People Before Profit blog

Ten fateful days in Mississippi, March 1962

Fri, 31 Jul 2015 13:45:00 +0000

In March 1962 I was a sophomore at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., pursuing studies in history and politics, and becoming increasingly aware of the broad social movements occurring across America. This coincided with the passage of eras from President Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. On the campus level there was passionate energy, talk, and movement. One could sense the impact of a historical moment.

A visitor from Mississippi, Mr. William Higgs, a lecturer at Harvard, spoke to us at a politics seminar. He discussed his failed Congressional run against an entrenched segregationist, Jamie Whitten, and his current efforts to bring together progressive whites and the emerging black movement. Famed lawyer William Kunstler gave credit to Bill Higgs for developing a legal strategy, the "interpositional theory," which constitutionally enables federal override of states' rights claims.

It so happened that Bill Higgs had some matters down home to attend to, and thus a week later Bill and I plus two others found ourselves pulling a double all-nighter in a junky old Ford. We left winter's snow in Boston and 45 hours later stopped the car alongside a glistening white field of unpicked cotton on Senator Eastland's plantation. Bill continued his exposition of all things "Mississippian," and we could now begin to grasp what he was talking about.

Thus began a ten-day whirlwind of activities. We met a wide spectrum of individuals and groups, including academics, politicians, ministers, publishers, and sharecroppers. We attended voter registration clinics and an NAACP convention. We visited college campuses and spoke with fellow students. We had lunch with James Meredith, who would soon integrate Ole Miss; we talked with NAACP leader Medgar Evers, an ally of Bill's, who would be assassinated in June 1963 at the age of 37; we drank whisky with Nobel Prize for Literature winner William Faulkner, who would be dead four months later at the age of 64; and we interviewed the Governor, Ross Barnett.

At that time the State Sovereignty Commission of the State of Mississippi was making a concerted effort to preserve the old accustomed "way of life." It promulgated propaganda defending the status quo, along with sincere attempts to meet with adversaries and "reason things out." Up to a point, of course. Nobody in Mississippi had ever heard of Brandeis - a decidedly liberal place - and we presented ourselves as willing to listen to all points of view.

As we traipsed about the state, I soon realized, as an instinctive historian, that the pamphlets, broadsides, and polemics of the segregationists were all literally at hand. The Sovereignty Commission had offices in Jackson, the state capital, and were quite willing to dispense whatever literature they had; the local White Citizens Councils were also available sources. All one had to do was look, and perhaps inquire, and there it was. I assembled what I could.

All that primary material has rested in a file folder that I have held onto for more than 50 years. Knowing that I won't be around forever, and fearing perhaps that anyone going through my papers might not grasp the significance of this collection, I recently entrusted this material to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., from which I graduated in the class of 1960, and to its Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, for permanent preservation and for the use of the young scholars in Ms. Judy Wombwell's civil rights seminar.

Editor's note: Let this be an object lesson to readers who may have valuable resource materials in their possession that might be of interest to future researchers. It may be time to locate a worthy home for them so the documentation of our movements for social change does not get tossed out.

Photo: Medgar Evers | Wikimedia (CC)

The way to save the planet: shrink the economy

Fri, 31 Jul 2015 12:45:00 +0000

The oil and gas industry claims that the 11 percent drop in reported U.S. carbon emissions between 2007 and 2013 was due primarily to the growth in fracking ("When Human Consumption Slows, Planet Earth Can Heal"). However a recent study in Nature Communications determined that 83 percent of the 2007-2013 reduction was the result of decreased consumption and production during the great recession, while only the remaining 17 percent was due to changes in fuel type. That makes sense; less economic activity lowers carbon emissions.

This simple truth has far-reaching implications. Our current economic system, based on growth, can't adjust to this fact. But that doesn't change the fact: the way to save the biosphere is to shrink our economy.

Progressive environmental activists know we must reduce our carbon footprint, but for strategic reasons, we advocate a mélange of solutions. We fight to ban fracking, stop the XL pipeline and divest from fossil fuel companies. This makes sense: if applied globally these actions, in combination with conservation, would significantly decrease economic activity, and thus lower carbon emissions. We also promote increased efficiency in heating and cooling appliances, air and automobile travel, better public transportation, recycling, and alternative solar generation. These actions, while reducing the carbon footprint of the products we buy and trips we take, may not lower total emissions if they result in our buying and traveling more, or using more cheaply generated solar power.

Significant segments of our movement celebrate a "green new deal," that will create an economic boom and new jobs while greening our economy. This is dangerous self-deception. Everyone needs living-wage jobs, but if the additional millions of job-holders produce more products and consume as the typical living-wage worker and their families do today, we'll collectively emit even more carbon and make the problem worse.

Therefore we must couple the new green jobs with significantly reduced hours and substantially increased wages/salaries for all workers, including professionals. These workers and their families must spend their increased funds and free time in a manner that does not produce more greenhouse gases. This complex of interactions won't work without careful planning and re-education. We'll make no progress if we create more consumers taking part in the throw-away society.

Progressive environmental activists are also reluctant to talk about population. We believe in sharing the world's resources more equitably, but don't calculate what that means as the global population approaches eight billion. The issue of population control has racist roots and a history of unequal practice. In addition, five hundred million relatively affluent North American and Western European whites produce 80 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, while billions of people of color in the third world have tiny carbon footprints. While masses of people living in poverty are not responsible for global warming, increasing their level of consumption to that enjoyed in the "developed world" will have a profoundly negative impact on the world's carbon footprint.

Any comprehensive climate change program must deal with this triple challenge:

1. to decrease economic activity to limit carbon emissions.

2. to achieve a livable standard of living for everyone by increasing wages to compensate for decreasing work hours.

3. to fairly redistribute the dwindling resources of our planet to include the third world.

This monumental challenge can only be met by global agreement to replace competition with cooperation, replace profit with sharing, and to engage in physical, social, artistic and intellectual pursuits instead of rampant consumption.

This article originally appeared, under the title "We Need Contraction," at Robert Meeropol's blog.

Photo: Chicago junkyard. Edward Blake/Flickr

Is “human capitalism” the solution to shrinking wages?

Wed, 29 Jul 2015 11:45:00 +0000

An article recently written in Forbes by a Mr. Ralph Benko proposes "human capitalism" as the solution to the shrinking wages and economic stagnation in the U.S.

Human capitalism, briefly described, is to treat investments in workers with the same seriousness and enthusiasm that investments in factories and machinery receive.

Simply put, the author argues that investments in the training and education of U.S. workers is essential.

He then goes on to praise Bernie Sanders' sincerity in fighting for the working class while at the same time deploring the senator's socialist solutions.

Socialism he argues, echoing the ignorant self-satisfaction of most neoliberal capitalists, simply doesn't work.

He goes on to then cite Venezuela as an example of failed socialism, conveniently forgetting to mention the role the U.S. and it's mega-corporations have played in it's current problems.

Criticizing Venezuela without mentioning the role the U.S. has played is akin to kicking a man and then blaming him when he falls.

I find it interesting that Mr. Benko's solution, investing in the workers, is remarkably similar to socialism.

Indeed, the entirety of the article is filled with socialist principles and solutions.

From the contrast between variable (human) capital and fixed capital (concepts popularized by Karl Marx) to the idea that investing in the education of the people is essential to the success of a nation, everything proposed is what you would expect under socialism.

Of course, what Mr. Benko forgets is that the reason why so many working people face chronic unemployment is not a lack of job skills and education.

Is is due to the mass exodus of jobs overseas combined with the automation of huge swaths of the American economy.

The idea that corporations are desperately wringing their hands and praying for skilled employees flies in the face of reason.

These corporations are not hiring because they do not need more employees.

Indeed, the reduced reliance on U.S. workers is one of the major reasons for the increasing profitability of the wealthiest one percent.

The mass underemployment of recent college graduates flatly contradicts the argument that people need to be better educated to find work.

LIke all good capitalists, Mr. Benko believes we can have our cake and eat it too.

We can have record profits for the one percent while at the same time producing good jobs for everyone else.

The problem is that record profits do not appear out of thin air but come from the wages, benefits, and labor that are no longer being paid for.

Capitalism is based on competition. For there to be competition there must be winners and losers. If both sides are winners then there was never a competition to begin with. While competition is necessary for capitalism to work, we have to ask if it is necessary for humanity to work.

The painful truth is we do not need winners and losers.

These winners do not offer anything to our economy that isn't already being created by the millions of working men and women in retail, in factories, in schools, and everywhere else.

Finally, Mr. Benko argues that Sanders is advocating for a reappropriation of funds from the one percent to the rest of the country.

He, correctly, argues that this would only amount to about $208 more per citizen.

Of course, he intentionally misrepresents Sanders who never argued that wealth should be divided up equally among millions.

Rather, Sanders argues that, by way of taxes, these funds be used to benefit public projects such as education, medical care, job placement, etc.

Mr. Benko's oversimplification is dishonest given that a man in his position is surely aware that Sanders' never advocated for a simple reappropriation and equal division of funds between all citizens.

After reading this article I am left wondering if this is the best the right has to offer us.

A rebranded and watered-down version of pseudo-socialism called human capitalism?

Why not commit to the logical conclusion of your economic theory and embrace socialism wholeheartedly?

Why not only invest in workers education but also in their homes, health, and communities?

While I applaud anyone who believes in the importance of investing in workers, I question his sincerity and his understanding of socialist economics.

Human capitalism, like so many conservative economic policies, is a contradiction in terms.

There is nothing human about an economic process that pits human beings against one another and forces the weaker one to give the stronger one what he has.

There is nothing human about allowing one percent of the population to control forty percent of the wealth.

And, there is nothing human in pretending that the brutal outcome of this process is, somehow, the fault of the working class who should have been more educated and better trained.

Photo: For capitalists there is profit in shipping jobs overseas. For workers there is joblessness and suffering. | AP

The battle lines are drawn: Rightwing neosecession or Third Reconstruction

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 16:33:00 +0000

The negative policies and missteps of the Obama administration are often the target of progressive fire, and rightly so. But these take place in the context of (and are sometimes caused by) an extremely perilous development in U.S. politics: an alliance of energized rightwing populists with the most reactionary sector of Big Business has captured the Republican Party with what even American Enterprise Institute conservative Norman Ornstein denounces as "the unabashed ambition to reverse decades of economic and social policy by any means necessary."

The GOP is in all out nullificationist mode, rejecting any federal laws with which they disagree. They are using their power in the judiciary and Congress to block passage or implementation of anything they find distasteful at the federal level. And under the radar the Republicans are rapidly implementing a far flung rightwing program in the 31 states where they control the governorship and the 28 where they lead both houses. They have embarked on an unprecedented overhaul of government that further deepens inequality and hurts all sectors of the poor and much of the working and middle classes, undermining the rights of all.

The main precedent in U.S. history for this kind of unbridled reactionary behavior was the states' rights, proslavery position of the white South leading up to the Civil War. In the 1960s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called out the segregationists' attempts at "nullification" in his famous "I Have a Dream Speech," and the movement defeated them.

This time we are at a pivotal point in a 35-year long rightwing offensive, begun with the Reagan victory in 1980. As shown in the ultra-conservative playground that is the government of North Carolina, the new laws and structures of today's rightwing program are so extreme and in such stark contrast to the rest of the country that I believe both their strategy and their program should be called "Neo-Secession." The country is politically polarized to an extreme, to the point that it could be called a peaceful civil war.

This nullification and neo-secession must be met by a renewed motion for freedom and social justice. The great scholar activist Manning Marable, the leader of the powerful fightback in North Carolina NAACP President Rev. William Barber II, MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry and others have called for a Third Reconstruction that builds on the post-Civil War first Reconstruction and the Civil Rights/Second Reconstruction.

We are now at a pivotal point in this fight. The battle lines are drawn: Reactionary Nullification and Neo-Secession or Third Reconstruction?

Like the first secession, this second neo-secession is centered in the South even though it is a national movement with unusual strength in the upper Rocky Mountain and plains states, as well as rural areas throughout the country. Similarly racism, especially anti-Black racism, lies at its foundation even as the rightwing assaults all democratic, women's, immigrant and labor rights, social and environmental programs. On our side a renewed grassroots African American movement may be shaping up, and it is critical that all progressives contribute to the movement of the most progressive part of the U.S. population. Similarly the fight for the South is growing in importance. Unfortunately, most Democrats, unions, progressives and social justice forces barely have the South on their radar and rarely invest in it. This must change, and change rapidly.

A shift in progressive priorities and intensification of on-the-ground organizing are crucial to defeating the right's neo-secessionist agenda as well as to forge a sufficiently powerful "Third Reconstructionist" political force to successfully pushback against the corporate leadership of the Democratic Party in the battles that must be waged against them along the way. We can righteously roast Obama all we want, but unless we can build a truly powerful force to his left that can simultaneously unite with moderates to break the political stranglehold of the far right, we will be spitting into the wind.

Neo-Secession and Third Reconstruction

Both the rightwing strategy of Nullification and Neo-Secession and the peoples fight for a Third Reconstruction are deeply rooted in U.S. history.

Nullification was born in the nineteenth century as the slaveholders' legal theory that states have the right to ignore any federal legislation, judicial decision or executive order that they disagree with. In practice it meant court decisions like Dred Scott, congressional filibusters and reactionary legislation, and the consolidation of the slaveholders' power in the states. It was the prelude to Secession and Civil War.

Post-Civil War, the victorious Union alliance with Blacks in the South then decreed Reconstruction, the most democratic, progressive and racially just program in U.S. history up to that point.

By the 1880s, however, the Southern racists and their allies overthrew Reconstruction and set up another white supremacist regime characterized by legalized racial discrimination in all facets of life, the virtual re-enslavement of Black labor and, crucially, a white monopoly on voting and political power. This regime even survived the New Deal and was not dismantled until the Civil Rights movement won passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. This Second Reconstruction not only finally ended the white dictatorship in the South but also ignited the anti-Vietnam War, Chicano, Asian American, Native American, women's and gay rights movements. Together they gave rise to the War on Poverty and won unparalleled national rights and programs for workers, women, immigrants, the poor and others.

Today the rightwing is once again spewing out this racist legal theory of nullification and invoking a new civil war, hardly bloodless though not involving clashing armies, in an attempt to overthrow what is left of New Deal, Civil Rights and War on Poverty legislation: e.g. progressive taxation, voting rights, Social Security, Medicaid, environmental protection, abortion rights, jobs programs, fairness to immigrants, union rights, public education, etc. They aim to drastically reduce the parts of the government that actually serve regular folk, privatize most of what remains of government and otherwise completely reshape the entire governmental system to the benefit of the very affluent and the big corporations. They are putting it into practice at the federal, state and local levels.

Due to decades of control of the presidency, they occupy most of the federal judiciary where they are systematically stripping away progressive laws, regulations and rights-even public education, the historic bedrock of the middle class. They control Congress through political hardball, gerrymandering and abuse of the rules. With control of two of the three branches of the federal government (not to speak of the military) and the malevolent abuse of the filibuster and mass refusal of executive political appointments, they are strangling the Obama presidency.

Meanwhile the Republicans control 31 governorships, both houses of 28 state legislatures and numerous local jurisdictions in which they are moving to nullify federal legislation with which they disagree (e.g. the Affordable Care Act and gay marriage), qualitatively cutback and privatize government and public education, drastically rollback the rights of people of color, women, workers, children and gays and eliminate progressive income taxes in favor of regressive sales taxes. Lara M. Brown recently reminded us in that "the vast majority of the laws under which each of us abides are state laws, not federal laws."

The 2013 Supreme Court decision invalidating the most powerful parts of the Voting Rights Act has opened the floodgates to voter suppression laws that heretofore have been ruled unconstitutional. Although there are still numerous Black legislators, David Bostis and Thomas Edsall assess that Republican gerrymandering, voter suppression and Black legislators' loss of clout and committee chairpersonships means that "At the state level, Black voters and elected officials have less influence now than at any time since the civil rights era."

Meanwhile the Great Recession has greatly increased already unacceptable levels of racial income and wealth inequality. Led by developers and corporations, affluent (and often "liberal" and "hipster") whites are reoccupying the cities and reshaping them to their desires, displacing millions of Black poor. The flood of police and vigilante murders over the past two years, most recently in Baltimore, have traumatically revealed, once again, the grave dangers to Blacks living amidst white racism.

Outright secession would be political suicide since the rightwing led states clearly lack the power to win a separate state. But if they have their way the difference between Blue and Red states will soon be so stark as to be the modern analogue to the free and slave states or the legally segregated versus non-legally segregated states of the past. This time the rightwing wants it both ways: to benefit from staying in the Union (and the great wealth of the Blue states) yet at the same time to recreate numerous states in their own ideological image. This is why I think it is historically justifiable and politically useful to brand today's right-wingers as nullificationist and neo-secessionist.

Nullification is one of the principal tactics of the rightwing movement; neo-secession is its strategy and its program.

The right reached both a new level of power and new level of extremism in reaction to the election of Barack Obama. Nearly two-thirds of the Republican primary electorate in 2012 voted for far right candidates and against the corporate rightist Romney. It is our fight to defeat them and bring forth a new, Third Reconstruction that will make further strides toward ending racism and bringing justice for all.

Nothing Could Be More Neo-Secessionist

North Carolina is a true battleground state: Obama won the state in 2008 by one percent and lost it by two percent in 2012. But through a combination of good luck and smart strategy, not to speak of state Democratic lethargy and division, Republican gerrymandering and the largesse of the rightwing retail mogul Art Pope, North Carolina has been the site of the Tea Party's most dramatic political victories and its most draconian legislative and social agenda. Unlike other billionaire right-wingers, Pope is an active politician and organizer-he is a former legislator and served as Gov. McCrory's first budget director-and his foundation finances ninety percent of the income of the state's leading rightwing groups.

In 2012 the Republicans won the governorship and a majority in both houses of the legislature for the first time since the first Reconstruction. In fact they boast a supermajority in both houses. "Since then," says The New York Times, "the state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot."

In just its first two weeks the new legislature: (1) became the only state to nullify all federally mandated and funded extensions to unemployment, affecting 170,000 people. It also slashed the maximum unemployment benefit for new claims from $522 to $360 per week and the maximum length to 20 weeks. North Carolina has the fifth highest unemployment rate in the nation; (2) refused the federally funded Medicare benefit that would have provided health care to an additional 500,000 North Carolinians; (3) moved to enshrine existing anti-union, "right to work" laws in the state constitution; (4) passed voter ID laws, cutback early voting by half and eliminated same day registration; (5) legalized and subsidized fracking; and (6) passed a bill to purge state commissions and Superior Court judges they don't like.

Reverend Doctor William Barber II, the North Carolina State President of the NAACP and the main leader of the growing fightback, gives further details about what he calls the "vicious war on the poor":

"Piling further indignities on the poor, they also want to require people applying for temporary assistance or benefits to submit to criminal background checks, and force applicants to a job training program for low-income workers to take a drug test, for which they have to pay. Now the legislature wants to increase and expand taxes on groceries, haircuts and prescription drugs. They're even taking aim at poor children with a bill to lower the income requirement for North Carolina's prekindergarten program, making it off limits to nearly 30,000 children who would have previously qualified."

In addition, the legislature is moving to privatize Medicaid; slash public education funding to 2007 levels, end teacher tenure and place charter schools under separate governance; shut down most abortion clinics; and establish outlandish rules for ex-offenders to restore their voting rights.

This reactionary avalanche of neo-secession was met by a burgeoning fightback. The North Carolina NAACP [1] and the wide progressive coalition it has built called Historic Thousands on Jones Street (HKonJ), where the state capitol is located, is fighting for what Rev. Barber enunciates as a Third Reconstruction. In 2013 they launched "Moral Monday": every Monday a demonstration against the legislature was followed by civil disobedience in the state house. Almost 1,000 people were arrested, usually supported by thousands at the rallies. HKonJ and its member groups have flanked Moral Monday with a statewide and sectoral organizing campaign. A major court victory was won when the courts upheld the movement's constitutional challenges to the arrests and charges were dropped. The movement reached a high point on Feb. 15, 2014 when tens of thousands marched on the capitol in the largest demonstration since the Civil Rights movement.

Despite this tremendous work, the Republicans passed their main legislative program and held their ground in the 2014 election, aided by the now gerrymandered districts. In a hard blow they also defeated Democrat Kay Hagen to win the U.S. Senate seat in the most expensive Senatorial contest in North Carolina history.

The Moral Monday Forward Together movement is regrouping. It has won a number of important preliminary legal victories, especially on voting rights but also on fracking and the defense of teacher tenure. This February it again mobilized more than ten thousand into the streets. Small civil disobedience actions have been recommenced and regular protests resumed at the legislature. Rallies are again being organized across the state. The movement has increased its focus on fighting for proactive legislation such as raising the minimum wage and for extension of Medicaid.

The hope is that the movement will regain momentum this summer in a series of actions on voting rights. Moral Monday plans to mobilize around their legal action against the legislature's voter suppression bill during the hearing starting on July 13 in Winston-Salem. That will be followed by actions in support of their challenge to the Republican's racist redistricting before the North Carolina Supreme Court in August. Actions are also planned to expose and reverse Gov. McCrory's silent destruction of the motor voter act: voter registration is down 66 percent at motor vehicle and social service agencies.

Fighting Neo-Secession

The neo-secessionist strategy poses a highly complex set of challenges, distinct from a straight up secession. The right must be defeated in public opinion, in the streets, in workplaces and at the polls. And it must be defeated in numerous discrete congressional and legislative districts, as well as county and city races, governorships, the Congress and the presidency. This will be protracted guerrilla political struggle. We must prepare ourselves to take advantage of big opportunities to mobilize the public and reshape public opinion when they are presented-the BlackLivesMatter motion is showing that kind of potential-but also drill down into the electoral fights district by district. Only a gigantic and determined coalition of everyone who opposes the right can do this, not just in presidential elections but all levels of government.

However we also need a massive and well organized progressive force to the left of Obama and Clinton Democrats with a social justice left that can root this force among people of color, unions and other poor folk that can provide the backbone that the elite Democrats consistently show they lack. This is crucial not only to win all of these battles, but to make sure the rightwing program is eventually buried at every level and forever, and replaced by a Third Reconstruction.

There are tens of millions of progressives in the U.S. However we have so far failed to gain enough unity to leverage our power. We are often strangers, or at best short term tactical allies, across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, issue and sector, pursuing separate agendas. Way too many of us seem to put our energy and resources behind or passively vote for mainstream Democratic candidates who more often than not fail to deliver, while failing to build independent political power of our own. Others eschew electoral politics, persist in "pure" but futile or even counter-productive third party schemes or think we can find safety in the non-profit world. While far right candidates and voters dominated the last several Republican presidential primaries, we have yet to come near matching the massive multiracial coalition spearheaded by Rev. Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. Ironically, President Obama expertly identified and mobilized the progressive electoral coalition in 2008 and 2012, but progressives themselves have precious little power within it.

This is not an ideological projection but a historically based reality of today's politics. Strikingly, African American voters are dynamically growing and the most progressive voting bloc in the country and the even faster-growing Latino and Asian American populations are increasingly moving in the same direction. In 2012 Black voter participation exceeded that of all other groups. And no other demographic group votes in such a unified liberal-progressive way.

However, progressives are not organizing these voters. In fact it often appears that the leadership and often membership of social justice non-profits and progressive electoral and issue organizations, editorial boards and actions are more racially segregated than the Fortune 500. And numerous people of color community organizations are isolated from the voter upsurge. Now we are presented with new opportunities arising out of the motion at the grassroots in response to the dramatic string of police murders in the last couple of years. To what degree will this motion be sustained and become organized? In what ways can it be linked to or impact electoral politics and it what ways can electoral work help build the movement?

People of color are the anchor of a larger motion that is now being called "the new majority" or the "rising American electorate" together with unmarried women, labor and youth. Increased inequality among seniors, married women and the middle class also provide important organizing and political opportunities. But progressives are often missing precisely the kind of voter organizing opportunities that the far right has built itself upon.

Of course the battle for a Third Reconstruction takes place in a vastly different global and national context than Reconstruction I and II. In this era of imperial decline, social austerity and looming environmental catastrophe today's radical reconstruction would encompass not only the fight for racial justice but also intersect with labor battles and anti-cutback efforts, fights for immigrant, women's and LGBT rights, peace and climate justice in new ways. Getting there will be complex but the potential exists for a social change movement in the U.S. that is both broader and more radical on a host of issues than previous progressive upsurges.

The Importance of the South

In this war for the heart and soul of the U.S., the battle for the South stands front and center. The South is the homeland of the most reactionary, most racist and most militarist forces in U.S. society. Yet it is also home to the majority of African Americans, the most progressive force in U.S. society. The right must be challenged on their home ground if they are to be defeated and southern Blacks are key to the formation of any national progressive bloc. It is the struggle against racism embedded in this unique polarization that gives the struggle for the South such urgency. Racism remains the cutting edge of the struggle for democracy, equality and justice in the U.S., and its most powerful advocates and opponents are both in the South.

The South is also the main center of poverty and militarism and a bastion of environmental destruction. The fight for peace and equality, therefore, also require a fight for the South.

In fact the South (remember that both Texas and Florida were part of the Confederacy) has more population, more Black people, more poverty, more military installations, more congressional seats and more Electoral votes than any other region of the country, and it is growing. Three of the precious few presidential battleground states are in the South: Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, soon to be joined by Georgia. Together with Maryland and Washington D.C., these Southern states alone have 84 electoral votes, more than 31 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Winning purple states and congressional districts in the South is key to victory in presidential races and the fight for the Congress. And the 105 African American majority counties in the South provide great organizing and governance opportunities for progressives.

Although often written off by Northern liberals as redneck, ignorant Bible Belt country, the South has undergone and is undergoing socio-economic transformation and has become a heated center of struggle against the right.

Historically the defining features of the South were the plantation economy, the racially coerced labor that it was founded upon, legalized racial discrimination and segregation, and the white dictatorship that enabled and enforced all of this. However, although there are scattered remnants, these iconic features have been largely vanquished. Civil rights, worldwide capitalist competition, technology, migration and immigration, gentrification/white flight and exurbs are transforming the Southern landscape, at different rates and in different ways. Indeed Maryland and Virginia now rank in the top ten in median household income while Southern states also occupy nine of the bottom twelve. Today even what's left of the Ku Klux Klan disavows racism.

These transformations have, ironically, given rise to two contradictory motions. The increasing political economic similarity of the South with other parts of the country has enabled its leaders to drive a nationwide rightward motion for the first time since the Civil War. Nationalization of the South economically has given rise to Southernization of large parts of the North politically.

The strongest part of the Southern Republican coalition is not just corporate, but the extreme rightwing of corporate forces in the U.S.: big oil and energy, the military industrial complex, low end retail like Walmart, big pharma, Southern-based banks, fast food companies and the private prison industry. They are flanked by powerful state and local elites, usually more rooted in reactionary Southern traditions, like real estate developers, big car dealers, low-wage construction, regional and local capitalists, conservative law firms, the criminal justice complex, fundamentalist churches and small businesses- the state and local chambers of commerce and Christian coalitions.

These forces unify a base of affluent white suburban right wingers, tax revolters, gun enthusiasts and reactionary white workers and poor and straight up white supremacists. The lingering poison is that Southern whites are far more conservative, Republican and prone to white political solidarity than elsewhere. Nationally, approximately 60 percent of whites vote Republican in presidential elections. But Southern whites do so at a 70 percent plus clip, rising to ninety percent in much of the Deep South in opposition to Obama.

No More Solid South

In the face of this formidable Republican/rightwing coalition, more moderate and progressive forces are developing at different rates in different states. The Solid South is Solid no more and although the Republicans still win most Southern states, the Democratic presidential vote in the South has been rising over the past couple of decades.

The potential to defeat the Republicans in the South starts with the powerful African American community (and Latino community in Texas) and extends to the wider multiracial civil rights coalition of liberal churches, trial lawyers, progressive educators and students, and unions. There is a far greater percentage of African American voters in the Southern states than elsewhere, topping at 35 percent in Mississippi. And like Blacks throughout the country, they consistently vote ninety percent Democratic. Black remigration to the South means that there is a higher percentage of African Americans in that region than in many decades. And Latino immigration is also on the rise and has become an especially important factor in Florida, Virginia and Georgia. As demonstrated most vividly in the Moral Monday/Forward Together movement in North Carolina, African Americans continue to hold the potential to lead another major transformation, a Third Reconstruction.

People of color are being buttressed by new forces arising from the nationalization of the Southern economy and society, a process which includes urbanization, large scale national and international migration, the growth of public education and government, tourism and retirement communities. Southern cities are growing rapidly in size, are generally blue and becoming bluer. As in the North, some older suburbs are becoming political battlegrounds although some remain exclusionary white enclaves.

There are high political stakes underlying the South's resistance to health care expansion, growth of government and public education, as workers in these sectors tend to be unusually liberal and unionized. There are important and growing women's and LGBTQ movements in the South.

Neither party seriously represents the economic interests of small farmers nor poor whites, a potentially volatile sector, especially as their economic positions inevitably become more unstable.

In fact the South has been wrongly stereotyped as a Republican monolith since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Actually it was not until 1994 that the Republicans won a majority of the Southern congresspersons. There are way more African American officeholders in the region than in any other part of the country. Democrats are generally stronger at the state and local levels than they are in presidential elections. New Deal and populist politics still exist among some working class whites and small farmers, and Latino and Asian immigration is growing.

The South is highly differentiated politically and economically, and the struggle for the South must be nuanced and taken on state by state.

Washington D.C. and Maryland long ago turned Blue, and Florida, Virginia and North Carolina are now true battleground states. President Obama won Florida both times, and Virginia and North Carolina once, losing very narrowly the other time. Together the outcome of the battleground elections in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina could determine the presidency. After North Carolina, Georgia was the most competitive state won by Romney and is most likely to be the next state to become purple. As earlier mentioned the South also has the biggest Senate and congressional delegations and control numerous key committees. Without defeating many of these Southern congresspersons we cannot win control of the Congress.

Mississippi still has a ways to go. But the potential, and importance, of Mississippi lies in the fact that it has the highest percentage of Blacks residents in the country and who represent 37 percent of the vote. The Republicans hold only a five-seat majority in the state's House. A proposed state constitutional amendment defining "personhood" as beginning at conception and prohibiting abortion "from the moment of fertilization" was defeated by 55 percent of voters in Nov. 2011. And the longtime Black and human rights activist Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor of Jackson in 2012, the state's capital and largest city. Chokwe unexpectedly passed in 2013, but his successful candidacy points to the vast potential of the 105 Black majority counties in the South. (There are none outside the South.)

Eventually turning Texas into a battleground state is a key priority since, given its size and large Latino population, it could be a national game changer.

Progressive political forces and mass rumblings can be heard in every Southern state. While some of the other states, especially those that are nearly all white, are not favorable terrain, even there key struggles against racism, poverty, fracking, big oil etc. are crucial to the national fightback, just as they were during the Civil Rights movement. The South is where a broad coalition centered on African Americans must be unleashed and the rightwing routed in its own backyard.

The South is also the site of some of the most exciting social justice organizing in the country.

The defeat of the Personhood amendment and the election of Chokwe Lumumba as mayor of Jackson highlight the growing power of groups like Mississippi One Voice [3], the Mississippi Black Leadership Summit and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in Mississippi.

Virginia New Majority has burst on the scene with the state's most dynamic political field operation and as a key organizing force in the Virginia legislature. It may be the first overtly social justice group to embark on an exciting new strategy of identifying, training and fielding progressive candidates in key areas of the state. New Virginia Majority and the Florida New Majority has built one of the largest social justice electoral formations in the country in that crucial battleground state.

Final Remarks

The 2016 election is already underway, and the Southern states of Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, along with Ohio, will likely be the key battleground states that determine the winner.

The stakes could hardly be higher and the race is a virtual toss-up. If a Republican is elected president, the Republicans may control every branch of the federal government as well as 31 governorships. Let the experience of North Carolina alert us to the danger: the "moderate" Republican former Mayor of Charlotte, a largely blue city, was elected governor, but the rabidly rightwing legislature passed the entire rightwing ALEC legislative program in a matter of two weeks. A Republican presidential victory in 2016 will likely follow the same playbook.

It is absolutely crucial that the Republicans be prevented from seizing the presidency but also key for progressives to find ways to support the Democratic candidate (most likely Hillary Clinton) against the Republicans but that also push him or her to more progressive positions and, most importantly, enable us to build the unity and strength of progressive forces going forward. The entry of Bernie Sanders into the race should help this process.

The BlackLivesMatter movement is already a force in U.S. politics. If it continues to gain momentum it could literally reshape the election. However, a polarization around racism does not automatically benefit progressives in the short run, as we could be out organized by the racists. It is therefore crucial that we put this fight front and center both in the long and short run. This cannot be done without the critical involvement of the majority of African Americans who live and struggle in the harsher political conditions of the South.

The emergence of a renewed mass African American led grassroots motion would be a major step for the progressive movement as a whole as we take on the task of fighting to defeat neo-secession and forge a Third Reconstruction for peace, jobs, equality and justice.

Bob Wing has been an organizer and writer since 1968. He was the founding editor of ColorLines magazine and War Times/Tiempo de Guerros newspaper. Thanks to him for his permission to reprint this article that came to us via Portside and CCDS.

Photo: Reverend Doctor William Barber II leads Moral Monday march, North Carolina NAACP, Facebook. Kaitlyn Barlow.

Sandra Bland had the right to say "no"

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 15:55:00 +0000

I wrote for PW some time back about the cops stopping a car I was in back during my college days in Odessa, Texas. I recalled the verbal humiliation and threats that the cops issued toward the gay men I was with, and the insulting remarks they directed at me. One of the gay men lost it, practically groveling; however, my friend Big Richard yessirred like I did but he kept his chin up. It marked a certain triumph on his part. He didn't give the police the pleasure of seeing him cry.

None of us felt able that night to show the courage it took Sandra Bland to speak up for herself. Some in the media have called her combative, yet the cop's behavior toward her was mercurial, abusive, and frankly racist. She had the choice of yessirring like so many of us do. Groveling to avoid a fine. She stood up to the cop, which enraged him. Threatening to "light her up" with a taser-would he have done that to a white man or woman of means? I doubt it.

I'm proud of her for taking a stand I was too afraid to take when I was nineteen. It is a tragedy that she was physically attacked for her courageous stand. Although she may well have been an emotionally fragile person, we do know that she didn't have a large bankroll or the connections to easily escape her predicament.

The evidence thus far proffered by Waller County is indicative of suicide, but who in reality killed Sandra Bland? Answer: Waller County, the state of Texas, the system that prefers to punish the poor over the wealthy, badge-wearing vigilantes like Brian Encinia, and, finally, the insidious, soul-damaging pressure all of this places on ordinary people.

When Sandra Bland, a stranger to the trooper, a fresh transplant to Texas from Illinois, is seen as nothing more an irritant and a target, as well as a source of funds for the county, that system is sick and in need of a radical cure.

Justice for Sandra Bland will come too late for her. For us, the living, who have seen far too many cases like hers, we can respond to the tears she cried in jail and the fears she felt while sitting behind bars.

We can't afford to be fearful any longer. If we helplessly agree to unjust searches and seizures, we may or may not escape maltreatment by law enforcement, but in a sense we're agreeing that they're allowed to do this.

We don't agree that they have carte blanche to tear through our homes and order us not to take legal actions in our cars.

We no longer assent to their legalized thefts; we no longer bow down. Law officers must accept that we are their equals, no matter what leeway the Supreme Court gives them on the Fourth Amendment's guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures and the Court's weakening of probable cause.

When we are peaceful, when we are law-abiding, nothing more is required of us as citizens. No more bowed heads and groveling before the would-be tin pot dictators who rule our streets.

Some day a court case may rein in abuses by law enforcement. Some day organized dissent will change the system that allows cases like that of Sandra Bland to occur.

Let's make that "some day" happen sooner rather than later. Sandra Bland's family, bereft of their loved one, needs to know that she didn't die in vain.

Photo: Protesters outside the Waller County Courthouse after a march from the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, July 17, to protest the death of Sandra Bland, who was found dead in the jail. Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis said there were no cameras in Bland's jail cell to show if the Illinois woman hanged herself in the lockup as a medical examiner has ruled. Her relatives and supporters dispute the finding. (Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle via AP)

Happy fifth birthday, Dodd-Frank Act

Tue, 21 Jul 2015 14:51:00 +0000

Five years ago, in the wake of the worst economic crisis in U.S. history since the Great Depression, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank act into law.

The Act's purpose was simple: prevent the likes of the 2008 financial crisis from ever happening again.

The implementation of the act, however, is far more complicated.

Complaints can be heard from conservatives who say that these regulations stifle growth without adding any actual protections and liberals who say the law does not go far enough in preventing Wall Street from engaging in reckless risk-taking.

The act is immense and features regulations designed to limit banks from engaging in risky investments, protect consumers from predatory business practices, and force banks to remain financially sound with surplus funds available.

What it has not done is limit executive pay and reform it in such a way that they are not rewarded for engaging in risky behavior.

While I applaud the Act as an instance of government working to protect its citizens from the rampant greed of Wall Street, I share liberal politicians concerns regarding the Act not going far enough.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, has been extremely critical of the Act and is one of the voices that claim it stifles economic growth.

Since 2008, Chase has paid $36 billion dollars in fines ranging from knowingly hiding Bernard Madoff's ponzi scheme to rigging foreign exchange rates.

HSBC, to give another example, recently paid out $28 million in fines for knowingly doing business with organized crime.

These were not high-risk investments made recklessly.

These were criminal acts knowingly engaged in for profit.

Yet, since the implementation of Dodd-Frank, Chase's stock price has risen 43percent.

So much for limiting growth.

Dodd-Frank rests on the naive belief that, due to a lack of regulation and oversight, banks engaged in risky, profit-driven behavior which resulted in economic disaster for the U.S.

The banks did made mistakes and Acts like Dodd-Frank must prevent these mistakes from happening again.

Yet, opening bank accounts for Madoff or rigging currency exchanges are not bad decisions or "mistakes" but criminal acts that were known to be illegal at the time.

The banks were not just acting irresponsibly but were profiting by colluding with criminals.

Banks, like most for-profit industries, will attempt to get away with as much profit-making behavior as they are allowed, whether it's hiding millions of dollars in criminal proceeds (HSBC) or selling toxic mortgages as investments (Chase).

Moreover, there are numerous examples of banks being fined far less than the profits that their illegal acts produced or being allowed to claim fines as deductions on their taxes.

Fines become the cost of doing business rather than deterrents or punishments.

So punishing the banks with fines is like suing your car thief's employer; it blames the insitution rather than the persons running it.

To be truly effective, legislation must be implemented that causes criminal acts, like the ones Chase engaged in, to be punished with jail time and censure that prevents the guilty parties from being employed in the financial services industry.

As a nation, our moral outrage is so severely provoked by acts like murder that we often demand the life imprisonment or even execution of the guilty party.

Yet those who caused the loss of life savings and homes through collusion with criminals and predatory loans are not held personally responsible.

The Dodd-Frank Act is to be praised as an attempt to protect Main Street from the limitless profiteering of Wall Street.

But let's not rest on our laurels; there is still much work to be done to prevent the likes of another 2008.

Photo: Demonstrators protest the greed of banks. | Desert Peace blog

Tell Congress to support peace with Iran

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 15:54:00 +0000

The agreement worked out so painstakingly between Iran and the U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia, and Germany is a milestone. It represents a turn away from militarism and toward diplomacy as a solution to conflicts between nations.

Experts call its curbs on Iran's potential nuclear weapons development far more complete and stringent than anything they had expected. But the pact is about much more than nuclear weapons. After all, several countries in the region already have nuclear weapons: India, Pakistan and Israel - not to mention the enormous U.S. nuclear arsenal (along with those of Russia, France, Britain and China)..

What is most significant is that this agreement begins a process for the U.S. and other Western countries to re-engage peacefully with Iran, yielding potential benefits in renewed trade and in cooperation on resolving bloody conflicts in Syria, Yemen, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and defeating the terrorist "Islamic State." And it opens the way for Iran to re-emerge in a positive way in the world community as a highly developed country rich in science, technology and culture. In short, it advances the concept that diplomacy, not military force, is the way to resolve international disagreements and tensions.

Meanwhile it offers the Iranian people the beginnings of relief from punishing economic sanctions. The Iranian public celebrated the announcement of the agreement last week. And Iran's Tudeh Party, the country's long-enduring communist party, in a statement issued July 15, says the agreement is a defeat for Iran's reactionary clerical leaders, who used a provocative nuclear weapons program as a diversion from their harsh domestic repression and failed "anti-people" economic policies.

"We believe," the Tudeh statement said, "that by pushing away the 'nuclear issue and sanctions' and development of hope in the mind of people for improvement of the situation, now the issues such as revitalization of the economy, improvement of the people's disastrous livelihood, rich getting richer and the increase in poverty in the country, and of course the suppression of any kind of protest by the working people, once again will become the main issues of the society."

The international community is welcoming this agreement. On Monday morning, the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved a resolution backing the deal and moving to lift non-military international sanctions against Iran. The European Union also approved the Iran deal on Monday, putting in motion the lifting of its own economic sanctions, including prohibitions on the purchase of Iranian oil.

Polls show a majority of Americans support the agreement with Iran and the lifting of sanctions. But Republicans, allied with the far-right Netanyahu government in Israel, and with possible support from some Democrats, are trying to block it in the U.S. Congress. They have 60 days to try to do that.

The influential Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, slated to become the next Senate Democratic leader, was one of eight Democrats to support earlier Republican efforts to block this agreement. The others were Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Michael Bennett of Colorado, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Ben Nelson of Florida - along with independent Angus King of Maine. If you live in those states, it's especially important to let these folks know you support the agreement.

It's up to the public to put on the pressure for peace. Don't wait. Let your senators and representative know you want this historic peace pact.

Photo: The agreement with Iran involves not just the United States, but Europe, Russia and China. From left to right: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, European Union High Representative Federica Mogherini, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and US Secretary of State John Kerry, at the United Nations building in Vienna, Austria, July 14, 2015, during their talks on the Iranian nuclear program. | Joe Klamar/pool photo via AP

Chattanooga deaths being called an act of domestic terrorism

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 14:59:00 +0000

On July 16 a gunman opened fire at the Armed Forces Career Center in Chattanooga, Tenn., killing four Marines before being killed himself. Two days later a fifth victim died.

This terrible act of violence adds to the growing list of massacres over the last few years, the second most recent being the killing of nine people at a church service in Charleston, S.C.

One significant difference between both of these senseless acts of violence is that public servants are already suspecting terrorist activity and freely using this phraseology.

"We will treat this as a terrorist investigation until we determine it was not" said FBI agent Edward Reinhold and was echoed by U.S. Attorney William C. Killian who stated that the act was being treated as "an act of domestic terrorism".

As of this writing the gunman, Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, has not been linked to any designated terrorist groups.

This has not stopped investigators from using these terms, however, which leads one to wonder why "terrorist" was deemed inappropriate when referring to the recent killing of nine church attendees in Charleston.

The question is: why a mass murderer who kills in the name of white supremacy is not considered a terrorist but a killer who, currently, has no known ideological motive is?

The answer is that "terrorist" is an empty term which doesn't apply to any one person or group in particular and, therefore, can be used to refer to any person or group. When we use the term "terrorist" we are not referring to a specific act or person but are referencing a narrative that the United States has created.

This narrative is that of a foreign group who violently opposes the United States and it's way of life. This story ensures that a terrorist is always outside the fold of the United States and its society.

This is why "terrorist" is used to define those particular foreigners who threaten, mostly white, bastions of U.S. American power, starting with the Twin Towers in New York all the way down to this assault on a Naval Facility.

The reason why "terrorist" is not used to define the likes of Dylann Roof is because his ideology and acts are not foreign U.S. society

By refusing to name him "terrorist" we tacitly admit that white supremacy and violence against African Americans is not foreign to the U.S. but is a deep and wounded part of our history.

It is time we put to rest such useless terms as "terrorism" and "terrorist" and instead focus on naming the racist and chauvinistic narrative that animates them and gives them life.

Photo: Chattanooga Police Department Chief Fred Fletcher speaks during a news conference July 16, in Chattanooga, Tenn. A gunman unleashed a barrage of gunfire at two military facilities a few miles apart in Chattanooga killing several Marines, officials said. The gunman was also killed. | John Rawlston/Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP

Greece put its faith in democracy, but Germany vetoed it

Wed, 15 Jul 2015 13:42:00 +0000

There is no way to sugar coat it: The heroic struggle of the Greek people against a nation-killing austerity regime has failed, at least for now. After being diplomatically "waterboarded" (according to one European Union official) by the EU finance ministers - mainly German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeubel and Chancellor Angela Merkel - Greek Premier and Syriza party leader Alexis Tsipras conceded defeat in achieving their main objective. That objective was reducing the debt load crushing the country's ability to grow out of its economic crisis.

Tsipras returns home with some additional loans, no reduction in debt load, and a nearly complete surrender of Greek sovereignty in exchange for immediate "aid." Indeed, the deal Tsipras brings home is in many respects worse than the one Greeks voted down last week! Not only more austerity economic measures (see below), but additional punishment for the Greek people for: a) electing an anti-austerity government and b) having the impudence to put the German dictatorship over the EU to a democratic vote.

As reported in the Guardian, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis likened the deal to the 1919 Versailles treaty - widely seen as the harbinger of the Second World War. He called the deal "unviable."

"This has nothing to do with economics. It has nothing to do with putting Greece back on the rails towards recovery," Varoufakis told Australia's public broadcaster. "This is a new Versailles treaty that is haunting Europe again, and the prime minister [Alexis Tsipras] knows it. He knows he's damned if he does and he's damned if he doesn't."

Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist and prominent critic of austerity both here and in Greece, said the creditors' demands on Greece "went beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, [leading to the] complete destruction of national sovereignty [with] no hope of relief ... .It's a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for."

What is austerity? For Greece, it means the following, on top of so-called previous "reforms" that have left Greece with huge reductions in pay AND 30 percent unemployment:

1. "Reforming the tax system" - in effect doubling the VAT tax (essentially a sales tax) from 12 percent to 23 percent.

2. Forcing the collection of taxes from workers -- but not any Greek billionaires, the suppoed "job creators." Merkel seems to have caught "foot in Mitt (Romney)" disease.

3. Cut promised pensions in half.

4. The International Monetary Fund will supervise every act of the Greek government, cutting off funds at any failure of the government to comply with draconian budget cuts in many areas.

5. 50 billion euros worth of Greek land, islands and historic sites will be given to EU creditors to pay them, and to recapitalize Greek banks. Note: EU - mainly German - creditors have acknowledged in the negotiations that they were aware the former right-wing Greek governments had lied about their economic statistics - yet still loaned them billions. Do they take any responsibility for their reckless 300 billion euro lending spree to a country they knew could not pay? No! Not a single euro forgiven, even though morally half the debt is their own responsibility.

Greece never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Now they will head even deeper into recession, and likely become another in a growing list of fragile or failed states.

One would think the implications of the Germans effectively dictating politics to Europe, in order to preserve a market environment nearly enslaved to Germany's export-oriented economy, would cause grave concern. And it is. Fissures are widening.

Yet German finance capital must have the EU. German leaders think punishing Greece will enforce "fiscal discipline." It's a version of "the hungry dog hunts harder" philosophy of the Koch brothers, and their kennel of barking dogs running for president. Also reminiscent of a Bavarian corporal who became chancellor and drowned the world in blood. Starve those dogs too much and they will savage their masters! This is is not over!

Indeed - news alert - the IMF has just announced it will not support an agreement that does not include a substantial debt reduction for Greece, or at least a 30-year postponement in payments. It appears brother Tsipras may have been playing a deeper game than the press, including this development, presumably! Bravo!

What about Greece exiting the EU and the Eurozone - known by the shorthand "Grexit"?

Some, including on the left, think Greece should leave the EU, and abandon the euro currency altogether. The Greek people do not want that. In addition, the EU effectively shut down Greek banks and drained them of funds prior to last week's referendum. That means conversion to a revived national currency - the drachma - would take place with nothing but current meager revenues. International trade for Greece - a big part of its economy before - would be cut to the bone for lack of any international credit. The drachma could start out being worth a tenth of the euro, if that. And they would still owe the debt, still in euros!

As it turns out, Grexit was the German preferred "solution" for Greece until France and Italy persuaded Merkel that it would result in a greater risk of the EU unraveling than the current "deal."

There remain huge questions of whether the "deal" will pass the Greek parliament. Even If it does, political chaos will rise in Greece - and perhaps within Syria - and Syriza will probably lose the government. The "deal" threatens an inverse result in several northern European countries, who do not want to loan Greece any money at all, and also prefer Grexit.

There is a profound and important lesson for Americans, especially working people, in the Greek crisis. If you go to the billionaires and big banks for relief, you will need more than rational, even scientific, or humane arguments. You will need more than a popular vote in your support. You need the ability, power and authority to put them out of business, in jail, and confiscate their property before starting negotiations.

Here is an American parallel with which we are all too familiar: After the financial crash of 2008, when Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan), Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs), and Jeffrey Immelt (GE) approached then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (and incoming Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner) for bailout relief following the Lehman Brothers collapse, they reportedly threatened to close their businesses if they were not protected against Lehman "counterparty" losses. Meaning, Lehman owed them money that would not be paid. Both Paulson and Geithner chose not to call their "bluff," fearing 30% unemployment (like Greece) instead of the 12-15 percent we got.

The correct approach, by my lights, would go like this - although you have to have the political power to do it: Arrest all three; nationalize, at least temporarily, their firms; and then begin "negotiations."

If Greece gets some breathing room, then the leadership may find the path to progress for all its people. Whether it stays in the European Union or leaves, larger forces than just Greece will decide the fate of the impoverishing austerity regimes advancing across the world since Reagan/Thatcher, and the wreckage of terror and failed states in their wake. But, like Prometheus of old, the Greek leadership and people are striving to take fire from the gods. We should find ways to spread that fire - and its light - across the world.

Photo: German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, right, talks with European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs Pierre Moscovici during a meeting of eurogroup finance ministers regarding Greece, at the EU Council building in Brussels on Monday, July 13, 2015. Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP

Is the labor movement split over the 2016 presidential election?

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 16:24:00 +0000

There is no question that there is a great deal of excitement in the labor movement about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the coming Democratic primary elections. Some 40 labor leaders met and greeted Sanders at an event yesterday at the headquarters of the American Postal Workers Union, an appropriate place for Sanders to be hosted considering his long battle to save postal and other public services threatened by right-wing lawmakers.

This week, on the other hand, the more than one million-member American Federation of Teachers endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, highlighting her positions in favor of strong public education and strong teachers' unions.

The AFL-CIO has withheld endorsing a candidate in the primaries for now, preferring to push instead on the issues it sees as critical not just to the labor movement but to workers in general - particularly trumpeting its "raising wages agenda," since its adoption last winter.

All unions, including the AFT, have expressed satisfaction with many of the positions taken by Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Martin O'Malley, three of the Democratic candidates. But, like the AFT, some unions will probably endorse one candidate or another meaning that the labor movement will not have a united front for the primary elections.

I do not think that any of this means the labor movement is hopelessly divided when it comes to the 2016 presidential elections. The evidence, in fact, is that the opposite is true, at least when it comes to the issues. There has been an unprecedented amount of unity around the AFL-CIO's raising wages agenda, with almost the entire labor movement pushing the major candidates for the same thing.

In many ways the campaigns of the major Democratic candidates reflect the success of this approach by labor and its allies. It is interesting that in both Clinton's and Sander's cases so far, each has avoided attacking the other, vowing to stick to the issues as they see them.

Clinton gave a major speech on the economy this week during which she said wage stagnation is the result of policy choices. This has long been the position of the labor movement which, of course would add to the Clinton assessment that the policy choices were made by lawmakers beholden to the super-rich and acting against the interests of the majority.

Clinton, in her speech on the economy, also said that wage stagnation is "the core economic challenge" that must be overcome to boost middle-class (we say working class) incomes. Cynics will say that Hillary's people can read labor movement press releases as well as anybody else but the labor movement itself cannot but be pleased that a major candidate who could win the Democratic nomination is taking this position. There are 20 Republican candidates, one or another of whom could end up as president, that are calling for elimination of minimum wage laws altogether. All of the GOP hopefuls oppose expansion of collective bargaining rights and almost anything else that is helpful to workers.

Bernie Sanders, of course, has been campaigning hard for an end to the wage gap, and for higher minimum wages and a host of other progressive positions favored by the labor movement.

I believe that by joining with its allies this year and getting behind a raising wages campaign, the nation's unions have been able to successfully push the major candidates, including Hillary Clinton, to address some of their issues.

Labor 's task during the lead up to this election, more than locking itself into either the Clinton or Sanders campaign, is to push on the major issues. The first of these is the continuing fight to raise the minimum wage.

Second, there needs to be major support for the administration's efforts to update overtime rules. The Obama plan would expand overtime protection to 13.5 million people. It should be extended to everyone who works overtime.

Sanders and Clinton both have said they support collective bargaining rights. The goal is to get them to become more and more specific on this point and to expose Republicans who oppose these rights as the national disgrace that they are.

Labor has told the candidates that undocumented workers must have a path to citizenship but even before that measures are needed to allow them to work legally and guarantee them the rights of all workers. A raising wages agenda, the labor movement says, will not succeed unless this is done. We need presidential candidates who will say this, not candidates like Trump who slander immigrants.

Both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns need to be more specific on the issues of race and gender discrimination. Such discrimination, and the institutionalized racism that leads to police crime and mass incarceration militate against the carrying out of a raising wages agenda.

The labor movement is pushing all the candidates, Clinton and Sanders included, to come out with stronger proposals on enforcement of labor standards.

The Federal Reserve system is charged with developing monetary policy that promotes full employment. It is the role of the labor movement and progressives generally to press the candidates on this issue too. Monetary policy should aim for full employment, not just for full pockets on Wall Street.

Labor has long been pushing for massive programs to rebuild infrastructure and create jobs. Clinton and Sanders both have supported this but are being pushed by labor and its allies to back infrastructure programs that target areas and groups hit hardest by unemployment, particularly minority communities.

Sanders has been good on opposing trade deals that hurt workers. The labor movement can be expected to continue to push Clinton to take stronger positions in this area.

Both of them call for fairer tax codes. The labor movement can be expected to push its longtime agenda here too - the ending of tax shelters and havens and laws that allow the super rich to pay far lower percentages of their income than the percentages paid by the working class majority.

It's fine to back a candidate who takes good positions and has a good record. But it would be a mistake to take a do or die approach to any particular single candidate at this time - a mistake to say "if my candidate doesn't win the primary, I'm staying home."

When it comes to the 2016 presidential elections labor's approach of focusing on the issues seems to be paying off. Americans are taking candidates like Clinton and Sanders seriously. The Republican cabal is looking more and more like a circus.

Image: Rini Art

Charleston, the Republican right, and the lessons of Martin Luther King

Wed, 08 Jul 2015 12:25:00 +0000

It's a hard life, it's a hard life
It's a very hard life
It's a hard life wherever you go
If we poison our children with hatred
And there ain't no place in Belfast for that kid to go

A cafeteria line in Chicago
The fat man in front of me
Is calling black people trash to his children
And he's the only trash here I see

And I'm thinking this man wears a white hood
In the night when the children should sleep
But, they'll slip to their window and they'll see him
And they'll think that white hood's all they need

It's a hard life, it's a hard life
It's a very hard life
It's a hard life wherever you go
If we poison our children with hatred
Then, the hard life is all that they'll know
And there ain't no place in Chicago for those kids to go

- Nanci Griffith, "It's A Hard Life Wherever You Go"

By now few people, perhaps with the exception of the talking heads on FOX, are claiming that there was anything random or mysterious about the brutal murder of nine innocent African American people on the hallowed ground of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. The facts are in and irrefutable. A 21-year-old white man poisoned by racist hatred decided that he was going to murder African American people in a sacred and historic place and he proceeded to cold-bloodedly do it.

What isn't so obvious is what made Dylann Roof into someone who would commit such a horrific act of hateful bloodletting. No one is born a racist murderer. He grew into one. Surely many things explain his evolution from an innocent child to a hard-core racist seething with rage in his teens and then a few years later into a remorseless, dehumanized murderer. But any accounting has to include the poisoning of the political discourse and atmosphere upon the election of President Obama in 2008, and the subsequent impact on public attitudes and actions.

When the first African American president began his first term in January 2009, it was reasonable to think that his adversaries would show him some respect and a willingness to search for common ground. That would have been the normal, decent, and sensible thing to do, especially in the midst of the deepest economic depression since the Great Depression. Instead, Obama met a wall of supercharged racist hostility and opposition to even the most innocuous of his political initiatives.

Nothing, no matter how untrue, vile, or provocative, was out of bounds when it came to attacking the new president. Unrelieved vilification, obstruction, "nullification and interposition" - in hiatus since the days of Jim Crow - became the Republican playbook. Any taboos on the use of racist invective, images, and threats of violence against President Obama were lifted.

It was "open season" on our country's first black president.

The voices of hate, violence, and glorification of guns included, of course, the white supremacist fringe. But if it were only the fringe it would have been no more than a faint noise in the echo chamber of U.S. politics. What gave this noxious message its reach, traction, and amplification was a much larger choir of "upstanding citizens," occupying prominent positions in the Congress, the courts, business circles, pulpits, think tanks, and mass media, especially talk radio. With a mix of subtle and crude racist diatribes, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Mitch O'Connell, and many others of their ilk mobilized a resentful, angry, overwhelmingly white mass constituency into shock troops of racist hate and obstruction of Obama's generally progressive agenda.

Not just marginal beer-drinkers

In other words, the architects of this full court press on the president and his policies weren't a bunch of young, marginal, beer-drinking, country-listening white males, sitting at their computers and posting racist screeds online. There were such people, and no doubt they had a part in the racist provocations against President Obama and African American people in general. But major figures in the right-wing establishment were the lead actors and major interlocutors.

Not surprisingly, the flood of lies, misrepresentations, and malevolence targeting the nation's first black president and the African American community found an especially receptive audience in the South - including in South Carolina. There Dylann Roof, not yet 15, was "coming of age" as Barack Obama was elected the country's 44th president. Whether Roof's mis-education began in earnest at this time, or before, or a while later, it is certain that at some point he began to inhale and absorb the racial hatred, slanders, and stereotypes that were thick in the air at the time. While no one could have predicted back then what the exact path or endgame of Roof's socialization process would be, he was surely egged on by the megaphones of the "respectable" right wing in high places.

Thus, Dylann Roof wasn't the singular author of his own life; none of us is. He had a hand in his own making, but not the main hand. He was not a "lone wolf" as some would like to claim.

Nor was he simply a product of the Internet rants of white supremacist organizations, or of the original sin of slavery. Nor can we chalk up his evolution to institutionalized racism alone and be done with it.

A coterie of "mainstream" right-wing extremists

All these were factors, certainly. But he was also a product - and I would argue considerably so - of the particular set of racial dynamics that evolved in the wake of the 2008 elections in which, as mentioned above, a coterie of "mainstream" right-wing extremists attacked without pause the country's first African American president and, in doing so, created an environment that facilitated the transformation of a white youngster in South Carolina into a remorseless killer of black people before he was barely a young man.

Fear and hatred among a white minority

That a spike in racist hatred and violence coincided with the election of the first African American president in our nation's history may seem contradictory. But only at first glance. On deeper inspection, the election of Barack Obama was rich in symbolic meaning for white people, but - and this is what we have to appreciate - in contradictory ways.

For many white people it was an exhilarating and transformative moment, much like it was for African American people and other people of color. When the president and his beautiful family walked onto the stage in Chicago's Grant Park on Election Night, tears of joy poured from the eyes of millions of Americans of all races and nationalities. It felt like an insurmountable barrier had come down and a new era worthy of our nation's best ideals and promises was commencing.

But for other white Americans Obama's election was traumatizing. Their world was turned upside down. Their way of life - the natural order of things, in which their status and sense of well being rested on the permanent assignment of people of African American descent to an inferior and subordinate status - was crumbling fast before their eyes. It felt like "end times" were near. If a magnetic, young, democratic-minded African American is the occupant of the highest position in our land, what's next?

The election of Barack Obama was for a significant minority of white people destabilizing at best, a nightmare at worst. It spiked their racial anxieties and resentments. It turned some of them into an irrational and frightening mob at times. "Take back our country" and "Impeach the president" became their rallying slogans.

And this near-existential panic intermingled and interacted with other strands of capitalist class ideology that exacerbated divisions, promoted hatred, and caused the dumbing down of the American people - "immigrants steal jobs and feast on government benefits," "government is too big and out of control," "taxes kill jobs and incentives to work and invest," "unions are wrecking the economy and infringing on the rights of workers," "private is better than public and markets should arbitrate everything," "liberal elites and the left are soft on terrorism, hostile toward religion, and contemptuous of America," "gay culture is corrosive of marriage and family values," and so on.

History lessons

That the right wing would employ this destructive and deadly strategy should probably have been anticipated if history is any guide.

A quick glance at some earlier episodes in our history - the Civil War, post-war Reconstruction in the former slave states, and the civil rights revolution of the 1960s - tells us that defeated white ruling elites were at first shocked and knocked off balance by the loss of their power, deferential treatment, wealth, and privilege, but not for long. They quickly regrouped, blocked radical reform and democratic development, and moved full throttle to restore (not always successfully) their former dominance.

And each time, force and displays of force, mob violence, public lynchings, and political assassinations were the favored weapons of the restorationists. Their purpose wasn't only to intimidate, inflict pain, and in many instances kill innocent victims. It was also a lesson to white as well as African American Southerners, warning them not to do anything that might either challenge or interfere with the efforts to reestablish the old social arrangements of racial and class subordination and exploitation there.

Ruling classes prefer to govern with the consent of subordinated classes and peoples, but when necessary their monopoly on the instruments of violence allows them to employ state-sanctioned violence or turn a blind eye to extra-judicial violence to either maintain or reimpose their rule.

While the present doesn't repeat the past, it also doesn't take a historian to find echoes of the past in the struggles of the present.

Charleston massacre part of a larger canvas

Thus, the massacre in Charleston, as horrendous as it was, is a piece of a larger canvas of extra-judicial and state-sanctioned violence against African Americans and other people of color in recent years as well as earlier periods of U.S. history.

And much like the past, its purpose was to police and discipline the living as much as steal the lives of its innocent victims, to restore by force old racialized political and social arrangements.

What makes Charleston unique, however, is its scale, its setting, its indisputably racist nature, and the immediate rejection and denunciation of it by a broad cross-section of white people including politicians.

The killer fantasized that his action would trigger a race war. But he was wrong. It not only became a wake up call to the entire country to resist racism, but it also threw the right wing - the main purveyors of the climate of racist hatred and violence - on the defensive.

We can draw cautious optimism from the broad insistence, including from public figures across the political spectrum, that the Confederate flag, and other symbols of the Confederacy displayed in public places, come down - coupled with the Supreme Court decisions upholding Obamacare and legalizing marriage equality, the rise of a number of promising social movements, and, not least, the enthusiastic reactions to the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders.

White people have stake in defeating racism

But whether the possibilities of the present materialize into a new burst of freedom in the future rests in no small measure on turning an anti-racist moment into a sustained and many-sided campaign against racist ideology and practices. The moment, in other words, has to be seized and stretched out by the words and actions of every democratic-minded person and especially the broad coalition that elected and re-elected President Obama. Significant numbers of white people have to step to the plate. Not as a favor to their brothers and sisters of color, but in their own interests and for their own future well being - moral and material.

Racism strikes people of color the hardest. About that there is no question. As a pervasive ideology and material practice, it denies them equality, security, freedom, and even life. But racism also heightens exploitation of working people irrespective of race and nationality, sustains other forms of inequality and oppression, destroys substantive and participatory democracy, impoverishes white people morally and culturally, and hangs like an albatross on the nation's progressive development.

Racism confers some relative advantages for white workers that are real. But those aren't so substantive or so durable, especially in this era of capitalist development, for them to sit out the struggle against racism or, even worse, to think that they have a stake in the maintenance of racism. Much like for workers of color, a society resting on the firm ground of substantive equality and solidarity will give new meaning to and enhance the quality of their lives as well. The only losers will be the main organizers and beneficiaries of racist exploitation, oppression, and ideology - the white ruling elites and their bidders.

King's legacy

At a moment like this when horror and hope mingle closely together, it is useful to reflect on the the life and legacy of Martin Luther King. He believed racism was neither natural nor eternal. He considered it to be a debilitating and deadly social, political, economic, and ideological construction that had to be uprooted. And that, he knew, took more than people's good will and piecemeal changes. It required deep-going alterations in the structure, dynamics, and values of society.

" ... we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act," King said in a speech at Riverside Church in New York in 1967. "One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice, which produces beggars, needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth."

At the center of King's political strategy and moral vision to make such changes was nonviolence and mass nonviolent action. In his view, there was nothing cleansing or salutary about the use of violence. Nonviolence as a philosophy and practice may not change the hearts of the perpetrators of violence, but its moral witness, its generosity of spirit, and its affirmation of the preciousness of life, he believed, attracted new supporters to the cause, preserved and asserted our humanity, and prefigured a fully human society that is begging to be born.

By contrast, the use of violence by opponents of oppression, he believed, narrowed down popular support, shifted advantage to the prosecutors and upholders of racism, ruptured the community long into the future, and dehumanized its practitioners no matter how just and righteous their cause.

King and his coworkers never locked people into tightly constructed categories. Instead, they gave space to people to shed old views and embrace new life-affirming ones. All of us, King understood, possess a complicated and contradictory mental makeup. Thus, when people found their better angels, he welcomed it - not grimly, not cynically, not with qualification, not with faint praise, not with "about time," but rather as the gospel instructs, with open arms and grace, with an understanding that the changing of one heart is a sign, if not a guarantee, that other hearts are close behind, and behind that sometimes lies a tipping point where people en masse will be swept into embracing new values and living anew.

Nor did King have any issue with associating his sacred cause with allies that were unreliable, temporary, and not in the struggle all the way. He resisted the pressures to narrow down the movement to only those who were fully on board and disposed to the most militant forms of action. Instead, he and his coworkers created a range of entry points to allow people with different levels of commitment and understanding a way to participate in the struggle against racism and for substantive democracy.

He also mastered the difficult dialectic of pressing his vision, demands, and tactics while at the same time maintaining unity and cooperation among the diverse actors in the civil rights coalition. Majorities, not active minorities, he knew from experience, were the main guarantee to dismantling the deeply entrenched edifice of racism and inequality on Jericho road.

Moreover, King didn't stand aloof from politics, but constantly interacted with the White House and Congress at each stage of the civil rights struggle. The notion of disengaging from electoral and legislative work in the name of some abstract political principle was anathema to him and his associates.

At the same time, King never entertained the idea that his oratory or political acumen or ties to people in "high places" alone was the key that unlocked the door to an an emancipatory future. He strongly believed that any hope of progress in the end depends on ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

While King appreciated that any serious and sustained challenge to racism takes a good measure of righteous indignation against racism, he also believed that this can't substitute for broadly, soberly and flexibly constructed strategies and tactics. Nor can it take the place of a network of broad-based organizations with mature and experienced leaders able to move, unite, and energize broad multi-racial majorities of the American people on "freedom's highway."

Were King alive today, I suspect, his anger and genius would be directed not so much at Dylann Roof, but at Roof's enablers in high places as well as the institutional structures and the priorities that sustain racism in its multiple forms.

He would insist that the websites and organizations of hate and violence come down, that gun control laws be enacted, that the criminal justice and prison system be thoroughly transformed, that restorative justice become the norm for dispensing justice, that jobs with living wages become a right, that the structures of all forms of inequality come down, and that a culture of guns, violence, and militarism be displaced by a culture of equality, human solidarity, and peace here and worldwide.

His voice would echo in the idiom of faith and scriptures - an idiom that resonates deeply in the South and other regions of the country. He would appeal to his fellow white clergy to do the same. He would give a revitalizing labor movement a front row seat in the freedom struggle. He would assist in the elaboration of tactics that maximize unity and draw in the hesitant and cautious. He would lift up the struggle for women's, immigrants', and gay rights. He would combine street action and political action. And at the core of his political practice would be nonviolence, nonviolent mass action, and a conviction that ordinary people, when challenged to live up to what is best in their humanity, will do extraordinary things.

Scaling up and out

King and his travelers on freedom's highway scaled a movement up and out politically and morally to the point where it became, I would argue, the most notable and successful movement of a mass, progressive, and radically democratic character of the 20th century. They did it with equal parts of creativity, compassion, courage, faith, and enduring commitment. To their regret, they didn't reach the "Promised Land," nor create a "beloved community." Nevertheless, what they did was history making, and the legacy they leave us we would be foolish to ignore as progressive humanity in decidedly new conditions attempts to reach new vistas of freedom.

Photo: "It Seemed Like Reaching for the Moon" - Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, Richmond, Va., commemorating protests that helped bring about school desegregation in the state.

The memorial, designed by American sculptor Stanley Bleifeld (1924-2011) and dedicated in 2008, is located on the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol. It features 18 statues of leaders in the Virginia civil rights movement.

Two quotes are engraved on the memorial:

1. "It seemed like reaching for the moon." - Barbara Rose Johns (1935-1991), a civil rights leader who in 1951, at the age of 16, organized a student strike for equal education at Moton High School in Farmville, Prince Edward County, Va.

2. "The legal system can force open doors and sometimes even knock down walls. But it cannot build bridges. That job belongs to you and me." - Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993).

The memorial is not far from a statue of Harry F. Byrd, Sr., U.S. senator from Virginia from 1933-1965, who was the architect of the "massive resistance" movement against Virginia school integration in the 1950s and 1960s.

Ron Cogswell/Creative Commons

Why I support Bernie Sanders

Tue, 07 Jul 2015 13:14:00 +0000

I figured I better get this written before the election is over! There has been debate and discussion about the Bernie Sanders candidacy - I'm backing him, here are my reasons why, and the probable limits of his campaign.

Back in the 1960's when Michael Harrington was pushing the argument that we should all go into the Democratic Party, I thought he should have entered the New Hampshire primary, as a socialist, running for the Democratic nomination. I didn't urge this in a mocking way -- I thought it would be very healthy for a democratic socialist to press the flesh, meet ordinary folks, let them see what a socialist looked like, and what socialism stood for. He wouldn't have won the nomination, but he would have introduced a discussion of socialism into the public dialogue. He was a charming guy, a good speaker, and might actually have helped shift the Democrats away from the their support of the Vietnam War (alas, as followers of socialist history know, Mike's approach to the Democratic Party was to support the war, until in 1972 he shifted).

Now we have another socialist doing what I thought then, and still think, is a good idea. Bernie Sanders, whom I met in 1980, and who kindly came down to New York City to speak to a Socialist Party convention (I have lost track of the year), and who put together real coalitions of real people and got elected as Mayor of Burlington, then as the Congressman from Vermont (they only have one member of the House) and then as Senator, is off and running, to huge and enthusiastic crowds.

I have heard some on the Left criticize Bernie's determination not to take part in personal attacks on Hillary. I think that is a refreshing stand on his part -- I salute him for it.

Others on the Left feel that Bernie is leading voters into the trap of supporting Hillary when he doesn't, himself, get the nomination. They feel he should run as an independent if he loses the race for the nomination. Let's have a little sense of history here -- independent candidates for President might help throw the election to one or the other major party candidate but they have absolutely no chance of winning election. Go back to the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948, to the later efforts by Barry Commoner, John Anderson, Ralph Nader. (I leave aside the campaigns of the truly minor party candidates, of which I was one, and of which Norman Thomas was the most distinguished example, because such campaigns were not aimed at winning the office but at providing a platform for dissenting views). These were good men but the enthusiasm of their supporters did not reflect the reality of American politics.

In 1948 I was a student at UCLA, the Cold War had just begun, Henry Wallace has been a Vice President under Roosevelt, and his supporters (at least those on campus) were convinced he might win -- in the end he didn't carry a single state (though I think he helped push Truman to the left on domestic issues).

Bernie is not running as a spoiler, but as a serious candidate, reflecting that part of the Left which is, in my view, most important: it is not locked into any of the small "officially Left groups" but it is there, a sometimes almost invisible left in the labor movement, among the elderly, the youth, the people who know our politics is rotten and really want a change.

Bernie has been properly criticized for not being perfect on all issues. I agree with that, he is not perfect. He has a record of supporting some of the worst aspects of the Military/Industrial complex, and, while not nearly as uncritical a supporter of Israel as some think, he has been silent when he should have spoken out. I urge my friends in the Jewish peace movement to reach out to Bernie and try a serious dialogue (not shouting) about why the US links to Israel should be ended (or at least weakened).

The peace movement should also dialogue with Bernie. He should not get a free pass from any of us. And it is urgent that the "Black Lives Matter" movement meet with Bernie. But let's be real -- the candidate who can prove right on every one of the issues which concerns us is not going to have a very wide base of support.

Bernie is dealing with what I think are the real issues: the control the 1 percent has over the country, the obscene power of money in our elections, the massive disparity between the handful of the ultra-rich and the millions who live in genuine poverty.

I'm delighted Bernie is doing so well -- much better than I had thought he would.

There are a couple of practical questions. If he doesn't get the nomination, what will he have accomplished? He will have done something very important, and God help the left sectarians who don't understand this: he will have made it possible to discuss socialism. He will have made it respectable to use the term. He will have shown there is a mass of people willing to hear a genuinely radical attack on the current corporate structure.

And what happens if Bernie doesn't get the nomination and Hillary does? I do not personally dislike Hillary -- I've never met her. But she has no principles other than power. I think it will be profoundly outrageous if, in November, the choice is between a Bush and a Clinton. Those of us in the "lucky states," where the electoral votes are already sure to go one way or the other, can vote our conscience (as I voted Green in New York when Obama ran, and as I will vote Green in 2016). Whoever the Democratic candidate is, they will be as sure to carry New York as the Republican candidate will carry Texas.

But, in swing states, conscience is not so easy to satisfy -- because the next President will have Supreme Court nominations to make, and in this country, those nominations are deeply important.

So yes, in this imperfect world I happily support the man who is not perfect on every issue, but very good on some key ones - and that is Bernie Sanders, a decent, smart, and very serious fellow. So serious that he has even taken to using something on his hair to keep it from flying off in all directions.

(There is a final note I must make. Twice before I have supported Democrats for high office. In 1964 I supported LBJ because I feared Goldwater would take us into war, and because the far right - including the John Birch Society and the KKK - was backing Goldwater, and Civil Rights was the key domestic issue. Boy, was I wrong! My political record has been wrong more than once - I helped bring Max Shachtman into the Socialist Party in 1958 -- a monumental error. In 1972 I supported -- and still have no regrets -- Senator George McGovern because I felt he was serious about the Vietnam War, and because I thought he represented a healthy shift to the Left in the Democratic Party, a shift which Bill Clinton later sharply reversed. So my record is imperfect, like real life and serious politics!).

David McReynolds was on the staff of War Resisters League for many years, was twice the Socialist Party candidate for President. He is retired and lives with his two cats on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He can be reached at davidmcreynolds7@gmail.com

Photo: Bernie Sanders Facebook. "10,000 came out to support our progressive agenda in Madison, Wisconsin." July 1.

As Bernie Sanders draws 10,000, socialism draws 47 percent

Thu, 02 Jul 2015 14:20:00 +0000

Sometimes, angle is everything. So I was reminded this morning when doing a search on Google News, after remembering a headline I had seen that nearly half of folks surveyed in a recent poll would vote for a socialist candidate. "Wow," I thought, "that's great!"

Imagine my surprise when I saw Gallup's headline: "In US, Socialist Presidential Candidates Least Appealing. Least appealing? With 47 percent open to considering a socialist candidate as an option? Gallup had tallied a number of categories including different religions or lack thereof. A candidate professing socialist beliefs was the least attractive according to the poll.

But I said to myself, "Okay, Gallup is known for its conservative bent." That's their class angle. I checked some others and as expected conservative rags echoed Gallup's sentiments.

To me, 47 percent wasn't bad - that's my class angle. But perhaps I was being too judgmental. I decided to check further.

Politico followed Gallup's spin: "Poll: Most Americans unwilling to vote for a socialist." I thought they were more centrist in their politics - so much for that.

The Huffington Post was one of the few who at least stated things more factually: "Nearly half of Americans would vote for a socialist for president."

Gallup's survey is interesting. Democrats were most inclined to vote for a socialist candidate with 59 percent signaling approval. Young folks between the ages of 18 and 30 were far more favorable: 69 percent said they'd cast a ballot for a red.

Earlier Rasmussen polls in 2009 and 2011 showed a shift away from Cold War attitudes toward socialism and a greater openness to consider its benefits. Clearly, that trend is deepening.

Still one can't ignore that slightly over half of Americans polled said they would not consider voting for a socialist presidential candidate.

However, the conversation is just beginning. In past years, billions have been spent portraying socialism in a negative light. And then of course there was the collapse of several countries attempting to build what they considered to be socialist societies and the accompanying dismay and disillusion amongst broad sections of the left.

But a lot has happened since then, both domestically and internationally, and with it new realities and understandings of the world. As recent events attest, thought patterns have changed significantly. On the one side people have to a certain degree overcome knee jerk reactions to red scare tactics. On the other, there's more willingness to see socialism in a positive light.

For example, here at home, President Obama and New York Mayor de Blasio were pilloried by right-wing opponents as socialists without much effect. In fact the opposite of what was intended may have occurred.

That being said, it's one thing to be red baited and offer plausible deniability and another to be, as Sanders boasts, "a self-described democratic socialist."

With crowds of 10,000 coming to hear him in Colorado and Wisconsin in recent days, it appears the broad U.S. public is more than ready to give him and his views a fair hearing. And when they hear what he has to say about what a socialist would do to address the country's problems, like unemployment, student debt, racism and criminalization, housing and health care - watch out!

Not since the days of Eugene Debs' bid for the presidency from his prison cell has a socialist candidate garnered so much attention and support. It's surely being talked about over coffee and beer in working-class homes all over America. As the capitalist press headlines suggest it's also being discussed in corporate boardrooms. They're going to give it their class angle: the glass is half empty.

But to workers, progressives, democrats and to the broad left, the glass is clearly half full.

Photo: Sanders shakes hands with supporters after speaking at a political rally in Madison, Wisconsin. Michael P. King/AP & Wisconsin State Journal

This article has been edited and updated.

On 4th of July, remember CPUSA's commitment to patriotism

Thu, 02 Jul 2015 14:01:00 +0000

It was February 1942. Pearl Harbor had been bombed just two months earlier. And President Franklin D. Roosevelt had recently signed Executive Order 9066, culminating in the forcible relocation and internment of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps.

Among the relocated Japanese-Americans was a Communist Party, USA member and longshoreman named Karl Yoneda. Yoneda, who had been an organizer in the Party-led Trade Union Educational League, the Japanese Workers' Association, the International Longshoreman's and Warehouse Workers' Union (ILWU), the Alaskan Cannery Workers' Union, and editor of Rodo Shinbun (a Japanese language communist paper), had spent most of his adult life fighting for workers' rights and expanding democracy.

That he, along with other U.S. citizens, were considered potential threats to national security due to their skin color, was nothing more than "stupid, cruel, and un-American...," as the Daily Worker reporter, Mike Gold, put it.

Unfortunately, the Communist Party, saying that it did not want to disrupt the coalition of anti-fascist forces that had coalesced around the Roosevelt Administration during the War, took a terrible position in support of the internment of Japanese Americans. In doing so it abandoned and even expelled Communist Party members like Yoneda and his wife Elaine. It was not until many years later that a resolution was passed at a CPUSA National Convention whereby the Party belatedly admitted its error and apologized for its shameful behavior to the Japanese American community. Yoneda himself was eventually reinstated after the War.

Yoneda, while at the Manzanar relocation camp, however, struggled to figure out how he and other Japanese Americans could contribute to the anti-fascist effort is a testament to his concept of radical patriotism - and something that should be celebrated this July 4^th.

In a letter to the CIO News, the national publication of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Yoneda talked about how he and other internees were "conducting drives to buy war bonds and to save tin for the war effort," in spite of the disgraceful internment.

Ultimately - along with an estimated 15,000 other communists - Yoneda would join the armed forces in World War II, and serve with distinction in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Corp. Yoneda recorded his heroic exploits in his 1983 autobiography, "Ganbatte, Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker," published by the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Communists were not new to radical patriotism or anti-fascism, as it was the Party who bore the brunt of the causalities defending the Spanish Republic from Franco's fascists in the late 1930's - years before U.S. involvement in World War II. In all, over 3,000 U.S. citizens - mostly communists - would join the International Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fight in Spain. Many would never return, thereby making the ultimate sacrifice as an illustration of their commitment to radical patriotism.

In fact, as early as July 1935, communists - like William 'Bill' Bailey - would risk life and limb to bring attention to the fascist threat to democracy. For, it was on a warm July evening in New York Harbor when Bailey, along with a handful of other anti-fascist seamen, secreted aboard the German passenger ship, the Bremen, as around 10,000 anti-fascist activists protested. Bailey, after tussling with some crew members, would climb the Bremen's flag pole, tear down its Swastika flag and toss it into the muddy Hudson River below. Onlookers "cheered wildly..."

Ten years later, as World War II ended, the African American Party leader, Claude Lightfoot, would sail home aboard the Bremen, now re-commissioned as a transport ship for returning soldiers.

That Lightfoot, a leader in the Unemployed Councils, business agent of the Chicago area Consolidated Trade Council of Negro Skilled Workers, and later Illinois District Organizer for the Communist Party, would be singled-out and discriminated against as an African American and as a communist while in the Army, undoubtedly, made his commitment to radical patriotism a heavy load to bear. For, as the war began, War Department directives required that communists be taken out of combat units, separated from other soldiers, and be prepared for "protective custody - in other words, concentration camps," due to their supposed loyalty to a foreign power - the Soviet Union.

That Lightfoot, like many other communists, was spied upon while in the service, "my first experience with the government intelligence service," only foreshadowed the McCarthy era repression that would engulf the nation shortly after the War's end - and call into question our nation's commitment to the Bill of Rights.

By July 1948, twelve national leaders of the CPUSA - including Gus Hall, the Party's long-time general secretary - would be rounded-up and thrown into jail "for thinking," as Hall put it. Their arrests proved to be the opening salvo against democracy, as the Bill of Rights was shredded.

Arnold Johnson, Hall's long-time friend and comrade, would later write that the Party's fight to protect the Bill of Rights "affects the entire course of American history," especially African American civil rights, as it is "no accident that the Negro people are most alert as a people to the need of fighting for the rights of Communists...[and]...see the meaning of this struggle in terms of bitter experience of brutality and oppression." Further, Johnson could write with pride, "They [African Americans] see the common enemy. Ever greater numbers among them also see in the Communist Party the champion of their struggle."

That Johnson, along with dozens of other Party leaders from across the country, were arrested in spring 1951 is illustrative of the post-war anti-communist hysteria, and the growing right-wing fear of an emerging Black militancy comfortable with Red allies - a militancy that would soon desegregate America's public schools, lead bus boycotts and dramatically demonstrate the power of peaceful sit-ins, while registering thousands to vote, especially in the Jim Crow South.

That this Red-Black alliance was, undoubtedly, another illustration of the Party's radical patriotism is today largely unquestioned, at least by honest students of U.S. history. That the McCarthy witch hunts were partly an attempt to destroy this alliance - even if it meant destroying the Bill of Rights - is a subject deserving considerably more attention.

In early 1962, Hall - the former political prisoner - would embark on a West Coast campus speaking tour. At the University of Oregon, Hall would address 12,000 students, as a dozen police on horseback nervously observed in the backfield.

After his presentation, Hall took questions well into the evening. "This was a serious discussion," he would later write. "The questions on a whole were on a rather high political plane." As veteran communist journalist, Joseph North, wrote, students "...listened intently, respectfully, and gave him a warm round of applause...So it was wherever he went."

Days later Hall would speak at Oregon College in Monmouth "to 2,500 persons" and then to "only 800" at Reed College, as Portland officials "refused" to let Hall speak at the city auditorium - which could have accommodated the additional thousand students who "stood around trying to get in." According to Philip Bart, one-time chair of the Party's history commission, Hall spoke in front of an accumulative 19,000 students on five campuses between February 10 and 15, 1962.

Hall's successful speaking tour wasn't an aberration. In the 1960's communists were speaking on college and university campuses in front of large audiences all across the country, thereby challenging HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee and its assault on the Bill of Rights, and spurring what would soon become the campus free speech movement, led by young communists like Alva Buxenbaum, Bettina Aptheker and Jarvis Tyner - just to name a few. Thousands of students would soon join the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, the Young Workers' Liberation League and the Communist Party.

That the Communist Party, USA was a leader in defense of democracy, the Bill of Rights and the campus free speech movement serves to exemplify its long-standing commitment to radical patriotism - this July 4^th, and every July 4^th.

Above is a revised version of the original article. The original did not take into account, or mention, that the Communist Party itself took a terrible position in support of the internment of Japanese Americans. The Party eventually repudiated its position in support of that internment, and apologized to the Japanese American community for failing to take a stand in their defense.

Photo: Karl Yoneda, a Japanese-American Communist, was, like the unidentified children in this historical photo, amongst many who were unjustly confined to concentration camps in the U.S. during WWII. He and many of them nevertheless saved scrap from cans to contribute to the American war effort against facism. | Toyo Miyatake/AP & National Park Service

By any other name, discrimination is discrimination

Thu, 02 Jul 2015 12:10:00 +0000

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of Indiana goes into effect Wednesday, July 1 after months of protest from Hoosiers across the state. The original bill was amended in April because it supported discrimination against members of the LGBT community.

Indiana legislators have maintained their bill is based on the original Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The intent of that bill was to "ensure interests in religious freedom are protected." The 1993 bill was proposed to complement the religious freedom already guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.

That bill was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1997, which ruled the bill is not a proper exercise of Congress's enforcement power. The bill is, however, still enforced with regard to the federal government. Since 1993, 20 other states have passed similar bills regarding religious freedom.

What made the Indiana bill so contentious was that it was used by businesses to justify discrimination. The alleged intent of the bill was to preserve religious freedom on an individual basis. This is a very important distinction as the bill has been used by various businesses to deny services to members of the LGBT community.

This discrimination has been most visible and thus the LGBT community has been front and center in demanding amendment of the RFRA or abolishing it altogether.

Companies are citing the law to obfuscate reproductive choices to their employees. Thus if the company's president is Catholic, he can deny an employee birth control in company-sponsored insurance plans. A pharmacist using the same law can refuse a woman the morning-after pill or a young man can be denied a purchase of condoms based on the pharmacist's religious principles.

This law, as it has been interpreted, can be used to deny same-sex couples the privilege of adoption. Conflicts over gay rights and reproductive rights have been polarizing nationwide.

There are other implications, however, that this law may trigger that have not been part of the discussion. For some religious zealots, the RFRA can be used in much the same way as Jim Crow laws were 50 years ago.

Some fundamentalist sects of the Mormon Church still believe Blacks, Jews, Native Americans and other minorities are not pure or less than human. By definition of this law, they can refuse service to any members of those groups as was done to people at the segregated lunch counters of the South.

What is at issue is very similar to the egregious Citizens United ruling that corporations are people. People direct and guide corporations. People may espouse religious beliefs but companies by their very nature do not.

Only companies that are part of religious organizations can justifiably cite the RFRA for its decisions. Although those in support of the act state that individuals bring their religious views with them to the workplace, it is also true that said individuals often set aside their religious beliefs when it comes to corporate behavior or corporate profit.

Isn't it about time for us to stop claiming God when it suits our purpose or offends our sensibilities? Isn't it time for morality and common sense to take precedence?

No one is advocating stopping religious freedom. No one is saying businesses don't have the right to deny goods or services to certain clientele. Claiming that God, however, doesn't want me to serve you because I don't condone your lifestyle or believe in birth control or like your skin color is one big step too far.

The RFRA has nothing to do with God but has everything to do with those who practice a selective form of religion. Hypocrisy by any other name, be it RFRA or Citizens United, is still hypocrisy. We all lose when we worship at that altar.

Photo: blogspot

Professor Walter T. Howard, 63: activist, teacher, organizer

Thu, 02 Jul 2015 11:37:00 +0000

Professor Walter T. Howard, 63, a scholar, activist, teacher and organizer, passed away on May 7 in Danville, Pa. He had been a patient at the Geisinger Medical Center since April 27.

Dr. Howard, the son of a long line of coal miners, was born November 23, 1951 in Hazard, Kentucky. He earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of West Florida and his Ph.D. from Florida State University in 1987. He had taught history at Bloomsburg University for the past 24 years and was active on many boards and committees at the University and in the wider academic community.

He organized the Bloomsburg chapter of the NAACP and was the group's faculty advisor. He served on the advisory board of the Bloomsburg Task Force on Racial Equality and of the Black History Month Committee.

His academic awards included the Award for Outstanding Scholarship from the Bloomsburg University Institute for Culture and Society and the Gustavus Myers Award for Human Rights Scholarship for his book, Lynchings: Extralegal Violence in Florida during the 1930s.

Dr. Howard wrote and edited numerous other works, including We Shall Be Free: Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices and Forgotten Radicals: Communists in the Pennsylvania Anthracite, 1919-1950.

He is survived by his wife of 23 years, the former Virginia M. Krepps, three sons, one daughter, three step sons and five grandchildren.

Dr. Howard lectured often on the role of Communists in the Pennsylvania anthracite fields. He also served on the editorial board of the online publication Political Affairs (politicalaffairs.net, the theoretical journal of the Communist Party USA) and wrote articles and book reviews for PA.

He may be remembered by sending a contribution to: NAACP Husky Fund at Bloomsburg University, c/o Community Activities Office, 400 E. Second Street, Bloomsburg, PA 17815.

This review includes information from the Dean W. Kriner Funeral Home and Cremation Service, Bloomsburg, PA.

Photo: Dr. Walter Howard speaking at the Philadelphia Social Science Forum February 2014. | Ben Sears/PA