Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers : Why We Oppose NATO

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Graphic from Left Turn :: Virage a Gauche.

Why we oppose NATO!

The new NATO is a secretive and costly instrument of war and aggression. It makes its own rules and confirms its own authority.

By Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers | The Rag Blog | April 26, 2012

The day after the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration took dozens of extreme, transformative actions, including invoking Article 5, the right to collective self defense, of NATO’s founding charter — a first in NATO’s 50-year history.

This marked the fateful expansion of NATO’s mission into new geographical regions (such as Afghanistan) and novel functions, such as the initiation and rationalization of the use of preemptive attacks on sovereign states.

All of this was codified and consolidated over the next months in support of the U.S. “war on terror,” crimes committed by non-nation state actors were reframed as “acts of war,” and NATO nations were now expected to join together and respond in kind, opening a door onto war without end, worldwide conflict, and the “long war.”

This is why groups of citizens in virtually every NATO nation have come together to press their governments to leave this deadly enterprise.

NATO has become part of the background noise that over time and with repetition we simply take for granted, an unexamined but passively accepted part of the given world: “NATO forces…” “NATO bombings…” “NATO casualties…” NATO becomes a familiar and entirely opaque presence in our lives. In reality NATO is anything but benign, and exposing the reality behind the mask is an urgent responsibility.

NATO is not a mutual self-defense organization; it is now plainly a global military alliance designed to engage in aggressive invasions and preemptive wars. A 2004 communiqué declared that “Defense against terrorism may include activities by NATO’s military forces, based on decisions by the North Atlantic Council [not the UN Security Council] to deter, disrupt, defend and protect against terrorist attacks, or threat of attacks, directed from abroad, against populations, territory, infrastructure and forces of any member state, including by acting against these terrorists and those who harbour them.”

NATO has collaborated with the U.S. CIA in a wide range of illegal activities, including detainee transfer operations called “renditions,” blanket over-flight clearances, and access to airfields for CIA operations — in effect acting as partners in torture, abduction, and indefinite detention. Under cover of NATO, the U.S. has created an entirely unaccountable framework that enables it to evade both national and international law.

NATO has refused to address civilian casualties resulting from NATO bombings and drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. The U.S. continues to dominate NATO military strategy and weaponry, accounting for virtually all of the 7,700 bombs and missiles dropped or fired on Libya.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968 prohibits nuclear weapon states from transferring nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states, and conversely prohibits non-nuclear states from receiving nuclear weapons from nuclear states. All NATO members are parties to the NPT. The five non-nuclear countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey) that maintain U.S. nuclear weapons on their territory, and the U.S. itself, are all in violation of the NPT.

The new NATO is a secretive and costly instrument of war and aggression. It makes its own rules and confirms its own authority. As a tool of global intervention NATO undermines democracy and constricts citizen participation on issues of war and peace. It has no place in a democracy, and an authentic democracy should have no business with NATO.

[William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. Both Ayers and Dohrn were leaders in SDS and the New Left, and were founders of Weatherman and the Weather Underground. Find more articles by and about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

IDEAS / Bill Meacham : Ways to Say ‘Should’

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from Bite Size Buzz.

Ways to say ‘should’

It behooves us to choose wisely what duties and rules to live by. And the way to choose wisely is by considering the effects of our choices.

By Bill Meacham | The Rag Blog | April 26, 2012

Since I advocate strongly for the Goodness paradigm over the Rightness paradigm when we think about how to conduct our lives(1), it seems appropriate to investigate more fully what I rail against. By “Rightness paradigm” I mean a set of concepts revolving around moral rules and duties. What is morally right, in this view, is what conforms to moral rules, and we have a duty to obey those rules. This way of thinking is called “deontological,” from a Greek word, deon, that means “duty.”

According to this approach, an action is justified, regardless of its consequences, on the basis of a quality or characteristic of the act itself, its conformance to a rule. Morality is concerned with identifying and obeying moral rules. It is right — indeed, it is mandatory — to obey the rules and wrong to disobey them. Any particular act can be judged right or wrong according to whether and to what extent it conforms to the moral rules. A central concern, then, is to identify the rules so you can make sure you obey them.

The problem, of course, is how to determine what those moral rules are. I’ll return to that issue shortly.

It is undeniable that we have moral intuitions, that we have a sense of right and wrong. Lots of psychological research demonstrates it(2) and we each know these intuitions first-hand: we feel self-righteous when we do something right, guilt when we do something wrong, and indignation when others transgress.

There are good reasons to believe that these instincts are built into our brains and minds at birth, ready to be channeled by culture into particular forms. We evolved this way because humans have to live with other humans in order to survive, and moral rules regulate how we get along together. A shared sense of morals makes for group cohesion, and those who are members of cohesive groups survive and reproduce better than those who aren’t.

Moral norms have two functions according to Duke professor David Wong, interpersonal and intrapersonal: “The interpersonal function is to promote and regulate social cooperation. The intrapersonal function is to foster a degree of ordering among potentially conflicting motivational propensities, including self- and other-regarding motivations. This ordering serves to encourage people to become constructive participants in the cooperative life…”(3)

In order to understand these functions, it is helpful to take a closer look at the various types of moral judgements and what they entail for our behavior. In this I am indebted to professor Margaret Little of Georgetown University, who has come up with what we might call a taxonomy of moral concepts. Here is an illustration:(4)

Moral concept taxonomy

Moral and ethical judgements are all ways of saying “should”: telling someone what he or she should do (or refrain from doing) or should have done, or telling ourselves the same.(5) Moral rules are in the branch labeled “deontic.” But the deontic is not the only type of “should”; another type is prudential. In deontic cases the “should” is a prescription or even a command. In the prudential case it is a recommendation. The force of our prescription or recommendation depends on the category in which the “should” is presented.

The first category is moral law (Deontic/Moral in the illustration). An example is “Thou Shalt Not Steal” (“should” being stated in its strongest form, “shall”). In this case we feel justified in demanding that someone obey the “should” and blaming them if they don’t. The imperative provokes in us feelings of moral righteousness and indignation. And the imperative has a sense of universality, that it applies to everyone. This is the domain of what I call the Rightness paradigm.

The second category is legal law (Deontic/Legal in the illustration), such as defining misdemeanor or felony theft. In this case we feel justified in demanding that someone obey and not only blaming but punishing them if they don’t. The imperative has force, however, only within the context of the laws of a given political community.

The third category is social convention (Deontic/Social). An example is the rule that if one attends a wedding, one should bring a gift. In this case we may not demand obedience (you can’t demand a gift) but we do feel justified in blaming failure, if not to the offender’s face then in gossiping to others. This is clearly a matter of social agreement, not universal law, and applies only within a given community.

The fourth category is prudential evaluation (Prudential/Commendatory), for example that for good health one should eat lots of vegetables. In this case we may not demand but may certainly advise adherence to such a “should.” And we may not blame or punish failure to comply but may say the choice is foolish.

This kind of judgement is in the Goodness paradigm, one of the features of which is that such judgements are objectively verifiable. We can do studies of the effects of diet on health, studies that provide factual evidence, so the recommendation is not just someone’s opinion. The scope of applicability is interesting. Potentially such a judgement could be universal, but in practice it depends on context.

Perhaps for a malnourished vegan eating lots of vegetables would not be good, and instead he or she should try some meat. I claim that there is nothing that is good in itself . When you are speaking about goodness, always ask, “Good for whom? Good for what and under what circumstances?” if you want to avoid confusion.

This taxonomy gives us some insights into the nature of rights and duties, the objects of moral judgement. There is a quite a large body of literature on the ontological status of moral entities, meaning the manner of their existence. They seem to be real, in that many people recognize them, but they can’t be touched or felt or measured as physical objects can.

Do they exist objectively, independent of our perception of them, as physical reality does? Are they merely social conventions? Are they somewhere in between?

There is good reason to believe that moral entities do not exist objectively, because it is a matter of empirical fact that people disagree about them in a way that they do not disagree about physical reality.

A study asked respondents in the United States and in India whether it would be morally wrong to steal a train ticket in order to attend a best friend’s wedding. People in the U.S. said it would be wrong to steal; people in India said it would be wrong not to steal, if that were the only way you could get to the wedding!(6)

This disagreement is clearly in a completely different category from, say, whether water always boils at the same temperature regardless of atmospheric pressure. You can observe and measure water boiling and come to a decisive answer, regardless of where you live. Cultural differences play no role at all in your answer about physical reality, but they do in your answer about moral reality.

This leads some to deny any reality to moral entities at all, and to label all moral judgements as false because they refer to fictional entities. This position, known as “moral error theory,” goes a bit too far, I think, as it ignores our indubitable intuitions of right and wrong. (Not that the content of such intuitions is indubitable, but that we do have them is not to be doubted at all.)

We could say that moral entities are just social conventions, but that is not strong enough. We do not get together and decide what we shall regard as right and wrong as we do in deciding when to have tea every day. We really do seem to recognize something that exists independently of whether or not we agree that it exists.

My take on it is this: Moral entities are realities that are intersubjectively constituted within a community of practice, a social group, a culture or a society. By that I mean that within such a community or society, everybody agrees (more or less) on what they are, everybody treats them the same way and everybody acts as if they are real. So, for members of such a community they are real.

The term “constitute” comes from the phenomenological insight, verified by cognitive psychology, that in large part our minds concoct what we perceive. We don’t just see physical things; we make up what we see, based on sensory input that we do not make up. There is a large cognitive component in our experience, which we mostly overlook, but which sometimes becomes startlingly obvious.

Here is an example: A woman I know was walking across her ranch one day and stepped over a hose. Then she thought, “That’s odd. What is a hose doing here?” She turned and looked and saw that it was a snake. (Fortunately, she was wearing boots.) Before she recognized that it was a snake, she had constituted it as a hose. Was it really a hose? No. Did she really see a hose the first time? Yes, she did.

Similarly, we really do intuit that some things are right and others wrong, that some deeds are obligatory and others forbidden, that some actions can be demanded of us and others cannot, that some behavior is blameworthy, some praiseworthy and some neither. And considering the effects of honoring those intuitions or not — namely, the reactions of others in the community — their objects really do have reality.

Does that mean we are stuck with the morals our society constitutes for us? Not at all. Now that we recognize the true nature of moral entities, we can choose what to do about them.

But how shall we choose? This actually presents a bit of a conundrum. Rationally, the sense of what is right and wrong, of what is our duty, loses its obligatory force. Constructed socially, moral entities are real but do not constrain our actions as physical reality does.

When we recognize this state of affairs a sort of spell is broken, and we do not see our world the same way as before; we are no longer taken in by moral reality. We are able to choose, within the constraints of our emotional and social conditioning, which duties to obey, or even whether to obey any at all. And we have this freedom even if we would rather not have it. You can’t go back; you can’t undo a realization about how the world works. As the existentialists say, we are condemned to be free.(7)

Second-order mentation, our ability to consider in thought and imagination not just the world around us but ourselves as well, can seem like a burden because emotionally we still feel the force of these moral intuitions. We may know intellectually that it is not always wrong to steal a train ticket, but we still cringe at the thought of doing so. We seek a way to reconcile the antinomy of freedom and facticity.

Here is where the Goodness paradigm becomes useful. Since sensitivity to moral concerns is a part of our biological inheritance it is difficult to imagine that we could ever get rid of it even if we wanted to. And we might not want to; moral intuitions enable us to live with others without having to think what to do all the time. So it behooves us to choose wisely what duties and rules to live by. And the way to choose wisely is by considering the effects of our choices.

Consider the injunction against stealing. Even though there could be some short-term gain for the thief, it is in a person’s long-term interest to live in a society where people are honest. And being honest produces in us a greater internal harmony of feeling than being dishonest. There are benefits to playing by the rules. An honest person will be better off in the long run, even though in certain instances it might seem disadvantageous.

So if you are wise you will notice the moral urge to be honest, the call of conscience, and decide to accept it. Even though it is a triggered response, you will let that response happen. You will adopt a policy of accepting such responses, of refraining from taking what is not yours even if the opportunity arises, and you will enjoy a happier life as a result.

Recall the function of moral norms: to promote social cooperation and well-being. Moral rules that promote well-being are worth following; moral rules that don’t, aren’t.

And if you feel the need for an overarching duty, a sort of highest principle, let me suggest this: The best duty is the commitment to find ways to live that promote the well-being of yourself, your community and your environment. The highest and noblest endeavor, which we are free to regard as a duty if we wish, is to work for the good in all things.

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin’s 60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes
(1) See my paper on “The Good and the Right.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/GoodAndRight.html.
(2) See, for instance, the works of Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker and Marc Hauser, among others.
(3) Wong, “Making An Effort To Understand,” p. 13.
(4) Adapted from Little, Margaret, “The Moral Right to do Wrong.” Little’s examination shows the strength of analytic philosophy: by clarifying conceptually what we are talking about, we can avoid confusion and make progress toward insight.
(5) I do not distinguish between “moral” and “ethical,” although some philosophers do, reserving the former for the Rightness paradigm of rights and obligations, and the latter for any situation in which advice or command is appropriate.
(6) Wong, “Making An Effort To Understand,” p. 12.
(7) Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism.”

References
Haidt, Jonathan, and Graham, Jesse. “Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality.” On-line publication, URL = http://ssrn.com/abstract=980844 as of 12 April 2012.
Haidt, Jonathan. “On the moral roots of liberals and conservatives.” On-line, URL = http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html as of 12 April 2012.
Hauser, Marc D. Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.
Little, Margaret. “The Moral Right to do Wrong.” Lecture presented at the 2012 Royal Ethics Conference, University of Texas at Austin, 25 February 2012.
Pinker, Steven. “The Moral Instinct”. On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html as of 12 January 2008.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm as of 17 September 2011.
Wikipedia. “Moral skepticism.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_skepticism as of 12 April 2012.
Wong, David. “Making An Effort To Understand.” Philosophy Now Magazine, Issue 82 (January/February 2011), pp. 10 – 13. London: Anya Publications, 2011. Also on-line publication, URL = http://www.philosophynow.org/issues/82/Making_An_Effort_To_Understand as of 12 April 2012.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : David P. Hamilton and Philip L. Russell on the French and Mexican Elections

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Philip L. Russell, left, and David P. Hamilton at the KOOP studios in Austin Friday, March 30, 2012. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio.

Rag Radio:
Writers David P. Hamilton and Philip L. Russell
discuss the French and Mexican elections

By Rag Radio | The Rag Blog | April 26, 2012

David P. Hamilton and Philip L. Russell were Thorne Dreyer’s guests on Rag Radio, Friday, April 20, 2012, on Austin community radio station KOOP 91-7-FM, and streamed live on the Internet.

Hamilton and Russell are long-time Austin-based writers and activists who have recently written comprehensive analytical articles about the upcoming presidential elections in France and Mexico, respectively, for The Rag Blog.

They discussed those elections, the issues involved, and the potential political ramifications. They also talked about the recent Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, and especially issues related to the drug war and drug legalization that are currently being discussed by Latin Americaan leaders.

You can listen to the show here.


Unabashed Francophile David Hamilton is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin in history and government. He spends part of each year in France and writes about France and politics (and French politics) for The Rag Blog. A retired teacher, David was active with SDS and the movement against the War in Vietnam and wrote for The Rag, Austin’s legendary Sixties underground newspaper.

Read his article, here.

Philip Russell has written six books on Latin America. His latest is The History of Mexico: From Pre-Conquest to Present (Routledge). His writings on Mexico have appeared in sources ranging from the Austin Chronicle to The New York Times. He is an explorer and an environmental activist with the Sierra Club, has been an interpreter for National Science Foundation expeditions in Mexico, and has served as an official presidential election observer in Mexico.

Read Philip’s Rag Blog article on the Mexican elections here.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show’s engineer and co-producer.

After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

Coming up on Rag Radio: THIS FRIDAY, April 27, 2012: Theologian and Social Ethicist Gary Dorrien.
May 4, 2012: Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science, and Reality.

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Two on Working Class Rabble-Rousing

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Two books on workers and rabble-rousing:
Kick some ass with the working class

By Ron Jacobs | The Rag Blog | April 25, 2012

[Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream, by Greg Shotwell (2012: Haymarket Books); Paperback; 200 pp.; $17.00
Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back, edited by Michael D. Yates (2012: Monthly Review Press); Paperback; 288 pp.; $18.95.]

Damn. That’s the word I kept repeating as I read Gregg Shotwell’s recently published book Autoworkers Under the Gun.

The ugly side of being a factory worker in the U.S. auto industry is all here. Sociopathic CEOs, their lawyers, and the acquiescence of the UAW leadership, it’s all there.

This collection of newsletters written by a United Auto Workers activist documents the purposeful destruction of a union, an industry, and a way of life by bankers, corporate raiders and supplicant union bosses. The tale told here is about the daily fight on the shop floor.

Shotwell’s writing is humorous, acerbic, and to the point. As part of a democratic movement in the UAW, he was one of many that fought hard to prevent the tidal wave of layoffs, plant closings, and destruction of benefits the union leadership not only allowed but seemed to encourage.

The missives published in this book are the textual equivalent of the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) Mr. Block cartoons. For those who aren’t aware of Mr. Block, let me quote IWW agitator Walker C. Smith:

Mr. Block is legion. He is representative of that host of slaves who think in terms of their masters. Mr. Block owns nothing, yet he speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire; he is patriotic without patrimony; he is a law-abiding outlaw… [who] licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him… the personification of all that a worker should not be.

In other words, Mr. Block was a satirical character created to call attention to workers and union bosses who identified with the owners and management at the expense of their fellow workers.

Autoworkers Under the Gun makes it very clear how the auto industry’s exorbitant payments to its executives and management combined with a penchant for bankruptcy destroyed it. Calling globalization a “four bit word for sweatshop,” Shotwell points out how CEOs and their co-conspirators control the discussion about the economy by blaming the workers for wanting to earn a living and pension.

As most readers know, the other part of this scenario involves those executives purposely downsizing the corporation by moving jobs offshore. His biting commentary reminds the reader how intentional this entire process is.

Unlike most mainstream reporting on the demise of the auto industry, Shotwell gives the reader the view from the shop floor. It’s not just the harassment from management he describes, he also tells stories about workers using their power to fight back.

After one particular attack on management’s machinations to undermine the workers and their union that drew a strong reaction from the bosses, Shotwell arrived for his shift to find his machine taken apart in a show of solidarity. Without that machine, the line was shut down for the entire shift.

Questioning the value of strikes that are not industry wide because of the International’s cowardice or because of the law, Shotwell urges workers to consider alternatives like occupations and working to rule. The point of the former is to prevent management from closing factories. After all, they can’t close a building if people are inside it.

Working to rule, meanwhile, has multiple effects. It slows down the speedups imposed by management to increase production while also preventing shop closures. In addition, working to rule can create overtime or, even better, the necessity to hire more people. The underlying point of both tactics is to emphasize that it is the workers who run the factory, not the CEOs and their minions.

It was more than a year ago that thousands of Wisconsin workers and supporters occupied the Capitol building in the city of Madison. The reason for the occupation was to try and prevent the anti-worker governor and legislature from passing legislation that would end collective bargaining for all state employees except firefighters and state police, end dues check-off from paychecks, and force unions to re-certify every year.

Under the guise of solving a budget crisis (that was created by giving mammoth tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy in Wisconsin), this bill was forced through the legislature despite the protests. Nonetheless, the protests were a welcome reaction to the never-ending attacks on working people in the United States.

Naturally, a few books have been published about this event, now known as the Wisconsin Uprising. Of those texts that wrote favorably, most have done a fairly decent job of describing the flow of the protests, the workers culture that was celebrated, and the intense feeling of solidarity felt by the participants.

Not all have done as good of a job analyzing why the protests failed and what they mean for the future of workers’ movements in the United States.

There is one entry; however, that does broach both of these subjects with some depth. Titled Wisconsin Uprising, this book, edited by labor writer Michael Yates, provides a genuinely left analysis. The collection of essays is divided into two main sections. One discusses the protests, their background and their organization and the other discusses the future of workplace organizing in the wake of the legislation’s success and the concomitant attacks on working people around the world.

The first section takes its subject and looks at the international aspects of the protest (austerity protests in Greece, Britain, etc.), its roots in capitalist crisis, and the lack of resistance experience among protesters. It was this latter element that gave the protesters false hope regarding the role police play, as well as the role unions play.

Indeed, much like the points made in Shotwell’s text, union leadership often concedes benefits, condition, and wages just to keep union dues structure intact and their paychecks coming in. This strategy eventually backfires because it weakens the unions in the eyes of the workers. Seeing this, corporations and governments attack unions, hoping to further weaken their standing in the eyes of members.

Once the union has been defanged, as occurred in Wisconsin after the aforementioned legislation was rammed through in the middle of the night, the rank and file often stop paying dues out of fear or after drawing the conclusion that the union has no power.

Like Shotwell emphasizes in his book, the best response to the attacks on workers and their unions is simple: more actions, more solidarity, and less complacency. The most positive conclusion to be drawn from the Wisconsin uprising is that there is an understanding in the United States that workers not only are being screwed, but that they will fight back.

The narrative here echoes the hope found in other books about the uprising in Wisconsin and the occupy movement that followed. However it tempers that hope with an understanding of what labor is up against in this latest battle with capital. It is an understanding that comes from the years of experience between the collection of contributors and their leftist comprehension of how monopoly capitalism works.

Shotwell explains why Wisconsin happened in a piece discussing concessions when he writes:

The nation that kicked off the struggle for the eight hour day is logging more hours than any modern industrialized nation on earth. Every household needs two wage slaves and every wage slave needs a vehicle to keep them on the treadmill. The turmoil is designed to foil collective action. The degradation of workers is not natural, accidental or unavoidable. It is a plan. Put the jigsaw pieces together and the picture is clear as glass and sharp as pain.

The complementary reason to Shotwell’s concise explanation of neoliberal capital’s plan for the world is that workers ignored the writing on the wall as long as it happened to someone else, while those that were unionized saw themselves as clients of the union when they needed to be fighters in solidarity with those that were the “someone else.”

Check out these books for their analysis, their insight, and their rabble rousing. Then go do some rabble-rousing of your own.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator’s Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Robert Jensen : There Are Marxists in India?

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Prabhat Patnaik. Image from The Bruce Initiative on Rethinking Capitalism.

‘There are Marxists in India?’
Economist Prabhat Patnaik on the global crisis

By Robert Jensen | The Rag Blog | April 25, 2012

After an engaging half-hour interview with India’s pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik.

“There are Marxists in India?” came the bemused response. “I thought India was the heart of the new capitalism.”

Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a rising economic power that is challenging the United States. While there certainly are no shortages of capitalists, there are still lots of Marxists in India, as well as communist parties that have won state elections.

Patnaik represents the best thinking and practice of those left traditions — both the academic Marxism that provides a framework for critique of economics, and the political Marxism that proposes public policies — which is why I was so excited to talk with him about lessons to be learned from the current economic crisis.

In the interview, conducted during a break in the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge’s “Futures of Finance” conference, I asked Patnaik two main questions: First, is there a “golden age” of capitalism to which we can return? Second, can we ever expect ethical practices from the financial sector of the global capitalist economy?

Before explaining why his answer to both questions is “no,” some background.

Prabhat Patnaik started his academic career in the UK, earning his doctoral degree at Oxford University and then teaching at the University of Cambridge. He returned to India in 1974 to teach at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi until his retirement in 2010.

He’s the author of several influential books, including The Value of Money, published in 2008. Patnaik-the-politician served as Vice-Chairman of the Planning Board of the state of Kerala from 2006-2011 and is a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He regularly writes on economic issues in the Party’s journal and addresses trade union meetings.

In the United States, where people believe Marxism was buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall and communism can only mean Soviet-style totalitarianism, his political affiliations would guarantee a life on the margins. But India’s political spectrum is considerably wider, and left ideas have a place in the national political discourse there.

On the world stage, Patnaik brings an unusual perspective: An experienced economist with a history of political organizing; an Indian who is engaged in the political debates of the West; a leftist who is not afraid to critique the weaknesses of the left tradition.

The quixotic quest for a ‘golden age’

Ever since the financial meltdown of 2008, there’s been more and more nostalgia in the United States — especially among liberals — for the immediate post-WWII period, the so-called “golden age” of capitalism during which profits and wages rose, and unemployment was low.

This was the achievement of Keynesianism, the philosophy that unwanted market outcomes can be corrected through monetary and fiscal policy designed to stabilize an otherwise unstable business cycle. Primarily through “military Keynesianism” — massive spending on wars and a permanent warfare state — the U.S. government helped stimulate the economy when it went into inevitable periods of stagnation.

That worked until about the mid-1970s, when growth started to slow.

Whether or not that system was good for everyone (lots of people in the Third World, for example, were not particularly happy with it), the question remains: Can we go back to that strategy? Patnaik says that golden age was necessarily short-lived, as the pressure for global investment pushed nations to give up the ability to impose controls on capital. This globalization of finance made national Keynesian policies less relevant. At about the same time, steep increases in the price of petroleum generated even more capital in the oil states, which went looking for investment opportunities around the world.

Globalization — this concentration of capital moving freely around the world — meant that no single nation-state could go up against international finance. And with the global flow of goods, the large “reserve army of labor” (the unemployed and under-employed) in places like China and India meant that workers in the advanced industrial countries had less leverage. So, productivity continued to rise, but wages stagnated.

Patnaik said it’s important to see the contemporary crisis in that historical context.

“The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is certainly part of the problem but not the root cause of the problem today,” he said. “The immediate crisis it touched off helps make the underlying problem visible.”

If this financialization of the global economy, which has put so much power in so few hands, is at the heart of the problem, the question is clear: In the absence of a global state, who is going to control international finance capital?

If capital is going to be concentrated, can we at least make it behave?

If the power of finance capital can’t be diminished, is there a way to at least make it follow some sane rules to prevent the worst from happening again? Short answer: No.

“It’s important to understand that capitalism is a spontaneous system, not something that is always necessarily planned or controlled,” Patnaik said. Because the reward for ignoring, evading, or getting around rules is so powerful, the attempts to make capitalism follow ethical norms are bound to fail.

“Keynesianism worked in a specific time and place, but capitalism escaped Keynesianism,” he said. New rules will suffer a similar fate, absent a force as strong as international finance capital to enforce the rules.

Although Patnaik often talks in detail about the complex workings of the global economy, he also articulates simple truths when that kind of straightforward analysis is needed. In doing so, he often draws on aspects of Marx’s analysis that the world tends to forget.

To make the point about the futility of talking about ethical norms in capitalism, Patnaik pointed to Marx’s insight that a capitalist is “capital personified.” Here’s the relevant passage from the first volume of Marx’s Capital:

[T]he possessor of money becomes a capitalist. … [A]nd it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.

What Marx described as “the restless never-ending process of profit-making” and “boundless greed after riches” reminds us that as actors on the economic stage we are less moral agents and more “capital personified,” relentless in our restlessness and bound to believe in an illusory boundlessness.

Society might be able make some moral claims on people with wealth if they were merely working in capitalism, but it’s more difficult to find common moral ground with “capital personified.”

What should people fight for?

If we can’t go back to business as usual, and there’s no reason to expect that new rules will solve our problems, what kinds of solutions are possible? Patnaik said that neither of the two most obvious responses to the financial crisis — creating a surrogate global state to impose controls on finance, or “delinking” a nation’s economy from the global finance system — are in the cards now. Even though capitalism is in deep crisis, resistance to capitalism is not nearly strong enough to produce movements that could make that possible.

Given his intellectual roots and political affiliation, it may seem surprising that Patnaik argues for organizing to bring back the liberal welfare-state policies that developed in the advanced industrial countries during the postwar period when Keynesian economics ruled.

“That is not about going back, which is impossible,” Patnaik said. “We have to go forward with new ideas.” The call for a more robust social safety net (protecting workers’ rights, unemployment insurance, social security, health insurance, etc.) isn’t new, but such policies can be a step toward new ideas, a transitional measure, he explained.

Rather than making those policies the final goal, as part of a more-or-less permanent accommodation with capitalism, they should be seen as a stepping stone toward radical change.

“We can work toward a reassertion of welfare state policies, not as an end but as a vehicle toward greater justice, as a way of making visible the inherent limitations of capitalism,” he said.

In addition to the limitations of capitalism, there also are ecological limitations we can’t ignore, he said, which means the goal can’t be raising India and China to material standards of the United States. Patnaik recognizes the need to adjust older socialist goals to new realities.

“The world simply has to be refashioned,” both in the Third World and in advanced capitalist countries, and specifically in the United States, Patnaik said, which means experiments in alternative ways of living that are not based on material measures.

“This really is a spiritual/cultural question, about what it means to live a good life,” he said, which should not be seen as foreign to socialism. “Marxism shouldn’t be reduced to productionism. The goal of socialism has always been human freedom, which is about much more than material wealth.”

“Gandhi talked about the ethical demands of nature, but I don’t like that phrase, being a socialist and anthropocentric,” Patnaik said with the hint of a grin. “But we do have to live within the limits of nature.”

The role of Marxism

It is easy to misjudge Patnaik from first impressions. Unlike many intellectuals, Patnaik does not immediately thrust himself into a discussion, and he’s soft-spoken both in conversation and from the podium. But when he does speak, his passion for justice comes through loud and clear. And, while Patnaik identifies very much as a communist, he also is quick to poke at some of the tradition’s platitudes.

“I just came from the (Communist) Party Congress, and I keep reminding everyone that they have to give up notions of a one-party State, of democratic centralism (the Leninist notion that party members are free to debate policy but must support the final decision of the party),” Patnaik said. “Democratic centralism always leads to centralism.”

If leftists reject the current dominance of finance in the world, Patnaik said it’s important to reject any suggestion that a single perspective or party should dominate.

“The hegemony of finance throttles democracy. The hegemony of finance beats you into shape,” he said. If the goal is to resist that kind of hegemony, then the approach of the old communist movement simply isn’t relevant, Patnaik said, but socialist principles are more relevant than ever.

“Any resistance has to be about opening up alternatives, opening up critical thinking to imagine those alternatives,” he said. “The only way to challenge that global regime is mass mobilization.”

Patnaik has no off-the-shelf solutions to offer, and it’s difficult to reduce his thinking to slogans. At the age of 66, when many people hold on tightly to what they believe will work, Patnaik doesn’t hesitate to say, “It’s time to invent.”

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics — and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His books include All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Harry Targ : Take a Deep Breath!

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from The Blog of Progress.

Take a deep breath:
How do we build our movements?

The response of 2011 was spontaneous, passionate, daring, and electric in its transformational possibilities.

By Harry Targ | The Rag Blog | April 25, 2012

Over the last 14 months we have observed Arab Spring, the Wisconsin uprising, labor ferment throughout the American Heartland, and the formation of Dream coalitions. In addition Occupy movements last fall spread like wildfire all across the country and with the arrival of spring are resuming.

Most recently anti-racist mobilizations have occurred in response to the execution of Troy Davis and the murder of Trayvon Martin.

In response, socialist and progressive organizations, single issue groups, political party activists, and visible pundits have called for or organized rallies, marches, conferences, and other mobilizations in Washington D.C., Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.

Grassroots activists, motivated by a passion for change, and sometimes a sense of desperation, are on the move.

While these are exciting times for progressives and lifetime organizers, it makes sense to take a deep breath, reflect on the concrete situations of struggle we face, and ask ourselves how best to channel (and preserve) our energies and resources.

Particularly, three questions need to be addressed and readdressed as political contexts change:

  • How do we build our movements?
  • What do we want to achieve?
  • How do we decide what to do?

Building our movements

It still is the case that movements are built out of a complicated array of forms of activism. Obviously there are no easy answers or mathematical formulae but several tools are regularly used in our work.

First, education, propaganda, calls to action, and programmatic visions are communicated through the innovative use of various media. Print publications such as newspapers, pamphlets, books, and flyers have been staples of organizers since the printing press was invented. There are some communities, including my own, in which progressive newspapers are printed regularly and distributed.

Various progressive presses, such as Changemaker, have published books and edited materials not readily available to the left reading public. In some communities alternative radio and television programs tell the story of activism on a regular basis. I know of regular progressive radio shows in West Virginia, Indiana, Wisconsin, Texas, and Oregon.

And, of course, 21st century electronics have added a broad array of blogs, listservs, Facebook and websites to the tool kit of radical communication. For all its flaws, and there are many, the Internet has dramatically democratized and made cheaper the ability to communicate messages near and far.

Second, political events provide a way of communicating to and educating audiences of potential activists. In virtually every community where progressive politics is alive and well, groups sponsor public lectures, films, concerts, and picnics and other social gatherings. The idea is to bring people together to listen and talk about key issues, hoping that such activities will recruit new members

Third, activists organize rallies, marches, sit-ins, leafleting campaigns, petition drives, and other public actions that are designed to educate and mobilize activists at the same time. These actions can make the movements more visible, if they receive media attention, and, at least, catch the eye of passersby who are concerned about the issues raised and have not yet committed to organized work to bring about change.

Fourth, organizers generally believe that the most effective but yet the most demanding work involves interpersonal interactions: door to door campaigns, tabling at public events, organizing study groups, and holding meetings that address substantive issues as well as organizational business.

Obviously, each of these forms of activism is vital to the construction of progressive groups and mass movements and if we reflect on the work that we do, all of the four forms are used. In addition, the first three forms can occur at regional or national levels as well as in local communities. The fourth, however, requires work in face-to-face communities, or in what we call the grassroots.

What do we want to achieve?

Most progressive movements are motivated by a variety of goals. Of necessity, most of the goals are short or medium range, while in the end most progressives and/or socialists are committed to the construction of a humane, democratic, and socialist society; one in which the basic needs and wants of every person are met.

Progressives want to educate. That is, they want to communicate and convince a large group of people that particular policies and the general vision of a more humane society are desirable and achievable.

Education involves presenting a compelling analysis of the nature and reasons societies are failing to meet the needs of the people, presenting an alternative vision of society that can meet peoples’ needs, and offering some explanation as to how we can move from here to there.

Progressives want to mobilize large numbers of people to their cause. The forces of reaction have vast economic resources, are positioned in the apex of powerful political and economic institutions, and oftentimes have access to the repressive apparatuses of the state. Social movements throughout history have been effective to the extent that they have been able to assemble their one potential resource, large numbers of people.

While “people power” is a slogan, it also is a fact. Again, from Tahrir Square, to Madison, Wisconsin, to Occupy Wall Street, it has been large numbers of loud, militant, and angry people who have forced their resistance on the public stage.

Progressives want to use people power to deliver demands to those who administer the state. The wealthy and powerful can communicate their wishes to policymakers in the corridors of power. The people can communicate primarily by delivering demands.

While small groups of progressives have been able to make their demands visible through bold actions that find their way sometimes into the media, we have learned over and over again that masses of people, delivering demands, have a greater likelihood of being heard and mobilizing others to the cause.

Many progressives believe that electoral work remains a powerful tool for educating, mobilizing, delivering demands and, on occasion, successfully transforming their passions into policies. In a society like our own in which “politics” is defined by most people as elections, progressives need to engage in that arena (along with other venues).

It is because of elections that activists can knock on doors, talk about single payer health care, convince people that wars in Afghanistan and other places are ill-advised, and communicate to people that the rights of workers, women, and people of color must be protected.

All of these goals require raising money and signing up new members. Organization building is both a goal and a means to achieve other goals. One of the enduring dilemmas for today’s progressives is that on the one hand vast majorities of people support progressive change when asked but only tiny minorities step forward to work to create that change.

Further, there are traditions among political activists that claim that organization-building is antithetical to political change. And, many of those who are readily available to protest, sit-in, and generally raise hell are resistant to attending meetings, debating strategy and tactics, entering names of new members on computer lists, and all the other necessities of organization building that are frankly boring.

In certain circumstances, progressives feel a need to bring institutions to a halt. Tactics such as the strike, the occupation, and the work slowdown take on a life of their own as activists seek to bring the institutions of oppression and exploitation to a halt, at least for a time.

Such actions are themselves a goal and a tool for achieving other goals. In each of the path-breaking campaigns listed at the outset, dramatic actions stimulated the creation of mass movements. Oftentimes the actions themselves spark the construction of movements for fundamental change.

Finally, some progressives have acted on the belief that alternative institutions can and should be built within the old order. Progressives learn by doing, engage in trial and error institution-building, and provide visible models for those who have not yet joined the movement. Sometimes the alternative institutions fulfill a need irrespective of the effectiveness the alternatives served in building a mass movement.

Deciding what to do

This is the perhaps the most difficult issue to address. The year 2011 was an extraordinary time in social movement history. After a long drought in America (and perhaps around the world) masses of workers, women, people of color, youth, the elderly, and people from faith communities stood up and said “no” to dictatorship, attacks on workers’ rights, the war on women, violent racism, and further destruction of the air, water, and natural landscape.

The magnitude of the uprisings probably matches the thirties or the sixties in the United States. Paradoxically, despite the long years of grassroots activism and important work done by national organizations, progressives were caught by surprise.

As a result of the shock waves of 2011 we should reflect upon the issues that need to be addressed, prioritizing work on them based on available resources. Progressives should make decisions about prioritizing short and/or long term policy and structural changes and the question of the location of venues for action at given times.

For some (I am one) politics begins at the base; that is in the communities in which activists are located. For others, coalition building at the national level must be prioritized.

What seems clear is that the forces of reaction in the United States and elsewhere are organized. They have enormous resources. They have been planning for a long time to reconstruct economic and political institutions to shift power and wealth back to the few.

Since the 1980s at least ruling elites have sought to return America to the “gilded age,” the post-civil war era when bankers and speculators ruled America without cumbersome government provisions of some rights and resources to the vast majority of people.

The response of 2011 was spontaneous, passionate, daring, and electric in its transformational possibilities. But now, progressives need to reflect on where we are, what our resources are, how to use them effectively, what priorities in action need to be developed, and how we might most effectively empower people.

Spontaneity and reflection represent two dimensions of a successful social movement. One alone will not create the kind of humane society most of us are working to achieve.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical — and that’s also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

David Bacon : How the Anti-Immigrant Tide Was Turned in Mississippi

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Members of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance at a rally at the Capitol in Jackson, Miss., Jan. 12, 2011. Photo by Rogelio V. Solis / AP.

How Mississippi’s black/brown strategy
beat the South’s anti-immigrant wave

By David Bacon / The Rag Blog / April 24, 2012

“We worked on the conscience of people night and day, and built coalition after coalition. Over time, people have come around. The way people think about immigration in Mississippi today is nothing like the way they thought when we started.” — Mississippi State Rep. Jim Evans

JACKSON, Mississippi — In early April, an anti-immigrant bill like those that swept through legislatures in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina was stopped cold in Mississippi. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
Tea Party Republicans were confident they’d roll over any opposition. They’d brought Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who co-authored Arizona’s SB 1070, into Jackson, to push for the Mississippi bill. He was seen huddled with the state representative from Brookhaven, Becky Currie, who introduced it.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, which designs and introduces similar bills into legislatures across the country, had its agents on the scene.

Their timing seemed unbeatable. Last November Republicans took control of the state House of Representatives for the first time since Reconstruction. Mississippi was one of the last Southern states in which Democrats controlled the legislature, and the turnover was a final triumph for Reagan and Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

And the Republicans who took power weren’t just any Republicans. Haley Barbour, now ironically considered a “moderate Republican,” had stepped down as governor. Voters replaced him with an anti-immigrant successor, Phil Bryant, whose venom toward the foreign-born rivals Lou Dobbs.

Yet the seemingly inevitable didn’t happen.

Instead, from the opening of the legislative session just after New Years, the state’s Legislative Black Caucus fought a dogged rearguard war in the House. Over the last decade the caucus acquired a hard-won expertise on immigration, defeating over 200 anti-immigrant measures. After New Year’s, though, they lost the crucial committee chairmanships that made it possible for them to kill those earlier bills. But they did not lose their voice.

“We forced a great debate in the House, until 1:30 in the morning,” says State Representative Jim Evans, caucus leader and AFL-CIO staff member in Mississippi. “When you have a prolonged debate like that, it shows the widespread concern and disagreement. People began to see the ugliness in this measure.”

Like all of Kobach’s and ALEC’s bills, HB 488 stated its intent in its first section: “to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state agencies and local governments.” In other words, to make life so difficult and unpleasant for undocumented people that they’d leave the state.

And to that end, it said people without papers wouldn’t be able to get as much as a bicycle license or library card, and that schools had to inform on the immigration status of their students. It mandated that police verify the immigration status of anyone they arrest, an open invitation to racial profiling.

“The night HB 488 came to the floor, many black legislators spoke against it,” reports Bill Chandler, director of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, “including some who’d never spoken out on immigration before. One objected to the use of the term ‘illegal alien’ in its language, while others said it justified breaking up families and ethnic cleansing.” Even many white legislators were inspired to speak against it.

Nevertheless, the bill was rammed through the House. Then it reached the Senate, controlled by Republicans for some years, and presided over by a more moderate Republican, Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves. Reeves could see the widespread opposition to the bill, even among employers, and was less in lock step with the Tea Party’s anti-immigrant agenda than other Republicans.

Although Democrats had just lost all their committee chairmanships in the house, Reeves appointed a rural Democrat to chair one of the Senate’s two judiciary committees. He then sent that bill to that committee, chaired by Hob Bryan. And Bryan killed it.

On the surface, it appears that fissures inside the Republican Party facilitated the bill’s defeat. But they were not that defeat’s cause. As the debate and maneuvering played out in the capitol building, its halls were filled with angry protests, while noisy demonstrations went on for days until the bill’s final hour.

That grassroots upsurge produced political alliances that cut deeply into the bill’s support, including calls for rejection by the state’s sheriffs’ and county supervisors associations, the Mississippi Economic Council (its chamber of commerce), and employer groups from farms to poultry packers.

That upsurge was not spontaneous, nor the last minute product of emergency mobilizations. “We wouldn’t have had a chance against this without 12 years of organizing work,” Evans explains.

“We worked on the conscience of people night and day, and built coalition after coalition. Over time, people have come around. The way people think about immigration in Mississippi today is nothing like the way they thought when we started.”

Evans, Chandler, attorney Patricia Ice, Father Jerry Tobin, activist Kathy Sykes, union organizer Frank Curiel, and other veterans of Mississippi’s social movements came together at the end of the 1990s not to stop a bill 12 years later but to build political power. Their vehicle was the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, and a partnership with the Legislative Black Caucus and other coalitions fighting on most of the progressive issues facing the state.

Their strategy has been based on the state’s changing demographics. Over the last two decades, the percentage of African-Americans in Mississippi’s population has been rising. Black families driven from jobs by factory closings and unemployment in the north have been moving back south, reversing the movement of the decades of the Great Migration. Today at least 37 percent of Mississippi’s people are African-Americans, the highest percentage of any state in the country.

Then, starting with the boom in casino construction in the early 1990s, immigrants from Mexico and Central America, displaced by NAFTA and CAFTA, began migrating into the state as well. Poultry plants, farms, and factories hired them. Guest workers were brought to work in Gulf Coast reconstruction and shipyards. “Today we have established Latino communities,” Chandler explains. “The children of the first immigrants are now arriving at voting age.”

In MIRA’s political calculation, blacks and immigrants, plus unions, are the potential pillars of a powerful political coalition. HB 488’s intent to drive immigrants from Mississippi is an effort to make that coalition impossible.

MIRA is not just focused on defeating bad bills, however. It built a grassroots base by fighting immigration raids at the Howard Industries plant in Laurel in 2008, and in other worksites as well. Its activist staff helped families survive sweeps in apartment houses and trailer parks. They brought together black workers suspicious of the Latino influx, and immigrant families worried about settling in a hostile community. Political unity, based in neighborhoods, protects both groups, they said.

For unions organizing poultry plants, factories, and casinos MIRA became a resource helping to win over immigrant workers. It brought labor violation cases against Gulf employers in the wake of Katrina. Yet despite being on opposing sides, employers and MIRA recognized they had a mutual interest in fighting HB 488. Both opposed workplace immigration raids and enforcement, which are based on the same “attrition through enforcement” idea.

Since 1986 U.S. immigration law has forbidden undocumented people from working by making it illegal for employers to hire them. Called “employer sanctions,” the enforcement of this law (part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986), especially under the Bush and Obama administrations, has caused the firing of thousands of workers.

Yet over the last decade, Congressional proposals for comprehensive immigration reform have called for strengthening sanctions, and increasing raids and firings. “That’s why we didn’t support those bills,” Chandler says.

“They violate the human rights of working people to feed their families. For employers, that opposition was a meeting point. They didn’t like workplace enforcement either. All their associations claimed they didn’t hire undocumented workers, but we all know who’s working in the plants. We want people to stay as much as the employers do. Forcing people from their jobs forces them to leave — an ethnic cleansing tactic.”

During the protests Ice, Sykes, and others underlined the point by handing legislators sweet potatoes with labels saying, “I was picked by immigrant workers who together contribute $82 million to the state’s economy.”

MIRA, however, also fought guest worker programs used by Mississippi casinos and shipyards to recruit workers with few labor rights. “When it came to HB 488 employers were tactical allies,” Chandler cautions. Unions, on the other hand, are members of the MIRA coalition.

While MIRA and employers saw a mutual interest in opposing the bill, MIRA helps unions when they try to organize the workers of those same employers, and helps workers defend themselves when employers violate their rights. MIRA, in fact, was started by activists like Chandler, Evans, and Curiel, who all have a long history of labor activity in Mississippi.

When HB 488 hit, busses brought in members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1529 from poultry plants in Scott County, Laborers from Laurel, Retail, Wholesale union members from Carthage. Black catfish workers from Indianola, and electrical union members from Crystal Spring. The black labor mobilization was largely organized by new pro-immigrant leadership of the state chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the AFL-CIO constituency group for black union members.

Catholic congregations, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Evangelical Lutherans, Muslims, and Jews also brought people to protest HB 488, as did the Mississippi Human Services Coalition — a result of a long history working on immigrant issues.

And groups around MIRA and the Black Caucus not only fought that bill, but others introduced by Tea Party Republicans as well. One would ban abortions if a fetal heartbeat is detected. Another promotes charter schools. A third would restrict access to workers compensation benefits, while another would strip civil service protection from state employees.

Dr. Ivory Phillips, a MIRA director and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jackson Public Schools, explains that charter school proposals, voter ID bills, and anti-immigrant measures are all linked. “Because white supremacists fear losing their status as the dominant group in this country, there is a war against brown people today, just as there has long been a war against black people,” he says.

“In all three cases — charter schools, ‘immigration reform’ and voter ID — what we are witnessing is an anti-democratic surge, a rise in overt racism, and a refusal to provide opportunities to all.”

Tea Party supporters also saw these issues linked together. In the wake of the charter school debate during the same period the immigration bill was defeated, a crowd gathered around Representative Reecy Dickson, a leading Black Caucus member, in which she was shoved and called racist epithets.

“Because of our history we had a relationship with our allies,” Chandler concludes. “We need political alliances that mean something in the long term — permanent alliances, and a strategy for winning political power. That includes targeted voter registration that focuses on specific towns, neighborhoods, and precincts.”

Despite the national importance of stopping the Southern march of the anti-immigrant bills, however, the resources for the effort were almost all local. MIRA emptied its bank account fighting HB 488. Additional money came mostly from local units of organizations like the UAW, UNITE HERE, and the Muslim Association.

“The resources of the national immigrant rights movement should prioritize preventing bills from passing as much as fighting them after the fact,” Chandler warns.

On the surface, the fight in Jackson was a defensive battle waged in the wake of the Republican legislative takeover of the legislature. And the Tea Party still threatens to bring HB 488 back until it passes.

Yet Evans, who also chairs MIRA’s board, believes that time is on the side of social change. “These Republicans still have tricks up their sleeves,” he cautions. “We’re worried about redistricting, and a Texas-style stacking of the deck. But in the end, we still believe our same strategy will build power in Mississippi. We don’t see last November as a defeat but as the last stand of the Confederacy.”

[David Bacon is a California-based writer and photographer. His latest book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, was published by Beacon Press. His photographs and stories can be found at dbacon.igc.org. This article was published at web edition of The Nation and was crossposted to The Rag Blog. Read more of David Bacon’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Marilyn Katz : Our Bodies, Their Politics

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from The Raw Story.

Our bodies, their politics

The last few months have made abundantly clear what women must do: rid America’s capitols of misogynists.

By Marilyn Katz / The Rag Blog / April 24, 2012

In the first half of 2011, close to 1,000 measures related to reproductive health and rights were introduced into state legislatures.

The first “women’s group” that I was involved in was not born out of feminist theory or organized by intellectual women on campus. Rather it was in 1966 in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, and its members were poor African-American moms on welfare and thirtysomething (looking 50) Appalachian women, newly arrived from Kentucky and West Virginia.

Not much older than me, many of the women in the group provided physical testament to the possible effects of multiple childbirths while young and poor. The work of the group ranged from food co-ops to welfare reform, from rent strikes to learning to read.

The impetus for the group, however, was a clear-eyed view that welfare was a “women’s issue,” and the need — among the Appalachian women in particular — for protection and camaraderie in the face of their husbands’ explosive anger upon learning that “their” women were seeking information about birth control from government VISTA volunteers.

Back then the outraged cry from men was not about “religious freedom,” but about male prerogative and the duties of women.

I have been reminded of those meetings in recent months by the series of controversies surrounding the contraception mandate in the federal healthcare reform law — from the exclusion of Sandra Fluke’s testimony at congressional hearings (GOP Rep. Joe Walsh said the birth control debate is “not about women”) to Rush Limbaugh’s virulent rant (and limp apology), to the barely audible denouncements of his statement by the Republican presidential candidates.

Contrary to the posturing of politicians and bishops alike, religious freedom is not the core issue. Consider, for example, the Catholic hospitals, schools and universities that have, for many years and with little fuss, provided insurance that covers birth control in the states that require them to do so.

The reality is, as it was 40 years ago in Uptown, that the debate about birth control is firstly and fundamentally about women — their rights and their lives. From Biblical times on, women — who bear the brunt as well as the joy of childbearing — have struggled to curtail unwanted pregnancies, often resorting to extreme measures in the face of possible death or the poverty that another child might bring.

More than 500,000 women die around the world each year from pregnancy-related causes, according to the World Health Organization. A majority of those deaths occur in developing countries, but only a century ago American women faced similar fates.

It was not until the 20th century that pregnancy-related death rates in the United States declined — a result of modern medicine, better sanitation and the advent of modern female contraception. According to a 2011 study, more than 99 percent of “sexually experienced” American women, including 98 percent of such Catholic women, use or have used non-natural (i.e., not abstinence or the “rhythm method”) birth control.

In the past year, as elected Tea Partiers have aligned themselves with religious fundamentalists, Republicans in the House have introduced eight anti-choice bills, each of which received the support of the same 225 GOP representatives. In the first half of 2011, close to 1,000 measures related to reproductive health and rights — from those curtailing contraception to those mandating transvaginal ultrasounds — were introduced into state legislatures.

Of the 28 states controlled by Republicans, 26 have passed laws that limit women’s reproductive choices. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 55 percent of American women of reproductive age lived in states characterized as “hostile” to abortion in 2011 — up from 31 percent in 2000.

The danger is to women, but among us also lies the remedy. Perhaps we owe a debt of gratitude to the Limbaughs of the world — they have brought to public view and hopefully to public attention the attack on women’s reproductive health and rights that has been steadily building over the past years.

And while it would be uplifting to get Limbaugh off the air, the real task is ridding our nation’s legislative bodies of misogynists. Women fought for and won a great deal in the last century. It’s time to say on the Web, in the streets, and of most importance and effect, in the ballot box: We’re not going back.

[An anti-war and civil rights organizer during the Vietnam War, Marilyn Katz helped organize security during the August 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention. Katz has founded and led groups like the Chicago Women’s Union, Reproductive Rights National Network, and Chicago Women Organized for Reproductive Choice in the 1960s and 1970s, and Chicagoans Against War in Iraq in 2002. The founder and president of Chicago-based MK Communications, Katz can be contacted at mkatz@mkcpr.com. This article was also published at In These Times. Read more articles by Marilyn Katz on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Jordan Flaherty : Gulf Residents Fear for the Future

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from GRIID
.
Two years after the BP drilling disaster,

Gulf residents fear for the future

By Jordan Flaherty | The Rag Blog | April 23, 2012

“The Gulf is a robust ecosystem and it’s been dying the death of a thousand cuts…” — Aaron Viles, Gulf Restoration Network.

On April 20, 2010, a reckless attitude towards the safety of the Gulf Coast by British Petroleum, as well as Transocean and Halliburton, caused a well to blow out 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

As the world watched in horror, underwater cameras showed a seemingly endless flow of oil — hundreds of millions of gallons — and a series of failed efforts to stop it, over a period of nearly three months. Two years later, that horror has not ended for many on the Gulf.

“People should be aware that the oil is still there,” says Wilma Subra, a chemist who travels widely across the Gulf meeting with fishers and testing seafood and sediment samples for contamination.

Subra says that the reality she is seeing on the ground contrasts sharply with the image painted by BP. “I’m extremely concerned on the impact it’s having on all these sick individuals,” she says. Subra believes we may be just at the beginning of this disaster. In every community she visits, fishers show her shrimp born without eyes, fish with lesions, and crabs with holes in their shells. She says tarballs are still washing up on beaches across the region.

While it’s too early to assess the long-term environmental impact, a host of recent studies published by the National Academy of Sciences and other respected institutions have shown troubling results. They describe mass deaths of deepwater coral, dolphins, and killifish, a small animal at the base of the Gulf food chain.

“If you add them all up, it’s clear the oil is still in the ecosystem, it’s still having an effect,” says Aaron Viles, deputy director of Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental organization active in the region.

The major class action lawsuit on behalf of communities affected by the spill has reached a proposed $7.8 billion settlement, subject to approval by a judge. While this seems to have brought a certain amount of closure to the saga, environmentalists worry that any settlement is premature, saying they fear that the worst is yet to come.

Pointing to the 1989 Exxon spill off the coast of Alaska, previously the largest oil spill in U.S. waters, Viles said that it was several years before the full affect of that disaster was felt. “Four seasons after Exxon Valdez is when the herring fisheries collapsed,” says Viles. “The Gulf has been a neglected ecosystem for decades — we need to be monitoring it closely.”

In the aftermath of the spill, BP flooded the Gulf with nearly 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants. While BP says these chemicals broke up the oil, some scientists have said this just made it less visible, and sent the poisons deeper into the food chain.

It is widely agreed that environmental problems on the coast date back to long before the well blew open. The massive catastrophe brought into focus problems that have existed for a generation. Land loss caused by oil company drilling has already displaced many who lived by the coast, and the pollution from treatment plants has poisoned communities across the state — especially in “cancer alley,” the corridor of industrial facilities along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge.

“The Gulf is a robust ecosystem and it’s been dying the death of a thousand cuts for a long time,” says Viles. “BP is legally obligated to fix what they screwed up. But if you’re only obligated to put the ecosystem back to where it was April 19, 2010, why would we?”

Fishing is a huge part of the economy for the Gulf Coast. Around 40% of the seafood caught in the continental U.S. comes from here. Many area fishermen were still recovering from Hurricane Katrina when the spill closed a third of Gulf waters to fishing for months.

George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association, a group that supports Gulf Coast fishers, says many fishers still had not recovered from Hurricane Katrina when the oil started flowing from the BP spill. Now, he says, many are facing losing their homes. “Production is down at least 70 percent,” compared to the year before the spill, he says. “And prices are still depressed 30, 40, 60 percent.”

In a video statement on BP’s website, Geir Robinson, Vice President of Economic Restoration for BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization, says that the company believes the legal settlement will resolve most legitimate economic claims. “We do have critics,” adds Robinson. “And we’re working hard every day to show them that we will meet our responsibilities.”

Environmentalists and scientists also complain that the Obama administration has let down the Gulf Coast. Viles is critical of the role the U.S. government has played, saying that by inaction they seemed to protect BP more than coastal communities or the environment. “The coast guard seems to empower the worst instincts of BP,” Viles says. “I don’t know if it’s Stockholm Syndrome or what.”

International environmental groups have also joined in the criticism. Oceana, a conservation group with offices in Europe and the Americas, released a report criticizing the U.S. government’s reforms as being either ineffective or nonexistent, saying “offshore drilling remains as risky and dangerous as it was two years ago, and that the risk of a major spill has not been effectively reduced.”

Theresa Dardar lives in Bayou Pointe-au-Chien , a Native American fishing community on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. Dardar and her neighbors have seen their land vanish from under their feet within their lifetimes due to canals built by the oil companies to access wells.

The canals brought salt water into freshwater marshes, helping cause the coastal erosion that sees Louisiana lose a football field of land every 45 minutes. The main street that runs through the community now disappears into the swamps, with telephone poles sticking out of the water.

Now, in addition to worries about disappearing land and increasing risk of hurricanes, she fears that her family’s livelihood is gone for good. “It’s not going to be over for years,” she says, expressing a widely held concern among fishers here. “We’re just a small Native American fishing community.”

That’s all they’ve done their whole lives. Some of them are over 60. What are they going to do? If BP gives them money for the rest of their lives, that’s one thing. But if not, then what can they do?

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based in New Orleans and author of the book Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org. This article was also published at CounterPunch. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Kate Braun : Beltane Is About Fertility, Life

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Beltane Fire Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, 2008. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
 
2012 spring fertility festival: 
Beltane: Monday, April 30 / Tuesday, May 1

By Kate Braun | The Rag Blog | April 23, 2012

“A health to the mothers of the Merry Begotten/ A health to the maiden with the fiery eyes/ A health to the crone that smiles beside us/ On the other side of the Beltane fire.”

Whether you choose to celebrate Beltane on Monday, April 30 or Tuesday, May 1, the emphasis is on Fertility and Life. The Goddess is Matron, her Lord is the Green Man, this third spring fertility festival celebrates their union with much festivity, music, and fire.

All colors of the rainbow may be used in your decorations, but be sure to incorporate red, white, and dark green. Red represents the active masculine force; white is for the feminine influences; dark green stands for fertility. Use braids, plaits, knot-work such as macrame in your decorating scheme. Braid your hair, using ribbons and/or flowers in the braids. Wear flowers in your hair, especially roses: they represent the flowering of the spiritual dimension of the human soul.

Honor all the local demi-goddesses and gods. Don’t neglect the fairies. Blow horns; raise your voices in song, build a fire, whether in a cauldron, a Weber grill, or a chiminea. Be sure to toss fragrant healing protective herbs such as rosemary on the fire’s embers and use a feather to waft the smoke around you, your guests, and the family pets. Small pets should be carried through the smoke.

Serve your guests a buffet of dairy foods, red fruits, oat or barley cakes, green salads, plenty of breads and cereals, honey, sweets of all kinds. Toast Goddess and God with with sangria. Celebrate outdoors if at all possible. Dance barefoot on the grass under the waxing moon.

The veil between the worlds is very thin on this night. While this celebration is all about the generation of new life and is focused on pleasant thoughts and fun activities, it would not be amiss to also make intentions for protection from possible malevolent spirits.

[Kate Braun’s website is www.tarotbykatebraun.com. She can be reached at kate_braun2000@yahoo.com. Read more of Kate Braun’s writing on The Rag Blog.]

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Lamar W. Hankins : Freedom of Conscience in Hays County, Texas

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Kyle, Texas-area Constable James Kohler: “If they can’t pledge allegiance to that flag, they need to get the hell out of the United States. Image from Hays Free Press.
 
Respect for freedom of conscience 
missing in Hays County

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | April 23, 2012

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” –– West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)

SAN MARCOS, Texas — The San Marcos Mercury recently reported that  Hays County Commissioner candidate Sam Brannon refused to stand and participate in the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of a Commissioners Court meeting about a year ago.  

His inaction was challenged by Kyle-area Constable James Kohler, who called out Brannon publicly for standing silently without his hand over his heart during the ceremonial recitation of the pledge at the beginning of the court session.

Kohler is reported to have said, “I’ve never seen anybody not salute, not put their hand over their heart, when we pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. If they can’t pledge allegiance to that flag, they need to get the hell out of the United States.” Kohler also noted that Brannon did not bow his head for the court’s invocation.

However Kohler’s official position is described — high or petty, or perhaps somewhere in between — he has no grounds for impugning the integrity of a citizen for exercising his or her conscience, as the Supreme Court opinion quoted above holds.

I know nothing about Brannon except what I have read in the local media. He may be a scoundrel or an upstanding person, or somewhere in between. Some have called into question Brannon’s lifestyle, past political activities, financial dealings as a former candidate, and whether he is a legitimate resident of County Commissioner Precinct 3, in which he is a candidate this year. But those matters are beside the point raised by Kohler. Perhaps a bit of background on the pledge can put this whole matter in context.

The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by the author, editor, Christian socialist, and Baptist minister Francis Bellamy as part of an advertising campaign to sell flags to schools and promote the magazine The Youth’s Companion, for which Bellamy was an employee hired to participate in this promotion. The magazine even worked into its advertising campaign the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, with the flag as the centerpiece — it sold flags to 26,000 schools during the campaign. As written originally, Bellamy’s pledge read:

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

In 1923, the words were modified slightly from “my Flag” to “the Flag of the United States of America.” That version lasted until the McCarthy era, when President Eisenhower, in 1954, was persuaded to join with the Knights of Columbus religious group to support having Congress adopt the pledge with the added words “under God” to distinguish the United States from the Soviet Union’s “Godless Communism,” giving us the pledge as it exists today:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Originally, Bellamy had prescribed a salute to the flag when the pledge was recited that resembled the Nazi salute. During World War II, this practice was largely abandoned in favor of a hand held over the heart, or in the case of a service man or woman, a military salute.

Of course, no law requires any particular behavior during the recitation of the pledge, but custom and social pressure have usually assured that standing at attention and gesturing as described during the pledge’s recitation are followed by most people.

In the 1930s, the expulsion from public school of the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses for their unwillingness to salute the flag and recite the pledge led to a Supreme Court decision that venerated patriotism over freedom of conscience.

The parents argued that as Jehovah’s Witnesses, the children’s allegiance was only to God; thus, to salute the flag and recite the pledge would violate their religious beliefs. But the Supreme Court held that the school district’s interest in creating national unity through a patriotic practice allowed school officials to require students to salute the flag in spite of their religious beliefs.

The 1940 decision was grounded in the shibboleth that “National unity is the basis of national security.”

Almost immediately after the decision was rendered, Jehovah’s Witnesses were set upon by mobs and beaten, and their children were expelled from public schools. According to the book Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution, by Shawn Francis Peters, by the end of 1940 “more than 1,500 Witnesses in the United States had been victimized in 335 separate attacks.” Such attacks included beatings, tarring and feathering, hangings, shootings, maimings, kidnappings, castration, threats, and other acts of violence.

Attacks were reported in Ash Fork, near Prescott, Arizona; Crocker, Missouri; Jasper, Refugio, and Port Arthur, Texas; Hinton and Union City, Oklahoma; Jackson, Mississippi; Litchfield, Carlyle, and Greenville, Illinois; Kennebunk and North Windham, Maine; Connersville, Indiana; Harlan, Kentucky; and elsewhere. Expulsions were reported in Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, Texas, and other states.

Details of the violence appeared in a 1941 report published by the American Civil Liberties Union and signed by well-known national figures, such as Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rev. Ernest F. Tittle, Rabbi Edward L. Israel, and several others.

The widespread barbarity engendered by the court’s opinion, in combination with the fear caused by the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, so shocked the court that it looked for a way to reverse its decision. In 1943, it found a way to do so. In West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, the Supreme Court held that mandating recitation “invades the sphere of intellect and spirit which it is the purpose of the First Amendment to our Constitution to reserve from all official control.”

The behavior of Constable Kohler toward Sam Brannon is one kind of action that the Supreme Court may have had in mind when it wrote that “no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

 It is shameful that no public official who witnessed Kohler’s outburst toward Brannon challenged it. Reports indicate that Hays County Judge Bert Cobb seemed beguiled by Kohler’s behavior. Perhaps all of our public officials are as petty as was Kohler. Certainly, they could all stand to learn something about our constitutional history.

But these are the same public officials who routinely use their public offices to force their preferred religious practices — Christian prayers — on all our citizens at public meetings. I can’t imagine that any of them will ever be able to appreciate the importance of the right of conscience that we are guaranteed by the Constitution. They have no problem forcing their theocratic views on us all, and they treat obeisance to the state no differently.

They would be wiser leaders if they heeded the words of Thomas Jefferson written to Benjamin Rush in 1803:

It behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

Theologian and social critic Gary Dorrien http://www.utsnyc.edu/Page.aspx?pid=351 will speak on “Breaking the Oligarchy” to keynote a weekend gathering on economic justice and faith.

 Dorrien, an Episcopal priest and professor at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, is a frequent speaker and commentator on programs such as “Bill Moyers’ Journal” http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07032009/profile.html. Described by Cornel West as “the preeminent social ethicist in North America today,” Dorrien is the author of 14 books, including Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice; Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana; Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition; and The Making of American Liberal Theology.

Posted in RagBlog | Leave a comment