People Before Profit blog

The "skills gap" myth: What's really driving down wages?

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 16:02:00 +0000

I have been writing quite a bit on income inequality lately with a particular focus on the narratives and values at work in our culture which justify inequality and shape the belief that economic inequality is consistent with a democratic and supposedly egalitarian society. As a society, Americans hold many beliefs that express, with varying degrees of consciousness, a deep commitment to inequality.

For example, I think it's fair to say that many, if not most, Americans seem accepting of the fact that different kinds of work are remunerated differently. We don't hear too many complaints about the doctor or lawyer receiving a higher salary than the custodian or postal worker.
In my own view, we should complain about this disparity. It's not clear to me why people spending forty hours of their week performing socially necessary work deserve more or less than others. Of course, when I express this opinion, I receive lots of complaints.
One of the most frequent objections littering the comment sections at the end of my articles is that jobs being remunerated with a minimum wage are jobs that require minimum skills, making the situation just. Thus, if people want to improve their wages, they need to improve their skills or acquire new ones that merit higher pay. The idea, quite a prevalent one in our society-constituting an almost common sense---is premised on the assumption that wage levels somehow correlate with skill levels.

Busting the "skills mythology"
Yet this "skills myth," as we might call it, is just that, a powerfully dangerous myth that is disarming in its power to cloud our perception of the real forces driving down wages in our economy. The term the "skills gap" has dominated the rhetoric accommodating the American psyche to gross economic inequality, promulgating the illusion that American workers' economic woes are attributable to their own lack of appropriate skills for the jobs demanding the highest salaries rather than to concerted efforts on the part of capital to disempower workers, largely though not exclusively through assaults on labor unions over time, and erode wages.
While in fact many jobs have not changed, studies show that on the whole real wages have been declining in many occupations. Last September, in an economic environment characterized by substantial job creation, CNBC's Jeff Cox reported, "For all the talk about the nearly 250,000 jobs a month the economy is creating, workers' real wages, including the cost of living, are going backward. Average pay in real terms slumped 4 percent from 2009-2014, according to the National Employment Project." That wages are declining in jobs for which the skills required have not altered debunks the myth that wages are declining because the American worker lacks skills. Indeed, the Economic Policy Institute earlier this year presented an analysis suggesting the opposite, concluding, "Workers with a four-year college degree saw their hourly wages fall 1.3 percent from 2013 to 2014, while those with advanced degrees saw an hourly wage decline of 2.2 percent. If demand for high-skilled workers were driving wage inequality, we would expect to see these workers' wages increasing, or at the very least, falling less than their low-skilled counterparts."

The union-busting reality
Thus, it is not workers' lack of skills driving down wages, but the all-out assault on workers and unions. Last July, janitors in the school system in Barrington, Illinois went on strike because their wages were being cut from $9.77 to $8.50 per hour. Did these workers' skills change? Not at all. In the arena of education, given technological developments, teachers actually need to possess more skills than in the past, and certainly not less. Yet the charter school movement has been responsible for driving down teachers' salaries. Why? Because charter schools typically feature a non-unionized faculty, prompting many to understand the charter school movement as a movement largely intended to break powerful teachers' union. Again, the skills required for the work have not changed; rather the assault on workers' rights and on wages has intensified.
In an interview regarding the resurgence of manufacturing in South Carolina, Republican Governor Nikki Haley celebrated the absence of unions in her state, explaining to CNBC's Phil LeBeau, "We don't have unions in here for a reason. And that's because of the complement between the companies and what they know they need to do is value their workforce and it's the workforce who knows they're part of a family and they don't want a middleman getting in the middle of it."
Americans support unions

I guess being part of family means workers give their paternalistic bosses a discount to the tune of ten dollars per hour, which is how much less Boeing's skilled machinists earn in Haley's neck of the woods compared to their unionized counterparts in Washington state. I'm not sure what worker focus group Haley convened to discern workers' perspectives, but her sense of what the workforce wants is noticeably out-of-sync with the recent Gallup poll indicating that Americans' approval of unions has been rising, standing now at 58%, up 5% over the past year and 10% since 2009. The percentage of Americans wanting labor unions to have more influence has also increased 5% to 37%since 2009, while the percentage of Americans wanting unions to have less influence has decreased 7% to 35%.
While perhaps we can't be sure about the exact cause of Americans' growing support for unions, it would be beyond silly to think that the unrelenting assault on wages and workplace rights don't have something to do with this changing perception of the role and need for unions. It seems that workers may increasingly be desiring "a middleman getting in the middle" of that otherwise happy family Haley references, a family riven by the GOP's intensifying agenda of class warfare.

Donald Trump declares war on wages
Of late, the Dickensian rhetoric like Haley's, typical of Republican rhetoric designed to assuage class tensions and deny the reality of the class warfare they wage, has all but disappeared thanks to Donald Trump's involvement in the GOP primary fray and what seems to be his case of political Turrets syndrome.
Indeed, the constant anti-worker statements from Trump, as cruel and outrageous as they might initially seem, actually provide an accurate description of the behavior of America's economic elites in their partnership with Republicans who craft legislation to underwrite their interests. Republicans have reversed the course of Lyndon B. Johnson's quest for the Great Society and the war on poverty, and instead have openly declared a war on the impoverished and those they intend to drive into poverty.
The rhetoric of shared prosperity that informed their celebrated trickle-down economics has disappeared, revealing the frightening reality of the GOP's unabashed keep-the worker-down economics and of its persistent drive to re-distribute wealth from the bottom to the top. Enough is never enough.
The class warfare agenda has been blatantly announced.
Trump, of course, notoriously revealed his ideas for driving down the wages of autoworkers, whom he deems overpaid, by closing and re-locating plants: "You can go to different parts of the United States and then ultimately you'd full-circle---you'll come back to Michigan because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less. We can do rotation in the United States---it doesn't have to be in Mexico." The objective is to make Americans desperate and disempowered so they'll work for even fewer crumbs from the proverbial cake corporate America eats but which the working classes bake.
And if you thought Trump was just putting his foot in his mouth, he doubled down on these comments in a subsequent appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," declaring his antipathy to the minimum wage and arguing that the U.S. could attract more jobs if there were no minimum wage.
Of course my point is that Trump's comments are not idiosyncratic in their content, even if his articulation of this content is unusual. Scott Walker has proudly insisted that the minimum wage "serves no purpose" and stands by his roll-back of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin. Moreover, Trump's strategy for reducing wages perfectly describes what is happening in Haley's South Carolina: corporations are moving there to avoid unions and pay workers less. It's no secret, despite the "happy family" rhetoric that seeks to mask this reality.
If we are going to have a serious discussion of income inequality in this country, we need to see through the damaging and specious rhetoric that justifies inequality in so many people's minds. A common -sense look at what is---and who is---really driving down wages for middle and working class people will show us that the assault on wages is linked to a de-valuing of people and their skills simply in an effort to continue the socially destructive project of re-distributing wealth to the top, increasing profits at workers' expense, and politically crippling the labor movement.

Photo: mSeattle/Flickr CC2.0

Revisiting Baltimore and changing the "racial conversation"

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 14:18:00 +0000

This is part 3 of a 3-part series on the "racial conversation." You can find here part 1 and part 2.

As Don Draper of AMC's hit series Mad Men likes to say, "If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation."

When it comes to the seemingly unceasing and certainly unproductive "racial conversation" in America, we clearly need a change. Mouths move and move, and Black bodies pile up. Just last weekend in Chicago, police shootings of highly dubious justification left two more African Americans dead, even in the wake of the revelations of Laquan McDonald's murder which prompted the scrambling of Chicago's negligent and corporate-minded mayor, Rahm Emanuel, to promise serious reform.

Then last Monday a grand jury in Cleveland moved not to indict police in the murder of 12 year-old Tamir Rice. Earlier in the month a judge in Baltimore declared a mistrial when jurors failed to reach a verdict in the case against the first officer on trial for the death of Freddie Gray. From these events we have to conclude, I think, that the more things stay the same, well . . . the more things stay the same. And we have to ask, what will it take for Black lives to matter?

Racial justice enriches all lives

Or, more to the point, we have to ask, what kind of world do we have to create that will make Black lives matter? We have to ask this question IF we want a world in which all lives matter. While I have issues with those who challenge the "Black Lives Matter" assertion with the assertion of "All Lives Matter" because this substitution fails to recognize the particular ways Black lives, and the lives of people of color generally, have been specifically devalued in U.S. society, I of course believe all lives matter but believe that if we are going to achieve a society and political economy in which all lives matter we need to address the way "race" functions as one of many critical factors in the U.S. political economic system that devalue human life. We all gain from addressing the myriad ways our world works to discount people and justify their oppression.

It may be that one of the chief obstacles to meaningful transformation toward a humane society is the way the "racial conversation" tends to get framed in the dominant cultural and political discourse, figuring efforts to achieve a state of affairs we might call racial justice as necessitating losses for some rather than gains for all. As a society, we don't recognize how the operations of "race" in our society hobble us collectively.

Gains not losses

The dynamic of the conversation now seems to position those asserting Black lives matter as somehow asking for something from the dominant culture that would require great sacrifice or economic loss, as though the uncashed check Martin Luther King, Jr. invoked in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech actually entailed a withdrawal from white Americans' accounts, when what he asked for was payment on the promissory note of equal rights. Discussions of race in the United States that center the concept of white privilege fuel this dynamic, cultivating the perception, indeed the powerful feeling among whites, that the achievement of racial justice in the United States will entail those of the white dominant culture somehow giving something up, losing the benefits of being white. Whether those benefits are ill-gotten or not, the prospect of change that requires having less generates anxiety and resistance, especially in a socio-economic world already characterized by diminishing returns for the working and middle classes.

It's this kind of talk I find not only unproductive but severely misguided and damaging to our best social prospects. African Americans and people of color generally do indeed have a check to cash, but cashing this check will means gains and not losses, morally and economically, for most Americans.

Frederick Douglass and changing the conversation

So, following Don Draper, I'd like to change the conversation by invoking Frederick Douglass and the analysis he offered in his slave narrative The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave about the relationship between racial liberation-the end of racial labor exploitation-and the larger economic self-interest of society at large, including whites.

At the end of his narrative, when he makes it North to freedom in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Douglass finds himself in a state of wonder, mesmerized by and in virtual disbelief of the wealth that appears before his eyes. He sees African Americans and workers of all types living in homes and is amazed at the absence of poverty and suffering. The reason the wealth and high standard of living all seem to enjoy in the North is such a revelation is that heretofore, in the political economy of slavery, Douglass has witnessed the production of wealth for some as entailing the suffering and degradation of many. Imagining wealth being produced without brutalizing many in the process was impossible for him.

The implicit argument in Douglass's narrative is that the most efficient and productive economy is actually the most humane economy. Humanity, as opposed to exploitation and oppression of any kind, is the key to creating an efficient economy that produces a high standard of living for all.

Returning to Baltimore

While Douglass's narrative provides an instructive historical example, interestingly enough, to return to Baltimore where upcoming trials of officers involved in Freddy Gray's death will keep the nation's eyes focused, it is worth remembering that Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos offered a similar analysis last spring in commenting on the mass protest the uprising represented. He pointed out precisely that the economy suffered-meaning it ceased to function efficiently to serve the needs of all-in direct relation to rollbacks in civil and human rights. The devastation of rights, the desecration of humane social practices, he observed, has gone hand in hand with economic devastation. In commenting on the uprising, he focused "neither upon one night's property damage nor upon the acts" but:

"rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American's civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

"The innocent working families of all backgrounds whose lives and dreams have been cut short by excessive violence, surveillance, and other abuses of the Bill of Rights by government pay the true price, and ultimate price . . .We need to keep in mind people are suffering and dying around the U.S. . . . poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don't have jobs and are losing economic civil and legal rights, and this makes inconvenience at a ballgame irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans."

While Angelos does not in any targeted or overt way mention "race" or even specifically talk about the specific situation of African Americans, the context for his comments speaks for itself. He is making clear that the "racial" uprising of African Americans in Baltimore is expressive of the interests of all Americans, or at least working and middle class Americans, if not the "American political elite" he calls out. In avoiding the direct language of "race," I don't think Angelos's point is to privilege "All Lives Matter" over "Black Lives Matter" but to underscore that making sure Black lives matter is the way to make sure that all lives matter.

Racism hurts all

Angelo's comments underscore that the conversation about "race" in America is not a conversation about securing political rights, social equality, and economic well-being for people of color alone but for all. His words make clear that the deployment of "race" as a system of structured inequality in U.S. society works against the interests of all Americans, save perhaps the political and economic elite.

As we change the racial conversation Don Draper-style, we can't submerge issues of race into issues of political economy alone but must recognize that when we talk about race we aren't talking exclusively about the experiences and interests of people of color who have historically endured special exploitation and oppression in U.S. society but about the interests of all. When we have the racial conversation, we are really talking about how to re-organize our society and political economy in the most humane way possible.

The Wire, race and political economy

To return to Baltimore, David Simon's HBO masterpiece The Wire tells a story about the city that highlights this very point. While the events in Baltimore last spring motivated Nation columnist Dave Zirin to re-assess The Wire and harshly critique it for its lack of representation of the social movements alive in Baltimore fighting for collective change, Zirin's assessment fails to see the story of human waste and economic efficiency-and its dialectical opposite-that The Wire does tell.

Throughout season one, a predominant image is that of the drug dealers spending their day on an orange couch in the middle of the projects. When they're not there on the couch, they are using their creativity to outsmart the police, running a drug operation that undermines the health of the community.

In season two, a predominant image is that of under-employed longshoreman sitting on bar stools waiting for work. What binds all these images is that they are symptoms, indeed registers, of an inefficient economy that fails to meet human need and is not designed to make use of all the available human creativity and resources in meeting human need, not serving the destruction of human lives.

As Simon himself has noted, " . . . that's what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15 percent of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy."

Simon's comments ask us to consider whether it isn't time to question the way a capitalist economy values people and shapes social relationships. Race is certainly at the center of season one and throughout the series, but in many ways The Wire urges us to see that we have tended to identify as a " racial" experience or issue is one extending more and more beyond the experience of people of color to everyone. Indeed, Simon notes:

"And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realized it's not just about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?"

While I take issue with Simon's language when he says "it's not just about race . . . It's about class," I do want to suggest that his comments and the story The Wire tells move us to change the racial conversation. It's not that it's about class and not just race; it's that when we talk about race we are already talking about class and talking about a system that impacts all of our lives.

Photo: A mural depicting Freddie Gray at the intersection of his arrest, in Baltimore on Dec. 16. The first trial to determine whether a police officer is criminally responsible for Gray's death from a broken neck in a police van ended with a hung jury and a mistrial. Patrick Semansky | AP

Straight outta everywhere: Learning to listen in the "racial conversation"

Tue, 29 Dec 2015 12:15:00 +0000

This is part 2 of a 3-part series on the "racial conversation." You can find here part 1 and part 3.

The recent release of the Chicago police department dashcam video featuring Officer Jason Van Dyke's shooting of Laquan McDonald reminded us all once again that Black lives really don't seem to matter in U.S. society. Of course, nobody should really need a reminder, right? Haven't we had enough reminders? Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Amadou Diallo, and on and on. Collectively speaking, (white) Americans have one heck of a short memory, I guess, because with each murder, with every new act of violence against and violation of Black lives, we hear the obligatory call for the need to have a racial conversation in America. And then there's a lot of talk. A lot of noise. And then we have another murder.

It's not clear how this whole racial mess in America, by which I mean the unmitigated and unceasing violence against and exploitation of people of color, hasn't been cleared up. I mean, after African-American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was wrongfully arrested by police for breaking into his own house in the summer of 2009, President Obama arranged a sit-down between Gates and the white cop who arrested him. The two talked over a beer, exchanged pleasantries, and supposedly had THE conversation, resolving hundreds of years of violence, exploitation, oppression, discrimination, and prejudice against African Americans and other people of color in the United States. It seemed like we had arrived at the Age of Aquarius, with harmony and understanding as well as sympathy and peace abounding.

Yet, while the conversation seems ongoing and unceasing, somehow it never quite seems to get had. The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1870, granting African American men the right to vote, and somehow in 1965 African Americans and U.S. society at large still found themselves engaged in a struggle to pass a voting rights law to grant citizens rights supposedly they already possessed. Didn't we have that conversation? Not really, it seems, as we keep winding up in the same situation of persistent racial inequality, exploitation, and disenfranchisement-even as we pretend as a society that we are addressing these issues, and even as the Supreme Court recently gutted the Voting Rights Act while the Republican Party moves to disenfranchise voters across the nation.

So why can't that conversation be had? Or, why does it seem to go nowhere-at least nowhere productive of a more humane world?

To have a conversation means people, particularly white people, have to listen and acknowledge reality. What we need to understand is why this is so difficult. As I was thinking about these questions recently, my mind was driven back to F. Gary Gray's film Straight Outta Compton. Released earlier this year, the hard-hitting film relating the saga of the hip-hop group N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude) provides insights into why any meaningful "racial conversation" tends to get short-circuited in American politics and culture, or, more precisely, why white America, to use a generalization that seems necessary, is so hard of hearing on issues of race and racism.

Given that the film dramatizes in full force police violence against and incessant harassment of African Americans in Los Angeles, which are the conditions of production from which N.W.A's music emerges, critics at the time of the film's release remarked on the film's timeliness given the rebellious political actions in Ferguson and Baltimore-and the deaths of African Americans at the hands of police that triggered them-which preceded the film. Yet, we might also ask, when wouldn't the film be timely, given the rather persistent violence against people of color in a U.S. society that has been racist since its inception? What seemed to make the film timely for some critics, we need to stress, was that mass protests in Ferguson and Baltimore drew attention to police violence against African America, not that fatal police violence against African America somehow erupted anew or became timely. Indeed, both the spate of media attention given to police shootings of African Americans and the critical attention characterizing Straight Outta Compton as timely actually accentuate the lack of attention given historically to the normalized conditions of police repression in African American communities.

What critics haven't remarked on in Straight Outta Compton and what is perhaps one of the most impactful elements of the story is the way the film diagnoses why this "racial conversation" is so hard to have, or why white America has such a hard time acknowledging and listening to the reality of racial oppression in America. The film highlights in part the production and release in 1988 of N.W.A.'s first album Straight Outta Compton, which featured the controversial song "F-k tha Police." While we see represented in abundance in the film the relentless police harassment and assault on young African American men which inspires and justifies the song, the film also highlights its vexed if not overtly racist critical reception in white America. Not only do we see the Detroit police warn N.W.A. before a concert not to perform the song and then later swarming and rounding them up for arrest afterward, but we also see respected "lame-stream" media icon Tom Brokaw using his network news bully pulpit to lambaste N.W.A. for hitting new cultural depths in its music.

Certainly, any of us of who lived through the late 1980s and the 1990s remembers the controversy and outrage much hip-hop and gangsta rap stoked within the white dominant U.S. culture. What Straight Outta Compton so effectively dramatizes, though, is the way the controversy the dominant culture created, while drawing attention to the music, actually worked to deflect attention away from the music's meaning and the social conditions that gave rise to its production. Rather than seeking to understand the music and the anger, frustration, and political critique of racist Amerika to which it gave voice, the dominant media focused on the music's profanity and vulgarity, seeking to dismiss the artists and their aesthetic practice as uncultured in typical racist fashion rather than actually seeking to understand what the film represents as a crafted aesthetic response to conditions of racial oppression and injustice in South Los Angeles.

In other words, Straight Outta Compton shows us white America's refusal to take a listening part in the racial conversation. At the same time as the film dramatizes white America's resistance to understanding this cultural form, it also instructs the culturally illiterate in how to understand rap music. At one point in one of his slave narratives, Frederick Douglass schools his reader in how to understand the spirituals. He points out that often white Northerners would visit the South and, witnessing enslaved African Americans singing spirituals while they work, depart with the misapprehension that because they were singing the slaves must be happy enough. Not grasping the sorrowful meaning of the cultural form of the spiritual, the white Northerners were also unable to grasp the meaning of the slave's experience. Similarly, Straight Outta Compton provides us with a reading lesson that urges us to comprehend what might seem to the uninitiated listener as profane and provocative lyrics as in fact meaningful and thoughtful lyrical responses to the experience of the profane and obscene living conditions of racist Amerika.

After seeing the film myself, I took my two pre-teen sons to see the film precisely because they listen to rap music and I wanted them to understand the meaning of the music and the experiential conditions that inform it. Notwithstanding some of the rather adult content of the film, I was nonetheless glad I did when recently over the holidays I had the very typical experience of having to encounter the usual smorgasbord of relatives comfortably spouting within earshot of my two sons political beliefs which, on my ideological radar, range from troubling to downright inhumane and offensive. One relative, engaging my sons in conversation, asked them what kind of music they like to listen to. They told him they listen to rap music. Before seeking to learn about their enjoyment or understanding of the music, this relative lectured them on how racist ALL rap music is because of the prevalence of the "n-word." They were advised not listen to this culturally degraded music.

This experience really bore out the film's depiction of the white dominant culture as more interested in critiquing the music rather than critiquing the conditions to which the music bears witness. Somehow rap music, not the racist conditions it addresses, is the problem, recalling the opening of The Souls of Black Folk when W.E.B. Du Bois laments so frequently being asked, as an African American, how it feels to be a problem. Just as Du Bois wants to underline how white racism is the problem and not African Americans, so Straight Outta Compton diagnoses white America's listening problem.

In unfurling the story of N.W.A., though, the film takes a step a further in diagnosing the challenges the artists of N.W.A. face in bringing the critical voice of hip-hop to the "racial conversation" in America. Again, much as Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk critiques and aims to provide direction for the Black intellectuals to transform American culture, so Straight Outta Compton tells the story of a group of Black artists who become divided in fights over money, attempting to critique and point a meaningful leadership path for Black artists and intellectuals. When Ice Cube leaves N.W.A. after a dispute with Easy-E and the manager Paul Heller over money, he as well as N.W.A. then, as the movie represents the situation, devote their artistic energies to producing music dissing each other, forgoing the political edge and social critique that gave life to the expressive musical form. And later in the film Dr. Dre leaves his studio to find his entourage partying while he's been working hard to make music, and he laments the evolution of the rap music industry away from its experiential roots. The film also dramatizes the distancing of the artist from the political and social conditions that inspired them when we see the members of N.W.A. each in isolation in their luxurious homes watching the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent rebellions on television.

The artists each pursue their own ways and their own wealth, highlighting the way commercial culture tends to pose the achievement of wealth and the escape from poverty as the chief objective for the individual, such that the social conditions the music meant originally to address remain unchanged.

In this sense, both the values of commercial and consumerist culture and its ability to subsume radical critique as well as a white racist ear that refuses to listen to or engage an African American aesthetic disarm the possibility for a racial conversation in America. Straight Outta Compton makes its best effort to get us to listen.

Straight Outta Compton http://www.straightouttacompton.com/

Director: F. Gary Gray

Music composed by: Joseph Trapanese

Produced by: Ice Cube, Tomica Wright, Matt Alvarez, F. Gary Gray, Dr. Dre

Screenplay: Andrea Berloff, Jonathan Herman

Rated R, 2h 30min, Digital HD, Blue Ray and DVD available in January 2016

Venezuelan official explains left wing losses to U.S. audience

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 14:04:00 +0000

CHICAGO -- After a right wing victory in Venezuela's recent legislative elections, the Bolivarian Revolution is entering a critical moment, says Jesús Rodriguez Espinoza, Consul General of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela for Chicago.

At the same time, he adds, the recent right-wing victory offers an opportunity to "deepen" the Revolution by taking a self-critical look at current strategic and tactical orientation and strengthening mass outreach and "people power" at the local level.

Rodriguez joined People's World and the Communist Party USA in a December webinar for a national online presentation and discussion of the legislative elections held in Venezuela on Dec. 6.

Presentation and discussion during the webinar ranged over the causes and implications of right wing's strong showing, as well as how progressive forces are organizing to resist the assault on Bolivarian institutions when the new National Assembly takes power on Jan. 5.

Rodriguez identified several causes for the electoral setback. Insufficient ideological and communication work and poor voter turnout among PSUV/'Chavista' forces were certainly contributing factors, he said, but the most significant cause was the international economic and ideological campaign waged against the Bolivarian Revolution.

The Venezuelan economy is currently in a state of deep crisis, with inflation at 62 percent and rising. Rock-bottom oil prices have hit the nation's petroleum-based economy especially hard, as have smuggling and black market currency trading.

Smugglers buy up goods in Venezuela, where government subsidies make necessary items available to low-income households, then resell those goods at market prices in Brazil and Colombia.

The government of Venezuela also subsidizes importers of vital goods like food and medical supplies by giving them access to U.S. dollars at a highly favorable exchange rate. Profiteers falsify import records to get dollars, then resell those dollars on the black market at a massive profit to Venezuelans anxious to move their assets to a steadier currency.

Some voters reacted to currency devaluation and shortages of goods by turning against the current PSUV majority. Tellingly, though, formerly scarce goods began reappearing on store shelves immediately after the opposition victory.

Mr. Rodriguez qualified smuggling and the creation of artificial shortages as an act of "economic war," a war fought in tandem with an international media campaign to discredit the Bolivarian Republic by portraying it as a dictatorship or failed state.

The irony, he noted, is that the very fact of an electoral loss by the ruling party demonstrates how unfounded those accusations are.

The implications of this setback for the Bolivarian forces are far-reaching. The MUD [Mesa de Unidad Democrática], a coalition of right-wing parties backed by the United States government and transnational corporate interests, now holds a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.

They are almost certain to use that majority to attack the monumental gains in social welfare, economic justice, and popular sovereignty made in the 16 years since the election of Hugo Chavez and the adoption of the Bolivarian constitution.

Moreover, the two-thirds majority has a special constitutional status that allows the MUD to initiate large-scale political changes, including declaring President Nicolas Maduro derelict in his duties and convoking a constituent assembly to rewrite the nation's constitution.

Rodriguez was careful, however, to warn webinar participants against excessive pessimism.

In the first place, he said, the election - free, fair, and with 70 percent participation - is in itself a victory. Venezuela is a multi-party democracy whose Bolivarian Constitution contains a strong system of checks and balances to prevent any one branch of government from ruling unilaterally.

It gives the PSUV and its allies an opportunity to assess both the mass ideological work and the economic decision-making of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Moreover, analysis of electoral results shows that the position of the PSUV is stronger than its number of Assembly seats suggests. Though the PSUV won only 4 provinces, it retains significant strength in much of the country, with the MUD winning decisive victories primarily in urban areas.

Overall vote totals show that the MUD garnered only slightly more votes in these elections than in the closely contested presidential election of 2013. It was not the growth of the right, but the disaffection of the left, that shifted power in the National Assembly.

Finally, the MUD's two-thirds majority is based on a fragile coalition of parties from center to extreme right, while the PSUV remains the largest single party in the National Assembly.

For Mr. Rodriguez, these results point to the necessity of taking a critical look at both the mass ideological work and the economic decision-making of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Major conflicts about the future of the Bolivarian project are on the horizon, he says, and the best way forward is to "deepen" the revolution by expanding the role of the Communal Councils and pushing for even more grassroots democracy.

For opportunities to participate in online discussions like the one with Mr. Rodriguez, like Peoples World on Facebook, follow us on Twitter at @PeoplesWorld, and sign up for our email list!

Image: Consulado de Venezuela en Chicago

Ted Cruz is Trump on steroids

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 10:36:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - As foot-in-mouth disease weakens Donald Trump's political health, Senator Ted Cruz, R.-Tex., is attracting some erstwhile Trump voters. According to polls of Republicans, Cruz is now in second place and ahead of Trump in Iowa.

Republican Party big shots must feel hopeful. They've been worried about keeping Trump fans in the fold if push comes to shove and they have to dump Trump. (Trump, according to Trump, has "fans." Other candidates have "supporters.")

Recently, Cruz has been performing a difficult balancing act. He's distancing himself from Trump while embedding himself in Trump's base.

For example, when other Republican candidates called Trump out for his close-the-door-on-all-Muslims proposal, Cruz would say only: "I'm a big fan of Donald Trump's, but I have different proposals."

Cruz has been selling himself as a "moderate." He's not. He's Trump on steroids.

For example, Trump's tax reform proposal would increase the burden on working people, but he's not blatant about it. Cruz is.

On his website, Cruz writes that under his plan, "the corporate income tax will be eliminated." Corporations would pay a 19 percent sales tax, as would everybody else.

Corporations love this proposal because there would be no taxes on profits or investments, just on the goods and services they buy. Corporate expenditures represent a relatively small percentage of their budget.

On the other hand, Cruz's tax proposal would hit working families and the poor very hard because, on the average, they spend close to 100 percent of their income on goods and services and Cruz's plan would, in effect, push prices up 19 percent.

Cruz claims that any potential adversity caused by his plan would be balanced out by eliminating payroll taxes and increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for low wage earners.

Economic experts say this wouldn't help. Retired persons on fixed incomes do not have payroll tax in the first place and don't qualify for EITC. Furthermore, at present retired persons pay less than nine percent of their income in taxes. Cruz's plan would raise that to 19 percent.

The Tax Foundation calculates that if the Cruz plan were to be put in effect, the top one percent would pay close to 30 percent less in taxes than they do now, while most people would see a decrease of about one to four percent.

What's worse, the Cruz plan would leave a $3.7 trillion hole in the federal budget over 10 years. You can bet the farm that this would mean huge cuts in social welfare programs.

Initiating a tax plan to help the rich get richer is only one part of what Cruz would do as president.

He believes America should return to the Gold Standard, which would greatly limit the amount of money is circulation and strip the federal government of its ability to rein in Wall Street.

It goes without saying that Cruz has received a zero rating from organizations ranging from the AFL-CIO and NARAL to the Animal Welfare Institute. On the other hand, he's a hero to the National Right to Life group and the National Rifle Association.

He's anything but a hero to his colleagues in the Senate. If you google "the most hated man in the Senate," Ted Cruz pops up.

In 2013, he single-handedly forced a government shut down in an attempt to eliminate Obamacare.

He tried to do the same thing this year, using the funding of Planned Parenthood as an excuse to prevent the 2016 fiscal year budget from being adopted. When the latest federal budget was about to be okayed, Cruz began a filibuster. It took until 3 a.m. for other senators to shut him down.

Despite all of Cruz's negative baggage, billionaire hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer is supporting him. Mercer is bankrolling four super PACs that are pouring money into Cruz-for-president efforts.

In fact, the money behind Cruz is second only to the money behind Jeb Bush.

It's a fair assumption that billionaire Mercer and his buddies believe that backing Cruz is a good investment. It probably is, for them.

Photo: Republican presidential candidate, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, R-Tex., addresses the Sunshine Summit in Orlando, Fla., Nov. 13. John Raoux | AP

In Trump, the right wing has created a Frankenstein monster

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 15:13:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - In the wake of Donald Trump's calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. and to register all those who reside here, observers, political leaders and even other right-wing Republicans are labelling him as a hate-mongering fascist.

The label is accurate. But it would be a mistake to use it to belittle the danger Trump poses to America.

He is appealing to and galvanizing the xenophobic fear that exists in American culture side by side with generosity, compassion and the conviction that in times of crisis Americans of all faiths, races and ethnic groups must pull together.

Trump continues to be the front runner among GOP presidential wannabes. Even if his campaign peters out, the tsunami of hatred he has unleased could very well continue sweeping across America.

At a rally at the U.S.S. Yorktown in South Carolina last night, tens of thousands cheered Trump as he outlined his idea for barring non-citizen Muslims from entering the U.S. He said all visitors should be asked about their religion and turned away if their faith is Islam.

The South Carolina crowd also cheered Trump's proposal to put limits on internet usage.

He has been using the murders in San Bernardino, California, to gain personal political advantage. He is coming up with fantasy plans he says would prevent the reoccurrence of such tragedies.

"[Even] without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred [of Muslims] is beyond comprehension," Trump said in a statement he released to the press and then re-stated in his South Carolina speech. "Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that [sic] believe only in Jihad and have no sense of reason or respect for human life."

Using the Big Lie

Trump quoted a poll by the Center for Security Policy, whose president and founder, Frank Gaffney, has claimed that President Obama is aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and that agents of the Muslim Brotherhood have infiltrated the U.S. government, the Republican Party and conservative political organizations. He has written that noted right-winger Grover Norquist, "has been working with the enemy for over a decade."

Even the American Conservative Union has condemned Gafney and banned him from its Conservative Political Action Conference.

Barring non-citizen Muslims from the United States has drawn support from organizations like the Society of Americans for National Existence and the Daily Stormer, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as hate groups.

The fact is that the husband and wife shooters in San Bernardino were U.S. citizens.

However, lack of facts to back up his statements has not stopped Trump from making them.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, Trump called for all Muslims in America to be registered. The fact that this is not only counter to everything America stands for, would be impossible to carry out and does not address the circumstances that led to the tragedy did not stop Trump from coming up with this plan.

Moreover, he continues to insist he saw "thousands of thousands" of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey immediately after the 9/11 attacks, although the New Jersey police and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie say this never happened.

By repeating his hallucinatory claim, Trump is demonstrating the Big Lie theory perfected by the Nazis: if you tell a lie that's big enough often enough, people will begin to believe it.

Condemned as "fascistic"

Ever since Trump called for Muslims to be forced to register, conservatives and right-wingers have been trying to distance themselves from Trump by calling him and his plans "fascistic." For example, Max Boot, a conservative fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Marco Rubio advisor, tweeted "Trump is a fascist. And that's not a term I use loosely or often. But he's earned it."

And Jeb Bush's national security adviser John Noonan wrote on Twitter, "Forced federal registration of U.S. citizens, based on religious identity, is fascism. Period. Nothing else to call it."

The list goes on and on. Right wingers are vying with each other to see who can abandon Trump's ship the fastest.

However, as former Vermont Governor Howard Dean said in a recent TV interview, right wingers are now reaping what they have sown.

For a long time, now, Dean said, "the Republican party has been authoritarian. Its programs support forcing women to give up control over their reproductive health, for instance."

Dean said that now the Republicans have a candidate on their hands who is articulating additional authoritarian programs. They have, in effect, created a Frankenstein's monster.

Trump scares right wing Republicans, but not because of the substance of what he's saying. They're scared because he's being too outspoken.

Historically, fascist governments are those that control national economies for the purpose of gaining great wealth for corporations at the expense of working people. Militaristic, authoritarian measures are needed because otherwise people might rise up.

For the same reason, to take power in the first place, the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy had to lie to people about their real objectives.

Right wingers support corporation-based governments, but they know they must be devious in order to gain power.

Trump is blowing their cover too soon and too loudly.

Photo: Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), CHIRLA Action Fund Facebook.

Obama addresses terrorism, others must too

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 14:12:00 +0000

In his Sunday night speech, President Obama sought to ease the growing public anxiety following the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, last week that brutally killed 14 innocent people and injured many more.

Speaking to the nation from the Oval Office, the president deplored the anti-immigrant hysteria and expressed sorrow over the senseless attack, but he minced no words in saying that the two killers were home-grown terrorists. They were inspired but not directed by a terrorist organization overseas such as ISIS. And they were not "part of a broader conspiracy here at home," he said. They were acting on their own.

He went on to say that the attacks were the latest evidence that "the terrorist threat has evolved into a new phase ... It is this type of attack that we saw at Fort Hood in 2009; in Chattanooga earlier this year; and now in San Bernardino."

But while "the threat from terrorism is real" and evolving, he declared, "we will overcome it. We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us."

In what was an obvious (and appropriate) swipe at the Republican Party and its presidential contenders, Obama asserted that eradicating terrorism "will take more than 'tough talk,' or abandoning our values, or giving into fear. That's what groups like ISIL[ISIS] are hoping for." Instead, it will be achieved by "being strong and smart, resilient and relentless, and by drawing upon every aspect of American power."

Most of the steps that the president proposed to fight ISIS are familiar and nothing new. But it is noteworthy that in speaking about Syria he acknowledged Russia as a player and didn't make the removal of Syria's much maligned and demonized president, Bashar al-Assad, a precondition for negotiations among the parties to end the Syrian civil war.

Not unexpectedly, the president made the case for the "umpteenth" time for "sensible" gun control legislation, but with a new urgency born from yet another horrific mass killing. While every would-be mass shooter "can't be identified, what we can do - and must do - is make it harder for them to kill," he said.

If common sense guided lawmakers in Congress, these measures would pass tomorrow, but the likelihood of that happening is close to zero. Short of a demonstrative and sustained public outcry, the Republican Party's far-right ideological disposition, hatred of the president, and reflexive loyalty to the gun lobby and manufacturers has made these modest proposals dead on arrival.

The president also repeated what he has said before: "we should not be drawn into another costly ground war," which would only benefit terrorists who can turn a drawn-out occupation to their advantage, and provide fertile ground for recruitment.

And in what was probably the best moment of the speech, he responded forcefully to his Republican adversaries who are poisoning the atmosphere with anti-Islam and anti-immigrant vitriol and hatred. "[J]ust as it is the responsibility of Muslims around the world to root out misguided ideas that lead to radicalization, it is the responsibility of all Americans - of every faith - to reject discrimination. It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It's our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently. "

"Because when we travel down that road, we lose," Obama continued. "That kind of divisiveness, that betrayal of our values plays into the hands of groups like ISIL. Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes - and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform who are willing to die in defense of our country. We have to remember that."

It is obvious that the president's prime time address wasn't designed to outline a significant shift in how the United States should fight terrorism. Apart from some tweaking here and there, Obama made it clear he thinks the current strategy - airstrikes, Special Forces, diplomacy, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country - will lead to a "more sustainable victory." The latter term is an oblique retort to and criticism of the current advocates of a "boots on the ground and regime change strategy" - a strategy that turned the Middle East into an inferno of war, death, dislocation, instability, sectarian strife, and breeding ground for terrorist activities and organizations.

Nor was the purpose of Obama's speech to convince Donald Trump and the rest of the motley crew running for the Republican presidential nomination of the folly and danger of their ways. Yesterday, in fact, Trump, in response to Obama's address Sunday, called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.

What the president hoped, I suspect, is that his prime time speech would ease growing public alarm over terrorism and regain the narrative as to the best way to fight it. He correctly sensed that the events in San Bernardino had shifted the ground on which people go about their daily lives and form their opinions. Public anxieties about safety and security - their own, their families', and their communities' - had ratcheted up; fear had become more palpable.

All of which could turn politics generally in a direction that gives advantage to right wing extremism.

In these circumstances, it is imperative that in public figures, liberal and progressive legislators, Democratic Party presidential hopefuls, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and the broader people's movement join the conversation as well. Silence to the latest terrorist attacks and the demagoguery of the right isn't an option, but a recipe for political marginalization and a nasty turn in our nation's politics to the right. On the other hand, what to say about it requires sensitivity and thoughtfulness as well as courage.

This isn't a moment, in other words, for the people's movement and candidates to the left of center to look for "safe" political ground, to hope that the question of terrorism doesn't come up. To the contrary, this is the moment to frontally reject xenophobia, nativism, militarism, and endless wars, to appeal to the better angels of the American people, and to challenge the reactionary, hypocritical positions of the Republican Party and its presidential candidates.

What is more, it is a moment to go beyond the president's strategy, while supporting his administration's positive initiatives and defending him against bizarre and racist political attacks from the right.

On every venue democratic, progressive, and left voices should argue with facts and convincing arguments for a strategy that heavily accents diplomacy, restraint, nonviolence, smart intelligence work that is mindful of privacy rights and civil liberties, full cooperation with countries like Russia and Iran, political settlement of sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Syria, reining in Saudi Arabia and the other oil principalities that are funding sectarian violence and civil war, statehood for the Palestinian people, and a global New Deal with a focus on the countries of the global South and communities of immigrants in the global North.

Another overarching task is to intensify the push for nuclear disarmament of big and small powers alike.

At the same time, it is naïve and wrongheaded to rule out in advance any military responses to ISIS and similar real threats, But when they occur, such actions should be measured, specific, and broadly supported and led by the international community - Muslim and Arab countries in the first place.

What is more, these actions must have the support of the Congress and American people. In his speech on Sunday, Obama noted that Congress is mandated to do what it conspicuously hasn't done: debate and decide on whether to authorize the continued use of military force in the Middle East. "For over a year, I have ordered our military to take thousands of airstrikes against ISIL targets," he said. "I think it's time for Congress to vote to demonstrate that the American people are united, and committed, to this fight."

Thus, a debate in Congress should be welcomed even if it outcome is uncertain. Congresswoman Barbara Lee, D-Calif., has been saying for months that it's time for "ending the blank checks for endless war."

Finally, it is plain that the imperative of defeating right-wing extremism, that is, the Republican Party, in next year's elections takes on new significance in the light of recent events.

Reposted from Sam Webb's blog.

Photo: President Obama addresses the nation from the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, Dec. 6. Saul Loeb | Pool Photo via AP

What is Hanukkah really all about?

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 16:19:00 +0000

A familiar saying at this time of year has it that when all the Jews spell Hanukkah the same way, Deliverance will truly have come! (Other variants include Hanukah, Chanukah, Hanuka, Khanuka, Khanike, and more.)

The joke is telling because like most things, the holiday can be viewed from multiple perspectives. For many years Jews considered it a minor holiday, observed with small gifts for the children and the lighting of candles on a menorah each of the eight nights of the season. It is no coincidence that Hanukkah is called the "Festival of Lights."

There's no mystery in understanding why Jews, and perhaps most peoples, celebrate a holiday of light at the time of the winter solstice. The Yule log, the Christmas lights, the evergreen, the Kwanzaa candelabrum, are all cheerful reminders of hope and promise in the cycle of rebirth that will return in the spring with the New Year. When Americans wish one another a generalized "Happy Holidays," we express a sincere universality of shared warmth amidst our collective cold.

Hanukkah is the only Jewish holiday (until modern times) with verifiable historical roots. It commemorates the revolt of the Maccabees in 167-164 BCE (Before the Common Era, as Jews prefer to say), against the Greek occupation of Jerusalem and Palestine. The Greeks had imposed the rule of law, philosophy, religion, debate and governance at odds with traditional Jewish practice. The Maccabean rebellion was directed as much against Greek hegemony as against fellow Jews they accused of becoming overly "Hellenized," giving up circumcision, for example, eating pork or engaging in nude sporting matches.

Although celebrated for having conducted the first successful documented revolution for "national liberation" and religious freedom, the Maccabees are also disparaged by history for having established a corrupt dynasty of priestly kings, a theocratic mixing of "church and state." Later rabbinical authorities looked back on this disastrous period and invented the charming story of the miracle of the vial of oil that lasted for eight days, trying to convert the significance of the holiday into one of awe of God and his wonders, rather than military victory.

Incidentally, the Hanukkah story inspired the American colonists in their struggle against King George III. How could people so profoundly influenced by Christian theology oppose the divine right of kings? Well, just look at the First Book of Maccabees and there you have it: "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God." And from that principle, how many people of faith, and entire movements for civil rights and freedom, have taken a potent lesson! (Needless to say, right-wing ideologues also cite such passages - one of the dangers of relying on Biblical literalism.)

In modern times, defenders of the West Bank occupation cite the Maccabean spirit as an expression of the militarist solution to Israel's survival. Curiously, those who most loudly insist on the definition of Israel as a "Jewish state" thus fly directly in the face of the many later generations of rabbis who emphasized that well-known passage in Zechariah 4:6 that warns us, "Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts."

So the controversy over the essential meaning of Hanukkah continues and perhaps can never be pinned down definitively. Perhaps it's best left as a joyous holiday for children that brings the Jewish component to the bountiful table of multiculturalism as we anticipate the return of sunny days.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scazon/ / CC BY 2.0

This article originally appeared on PeoplesWorld.org Dec.14, 2009.

The legacy of Spain and the Lincoln Brigade

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 12:14:00 +0000

Speech given at the 79th Annual Celebration of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Berkeley, California November 8, 2015

All my life I've known about Spain. I grew up singing Freiheit and Viva la Quince Brigada and Los Cuatro Generales, and knew the names of some of the places in Spain where the big battles were fought. I owe a lot to my parents, and to the culture they helped create. They didn't go to Spain, but they were brave people nonetheless. When Paul Robeson went to sing in Peekskill, my dad was one of the union members from New York City who lined the roads to protect people from the rocks thrown by the fascists of upstate New York. In 1953, the year the Rosenbergs were executed, they brought my brother and me here to Oakland, where I grew up. That's why I'm an Oakland boy, and not a Brooklyn boy.

When I think about the impact of Spain on my life, I think about the people who went and fought there, and what they taught me. Some of them I knew personally, and some taught me by example. They all taught me about how to conduct a life dedicated, not just to opposing injustice, but to fighting for a different world, for a vision of a just society, a socialist society.

California Rural Legal Assistance

Today I work with California Rural Legal Assistance, as a photographer and a journalist. Growing up in Oakland, I didn't know much about life in rural California, or who farm workers are and the work they do. But I come from a union family, so when I got back from Cuba in the early 70s, full of revolutionary enthusiasm, the place where I thought I could fight for real change here was the farm workers union. I went to work, learning from people like Eliseo Medina the nuts and bolts of how to organize strikes, win union elections, go on the boycott - the basic toolkit of working class struggle.

There I met Ralph Abascal, who had helped to organize California Rural Legal Assistance. With a nod and a wink, after the lawyers had gone home at the end of the day, our crew of workers and organizers would come in and use the typewriters and photocopy machines all night to put together our legal cases against firings and grower dirty tricks. That's what I loved about CRLA and the way he ran it - it was a part of the workers movement, and its resources were shared. He wanted the union and the workers to fight and survive. It was no surprise to me later to learn that Ralph's family came from Spain, and that his uncles fought in the Civil War.

I'm not your average photographer. That's one reason why CRLA and I get along so well, together with our partner in documenting the lives of farm workers, the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales. The purpose of our work is to create photographs that are instruments or tools for social change. We document workers living in tents under trees and sleeping in their cars when the harvest comes, in Arvin, Coachella, San Diego and Santa Rosa. But we do more than show abuses. Our photographs show workers acting to change those conditions.

One of my favorite quotes is by Alexander Rodchenko, the famous Soviet photographer of the 1920s and 30s. He said, "Art has no place in modern life," and that we should "take photographs from every angle but the navel." What he means, of course, is not just that photographs should have a social purpose, but that the photographer should be part of the movements for social change, for revolution.

Tina Modotti

One of the most important photographers who not only shared this idea, but lived her life by it, was Tina Modotti. She had a deep connection with the defense of the Spanish Republic. She was an Italian immigrant, from Udine, but she grew up here, in San Francisco. Today they have festivals in her birth town and a foundation in her name in Italy. Here in the Bay Area, though, we hardly know or speak about her. She grew up in North Beach, wanted to become an actress, and went to Los Angeles where she met Edward Weston. Together they went to Mexico just at the height of the artistic ferment of the 1920s, when the revolution was going strong.

She and Weston developed modernism in photography, but she went a step further. She filled their modernistic style with political and social content. And she did more. She joined the Mexican Communist Party, and helped organize the Union of Painters and Sculptors. She took some of the first photographs of huge political demonstrations, and tried to find a visual language that was simple and could inspire people to act.

As her political commitment deepened, the Mexican government deported her in 1930 to Germany, and from there she went to the Soviet Union, where she went to work for the Comintern. During that time she stopped taking photographs. That's one of the things I admire most about her. She said, "I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art." There are times when the need to act politically is so important that art has to give way. That's the opposite of what we're taught in the corporate culture of today, where "art is everything" - that you can't let mere social justice get in the way.

When the war came in Spain, she went with her lover, Vittorio Vidali, or as he was known in Spain, Comandante Carlos. Modotti was the organizer for Workers Red Aid, helping to free what prisoners they could, and sustain and keep alive those they couldn't. She worked with Dr. Norman Bethune. Vidali organized the Fifth Regiment, and today when I hear the words to El Quinto Regimiento, that in the "patio de un convento, el partido comunista (in Oscar Chavez' version) or el pueblo madrileño (in Rolando Alarcon's version) formo el quinto regimiento," I think about Vidali and Modotti.

At the end of the war, Modotti was in charge of helping the streams of refugees that filled the roads along the coast, from Barcelona to the French border, as they fled Franco's advancing troops. I think about her when I see the roads filled with migrants fleeing the bombing in Syria and Iraq today, trying to find refuge in Europe. If Modotti were alive, she would be there. But she would be the first to say that these desperate people can't use our pity any more than the Spanish refugees could.

Just as we know that the advance of fascism was the root cause of people fleeing Spain, we have to look at the root causes of the flight of migrants today. We have to ask what, or better still, who makes poverty and violence so unbearable that drowning in the Mediterranean seems an acceptable or necessary risk. And of course, it's not just there. What is causing the poverty and displacement in Honduras or Mexico, that makes migration a necessity for survival? And just as the internment in France that greeted the Spanish refugees was a basic violation of their human rights, and a demeaning humiliation, the Karnes and Hutto detention centers in Texas are a crime against working people that we have to fight today.

After the war Modotti and Vidali separated. Vidali eventually returned to the Free Territory of Trieste, and when it became part of Italy he was elected the Communist deputy from Trieste for many years. Modotti returned to Mexico when Lazaro Cardenas was president, but she was so exhausted she got sick and died. She was never allowed to return to San Francisco, and to her family.

So this lesson of Modotti and Spain is that photography and social change are important and go together, but the most important thing is the objective, which is to fight fascism and change the world.

Spain attracted photographers. We all know the Robert Capa photo of the soldier shot just at the moment when he rises to charge the enemy. Capa made his reputation in Spain. The famous Magnum Photo Agency in New York was organized by photographers who supported, and some who participated, in this huge social upheaval. I did a Google search of the VALB archive database, and I found 26 photographers who went to Spain, and that's not counting the other artists. They didn't go to take pictures or paint. They went to fight. So Modotti was definitely not the only person who thought this way. But she asked the big question about our role as artists - how to make art serve the cause of social justice, and how to make that the main question - not becoming a celebrity or making lots of money.

When the vets came back from fighting in Spain and from World War Two, California and the Bay Area were very different politically from what they are today. Don Mulford was firing teachers for not signing loyalty oaths. The Knowland family ran Oakland. Sam Yorty ran Los Angeles with Chief Parker running the LAPD, including its notorious Red Squad. The growers in the valley had all the power. They had yet to be challenged by the farmworkers historic strike in 1965, the fiftieth anniversary of which we're celebrating this year.

In my life as a union organizer, I met other people who'd fought in Spain.

In my life as a union organizer, before I started work as a photographer and journalist, I met other people who'd fought in Spain. They were part of the unions and movements where I met them. Henry Giler was blacklisted in those bad old days, and became an air conditioning mechanic, before he went back to law school. Then he became a civil rights lawyer, and defended our strikers when I worked for the United Electrical Workers. We were organizing immigrants at the beginning of the huge upsurge that has changed California's politics so fundamentally.

I met Coleman Persily, because we were both friends of Bert Corona, the founder of our modern immigrant rights movement. Coleman fought in Spain, and then in the 50s he and Bert helped run the campaign for Edward Roybal, the first Chicano elected to Congress from California since 1879. That was a harbinger of the end of the Yorty years, of the hatred of Latinos seen in the Zoot Suit riots and the Sleepy Lagoon prosecution, and of LA's reputation as the home of the Open Shop. As we know today, much bigger political changes were to come, and people like Henry and Coleman helped set the stage. Coleman went on to help organize the Canal Street Alliance, which today is Marin County's main immigrant rights organization.

Through organizing immigrant farm and factory workers, I became an immigrant rights activist and organizer, like them. In those days, it didn't make you popular, in the labor movement especially, to insist that undocumented workers had rights, and that our unions had to include and fight for them.

Both Henry and Coleman had a vision of justice and equality, which took them to fight in Spain, and which they brought back into the movements here at home. They also brought back a love of the Spanish language and culture, which then became a love for the Mexican people. It's remarkable how many people came back from Spain and wound up in Mexico itself. Some were like Linni De Vries. She went to Mexico because she was hounded by the FBI, but then loved it so much she become a citizen in 1962. The U.S. government took away her U.S. citizenship a year later.

And then there's Archie Brown.

When I was trying to figure out what it meant to be committed to socialism, and to be a union organizer at the same time, Archie was the person who helped me.

When my youngest daughter was little, her favorite movie was "Newsies" - the musical about the newsboy strike against Pulitzer in New York in 1899. Only later did I learn that Archie too had been a newsie, and helped organize a newsie strike here in Oakland in 1928. Archie became a Red very young, as did many people who went to Spain. He was so visible that the State Department wouldn't give him a passport, and he had to cross the Atlantic as a stowaway.

When I was just becoming politically aware, at 12, Archie got called by the House Un-American Activities Committee. As he started to speak, refusing to name names, demonstrators, many from the UC campus here, burst into the hearing room and disrupted it. Archie was thrown out. It was the opening of the civil disobedience offensive that eventually led to the students being washed down the marble staircase of San Francisco City Hall. That was the beginning of the end for HUAC.

Archie spent his working and political life in Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. In Archie's book, the most important political work you could do in a union was to educate rank and file workers, and help them become activists for change, in the union, at work, and in the community around them. When he ran for union office as a Communist, his point was first, to get workers to think about more radical ideas, and second, to challenge the Federal government's prohibition on electing Communists to union office.

He was successful on both counts, I think. The government indicted him, but the Supreme Court overturned the prohibition. This is important for us to think about. His attitude was that laws that violate the political and labor rights of working people have to be challenged directly, legally in court, and politically out in the world. Today the Supreme Court is about to strike down the laws protecting union membership in contracts for public workers. Archie, running for office deliberately to defy the law, is saying to us, we have to fight.

His other objective was as important. One of the most important reasons why the Bay Area, and the cities of the Pacific Coast, have a radical political tradition is because of the ILWU. But it's not just the union as an institution. It's the fact that the union brought together and educated a body of workers who then worked in political campaigns, civil rights demonstrations, school and workplace integration, and a myriad of other social struggles. And creating and maintaining that active membership was the job of the left-wingers in the union.

That's what Archie believed. Power and leftwing politics in the labor movement come from the bottom up, not the top down, and only if there is an organized left fighting for them. In my own work as an organizer, I tried to use every strike, every plant that closed throwing workers onto the sidewalk, as an opportunity for us to learn about the nature of the society we live in.

Today in our labor movement we have a crisis

Today in our labor movement we have a crisis, in part because we represent a falling percentage of the workforce. We face a political structure, Republican and even Democratic, that is more hostile towards us than any we've seen since the 1920s. But the crisis is also a result of our unions' failure to propose much more radical measures to advance our interests, and to educate our members so they understand why that's necessary.

I don't think Archie learned his way of being a working class activist and organizer in Spain. But I think he shared it with many other people who went to Spain from the surging working class movement of the mid-1930s. This was their style of work, what made them so effective. After all, they left for Spain within just a year or two of the San Francisco General Strike, the greatest labor upsurge we've ever had here. They made the same choice that Tina Modotti did. Defeating fascism in Spain was the overarching need of the working class movement all over the world, more important even than the union itself. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade is the product of that idea - what made international solidarity such a force that we celebrate it today, eighty years later.

And what they all have in common - Tina, Henry, Coleman, Archie, Vittorio Vidali - and I think everyone here - is that we fight for a more just world, not merely against the injustice of this one. This is why the living memory of the Lincoln Brigade is so important.

Sergio Sosa, a Guatemalan migrant who now directs Omaha's Heartland Workers' Center, says: "People from Europe and the U.S. crossed our borders to come to Guatemala, and took over our land and economy. Migration is a form of fighting back. Now it's our turn to cross borders."

The experiences of workers migrating from country to country for jobs, or fleeing warfare and repression, testify to the impact of free-market economics and the wars they bring about. But at the same time, these migrants are changing profoundly the culture and social movements of the wealthy countries of the global north. They are one reason why we have a greater opportunity to talk about a vision of a society free from exploitation, a socialist society, than we've had for twenty years. Now we celebrate May Day, thanks to the outpouring of immigrants, especially from countries where it's always been celebrated as the workers' holiday.

The economic inequality and social cost of capitalism haven't changed - if anything, they've become even more exaggerated. The class conflict at the root hasn't been eliminated by globalization. In fact, it's been extended and deepened in country after country.

Many people in our movement, at least in the US, see the cost of this system to our people and hate it. We recognize the common interest of many sections of our society in opposing it. Hating capitalism, even by name, has become popular. In my youth, just using the word capitalism was enough to get redbaited and ostracized.

But what is the alternative? Can society be managed on the basis of equality? Can economic development provide a full life for all people, not just more efficient commodity production? What is the vision of the future that can bind together a movement of millions of people, which can produce an alternative culture that can last from one generation to the next?

A radical vision runs counter to the prevailing wisdom of our times, which holds the profit motive sacred, and believes that market forces solve all social problems. If we challenge that wisdom, we won't get invited for coffee with the President. At the beginning of the cold war, the AFL-CIO built its headquarters right down the street from the White House. Maybe it's time now to move.

For working people to organize by the millions, which is what we have to do, we have to make hard decisions.

People must put their jobs on the line for the sake of their future. But the unions of past decades, the activists and organizers who went to Spain, won the loyalty of working people when joining was even more dangerous and illegal than it is today. The left then proposed an alternative social vision - that society could be organized to ensure social and economic justice for all people.

We were united by the idea that we could gain enough political power to end poverty, unemployment, racism, and discrimination. The radical vision of those who fought in Spain made the movement here stronger. When our movement lost that vision in the red scares of the 1950s, we lost our ability to inspire. It's no accident that the years of McCarthyism marked the point when the percentage of organized workers began to decline.

Today we have to have a much clearer sense that large-scale social change is possible. Our biggest problem is finding ways to affect consciousness-the way people think-like those used by the people who went to Spain, and who organized the great social movements of their time.

Radical ideas have a transformative power - especially the idea that while you might not live to see a new world, your children might, if you fight for it. In the 1930s and 40s, these ideas were propagated within unions by leftwing political organizations. A general radical culture reinforced them. Today we need a core of activists unafraid of radical ideas of social justice, and who can link them to immediate economic bread-and-butter issues. And since good ideas are worthless unless they reach people, we have to be able to communicate that vision to working people as broadly as we can.

We are not at the end of history. We have to reclaim our history, not discard or forget it. Working people have proposed alternatives to capitalism for over a hundred years - socialism, communism, nationalist economic development, and more. Those who went to Spain were fighting for this vision, as much as they were fighting against Franco.

We are told today we must allow millions of people to become casualties of the free market, whether as the unemployed, the hungry and powerless, or the victims of war and oppression. It is up to those who say there is an alternative, not only to proclaim it and advocate for it, but to organize the majority of our people to fight for it.

This is the most important legacy of Spain. If there is to be any alternative, it will only exist because those who don't benefit from the current system fight to bring a new one into being.

Photo: David Bacon at 16 - the skinny kid in the middle with glasses in the back - singing inside Sproul Hall on the University of California campus in Berkeley, during the Free Speech Movement sit-in. After midnight that night, 800 students were arrested and dragged out, for defending the right to recruit people on the campus for civil rights demonstrations, especially against racist hiring practices at Bill Knowland's Oakland Tribune.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel must be impeached

Sat, 05 Dec 2015 19:21:00 +0000

CHICAGO - It's the Tuesday evening after Thanksgiving in Chicago, and many residents remain stuffed with love, food and family memories. That comforting fullness belies the unsettling recent Windy City events culminating in today's instantly-infamous press conference. Mayor Rahm Emanuel summoned a media pool to announce the ouster of beleaguered police Superintendent Garry F. McCarthy. For the latter's role in the total desecration of transparency and justice that was, is and forever will be the Laquan McDonald murder case, as well as his failure to address the CPD's systemic cancers, good riddance doesn't begin to cover it.

But the satisfaction of a moment is hardly enough to counteract the sense of national shame. Until now the city's reputation as the most corrupt in America was a joke with which we could laugh along, even as we watched the successive administrations of Daley and Emanuel sell public assets and trust out from under our literal feet. We could fool ourselves with talk of recessions and competitiveness, or at least indulge in bad Sean Connery impressions, brouging about "The Chicago Way." We were sort of proud of our failure to thrive, shrugging our shoulders with a tired smile.

But all remnants of fun expired just before lunch today. What we are left with is the certainty that we are still being told lies. That fraud on top of coverup is still happening, right now. And the perp with the most blood on his hands is walking around freely - straight out of the press room and back into control of our city's schools, finances and law enforcement.

Did former Superintendent McCarthy concoct the preemptive settlement (using taxpayer funds) with the McDonald family after the 2014 killing? Nope. Per a mid-November article from Justin Glawe of The Daily Beast:

"Mayor Rahm Emanuel and officials both in city government and within the Chicago Police Department have said the footage should remain sealed from public view. As part of a $5 million settlement between the city and the McDonald family, a judge barred attorneys from releasing the video."

And who was it that unsuccessfully argued in a court of law, 13 months after McDonald’s murder and eight months after Emanuel’s tight re-election campaign (again using public funds), that releasing the video would compromise the “ongoing investigation?” That would be City Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton, acting on behalf of the Mayor.

McCarthy’s most egregious error, as writer Mark Konkol identifies it, is actually his blind support and fall in deference to Emanuel. The fired cop is little more than “a political peace offering to black ministers who helped keep protests peaceful after the world saw the video of a Chicago police officer pumping 16 bullets into a black teenager.”

Don’t say, as the Chicago Tribune‘s Scott Stantis and other pundits have tried, that we can’t impeach Rahm Emanuel because there’s no government mechanism for doing so. With all due sneering at the Windy City’s joke of a City Council, let’s create one. Illinois passed a state law last decade to help unseat former Governor Rod Blagojevich – because it was the right thing to do in the face of flagrant, illegal conduct. We are the city that reversed the flow of the mighty Chicago River in 1900 to rid ourselves of toxic filth. We can do it again. We must. If not, we are officially, if passively, surrendering to an Orwellian dystopia. And we can’t complain about anything else from here.

I’m attending my Alderman’s Ward night (Ameya Pawar – 47th) tomorrow evening. I encourage all Chicago residents to do the same. The change we need is going to have to bubble up from the bottom.

I expect it to be a busy two hours. But if I make it to the front of the line for a meeting with the neighborhood’s elected representative, I’m going to tell him in the strongest, most profane-free words I can muster. Rahm Emanuel has got to go. It is the Mayor who has “become an issue, rather than dealing with the issue, and a distraction.” I’m still struggling to understand the level of hypocrisy it took for Emanuel to utter that statement regarding anyone involved in the murder/coverup of Laquan McDonald besides himself. With a straight, even victimized face. On camera.

Rahm Emanuel has proven himself the most roughly drawn, one-dimensional of comic book villains. An insult to the city’s intelligence and sustainability. But this is not Gotham, and the Dark Knight won’t be coming to save us. No, Chicago. We’re going to have to do that on our own. Instead of embracing, or at the very least ignoring, the cartoonish city corruption, discrimination, segregation and corporate raiding that have become an extremist microcosm of the country’s greatest ills, let’s give their ambassador a hard shove of rejection. Let’s be a genuine populist democracy, shake off the civic lethargy and get this recall done.

Photo: Rahm Emanuel, in a 2010 photo. Daniel X. O'Neil/Flickr/Creative Commons

Becky Sarwate is president of the Illinois Woman's Press Association, as well as recording secretary for the National Federation of Press Women. She is a national award-winning journalist, blogger, newsletter editor and theater critic. Becky lives in Chicago with her partner Bob and their menagerie of pets. Keep up with her at beckysarwate.com.

This article originally appeared at contemptor.com and is reposted with permission of the author.

Laquan McDonald killing exposes edifice of brutal oppression

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 17:35:00 +0000

CHICAGO - The dash cam video capturing the execution of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke on October 20, 2014 exposed a heinous crime before the world and has sparked nationwide revulsion and outrage.

It appears a widespread criminal cover-up of McDonald's murder was carried out by the police, state's attorney's office and the administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. This has created an unprecedented institutional crisis of credibility.

The sudden indictment of Van Dyke 400 days after the killing, the firing of Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and the appointment of yet another task force by Emanuel are unlikely to restore trust or quell growing anger.

Hillary Clinton and Illinois State Attorney General Lisa Madigan are among those calling for an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department.

In the aftermath of the video's release, the veil is being lifted from an entire interdependent system of institutionalized racism and oppression and its ugly inner workings: a lawless and corrupt police department, the state's attorney's office and the Emanuel administration representing financial elites.

This edifice is feeding the mass incarceration of mainly young African American and Latino men. The Cook County court system is one of the nation's largest and its jail is the largest single site jail in the nation.

It sits on top of economic policies driving incredible wealth inequality, racism, deep concentrated poverty and violence, gentrification and privatization of public education.

First, immediately after McDonald was shot sixteen times by Van Dyke, witnesses were forced to leave the scene upon threat of arrest. One witness was taken to a police precinct and warned she "didn't see what she saw."

Officers entered the nearby Burger King and criminally erased crucial video of the shooting. Ironically, officers were unaware they were being recorded while at the controls. Sound from police videos is still missing.

Police lied in their initial report, claiming McDonald punctured a police cruiser tire and menaced them with a jack knife - all fabricated.

Secondly, whatever internal investigation being done is likely to go nowhere. The Police Internal Review Board (PIRB), staffed by police department officials, is a firewall protecting officers.

It took a decade- long battle for release of information from the PIRB by Invisible Institute, a nonprofit journalism organization, and the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School.

The data for 2015 shows "that in more than 99 percent of the thousands of misconduct complaints against Chicago police officers, there has been no discipline. From 2011 to 2015, 97 percent of more than 28,500 citizen complaints resulted in no officer being punished, according to the files," reported the New York Times.

This includes officers with multiple complaints, for brutality, excessive force or verbal abuse. One officer, later convicted of robbing suspects, had 68 civilian complaints but was kept on the force. Van Dyke had numerous complaints including abuse and use of racial slurs.

The blue wall of silence is real. Police shoot at least one Chicago resident each week. Police have killed 70 people over the past 5 years. The story is always the same - the officer felt his or her life was threatened.

The existence of a secret holding cell was only recently revealed, where people can disappear for hours or days, without the ability to contact their attorneys or families.

It took years to bring to light the systematic brutal torture and forced confessions of scores of African American men by the "Midnight Crew" overseen by Lieutenant Jon Burge in the 1980s.

The city has spent $500 million over the last decade in settlements with the Burge torture victims and other victims and their families of police abuse and murder.

Thirdly, had the video of McDonald's murder not come to light it's highly unlikely Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez would have charged Van Dyke. Up until his indictment, the state's attorney's office had not indicted any Chicago police officer for murder in 35 years.

A stinging commentary by former prosecutor Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve on the NBC News website describes the corrupt, racist relationship between the prosecutor's office and the police department. She calls Emanuel and Alvarez "figureheads" of "a court system where the death of another black boy barely makes anyone stand up and take notice and staying quiet about the police officers involved in the shooting is considered a professional courtesy amongst peers."

The entire system is based largely on white judges and lawyers and black and Latino criminal defendants. To question the credibility of an officer is to risk one's career.

"Prosecutors are dependent upon police officers as their witnesses. Police testimony is crucial to winning trials and hence, earning promotions within the prosecutor's office. With such co-dependency, prosecutors describe a system of interdependence between prosecutors and police governed harshly by a code of silence and fear," writes Van Cleve.

Finally, the cover-up was essential to ensure Emanuel's re-election in April 2015. It was an unexpectedly tough re-election that saw an unpopular Emanuel forced into a runoff against independent reformer Jesus Garcia, backed by a growing progressive coalition.

The Emanuel administration did everything in its power to keep the shocking video from becoming public. It feared inflaming the African-American community, since the African American vote was decisive to his victory.

During the election campaign the city was negotiating with the McDonald family over what became a $5 million settlement that ensured the video would not become public. They hoped to bury it from public view due to an "ongoing investigation."

It took a courageous whistleblower within the police department to notify the media of the existence of the video and a FOIA lawsuit to get it released. The Emanuel administration resisted at every turn.

This is a growing crisis, especially for Emanuel. It will take continued public pressure and legal action to compel the release of more information.

There is a growing chorus calling for Alvarez's resignation and a movement for her ouster in the primary election in March, 2016. Kim Foxx, another former prosecutor, is opposing Alvarez.

Elections have consequences. The election of Marilyn Mosby as Baltimore prosecutor is a good lesson. Mosby ran on a platform to prosecute police crimes and later indicted the officers involved in the murder of Freddie Gray.

Part of the long-term fight to root out racism embedded within the system is creating new organs of democratic control of the police, including the establishment of an independent civilian police accountability council. Such a proposal is being advanced by a coalition led by the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

The Community Renewal Society and others are calling for passage of a FAIR COPS bill that would establish a police auditor independent of mayoral control.

A special prosecutor is needed to investigate and prosecute police crimes, independent of the state's attorney.

It will take a much bigger and broader multi-racial coalition to compel meaningful and deep-going reforms of the police and criminal justice system. This includes electing an anti-racist, pro-people reform minded government that will radically change policies.

We are in the first stages of that fight.

Photo: FAIR COPS Action and Press Conference, Community Renewal Society, Facebook.

Laquan McDonald killing underlines need to radically reconstruct criminal justice system

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 11:59:00 +0000

Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer who shot Laquan McDonald on a city street more than a year ago, was finally charged last week with first-degree murder. Twenty-four hours after his arraignment, the police finally released the video of the incident that they'd had in their possession all along. In it, Van Dyke is seen executing the 17-year-old, firing 16 shots, 13 while McDonald lay on the street.

All of which begs two questions: why did it take a year before charges were brought against Van Dyke and why did it take a judge's order to release the video to the public?

The answer to both questions is the same. It was an attempt by the Police Department and Mayor Rahm Emanuel to take themselves out of the line of public criticism as well as give Van Dyke either a free pass, or a slap on the wrist, or a reduced punishment for his criminal action. But thanks to the vigilance of community leaders and activists a first step has now been taken, to hold Van Dyke accountable and unearth his accomplices in the police department and City Hall.

Of course, everyone pressing for justice in this case understands that turning this first step into a conviction of Van Dyke and appropriate actions against obstructionist public officials will require sustained public oversight and engagement every step of the way. It will also take a major campaign to reach new supporters and influence public opinion.

Beyond righting this particular and terrible wrong (to the degree possible, because Laquan McDonald was robbed of his young life and his family's grief will never disappear), it is increasingly apparent that something more must be done.

In other words, responding to specific injustices is absolutely necessary; it is the ground on which people must continue to fight to rein in racist police practices and crimes. But at the same time, the almost daily stream of vigilante and state-sanctioned violence against young people of color-especially young men, though women are victims too-demonstrates the necessity of building a multi-racial people's coalition that has the vision, moral authority, and political acumen to radically reconstruct the entire system of criminal justice.

Such an undertaking begins with the complete undoing of an interconnected set of institutions, police, judicial, and political enforcers, rules and procedures, and prisons that systematically ensnare, incarcerate, and cripple the life chances of - too often kill - young people of color, and especially African American young men.

But it can't stop here. No less important is a frontal and wide-ranging challenge to the powerful ideological apparatus that gives legitimacy to the current judicial system and its racist practices. This apparatus promotes the notion in subtle and not so subtle ways and on multiple platforms (media, educational institutions, courtroom, pulpit, right wing think tanks, etc) that young people of color are themselves the problem, that Black lives don't matter. Sunk in the notion of racial inferiority dating back to slavery and colonial expansion, racist ideology is at the same time adaptive. Its rationalizing arguments, code words, symbols, and images are modified by changing conditions of racist exploitation and oppression and anti-racist struggle.

In short, in this worldview, the consequences of racist exploitation and oppression become the causes, while a rigged and racist system of justice that overwhelmingly stacks the deck against young people of color - not to mention deep social and economic inequality in the larger society - becomes invisible. As New York Times columnist Charles Blow put it, "People try to pitch this ... as an issue of blacks against the police or vice versa, but that is simply an evasion, a way of refusing societal blame for a societal defect: We view crime and punishment with an ethnocentric sensibility that has a distinct and endemic anti-black bias."

There is no doubt that uprooting this ideology and the institutions, political coalitions, and outrages that it sustains will take a movement of enormous strength and reach - something on the scale of the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s that was led by the incomparable Martin Luther King. And while this is a tremendous challenge to be sure, both necessity and the emerging social movements, including but not limited to the Black Lives Matter movement, make it possible.

Photo: In this Nov. 24, file photo, a protester holds a sign as people rally for 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times by Chicago Police Department Officer Jason Van Dyke in Chicago. AP Photo | Paul Beaty, File