Generational Politics and the Future of Youth

We Can't Afford to Be Quiet

About the Rising Cost of College

Justin Sullivan, Getty Images

Demonstrators at Oakland City Hall, in California, last month during a national day of protest against cuts in higher-education budgets

 

By Tom Hayden

"There are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. ..."

That heartfelt plea for university reform, issued in 1969, is striking because it was voiced by Hillary Rodham, a student at Wellesley College. Are there any lessons or comparisons to be drawn from those turbulent times for the students and faculty members who are today demonstrating against the rising cost of higher education? As a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in those days and an itinerant sociologist at Scripps College now, I believe we can look to the past as legacy but not as blueprint.

The current generation of young people deserves admiration for the contributions they already have made: creating hip-hop culture, winning sweatshop-free purchasing agreements, leading online advocacy groups like MoveOn.org, and for being the backbone of Barack Obama's unprecedented volunteer campaign. They will be the cradle of social activism for the next 20 years. But the challenges they face on their campuses are far different from those of my generation, and perhaps more profound. Tuition at Michigan in 1960 cost less than $150 per semester. So I could obtain my degree, edit the student newspaper, go south to work in the civil-rights movement for two years, return and enter graduate school, and never feel that I was falling behind in the competitive economic rat race that young Hillary spoke out against.

Students today, however—even those who hold two part-time jobs—fall tens of thousands of dollars into debt, a burden that limits their career choices. Dropping out for social activism brings competitive disadvantage. The speedup of academic pressures dries up discretionary time that used to go to dreaming and exploring. Campuses are crowded with scrambling multitaskers for the most part too busy to protest the pace. Meanwhile, increases in the cost of college exceed inflation every year, intensifying the squeeze.

We had different grievances. The curriculum was often irrelevant to the social crisis we perceived ourselves inheriting; it needed reform. Students were powerless under the paternal doctrine of in loco parentis; we wanted rights. Students were disenfranchised, even though men could be drafted; we needed the vote and alternatives to the draft. Structurally excluded, we went to the streets, to the outside, demanding change on the inside. It's an exaggeration, but only after strikes, rioting, and taking over buildings did colleges offer the mainstream menu of women's studies; black, Latino and Asian studies; queer studies; and environmental programs that they do today. Now most students read Howard Zinn in history classes; back then Zinn was fired from Spelman College for marching with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In those days, university administrators were personified by the impersonal managerial elites depicted by C. Wright Mills, our sociologist hero. In recent decades, the multiversity has been succeeded by a privatized hybrid institution enmeshed in Wall Street machinations, a development epitomized by the former Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers. Excessive financial risk-taking has resulted in depleted portfolios everywhere. No longer independent, higher education has succumbed to the political pressures of regents and trustees who all too often are tied to banks and corporations. For an example of this inbred conservatism, consider a recent survey that showed the public favoring the use of federal stimulus money to keep tuition down, even if that meant leaving less money for operations. In response, a spokesman for the American Council on Education said, "The public is not always right."

The question for today's students is not whether they can read Noam Chomsky, Anaïs Nin, or Zinn, but whether they can afford to. The recent outbreak of protests on hundreds of campuses is a promising sign that economic populism will be a central dynamic in any student movement of the future. Since many of the most active protesters today are students of color, there is greater potential for a coalition that includes inner-city taxpaying communities than there was when so many of the militants were from affluent suburbs. Making college less affordable just as a large number of qualified aspirants are emerging from disadvantaged minority communities is an explosive issue. The numbers of women in college are larger than in the past, which might also widen the coalition.

The value of the past lies in remembering how recently higher education was affordable, even cheap. It's not inevitable that a college education today costs so much. Undergraduate education is virtually free at the Sorbonne or the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a year at Oxford costs no more than community colleges charge here. The choices we have made as a country—to relentlessly privatize our public institutions; to eventually spend three trillion dollars, by some estimates, on the war in Iraq instead of on our public universities; to bail out billionaires on Wall Street while hitting students and their families with repeated tuition increases—are choices with consequences that we have to rethink or accept.

As recently as 1982, when I entered the California State Assembly, my first battle as a naïve new legislator was against fee increases at community colleges, which then were proudly free and accessible. Under President Ronald Reagan and Gov. George Deukmejian, the (Republican) lobbyists for the colleges supported first-time fee increases to avoid budget cuts. Their motivation was not merely budgetary but also a matter of ideological principle. Nothing, they said, should be free in life, which meant that investment in public colleges and universities should be replaced by a consumer-marketplace approach. Most of the Democrats went along when they were promised that the fees would be temporary. When the recession of that period ended, those fees became permanent, and they have escalated ever since. A similar pattern has been true of tuition increases at California State University and the University of California.

Were I still in politics, I would run for office on a promise to keep the magical possibilities of higher education affordable for today's American families, and for the next generation seeking new opportunities for their children. I wonder why the silence from politicians is so deafening. Is it that colleges and universities are easier targets at budget time than corporate-tax loopholes are? Is it that students and faculty members are marginal players in the great game of campaign contributions? Or that college constituencies are too fragmented, divided, and transitory to unify as an effective force for change?

The recent discontent on campuses is a healthy challenge to America's priorities. I hope that Hillary Clinton hears an echo of herself before she and her colleagues become the politicians she warned us against.

Tom Hayden is a visiting professor of sociology at Scripps College, in Claremont, Calif. His most recent book is The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (Paradigm, 2009).

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Tea Party Getting Nasty, Dividing Right

What Next for

the Tea Partiers?

By Leonard Zeskind

Progressive America Rising

March 23, 2010 - After a year of fast-paced growth and increasing influence, the Tea Partiers suffered their first ever political defeat on Sunday when the House of Representatives passed health care reform.

Remember, it was the Tea Parties protests at town hall meetings last August that slowed the legislative drive toward reform and effectively took the single-payer option out of the Democratic Party's playbook. Tea Partiers started to push "independents" away from the Democrats, and they pushed the Republican establishment into becoming the party of no-compromise opposition.

Now a simple up or down vote has thrown the first roadblock in front of the Tea Partiers, and the question emerges: how will they respond over the next five months? Already there are some clues. Tea Party Patriots has announced a "Repeal the Bill" petition on its website and has gathered about 20,000 signatures at the time this article was written.

They claim they want 100,000 names. Once they amass those names and email addresses, however, they will be faced once again with the question of what to do. Some Tea Partiers gathered at the capitol in Atlanta, hoping Georgia state legislators will pass a constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of federal healthcare mandates. And across the country a similar scenario can be expected to unfold as states rights advocates enlist Tea Party activists in a common attempt to annul the effect of federal statutes.

The nastier side of these protests has already shown itself multiple times, and the racist and homophobic name calling and spitting at Democratic congressmen as they walked through the Longworth Building on Saturday may also augur a different type of tactics. While the incidents themselves have been reported, less well known is the Tea Partiers response to these reports.

At the Tea Party Express, one of the networks most closely allied with Republican Party operatives, Amy Kremer claimed that people in her movement "won't tolerate" racist slurs. A few Tea Party Nation activists similarly decided that name-calling was bad public relations and that the offending parties should be "identified and ran out." However, the majority of bloggers in this particular website discussion claimed that there was no evidence beyond the word of the offended congressmen that anything untoward had happened--and therefore they decided that nothing did happen.

And besides, one respondent argued, he was a libertarian and believed in free speech. "I could care less what some crackpot with an "I'm an Official Tea Party Member" T-shirt on has to say about anything," he wrote. Racist name-calling apparently did not bother him. For their part, Republican congressman have promised lawsuits and court actions designed to prevent health care reform from being implemented. Obviously they would need a favorable decision from an (activist) judge.

But for these politicians, the ultimate remedy is in the November elections, and they have started working overtime to keep Tea Party activists stumping for Republican candidates over the next five months. The danger for these Republicans is that the Tea Partiers will run in primaries against establishment politicians or be drawn away from electoral politics altogether and in ever more radical directions.

And that too is about to happen. Consider the call over the internet last Friday by an Alabama militia devotee: "To all modern Sons of Liberty," he wrote, "This is your time. Break their windows. Break them now." Sure enough, the windows of several Democratic representatives who had voted for health care, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' office in Tucson, were broken out with bricks over the weekend. There is no evidence that any Tea Partiers were involved in these crimes, but as their frustration grows over the next months, the choice between Republican Party electioneering, racist sloganeering, and militia-style brick throwing may be difficult for them to make.

 [Leonard Zeskind, author of Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, is president of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, www.IREHR.org ]

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Tea Party Racism: You Don't Even Need a Secret Decoder Ring

Graphic: Rightwing poster vs. Obama

The Tea Party

Is All About Race

 

By Bob Cesca
Huffington Post

March 3, 2010 - I was going to open this piece with an analogy about the tea party groups and why they're treated seriously by the press and the Republicans. The analogy would go something like: "Imagine [insert left-wing activist group here] getting a serious profile in a mainstream newspaper, and imagine serious Democratic politicians appearing at their convention."

The problem is, when I really evaluated what the various far-left activist groups are all about and compared them with the tea party movement, there really wasn't any equivalency. At all.

Because when you strip away all of the rage, all of the nonsensical loud noises and all of the contradictions, all that's left is race. The tea party is almost entirely about race, and there's no comparative group on the left that's similarly motivated by bigotry, ignorance and racial hatred.

I hasten to note that I'm talking about real racism, insofar as it's impossible for the majority race -- the 70 percent white majority -- to be on the receiving end of racism. That is unless white males, for example, are suddenly an oppressed racial demographic. But judging by the racial composition of, say, the Senate or AM talk radio or the cast members playing the Obamas on SNL, I don't think white people have anything to worry about.

This isn't an epiphany by any stretch. From the beginning, with their witch doctor imagery, watermelon agitprop and Curious George effigies, the wingnut right has been dying to blurt out, as Lee Atwater famously said, "nigger, nigger, nigger!"

But they can't.

Strike that. Correction. TeaParty.org founder Dale Robertson brandished a sign with the (misspelled) word "niggar." So they're not even as restrained as the generally unstrung Atwater anymore.

Most of the time, they merely imply the use of the word. Rush Limbaugh referring to the president as a "black man-child," for example. Every week, a new example pops up on the radio and somehow the offenders are able to keep their job while Howard Stern is fined for saying the comparatively innocuous word "blumpkin." Limbaugh, on the other hand, can stoke racial animosity on his show by suggesting that health care reform is a civil rights bill -- reparations -- and no one seems to mind. And no, the impotence isn't an adequate Karmic punishment for Limbaugh's roster of trespasses.

The tea party is an extension of talk radio. It's an extension of Fox News Channel. It's an extension of the southern faction of the Republican Party -- the faction that gave us the Southern Strategy, the Willie Horton ad, the White Hands ad and the racially divisive politics of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. It's an extension of the race-baiting and, often, the outright racism evident in all of those conservative spheres.

But unlike the heavy-handedness of Dale Robertson and others, the tea party followers are generally more veiled about why they're so outraged by our current president.

In the New York Times this past weekend, David Barstow profiled a teabagger from Idaho:

SANDPOINT, Idaho -- Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated -- even manufactured -- by both parties to grab power.

Now you might be saying to yourself, I don't see the racism here. But if you eliminate all of the reasons for Stout's participation in the tea party movement as being contradictory or nonsensical, all that's left is race.

Let's deconstruct.

She claims to be against the bank bailouts, but the tea party is against the president's bank fee designed to recover the TARP money. They also appear to be against financial regulatory reform. None of this makes any sense. If tea partiers are against the bailouts, basic logic dictates that they ought to be in favor of getting the money back. Or do they prefer that the banks keep the money and orchestrate further meltdowns? Honestly, I'm not even entirely sure they realize that the bailouts and the recovery act (stimulus) are two different things. But they're also against the recovery act -- you know, whatever that is.

She also told the New York Times that she's tired of politicians "manufacturing crisis."

Right. Three things here.

First, where was she -- where were the teabaggers -- when the far-right endorsed and supported a massive increase in the size of government, unitary executive power grabs and unconstitutional measures fueled by fear-mongering over the very remote threat of terrorism? Crickets chirping. The odds of being killed in an airborne terrorist attack are literally 1 in 10 million. You're much more likely to kill yourself than to be killed by a terrorist.

Second, I refuse to believe that health care is a "manufactured crisis." People are going broke and dying every day. Even the most conservative estimates show that there are 9/11-level casualties each month due to a lack of adequate health insurance. The horror stories are readily available online. Just Google "health insurance horror story" and see how manufactured the crisis is.

Third, look at any bar graph of the economy as of one year ago or any basic jobs number and tell me if the crisis is manufactured. Hell, Pam Stout's son lost his house! How can she possibly suggest the economic crisis was manufactured?

I hate to single out one person, but Stout's incongruous anger is indicative of the entire movement.

From the outset, the tea party was based on a contradictory premise (the original tea party was a protest against a corporate tax cut). And when you throw out all of the nonsense and contradictions, there's nothing left except race. There's no other way to explain why these people were silent and compliant for so long, and only decided to collectively freak out when this "foreign" and "exotic" president came along and, right out of the chute, passed the largest middle class tax cut in American history -- something they would otherwise support, for goodness sake, it was $288 billion in tax cuts! -- we're left to deduce no other motive but the ugly one that lurks just beneath the pale flesh, the tri-corner hats and the dangly tea bag ornamentation.

Irrespective of whether the president passed a huge tax cut or went out of his way to bring Republicans into the health care process, the seeds of racial animosity from the far-right were sown during the campaign. In those lines waiting for then-vice presidential candidate and current tea party heroine Sarah Palin, their loud noises spread the pre-scripted lies, lies that entirely hinged on the president's African heritage. A white candidate would never be accused of being a secret Muslim. A white candidate would never be accused of being a foreign usurper. Only a black candidate with a foreign name would be accused of "palling around with domestic terrorists."

In the final analysis, when you boil away all of the weirdness, it becomes clear that the teabaggers are pissed because there isn't yet another doddering old white guy in the White House -- like they're used to. That's what this is all about.

By way of a postscript, one of the many faceless radio talk show wingnuts, Jim Quinn, this week called President Obama a "Kenyan wuss" who should be "slapped silly." The Kenyan lie and the "slap silly" insult aside, this president is no wuss. You know how I know? He's a black man who ran for president and won despite the growing mob of gun-toting militant white bigots like Jim Quinn who are sucking air in America. President Obama achieving this despite the hatred and threats against him takes serious guts. Guts that Jim Quinn and the tea party movement will never understand.

Followup article:

Last week, I wrote a piece about the tea party movement and the obvious through-line of race, race-baiting, racism and the use of the Southern Strategy within the movement. The responses were mostly positive and supportive, while the responses from the far-right and tea party people were predictably obnoxious, contradictory and fact-free.

The dominant theme throughout the most outraged responses was, essentially: We're not racists, but here's why we're pissed about blacks and immigrants. For example, here's a particularly illustrative e-mail, reprinted as it was received:

The Tea Party is NOT about race, it is about me paying taxes to support every non contributing individual that has the ability to pro create. It is not my/our fault that the majority of NON contributors are minority. It is not my/our fault some refuse to learn English, thereby limiting their employment opportunities. Hell, the whole race thing is nothing but bullshit for losers such as Garafolo and yourself to capitalize on. Rest assured Booby Boy we no longer give a damn about what you think do or say The main reason the Tea Party exists is Obama's Marxist/Socialistic COMMUNISTIC leanings that will ultimately cost me, part of the 50% that pays taxes, as opposed to the 50% that DON'T PAY!! An ideology that will transform this Country into a third world nation. Try having some honest debate Booby and you might gain cred. Until then you're shining Garafolo's shoes. Sounds to me like you may be an immigrant yourself with an axe to grind. Is that the case Booby? If so you can always go home! Careful moron that light you're looking at is a train not the end of the tunnel......

Smart. I have dozens more just like it. Several of them tell me I'm an idiot for suggesting there's a racial component, followed closely with a line about how I should "go back to Cuba or Africa." Nope. No racism there. Nevertheless, no matter how unhinged the above message might be, it proves an important point -- my point.

Each topic abstractly hinges on race.

The insistence that the tea party movement is more about taxes, big government and personal freedoms is partly true. And many tea party people honestly believe it. But if you dig below the surface into the details underlying these banner themes, it's not difficult to find that, yes, it's about taxes -- taxes on the rich to finance the extravagant lives of layabout welfare queens, or big government "ramming health care down our throats" as a means of slavery reparations to African Americans, and personal freedoms being stripped away by a liberal fascist Nazi who wants to give money and handouts to minorities in the form of health care subsidies and mortgage relief. You know, typical Nazi behavior. If I had a dollar for every Nazi who wanted to funnel government cash to immigrants and minorities...

It's the subtext that gurgles just below the surface of these three topics that composes the tea party version of the Southern Strategy.

Developed by Republican strategists like Harry Dent and Pat Buchanan during the rebuilding of the GOP in the post Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act era, the Southern Strategy's goal was to win over southern whites by demonizing blacks using subterfuge, dog whistles and coded language. As I mentioned last week, the late Republican mastermind Lee Atwater described the use of the Southern Strategy as being all about the use of "abstract" issues that imply race without explicitly using direct racial epithets or even the words "black" or "white."

Atwater described some of the abstract issues of his era as "forced bussing" or taxes, and framing these issues in a way that subconsciously fuels white resentment towards blacks, and serves to coalesce white votes around Republican candidates. After all, Republicans will readily admit that trying to win over black voters has been a lost cause since LBJ, so why not exploit that loss by playing to white racial bias and thus locking down larger chunks of the white vote?

When Atwater was discussing this issue with political science professor Alexander P. Lamis (reported by Bob Herbert in the New York Times), the topic was Reagan and his cuts in food stamps and legal services in urban communities. Even though the Republicans had already won over the South, Atwater explained, these Reagan-era moves tended to reinforce white turnout and Wallace types. Again, it's not about direct racism, but it's borne out of a racial component.

That's the Southern Strategy. It's as old as the Civil War and the Southern white "fire-breathers," but only in the last 40 years has it become a significant subheading in the fear chapter of the Republican Party playbook.

In other words, this isn't a figment of my imagination or a wacky far-left conspiracy theory. The Southern Strategy was and still is very real. Look no further than the Willie Horton ad. The White Hands ad. The 2006 "Harold! Call me!" ad which set off white dog whistles in Tennessee about a black candidate having sex with a clearly naked blond white woman. Not ancient history by any stretch, nor have been the various attempts to fuel racial animosity against President Obama during and following the campaign.

Likewise, no one in charge of the tea party movement, save for obvious racist Dale Robertson (he of the pirate form of "niggaaarrrr"), is out there gathering members while sporting white headgear and spouting off obvious white supremacy slogans. This would backfire, as Atwater said during his Southern Strategy remarks. The subconscious racial element would suddenly become obvious and scare away supporters who aren't necessarily racist, or who are in denial about their racism. Instead, they rally supporters around issues like taxes, big government and personal freedoms. But with a not-so-hidden Southern Strategy wink.

The flimsy and contradictory policy arguments only make the winking racial subtext more obvious.

For instance, the president cut taxes for the middle class. According to the CBO, a full third of the projected national debt -- $3 trillion over the next 10 years -- is due to the president retaining middle class tax cuts and rolling back the alternative minimum tax so it doesn't absorb middle class earners. Tax cuts. So how, then, can the tea party reasonably claim that President Obama is all about taxing the middle class "to death," as some e-mailers argued?

For the tea party leadership, it's all politics, and politics is power. It's about saying "join us" so we can oppose "them" and their taxes to pay for the poor (wink, we mean blacks) and their health care handouts (for reparations to blacks, wink). Consequently, tea party organizers and their PR wing at Fox News and on talk radio are able to consolidate political and financial power.

Glenn Beck, this week, was at it again, suggesting that the U.S. Census was scheming to give lopsided representation to minorities. This on top of his ongoing line that President Obama hates white people and that health care reform is all about reimbursing black people because of slavery. Yeah. He's not so "abstract," as Lee Atwater once said.

In Beck's case, sure, he spends a considerable amount of time talking about freedom and something about red phones and assembling acronyms that spell out non-words like "OLGIARHY." But the race argument is ever present. As obvious as it is, he doesn't say outright that his viewers should hate black people or immigrants. But he's clearly stoking white resentment for ratings and financial gain. Beck, like it or not, is a major player in the tea party movement, as is Fox News Channel. Together, they've spent countless sums of cash promoting tea party rallies and endorsing tea party causes. They are inextricably linked. And the Southern Strategy is right out there in plain view.

To date, for all of their protests and e-mails, I have yet to hear or read about any tea party participant who has denounced Beck. Or denounced Limbaugh for his daily race-based grabassery (yesterday is was a pun about Eric Massa, Governor Patterson and the racial epithet "massa"). Or denounced the scores of people who turn up with witch doctor signs and other racially-insensitive agitprop.

And finally, no. I'm not implying that everyone who disagrees with President Obama is a racist. Hell, I disagree with him on a number of issues. And no, not every member of the tea party movement is an outright racist. There are surely some earnest, decent (though politically misguided) people who are unaware of the race-baiting that's happening around them, and it's reasonable to suggest that there are more than a few people who simply don't recognize racism when they see it. But it's clear that a major component of the tea party movement -- the movement -- is the use of race, anti-immigrant sentiment and abstract racism as a strategy. Naturally, it wouldn't be used if there wasn't anything to gain. Sadly, however, the target demographic for the tea party movement is low-information white middle class voters who have a tendency, no matter how subconscious, to respond to political dog whistles.

No matter how loud and obnoxious they might become, the urgency is to make sure the tea party isn't taken any more seriously than its backwards and contradictory positions on the issues, its phony Astroturfing, and its Southern Strategy politics. This is essentially a corporate-driven assembly of angry white people gathered around abstractly racial issues for the purposes of venting rage while financially benefiting the far-right power elites who are pulling the strings. The broader conservative movement, say nothing of anyone who takes seriously the issues confronting the nation, would do well to stay away from the tea party, leaving it to flail in the margins where it belongs.

-
Correction: Atwater's discussion took place with Alexander P. Lamis, and was first reported by Bob Herbert.

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Van Jones, Still the Driving Force for Green Jobs

 

After Right-Wing Smears,

Van Jones gets a second chance

 

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

The Nation

Van Jones, who resigned from the White House Council on Environmental Quality last fall in the face of a coordinated smear campaign by conservative activists, has reemerged from his self-imposed exile. He'll be teaching at Princeton University and taking up a senior fellowship at the Center for American Progress, where he will head a "green opportunity initiative."

And today, Jones will accept the NAACP President's Award from Benjamin Jealous, who mounts an eloquent defense of Jones in an op-ed.

A founder of "Green for All" and the online civil rights group "Color of Change," Jones penned a bestseller, "The Green Collar Economy," which provided a blueprint for using green technologies to bring jobs to deindustrialized American cities and create pathways out of poverty. He was a driving force behind the passage of the 2007 Green Jobs Act and one of America's most pragmatic environmental visionaries.

As we wrote in The Nation soon after Jones was run out of his job by clownish demagogue Glenn Beck,

The idea that Van Jones...was some kind of crypto-radical bent on subverting American capitalist democracy from the inside has as much relationship to the truth as the notion that Obama is hatching a plan for mandatory euthanasia of America's seniors. In giving him the NAACP's President's Award, Jealous referred to Jones's missteps, including political statements made years ago. Yes, it was a misstep to sign a 911truth.org petition. But Jones repudiated his signature and said the petition's wording didn't then and doesn't now represent his views. In a saner political environment, that would have been the end of it. Or, as the NAACP'S Jealous put it, "we can never afford to forget that a defining trait of our country is our collective capacity to practice forgiveness and celebrate redemption. This is a nation built on second chances."

It is good news that Jones has gotten that quintessentially American second chance. I am sure he will be a force working "outside" the White House -- oxygenating the grassroots with his fertile ideas.

Yet I remain sad for my country. Jones is one in a line of would-be public servants, stretching from Lani Guiner and Jocelyn Elders all the way back to those harassed by Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.), who were driven out of public office because right-wing demagogues targeted and distorted their views. How is it that a man working to help Americans invest in a green collar economy ended up branded as an untouchable radical? How is it that such attacks led a skittish White House, admittedly battling attacks on many fronts, to jettison a powerful voice for environmental justice?

What a victory that was for the demagogues among us. Van Jones is back, but there will be other targets and well-coordinated attacks that Americans must resist, instead of giving in to those who would debase our politics through smears.

By Katrina vanden Heuvel | February 26, 2010; 12:58 PM ET

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Obama Pressed by US 'Long Warriors'

 

Threat to Iraq

Withdrawal Plan

 

By Tom Hayden

Peace & Justice Resource Center

Was it too good to be true? In February at Camp Lejeune, our new President Barack Obama surprised all observers by pledging to withdraw all US troops from Iraq by 2012, in accord with a pact secretly negotiated at the end of the Bush era. Previously, Obama was promising to withdraw all combat troops, leaving a "residual force" dominating Iraq for years.

Obama has restated his commitment to the full withdrawal on several occasions. But heavy pressure is building to make the president drop his commitment.

The most ominous sign of the gathering campaign to make Obama cave in came in an Feb. 24 op-ed piece in the New York Times by Thomas Ricks, the pre-eminent mainstream historian of the war. Given the political gridlock and growing turbulence in Iraq, Ricks says that breaking his campaign promise is the "best course" for Obama to pursue.

Ricks says "it would be best to let [read: pressure] Iraqi leaders to make the first public move to re-open the status of forces agreement" under which US combat troops will soon be departing.

"As a longtime critic of the American invasion of Iraq, I am not happy about advocating a continued military presence there", Ricks writes. Perhaps he is forgetting his 2009 book celebrating Gen. David Petraeus, The Gamble, in which Ricks predicted that Obama would have to break his vow to remove all combat troops to avoid "abandoning Iraq." Or his prediction in the same book that the US is only "halfway through" the Iraq War.

Ricks' epilogue was titled "The Long War", making him one of the earliest warrror-journalists to embrace the notion of a 50-80 year war projected by top counterinsurgency advisers to Petraeus and the Pentagon.

Everyone including Ricks agrees that the American public is completely soured on the Iraq War. Just this week a federal agency noted that the $53 billion spent on Iraq reconstruction, the largest aid effort since the Marshall Plan, has been squandered. [NYT, Feb. 22, 2010]

That doesn't phase our ideological fanatics who believe in permanent war until all their ideological fanatics are dead.

No matter that both Iraq and Afghanistan are trillion-dollar wars and, according the latest federal budget analysis, there is "virtually no room for domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors." The neo-conservative stealth strategy of destroying government programs by "strangling the baby in the bathtub" [the phrase of Grover Norquist] is working. 

The reason US military combat may continue in Iraq is that the Pentagon has not won the war. On the one hand, the US has installed a brutal authoritarian Shiite-dominated coalition in power in Baghdad, one closely aligned with the Pentagon's strategic enemies in Iran. That's not a victory. That same Shiite coalition has used its power to purge the minority Sunni candidates from running in the elections scheduled for next month. Gen. Ray Odierno recently stated the obvious, that the key Iraqi politicians purging the Sunni candidates "clearly are influenced by Iran." [NYT, Feb. 17, 2010]

Not surprisingly, the top Iraqi blocking Sunni participation, according to Gen. Odiorno, is the same Ahmed Chalabi who conspired with the neo-cons to pass along false information leading to the 2003 invasion.

These events may drive the Sunni community to revive its insurgency, which was contained by US funding of the "Awakening" movement and promises of protection. The return of insurgency would mean civil war. The alternative may be more likely, a demand from the Sunnis that their former enemies, the Americans, stay in Iraq to protect them from the Shiites. This scenario would be in accord with the doctrine advocated by Petraeus advisor Stephen Biddle [see Foreign Affairs, Mar.-April 2006]. Divide and conquer may succeed.

What are the chances Obama will keep to his commitment? At this point, the most likely withdrawal we can expect from the President is not from Iraq but from his previous commitment. How can he politically succeed in withdrawing against warnings from all sides that chaos and bloodshed will be the result? The Long War advocates have him where they want him.

The peace movement may protest, and public opinion may be unenthusiastic, but cannot be counted on to stop this Long War plan for Iraq if Obama caves. Last month there were only five American deaths in Iraq; for 2009, the count was 149 [compared to 822 in 2006].

If renewed American intervention cannot be stopped, neither can a reckoning down the road, however. The cost of occupation is more than a fiscal one. A permanent American occupation of Iraq will be like a giant breeder reactor generating deadly and unpredictable opposition from Iraqi nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism for years to come.

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People Power Vs. 'The Long Warriors'

How To Rebuild

The Peace Movement

From the Bottom Up

 

By Tom Hayden

Peace and Justice Resource Center

Here at the PJRC we are exploring ways to implement communications with peace activist at local or regional levels, including a series of conference calls. In the meantime, let me share some specific thoughts about building the peace and justice movement from the bottom up.

Social movements always depend on leadership, a commitment by a single individual or small group to continue their work in the face of all odds. Then there's the question of a strategy for being effective. We always have to measure our capacity against the goals we set.

PEOPLE POWER AGAINST THE PILLARS OF POLICY

The bottom-up strategy which I propose is building the pressure of people power against the pillars of policy that prop up the Long War.

The key pillars for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan include, first, the pillar of public opinion; second, the pillar of budgetary support; and third, the pillar of our military resources. Other pillars include the mainstream media, religious institutions and, of course, the required stability of America's ally Kabul.

In the end, it's about public opinion. We have to argue that the American people are not any safer for having fought these wars, and we cannot afford the cost in casualties and tax dollars.

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Tea Party Factions Prepare for 2010 Vote and Beyond

Revival and Revolt:

Inside the Tea Party

National Convention

By Devin Burghart
Huffington Post

Feb. 10, 2010, Nashville - The rancor and division among Tea Partiers that erupted in the weeks leading up to the first Tea Party National Convention was nowhere to be found inside the expansive biosphere-like confines of the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center. Squabbles set aside, at least for the moment, the real business of the February 4-7 convention was three-fold: culture warring, movement building, and campaign winning.

Organized by Judson Phillips, a Nashville attorney, and his wife Sherry, Tea Party Nation (or TPN) is one of several different Tea Party factions vying to be the voice of those angry white voters wanting to “take America back!”

TPN describes itself as a “user-driven group of like-minded people who desire our God given Individual Freedoms which were written out by the Founding Fathers. We believe in Limited Government, Free Speech, the 2nd Amendment, our Military, Secure Borders and our Country!” These threads ran through the convention.

The crowd of roughly six hundred came to Nashville from across the country. Among the TPN conventioneers was an attorney from Virginia, an IT professional from Atlanta, a retired executive from Lansing, a veterinarian from rural Pennsylvania, a power plant engineer from Houston, a teacher from rural Idaho, and snowbirds from Arizona.  The crowd skewed slightly older, primarily from the 55+ demographic range, and was split almost evenly between men and women.

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A Organizing Tool to Win the Democracy Battle

If We Had A Bell:

The Democracy Charter

CIO Poster: The Campaign for FDR's Second Bill of Rights.

By Zach Robinson

CCDS Mobilzer

December’s National Coordinating Committee (NCC) meeting opened December 4, 2009, by taking up Jack O’Dell’s essay “Democracy Charter." O’Dell, a member of the CCDS National Advisory Board, participated by tele-conference. The following day, the NCC considered a resolution outlining a plan of work around the Democracy Charter. It generated strong support and was adopted by the body.

In his NCC presentation, O’Dell pointed out that these times of multiple crises are pregnant with hopes as well as fears. He characterized the 2008 elections as a “moment of promise,” and said that the strategic goal of the Democracy Charter is “to enable the coalition that achieved that moment to become a movement… to transform the electoral victory into a movement of direct action inseparable from electoral activity.”

Segmentation developed in the progressive movement under conditions when focused, issue-based activity yielded tangible results. In today’s conditions, however, a segmented structure can reduce the effectiveness of movement campaigns. For example, facing expansion of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, the peace movement would seem naturally allied with organizations seeking better funding for public schools. Yet fears that their constituency might not understand the classic guns-vs-butter problem can make leaders in the education movement shy of taking an anti-war stance. And some in the peace movement may not be sufficiently aware of how lack of real educational opportunity creates people who can be treated as cannon fodder by the military.

 

Pamphlet to populate the South African Freedom Charter.

The various activities of the progressive movement have always had something in common: the democratic aspirations of diverse constituencies. Yet it requires special conditions for that general commonality to take on an organized character greater than the temporary alliances of numerous electoral campaigns over the last few decades. In his historic speech at the 1963 march on Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of “the fierce urgency of now.” That is the urgency of today. Deep economic and environmental crises reach all aspects of human society and by so doing, provide the material connections and the psychological basis for organizing a realignment. The Democracy Charter is a touchstone.

By bringing the many struggles together under the banner of expanding democracy from a formal to a substantive level, the strategic concept of the Democracy Charter opens a way to organize the greater unity that is needed. O’Dell writes, “The Charter proposal is designed to acknowledge and enhance the effective work that is already being done in many areas of Movement activity. When harnessed to the grassroots organizing tradition, the Democracy Charter can bring new energy that is transformational in its possibilities for social change in our nation.”

President Roosevelt’s 1944 “Second Bill of Rights” is a key point of historical reference for O'Dell, as it is for Michael Moore in his documentary film “Capitalism: A Love Story.” O'Dell related Moore’s answer to the reporter who asked, in light of his blistering critique of capitalism, what it was that he wanted: a higher form of democracy.
At the end of World War II, labor unions led a massive mobilization in favor of Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights. But after his death, that promise was buried by the Cold War’s nuclear-armed military alliances and McCarthyist pressure toward political conformity. The Cold War stifled the hope for progress that was embodied in the diplomatic alliances and popular movements that brought victory against fascism in the 1940s.

Chartist mass meeting, Kennington Common, London,

1848. The Chartists were a British working class-based

organization that backed the six-point People's Charter.

Chartists met with Frederick Douglass during his European

tour of the 1840s. Rising political consciousness in the

Chartist movement prompted Marx and Engels to write the

Communist Manifesto in 1848. This movement laid the

foundation for mass opposition to British intervention on

behalf of the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War.

 

Yet, as O’Dell writes in his essay, three signal events of 1955 made a breakthrough: (i) the Montgomery bus boycott in the U.S., which, through direct action, put realization of the Reconstruction-era Constitutional amendments on the agenda, (ii) the Congress of the People in South Africa, which ratified the Freedom Charter that guided the anti-apartheid movement, and (iii) the Bandung Conference, in which representatives of 29 African and Asian countries articulated a 7-point manifesto that gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement, establishing the prospect of a victorious struggle to abolish colonialism. This history shows that united action behind a people's agenda can change the balance of forces.

The NCC resolution cites views of several panelists at the July, 2009 symposium “Building the Progressive Majority” in San Francisco. Bill Fletcher, co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal and the Black Radical Congress, characterized the Democracy Charter as a polemic against post-modernism, the notion that there is no over-arching way of linking struggles. He urged us to integrate the Democracy Charter into discussions with our constituencies, and to develop working people’s assemblies and working people’s agendas. Steve Williams, executive co-director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), said that the Democracy Charter can build a core of people active in working class communities, in communities of color, and gay and lesbian communities who will build a progressive majority. Jackie Cabasso, executive director of the nuclear disarmament group Western States Legal Foundation, noted that the Democracy Charter contributes to a causal analysis of the levers of social change, and to a comprehensive vision that allows people to see the interconnectedness of issues in a way that undermines neo-liberalism, individualism and privatization.

The NCC resolution projects a role for the CCDS in launching the Democracy Charter into a national conversation in such a way that it can be owned and acted upon by a much broader array of social forces, building connections among the progressive majority. The resolution outlines a plan of work on two tracks. One track is based on winning endorsement by noted figures. The other, primary track is based on a step-by-step organizing process of outreach to local activists in labor, the human rights movements, peace and multi-issue formations. The grassroots organizing proceeds from developing a cadre of activists who can promote work around the Democracy Charter, offering the Democracy Charter to their local organizations for study. The goal is to organize across the country 500 educational meetings of 5 people each. Building on this framework, regional conferences can be held with the Democracy Charter as a central organizing document. This work would culminate in national meetings. For example, the Democracy Charter can be brought to the People's Assemblies being organized in preparation for the meeting of the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, and then to the Detroit national meeting in June, 2010.

We have a bell to ring all over this land!

(Print This Article)

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Obama's Speech: The Practical and the Problematic

 

The Good and

the Not So Good 

State of the Union

 

By Carl Bloice
BlackCommentator.com

First the good stuff.

"Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse," President Obama told the country. "Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations - they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America."

I about fell off my chair when I heard that. He was speaking the truth, telling us all something that we should wrap our collective brains around.

You don't really need the comparative statistics. Travel outside the country, to say Shanghai, Berlin, Tokyo or Copenhagen and it quickly become obvious that, despite all their real problems, others are moving into the 21st Century and we're lagging behind.

"No president has ever delivered so direct a strike to the soft underbelly of contemporary American conservatism, or one that resonates more with Americans' hopes for their nation.," commented Alan Meyerson, co-editor of the liberal American Prospect magazine.

Obama's got both the diagnosis and the prescription right. I think he means it. He thinks the lag can be overcome within the strictures of the capitalist market system. And, he's much better suited to try that than the craven, self aggrandizing lot that make up most of the U.S. Congress and the timid politicians that comprise the bulk of the rest.

"We need to encourage American innovation," the President said. "Last year, we made the largest investment in basic research funding in history - an investment that could lead to the world's cheapest solar cells or treatment that kills cancer cells but leaves healthy ones untouched.

"And no area is more ripe for such innovation than energy. You can see the results of last year's investments in clean energy - in the North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries; or in the California business that will put a thousand people to work making solar panels.

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives."

And then came the problematic.

"And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country," he said. "It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies." There are a lot of people who would disagree. Each of these presents serious technical, safety and environmental quandaries that he did not address and which will be debated in the months and year ahead. Still we should welcome his call for passage of a "comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America."

Those other countries are not investing in green technologies merely "because they want those jobs." They also want to pass on to future generations a clean and safe environment and they recognize the physical and political consequences of perpetual reliance on petroleum (and coal) as our principle source of energy. It should be the same for us. However, right now nearly everything we contemplate doing is seen through the prism of the economy and employment.

Yes, a longer range view that links our future to green technologies, sustainable agriculture and the like is essential but so is the hard fact that over one out of every ten people in the country can't find a way to earn a living. There shouldn't be a contradiction between addressing both problems at once. Indeed, if the latter is not addressed with the urgency it requires all hell will break loose and neither President Obama nor anyone else will be in a political position to do anything about the future.

Critics used to make fun of socialist counties' five year plans but right now we could use something like that.

And then there is what's necessary and possible.

In an editorial titled, "Opposite of Bold" that appeared the day before the State of the Union, the New York Times said, "The danger is that the initiatives announced so far this week will move to center stage, eclipsing more difficult and more important needs. It is Mr. Obama's job to make sure that does not happen."

"There is a crater in the economy where the job market used to be, a hole so deep that it would take at least 10 million new jobs to fill it," wrote the Times editors. "There are more than six jobless workers for every job opening, which means prolonged spells of unemployment for many of the nation's 15.3 million jobless workers."

"A lack of jobs also means delays in getting hired or lower entry-level wages for millions of high school and college graduates - long-lasting setbacks. It portends little to no wage gains well into the future for millions of underemployed Americans, and even for the majority who have held on to their jobs as the economy has tanked. It means intractable budget deficits - because without new jobs, economic performance and tax revenues will remain inadequate.

"Even the $154 billion jobs bill passed by the House in December is only a starting point for the repair and recovery work that needs to be done.

A study recently commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Mayors predicts jobless rates in most urban areas are likely to cease rising some times this year but it will be a long time before they return to what was normal in the 1990s. Furthermore, in places like the inland portions of California, it will remain above 10 percent at least through 2013. The Congressional Budget Office says unemployment will remain above 9 percent for at least the next two years.

A record 40 percent of the jobless still looking for work have been on the streets for at least 6 months. Twenty percent of the 25 o 54 year old men in the country are not working.

And, it goes without saying - but should be repeated anyway - joblessness is highest proportionately for communities of color, young workers, and women who head households.

Nearly one third of all people in the country now live below the federal poverty line, according to a recent Gallup poll. Close to one in five say they lacked the money to buy food at some point in the last year. Over 38 million people - one in eight - now receive food stamps, the highest portion ever.

Economist Dean Baker commented last week that the latest data on unemployment insurance filings indicate that the economy is still shedding jobs. "With final demand growth remaining weak, there is little prospect for a turnaround of employment in the near future." he wrote.

"To create jobs, Mr. Obama must make it clear that he will not abandon the states at this time of budget crises," said the Times editorially. "Bolstered aid to states is unpopular. But it is among the surest ways to preserve and create jobs because the money is pushed through quickly to employees, contractors and beneficiaries. The alternative is recovery-killing spending cuts and tax increases on the state level."

To students of all ages in California the portion of the President's address devoted to education must have seemed like a sick joke of some kind. Amid all the lofty talk about increased funding and educational "reforms," the state is responding to the financial crisis by decimating its school system from kindergartens to graduate schools. It's hardly clear what Obama's call for increased commitment to community colleges is going to mean in a state where student are finding teachers laid off and classes cut that they need to complete their degrees, or, in some cases to qualify for student loans. Students here - at all levels - are planning a massive day of protest next month.

Following the President's speech, American Federation of Teachers President, Randi Weingarten, said she welcomed the Administration's call for increased spending on education but added: "Our future depends on education and we know that kids don't get second chances. So we are looking for that ongoing commitment to public education." Further, she said, a federal freeze on spending will do harm. "There's still a lot of folk that are suffering. I am confident that the president wants to do the best he can under this circumstance. But ultimately the cuts are real and they're going to hurt people."

The President said he would use part of the $30 billion in bailout funds the big banks paid back to the federal government to create small business loans and has proposed a new small business tax credit directed to more than a million small businesses that hire new employees or raise wages. Economist Robert Reich commented in his blog last week that "targeted tax cuts," mostly for small business, are good to the extent they give businesses a nudge toward creating more jobs. But businesses won't begin to create lots of jobs until they have lots of customers. And that won't happen until lots more Americans have work. The only way to get them work when businesses aren't hiring is for government to prime the pump.The best and fastest way for government to prime the pump is to help states and locales, which are now doing the opposite. They're laying off teachers, police officers, social workers, health-care workers, and many more who provide vital public services. And they're increasing taxes and fees. They have no choice. State constitutions require them to balance their budgets. But the result is to negate much of what the federal government has tried to do with its stimulus to date.

"We need a second stimulus directed at states and locales.

In an email message last week, NAACP President, Benjamin Todd Jealous, observed, "The Supreme Court has unleashed unlimited amounts of corporate dollars into the political landscape with its ruling this month on campaign finance reform, money sure to undercut and distort the real priorities of our democracy. President Obama has vowed to fight. He has pledged to reverse the worst impact of the Supreme Court decision. Yet without each of us fully engaged, billions of dollars will be harnessed to crush his agenda and those who support it for simply daring to do the people's will."

"Still, we can win. Organized and educated people ultimately trump misdirected money.

"But without you and all your friends and neighbors back on the battlefield, harnessing the power of we, there is no guarantee progress will continue. Like every great wave, the one that made it possible for an African-American family to live in the White House must be regenerated, or it will ebb. More importantly, our communities' and families' fates, which are in perilous condition, will ebb with it.

Last Friday, the Campaign for America's Future announced it was launching a grassroots campaign to get the Senate to pass the House jobs bill and embark on a comprehensive long term job strategy comprising key goals of rebuilding the nation's schools, roads and energy systems, closing state budget gaps to prevent mass layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters, directing public sector hiring to expand services that strengthen our communities and using revenue to "Buy American" and revitalize our manufacturing industry.

Last week, AFL-CIO President, Richard Trumka, pledged that the labor federation will "continue to be an independent voice for middle class Americans and fight for the change working families need - and we are ready to do more."

"This is the time for a broad movement of Americans demanding jobs and an economy that works for all, and we're ready to put our energy and leadership into building that movement - taking the fight to the doorstep of the banks that are exploiting struggling homeowners, of corporations that are running away from communities and of lawmakers who choose to back them up," Trumka said. _____________________

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a National Co-Chair of the Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union

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Obama: For Victories, We Need More Than Crumbs

The Message of

Massachusetts: Jobs

 

By Leo W. Gerard
AFL-CIO Blog

Bill Clinton saw it clearly when he was running for president against Bush I. It became his mantra: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Clinton wanted to reform health insurance, too. But he understood that during a recession, the first priority is jobs.

Politicians and commentators continue to blather obtusely about the meaning of Senate candidate Martha Coakley’s loss in Massachusetts to a Republican in a heavily Democratic state. Like Coakley and her advisers, they have failed to see the obvious, failed to learn from Clinton’s victory:

It’s the economy, stupid.

Poll results show that Massachusetts voters punished Coakley—and Democrats—for neglecting the issue most vital to them: jobs. If politicians had studied earlier polls or attempted to actually get in touch with mainstream, Main Street Americans—or just listened to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s address at the National Press Club on Jan. 11—they’d have known to focus on jobs. The message of Massachusetts should be clear: If Democrats want to save their own jobs in the midterm elections this fall, they must create jobs now.

A [1] poll taken in the first week in December exposed voters’ anger over the economy. The bipartisan Battleground Poll showed this: A huge majority of those surveyed ranked improving the economy and jobs as the most important tasks for Congress. It was 40 percent, compared to healthcare reform, at just 15 percent.

Here’s what pollster Celinda Lake said about the results:

The number one thing Democrats have to do is prove they really have a jobs program and an economic program that is going to sell on Main Street.

That was a month before the Massachusetts vote. In the meantime, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced unemployment numbers for December—and they were worse in 43 states than they had been in November. Joblessness in Michigan, a high-population Heartland State, was the highest in the country at 14.6 percent. In Rhode Island, it was 12.9 percent; in South Carolina, 12.6 percent. In California, one of the dozen largest economies in the world, it was 12.4 percent, significantly higher than the U.S. average of 10 percent.

People are hurting. Pay attention, politicians. Pay attention.

They didn’t. In the Massachusetts race, they were talking about terrorism and baseball.

In a Research 2000 [2] poll done for MoveOn.org, 95 percent of Massachusetts residents surveyed ranked the economy as either important or very important to their candidate choice. Research 2000 questioned 1,000 registered voters—half of whom voted for Republican Scott Brown and half of whom did not vote at all.

Among those who voted for Obama in 2008 but Brown this month, 51 percent said they believed Democratic policies helped Wall Street more than Main Street.

It’s the economy, stupid. The Main Street economy.

Similarly, in a Hart Research Associates [3] poll conducted on election night in Massachusetts, 79 percent of voters said electing a candidate who would strengthen the economy and create more good jobs was the single most important factor in their decision. The were looking for someone who would fix the economy.

The Great Recession of Bush II is more than two years old now. Workers are frightened and angry. They see bailouts for Wall Street, big bonuses for bankers and unemployment continuing to rise.

They will vent their frustration on politicians. Massachusetts showed it. Trumka [4] warned about it earlier this month in his talk at the Press Club:

At this moment, the voices of America’s working women and men must be heard in Washington—not the voices of bankers and speculators for whom it always seems to be the best of times, but the voices of those for whom the New Year brings pink slips and givebacks, hollowed-out health care, foreclosures and pension freezes—the roll call of an economy that long ago stopped working for most of us.

He went on: “Working people want an American economy that works for them, that creates good jobs, where wealth is fairly shared.”

Trumka recommended immediate implementation of the AFL-CIO’s [5] five-point jobs program, a plan that would produce 4 million jobs and includes dramatically increasing investments in federal infrastructure and green jobs and direct lending of the refunded bank bailout money to small and medium-sized businesses that can’t get credit because of the financial crisis.

Just as important is implementation of the recommendations in the report issued by the White House manufacturing task force in December, [6] Framework for Revitalizing American Manufacturing. That report contains concrete measures to revive manufacturing in the United States to generate real wealth, not the illusory paper assets counterfeited on Wall Street.

Trumka called for immediate action, not going slow, not taking half steps. Those who seek delay are “harming millions of unemployed Americans and their families,” he said, and jeopardizing economic recovery.

He ended with this warning:

The reality is that when unemployment is 10 percent and rising, working people will not stand for tokenism. We will not vote for politicians who think they can push a few crumbs our way and then continue the failed economic policies of the last 30 years.

Workers executed that warning in Massachusetts.

What Americans want is jobs.

Article printed from AFL-CIO NOW BLOG: http://blog.aflcio.org

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Organization - You Get Nothing Without It

 

It’s Time for the

Left to Get Serious

By Bill Fletcher Jr.

Democratic Left – Winter 2009

http://dsausa.org/dl/Winter_2010.pdf

Shortly after last November’s presidential election, I spoke at a forum discussing its implications. There I mentioned that we should anticipate a right-wing populist trend emerging, one that I would describe as “revanchist” – a term meaning “revenge-seeking.” Interestingly enough, a member of the International Socialist Organization dismissed my concerns as pessimistic and unwarranted. She emphasized the energy and dynamism coming out of the campaign. While, of course, I could see the same thing, I suggested to her that she was underestimating the toxic filth that exists in the bilges of the U.S. Unfortunately, we can see what has been unfolding over the last year.

Right-wing populism has a long history in the U.S. and, much like various chronic illnesses, becomes a part of the system and seems to emerge when the body is weakened. In our case, the body is the economy. When the economy is in crisis, and particularly when there is a financial crisis, right-wing populism emerges and can become a potent political force. Right-wing populism is not well understood by the Left. Fascism, for instance, which is often our description of anything we do not like that comes out of the Right, is one variant of right-wing populism, but they are not identical. Right-wing populism is a political force that sometimes sounds like a Left critique, but is anything but such a critique. It is – and this is why it is so dangerous – a phenomenon that draws from the myth of U.S. history, so elements of it are easily picked up by segments of the population that are susceptible to the draw of the dominant U.S. narrative.

Let me lay out the basic right-wing populist narrative: We once lived in a society of rugged individuals. If you – generally speaking, a white person – worked hard, you would succeed. If you put in a good day’s work, you would be rewarded. But, you see, we – white people – were betrayed. “Our” lives are falling apart. It was one thing for blacks to fall deeper into poverty, or Latinos to be on the margins, but it was not supposed to happen to us. And so, we must find out and identify who betrayed us. Jews are one group; racial minorities are another… And so the story goes…

The virulent racism inherent in right-wing populism is evident today in the anti-Obama madness that has been unfolding. Now there is much to be critical of when it comes to the Obama administration, but the nature of the right-wing assault speaks to the irrationalism of right-wing populism. Whether it is the so-called Birthers, or the healthcare debate, we see it again and again. No concern regarding the truth or facts, but instead playing to fears.

The election of Obama completely unsettled large segments of white America. While their lives were collapsing, how was it possible that a black American would be elected president of the USA? It was not supposed to happen that way.

Right-wing populism plays on fears but it also plays on real concerns. Obama’s main focus has been on securing capitalism. The bailouts of Wall Street, begun under Bush, continued. Yet with these bailouts there were precious few controls on the greed and avarice of Wall Street. The sickening efforts by Wall Street to continue its huge salaries and bonuses flaunted the bailouts and made many people, quite justifiably, furious. On top of that, of course, the wars continue, with resources that should be used to rebuild the U.S. (and save the planet) being devoted to aggression.

But there is something else that has been happening that particularly unsettles right-wing populists. While Obama is concerned about changing the image of the U.S. empire, he altered U.S. foreign policy in some ways that drives the political Right crazy. Take, for instance, his speech to the Muslim world and the apology he offered regarding the 1953 coup in Iran. The president openly acknowledged the U.S. role in that coup, i.e., in the overthrow of a democratic, sovereign government. The problem, however, is that Obama broke the cardinal rule: the U.S. does not apologize for anything, irrespective of whether it is wrong.  One of the challenges that we on the Left face is how to respond to right-wing populism while at the same time taking on Obama. Too many progressives believe that we either have to denounce Obama or we have to embrace Obama. The lack of any sort of tactical nuance is pathetic.

Let us be clear about our situation. We live at a moment of the convergence of three crises: economic, environmental and state legitimacy. While we are increasingly clear about the dangers brought about by the economic and environmental crises, few of us, including on the Left, pay attention to the crisis of state legitimacy. The impact of neoliberal globalization has, among other things, reshaped the role of the state. In general, the capitalist state cannot operate strictly on repression;therefore there must be some level of consensus. That consensus, at least among significant portions of the population, rests on the notion that the state will distribute resources and will help to sustain the population, particularly during rough periods. But what happens when the state stops fulfilling its distributionist role? What happens when people come to believe that they cannot count on the state? Neoliberal globalization has led to a shifting of the role of the State in that it is now more highly repressive but also much less distributionist. Given the polarization of wealth and overall inequality, there are fewer resources that can be devoted to distributionist activities, but always plenty of resources to devote toward wars, prisons and police. In that situation, people start looking out for themselves and this is when things can become dangerous. While the Left’s response to such a situation is to, among other things, demand a progressive role for the state and, for socialists, to look for a transformation beyond the capitalist state, the political Right can either move in the direction of greater authoritarianism or toward militiatype movements. An extreme version of this can be openly genocidal, e.g., Rwanda, 1994: people murdering one another over increasingly scarce resources.

Obama emerged in the midst of these crises bringing hope and inspiration, and, while I sincerely believe that he had the intention of introducing certain significant changes, the objectives of his administration are focused on reforming neoliberal capitalism and, as such, are not qualitatively different from either Bill or Hillary Clinton. Look, I was not anticipating an anti-capitalist president, but what is striking is that his administration does not even seek to introduce a different form of capitalist accumulation in light of the crisis of neoliberal globalization – at least not yet. And that, I would argue, will depend to a great degree on what the Left and progressive social movements are prepared to do.

Obama’s efforts to preserve neoliberal capitalism actually fuel the fires of rightwing populism. Of course right-wing populism is not anti-capitalist, but in opportunistic fashion, plays on the fears and grievances that people face as a result of the reality of neoliberal capitalism. Insofar as Obama places attention on protecting capital, right-wing populism plays upon this because there is very little left-wing challenge that speaks to the grievances felt by so many.

Prior to the Obama election I feared that progressives and leftists would do, essentially, what many subsequently have done: either write off the election results or fall into demobilization. I will leave aside those who simply write off the administration. They are of little consequence. What is more dangerous are those who have decided to restrain their critiques of the administration; those who have decided that it is better to follow an inside track of playing up to the administration, hoping that by muting their criticisms and differences that they will at least have a seat at the table. In fact, there is a national labor leader who said just that, i.e., that it was better to be at the table and get nothing than to be standing on the outside.

For the Left, in the midst of the convergence of these three crises I would suggest the following:

• Offer a different explanation of U.S. history and of what

is happening right now.

• Respond to the crises with theory and action. We cannot destroy myths with facts alone but must instead link those facts to a counter-analysis or framework.

• Build real organizations that are prepared to fight back. This is what makes the ACORN disaster so troubling. We need organizations like ACORN that are rooted among the poor and are prepared to resist. The recent demonstrations in Chicago that involved SEIU and National People’s Action are a good example of the sorts of activities that we need, but we must go much further, ranging from eviction resistance to the need for a resurgence of the anti-war movement. What about unemployed councils?

• Force the Obama administration to do what needs to be done, both domestically and internationally. We cannot afford to sit back and soft-pedal our criticisms of Obama.

• Get serious about mounting progressive electoral challenges, which will not only take on Republicans but also conservative Democrats.

And then there are the tasks of socialists. I must say that I am sick of our failure to think through what needs to be done to rebuild a visible and viable radical Left. Yes, radical! Yes, one that is completely unapologetic in pointing out that capitalism is a criminal system driving this planet to the brink of disaster. The Left must be at the core of those who voice their outrage as to what is not only happening to the Palestinians, but also to people in Paterson, New Jersey. We must be the ones who continue to point out that every time we hear about this damned deficit, people should remember what could be saved were we not in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must be the ones who point out that this administration was absolutely wrong in its approach to the Honduran coup; i.e., that the U.S. should have done everything in its power to force the coup people from power. We must be the ones who speak to the misery in Camden, New Jersey; Flint, Michigan; and Oakland, California.

But we cannot do that without organization. We cannot do that by relying on Facebook, Web sites and e-mails. We cannot do that by relying on speaking to and with those people that we like and who agree with us. It means organization and it means that we have to operate very differently than most of us are comfortable operating. Yes, comrades of DSA, while your younger members are going great guns, a fact about which you should be very proud, we need a different DSA. We need tighter organization that educates and activates. We need DSA to reach out to others on the Left, particularly the radical Left, and engage in both joint work but also discussions regarding what steps need to be taken to create a significant formation on the political Left.

We ultimately need a party of the Left, a formation that while not focused on running candidates for office in the near future, becomes a vehicle to unite activists from various progressive social movements; a party that is overtly anti-capitalist; a party that tells the people of the U.S. a different story, a story about possibilities, but also a story about our real history as a country; a party that pushes for the U.S. to rejoin the people of planet Earth, repairing the damage that the U.S. helped to bring about, as we struggle and fight to save what Jacques Cousteau always called the “Water Planet.”

In this sense, comrades, I am here to not only speak to you about the subject of this panel, but to put before you a challenge. Too many of us on the Left act as if we have all the time in the world to make changes. If it does not happen in our lifetimes, too many of us think, it will inevitably happen in the next. No! History demonstrates exactly the opposite. There are no guarantees. Right-wing populism, whether in the form of the Birthers, Aryan Nation-types, Minutemen, the Front National in France, the Northern Leagues in Italy or in the form of clerical fascists such as Al Qaeda – yes, Al Qaeda – seek to take us into a mythical world that never existed; a world of fear, of horror, of hopelessness, of endless repression.

DSA is needed as a major force to transform the Left and compel the entire Left to recognize that ours must be a struggle for power; a struggle for a progressive politics; a struggle to create a national-popular bloc capable of truly altering the priorities of this country…and this necessitates theory and it necessitates organization. Remember the words of A. Philip Randolph that I think are so applicable to this moment:

“At the banquet table of nature there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything; and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.”

What more needs to be said?

[Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the executive editor of BlackCommentator.com and a senior scholar with the ‘Institute for Policy Studies’. The immediate past president of ‘TransAfrica Forum’, he is co-author of ‘Solidarity Divided’, which analyzes the crisis in organized labor in the U.S. He can be reached at papaq54@hotmail.com. ]

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Three Evils of Anti-Democracy

The Biggest Roadblocks

to True Democracy

Excerpted from "First Steps on a Long Road"

By William Rivers Pitt

www.truthout.org/012309R

 

January 23, 2009 - Confronting every American citizen is the existence of three dominant factors which have become part of the nation's DNA over the course of the last century and a half. Each of these factors holds muscular sway over the doings of government and has a direct effect upon all our lives. None of them are going away any time soon, and that is fact.

1.  CORPORATE PERSONHOOD

One of these three is the existence of something called "corporate personhood," the legal theory established by a number of Supreme Court cases, including the 1886 Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which grants 14th Amendment rights to corporations. In essence, it is a legal shield that grants the same rights and privileges of citizenry enjoyed by you and me to faceless, on-paper corporate constructs. This has given rise to what can only be described as corporate super-citizens, entities with our rights but with the enormous financial ability to press, and indeed distort, those rights for their own purposes.

2.  MONEY = FREE SPEECH

Another factor we currently endure is the lingering existence and aftereffect of the establishment of legalized political bribery, best represented by the 1976 Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo. In short, due to decisions like the one in Buckley, the payment of millions of dollars to political parties and candidates amounts to "free speech." Combined with the existence of corporate personhood, the result was corporate super-citizens pressing their "rights" by purchasing politics wholesale. Corporations seeking the dismantling of media ownership rules, the deregulation of banking and financial strictures, and the denuding of environmental protections merely purchased enough politicians via "free speech" contributions, and they got what they wanted.

3.  MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX:

THE PERMANENT WAR ECONOMY

The third factor takes us all the way back to World War II, and is where the confluence of those first two factors truly came together to form a juggernaut that marks every part of our national landscape. In order to gear up for the kind of colossal manufacturing output required to defeat two massive military powers on opposite ends of the globe, President Roosevelt placed our national economy on a wartime footing. With the establishment of the Truman Doctrine to confront Soviet communism, and the passage of the National Security Act in 1947, America's wartime economic footing became a permanent thing that remains at the nucleus of our national economy to this day.

Put plainly, much of the health of the American economy today requires the permanent preparation for and fighting of wars. The corporate persons who profit from defense spending have made sure, by way of their "free speech" spending on pet politicians and acquirement of major media outlets, that nothing interferes with the financial processes of this arrangement. Their politicians and media spokesmen terrify the people with the golems of imminent national doom, the money rolls in, and the world gets more dangerous by the day.

These three legs are the tripod upon which our national reality currently stands, and not to put too fine a point on it, but President Barack Hussein Obama isn't going to put even a tiny dent in the way things are. No president can, not completely, and certainly not now. Fixing this self-destructive arrangement cannot be accomplished in one fell swoop, but will require the slow, steady, patient dedication of a lifetime ... along with victories in many more elections to come, of course.

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Jobs, Team Obama and the Banksters

Main Street?

by Bill Fletcher, Jr.

January 21, 2010

(NNPA) - In the midst of the 2008 financial collapse the public was told that Wall Street needed to be saved otherwise we faced total economic disaster. We were also told that so-called Main Street, that is our communities, would also receive badly needed assistance. In fact, the Obama stimulus package was to be aimed at speaking to the needs of Main Street.

The drawbridge between the two ''streets'' seems to be stuck in the up position. While Wall Street has largely been saved from total catastrophe, and many financial institutions have actually grown as a result of the crisis, the plight of regular working people has stagnated or worsened. Yes, it is true that the economy is shedding fewer jobs than a year ago, but the point is that the economy continues to shed jobs rather than add jobs. Thus, once again we face the prospect of what has come to be known as a ''jobless recovery.''

The depths of the current economic crisis go beyond what most of us that have grown up since the Depression are familiar with. Yet what we are experiencing did not just start to happen in the fall of 2008 or the end of 2007 (when the recession officially came about). There has been a slow-moving decline in living standards going on since the mid-1970s and some communities, particularly communities of color, have suffered badly.

When the discussion of the stimulus package was raised this seemed to be the right direction to go. Tax cuts and other Republican magical devices would not work. Yet, true to form, the Obama administration chose to proceed cautiously rather than put the funds into the stimulus that were truly needed. The second problem is that it has taken a long time for the stimulus funds to get where they are needed. The third problem is that too much of the thinking around the stimulus focuses on the immediate victims of this current recession rather than thinking about the long-term victims of our brave new economy.

Ironically, the political Right is attacking the Obama administration for paying too much attention to Wall Street. Certainly if the Republicans were in power they would have done even less for Main Street, but who bothers with the facts? The political Right is playing off of increasing anger among white victims of the economic crisis in order to focus them on looking for scapegoats, whether those scapegoats are Jews, immigrants, gays/lesbians or, yes, Black folks. If the Obama administration does not move quickly to preempt this right-wing demagoguery huge sections of the population will not only be drawn into irrationalism, but people will not bother to pay attention to any efforts by the Administration to address Main Street.

Significant effort must go into jobs and economic development, but it is an effort that must be linked to local initiatives at rebuilding. Not only should funds go to those who have recently lost their jobs, but there must be attention to sites of chronic unemployment, such as the Camden, New Jerseys or Flint, Michigans. That means that it is more than just sending in funds, but funds must also be accompanied by the creation of local economic development boards that work to plan how the funds can be used in order to build a sustainable local economy. Anything less and it will only result in pouring water into a draining bathtub.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and the co-author of ''Solidarity Divided.''

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Big Bucks in the Right's Radicalization

 

Uneasy Marriage

Between Tea Partiers

and the GOP

By Ed Kilgore
January 14, 2010

Recent polls show their movement is thought of more favorably [1] by Americans than either the Democratic or Republican Parties. Political independents are said to be attracted more each day. Progressive dissenters against the “pro-corporate” policies of the Obama administration pine for alliances [2] with them.

But at the same time, Republican politicians constantly ape their rhetoric and seek to deploy them against their Democratic, and sometimes intraparty, enemies.

So the question persists: Is the Tea Party Movement an independent “third force” in American politics? Or is it essentially a right-wing faction aimed at the conquest of the Republican Party?

There are no snap answers to these questions. Tea Party activists unsurprisingly stress their independence [3] from both parties, and their hostility towards the “Republican establishment.” The grassroots and citizen-based nature [4] of the movement is constantly promoted as a bedrock principle. And even when tea-partiers operate in the conventional electoral setting of Republican primaries, their candidates are billed as insurgents, not as intraparty warriors.

But the fact remains that these candidates are almost invariably self-identified Republicans, campaigning on traditional conservative Republican themes, and cooperating with Republican politicians tactically and strategically on major issues. There is zero visible outreach to Democrats of any stripe. And to the extent there is a consensus Tea Party ideology, it is indistinguishable in any significant way from the longstanding agenda of the right wing of the GOP—particular the agenda of the most recent past, when conservatives have sought conspicuously to disassociate themselves from the record of the Bush administration.

Republican politicians are already very active in the movement itself. Former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, who appears to have a better than even chance of toppling popular Republican governor Charlie Crist in a Senate primary this year, is a major figure [5] in both the Tea Party Movement and more traditional conservative GOP circles. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, generally known as the most conservative Republican U.S. senator, has said [6]: “We need to stop looking at the tea parties as separate from the Republican Party.” (For a look at the rise of Tea Partiers in the House, read Lydia DePillis’s excellent piece [7].)

What makes this sort of talk especially relevant politically is that it serves a very deep psychological need among contemporary conservative Republicans. They’ve largely succeeded in subduing those few voices in the GOP urging a old-fashioned “big tent” party that’s tolerant of ideological moderates. Now the Tea Party phenomenon offers conservative Republicans a talking point they badly need: evidence that there is a previously hidden conservative majority in the country that only a more sharply consistent conservative message can reach. In other words, electoral gold is to be found on the right, not in the center, of the ideological spectrum. But aside from a shared antipathy towards Barack Obama, “liberals,” taxes, and various other bugaboos, sealing the deal between a “reformed” GOP and Tea Party activists is a complicated proposition.

This much has been made clear by the calling of a National Tea Party Convention [8] in Nashville next month, by a for-profit group called Tea Party Nation. Aside from the questionable right of anyone in particular to “convene” this highly decentralized movement, a $549 registration fee has raised hackles in many circles, and it’s not clear how legitimate the Nashville gathering—denounced this week [9] by the highly influential RedState founder Erick Erickson as “scammy”—will turn out to be.

But interestingly enough, no one seems to be complaining about the speakers list put together for the National Tea Party Convention. The big keynote speaker is Sarah Palin [10]; other featured speakers include Republican House members Michelle Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn (the latter a member of the House GOP leadership). Aside from illustrating an unusual and admirable commitment to gender equity in speaking gigs, this lineup does not exactly show uneasiness about alliances with Republican pols.

The Nashville linup also would appear to rebut another commonly held argument that the Tea Party Movement’s independence is guaranteed by its fundamentally libertarian character, so incompatible with the GOP’s heavy reliance on cultural conservatives and foreign-policy neocons. Palin is, of course, the maximum heroine of cultural conservatives. Bachmann is famous for questioning the patriotism of any and all Democrats. Beyond that, Tea Party Convention panelists include the Christian Right warhorse Rick Scarborough of Vision America (notable, among other things, for his advocacy of global conflict with Muslims) and Judge Roy Moore, the famous “Ten Commandments Judge” who’s a favorite of theocrats everywhere. No genuine libertarian would embrace this crew.

Indeed, for all the talk about the Tea Party Movement as a potential “third force” in American politics, it’s just as easy to argue that it’s mainly composed of right-wing Republican activists who have been radicalized by the political and economic events of the last couple of years, and particularly by the election of Barack Obama.

The usefulness of the Tea Party Movement in a full right-wing takeover of the Republican Party is obvious. What’s less obvious is why a close relationship with Republican politicians serves the purposes of truly independent citizen-activists disgusted by the political status quo. Republicans have swallowed a lot of Tea Party rhetoric, but they may be in the process of swallowing up the Tea Party Movement.

Ed Kilgore is Managing Editor of The Democratic Strategist [11] and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

For more TNR, become a fan [12] on Facebook and follow us [13] on Twitter.

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