People Before Profit blog

Rubio: God demands free enterprise

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 16:27:00 +0000

DES MOINES, Iowa -- Many - but not all - in the crowd cheered as presidential wannabe Senator Marco Rubio, R.-Fla., reported that God demands free enterprise and small government. The audience was about 200 mostly white folks crammed into a room at the Ramada Inn.

Rubio asked them to vote for him in the Republican caucuses to be held February 1.

He said that he understood and agreed with the deep anger felt by many people, but that "anger is not a plan."

He said he was the only Republican candidate with a proven record of using governmental processes to undermine government functioning.

Rubio pledged to do away with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education. He said that in his first day in office, he would repeal the "illegal and unconstitutional" executive orders issued by President Obama, especially those protecting immigrants.

Furthermore, he said, "With a simple majority vote in the House and Senate and my signature, Obamacare is gone forever." He claimed to have an alternative, but said that because the temperature in the room was getting hot, he would not bore the crowd with details. He suggested people check out his website.

We did.

Rubio's "plan" is to give Americans a series of tax refunds for the purchase of health insurance. He doesn't say how people with low incomes and low tax rates would be able to pay in the first place.

In any case, he told the crowd in the Ramada that America is "so exceptional" because "it was founded on the idea that our rights come from God, not from government. It's because of that powerful truth that we embrace free enterprise and that we embrace small government ... and [that] we became the freest and most powerful nation in the history of all mankind."

Rubio accused President Obama of wanting to "change America ... to be more like the rest of the world."

Many in the audience - but not all - dutifully booed.

Rubio was calm and collected. One undecided voter in the crowd described him as "smooth." He sported the zip-up fleece sweater being worn by all the Republican candidates. It's supposed to say "I'm just plain folks."

In fact, Rubio accurately described the plight of many working people. He said "that jobs today do not pay what they used to," and that many people "have simply given up looking for work."

He said he himself had been burdened by a $100,000 student loan, which he recently paid off. He did not say how.

Nor did he mention the fact that his campaign is being financed by the Koch Brothers and by Norman Braman, a Miami billionaire who once owned the Philadelphia Eagles and now sells BMWs, Rolls-Royces and Bugatis.

In a New York Times interview, Rubio described Braman as "a father figure" who had given him advice on everything, from "what books to read to how to manage a staff."

Rubio's proposal for ending unemployment and raising wages spoke louder than his sweater about his plan for working people.

His plan: end regulations on business, cut taxes for the rich and shrink government.

He did not explain how shrinking government squared with his plan to hire "20,000 more border guards."

And he did not explain how his Administration would finance anything at all after cutting taxes for the rich and giving tax refunds for health insurance.

Maybe he plans to default on America's debt. He's fought increases in our debt limit every year he's been in the Senate.

We interviewed several members of the audience before and after Rubio's speech. Most said they were undecided and that they were attending the rallies of as many different candidates as possible before making up their mind.

A voter named Grace said, "I'm interested in taxes; I'm interested in security. There are a lot of social issues I disagree with the [Republican candidates] on.

"I actually kinda like Rubio, but my lovely husband is leaning toward Bernie.

"Both of us are very confused about the Republican stance on Obamacare and why they think its such a terrible thing."

A man named Scott is also undecided, but he's leaning toward Mike Huckabee because he wasn't afraid to bring people who disagreed with him onto his television show.

Scott said that the candidate who "could be near the top of [his] list," John Kasich, hasn't bothered to come to Iowa.

Asked why he liked Kasich, Scott said he perceived him as a "medium kind of guy" in temperament and policy. He valued being able to see both Kasich and Huckabee handle controversial subjects on their Fox TV shows.

A voter named Tom who lives in Des Moines said he understands that Republicans have to "pander to their base" and that it's "all a show."

All of the interviewees said they're worried about the current frontrunner, Donald Trump because he seems to be all bombast and no substance.

Grace said "anyone but Trump. We just don't know what he's going to do."

Photo: Earchiel Johnson | PW

The focus on Iowa caucuses: accident meets media hype

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 15:14:00 +0000

DES MOINES, Iowa - As we from the People's World cover the caucus here, we wonder: Why is the nation paying so much attention? The correlation between winning in the Iowa caucuses and winning a presidential nomination or election is almost nil.

The answer: it's like Groundhog Day. Nobody really believes that a rodent's shadow has anything to do with the coming of Spring, but the Chamber of Commerce of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania promotes the event big time and the media builds it up in the never-ending quest for ratings.

Like Groundhog Day, the Iowa caucuses are a boon to local businesses. They are run by the political parties themselves and are financed the same way everything done by political parties are financed: through corporate contributions.

For instance, media accommodations here in Des Moines are provided by the Microsoft corporation. The more you pay, the easier the access to newsmakers. The People's World, needless to say, is in steerage class.

In the 1800s, the political parties in all states chose candidates through caucuses. A few wealthy white guys got together and decided who would get what job.

However, people began to feel that publicly funded primaries with secret ballots were more democratic, so in the beginning of the 20^th century, states began to switch to the primary system.

Today, most states hold primaries, financed and regulated by states government. Only 13 have stuck with the caucus system.

Here's how it works in Iowa: the two political parties hold caucuses in 1,681 locations. This year, they take place Monday, February 1.

You have to be registered as a member of the political party holding a caucus to attend, but other than that how each caucus is run varies greatly. Some have secret ballots; some do not. Some are winner-take-all; some report out exactly how many votes each presidential candidate received.

Most caucuses take several hours. They're held in gyms, schools, churches, hotels or the homes of individuals. The number of participants vary from two or three to about a thousand.

Technically, caucus participants are not choosing their party's presidential nominee. They are choosing delegates to represent the presidential candidates at county conventions.

There are 99 counties in Iowa, and thus 99 conventions. These county conventions then select delegates for both Iowa's Congressional District Conventions and the State Convention, which eventually choose the delegates for the national presidential nominating conventions of each party.

Iowa gets 44 votes at the national Democratic convention and 30 at the Republican convention.

It's strictly by accident that Iowa hold its caucuses first. Due to the primary reforms after 1968, Iowa Democrats had to change their delegate selection and allocation process, and the Republicans followed suit. A proposed date in June for state conventions to be held in Des Moines was impossible because there were not enough hotel rooms available, and anyway many people had to be doing farm work. That pushed the state conventions back and, with it, the earlier steps in the caucus-plus-convention process.

The Iowa caucuses ended up ahead of the New Hampshire primary.

In the beginning, it didn't seem to matter. But after the media started to mine the "first in the nation" angle for endless stories and features, Iowa businesses discovered how valuable being first is. They've had to fight off other states that have wrangled for the spot.

The media attention has resulted in the public believing that somehow what happens in Iowa portends the future of presidential races. People are led to believe that somehow Iowa represents the "heartland of America."

If the term "heartland" means "typical," Iowa is not. The state's population is less than one third the size of Los Angeles. It's largely agricultural. It's 91 percent white, although there is a small but significant Latino community.

Iowa's governor, senators and three out of its four Congressional representatives are Republicans. Both houses of its state legislature are dominated by the GOP. It's doing well economically while most of the nation is suffering.

A relatively small number of Iowans take part in the caucuses: party activists and functionaries, and those that have the time and mobility to get to caucus sites.

On the other hand, an argument can be made that the decisions made in the caucuses are worth scrutinizing because participants study the issues and are generally knowledgeable and thoughtful.

This has been borne out by the interviews we've done with both Republican and Democratic voters. Their conclusions might be wrong-headed, but they demonstrate good will and a healthy skepticism about the platitudes mouthed by the politicians. Most, even at this late date, say they are "undecided," are looking behind the rhetoric of political speeches, and are striving to learn the exact programs the politicians propose.

They are not awed by the celebrity of the hopefuls.

In short, the Iowa caucuses don't have the meaning ascribed to them by the media, but they are not meaningless. The results should be taken with a grain of salt, but they should be taken into account by anybody studying the political mood of America today.

In addition to Larry Rubin, Patrick J. Foote and Earchiel Johnson are on the ground in Iowa. Follow People's World for more coverage, photos, video and podcast.

Photo: Iowa caucus sign-up. Patrick J. Foote | PW

Black Radical Tradition conference features Dr. Cornel West, other activists

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 14:15:00 +0000

PHILADELPHIA - On Jan. 8- 10, a steering committee led by Dr. Anthony Monteiro, and including grassroots activists, organizers, educators, scholars, and faith leaders, convened a conference on the Black Radical Tradition. The title of the conference was "Reclaiming our Future: the Black Radical Tradition in our time."

The three-day conference, which took place on the campus of Temple University in North Philadelphia, was attended by hundreds of participants from places as far as Michigan, Virginia, and Boston. This powerful weekend began on Thursday, January 7 with a meeting featuring faith-based activists Rev. Renee McKenzie and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. of Chicago. Both religious leaders spoke about the need for morality in a "morally broken world." Other speakers of the evening included Pamela Lightsey, Obery Hendricks, and MOVE survivor Ramona Africa.

To officially kick off the conference, there was a "March for our Future," followed by a panel discussion entitled "The Moral Bankruptcy of Capitalism: The Black Radical Tradition as Socialist Alternative." This discussion was led by Dr. Cornel West of Princeton University and Dr. Anthony Monteiro.

Saturday's and Sunday's discussions, following the opening panel discussions and theme of the weekend also focused on the need to implement an alternative solution to capitalism and importance of stopping imperialism around the globe. Such panel discussions included "War, Peace and Global Justice: Resistance to the U.S. Empire", "Neoliberalism, Spatial, Domination and Gentrification: the Struggle to Resist the New Urban Strategy", "Black Women: In the Radical Tradition", "Challenging White Supremacy: The Black Radical View", "Police, Prisons, and the Neoliberal State", "Queer Resistance and the Legacy of the Black Radical Tradition", and the "Souls of Black Folk: Art, Culture and the Emancipation of Humanity."

The panelists, a who's who among activists included great minds such as Angela Y. Davis, Glen Ford, Pam Africa, Jamala Rogers, Margaret Stevens, Charlene Caruthers, Ewuare X. Osayande and Vijay Prishad who commented that "the Black Radical Tradition is an international tradition", followed by an acknowledgment of the huge contribution to the movement by Black Communists and the Communist Party, USA. Patricia Armstead, a moderator for one of the panel discussions, put it best when she stated: "Until we are free of capitalism, we HAVE to resist."

Photo: "March for Our Future" that preceded the conference. | Reclaiming Our Future Facebook page

Beyond deportation: Fixing a broken system, filing a federal suit

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 13:13:00 +0000

When President Obama appointed Dollie Gee to the U.S. District Court in 2010, he undoubtedly didn't expect her to mount a frontal challenge to his administration's detention and deportation policies. But five years after her elevation as the first ChineseAmerican woman on the federal bench, Gee ruled last summer that holding Central American women and children in private detention lockups was illegal.

Gee didn't mince words. She called the detentions "deplorable." And she denounced as "fear-mongering" the claim by Homeland Security lawyers that the detentions would discourage more people from leaving Central America.

Her angry tone shouldn't have come as a surprise. Gee's father was an immigrant engineer and her mother a garment worker in a Los Angeles sweatshop. After law school, as a young lawyer, Gee sued employers for discrimination and then worked for the Teamsters Union, helping workers and immigrants win representation elections. For Chinese Americans, today's detentions contain ugly echoes of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which led to the brutal detention of thousands of Chinese immigrants on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay 128 years ago.

Gee ruled that imprisoning families violated the Flores Settlement, an agreement by the federal government in 1997 that it would release children whenever possible, and hold them in the least restrictive conditions when it could find no one to care for them. But the U.S. appealed Gee's ruling, handed down in August of last year, and in December the Obama administration announced that it would begin deporting Central American migrants who had arrived after May 2014, and who had lost their appeals before immigration judges. Agents then picked up 121 people, including women and children, and sent them to detention centers in Texas.

Contradictory policies

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, defended the action. "Our borders are not open to illegal migration," he said at a press conference. "If you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values."

The statement captures one side of the administration's contradictory treatment of Central American immigrants. On the one hand, President Obama acknowledges that families crossing the border are fleeing violence at home in Central America. On the other, he blames people for coming. "Do not send your children to the borders," Obama warned in 2014. "If they do make it, they'll get sent back." In that sense, the Obama administration is perpetuating the nation's decades-old practice of ejecting and detaining Central American immigrants, even as U.S. policy makers help foster the very conditions that encourage them to flee north across the border.

The latest wave of women and children from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala began arriving on the U.S. border in 2014, prompting the right-wing Breitbart News Network to launch a campaign of hysteria. Agents at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, presumably at the behest of conservatives within their ranks, chimed in with allegations that detention centers were being "flooded" by Central American children.

In response, the Obama administration pushed forward construction of two privately run facilities in Texas, designed to hold 1,500 people between them. When immigrant advocates voiced outrage, the administration began processing asylum claims more rapidly, to shorten stays in the centers. At the same time, the administration defended its much broader decision to defer the deportation of family members of legal residents and citizens. When a Texas judge declared that decision illegal in 2014, the administration began a long appeals process that has now brought the case before the Supreme Court. Twenty-six states, almost all with Republican governors, joined the suit against the Obama order.

Both the administration's threats and detentions have failed to reduce migration, however. Some 58,650 non-Mexicans were picked up on the U.S.-Mexico border during the last three months of 2015. The number of unaccompanied children apprehended was 17,370, compared to 7,987 during the same period the year before, while the number of families went from 7,468 to 21,469.

Blaming the wave of migration on "violence" is far too simple. Modern migration from Central America began with the counterinsurgency wars of the 1980s. The Reagan administration cast as a Cold War threat what were essentially civil conflicts to change societies dominated by wealthy elites, and intervened to support right-wing militaries and contras. As U.S.-backed armies and contras waged war on civilians, hundreds of thousands of people fled.

Sergio Sosa, a Guatemalan immigrant who now directs Omaha's Heartland Workers' Center, recalls bitterly: "The U.S. was responsible for the coups that happened in Guatemala in 1944 and later in '54. Our army was trained at the School of the Americas, and they would come back afterwards and kill our own people. The U.S. used its power and we buried the dead."

An estimated 500,000 Salvadorans arrived in the U.S. in the 1980s, and tens of thousands more fled Honduras and Guatemala. As a result, thousands of families have been separated for decades.

Many settled in the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods of big U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, and were recruited into gangs. The Los Angeles police-many of whom were later found guilty of robbery, murder, and selling drugs themselves-launched the notorious Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) program that arrested and deported young immigrants by the thousands.

So instead of convincing young people in L.A. not to join gangs, deportation spread gang culture through Central America. The name of the Trece (13) gang, for instance, refers to 13th Street in Los Angeles, not in Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras.

Development of underdevelopment

As the Central American civil wars wound down, the administration of George H.W. Bush sponsored development programs designed to woo investors from the U.S. USAID built the infrastructure for industrial parks in San Pedro Sula, for instance, a Caribbean coastal city in Honduras, and lured U.S. garment companies to relocate there. That process accelerated with passage of the Central America Free Trade Agreement.

The expansion of factories at first drew people in from the countryside, although wages were low. Workers testified to earning 270 lempiras per week at the time (about $30 in 1994). But once drawn into the global economy they were then abandoned. In the last decade most of the factories have closed as operators moved production yet again, to Bangladesh or China.

That combination of low wages, unemployment, and gang culture created a violent environment, leading some U.S. media to name San Pedro Sula "the murder capital of Central America."

In 2009, Hondurans tried to find an alternative. A populist president, Manuel Zelaya, raised the country's minimum wage, gave subsidies to small farmers, cut interest rates and instituted free education. All were measures that would have given people a future at home. Nevertheless, after the Honduran military overthrew his government, the Obama administration rapidly gave approval to the coup regime that followed. If social and political change had taken place in Honduras, far fewer Hondurans would be coming to the U.S.

Today, Central American children and families are migrating because they are trying to reunite families divided by war and migration, fleeing violence caused by war and deportations, and looking for an economic escape from poverty intensified by free trade agreements and globalization.

Threats, detentions, and more border walls are simply no match for the enormous pressure on families to leave home. Giving one migrant asylum because she is fleeing violence, and denying it to another because she has no job and no food at home, is a distinction that only makes sense to people far removed from the reality both women face.

Militant response to arbitrary deportations

The Obama administration has faced massive protests and civil disobedience over its deportation policy, which has resulted in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people each year since the president took office. Young people have even blocked buses carrying people to the deportation centers. The decision to begin deportations of Central American mothers and children has provoked even more protests.

On January 19, immigrant-rights groups filed another suit against the Department of Homeland Security and nine other federal agencies, accusing the government of refusing to provide documents or details on what plaintiffs allege is "a controversial and secretive deportation program" known as the "Priority Enforcement Program."

The protests are reverberating on the presidential campaign trail. The Republican candidates, falling in line behind Donald Trump and his hate-filled rhetoric, have all cheered the deportations and condemned immigration proposals that would provide legal status to undocumented people. Democrats, however, have distanced themselves from the administration on detentions and deportations, mindful of mounting anger among Latinos, Asian Americans, and unions-all key progressive voting blocs. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O'Malley have all called for an end to mass deportations and for the closure of privately run detention centers for families.

Ending detentions and mass deportations will require political courage and action from whoever is elected. It will have to be more than just a campaign promise. But as important as that action is, it will still not reach the roots of this current forced migration. Those roots lie in a history of military intervention on the side of wealthy elites, trade policies intended to benefit U.S. investors, and decades of deportations that have separated families. Getting at the roots means changing those basic policies. Those who want change have their work cut out for them-organizing a movement that can make the next president willing to accept the challenge.

Photo: Immigrant youth groups protest the detention and deportation of young migrants and their families in front of a federal building in Oakland, Calif. | David Bacon

Whither Virginia in the 2016 national elections?

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 11:00:00 +0000

In 2016 once again, Virginia, with its 8,382,993 inhabitants, 11 congressional districts and 13 electoral votes, is shaping up as an important electoral battleground. How things go in Virginia will depend on voter registration and turnout.

Virginia was one of the states of the Confederacy and later of the "solid" segregationist South. It is a right-to-work state, which has kept union membership around only 5 percent. But there is a large African American population (about 20 percent) concentrated in the Southeast, and a smaller but growing (about 9 percent) Latino population concentrated in the Washington, D.C. suburbs and exurbs to the North. In addition, migration of non-Southerners to northern Virginia has changed state politics in a more progressive direction in recent years.

Over the last several years, election outcomes in Virginia have swung back and forth between Republicans and Democrats, largely depending on election turnout.

In 2008 and again in 2012, Virginia went for Obama by small but secure majorities. In 2008 Virginia's voter turnout was an unusually high 74.5 percent of registered voters. Obama defeated the Republican Party candidate, Arizona Senator John McCain, in northern Virginia's suburbs and exurbs of Washington, D.C., in Richmond (the state capital), and in theTidewater area of southeastern Virginia, which includes Norfolk, Portsmouth and Hampton. These are all areas in which there is a concentration of African-American and other minority voters. With Obama, the Democrats picked up three new House seats in the state, plus an open Senate seat won by Democrat Mark Warner.

In the next presidential election, in 2012, the pattern repeated with minor variations. Voter turnout was still highat 71.78 percent of registered voters.

But things have been very different in non-presidential year elections.

In 2010, with a turnout of registered voters of only 44.01 percent, the Democrats lost three House seats, and the Republicans won all three statewide elective offices - for governor, lieutenant governor and state attorney general.

In the state legislative elections in 2011 and 2015, voter turnout as a proportion of registered voters was abysmal, at 28.61 percent and 29.1 percent, respectively. Politically this meant that the Republicans widened their control of the House of Delegates (the lower house of the General Assembly, Virginia's state legislature) in both years. The Republicans now also have a majority in the state Senate.

In 2014, voter turnout went up to 41.6 percent, and all three state executive offices were won by Democrats. But the Democrats retained only 3seats in the federal House delegation, the Republicans retaining 8.

Overall, Department of Elections statistics suggest a decline both in voter registration (as a proportion of eligible voters) and turnout (as a proportion of registered voters). Given that both registration and turnout correlate highly with income, this harms the Democrats and helps the Republicans. It also underlines the point that voter registration, mobilization and turnout are the key to defeating the right in November 2016, in Virginia and all over the country.

How is the right wing managing to suppress the vote? Through racial gerrymandering, onerous voting requirements (a mixture of methods including photo ID and hard-to-get-to polling places), and other measures. This is, of course, a national pattern. The Republicans and the right have noticed that outcomes depend more than anything on the turnout of the Democratic Party's electoral base, so they do whatever they can to keep people from registering and actually voting.

Virginia Republicans are on the cusp of suffering a defeat on racial gerrymandering. On January 7 a federal court ruled that the Republican-controlled legislature had engaged in illegitimate racial gerrymandering when they defined the boundaries of the Third and Fourth Congressional Districts in the Southeastern part of the state. The court also imposed its own map. The original complaint was that the legislature's Republican majority had deliberately packed African-American majority areas into the Third Congressional District, which is represented by an African-American Democrat, Bobby Scott, thereby making it much harder for African-American voters to have their voices heard in the neighboring Fourth Congressional District immediately to the Southeast. The court mandated map changes to the boundaries of those two districts, and made other adjustments, so that the Third District has fewer African-Americans and the Fourth District has more. Scott will most likely hold onto his seat in November, but the chance that the Democrats take the Fourth District seat also is greatly increased.

Seeing the writing on the wall, the ultra-right-wing Republican incumbent in the Fourth District, Randy Forbes, is exploring a run for a seat in the neighboring Second District, where the incumbent Republican congressman, Scott Rigell, is retiring.

The Republicans have appealed the court-mandated remap to the U.S. Supreme Court, so it may be a matter of months before the ultimate situation is clear. In addition, another Republican, John Hurt, is retiring from his Fifth Congressional District seat, creating another open seat in an area with a fair number of African-American voters.

There is no federal Senate, state legislative or state executive election in Virginia this year.So the results of the presidential election, and of Virginia's 13 electoral votes, and the election for the state's 11 House members, are tied together. The crucial factors are voter registration and turnout.

All the Democratic presidential candidates see Virginia as key to their fate in November. The Republicans feel the same way and are using all their demagogic tricks in Virginia as everywhere else.

Anti-immigrant themes are already being struck. Donald Trump has selected Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors in the northeastern part of the state, as his campaign chairperson. Stewart gained national fame by being one of the first local officials to instruct his police force to demand to see immigration documents from people they stop for traffic and other offenses. Prince William County (where this writer lives) has been a major area of settlement for immigrants from Central America, and there were immediate problems with police harassment amidst a wave of fear that led some people to move out of the county. Non-citizens cannot vote, but many live in households that include voting citizens as well as documented and undocumented non-citizens, so this is an effective vote-suppressing mechanism also, given that Latino voters in Virginia vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats.

There will be no dull moments in Virginia, or national, politics this year.

Photo: How is the right wing managing to suppress the vote? Through racial gerrymandering, onerous voting requirements (a mixture of methods including photo ID and hard-to-get-to polling places), and other measures. | AP

Sanders and Clinton: Both can be true, both need each other

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 10:08:00 +0000

There is a wave of articles and comments, from Sanders supporters and from Clinton's, trying to delineate their differences over a philosophy of change. Some liberal pundits damn Sanders with faint praise, saying that his philosophy of how change happens has never worked. And Sanders supporters lambaste Clinton for her Wall Street ties and for defending the incrementalism of the Obama administration on health care, financial reform, and the environment.

Some commentators see this as a fight over how to view President Obama's accomplishments. They contrast the Sanders campaign, which focuses on reaching those still not covered by health insurance through expansion of Medicare, with Clinton's campaign, which defends the results of Obamacare and seeks to improve on it.

The problem is characterizing the present moment as a world of either/or choices. Certainly primary voters and caucus-goers have to choose but one candidate. However, that is not the same as understanding the complexity of the real world.

We have to acknowledge, appreciate, and honor the massive changes brought about by Obamacare. Political efforts to expand health care coverage go back many decades, to Teddy Roosevelt at least. While Obamacare has limitations, mainly because it's a kludge built on existing insurance and health care models, it has resulted in coverage for many millions of people - and that is worth celebrating. We can also, simultaneously, recognize the shortcomings built into Obamacare.

We need a system, new in some ways, that enables 100 percent health care coverage. Steps along that path are gradual improvements to Obamacare, a tangible accomplishment that needs defending from the rapacious Republicans who want to dismantle it and destroy some of the lives of those who rely on it.

Posing these two ways of accomplishing change ignores the ways they can, and must, support each other. If not for the reality of Obamacare, talking about improvements would be pointless. If we were still fighting about universal coverage, flailing about due to Republican obstruction with no success at achieving broader coverage, we'd be having a much different debate.

All this counter-posing is harmful in the long run. Whichever candidate is still standing at the end, s/he will have to win the other's following. Much has been commented on from the perspective of "how will Clinton appeal to Sanders voters once she wins." But the same is true in reverse: How will Sanders win over Clinton supporters, disappointed yet again that a woman hasn't made it to the final race, discouraged by a Sanders approach that seems to reject the very idea of increments that can actually be won in our present political circumstances, not yet ready to reject all aspects of the Clinton legacy, angry that Sanders supporters (not Sanders himself) ascribe all Democratic opposition as selling out to moneyed interests. Sanders and Clinton both will have to win the other's supportersin November.

It's a built-in part of the process that each candidate needs to differentiate him or herself. But we don't have to be drawn into destructive battles over the "perfect" approach to change, nor use arguments that resonate with Republican attacks. We don't have to accuse Clinton of being a conscienceless sell-out hypocrite (though we shouldn't ignore some of her history), nor Sanders as a wild-eyedradical idealist spouting unrealizable visions, as suggested by some of his rhetoric. Either will make a strong candidate against whichever troglodyte the Republicans nominate. Neither should we think that a Democratic victory will be easy: It will require unity among all the supporters of both candidates.

One cannot deny that there are serious limitations of both candidacies. Sanders bests Clinton on the use of force in foreign policy, but his international positions are far from perfect. Clinton edges out Sanders with her consistency fighting for gun regulation. Sanders is way more explicit about the necessity of building mass movements to force the political system to embrace actual fundamental change. Clinton, at the moment, appeals more to African American voters, a key constituency for victory in November.

All the kerfuffle about strategies of change ignores that it's not about the personalities or the specific positions of the candidates; it's about the movements that are built in the campaign. Arguably, Obama's biggest failure as president is his abandonment of the independent movement that elected him, ceding power back to the Democratic establishment, thereby losing a powerful tool to pressure the political system for more basicchange. For example, if that independent movement had forced the adoption of the Employee Free Choice Act making union organizing more fair - which was endorsed by candidate Obama - the political landscape we face today would be much more favorable to progressive candidates and issues.

Change requires incremental improvements and smaller scale victories - and also a far-reaching, transformative vision. Posing these two against each other is not necessary. Without accepting that complexity, we are easily drawn into pointless battles over who is right and who is wrong, rather than how we together accomplish our mutual goals. Both philosophies of change can reinforce each other. Getting mired in arguments over whether or not Sanders is a "real" socialist, or who is most electable in some poll-dominated universe, does not help.

Whoever wins the Democratic nomination will have to build a movement capable of beating the Republican, whose victory - no matter the GOP nominee, as Noam Chomsky recently said - would be a danger to the survival of humanity.

For more on widening the focus beyond Sanders' limitations to encompass the building of a movement for change, see this piece by Chauncey K. Robinson.

Photo: Scott Morgan and Cliff Owen | AP

Sanders supporters take to the streets, with video

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 17:30:00 +0000

CHICAGO - Thousands gathered nationwide Jan. 23, as demonstrators rallied together in support of Bernie Sanders. National initiators of the event estimated on Facebook that 34 cities held grassroots-organized marches and even more speech-watching parties (deemed "virtual rallies") for Sanders as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination. Sanders gave a speech that was livestreamed later that evening exclusively to grassroots organizers and campaign workers and it was viewed by over 2,000 individual watch parties on Saturday night.

Interestingly, Saturday's marches were not coordinated as a top-down effort of the campaign. The marches were organized by local grassroots efforts. Millennial activist Ryan Thomas coordinated the events from his home in Philadelphia through his Facebook page.

Sanders' speech was the campaign's response to the swell of grassroots action by groups such as #Movement4Bernie and Millennials for Bernie Sanders 2016. Many of the same students who started the #MarchForBernie coordinated the #MillionStudentMarch, which took place in many cities last November to demand tuition-free public universities, forgiveness of all outstanding federal student loans, and a $15 minimum wage for all campus workers - all parts of Sanders' platform.

Video: Chicago #MarchForBernie

People's World video by Emily Likins.

Over 1,500 people marched from Daley Plaza to the Chicago Board of Trade, cheerful in the (balmy for January in the windy city) 35-degree weather. The march paused at Bank of America, demanding: "Break it up!" Theresa Powers spoke on behalf of #Movement4Bernie. The pre-march rally featured speakers Martese Chism from National Nurses United; David Hernandez from the Chicago Teachers Union; Lamon Q. Reccord (Glo Boy Lo-Lo), 10^th ward Alderwoman Susan Sadlowski Garza; and anti-deportation immigrant rights activist Maria Paz Perez .

Photo: Bob Simpson, Chicago for Bernie Sanders, Facebook.

Race or class: Must Bernie choose?

Wed, 27 Jan 2016 16:23:00 +0000

Is Bernie Sanders' greatest weakness his campaign's limited addressing of race? Or is he being unfairly targeted for taking on economic injustice - an issue that racial justice activists ought to get behind? In fact, this controversy over Sanders' perceived lack of attention to the issue of racial justice is more complicated than "class first or race first". Settled institutions of economic power were built through the exploitation of immigrants, African-Americans, and women. Because of this, these groups' voices are critical to a policy agenda that claims to solve poverty and inequality. But what are those voices saying?

With the Iowa caucus fast approaching, Democratic candidates Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have each come under intense pressure to show that their candidacy is the most likely to triumph over the Republican presidential nominee. The Sanders campaign has been steadily gaining momentum, but has not been immune to its share of public criticism. That seems to be intensifying as the fight for Iowa draws near. Sanders has continued to come under fire for his perceived weakness on issues dealing with systemic racism.

Then again, our attention to the issue of systemic racism should not be limited to whether or not the Sanders campaign is addressing it. Whoever is the next Democratic party nominee (or for that matter, the next President) will have to deal with injustices tied to race, gender, and sexual identity and orientation not as back burner topics, but at the forefront of their agenda--along with economic and class politics. We've seen the beginning of these struggles coming together through the Fight for $15 and the Movement for Black Lives (#BlackLivesMatter).

Nonetheless Sanders' perceived reticence around race may threaten his campaign. The African-American turnout in voting has been rising steadily since 2000. By percentage, African-American turnout exceeded that of whites by two points in 2012, 66 percent to 64. This is coupled with the consistent rise in voter turnout of the Latino community.

If Sanders' campaign aims to be "of the people," then it can be argued that his campaign should first address extensively the most oppressed among us. Systemic racism is an issue that many voters of color face on a daily basis, and if Sanders is to win over a majority of them, his campaign can't afford to ignore, or be coy, about an issue that these voters don't have a choice but to face every day of their lives.

Critics vs. supporters

The most recent controversy over the Sanders campaign erupted last week when journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates asked the Vermont Senator if he supported reparations for African-Americans. Sanders' reply was that he was not in favor of reparations and that its likelihood of getting through Congress was nil. The Senator suggested that reparations would be divisive and added:

"...[W]hat we should be talking about is making massive investments in rebuilding our cities, in creating millions of decent paying jobs, in making public colleges and universities tuition-free, basically targeting our federal resources to the areas where it is needed the most and where it is needed the most is in impoverished communities, often African-American and Latino."

As Coates points out, there is irony in a self-proclaimed "revolutionary" candidate shying away from endorsing a policy that would help a disadvantaged group because it may be "divisive". Although Sanders makes a compelling argument for economic justice that would also benefit African-Americans and Latinos, he seems to quickly dismiss a topic that is seen as very important to the African-American community by simply stating it is impossible to get through Congress. This is despite the fact that his campaign, as others such as Coates and Kathleen Geier of The Nation have pointed out, is one that stands on many demands and proposals that may be just as "impossible" to get through a Republican-majority Congress as reparations would be.

Or is it that Sanders is leading with a "class first" mentality, one that holds that racism will be eradicated once economic justice is achieved? Is this a faulty way of going about dealing with the issue of systemic racism?

Coates argues that the "class first" approach is one that relies on the myth that racism can not exist within socialism. He explains that raising wages and bettering the economy will not, by default, cure racial injustice. That it will not address the wage gaps between blacks and whites, or housing discrimination based on race, and other ills of capitalism that target marginalized groups specifically. He asks: if Sanders' campaign is about visionary revolutionary change, why not include the fight for reparations?

Supporters of Sanders have replied directly to Coates' criticisms. Celebrity and avid Sanders supporter, Michael Render (Killer Mike), took to Twitter to respond to Coates when the controversy broke. Render asserted that it was a shame that African-Americans needed to even make a case for reparations, but that it was unfair to target just Sanders when the other candidates, such as Clinton, have also come out against reparations. Render went further to add that he encouraged "other blacks that are concerned with our poor, working class & middle class to vote Sanders." But does his encouragement hold weight when looking at Sanders' platform?

Is Sanders' economic platform enough?

Some would argue that the Sanders campaign, in addressing economic injustice, is actually addressing racial injustice, and does not treat systemic racism as an afterthought.

Adolph Reed, an author and professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, noted in a recent interview on Behind the News with Doug Henwood: "You can go down Sanders's platform issue by issue and ask, "so how is this not a black issue?" How is a $15 minimum wage not a black issue? How is massive public works employment not a black issue? How is free public college higher education not a black issue? The criminal justice stuff and all the rest of it... [T]he only way we're going to be able to make anyone's life better is to change the terms of political debate. And we can only do that on the basis of common experience and the most broadly shared experience is that of those who work for a living or are expected to work for a living."

Anoa Changa, an Atlanta based attorney, and one of the organizers of African-Americans for Bernie, spoke with People's World about the scrutiny the Sanders campaign is getting from activists. Changa stated that the economic injustice Sanders wants to dismantle is connected to the black struggle for equality. She expressed that, although the fight for raising the wage to $15 an hour and expanding union rights was not enough to deal with racism, African-Americans are "disproportionately affected when the economy is bad". Changasaidthat a deeper conversation on race needs to happen--not just within the Sanders campaign, but the whole movement.

"The criticism shouldn't be treated as an academic exercise," Changa argued. "This is larger. It needs to be a more balanced conversation. [We need to] discuss race in democratic politics. Black votes need to be seen as more than just a bloc to be coveted by candidates."

The need to build power

Others, such as Moumita Ahmed, would argue that the weight of dealing with race in relation to the system should not rest solely on Sanders' campaign. Ahmed, a national organizer for Millennials for Bernie, and supporter of Black Lives Matter, spoke with People's World. She said she felt that the Coates' article was a bad analysis of the Sanders campaign, and that although she felt he had a right to be critical, he was unfairly targeting Bernie.

Ahmed asserted that "race analysis and class analysis go hand in hand," and that Sanders isn't someone that plays "identitarian politics," but pushes politics that will benefit everyone. She concluded that the ultimate power doesn't lie in any one candidate, but with the people, "Grassroots push for change. When the grassroots push them [the candidates] they listen."

Changa expressed similar sentiments, noting, "At some point, for sustainable change to take root we will have to be involved in the political process at the local and state levels, as well as national politics."

Changa makes an important point that the movement has to demonstrate power in a wide array of sectors that goes beyond questioning racial justice in academia and demonstrations in the streets.

Left-wing hip-hop artist and author Boots Riley explained in a recent interview on Democracy Now that there needs to be an understanding that at the base of this system is the exploitation of labor, and that it is up to activists to push that point. He asserted that "radicals have to organize a new labor movement, a new radical, militant labor movement that withholds labor and breaks the (anti-union) Taft-Hartley laws in order to do that. This will give social movements teeth."

No saviors

Activists' close look at the Sanders' platform has opened a dialogue on a topic that can often get pushed aside on the left: how to address the fact that there can be no true economic justice without an acknowledgment that much of this system is built upon racial and gender oppression.

Intersectionality, (the idea that racism, sexism, classism, etc. are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another), is a concept that many on the left and any Democratic presidential hopeful should get familiar with. There are battles in progress (for example, the current court battle around affirmative action) that can serve as a starting point for politicians to begin to address racial disparities, but there is a long way to go. The burden cannot rest on one candidate alone.

AnoaChanga perhaps summarized it best: "People assume [grassroots supporters] want a savior, or someone to save us. I don't see Bernie as my savior. We are looking for a leader. [There] needs to be a course correction."

Photo: Eliane Thompson/AP

Texas grand jury clears Planned Parenthood, indicts accusers

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 16:22:00 +0000

HOUSTON - A grand jury yesterday completely cleared a Planned Parenthood clinic that had been charged with illegally profiting from the sale of fetal tissue.

On the other hand, it indicted David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the two people behind the charges, for "tampering with a governmental record," a felony carrying a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

Moreover, it charged Daleiden with the violation he had tried to pin on Planned Parenthood: the illegal purchase or sale of human organs.

Last July, Daleiden and Merritt kicked off an orgy of right wing furor by releasing videotapes they had secretly made purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials negotiating the sale of fetal tissue.

Republican lawmakers spent millions of dollars and countless hours holding hearings reviewing the tapes and investigating Planned Parenthood. Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul used the tapes to lead right wingers in the U.S. House and Senate in an attempt to shut down the government rather than adopt a federal budget that included Planned Parenthood funding.

Daleiden and Merritt are leaders of an outfit called the Center for Medical Progress, based in California. Posing as representatives of a biotechnology firm, they used fake identification to set up meetings with officials of the Planned Parenthood clinic serving the Houston area. They tried to convince the officials to sell them fetal tissue and secretly recorded the meetings using their smartphones.

The Planned Parenthood officials wouldn't bite, so Daleiden and Merritt evidently doctored the videos and released them to the public.

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a right wing Republican and an ardent opponent of women having the right to choose their own health care options, asked District Attorney Devon Anderson, also a Republican activist, to convene a grand jury to conduct a criminal investigation of Planned Parenthood. Anderson's jurisdiction includes Harris County and Houston.

After more than two months of intensive work, the grand jury reached its verdict and indicted not Planned Parenthood, but Daleiden and Merritt.

District Attorney Anderson would not reveal any details of the case, but observers believe that the indictment for "tampering with a government record" probably means that the grand jury found that Daleiden and Merritt had tampered with the tapes that were reviewed by the House and Senate.

Daleiden was probably slapped with the additional charge of attempting to purchase a human organ because he sent an email to Planned Parenthood in June offering to buy fetal tissue for $1,600 per sample. Planned Parenthood never responded.

In announcing the grand jury's decision, the Harris County District Attorney's office issued a statement saying, "After a lengthy and thorough investigation by the Harris County District Attorney's Office, the Texas Rangers, and the Houston Police Department, a Harris County grand jury took no action Monday against Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast.

District Attorney Anderson said, "As I stated at the outset of this investigation, we must go where the evidence leads us. All the evidence uncovered in the course of this investigation was presented to the grand jury. I respect their decision on this difficult case."

Photo: Planned Parenthood ‏@PPGulfCoast 5 Nov 2015 Twitter, Thank you to our amazing supporters who showed up to #PinkOutTX & #StandwithPP!

Blood money? U.S. is world's top arms dealer

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 11:28:00 +0000

The United States is the top arms peddler in the world, its weapons sales to other countries far surpassing those by Russia and others, the Congressional Research Service reported last month.

Put another way: The U.S. is the lead player in making our world awash with arms, causing horrifying levels of death, destruction and environmental degradation. In so doing, it is fueling the flood of refugees fleeing the devastation. Terrorism feeds on this; many of the weapons we ship abroad wind up in terrorists' hands. The massive arms industry that supplies and profits from this weaponry distorts our economy, and - given that most other manufacturing jobs have moved overseas - funnels people into jobs making weapons of war that they might prefer not to make if they had a choice.

In 2014, the most recent year covered in the report, the U.S. widened its share of the global arms market. It signed $32.8 billion worth of arms sales agreements with other countries-a whopping 50.4 percent of all worldwide arms transfer agreements that year. Russia was a distant second, with $10.2 billion, or 14.2 percent. (This widened the previous year's gap between the two countries' share of the market, when the U.S. controlled 38 percent of the world's weapons sales market.)

Yet one hears little worry expressed in the mainstream media over this situation. On the contrary, the report has the war industry excited.

Defense News, a publication serving the "global defense community," noted the "opportunities ... because global instability is creating demand."

"Peace is not breaking out around the world, and nations are going to have to increase the size of their force structures," Frank Finelli, a managing director at the Carlyle Group, told the publication. The Carlyle Group is a big but shadowy player in the military industry, government and financial worlds.

Industry consultant John Niehaus said his "clients are increasingly optimistic about their future sales prospects."

Who gets the money?

The CRS report covers government-to-government arms sales. The governments make the deals. The seller government contracts with private "defense" corporations to provide the weaponry. For example, the U.S. recently signed off on a $1.83 billion weapons sale to Taiwan, and a $1.29 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. The Taiwan deal involves refurbishing two U.S. Navy frigates, and providing anti-air and armor missiles, defensive ship systems and 36 amphibious assault vehicles, produced mainly by U.S. "defense" industry giants Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The Saudi sale will provide over 10,000 bombs, munitions, and weapons parts produced by Boeing and Raytheon.

The Congressional Research Service report was issued Dec. 21. A week later, the financial news site The Street had its investors' eye on "the thriving global arms bazaar." It pointed to the top U.S. military stocks to watch - Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Boeing. "These giant companies make the jet fighters, drones, missiles, and other defense systems that foreign nations increasingly covet in a troubled world." The Street noted that these companies' biggest clients in 2014 included South Korea, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, "countries in regional 'hot spots' that will only get hotter in 2016."

By way of illustration, here is a list of major arms and logistical support contracts the U.S. government awarded to U.S. corporations to fulfill government sales agreements with Gulf Cooperation Council countries between March and September 2015, via the Council on Foreign Relations:

On May 27, Lockheed Martin Missile and Fire Control was awarded a $12,037,639 contract for post-production support services for the Royal Saudi Land Forces Aviation Command Modernized Target Acquisition Designation Sight/Pilot Night Vision Sensor program.
On June 11, Boeing Co. was awarded a $41,146,387 contract for Apache helicopter post-production services and maintenance in Saudi Arabia.
On June 24, L-3 National Security Solutions was awarded a $95,000,000 contract for air operations center training to Royal Saudi Air Force personnel.
On July 24, Raytheon Co. was awarded a contract for 355 AGM-154 Block III C Unitary Joint Stand-Off Weapon missiles for Saudi Arabia, including associated supplies and services.
On July 13, Booz Allen & Hamilton was awarded a $12,386,000 contract for support services in the areas of training and education, engineering, technical, and management support services to the Saudi navy.
On July 29, the State Department approved the sale of $500M "for ammunition for the Royal Saudi Land Forces and associated equipment, parts and logistical support."
On July 31, DynCorp International was awarded a $17,313,518 contract for maintenance support to the Royal Saudi Land Forces Aviation Command aviation program.
On September 24, Boeing Co. was awarded a $22,311,055 contract for 13 Harpoon lll-up round tactical missiles and seven Harpoon air launch missile containers to Saudi Arabia.

A list of the top 100 U.S. military contractor corporations in 2015 is available here, and gives an idea of the billions of dollars involved in a year's worth of contracts.

These are typically "cost-plus contracts," which guarantee profits for the companies (at taxpayer expense) even if projects go over budget, as they generally do, or if the Defense Department underestimates the initial budget. Critics say such contracts promote wastefulness, inefficiency, and cost-padding. Moreover, there is little government oversight of these contracts and how they are carried out. (The Project on Government Oversight has information on the massive failures of the Pentagon's accounting and management practices, and its penetration by outside contractors. See this piece, for example.)

What about those profits?

Think Progress reported in 2012 that "The last ten years have seen massive growth in defense industry profits." During that period, "the largest defense contractors have prospered to a degree that would have looked very unlikely just eleven or twelve years ago."

"The defense industry has continued to enjoy this prosperity" during and after the 2008 economic recession "that has had a devastating effect on both businesses and families across the country," the report noted.

Even as families, communities and public services continue to struggle financially, in just one year, 2014, the nation's top six aerospace and defense contractors reported a 7 percent increase in profits. According to the National Priorities Project, Lockheed Martin, the nation's top military contractor, "saw over $5.5 billion in profit, and paid its CEO more than $34 million in 2014. And the $32 billion it received from the U.S. government made up more than seventy percent of its total sales."

Boeing, another giant military contractor, reported profits of $5.45 billion. A big chunk of that came from Boeing's commercial aircraft, but one-third of its revenue comes from military-related products. Northrop Grumman, another top 10 U.S. military contractor, reported profits of $2.7 billion, up 6 percent from the previous year.

Who gets the weaponry?

More than 75 percent of worldwide weapons sales go to developing countries, defined by the report as the countries of Asia, Near East, Latin America and Africa. Not surprisingly, the leading markets for arms are in the Near East and Asia. And the bulk of the sales efforts are focused on the wealthier - as well as highly strategic - countries in those regions, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and India. Saudi Arabia has been the top weapons buyer over the past seven years, to the tune of $86.6 billion, far exceeding any other country. It has also been the top U.S. weapons buyer: from 2010 to 2015 the U.S. made $90 billion worth of arms deals with Saudi Arabia, according to a separate Congressional Research Service report. "Saudi Arabia's relationship with the United States is primarily as a source of cash for weapons," says the Council on Foreign Relations' Micah Zenko.

What kinds of weapons are we selling to the world? They include surface-to-air missiles, tanks and self-propelled guns, supersonic combat aircraft, artillery and armored vehicles.

The CRS report notes that the weakened state of the global economy is slowing the growth of military purchases. "Concerns over their domestic budget problems have led many purchasing nations to defer or limit the purchase of new major weapons systems," the CRS says. Yet "orders for weapons upgrades and support services can still be rather lucrative, and such sales can provide weapons suppliers with continued revenue, despite the reduction in demand for major weapons systems."

As a result, competition among sellers has increased, according to the report, and arms suppliers are widening their net, seeking to sell their weaponry to new countries and regions. Thus, there is an incentive to promote militarization of conflicts that did not start out that way.

The competition among sellers is both among countries - the U.S. is in a sharpening competition with Europe in this - and also, in the U.S. for example, among military corporations competing to land lucrative Defense Department contracts.

The "military-industrial complex"

The Congressional Research Service report's numbers represent only government-to-government Foreign Military Sales program sales; according to the report, the bulk of foreign arms sales occur through such deals. The report does not include licensed commercial arms export deals, which, startlingly, are not recorded on an ongoing basis, according to the CRS.

Data that is collected on commercial sales is largely not made public, the report says. However a U.S. State Department Annual Military Assistance Report for 2014 shows that the value of such U.S. sales authorizations that year totaled billions of dollars. These include military goods and services such as: firearms, flamethrowers, ammunition; rocket, bomb, grenade, torpedo and missile launch vehicles; explosives and their components; warships, aircraft, armored ground vehicles and related navigation systems; chemical and biological weapons and services; nuclear weapons parts, equipment and simulation tools.

Because of the absence of data on these kinds of foreign weapons sales, the CRS acknowledges that its numbers undercount the real totals.

But the facts it does present show the vast sums of money being made by arms manufacturers, and their interest in keeping the sales and profits growing. Defense corporations are among the top "politically active corporations," measured in the money they spend on federal lobbyists and campaign contributors, according to a Sunlight Foundation report.

The Center for Responsive Politics observes, at its OpenSecrets.org website, "The hundreds of billions of dollars the federal government spends each year on defense are part of the reason defense aerospace firms make millions of dollars in campaign contributions, a majority of which has gone to Republicans since 1989."

These military contractors "concentrate their political donations on members of the House and Senate Appropriations subcommittees that allocate federal defense money. Prime targets of defense aerospace money also include members of the Armed Services committees, who influence military policy and have the power to create demand for this industry's commodities."

They also play a role in electoral politics through front groups. This year, for example, a new group called Americans for Peace, Prosperity and Security is promoting right-wing militarist policies in the race for the White House. Military contractors are heavily represented in the group's leadership, including Raytheon, SAIC (another top 10 defense contractor), BAE Systems, and others. APPS is registered as a 501©4 nonprofit, which means it does not have to report its donors.

Moreover, defense industries participate heavily in the "revolving door" of prominent politicians going back and forth between influential government and corporate jobs. Just one defense giant, Northrop Grumman has employed at least 20 former congressional staffers as lobbyists, Lee Fang reported in The Nation in 2013. In addition, the company has former lobbyists running the both the House and Senate Armed Services committees. Northrop Grumman, like many other corporations - military and otherwise - provides hefty bonuses to employees who take positions in government.

What happened to our economy?

It is a sad fact that - with highly lucrative, virtually open-ended contracts - the federal government subsidizes the "military-industrial complex" that President Eisenhower warned about in a 1961 speech. "Defense companies now make up a very substantial part of America's much diminished industrial base - and these companies are hooked on the narcotic of defense spending," defense expert Chuck Spinney, who spent 30 years at the Pentagon, wrote in Time magazine in 2012. This has come at the expense of civilian manufacturing, civilian research and scientific innovation, and all the jobs that have been lost in those areas. As an indicator of the economic distortion caused by our country's "defense dependency," Spinney points out that more than half of the federal government's research and development budget now goes to military-related activities.

Meanwhile, we see other manufacturing and jobs continuing to hemorrhage.

At the same time, Good Jobs First reports that financially hard-pressed state and local governments, along with the federal government, are shelling out billions of dollars in subsidies to defense contractors, in the form of grants, tax credits, and other "incentives." Lockheed Martin, for example, has received $1.2 billion in federal, state and local subsidies in the last 10 years, the bulk of them since 2010. That includes $766 million in subsidies from state and local governments. Northrop Grumman got over $1 billion in government subsidies, almost all from state and local governments. California, constantly struggling over budget priorities, is one of the biggest subsidizers of these companies.

The usual rationale is that this spending protects or attracts jobs. But research has shown that spending on human needs produces more jobs across a range of pay scales than spending on the military. One billion dollars spent on clean jobs, health care and education plus tax cuts for working families will create "substantially more jobs" across all pay ranges (high, middle and lower) than the same $1 billion spent on the military, a 2009 report from the University of Massachusetts showed.

Blood money

The worldwide government-to-government arms trade totaled $71.8 billion in 2014. The 75-page Congressional Research Service report contains 44 tables and diagrams detailing the billions, the buyers, and the sellers. Behind the avalanche of numbers are millions of human beings killed, maimed, orphaned, left homeless, their schools, hospitals, cities and villages destroyed. Also behind the numbers are human needs that are going unmet in the seller countries such as the U.S. Instead of being used for meeting people's needs, our tax monies are sucked up and economic development thwarted by war spending pushed by powerful "special interest" weapons corporations.

Photo: S L R Jester/Flickr/CC

Dildos for the Bundy brothers: Love, laughter, and the politics of joy

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 16:34:00 +0000

If you're going to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Princeton, Oregon, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. Rumor has it, wintertime will be a love-in there. In fact, it's more than rumor if you consider fifty-five gallons of lube and a stockpile of dildos compelling evidence.

If you haven't yet encountered this viral bit of news, when Ammon Bundy and his gaggle of armed ranchers sent out a list of needed supplies, the militia men were apparently flooded with boxes full of dildos.

They even received some penis-shaped snack foods and a fifty-five gallon drum of lube. For whatever reason, the occupying ranchers responded with disgust, perceiving the care packages as expressions of hate. Their spokesperson, Maureen "Mo" Peltier, said, "People spending money to send items representing their hate. That could have been spent on good things. Or those in need. Or something."

But do the dildos necessarily constitute hate mail? How do we understand the political significance of the dildo in this instance?

The politics of the dildo

It should be noted that the dildo is no foreigner to the political stage. It sprang into the spotlight back in the day when lesbian feminists debated whether its use in lesbian sex represented a re-inscription of patriarchal power dynamics or a form of progressive sex for which no male was needed.

This time, the mass-mailing of dildos inspired a minor controversy that merits some inquiry into the politics of the dildo. Some Twitter commentators assigned the moniker #brokebackmilitia to the Bundy gang and promptly received accusations of homophobia. Questions were raised as to whether the dildo barrage was somehow meant to belittle the militia by undermining their masculinity and labeling them gay.

It is also possible, however, to interpret the dildo packages as a progressive gesture. It might be seen as a way to challenge, in a joyful and humorous manner, dominant conceptions of masculinity and the aggression and violence often informing masculinist values and behaviors. Perhaps we cannot know the intentions of the mailers, but we can talk about the effects of their gesture.

Frankly, it's nice to see the dildo back. It's been absent from our finer political discourse for too long. When I first caught wind of this bounty being bestowed on the Oregon militia, I have to say I belly-laughed until I just about bust my gut, popped an aneurism, and popped anything else that could burst in my being.

The laughter was a relief, buoying my spirits and altering my attitude in a political and cultural environment that usually locks me in a state of constant anxiety and, more often than not, inspires paralysis rather than activism.

It reminded me of the historical role of laughter in resistance and the need to reinvigorate our politics and ourselves with a joyful and erotic dimension. This is what makes us most vibrantly human and should characterize the world we seek to win.

In the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., we need to foreground love in all that we do in the name of politics. As the good Dr. King stressed in his Nobel Peace Prize address:

"Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."

The outpouring of dildos was, perhaps, just such an effort.

News of the militia's occupation first broke for me through Facebook. The most prominent response seemed to be an insistence that if the militia men were people of color, the government would have moved quickly with violence and the protesters would likely be dead.

I wasn't sure if this was meant only to underscore the racist double-standard at work in our culture, given the recent spate of Black lives taken in police shootings, or whether there was an implicit wish for federal authorities to visit violence upon the militia?

If we were to take a breath and reflect on Dr. King's wisdom, we would see reacting to violence and anger in kind simply isn't the way.

The beauty of the dildo shower is that it erects a vision of another way to resist and seek justice. It not only provokes laughter to counter terror and disarm anger, but it takes us a step beyond passive non-violent resistance. To borrow a phrase from back in the day, it calls on us to make love, not war.

Particularly in our age of terror in which we risk reacting out of fear, the mailing of dildos and lube underscored the need for a politics of joy that combines laughter and eroticism. These two ingredients are needed if we are going to craft a political resistance that doesn't just wage war against oppressive forces but pre-figures the next world we seek to build - a humane, expressive and joyful one. As Gandhi so eloquently reminds us, "The means is the end."

Make love, not war

Writing during the repressive rule of Stalin, Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin highlighted the political uses, indeed the necessity, of laughter to challenge terror and authoritarianism. In his study Rabelais and His World, which should be required reading for U.S. left activists, he concludes, "The serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and always contain an element of fear and intimidation. These elements prevailed in the Middle Ages. Laughter, on the contrary, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used by violence and authority."

Laughter "frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes...are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way."

Mailing dildos instead of throwing grenades represents a move that perhaps "prepares the way." It allows us to access a different kind of power - the power of the erotic - in what we might call the politics of joy. It is a practical politics designed to counter hate, anger, and violence by making love instead of waging war. It re-directs traditional "masculine" energies of revenge, aggression, and retaliation toward a creative method of response founded on love, as King promoted.

Audre Lorde explains the power of the erotic as a form of political practice, defining it as "our most profoundly creative source" and "that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society."

While she defines the erotic as "female," contrasting its qualitative difference from patriarchal hierarchy and aggression, she identifies it as "a resource within each of us." Just as Bakhtin thinks about laughter, Lorde sees the erotic as a central energy for social change. It is a "source of power and information within our lives" against the forces of oppression which always "must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change."

The erotic, echoing the words of Gandhi, is both the means and the end of political struggle according to Lorde:

"We begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives."

In other words, while the erotic offers the clean and green political means - i.e. the activist energy - through which we must act to ensure humane and joyful consequences from our actions, the erotic is also the chief criteria by which we measure outcomes. We must ask, have we created a joyful world that gives expression to our fullest creative or erotic energies?

The joy of resistance

Although Lorde doesn't use the term, she describes the erotic as a necessarily anti-capitalist energy and as the hallmark of what Karl Marx would have termed a dis-alienated society. Herein lies the vitality of her thinking for a moribund left, as she writes:

"The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love."

The erotic is the power through which we reclaim our work and ourselves, essentially aiming at what we tend to understand as a socialist society. It is one in which people enjoy the fruits of their collective labor and social conditions allow for the fulfillment of realizing one's full creative potential. It is a society in which the free and full development of each is the precondition for the free and full development of all.

While we have not yet succeeded in transcending a system with this "principal horror" and creating a system that truly honors life and enables human fulfillment, the mailing of the dildos (the militia's unappreciative reception notwithstanding) signals a recognition of the erotic as a source of power and social change. It counters modes of resistance that simply replicate the violence and repression we mean to eliminate in the future world that, in the spirit of John Lennon, we must imagine.

And, the delivery of dildos does not stand alone in the history of joyful resistance to capitalism. When I first heard about their arrival in Oregon, I was reminded of the striking women textile workers in Elizabethton, Tennessee back in 1929.They changed the tone and tenor of the picket line in a way that male workers could not, bringing play back into politics precisely by accessing the erotic power Lorde identifies.

As labor historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall writes, the women made "no secret of their sexual experience" as they "combined flirtation with fierceness on the picket line." As opposed to anger and muscle, "Laughter was among the women's most effective weapons."

Much like the dildos, this joyful and erotic play disarmed anger and violence.

I also remember visiting the Solidarity Singers on the lawn of the capitol in Madison, Wisconsin a couple years ago. Joyful and concerned citizens had been gathering every day at noon to sing together since the mass protests of Governor Scott Walker's hijacking of democracy and collective bargaining rights in early 2011.

I spoke to one of the protestors, an oncology nurse, who related the importance of the singing, of resisting and protesting in playful and joyful ways. She recounted how at one moment back in those frigid days, amid the masses in the Capitol, she and others suddenly stopped yelling and started singing. The feeling in her body and spirit completely transformed. She found herself uplifted, energized, joyfully open to others and the future, as opposed to consumed and exhausted by the stress of anger and negativity.

This joy, I would wager, has functioned like a clean and renewable energy, keeping these singers congregating everyday at noon for years now. By contrast, our anger, like fossil fuels, gets harder and harder to access and is less sustainable for the long struggle ahead.

Regardless of how the ranchers received the dildos or how the Elizabethton strike fared, the point is how we sustain ourselves in our movements and how we conceptualize a radical means to achieve the ends of humane social transformation.

Perhaps an unexpected beacon in a fog-shrouded political environment, the dildo has appeared to light the way, bringing the joy of sex to radical politics.

Photo: Video snapshot

This week in history: Louis D. Brandeis nominated to Supreme Court

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 14:46:00 +0000

One hundred years ago, on January 29, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson nominated the crusading social justice lawyer Louis D. Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, his nomination was bitterly contested and denounced by conservative Republicans, including former president (and future Chief Justice) William Howard Taft, former Attorney General George W. Wickersham, and former presidents of the American Bar Association, such as ex-Senator and Secretary of State Elihu Root of New York, who claimed Brandeis was "unfit" to serve on the Supreme Court.

The controversy surrounding Brandeis's nomination was so great that the Senate Judiciary Committee, for the first time in its history, held a public hearing, allowing witnesses to appear before the committee and offer testimony both for and against Brandeis's confirmation. While previous nominees to the Supreme Court had been confirmed or rejected by a simple up-or-down vote on the Senate floor - often on the same day the President submitted the nomination - a then-unprecedented four months lapsed between Wilson's nomination of Brandeis and the Senate's final confirmation vote.

Brandeis was accused of being a radical and anti-corporate reformer who, according to the New York Times, would lack the "dispassionate temperament that is required of a judge."

Much of the opposition to Brandeis also stemmed from the fact that he was the first Jew nominated to the Supreme Court.Taft accused Brandeis of using his Judaism to curry political favor, and Wickersham referred to Brandeis' supporters as "a bunch of Hebrew uplifters."

However, those in favor of seeing him join the court were just as numerous and influential. Supporters who testified on his behalf included attorneys, social workers, and reformers with whom he had worked on cases. Harvard law professor Roscoe Pound told the committee that "Brandeis was one of the great lawyers,"who would rank among the Court's best justices. Other lawyers who supported him pointed out to the committee that he "had angered some of his clients by his conscientious striving to be fair to both sides in a case."

In May, President Wilson wrote a letter to the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying, "I cannot speak too highly of his impartial, impersonal, orderly, and constructive mind, his rare analytical powers, his deep human sympathy, his profound acquaintance with the historical roots of our institutions and insight into their spirit, or of the many evidences he has given of being imbued, to the very heart, with our American ideals of justice and equality of opportunity; of his knowledge of modern economic conditions and of the way they bear upon the masses of the people, or of his genius in getting persons to unite in common and harmonious action and look with frank and kindly eyes into each other's minds, who had before been heated antagonists."

On June 1, 1916, the Senate officially confirmed his nomination.

Defending free speech

Jurists are known for the opinions they render whether on the winning or the losing side. Ringing dissents often go down in history as important milestones along the road to greater freedom which may take another generation or even longer to evolve.

Brandeis weighed in on a number of cases involving freedom of speech. Many such issues arose during World War I, when groups such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and socialists such as Eugene V. Debs, argued against the war. Gilbert v. Minnesota (1920) dealt with a state law prohibiting interference with the military's enlistment efforts. In his dissenting opinion, Brandeis wrote that the statute affected the "rights, privileges, and immunities of one who is a citizen of the United States; and it deprives him of an important part of his liberty.... [T]he statute invades the privacy and freedom of the home. Father and mother may not follow the promptings of religious belief, of conscience or of conviction, and teach son or daughter the doctrine of pacifism. If they do, any police officer may summarily arrest them."

The case of Whitney v. California (1927) dealt with the prosecution of a woman for aiding the Communist Labor Party, an organization accused of promoting the violent overthrow of the government. In the opinion and test to uphold the conviction, Brandeis and his co-writer Oliver Wendell Holmes expanded the definition of "clear and present danger" to include the condition that the "evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion." According to legal historian Anthony Lewis, scholars have lauded Brandeis's opinion "as perhaps the greatest defense of freedom of speech ever written by a member of the high court." The opinion reads:

"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of free speech to free men from bondage of irrational fears.... Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty...."

In his widely cited dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States (1928), Brandeis relied on thoughts he developed in his 1890 Harvard Law Review article "The Right to Privacy." Now he expanded his focus to include the government itself "as a potential privacy invader."The issue in Olmstead was the use of wiretap technology to gather evidence. Referring to this "dirty business," he tried to combine the notions of civil privacy and the "right to be let alone" with the right offered by the Fourth Amendment, which disallowed unreasonable search and seizure. Brandeis wrote in his lengthy dissent:

"The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men."

Of course, many legal issues are decided, in their time, on a thin, sharp razor's edge, and in the light of history Brandeis can be considered to have erred in his judgment. With a unanimous Supreme Court, he approved the restrictive Schenck v. United States decision in 1919concerning enforcement of the Espionage Act of 1917, which concluded that defendants (such as IWW activists) who distributed leaflets to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense. In 1927 he also approved a pro-sterilization decision in Buck v. Bell.

During the New Deal, along with Benjamin Cardozo and Harlan Fiske Stone, Brandeis was considered to be in the liberal wing of the court-the so-called Three Musketeers. Nevertheless, Brandeis remained allergic to the idea of concentration of power in federal government, and decided in several cases to limit presidential discretion, even when FDR's clear intent was to help the nation rebound from economic disaster. In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), the Court voted unanimously to declare the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) unconstitutional on the grounds that it gave the president "unfettered discretion" to make whatever laws he thought were needed for recover.

Brandeis also opposed Roosevelt's court-packing scheme of 1937, which proposed to add one additional justice to the Supreme Court for every sitting member who had reached the age of seventy without retiring. "This was," felt Brandeis and others on the Court, a "thinly veiled attempt to change the decisions of the Court by adding new members who were supporters of the New Deal," leading historian Nelson Dawson to conclude that "Brandeis . . . was not alone in thinking that Roosevelt's scheme threatened the integrity of the institution."

Brandeis retired from the Supreme Court in February 1939, and died in 1941.

Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., founded in 1948, was named for him, one of the great secular achievements of the American Jewish community.

The U.S. Postal Service honored Brandeis in 2009 with a commemorative stamp. In the announcement about the stamp, he was credited with being "the associate justice most responsible for helping the Supreme Court shape the tools it needed to interpret the Constitution in light of the sociological and economic conditions of the 20th century."He was "a progressive and champion of reform, [and] Brandeis devoted his life to social justice. He defended the right of every citizen to speak freely, and his groundbreaking conception of the right to privacy continues to impact legal thought today."

Adapted from Wikipedia and other sources.

Photo: Wikimedia (CC)

VIDEO: Among the Bernites, reporting from the trenches of the Sanders campaign

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 10:44:00 +0000

CULVER CITY, Calif. - January 23 was a big day for Bernie Sanders supporters. It was a day of marches in various cities and, according to his campaign, over 2,000 meetings and gatherings where Sanders could thank his supporters and, more importantly, persuade them to participate in phone banks so that potential caucus-goers in Iowa and voters in New Hampshire would get out and do their thing.

I attended one such house party - and it was indeed a party, though with a serious undertone. Held in a neat little house with two dogs running about, the living room was dominated by a huge flat-screen television tuned to the stream that Sanders was going to use. In fact, when I RSVP'd for the event, the host ended our conversation with "Feel the Bern." Obviously, a true believer.

The attendees were indeed a cross-section of the population, ranging from a woman from Manhattan Beach who drove all the way to Culver City because she couldn't find a house party nearer to her home, to a student from the University of California, Merced, who was determined that Bernie's plan to control student debt would make her life more livable. Young men, old men, ex-teachers, women and men of color, bookkeepers - they were all there, ready to hear what Sanders said. (story continues after video)

He didn't disappoint. Putting a remarkably graceful face on his campaign, he noted that it was we (his audience) who had brought him as far as he had come, that he began as an afterthought and now he was, to quote some movie or other, "a contender." And he told us that the fight was nowhere near over, that his call for a "political revolution" was a long-term project.

It was a no-nonsense speech, but one that was oddly moving, because it spoke not of experience or accomplishments, but of work to be done. We were receptive - and energized by the end of the speech.

Our host then told us the nuts and bolts of phone banking - and that it was very necessary to reach out to people to find out if they were voting or caucusing for Sanders, or whether they were familiar with him. These calls would then be collated in Iowa, and other people would use them to knock on doors. This kind of grassroots activity, I must admit, made me feel part of something bigger than myself - a good feeling.

We don't know whether Sanders is going to win Iowa, though New Hampshire looks pretty good for him. I have fears that by calling himself a "democratic socialist" he could scare some people away - I would much prefer that he call himself a "social democrat" - which is much less threatening and, in my opinion, more accurate anyway. But the guy - a hectoring yet endearing old guy - talks a good game. He even has details about how he's going to pay for his ideas - don't believe that he doesn't. He's about the future - yes, a long-term, rather visionary future, but when he shakes his finger at you, you believe.

In one sense, he reminds me of the quote by Pablo Neruda in which he says that slowly, but inexorably, we are approaching "a great and common tenderness." Neruda says he has to believe that.

Let me tell you, the Bernites believe.

Photo: Sanders speaks to members of the media after a campaign stop at U.M.B.A. Hall in Pottawattamie, Iowa on Jan. 19. | Andrew Harnik/AP

Video: Bernie speech and rallies Saturday Jan. 23rd drew watching crowds in Southern California. | Rossana Cambron and Emiliana Sparaco/PW

An old-fashioned red scare? Sanders, socialism, and the Democrats’ anti-communism

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 16:50:00 +0000

Did you know that Bernie Sanders is on the verge of destroying the Democratic Party?

Or that his self-declared preference for democratic socialism and a 'political revolution' aimed at restraining the billionaire class are actually the greatest dangers to progress in America?

Did you also know that if you vote for him as the Democratic candidate you are basically handing the election to the Republicans?

If you did not know these things, then you must not have tuned in to cable news within the last 48 hours. As Bernie Sanders' poll numbers have continued to surge, particularly in New Hampshire and Iowa, it would seem as if many figures from the Democratic Party officialdom have suddenly discovered the grave threat his campaign poses to the nation.

For the supposed good of party and country, a number of prominent Democrats have jumped into the media spotlight to warn us all about what awful things will happen if Sanders gets the nomination. It's some pretty scary stuff. And, truth be told, they might not be making all of it up.

Questions of electability have so far been the main angle from which most Clinton-supporting Democrats have approached the thorn-in-their-side Sanders campaign. When he was down around 15 or 20 percent in national polls a few months back, that was the only real concern that mattered probably.

But now, with serious people beginning to fathom the possibility that he might win a few states, or even through some stroke of luck the nomination itself, a different set of questions is being raised. It is no longer just an issue of whether Sanders himself is electable, but whether he and his dangerous ideology jeopardizes the whole party's chances in November.

And that is where this unpredictable race begins to take a very old, ugly, and unfortunately all-too-predictable turn. This is where it begins to steer down a well-worn path that has led to the death of many a progressive movements and coalitions in our country's history. Enter that classic tool of political reaction: red-baiting.

In their panic over poll numbers and primaries, it seems as if some Clinton supporters have decided the time is right for a good old fashioned red scare. Correctly anticipating that the GOP would resort to such tactics, more than a few in the Democratic establishment have opted to beat them to the punch.

The Missouri duo of Governor Jay Nixon and Sen. Claire McCaskill have been among the most prominent in raising the red specter over the last couple of days. They have teamed up in an attempt to pour water on the grassroots fire that Bernie has generated.

"Here in the heartland, we like our politicians in the mainstream, and he is not - he's a socialist," Governor Nixon exclaimed to the New York Times. Radical ideas like affordable college, healthcare for every person, or heavier taxes on Wall Street hedge fund managers are apparently just not tenable in middle America. "He's entitled to his positions, and it's a big-tent party," Nixon said, "but as far as having him at the top of the ticket, it would be a meltdown all the way down the ballot."

Sen. McCaskill also wants you to know that socialism is not something Democrats should be playing around with. "It is very hard," she reasons, "for most Americans to see how socialism would cure the problems we are facing right now." The 43 percent of likely Iowa caucus-goers who recently told the Des Moines Register they consider themselves socialists might differ with her, but I digress.

Bernie Sanders would be a dream candidate for the Republican Party, McCaskill tells us. The GOP is just waiting for Sanders to tear Hillary down so that they can then have a run at him in the general election. "The Republicans won't touch him because they can't wait to run an ad with a hammer and sickle," McCaskill argues. For what it's worth, she's probably right.

David Brock, the head of a pro-Clinton super PAC called Correct the Record, was even less polished in his remarks: "He's a socialist... He's got a 30-year history of affiliation with a lot of whack-doodle ideas and parties. Think about what the Republicans will do with the fact that he's a socialist in the fall."

A lot of these attacks on Sanders are sparking debates about what the word socialism even really means. It's an important question. Imagining what a socialist alternative to the current system might look like is certainly an exercise that deserves to be the topic of a broad national conversation. But that's not what's at issue here, at least not immediately.

By raising the issue of Sanders's socialism as a bogeyman, Clinton's supporters are doing more than just embracing the reprehensible tactics of fearmongering and demonization. They are playing a dangerous game that could hurt the chances of whoever the nominee is once these primaries and caucuses are over. Though they may see their red scare campaign against Sanders as a short-term political tactic, it poses a long-term threat to the whole movement for progress.

Red-baiting and anticommunism

Unfortunately, the bypassing of substantive debate and the resort to smearing an opponent with the label of socialist, red, pinko, radical, or communist is not a new development in American politics. It has popped up many times throughout our history, usually at just about the time that a broad popular coalition for change is either making strong advances or is poised to do so. It always tries to paint leaders and movements with a foreign brush and raise suspicions about the "American-ness" of programs for reform.

In the years when labor was on the move during World War I, a time that saw the organizing of major strikes by the Industrial Workers of the World and the founding of the Communist Party, right wing reactionaries turned to a combination of fear and force to short-circuit growing challenges to the prevailing order. The First Red Scare of 1919-21 brought vicious attacks on progressive movements across the board. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer led the deportation of hundreds of labor leaders and left wingers of various stripes.

During the Depression, when the united strength of labor and the People's Front pushed Roosevelt to carry the New Deal forward, Wall Street went on the offensive. They tried to hang the socialist tag around Roosevelt's neck and denounced the growth of the CIO as a red plot to undermine America. The attacks only intensified following World War II, when labor militancy was on the rise and the left's influence was growing internationally. With the launching of the Cold War abroad and the McCarthy blacklists at home, the red scare entered its most menacing period.

Though the McCarthy years are the most talked about period of red-baiting, it certainly wasn't the last. Red-baiting and racism came together, as they often do, when Martin Luther King Jr. and many civil rights leaders were hounded by accusations of socialist and communist influence in the 1950s and 60s. Many activists opposing the war in Vietnam were also on the receiving end of anti-socialist smears.

You might have thought that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR that red-baiting might have lost some of its currency. But who can forget the Tea Party attacks on President Obama's supposed socialism or his big government takeover of healthcare? Van Jones was run out of his White House green jobs advisory position in 2009 over accusations of socialist links.

And it was only a few years ago that Rep. Allen West of Florida, in an imitation of old Joe McCarthy, was waving a piece of paper and claiming the Congressional Progressive Caucus were all a bunch of commies. As has been said, the first time is tragedy, the second time farce.

In all of these cases, the red scare tactic - more properly understood historically as anticommunism - has been a boon to the forces of reaction and a drag on the forces for progress. It is a divide and conquer strategy that splits left and center and denies the American people the chance to work together to create democratic change.

Why now?

Though the attacks of McCaskill, Nixon, Brock and others come nowhere close to the rabid smears that some red-baiters have employed in the past, they are certainly flirting with some of these unsavory historical characters. They should be giving second thought to what they are getting themselves into.

The Sanders campaign is surging at just the right time in the polls. This, of course, is making many in the Clinton camp nervous. They worry about a repeat of 2008, another time when their candidate seemed to have the nomination in the bag. That's understandable.

Raising questions about Sanders's electability in red states is no doubt a legitimate topic for debate. And of course there is room for doubts about the political feasibility of some of his proposals, given the potential hurdle of a right-wing dominated Congress. But is painting a caricature of Bernie as a red flag-waving radical really the responsible thing for Clinton's backers to be doing?

It's not only ethically wrong, but actually very short-sighted politically.

Keeping all of Bernie's diehard voters on board for Clinton, should she emerge as the nominee, is already going to be a challenge. Likewise, if Sanders wins the nomination, the GOP is going to do everything it can to pry Hillary supporters away from him. Given how crucial unity is going to be in November, it is not very smart for Democrats to be putting even more obstacles between the supporters of the two candidates. Yet that is exactly what the red-baiting on the part of some of Clinton's people threatens to do.

The big moneyed interests at the core of the ultra-right forces will do anything to stop the advance of the people's movements. We can count on them to do all of this kind of dirty work and more. Do Democrats really need to be helping them out?

Photo: Mic Smith/AP

First Trinity Baptist becomes an oasis during Flint water crisis

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 13:24:00 +0000

FLINT, Mich. - President Obama said on national television last night that if he were a parent in Flint he would be "beside" himself with anger.

As he spoke members of the National Guard deployed a week ago by Gov. Snyder were working at a water distribution center set up at a Flint fire station. They unloaded pallets of water from the backs of massive semis.

Up a block and over, in the parking lot of First Trinity Baptist, a humbler scene unfolded. Volunteers, some of them the parents the president talked about, were unloading a pick up truck loaded down with 80 cases of water. The water was driven from Southfield, a little less than an hour away. Darius Jones and Marcus Johnson were compelled to put a call out for water in their community utilizing the connections they've made as promoters.

"I've got so much water I couldn't even bring it in on one run, truck was dragging," said Jones "but like I said, it's for the kids, and I would want somebody to help me if I was in need like this."

This isn't the first water delivery of the day, nor is it going to be the last.

The "first lady" of the church, Catrina Tillman, showed me around the church hall which has been converted into a warehouse. Five-foot tall stacks of 24 and 32 packs of water bottles lined the walls. Tillman is the wife of the pastor of the church, Ezra Tillman.

"We're open twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays and this whole stage," maybe 16-feet wide by 8 feet deep, "was filled with water," she said. When I asked her how many people she has served so far, Catrina said, "I don't know if we can put a number on that."

The operation carried out by the National Guard requires would-be water recipients to show photo IDs and limits families to a pack of water per day, First Trinity's operation, however, is informal and has no such restrictions.. Tillman said, however, that she has gone down to the fire station to supplement the church rations.

"I talked with the National Guard, I talked with the state police.....They are only giving out one case per day and they are giving out 24-packs. Well if you're a family of three or four, I mean, the two of us can go through a case of water just drinking it but we're talking drinking, brushing teeth, washing, cooking; that's just not enough water." (story continues after video)

Video by Earchiel Johnson with Patrick J. Foote.

Aside from serving individuals and families in the community, First Trinity has been a hub for other churches in the area who go there to receive water that they then distribute to their own congregations.

Using social media, the church has made connections throughout the country with other congregations who have held water rallies for them. They've even managed to come into contact with some big names in the faith community like Pastor Jamal Bryant.

"We contacted him, he's going to do a large rally here on February," she said.

Bryant is a well known figure in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore and is also well known on national television and radio.

Individuals have also been donating after hearing about the water station on the Rickey Smiley Morning Show, Tillman added.

Not over when the cameras turn off

Pastor Ezra Tillman spoke to the People's World in his office just down the hallway as another small (comparatively) donation of water was being loaded into the hall. He said he knew something was very wrong with the water system months ago when his church's annex was getting bills for $400 to $500 for an average of eight days of water use a month.

"It's very pricey and taxing to our community and members because we have a high percentage of retirees and seniors on a set income. It's like you're a prisoner to the situation: you pay your bills, but you don't get your water... It's awful."

The church has purchased several freestanding purified water dispensers that sit next to the old water fountains, now draped with black trash bags.

Joseph Hampton, a volunteer at the church, showed us his water bill for a property he owns in the city of Flint. The upstairs flat, which is occupied, was charged $377.26. The downstairs flat, whose water was only turned on for a few days, so that the pipes could be inspected, was charged $206.76.

Hampton said he told his tenants, "You pay whatever you can, I'll pay the rest," adding "They can't afford it... you eat it because the city of Flint does what they want to do."

Folks who own property in Flint can't sell it even if they wanted to, at least not until the water crisis is solved and their taps are safe. "We feel like we're refugees, but you can't be refugees because you can't escape," said Pastor Tillman, referring to the plight of some members of his congregation.

The goal right now, he said, is to get the word out across the world and "to give a platform to the victims who have hair missing, and skin pigmentation issues, and those who have given birth to children suffering from autism. We have great concerns about what the future is going to look like since its been reported that 10 people have died from side effects attached to [the water crisis]. Not everyone has picked up on it."

On the issue of who is accountable, the pastor couldn't be clearer.

"The governor, solely, is responsible. It is a travesty for anyone to blame the president, or to go to city council to blame them for it because whatever goes on in the state goes through him." He added: "The emergency manager law concentrated power in the state's hands in such a way that there is no way for the governor to not be held liable."

When asked if there's one thing he wants the world to understand, the pastor was quick with the reply:

"It does not stop after the cameras stop rolling. This is going to be a long, continual fight. Make sure to keep your eyes on Flint to see what our government will do about it while we send funds across seas to fight and to guard oil."

He said that other people in other countries and other parts of the U.S. get to enjoy "Pure Michigan", invoking the now ironic state tourism slogan, while citizens in Flint suffer.

"It will not be resolved until there is digging, until there is an infrastructure system put into the ground and into the homes to make sure people are getting quality water."

To arrange a donation of water to the Flint community through First Trinity Baptist Church, you can call 810-234-2653 or contact them on Facebook.

Photo: National Guard unloading water at a distribution center a block away from First Trinity Baptist Church. The National Guard center requires a potential water recipient to show photo ID before they can get even one case of bottled water. At First Trinity Baptist Church, no such requirement exists. | Earchiel Johnson/PW | Follow @peoplesworld_action on Instagram for our on-the-ground coverage. And check out our Facebook page.

Boston's MLK march unites movements for economic and racial justice

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 12:42:00 +0000

BOSTON - Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. stood with Memphis sanitation workers shortly before his assassination--now, advocates in Boston are invoking his legacy to continue the fight for economic and racial justice. Hundreds attended a Jan. 18 march organized by Mass Action Against Police Brutality (MAAPB) and the Fight for $15 Massachusetts campaign demanding: the jailing of police officers who commit violence; a $15/hour wage and union representation for workers; a rejection of Islamophobia; and an end to institutional racism.The march started in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood and proceeded from there to Grove Hall with several stops along the way.

The months following the 2014 civil uprisings in Ferguson, MO have brought to light numerous cases of police violence, such as the high-profile cases of victims Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice and Laquan McDonald. In Boston, former MBTA officer Jennifer Amyot Garvey was recently indicted for assaulting Roxbury resident Mary Holmes, who intervened publicly in another case of police abuse. Other cases of police violence, such as those of Burrell Ramsey White, Denis Reynoso andUsaama Rahim, have never seen indictment or sentencing. MAAPB is calling for the state to prosecute police officers complicit in these acts of violence.

The march also highlighted active labor struggles in Boston involving fast food workers, adjunct professors and airport baggage handlers fighting for fair wages and union representation. Marchers stopped at fast food restaurants along the route and were joined by a contingent of airport workers. The airport workers had staged a separate action earlier in the day where six people were arrested.

"The fight against police brutality is central to the fight against racial and economic injustice," said Brock Satter of Mass Action Against Police Brutality. "More often than not, the population most targeted by police are also on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder--black, brown, and poor. The labor movement is the natural ally of this fight: police always take the side of the company during labor disputes. Raising workers' wages will lift up lowincome communities."

"As we commemorate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the fight for economic and racial justice continues," said Darius Cephas, Boston McDonald's worker and National Organizing Committee member with the Fight for $15. "The intersection of racial and economic justice is evident in the fast food industry, where people of color make up more than 43 percent of employees. The Fight for $15 is fighting to restore dignity in the workplace and create a community where we can all walk safely without fear of losing our life to the fate of police brutality."

Photo: Howard Rotman

VIDEO: Is America’s love of guns stopping common sense gun regulation?

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 10:37:00 +0000

On Jan. 5, 2016, President Obama gave a passionate speech that unveiled his new strategy to curb gun violence in America by calling for a "national sense of urgency" on the issue.

As the president stated: "We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass [gun] violence erupt with this kind of frequency... It doesn't happen in other advanced countries. It's not even close. And as I've said before, somehow we've become numb to it and we start thinking that this is normal." (story continues after video)

His proposals focus on new background check requirements that will enhance the effectiveness of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), and greater education and enforcement efforts of existing laws at the state level.

People's World took it to the streets to ask: What do you think it will take to curb gun violence, and what is it about America's love of guns that prevents common sense gun regulation? Check out the video above to see what people had to say.

Photo: Video screenshot, courtesy of Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Video: Chauncey K. Robinson

Contributors: Teresa Albano, Rossana Cambron, Mariya Strauss

This week in history: Robert Clifton Weaver, first Black U.S. Cabinet member

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 14:17:00 +0000

This week marks the 50^th anniversary of the swearing-in of the first African-American Presidential Cabinet member in United States history. On January 18, 1966, Robert Clifton Weaver became the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. He served in that capacity through 1968.

Weaver had expressed his concerns about African Americans' housing issue before 1930 in his article, "Negroes Need Housing", published by the magazine The Crisis of the NAACP after the Stock Market Crash.He noted there was a great difference between the income of most African Americans and the cost of living; African Americans did not have enough housing supply because of many social factors, including the long economic decline of rural areas in the South. He suggested a government housing program to enable all the African Americans the chance to buy or rent their house.

A noted economist and administrator, Weaver was born in Washington, D.C., in 1907 into a middle-class family. His parents were Morgan Weaver, a postal worker, and Margaret Freeman, daughter of Dr. Robert Tanner Freeman, the first African American to graduate from Harvard University in dentistry.

From 1929 through 1934, Weaver attended Harvard, earning three degrees in economics: a B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. In the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, Weaver worked as an adviser to Harold L. Ickes (one of the most outspoken supporters of civil rights in the Roosevelt administration), Secretary of the Interior (1933-37), special assistant for the Housing Authority (1937-40), and an administrative assistant with the National Defense Advisory Commission (1940). During the Second World War, he worked in several capacities concerned with mobilizing black labor into industrial employment contracted by the federal government. He was one of 45 prominent African Americans who helped make up Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet," or "Black Brain Trust," the semi-official racial-affairs advisory committee.

In the immediate postwar period, Weaver held several successive positions with the federal government. His most noted positions were serving as the Department of the Interior's first Black adviser on racial problems, and Chicago's executive director of the Mayor's Committee on Race Relations under Mayor Edward J. Kelly. Simultaneously, Weaver taught at several universities and directed the fellowship department at the John Hay Whitney Foundation (1949-1955). Thereafter, he became a member of New York State Gov. W. Averell Harriman's cabinet as rent commissioner (1955-1959), the first black State Cabinet member in New York. He was then named to New York City's Housing and Redevelopment Board.

Before reentering Washington's "beltway politics," Weaver chaired the NAACP. In 1961, he was appointed by Pres. John F. Kennedy to head the Housing and Home Finance Agency. After his term at the helm of the new HUD, Weaver became president of Bernard M. Baruch College (1969-70), and then became a professor of urban affairs at Hunter College (1970-1978).

Weaver's books include Negro Labor: A National Problem (1946), The Negro Ghetto (1948), The Urban Complex: Human Values in Urban Life (1964), and Dilemmas of Urban America (1965).

Weaver died in New York City in 1997 at the age of 89. In the year 2000, the HUD headquarters building, which Weaver had dedicated at its completion in 1968, was renamed the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in his honor. In 2006, a street was named after him in NE Washington, D.C., Robert Clifton Weaver Way.

Source: blackpast.org and Wikipedia.

Photo: Robert C. Weaver official portrait by Department of Housing and Urban Development. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

Conn. labor and civil rights groups join together at M. L. King event

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 13:42:00 +0000

BLOOMFIELD, Conn. - On Jan. 16, a diverse group of labor, community, and civil rights organizations came together to pledge to continue Dr. King's fight to promote democracy, and to end racial and economic inequality.

The event, titled "A Celebration of Unity, Equality & Democracy," was held at the Bethel AME Church in Bloomfield, CT.

Participants came not only to celebrate the life of Dr. King, but also to commit to building a more just and inclusive society. The diverse group of people that attended pledged to work together and hold leaders accountable on five key themes. These included good jobs and fair wages; universal access to quality public education (preschool to graduate school); a vibrant and fairly funded public sector; racial, gender, and ethnic justice; and democracy in our state and in our workplaces.

Bilal Sekou, the chair of the good-governance group Common Cause Connecticut, served as the master of ceremonies for the event. He began by connecting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of a just and equal society to the challenges facing the nation in 2016.

"In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1964, Dr. King said 'I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits,'" said Sekou. "These days, we see the middle class shrinking, wages stagnating, voting rights under attack, and black and Latinos facing high unemployment and diminished economic opportunities. If we are to achieve Dr. King's audacious vision, people from all backgrounds need to unite together in a common struggle."

Yale University professor Jennifer Klein presented an overview of the struggles for economic and social justice that led to the 1963 march on Washington, the emergence of public sector unions and the empowerment of those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Each movement, she noted, worked collectively across class and racial lines, and each had a sense of urgency about their goals. She urged the audience to recommit to that sense of urgency.

The Reverend Scott Marks of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy and New Haven Rising delivered the keynote address. He brought the audience to its feet with his exhortations: "Community, clergy, labor - we have to come together. Together we stand. Together we win."

Among the statements of support issued for the event was a call for unity from New Haven Peoples Center Coordinator Joelle Fishman: "The celebration of Unity, Equality and Democracy uniting civil rights and labor in Connecticut is a beacon of hope for our state and nation," said Fishman. "We come together in the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s call for a 'radical revolution of values' to overcome 'the triple evils of poverty, racism and militarism.'"

"If we allow ourselves to be divided by racism, bigotry and fear," she added, "we will be in a race to the bottom. If we join together we can raise everyone up and build a just society that puts people before profits."

Dan Durant, a board member of the Greater Hartford NAACP, helped organize the event. "When Dr. Martin Luther King made common cause with the labor movement, he recognized that the fight for workers' rights and the fight for civil rights were one and the same," Durant concluded.

Endorsing organizations were diverse and ranged from civil rights organizations to labor federations and good governance groups, including the Greater Hartford NAACP, Connecticut AFL-CIO, the New Haven Peoples Center, the Connecticut Alliance for Retired Americans, Common Cause, and the Connecticut Women's Education and Legal Fund.

Photo: Audience responds at MLK Day "Celebration of Unity, Equality & Democracy." Win Heimer

Calling out the hypocrisy of the U.S. Cuban blockade

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 13:58:00 +0000

Ending restrictions on U.S. tourist travel and expanding U.S. exports to Cuba are both current legislative topics that are not likely to survive the rigors of a Republican-dominated Congress. President Obama's remarks on reopening diplomatic relations with Cuba were warmly received at the September 28, 2015, meeting of the UN General Assembly. However, statements from Pres. Obama officially supporting the elimination of economic sanctions have as yet to be matched by action. Instead, present U.S. law prohibits the use of U.S. dollars by foreign businesses to conduct transactions with Cuban entities including the government.

Crédit Agricole (CA), a French bank, has just recently been fined 694 million euros by the U.S. for processing transactions in dollars for Cuba. French academician Salim Lamrani adds that "Facing the threat of having all activity within U.S. territory closed off, the French bank had no alternative but to accept the sanction." His article appeared in Cuba's Granma newspaper on November 20, 2015.

Lamrani reports that "In 2014, the French bank BNP Paribas was [also] obliged to pay the U.S. an astronomic fine of $6.5 billion for maintaining financial relations with Cuba."

He emphasizes that "These institutions committed absolutely no illegal acts." And "It is President Obama, not Congress, who is responsible for this decision, clearly contradicting his UN speech where he promoted a policy based on dialog, understanding and respect for international law."

The use of economic blackmail to target legitimate commercial relations between France and Cuba through application of extraterritorial sanctions under the 1996 Helms-Burton law is a violation of international law. Washington's arbitrary attack on French interests represented interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign, independent nation.

It is certainly true that, according to the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. president is able to recommend for consideration by Congress "such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." Thus Obama is on sound, legal ground in continuing to recommend to Congress that it end the blockade. The general assumption, of course, is that, under the Helms-Burton law, the power for such lies exclusively with Congress.

Lamrani, however, believes that "[A]s head of the executive branch of government," Obama himself actually has the power to "dismantle the blockade, practically in its entirety." In fact, "there are only 3 areas Obama cannot touch without Congressional authorization." He may not open up Cuba to regular U.S. tourism. And the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000 stipulates that Cuba may not use credit for importing U.S. agricultural products; cash payment is required in advance. Thirdly, Obama "cannot authorize affiliates of U.S. companies in other countries to maintain commercial relations with Cuba."

Lamrani has suggestions for how to get past even these obstacles. In the first place, Obama could broaden "the definition of categories which establish the type of travel to Cuba". A visit to a museum in Cuba, for example, would fit the U.S. visitor into the category of cultural travel.

And while the congressional prohibition on credit for Cuban purchase of agricultural goods must stand, "the president could allow Cuba to buy any other type of item on credit." Examples would include medical devices, pharmaceuticals and educational supplies.

Lastly, Lamrani claims the U.S. president can make the prohibition on trade with "third country affiliates" irrelevant. He would do so by "simply authoriz[ing] U.S. companies [not their affiliates] to maintain regular commercial relations with Cuba." The proposal is consistent with measures already taken to allow banking, air travel, communications and postal services to take root in Cuba.

At present, though, according to Lamrani, "the punitive sanction [Obama's] administration has imposed on international companies and the meager steps he has taken to dismantle blockade regulation contradict his statement of principles." Meanwhile, the U.S. economic, commercial and financial blockade remains as hypocritical, brutal and anachronistic as ever.

Photo: AP