People Before Profit blog

Connecticut women basketball players owe no apologies

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 11:47:00 +0000

Dan O'Shaughnessy, Boston Globe sports columnist, caused a stir across the sports world, when he tweeted two days ago, "UConn Women beat Miss St. 98-38 in NCAA tourney. Hate to punish them for being great, but they are killing women's game. Watch? No thanks."

The reaction was immediate and mainly very negative. Leading the pack was, not surprisingly, Connecticut basketball coach Geno Auriemma.

"Nobody's putting a gun to your head to watch," he said. "So don't watch. And don't write about it. Spend your time on things that you think are important."

And others joined the chorus of criticism against O'Shaughnessy. And they all have a point, in fact, many points. The greatest dynasty in college basketball was John Wooden's UCLA Bruins. His teams won ten NCAA national championships in a 12-year period, including a record seven in a row.

But no one took them to task for their dominance. Both Wooden and his players were rightly celebrated. It was a great run.

Similarly, Connecticut women basketball players owe no one any apologies for their dominance. They earned it the hard way - constant repetition, unselfishness, teamwork, skill development, and superb coaching. And they should be celebrated every bit as much as Wooden's UCLA teams were in their time. What these young women and their coaches have accomplished will likely not happen again for a long time.

That said, O'Shaughnessy has a point. When you are beating teams by as much as 30 and 40 points in game after game and season after season, something is out of whack. Something has to be done - not to cut Connecticut women down to size - but to raise the competitive level of the rest of the teams.

Otherwise interest in a sport that is already struggling for an audience, will wane. And that would be a shame. For women's basketball has turned into a wonderful game to watch. There is no lack of excitement or skill or artistry. If you doubt me, tune into next weekend's final four games. See for yourself. You won't be disappointed - especially by the Connecticut women.

In their own way, their play is like listening to a great symphonic orchestra performing a great classical piece. Different and seemingly dissonant parts blend into a beautiful composition on the court. How they play is as much art form as sport. I won't miss their bravura performance and I hope you don't either.

Photo: UConn women | AP

Capturing and punishing the bombers won't end terrorism

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 10:58:00 +0000

The year 2016 is the 100th anniversary of the Irish Easter Rebellion. Throughout the year, Conn Hallinan will be revisiting some of the lessons of Ireland's struggle for freedom.

Bombs explode in a subway. The victims are everyday people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. What follows is outrage: track down the perpetrators. The people who set off the bombs are monsters and inhuman fanatics, thunder the authorities.

But the year is not 2016, it is 1883 during the "Dynamite War" waged by mainly Irish-American members of the Fenians against the English occupation of Ireland. The Fenian Brotherhood was founded in 1848. Their "War" targeted the underground, train stations, city halls, public plazas, and factories in London, Manchester, and Liverpool. The war spanned four years, and in light of the current terrorist attacks in the Middle East and Europe, it is an instructive comparison.

On one level there is no similarity. The "Dynamite War" killed and injured very few people, while terrorist attacks and bombs in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, France, and Belgium have murdered hundreds and wounded thousands. It is also hard to compare John Devoy and Patrick Tynan of the Fenians to the likes of the Islamic State's Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi and Abu Muslim al-Turkmani.

Yet there is an historical lesson here, and we ignore it at our peril. Terrorism is a difficult subject to talk about because anything other than outrage seems like one is making an excuse for unspeakably heinous acts. And yet if we are to seriously look for solutions, that requires asking "why," even if the answers are uncomfortable.

There are certainly easy "solutions" out there: occupy Muslim communities and torture suspects we arrest. Unleash yet more drones, carpet bomb the bastards, and, if necessary, send in the Marines. But that is exactly what we have been doing for the past three decades, and is there anyone who would seriously argue that things are better now than they were in 1981?

Did the invasion of Afghanistan muzzle terrorism? A decade and a half later, we are still at war in that poor benighted country, and the terrorism that we experienced on 9/11 has spread to Madrid, Paris, Beirut, Ankara, Cairo, Brussels, Damascus, Baghdad, and other cities. We sowed the wind in Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Did we expect to reap less than a whirlwind?

In his book Blowback, the late Chalmers Johnson chronicled the ricochets from American foreign policy. We raised up the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan to defeat the Russians and helped create Osama bin Laden. We ally ourselves with Saudi Arabia, the country that supplied most of the people who flew those airplanes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, whose reactionary brand of Islam has helped create an army of jihadists worldwide.

The flood of refugees headed toward Europe is a roadmap of U.S. interventions in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya. In the case of the latter, we created a failed state, whose massive arms caches has succeeded in destabilizing significant parts of Central Africa.

The nature of American foreign policy - as well as those of some of its allies - is where the conversation of what to do about terrorism has to begin. This is not to excuse terrorism, but to try to understand what it emerges from, instead of playing an endless - and eventually futile - game of whack-a-mole.

For people like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the answer is simple: terrorists are evil Muslims (although sometimes just being a Muslim is enough). But how many of our leaders ask, "Why are they doing this?" and are really interested in an answer? Hillary Clinton says she doesn't think we should torture people, but she is all for bombing the bejesus out of them and overthrowing their governments. Bernie Sanders is much more sensible, but even he voted for the Yugoslav War, which set off NATO's eastward march and led to the current crisis over the Ukraine.

Terrorism is not a thing you can wage war against; it is a tactic employed by the less powerful against the more powerful. If you can't defeat someone's armies, you can always blow up their citizens. Simply using military power in response to terrorism is the most efficient way to recruit new terrorists.

Drone strikes are supposed to be "surgical" weapons that only kill bad guys. But as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found, drones have killed thousands of civilians. Each of those civilians has a family, and each of those family (clan, tribe, etc.) members is now a potential recruit. The drone war is a perfect example of Johnson's "blowback."

Of course, terrorism generates its own "blowbacks." The "Dynamite War" didn't do much damage to the British, but it was a political catastrophe for the Irish. The English used it - along with the infamous 1882 Phoenix Park murders of the colonial authority's chief secretaries - to pass the "Perpetual Coercion Act" and imprison hundreds of Irish activists. The loss of those leaders seriously damaged efforts by the Land League to stop a wave of tenant farmer evictions that followed in the wake of the 1878-79 crop failures.

Those evictions produced a "blowback" of their own. Tens of thousands of Irish were forced to emigrate to America, bringing with them a deep rage at English landlords and the colonial authorities. That fury fed the anger that many Irish-Americans still held against the British, and that led to a revival of the Fenians and the launching of the "Dynamite War." It was good old American know how that built the bombs that blew up targets in England.

The "War" was actually similar to the current wave of terrorism, at least in conception. Rather than going after the English armed forces and police, most of the bombs were set in public places with the explicit idea of terrorizing everyday life. The plan was to transplant the violence of the colonial occupation to the home country. It did, indeed, scare people, including many English who formerly favored the Irish cause, and turned those who were indifferent anti-Irish. It derailed the Home Rule movement for several decades.

The Colonial authorities responded with yet greater repression, much as many of the current candidates for the White House would if given a chance. But while the "Dynamite War" was ill conceived and counterproductive, it was a reflection of the basic injustice of colonialism.

The Islamic State is a genuine monstrosity, but it reflects a hundred years of European and American manipulation of the Middle East's resources and politics. When Britain and France divided up the Middle East to their liking in 1916 - deliberately building in ethnic, tribal, and religious instability - did they really think there would never be a day of reckoning?

There are monsters in the Middle East, but we have helped create them. The question is, can we stop them?

We should know by now that more bombs and troops do exactly the opposite. To seriously tackle terrorism will take a fundamental re-examination of U.S. foreign policy. It must start with challenging the idea that everything about this country is the "best," the ideology of "American exceptionalism" that underlies so much of our strategic policies. That idea of "exceptionalism" gives us the right to intervene in other countries' internal affairs, to subvert their political structures, and, if necessary, seek regime change.

We preach "democracy" to Cuba, China, and Russia, while being perfectly comfortable with Saudi Arabia and the other autocratic monarchies that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council. People take note of that contradiction and quite logically assume that it is hypocrisy and has more to do with our "interests" than any commitment to the right of people to choose how to run their own lives.

In any case, our own political system increasingly looks like some grotesque caricature of democracy, where presidential candidates blithely propose ignoring the Constitution and violating international law, and where a handful of billionaires can dominate the public space.

We are the most powerful economic and military force on the planet, so overthrowing a government or strangling its economy is not all that hard to do. At least in the short run. But the world is simply far too complex to fit into one model of government or worldview and, sooner or later, people will dig in their heels.

How we respond to that resistance is what we need to examine. If the response is force, we can hardly complain when we find ourselves the target of "asymmetrical violence" - terrorism.

The people who set the bombs have to be caught and punished, but that will not end the problem. The Irish who murdered the colonial secretaries in Phoenix Park were caught and punished, but it did not make Ireland a calm place or end Irish resistance to the English occupation. That was resolved when the British finally realized that they could no longer determine the history of another country. We must do the same. And that will take a conversation that we have not yet had. It's time to start.

This article originally appeared on the author's blog, Dispatches from the Edge.

Photo: Emergency workers sorted through the damaged terminal at the Brussels airport. | AP

Singing in the shower at Amherst led to bigger things

Tue, 29 Mar 2016 14:33:00 +0000

The acoustics in the communal shower of Stearns Dormitory on the Amherst College campus were superb, like singing in the chapel of an Italian monastery.

One morning in the spring of 1959 I was standing with hot water jetting on my body and singing "Ave Maria," hitting every high heavenly note that Bach and Gounod had written into that sublime song. The notes bounced off the tiles and resounded out the window to the sidewalk below.

I heard a voice outside the shower. "Hello, hello. Excuse me. Do you always sing so high?" He stuck his head around the corner. "I'm sorry to intrude. I was passing by and heard you singing. Is that your normal range?"

"Yes. It is how I sing," I replied.

He was an upper classman, an African American guy. I recognized him as the assistant to the director of the Amherst College Glee Club.

"We need voices like yours in the Johnson Chapel Choir and in the Glee Club too. Would you be interested?"

By now I had turned off the shower and was dripping in all my stark nakedness.

"Yes. I would. Both."

That is how I became a member of the Chapel Choir. In those days, chapel attendance was required. Religious chapel was twice each week and the alternate days a secular program was offered for those brief, as I recall, half hour observances.

I arrived in the wee hours of the morning and stood with the other members of the choir behind the pulpit and sang: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow/Praise him all creatures here below/Praise him above, ye heavenly host/Praise father son and holy ghost. Aaaaamen."

For performing this sunrise service, I satisfied my chapel requirement and was paid 60 cents each morning I showed up. It was modest compensation but I was a dirt poor scholarship student and every penny helped.

Soon I was also recruited into the Amherst College Glee Club. We practiced regularly and even though I could not read music, I memorized my part and sang with lust and much joy in performances both in Amherst and elsewhere in New England. Since Amherst was a mens college, we teamed up with the choir of Pembroke College, an all-women's college in Providence, Rhode Island for some of our most memorable performances.

The town of Amherst was celebrating its bicentennial in 1959. The great composer, Randall Thompson, was commissioned to put music to a collection of Robert Frost's poem to celebrate this event. The result was "Frostiana." We practiced singing these lovely songs for weeks and Randall Thompson came to Amherst and led us in the premier performance of this great, original work.

My best friend at Amherst, Alec Stewart, a physics major from Ellensburg, Washington, heard me sing in the Chapel Choir. I visited him often in his room in Morrow Dormitory.

"Tim," he said one day. "You have a great voice. Would you like to have my autoharp? It was given to me when I was in high school. I never use it. It's your if you want it."

He pulled from his closet a music instrument case and handed it to me. I opened it. Inside was a shiny black instrument, an Oscar Schmidt autoharp. I was over the moon! I accepted Alec's gift.

I pressed the button for the G-Major chord and strummed my finger across the strings. A heavenly harmony filled the room. A musical instrument that virtually played itself. It was a miracle.

I started teaching myself chord progressions immediately and soon I was singing the folk songs I had grown up singing acapela. I've been singing and strumming my autoharp, especially at family reunions where my father, Joyce, our daughter, Susan, our sons, Morgan and Nick, and many cousins sing joyously and loud enough to lift the roof or even the open sky.

Yet never have I sung with so much joy as that day in the shower at Amherst College when I stood in all my naked glory, hitting every high note, as free and innocent as Adam before his expulsion from the garden.

Photo: PW

Setting the record straight about socialism

Tue, 29 Mar 2016 13:02:00 +0000

People's World Series on Socialism

Everyone seems to be talking about socialism these days, but what does it mean? That was the question asked by Susan Webb in one of our most popular and widely-shared recent articles. Millions of Americans are considering alternatives to a system run by and for the 1 percent. They are taking an interest in socialism, a word that has meant a great many things to activists, trade unionists, politicians, and clergy around the world over the last century and a half. The article below is one of a series on socialism, what it can mean for Americans in the 21st century, and how we might get there. Other articles in the series can be found here.

In every age, scientific reasoning takes a beating from entrenched prejudices, fears, and hatreds. In the most extreme cases, life itself has been the price: the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the Holocaust, lynchings, etc. Of recent vintage we have the vilification of socialism.

It predates Senator Joe McCarthy, but that period - which gave us another "ism" - etched into the heart of our body politic the idea that socialism is the epitome of evil. Such was to be expected. There has never been a socio-economic system in which those in power passively and peacefully surrendered that power to a more equitable system.

Yes, I believe that socialism is more equitable than capitalism. You may ask, "What about the failure of the Soviet Union and those other Eastern European countries, and the atrocities committed under Joseph Stalin?" Good questions. But you may also ask why China and Cuba, both socialist countries with leading Communist Parties, have survived.

The setbacks in Eastern Europe can't be adequately analyzed here, but they don't prove the invalidity of socialism. They only show that socio-economic change, whenever it's on history's agenda, must contend with human fallibility as well as the power of the established system.

In any case, socialism ought to be considered for what it actually is, not for what we are told it is by those who would be out of business if we went in that direction. While the classical definition of socialism is public ownership of the basic means of production, it also includes aspects we already enjoy, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the many federal departments established for the betterment of the entire population.

Fortunately, today's world is not the one of the Cold War and McCarthyism. Recent polls show that some 20 percent of Americans now view socialism favorably.

Witness the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist. The word democratic is well-chosen, whether or not Sanders favors an all-out socialist state, because the intent of socialism is to advance democracy, not curtail it.

How far he will go toward the Democratic nomination for president is unknown, but that he has come this far is an indication that the American people are fed up with current economic and political conditions and are ready to entertain "democratic socialist" ideas.

I don't mean to suggest that socialism is a panacea - all milk and honey, instant peace, and happiness. The economic and social complexities in modern society, including human fallibility, will be negative factors in whatever social system is established.

Cynics would have us believe that greed is endemic in humans, and that it will undermine any socio-economic structure. History tells a different story. Wasn't the overthrow of the monarchy in France an advance toward democracy and equality? Wasn't our own revolution a defeat for colonialism? Wasn't our Civil War a defeat for slavery? Didn't the Bolshevik revolution bring an end to Czarism?

True, as I noted earlier, none of these historic events brought an end to injustice. But they were steps forward. Greed and oppression have always been forced to give way to greater equality and justice. So it will be in the future. As humans change society, so society changes humans. No one has been burned at the stake in a long time.

We're not close to taking that qualitative leap to becoming a socialist state, but the economic catastrophes through which we're now struggling should at least give us pause to question the inequities of capitalism, and wonder whether this system is the last and best system possible. I'm sure that's what King Louis XVI and King George III thought about their systems.

Seymour Joseph, now retired, was a longtime editor, writer, and graphic artist for People's World's predecessor publications. He is also a poet and blogger on current events. This article originally appeared at his blog.

Obama’s back from Havana; struggle against Cuba blockade continues

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 10:09:00 +0000

For those who have been involved in the Cuba solidarity movement for years, the meeting between Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro this past week undoubtedly stands as a milestone. It's a powerful symbol of the move toward normalization between the two countries.

But with all the pageantry of the trip - from the awkward press conferences to the baseball diplomacy - it might be easy to forget that a lot of the hard and detailed work to end the blockade goes on behind the scenes and in the halls of power back in Washington. And for all the importance of Obama's visit - and don't get me wrong, it's huge - there is still a lot of work to be done.

Since Obama announced the shift in U.S. policy toward Cuba back on December 17, 2014, meetings between the two sides have progressively grown in importance as discussions take on a life of their own. A case in point: immediately after the President announced in February that he would be headed to Havana, a "Cuba Consortium Conference" was convened in D.C.

Senior officials of the Obama administration, academics, and business people conducted a nine-hour session on "the complex framework of laws" which make up the U.S. blockade.

Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker recalled her trip to Havana last October, stating openly: "We learned that in Cuba - as in many of our other trading partners around the world - it is necessary to work with state-owned enterprises in order to support the local private sector." Such a recognition is a good start, but not yet far enough.

In his remarks, Rodrigo Malmierca, the Cuban Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment, highlighted three key aspects of the blockade policy which Obama himself still has the power to change: permitting the island to use the dollar in international financial transactions, authorizing Cuban exports to the U.S., and allowing American companies to invest in other sectors besides telecommunications.

Understanding the meaning of democracy includes the ability to think critically, to use dialectics to expose the contradiction and folly of U.S. policy toward Cuba. Treasury Department specialist Andrea Gacki, perhaps inadvertently, did just that at the conference. Responding to a question from a Granma International reporter, Gacki was at a total loss when asked to specifically identify the law which prohibits Cuba's use of the dollar in international transactions. Her response: the issue is being investigated.

In this instance, the ability of people to travel and trade between Cuba and the U.S. is a constitutional protection that has been prohibited by the Helms-Burton Act in contravention of international standards regarding the right of a people to their own self-determination. Cuban and U.S. citizens both are harmed due to illegal, criminal legislation in violation of the sovereignty of independent states.

Why continue supporting a policy overwhelmingly rejected by the U.S. population while the rest of the world watches in amazement?

Obama's visit to Cuba to advance the process of normalization is a recognition of the fact that the world has changed. But that doesn't mean there aren't still potential hurdles along the way as this process moves forward.

For instance, the Deputy National Security advisor, Ben Rhodes, was still emphasizing to the press just last month that he thinks "we're always going to have differences with this government [Cuba] because they have a different political system." It is clear that the momentum needed to end the blockade - the main obstacle to Cuba's development and the normalization of relations - can't come too soon.

There are signs that the wind may be at the backs of the anti-blockade forces. Attitudes among Cuban Americans are shifting in favor of ending the blockade. The U.S. government must recognize these voices - along with the demands of the farm and agriculture community to trade with their Cuban counterparts.

Congress has a duty to represent the good of all. With rapprochement moving forward, what are we waiting for?

Photo: Workers' Central Union of Cuba

Henry David Thoreau: Bright glows the pond

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 14:20:00 +0000

Upon the capture and arrest of abolitionist John Brown, a man ran to the church tower in the center of Concord Massachusetts. He was full of fury and pain. Of lithe and willowy build, this impassioned human being was known locally more as a contemplator than a man of action. Yet here he was streaking to ring a clarion bell.

He was harkening to his fellow citizens, not only an alarm of the week's events, but also a warning of dark days ahead unless the scourge of slavery was expunged from the land. It was October 30, 1859. That man was Henry David Thoreau.

Some short-lived acts speak volumes of the person. So it was that autumn day in the life of Henry David Thoreau. Its message rung out loud and clear as did the pealing of the bell warning of consequences for his town and country if the inhumanity and genocide of slavery were to continue.

Sometimes we also learn of a person in a back-door kind of way. Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, who need no introductions, carried with them the essays of Mr. Thoreau. Reformers and revolutionaries still do. That is why, now as then, apologists for the maintenance of the way things are, will try to discredit them. They want to take the powerful writings of a mid-nineteenth century American away from reformers and revolutionaries and those heading in that direction.

The latest of these apologists to fail is Kathryn Schulz. She tries to "uncool" Thoreau in The New Yorker magazine essay entitled Pond Scum. Schultz accuses the architect of American environmentalism of being a "misanthropic, arrogant, self-righteous prig." Really?

Schulz's first broadside came as she cherry picked a quote from Thoreau that she obviously believed lends itself to misinterpretation. In 1849, a ship carrying Irish immigrants was dashed on the shores of Cohasset, Mass. Only a fraction of the passengers survived.

Thoreau was travelling to Cape Cod at the time and viewed the scene along the shore. "On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day."

What was Thoreau saying here? Simple. We are all quite familiar with being overwhelmed by the shear magnitude of a tragedy. The events of 9/11 are an unfortunate, good example. How many of us had to turn our televisions off because the scenes began to overwhelm us with grief and sorrow? Thoreau, similarly overwhelmed, points to the storm itself as unwittingly being part of the tragedy.

Henry David Thoreau pointed out that seeing "one body" would suffice to grasp the tragedy. Concerning the Syrian refuge crisis, how many of us are overwhelmed by the 90 percent civilian casualty rates there? Yet the one picture of a little toddler washed up on a beach moved more to take action to help, especially in Germany.

There is still more. You would think Ms. Shultz, a writer, would have understood Thoreau's use of paradox. He quite often used this technique to have a jarring effect. A self-contradictory statement is used to show a universal truth.

David Brooks of The New York Times trumpeted Schulz's demonizing of Thoreau. Why? Because her writing was among the Sidney Awards, essays that best represent the outlook and thinking of one Sidney Hook.

Who was he? Sidney Hook was a right-wing social democrat and one of the arch promulgators of the Cold War. He was particularly involved in driving communists and other progressives out of government. In other words, he helped construct the black list that the recent movie Trumbo exposes. Brooks and Schulz, and those of their ilk, are apparently comfortable with Hook's company.

Sometimes in cherry-picking essays a statement is included, almost a disclaimer, that says something like this. " Oh yes, he was a wicked fellow but he did this one honorable thing." Shultz uses this disclaimer technique in a failed attempt to slip her gross distortion of Thoreau past unsuspecting readers. In her essay of over 40 paragraphs, she includes one recognizing Henry David's avowed antislavery positions. The 40 to one ratio is hardly a balanced assessment of this anti-war, equal rights activist. It is a gross distortion.

Thoreau was an abolitionist. Abolitionists were at the heart of the movement to free black Americans. Frederick Douglass, who, along with Karl Marx, urged President Lincoln to allow freed slaves to join Northern troops in the Civil War, can be counted among them. The roots of the socialist and communist movements of the 20^th century can be found here.

The apologists for the way things are, or were, will always peck around the edges of a Thoreau or a Mandela or a Rachel Carson or a Wangari Maathai. It's their essence that really scares them. It's those essences, that blend of reform and revolution we must embrace.

Why attack a noted figure and really, a progressive movement of the past? Fear. People are on the move. The drive for the $15 minimum wage, Black Lives Matter, anti-climate change, and renewable energy are on the move and growing with break-neck speed.

The Climate March of the fall of 2014 put the heebie jeebies into ruling circles, especially the fossil fuel boys. Seeing peace, labor, green, and social justice groups united in a common cause put the fear in them. Thus the apologists of the past take their pens out?

Read Thoreau. You will find yourself there. Like all giants of the past, Henry David Thoreau writes in a different period of time but speaks to us today. One line in his moving eulogy of John Brown does this best. "Only what is true, and strong, and solemnly earnest will recommend itself to our mood at this time."

Photo: Panel from Diego Rivera's mural at Pennsylvania's Unity House, depicting the growing conflict over slavery that eventually led to the Civil War. Also included are references to the Mexican War and the discovery of gold in California. Important figures include Henry David Thoreau, Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott, John C. Calhoun, Nat Turner, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. (Kheel Center for Labor-Management Cornell University/CC)

Trump and the Republican elite: Two sides of a single coin

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 13:52:00 +0000

The meteoric rise of Donald Trump has become the biggest surprise of this election year. Not even the candidacy of a "democratic socialist" on the Democratic side comes close to commanding the same kind of public attention. And no one has been more caught off guard and thrown into a tailspin than the right-wing Republican establishment.

The prevailing assumption was that Trump's star would quickly lose its luster. Voters infatuated by his persona would sour on him as they took closer measure of the man and deemed him not of presidential timber. But, to the surprise and dismay of the GOP establishment, the early infatuation gave way to an ongoing love affair.

Trump went from mild irritant to contending candidate to front-runner in the Republican presidential race. His toxic stew - demagogic, outrageous, divisive, brutish, misanthropic, paranoid, incendiary, violent, and narcissistic - has struck a deep nerve among a section of the electorate as it has frightened many others.

In handily winning so many recent primaries, in states as different as Massachusetts, Michigan, Alabama, Nevada, and Florida, he now becomes the prohibitive favorite to win the Republican nomination.

How do we explain his ascent?

Should we blame Trump supporters? Celebrity culture? A lopsided economic recovery with persistent inequality? Legislative gridlock and career politicians? Islamophobia? Nativism? Ramped up racism? Unabashed male supremacy? Hard-wired nationalism? Reactionary nostalgia? Terrorism?

All of the above are part of an explanation for Trump's ascent, but to find the main cause of this dangerous phenomenon, we have to look elsewhere. And there is no better place than the descent of the Republican Party into the cesspool of right wing extremist politics decades ago.

More than anything else, it was this descent that tilled the soil and built the ladder for Trump's meteoric ascent. If he is the GOP's worst nightmare at this moment, he is also its creation and offspring.

In the glare and noise of Trump's outrageous behavior and the increasingly voluble attacks on him by the gatekeepers of the Republican Party and the conservative establishment, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that over the past four decades, an ascendant gang of right wing extremists systematically gave voice, albeit in coded language, to white and male supremacy, obstructionism, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, labor bashing, nativism, and climate change denialism.

They also organized and egged on an angry grassroots constituency, creating a climate that fueled the provocative and deadly actions of hate groups and hateful individuals.

Meanwhile, in the face of mass shootings - including the killing of 26 small children at Sandy Hook Elementary School - Republican right-wing lawmakers, with a deaf ear, a cold heart, and an open hand to corporate lobbyists, found it easy to resist the slightest restraints on gun sales.

Nor should anyone forget that right wing extremists in the GOP gave the military a green light and blank check to inflict bloody mayhem on the world.

Not least, the descent of the GOP into the cesspool of right-wing extremism gave the billionaire class its most loyal servant. First Reagan and then his successors became the featured blocking backs of a corporate assault that restructured the economy to benefit the 1 percent, fractured and destabilized everyday life, hacked away at democracy and democratic rights, and propagated a pro-corporate "you're on your own" ideology.

The Democrats were not bystanders by any means; in fact, Bill Clinton and his aides get high marks in this effort. But in the right wing and the Republican Party, the corporate class got its most zealous and ruthless prosecutors of its agenda.

During the Obama years, this brand of politics and ideology, as bad as it was, took an even nastier turn. The politics of obstruction, repeal and nullification, sequestration and draconian austerity, government shutdown, debt limit blackmail, and winking at vile racism, even death threats, directed at the country's first African American president became the defining features of the "Party of Lincoln." Whatever fissures arose - and there were some in GOP circles - were tactical in nature.

What is more, the rise of the Tea Party two years into Obama's first term gave this brand of politics an even more frenzied, strident, and apocalyptic tone. Not for a long time - maybe one would have to go back to the pre-Civil-War period when Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina roared nullification and secession in the halls of Congress - had the American people seen a movement whose leaders and mass constituency were so openly racist, sexist, anti-labor, anti-immigrant, and anti-government, so disdainful of facts and science, and so determined to bring down a president whose election signified in their eyes the approaching destruction of a social order that gave them a sense of social, class, and racial entitlement and superiority.

Trump is cut from this same cloth. He isn't, sorry Mitt, an aberration. If Reagan was the father of right-wing ascendancy, Trump is the newest member to the family. But here's the rub. In elite Republican circles, he is considered an unruly and reckless practitioner of their brand of politics. His rhetoric too unfiltered and unapologetic. His policies too erratic and inconsistent. His contempt for democratic norms and rule too unconcealed.

And his candidacy could be crippling, if not fatally damaging, to their right-wing political project. If the Tea Party rebellion had to be subdued by the Republican Party's gatekeepers in the 2012 elections, Trump's palace revolt has to be either forcefully reined in or outright crushed, although neither will be easy.

Robert Kagan, the widely read neoconservative author, in a blistering and brilliant appraisal of Trump and the Republican hierarchy, writes:

"Let's be clear: Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party's creation, its Frankenstein's monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party, and now made strong enough to destroy its maker. Was it not the party's wild obstructionism - the repeated threats to shut down the government over policy and legislative disagreements, the persistent calls for nullification of Supreme Court decisions, the insistence that compromise was betrayal, the internal coups against party leaders who refused to join the general demolition - that taught Republican voters that government, institutions, political traditions, party leadership, and even parties themselves were things to be overthrown, evaded, ignored, insulted, laughed at? Was it not Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), among others, who set this tone and thereby cleared the way for someone even more irreverent, so that now, in a most unenjoyable irony, Cruz, along with the rest of the party, must fall to the purer version of himself, a less ideologically encumbered anarcho-revolutionary? This would not be the first revolution that devoured itself."

Whether Trump devours his hypocritical progenitors on the right can't be answered at this moment, but what is incontestable is that he presents a danger of a different order of magnitude to the well-being of the American people and the country's democratic fabric than encountered in the past. His narcissism, divisive rhetoric, skillful demagogy, incitement to violence, invention of enemies, and ability to mobilize and incite a multi-class populist base, are cause for grave concern.

Whether he is a fascist or not is something I'll discuss in a future column, but suffice it to say that a Trump presidency would cleave toward a new ground of governance somewhere between democracy as we currently understand and practice it and fascism.

While its exact features can't be adumbrated with any certainty, we can say that it would be authoritarian and in its sights would be the rights revolution of the past century and the social movements that fought for them.

But before we arrive at that destination, two things (at least) could get in the way of Trump's march to the White House. First, the upper crust of the Republican Party may successfully block his path to the nomination. A brokered convention in August would be the vehicle to dump Trump and anoint someone else. That candidate would still be right-wing to be sure - Cruz, Kasich, or Paul Ryan - but more to the liking of the Republican establishment. On the other hand, the GOP may do an about-face and decide to let bygones be bygones and make nice with Donald. It wouldn't be the first time that a party (and sections of the capitalist class) rallied around an insurgent outsider. A wild horse can be corralled and tamed.

The other obstacle to Trump's march to the White House is the American people. They can bring it to a humiliating end in November. While it seems reasonable to think that they would do just that, it is also true that politics is too fluid to make that assumption with any sense of assurance. Both big and small unforeseen changes can alter election dynamics in ways that wipe away expected outcomes in a flash.

The takeaway? The people's movement - and the respective supporters of Hillary and Bernie - will have to keep unity and broad-scale outreach at the top of their agenda between now and the Democratic Party convention, and right into the fall campaign. In doing so, they will serve themselves and the country's future well.

This article originally appeared on the author's blog, SamWebb.org.

Photo: Romney and Trump during happier times in 2012. Julie Jacobson | AP

Cuba solidarity movement calls for intensive Congressional lobbying while Obama is in Cuba

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 13:29:00 +0000

Since Sunday, President Obama has been in Cuba on an historic mission of goodwill. Obama has called for the elimination of the five-decade-old economic blockade of the island and has taken some key steps to accomplish this. There are more steps he can take, and we must ask him to do so.

But to completely eliminate the blockade will require congressional action. The blockade is locked into place, especially, by the 1992 Torricelli Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act. To remove these acts will require the passage of legislation in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Though the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress constitute a daunting obstacle, it is not impossible to overcome. Besides the fact that ordinary U.S. citizens are motivated by a desire to see justice for the Cuban people, there are business interests which are anxious to develop commercial relationships with Cuba, relationships now impeded by the blockade. This mixture of interests is able to influence Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress to follow Obama's bold step with legislative action.

IFCO/Pastors for Peace is a highly respected faith based organization which has organized solidarity actions with the people of Cuba for more than twenty years, including annual "Friendshipments" which defy the blockade by bringing needed supplies to ordinary Cuban people. Now IFCO/Pastors for Peace is requesting that we all take advantage of the moment created by Obama's Cuba visit to contact our elected representatives, including the White House and members of Senate and House, to promote support for some specific bills in Congress, which will eliminate the blockade and also the onerous restrictions on U.S. citizens' right to travel to Cuba.

In the House, these are HR 3238, the Cuba Trade of 2015 and HR 664, the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act of 2015. In the Senate, the bills to focus on are S 1543, the Cuba Trade Act of 2015, and S 299, the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act of 2015.

All four bills have both Republican and Democratic cosponsors and are deemed to have an excellent chance of passing. But they need to get many more supporters in Congress, which means we have to work hard to lobby in their support.

IFCO/Pastors for Peace has provided a very handy script you can use for contacting the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the script are links to the contact information you will need. Or, you can find Congressional contact information here:

Phone calls, emails, faxes and visits to your representatives' district or D.C. offices are all useful, but it is important that we act now while the minds of our leaders are focused on the Cuba issue.

Photo: President Barack Obama greets people in Old Havana, Cuba, March 20, 2016. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

More from the White House on the historic trip to Cuba: medium.com/an-historic-trip-to-cuba

Full statements published by Time magazine, here: http://time.com/4266772/barack-obama-raul-castro-press-conference-transcript/

Obama in Cuba: An historic opportunity

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 13:06:00 +0000

On Sunday March 20, President Obama made history when Air Force One touched down at José Martí International Airport in Havana, Cuba at 4:19 PM local time. He is the first U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge to visit the island nation. When Coolidge arrived for the Pan-American Conference aboard the warship U.S.S. Texas in 1928, he carried with him a message of U.S. support for a corrupt and bloodthirsty dictator, Gerardo Machado.

This time, the U.S. president goes to Cuba for a two-day state visit that caps a remarkable process of reconciliation that began on December 17, 2014 with a joint declaration by Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro.

This trip by Obama cements the commitment that was made on that day to normalize relations between Cuba and the United States - relations which have been in the deep freeze since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

Since that revolution, and through all the Cold War years that followed, successive U.S. administrations have done their best to bring down Cuba's socialist government. An iron economic blockade, industrial and agricultural sabotage, terrorism costing thousands of Cuban lives, and more than 600 attempts to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro - all of these attacks and more have been visited on Cuba over the years.

None of these efforts, however, stopped the Cuban people from building their own innovative form of socialism. They did not stop Cuba from building the best health care and educational systems in Latin America. Nor did they stop the country from providing help to the peoples of many different countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia who were trying to free themselves from poverty and exploitation. Cuba's role in helping to end the apartheid regime in South Africa, for instance, marks one of the island nation's finest moments.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist states in 1989-91 created a severe crisis for the country. However, the people of Cuba were not daunted. They sought ways to adapt and survive under the harsh conditions that followed the loss of their major trading partners.

The long road to today's breakthrough

Since that time, a number of developments have coalesced to produce the current thaw between Washington and Havana.

International opposition to the anti-Cuba policy of the United States has grown. From 1991 onward - every year for 24 years - the United Nations General Assembly has voted to denounce the blockade by increasingly lopsided margins. In the fall of 2015, the gap grew to 191 votes to 2. Every single member country, with the exception of Israel and the United States, voted to end the blockade, including all of the U.S.' other allies and major trading partners.

Here at home in the U.S., not only progressive activists but also major business blocs have begun to actively lobby against the blockade in recent years once they realized the profit-making opportunities they were losing to competitors from other countries. The power of the right-wing Cuban exile lobby in South Florida has also waned as younger Cuban-Americans drift away from the intransigent positions of the older generation and as the ethnic demographics of Florida have changed.

And of course, the pivotal role of President Barack Obama cannot go unmentioned. His willingness to buck more than a half century of hostility and to stand up to Republican belligerence on the Cuba issue will be remembered as highlights of his presidential legacy.

All of these developments - along with the intervention of Pope Francis and a number of other foreign leaders - led eventually to the breakthrough announcements of December 2014. Subsequently, tough but respectful negotiations between the United States and Cuba led to a series of constructive steps. The Obama administration issued executive orders making it easier for U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba and do business there. The last of the Cuban Five prisoners were released in a swap for Alan Gross. Cuba was removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. And finally, full diplomatic relations were restored between the two countries.

Negotiations continue on a number of fronts, and there is a lot more to be done. The Cuban side, while expressing satisfaction with the progress so far, has pointed out some of them. Among the next priorities, the blockade must be definitively ended so that Cuba can sell its products in the United States as well as buy U.S.-made goods and the U.S. occupation of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base has to be ended.

The tasks ahead here at home

Whether the potential benefits opened up by this breakthrough can be realized depends entirely on the outcome of the elections on November 8.

Should any of the Republican candidates win the presidency, there is a high likelihood that the rapprochement between the United States and Cuba would be stopped or reversed.

Although Donald Trump says that he is "fine with" the Obama Cuba policy, he adds that he would have pushed for more concessions from Cuba. Given Trump's well-known delicate touch in dealing with foreign countries, it is likely that he would end up scuttling the whole initiative.

Ted Cruz has declared that he would reverse the policy of reconciliation with Cuba and break off recently re-established diplomatic relations. He cozies up to the most reactionary elements of the Cuban exile community in South Florida on this and other issues.

John Kasich uses softer language, but he also basically opposes a full normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba.

On the Democratic side, meanwhile, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton approve of Obama's normalization moves and say they will continue them.

To completely eliminate the U.S. blockade of Cuban trade, though, it will be necessary to pass legislation in both houses of Congress. The current balance of power makes any legislative advance on the issue difficult, to say the least.

Therefore, it is also essential that the GOP be defeated in the Senate and House elections wherever possible. While we rightly pay attention to the very dramatic presidential election, we must also be ready to pitch in at the Congressional level, and create a Congress that will cooperate with the rapprochement that Presidents Obama and Castro have initiated.

This is the greatest chance we have ever had to do right by the Cuban people. Let's get to work.

Photo: AP

Remembering Ferguson and the birth of a movement

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 14:45:00 +0000

"Who are we? Mike Brown!" "Who are we? Mike Brown!"

"Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up! Don't shoot!"

"We're young. We're strong. We're marching all night long!"

These are some of the chants I heard on the night of August 19, 2014, ten days after 18-year-old Ferguson resident Mike Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson. I was in Ferguson that evening to cover the mass protests for People's World.

Seeing the news this week that the Ferguson City Council has finally, after much legal pressure, voted to accept all the terms of the Justice Department's consent decree, I was reminded of those scenes from over a year and a half ago.

With the unanimous 6-0 vote, the city now begins the long and costly process of implementing sweeping reforms to its criminal justice system. If the changes eventually result in setting a national model for criminal justice reform, as some believe they may, we will all owe a debt of gratitude those who took to the streets of Ferguson during those warm August nights.

I count myself lucky to have been there to bear witness to the birth of their movement - a movement of teachers, fast food workers, nurses, students, fathers, mothers, veterans, restaurant owners - of working people, of black young people, who in their protests for justice for Mike Brown created a way to honor the victims of police crimes.

They stood up and in a simple act, spoke his name - Mike Brown.

Others have since stood up and spoken Tamir Rice's name, Rekia Boyd's name, Eric Garner's name, Sandra Bland's name, LaQuan McDonald's name, and far too many more.

That movement finally took the name Black Lives Matter, a spinoff of a hashtag used to honor Trayvon Martin. A new generation found their voice and power.

As it turned out, August 19 was the first night after nine days of protest that police did not use tear gas. They didn't hesitate to continue their reliance on pepper spray, though. Mass and often arbitrary arrests also carried on.

The national guard had been deployed for a week. Military vehicles were parked in the shadows of Auto Zone on West Florissant Avenue. As we left our car in the StopNShop parking lot, we made our way past police barricades, past the Hunan Chop Suey restaurant with its boarded up windows that had the word "Open" spray painted on them, past a delivery truck with "No Shoot, No Loot" written in tape on its sides, past Sam's meat market and liquor store with its police-edited security video that made it look like Mike Brown had stolen cigars.

Eventually, we made our way to Canfield Road, the same street where Mike Brown was shot and killed. A block and half away were the still visible stains from the teenager's blood, a grim memorial that seeped into the road like that August seeped into the consciousness of America.

Up and down West Florissant Avenue, a commercial street like any other in cities across America, dotted with fast food restaurants, convenience stores and small businesses, marched protesters - three blocks long - they marched up one side, on the sidewalks, and down the other side chanting, "Hands up, Don't shoot," carrying signs with Mike Brown's photo, wearing t-shirts that said, "Don't Kill Us." Marching past a carnival like Peace Train playing Marvin Gaye. Marching past police that congregated off to the side with their nightsticks and shields, military-style weapons still in the shadows.

I talked to many protesters that night, trying to get their stories out to the wider world. By then the corporate-run media would pair the word "violent" with the word "protests." But what I saw that night were people pridefully and nonviolently standing up for themselves and for Mike Brown.

There were four young fast food workers who weeks before had been organizing at the McDonald's on West Florissant for $15 an hour and a union. They were in the parking lot armed - not with weapons - but spray bottles with a cloudy mixture of water and milk of magnesia to wash peoples eyes if tear-gassed. These young workers, who had cut their teeth with a new kind of labor movement, were fearless and savvy as they joined their efforts with this new civil rights movement.

There were parents, fathers and mothers with their sons and daughters, who had stories of their own police harassment, being pulled over for no reason, being told they can't congregate in front of their own house. Instead of giving their kids what's often called "the talk," that night they were showing how to "talk," how to speak up. How to be - as Kendrick Lamar says - "alright."

Protesters were frustrated with the media not recognizing that the demonstrations were peaceful and not recognizing the police role in instigating violence. As one young mother, a nurse, and her husband, a teacher, put it: the police "initiated" the violence but the media "flip flops it," blaming the protesters instead.

She said, "We have a right to stand and march wherever we want."

The protesters weren't only demonstrating for justice for Mike Brown or taking a stand against police crimes. They were fighting for their constitutional rights - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly.

The people of Ferguson - brown, black and white - rallied together in other ways, too. Teachers volunteering to lead classes in spaces provided by the public library while the schools were shut down. Churches offering spaces for protesters and classes. Unions providing food and water for the activists.

People held vigils outside the Ferguson Police Department on the other side of town from where Mike Brown was killed. A business owner from an adjoining strip mall offered a section of his parking lot to the picketers. Protests and solidarity took many forms in Ferguson, as it has in other towns and cities. It's created a new awareness about racism as a system, its expressions towards all people of color, and of everyone's stake - white, black, and brown - in ending it.

This article is based on remarks delivered by People's World Associate Editor Teresa Albano at a forum held February 25 at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. It was organized by the NEIU Muslim Student Association, the African-American Resource Center, and the Departments of English and Justice Studies.

Photo: CoopEcon

What's a people's agenda for political revolution?

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 10:47:00 +0000

Does it really matter who becomes President of the United States? It sure does!

The Republican Party is traveling down the road toward the destruction of our democracy by chipping away at our democratic principles. As progressives this is a valid concern during this period in the history of our nation.

Democrats allow for sustainable ongoing organizing around issues and concerns that impact our communities and the working class. In other words we can work with Democrats to move forward a progressive agenda. It won't be easy but change never is. There are major differences. We may not agree with every approach taken by the Democrats but Bernie Sanders has said it well: "it takes a political revolution."

As progressives we need to take a real look at the short-term and long-term effects of electoral politics, especially now: 2016 will be a benchmark for our democracy. There is no doubt that our democracy is under attack. Let's take a look at this.

Democracy under attack

Republicans in many states are making policies and implementing laws that make it harder for individuals to vote. These measures include cuts to early voting, voter ID laws, and purges of voter rolls. Many of these people are now non-voters through no fault of their own. The concept of one-person one-vote-universal suffrage - is a building block for our nation's participatory democracy, but it is now a thing of the past for many people, especially people of color and millions that are in prison or ex-offenders. In 21 other countries incarcerated individuals can still vote. Voter suppression is a direct attack upon our democracy.

Corporations and the billionaire class are now able to influence elections without any accountability or limits on spending. Buying politicians has always been a part of our election history, but now the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling along with the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling making corporations 'persons,' have provided new rights and privileges to this class. The January 2010 high court's 5-4 Citizens United decision said that it is OK for corporations to spend as much as they want to convince people to vote for or against a candidate. It is now legal to fully influence elections in the interest of the 1 percent. Can our democracy survive under the repressive profit-driven policies of the 1 percent and their politics of exclusion?

Our democracy is also under attack when the police are militarized and surveillance by various agencies both private and police agencies supersedes the privacy rights of people. The principle of personal freedom is being chipped away as exposed by whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. A direct assault on our democracy takes place when military style equipment is used by police agencies to confront the people's right to peacefully assemble. Democracy is threatened when our community police stations begin to look like armed military outposts. Democracy is threatened when people live in fear of those paid with tax dollars to protect them.

A basic tenet of our democracy is advise and consent, the authority given by the U.S. Constitution to the Senate to ratify treaties and confirm presidential cabinet, ambassadorial, and judicial appointments. However the Republicans are now turning their backs on the Constitution by refusing to advise and consent. This is a dangerous trend.

Push for a progressive agenda

In order for our democracy to thrive, full participation of the people must be protected and advanced. This will take an understanding of our particular conditions today. It will take many to be engaged in organizing for a broad based social movement promoting a progressive agenda. What are some ways to be engaged to push for a progressive agenda?

How do progressives work in collaboration with others to bring in the broadest sectors of society to support a community-based progressive agenda? There are several key movements that progressive are working with and encouraging further participation in. These movements need to be fully engaged by progressives.

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter is an important movement that must be expanded and supported. Black Lives Matter is a youthful surge from the bottom up holding police and authorities accountable. This movement has direct links to a fight back against the incarceration rate of minorities in prison and the unjust sentencing laws. Most importantly it is social movement with direct community passion and historical relevancy. It is the most outspoken voice for people who are mobilizing to stop the killing of our youth and adults in our communities and the community-at-large.

Climate change movement

There many important issues that must be address that have an impact on our communities but none more important than climate change. The majority of the American public believes that climate change is real. In fact those denying climate change evidence or who believe that climate change is some conspiracy are wrong. For instance the Republican Party hostility to climate change science is now a minority viewpoint.

Broad sectors of society are now concerned that our planet is endangered. Many understand that addressing other issues is important but nothing will be resolved if there is no planet. Progressives working within the climate change movement allow for broad based organizing. This movement allows the opportunity to work with groups locally, nationally and internationally. In many cases individuals and groups are not always in line with a progressive agenda but clearly understand the importance of climate change. As progressives we need to challenge our organizing and accept climate change as a worldwide issue that connects to the grassroots. It is an issue of the life and death for our planet.

Peace movement

The Peace movement has been around for sometime and has a great history of organizing. The potential for bringing in and working with a broad sector of society for a progressive agenda is renewed given the fact that neo-cons and the Republican Party view military might and intervention as the best way to resolve conflicts in place of diplomacy. These individuals and groups emphasize and entertain the use of nuclear weapons.

The issue of peace is as important as climate change because people understand that nuclear destruction of our planet is at the finger tips of a few world leaders. At anytime a world leader or a mistake in nuclear preparation can end life on our planet as we know it.

Dreamers and immigration right struggle

One major achievement coming out of the mass struggles and protest of the immigrant rights movement in 2006 was the activism of the Dreamers. Many young people in the struggle for the first time went on to actively confront the political powers on the state and national level to promote the Dream Act. This was an effort to provide legal status for young immigrants who were brought to this country as children. Now 1.2 million young immigrants have been allowed to stay and work freely in this country.

The immigration rights and Dreamers movement is a struggle that saw wide-spread demonstrations and marches, sit-ins, hunger strikes, and confrontation tactics that forced policy-makers to take up their issues. This would not have happen had it not been for the millions of participants, many undocumented taking to the street to demand immigrant reform. The struggle for immigration rights and immigration reform continues. Millions of immigrant workers and their families will be engaged in the fight for equality understanding that immigrants are and continue to be important participants in the economic development of the United States.

Low wage workers and the Fight for $15

Closely linked to the immigrant struggle is the fight for $15 an hour wages. Millions of low wage workers, many undocumented and minorities, are organizing and mobilizing for economic justice and to lift wages. Raising the wage floor is important in order to lift workers out of poverty and especially to grow the economy. A broad sector of society is now working under extreme low wages. They are now demanding better wages, benefits and union rights.

The labor movement has taken an active role in organizing campaigns for low wage workers. The Fight for $15 and the right to join a union is important to bring in millions of workers into the labor movement. This is not the main focus of labor but it is a natural outcome when millions of workers become empowered by organizing for better wages and to better their working conditions.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of movement involvement only to offer some suggestions in areas where progressives are involved and can continue to move forward.

Photo: Fight for $15, Chicago rally of home health care workers and supporters, May 21, 2015. | Earchiel Johnson/PW

A socialism for every generation

Wed, 16 Mar 2016 10:18:00 +0000

People's World Series on Socialism

I am a U.S. historian as well as a half-century activist, interviewer of old-timers in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and a reader of the historic left-wing press in English, German, Yiddish and (a little) Italian. This is the background that shapes my framework for reasoning on the subject of socialism.

Before 1920, many in the radical movements saw socialism as an inevitability. The growth of the industrial working class, of socialist education and self-education, and the extension of the right to vote to ever-wider groups of people appeared to be carrying society along toward a socialist future.

The followers of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) envisioned a different path. They advocated the outright abolition of the existing state in favor of a decentralized, functional self-government of workers.

One belief they all shared, though, was that the workers of different countries would stand together and refuse to kill each other in the event of any war. International solidarity would cripple any military conflict. The grim reality of 1914-18, however, brought sweeping disillusion. It was a despair from which, in some ways, the Left, as a once-optimistic, popular movement of socialists in the U.S., has never recovered.

Bolstered by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, one segment of activists at that time (mostly the younger ones) nevertheless came to see a global movement of nationalities and races, very much present in blue collar America, as part of the vast working class struggle. They concluded that a vanguard party would be necessary to lead the world movement to a socialist future.

The "party of a new type," Lenin's notion considerably modified, saw fruition in the United States in the form of the Popular Front with the Communist Party USA at the center, from the middle 1930s onward. Contrary to the claims of most existing histories, this development was an organic one, not simply an artificial imposition from abroad. It was organized from the bottom up, as well as signaled from Moscow.

In the process, "revolution," i.e, socialism, was once more re-conceived, this time as a series of steps through and beyond something like the New Deal. Perhaps a million followers in unions, summer camps, cultural, and fraternal associations shared this vision. It shaped the lives and hopes of ethnic and racial minorities in far-flung communities and was reinforced by victories for unionism and the struggle against fascism. This version lasted, with some gaps, until around 1946.

It was smashed (also amidst considerable disillusionment) during the following ten years of reaction. Thousands of its veteran activists though, the vast majority no longer in any Left organization, went on to lead a range of community struggles. And just as importantly, they bestowed upon the future Left their children.

New Leftists (my own generation) came of age in a different time, when unions at large fell under rigid, conservative Cold War leadership. The Cuban Revolution and the civil rights movement, however, opened our eyes to a changing world. Personal freedoms were advancing, for the young in particular.

The Vietnam War transformed us by precipitating a vast protest movement that stretched from the campus out into the wider community. We learned to organize, publish our own local ("underground") press, and reach out to build alliances. "Liberation" came to be viewed as a cultural and political movement, with momentum around the planet. Everywhere, it emphasized youth.

With its collaborating movements - civil rights and Black liberation, gay liberation, women's liberation, and others - it helped shape both a phase of popular culture and new ways of seeing the world.

Like the Old Left, however, our movements were infiltrated and disrupted. Energies dissipated in despair at the recuperation of capitalism. The New Left disintegrated and finally seemed, as a mass force, to disappear, if never entirely. We, like our predecessors, carried on, struggle after struggle and managed to prompt another generation or two beyond ourselves.

In time, the Popular Front model - work within the Democratic Party as well as outside - returned in new forms. Socialism as a vanguard party, as a movement centered in Russia, however, was now gone.

Socialism though, as a vision of a world freed of ecological catastrophe, remains alive and mandatory. Waves of popular struggle - Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Bernie Sanders campaign - continue to rise. They always will.

Our role, as my now elderly generation concludes, is to find ways to make ourselves useful to these movements and to find the road back to socialist visions for ourselves and younger generations. How different this experience is for American socialists, despite all the changes of a century, offers intriguing questions.

Paul Buhle, founder of the new left journal Radical America, has published widely on the history of the Left in the U.S. and the Caribbean. In the last decade, he has turned to creating radical, nonfiction comic art books. Some of his recent titles can be found here.

Clinton should release transcripts of her Wall St. speeches

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 16:07:00 +0000

Bernie Sanders' call for Hillary Clinton to release the transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms is a reasonable one. Clinton's refusal to do so unless all the other candidates for president release transcripts of speeches they have made on Wall St. is unreasonable. Her assertion that the speeches dealt with her experience and expertise in the area of foreign policy should only increase concern about their content.

Iraq war veteran and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said in endorsing Sanders that Clinton, after disavowing her vote to give then-President Bush authority to invade Iraq, continued, as Secretary of State, to support regime-changing policies in Libya and Syria.

In addition, under her leadership, the State Department backed the coup that overthrew the legally-elected government of the Ukraine. Among the leaders of that coup were extreme right wingers including known neo-Nazis.

Had Russia not reclaimed Crimea the nuclear naval base there would have fallen into the hands of the dangerous rogue government. Continuing the confrontationist approach to relations with Russia, Clinton says she supports a no-fly zone over Syria.

No wonder Henry Kissinger has described her as a "strong" leader of the State Department. Kissinger is a poster child for imperialist policies of regime change and has been indicted by courts in France, Spain, Argentina and Uruguay for war crimes and the deaths of millions in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

To be sure, Clinton herself opposes the domestic policies espoused by right wing extremism. She has taken a wide variety of strong progressive positions on a host of issues and can be counted on to oppose a national right-to-work law, to oppose repeal of the Affordable Care Act, to push for of women's reproductive rights, to oppose curtailment of voting rights and to oppose reckless assaults on the environment. She has come out strongly against racist police violence and she supports a hike in the minimum wage and expanding access to health care and education. She supports massive rebuilding of our nation's crumbling infrastructure.

The point, however, is that all of this could be subverted if the country remains on a Wall St.-backed policy that feeds the fires of war.

This is why National Peace Action, after polling its members, took the unusual step of endorsing Sanders. Endorsing a candidate is something the peace organization hasn't done in the past. This is also why voters have the right to see the transcripts of the former Secretary's speeches on Wall Street.

Photo: Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders stand on stage before a Democratic presidential primary debate at the University of Michigan-Flint, March 6, in Flint, Mich. Charlie Neibergall | AP

Trump: The Great Disconnector

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 14:36:00 +0000

You are your race, your ethnicity, your gender, your orientation. You own these attributes, soul-deep.

Harder to change, of course, is your religious or non-religious belief. Yet, everyday, there are people who still feel moved to make such a switch.

Your appearance? Well, you can change the optics through surgery, makeup, and physical effort. Money and genetics will still have a powerful say-so on the matter, though. Physical and intellectual being, on the other hand, might be impossible to alter, due to a broken spine, disease, congenital impairment, or a host of other factors.

Your national allegiance can be switched by leaving one country and being accepted for eventual membership in a new one. It's quite simple, really. That is, if you happen to come from a favored nation and have the means to ease your way.

One of the hardest things to change, though, is the status assigned by income level and social class. Whether you rise or fall in the rankings depends much on the elements mentioned above.

You may well be white, middle-class, and Christian but still founder from a diagnosis of lupus that threatens to wipe out your savings and take you from the home - and the life - you thought secure. Even class and wealth, then, are no guarantee.

You, or perhaps someone like you, sees much in the country that is worrying. Social unrest involving shootings by or against police officers. Protests over low wages by people you think should probably just be trying harder to lift themselves up. Jobs going overseas. And a seemingly endless parade of do-nothing politicians.

Going to a Trump rally is, for you, a declaration that the country is going to hell in a handbasket. You are going to raise your voice proudly in favor of change.

Okay. Now let's flip the script.

Instead of the white middle-class Christian, you are a person of color. Maybe you are of a minority religion. Perhaps gender non-conforming, or white non-conforming. Whatever the social ID, you're not the target audience for Mr. Trump.

Protesting a Trump rally is, for you, a declaration that the country is going to hell in a handbasket. You are going to raise your voice proudly in favor of change.

Now let's say these two meet on the floor of the rally.

You the supporter, roused by the multitude, curse the alien in your midst. You jostle her, possibly punch her, as Trump commands. You feel you are defending your country.

You the protester, surrounded by an angry multitude, stand politely or jostle back, then find yourself escorted or dragged out, as Trump commands. You feel you are defending your country.

Despite appearances, it's not unreasonable to suggest that there could actually be a mutual dream of America animating both supporter and protester in this instance. Both dream, in their different way, of an America in which opportunity exists for all, and where people stand together in defense of what's left of our freedom.

The connective tissue between them is unseen, however, because the ever growing micro-marketing of media and consumerism defines who we listen to and what we read. We all occupy a niche that is either served or disserved by our media environment.

For both supporter and protester, the dream is under attack by the same economic forces and divisive policies.

We may not see it that way though if no one is pointing out, for instance, how money marketers are still on the loose, despite the criminal acts which largely caused the Great Recession. If you absorb the Fox News mindset, for example, that what the country needs is far less government (except for the military and corporate giveaways), then your discomfort zone has prepared you for the raging id of a Donald Trump.

How could it be otherwise? Given a political climate that advantages the wealthy and grants media coverage to the loudly entertaining - in a country where our shared dream has turned toxic - Donald Trump is inevitable.

He is a symptom of our nation's core problem of social and economic inequality. He is not the cure. Nor is he even the prime villain. Should the Republican Party fail to stop his rise, then both the Trump supporter and the Trump protester are faced with the same question.

Will they reach out to each other?

Sending a message to foes by supporting Trump really does the country no favor in the end. As for the one who is speaking out, justifiably, against Trump's explicit bigotry, there might be the temptation to give up on the political process entirely.

But that means giving up on each other. The anger Trump elicits on all sides is real, and the causes of it are often the same, even though their impact lands differently.

Trump, the Great Disconnector, has no interest in the two - supporter and protester - finding common cause. Or in them realizing that they each care greatly for the health and future of an America that is my land, that is your land.

Find the connecting thread that runs so true, and don't give up.

Photo: A protester holds up a ripped campaign sign for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump before a rally on the campus of the University of Illinois-Chicago, March 11. Trump cancelled his rally. Charles Rex Arbogast | AP

Delmer Berg, last of the Lincoln Brigade vets, dies at 100

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 14:04:00 +0000

Delmer Berg, who fought Franco fascism in Spain in 1938, died Feb. 28 at his home in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. He was 100 years old and was the last known surviving member of the famed Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 2,800 men and women, African American, Latino and white, who volunteered to defend Spain's elected government when Franco and his fascist legions instigated civil war in 1936.

An estimated 800 of the Lincoln volunteers died and Berg himself was badly wounded when a fascist warplane bombed the monastery near Valencia where he was billeted. He carried the shrapnel in his liver the rest of his life.

Delmer Esley Daniel Berg was born in Anaheim, California, Dec. 20, 1915, of Ukrainian, Dutch and Bavarian ancestry. His father was a tenant farmer. He dropped out of high school in Manteca, California, to help his impoverished family survive during the depths of the Great Depression. They moved to Oregon.

He later moved back to Los Angeles where he joined the National Guard. He was assigned to the 76^th Field Artillery in the Presidio of Monterrey. It was here that he learned of the rising menace of fascism in Europe, especially in Spain.

"With the intention of traveling to Spain, Berg bought his discharge for $120," according to The Volunteer, newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. In the meantime, he found work washing dishes at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. He caught sight of a billboard urging volunteers to sign up for combat in defense of the Spanish Republic. He located the Young Communist League and volunteered.

"I was a worker. I was a farmer. I was in support of the Spanish working people and I wanted to go to Spain to help them," he explained in a recent interview.

He managed to scrape together bus fare to New York City where he boarded the Champlain and sailed for France in the winter of 1938. Like other volunteers, he walked over the snowcapped Pyrenees mountains from France to Spain. He was assigned to a field artillery and anti-aircraft battery. He laid telephone lines from Republican defense headquarters to the front during the momentous Battle of the Ebro, the largest battle of the Civil War. It was during the next battle, near the town of Valencia, that Berg sustained his shrapnel wound. It took him a year of convalescence to recover from that wound.

Ultimately, Franco forces defeated the Republicans, clamping a fascist dictatorship on Spain. This was the era of appeasement of fascism. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact with Hitler, a sell-out that Britain would do nothing to block Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia, setting the stage for invasion of France, Poland and other nations, triggering World War II.

The U.S. had remained "neutral," a capitulation to fascism that reflected the power of pro-fascist forces in the U.S. like the Morgans, DuPonts, Rockefellers, and others in the corporate elite. The Soviet Union, alone, among the main military powers of that day supported the Spanish Republic and ultimately the USSR sacrificed more than 20 million to defeat Hitler and the Axis power.

After recovering from his wounds, Berg returned to the U.S. But when World War II erupted, Berg served again, in combat for three years in the Pacific.

As an obituary in the New York Times reported, Berg went to his grave an "unreconstructed Communist," a member since 1943 of the Communist Party USA. He was an active opponent of the Vietnam War, a past Vice President of the local chapter of the NAACP and active in solidarity with the United Farm Workers.

Delmer Berg's passing is the end of a glorious epoch. The veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, aptly described as "premature anti-fascists," survived the bullets and bombs of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. They came home from combat to face home-grown Cold War repression, redbaiting and the blacklist orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon and other warmongers, racists and unionbusters.

It is a sign of the times that "Trumbo," a film celebrating the life of Dalton Trumbo, an Abraham Lincoln vet, was nominated for an Oscar about the same time Berg died. Trumbo, who wrote "Men in Battle" describing vividly his own experience of combat in Spain, was savagely blacklisted by Hollywood even though he wrote the screenplay for Oscar winning films like "Spartacus."

In the 1950s and 1960s, Berg and his fellow Lincoln vets threw themselves into the surging civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the resurgent labor movement. They were heroes to younger generations, marching with their jaunty berets in the vanguard of enormous anti-Vietnam war parades in New York, Washington D.C. and San Francisco.

Berg was honored on the Lincoln Brigades's 76^th anniversary by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives in Berkeley, California, May 27, 2012. A story in the online People's World quotes Berg. "I'm really happy to be among people who are concerned about what's happening now and what was happening when we were in Spain," said Berg who was then 96.

Photo: Yanks in the Dimitrov Battery: standing Sam Slipyan, Conlon Nancarrow, Ed Lending, Charles Simpson (?), Delmer Berg (circled), Norman Schmidt, kneeling two Spanish drivers. The photo is part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) collection at the Tamiment Library (NYU).

Not voting? Think again

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 14:27:00 +0000

One Tuesday morning, a little more than a week ago, I was drinking my coffee and decided my digestion couldn't handle reading about another schoolyard brawl between Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner.

So I opened the Red Eye, a Chicago free daily newspaper, and started to flip directly to the Celebrity News for a little mental relaxation. Instead of checking out the reaction to Beyoncé's Super Bowl outfit, my eyes were drawn to this headline: "I've Never Voted: Here's Why."

I expected a sad column trying too hard to replicate the humorous genius of The Daily Show. However, instead of satire, I read a self-serious list of reasons why 24-year-old Chicago Tribune reporter Rianne Coale has NEVER voted, or even registered to vote. Ever.

She offered the usual pro forma list of excuses. It's too much hassle to register. Nobody else votes anyway, so why bother. I sadly have to agree with Coale and admit, with voter turnout at 40% for the last Chicago mayoral election, she is correct in acknowledging voter apathy.

But the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners does understand the "hassle" of filling out forms, so they made it possible to register to vote online. I wondered if Coale knew she could procrastinate right up until Election Day and register at her polling place. That's right - it's possible to register and vote on the same day, at least in Illinois! (Check the procedure where you live here.)

As I continued reading the article, I became aware of a certain futility in all these attempts to "get out the vote." Because her reason for not voting is more insidious than mere laziness.

Coale believes it is not her "civic duty" to vote.

I sighed...deep breaths...I tried solving the crossword puzzle to relax. But I couldn't overlook the implications of Coale's total civic apathy.

The next presidential election is historic because for the first time we (not including Coale, of course) will elect either a woman, a genuine activist, or a pouting bully.

How could she sit this one out? It doesn't matter what her politics are. If the thought that Trump could be our next president doesn't get her running to the polls to stop this madness, what will?

At this point I was wishing for an asteroid to enter Earth's atmosphere and just end it all quickly. Which led me to another maddening statement in Coale's article: "So here I sit, going about my post-graduate life and still not registered to vote. I have plenty of time, but maybe like in my work life, I'll do it on a deadline."

Really, Rianne? I hardly know where to begin. Do you understand why you enjoy a modern post-graduate work life with the freedom to make ignorant choices?

While you think of an answer, look up Lucy Burns (1879-1966). She fought for the same right to vote that so disinterests you. She was arrested, went on a hunger strike, and then faced torture when authorities shoved a tube down her throat to force feed her - all this, so you can choose to take that struggle for granted.

Once Lucy's battle was over, the next generation of women leveraged their votes to fight for equal rights - the ones that offer you a 21^st Century opportunity to get an education and build a career. These women looked into the future, saw your potential, and battled for you.

How do you repay them? By abdicating the responsibility you owe to our foremothers, yourself, and our children.

The responsibility to remember this history and show up at the ballot box is indeed your "civic duty," and allow me to help you remember the definition from your 7^th grade Constitution Test. Civic Duty is "the social force that binds you to the courses of action demanded by that force."

Like it or not Rianne, you are bound to a social force comprised of militant suffragettes and feminists of the women's rights movement. Since this army of women fought, suffered, and died to provide you with the freedom of a comfortable post-graduate life, they have a right to demand your recognition.

Honor them by fulfilling your civic duty. Vote in the general election on November 8, 2016. Even before that, you should be getting your ballot in the box for the primaries.

Actually, just make sure you are there every time the polls are open.

Noreen Hernandez has been a financial services professional for 10 years. A lifetime student with a passion for keeping her skills sharp, Noreen recently returned to university life, pursuing a degree in English Literature. Follow her on Twitter: @Noreen_Hern

This article originally appeared on the blog, beckysarwate.com.

Photo: Lucy Burns in Occoquan Workhouse. From the Records of the National Woman's Party | Harris & Ewing, Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, Public Domain.

UPDATE: The day after this article was first published, Rianne Coale tweeted a response to the author with picture of herself holding a ballot receipt along with the words, "There's a first time for everything!" PW writer Noreen Hernandez wants Coale to know how proud she is. Also, she wants everyone else to go out and do exactly what Rianne just did.

You don’t have to be Einstein to see socialism’s potential

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 14:40:00 +0000

People's World Series on Socialism

Recently, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill declared, "It is very hard for most Americans to see how socialism would cure the problems we are facing right now."

She is right.

Of course it's hard for Americans to see how socialism can solve our problems when, by and large, they don't know what it is. Why would they?

"Socialism" has long been a dirty word in America. It is ignored in our educational system and shunned within respectable political conversation. It is often hurled as a pejorative descriptor, meant to dismiss ideas rather than encourage exploration and consideration of them.

Frankly though, it's hard for me to see how we can really cure the problems facing us without socialism.

Of course, to even have this discussion we need to get clear on what socialism is, a question made urgent by Sanders' lightning-rod campaign and McCaskill's patently obvious need for education on the matter.

In order to understand what socialism offers as an alternative to our current socio-economic arrangement though, we have to first understand the specifics of that system we call capitalism. I once had a student ask me, "What is capitalism?" It was one of my favorite questions ever raised in my classroom. What the befuddlement of his classmates revealed was that even those who voiced feelings one way or the other about capitalism could not, in any substantial way, spell out its basic features and characteristics.

It's a big question, almost as big as the question, "What is socialism?". Instead of trying to answer these queries in a comprehensive way, I'd like to start sketching an answer by taking up the issue of wages. Approaching the challenge in this way brings us to the heart of the differences between capitalism and socialism. It allows us to look at these two complex ideas in terms of their economic principles and social values. After all, the "wage" is a chief way we value people and the contributions they make to the world.

When I was watching the second Democratic debate with my nine-year-old son Elijah, the candidates were asked what the minimum wage should be. I think Clinton said $12 and Sanders said $15. I don't know what O'Malley said. Elijah threw out some number, $12 I think.

When I asked him how he came up with that, he said it shouldn't be so high that it would cause businesses to close. (I don't know where he heard this, but it wasn't from me.) I asked him if he really thought a company like McDonald's, which generates billions in profits, couldn't afford to pay its workers more. After all, don't those fast food workers earning minimum wage play a rather consequential role in producing the wealth of the company?

At the heart of this discussion is the question of how wages are determined - indeed, how value is determined - in a capitalist market economy. I'm not really sure how often most people have really reflected on this issue.

To provide a concise, clear, and incisive answer to this question, I'd like to turn to Albert Einstein. In his May 1949 essay "Why Socialism?" in Monthly Review, the famed physicist wrote:

"Insofar as the labor contract is 'free,' what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product."

Key here is that in both capitalist theory and practice, the wage a worker is paid does not correspond directly to the market value of what she or he produces. Rather, as Einstein says, the worker must earn at least enough to survive day-to-day and come back to work tomorrow. They won't earn more than that as long as there are others competing for the same job.

In short, the capitalist theory of wages is that we won't pay you any more than we can get the next guy to do the job for. There have always been capitalists who try to find ways around paying even enough to meet the "minimum needs" Einstein talked about. There are plenty of workers out there today - such as those at Walmart - who have to count on government assistance such as food stamps and Medicaid to meet their "minimum needs."

To highlight this gap between wages and the value produced, consider a recent study by the marketing firm MVF Global which examined the top 100 companies and the "true value" of each of their 20.8 million employees. The study determined that, on average, each employee generated $1.3 million for their employers.

The "geniuses" who work at Apple stores, for example, earn $29-55,000 annually and generate on average $1.9 million each for the tech giant. The average Walmart retail employee earns about $15,000 annually while generating up to $225,000 for the company. Most striking of all is the situation of the average oil worker at Phillips 66 who took home about $77,000, but generated an astounding $11.3 million in revenue!

Of course, revenue is not pure profit. It also has to cover the costs of doing business - machinery and equipment, raw materials, utilities, rent, transport, and marketing - so we can't suggest a worker should necessarily earn the full revenue they generate. The larger point, though, as Einstein stressed, is that under capitalism, the wage a worker earns comes nowhere close to the actual value of their contribution.

The logic of shortsighted capitalists is to reduce wages as much as possible - to, in economic terms, respect the work as little as possible and make the workers' lives as impoverished and minimalist as possible.

I wonder if the average person in our society really understands that this is the dominant morality that animates our economy and shapes how we treat each other. The determination of wages - of value - isn't typically explained to us in this way. It is, in fact, the reality of capitalism's value system and economic practice, however.

By contrast, a socialist system, as I understand it and would hope to see realized, would operate on the general premise articulated by a pair of 19^th century German philosophers: "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs."

The idea is not exclusive to Marx and Engels, however; there are other takes on it as well. There are societies considered socialist by many, such as Denmark, oft-invoked these days, which has a market dimension and a mixed economy allowing for the accumulation of individual wealth beyond need.

The basic idea behind socialism, though, is that social resources belong to all and all should share in them at least to the point of meeting their basic needs. The labor of the farmworker picking the fruits and vegetables we eat is as essential to our lives as that of the teacher who educates our children or the doctor who heals us.

Now, at this point in the discussion, the question is often raised, "What about lazy people who won't work?" This is a huge question, and for now I am going to defer tackling it for now.

What I do want to say about that frequent objection here, though, is that it shouldn't let us off the hook from asking why people who clearly work hard 40 hours per week generating wealth for others somehow still deserve to earn less than a subsistence wage. Or why, in many cases, they have to forego adequate access to healthcare. Or why they don't have their basic needs met. This issue of "human nature" and whether or not people will work and contribute to the world without coercion or incentive does not absolve us of answering these tough questions.

To my understanding, socialist theory asks us to consider some basic questions: Why would we want to undermine the life of someone on whom we depend for our own life? Why would we want to settle for a system whose central goal is to give people as little as possible for the work they do - work which we collectively need them to do? Why settle for a system that makes their lives as difficult as possible and willfully creates deprivation that makes for horrible social environments and living conditions?

We can talk about issues of economic efficiency in terms of production and distribution, but right now I simply want to raise this values issue, putting in stark relief the values of capitalism (which I don't think most Americans seriously reflect upon) and the values of socialism (which by and large Americans don't understand).

Do we really think people who contribute what they can deserve to be homeless, under-educated, hungry, and lacking basic medical care?

The theory of wages informing capitalist economics answers "Yes!" to this question, suggesting that the economic objective of capitalists is to pay as little in wages as possible, regardless of the consequences.

The socialist worldview assigns a basic value and respect to human life and to all the work people do make our very interdependent lives possible, recognizing that, as the good Reverend once said, "All labor has dignity."

Black history celebration: Up close and personal

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 13:48:00 +0000

OAKLAND, CA -- The rains poured down on us and the winds howled as we made our way to the Niebyl-Proctor Community Library last Saturday to honor our history.

This year's celebration would be a roundtable discussion of the presidential election and its significance to our future as a people. Like most events, the organizers watched nervously through the windows to see who may be joining us.

In the kitchen, chickens were frying, corn soup was heating up and barbequed organic sausages were simmering in the oven. Oh my Lord, we sure like to cook! Tables were set with our traditional red, black and green colors. Soulful rhythms filled the air and for that moment all was right with the world.

A few people arrived and then the door blew open wide! Like a gust of wind, young people entered with their children and babies in tow. Quite magically in an instant we had the roundtable fully assembled.

The first hour was spent eating and socializing. Then it was time to begin the discussion. Everyone, including children ranging in ages from 11 months to 19, remained at the table. I supposed some of us thought the children might not stay put, but they did.

Lyndsey Ellis, from the We Tell Our Stories Film Collective, chaired the gathering. Her first question: "Who do you like best between Bernie and Hillary and why?"

Amazingly the young children's hands went up first. Lil Antoine - nine years of age - blurted out, "Hillary...because my grandpa likes her and he says she's the best and I believe my grandpa." Then he gave the two thumbs up.

Nineteen year old college student Kwame Lewis also spoke in favor of Hillary. "Hillary has the big support and the big dollars, so I figure she can't be beat. Also she's a woman, and women want their turn in the White House."

However, some of the young adults were of a different mind. They felt that Bernie, out of all of the candidates, spoke to our issues. Toussaint Stewart, who teaches in the public schools, said that Hillary has too much big money baggage. "How can she truly represent us when she is so tied to Wall Street?" He also spoke about her role in the welfare reform act of the 1990s that put poor people, especially women and people of color, off welfare rolls. "This deepened the poverty that already existed."

There were those who were not sure who they would support. Symone Bradley, 13 years of age, articulated her point of view very well. "I believe that people need to do their research about the candidates before they decide. Too many people just listen to the news, but don't read to get the truth about these people and who is behind them. I have not yet decided, and maybe I am guilty of being a little lazy about all of this myself. But what I do believe is that Donald Trump won't have a chance if people do their homework."

Brotha Val Serrant, a world famous steel drum musician, had a different take. He said, "I believe the presidential election is a farce. Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin. We need to focus on the local elections where we can have some impact on what is going on right here in Oakland."

From that point on the discussion got a little heated. Sistah Fischer, a retired educator, and Shannon, a student of Chinese medicine, both spoke passionately about the need for more resources in the black community. The need for good paying union jobs and great schools to prepare our next generation were highlighted. Racial discrimination in hiring also came to the forefront. "Even when more jobs are created, we - black folks - are last to be hired, if hired at all," I said vehemently.

As master of ceremonies, I expounded on the notion by some folks that the vote is a waste: "If our vote is worthless, why are they working overtime to suppress it?"

I underscored the need for us to use the power of the vote along with other organizing tools in our communities: "We have to use the vote, because it can be a deciding factor in electing someone who will stand with us, helping to unleash some of the much needed resources that our communities desperately need."

There was consensus among most in attendance that having Bernie or Hillary become president is our best shot.

At the end of the roundtable discussion, Lil Antoine helped bring the meeting to a close by asking people to give a thumb vote for their favorite candidate. Thumbs up for Hillary, thumbs to the side for Bernie and thumbs down against Trump.

The vote was pretty much split, but for Trump it was all thumbs down!

Photo: Touissant & son Dinari, Antoine & Lil Twan

GOP stopped being the 'party of Lincoln' long before Trump

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 10:17:00 +0000

Last week, House Speaker Paul Ryan denounced Donald Trump for playing footsie with David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, saying Republicans are "the party of Lincoln." The speaker is to be applauded for denouncing Trump's dog whistle racial politics, but he's got his history wrong. Today's Republican Party is a far remove from the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln fought to save the Union, and after the Confederate surrender he moved to reconcile warring states in order "to build a more perfect Union." Lincoln's party introduced and ratified the 13th Amendment, legally ending slavery. Today, 20 percent of Republicans who voted for Donald Trump in South Carolina disapprove of Lincoln's executive order freeing the slaves, according to a YouGov poll, and 70 percent want the Confederate flag to fly over the State House.

The Republican Party in Lincoln's day introduced and ratified the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection under the law. Today's Republican Party - the party that Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are fighting so hard to lead - opposes any steps that actually promote equal protection or fairness. They oppose affirmative action, economic set-asides, and special consideration for programs for the needy. They oppose equal pay for women. They oppose equal rights for the LGBT community.

The Republican Party in Lincoln's day introduced and ratified the 15th Amendment outlawing discrimination in voting on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Today's Republican Party introduced literally hundreds of legislative bills in 49 states after 2011 to enforce new voting restrictions that would disproportionately impact minorities, women, workers, young people, seniors and the disabled. Today's Republican Party praises the conservatives on the Supreme Court who gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, and won't hold hearings or allow a vote on legislation to fix the damage done.

The Republican Party in Lincoln's day built the national railroads, even as the Civil War raged. It created the land grant colleges, helping to open access to millions to higher education. Lincoln constantly called for "internal improvements" and championed the rights of free labor, as opposed to slave labor. Today's Republican Party has systematically favored tax cuts for the rich while slashing investments in areas vital to our future from infrastructure to education.

In Lincoln's day, Democrats were the party of the South, the party of Jefferson Davis, leader of the Confederate revolt. Democrats were slaveholders. Democrats flocked to the Confederacy and opposed the Reconstruction after the Civil War. Democrats became the party of segregation, opposing the civil rights movements. Orville Faubus, Lester Maddox, George Wallace, and Bull Connor were all Democrats.

But after national leaders of the Democratic Party began to support civil rights for African-Americans, blacks began to switch parties. When Lyndon Johnson worked with Dr. King and others to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the War on Poverty, blacks flooded the Democratic Party.

And in 1964, Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. Strom Thurmond led Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party. Richard Nixon's Southern strategy sought to consolidate Republican gains in the South. Ronald Reagan opened his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, infamous for the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, talking about states' rights. The heirs of Jefferson Davis joined the Republican Party en masse. And Democrats became the party of diversity, the heirs to Abraham Lincoln.

Trump's dog whistle racial signaling is not new to today's Republican Party. This is the party that fostered the nonsense about Barack Obama's birth certificate. It is the party that waged a campaign of relentless obstruction to everything Obama proposed as president.

Trump shocks Republicans because he is cruder than most but also because he's revealed their dodge. Republicans have used racial signaling to get those whose jobs are being shipped abroad to embrace the party run by those who are shipping them abroad. It brings together the workers who are being shafted with the billionaires who are getting the gold.

Trump has used the same dog whistle racial signaling, but he has also challenged the lousy trade deals and the big money special interest politics. That has made him a hero to many angry blue-collar Republican voters but anathema to the Republican country club set.

But the reality is inescapable. Today's Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln. It is the party of Jefferson Davis, the Southern-based, increasingly white party of states' rights and racial division.

Rev. Jesse Jackson is the founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. He was a leader in the civil rights movement alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and was twice a candidate for President of the United States.

This article originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times. It is reprinted here with the permission of Rainbow PUSH.

Photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP

Mexico is our neighbor, not the enemy

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 10:23:00 +0000

Presidential campaigns often turn raw. Politicians reach for sound bites that bite. Often they gain by playing on fears, winning by division, not by addition. In 2016, insult has become the coin of the campaign, particularly in the Republican primaries. And too often the enemy singled out has been Mexico and Mexicans.

Mexico has been burlesqued as a source of illegal immigrants, who are slandered as rapists and criminals. Mexico is accused of taking our factories abroad and Mexican immigrants of stealing our jobs at home. Trumpets sound for building a wall across a 2,000-mile border, for deporting millions of Mexicans living in America, for booting out the Dreamers who were born here, and more.

We would be wise to step back and take a deep breath. Mexico isn't our backdoor; it is our next-door neighbor. One hundred million people live in the 10 U.S. and Mexican states along the border region, and taken together these form the equivalent of the fourth largest economy in the world. Our ties with Mexico are deep, our peoples intertwined. They should not be reduced to a sound bite or an insult.

Thirty-four million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans live in the United States; about 22 million were born here. Every day, the U.S. and Mexico exchange $1.4 billion in two-way trade. Mexico is our second largest export market (after Canada). Mexico buys more U.S. goods than all of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and Singapore) combined, nearly as much as the entire EU. Mexico is the third largest supplier of crude oil to the U.S. It is the largest export market for U.S. refined petroleum products and a growing market for our natural gas.

Cooperation between our two great countries is inescapable. We must and do coordinate on transportation, on legal entry points, on international organized crime, on trans-border infectious diseases and trans-border environmental challenges. In recent years, focus has necessarily been placed on criminal activity - the flow of drugs coming north and the flow of guns and contraband cash going south. We are the biggest market for illegal drugs in the world. Our appetites feed the criminal drug rings that threaten entire countries. We have an obligation and a national interest in bolstering enforcement on both sides of the border.

We don't need a wall; we need a bridge. We are neighbors, bound together by geography and by history. Now we hear all these fulminations about undocumented workers. People don't leave their homes on a lark. They flee parched earth for green grass. For too long, we have exploited Mexican workers on both sides of the border. They pick our fruit and vegetables. They clean our houses. They fight and die in our wars, hoping for a green card and a shot at an American dream. Mexicans didn't take our jobs to Mexico; U.S. corporations used NAFTA to take our jobs to Mexico. Mexicans don't seek subminimum wages here. U.S. employers exploit the undocumented to pad their own pockets.

This furious debate about immigration is taking place as illegal immigration has virtually disappeared due to the lack of jobs in the U.S. The biggest flood of immigration came after NAFTA forced family farmers in Mexico to compete with subsidized agribusiness in the U.S. Many lost their lands and their livelihood and came north to survive. We need economic policies that work for working people on both sides of the border, not a policy of division and insult that allows employers to keep exploiting workers in both countries.

America's strength is its diversity. And our security is enhanced by having close relations with our neighbors. American workers have every reason to be angry about an economy that is rigged to work against them and a politics that is corrupted by big money. But our Mexican neighbors didn't do that, and building a wall won't change it. The politics of insult ends up insulting us.

This article originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times. It is reprinted here with the permission of Rainbow PUSH.

Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP