The revolution at home:Dispatch from the Madison front
By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2011
MADISON, Wisconsin -- My wife Kathie and I have been to the Capitol square in Madison, sometimes inside, sometimes outside the Capitol building, most days since February 13 when the demonstrations began. It’s been cold, often snowy, usually with a wind chill of 20 degrees or less. Pretty uncomfortable. And they’ve been some of the best days of our lives.
We are proud of Wisconsin. We have new hope (dare we hope so much?) for America. According to Michael Moore , everyone is a Wisconsinite now. Welcome! Badgers of the world, unite!
Background to protest
Scott Walker provoked the demonstrations Friday, February 11, when he tabled his 144-page “Budget Repair Bill” and insisted it be passed the following week without significant alteration. The first thing that leapt out of the bill was its frontal assault on Wisconsin’s public service unions: the bill would eviscerate the unions and effectively eliminate the collective bargaining process.
Quickly it became apparent that there were many other right-wing dreams buried in the bill that would be instantly made law.
SB11 attacked public-sector pensions and health care (resulting in public service pay reductions of 8-10%); provided authority for the Walker administration (without further legislative consideration) to sell off public owned power plants on no-bid contracts; and it separated the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the State of Wisconsin University System.
There were many other far-reaching provisions as well, together with ominous undertones foretelling drastic cuts that would be included in the biennial budget still to come: cuts to local schools and services, and to Wisconsin’s very successful Medicare initiative (Badger Care). Many suspected that Wisconsin’s huge and fully-funded public service pension fund would soon have crosshairs on it.
Understanding spread that, first, most of the provisions had little or nothing to do with “repairing” the present-year budget; and, second, all were part of a national right-wing agenda best articulated by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and funded by billionaires such as the Koch brothers. (The latter, Charles and David, were heavy funders of Walker’s election campaign, and they had just opened a lobbying firm a block away from the Wisconsin Capitol.)
As all of this came out, the Budget Repair Bill seemed radical to the core in turning back Wisconsin’s progressive traditions and in transferring important legislative powers to the Governor’s administration.
Walker threw a match into this pail of gasoline by preemptively remarking that if there were worker trouble he would call out the state’s National Guard.
In the state Assembly, the Republican majority was strong enough to pass the bill without a single Democratic vote, or even the presence of a single Democrat. But in the Senate, while Republicans held a 19 to 14 advantage, at least one Democrat had to be in the chamber to count toward quorum to legally pass the bill.
The Democrats made themselves scarce. The Republican leader of the Senate instructed his father (since Walker’s election, the head of the State Patrol) to bring them in. Suddenly, on Thursday, February 17, all heard the news: the 14 Democratic Senators were safely out-of-state, in Illinois. The bill could not be passed.
Meanwhile, demonstrations had begun. They started small with a few of Madison’s “usual suspects” (people like myself) and members of the UW-Madison’s Teaching Assistants’ Association. But in a day or so protesters numbered in the thousands: unprecedented in recent history.
The numbers grew exponentially as understanding of the bill’s implications sank in. Teachers caught a collective cold; the schools had to close; high school students marched down in phalanxes to join the crowds. University students were there en masse, and parents brought their children. The Capitol’s marble rotunda became a gigantic resonator for the opposition: packed on three levels, festooned with signs, reverberating with drums and chants: “Walker is a weasel, not a badger!” “What’s disgusting? Union busting!” “Kill the Bill!”
And among the teachers, the parents, the school children, the university students, the retirees and other townspeople were: the unions! The unions really got it from day one: they knew that this battle had the significance of the 1981 air controller’s strike: a last ditch struggle to hold on to the remnants of our trade union movement (and with it, much of the progressive achievement of the twentieth century).
The unions knew this was not a local issue, not a Wisconsin-only issue, and not a budget issue. (Early on, the public service unions indicated they would agree to the salary cuts -- for health and pension payments -- that the Budget Repair bill demanded; they thus took the genuine deficit-reduction issues off the table.)
Walker had cunningly tried to separate the police and fire fighter unions from the rest by exempting them from the bill’s provisions. What a great moment it was (we were there, and up front) when a long line of fire fighters, many in uniform, carrying solidarity placards, marched in a file through the crowd which cheered them ecstatically. And this happened over and over again: fire fighters, police, prison workers condemned the anti-union provisions.
Taken in by a prankster, Walker said to a caller he thought to be David Koch that the demonstrations were dying down and consisted mainly of out-of-staters. (See the complete transcript of the call.)
He wished! The demonstrations were only getting going!
The joy of protest
What does it look and feel like? First, really huge crowds. Thursday, the 17th, when the 14 Senators fled, the crowd is 25,000. The next day, 40,000. On Saturday, 68,000. The following Saturday, more than 70,000. (This despite the constantly below-freezing temperatures). The wide streets that make the square around the Capitol are packed all the way around. The crowd moves slowly, drumming, chanting, waving signs. The procession moves (wouldn’t you know it!) in a leftward direction.
There are some pre-printed signs, mainly from the many (more than 60) unions that are participating. They predominated on the first day or so, but quickly were swamped by thousands of wonderful, whimsical hand-made signs. Each communicates its maker’s own sense of the essence of the problem or the solution.
Humor is adopted as a weapon by many. Plays are made on the name of Scott Walker’s corporate backers, the Koch brothers (the funders of Americans For Prosperity, which already is taking out ads and organizing bus tours to support Walker).
“Scottie, kick your Koch habit.” Or, referring to the infamous 20 minute phone conversation with “David Koch:” “Scott: Koch dealer on 2.”
Many, a little ribald for these pages, play on the Koch brothers’ name mispronounced. Many other signs, always greatly appreciated by the crowd, proclaim: “I voted for Walker. And am I sorry.” You see the figure “14” everywhere: “14 Heroes!” Or just “14.” We all know who they are.
By the time of Saturday’s big demonstration on March 5 (when Michael Moore spoke) the variety of hand-made signs has come to seem infinite. Even dogs are displaying signs, on the order of “I smell a weasel!” or “Bad Scottie! Bad! Bad!”
Inside and out, music and drumming has a spontaneous character. Many of the drums are plastic drywall tubs, sometimes with a tin can inside to impart a ring. We also saw pans, cow bells, snare drums, African drums, even a ukulele. South African vuvuzelas blare discordantly.
Here and there, inside and out, speeches are being given. Most loudspeaker systems are minimalist, hand-held. Some speakers (or, shouters) use only old-fashioned unamplified megaphones (probably made at the kitchen table an hour ago).
Amid the drumming and the chanting in the Capitol, most speeches can’t be heard by most people. But that doesn’t stop us from cheering and applauding. We feel sure the speech was right on, saying just what we think!
Getting warm In Madison (I don’t mean the weather)
Monday, February 28, a new stage was reached. The Capitol reverberated throughout with the people’s voices. Governor Walker would present his budget on Tuesday evening. How could the television-watching public be allowed to see and hear the tens of thousands of citizens that would be outside the chamber?
Solution: close the Capitol to the public. He did. That added more fuel to the fire. The Dane County sheriff withdrew his men and women from the job of closing the entrances, making the unhelpful statement: “My deputies are not a palace guard.”
The Capitol police, assigned the job of clearing the rotunda of the tens, sometimes hundreds, of protesters who had camped there for two weeks, declined to do so, saying the protest had been remarkably peaceful, safe and respectful, and they saw no necessity of arresting and dragging out the campers.
A Dane County judge decided it was not legal to close the building to the public. He issued an injunction against the closure. This was overruled (not legally, of course) as Walker’s Department of Administration simply announced they were in compliance, but then did not open the building.
Some remarkable scenes ensued. Senator Glenn Grothman, a Tea Party Republican, left the Capitol for some reason and for some time could not get back in. He knocked on a window to attract the attention of his staff inside, and they assumed he was a demonstrator and ignored him. Meanwhile the crowd walked with him, wherever he went, and shouted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” (This was the refrain of the Democrats in the Assembly after the Budget Repair Bill there was passed -- or “passed” -- in a surprise vote at 1 a.m.
Finally, Grothman was rescued by a Democratic Assembly member who came out, calmed the crowd, and brought him back into the building. Afterwards, somewhat strangely, Grothman referred to the “slobs” who had “attacked” him, even though the crowd is dressed in pure Wisconsin and is almost embarrassingly middle class in character.
A Democratic Assembly member meanwhile was denied entrance to the Capitol completely; she had her official ID card but insisted it should not be required for her, as a Wisconsin citizen, to enter. Another Democratic Assembly member was tackled and taken to the floor by police (on video), even though he WAS showing his state ID card.
By the end of the week the Department of Administration had to retreat from their manifestly not-legal closure of the building. They then imposed a “security” system so elaborate as to make entrance an onerous, hour-long job. By Saturday March 5, this too was backed away from as a much more reasonable security check was administered by friendly police officers.
The Republican Senate then passed a resolution defining the absent 14 as in contempt, and ordering their arrest. But police spokesmen indicated they would not attempt to arrest them.
Still one more Walker initiative did not work out well. Probably feeding into Tea Party stereotypes involving long-haired, bad-smelling “radicals,” his administration announced that it would cost $7.5 million dollars to remove tape and repair other damage done to the beautiful Capitol building interior during the occupation.
Alas for Walker, both the painters union and an expert in landmark building preservation surveyed the building and reported that damages were slight to non-existent.
Finally, a Fox TV interview show about Madison by Bill O’Reilly cut in footage showing “unruly” (read dangerous Communist?) protesters. Unfortunately, in the scenes shown there was no snow, trees were leafed out, and palm trees could be seen. Oops: not Madison! (Ever since this report, some protesters have carried plastic palm trees.)
Beginning of a movement (or not?)
Where are we now? On Saturday, March 6, it is clear from speeches and conversations that most people feel that we are winning. Whistling in the graveyard? We can’t know for sure. But things seem to be swinging our way.
Walker was forced to present his biennial budget before getting the special powers provided in the Budget Repair Bill. Now, throughout Wisconsin communities are realizing the extent of the hit they are about to take, especially to their schools. Teachers all over Wisconsin are already getting layoff notices.
“Luxuries” like school athletic programs may have to go. Ambulance service may be cut. Smaller towns’ personnel budgets typically are about half police and firefighters and they are exempt from the anti-collective bargaining provisions (even if Walker gets them). Most communities already have multi-year contracts with their public workers anyway.
Demonstrations are beginning in the small towns. The polls make very bad reading for Republicans. Stay tuned.
My wife and I are old enough to remember the anti-Vietnam protests of the 60s. How does this compare? Larger, we would say, and happier. The participants are passionate about the issues: the attack on workers' rights to collective bargaining and on their pensions and health care; cutting Medicaid eligibility and funding; pushing a state deficit down to the local level; and pushing the deficits born mainly of tax concessions to the rich and the corporations onto the schools and the young.
But also, humor seems to bubble through it all, and there is an enormous sense of fellowship. The police have mainly been wonderful (that’s a contrast!). The crowds are a complete cross-section of Wisconsin’s working (or studying) population, and all ages are participating.
Everyone admits that, while they are campaigning seriously for the old Wisconsin (good schools, good government, clean government, union rights, democracy), they are also having the best time that they’ve had in a long time. Emma Goldman would have loved it.
Is this the beginning of a nationwide mobilization of the center and the left against right-wing extremism? All here in Madison hope so. We’ll have to wait to see. In the meantime, we feel that our protest here is, indeed, exactly “what democracy looks like!”
[Dr. Paul Beckett lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at beckettpa@gmail.com.]
Friday, March 11, 2011
From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On German Bonapartism
Leon Trotsky
German Bonapartism
(October 1932)
Written in exile in Turkey, October 30 1932.
Bulletin of the Opposition, No.32, December 1932.
Translated for The Militant, December 24, 1932.
The elections to the Reichstag put the “presidential government to a new critical test.” [1] It is useful, therefore, to remind ourselves of its social and political nature. It is precisely through the analysis of such concrete and, at first glance, “sudden” political phenomena as the government of Papen-Schleicher, that the Marxist method reveals its invaluable advantages.
At one time we defined the “presidential” government as a species of Bonapartism. It would be incorrect to see in this definition the chance outcome of a desire to find a familiar name for an unfamiliar phenomenon. The decline of capitalist society places Bonapartism – side by side with fascism and coupled with it – again on the order of the day. Previously we have characterized the government of Brüning as a Bonapartist one. Then, in retrospect, we narrowed the definition to a half, or pre-Bonapartist one.
What did other Communists and in general “left” groups say in this connection? To await an attempt at a scientific definition of a new political phenomenon from the present leadership of the Comintern would of course be naive, not to say foolish. The Stalinists simply place Papen in the fascist camp. If Wels and Hitler are “twins,” then such a trifle as Papen is altogether not worth breaking one’s head about. This is the same political literature that Marx called vulgarian and which he taught us to despise. In reality fascism represents one of the two main camps of civil war. Stretching his arm to power, Hitler first of all demanded the relinquishing of the street to him for seventy-two hours. Hindenburg refused this. The task of Papen-Schleicher: to avoid civil war by amicably disciplining the National Socialists and chaining the proletariat to police fetters. The very possibility of such a regime is determined by the relative weakness of the proletariat
The SAP rids itself of the question of the Papen government as well as of other questions by means of general phrases. The Brandlerites preserved silence on our definition as long as the matter concerned Brüning, that is, the incubation period of Bonapartism. When, however, the Marxist characterization of Bonapartism confirmed itself fully in the theory and practice of the presidential government the Brandlerites came out with their criticism: the wise owl of Thalheimer takes flight in the late hours of the night.
The Stuttgart Arbeitertribüne teaches us that Bonapartism, raising the military-police apparatus over the bourgeoisie in order to defend its class domination against its own political parties, must be supported by the peasantry and must use methods of Social Democracy. Papen is not supported by the peasantry and does not introduce a pseudo-radical program. Therefore, our attempt to define the government of Papen as Bonapartism “does not fit at all.” This is severe but superficial.
How do the Brandlerites themselves define the government of Papen? In the same issue of the Arbeitertribüne there are very timely announcements of the lecture of Brandler on the subject: Junker-monarchical, fascist or proletarian dictatorship? In this triad the regime of Papen is presented as a Junker-monarchist dictatorship. This is most worthy of the Vorwärts and of vulgar democrats in general. That titled German Bonapartists make some sort of little private presents to the Junkers is obvious. That these gentlemen are inclined to a monarchistic turn of mind is also known. But it is purest liberal nonsense that the essence of the presidential regime is Junker monarchism.
Such terms as liberalism, Bonapartism, fascism have the character of generalizations. Historical phenomena never repeat themselves completely. It would not have been difficult to prove that even the government of Napoleon III, compared with the regime of Napoleon I, was not “Bonapartist” – not only because Napoleon himself was a doubtful Bonaparte by blood, but also because his relations to the classes, especially to the peasantry and to the lumpenproletariat were not at all the same as those of Napoleon I. Moreover, classical Bonapartism grew out of the epoch of gigantic war victories, which the Second Empire [2] did not know at all. But if we should look for the repetition of all the traits of Bonapartism, we will find that Bonapartism is a one-time, unique occurrence, i.e., that Bonapartism in general does not exist but that there once was a general named Bonaparte born in Corsica. The case is no different with liberalism and with all other generalized terms of history. When one speaks by analogy of Bonapartism, it is necessary to state precisely which of its traits found their fullest expression under present historical conditions.
Present-day German Bonapartism has a very complex and, so to speak, combined character. The government of Papen would have been impossible without fascism. But fascism is not in power. And the government of Papen is not fascism. On the other hand, the government of Papen, at any rate in its present form, would have been impossible without Hindenburg who, in spite of the final prostration of Germany in the war, stands for the great victories of Germany and symbolizes the army in the memory of the popular masses. The second election of Hindenburg had all the characteristics of a plebiscite. Many millions of workers, petty bourgeois, and peasants (Social Democracy and Center) voted for Hindenburg. They did not see in him any one political program. They wanted first of all to avoid civil war, and raised Hindenburg on their shoulders as a superarbiter, as an arbitration judge of the nation. But precisely this is the most important function of Bonapartism: raising itself over the two struggling camps in order to preserve property and order. It suppresses civil war, or precedes it or does not allow it to rekindle. Speaking of Papen, we cannot forget Hindenburg, on whom rests the sanction of the Social Democracy. The combined character of German Bonapartism expressed itself in the fact that the demagogic work of catching the masses for Hindenburg was performed by two big, independent parties: the Social Democracy and National Socialism. If they are both astonished at the results of their work, that does not change the matter one whit.
The Social Democracy asserts that fascism is the product of Communism. This is correct insofar as there would have been no necessity at all for fascism without the sharpening of the class struggle, without the revolutionary proletariat without the crisis of capitalist society. The flunkeyish theory of Wels-Hilferding-Otto Bauer has no other meaning. Yes, fascism is a reaction of bourgeois society to the threat of proletarian revolution. But precisely because this threat is not an imminent one today, the ruling classes make an attempt to get along without a civil war through the medium of a Bonapartist dictatorship.
Objecting to our characterization of the government of Hindenburg-Papen-Schleicher, the Brandlerites refer to Marx and express thereby an ironic hope that his authority may also have weight with us. It is difficult to deceive oneself more pathetically. The fact is that Marx and Engels wrote not only of the Bonapartism of the two Bonapartes, but also of other species. Beginning, it seems, with the year 1864, they more than once likened the “national” regime of Bismarck to French Bonapartism. And this in spite of the fact that Bismarck was not a pseudoradical demagogue and, so far as we know, was not supported by the peasantry. The Iron Chancellor was not raised to power as the result of a plebiscite, but was duly appointed by his legitimate and hereditary king. And nevertheless Marx and Engels are right. Bismarck made use in a Bonapartist fashion of the antagonism between the propertied classes and the rising proletariat overcoming in this way the antagonism within the two propertied classes, between the Junkerdom and the bourgeoisie, and raised a military-police apparatus over the nation. The policy of Bismarck is that very tradition to which the “theoreticians” of present German Bonapartism refer. True, Bismarck solved in his fashion the problem of German unity, of the external greatness of Germany. Papen however so far only promises to obtain for Germany “equality” on the international arena. Not a small difference! But we were not trying to prove that the Bonapartism of Papen is of the same caliber as the Bonapartism of Bismarck. Napoleon III was also only a parody of his pretended uncle.
The reference to Marx, as we have seen, has an obviously imprudent character. That Thalheimer does not understand the dialectics of Marxism we suspected long ago. But we must admit we thought that at least he knew the texts of Marx and Engels. We take this opportunity to correct our mistake.
Our characterization of the presidential government rejected by the Brandlerites, received a very brilliant confirmation from a completely unexpected and in its way highly “authoritative source. With regard to the dissolution of the “five-day” Reichstag, DAZ (Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, organ of heavy industry) quoted in a long article on August 28 the work of Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – for what purpose? No more and no less than to support the historical and political right of the president to put his boot on the neck of popular representation. The organ of heavy industry risked at a difficult moment drinking from the poisoned wells of Marxism. With a remarkable adroitness the paper takes from the immortal pamphlet a long quotation explaining how and why the French president as the incarnation of the ”nation” obtained a preponderance over the split-up parliament. The same article in the DAZ reminds us most opportunely of how in the spring of 1890 Bismarck developed a plan for a most suitable governmental change. Napoleon III and Bismarck as forerunners of presidential government are called by their right name by the Berlin newspaper, which – in August at least – played the role of an official organ.
To quote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in reference to the “July 20 of Papen” is of course very risky, since Marx characterized the regime of Napoleon in the most acid terms as the regime of adventurists, crooks, and pimps. As a matter of fact, the DAZ could be liable to punishment for a malicious slander of the government. But if we should leave aside this incidental inconvenience, there remains nevertheless the indubitable fact that historic instinct brought the DAZ to the proper place. Unfortunately one cannot say the same of the theoretical wisdom of Thalheimer.
The Bonapartism of the era of the decline of capitalism differs utterly from the Bonapartism of the era of the ascension of bourgeois society. German Bonapartism is not supported directly by the petty bourgeoisie of the country and village, and this is not accidental. Precisely therefore, we wrote at one time of the weakness of the government of Papen, which holds on only by the neutralization of two camps: the proletariat and the fascists.
But behind Papen stand the great landowners, finance capitalists, generals – so rejoin other “Marxists.” Do not the propertied classes in themselves represent a great force? This argument proves once more that it is much easier to understand class relations in their general sociological outline than in a concrete historical form. Yes, immediately behind Papen stand the propertied heights and they only: precisely therein is contained the cause of his weakness.
Under the conditions of present-day capitalism, a government which would not be the agency of finance capital is in general impossible. But of all possible agencies, the government of Papen is the least stable one. If the ruling classes could rule directly, they would have no need either of parliamentarism, or of Social Democracy, or of fascism. The government of Papen exposes finance capital too clearly, leaving it without even the sacred figleaf ordered by the Prussian Commissioner Bracht. Just because the extra-party “national” government is in fact able to speak only in the name of the social heights, capital is ever more careful not to identify itself with the government of Papen. The DAZ wants to find support for the presidential government in the National Socialist masses, and in the language of ultimatums demands of Papen a bloc with Hitler, which means capitulation to him.
In evaluating the “strength” of the presidential government we must not forget the fact that if finance capital stands behind Papen, this does not at all mean that it falls together with him. Finance capital has innumerably more possibilities than Hindenburg-Papen-Schleicher. In case of the sharpening of contradictions there remains the reserve of pure fascism. In case of the softening of contradictions, they will maneuver until the time when the proletariat puts its knee on their chests. For how long Papen will maneuver, the near future will show.
These lines will appear in the press when the new elections to the Reichstag shall already have gone by. The Bonapartist nature of the “anti-French” government of Papen will inevitably reveal itself with a new force, but also its weakness. We will take this up again in due time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
German Bonapartism
(October 1932)
Written in exile in Turkey, October 30 1932.
Bulletin of the Opposition, No.32, December 1932.
Translated for The Militant, December 24, 1932.
The elections to the Reichstag put the “presidential government to a new critical test.” [1] It is useful, therefore, to remind ourselves of its social and political nature. It is precisely through the analysis of such concrete and, at first glance, “sudden” political phenomena as the government of Papen-Schleicher, that the Marxist method reveals its invaluable advantages.
At one time we defined the “presidential” government as a species of Bonapartism. It would be incorrect to see in this definition the chance outcome of a desire to find a familiar name for an unfamiliar phenomenon. The decline of capitalist society places Bonapartism – side by side with fascism and coupled with it – again on the order of the day. Previously we have characterized the government of Brüning as a Bonapartist one. Then, in retrospect, we narrowed the definition to a half, or pre-Bonapartist one.
What did other Communists and in general “left” groups say in this connection? To await an attempt at a scientific definition of a new political phenomenon from the present leadership of the Comintern would of course be naive, not to say foolish. The Stalinists simply place Papen in the fascist camp. If Wels and Hitler are “twins,” then such a trifle as Papen is altogether not worth breaking one’s head about. This is the same political literature that Marx called vulgarian and which he taught us to despise. In reality fascism represents one of the two main camps of civil war. Stretching his arm to power, Hitler first of all demanded the relinquishing of the street to him for seventy-two hours. Hindenburg refused this. The task of Papen-Schleicher: to avoid civil war by amicably disciplining the National Socialists and chaining the proletariat to police fetters. The very possibility of such a regime is determined by the relative weakness of the proletariat
The SAP rids itself of the question of the Papen government as well as of other questions by means of general phrases. The Brandlerites preserved silence on our definition as long as the matter concerned Brüning, that is, the incubation period of Bonapartism. When, however, the Marxist characterization of Bonapartism confirmed itself fully in the theory and practice of the presidential government the Brandlerites came out with their criticism: the wise owl of Thalheimer takes flight in the late hours of the night.
The Stuttgart Arbeitertribüne teaches us that Bonapartism, raising the military-police apparatus over the bourgeoisie in order to defend its class domination against its own political parties, must be supported by the peasantry and must use methods of Social Democracy. Papen is not supported by the peasantry and does not introduce a pseudo-radical program. Therefore, our attempt to define the government of Papen as Bonapartism “does not fit at all.” This is severe but superficial.
How do the Brandlerites themselves define the government of Papen? In the same issue of the Arbeitertribüne there are very timely announcements of the lecture of Brandler on the subject: Junker-monarchical, fascist or proletarian dictatorship? In this triad the regime of Papen is presented as a Junker-monarchist dictatorship. This is most worthy of the Vorwärts and of vulgar democrats in general. That titled German Bonapartists make some sort of little private presents to the Junkers is obvious. That these gentlemen are inclined to a monarchistic turn of mind is also known. But it is purest liberal nonsense that the essence of the presidential regime is Junker monarchism.
Such terms as liberalism, Bonapartism, fascism have the character of generalizations. Historical phenomena never repeat themselves completely. It would not have been difficult to prove that even the government of Napoleon III, compared with the regime of Napoleon I, was not “Bonapartist” – not only because Napoleon himself was a doubtful Bonaparte by blood, but also because his relations to the classes, especially to the peasantry and to the lumpenproletariat were not at all the same as those of Napoleon I. Moreover, classical Bonapartism grew out of the epoch of gigantic war victories, which the Second Empire [2] did not know at all. But if we should look for the repetition of all the traits of Bonapartism, we will find that Bonapartism is a one-time, unique occurrence, i.e., that Bonapartism in general does not exist but that there once was a general named Bonaparte born in Corsica. The case is no different with liberalism and with all other generalized terms of history. When one speaks by analogy of Bonapartism, it is necessary to state precisely which of its traits found their fullest expression under present historical conditions.
Present-day German Bonapartism has a very complex and, so to speak, combined character. The government of Papen would have been impossible without fascism. But fascism is not in power. And the government of Papen is not fascism. On the other hand, the government of Papen, at any rate in its present form, would have been impossible without Hindenburg who, in spite of the final prostration of Germany in the war, stands for the great victories of Germany and symbolizes the army in the memory of the popular masses. The second election of Hindenburg had all the characteristics of a plebiscite. Many millions of workers, petty bourgeois, and peasants (Social Democracy and Center) voted for Hindenburg. They did not see in him any one political program. They wanted first of all to avoid civil war, and raised Hindenburg on their shoulders as a superarbiter, as an arbitration judge of the nation. But precisely this is the most important function of Bonapartism: raising itself over the two struggling camps in order to preserve property and order. It suppresses civil war, or precedes it or does not allow it to rekindle. Speaking of Papen, we cannot forget Hindenburg, on whom rests the sanction of the Social Democracy. The combined character of German Bonapartism expressed itself in the fact that the demagogic work of catching the masses for Hindenburg was performed by two big, independent parties: the Social Democracy and National Socialism. If they are both astonished at the results of their work, that does not change the matter one whit.
The Social Democracy asserts that fascism is the product of Communism. This is correct insofar as there would have been no necessity at all for fascism without the sharpening of the class struggle, without the revolutionary proletariat without the crisis of capitalist society. The flunkeyish theory of Wels-Hilferding-Otto Bauer has no other meaning. Yes, fascism is a reaction of bourgeois society to the threat of proletarian revolution. But precisely because this threat is not an imminent one today, the ruling classes make an attempt to get along without a civil war through the medium of a Bonapartist dictatorship.
Objecting to our characterization of the government of Hindenburg-Papen-Schleicher, the Brandlerites refer to Marx and express thereby an ironic hope that his authority may also have weight with us. It is difficult to deceive oneself more pathetically. The fact is that Marx and Engels wrote not only of the Bonapartism of the two Bonapartes, but also of other species. Beginning, it seems, with the year 1864, they more than once likened the “national” regime of Bismarck to French Bonapartism. And this in spite of the fact that Bismarck was not a pseudoradical demagogue and, so far as we know, was not supported by the peasantry. The Iron Chancellor was not raised to power as the result of a plebiscite, but was duly appointed by his legitimate and hereditary king. And nevertheless Marx and Engels are right. Bismarck made use in a Bonapartist fashion of the antagonism between the propertied classes and the rising proletariat overcoming in this way the antagonism within the two propertied classes, between the Junkerdom and the bourgeoisie, and raised a military-police apparatus over the nation. The policy of Bismarck is that very tradition to which the “theoreticians” of present German Bonapartism refer. True, Bismarck solved in his fashion the problem of German unity, of the external greatness of Germany. Papen however so far only promises to obtain for Germany “equality” on the international arena. Not a small difference! But we were not trying to prove that the Bonapartism of Papen is of the same caliber as the Bonapartism of Bismarck. Napoleon III was also only a parody of his pretended uncle.
The reference to Marx, as we have seen, has an obviously imprudent character. That Thalheimer does not understand the dialectics of Marxism we suspected long ago. But we must admit we thought that at least he knew the texts of Marx and Engels. We take this opportunity to correct our mistake.
Our characterization of the presidential government rejected by the Brandlerites, received a very brilliant confirmation from a completely unexpected and in its way highly “authoritative source. With regard to the dissolution of the “five-day” Reichstag, DAZ (Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, organ of heavy industry) quoted in a long article on August 28 the work of Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – for what purpose? No more and no less than to support the historical and political right of the president to put his boot on the neck of popular representation. The organ of heavy industry risked at a difficult moment drinking from the poisoned wells of Marxism. With a remarkable adroitness the paper takes from the immortal pamphlet a long quotation explaining how and why the French president as the incarnation of the ”nation” obtained a preponderance over the split-up parliament. The same article in the DAZ reminds us most opportunely of how in the spring of 1890 Bismarck developed a plan for a most suitable governmental change. Napoleon III and Bismarck as forerunners of presidential government are called by their right name by the Berlin newspaper, which – in August at least – played the role of an official organ.
To quote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in reference to the “July 20 of Papen” is of course very risky, since Marx characterized the regime of Napoleon in the most acid terms as the regime of adventurists, crooks, and pimps. As a matter of fact, the DAZ could be liable to punishment for a malicious slander of the government. But if we should leave aside this incidental inconvenience, there remains nevertheless the indubitable fact that historic instinct brought the DAZ to the proper place. Unfortunately one cannot say the same of the theoretical wisdom of Thalheimer.
The Bonapartism of the era of the decline of capitalism differs utterly from the Bonapartism of the era of the ascension of bourgeois society. German Bonapartism is not supported directly by the petty bourgeoisie of the country and village, and this is not accidental. Precisely therefore, we wrote at one time of the weakness of the government of Papen, which holds on only by the neutralization of two camps: the proletariat and the fascists.
But behind Papen stand the great landowners, finance capitalists, generals – so rejoin other “Marxists.” Do not the propertied classes in themselves represent a great force? This argument proves once more that it is much easier to understand class relations in their general sociological outline than in a concrete historical form. Yes, immediately behind Papen stand the propertied heights and they only: precisely therein is contained the cause of his weakness.
Under the conditions of present-day capitalism, a government which would not be the agency of finance capital is in general impossible. But of all possible agencies, the government of Papen is the least stable one. If the ruling classes could rule directly, they would have no need either of parliamentarism, or of Social Democracy, or of fascism. The government of Papen exposes finance capital too clearly, leaving it without even the sacred figleaf ordered by the Prussian Commissioner Bracht. Just because the extra-party “national” government is in fact able to speak only in the name of the social heights, capital is ever more careful not to identify itself with the government of Papen. The DAZ wants to find support for the presidential government in the National Socialist masses, and in the language of ultimatums demands of Papen a bloc with Hitler, which means capitulation to him.
In evaluating the “strength” of the presidential government we must not forget the fact that if finance capital stands behind Papen, this does not at all mean that it falls together with him. Finance capital has innumerably more possibilities than Hindenburg-Papen-Schleicher. In case of the sharpening of contradictions there remains the reserve of pure fascism. In case of the softening of contradictions, they will maneuver until the time when the proletariat puts its knee on their chests. For how long Papen will maneuver, the near future will show.
These lines will appear in the press when the new elections to the Reichstag shall already have gone by. The Bonapartist nature of the “anti-French” government of Papen will inevitably reveal itself with a new force, but also its weakness. We will take this up again in due time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From The Rag Blog-Barbara Deming and David McReynolds were 'out' pioneers of the left.
A Saving Remnant:
Two lives of courage and commitment
Barbara Deming and David McReynolds were 'out' pioneers of the left.
By Doug Ireland / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2011
[A SAVING REMNANT: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds, by Martin Duberman (The New Press, March 1, 2011); Hardcover; 298 pp; $27.95.]
Martin Duberman, known as “the father of gay studies,” is a distinguished historian, playwright, essayist, novelist, and public intellectual, and any new book by him is an event in queer culture to which attention must be paid.
Such is certainly the case with A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds, an unusual dual biography by Duberman just published by the New Press.
Duberman is a distinguished professor of history emeritus at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where three decades ago he founded the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), the first such program in any American university, much emulated since. Duberman’s long struggle to establish that center is recounted in his third volume of memoirs, Waiting to Land, published two years ago (see this reporter’s October 15, 2009 review, “Queer Studies’ Essential Man.”)
Duberman first established his reputation as a historian with his groundbreaking work on the 19th-century anti-slavery movement, and later produced stunning biographies of Paul Robeson and Lincoln Kirstein, among others, a body of work that won him the recognition of his peers, who awarded him the American Historical Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Scholarship.
Duberman was already well-known as an important public intellectual whose essays and articles engaged with “the passion and action of our time” (to borrow Oliver Wendell Holmes’ formulation), and as a prize-winning historian and playwright, when he became the first major intellectual of premier rank to come out and join the gay liberation movement in the early 1970s. As an activist, he went on to help found the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and, later, Queers for Economic Justice.
With his new book, “A Saving Remnant,” Duberman returns to the preoccupation with social movements that has been at the heart of much of his work. And in choosing to recount the lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds [a contributor to The Rag Blog], Duberman has picked two openly queer Americans who devoted their lives to the struggles for peace and social justice.
David McReynolds addresses a gathering of the War Resisters League, where, on the recommendation of Bayard Rustin, he worked late in his career, until his retirement in 1999. Photo from The New Press / Gay City News.
Nothing in their family backgrounds destined either Deming or McReynolds to become political radicals. Deming, a novelist, short story writer, and poet who was born in 1917 and died in 1984, was raised in Manhattan by upper-middle class parents with “traditional habits and opinions.” But at 16, she fell in love with her mother’s best friend (Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister Norma) and boldly wrote in her journal, “I am a lesbian. I must face it.”
Thereafter, she refused to conceal her sexual orientation. After graduation from Bennington, Deming moved to Greenwich Village, worked at Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater, and had a brief affair with Lotte Lenya, the Austrian actress-singer who was married to composer Kurt Weill.
McReynolds, born in 1929 and still going strong today, was raised in Los Angeles as a devout Baptist by conservative Republican parents. But while in high school he read muckraker Lincoln Steffens’ autobiography and underwent a political conversion. McReynolds had his first homosexual experience in grammar school, and when he was 19 came out to his parents.
Although he had some guilt about his “deviance,” that vanished when he was a student at UCLA after an encounter in a notorious “queer bathroom” on campus with a young Alvin Ailey, not yet famous as a dancer and choreographer.
“Alvin’s guilt-free attitude toward homosexuality became a model for David (‘I came home walking on a cloud’) and the two became good friends, though never lovers,” Duberman recounts.
By this time, 1951, McReynolds had become deeply involved with the Socialist Party. Founded in 1901 under the leadership of labor leader Eugene Victor Debs, the party reached its peak of influence in 1912, when, with Debs as its presidential candidate, it won 6 percent of the vote; had 100 elected public officials, including several members of Congress; and a press with a readership in the millions.
But the party’s principled pacifism during World Wars I and II brought it government persecution and decimated its membership, and by the early ’50s the party, for decades led by Norman Thomas, was a shadow of its former self.
As a well-known, “outspoken and magnetic” campus radical “on the non-Communist side,” the handsome young McReynolds became a leader of the Socialists’ left wing, all while being open about his homosexuality with his party comrades in its somewhat Bohemian LA local, but “never taking any flack for it.”
McReynolds, already a committed pacifist, risked prison when he refused induction into the army for the Korean War, and it was then that he met Bayard Rustin, the field director of the principal pacifist organization, the War Resisters League, later famous as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington under Martin Luther King’s leadership.
At the time of their meeting, Rustin had just been arrested on a “morals charge” for a homosexual encounter, and a long talk with Rustin about homosexuality helped further diminish any of McReynolds’ residual guilt feelings about his own same-sex orientation.
It is difficult to overstate the enormous courage and personal integrity required of Deming and McReynolds to be openly queer at a time in America when homosexuality was illegal, and homosexuals were condemned to barbaric tortures to “cure” them by medicine and loathed as degenerate outcasts by most of society.
This was especially true in the 1950s at the height of the McCarthyite witch-hunts, when government was purging both left-wingers and homosexuals from its ranks and those of academia and the labor movement, and when homosexuality was frequently identified with Communism in the dominant rhetoric of the red-baiters.
In 1955, McReynolds was fired from his job on account of being a “political security risk” and decided to move to New York where, with help from Rustin, he obtained a series of “movement” jobs (including a stint with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, where he was the only white person in its Harlem headquarters) before joining Rustin on the staff of the War Resisters League, where he remained until his retirement in 1999.
Deming, while essentially liberal, had remained rather apolitical until the late ’50s, when on a trip to India she steeped herself in Gandhi’s writings and became a convert to his theory of nonviolence as the path to peace and change, eventually emerging as a leader of A.J. Muste’s Committee for NonViolent Action.
It was on her return to the U.S. from revolutionary Cuba that Deming began to put her body on the line and got arrested in a never-ending series of non-violent direct action struggles, both in the movement for black civil rights -- she spent several harrowing months in jail in Albany, Georgia -- and in the budding movement against nuclear weapons and for peace and disarmament.
As she later wrote of these militant actions, they “reverberated deeply a so-called ‘apolitical’ struggle I’d been waging on my own, in a lonely way up until then, as a woman and a lesbian: the struggle to claim my life as my own.”
Barbara Deming (holding flowers) at the 1983 Seneca Women's Encampment for Peace and Justice to protest the planned deployment of NATO first-strike missiles from the Seneca Army Depot. Image from The New Press / Gay City News.
Duberman writes, “Barbara would also come to believe that nonviolent actions are by their nature androgynous. Two impulses long identified as belonging to different genders -- the ‘masculine’ impulse of self-assertion and the ‘feminine’ impulse of sympathy -- come together in any individual, regardless of gender, who adheres to nonviolence.”
Duberman contrasts McReynolds’ focus from Deming’s, saying he “was no less committed than Barbara to nonviolence, but throughout most of the 1960s, until the rise of the feminist movement, he emphasized a somewhat though not absolutely different goal than she: his concern centered more on the need to transform social institutions than individuals.”
But the path of Deming and McReynolds increasingly crossed in their activism, as they participated in many of the same direct actions and causes. In the long struggle against the Vietnam War, McReynolds’ War Resisters League and the Committee for Non-Violent Action, in which Deming was a key figure, both played crucial roles.
A Silent Remnant recounts the history of all this activism with many details never before recorded. Deming left her extensive papers at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, and McReynolds not only has retained expansive personal files but is fortunately still around to add his personal illuminations to Duberman’s account of those years. The book is, as usual with this distinguished historian’s work, carefully footnoted, and includes several dozen photos of its principals and their activism.
There are chapters on the controversies over the U.S. New Left (including McReynolds’ debates about it with right-wing socialists like Irving Howe); on the burnout toll that activism takes on those who choose its demanding path (including McReynolds’ struggle with alcoholism and Deming’s eventually failed attempt to preserve her love affair of two decades with the artist and writer Mary Meigs); on the impact of the feminist and gay movements; and on the disagreements between the two sterling activists on such questions as pornography and patriarchy.
There are also fresh insights into the history of the Socialist Party and the debates and splits with which it has been riven over the last half-century. McReynolds went on to become the first openly gay presidential candidate as the Socialists’ standard-bearer twice, in 1980 and 2000.
Queers have always played an important role in all the movements for social justice and social change, and the lives of Deming and McReynolds are both eloquent testimony to that fact, but it has largely remained hidden history to heterosexuals on the left.
At the same time, as Duberman writes, “Radical gay people engaged with a wide variety of issues besides ‘gay liberation’ (like the continuing struggle against racial discrimination) do still exist in the gay community, but they lack the influence they once wielded in the half-dozen years after Stonewall.”
In A Saving Remnant, Duberman has given us an absorbing book, radiant with an emboldening and unquenchable humanity, that has meaningful lessons both for the left and for today’s single-issue gay activists.
Duberman notes, “I’m certain that my empathy, both political and personal, for both Barbara and David had a lot to do with my being drawn to write about them in the first place and may well have affected how I chose to narrate their lives. Although unsympathetic critics -- especially those with a centrist or right-wing political bias -- will perhaps accuse me of whitewashing my subjects, I’ve nevertheless done my best to recognize and record their foibles and shortcomings.”
That Duberman has succeeded in doing so renders this dual biography all the more meaningful and admirable.
[Doug Ireland is a longtime radical political journalist and media critic and an openly gay man. His work has appeared in many U.S. and French publications, including the New York Post (back in its liberal days), the Village Voice, New York magazine, The Nation, Bakchich, the Parisian daily Liberation, the LA Weekly, and Gay City News, the largest lesbian and gay weekly in New York City, where this article was first published.]
The Rag Blog
Posted by thorne dreyer at 8:36 AM
Labels: Barbara Deming, Books, David McReynolds, Doug Ireland, Gay Movement, Leftists, Martin Duberman, Nonviolence, Peace Movement, Rag Bloggers, Sixties, Socialists
1 Make/read comments:
Anonymous said...
Barbara Deming and David McReynolds are two of the three people who have influenced me the most politically and ethically.
The third was their EWar Resisters League colleague Igal Roodenko.
Worth noting that all three are/were gay. I am not.
Two lives of courage and commitment
Barbara Deming and David McReynolds were 'out' pioneers of the left.
By Doug Ireland / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2011
[A SAVING REMNANT: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds, by Martin Duberman (The New Press, March 1, 2011); Hardcover; 298 pp; $27.95.]
Martin Duberman, known as “the father of gay studies,” is a distinguished historian, playwright, essayist, novelist, and public intellectual, and any new book by him is an event in queer culture to which attention must be paid.
Such is certainly the case with A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds, an unusual dual biography by Duberman just published by the New Press.
Duberman is a distinguished professor of history emeritus at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where three decades ago he founded the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), the first such program in any American university, much emulated since. Duberman’s long struggle to establish that center is recounted in his third volume of memoirs, Waiting to Land, published two years ago (see this reporter’s October 15, 2009 review, “Queer Studies’ Essential Man.”)
Duberman first established his reputation as a historian with his groundbreaking work on the 19th-century anti-slavery movement, and later produced stunning biographies of Paul Robeson and Lincoln Kirstein, among others, a body of work that won him the recognition of his peers, who awarded him the American Historical Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Scholarship.
Duberman was already well-known as an important public intellectual whose essays and articles engaged with “the passion and action of our time” (to borrow Oliver Wendell Holmes’ formulation), and as a prize-winning historian and playwright, when he became the first major intellectual of premier rank to come out and join the gay liberation movement in the early 1970s. As an activist, he went on to help found the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and, later, Queers for Economic Justice.
With his new book, “A Saving Remnant,” Duberman returns to the preoccupation with social movements that has been at the heart of much of his work. And in choosing to recount the lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds [a contributor to The Rag Blog], Duberman has picked two openly queer Americans who devoted their lives to the struggles for peace and social justice.
David McReynolds addresses a gathering of the War Resisters League, where, on the recommendation of Bayard Rustin, he worked late in his career, until his retirement in 1999. Photo from The New Press / Gay City News.
Nothing in their family backgrounds destined either Deming or McReynolds to become political radicals. Deming, a novelist, short story writer, and poet who was born in 1917 and died in 1984, was raised in Manhattan by upper-middle class parents with “traditional habits and opinions.” But at 16, she fell in love with her mother’s best friend (Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister Norma) and boldly wrote in her journal, “I am a lesbian. I must face it.”
Thereafter, she refused to conceal her sexual orientation. After graduation from Bennington, Deming moved to Greenwich Village, worked at Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater, and had a brief affair with Lotte Lenya, the Austrian actress-singer who was married to composer Kurt Weill.
McReynolds, born in 1929 and still going strong today, was raised in Los Angeles as a devout Baptist by conservative Republican parents. But while in high school he read muckraker Lincoln Steffens’ autobiography and underwent a political conversion. McReynolds had his first homosexual experience in grammar school, and when he was 19 came out to his parents.
Although he had some guilt about his “deviance,” that vanished when he was a student at UCLA after an encounter in a notorious “queer bathroom” on campus with a young Alvin Ailey, not yet famous as a dancer and choreographer.
“Alvin’s guilt-free attitude toward homosexuality became a model for David (‘I came home walking on a cloud’) and the two became good friends, though never lovers,” Duberman recounts.
By this time, 1951, McReynolds had become deeply involved with the Socialist Party. Founded in 1901 under the leadership of labor leader Eugene Victor Debs, the party reached its peak of influence in 1912, when, with Debs as its presidential candidate, it won 6 percent of the vote; had 100 elected public officials, including several members of Congress; and a press with a readership in the millions.
But the party’s principled pacifism during World Wars I and II brought it government persecution and decimated its membership, and by the early ’50s the party, for decades led by Norman Thomas, was a shadow of its former self.
As a well-known, “outspoken and magnetic” campus radical “on the non-Communist side,” the handsome young McReynolds became a leader of the Socialists’ left wing, all while being open about his homosexuality with his party comrades in its somewhat Bohemian LA local, but “never taking any flack for it.”
McReynolds, already a committed pacifist, risked prison when he refused induction into the army for the Korean War, and it was then that he met Bayard Rustin, the field director of the principal pacifist organization, the War Resisters League, later famous as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington under Martin Luther King’s leadership.
At the time of their meeting, Rustin had just been arrested on a “morals charge” for a homosexual encounter, and a long talk with Rustin about homosexuality helped further diminish any of McReynolds’ residual guilt feelings about his own same-sex orientation.
It is difficult to overstate the enormous courage and personal integrity required of Deming and McReynolds to be openly queer at a time in America when homosexuality was illegal, and homosexuals were condemned to barbaric tortures to “cure” them by medicine and loathed as degenerate outcasts by most of society.
This was especially true in the 1950s at the height of the McCarthyite witch-hunts, when government was purging both left-wingers and homosexuals from its ranks and those of academia and the labor movement, and when homosexuality was frequently identified with Communism in the dominant rhetoric of the red-baiters.
In 1955, McReynolds was fired from his job on account of being a “political security risk” and decided to move to New York where, with help from Rustin, he obtained a series of “movement” jobs (including a stint with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, where he was the only white person in its Harlem headquarters) before joining Rustin on the staff of the War Resisters League, where he remained until his retirement in 1999.
Deming, while essentially liberal, had remained rather apolitical until the late ’50s, when on a trip to India she steeped herself in Gandhi’s writings and became a convert to his theory of nonviolence as the path to peace and change, eventually emerging as a leader of A.J. Muste’s Committee for NonViolent Action.
It was on her return to the U.S. from revolutionary Cuba that Deming began to put her body on the line and got arrested in a never-ending series of non-violent direct action struggles, both in the movement for black civil rights -- she spent several harrowing months in jail in Albany, Georgia -- and in the budding movement against nuclear weapons and for peace and disarmament.
As she later wrote of these militant actions, they “reverberated deeply a so-called ‘apolitical’ struggle I’d been waging on my own, in a lonely way up until then, as a woman and a lesbian: the struggle to claim my life as my own.”
Barbara Deming (holding flowers) at the 1983 Seneca Women's Encampment for Peace and Justice to protest the planned deployment of NATO first-strike missiles from the Seneca Army Depot. Image from The New Press / Gay City News.
Duberman writes, “Barbara would also come to believe that nonviolent actions are by their nature androgynous. Two impulses long identified as belonging to different genders -- the ‘masculine’ impulse of self-assertion and the ‘feminine’ impulse of sympathy -- come together in any individual, regardless of gender, who adheres to nonviolence.”
Duberman contrasts McReynolds’ focus from Deming’s, saying he “was no less committed than Barbara to nonviolence, but throughout most of the 1960s, until the rise of the feminist movement, he emphasized a somewhat though not absolutely different goal than she: his concern centered more on the need to transform social institutions than individuals.”
But the path of Deming and McReynolds increasingly crossed in their activism, as they participated in many of the same direct actions and causes. In the long struggle against the Vietnam War, McReynolds’ War Resisters League and the Committee for Non-Violent Action, in which Deming was a key figure, both played crucial roles.
A Silent Remnant recounts the history of all this activism with many details never before recorded. Deming left her extensive papers at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, and McReynolds not only has retained expansive personal files but is fortunately still around to add his personal illuminations to Duberman’s account of those years. The book is, as usual with this distinguished historian’s work, carefully footnoted, and includes several dozen photos of its principals and their activism.
There are chapters on the controversies over the U.S. New Left (including McReynolds’ debates about it with right-wing socialists like Irving Howe); on the burnout toll that activism takes on those who choose its demanding path (including McReynolds’ struggle with alcoholism and Deming’s eventually failed attempt to preserve her love affair of two decades with the artist and writer Mary Meigs); on the impact of the feminist and gay movements; and on the disagreements between the two sterling activists on such questions as pornography and patriarchy.
There are also fresh insights into the history of the Socialist Party and the debates and splits with which it has been riven over the last half-century. McReynolds went on to become the first openly gay presidential candidate as the Socialists’ standard-bearer twice, in 1980 and 2000.
Queers have always played an important role in all the movements for social justice and social change, and the lives of Deming and McReynolds are both eloquent testimony to that fact, but it has largely remained hidden history to heterosexuals on the left.
At the same time, as Duberman writes, “Radical gay people engaged with a wide variety of issues besides ‘gay liberation’ (like the continuing struggle against racial discrimination) do still exist in the gay community, but they lack the influence they once wielded in the half-dozen years after Stonewall.”
In A Saving Remnant, Duberman has given us an absorbing book, radiant with an emboldening and unquenchable humanity, that has meaningful lessons both for the left and for today’s single-issue gay activists.
Duberman notes, “I’m certain that my empathy, both political and personal, for both Barbara and David had a lot to do with my being drawn to write about them in the first place and may well have affected how I chose to narrate their lives. Although unsympathetic critics -- especially those with a centrist or right-wing political bias -- will perhaps accuse me of whitewashing my subjects, I’ve nevertheless done my best to recognize and record their foibles and shortcomings.”
That Duberman has succeeded in doing so renders this dual biography all the more meaningful and admirable.
[Doug Ireland is a longtime radical political journalist and media critic and an openly gay man. His work has appeared in many U.S. and French publications, including the New York Post (back in its liberal days), the Village Voice, New York magazine, The Nation, Bakchich, the Parisian daily Liberation, the LA Weekly, and Gay City News, the largest lesbian and gay weekly in New York City, where this article was first published.]
The Rag Blog
Posted by thorne dreyer at 8:36 AM
Labels: Barbara Deming, Books, David McReynolds, Doug Ireland, Gay Movement, Leftists, Martin Duberman, Nonviolence, Peace Movement, Rag Bloggers, Sixties, Socialists
1 Make/read comments:
Anonymous said...
Barbara Deming and David McReynolds are two of the three people who have influenced me the most politically and ethically.
The third was their EWar Resisters League colleague Igal Roodenko.
Worth noting that all three are/were gay. I am not.
From The Rag Blog- 'March Madness' takes on new meaning:Peddling the irrational in American politics-By Danny Schechter
'March Madness' takes on new meaning:
Peddling the irrational in American politics
By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2011
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold -- William Butler Yeats
The term class war has been extricated from the archives of another era, while divisions over the future of the economy have become a battleground in which the adversaries yell at each other, but rarely engage in any discourse with each other in a shared language.
The worse things get, the harder it is for people to agree on what to do.
This is a month known in the USA for the “March Madness” college basketball finals, but the madness seems now to be oozing from sports arenas into political capitols.
In the Middle East, all the political turmoil will ultimately impact on a regional economy built on the flow and price of oil, contends author/historian Michael Klare:
Whatever the outcome of the protests, uprisings, and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: the world of oil will be permanently transformed. Consider everything that’s now happening as just the first tremor of an oilquake that will shake our world to its core.
Back in the once thought of as “stable” United States, the economic crisis has finally spurred a confrontation between right and left with noisy protests following threatened crackdowns on union rights to collective bargaining, and cutbacks on social programs.
Conservatives hype the austerity programs that divided and created chaos in Ireland as the model Americans should be following.
Writes Terrance Heath,
The irony is that the things that the Heritage (Foundation) praises about Ireland's economy are what drove it to the brink of extinction... Ireland followed the same tax-cutting, deregulating conservative economic path to its misfortune that led America to its own. That Ireland stands as an example of austerity's epic failure, makes it even more mystifying that conservatives keep spotlighting the clearest example of the disastrous impact of conservative economic policy.
Activists in the sweltering heat of Egypt hold up signs praising protesters in Wisconsin while the shivering public workers in the snow of Madison talk about struggling "like an Egyptian."
Who would have thunk?
The poet Yeats once wrote that things fall apart when the center doesn’t hold, and his words seem prophetically appropriate to the unraveling now underway in the U.S. with fierce political combat paralyzing the Congress and rhetoric escalating into a realm beyond the rational.
Even as a film won an Academy Award for calling the collapse of the economy an “inside job,” there is no consensus on the causes of the financial crisis.
The debate about what to do, and whether or not to punish wrongdoers, rages on even as the media looks away from the consequences -- the armies of permanently unemployed and growing foreclosures.
Politicians only worry about public budgets, not the private pain of their constituents.
An ideological fight over policy footnotes is considered de rigueur but the suffering of those unable to cope with cutoffs of benefits, rising gas and food prices, and growing despair, is considered a “bummer.”
Many Democrats want so badly to move on that they avoid discussions of Wall Street crime and massive fraud. The President sees all that as unproductive because his new focus is to “win the future.” Believe it or not, that slogan comes from a book by Newt Gingrich.
The White House deliberately stayed away from protests in Wisconsin, later scolding the Democratic Party apparatus after learning that it was urging supporters to back worker protests. For them, such pro-union activism was decidedly off-message, reports The New York Times.
And so much for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report with 633 pages of documented analysis about how the system imploded. That was last week’s non-story.
Republicans want to change the subject and have found new theories to divert attention and/or make the debate so complicated that no one except some Ph.D.'s can follow it.
And even they have problems doing so.
Fed head Ben Bernanke who ignored calls to stop mortgage fraud when it might have made a difference now says that the crisis was caused by China.
It’s all their fault!
The Chinese meanwhile buy up American debt and keep our system going.
The right conspiracy theorists have a new explanation to amuse themselves with as well: the crisis was caused by terrorists.
The Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the Moonies, reports:
Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system...
Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran.
That just about throws all the “bad guys” they could come up with into one big barrel of ducks to shoot at. Never mind, that this “revelation” is vague and totally undocumented.
On the left, artists explore apocalyptic themes, not a serious activist response. One new exhibit is called “The Days of this Society Are Numbered."
Inspired by a famous statement by French thinker Guy Debord, proclaiming that THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY ARE NUMBERED, this exhibition plays with the notion that at the beginning of the XXI century one is experiencing a period of fin de siècle, in which the state of affairs is questioned and a collective anxiety is emerging, a situation caused by the feeling of political, economic, and cultural crisis that is permeating the Western world and is creating a social entropy.
Perhaps there is something in the water or the political ether that precludes any agreement on facts, much less a consensus on what to do about them.
Resolve on punishing mortgage fraudsters has gotten caught up in arcane debate over obtuse contractual language. Even as “pervasive fraud” was documented by the FBI, no one, least of all the regulators, can agree on who is responsible and what the fines and penalties should be.
It’s clear that denial is not just a river in Egypt. Reports The New York Times, “as the negotiations grind on, there are signs that the banks have still not come to grips with the problems plaguing the foreclosure process.”
The newspaper of record does not look at the record to note that big banks may have no interest in coming “to grips” with charges that they defrauded their customers.
All of this “debate” functions like a fog machine to insure that the public doesn’t know what is happening, and to insure that the class at the top is not treated like the class at the bottom as Naked Capitalism.com’s Yves Smith observes:
It is one thing to point out a sorry reality, that the rich and powerful often get away with abuses while ordinary citizens seldom do. It’s quite another to present it as inevitable.
It would be far more productive to isolate what are the key failings in our legal, prosecutorial, and regulatory regime are and demand changes. The fact that financial fraud cases are often difficult does not mean they are unwinnable.
Winnable or not, there seems to be rational calculation -- even a carefully constructed strategy -- behind the increasingly irrational political debate.
Perhaps it’s a form of a calculated lack of “intelligent design” that belongs right up there with classic political strategies in which invented realities and message points become believable they more they are repeated.
George Bush once contrasted a fact-based political order with his preferred faith-based one. That’s why all the exposes of his WMD claims in Iraq rolled off his back and never stuck.
The madness this month is like a chicken that has come home to roost, reminding us again that the only time we can tell when a politician is lying is when his or her lips start moving.
[News Dissector and blogger Danny Schechter directed Plunder The Crime of Our Time, a film assessing the financial crisis as a crime story. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.
The Rag Blog
Peddling the irrational in American politics
By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2011
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold -- William Butler Yeats
The term class war has been extricated from the archives of another era, while divisions over the future of the economy have become a battleground in which the adversaries yell at each other, but rarely engage in any discourse with each other in a shared language.
The worse things get, the harder it is for people to agree on what to do.
This is a month known in the USA for the “March Madness” college basketball finals, but the madness seems now to be oozing from sports arenas into political capitols.
In the Middle East, all the political turmoil will ultimately impact on a regional economy built on the flow and price of oil, contends author/historian Michael Klare:
Whatever the outcome of the protests, uprisings, and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: the world of oil will be permanently transformed. Consider everything that’s now happening as just the first tremor of an oilquake that will shake our world to its core.
Back in the once thought of as “stable” United States, the economic crisis has finally spurred a confrontation between right and left with noisy protests following threatened crackdowns on union rights to collective bargaining, and cutbacks on social programs.
Conservatives hype the austerity programs that divided and created chaos in Ireland as the model Americans should be following.
Writes Terrance Heath,
The irony is that the things that the Heritage (Foundation) praises about Ireland's economy are what drove it to the brink of extinction... Ireland followed the same tax-cutting, deregulating conservative economic path to its misfortune that led America to its own. That Ireland stands as an example of austerity's epic failure, makes it even more mystifying that conservatives keep spotlighting the clearest example of the disastrous impact of conservative economic policy.
Activists in the sweltering heat of Egypt hold up signs praising protesters in Wisconsin while the shivering public workers in the snow of Madison talk about struggling "like an Egyptian."
Who would have thunk?
The poet Yeats once wrote that things fall apart when the center doesn’t hold, and his words seem prophetically appropriate to the unraveling now underway in the U.S. with fierce political combat paralyzing the Congress and rhetoric escalating into a realm beyond the rational.
Even as a film won an Academy Award for calling the collapse of the economy an “inside job,” there is no consensus on the causes of the financial crisis.
The debate about what to do, and whether or not to punish wrongdoers, rages on even as the media looks away from the consequences -- the armies of permanently unemployed and growing foreclosures.
Politicians only worry about public budgets, not the private pain of their constituents.
An ideological fight over policy footnotes is considered de rigueur but the suffering of those unable to cope with cutoffs of benefits, rising gas and food prices, and growing despair, is considered a “bummer.”
Many Democrats want so badly to move on that they avoid discussions of Wall Street crime and massive fraud. The President sees all that as unproductive because his new focus is to “win the future.” Believe it or not, that slogan comes from a book by Newt Gingrich.
The White House deliberately stayed away from protests in Wisconsin, later scolding the Democratic Party apparatus after learning that it was urging supporters to back worker protests. For them, such pro-union activism was decidedly off-message, reports The New York Times.
And so much for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report with 633 pages of documented analysis about how the system imploded. That was last week’s non-story.
Republicans want to change the subject and have found new theories to divert attention and/or make the debate so complicated that no one except some Ph.D.'s can follow it.
And even they have problems doing so.
Fed head Ben Bernanke who ignored calls to stop mortgage fraud when it might have made a difference now says that the crisis was caused by China.
It’s all their fault!
The Chinese meanwhile buy up American debt and keep our system going.
The right conspiracy theorists have a new explanation to amuse themselves with as well: the crisis was caused by terrorists.
The Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the Moonies, reports:
Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system...
Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran.
That just about throws all the “bad guys” they could come up with into one big barrel of ducks to shoot at. Never mind, that this “revelation” is vague and totally undocumented.
On the left, artists explore apocalyptic themes, not a serious activist response. One new exhibit is called “The Days of this Society Are Numbered."
Inspired by a famous statement by French thinker Guy Debord, proclaiming that THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY ARE NUMBERED, this exhibition plays with the notion that at the beginning of the XXI century one is experiencing a period of fin de siècle, in which the state of affairs is questioned and a collective anxiety is emerging, a situation caused by the feeling of political, economic, and cultural crisis that is permeating the Western world and is creating a social entropy.
Perhaps there is something in the water or the political ether that precludes any agreement on facts, much less a consensus on what to do about them.
Resolve on punishing mortgage fraudsters has gotten caught up in arcane debate over obtuse contractual language. Even as “pervasive fraud” was documented by the FBI, no one, least of all the regulators, can agree on who is responsible and what the fines and penalties should be.
It’s clear that denial is not just a river in Egypt. Reports The New York Times, “as the negotiations grind on, there are signs that the banks have still not come to grips with the problems plaguing the foreclosure process.”
The newspaper of record does not look at the record to note that big banks may have no interest in coming “to grips” with charges that they defrauded their customers.
All of this “debate” functions like a fog machine to insure that the public doesn’t know what is happening, and to insure that the class at the top is not treated like the class at the bottom as Naked Capitalism.com’s Yves Smith observes:
It is one thing to point out a sorry reality, that the rich and powerful often get away with abuses while ordinary citizens seldom do. It’s quite another to present it as inevitable.
It would be far more productive to isolate what are the key failings in our legal, prosecutorial, and regulatory regime are and demand changes. The fact that financial fraud cases are often difficult does not mean they are unwinnable.
Winnable or not, there seems to be rational calculation -- even a carefully constructed strategy -- behind the increasingly irrational political debate.
Perhaps it’s a form of a calculated lack of “intelligent design” that belongs right up there with classic political strategies in which invented realities and message points become believable they more they are repeated.
George Bush once contrasted a fact-based political order with his preferred faith-based one. That’s why all the exposes of his WMD claims in Iraq rolled off his back and never stuck.
The madness this month is like a chicken that has come home to roost, reminding us again that the only time we can tell when a politician is lying is when his or her lips start moving.
[News Dissector and blogger Danny Schechter directed Plunder The Crime of Our Time, a film assessing the financial crisis as a crime story. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.
The Rag Blog
From The StevLendmanBlog-Pack Journalism Promotes War on Libya
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Pack Journalism Promotes War on Libya
Pack Journalism Promotes War on Libya - by Stephen Lendman
America's major media never met an imperial war it didn't love and promote, never mind how lawless, mindless, destructive and counterproductive.
Despite Washington already bogged down in two losing ones, Obama's heading for another on Libya, the media pack in the lead clamoring for it, perhaps by "shock and awe," supplemented by special forces death squads on the ground recruiting, inciting, and arming opposition elements.
Notably favoring intervention, a New York Times February 24 editorial headlined, "Stopping Qaffafi," saying:
Unless he's stopped, he'll "slaughter hundreds or even thousands of his own people in his desperation to hang on to power."
Where's the Times outrage over millions Washington slaughtered, hundreds more killed daily, its ties to global despots, its funding and support for Israeli brutality against Palestinians, and its imperial insanity to achieve unchallengeable global dominance, no matter how many corpses it takes to do it.
Nonetheless, The Times hailed Libyan courage, asking for more Western support, implying the belligerent kind. "Colonel Qaddafi and his henchmen have to be told in credible and very specific terms the price they will pay for any more killing. They need to start paying now. (The) longer the world temporizes, the more people die."
On February 28, The Times editorial headlined, "Qaddafi's Crimes and Fantasies," saying:
His "crimes continue to mount. Rebel commanders said (his) warplanes bombed rebel-controlled areas in the eastern part of the country." However, Russian satellite imagery showed no bombing evidence or destruction on the ground. So much for The Times or other major media credibility, reporting the same unverified accounts.
On March 8, The Times headlined, "Washington's Options on Libya," saying:
"....some way must be found to support Libya's uprising and stop (Gaddafi) from slaughtering his people....It would be a disaster if (he) managed to cling to power by butchering his own people."
Indisputably, Gaddafi is a despot, but he didn't initiate conflict. Western powers did, sending in covert intelligence and special forces to incite, arm and support it.
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that UK commandos were in Benghazi. So did Foreign Secretary William Hague, telling Parliament it was "a serious misunderstanding," drawing laughs from opposition benches.
Channel 4 News aired a video with him saying intelligence and elite special forces were on "a diplomatic mission" to make contact with rebel elements. However, he left unexplained why they arrived secretly by helicopter at 2AM with no advance warning. In fact, the Cameron/Hague "misunderstanding" came to enlist and incite violence along with US special forces there for the same purpose. Commandos are trained killers, not diplomats.
As a result, Gaddafi responded in self-defense. Washington and NATO bear full responsibility for growing daily casualties. Blood's on their hands. It's their cross to bear, costing many Libyan lives.
It hardly matters for greater stakes, including:
-- replacing one despot with another;
-- preventing democratization;
-- colonizing Libya;
-- controlling its oil, gas and other resources;
-- privatizing its state industries, handing them over to Western interests;
-- perhaps balkanizing the country like Yugoslavia and Iraq - in other words, effectively destroying it for profit and control, as well as using it as a platform to intimidate other regional states to comply fully with Western diktats - or else; and
-- exploiting its people ruthlessly as serf labor.
It's a familiar Western scheme, justified as "humanitarian intervention," what America, above all, doesn't give a damn about and never did, seeking only imperial dominance, no matter how much death and destruction it takes to get it. "Operation Libya" had antecedents, notably in Yugoslavia and Iraq, two previous countries Western powers destroyed and now exploit.
International Law on Self-Defense and External Intervention - Humanitarian or Otherwise
International law authorizes Gaddafi to respond in self-defense. Article 51 of the UN Charter's Chapter VII: Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression" states:
"Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security."
In other words, self-defense is permissible. Moreover, the UN Charter explains under what conditions intervention, violence and coercion (by one state against another) are justified. Article 2(3) and Article 33(1) require peaceful settlement of international disputes. Article 2(4) prohibits force or its threatened use, including no-fly zones that are acts of war.
In addition, Articles 2(3), 2(4), and 33 absolutely prohibit any unilateral or other external threat or use of force not specifically allowed under Article 51 or otherwise authorized by the Security Council.
Three General Assembly resolutions also prohibit non-consensual belligerent intervention, including:
-- the 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty;
-- the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations; and
-- the 1974 Definition of Aggression.
Under no circumstances, with no exceptions, may one nation, NATO, or other combination of nations intervene against another without specific Security Council authorization. Doing so is illegal aggression, a lawless act of war. Washington and NATO have already initiated conflict. Gaddafi, or any other democrat or despot, legally may respond in self-defense as he's doing, love him or hate him. By law, he's justified.
Yet The Times urges NATO to expand "its air surveillance over Libya (and) share relevant information with the rebels." No matter that violating its air space is illegal and aggressive. The Times also wants pressure put on "Qaddafi and his cronies to cede power," by what authority it didn't say because there is none. No matter because in Times-think, "(i)t would be a disaster if (he) managed to cling to power by butchering his own people."
Hyperbole, misinformation, imperial support, and disdain for international and US laws as well as democratic values are Times specialties - on display backing Washington's attempt to destroy, colonize and exploit another country, no matter the corpse count to do it.
In his March 9 commentary, longtime insider Bob Chapman said the following:
"....as we pointed out after the Tunisian episode, this was the beginning of CIA, MI6 and Mossad planned activities in the Middle East. As usual there were several objectives. The first was a distraction to cover up (Western) financial troubles....The second was to remove Mubarak from his dictatorial position, because (he refused) to participate and agree to an invasion of Iran and to cause chaos in the region, so that (Iranian allies) would not give it assistance in the event of war."
"There was also the matter of controlling Libya's oil and toppling its dictator Gaddafi....From behind the scenes, (new leadership will emerge) tied to the CIA, MI6 and the Mossad. (These plans) have been in the works for years." Unrest will continue. "A solution will be found for Libya, and the west hopes its puppet (Saudi) regime stays in place." If disruption occurs there, America will intervene. Turmoil will continue for some time. "It won't take long for Mr. Gaddafi to be deposed and sent on his way," perhaps by US troops.
More Major Media War Endorsements
With total editorial control, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal aggressively backs imperial wars, notably now against Libya. On February 23, it editorial headlined, "Liberating Libya," saying:
"The US and Europe should help Libyans overthrow the Gadhafi regime," replacing him, of course, with a Western favored despot, ceding control to imperial interests.
On March 6, the Journal headlined, "Obama's Libyan Abdication," asking:
"Will the US let Gadhafi slaughter his way back to power? The greatest danger now to US interests - and to Obama's political standing - would be for (him) to regain control....isolated and dangerous (he'll) likely (abet) terrorists," hyperbole exceeding The New York Times and most other corporate sources.
Not far behind, a February 21 Washington Post editorial screamed, "Moammar Gaddafi must pay for his atrocities," calling them "genocide." It was the same deception used before, including against Slobodan Milosevic to justify NATO's punishing 1999 illegal aggression to complete its long-planned Yugoslavia balkanization, defended then as "humanitarian intervention," no matter the vast destruction and loss of lives it caused.
The Post's resident zealot, Charles Krauthammer, called Gaddafi "a capricious killer" in his March 4 "Baghdad to Benghazi" article, saying he's "delusional, unstable and crazy."
On March 8, the Post's Marc Thiessen headlined, "Apply the Reagan Doctrine in Libya," by arming opposition elements, and inciting violence to topple Gaddafi the way Reagan operated in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and Central America, notably against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and FMLN in El Salvador, killing countless tens of thousands in the process, a record airbrushed from official history, calling imperial slaughter "liberation."
Arming Libya's Opposition
On March 7, London Independent writer Robert Fisk headlined, "America's secret plan to arm Libya's rebels," saying:
Washington asked "Saudi Arabia (to) supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi." In the 1980s, Saudis helped arm Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan and Contra forces in Central America. Asking Saudi help lets Washington deny involvement, perhaps impossible with Fisk breaking the news. He also said "US Awacs surveillance aircraft have been flying around Libya" for days, violating its air space illegally.
Moreover, he noted an "Arab awakening, the demand for democracy in North Africa, the Shia revolt, and the rising against Gaddafi become entangled in the space of just a few hours with US (UK, and NATO) priorities in the region." They augur no good for Libyans for sure.
A Final Comment
At times, Al Jazeera sounds like BBC, falling short of what viewers deserve. On February 18, Professor As'ad AbuKhalil's Angry Arab News Service discussed its coverage, saying:
"I am seething. The coverage of Aljazeera Arabic has become too blatantly politically biased for my taste. They protect their allies and friends and go intensely after the rivals and enemies of Qatar (where it's based) like the regime of Hosni Mubarak."
When GCC countries "decided to back the Bahrain monarchy, Aljazeera quickly reflected that. It is not a story anymore. Aljazeera is extensively covering Libya and Yemen now: not close allies of Qatar. If Mubarak was a member of the GCC, he would have been protected by Aljazeera."
Nonetheless, its service is vastly superior to US corporate news, offering entirely propaganda, sanitized reports and infotainment, a worthless mix to be avoided and condemned.
Reaching 40 million viewers, The New York Times called Al Jazeera "the bete noire" of Arab governments (shaping) popular rage against oppressive American-backed Arab governments (and against Israel) ever since its (1996) founding."
In their recent study on "How Al Jazeera Shapes Political Identities," Erik Nisbet and Teresa Myers found that exposure to Arabic media weakens national identities and strengthens Muslim and Arab ones.
Asked how it affects Middle East protests, Nisbet said:
"In the short term, the Pan-Muslim and Pan-Arab narratives typically embedded in Al Jazeera content, in combination with growing Pan-Muslim and Pan-Arab identification among Arab audiences, most likely facilitate the contagion begun by the Tunisian revolt."
The long-term implications for US foreign policy are also significant, posing "a serious challenge for Egyptian relations with the United States and Israel." Perhaps also for America's regional agenda. The "greater political liberalization combined with the growth of transnational political identification may challenge the United States to enact foreign policy within a regional context dominated by transnational political identities whose interests may be more opposed, or at least less amenable, to US foreign policy goals compared to state-centric identities."
Anything weakening Washington's dominance anywhere is important. Hopefully, Al Jazeera will promote and encourage it by more forcefully opposing imperial intervention, especially by belligerence and occupation.
That would make its service invaluable.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
Pack Journalism Promotes War on Libya
Pack Journalism Promotes War on Libya - by Stephen Lendman
America's major media never met an imperial war it didn't love and promote, never mind how lawless, mindless, destructive and counterproductive.
Despite Washington already bogged down in two losing ones, Obama's heading for another on Libya, the media pack in the lead clamoring for it, perhaps by "shock and awe," supplemented by special forces death squads on the ground recruiting, inciting, and arming opposition elements.
Notably favoring intervention, a New York Times February 24 editorial headlined, "Stopping Qaffafi," saying:
Unless he's stopped, he'll "slaughter hundreds or even thousands of his own people in his desperation to hang on to power."
Where's the Times outrage over millions Washington slaughtered, hundreds more killed daily, its ties to global despots, its funding and support for Israeli brutality against Palestinians, and its imperial insanity to achieve unchallengeable global dominance, no matter how many corpses it takes to do it.
Nonetheless, The Times hailed Libyan courage, asking for more Western support, implying the belligerent kind. "Colonel Qaddafi and his henchmen have to be told in credible and very specific terms the price they will pay for any more killing. They need to start paying now. (The) longer the world temporizes, the more people die."
On February 28, The Times editorial headlined, "Qaddafi's Crimes and Fantasies," saying:
His "crimes continue to mount. Rebel commanders said (his) warplanes bombed rebel-controlled areas in the eastern part of the country." However, Russian satellite imagery showed no bombing evidence or destruction on the ground. So much for The Times or other major media credibility, reporting the same unverified accounts.
On March 8, The Times headlined, "Washington's Options on Libya," saying:
"....some way must be found to support Libya's uprising and stop (Gaddafi) from slaughtering his people....It would be a disaster if (he) managed to cling to power by butchering his own people."
Indisputably, Gaddafi is a despot, but he didn't initiate conflict. Western powers did, sending in covert intelligence and special forces to incite, arm and support it.
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that UK commandos were in Benghazi. So did Foreign Secretary William Hague, telling Parliament it was "a serious misunderstanding," drawing laughs from opposition benches.
Channel 4 News aired a video with him saying intelligence and elite special forces were on "a diplomatic mission" to make contact with rebel elements. However, he left unexplained why they arrived secretly by helicopter at 2AM with no advance warning. In fact, the Cameron/Hague "misunderstanding" came to enlist and incite violence along with US special forces there for the same purpose. Commandos are trained killers, not diplomats.
As a result, Gaddafi responded in self-defense. Washington and NATO bear full responsibility for growing daily casualties. Blood's on their hands. It's their cross to bear, costing many Libyan lives.
It hardly matters for greater stakes, including:
-- replacing one despot with another;
-- preventing democratization;
-- colonizing Libya;
-- controlling its oil, gas and other resources;
-- privatizing its state industries, handing them over to Western interests;
-- perhaps balkanizing the country like Yugoslavia and Iraq - in other words, effectively destroying it for profit and control, as well as using it as a platform to intimidate other regional states to comply fully with Western diktats - or else; and
-- exploiting its people ruthlessly as serf labor.
It's a familiar Western scheme, justified as "humanitarian intervention," what America, above all, doesn't give a damn about and never did, seeking only imperial dominance, no matter how much death and destruction it takes to get it. "Operation Libya" had antecedents, notably in Yugoslavia and Iraq, two previous countries Western powers destroyed and now exploit.
International Law on Self-Defense and External Intervention - Humanitarian or Otherwise
International law authorizes Gaddafi to respond in self-defense. Article 51 of the UN Charter's Chapter VII: Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression" states:
"Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security."
In other words, self-defense is permissible. Moreover, the UN Charter explains under what conditions intervention, violence and coercion (by one state against another) are justified. Article 2(3) and Article 33(1) require peaceful settlement of international disputes. Article 2(4) prohibits force or its threatened use, including no-fly zones that are acts of war.
In addition, Articles 2(3), 2(4), and 33 absolutely prohibit any unilateral or other external threat or use of force not specifically allowed under Article 51 or otherwise authorized by the Security Council.
Three General Assembly resolutions also prohibit non-consensual belligerent intervention, including:
-- the 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty;
-- the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations; and
-- the 1974 Definition of Aggression.
Under no circumstances, with no exceptions, may one nation, NATO, or other combination of nations intervene against another without specific Security Council authorization. Doing so is illegal aggression, a lawless act of war. Washington and NATO have already initiated conflict. Gaddafi, or any other democrat or despot, legally may respond in self-defense as he's doing, love him or hate him. By law, he's justified.
Yet The Times urges NATO to expand "its air surveillance over Libya (and) share relevant information with the rebels." No matter that violating its air space is illegal and aggressive. The Times also wants pressure put on "Qaddafi and his cronies to cede power," by what authority it didn't say because there is none. No matter because in Times-think, "(i)t would be a disaster if (he) managed to cling to power by butchering his own people."
Hyperbole, misinformation, imperial support, and disdain for international and US laws as well as democratic values are Times specialties - on display backing Washington's attempt to destroy, colonize and exploit another country, no matter the corpse count to do it.
In his March 9 commentary, longtime insider Bob Chapman said the following:
"....as we pointed out after the Tunisian episode, this was the beginning of CIA, MI6 and Mossad planned activities in the Middle East. As usual there were several objectives. The first was a distraction to cover up (Western) financial troubles....The second was to remove Mubarak from his dictatorial position, because (he refused) to participate and agree to an invasion of Iran and to cause chaos in the region, so that (Iranian allies) would not give it assistance in the event of war."
"There was also the matter of controlling Libya's oil and toppling its dictator Gaddafi....From behind the scenes, (new leadership will emerge) tied to the CIA, MI6 and the Mossad. (These plans) have been in the works for years." Unrest will continue. "A solution will be found for Libya, and the west hopes its puppet (Saudi) regime stays in place." If disruption occurs there, America will intervene. Turmoil will continue for some time. "It won't take long for Mr. Gaddafi to be deposed and sent on his way," perhaps by US troops.
More Major Media War Endorsements
With total editorial control, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal aggressively backs imperial wars, notably now against Libya. On February 23, it editorial headlined, "Liberating Libya," saying:
"The US and Europe should help Libyans overthrow the Gadhafi regime," replacing him, of course, with a Western favored despot, ceding control to imperial interests.
On March 6, the Journal headlined, "Obama's Libyan Abdication," asking:
"Will the US let Gadhafi slaughter his way back to power? The greatest danger now to US interests - and to Obama's political standing - would be for (him) to regain control....isolated and dangerous (he'll) likely (abet) terrorists," hyperbole exceeding The New York Times and most other corporate sources.
Not far behind, a February 21 Washington Post editorial screamed, "Moammar Gaddafi must pay for his atrocities," calling them "genocide." It was the same deception used before, including against Slobodan Milosevic to justify NATO's punishing 1999 illegal aggression to complete its long-planned Yugoslavia balkanization, defended then as "humanitarian intervention," no matter the vast destruction and loss of lives it caused.
The Post's resident zealot, Charles Krauthammer, called Gaddafi "a capricious killer" in his March 4 "Baghdad to Benghazi" article, saying he's "delusional, unstable and crazy."
On March 8, the Post's Marc Thiessen headlined, "Apply the Reagan Doctrine in Libya," by arming opposition elements, and inciting violence to topple Gaddafi the way Reagan operated in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and Central America, notably against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and FMLN in El Salvador, killing countless tens of thousands in the process, a record airbrushed from official history, calling imperial slaughter "liberation."
Arming Libya's Opposition
On March 7, London Independent writer Robert Fisk headlined, "America's secret plan to arm Libya's rebels," saying:
Washington asked "Saudi Arabia (to) supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi." In the 1980s, Saudis helped arm Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan and Contra forces in Central America. Asking Saudi help lets Washington deny involvement, perhaps impossible with Fisk breaking the news. He also said "US Awacs surveillance aircraft have been flying around Libya" for days, violating its air space illegally.
Moreover, he noted an "Arab awakening, the demand for democracy in North Africa, the Shia revolt, and the rising against Gaddafi become entangled in the space of just a few hours with US (UK, and NATO) priorities in the region." They augur no good for Libyans for sure.
A Final Comment
At times, Al Jazeera sounds like BBC, falling short of what viewers deserve. On February 18, Professor As'ad AbuKhalil's Angry Arab News Service discussed its coverage, saying:
"I am seething. The coverage of Aljazeera Arabic has become too blatantly politically biased for my taste. They protect their allies and friends and go intensely after the rivals and enemies of Qatar (where it's based) like the regime of Hosni Mubarak."
When GCC countries "decided to back the Bahrain monarchy, Aljazeera quickly reflected that. It is not a story anymore. Aljazeera is extensively covering Libya and Yemen now: not close allies of Qatar. If Mubarak was a member of the GCC, he would have been protected by Aljazeera."
Nonetheless, its service is vastly superior to US corporate news, offering entirely propaganda, sanitized reports and infotainment, a worthless mix to be avoided and condemned.
Reaching 40 million viewers, The New York Times called Al Jazeera "the bete noire" of Arab governments (shaping) popular rage against oppressive American-backed Arab governments (and against Israel) ever since its (1996) founding."
In their recent study on "How Al Jazeera Shapes Political Identities," Erik Nisbet and Teresa Myers found that exposure to Arabic media weakens national identities and strengthens Muslim and Arab ones.
Asked how it affects Middle East protests, Nisbet said:
"In the short term, the Pan-Muslim and Pan-Arab narratives typically embedded in Al Jazeera content, in combination with growing Pan-Muslim and Pan-Arab identification among Arab audiences, most likely facilitate the contagion begun by the Tunisian revolt."
The long-term implications for US foreign policy are also significant, posing "a serious challenge for Egyptian relations with the United States and Israel." Perhaps also for America's regional agenda. The "greater political liberalization combined with the growth of transnational political identification may challenge the United States to enact foreign policy within a regional context dominated by transnational political identities whose interests may be more opposed, or at least less amenable, to US foreign policy goals compared to state-centric identities."
Anything weakening Washington's dominance anywhere is important. Hopefully, Al Jazeera will promote and encourage it by more forcefully opposing imperial intervention, especially by belligerence and occupation.
That would make its service invaluable.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
Form The HistoMat Blog-London protest in solidarity with Zimbabwean socialists
Thursday, March 10, 2011
London protest in solidarity with Zimbabwean socialists
From here:
Please join the protest outside the Zimbabwean embassy this Friday 11 March, 12 noon – 1.30pm, Zimbabwe Embassy, 429 Strand, London, WC2R 0JR.
Six socialist activists in Zimbabwe face the death penalty for watching a video about the revolt in Egypt. Munyaradzi Gwisai, Hopewell Gumbo, Antonater Choto, Welcome Zimuto, Eddson Chakuma and Tatenda Mombeyarara are charged with treason. Treason is punishable by death.
Charges against another 39 people who attended the meeting were dropped this week.
A new website has been set up for the Free the Zimbabwean Treason Trialists campaign. Go to www.freethemnow.com
The campaign urgently needs money. Make payments to:
Account: CDL– MINE-LINE Worker Solidarity Fund,
Deposit reference “Zimbabwe Treason Trialists Solidarity Fund”,
NEDBANK, Killarney Branch, Johannesburg.
Branch code: 191 60535,
Current Account number: 100 185 3784,
SWIFT CODE NEDSZAJJ
When you make a donation please email us at zimtreasontrial@gmail.com to tell us who it is from and how much it is
London protest in solidarity with Zimbabwean socialists
From here:
Please join the protest outside the Zimbabwean embassy this Friday 11 March, 12 noon – 1.30pm, Zimbabwe Embassy, 429 Strand, London, WC2R 0JR.
Six socialist activists in Zimbabwe face the death penalty for watching a video about the revolt in Egypt. Munyaradzi Gwisai, Hopewell Gumbo, Antonater Choto, Welcome Zimuto, Eddson Chakuma and Tatenda Mombeyarara are charged with treason. Treason is punishable by death.
Charges against another 39 people who attended the meeting were dropped this week.
A new website has been set up for the Free the Zimbabwean Treason Trialists campaign. Go to www.freethemnow.com
The campaign urgently needs money. Make payments to:
Account: CDL– MINE-LINE Worker Solidarity Fund,
Deposit reference “Zimbabwe Treason Trialists Solidarity Fund”,
NEDBANK, Killarney Branch, Johannesburg.
Branch code: 191 60535,
Current Account number: 100 185 3784,
SWIFT CODE NEDSZAJJ
When you make a donation please email us at zimtreasontrial@gmail.com to tell us who it is from and how much it is
From The Rag Blog-Poverty in America and theattack on public sector unions
Poverty in America and the
attack on public sector unions
want to ask a basic question that unifies religious, labor, and community organizations at the core. Why in this, the richest country in the world, are people poor?
By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / March 10, 2011
The labor movement has rarely won anything without the social movement, and the social movement has rarely won anything without the labor movement. One often cited example is Dr. King’s 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom initiated by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
If you have any doubts about the necessity of a combined effort, watch this archival film of John L. Lewis when he testified before Congress in 1947 about health care and pensions for miners paid by the coal companies.
The resulting welfare fund, hard fought at the grassroots level by miners and their families, was the most comprehensive health care that I can think of. I know because I was covered under it from the mid seventies to the eighties when it was lost under Reagan.
We frequently marginalize each other -- social movement folks saying unions don’t matter anymore and condemning labor “bureaucrats” and union folks saying that social movement people don’t care about workers and have grandiose ideas of their own power. Some of us get downright schizophrenic dividing our lives into two segments. It’s time we stop this nonsense. We need to speak a common language.
I want to ask a basic question that unifies religious, labor, and community organizations at the core. Why in this, the richest country in the world, are people poor? Please think about how you might respond.
That same question was posed to a wide segment of people, rich and poor, in 2001. The NPR survey provides an analysis of public response to welfare reform (many of us called it deform) during the Clinton administration.
Here’s a table that asks whether it’s circumstances that create poverty or poor people themselves not doing enough. The percentages describe poverty level -- we know it’s set way too low. In 2001 200% of poverty for a family of four was $34,000.
Then NPR asked folks to name the most important cause of poverty in the United States.
Number one is “the poor quality of public schools.”
At about the same time, the Heritage Foundation decided to prove poverty in the United States wasn’t a problem after all. The Heritage Foundation survey is titled, “Understanding Poverty in America.” Here’s the starting point.
The next bar graph compares the living space of poor people in the United States favorably to that of the average European.
CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.
Here are two more rational definitions of poverty:
Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and clothe a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living in marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation. -- United Nations
To meet nutritional requirements, to escape avoidable disease, to be sheltered, to be clothed, to be able to travel, and to be educated. -- Amartya Sen
Better, right? We’re at least getting to the idea of living well and a more humane definition. Notably lacking is the mention of labor unions and collective action, although you could make the argument that the United Nations definition pushes us in that direction with language about effective participation, dignity, and jobs. The lack of worker organization isn’t mentioned in the NPR study. Neither is discrimination, race, ethnicity, or gender or environment or workers’ rights.
Would you have named lack of unionization or lousy labor law or something like that as an important reason why poverty exists in this country?
In July 2002, union members overall had a 20% higher hourly wage ($20.65 vs. $16.42). In blue-collar industry it was $18.88 vs. $12.95; in service occupations, $16.22 vs. $8.98. That’s not counting benefits. Those ratios have remained constant.
Currently nearly one in three public workers are union members compared with 6.9 percent of the workers in private-sector industries. These organized workers are under siege in Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, Indiana, Ohio, and here in Texas. Many work in public schools and universities. The occupation of the Wisconsin capitol started with 2,000 graduate teaching assistants and union members from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on Feb. 14. The attack on these workers and on the work that they do is tightly connected -- and they are fighting back.
First, education is not, in and of itself, a cure for poverty. NPR poll aside, “Poor quality of public schools” is not the most important cause of poverty. We could go on and on about how good or bad our schools are, but lack of education is not the leading indicator of poverty.
As much as we’d like it to be so, there isn’t any substantial difference in the average wage of a high school graduate and a high school drop out. It’s considerably less than the boost from unionization. Remember unionization gave a worker at least a 20% boost in wages. A high school diploma gives a less than 15% boost.
The attack on teachers’ unions in this country has been absolutely barbaric and I believe it violates international standards of dignity and decency.
Unfortunately, the way we’ve been looking at education both at primary and secondary level is supply-side economics: improve the quality of workers through education and grow the quantity of quality workers-- all for the rich employers -- and they won’t be poor no more because the rich will take care of them. Well it doesn’t work that way any more than tax breaks for the rich have created an economy that benefits all of us.
All this talk about creating a competitive workforce for the global economy and endless debates about whether our public schools and universities do or don’t meet the demands of the marketplace is a bunch of hooey. But most folks believe this nonsense. Me too. When I think about our teen-age son’s future, I immediately think: will he finish high school; will his grades and SAT scores be high enough to get into a good college; what’s a high ranked college we can afford... and so on.
Even though I know darn well that there would be much better ways to go about making sure that our child has a good future -- make sure that his nutrition is good, introduce him to cultural expression, work to strengthen our community with public transportation, public space, libraries, and museums, fight for the rights of public school workers and quality public schools, and fight for the rights of all workers, especially their right to organize.
The attack on teachers’ unions in this country has been absolutely barbaric and I believe it violates international standards of dignity and decency. I also believe there are large elements of sexism involved here. 70% of public school teachers are women overall. In Texas about 82% of elementary and middle school teachers are female. At UT, about 80% of full professors are male and about 60% of lecturers are female.
Working conditions for teachers are really lousy. Think about being the only adult in front of a class of 20 eight-year-olds and having to pee. Forced overtime -- hours worked without pay are unbelievable -- and pay isn’t so great. Wisconsin teachers average about $40,000 a year. Lecturers in my department, which is unusually well paid, start at $6,500 a class and are only allowed two classes a semester and two semesters a year. That’s $26,000 a year for what works out to be full time work with an unpaid leave over the summer.
Still image from archival film of John Lewis testifying before Congress in 1947.
In 2002, No Child Left Behind began a new attack in the name of school reform by devaluing teachers in the name of accountability. It was really insidious. It told teachers what to say in their classrooms (teachers in low performance schools are scripted like actors these days); used corporate standardized tests to tell teachers what to teach; it bought curriculum prescribed by corporations (yes folks like Pearson Education, Houghlin Mifflin, and The Pet Goat publisher McGraw Hill use the language of illness as though kids are sick and they’re doctors); and emphasized charter schools and privatization as salvation. And it’s not just the Republicans. Think of Arne Duncan and the Race to the Top.
Now I would agree that our public schools have failed Latino and African American and working class children. That’s one of the reasons that so many parents fought for integration. We know that separate is not equal. Now we have further segregation of the schools in a system based on and currently exhibiting apartheid.
I don’t think the language is too extreme. A very interesting study explores the role of the Koch brothers of Wisconsin fame in defeating the Wake County, North Carolina, socio-economic integration plan. That plan was a model of quality education for all children for the country. The Kochs poured money into the school board race, cast the plan as communistic, and put in a new school board. They won and the children and teachers of Wake County lost big.
Then we have “Waiting for Superman,” which I watched at the Alamo Drafthouse South with a “progressive” Austin audience who giggled at those lazy teachers, cried and then rejoiced with the poor little black child who won a school lottery, and really dug the idea that the problem with the public school system was teacher tenure and their union. I resorted to drink.
Here’s a cartoon from Saving Our Schools from Superman that sums up the movie.
Saving our schools from Superman
At UT, our buildings are plastered with plaques that reveal the connections between the corporate world and higher education. We have the Accenture Endowed Excellence Fund; the Arthur Anderson and Co. Centennial Professorship; Austin Smiles Endowed Fellowship in Speech Pathology; Bank of America Centennial Professorship in Petroleum Engineering; Enstar Chair for Free Enterprise; La Quinta Motor Inns, Inc. Centennial Professorship in Nursing; the BP Exploration Classroom Endowment; Conoco Phillips Faculty Fellowship in Law; and so on.
We have a University President whose three legislative priorities are:
no disproportionate cuts (I guess it’s okay to cut education as long as we also let folks die on the streets);
support for the Texas Competitive Knowledge Fund (dollar match for external research support);
and a new engineering building.
We have a legislature and a state governor that doen't believe in public services at all -- not education, not health care -- not for children, not for the disabled, not for the elderly. They’re cutting off college scholarships and denying the rights of immigrants as well as working class students an education.
That’s the external world. The internal one at the University of Texas, Austin is that the budget crunch is used as an excuse to do what the higher-ups have wanted to do all along. Raise tuitions and cut programs that serve students and lay off lecturers, graduate students, and staff (we’re down to once a month office cleanings). Do away with the Identity Studies Centers that we fought to bring to the University -- African American, Asian, Mexican American, women, and gender. Forget undergraduate education and turn us into an elite research institution.
We need to join every progressive force in this country into a movement that will finally put an end to the systemic destruction of educational opportunity and workers’ rights.
Before I summarize this rant, I wanted you to see a scene from an interview I did with the Director of Public Affairs, Martin Fox, at the National Right to Work Committee. That’s one of the main organizations that the Koch brothers fund and hang out with.
The clip is from a documentary I made in the context of the Pittston coal strike, which was about health care for retired and disabled miners and widows. “Justice in the Coalfields” is about the contradictions between individual and collective rights and what justice means.
The clip begins with a map of right to work states -- you’ll be hearing a lot about that in the next few months. It ends with Bradley McKenzie who led a student walkout in support of the miners. He became a non-union coal miner because there were no union jobs, but his ideas express solidarity at its core. In between is Martin Fox who handled press communications for the Committee at the time.
Martin Fox was a proud member of the National Rifle Association. I know this because I watched him get in his car, with a customized license plate that read “GETAGUN.” Martin Fox is now President of the National Pro Life Alliance and a priest. He holds forth on unions on his blog.
Who has the power to challenge these obscene thugs who have taken over our country? Who wants to challenge them?
Well we do. The “we” is organized labor -- public worker unions. Really, we’re not providing state “services.” We’re providing public necessities. We’re helping the social movement create a vision of a more decent world that includes the working class. And when we collectively fight for ourselves to have decent pay and decent working conditions and democratic control in the work place, we’re not in contradiction with the public good. We’re supporting it.
There are a lot of us. The Texas State Employees Union TSEU-CWA local 1686 has 12,000 members in Texas. We have large numbers of women and African Americans and Latinos. Discrimination has been slightly less in the public sector and these workers are more likely to join a union because of a history of struggle. AFT has 57,000 members in Texas and TSTA has 65,000 members. And there are state workers organized by AFSCME and other unions.
Those of us in the labor movement and those of us in the social movement have got to get to know each other. We need to practice democracy together and work together. We need to join every progressive force in this country into a movement that will finally put an end to the systemic destruction of educational opportunity and workers’ rights.
There’s a great line at the end of a Committees of Correspondence statement on Wisconsin:
And to the workers of Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio: our heartfelt thanks -- may your occupation of the statehouses foretell the day when you become the governors.
[Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker associated with Appalshop, senior lecturer at UT-Austin, and member of TSEU-CWA Local 6186 and NABET-CWA. She is the associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. Her website is annelewis.org.]
The Rag Blog
Posted by thorne dreyer at 8:15 AM
attack on public sector unions
want to ask a basic question that unifies religious, labor, and community organizations at the core. Why in this, the richest country in the world, are people poor?
By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / March 10, 2011
The labor movement has rarely won anything without the social movement, and the social movement has rarely won anything without the labor movement. One often cited example is Dr. King’s 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom initiated by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
If you have any doubts about the necessity of a combined effort, watch this archival film of John L. Lewis when he testified before Congress in 1947 about health care and pensions for miners paid by the coal companies.
The resulting welfare fund, hard fought at the grassroots level by miners and their families, was the most comprehensive health care that I can think of. I know because I was covered under it from the mid seventies to the eighties when it was lost under Reagan.
We frequently marginalize each other -- social movement folks saying unions don’t matter anymore and condemning labor “bureaucrats” and union folks saying that social movement people don’t care about workers and have grandiose ideas of their own power. Some of us get downright schizophrenic dividing our lives into two segments. It’s time we stop this nonsense. We need to speak a common language.
I want to ask a basic question that unifies religious, labor, and community organizations at the core. Why in this, the richest country in the world, are people poor? Please think about how you might respond.
That same question was posed to a wide segment of people, rich and poor, in 2001. The NPR survey provides an analysis of public response to welfare reform (many of us called it deform) during the Clinton administration.
Here’s a table that asks whether it’s circumstances that create poverty or poor people themselves not doing enough. The percentages describe poverty level -- we know it’s set way too low. In 2001 200% of poverty for a family of four was $34,000.
Then NPR asked folks to name the most important cause of poverty in the United States.
Number one is “the poor quality of public schools.”
At about the same time, the Heritage Foundation decided to prove poverty in the United States wasn’t a problem after all. The Heritage Foundation survey is titled, “Understanding Poverty in America.” Here’s the starting point.
The next bar graph compares the living space of poor people in the United States favorably to that of the average European.
CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.
Here are two more rational definitions of poverty:
Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and clothe a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living in marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation. -- United Nations
To meet nutritional requirements, to escape avoidable disease, to be sheltered, to be clothed, to be able to travel, and to be educated. -- Amartya Sen
Better, right? We’re at least getting to the idea of living well and a more humane definition. Notably lacking is the mention of labor unions and collective action, although you could make the argument that the United Nations definition pushes us in that direction with language about effective participation, dignity, and jobs. The lack of worker organization isn’t mentioned in the NPR study. Neither is discrimination, race, ethnicity, or gender or environment or workers’ rights.
Would you have named lack of unionization or lousy labor law or something like that as an important reason why poverty exists in this country?
In July 2002, union members overall had a 20% higher hourly wage ($20.65 vs. $16.42). In blue-collar industry it was $18.88 vs. $12.95; in service occupations, $16.22 vs. $8.98. That’s not counting benefits. Those ratios have remained constant.
Currently nearly one in three public workers are union members compared with 6.9 percent of the workers in private-sector industries. These organized workers are under siege in Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, Indiana, Ohio, and here in Texas. Many work in public schools and universities. The occupation of the Wisconsin capitol started with 2,000 graduate teaching assistants and union members from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on Feb. 14. The attack on these workers and on the work that they do is tightly connected -- and they are fighting back.
First, education is not, in and of itself, a cure for poverty. NPR poll aside, “Poor quality of public schools” is not the most important cause of poverty. We could go on and on about how good or bad our schools are, but lack of education is not the leading indicator of poverty.
As much as we’d like it to be so, there isn’t any substantial difference in the average wage of a high school graduate and a high school drop out. It’s considerably less than the boost from unionization. Remember unionization gave a worker at least a 20% boost in wages. A high school diploma gives a less than 15% boost.
The attack on teachers’ unions in this country has been absolutely barbaric and I believe it violates international standards of dignity and decency.
Unfortunately, the way we’ve been looking at education both at primary and secondary level is supply-side economics: improve the quality of workers through education and grow the quantity of quality workers-- all for the rich employers -- and they won’t be poor no more because the rich will take care of them. Well it doesn’t work that way any more than tax breaks for the rich have created an economy that benefits all of us.
All this talk about creating a competitive workforce for the global economy and endless debates about whether our public schools and universities do or don’t meet the demands of the marketplace is a bunch of hooey. But most folks believe this nonsense. Me too. When I think about our teen-age son’s future, I immediately think: will he finish high school; will his grades and SAT scores be high enough to get into a good college; what’s a high ranked college we can afford... and so on.
Even though I know darn well that there would be much better ways to go about making sure that our child has a good future -- make sure that his nutrition is good, introduce him to cultural expression, work to strengthen our community with public transportation, public space, libraries, and museums, fight for the rights of public school workers and quality public schools, and fight for the rights of all workers, especially their right to organize.
The attack on teachers’ unions in this country has been absolutely barbaric and I believe it violates international standards of dignity and decency. I also believe there are large elements of sexism involved here. 70% of public school teachers are women overall. In Texas about 82% of elementary and middle school teachers are female. At UT, about 80% of full professors are male and about 60% of lecturers are female.
Working conditions for teachers are really lousy. Think about being the only adult in front of a class of 20 eight-year-olds and having to pee. Forced overtime -- hours worked without pay are unbelievable -- and pay isn’t so great. Wisconsin teachers average about $40,000 a year. Lecturers in my department, which is unusually well paid, start at $6,500 a class and are only allowed two classes a semester and two semesters a year. That’s $26,000 a year for what works out to be full time work with an unpaid leave over the summer.
Still image from archival film of John Lewis testifying before Congress in 1947.
In 2002, No Child Left Behind began a new attack in the name of school reform by devaluing teachers in the name of accountability. It was really insidious. It told teachers what to say in their classrooms (teachers in low performance schools are scripted like actors these days); used corporate standardized tests to tell teachers what to teach; it bought curriculum prescribed by corporations (yes folks like Pearson Education, Houghlin Mifflin, and The Pet Goat publisher McGraw Hill use the language of illness as though kids are sick and they’re doctors); and emphasized charter schools and privatization as salvation. And it’s not just the Republicans. Think of Arne Duncan and the Race to the Top.
Now I would agree that our public schools have failed Latino and African American and working class children. That’s one of the reasons that so many parents fought for integration. We know that separate is not equal. Now we have further segregation of the schools in a system based on and currently exhibiting apartheid.
I don’t think the language is too extreme. A very interesting study explores the role of the Koch brothers of Wisconsin fame in defeating the Wake County, North Carolina, socio-economic integration plan. That plan was a model of quality education for all children for the country. The Kochs poured money into the school board race, cast the plan as communistic, and put in a new school board. They won and the children and teachers of Wake County lost big.
Then we have “Waiting for Superman,” which I watched at the Alamo Drafthouse South with a “progressive” Austin audience who giggled at those lazy teachers, cried and then rejoiced with the poor little black child who won a school lottery, and really dug the idea that the problem with the public school system was teacher tenure and their union. I resorted to drink.
Here’s a cartoon from Saving Our Schools from Superman that sums up the movie.
Saving our schools from Superman
At UT, our buildings are plastered with plaques that reveal the connections between the corporate world and higher education. We have the Accenture Endowed Excellence Fund; the Arthur Anderson and Co. Centennial Professorship; Austin Smiles Endowed Fellowship in Speech Pathology; Bank of America Centennial Professorship in Petroleum Engineering; Enstar Chair for Free Enterprise; La Quinta Motor Inns, Inc. Centennial Professorship in Nursing; the BP Exploration Classroom Endowment; Conoco Phillips Faculty Fellowship in Law; and so on.
We have a University President whose three legislative priorities are:
no disproportionate cuts (I guess it’s okay to cut education as long as we also let folks die on the streets);
support for the Texas Competitive Knowledge Fund (dollar match for external research support);
and a new engineering building.
We have a legislature and a state governor that doen't believe in public services at all -- not education, not health care -- not for children, not for the disabled, not for the elderly. They’re cutting off college scholarships and denying the rights of immigrants as well as working class students an education.
That’s the external world. The internal one at the University of Texas, Austin is that the budget crunch is used as an excuse to do what the higher-ups have wanted to do all along. Raise tuitions and cut programs that serve students and lay off lecturers, graduate students, and staff (we’re down to once a month office cleanings). Do away with the Identity Studies Centers that we fought to bring to the University -- African American, Asian, Mexican American, women, and gender. Forget undergraduate education and turn us into an elite research institution.
We need to join every progressive force in this country into a movement that will finally put an end to the systemic destruction of educational opportunity and workers’ rights.
Before I summarize this rant, I wanted you to see a scene from an interview I did with the Director of Public Affairs, Martin Fox, at the National Right to Work Committee. That’s one of the main organizations that the Koch brothers fund and hang out with.
The clip is from a documentary I made in the context of the Pittston coal strike, which was about health care for retired and disabled miners and widows. “Justice in the Coalfields” is about the contradictions between individual and collective rights and what justice means.
The clip begins with a map of right to work states -- you’ll be hearing a lot about that in the next few months. It ends with Bradley McKenzie who led a student walkout in support of the miners. He became a non-union coal miner because there were no union jobs, but his ideas express solidarity at its core. In between is Martin Fox who handled press communications for the Committee at the time.
Martin Fox was a proud member of the National Rifle Association. I know this because I watched him get in his car, with a customized license plate that read “GETAGUN.” Martin Fox is now President of the National Pro Life Alliance and a priest. He holds forth on unions on his blog.
Who has the power to challenge these obscene thugs who have taken over our country? Who wants to challenge them?
Well we do. The “we” is organized labor -- public worker unions. Really, we’re not providing state “services.” We’re providing public necessities. We’re helping the social movement create a vision of a more decent world that includes the working class. And when we collectively fight for ourselves to have decent pay and decent working conditions and democratic control in the work place, we’re not in contradiction with the public good. We’re supporting it.
There are a lot of us. The Texas State Employees Union TSEU-CWA local 1686 has 12,000 members in Texas. We have large numbers of women and African Americans and Latinos. Discrimination has been slightly less in the public sector and these workers are more likely to join a union because of a history of struggle. AFT has 57,000 members in Texas and TSTA has 65,000 members. And there are state workers organized by AFSCME and other unions.
Those of us in the labor movement and those of us in the social movement have got to get to know each other. We need to practice democracy together and work together. We need to join every progressive force in this country into a movement that will finally put an end to the systemic destruction of educational opportunity and workers’ rights.
There’s a great line at the end of a Committees of Correspondence statement on Wisconsin:
And to the workers of Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio: our heartfelt thanks -- may your occupation of the statehouses foretell the day when you become the governors.
[Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker associated with Appalshop, senior lecturer at UT-Austin, and member of TSEU-CWA Local 6186 and NABET-CWA. She is the associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. Her website is annelewis.org.]
The Rag Blog
Posted by thorne dreyer at 8:15 AM
From The The HistoMat Blog-HANDS OFF THE MIDDLE EAST - NO MILITARY INTERVENTION IN LIBYA - TROOPS OUT OF AFGHANISTAN
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Stop the War Protest at Downing Street
HANDS OFF THE MIDDLE EAST - NO MILITARY INTERVENTION IN LIBYA - TROOPS OUT OF AFGHANISTAN
Join the day of action this Saturday March 12th – Downing Street 2pm in London - called by Stop the War Coalition, CND and the British Muslim Initiative
Labels: afghanistan, empire, Libya, war
posted by Snowball @ 7:35 PM
Stop the War Protest at Downing Street
HANDS OFF THE MIDDLE EAST - NO MILITARY INTERVENTION IN LIBYA - TROOPS OUT OF AFGHANISTAN
Join the day of action this Saturday March 12th – Downing Street 2pm in London - called by Stop the War Coalition, CND and the British Muslim Initiative
Labels: afghanistan, empire, Libya, war
posted by Snowball @ 7:35 PM
From The SteveLendmanBlog-Corporate Coup d'Etat in Wisconsin
Corporate Coup d'Etat in Wisconsin
Corporate Coup d'Etat in Wisconsin - by Stephen Lendman
Ralph Nader calls Washington corporate-occupied territory - "every department agency controlled by the overwhelming presence of corporate lobbyists, corporate executives in high government positions, turning the government against its own people."
Nader also said corporations don't just control government, they are the government. "The corporation IS the government!" They bought and own it at the federal, state and local levels, running it like their private fiefdom at the expense of working Americans, systematically stripping them of hard-won rights.
They have 10,000 Political Action Committees and 35,000 full-time lobbyists. "Just imagine," says Nader, "even the Labor Department is not controlled by trade unions - it's (owned and) controlled by corporations."
In 1938, Franklin Roosevelt defined the problem, saying:
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power."
Today it's more virulent and pervasive than anything Roosevelt could have imagined, using corrupted politicians to smash worker rights.
It's more evidence of America's fake democracy and the criminal class running it. Politicians are bought like toothpaste. Mock elections pretend to be real. Behind the scenes power players control everything, supported by brazen media misreporting, whether about war and peace, the rule of law, or other vital issues, including worker rights.
Overnight on March 9, fascist Republicans erased them in five minutes, in violation of Wisconsin's open meetings law, requiring "24 hours prior to the commencement of (special sessions) unless for good cause such notice is impossible or impractical."
The measure had nothing to do with budget-balancing. It's corporate ordered union busting. Wisconsin is a microcosm of America, ground zero, now breached as well as Ohio. Expect other states to follow. Public and private sector workers nationwide are losing out - betrayed by brazen politicians and corrupted union bosses, selling out rank and file members for self-enrichment and privilege.
On March 9, New York Times writer Monica Davey headlined, "Wisconsin Senate Limits Bargaining by Public Workers," saying:
The 23-day "bitter political standoff in Wisconsin over Gov. Walker's bid to sharply curtail (public worker) collective bargaining (rights) ended abruptly Wednesday night as" on-the-take Senate Republicans rammed through an illegitimate bill, voting 18 - 1 - with no debate or Democrat members present.
On March 10, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (JS) writers Patrick Marley and Lee Bergquist headlined, "Maneuver ignites furious protests," saying:
Republicans secretly "devised a plan to get around the impasse and hurriedly approved the bill late in the day." Some financial issues were removed to be voted on separately. Included were provisions raising worker healthcare and pension contributions. Democrat Senator Bob Jauch called it 'political thuggery,' saying 'it's akin to political hara-kiri. I think it's political suicide.' "
The measure gives Walker dictatorial power over BadgerCare health coverage for low-paid Wisconsinites earning too much for Medicaid. It also makes 37 civil service jobs political appointments.
Moreover, state and local public employees must pay half their annual pensions cost contributions, and minimally 12.6% of healthcare premiums. In addition, future pay raises are pegged to annual CPI increases, a rigged index not reflecting true inflation. Greater ones may only be approved by statewide referendum, a cumbersome process taking time.
Further, unions must hold annual votes to let workers decide whether or not to be members, and state authorities no longer will collect union dues from paychecks.
On March 10, Wisconsin's Republican controlled State Assembly easily passed the measure 53 - 42. Walker will sign it into law - by diktat, not democracy.
On March 10, JS writers Lee Bergquist, Jason Stein and Bill Glauber headlined, "Demonstrators crowd Capitol in wild scene after Senate vote," saying:
"Protesters took back control of the Capitol on Wednesday night after Senate Republicans" stripped their collective bargaining rights. "Surging past security, (they) reclaimed the Capitol rotunda...."
Others outside chanted, "Let us in." Inside, they yelled, "You lied to Wisconsin" and "Kill the Bill." In a shocking act of betrayal, the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), representing 98,000 public education employees, instructed teachers to return to classrooms, instead of calling for a general strike to shut down the entire state until the bill is reversed. Growing numbers of teachers and other workers demand one.
Ahead of the Senate vote, email exchanges between Walker and Democrats suggested a deal, involving union certification votes triannually instead of as approved as well as other compromises. All along Democrats, like union bosses, planned capitulation, but needed enough cover to fool constituents.
On March 10, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal gave Walker op-ed space to headline, "Why I'm Fighting in Wisconsin," claiming:
He's doing it "to avoid mass teacher layoffs and reward our best performers," when, in fact, he and other Democrat and Republican governors and lawmakers are destroying public education in their states, and making public university tuitions unaffordable for millions of aspiring students with inadequate family and personal resources to afford them.
Nonetheless, Walker claimed the bill's passage is "good for the Badger State's hard-working taxpayers. It will also be good for state and local government employees who overwhelmingly want to do their jobs well....Our (union busting) bill is a commitment to the future so our children won't face even more dire consequences than we face today, and teachers (won't have to be) laid off (so) government (can) work for" everyone in Wisconsin.
It's instructive to remember journalist IF Stone's admonition to young journalists, telling them:
"All governments lie," or at other times, saying, "All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed." Who better than Walker and Obama prove it. Like other corrupted politicians, the president is no friend of labor.
A Final Comment
Wisconsin Republicans' Wednesday night putch was preceded a week earlier by Walker demanding at least $1.5 billion in budget cuts, besides earlier ones enacted, including:
-- $1.25 billion from schools and local governments, including $900 million in education funding (or $500 per student), exposing his real education agenda;
-- $500 million from Medicaid at the expense of a million needy Wisconsinites dependent on it; and
-- $250 million from the University of Wisconsin, besides sharp tuition hikes, wage and benefit reductions, separating the main Madison campus from others, and possibly privatizing the system, ruining it by selling it off to profiteers.
Now, with collective bargaining gone, all other rights are threatened, except one - a mass action general strike, shutting down the state, staying out until Walker's coup is reversed. Protests aren't enough. Inflicting pain on politicians and corporate interests is crucial. Nothing less can work with firm non-negotiable demands for:
-- restoring collective bargaining rights;
-- social spending increases, not cuts, especially for healthcare, education, and aid to Wisconsin's most needy;
-- recalling all Democrat and Republican politicians, eligible under state law, requiring one year in office before possible; and
-- replacing corrupted union bosses who sold out their rank and file members for self-enrichment and privilege.
Negotiations failed. Mobilized, committed, unified mass action is essential as quickly as possible. On Wisconsin! Then take the campaign nationwide, especially to ground zero in Washington, the heart of corrupted power.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive
Corporate Coup d'Etat in Wisconsin - by Stephen Lendman
Ralph Nader calls Washington corporate-occupied territory - "every department agency controlled by the overwhelming presence of corporate lobbyists, corporate executives in high government positions, turning the government against its own people."
Nader also said corporations don't just control government, they are the government. "The corporation IS the government!" They bought and own it at the federal, state and local levels, running it like their private fiefdom at the expense of working Americans, systematically stripping them of hard-won rights.
They have 10,000 Political Action Committees and 35,000 full-time lobbyists. "Just imagine," says Nader, "even the Labor Department is not controlled by trade unions - it's (owned and) controlled by corporations."
In 1938, Franklin Roosevelt defined the problem, saying:
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power."
Today it's more virulent and pervasive than anything Roosevelt could have imagined, using corrupted politicians to smash worker rights.
It's more evidence of America's fake democracy and the criminal class running it. Politicians are bought like toothpaste. Mock elections pretend to be real. Behind the scenes power players control everything, supported by brazen media misreporting, whether about war and peace, the rule of law, or other vital issues, including worker rights.
Overnight on March 9, fascist Republicans erased them in five minutes, in violation of Wisconsin's open meetings law, requiring "24 hours prior to the commencement of (special sessions) unless for good cause such notice is impossible or impractical."
The measure had nothing to do with budget-balancing. It's corporate ordered union busting. Wisconsin is a microcosm of America, ground zero, now breached as well as Ohio. Expect other states to follow. Public and private sector workers nationwide are losing out - betrayed by brazen politicians and corrupted union bosses, selling out rank and file members for self-enrichment and privilege.
On March 9, New York Times writer Monica Davey headlined, "Wisconsin Senate Limits Bargaining by Public Workers," saying:
The 23-day "bitter political standoff in Wisconsin over Gov. Walker's bid to sharply curtail (public worker) collective bargaining (rights) ended abruptly Wednesday night as" on-the-take Senate Republicans rammed through an illegitimate bill, voting 18 - 1 - with no debate or Democrat members present.
On March 10, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (JS) writers Patrick Marley and Lee Bergquist headlined, "Maneuver ignites furious protests," saying:
Republicans secretly "devised a plan to get around the impasse and hurriedly approved the bill late in the day." Some financial issues were removed to be voted on separately. Included were provisions raising worker healthcare and pension contributions. Democrat Senator Bob Jauch called it 'political thuggery,' saying 'it's akin to political hara-kiri. I think it's political suicide.' "
The measure gives Walker dictatorial power over BadgerCare health coverage for low-paid Wisconsinites earning too much for Medicaid. It also makes 37 civil service jobs political appointments.
Moreover, state and local public employees must pay half their annual pensions cost contributions, and minimally 12.6% of healthcare premiums. In addition, future pay raises are pegged to annual CPI increases, a rigged index not reflecting true inflation. Greater ones may only be approved by statewide referendum, a cumbersome process taking time.
Further, unions must hold annual votes to let workers decide whether or not to be members, and state authorities no longer will collect union dues from paychecks.
On March 10, Wisconsin's Republican controlled State Assembly easily passed the measure 53 - 42. Walker will sign it into law - by diktat, not democracy.
On March 10, JS writers Lee Bergquist, Jason Stein and Bill Glauber headlined, "Demonstrators crowd Capitol in wild scene after Senate vote," saying:
"Protesters took back control of the Capitol on Wednesday night after Senate Republicans" stripped their collective bargaining rights. "Surging past security, (they) reclaimed the Capitol rotunda...."
Others outside chanted, "Let us in." Inside, they yelled, "You lied to Wisconsin" and "Kill the Bill." In a shocking act of betrayal, the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), representing 98,000 public education employees, instructed teachers to return to classrooms, instead of calling for a general strike to shut down the entire state until the bill is reversed. Growing numbers of teachers and other workers demand one.
Ahead of the Senate vote, email exchanges between Walker and Democrats suggested a deal, involving union certification votes triannually instead of as approved as well as other compromises. All along Democrats, like union bosses, planned capitulation, but needed enough cover to fool constituents.
On March 10, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal gave Walker op-ed space to headline, "Why I'm Fighting in Wisconsin," claiming:
He's doing it "to avoid mass teacher layoffs and reward our best performers," when, in fact, he and other Democrat and Republican governors and lawmakers are destroying public education in their states, and making public university tuitions unaffordable for millions of aspiring students with inadequate family and personal resources to afford them.
Nonetheless, Walker claimed the bill's passage is "good for the Badger State's hard-working taxpayers. It will also be good for state and local government employees who overwhelmingly want to do their jobs well....Our (union busting) bill is a commitment to the future so our children won't face even more dire consequences than we face today, and teachers (won't have to be) laid off (so) government (can) work for" everyone in Wisconsin.
It's instructive to remember journalist IF Stone's admonition to young journalists, telling them:
"All governments lie," or at other times, saying, "All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed." Who better than Walker and Obama prove it. Like other corrupted politicians, the president is no friend of labor.
A Final Comment
Wisconsin Republicans' Wednesday night putch was preceded a week earlier by Walker demanding at least $1.5 billion in budget cuts, besides earlier ones enacted, including:
-- $1.25 billion from schools and local governments, including $900 million in education funding (or $500 per student), exposing his real education agenda;
-- $500 million from Medicaid at the expense of a million needy Wisconsinites dependent on it; and
-- $250 million from the University of Wisconsin, besides sharp tuition hikes, wage and benefit reductions, separating the main Madison campus from others, and possibly privatizing the system, ruining it by selling it off to profiteers.
Now, with collective bargaining gone, all other rights are threatened, except one - a mass action general strike, shutting down the state, staying out until Walker's coup is reversed. Protests aren't enough. Inflicting pain on politicians and corporate interests is crucial. Nothing less can work with firm non-negotiable demands for:
-- restoring collective bargaining rights;
-- social spending increases, not cuts, especially for healthcare, education, and aid to Wisconsin's most needy;
-- recalling all Democrat and Republican politicians, eligible under state law, requiring one year in office before possible; and
-- replacing corrupted union bosses who sold out their rank and file members for self-enrichment and privilege.
Negotiations failed. Mobilized, committed, unified mass action is essential as quickly as possible. On Wisconsin! Then take the campaign nationwide, especially to ground zero in Washington, the heart of corrupted power.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive
Thursday, March 10, 2011
*Another Small Victory On The Death Penalty Abolition Front- Illinois Falls
Click on the headline to link to a The New York Times article about the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois.
Markin comment:
Below is a comment made in this space when New Mexico abolished the death penalty in 2009. The main points, the main political points, made there apply here especially the last one- Abolish the death penalty- everywhere!
Saturday, March 21, 2009
*Another Small Victory On The Death Penalty Abolition Front- New Mexico Falls
Commentary
This week, the week of March 16, 2009, Governor Bill Richardson (you remember him from the Democratic presidential campaign trail in 2008 and as a Obama Cabinet appointment gone awry, don’t you?) signed a bill passed by the New Mexico legislature that abolished the death penalty for capital crimes in that state. New Mexico thus joins New Jersey (2007) as the second state in recent times that has overturned this barbaric practice that had previously been on its books. We will take every, even small victory, on this front that we can get our hands on. Kudos.
As a general political proposition it has become apparent that the way that the death penalty will be abolished, short of an early act of a victorious workers government, is through piecemeal legislation in the individual states. So be it. On the federal level one should expect no positive action as the vaunted “liberal’ President Barack Obama is in favor of its retention (as, to be even-handed in our scorn, were then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Massachusetts Senator John Kerry- such is the nature of big time bourgeois politics).
That leaves the United States Supreme Court. Well, let’s move on back to that first paragraph about where the locus of action is on the death penalty question-the individual states. One little note though, some of the Supremes have been making noises (especially Justice Stevens) about abolition of the death penalty as a constitutional question. Well, we have been down that road before. I recall that former Justice Blackmon came out against the death penalty and received accolades and awards far and wide, especially from his brethren in the legal community. The only problem with that tribute from this corner is that he did so AFTER he left the bench. Where was the good Justice he when he could have done something (even in a technical sense like granting stays of execution and other legal niceties) about it though? This death penalty question is a quintessential democratic issue but, once again, don’t depend on the “house” liberals to be in the forefront of its abolition. Abolish The Death Penalty Everywhere Now!
Markin comment:
Below is a comment made in this space when New Mexico abolished the death penalty in 2009. The main points, the main political points, made there apply here especially the last one- Abolish the death penalty- everywhere!
Saturday, March 21, 2009
*Another Small Victory On The Death Penalty Abolition Front- New Mexico Falls
Commentary
This week, the week of March 16, 2009, Governor Bill Richardson (you remember him from the Democratic presidential campaign trail in 2008 and as a Obama Cabinet appointment gone awry, don’t you?) signed a bill passed by the New Mexico legislature that abolished the death penalty for capital crimes in that state. New Mexico thus joins New Jersey (2007) as the second state in recent times that has overturned this barbaric practice that had previously been on its books. We will take every, even small victory, on this front that we can get our hands on. Kudos.
As a general political proposition it has become apparent that the way that the death penalty will be abolished, short of an early act of a victorious workers government, is through piecemeal legislation in the individual states. So be it. On the federal level one should expect no positive action as the vaunted “liberal’ President Barack Obama is in favor of its retention (as, to be even-handed in our scorn, were then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Massachusetts Senator John Kerry- such is the nature of big time bourgeois politics).
That leaves the United States Supreme Court. Well, let’s move on back to that first paragraph about where the locus of action is on the death penalty question-the individual states. One little note though, some of the Supremes have been making noises (especially Justice Stevens) about abolition of the death penalty as a constitutional question. Well, we have been down that road before. I recall that former Justice Blackmon came out against the death penalty and received accolades and awards far and wide, especially from his brethren in the legal community. The only problem with that tribute from this corner is that he did so AFTER he left the bench. Where was the good Justice he when he could have done something (even in a technical sense like granting stays of execution and other legal niceties) about it though? This death penalty question is a quintessential democratic issue but, once again, don’t depend on the “house” liberals to be in the forefront of its abolition. Abolish The Death Penalty Everywhere Now!
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It
Click on the headline to link to an AP report on the latest turn of events in the struggle by Wisconsin public workers unions to retain their collective bargaining rights against a right-wing directed onslaught to eliminate them.
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
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