luther King - was a big draw. And though just being there was exciting enough, the more emotional thing for me was what happened as the bus drove towards the Lincoln Memorial. The streets on both sides were lined with people, mainly African Americans, cheering and clapping, shoulder to shoulder, all the way, 15-20 blocks straight. And of course on the bus we were all singing "'We Shall Overcome.'"

My uncle had a similar experience: "The reception we got as we drove down the D.C. streets made the uncomfortable ride worth it. People lining the side walks, Black & White, clapping and greeting us like liberation heroes. Bobby Zimmerman & Joan Baez not so much, but loved the UAW marchers that we met and talked to (little did I know that 16 years later I would be a member of same)." And to my last question, he said, "The legacy of slavery is long and deep-rooted, but with your actions today you are helping to extirpate that inhuman evil. Thank you for holding high the torch of freedom, and carrying it on."

So my father and uncle answered the first two questions, and the fact that my daughter and I, with their blessing, are going to the march this Saturday, kind of answers the last question about the status of the struggle today. Although there have been many advances made and historic firsts (President Obama!), our country has a very long way to go before racism and poverty are eliminated, and all people are treated equally, fairly, and with dignity.

Photo: Dennis Mora holds a sign demanding federal intervention in Selma, Ala., during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (Courtesy of Dennis Mora)

Obama outlines proposals to make college affordable

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 13:35:00 +0000

On Thursday, President Obama forcefully brought the issue of student loan debt before an overflow crowd at the University of Buffalo's Alumni arena. Over 7,000 people filled the 6,000-seat stadium. (See video of speech at end of story.)

"Higher education cannot be a luxury - it is an economic imperative," Obama declared. "Every American family should be able to afford to get it."

And yet most cannot afford it: the cost of college tuition is a crisis that almost every student faces.

Previous generations didn't have to deal with this problem. The Buffalo News reports, "In recent years Obama said, there has been a striking rise in the cost of tuition, which has been outpacing wages - with states spending less, and families taking out more loans."

In fact, Obama said college costs have risen 250 percent in the last 30 years while family wages have risen only 16 percent during the same period.

Ever escalating costs create a vicious cycle of associated problems. Rising debt for example, is slowing down graduates obtaining degrees. Because of the overwhelming cost, instead of students attending all of the classes they need, they only take the classes they can afford. This prolongs their education, which simultaneously prolongs the time needed to enter the workforce.

Obama said, "Our economy can't afford the $1 trillion in outstanding student loan debt, much of which may not get repaid because students don't have the capacity to repay it."

To really put things into perspective, look at the president's own personal situation. He and Mrs. Obama just paid off their debt nine years ago. Imagine: they have been paying off their college debt longer than Obama's entire political career!

Today, the average debt for a student is $26,000, almost the equivalent to the average salary of minimum wage worker.

How did we get to a point to where a college graduate's debt is a minimum wage worker's salary? Why are we seeing people fall victim to overwhelming costs on services that used to be so affordable that they were dang near free?

Obama put it this way, "We can't price the middle class and everybody working to get into the middle class out of higher education."

In Buffalo, the president proposed a three step policy to begin to address these issues: a ratings system to measure how efficient colleges are in working to keep tuition costs down; more innovation and competition among schools; and helping students manage their loan debt.

The rating system would by 2015 measures schools on issues like " tuition, graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and the percentage of lower-income students who attend." Financial aid would based in part on these rankings.

Under the president's proposal student debt would be capped at ten percent of discretionary income.

After the president's speech, criticism from the right was fast to come. Rep. Ron Kline, R-Minn., who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said he is "concerned that imposing an arbitrary college ranking system could curtail the very innovation we hope to encourage, and even lead to federal price controls."

The Republican National Committee branded Obama's latest trip as a "Lame Duck Bus Tour" with little substance.

Students, educators and parents however are likely to rally around Obama's higher education initiatives. While no policy or legislation is perfect, the White House's proposals are an important start.

In order for it to have a chance at passing however, Congress has to be lobbied and lobbied hard. Many on the right may reject the president's plan, but bringing our voices to the floor will at least show the nation stands behind solutions and not inaction.

As Bill Nowak of the Sierra Club said on Thursday in Buffalo "The president and governor can only do what mass movements allow them to do. A lot of our friends are going in there (to hear Obama)," he said. "He needs people to stand behind him."

On Friday, Obama will speak at the State University of New York at Binghamton before concluding the trip at Lackawanna College in Scranton, Penn., where he will be joined by Vice President Biden.

The president is on the right track. We know that there needs to be a fundamental change and Obama knows this as well: "Our national mission is not to profit off student loans" the president stressed. "Our national mission must be to profit off having the best-educated workforce in the world."

An educated workforce is key to the liberation of the workforce period. Because knowledge is power, the working class needs to possess and use it so that it may become the power that restructures the nation back to a society that works for it and not the few at the top.

Photo: President Obama speaks to students, faculty and families at the University of Buffalo, Aug. 22, on a plan to make college affordable. (White House)

Three days on bus, then dancing at March on Washington

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 13:30:00 +0000

I was a 28 year-old peace activist in San Francisco in 1963 when I got a call from Women for Peace asking if I'd like to go to the March on Washington as one of their delegates. They said apologetically that they couldn't afford plane tickets, would I be okay with three days and two nights on the Congress of Racial Equality bus going there and three nights and two days coming home. Sure, I said.

I didn't know the other peace delegate, a young black woman named Maryann, but we settled in to the very back seat and talked the whole way to Washington. There was a film crew on the bus, headed by Haskell Wexler, making a documentary. We were told that if they zeroed in on us in the middle of a conversation we should just go on with it as if they weren't there. When Maryann and I were in the middle of a conversation about the death penalty they asked us to move to different seats and start over because the motor was making too much noise where we were. We tried starting over, but it wasn't the same.

Before we left, Women for Peace organizers had told us that they barely had money to get us there and back, and none for bail, so we were not to do anything that would get us arrested. We agreed. But the morning of the march, when we were waiting in the designated hotel lobby for the rest of the California delegation so we could all march together, a bunch from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee came in, singing and conga-lining, and Maryann and I just fell in with them. To hell with the California delegation!

As we approached the White House on our way to the National Mall, we wondered if they planned to sit-in or something. We kept following them, singing. If we got arrested, so be it. They passed the White House and we got to the Mall, at the far end of the reflecting pool from the stage.

I have never been in such a huge crowd of people being extra nice to each other. We listened to a lot of speeches and songs. Then Maryann and I got restless and began to walk back to where our bus was parked among the hundreds of busses. We were between government buildings on one of the streets leading off the Mall when we heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. begin his speech. The sound system carried perfectly, so we stood and listened to the whole speech. Then we went to our bus.

There was no film crew on the trip home. The anticipation was over and we sprawled out, tired and relaxed. I kept up with Maryann for a while, then we lost touch.

While I was in Washington, my then husband and some of his friends hiked to the top of Mt. Whitney. I was sorry to miss that, but I'm glad I was where I was.

March on Washington volunteer recalls Bayard Rustin, tears

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 12:48:00 +0000

In 1963, I was a volunteer at the March on Washington's headquarters in Harlem. Under the leadership and direction of Bayard Rustin and his lieutenants, others and I stuffed envelopes, answered phones, provided information, and organized transport to Washington.

On the eve of the march, my task, with others, was to load people onto the fleet of buses leaving from the office and ensure that everyone who wanted to go got a seat on a bus. The last bus left close to midnight, I think, and there was no seat left for me. In the morning, I went out to La Guardia Airport and jumped on a shuttle to Washington. As the plane flew low over Washington I looked out the window and my heart sank. I couldn't see any people on the ground. Would the promised numbers not materialize? Then I suddenly realized that what I was seeing was not the ground but the masses of people; so many people that the streets below were completely covered. I burst into tears. That memory has stayed with me for 50 years; I didn't need the invitation to write about it to recall it.

Everyone knows about Dr. King's magnificent speech but I feel it is important that Rustin's role and influence has recently been recognized and written about. I'm glad too that in recent times the focus on the March on Washington has broadened to include a reminder that it was a march for jobs as well as for freedom and equal treatment. Bayard himself always acknowledged and paid tribute to others in the movement who supported the march: the trade union leaders, especially of course A. Philip Randolph, the leaders of national and local progressive churches and synagogues, the community activists from all across the United States. The march office remained open and functioning for a time after August 1963 and the phone calls and letters (well before email of course) that came in provided evidence that all those people, in organizing participation on the day, were also building activist movements and participation in the ongoing struggle for "jobs and freedom."

A postscript: Earlier that year I and others had participated in a sit-in at the office of the governor of New York to protest work on state building projects being carried out by companies and unions who would not hire or accept as members Black workers. We were arrested for trespassing and during the week of the march we had been in court. Our lawyers, Percy Sutton and Mark Lane, asked that our trial be suspended for the day of the march so that we could go to Washington. We were astonished that the judge granted their request. In retrospect it may have had to do with Sutton's position and influence in the Democratic Party - he had been Manhattan Borough president, and judges were elected.

Photo: March on Washington 1963 exhibit installation from the National Museum of American History, 1983-1984.

Building a racial justice movement

Wed, 21 Aug 2013 15:11:00 +0000

This week, the nation will celebrate the 50^thanniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with events in Washington, D.C., and many other cities. A hot summer of race news-Moral Mondays to preserve voting rights in North Carolina, the efforts of the Dream 9 to expose the vagaries of our immigration policy, and those of the Dream Defenders to undo Florida's Stand Your Ground law-have led many to speculate on whether we are at the start of a new civil rights movement.

We are definitely at the brink of something. I hope that it is a racial justice movement, one that builds on the legacy of civil rights while bringing crucial new elements to our political and social lives. We have a chance to explore fundamental questions like the nature of racism, what to do with the variety of racial hierarchies across the country, and how to craft a vision big enough to hold together communities who are constantly pitted against one another.

Using the racial justice frame allows us to fight off the seductive, corrupt appeal of colorblindness, which currently makes it difficult to talk about even racial diversity, much less the real prize of racial equity. Such language also allows us to move beyond the current limitations in civil rights law to imagine a host of new policies and practices in public and private spaces, while we also upgrade existing civil rights laws at all levels of government. Finally, the modern movement has to be fully multiracial, as multiracial as the country itself. The number and variety of communities of color will continue to grow. If all of our communities stake out ground on race, rather than on a set of proxies, we will more likely be able to stick together when any one of us is accused of race baiting.

The need for plain speech

We cannot solve a problem that no one is willing to name, and the biggest obstacle facing Americans today is that, in the main, we don't want to talk about race, much less about racism. Our societal silence makes room for inventive new forms of discrimination, while it blocks our efforts to change rules that disadvantage people of color. Unless we say what we mean, we cannot redefine how racism works or drive the debate toward equity.

Americans define racism as individual, overt and intentional. But modern forms of racial discrimination are often unintentional, systemic and hidden. The tropes and images of the civil rights era reinforce the old definition. People taking on new forms constantly look for our own Bull Connor to make the case. We can find these kinds of figures. But there's inevitably debate about whether they truly hit the Bull Connor standard, as we can see in popular defenses of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Gov. Rick Scott. Politicians, employers and public administrators have all learned to use codes for the groups they target.

The notion that all racism is intentional and overt is a fundamental building block of the false solution of colorblindness.

The obsession with examining the intentions of individual actors in order to legitimize the existence of racism undermines efforts to achieve justice. This is because the discussion of racism in the U.S. is devoid of any mention of history, power or policy. The person who notices racial disparities in health care, for example, is vilified for so-called race baiting, while someone like Rep. Steve King is virtually unchallenged when he puts up a sign referring to the State Children's Health Insurance Program as "Socialized, Clintonesque, Hillary Care for Illegals and Their Children." Hey, he didn't say Latino illegals, so that's not racist.

Fifteen years of brain research have revealed that ignoring racial difference is impossible, and that most human beings are unconscious of their biases. Thus getting people to acknowledge and change their biases voluntarily is often very difficult, and if it does happen, is insufficient to address the institutional problem.

Even people who don't dismiss the need for race talk entirely often have the wrong end goal in mind. They encourage respect for diversity, or multiculturalism. Those are both good things. But neither one is the same thing as justice. It is entirely possible to have a diverse community, city or workplace that is marked by inequity. In restaurants I've worked in and observed, the white workers in the dining room get along perfectly well with black and Latino workers confined to the kitchen and dishroom, but they are not in an equitable situation. In being explicit about working on racial justice, our modern movement has a chance to push past the diversity goal and define justice.

Justice and rights aren't the same

Justice can include civil rights laws, but civil rights laws don't always include justice. The difference between the two is suggested for me in that old school precursor to jokes, "There oughta be a law." There ought to be lots of laws and we won't get them unless we recognize the limits of the laws we have now in relation to justice.

Here is NOLO Press's plain language definition of civil rights:

"Rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, the 13th and 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution. Civil rights include civil liberties (such as the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion), as well as due process, the right to vote, equal and fair treatment by law enforcement and the courts, and the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of a democratic society, such as equal access to public schools, recreation, transportation, public facilities, and housing."

"Civil" refers largely to political rights, but communities of color need change in economics and culture, too, the kind of change that hasn't yet been encoded in the law. People of color should be able to see ourselves on television and in movies as something other than villains far more often than we do now, but there is no law that calls this a "right." Food justice would mean that people could get access to fresh produce at reasonable prices within a short distance from their homes, yet no law punishes grocery store chains for abandoning poor neighborhoods of color. But laws and other structures could be crafted to change these arrangements that too many people currently accept as "just the way it is."

In fact, over time, the kinds of rules and regulations that once supported cultural rights, such as the fairness doctrine in communications law, have been steadily gutted by the same deregulation that created Fox News.

People should not be subjected to exploitation on the job, but labor laws, including those against discrimination that are in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, don't get us anywhere near workplace justice. After New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse examined the comment threads from his reporting on the growing fast food workers strikes, he was moved to tweet that he'd never seen such lack of sympathy for workers. Research by Topos reveals that most Americans do not think of crappy jobs as exploitive jobs. They think "entry level" jobs are meant to pay little, and they put all the responsibility for improvement on the workers themselves, in the form of further education to get a better job. That sentiment was borne out again and again in Greenhouse's comment thread. The fact that people of color, especially black people, are heavily concentrated in the fast food industry strikes me as the trigger for that kind of easy victim blaming.

The language of justice simply gives us more options for articulating what fairness looks like than does the language of civil rights. Only a big, broad vision will be exciting enough to mobilize Americans for the hard thinking and action required to meet our upcoming challenges. The country's changing demographics are at the top of the challenge list for me.

Going multiracial

When the March on Washington took place in 1963, there was also organizing among Latino, indigenous and Asian communities. These communities were often inspired by and related to the movement against Jim Crow segregation in the South, and they had their own forms of exploitation and discrimination to confront. The exploitive Bracero Program, which recruited Mexican guest workers for farmwork, had to be ended, and so did its brutal aftermath, Operation Wetback, which deported those same workers when they dared to overstay. The effects of Japanese American internment had to be addressed, and American Indians were trying to protect families from having their kids stolen right through the 1970s.

Connections surely existed between these groups during the 1960's, and they cannot be minimized. I know, however, that those ties were not nearly as strong as they need to be today.

My own experience as an immigrant, racial justice organizer has convinced me that building a container that can hold all the experiences different people of color have with racial hierarchy is critically important to prevent further loss of civil rights victories-even more so if we are to expand those victories. The vast changes in our national demographics are largely due to one of the benefits of the civil rights era: the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the policy that enabled my people, Indians, to enter the U.S. in significant numbers.

Yet many Indian immigrants and their descendants are all too eager to distance themselves from that very same movement, accepting a role as the "solution" to the "problem" of black insurgence. My friend Vijay Prashad has written beautifully about this phenomenon in "The Karma of Brown Folk." The racial profiling of South Asians, Arabs, and Muslims following September 11 shocked many of us into a new awareness, but it is still possible, for example, for middle class South Asian Americans in particular to resist the profiling of us, while engaging in the profiling of others.

I say this as an immigrant who has spent countless hours arguing with other immigrants and refugees who refuse to acknowledge our place in a racial hierarchy, and to take that into account as we fight for our own freedom. It has taken a long time, for example, for immigrant rights marches to stop featuring Latinos and Asians holding signs saying "we are not criminals," implicitly distancing themselves from the people who are stereotypically cast in the role of "criminal." And, no, I do not mean white men in suits committing financial crimes. If the immigrant rights movement had embraced racial justice from the beginning, we would have had far fewer debates about whether the "innocence" or "exceptional" frames would save us, and we would have been more able to ward off efforts to pit native-born black people against the immigrant rights agenda.

We can and must get to the place where we all see ourselves as one movement, rather than as a collection of movements working in solidarity with one another. It's a subtle shift, but one that would serve us well. Being one movement doesn't mean we have to lose the specificity of our experiences and solutions, but it does mean that we can engage in a level of joint analysis, planning and action that would make the most of each community's assets. I can tell you, the leaders and foot soldiers of a single movement talk to each other far more often than do the leaders and foot soldiers of allied movements.

The seminal event we commemorate this week was a march for "jobs and freedom," not a march for civil rights. We can assert collective strength and unity toward those goals with analysis that is explicit about race, campaigns that fight for economic and cultural as well as political change, and organizing that is grounded in a multiracial constituency.

A few months before the 1963 march, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." There is a modern expression of this most fundamentally moral concept, and inserting that idea into the body politic is our own generation's responsibility.

This article was reposted from Color Lines.

Photo: Joshua Trujillo/seattlepi.com/AP

Bar Association condemns “panic” defense in LGBTQ murders

Wed, 21 Aug 2013 13:23:00 +0000

Getting away with murder can be much easier if the victim is transgender or gay. So it's a major step forward that the American Bar Association has now officially condemned "panic" defenses used to justify such crimes.

In a trial, sometimes a defendant accused of attacking an LGBTQ person in a hate crime will admit to the assault - but will claim that the victim's sexual orientation or gender justified their actions. The "gay panic" and "trans panic" defenses claim that the perpetrator of hate violence could not help hurting or killing a gay person who made a sexual advance or a trans person whose gender identity they just discovered. The nation's lawyers, though, now officially reject these "panic" defenses. The American Bar Association, a national lawyers' professional organization, unanimously passed a resolution at its most recent meeting calling for an end to the use of these defenses in court - thus sending a strong message that legally excusing anti-LGBTQ violence is unacceptable. The resolution not only condemns these legal tactics, but calls on legislatures to enact laws banning them, and encourages judges not to accept them in court.

Such "panic" defenses were famously invoked by Matthew Shepard's killers in 1999, and by the men who murdered Gwen Araujo, a teenage trans woman living in California, in 2002. In each of these cases, the heterosexual-identified male defendants confessed to the murders they committed - but said that a gay man flirting with them, or the trans identity of a woman they had slept with, was enough to excuse homicide.

Of course, the gay and trans panic defenses only come into play after violence has been committed. Transphobic and homophobic violence are endemic in the United States and across the world. While all LGBTQ people (as well as straight people perceived as LGBTQ) face the risk of assault, trans women of color bear the brunt of these attacks. Racism, misogyny, and transphobia all come together as trans women of color are killed. Bigotry - racist, anti-LGBTQ, and otherwise - often goes beyond discrimination and harassment, and manifests as violence, including murder. This is why members and supporters of the trans community gather every November in cities across the globe to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, a vigil that mourns the previous year's victims of anti-trans murder.

Thus, the ABA's new official position occurs in the context of a reality of violence that faces many parts of the LGBTQ community daily. While rejecting the gay and trans panic defenses is surely a vital step, people's movements must prioritize stopping anti-trans and anti-gay attacks before a trial needs to happen. Across the country, millions celebrated the Supreme Court's decisions this summer legalizing same-sex marriage in California and striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act. Marriage, however, is one issue among many - and for the most vulnerable LGBTQ people, safety remains a far more pressing concern. The LGBTQ movement, the left, and all people's movements must prioritize defending our communities against racist, transphobic and homophobic violence.

Too many trans and queer people are being killed. It's time for us to defend our sisters, brothers, and comrades. All of us - LGBTQ and straight - need to band together to create a world where hate murder and other expressions of oppression are no more.

Photo: Candlelight vigil in New York's Union Square, July 1, 2012, for lesbian teenagers Mary Christine Chapa and Mollie Judith Olgin, who were shot in a park in Portland, Texas. GLAAD CC 2.0

March on Washington - right place to be in 1963 and 2013

Wed, 21 Aug 2013 10:57:00 +0000

I was 14 years old and going on my first march on Washington.

I had been at the march in Detroit a couple of months earlier. It was huge. It filled Woodward Avenue. It seemed to go on forever.

I remember going to a black church the week before to make posters for the Detroit march. I was the only white kid there. Didn't bother me, I grew up in Detroit in a predominantly black neighborhood. When your parents are communists, you grew up with picket lines and a multicultural view.

For the Washington march there was a train going from Detroit. My older sister and I were going, along with several adult friends we knew. I guess my mother had to work, but she packed sandwiches for everybody.

I don't remember a lot about Washington D.C. and the march itself on that day - Aug. 28, 1963. It was massive, and because of that we were far away, it seemed so far away - and couldn't make out the speakers. It wouldn't dawn on me for some time that I was part of this historic event. I couldn't hear the passionate speeches, but I knew I was in good company and it was the right place to be.

I have my button from that day. It is the one button I value.

It's 50 years later but we still have to march. We're marching for Trayvon. We're marching for voting rights - still! We're marching because our schools and communities are being cast aside. We're still marching for jobs, peace, and equality.

There will be four of us driving in this weekend. I plan to hear the speakers this time.

Photo: An image of one of the original buttons from the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (Courtesy of April Smith.)

Reader voices: Stop attacks on Fourth Amendment

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 12:52:00 +0000

The times, they are a-changin, an appropriate song title written by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in 1964. Fast-forward to our present day and the times are still changing, only not in our favor. Today we find our rights being forcibly stripped from our Constitution by "the powers that be." We can recall the First and Second Amendments being targeted by the Obama administration's evolving attempts to eavesdrop on us at any point in time, deciding on whom they deem to be a domestic terrorist.

Now, we find a new attack from the ruling class on the Fourth Amendment, all in the name of national security. As Americans, one of the most important things that we must do is have an awareness of our Bill of Rights and of our amendments within the United States Constitution. I say this, because in 2008, the Bush administration first announced the suspicion-less, electronics search rules, and two years later the Obama administration pursued an advancement in these same actions creating a "Fourth Amendment free zone," allowing for the search of electronic equipment without establishing reasonable suspicion of those selected for an illegal search.

The Fourth Amendment gives us the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, but because of the Fourth Amendment free zone was created, it does not apply along the borders of our great nation. These designated borders stretch 100 miles inland from our nation's actual border. Sixty-six percent of the U.S. population lives within 100 miles of the land and coastal borders.

From 2008 to 2010, over 6,500 people traveling to and from the United States had their electronic devices searched at the border, with half of these people being U.S. citizens..

For every three Americans, two of them live within this Fourth Amendment Free Zone, which totals to about 197.4 million people. A frightening fact that many might not comprehend, nor might they be aware of. The removal of the Fourth Amendment does not stop there.

In 2011, Indiana's Supreme Court ruled that if a police officer decides to illegally come into your house for any reason or no reason at all, the homeowner is not allowed to do anything to prevent this from happening. Do you get that? If you live in the state of Indiana and a cop decides to invade your home without any legal justification, it is considered a crime for you to do anything to stop them. According to Justice (and I use this term lightly) Steven H. David, "We believe ... a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. By allowing resistance to law-breaking cops unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injury to all parties involved.

If you are not familiar with Steven David's work, he is noted to have served as a chief defense counsel for the Office of Military Commissions, the body authorized to conduct the military commissions to try Guantanamo captives.

What this means to those who live in Indiana, is that they have in fact no rights at all. These actions, if they continue, can push our country towards a direction that can be classified as totalitarianism - enabling the control freaks in power to determine that even when they break their own laws their victims have no right to resist. This is a direct assault on our freedoms as Americans.

If we as Americans do not object to the slithering augmentation of federal tyranny held against we the people over the principle of "protecting our borders," then the rights and freedoms that our forefathers wrote for us will be lost. To reflect upon this article and its meaning, I leave you with two quotations to ponder upon.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. - Thomas Jefferson

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin

Photo: Terence McCormack/Flickr

Who should be the next Fed chair?

Fri, 16 Aug 2013 12:17:00 +0000

Who should be the next Federal Reserve chair? If it were my decision, first I would try to talk Ben Bernanke out of leaving, since he is the closest thing to a "Depression scientist" that has ever been in the job. And, despite the constraints on any chair of a bankers' organization, he was the most resistant to austerity measures of all the major central banks, possibly excepting China's.

The domain of the Federal Reserve is monetary policy: monitoring and managing the supply of money and credit in the economy with a mission of full employment and low inflation. Sometimes these missions are asynchronous, or even in conflict. Bernanke leaned more toward the full employment mission of the Fed than any of his predecessors. Historically the Fed has been accused of leaning more toward inflation fighting than job creation. That is easily explained by the natural fear of bankers, the Fed's strongest constituency, that inflation erodes the values of their loan assets. But sometimes - like now - modest inflation can be a good thing. Interest rates have been near zero since the financial crisis that began the current depression. Yet corporations and hedge funds are hoarding billions in reserves. Inflation can persuade those who are hoarding capital to put it in circulation.

However, one of the chief lessons of the current depression is that monetary policy did nothing to stop the crisis, and, beyond insuring cheap borrowing rates, has had a limited impact on recovery, though things could have turned out much worse had Bernanke not taken the aggressive actions he did. Bernanke repeatedly urged Congress to provide stronger fiscal stimulus to the economy, the primary Keynesian tool to fight depressions.

Fiscal policy includes both taxing and spending policy. While latter day Keynesians recognize monetary policy as a more powerful tool than it was viewed in Keynes' time, they still, like Keynes, require the government to make up declines in aggregate demand with public works, services or simple payments (unemployment, welfare services, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military). A World War II scale of public investment (120 percent of GDP at the time) and stimulus are often cited as the key factor in finally ending the Great Depression.

But there is a problem with the theoretical fiscal remedies: barring cataclysm or war, the class politics of providing sufficient stimulus is nearly impossible politically, especially when so many institutions - Congress, for example - have been captured by corporate and billionaire interests. The truth is that neither monetary nor fiscal fixes are working to either prevent or recover from depressions.

As Paul Krugman indirectly advised in his blog this week, we need to find someone who understands the limits of both monetary and real life fiscal policy. He writes:

At the very least it means that we need "macroprudential" policies -regulations and taxes designed to limit the risk of crisis -even during good years, because we now know that we can't count on an effective cleanup when crisis strikes. And I don't just mean banking regulation.... the logic of this argument calls for policies that discourage leverage in general, capital controls to limit foreign borrowing, and more.

In layman terms, this is equivalent to saying the U.S. economy needs more socialism, more industrial policy, and a rollback of corporate power over the political institutions. Strong medicine - even to provide a framework for recovery in the capitalist sectors of the economy!

So what does this say about who the next Fed chair should be? The president clearly wants a successor to Bernanke who will maintain the emphasis on jobs over inflation. He thinks Larry Summers is that person. Many others support Janet Yellen, current vice chair of the Fed, who would be the Fed's first woman chair. Both are eminently qualified Keynesians, both supporters of Bernanke's policies, although Yellen was somewhat less enthusiastic about financial deregulation than Summers during the tech boom years. At least until unemployment gets significantly lower than the current official rate of 7.5 percent, and perhaps until there is some improvement in workforce participation rates, he wants another Bernanke.

Like Bernie Sanders and others, I would love to see a candidate like Nobel-winning economist Joe Stiglitz get the job. No one better understands the direction economic policy needs to go. Whether that means he could be an effective leader of the Fed is another question. Stiglitz angered many in the 90s when he took on the austerity priests in the World Bank. Being proved right may not have repaired the political and ideological chasms between him and the institution he would be called on to lead.

It is true that Summers bought into the fast money liberalization on Wall Street during the tech boom that contributed to the terrible financial meltdown in 2007. Some say that disqualifies him to be Fed chair. Maybe. He has confessed the errors of that policy. But he is also a first class economist a bit to the left of Bernanke, and a track record of being effective in the hardball environment of bankers and Washington politics.

The Fed will never be a bastion of progressivism. But we need to divide the bosses to move forward. Perhaps the best we can hope for now is to have a Fed chair that will help effect THAT task.

Photo: Larry Summers, left, and Janet Yellen are the two possible candidates to take over the chair of the Federal Reserve.