People Before Profit blog

Elections, the state, reform & revolution

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 13:11:00 +0000

The following is from the Communist Party USA convention discussion website. John Bachtell is the newly elected national chair of the CPUSA. Under the slogan, "People and nature before profit," the CPUSA held its convention in Chicago, June 13-15. It was live streamed and recently broadcast on C-Span. Peoplesworld.org will continue to provide CPUSA coverage and repost discussion articles. Join the continuing conversation on theory, politics and culture at peoplesworld.org, Twitter #cpusa95 or Facebook.

Another major electoral battle is shaping up in November that will determine the political terrain of struggle for the next period. Some on the left are less than enthusiastic about throwing themselves into this battle, not seeing any difference between Democrats and Republicans and the viability of change through elections dominated by the two-party system.

This approach doesn't see the need for multi-class united front electoral alliances and the strategic objective of a decisive defeat of right wing extremism. But perhaps lying much deeper is the idea that radical change and the revolutionary transition to socialism will not occur via the electoral path.

Envisioned instead is change mainly through demonstrations and strikes. Socialism will be ushered in via a general strike during a crisis of capitalism. The capitalist state will be smashed in one blow and a socialist state established in its place. Some see change only through force and violence based on their understanding of the Russian or Cuban revolutions, or even our Civil War.

The CPUSA has long argued against this mischaracterization of history and its implications for our path to US socialism because it has nothing to do with contemporary realities and institutions, traditions and history of democratic struggles. In addition, arguments that place violence as the principle - and only - means to a socialist United States undermines mass democratic involvement. This approach will never win majority support among the American people. Such notions reinforce ruling class stereotypes of communists.

The CPUSA has long said the transition to US socialism will be much more prolonged and complex. The left's challenge is to involve the active participation of the overwhelming majority of Americans. Just like the socialist society we envision - peaceful, humane and democratic - so too must be the path as it will shape every aspect of the new society.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels foresaw the possibility of peaceful transition particularly under conditions of the democratic or bourgeois republic. Engels wrote in Critique of the Erfurt Program: "One can conceive that the old society may develop peacefully into the new one in countries where representatives of the people concentrate all power in their hands, where, if one has the support of the majority of the people, one can do as one sees fit in a constitutional way; in democratic republics such as France and the USA..."

Even Lenin initially thought possible a peaceful transition to workers and peasants power in Russia, which mainly happened as a result of the crisis brought on by WWI but before the armed intervention of western imperialist powers changed the course of history.

The state

Such a process inevitably raises the question: Can the state in the stage of monopoly capitalism, be an arena of class struggle? Can the working class make inroads, gain power and even transform the state for its own purpose?

The state is the form where a class asserts its common interests and includes legislature, judiciary and the armed forces. A revolutionary transition under conditions of advanced monopoly capitalism is exceedingly complex where the capitalist state is far more developed. Its institutions, the ideological, bureaucratic and coercive apparatus have undergone centuries of development. How a struggle is conducted against the most heavily armed and powerful ruling class in history is no small matter.

The contest for power involves winning the ideological and political battle in civil society and the institutions of state as well, chief among them the democratic legislative arena. With the decisive conquest of political power, the working class will use this power to "wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state..." wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto.

The state it seems is not smashed but "reshaped" (in the words of Engels) in accordance with the balance of class and social forces from an instrument of class oppression and repression, into one of liberation. In the process the state is transformed, and the foundations are laid for its eventual withering away.

In this view, power is attained through democratic means, through the working class electing its representatives to legislative bodies and through political action, including strikes and demonstrations. Democratic institutions are transformed in the process - existing ones become more democratic and new ones arise to extend and deepen participation.

Political power is wielded to transform the state apparatus at every level, even while the economy is dominated by monopoly capital. Curbing monopoly power restricts their ability to resist, obstruct and use violence against a revolutionary working class movement.

The working class can redirect social development by embarking on a path of converting the economy from one dependent on fossil fuels to one based on renewable resources, while retrofitting buildings and homes and rebuilding and modernizing the infrastructure; from one based on militarization to peaceful purposes.

It can radically expanding investment in the public sector, including education and public health care systems, public parks and recreation and the arts, establishing public banks, utilities and cooperatives; redistribute wealth through progressive taxation; and expand democratic rights and end discriminatory practices. It can also begin the process of demobilizing the repressive apparatus of the state, by instituting new policies that democratically control the police and begin demobilizing the standing army, implementing a peaceful foreign policy and destroying weapons of mass destruction.

The ability to carry out such reforms, their scale and scope, depends on the social and class balance of forces. The more favorable they are for the working class, the more radical the reform and change.

Expanding electoral participation

Marx foresaw the possibility of achieving socialism through universal suffrage. "A historical development can remain 'peaceful'" wrote Marx, "only for so long as its progress is not forcibly obstructed by those wielding social power at the time. If in England, for instance or the United States, the working class were to gain a majority in Parliament or Congress, they could, by lawful means, rid themselves of such laws and institutions as impeded their development, through they could only do so insofar as society had reached a sufficiently mature development."

Given the development of democratic institutions and traditions in the United States, involvement in the electoral arena and political action is essential and grows in importance. It entails building broad anti-ultra right, reform and anti-monopoly coalitions that win majorities and thus power in every democratic institution e.g., school boards, planning boards, city council, county boards, state legislature, federal office, in "red" and "blue" states.

The process underway in Central and South America where socialist oriented movements are in power and leading a transition to socialism (i.e., Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc) is particularly relevant to our reality. Revolutionary transformation is proving infinitely more complex and protracted than many appreciated. Victories are won by degrees, beginning with small reforms and leading to more radical ones, of gradually supplanting market capitalism with socialist oriented policies.

This type of transition is by and large peaceful, utilizing the democratic structures and mobilizing millions, notwithstanding the provocations and resistance of the domestic corporate class and U.S. imperialism.

There are important electoral victories that can be built upon in the U.S., including the historic Obama victories and in New York City where the new progressive reform mayor and city council are challenging income inequality, school privatization and the city's stop-and-frisk/racial profiling policies. Other progressive victories including the election of Ras Baraka as mayor of Newark, the election of socialist Kshama Sawant in Seattle and the sweep of labor candidates in Lorain, Ohio, raise the possibility for initiating broad reforms.

These advances, including the emergence of a labor led third party, are possible through greater activism in the electoral arena. This means the imperative of expanding voter rights, including restoring them for presently and previously incarcerated, building a grassroots independent voter education and mobilization apparatus - and left candidacies. Likewise expansion of the democratic process will ease restrictions on third parties and limit the power of money. The "Move to Amend" fight to undo the Citizen's United Supreme Court decision is essential.

All this underscores the key political task for the 30th national convention - an all out effort to build the broad labor led democratic movement and build the Party in all directions. But this can't be separate and apart from involving the Party and the mass movements in the 2014 elections to defeat right-wing extremism.

Photo: Early voting at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland, Oct. 2, 2012. AP/The Plain Dealer, Marvin Fong

Report: Economic concentration helps fuel the income gap

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 15:39:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - Researchers Lina Khan of the New America Foundation, and Sandeep Vaheesen of the American Antitrust Institute have just published a new study that exposes another reason for the rise of the one percent and ever-widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us: The U.S., in so many words, is going back to The Gilded Age, and not just in incomes and wealth.

For them, economic concentration, unchecked by government, and its effects, notably less competition, are another reason for the yawning gaps.

"The return of plutocracy to America was no accident," they wrote in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post. "The drastic decline in market competition has been a result of conscious political decisions."

Khan and Vaheesen point out that monopolies and oligopolies were a key characteristic of the first Gilded Age, from the 1870s through 1910 or so. Think of the "trusts" of that day: U.S. Steel, Standard Oil, the Guggenheim mining operations, the three or four big railroads that controlled all freight traffic, Northern Securities - an enormous holding company which Teddy Roosevelt busted - giant utility firms, J.P. Morgan's bank, and so on.

Those trusts monopolized commerce, setting freight rates, cutting workers' wages, eliminating farmers' profits, seizing their land. Trusts controlled the banking system and credit. Trusts colluded on prices and wages and used the power of government to enforce their demands. They bought and sold politicians: A Thomas Nast cartoon of the era shows the U.S. Senate of bloated top-hatted lawmakers labeled "gold trust" "oil trust" and "copper trust".

And it's the Gilded Age that gave us the original U.S. Supreme Court ruling that corporations had the same rights that people do. The current court says so, too.

The result: Those oligopolists amassed billions. But we the people fought back.

Public pressure forced Congress to regulate the railroads, which were the prime freight carriers of the day, their study says. Lawmakers passed the Sherman Antitrust Act and Clayton Antitrust Act, the Food and Drug Act, regulated meat packing and established the Federal Trade Commission. All this, plus enforcement by Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the researchers add, broke the economic concentration of The Gilded Age.

Well, their study adds, here we go again.

In key industries, they note, market consolidation leads to monopolies, oligopolies, barriers to competition, huge price increases to consumers and huge fortunes to plutocrats.

Now, four meatpackers control three-fourths of the market. The big four airlines - Delta (which devoured wall-to-wall union Northwest), United, Southwest and American-US Airways - account for 68.7 percent of all passenger miles. The top four broadband providers have 63.5 percent of all subscribers. The top four cable TV firms account for two-thirds of all of that medium's customers. We haven't even talked about trucking deregulation and its impact.

And the chart listing those sets of oligopolies didn't even mention an even more-pernicious one: The banks. The top four have more than half of all U.S. deposits. "Too big to fail" is even bigger now than when we the taxpayers had to bail them out six years ago.

But where is the government? The answer to that question, the researchers say, is that it's abdicated its responsibility. The FTC hasn't objected to megamergers. The Justice Department sets some conditions on some of them, but shies away from breaking them up. Congress stands aside, cowed by the campaign contributions and SuperPACs the oligopolies and their owners finance. And organized labor is not large enough to take them on on its own.

And what do the oligopolies do with the latitude government gives them and freedom it yields to them? They use it to control our lives, shovel our wealth into millionaires' pockets, lower wages, raise prices, trash workers, destroy unions - think Walmart and its market share - and concentrate more and more economic and political power in the hands of the 1 percent.

There is a double solution to this new Gilded Age, the two authors write: Government must reassert its power to control and crack the oligopolies, and the people must rise up against the oppression. Such a mass uprising, they assert, can start to right the balance between the rich and the rest of us.

"Americans in the Gilded Age freed themselves from the clutches of Standard Oil and the railroads because they knew that markets and economic outcomes were theirs to shape," the two wrote. "We can change, too, through popular will and political action."

Photo: Soon after the building of the First Continental Rail Road in the 19th century, all rail freight traffic in the U.S was swallowed by three big companies. Andrew J. Russell, National Park Service, courtesy of Wikipedia (CC)

Mother Courage of Clallam County remembered

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 11:52:00 +0000

SEQUIM, Wash. - One late autumn afternoon - I believe it was 1950 - Clallam County Sheriff, Mutt Breece, arrived in his big blue Pontiac. He knocked at the door and my father answered. Breece was bringing a summons. My dad read the summons silently and handed it to mother standing beside him. I could see an expression of anger and alarm spread across Mama's face as she read the document. Breece was a big, florid faced man but he didn't look comfortable in carrying out this particular assignment.

A new word entered my vocabulary that day: subpoena. Daddy was ordered to appear before a Grand Jury in Washington, D.C. to answer the charges of an FBI stool pigeon that he was one of the hundreds of communists who had infiltrated our government in the nation's capital. Indeed, these communists, according to the self-appointed guardians of national security had infiltrated every facet of American life from Hollywood to the local factories, not to speak of logging operations right in Clallam County.

Their "crime" was that they led the way in fighting for living wage jobs, unemployment compensation, racial equality, health care for all, 100 percent parity for farm produce. They were the best organizers of the workers and fought for union rights. And they were the most courageous fighters against fascism whether it was Franco fascism in Spain, Hitler and Mussolini, or home grown fascism right here in the U.S. That describes my father to a "T." He was an anti-fascist.

He was a brilliant scholar, exacting in his scientific approach to reality. But he was also a visionary. He was born dirt poor in a tent, on a fruit farm on the banks of the Columbia in White Bluffs, Washington. He grew up to believe that the people would unite, African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American, and white. They would build a new civilization free of exploitation - socialism.

My father was to endure many forced separations, summoned to appear seven times before witchhunt hearings in Washington D.C., San Francisco, Seattle, and Tacoma in the years that followed. In fact, he had been blacklisted and that was the reason we were then eking out an existence on a dairy farm in Sequim, Washington.

None of those later subpoenas hangs in my memory more ominously than that first summons to Washington D.C.

He would cross the country on the train, being absent for more than a week to appear before the tribunal. He would refuse to testify no matter what questions the inquisitors asked. He was represented in that hearing by an eminent labor, civil rights and civil liberties attorney, David Rein. My wife Joyce and I got to know David and Selma Rein - as well as David's partner, Joe Forer - 20 years later when I was assigned to Washington D.C. by the Daily World, now the People's World.

Father left behind my mother, then caring for two infants in diapers, my little sister, Honeybee, and little brother, Nat. There was my elder brother, Steve, 13, my little sister Susan, then seven, and me, then ten. Twenty-five cows had to be milked twice daily, the herd fed, the barn cleaned. How did my mother, so small of stature, of such genteel birth, so burdened with young children, manage such an impossible task by herself?

Today, 64 years later, I still do not know. Daddy told us that the witch-hunters knew exactly the impossible situation we were in. "They calculated that I would crack under the pressure and cooperate with them." They miscalculated.

Steve took on responsibilities far beyond his years. To add to his misery, Steve came down with flu, suffering terrible stomach cramps, fever, dizziness. Yet without complaining, he donned his boots, jacket, milking cap, and gloves, and went out to do the milking. I went with him.

Our grandfather, Bapa, in his eighties, came up from Bainbridge Island to help. He was an old man in failing health but still strong enough and lucid enough to help us stave off collapse.

An ice storm gripped the valley and the power went out. Our house, and more important, the barn and milk house, were without power. It meant no lights and no milking machines.

Steve and Bapa made an executive decision. We wouldn't try to milk the cows dry. Just strip milk them enough to relieve the pressure on their udders. "Maybe the power will be back on tomorrow morning so we can milk the cows properly," Bapa said.

No one argued. Bapa, Steve, and I hand-stripped the cows by kerosene lantern light that frigid night. Sure enough, the next morning, PUD managed to restore power and we milked the cows as they should be milked.

My father's summons to appear at a hearing in Washington D.C. was front-page news. Before he left, the Sequim Press asked him if he wanted space to answer the charges and granted him an entire page to tell his side of the story.

He wrote an eloquent defense. I remember only one student spoke to me about the issue. Jerry McNamara, whose father worked for the U.S. Postal Service, came up to me before our class began one morning. "I heard about your father's troubles," he said. "I'm very sorry."

We celebrated when Daddy returned. No one was more relieved than Mama. One evening after the barn chores were completed, after she had prepared dinner and we had eaten, Mama broke down. She had been holding herself together, grimly. Now she could give vent to her feelings and she did. She fell into bed weeping uncontrollably. We all gathered in the bedroom with her, trying to console her. I burst into tears. "Don't cry Mama. Please don't cry."

So what did Mama do as tears streamed down her cheeks? She started to laugh. Yes! She burst into laughter seeing in our situation something so absurd, so ludicrous, what could you do but laugh?

Then Daddy started to laugh. And Steve, Susan, little Honey Bee, and Nat in their diapers. And I too began to laugh even as I wiped away the tears. We all had a great laugh together.

Years later, Mama told me, "When your father was subpoened and went away, I didn't know if he would come back." Those were the days when the Rosenbergs were on death row. The nation was caught in the grip of fear and hate.

One evening, three years later, we sat around our dining room table writing postcards to President Eisenhower urging clemency for the Rosenbergs. I remember the evening when the news came over the radio that the Rosenbergs had been executed. Mama's dark, sorrowful, eyes filled with tears and she wept again.

The Rosenbergs could have lived if only they had bowed to the inquisitors demand, "Name names." They refused to surrender. They were framed. They died for all of us. I loved them then and I love them still.

Our situation was to improve dramatically in the years that followed. We made many friends in the Sequim-Dungeness valley. Not least, we joined the Communist Party of Clallam County. We would never feel alone as long as comrades like the Gabourys stood with us.

Yet in that terrible time, 1950, Mama was not immune to the fear. I saw her hands tremble when she rolled a cigarette. Even so, she stood her ground. She never left Daddy's side. She did not flinch. She was Mother Courage.

Photo: Courtesy of Tim Wheeler/PW

South Dakota’s genocide against Native Americans continues nonstop

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 11:39:00 +0000

It will soon be a year since I wrote the first of a series of articles about the horrific genocide being perpetrated by the state of South Dakota against Native Americans. Incredibly, the genocide - the abduction and kidnapping of Indian children by state officials - continues unabated. This is beyond maddening.

Lakota People's Law Project chief counsel Danny Sheehan recently told this journalist that South Dakota has not slowed down its illegal activities because to do so would be an admission of guilt.

Just to recount the situation of a year ago:

1. Over 700 American Indian children were being snatched from their homes by state officials every year. This occurred on a daily basis.
2. These hundreds were sent to white foster homes or group homes.
3. Most were adopted by white families.
4. Native children were 13.8 percent of the state's child population, yet they represented 56.3 percent of the foster care population.
5. 87 percent were placed in white foster homes, while Indian foster homes went empty.

Nothing has changed! All of the above cited statistics are still current. The genocide train roars full speed down the tracks.

Again, this is genocide as defined by the United Nations General Assembly Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This Convention (Article 2) defines genocide as follows:

"... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

South Dakota is still committing brutal genocide against the Lakota people in violation of subsection (e) Article 2 of the Convention on Genocide, and is still in gross violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978.

The Lakota People's Law Project has filed a lawsuit challenging South Dakota's actions. The federal government is attempting to settle a part of the lawsuit administratively by transferring federal funds for child care from South Dakota to the tribal governments of the state. Subsequently, there would an alternative lawsuit to locate the abducted children and have them returned to their families and to hold responsible state officials who put in place the hated abduction program.

There has been no action taken by the United Nations as a result of the meeting by UN Human Rights Officer Giorgia Passerelli at the Pine Ridge Reservation with tribal representatives and the families of the abducted children in August last year. Calls by this journalist to Passerelli have never been returned.

The reign of genocide marches on! The racist power of South Dakota must be broken!

Photo: Native Resistance Network.org

UAW and all unions need membership participation

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 16:30:00 +0000

DETROIT-The United Auto Workers, at their 36^th Constitutional Convention here on June 5, are ready to fight the greatest assault against working people of our times. Around 2,000 totally fired-up participants would rage out of Cobo Hall and tear their corporate enemies apart, brick by brick, barehanded, if they could.

But the actual task before them is different. It is to mobilize around 400,000 members, their families, and their communities. The "P" in the union's "PRO Member" fightback program stands for "participation."

It won't be easy. Harangues from union leaders do not translate directly through the lower layers of the rank and file. Many shop floor leaders do not want to see change. They were elected by the status quo, and some of them see any kind of change as threatening their positions.

The same could actually be said against the top UAW leadership. The Administrative Caucus has triumphed handily in every election since it was set up by Walter Reuther in the late 1940s. Almost every leader at this convention was elected by acclamation. The exception was new President Dennis Williams, the former Financial Secretary. Williams overcame his single challenger 3,215 votes to 49.

Nepotism, a natural outgrowth of unchanging leadership, which used to be forbidden in the UAW, is creeping in today. Another problem in the Autoworkers union is persistent anti-communism, which was also established by Walter Reuther and persists today in spite of the AFL-CIO, which ditched anti-communism 17 years ago.

A proposal to scrap the anti-communist article in the UAW constitution did not get enough support to be considered on the convention floor in 2014. The article unfortunately links communists with fascists, so the effort to delete it completely was made more difficult.

Although there is no sign of it in the 2014 convention, UAW rank and file members are subject to a certain cynicism. Instead of militant unionism, they are veterans of the UAW's tepid "Buy American" and "Team Concept" attempts to hang on. UAW members rarely take action without direct orders from above. Almost every move is orchestrated. Even at the convention, many of the speakers from the floor were selected by the ever-present staffers who stand nearby and guard each section of delegates like shepherds guarding their sheep. To prevail, progressive UAW leaders have a lot of inertia to overcome.

On the other hand, the convention points out great new positive signs. Discussion was overwhelmingly in favor of embracing immigrants and all other diversity issues. The resolutions "Justice for Immigrant Workers" and, especially, "Forming Lasting Labor and Community Alliances" indicate a broad approach. The latter calls for "establishing neighborhood labor-community coalitions that bring together local union members, faith-based organizations, civil rights groups, schools, businesses, young people and others to build enduring partnerships at the local level." American activists since the days of the Occupy Movement can testify that the UAW is indeed making an effort to bring members out to the streets.

The UAW has developed a habit of including militant pickets and marches whenever they hold national meetings. The 2014 conventioneers stormed out of Cobo Hall to march and rally around the Crowne Plaza hotel at the end of the convention. They were in solidarity with UNITE-HERE workers.

The most hopeful of all the resolutions passed at the 2014 convention is "Mobilizing UAW Members for Justice." It recalls the great struggles the past, when UAW members fought their way out of unemployment councils and wretched conditions, and days when they were able to reach out and help many other progressive struggles. It says: "As always, our union's strength in the continuing fight for justice comes from our members. The more of us who are engaged, the stronger we are. Each and every one of us has the ability to make a difference."

It couldn't be said better.

Photo: Jim Lane/PW

Checks in Native American settlement delayed again

Mon, 02 Jun 2014 15:57:00 +0000

More than 490,000 Indians are still waiting for settlement monies due them from the federal government. It's a disgrace.

The payments are part of a settlement of a class action lawsuit on behalf of tens of thousands of American Indians who charged that for more than 100 years they had been defrauded of royalties for land that the government had placed "in trust" for them. The lawsuit was filed in 1996 by Eloise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, who died in 2011.

After incredible legal wrangling Congress approved a settlement figure of $3.4 billion in November 2010. In December 2012 the first round of checks for $1,000 each were sent to the Native American holders of the trust accounts. The second, final round of payments are for about $800 each. The final settlement monies were to be paid before last Christmas, as the government originally said, but now will not arrive until sometime in 2014, maybe not until next December, according to the latest announcements. Many in the Native community question whether that is believable.

Many Native families were looking forward to a better Yuletide with children unwrapping presents on Christmas morning. For poor Indian families, with children expecting a jubilant holiday, having to at the last minute struggle for holiday presents because of another broken government promise only made the delay doubly cruel.

These are token payments to represent royalties - for oil, timber, grazing - that should have been paid by the Department of Interior since 1887. The $3.4 billion settlement was forced on the Indian plaintiffs. Keep in mind that thousands of eligible Native recipients opted out, refusing to accept what they saw as a disgraceful settlement. Relatives of mine and others I know opted out, considering the settlement a gross insult.

Does $3.4 billion sound like a lot of money? Not when the true amount of loss, with interest, was over $179 billion. According to informed sources each Native plaintiff should have received at least $100,000 if there had been a just settlement. The $1,000 per person of the initial payment would not even buy a decent used car. This is what the U.S. government thinks of Native Americans.

This disgraceful settlement was approved by Congress and signed by President Obama, who said he thought it was "fair."

The purpose of the lawsuit was to obtain a just settlement to improve to some extent the quality of life for poverty-stricken Native American families. The first payment of $1,000 obviously did not make a difference. The second payment of $800 is equally paltry.

The $3.4 billion settlement must also been seen in context with other issues. For example, in the Iraq war $12 billion was spent per month. In just one week, the U.S, government spent as much on the Iraq conflict as it did to settle an Indian lawsuit that it fought tooth and nail for 16 years. This is a grotesque, obscene injustice.

Some issues can never be adequately addressed. Over the 127 years since 1887, Native Americans have lived in a nightmare of hopelessness, deprivation and intergenerational trauma generated in part by abject poverty. Poverty stifles; abject poverty kills. Just think how the just payment of money due over this time span could have alleviated some of that misery. Consider how many countless lives - adults , children and the elderly - could have been altered and saved.

Currently, on many reservations the suicide rate among teenagers and young adults is the highest in the Western Hemisphere. This again is the result of generations of malevolent, intentional, genocidal poverty inflicted on Native Americans by an endless succession of U.S. administrations, both Democratic and Republican.

Make no mistake, the verdict of history shall judge this settlement harshly, as a blot on the Obama presidency and on the U.S. as a whole. It will be to the everlasting ignominy of this government that no fair settlement was reached, only more dishonor attached to a system already covered with the gore of generations of victimized Native Americans.

The thousands of American Indians who opted out are ready to file another lawsuit, mindful of the fact that a just resolution will not be seen in their lifetimes. Moreover, in early May, many tribes started petitions demanding to be "paid now" on the final monies due. Never has so much been owed to so many, who have received so little.

Photo: This photo hangs in the lobby of the Prairie Wind Hotel & Restaurant, operated by the Oglala Sioux Tribe, South Dakota. Melanie Bender/PW