Diary of a Heartland Radical

POLITICAL NEWS IS A COMMODITY: WHAT SELLS IS LEGITIMATE

2012-03-05T22:03:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

“The public version of Andrew was not the version I knew. I won’t miss the public version of Andrew. But the next time I’m walking down the street in New Hampshire, I will think of him, and I will wish I could run into the Andrew Breitbart who I knew.”(Lawrence O’Donnell, The Last Word, March 2, 2012, MSNBC).

Andrew Breitbart, the despicable electronic journalist of the Right, died on March 2 at the age of 43. Breitbart gained fame for producing short “documentaries” which distorted the image and activities of ACORN, a national organization of community activists. The slander of this grassroots organization led ultimately to its defunding by Congress.

Breitbart prepared and disseminated distorted footage of a speech by Georgia Rural Development Director for the Department of Agriculture Shirley Sherrod leading to her dismissal by the Obama Administration. He constructed a clumsily doctored documentary from a Labor Studies class at the University of Missouri to make it look like the instructors, one of whom was a trade union staffer, were advocating working class revolution.

Breitbart produced vicious lies about people and organizations. The harm he did to the real lives of poor and powerless people in our society in these and other instances is incalculable.

And not only did Brietbart produce venomous news accounts, he became a role model for other so-called journalists who have produced like-minded distorted reportage on venues such as Fox News. In addition, it is important to recognize that the distorted journalism that pervades Fox News can be found in the work of almost every other major media purveyor, electronic and print, in the United States. And Breitbart was a producer of this distorted journalism and an inspiration for the expansion of it throughout the profession.

So why did Lawrence O’Donnell, who generally is a principled journalist and voice of those victimized by powerful economic and political elites, memorialize Breitbart in such touching ways? And O’Donnell was not alone. Arianna Huffington and many others took the view that Breitbart, although he presented distorted information that impinged on progressive movements and policies, was passionate about his craft. Several media pundits suggested that Breitbart’s slanderous advocacy journalism, even if misplaced, was a contribution to a new journalism.

Why is it that journalists laud those who produce and disseminate news that destroys organizations and people who do good works? Why are journalists celebrated by their peers who produce news that exacerbates anti-worker, racist, and sexist attitudes and values, or more generally produces pain and suffering?

Perhaps part of the answer can be found in an analysis of news in modern society. We know that products that people produce and consume have “use value,” that is they provide some concrete and practical purpose which explains why we value them. Food is produced and consumed because we need food to survive. Beyond food, we consume many products because they provide us with comfort and pleasure.

Before the rise of capitalism, workers and peasants produced goods and services for their own use. With the rise of capitalism workers increasingly participated in the production of goods and services for sale in the marketplace. Workers produced not for use but for sale. Virtually every product became a commodity for sale.

In a system of commodity production the sales effort becomes more important than the basic value the goods hold for their producers. As capitalism unfolded over the last 200 years, the production of goods and services became more concentrated in fewer and fewer corporations and financial institutions. Huge conglomerates organized the production and distribution of goods and increasingly engaged in the process of generating demands for the wants people have in a modern society. In short, ours is a society of mass production and mass consumption. And consumers are vital to its survival and growth.

What does this analysis of the rise of our modern economy mean for journalism? It suggests that at some time in the past, images of our world and knowledge about it were produced and consumed by families and communities for their immediate needs. Over time, large media corporations were created to produce news and knowledge for dissemination among larger and larger populations. News became a commodity.

Media corporations increasingly saw the need to produce news, a commodity, which would be broadly consumed by the people. In other words news, in a world in which ten media monopolies dominate, required the selling of their product. As the media monopolies competed for customers for their commodities, appeals increased to the base desires, values, and beliefs of a population that already were shaped by racism, sexism, and animosity toward workers and the poor. Here is where skilled journalist/viral ideologues enter the picture. They applied their skills to the production of news that would entice and increase the appetite for more of the news that privileged scandal, racism, and sexism.

But what about the more rigorous, informed, and ‘professional' journalists who waxed eloquently about Breitbart’s professionalism despite some of his odious practices? Well, sad to say, virtually all media workers are engaged in the business of producing commodities for sale in the media market. So for them, the Breitbarts of the world are to be admired for their craft, if not their message and impacts on people’s lives.

In the end, the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the media, the ten media conglomerates that produce one-half of all we read, listen to, and view in news and culture, is a direct result of the fact that our economic system requires the commodification of everything, including news and culture. Andrew Breitbart was an inevitable product of this system.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: FIGHTBACKS AND VISIONS

2012-02-29T08:25:00.003-05:00

Harry Targ

“Of course, Big Labor's coercion of employees into paying union dues to subsidize its political agenda isn't new, since this practice is as old as the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). But with AFL-CIO president John Sweeney beating his chest about the Federation's political spending, the coercion of workers to fund the AFL-CIO's political operations became news.” (National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Inc, September 9, 1997)

“A source with direct knowledge of decision-making at Komen's headquarters in Dallas said the grant-making criteria were adopted with the deliberate intention of targeting Planned Parenthood. The criteria's impact on Planned Parenthood and its status as the focus of government investigations were highlighted in a memo distributed to Komen affiliates in December.” (Associated Press, February 7, 2012)

WHEREAS, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was founded in 1970 with the mission of increasing voter participation, delivering services to inner-city neighborhoods, community organizing, and carrying out issue campaigns; (followed by a list of financial and other transgressions)

THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that ALEC calls on all states to immediately end support for ACORN and groups linked to ACORN. (From the website of the American Legislative Executive Council)

Academics define social movements in different ways and believe they arise for a variety of reasons. They can come from groups that already exist, a growing availability of resources, the rise of crises of one sort or another, and/or from specific issues. Such movements may take a long time to gestate and grow, or emerge in moments of spontaneity, sometimes rising from inspirational examples. Often they have their roots in the need to react to powerful and negative initiatives by opposing political or economic groups.

The forces of reaction may have as their project immediate efforts to destroy existing rights or prerogatives embedded in public policies. In addition they may see in the policies and groups they oppose the seeds of new ideas that could lead to fundamental social changes that must be challenged.

While reactionary forces may arise to oppose specific changes in policy, their most important legacy is the long-term efforts they employ to crush organizations of people that could see the need for fundamental social change. Therefore, as in the cases of labor, women’s rights, and people’s movements, reactionary forces are fundamentally committed to long-term organizing, rolling back the very forces that have provided some services to those not part of the ruling class.

We can see examples of the rise of social movements out of reactionary programs in the recent battles over “Right-to-Work for less” legislation in the state of Indiana and the spreading campaigns to bring similar legislation to states throughout the industrial heartland. Right-to-Work campaigns have followed on efforts to diminish worker power to destroy rights of public employees to organize and to make difficult worker organizing in any venue.

The data comparing the conditions of workers in Right-to-Work states with others clearly shows that the former experience lower wages, health benefits, shop-floor safety and their families fewer rights to health care and retirement security.

More generally, in a thorough recent report on the role of unions in American life, the authors of a Center for American Progress Action Fund study (David Madland and Nick Bunker) point out that virtually every positive social change in the United States has received strong support from organized labor. Historically, during periods of high union density (high percentages of workers in unions), all American workers have benefited in terms of wages, benefits, and workplace rights.

In addition, organized labor has been among the strongest institutional supporters of the Democratic Party, and on occasion, some trade unionists have supported progressive third party campaigns (from the Henry Wallace campaign for president in 1948 to Green Party campaigns by candidate Ralph Nader).

Further, the existence of a vibrant labor movement is vital for workers everywhere. Those who oppose organized labor, such as the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation quoted above, do so for reasons of short term gain. Right-to-Work laws may weaken unions, lead to declining wages, and create larger profits.

But more importantly, destroying the labor movement and the very idea that workers have rights and those rights have the potential of being realized in strong organizations of their making seems vital to economic and political elites who are always striving to create a society dominated even more by industrial and finance capital. Trade unions, while driven by the defense of basic interests today, imply the possibility of creating a society that privilege worker rights and democracy. This remains the ultimate danger from the standpoint of big capital that must be stamped out.

Just as trade unions embody the possibility of real democracy for workers, women’s rights to make choices about their own bodies constitute the same kind of immediate and long-term reality. The signature target of the reactionary right is Planned Parenthood of America. Planned Parenthood provides a broad array of reproductive health services for women, particularly poor women. Only a small percentage of their resources are allocated for abortions.

In addition the mission of Planned Parenthood is to create the conditions in which each individual can manage his/her own fertility, what they refer to as “reproductive self-determination.” To achieve this goal Planned Parenthood works to provide reproductive and comprehensive health care, including advocating public policies to achieve the mission.

Reactionary forces, from the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) to various national anti-abortion groups, and most recently Susan Komen for the Cure (ostensibly apolitical) have mobilized not only to shrink Planned Parenthood services to women but to eliminate the organization itself. For some, abortion is an anathema for theological reasons. But for most, Planned Parenthood represents institutionally the basic rights of women to control their own bodies and by implication the provision of accessible and comprehensive health care.

The rising of the poor, women and men, black and white, employed and unemployed, the young and old, constitute another fundamental challenge to the economic and political power of reactionary forces in America. Organizations such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), until it was destroyed by an orchestrated campaign of lies in 2010, received public funding to support programs for low and moderate income families. It promoted voter registration in communities, and advocated for health care reform, public housing, and living wage legislation.

From the vantage point of economic and political elites, power and privilege could be challenged in cities and towns across America if community organizations such as ACORN developed programs of action and service.

These three organizations together represent labor, women, and grassroots poor people’s campaigns. They are the embodiment of popular forces which seek to end exploitation, sexism, and racism. Implicitly they stand for the construction of a different kind of society in which these pathologies do not exist. That is why all three—organized labor, Planned Parenthood, and ACORN--have been and continue to be under assault. And that is why progressive campaigns need to be organized around the fundamental connections between class, gender, and race and to defend labor, women’s, and community organizations.

NARRATIVES AND ELECTIONS: THE BIG QUESTIONS

2012-02-21T16:54:00.003-05:00

Harry Targ

Last week a group of Hoosier Occupiers met in a “teach-in” format to discuss how movements for change can and should relate to the labor movement and the working class at large. The event, hosted by Occupy Purdue, was held in a community center in West Lafayette, Indiana. An extended panel included a faculty member from African American Studies on campus, a Unite-Here organizer, an activist from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and representatives from the International Socialist Organization and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

The panel moderator skillfully questioned panelists and encouraged what became rich and thorough discussion and debate with attendees who were not designated panel speakers but shared the interest and much of the experience of those who were the panelists.

Virtually everyone recognized the problems and strengths of the movements that sprung up last summer, saw the necessity to move ahead with new ideas about organizing and educating many publics, and believed in the necessity of building a broad working class movement. Most felt that the working class constitutes the vast majority of people, whether they are in unions or not.

The knowledge, experience, and passion of all who attended this event were palpable and gave reason to be hopeful about the possibilities for progressive change in the months and years ahead. While teach-in participants agreed on most things, tensions were noted in at least three areas that so often surface as progressive movements are launched. While these tensions may not be easily resolvable, they need to be part of the consciousness of participants as they develop their day-to-day programs.

The first issue has to do with historical narratives. Many participants told historical stories that justified advocacy for particular strategies for building a mass movement. These narratives were stories about the origins of political movements, their participants, the issues they engaged in, the outcomes of their activities, and their connection to the projects that contemporary activists are pursuing.

Teach-in narratives addressed class, race, and gender. Some emphasized workers and class struggle, others talked about labor militancy and the construction of labor unions, and still others emphasized the deleterious consequences of racism and sexism in the labor movement. There was also a current among the story-tellers about how organized labor had betrayed the working class with the implication that the movements of the twenty-first century must distinguish between workers in general and workers in unions.

One narrative addressed the issue of race and the organized labor movement in the United States. Historical examples of organized labor’s racist practices included reference to exclusionary clauses requiring that Black and white union locals be segregated or that only limited numbers of African-Americans ever became labor movement leaders. Beginning a narrative of class and race by identifying certain key dates, for example, the founding of the American Federation of Labor, the rejection by white workers of integrated unions in the packinghouses of Chicago in 1919, or the racism that impaired the campaign to organize the South in “Operation Dixie,” can make this point.

On the other hand, if the class and race narrative begins with the anti-racism of the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1880s, or the struggles around slogans of “Black-White Unite and Fight” in CIO organizing drives of industrial workers in the 1930s, or left unions going South after World War II to organize integrated unions, or the significant support given the foundation of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) by the United Auto Workers and the United Packinghouse Workers of America (both affiliated with the new AFL-CIO), then the story is different.

The point here is that the adoption of one or another narrative of the past has consequences for political activism today and tomorrow. Activists today do not need to accept one narrative over another. They just must recognize that each narrative tells part of the story that is critical for today’s work. To some degree the discussion on race and class at the teach-in reflected the recognition that in this case, there are different narratives about class, race, and labor. Maybe in the end activists are best served by learning the lessons from very different narratives.

A second issue that inevitably comes up at every movement-building discussion has to do with relations between the left and elections. On the one hand, electoral work is taxing, absorbing time and money. Passions are energized by electoral work and oftentimes the candidates selected only minimally satisfy the goals electoral activists are seeking. Sometimes compromises are carried out by candidates progressives support that are on balance net losses for the people.

In the history of the two-party system of the United States, there usually has been limited ability for progressive voices to be heard. Progressives are mired in the classic “lesser of two evils,” conundrum. This problem is exacerbated by the transformation of the electoral system into a sports contest. The media identifies certain “stars” who become the subject of 24/7 news coverage as personalities with little or no attention to political issues.

However, elections, at state and local as well as national levels, do matter to large portions of the working class. For example, as a result of the 2010 elections, union rights have been reduced through passage of Right-to-Work and anti-collective bargaining laws. The loss of Medicaid coverage for women who seek reproductive health services from Planned Parenthood will have disastrous consequences for large numbers of customers. Defunding of public institutions and services--education, libraries, transportation--hit working people the hardest. And elected officials get to appoint full-time judges from district courts to the Supreme Court. It is clear that one of the least observed outcomes of the “Reagan Revolution” is the life-time appointments of federal judges that have ruled in ways that have destroyed worker, citizen, and women’s rights. The criminal “justice” system has qualitatively advanced the prison-industrial complex during the last decade.

The contradictory character of elections suggests that the left may need a variegated strategy that addresses participation or non-participation at state and local levels as well as at the national level; that works for and against key critical candidates; that campaigns around issues relevant to class, race, and gender; and that uses the electoral arena to politicize and mobilize the vast majority. Of course, in certain political and geographic spaces, organizing third parties might serve many of these purposes.

The final issue that activists struggle over has to do with who they are. It is often the case that activists have developed an intellectual pedigree. They have read theory and history, and many come out of movements that provide important experiences.

At the same time, there are much larger numbers of workers and others who share the basic values of the most active and who have an experiential pedigree. For a variety of reasons, large numbers of politically alert and conscious workers have not engaged in political struggles on a regular basis. But many of these workers are members of organizations that in the main have articulated progressive agendas: from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, to the National Organization of Women, to the Sierra Club.

In the end activists, who are the most committed in the sense of time and resources, should be sympathetic to the existing mass organizations. In other words, activists need to work with their brothers and sisters in a whole array of organizational contexts to build networks and break down barriers between different political voices. Activists need to shed their own sense of superiority while they work with non-movement activists to reduce broad stereotypes and forms of suspiciousness among those in the popular organizations.

So this wonderful encounter in West Lafayette, Indiana brought together activists from around the state; people of different ages and backgrounds; reflected class, race and gender; and raised directly and by inattention issues critical to building a progressive future. It was clear from the dialogue that narratives, elections, and political identities, in one way or another, constitute continuing hurdles which may be difficult to resolve but should be critically examined.

ON PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

2012-02-11T15:59:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

I teach about United States foreign policy from the 1940s until the Obama Administration. I do briefly discuss the emergence of the United States as a world power in the 1890s, the so-called Spanish American War and the crushing of liberation forces in both Cuba and the Philippines, and date the onset of the Cold War with the Russian Revolution and Western intervention of military forces to overthrow the new Bolshevik regime in 1917. But my narrative is largely about the period of the Cold War and its implications for United States foreign policy since 1991.

This week I just began to discuss the foreign policy of the Eisenhower Administration. I tell the students that the trajectory of United States policy throughout much of its history is imperial but that within that general characterization different administrations have varied in their approach to the world.

What is interesting about the Eisenhower era is that the president projected competing images of imperial America. He did say upon assuming office that “every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies…a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” This speech made in the spring of 1953, included a plea for East-West dialogue and a diminution of the escalating tensions between the two powers, the Soviet Union and the United States. Of course, many of us remember with fondness Eisenhower’s “farewell address” warning of the encroachment of a “military-industrial complex” on American life.

But as historian Blanche Wiesen Cook pointed out in her important book, The Declassified Eisenhower, 1984, the president, while passionate about avoiding a third world war, articulated and authorized very contradictory policies. Wiesen Cook reports on a document, National Security Council Document 5412, that led to policies the president adopted (they were foreshadowed by the interventionism and covert operations launched by the Truman administration in the late 1940s). The language of NSC 5412 is as contemporary as today’s news.

NSC 5412 recommended that the Eisenhower Administration continue its “overt” diplomacy, including calls for peace with the former Soviet Union. In addition, however, diplomacy should be supplemented, it suggested, by “covert operations.” Central Intelligence Agency activities should be authorized to “create and exploit troublesome problems for International Communism.” Activities should be approved to further induce suspicion and conflict between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, exacerbate tensions inside Eastern Europe, and impair the image of the Soviet Union and “International Communism” every place in the world, including inside non-Communist nations where left political movements may hold some legitimacy.

In short every effort should be made to “develop underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations and ensure availability of those forces in the event of war.” Specifically NSC 5412 asserted such operations should include “…propaganda, political action; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition; escape and evasion and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states or groups including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, support of indigenous and anti-Communist elements ….and deception plans and operations.” (Wiesen Cook, 183).

As I was lecturing on this material, I was most taken by the recommendation that U.S. covert operations should be carried out in such a way that “U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident and if uncovered the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.”

At the time that NSC 5412 was still secret, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles was proclaiming a policy of “liberation” which promised to “rollback” Communist regimes we abhorred. In addition, he made it clear that we might use “massive retaliation,” or nuclear weapons, to defend against the scourge of “International Communism.”

The rest of my course will describe United States policies in Iran, Guatemala, Hungary, and Cuba in the 1950s; the continuation of militarism on the Korean Peninsula, the escalating war in Vietnam, and U.S. policies toward Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Chile. When we get to the 1980s and beyond materials will be presented about Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, and in our own day ongoing support for repression of the Palestinian people, a NATO war on Libya, and claims about Iran producing nuclear weapons. Attention will be given to the U.S. global presence reflected in 700 bases in 38 countries supplemented by private contract armies everywhere and a military budget that is half that of the world.

In a recent example of media complicity with government distortion, Howard Kurtz, a television pundit who moderates a show critiquing the media, reported that a West Coast radio station played a narrative by a man claiming to have been a soldier in Iraq who killed numerous innocent civilians. The soldier’s background was checked with the Pentagon. The Army declared it had no record that a person with the soldier’s name had been in Iraq. For Kurtz, the case was closed. If the Pentagon declares it has no record of the soldier in question, the media report of atrocities committed by the soldier must have been false.

So I have to conclude from my own lectures that the historical record of United States foreign policy is defended by repeated lies; for example about who we were protecting in Korea and if two U.S. vessels in Vietnamese waters were attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats. In addition, the foreign policy establishment, both government and media, claimed that Juan Bosch and Salvador Allende were agents of International Communism, that Palestinians had no claim to the land from which they were ejected, and anti-government rebels in Afghanistan were freedom fighters. Both government spokespersons and the media communicated uncritically the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. To assist misrepresentations organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy proclaim that they in fact represent the interests of the people in countries in which they covertly operate.

Therefore, ever since the onset of the Cold War, as NSC 5412 codified in 1954, United States foreign policy decision-makers authorized covert operations, which if uncovered would allow them to “plausibly disclaim any responsibility.” The Kurtz example suggests that the media will
readily collaborate with such government misrepresentations.

Documents such as NSC 5412, the historical record of United States foreign policy, and news information about it, leaves little reason to believe what the American people are told by their government about its role in the world.

THE SUPER BOWL OF ANTI-WORKER LEGISLATION

2012-01-29T14:58:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

“The heart of the Super Bowl action will be in downtown Indianapolis at the three-block interactive fan environment known as Super Bowl Village. AFC and NFC fans, families, visitors and locals alike can enjoy this ultimate, free fan zone that spans from Bankers Life Fieldhouse all the way to the NFL Experience at the Indiana Convention Center via the newly redesigned Georgia Street.

In addition to endless entertainment, interactive games, Tailgate Town, live concerts on two different stages, bars and other attractions, fans can also fly over Super Bowl Village with four zip lines that traverse Capitol Avenue.” (from http://visitindy.com)

One hundred passionate activists from labor and occupy groups around the state of Indiana assembled at the State House on Saturday, January 28 to continue opposition to the pending “Right-To-Work for Less” bill which appears to be close to final endorsement by the legislature and Governor Mitch Daniels.

Ironically, Alcoa Corporation just announced the expansion of plant facilities in Lafayette, Indiana prior to the passage of the odious anti-worker bill that Governor Daniels has claimed will bring more jobs to Indiana. A plant in Iowa, a Right to Work State, lost its bid for the Alcoa plant expansion to Indiana, not yet such a state. Workers in the Lafayette plant are represented by United Steel Workers of America Local 115.

The Indiana House of Representatives last week voted 54-44 to endorse a Right-To-Work bill (several Republicans voted “no” with their Democratic colleagues). Now the bill returns to the Indiana Senate for discussion of amendments to the bill and final passage before it goes to the desk of the Governor for his signature. Despite the fact that he had promised labor in the past that he would not support such a bill, the Governor made it his top priority item in the 2012 legislative session.

The intense political battle over RTW has occurred in the context of enormous celebration of the impending arrival of 150,000 NFL fans to the Super Bowl which will be played in Indianapolis on Sunday February 5. Indianapolis big money interests have been lobbying for this event for years, hoping to put the city on the map for hosting huge money-making events such as the football classic.

Two buses of RTW protesters traveled from Lafayette, Indiana and Purdue University, 65 miles away, to the rally. After spirited speeches, including remarks from three state legislators, representatives from building trades unions, students, and professors, rally organizers led a march through the Super Bowl village in downtown Indianapolis. Marchers were seen by thousands of Super Bowl celebrants who were roaming around the village spending money in dozens of food and entertainment venues.

Demonstrators encountered some hostile reactions, including physical jostling, but also numerous thumbs up and clenched fists in support of protestors carrying placards demanding “Kill the Bill,” “Workers United Will Prevail” and “Occupy Purdue.”

Opposition to Right-To-Work has a decade-long history around the state since the governorship and the Indiana House of Representatives has shifted from Republican to Democrat and then Republican control. The Republicans, for their part, are committed to destroying the labor movement not only to reduce labor costs but also to end political opposition to their domination of state government.

Among the responses has been The Indiana Coalition for Worker Rights initiated by the Northwest Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO in 2006 “to educate and mobilize workers to demand and defend worker rights.” It pledged itself to;

1)educate union members and the public about the negative consequences of “Right to Work (for Less)” legislation;

2)challenge the general shift toward privatization of public institutions such as schools, libraries, and health care delivery systems;

3) mobilize citizens to support a living wage for all workers, affordable health care and education, and greater worker rights to participate in the workplace and the political system;

4)and work with others to create a coalition of informed citizens “who believe that the protection of workers’ rights is the bedrock of our democratic society.”

In the summer of 2011, a coalition representing various progressive groups in the Greater Lafayette community formed to work on reproductive health care, civil liberties, peace, and labor rights. The new organization, the Indiana Rebuild the American Dream Coalition, held jobs and justice rallies in downtown Lafayette in November.

Parallel to these developments the Tippecanoe Building and Construction Trades AFL-CIO and Occupy Purdue and Occupy Lafayette have mobilized around Right-To-Work and a whole range of issues that concern the 99 per cent.

It is clear from the experiences of small communities such as those in Tippecanoe County (Lafayette and West Lafayette are the population centers) and various other communities all across Indiana that so-called “outside” and “inside” strategies are needed to fight back against the draconian efforts to destroy worker rights, to promote acceptable living conditions for all, and to begin to create a better world.

Outside strategies include mass mobilizations, protests, educational forums, and dramatic public displays of peoples’ views in venues such as the Super Bowl celebrations.

Jim Ogden, Lafayette, union electrician from IBEW Local 668 articulated a strategy of how best to connect the mass mobilizations to electoral work, a so-called ‘inside strategy:’

“We realize that at this point where it’s at in the legislation. We probably will not stop this.

“At this point, I think we’re looking at this as a kickoff for the elections in November. And trying to do whatever we can to get the Republicans that had voted for this, to get them out of office.” (Journal and Courier, January 29, 2012, B3)

It is clear that the electoral process cannot alone defend workers rights. However, in the context of the immediate needs of the 99 percent, elections, in conjunction with massive public expressions of protest, must constitute a critical component of the work of progressives in the months ahead.

NOTES ON "RIGHT TO WORK FOR LESS" IN INDIANA:THE HISTORIC BATTLE AGAINST WORKERS CONTINUES

2012-01-15T13:46:00.003-05:00

Harry Targ

Fifty working people assembled at a town hall meeting in West Lafayette, Indiana on Saturday, January 14 to share information about the latest phase of Indiana’s battle over a new “Right-To-Work for Less” bill. The bill will be voted upon some time in the coming week.

One of the minority Democrats in the State House, Sheila Klinker, described the Republicans fast-track effort to get its Right-To-Work bill through the legislature and signed by Governor Mitch Daniels well before the National Football League Super Bowl game on February 5. The NFL players union has strongly condemned the bill.

Labor activists had attended the Governor’s State-of-the-State address three days earlier and booed him loudly as he made claims about how Right-To-Work would bring jobs to Indiana (even though he has already praised himself for alleged increases in new investors and jobs in the state during the first seven years of his reign without being a Right-To-Work state).

The Klinker update included reference to the upcoming meeting of the Indiana House of Representatives at which time that body will vote for and probably endorse the bill. Republicans have a 60 to 40 vote majority in that body (and an even bigger majority in the State Senate). Despite the odds, she and her Democratic colleagues support an amendment to the bill which would bring the issue to voters next fall in a referendum.

Although chances of blocking the national reactionary big money juggernaut and the state Chamber of Commerce from getting their way are slim, those for the referendum argue that, because the issue is not well-understood, many Hoosiers remain undecided about it. Since the bill would have such great consequences for workers, union and non-union alike, time to get educated and discuss it are desirable. Also from the standpoint of most Democrats a referendum would defuse the escalating political conflict around the state.

Most Indiana Republicans and the big money outside interests represented by such groups as the National Right to Work Committee and the America Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), want to move as quickly as possible. For them Indiana is a bellwether state in the former industrial heartland where unions have been historically strong, wages and benefits were good, and workers had a greater voice in the work place and the voting booth.

Generally, worker rights of all kinds have been superior in the Midwest compared with the 22 states of the South and Southwest where Right-To-Work is the law. After the 2010 election these national organizations increased efforts to apply their own “domino theory” to destroy worker rights. With the victories of reactionary candidates in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana reestablishing Right-To-Work in one state would lead, like a series of falling dominoes, to victories in the rest (They have already suffered setbacks in this plan in Wisconsin and Ohio). Indiana, the most conservative of these would be the best place to start. Reestablish Right-To-Work in Indiana (for a short time in the 60s, Indiana was a RTW state), and the other states would follow.

The Klinker update was followed by two impressive presentations by Tippecanoe County Building and Construction Trade Council President Eric Clawson and Treasurer James Ogden. Clawson gave an impassioned description of what unions meant to all workers. With both heart and intellect he made it clear that the quality of life and work would be made immeasurably worse if union rights were weakened by the Right-To-Work bill.

Ogden referred to numerous studies as he meticulously challenged each claim made by the bill’s supporters. These studies, often based on comparative data between the 22 Right-To-Work states and the rest, have overwhelmingly shown that the 22 have had less job creation, lower wages, worsened health and safety standards, and lowered public school graduation rates. Even though factors other than Right-To-Work status are also causally connected to these negative worker outcomes, Ogden and Clawson made it clear that the basic standard of living of most workers is hurt by any weakening of the right of workers to form and participate in unions.

It is important to understand that the struggle today in Indiana is part of a 250 year struggle waged off and on between capital and labor in the United States. From the formation of craft unions during the 1780s to the battle for the eight-hour day in the 1880s, to the use of police power, public and private, to destroy railroad and steel workers unions in the 1890s, to the massive general strikes, sit-ins, and other occupy movements of the 1930s, to the PATCO and Pittston strikes of the 1980s, workers have sought to defend their rights and their very survival. Capitalists have set out to make labor cheaper, more pliable, and vulnerable to shifts in profit-making from investments in factories to stocks, bonds and derivatives.

This latest phase of the struggle has its roots in the passage of the National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act in 1935. This Act, based on efforts by Congress and President Roosevelt to mollify workers, who were striking all over the country, established the machinery for workers to form unions and procedures for collective bargaining.

From the time of the Unemployment Councils in big cities in 1931, to general strikes in 1934, to factory sit-ins, to the establishment of 40 unions of industrial workers, four million workers strong, in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1936, labor became a force to be reckoned with in national politics.

The peak of labor strength was reflected in the 1946 strike wave, the largest in U.S. labor history. Four million workers walked off the job in electronics, steel, auto, meat packing, mining, and the railroads. Workers wanted wartime caps on wages lifted, continuation of wartime price controls, greater union recognition at the workplace, health and pension systems, and the creation of a political system in which the political power of labor would be as strong as capital.

However, in the 1946 elections, Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress. A first order of business (much as in the 2012 Indiana legislature) was to destroy the power of organized labor. They passed the odious Taft-Hartley Act which was designed to defend the rights of capital in opposition to the National Labor Relations Act which was seen as special interest labor legislation.

Taft-Hartley banned the closed shop, wildcat strikes, strikes in solidarity with other workers, secondary boycotts and picketing, and gave the federal government the right to order striking workers to abandon strikes and return to work for 80 days. The act also established rules regarding reporting of finances and constricted the rights of unions to support political campaigns.

Taft-Hartley also required union leaders to sign affidavits proclaiming that they were not members of the Communist Party. Refusal to sign such statements could allow workers to challenge the authority of their unions to continue to represent them. Anti-Communist unions, it was hoped, would replace unions in which leaders failed to sign the affidavits. Since labor radicals played an instrumental role in organizing the CIO, Taft-Hartley saw undercutting labor militancy as central to winning the battle for capital against labor in post-war America.

To further limit the power of unions to represent the interests of all workers, Taft Hartley included Section 14b. This section allowed states to establish so-called Right-To-Work provisions. These provisions would allow workers to not join the unions that existed in their work sites. Unions were required to represent all workers in unionized work places, even those workers who refused to join their union. This meant that workers might take a “free ride” by getting important services, including negotiation of contracts and defense in grievances against bosses, without paying for them. The long-term impact, it was hoped, was to reduce the size and resources of organized labor.

In 1947, when Taft-Hartley was passed, powerful economic actors such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and huge auto, electronics, and meat packing corporations wanted to achieve several inter-connected goals.

They wanted to destroy the power of organized labor which had grown from the streets and the workplaces to the Democratic Party.

They wanted to launch an anti-Communist crusade to convince a skeptical American public that the United States needed to launch a Cold War against the Soviet Union, and alleged “communist” surrogates at home.

And, Southern politicians, particularly, wanted to defeat “Operation Dixie,” a CIO campaign to organize integrated trade unions in the South.

And, for sure, these economic interests wanted to disabuse American workers, unionized or not, of the idea that they had the right to participate in the political process equal to the wealthy and powerful.

So listening to Hoosier union brothers and sisters speak out now at rallies, before television cameras, at town hall meetings and in their communities and family gatherings, one feels pride and inspiration from the campaign to defeat Right-To-Work in Indiana.

And any kind of historical reflection has to lead to the conclusion that today’s struggle is part of the same struggles that go back years and years. These struggles, dare to say, are class struggles. But now-a-days the occupy movement has made it clear that this historic battle is one between the 99 percent, for all its variation and the one percent. “Right-To-Work for Less” may pass in Indiana in 2012, but with odds like 99 percent versus one percent, it is clear which side will achieve lasting victory in the years ahead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITxJVjFkNV4&feature=youtube_gdata_player

BRUTE FACTS AND POLITICAL CHOICES: THINKING ABOUT 2012

2012-01-06T16:44:00.003-05:00

Harry Targ

The year 2011 has truly been an exciting year for progressives. Arab spring sent shock waves across the Middle East, launching a campaign for democratization that will ultimately impact every regime in the region. Also Arab spring showed the rest of the world, and particularly the young, that mass mobilization, challenging economic control and military might with people power, can affect history.

The spirit of grassroots anger, activism, a growing sense of solidarity across races, gender, class, and national boundaries planted the seeds for the rise of a new age out of the old. As the young people in Tahrir Square knew from the beginning of their protest, the struggle will be long, sometimes bloody, but the 99 per cent, in the end, will win.

But 2011 also showed the world that politics can be ruthless. Masses of people died in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan and in various locations in Africa, Europe, and North America. The United States shifted priorities from sending the military everywhere to supporting private armies and high tech drone warfare. Secret intelligence agencies now define the threats to the United States who are targeted for assassination. Meanwhile the mass media has celebrated executions abroad and at home and the deaths of ostracized leaders. In many ways 21st century global culture, has become a “death culture,” in its entertainment as well as its politics. Killing has become fun.

Within the United States, political forces have been unleashed that are trying to return politics to the Dark Ages:

-escalating the shift in wealth and power from the many to the few
-destroying the historic right of workers to organize to better articulate their interests
-privatizing education, health care, and basic concern for the environment
-transferring control of women’s bodies from themselves to various churches and private interest groups
-increasing the power of police to control people’s lives, using pepper spray, SWAT teams, covert operations, and spying to serve the status quo
-eliminating longstanding legal procedures that have given some protection to people, particularly minorities, who have been accused of crimes
-using, abusing, and disposing of immigrant workers.

So at the dawn of the 2012 the world continues its contradictory path. And as the forces of light and darkness contend, progressives once again are confronted with political choices. As the debates escalate, particularly in the electoral arena, some of the summary data I accumulated just after the 2010 election remains relevant:

“From data reported in the media between November 3rd and 10th, 2010 the new United States Senate will be comprised of 51 Democratic Senators and 2 Independents and 47 Republicans. The Republicans experienced their biggest gains in the House of Representatives winning 239 seats to 189 for the Democrats…. The 2011 distribution of the governorships will include at least 29 Republicans and 18 Democrats. In sum, the elections brought Republican control to the House of Representatives and significant shifts in gubernatorial contests which will impact on the redistricting of House of Representative districts for the next decade.

At the state level, Republican candidates won 650 seats in legislative assemblies, taking control of 19 legislative bodies from Democrats. For example, Republicans gained both state houses in Alabama, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. They won an additional house to take control of both houses in Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Through gubernatorial and legislative victories at the state level Republicans will control the designation of 170 congressional districts while Democrats will control 70. The rest, about 200, will be determined by bipartisan bodies.

Republicans won three state legislatures in the Northeast, eight in the South, nine in the Midwest, and five in the West. Looking at a USA map of red and blue states, 27 states will be red in the next period.”

As I write, Indiana workers are marching inside and outside the state capital protesting the backroom passage of a new Right-to-Work law. Indiana has not been a right to work state since the 1960s. In 2008, the Indiana House of Representatives consisted of 52 Democrats and 47 Republicans. Today the House has 60 Republicans and 40 Democrats.

And as a result of the 2010 election, not only is it likely that Right-to-Work legislation will become a reality in Indiana but education and resources for women’s reproductive health will be even more vulnerable.

There are similar stories to be told in each and every state, as well as in the national political arena. And, at the same time, there are differences in politics and history in each state and locale. And make note: none of this has much to do with the selection of nominees for president of the United States. That story is the circus, the Super Bowl--Romney or Santorum, the “moderate” Republican or the “social conservative.”

So progressives have a lot to think about in 2012: how to protect the people, the 99 percent, from all the hurt that they increasingly will experience in the short-run while at the same time moving “inch by inch, row by row” to the vision that animated Arab Spring, Ohio, and Madison, Wisconsin.

"I SUPPOSE THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO"

2011-12-30T18:17:00.001-05:00

Harry Targ

While I sleep through some of the news shows hosted by Ed Shultz, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC every night I am conscious of at least part of each. In addition, I watch an hour’s worth of whoever is hosting the daytime news program on this “liberal” channel as I limp along on the treadmill at the gymnasium.

The framing and information about the world provided by MSNBC is often useful. Some stories I would not have access to any other way, such as the growing Michigan program to replace local officials with state-appointed financial officers who will have authority to supersede decisions of those elected. Sometimes hosts present materials on grassroots struggles that more “mainstream” media would not dare cover. We who engage in such grassroots politics know that the world is changing. But most of the media have ignored uprisings, until the Occupy Movement temporarily made such inattention impossible.

Contrary to providing useful information, the cable liberals of MSNBC have done a disastrous job on other stories. They ridicule U.S. defined enemy leaders without providing any context for their disdain. This is the case for Kim Jong Il, Muammar Gaddafi, the leadership of Iran, and others from the Global South. More damaging still, the liberal cable stations provide little coverage of world affairs aside from an occasional report from Afghanistan or an anti-drone story, which is good.

Even more negative, in my view, are the hours upon hours of coverage of the Republican presidential nominating process. We have heard more about the daily ups and downs in the fortunes of the various Republican candidates for president in Iowa than any combination of stories on jobs, the environment, or the European debt crisis.

Since I occasionally doze off, I may have missed coverage of the Durban conference on the environment, the recent formation of a bloc of Latin American and Caribbean countries, the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) to assert regional self-determination, the post-war Libyan political situation, or the decision by the Obama administration to send U.S. marines to protect Australia from Chinese aggression.

Therefore, MSNBC communicates some good information, exaggerates the importance of certain stories, and ignores material that represents the bulk of the experiences of humankind. This may be OK. We have the internet, left blogs, list-serves, and web pages (which raise different issues of Left censorship) to supplement our knowledge about the world.

Political junkies, particularly activists, find ways to build cognitive data banks and analytical abilities. Good alternative radio, television, and internet outlets exist. Amy Goodman’s qualitatively different news program, “Democracy Now,” can be seen and heard on radio and television stations and online around the country. Even though it has its own agenda (don’t we all) the English language Aljazeera, which is available mostly on the internet, at least portrays a world that does not begin and end with the United States and Western Europe.

So while liberal media inform consumers, it also distorts or ignores news. Watching MSNBC on the treadmill yesterday raised to my awareness a level of media malevolence I had not thought about before. A glib panel of inside the beltway commentators provided useful information about the disparity of wealth and income between our political leaders, such as Congresspersons, and average Americans. They portrayed, with some data, a political system that was at best an aristocracy and at worst a system driven by an economic ruling class that has bought and paid for political elites who serve its interests. One can only recall Marx’s profound assertion that the state represents the “executive committee of the ruling class.”

These five pundits skillfully presented the data, albeit with a posture suggesting that the data was humorous. After discussing whether all people who are part of the one-percent lack empathy for the poor (after all FDR and JFK were concerned about the poor), one of the professional hacks concluded by saying that he supposed that “there is nothing we can do.” Alas, inequality, poverty, powerlessness, and the multitude of problems humankind faces will always be with us.

Many thoughts raced through my mind (I almost fell off the treadmill). This conversation did not include any reference to the Occupy Movement. No mention was made of the recent Supreme Court decision that legitimized massive private spending in elections. It failed to include a discussion of campaign finance reform. And it ignored the fleeting possibility of grassroots activists such as the Progressive Democrats of America, the Green Party, the Peace and Freedom Party in California, the recall movement in Wisconsin, the successful campaign to overcome anti-worker laws in Ohio and on and on.

Of course, not all of these or many other campaigns can fully and/or successfully address the problem. But there are millions of people in the United States and around the world who are giving their time, resources and sometimes their lives to change rule by the few.

And finally, such discussions willfully ignore the proposition that the economic and political systems that dominate our lives are the problem. At least some would say that these systems must be overturned and new institutions created. And, if history is any guide, such things have happened before.

But where would these pompous, overpaid, and under-worked journalists be if the society did change? They in fact have a stake in promoting the message that nothing can be done.

This speaks, then, to an alternative media, education, and role for intellectuals, which can present information about the world and realistically analyze the programs and possibilities for action that work on behalf of the interests of the many, not the few.

LET'S BE FRANK: THE UNITED STATES HAS BEEN IN PERPETUAL WAR

2011-12-24T15:56:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

Liberal cable commentators have been waxing eloquent about the withdrawal of the United States military from Iraq while ridiculing and scorning the recently deceased dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Il. They fail to see the historic connections between the onset of war along the Korean peninsula in 1950 and the Iraq war of our own day. If pundits reflected on the causes of the Korean War and the consequences following it they might see the culpability of the United States in launching a sixty year war system that has cost the lives of millions of people all across the Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and Latin American landscape.

To use the language of our own day, we need to “Occupy Our Minds,” or “Occupy Our History.” We need to understand where the North Korea of Kim Jong Il came from and why the United States created a dictator in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and then destroyed him, his country, and hundreds of thousands of his people. This revisiting of the American past is painful but necessary.

Consider the Korean peninsula. It was a colony of expansionist Japan from the dawn of the twentieth century until the end of World War II. After that war, Korea was “temporarily” split at the 38th parallel by the United States and the former Soviet Union for “administrative purposes.” As the war ended, the Korean people fully expected to create their own independent state. “People’s Assemblies” were held throughout the peninsula to serve this purpose.

In the South, under U.S. control the assemblies were ignored. Over the next five years, using the new United Nations as the stamp of legitimacy the United States created an unpopular regime in the South led by Syngman Rhee. Rhee, tied to western anti-communist interests and domestic wealth very much like Chiang Kai Shek in China and later Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, established a brutal dictatorship. The Soviets, in the north, established a Communist regime led by Kim Il Sung.

In 1950 powerful foreign policy interests promoted a global U.S. foreign policy that would benefit from war. General Douglas McArthur, overseer of post-war Japan, John Foster Dulles, anti-communist foreign policy spokesperson of the Republican Party and Rhee, on the verge of losing his power in South Korea, met in Tokyo in May. Conversation ensued that likely included making war on North Korea.

Back in Washington, Dean Acheson, Secretary of State, and his key aide, Paul Nitze, were lobbying for a new bold military policy, proclaimed in the secret National Security Document 68. It called for military spending to be the number one priority of each American administration. The reason, the document claimed, was the world-wide threat to civilization represented by international communism. George Kennan’s “containment” policy, beefing up U.S. and allied forces to protect against any aggressive attack from a prospective enemy, was not enough. By 1954, the document predicted, the former Soviet Union would be as powerful as the United States.

As Acheson himself admitted in his memoirs, he felt the need to exaggerate the threat to United States security to gain support for a more global US foreign policy. In other words, support for empire required lying to the American people. In the Korean case, an artificial division of the Korean peninsula, contestation between competing political forces, and a North Korean military attack on the South was reframed as a worldwide war on freedom and democracy. The Korean War institutionalized the big lie.

Then the Truman Administration, the Defense Department, big corporations, the major media, and many religious institutions launched a campaign of fear based on a fantasy of a dangerous communist subversion. Who could question a dramatic military response to a nation under siege. With the onset of the Korean War, the politics of fear converged with the politics of empire. In sum, the United States redefined a civil war between Koreans, north and south of the 38th parallel, into a struggle between the “free world” and “international communism.”

The Korean War led to the deaths of four million Koreans and 54,000 U.S. soldiers. Between 1950 and 1995, the United States continued to develop the largest military force in the world, with hundreds of bases in thirty or more countries, dozens of covert military operations, and support for countless dictators in countries of the Global South. In wars in which the United States had a role during these 45 years, some 10 million people died, most of them civilians.

Fifty-three years after the onset of the Korean War, the United States launched a war on Iraq based on lies. The American people were told of the dangers the Iraqi regime posed for United States security. The threat was no longer communism but terrorists. And Saddam Hussein was framed as a supporter of terrorism against the West who possessed weapons of mass destruction. These were lies based on significant historical distortions of the politics of the region. The details were different but the arguments for war on North Korea and the war on Iraq were both based on lies. The same case can be made for most U.S. interventions and wars from Korea to Iraq.

The policies of fear, empire, and military operations continued in the 21st century. The war in Afghanistan, begun in 2001, still goes on. We now celebrate the ostensible end of the Iraq war after nine years. About ten thousand U.S. soldiers and probably a million Afghan and Iraqi people have died in these two wars. Economists predict that the Iraq war alone will have cost the U.S. government 3 trillion dollars by 2030, a total similar to U.S. military expenditures between 1945 and 1990.

So when pundits ridicule the dictatorship in North Korea and make grandiose statements about the millions imprisoned, killed, or starved, no mention is made about why the Korean War was launched, whose interests it served on the United States side, and how U.S. aggressiveness was used by North Korean political elites to justify dictatorship there. And, the failures of the North Korean economy are presented as solely the result of their socialist economy, not the 60 year war and economic embargo on that country perpetrated by the world’s most powerful country.

Ironically, while media pundits condemn poor North Korea for constructing deliverable nuclear weapons, they fail to point out that countries defined as enemies of the United States, such as Iraq and Libya, were subject to U.S. military attack because they did not have such weapons to deter military assault.

The death of the current dictator of North Korea and the end of U.S. military operations in Iraq should encourage a frank and serious discussion about the United States foreign policy of perpetual war that has been a central feature of the U.S. role in the world since Korea. As masses of Americans mobilize in parks, reoccupy foreclosed homes, and in other ways petition government to change its ways, elimination of the system of constantly preparing for and engaging in war must be included in demands for change.

THE STATE OF INDIANA ABOUT TO VIOLATE THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

2011-12-10T10:04:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

The massive atrocities of World War II led nations to commit themselves permanently to the protection of basic rights for all human beings. Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the wartime President, Franklin Roosevelt, worked diligently with leaders from around the world to develop a document, to articulate a set of principles, which would bind humankind to never carry out acts of mass murder again. In addition, the document also committed nations to work to end most forms of pain and suffering.

Over 60 years ago, on December 10, 1948, delegates from the United Nations General Assembly signed the document which they called “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” It consisted of a preamble proclaiming that all signatories recognize "the inherent dignity" and "equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family" as the "foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world." The preamble declared the commitment of the signatories to the creation of a world “…in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want…”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights consisted of thirty articles, with varying degrees of elaboration. The first 21 articles refer primarily to civil and political rights. They prohibit discrimination, persecution for the holding of various political beliefs, slavery, torture, and arbitrary arrest and detention. Persons have the right to speak their mind, travel, reside anywhere, a fair trial if charged with crimes, own property, form a family, and in the main to hold the rights of citizenship including universal and equal suffrage in his or her country.

The remaining 9 articles address what may be called social and economic rights. These include rights to basic social security in accordance with the resources of the state in which the persons reside; rights to adequate leisure and holidays with pay; an adequate standard of living so that individuals and families have sufficient food, clothing, shelter, and medical care; and education, free at least at the primary levels. In addition, these nine articles guarantee a vibrant cultural life in the community, the right to enjoy and participate in the arts, and to benefit from scientific achievements.

While each article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides a rich and vivid portrait of what must be achieved for all humankind, no article speaks to our time more than Article 23. It is one of the longer articles, identifying four basic principles:

*Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

*Everyone, without discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

*Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself (or herself) and his (her) family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary by other means of social protection.

*Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his (her) interests.

Using the language of our day, the principles embedded in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights constitute a bedrock vision inspiring the global 99 percent to rise up against their exploiters from Cairo to Madison, to Wall Street, to cities and towns all over the world. The global political economy is broken. The dominant mode of production, capitalism, increasingly cannot provide work, fair remuneration, rights of workers to speak their mind and organize their own associations, and the provision of a comfortable way of life all because the value of what they produce is expropriated by the top 1 percent of global society.

While each locale experiences this dilemma in its own way, the Republican controlled legislative and executive branch of state government in Indiana is poised to pass legislation reestablishing itself as a so-called Right-To-Work State. The RTW laws which can be found in over twenty states allow workers to gain the benefits of union representation on the shop floor without joining unions or paying for union services which are provided to all workers. The basic goal of RTW laws is to bankrupt the labor movement. The end result, as data suggests in every state, is to reduce rights, benefits, and working conditions for all workers. The National Right to Work Committee, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and other rightwing groups funded and organized by the 1 percent, want to eliminate hard-fought worker rights which will reduce the costs of labor, wages, working conditions, and the standard of living of all workers, unionized or not.

Data about the world and data about the United States make it clear that there has been a thirty year trajectory in the direction opposite to the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Global inequality is growing. The rights and abilities of workers to form unions are shrinking. Standards of living of most of humankind are declining. The ability of most workers everywhere to acquire secure jobs is declining. Globally there has been a quantum shift from agricultural, manufacturing, and service employment to the informal sector, oftentimes “street hustling.”

Not only is this condition being put in place in the state of Indiana but well-financed organizations such as ALEC foresee victory in Indiana setting off a “domino effect;” Indiana, then Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and Wisconsin. To paraphrase a late nineteenth century geo-politician; “he who controls the heartland then can control the rimland.”

And in the end, anti-worker politics in the United States, like anti-worker politics virtually everywhere around the globe, violates the fundamental principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially its precious Article 23. The workers’ agenda is fundamentally the human rights agenda.

VETERANS UNPLUGGED: A HOOSIER ANTI-WAR ACTIVIST CONNECTS RETURNING VETERANS TO THE 99%

2011-12-01T16:27:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

“I grew up in Chicago and Northwest Indiana. Working-class family, father was a Union Ironworker…mother was a stay at home Mom.” Vince Emanuele joined the Marines after graduating from high school. “I came out of boot camp a hard chargin’ Devil Dog.” He served in the Marines from 2003 until 2005 stationed in California, Kuwait, and Iraq. His eight month deployment in Iraq involved him in street patrols, looking for snipers and land mines “…along with shooting at innocent civilians, destroying their property and beating up prisoners….”

While in Iraq the fascination with war that he had acquired as a kid playing video games dissipated. His father sent him reading material--Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Hunter Thompson, the Nation--and he and friends began to reflect on what they were doing in Iraq. He came to the view that the war was “illegal, immoral, unjustified, and unneeded.” He was not spreading “democracy” or “peace” and the U.S. war effort was not winning the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people.

After returning to the U.S., Emanuele joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, has been organizing vets in Indiana and Illinois, created a weekly radio show called “Veterans Unplugged” which is available on-line, and has become a prominent activist for social, economic, and political justice in the heartland of America while finishing an undergraduate political science degree.

Emanuele recently spoke on a panel organized by the Lafayette Area Peace Coalition. He elaborated on the current plight of veterans, particularly veterans who served in the two longest wars in U.S. history, Afghanistan and Iraq. While acknowledging that the current military force has chosen to enlist in regular army or reserve units, the 21st century enticement to serve is really an “economic draft.” With declining incomes, wages, job opportunities, and rising educational costs, more and more men and women, he said, have seen military service as the only escape from lives of economic marginalization.

He spoke of the culture of militarization to which every new recruit was exposed: a process of dehumanization; the spread of racism, particularly targeting stereotypes of Muslims; sexism; and homophobia. In reality the military experience of young people, Emanuele said, involves placing raw, uneducated, teenagers in a war zone, with weapons and a license to kill. The victims of the actions of these raw recruits, schooled in video games and super-patriotism, were the millions of Iraqi and Afghan citizens who most fervently wanted the young foreigners off their land.

Emanuele presented some figures on the impacts of military service on returning veterans. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2010 there were 20.2 million men and 1.8 million women who had served in the military). In 2011, Emanuele reported;

-Rates of unemployment of returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq are higher than in the non-veteran population, both men and women

-African-American vets experience double the unemployment rate of white vets

-80,000 returning veterans are currently homeless (56 % of homeless vets are African American or Latinos)

-20% to 50% of 21st century returning veterans suffer some form of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (an estimated 350,000 to 1 million vets)

-1,000 returning vets attempt suicide each month

Emanuele, connected the plight of returning veterans to the military/industrial/complex and imperial wars. As a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, he highlighted the long tradition of soldiers resisting participation in unjust wars. He referred to patterns of resistance to war running throughout U.S. history:

-In 1781 the Pennsylvania militia mutinied against war profiteers and for food

-Between the 1870s and the 1890s, National Guard soldiers often refused to fire on striking workers
-In 1919 unknown numbers of U.S. soldiers refused orders to go fight against the Bolsheviks who had come to power in Russia

-Thousands of World War I veterans, known as the Bonus Army, assembled in Washington D.C. in 1932 to demand back pay due them from their active duty experience.

--From 1964-75 a massive GI anti-Vietnam war resistance movement emerged with over 300 GI anti-war newspapers produced, 10 % of all Vietnam era soldiers going AWOL or deserting, and a broad array of other forms of anti-war resistance, and opposition to military recruiting.

Emanuele stressed the commonality of experience and vision that is shared by most veterans with the Occupy Movement. He suggested that peace and justice activists must understand that returning veterans are a vital part of the 99% movement committed to radically restructure American society. He argued that the 99%, including vets, must see the vital connections between the global capitalist system, the military/industrial complex and the pain and suffering that have generated war and economic insecurity in the twenty-first century.

Emanuele ended his talk with reference to the frank admission of General Smedley Butler who oversaw the effort to crush the army of Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua in the early 1930s. Butler admitted that he, as a Marine General, had served as an instrumentality of Wall Street, putting down popular rebellions in the service of profit.

To learn more about Vince Emanuele and his weekly radio show check out http://www.veteransunplugged.com/

To learn more about Iraq Veterans Against the War see http://ivaw.org/

See my blog at http://www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com/

I

VISITING WITH SYDNEY GLICK: AUTHOR OF "BAGEL CAPITALISM"

2011-11-29T14:32:00.001-05:00

Harry Targ

Back in the late 90s I came upon an essay called “Bagel Capitalism: the Theory of Capitalist Development.” While I revised it for my huge blog audience, the original was written by Sydney Glick, a once well-known Marxist theorist. After developing the original theory of bagel capitalism, Sydney disappeared from public view so when I recently saw him sitting in a booth at Schmutz’s Bar and Grill I was taken aback.

I sat down and almost speechless asked him where he had been for the last several years. He told me that he was so deluged with requests to speak before political groups after the draft of his theoretical work on the transformation of the production, distribution, and consumption of the bagel that he decided to drop out. He said he could no longer take the publicity and he was glad that I drew upon his work so he could withdraw to a life of private contemplation, particularly since it looked like the prospects for building a mass movement-this was the late 1990s-were dim. (I told him that I had published an essay on his ideas about bagel capitalism. The audience for the essay, I reported, swelled to the high two figures. And six of my readers were not relatives).

I asked Sydney what he had been doing all these years and what he was doing now. He reported that his work recently has been stalled by the horrible fire that occurred at Kaufman’s Bagel Bakery and Delicatessen in Skokie, Illinois. According to Kaufman’s website-even a real bagel bakery has to have a website-the bakery would be closed for several weeks until they could renovate it.

So, Glick said, he had been going down to Occupy Chicago from time to time and was following as best he could the Occupy movements elsewhere in the country. Also he said he was working on a new theoretical work that links the crisis of bagel production to the broader global and national economic crises of capitalism. In addition, he had begun to think more seriously about how to build a progressive majority and thinking about ways to plant the seeds for a socialist future.

With much excitement, I asked him if he would be willing to talk to me about these subjects. And, I asked if he would mind if I taped his remarks. He was reluctant because he said he was so bothered by the celebrity status he had garnered when the theory of bagel capitalism was first leaked out that he wanted to avoid that happening again. He did, however, indicate that he was willing to share his ideas with me if I, rather than he, communicated them to the public. Since I knew I could handle all the publicity my blog generated I readily agreed.

So, for starters I asked Glick for his thoughts on the Occupy Movements that seemed to be spreading around the country. His eyes perked up, he began to stammer with delight, and he spoke rapidly in response. Glick said that the spirit of revolt was spreading like wildfire from the Middle East, to the Heartland of America, to Wall Street, to college campuses.

He said the mass protests now were mirroring the massive movements against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization of the 1990s. The global character of these movements seemed to be putting the spirit of the World Social Forum into action.

The metaphor of the one percent versus the 99 percent was catching on and resonated with workers, people of color, women, young and old, indigenous peoples and all different sectors of global society. Glick said it was unclear what will happen next, sort of like in Egypt, but it is exciting to watch, reflect on, and to participate in whatever activities were occurring in various locales.

I asked him what the mainstream media and older leftists had been asking for two months now. What is their plan? What do they want? How can they know when victory has been achieved?

In response, Glick pointed out that the Occupy Movement was a little like an ‘everything’ bagel. “You know the kind of bagel that has some garlic and onion on it, and some poppy and sesame seeds, and a few other spices and seeds that could not be identified. In other words, the movement is made up of an extraordinary array of individuals and groups, each with their own flavor. But, in the end, the movement like the metaphor is a bagel.”

I asked him if the metaphor had any additional meanings. “Sure,” he said. “The bagel, as I wrote a few years ago, is a nutritious food-at least filling. It has a nice taste to it-particularly with onion and chive cream cheese. So you could enjoy consuming it. Social movements can be like that as well.”

Then he added, “Remember I said that during the height of intense class struggles in the 1880s and the 1930s in the United States, and during the Russian Revolution, workers could use day-old bagels as weapons. Czarist forces, cops in the U.S. and others were intimidated by the power of the bagels that were available to be thrown at them. In fact, I would argue-and am developing the thesis in my latest book-that the National Labor Relations Act guaranteeing workers the right to collective bargaining in 1935 would not have been passed without the existence of stockpiles of bagels that the ruling class knew existed.”

Let me get this straight I said. “You are suggesting that like the bagel, the Occupy Movements taste good, provide joy to those who consume them and also could be a weapon in the struggle for progressive social change.”

Glick responded that I had understood the subtlety of his argument. But, he said, he was having a little heartburn, and had to go home to take some of his medicine. I asked him if we could meet again. I wanted to ask him what he thought about President Obama’s foreign policy, such as his sending 2,500 marines to Australia to protect that country from a Chinese invasion.

As he meandered off I heard him say: “Oy. Let’s leave that subject for next time.”

The original essay about Bagel Capitalism can be found on www.ragblog.blogspot.com or www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com

THE PATERNO EFFECT: THINKING ABOUT CAPITALISM, HIGHER EDUCATION, AND MORAL REPUGNANCE

2011-11-17T17:12:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

“And when I think of all the talent and energy which daily go into devising ways and means of making their torment worse, all in the name of efficiency and productivity but really for the greater glory of the great god Capital, my wonder at humanity’s ability to create such a monstrous system is surpassed only by amazement at its willingness to tolerate the continuance of an arrangement so obviously destructive of the well-being and happiness of human beings.” Paul Sweezy in Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital,1974, xii-xiii.

The scurrilous news about Penn State University has led me to reflect upon the context in which higher education, sports, popular culture more broadly, and political, economic and cultural institutions are created, flower and grow, and in Paul Sweezy’s view destroy “the well-being and happiness of human beings.”

Numerous political economists have described capitalism as an economic system that has its roots in global trade, enslavement, and expropriating commodities produced in the “new world” and then processed in Europe into finished goods that were traded on the world stage. Capitalism emerged out of rudimentary trade and production into the most productive, innovative, and technologically creative economic system in the world. The 500 year journey, from an early capitalist stage in which the transport of natural resources and commodities took months or years to a transnational global system that has obliterated differences in space and time, has truly transformed what it means to be human.

The positive features of capitalist development that Paul Sweezy and others recount also are grounded in analyses of the pain and suffering that has been caused by the unbridled pursuit of profit and capital accumulation. The growth, development, transcendence of natural barriers (again ultimately space and time) has come with a price, as millions were enslaved and slaughtered. In addition, capitalism brought wars, starvation, the tearing up of the natural environment and the perpetuation of human misery on a massive scale.

This is a story about the political economy of world history that came to mind while observing the evolving scandal at a major university in November, 2011. The rape and molestation of numerous boys over many years on the campus of Penn State University has been discussed in the context of sociopathic coaches, iconic sports figures, negligent university administrators, bought-off government officials, thoughtless students, and the exigencies of public relations.

Are there connections between the “political economy of world history” and rape on one college campus? I think so. And these connections that have inspired my thinking I am calling “the Paterno effect.”

First, reflections on the capitalist system must include an historical sense of the 500 year struggle to overcome any and all barriers to the pursuit of profit. Words like genocide, massacre, plunder, while not used in polite and proper academic company, are important to jar the conscience of humankind.

Second, the rise of capitalism necessitated the construction of political, economic, cultural, social, and religious institutions that supported it. These institutions stimulated scientific discovery, the organization of production, the facilitation of consumption, the creation of entertainment and culture, and the invention of political/spiritual systems of myths, symbols, and rituals that legitimized the global pursuit of profit.

Third, systems of education have played vital roles in training workers, organizing discovery, and convincing the young of the virtues of the system in which they live. In short, education at all levels is the institution that links the “needs” of the system to the generation of talent and the legitimating of its perpetuation.

Fourth, since the industrial revolution institutions of higher education have served the capitalist system in important ways. Early universities trained clerics or lawyers. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the modern university was constructed to meet the needs of capitalism: for inventors, accountants, engineers, and those who would transmit sanitized histories and cultural artifacts from generation to generation.

Fifth, as the “golden age” of U.S. capitalism developed, 1945 to the 1970s, higher education expanded. Whole university systems were constructed in states such as New York and California. Growing percentages of young people entered college. Job credentials increasingly required college degrees.

Sixth, university campuses began to reflect more the characteristics of parallel institutions and evolved even more directly into instrumentalities of corporations, banks, and the state. Major universities became businesses in their own right.

Today universities produce the human resources for the capitalist system. They collaborate with monopolies in agribusiness, technology, food service and tourist industries, and every other industrial and financial sector of the society. It has been suggested that former President Eisenhower was considering addressing the “military/industrial/academic complex” in his famous farewell address. Although he did not include the “academic,” the connection is clear.

Universities are also big businesses themselves. They regard their students as “customers” and their corporate friends as their “investors.” On campuses and in host communities they sell products. University administrations and campus towns are beholden to corporate and government dollars. The university systems of modern America parallel the quest for profit and capital accumulation characteristic of the corporate and finance institutions of the society at large.

Therefore, a reading of the political economy of world history would lead the observer of higher education to realize that the cover-up of grotesque violence against young boys in one major university occurred in the context of a capitalist institution that craves profit and funding, investors, the celebration of star power in athletics, and the creation of icons in the sports and/or “educational” spaces of the college campus. Scandals that reduce the legitimacy, and hence the profitability, of the total institution must be ignored, explained away, or excused.

Perhaps the Paterno effect can encourage a progressive turn in higher education. There exists a principle of academic freedom that is solemnly defended by most academic administrators and faculty. There is also a legacy of debate and discovery in the history and mythology of higher education. And, finally, in various places in the academy there exist traditions of advocacy research and teaching that engage students and communities in discussions of alternatives to the brutalities of the present order. Advocacy research and teaching is based on the proposition that the validity of ideas comes in part from whether they improve or harm “the well-being and happiness of human beings.”

The tragedy of Penn State University should stimulate a reexamination of the purposes, functions, goals of the modern university that addresses how it can participate in the dramatic changes humankind desperately needs.

BUILDING A NEW SOCIETY

2011-11-08T14:47:00.003-05:00

Harry Targ

A powerful concept animated the vision of young people in the 1960s, the idea of community. Many of us came to that decade with little interest in politics. We were not “red diaper” babies but we became outraged by Jim Crow, McCarthyism, and war. Our education had communicated an early version of Margaret Thatcher’s admonition, “ there is no alternative,” and our impulses told us then that “another world was possible.”

New and old ideas about a better world began to circulate from college campuses, the streets, some churches, and popular culture. A whole body of engaging literature caught the fancy of young people. For me Paul Goodman’s description of youth growing up in the sterile 1950s, Growing Up Absurd, resonated. He wrote about alternative possibilities in such books as Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals.

Perhaps most startling to a young reader was the earlier analysis Goodman published with his brother Percival, Communitas. In that book the Goodman brothers argued that societies, big and small, were products of values. Architecture and the organization of space, social and political forms, and the ease with which people could communicate and interact with each other varied. And the variations created in space and social forms affected whether communities valued life and sociability or consumption and profit maximization.

The Goodman’s opened up new intellectual doors for me. I looked at earlier anarchists, such as Peter Kropotkin, who argued that humans-if not separated by time, space, and power structures-often lived in solidarity with their neighbors. A “mutual aid” principle was natural to human existence. And, as a result “the state" sought to stamp it out and replace it with top down authority.

Martin Buber, in Paths in Utopia, identified a “centralistic political principle” that emerged when groups and states sought control of markets and natural resources and “the most valuable of all goods,” the lives of people who lived with each other changed as “…the autonomous relationships become meaningless, personal relationships wither; and the very spirit of…” being human “…hires itself out as a functionary.” The alternative for Buber was what he called a decentralized social principle, or community which is “…never a mere attitude of mind” but of “…tribulation and only because of that community of spirit; community of toil and only because of that community of salvation….”

In 1974, I wrote in summation about these theorists and many others that “the architectural forms and social structures of the Goodmans can profitably be blended with the spiritualism and socialism of Buber to construct a synthesis of all that the utopians and anarchists set out to achieve. The Goodmans show how community can be created in the industrial age and Buber illustrates how the best features of the entire community tradition fit together.”

The ideas of community, empowerment, and social justice spread from these and other sources. They were articulated for the sixties in The Port Huron Statement, written by founders of the Students for a Democratic Society. While written by and for a relatively privileged sector of disenchanted youth in a period of booming economic growth and military expansion, the document spoke to the passion for justice, participation, and community; “…unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.” It called for the creation of “human interdependence” replacing “…power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance…” by “power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity.”

By the late sixties many of us were identifying a new society that must be built on core principles. These included;

- local control and participatory democracy
- racial justice
- gender equality
- equitable distribution of resources and the collective product of human labor
- commitments to the satisfaction of minimal basic needs for all of humankind
- the development of an ethic that connects survival to human existence not to specific jobs
- human control over technology
- a new “land ethic” that conceives of humankind as part of nature, not in conflict with it.

Many of us began to explore the impediments to the construction of a society based on human scale that celebrated both individual creativity and community. Growing familiarization with the critique of capitalism suggested that the capitalist mode of production, dominant over two-thirds of the world, was based upon the exploitation, oppression, dehumanization, and repression of the vast majority of humankind.

Incorporating an understanding of the workings of capitalism did not contradict the vision that Buber called the decentralized social principle and the many eloquent calls by others for “community.” It did suggest that building a new society entailed class struggle which would manifest itself in factories and fields, in rich and poor countries, and in political venues from the ballot box to the streets. Bringing about positive change was a much more complicated affair than activists originally thought but the sustained and sometimes brutal opposition to our visions validated the general correctness of them.

Today, new generations of activists, along with older ones, are reflecting and participating in diverse social movements in our cities and towns. They observe with enthusiasm the mobilizations, the militancy, and the passion for justice still unfolding in the Middle East. The efforts of Venezuelans, Bolivians, Ecuadorians, and the Cubans who inspired us so much over the years are applauded. Important debates about social market economies, workers’ management of large enterprises, this or that candidate or political party are occurring on the internet and in the streets.

Although the times are so different from the 1960s, perhaps the vision of community that animated our thinking then (which we in turn learned from those who preceded us) may still be relevant for today. Without creating new documents or dogmas perhaps it can be proclaimed that we remain committed to the sanctity of human life, to equality, to popular control of all our institutions, to a reverence for the environment, and to the idea that the best of society comes from our communal efforts to make living better for all.

UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY DOES NOT RESPECT HUMAN LIFE

2011-10-24T22:52:00.003-04:00

Harry Targ

"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner...We value life and human dignity. They don't care about life and human dignity." General William Westmoreland interviewed in Hearts and Minds (1974), a documentary about the Vietnam War.

This past week American politics took a peculiar turn. A new narrative about the Obama administration began to be systematically presented to the liberal media audience. Reviewing his three-year-old administration, the new construction is that on the national security front Obama is markedly more tough and effective than Republicans claim.

The brutal murder of Muammar Qaddafi by rebellious opponents on global television, followed by celebratory remarks by the President, his Secretary of State and other members of the administration, capped three years of U.S. violence on people of the Global South. Many critics of Obama’s less than forceful advocacy of economic justice have shifted their focus to a frame of the President as resolute in protecting American national security in the face of a challenging world. They even have implied that Obama is more of a tough guy than his predecessor ever was.

What is the evidence for this? Frankly, President Obama has unleashed new variants of the U.S. killing machine. Violence against Asian, Middle Eastern and African people has been visibly celebrated in public view. The numbers of victims killed may not be greater than that of prior administrations but the celebration of public murders seem to have increased.

Early in the Obama administration, the president made a decision to assassinate Somali pirates, pirates who had kidnapped westerners off the Horn of Africa. Last May, with the President’s diplomatic team staring at a television screen during a nail-biting meeting, Navy Seals invaded the compound housing Osama Bin Laden who was unceremoniously killed and dumped in the sea. The media highlighted Americans who celebrated this killing.

Four months after the successful murder of Bin Laden, Obama’s crack team assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki, American citizen and alleged leader of Islamic terrorists, who threatened the United States. Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki, his teen age son and others were summarily executed for crimes for which they had not been accused or tried.

In addition, President Obama agreed to work with allies, Great Britain and France, who held colonial empires in the Middle East and North Africa in the twentieth century. They mobilized a campaign in the United Nations to gain public legitimacy for military intervention in Libya to overthrow the long-time idiosyncratic leader, Qaddafi, whose tiny nation from time to time supported dissidents in the Arab and African worlds. The initial claim was that the force, a NATO operation, would be humanitarian, saving the lives of those who were rebelling against the Libyan dictatorship.

The rebels, contrary to the non-violent activists in Tunisia and Egypt where western support was minimal, were armed, probably by the West, and launched a civil war against the regime. Then NATO air power was used for seven months to pound Libya until the Qaddafi military collapsed. The “humanitarian” intervention took between 30,000 and 50,000 lives, dissidents as well as Qaddafi loyalists. Shortly after the war ended with the death and mutilation of the dictator’s body on a street in Sirte, President Obama declared victory for the Libyan people--although who the rebels were remains unclear--and pronounced what he referred to as a new measured and wise U.S. foreign policy.

The new foreign policy, what might be called the “Obama Doctrine,” has four parts. First, the United States, as the last remaining superpower, and as the defender of the global moral standard, could once again assume the right and responsibility to intervene militarily to preserve and enhance human rights around the world. As the President put it reflecting on the recent killings in a press conference after the death of Qaddafi was announced, U.S. actions have demonstrated “…the strength of American leadership across the world.”

Second, U.S. humanitarian interventions will be carried out in conjunction with military operations with our friends, presumably equally committed to high moral standards. In Obama’s words; “We’ve demonstrated what collective action can achieve in the 21st century.” NATO, an alliance established in 1949 to protect Western Europe and North America from security threats from “international communism,” now would police the world.

Third, new technologies make it possible for the United States to police the world without “boots on the ground.” Given the new technology, the free world can intervene virtually anywhere, anytime, through the use of incredibly sophisticated drone warfare. In the Libyan case, as the President said, “without putting a single service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives, and our NATO mission will soon come to an end.”

US/NATO warriors can target enemies without personal danger to themselves while working in antiseptic offices in the United States or Europe, or on small bases in the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, or Africa. Nick Turse, author of The Complex (2008) estimates that at least 60 drone bases are operational around the world ready to hit enemy targets virtually anywhere.

Fourth, the Obama Doctrine makes it clear that human life is not sacred and that due process, the hallmark of western legal traditions, is now superseded by the unilateral right of key decisionmakers to kill potential, as well as actual, enemies of the United States. To paraphrase the old definition of the state as that institution that holds the monopoly of the legitimate use of force, the state now holds the monopoly of legitimate use of murder.

In the end, the oft quoted remark by General William Westmoreland about the Vietnamese enemy in the 1960s may more accurately be restated: “The United States government does not put the same high price on human life as other countries.”

Fortunately for progressives, mass movements exist that show the world that many Americans do not stand with their government’s use of violence. Progressives oppose mass murder, targeted executions, the death penalty anywhere, and despicable drone warfare. Progressives also respect the right and responsibilities of others to choose their own political destinies.

IS PRINT MEDIA DEAD? NOT IF IT REPRESENTS AND INFORMS THE COMMUNITY!

2011-10-20T19:43:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

I have lived in West Lafayette, Indiana for over 40 years. During much of that time I have been a regular subscriber to the Lafayette Journal & Courier. The Journal & Courier reports it has a daily circulation of approximately 115,000 readers. It is part of the Gannett Corporation, the largest newspaper mega-corporation in the United States.

The J&C editorials, editorial policy, story selection, celebration of local heroes and heroines, and coverage of regional, national, and international events usually have been conservative. While my own politics are very different, generally I had high regard for the professionalism of the J&C, and found the editorial statements and columns to be clear-headed and fair minded. Some reporters made a point of covering labor issues and events, student activism, and sought the opinions and research findings from professors of Purdue University, the largest employer and educational institution in the area.

But about four years ago, the paper began to shift in content and political predisposition to the right. The small group of local Tea Party advocates gained visibility through the newspaper, while those with different political agendas received declining attention. The paper has become a source of disinformation and advocacy for those who in the national political context would be a distinct minority. Recent examples below tell only a small part of the story of what gets ignored and what gets covered in the local paper and how the J & C political agenda intrudes on its obligations to inform and reflect the community.

Thirty postal workers and supporters of the post office rallied in front of the local Congressman’s district office two weeks ago to demand that the U.S. Postal Service be saved. About 150 passers-by signed petitions to save the Postal Service. The event, held three blocks from the newspaper office, was not covered.

Sixty men, women, young and older, white and African-American, rallied at the same Congressman’s office last week to urge him to support job creation legislation. The sponsoring organization was the newly created Indiana Rebuild the American Dream Coalition. Again, no reports announcing the event or describing its occurrence appeared in the paper.

A month ago, 75 people attended a panel on the campus of Purdue University on the impacts of 9/11 on United States foreign and domestic policy. The event was sponsored by the university’s Committee on Peace Studies, the Lafayette Area Peace Coalition, the Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Church, and a Purdue student chapter of Amnesty International. Again the event was not covered.

Professor Benjamin Ginsberg, Johns Hopkins University, who published a new book entitled The Fall of the Faculty spoke on campus last week. One hundred twenty five faculty, students, and administrators came to hear about his claim that the ratio of administrators to faculty at most universities is increasing. He asserted that educational costs, including tuition, are rising as the number of administrators go up and class size increases. Although campus events are usually covered; not this time.

On the other hand, the participation of some Purdue students and Lafayette area residents at a recent “Occupy Indianapolis” rally was covered by a veteran J& C reporter. The first half of his story informatively covered the rally and provided an in-depth interview with a Purdue student attendee.

However, at least half of the story consisted of interviews with two chiefs of police, Purdue and Lafayette, about community security. Nothing in the experiences of Indianapolis, Lafayette, or Purdue would suggest a need to interview police officials, unless, of course, the reporter wished to instill fear or to delegitimize protest activities. This reporter was the same reporter who collaborated with Tea Party activists two years ago to ostracize campus organizations and faculty for bringing retired Professor William Ayers to campus.

The new editorial page editor wrote two scurrilous brief articles ridiculing a university employee who is alleged to have engaged in shoplifting. The inappropriate comments came a few days after the newspaper published an article essentially convicting the person charged before the judicial process has been initiated.

The front page of the newspaper highlights some non-news, so-called human interest stories, and big local sporting events. Significant portions of the paper every week are given over to local sports and religion.

Editorial page community contributions have been reduced. Those that appear consist largely of a handful of commentaries of the life and times of religious fundamentalists and rugged individualists who despise government, unions, professors, public employees, and politicians. While they despise Democrats more than Republicans, several of the regular contributors disdain the political process most of all.

Fortunately, a new alternative monthly newspaper, the Lafayette Independent began publication a year ago. It has two editors, 17 regular “contributors and facilitators,” guest authors, a treasurer, a distribution manager, and an advisory board. No one is paid and the paper is sustained by contributions and advertisements. It is truly a community enterprise.

So far LI publishes 3,000 copies per issue but readers are enthusiastic, and given the unprofessional and biased character of the major newspaper today, LI production and consumption might grow.

The October issue of LI included articles on the consequences of Governor Daniels’ long-term lease of the Indiana Toll Road to foreign investors, analyses of the media, reports on the state and local labor movement, the ‘shock doctrine” and neighborhood schools, local city council candidates, consequences of poverty, the mayors’ for peace campaign, Libya, breast cancer awareness, Medicare, ozone dangers, and the problems of reliance on nuclear energy. In addition, LI publishes stories about local restaurants, good recipes, and the jazz scene. Advertisements come from local businesses, political and social groups, artists, and writers.

LI assumes readers are intelligent and informed. It publishes articles on significant economic and political issues from a variety of points of view. It emphasizes stories from local authors. It seeks to provide updated information about significant sectors of the community: labor, environmental, civil liberties, women’s, and grassroots political groups.

This print media report in one small community is probably similar to stories all around the country. Some commentators suggest that print media is a dying institution. They say that the internet will sooner or later totally replace the press.

Perhaps what is becoming obsolete is not print media but rather print media that represents mega-corporations and local power structures. It may be that newspapers like the Lafayette Independent, a small newspaper distributed free by community activists, targeting working people in the community, are the wave of the future. They could parallel the occupations, mobilizations, and celebrations of grassroots politics that have become part of the growing national and global political landscape.

DRONES, BANKS, AND MULTITUDES

2011-10-04T15:56:00.001-04:00

Harry Targ

In this age of tweets, sound bites, and short-hand references to broad and complicated swaths of history, what political scientist Murray Edelman called “symbolic” politics, becomes “real” politics. Three symbols represent politics today; “drones,” “banks,” and “multitudes.”

Drones refer metaphorically to state-directed murder, often using the latest technology to target and assassinate those who have been defined by officials as the enemy or as threats to society, or just plain criminals. Based on recommendations by key decision-makers, civilian, military, and police, the U.S. has increasingly relied on new high-tech instruments of murder. Drones, smart bombs, and chemicals are used to kill, maim, and disable people abroad and at home with little or no threat to the safety of the personnel pushing the buttons, dropping the bombs, or spraying the victims. These newer forms of murder continue to be paralleled by a variety of police beatings and shootings and executions sanctified by governments attributing crime to the poor and people of color. The 21st century nation-state, to paraphrase sociologist Max Weber’s original definition, is the organization that holds the monopoly of the “legitimate” implementation of murder.

Banks are real but as symbols refer to a capitalist economic system which organizes workers to generate wealth which is increasingly appropriated by the few. In reality, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century saw huge manufacturing corporations mobilizing working classes and stealing the wealth that they produced. When rates of profit began to decline the corporate elites collaborated with the heads of banks, institutions which at one time served as the accountants and vaults for accumulated profits. Great mergers of manufacturing and banking capital in the early twentieth century and more so since the 1970s contributed to a new kind of capitalist economy based on finance. Most transactions now are speculative: buying and selling stocks and bonds, the creation of hedge funds, and real estate and insurance investments. Banks and investment houses are global. They produce enormous profit without creating useful products for people to use or consume. And, the banking metaphor represents a vision of an economic system that has become grotesquely unequal.

The third metaphor, the multitudes (borrowed from abstract formulations by Italian theorist Antonio Negri) refers to the rising up of masses of people-- the traditional working class, the unemployed, youth without hope, youth with vision, women long oppressed, people of all races, and people who clean streets or live on them, serve coffee at Starbucks, and even write software programs for big corporations. The multitudes, Negri suggests, represent the underside of a new global order, an economic empire that traverses the earth bursting out of its national and sovereign boundaries.

Drones and banks represent both the coercive and the manipulative power of capitalism. Americans see examples of each on television or computer screens every day. Just in the last two weeks U.S. drones killed U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen. Troy Davis, despite evidence raising reasonable doubt that he was guilty of a murder, was executed by the state of Georgia. And, the Bureau of the Census reported the rise of rates of poverty not seen in the United States since the 1990s and numbers of persons living in poverty larger than any time since the 1960s.

What is also becoming a regular feature of our electronic experience is resistance, anger, and collective mobilization. This is occurring all across the globe--Arab spring; student protest in Santiago, Chile; angry Israeli citizens; workers in Athens, Greece; students and public workers in Madison, Wisconsin, Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana--and now undifferentiated groups occupying Wall Street and metaphorical Wall Streets around the United States.

It is unclear what will come of all of this except that the contradictions between drones and banks versus the multitudes is becoming more clear and that the transformation of society that is so desperately needed just might be emerging. Hope so.

REMEMBERING THE GREAT SOCIETY

2011-09-28T21:23:00.003-04:00

Harry Targ

On Monday, September 26, the Reverend Jesse Jackson visited Ohio University, located at the northern edge of Appalachia. President Lyndon Johnson had introduced his vision of a “Great Society” in 1964 at this site and Jackson was returning 47 years later to call for the establishment of a White House commission to address poverty and hunger in America.

Jackson pointed out that Athens County, Ohio, where he spoke, represented “ground zero” as to poverty in America today. Thirty-two percent of county residents live in poverty.

The fact that increased poverty is a national problem was underscored in a September 13 press release from the United States Census Bureau. The Census Bureau reported that 46.2 million people lived below the poverty line in 2010, the highest number in 52 years. In 2010, 15.1 percent of Americans lived in poverty, the highest percent since 1993. The poverty line for a family of four was $22,314. The New York Times (September 14, 2011) quoted Professor Lawrence Katz, economist, who said that “this is truly a lost decade. We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

In a press release, the Census Bureau identified some additional data which reflects the economic status of large numbers of Americans:

-The number of Americans below the poverty line in 2010 increased by 900,000 over 2009.
-Proportions of Black and Hispanic citizens living in poverty increased from 2009 to 2010. Black poverty rose to 27 percent from 25 percent; Hispanic poverty 26 percent from 25 percent.
-48 million Americans, 18 to 64 years of age, did not work at all in 2010, up from 45 million in 2009.
-Median income declines were greatest among the young, ages 15 to 24, who experienced a 9 percent decline between 2009 and 2010.
-Childhood poverty rates rose from 20.7 percent in 2009 to 22 percent in 2010.

Timothy Smeeding, Director, Institute for Research and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, was quoted in the New York Times article: “We’re risking a new underclass. Young, less-educated adults, mainly men, can’t support their children and form stable families because they are jobless.”

Arloc Sherman, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, reminded readers that the level of poverty was higher and median income was lower in 2007 than 2001.

In this economic context, it was surprising that the calls by Reverend Jackson for a new Great Society largely were ignored by the liberal blogosphere as well as most of the mainstream media.

One impressive exception was an interview on Up with Chris Hayes, MSNBC, on Sunday, September 25. On this program, Jackson pointed out that if it had not been for President Johnson’s disastrous Vietnam War policy he would have been recognized as one of the transformational presidents in American history.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has pointed out in an interesting essay entitled “Race, Class and Economic Justice” that the Johnson programs, the “Great Society,” and its “War on Poverty,” were grounded in the civil rights struggle for jobs and justice. When LBJ’s program got mired in the escalating war in Vietnam, Dr. Martin Luther King launched the “Poor People’s Campaign.”

Both the Great Society and the Poor People’s Campaign need to be revisited as young people, workers, men and women of all races and classes, mobilize along Wall Street and in virtually every city and town in America to demand economic and social justice. And as the Reverend Jackson reminded students and citizens of Athens County on September 13, LBJ’s program was a comprehensive one linking government and community groups. Among its major achievements the following need to be celebrated:

-The Food Stamp Act (1964) provided low income families with access to adequate food.
-The Economic Opportunity Act (1964) created the Job Corps, VISTA, and other community-based programs.
-The Tax Reduction Act (1964) cut income tax rates for low-income families.
-The Civil Rights Act (1964) outlawed discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations.
-The Wilderness Preservation Act (1964) protected over 9 million acres of national forests from developers.
-The Elementary and Secondary School Act (1965) provided federal aid to schools with low-income students, including the establishment of the Head Start program.
-Amendments to the Social Security Act (1965) established Medicare for retirees and Medicaid for low-income health care recipients.
-The Voting Rights Act (1965) ended racial discrimination in voting.
-The Water Quality Act (1965) required states to clean up polluted rivers and lakes.
-The Omnibus Housing Act (1965) provided for low income housing.
-The Clean Air Act (1965) amended legislation to add requirements for auto emissions standards.
-The Higher Education Act (1965) created scholarships for college students.
-The School Lunch and Child Nutrition Act (1968) was expanded to provide food to low-income children in schools and day care facilities.

Between 1964 and 1968 the United States Congress passed 226 of 252 bills into law. Federal funds transferred to the poor increased from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $30 billion in 1968. One million workers received job training from these programs and two million children experienced pre-school Head Start programs by 1968.

Progressives should revisit this history and tell the story of the successes and failures of the 1960s vision and programs and work for the fulfillment of the dream articulated by Dr. King and LBJ. Both visions presupposed the connection between government, communities, and activists. And, it should be made clear that the Great Society floundered, not because of errors in the vision or programs, or because of “government bureaucrats,” or because the “free market” could serve human needs better, but because of a disastrous imperial war that sapped the support for vibrant and needed domestic programs. Slogans about Money for Jobs and Justice, Not for War, constitute the lessons for today. The Reverend Jesse Jackson should be supported in his efforts to revive the vision of the Great Society.

PLANTING AND RESEEDING: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

2011-09-21T21:44:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

Naomi Klein, in her fascinating book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, argued that over decades free market capitalists and empire builders organized themselves to be ready when the opportunity to seize power, after a shock, occurred.

Progressives need to organize for the future when a shock could compel masses of people to join the struggle for their liberation. In the meantime, they must keep at it; plant the seeds and reseed as much as energy and spirits allow. This is what Lafayette area activists were doing this month.

For example, a panel discussion “Rebuilding Our Future and Empowering Voters,” sponsored by Yes We Can Tippecanoe, which began as the local Obama campaign group, was held at the Tippecanoe County Public Library, Lafayette, Indiana, Sunday September 18. Speakers representing the Indiana State legislature, the labor movement, Common Cause Indiana, area teachers, and the local Democratic Party shared their concerns for Indiana’s future.

Sheila Klinker, state representative from District 27, who joined the five-week legislative walkout last spring to forestall Indiana’s passage of draconian educational bills, spoke first. She said that despite efforts by the Democratic minority in the legislature, the legislature passed bills that significantly increased funding for school vouchers, established so-called scholarships for home schooling, authorized public funds in the form of vouchers for religious schools, promoted the contracting of private corporations to run schools, decided to evaluate teacher performance through standardized test scores of students, and cut state budgets significantly for education at both the K-12 and higher education levels.

Earl Cox, Community Services Liaison, AFL-CIO and a member of the United Auto Workers, pointed out that the Indiana legislature, now controlled by Republicans, plans to reintroduce so-called Right-to-Work legislation in the 2012 legislative session in January. Right-To-Work laws allow workers in unionized work places to acquire all the benefits of being in a union without becoming a member of that union. This, coupled with attacks on public employees, is designed to destroy the labor movement in Indiana.

Julia Vaughn, Policy Director, Common Cause Indiana, reported that the state was once among the more progressive states in terms of ease of voter registration. She suggested that policy changes initiated over the last several years contributed to a declining voter turnout; in 2010 Indiana was ranked 48 among 50 states. Limiting voter registration sites and increasing voter identification requirements particularly target poor and working people, she said. With the addition of 600 Republican state legislators in 2010 around the country, numerous states have initiated similar efforts to reduce voter participation.

Bruce Hall, special education teacher, Lafayette School Corporation, told of the self-sacrifice of teachers, particularly special education teachers like himself who serve the needs of differently abled young people. He asked who was going to care for the young as public education funding is eliminated.

Organizers were disappointed that only 25 Greater Lafayette residents attended this informative panel. However, they reported that probably many progressives were at parallel important events in the community including the annual Hunger Hike and the opening of a newly constructed Habitat for Humanity house.

Five days earlier, 60 students and community members attended a panel entitled “September 11: Ten Years Later,” sponsored by Purdue University’s Committee on Peace Studies, the Purdue chapter of Amnesty International, the Lafayette Area Peace Coalition, the Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Church, and the Lafayette Friends Meeting. Berenice Carroll, former Director of Women’s Studies at Purdue, spoke about the deleterious impacts of ten years of war on women. She also reported that repeated national surveys suggest that the American people oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She referred to a recent book by Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, alerting the danger of a shift toward fascism in the United States.

Harry Targ, Coordinator of the Purdue Committee on Peace Studies, argued that the impacts of 9/11 have to be seen in the context of two long-term struggles in the United States: one about whether the United States should be an imperial power and the other whether the U.S. government should serve the needs of the vast majority of people or primarily financial and corporate interests. He asserted that 9/11 provided the environment, what Naomi Klein called a “shock,” that made it easier for those advocating renewed empire and austerity policies at home to get their way. He referred to data indicating that the impacts of war on the U.S. economy, particularly on the working class, have been profoundly negative.

Jacob Hernandez, President of Purdue’s Amnesty International chapter, concentrated his remarks on the dubious advances in the promotion of human rights in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11 and the threats to civil rights within the United States. He read major points from the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, arguing that those rights need to be defended in the face of growing challenges.

Earlier, on September 7, 2011, the new local chapter of “Rebuild the American Dream” met. Nine activists, representing labor, peace, environmental, and civil rights groups, discussed how it might build its coalition. It was agreed that a name needed to be chosen for the group and literature needed to be prepared. Also it was suggested that efforts to learn about other Rebuild the American Dream groups was necessary. In addition, providing voter information was put on the agenda for discussion. It was suggested that the group might model itself as an activist coalition on Central Indiana’s Jobs with Justice. Finally, members decided to organize an October 14 rally outside the office of Fourth District Congressman Todd Rokita, to protest his opposition to taxing the rich, job creation, funding Planned Parenthood, and virtually every progressive program that involves government support. The coalition will meet again September 28.

These activities (as well as distribution of 3,000 copies of The Lafayette Independent the area’s new progressive newspaper) represent modest but timely efforts by progressives in North Central Indiana to educate and organize a movement for progressive change. It is fair to assume that similar activities have been occurring in thousands of cities and towns all across the United States.

NEO-LIBERAL GLOBALIZATION, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE AND THE IMPACTS OF 9/11 ON THE U.S. ECONOMY

2011-09-10T21:30:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

(Comments prepared for a panel discussion entitled “September 11: Ten Years Later” on Tuesday, September, 13, 2011, at Purdue University)

The Historical Context of the 9/11 Tragedy

The impacts of monumental tragedies on the lives of a people are derived both from the immediacy of the tragedy in question and from the long-term historical context in which the tragedy occurs. Just to reflect for a moment on the history of American economic and political conflict before 9/11 we must recognize two essential struggles.

First, from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the Fair Deal of the Truman era to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s, policymakers believed that a partnership of government with the private sector was likely to provide economic well-being for most Americans. Economists argued that government programs, including fiscal stimuli, supports for the needy, and regulations of unbridled banks and corporations were required to smooth out the negative consequences of capitalism.

As a result of rapidly changing events in the 1970s, from the oil shocks of that decade to increased government deficits at home, some political leaders and economists advocated a return to economic policies that minimized government, maximized corporate and banking freedom, and returned to the pre-Depression philosophy promoting “the magic of the marketplace.”

In response to global challenges to the mixed economy policy model, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the most powerful nations in the world pressured weaker countries to shift their policy programs to what became known as “neo-liberal” policies. These policies called for cutting government spending (even vital programs for the needy), deregulation of the private sector, and privatization of government programs including transportation, education, health care, and even the provision of fresh water. In many countries, these new policies included challenging the rights of workers, peasants, and others to organize and make demands on corporations and government.

In the 1980s, the so-called “Reagan revolution” expanded and in some cases initiated new neo-liberal programs in the United States. According to David Harvey, the long-term impacts of this dramatic shift in public policy since the 1980s has involved massive outsourcing of work, deindustrialization, and transformation from a manufacturing and service economy to one based on financial speculation. As a result, the impacts for the next thirty years included growing income and wealth inequality, a rising proportion of society’s wealth accumulated by the top 1 per cent of the population, growing consolidation of corporations and banks, increased personal, state, and national debt, and declining real wages, living standards, access to public services, and quality of life for most Americans.

On the international front, U.S. policymakers launched a worldwide crusade against what Reagan era policymakers defined as the threat of “international communism.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, policymaking elites who had entered the foreign policy establishment in the Nixon years and continued their service through the Reagan years and two Bush presidencies lobbied for a foreign policy of global domination. Their lobbying vehicle, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), engaged actively in the 1990s to mobilize support for war on Iraq and Iran and the establishment of friendly regimes all across the broad swath of territory from Northern South America, to the Horn of Africa, to the Middle East and Persian Gulf to East Asia.

Then 9/11 Happened

So the economic policy agenda and advocacy for a global foreign policy was in place and/or well represented and articulated before the tragedy of 9/11. Then we all saw the brutal images of the twin towers destroyed, the plane downed over Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon attacked. Selfless men and women came to the rescue as best they could to save lives and comfort the loved ones of victims.

Within days of 9/11, the Bush Administration was debating making war on Iraq and deciding in an intervening period to launch a war on Afghanistan, on October 6, 2001. A year and a half campaign followed leading to attacks on Iraq in March, 2003. These decisions were supported by the beginning of qualitative increases in military spending (roughly tripling military spending from 2001 to 2011), expanding a program of tax cuts for the rich that had begun before 9/11, and organizing a sustained program of downsizing, privatizing, and deregulating the economy. In the context of the grieving nation, the programs of shifting the economy further to banks and corporations and maintaining and expanding a global presence (more than 800 U.S. bases everywhere) were readily accepted. Instead of pursuing the perpetrators of the crimes of 9/11, the United States launched a “war on terrorism,” defined an “axis of evil,” and announced its new “Doctrine of Preemption.”

The Shock Doctrine

In 2007, Naomi Klein published a fascinating book called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it she develops the idea of the shock doctrine, paying homage to the source of the concept, Milton Friedman, the renowned free market economist. In one of his essays she quotes the following: “…only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Klein references one of the other infamous 9/11s, 9/11/73 when the Chilean military carried out a brutal coup against an elected socialist government, causing the death of President Salvador Allende, terrorizing and killing thousands of citizens, abolishing trade unions and political parties, and moving the Chilean economy from mixed public and private institutions to so-called markets. In fact, Professor Friedman and his colleagues were invited to Chile to advise the new dictatorship about how to create a “free market” economy.

Costs of War

So since 9/11, the United States has been engaged in at least two wars with no end in sight, tripled its military spending, and reestablished a global military presence with both armies and private contractors on every continent while at home working people are suffering through economic crises. Political discourse, for the most part, omits serious attention to the pain and suffering of most Americans.

Joseph Stiglitz, in his essay “The Price of 9/11,” reflected on the relationship between the tragedy, the U.S. military response and the long-term consequences the tragedy has had for the American people.

“Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America’s future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why American went from a fiscal surplus of 2 % of GDP when Bush was elected to its perilous deficit and debt position today.
Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion--$17,000 for every U.S. household--with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50%.”

Costofwar.org provides very useful data on war spending and the U.S. economy. For example they indicate:

-Spending for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 through the end of fiscal 2011 totals $1.26 trillion.
-Total spending on “security” since 9/11 has been $7.6 trillion.
-There has been a 96% increase in “security” discretionary spending since 9/11 and only a 39 % increase in non-security discretionary spending.
-Annual funding for “homeland security” has increased by 301% since 2001.
-Increased DOD annual base budget (not counting the wars) has gone up by $235.6 billion since 2001.
-Currently the United States and its NATO allies account for 65 % of global military spending.
-52% of U.S. war veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq have been treated by the Veterans Administration (650,000 of 1.25 million) at a cost of $32.6 billion.

The National Priorities Project presents data on “trade-offs,” that is if spending on 9/11 related wars were used to serve the needs of citizens. For the state of Indiana for example:

-The cost of the Afghan War in 2011 alone would provide Head Start funding for all eligible Indiana children for 22.7 years, while now budgets can only provide for 1/3 of those children eligible for the program.

-Total Indiana costs for the Afghan War (2001-2011) would pay for all those without health insurance in the state for 1.9 years.

-Afghan and Iraq war total spending “would fund all in-state expenses of a four-year education for each incoming freshman class for the next 46.2 years” at the Indiana/Purdue University campus in Indianapolis.

In sum, United States economic policy has been on a thirty year trajectory to eliminate the connections between government programs and human needs. United States foreign policy from the Reagan Doctrine, to President Clinton’s “humanitarian interventions,” to the War on Terror and the Doctrine of Preemption parallels the advocacy and institutionalization of economic policy. The shock of 9/11 advanced both the domestic and foreign policy agendas to a considerable degree.

Fight Like Hell for the Living

The anti-war/social justice movement Code Pink believes that both economic policies that privilege the rich and foreign policies that dominate and control other countries must be challenged. That, Code Pink implies, is the meaning of 9/11 for us today. One contributor to the Code Pink website, Janet, wrote the following:

“On a button on my pink jacket, and on my heart, I carry the words of Mary “Mother” Jones, a labor organizer: ‘Mourn for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.’ Today…and every day, I will try to live up to those words, and to help make a world where the young bury the old, and rarely the reverse—and where war is as unthinkable as cannibalism.”

IMPACTS OF 9/11s

2011-09-01T09:31:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

9/11 in Chile

On the bright and sunny morning of September 11, 1973, aircraft bombed targets in Valparaiso, Chile, and moved on to the capital, Santiago. Following a well-orchestrated plan, tanks rolled into the capital city, occupied the central square, and fired on the Presidential palace. Inside that building, President Salvador Allende broadcast a final address to his people and fatally shot himself as soldiers entered his quarters.

Thousands of Allende supporters were rounded up and held in the city’s soccer stadium and many, including renowned folk singer Victor Jara, were tortured and killed. For the next fifteen years, Chilean workers were stripped of their right to form unions, political parties and elections were eliminated, and the junta led by General Augusto Pinochet ruled with an iron fist all but ignored outside the country until Chileans began to mobilize to protest his scheme to become President for life.

9/11 in the United States

Of course, 9/11/01 was different. The United States was attacked by foreign terrorists, approximately 3,000 citizens and residents were killed at the World Trade Center, over a rural area in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon. People all over the world expressed their sorrow and sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks as the American people experienced shock and dismay.

But then everything began to change. Within days of the terrorist attacks, members of President Bush’s cabinet began to advocate a military assault on Iraq, a longstanding target of the Washington militarists of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Now is the time, they said, to take out Saddam Hussein, seize control of Iraqi oil fields, and reestablish United States control over the largest share of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf region. Cooler heads prevailed for a time, however. We cannot attack Iraq, critics said, because Iraq had nothing to do with the crimes in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

So it was decided that a war would be waged on Afghanistan, because the headquarters of the shadowy organization Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, was said to be in that country. On October 6, 2001, that war was initiated and still goes on although Bin Laden has been killed.

Shortly after launching the war on Afghanistan, the neo-cons in the Bush administration began a campaign to convince the American people that we needed to make war on Iraq. Lies were articulated that the Iraqi dictator was really behind the global terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. He had weapons of mass destruction. He was part of a global Islamic fundamentalist cabal. At last, despite evidence to the contrary, the mobilization of millions of Americans against war, growing global resentment against the Bush Doctrine justifying preemptive wars, the United States attacked Iraq in March, 2003. That war too still goes on.

Over the last decade, U.S. military budgets have tripled, thousands of U.S. soldiers have died or sustained irreparable injuries, and an estimated one million Afghan and Iraqi people, mostly civilians, have died. Meanwhile the United States has maintained over 700 military installations around the world, declared the great land and sea area around the globe at the equator the “arc of instability,” and engaged in direct violence or encouraged others to do so, from Colombia to Honduras in the Western Hemisphere, to Ethiopia and Somalia in the Horn of Africa, to Israel, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Libya in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, to Pakistan, and Afghanistan in East Asia. Presidents Bush and Obama have declared that United States military overreach to be in the national interest of the country and to serve the humanitarian interest of the world. Now the U.S. program includes the use of computer operated aircraft, drones, that can target and kill anywhere based on decisions from command headquarters half way around the globe.

Meanwhile at home, the Patriot Act has extended the prerogatives of government to launch a program claiming to be essential to protect the people from domestic terrorists: spying on Americans; incarcerating people from virtually anywhere deemed to be a security threat; and establishing a political climate that intimidates critics of United States foreign policy.

Domestically, the decade since 9/11 has been characterized by sustained assaults on the basic living standards of the bottom 90 percent of the population in terms of wealth and income. Unemployment has risen dramatically. Job growth has ground to a halt. Health care benefits have declined while costs skyrocket. Virtually every public institution in America, except the military, is being threatened by budget cuts: education, libraries, public health facilities, highways and bridges, fire and police protection, environmental quality.

Support for war overseas and at home is stoked by a so-called “war on terrorism” and an anti-government ideology, made popular earlier by the Reagan administration that lionizes Adam Smith’s claims that only the market can satisfy human needs. Following 9/11, the “beast,” government, has been starved even more resulting in increased demand on workers and institutions with reduced resources, offering “proof” that government never works.

Not all have had to sacrifice during this ten-year “war on terror” and its attendant domestic programs. The rich have gotten richer while the income and wealth of 90 percent of the population have experienced economic stagnation or decline. Media monopolization has facilitated the rise of a strata of pundits who simplify and distort the meaning of events since 9/11 by claiming that war is necessary; the terrorist threat is a growing global threat; as a nation and individually we need to arm ourselves; and subliminally it is people of color who constitute the threat to security and well-being.

Where Do We Go From Here

So the United States 9/11 event was not the first. The Chilean 9/11 preceded the U.S. one by 28 years. Its people experienced a brutal military coup. And in the United States mass murder was committed by 19 terrorists. But in both cases the 9/11 event was followed by violence, threats to democracy, and economic shifts from the vast majority of the population to the wealthy and political/military elites. In both cases, draconian economic policies and constraints of civil and political rights were defined as required by threats to the “homeland.”

As the ten-year anniversary of the U.S. 9/11 is remembered, it is critical to reflect upon how the murder of 3,000 citizens and residents was defined as an opening salvo in a perpetual “war on terrorism:” how this war trumps traditional civil liberties afforded by the constitution; how this war must be waged at whatever cost to the lives and economic resources of the country; and, as with the Cold War, military spending must take priority over every other activity for which the government has a role. 9/11/73 caused the Chilean people pain and suffering that they are still working to overcome 28 years later. Unless the American people mobilize to challenge the policies, foreign and domestic, that were justified by the tragedy of 9/11, the United States will continue to move down a similar path the Chilean people traveled after their 9/11.

THE POWER OF A GOOD EXAMPLE

2011-08-29T19:33:00.001-04:00

Harry Targ

For many years those of us who followed United States/Cuban relations puzzled over the variety of explanations for why United States policy toward the small island was so hostile. Some spoke of the fear of “communism,” others the influence of anti-Castro Cuban-Americans, and still others how American politicians for two hundred years believed Cuba really belonged to the United States. An alternative explanation, some felt, was the power of a good example. This latter thesis suggested that since Cuban socialism was providing good health care and education for its people and since the quality of life and culture in Cuba had been thriving under socialism, others might choose the Cuban path to building their own political, economic, and cultural institutions. This development, that is an improving quality of life on the island, must be disrupted.

In January and February, 2011, masses of Tunisians and then Egyptians went into the streets to protest the dictatorial governments that ruled their lives for years. As it turned out, protests, at least in Egypt, were part of a long tradition of activism, fueled by enthusiastic organizing efforts of young people. Massive mobilizations included youth, women as well as men, workers, religious and secular people, and Egyptians of all educational levels and occupations. While many protestors over the weeks were victimized by police and military, they committed themselves, in part out of necessity, to non-violent resistance.

In Egypt the immediate goal was the ouster of the forty year dictator, Hosni Mubarak, but people interviewed in the streets indicated that in addition to democratization they wanted jobs, and improved living standards, and rights for all Egyptians irrespective of class, ethnicity, religion, and gender. Some analysts claimed that protesters knew that their struggle for a better life was a long-term one that would extend well beyond the overthrow of the dictator. While they sought support from the powerful military, they had no illusions about the role the military would play in the long-term.

Their force was in their numbers, their determination, their articulated vision, and the inspiration they communicated to each other and to those in similar situations all around the world. Protestors in Madison, Wisconsin, began to refer to peoples movements “from Cairo to Madison,” suggesting that non-violent mass mobilizations representing progressive majorities could spread throughout the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. The Arab Spring was another “power of a good example.”

But in early March, after a seeming upsurge in protest against the dictatorship in Libya and threats against those in rebellion, the United Nations voted to authorize NATO forces to be used in that country if human life was threatened. As we know, NATO launched a massive air war, presumably against targets of the Muammar Gaddafi government. That set off a violent war between unidentified rebels and the Libyan government. Now it seems that the rebels backed by NATO bombing and arms are on the verge of toppling the Gaddafi government.

In this latter case, the rebels have engaged in violence, the Libyan government engaged in violence, and NATO forces have unleashed massive violence. Media coverage is of the bombing, the fighting, and the eccentric behavior of the Libyan dictator. But NATO has exceeded its UN mandate to engage in humanitarian intervention. And we know little about the rebels except that they employ violence.

And in the end, the Libyan experience returns us to the old narrative: a crazy dictator, brutal violence on all sides, and a virtual absence of declaration of any vision and purpose by those fighting on either side. Contrary to the vision of the non-violent youthful workers, men and women, who went out in the streets of Cairo, we have returned to the old Middle East narrative of guns, brutal dictatorships, massive bombings, death and destruction, and great powers to the rescue.

NATO countries can heave a sigh of relief: the Arab Spring is over.

BACK TO BASICS: THE WAR ON LIBYA IS AN IMPERIAL WAR

2011-08-23T17:46:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

I was on an educational tour of Vietnam when NATO forces launched an air war on Libya. Our group heard the news with shock and horror. Part of the reason for the depth of our reaction was that we were touring a country that had experienced a decade of sustained bombing by U.S. aircraft.

Members of our delegation to Vietnam had come to political awareness in the 1960s. We were educated by the daily bloody newscasts we watched of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement we observed and played a role in building. In addition to observation and participation in anti-war activities, we read about the history of empires, particularly the American empire.

Through our study in school and out, we learned how European powers--the Dutch, the Spanish, the French, and the British--had emerged from feudalism, built modern navies, and developed weapons systems to conquer the world. The Western Hemisphere, the African continent, the Persian Gulf region and Asia were occupied by foreign powers and forever had their cultures, polities, and economies shaped by them.

By the late nineteenth century the industrial revolution spread to the United States. Agricultural and industrial productivity required markets, natural resources, and cheap labor. To fulfill these needs the United States became an imperial power.

The U.S. empire was launched in a war that crushed Spain in 1898 and led to the colonization of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, and the Philippines in Asia. For the next thirty years, the marines were sent to the Caribbean and Central America at least 30 times. After two world wars, the United States began to construct a worldwide empire in 1945. It overthrew governments overtly and covertly that were deemed part of the “communist threat.” By the dawn of the twenty first century in response to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States established over 700 military installations in 130 countries and created a high-tech war machine to target presumed enemies virtually everywhere.

So as we traveled through Vietnam we remembered the 1960s when our consciousness, our sensibilities, and our passions were driven by a commitment to challenge American imperialism. And then, all of a sudden, we heard about the United Nations resolution endorsing humanitarian intervention in Libya. This was followed by a NATO-led air war on targets in that country. We asked how another preposterous war could be waged in 2011 by NATO and its key partner, the United States. In the Persian Gulf the contradictions between so-called humanitarianism and reality seemed more stark than ever.

First, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established in 1949 as a military alliance to defend Europe from any possible aggression initiated by the former Soviet Union. If words mattered, NATO should have dissolved when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Second, the United States, so concerned for the human rights of people in the Persian Gulf and Middle East, was virtually silent as non-violent revolutions overthrew dictatorial regimes in Tunisia and Egypt earlier in the year.

Third, the United States continued to support regimes in Bahrain and Yemen in the face of popular protest and violent response.

Fourth, the United States has been a rock-solid supporter of the state of Israel as it has expanded settlements in the West Bank, and embargoed Palestinians in Gaza

Fifth, in the face of growing ferment in the Middle East and Persian Gulf for democratization not a word has been said by way of criticism of the monarchical system in Saudi Arabia.

So as the Qaddafi regime in Libya nears its end, the NATO alliance and the United States praise themselves for their support of movements for democratization in Libya. What they cannot hide in the media is the fact that the overthrow of the Libyan regime, for better or worse, could not have occurred without the massive bombing campaign against military and civilian targets throughout Libya carried out by NATO forces.

Remembering our shock when we heard of the initiation of bombing of Libya in March and seeing what has happened since, I can only come to the conclusion that United States foreign policy and the reaction to it has not changed very much from the Vietnam era. Deadly policies, we are told, are carried out for humanitarian reasons. Violence remains the major tool of the state. The great powers continue to interfere in the political life of small and poor countries. And, the mainstream media continues to provide a humanitarian narrative of imperialism at work.

Alexander Cockburn put it well in The Nation in June, 2011 when he wrote:

“America’s clients in Bahrain and Riyadh can watch the undignified pantomime with a tranquil heart, welcoming this splendid demonstration that they have nothing to fear from Obama’s fine speeches or Clinton’s references to democratic aspirations, well aware that NATO’s warplanes and helicopters are operating under the usual double standard-with the Western press furnishing all appropriate services.”

INDIANA COMMUNITY DELIBERATES ABOUT REBUILDING THE AMERICAN DREAM

2011-08-18T10:17:00.003-04:00

Harry Targ

Seventeen community activists met Tuesday August 16, 2011 to view Van Jones’ speech initiating his “American Dream Movement.” The 70 minute video was followed by 45 minutes of discussion on how progressives in Central Indiana should respond to the national, state, and local economic and political crises of 2011.

Participants included activists from various local organizations: the local labor council and building trades, the peace movement, Planned Parenthood, the independent Obama campaign organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the local alternative newspaper, the Lafayette Independent.

Jones gave his inspirational speech hoping to initiate a national progressive movement at Town Hall, in New York on June 23, 2011.

Jones, a former advisor to the Obama administration on green jobs, resigned from office after being attacked for radicalism by Fox News. The specious attack on Jones preceded similar attacks on the community organization, ACORN, and Department of Agriculture expert Shirley Sherrod. In none of these cases did the Obama administration defend the targets of lies and slander.

In his speech, which was designed to inspire progressives to organize house parties and other public meetings in every city and town in America, Jones identified four lies that have come to shape our political discourse.

The first lie, plastered across the screens and print media, is that America is broke. Presenting data and analysis, Jones showed that the US economy was not broke. In fact, the United States remained the richest country in the world, but the wealth and income was shifting ever more dramatically from the vast majority of the population to banks and corporations.

The second lie, he claimed, which has become part of common wisdom, though untrue, is that if the rich are taxed more equitably, the economy will be hurt. He presented evidence from periods of America’s greatest growth, from the 1940s to the 1970s, that wages, profits, taxes, and productivity increased together. But since 1980, wealth has increased while taxes declined along with jobs and wages. In other words, radical tax cuts have made the rich richer but the population at large poorer.

The third lie is that the problem with today’s economy is the existence of an active, involved government. As President Reagan put it: “Government is the problem, not the solution.” Jones spent much of his speech pointing out that capitalism as an economic system would not have developed, nor individual corporations profited, nor communities survived without government. Roads, schools, health care delivery systems, protections from fire and crime, and basic environmental standards all result from government programs. The American people pay taxes to provide the supports for corporations and banks that accumulate the wealth produced by workers.

The fourth lie, and for Jones the most damaging, is that the people are helpless to reshape the course of American economic and political life. As so many learned from weary parents: “You can’t fight city hall.” For Jones that proposition contradicts all of American history. Movements to end slavery, for civil rights, for worker rights, for moving toward equality for women, for environmental justice, all occurred because of peoples’ movements.

So Jones in his June speech called for local meetings around the country. He urged these meetings to generate ideas for building a new national movement out of local activism.

Since the speech some 1,500 house parties were held, generating 25,000 ideas for the development of a “Contract for the American Dream.” 125,000 people rated the ideas.

In early August a ten-point “Contract for the American Dream” was posted on a website (http://contract.rebuild%20the%20dream.com/). The ten points included:

1.Invest in America’s infrastructure.
2.Create 21st Century energy jobs.
3.Invest in public education.
4.Offer medicare for all.
5.Make work pay.
6.Secure social security
7.Return to fairer tax rates.
8.End the wars and invest at home.
9.Tax Wall Street speculation.
10.Strengthen democracy.

In the discussion following the video, the Indiana activists reflected on what if anything a coalition of progressives represented at the video showing could and should do in the community. Most attendees agreed that the crisis in our community and the state and nation was severe; that we needed to begin organizing. But we asked: how, who, and for what goals? Questions were raised about whether a progressive coalition should engage in electoral work, participate in the local Democratic Party or not.

Some participants suggested distributing progressive literature on jobs, health care, the threat to reproductive rights, and ending wars at the local Labor sponsored September 3 picnic, Labor’s Family Day in the Park. Others talked about organizing a series of panels presenting the major issues our groups are concerned about.

While the problems of organizing seemed enormous, everyone agreed that attendees and friends should be invited to another meeting to continue the dialogue. It was felt that with further discussion we could adapt the Contract for the American Dream to our local needs and capabilities.

SOMETIMES WE HAVE TO SING AND CRY AND HIT THE STREETS

2011-08-07T19:47:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

Fred was dating a young woman who gave him the two Weavers Carnegie Hall albums for Chanukah in the winter, 1958. He brought the albums over to my house so I could listen. He never got them back.

I’m not a Red Diaper baby. I didn’t read Marx until the 1970s. I don’t know when I decided I was a Marxist. I didn’t start teaching Marx and political economy until the late 1970s. But I became a small “r” red when I first heard those albums. Then on to Pete Seeger alone, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and later Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and even Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Springsteen.

From time to time I reminisce about all this as I still listen to the music that makes me mad, makes me cry, and makes me want to hit the streets. I forget the fine tuned lectures I listen to and even give myself, on neoliberal globalization, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over-production and under-consumption, and financialization, and break into song and tears as I hear the old music in the car or at home.

The deficit battle, which is a farce except for the pain the outcome will cause working people, reminded me of the Weavers blasting out “The Banks Are Made of Marble.” They sang of travels around the country seeing all the suffering that the capitalist system was causing; “the weary farmer,” the idle seaman, the miner scrubbing coal dust from off his back, “heard the children cryin” as they froze in their shacks, and the suffering of workers everywhere.

Why does the song suggest there is so much suffering all across America? The answer is so simple:

“… the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for”

The song, written by Les Rice in 1948 said the antidote to this situation was workers getting together and together making a stand. He predicted that the result would be a good one:

“Then we’d own those banks of marble
With a guard at every door
And we’d share those vaults of silver
That we have sweated for”

I also was thinking about an old Robin Hood song written by Woody Guthrie in the 1930s about an Oklahoma legend, Pretty Boy Floyd. According to Woody’s rendition, Pretty Boy Floyd got into a fight with a deputy sheriff and killed him. Floyd was forced to flee and allegedly took up a life of crime. At least authorities and journalists blamed Floyd for every robbery or killing that occurred in the state of Oklahoma. “Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name.”

But in true Robin Hood fashion Pretty Boy Floyd stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Floyd, the outlaw, paid the mortgage for a starving farmer. Another time when Floyd begged for and received a meal in a rural household, he placed a thousand dollar bill under his napkin when he finished dinner. One Christmas Day Floyd left a carload of groceries for starving families on relief in Oklahoma City.

And in these days of massive unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, criminal wealth, and staggering poverty, through the voice of Pretty Boy Floyd, Woody Guthrie tells the wrenching story of capitalism that today is not too much different from during his time.

“Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.”

AN AMERICAN DILEMMA: 2011

2011-08-01T19:49:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

Common threads run throughout America’s history from the revolution to 2011. Class and race are particularly enduring features of the life of the nation. Perhaps we need to examine our history and contemporary plight using class analysis and the fundamental interconnections of class and race to better understand why American society is in crisis today and what can be done about it.

First, it is undeniable that America is a class society. The dominant class owns the factories, the businesses, the entertainment and information industries, and the financial institutions that control investment, trade, debt, and speculation. As the capitalist economy has changed, the ruling class has changed also. But in each historical period the ruling class has acted on the basis of its interests and ideology. Since the 1970s, the economic ruling class, while diverse, has been dominated by finance capital.

Second, it is important to remember that concentrated economic wealth is usually complemented by centralized political power. In our own day, for example, Wall Street financial interests dominate the political process. In the increasingly desperate pursuit of increased rates of profit since the 1970s, financiers have been pressuring political elites to institutionalize policies that cut government programs, deregulate the economy, reduce workers rights, and shift societal wealth from the poor and working people to the wealthy. The deal being brokered to “solve the deficit ceiling” problem is the most current of examples.

Third, set against the economic ruling class in every age is a broad array of sectors of the working class, some employed, some not, who have little wealth and power. During exceptional periods they rise up angry, challenge myths about what the economy needs, and demand policies to further the shift of wealth from the few to the many. Since the 1980s, with brief exceptional periods, wealth and income has shifted more to the few.

This model of an economic ruling class and a vast working class is largely an accurate framework for understanding American history, from the revolution of 1776 to the deficit crisis of 2011. But the model needs to be refined based upon the particular interests, organizations, economic activities and ideologies of the two basic classes, the ruling class and the working class.

For example, even within the two classes there are “fractions” or segments that do not share precisely the interests of other fractions within the class. For example, since the 1970s, more and more wealth has been invested in finance and less and less in manufacturing and agriculture, the traditional backbones of a capitalist economy. It became clear to the financiers that government regulations, social safety nets, and public institutions of all kinds had become impediments to the free flow of money capital. Thus we saw the dawn of the Reagan “revolution,” which consisted of policies designed to replace the New Deal policies of mixed government and the private sector that favored manufacturing and workers in industry.

Over the last thirty years, the United States economy, and more or less all of the wealthy capitalist economies, has shifted its priorities to making money via financial speculation. Government has helped by adopting free market, market fundamentalist, and what people around the world call neo-liberal economic policies. Introduced selectively during the presidency of Jimmy Carter and promoted full blown in the Reagan era, United States economic policy has been driven by the downsizing of government (except the military) and deregulation.

Today, most Democrats and Republicans are fighting over how to cut government spending and which people-oriented programs to eliminate. They are not fighting about whether to cut government, but rather in what ways it should be cut. In sum, if we label political actors, the neo-liberal monster has two heads, Democrats and Republicans.

The current context is made even more complicated by the so-called Tea Party. The Tea Party was created by a small fraction of the wealthy economic class and sectors of the monopoly controlled media. Its membership consists of a vast array of disenchanted, alienated increasingly marginalized business and professional elites who claim to be motivated by the need to challenge intrusive government. While it has its roots in fractions of the economic ruling class it has used its resources to appeal to a base of supporters from the working class.

Many Tea Party activists have used the historic and institutionalized racism in the United States as a tool to expand their support. Tea Party enthusiasts have made it clear that their real motivation is to destabilize and destroy the United States government which happens to be led by the first African- American president. Senator Mitch McConnell, in a desperate attempt to co-opt this political fraction, spoke frankly when he declared that the number one priority of the Republican Party is to insure that Barack Obama is a one-term president. This simple and frank declaration parallels the constant racist stereotypes of Obama that find their way into main stream media and are staples of Fox News, and the reactionary radio chorus. And to generalize, the Tea Party and much of the Republican Party express their racism against Islamic and Latino targets as well.

Furthermore, the racist ideology that is just below the surface of political discourse has escalated as the gaps in wealth and income between whites and people of color have expanded over the last thirty years. In fact, the assault on government programs, and the vast majority of workers, has been at the same time an assault on African Americans, Latinos, and all other so-called minorities, who by 2050 will be the new majority of Americans.

In short, the deficit struggle may be seen as a conflict between two fractions of the economic elite, represented by most of their Democratic and Republican allies, over the shape of the neo-liberal policies to be adopted as public policy AND the Tea Party political fraction, from the ruling and working class, who are driven as much by racism as by any idea of doing what is best for the economy. The ideology of racism used by some of those who promote the neo-liberal agenda is paralleled by the real mal-distribution of wealth and income that has been exacerbated in recent years and will be a center-piece of any deficit reduction deal in the future.

But as Marx said, all history is the history of class struggle. The working class, varied as it has been over time, continues to resist the efforts of the wealthy and powerful to appropriate more and more of society’s resources. In fact, what may be called the Progressive Majority is a coalition of workers, women, people of color, environmentalists, health care activists and others who will refuse to accept neo-liberal and Tea Party policies. For them the struggle is not over. It is just beginning.

In some ways, the impending deficit deal that leaders of the two political parties are consummating clarifies the task the progressive majority faces. The American Dilemma of 2011 requires mobilizing on two interconnected fronts. First, progressives must adopt a campaign to increase government support for the vast majority of Americans and to do so by taxing the rich. In other words, progressives must say “no” to neo-liberalism. Second, progressives must incorporate a 21st century anti-racism platform in their economic program. Demographically, people of color will constitute a majority of the voting age population by 2050, a disquieting realization for Tea Party supporters and their neo-liberal representatives who want to return to an era of Jim Crow economically and politically.

A useful guide for this progressive agenda is The People’s Budget proposed recently by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (http://www.thepeoplesbudget.org/) which calls for a massive jobs program, the construction of a fairer more equitable tax system, real health care reform, tax reforms to safeguard the social security trust fund, and dramatic cuts to military spending. The People’s Budget clearly would address issues of government spending by shifting to policies of fairness that benefit the vast majority of the country’s population.

So the task of the progressive majority is clear whatever final form the deficit compromise takes. Joe Hill is still right: “Don’t Mourn, Organize!”

REMEMBERING MALCOLM AND MANNING

2011-07-14T18:27:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

And finally, I am deeply grateful to the real Malcolm X, the man behind the myth, who courageously challenged and transformed himself, seeking to achieve a vision of a world without racism. Without erasing his mistakes and contradictions, Malcolm embodies a definitive yardstick by which all other Americans who aspire to a mantle of leadership should be measured (Manning Marable, Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention, 2011, 493).

Professor Manning Marable was a member of the Political Science and Sociology Departments at Purdue University during the 1986-87 academic year. His scholarship, activism, and ground-breaking books and articles inspired faculty and students even though his stay at our university was brief. His classic theoretical work, "How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America," along with over 20 books and hundreds of articles, inspired social science scholarship on class, race, and gender. His weekly essays, "Along the Color Line," were published in over 250 community newspapers and magazines for years. He once told me that writing for concerned citizens about public issues was the most rewarding work he ever did. He was a role model for all young, concerned and committed scholar/activists (Harry Targ in Purdue University Black Cultural Center Newsletter, April, 2011).

I just finished reading the powerful biography of Malcolm X authored by Manning Marable. My encounter with this book was as fixating and transforming as I remember was my reading of Malcolm’s autobiography in the 1960s. While I lack the deep sense of Malcolm X’s impact on African American politics and cultural identity that others have, I feel compelled to write something about this reading experience. (Bill Fletcher’s review and analysis of the Marable biography provides much expertise on the subject. “Manning Marable and the Malcolm X Biography Controversy: A Response to Critics”, www.blackcommentator, July 7, 2011).

During my first year at Purdue University in north central Indiana in 1968, I requested to teach a course called “Contemporary Political Problems.” Since I was on the cusp of becoming a political activist in belated response to the civil rights and anti-war movements, I thought I could use this course to have an extended conversation with students about where we needed to be going intellectually and politically.

My plan was to assign a series of books that reflected different left currents, politically and culturally, and get us all to reflect on their value for understanding 1968 America and what to do about it. We read Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Herbert Marcuse, the Port Huron and Weatherman statements, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

While my students and I embraced, endorsed, or rejected various of these authors, we were profoundly impacted by the power of Malcolm X’s personal biography and transformations from the streets to the international arena. As the word got out about the course, and largely because of Malcolm X, sectors of the Purdue campus got the word that there was a new “radical” in the political science department. Therefore, I owe my growing enrollments to Malcolm X.

More important, during the second semester in which I taught the course, I had a very quiet and respectful African American student in the class. He was a member of Purdue’s track team. One day, after he showed up at the local airport sporting a very thin, almost invisible, mustache the track coach ordered him off the plane. Why? Because he had unauthorized facial hair. His modest symbolic act, growing the mustache, set off extended protest activities over several weeks.

Shortly before this incident, we had spent a couple of weeks in class discussing Malcolm X’s autobiography. During one class period this very quiet person announced to the rest of us that we should consider ourselves lucky that he chose to participate in this class. I saw him forty years later for a fleeting moment. He remembered me and said that he had read Malcolm X’s autobiography for the first time in my class. The student’s emerging boldness and his articulated sense of pride must have had something to do with his reading of Malcolm X.

Reflecting on the Marable biography, I was struck by the capacity of people to change their ways of thinking, their ideologies, and their practice. Marable attributes some of Malcolm X’s development to his conscious desire to reinvent himself and to do so as he told his life story to Alex Haley, his autobiographical collaborator. Despite the world of racism, repression, and theological rigidity Malcolm experienced, Marable records how Malcolm X’s experience and practical political work was in fact transforming.

Different people gleaned different things from reading Malcolm X’s autobiography, and the same is true of a reading of Manning Marable’s stirring and frank biography. While those of us on the left were most inspired by the last two years of Malcolm X’s life, my student was probably impacted as much by Malcolm’s developing sense of pride and self-worth in a society that demeaned and ridiculed people of color

Reading Malcolm and Marable reminds us, that while we bring change through our organizational affiliations, each individual can have a role to play in achieving that change. Not all of us can be Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Dolores Huerta, or Mother Jones. But we can make a difference.

In addition, Manning Marable makes a particularly strong case for Malcolm X as an internationalist. The United Nations had adopted a Declaration on Human Rights in 1948 but human rights discourse was not part of the language of international relations until Malcolm X demanded the international community address the issue.

For Malcolm X, United States racism, while violating the civil rights of its Black and Brown citizens, was also violating the fundamental human rights of peoples at home and abroad. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X was working to build a coalition of largely former colonial states to demand that each and every country, and particularly the United States, respect the human rights of all peoples. Multiple problems including racism, poverty, disease, hunger, political repression and sexual abuse were problems at the root of twentieth century human circumstance AND the United States was a major violator of human rights.

Marable describes in great detail Malcolm X’s frenetic travels through Africa and the Middle East to build a coalition of Black and Brown peoples to demand in the United Nations and every other political forum the establishment of human rights. Bombing Vietnamese people and killing Black children in Birmingham were part of the same problem. And, this campaign was being launched at the very same time that the countries of the Global South were struggling to construct a non-aligned movement to retake the resources, wealth, and human dignity that had been stripped from peoples by colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism. This was the position that Dr. Martin Luther King came to in 1967, as articulated in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York. Malcolm X was introducing this global human rights project in 1964.

Marable’s Malcolm X therefore transformed himself from a minor street hustler, to a Black Muslim, to a visible world leader advocating a global human rights agenda. This is the Malcolm X that has meant so much to us over the years, along with his insistence that Black and Brown people be accorded respect everywhere and they should honor and respect themselves. But, Marable carefully documents Malcolm X’s flaws as well as his strengths. He was anti-Semitic, misogynist, not unsympathetic to violence, and a man engaged in intense, some times petty, political struggles with his organizational colleagues.

Manning Marable humanizes Malcolm X. Humanizing our heroes makes our efforts to pass the messages and symbols of the past to newer generations of activists more convincing. Young people do not need to see progressive heroes as untainted by their own humanity. And when we present those who make a contribution to building a better world to new generations, the examples of their flaws make it clear that no one is beyond personal and political redemption.

Finally, the biographer, Manning Marable, as my statement at the outset suggests, was a profoundly important scholar/activist. Marable used his historical knowledge, social scientific analytical skills, and political values to craft a career of writing and activism that impacted his students, his academic colleagues, and his fellow socialists in the struggle for a better world. Telling Malcolm X’s story was Marable’s way of advocating for fundamental social change in a deeply troubled world.

LESSONS FROM THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

2011-07-03T12:54:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

When the sun comes back,
and the first Quail calls,
Follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.

Chorus:

Follow the drinking gourd,
Follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.

The riverbank will make a very good road,
The dead trees show you the way.
Left foot, peg foot traveling on,
Following the drinking gourd.

The river ends between two hills,
Follow the drinking gourd,
There's another river on the other side,
Follow the drinking gourd.

When the great big river meets the little river,
Follow the drinking gourd.
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.

(Old song directing slaves on their escape, in modern times popularized by Pete Seeger and the Weavers)

“Dad, didn’t you ever go to elementary school?” (my daughter responding to my enthusiastic report on a two-day trip along the Underground Railroad).

I just returned from an inspiring two-day trip to southern Indiana and Ohio, visiting three sites along the Underground Railroad. I was familiar with the history of African Americans’ active resistance to slavery, such as armed revolts, and forms of passive resistance, including purposive manipulations of master/slave relationships. However, my knowledge of the underground flights to freedom was limited.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, as many school kids know, slaves fled the plantation dictatorships to travel north to so-called “free states.” They continued their journey to Canada where slavery was outlawed. In 1850, the controversial Fugitive Slave Law passed Congress which strengthened the hand of slaveholders in their efforts to stop the Underground Railroad. It declared that although slavery was prohibited outside the South, slaveholders and bounty hunters could travel north to retrieve their human “property.” Escaping slaves, therefore, could not regard themselves as secure until they reached Canada.

While the flight of slaves was largely unplanned, African American slave society was replete with secret directions for escape transmitted through songs such as “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and “Go Down Moses.” Even the quoting of certain scripture in Black churches was designed to give information on routes to the North and possible safe houses to seek. The courage, creativity, and will to freedom of the slaves were extraordinary.

A trail of safe houses in the “free” state of Ohio was created to give runaway slaves sanctuary, food, and directions for moving further north, ultimately to Canada. Ohio was north of the Ohio River, and Kentucky on the river’s southern banks was still a slave state.

Safe houses existed in Indiana, Michigan and elsewhere in the Midwest and the East. Those providing sanctuary were both white and Black abolitionists. In Ripley, Ohio, John Rankin, a white Presbyterian Minister and long-time abolitionist, and John Parker, a former slave and local entrepreneur, risked their livelihoods and their physical security to provide safe havens to fleeing slaves.

In the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law it became a crime for northern abolitionists to provide such sanctuary. Northerners were obliged by law to cooperate with slaveholders, blood thirsty bounty hunters, and local law enforcement officials in the brutal kidnapping of those who sought their freedom.

In my travel along the Underground Railroad, a trip that ended at the exciting new museum in Cincinnati, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, I learned about the ingenuity of the runaway slaves and the abolitionists in their construction of this long road to freedom.

Much of the story of the Underground Railroad has only been reconstructed in the last thirty years or so. The paths to freedom embarked upon by the slaves, their level of organization, and the numbers of those who tried to escape and who succeeded remain unclear as do the names and activities of abolitionists. Information at the time about the Underground Railroad, of necessity, was shrouded in secrecy for reasons of security and for the most part narratives of the trials and tribulations of slaves and abolitionists come from memoirs of abolitionists written after the Civil War.

Historians debate any number of elements of the story of the Underground Railroad. But the historical narrative that I experienced on a simple guided tour left a deep impression on me, particularly on what seems to me to bear relevance to our continuing work today.

Contrary to paternalistic accounts of the slave system that many of us were exposed to as children, the slaves, against all odds, were courageous and possessed an extraordinary ingenuity. Slave society was built on a profound level of human solidarity such that the successful flight to freedom of each and every slave was built on the common struggles of entire communities. Language, songs, community leaders such as “the old man waiting for to carry you to freedom,” and the sacrifices of men and women to get some of their kin “over Jordan” was the collective responsibility of every family and community.

Abolitionists, white and Black, refused to accept the slave system. They were willing to put their lives on the line to oppose an oppressive and immoral system.

The abolitionists were the first revolutionaries in U.S. history after the formation of the new nation. Some were motivated by a conception of the slave system as a system of super-exploitation of the labor of the slaves by the ruling class of cotton producing slave owners. Others were motivated by religious passion. Quakers, Presbyterians, and people of other faiths deemed slavery an immoral system that contradicted God’s law. For them, the laws of society, such as the Fugitive Slave Law, were superseded by God’s law. And still others, mostly the Black abolitionists, combated the slave system because they experienced it directly and because it was their brothers and sisters who suffered under its yoke.

Examining the slave system and the laws that gave it sustenance suggests a perverse feature of the U.S. constitutional system. Throughout U.S. history, and particularly during the period of slavery, the Constitution and the political system have, on the one hand, opposed immoral laws such as the Fugitive Slave Law, and, on the other hand, accepted them because of the necessity of political “compromise.” The Fugitive Slave Law was the result of compromise dictated by demands from pro-slavery advocates in contention with anti-slavery advocates. California would be admitted into the federal union as a free state at the same time that southern bounty hunters would be allowed to enter “free” states and kidnap runaway slaves. Ohio was a free state but slave owners, or their henchmen, could lawfully enter the state to retrieve their “property.” The United States political system has been based on this system of “compromise.” Abolitionists said “no” to what was seen as compromise. They viewed the Fugitive Slave Law as hypocrisy.

The lessons of the Underground Railroad parallel our politics today. First, the story of the Underground Railroad and the slave question is one instance among many in which what is called “compromise,” is in fact hypocrisy. Lofty principles continue to be endorsed which are defied in common practice. The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973 declared that women
have the right to control their own bodies, but health care services are denied to them if they make certain choices. Moreover, health care workers risk death if they provide services that are guaranteed by the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court. In the 19th century slavery was outlawed in Northern states but slave holders and bounty hunters could kidnap former slaves to be brought back to their owners.

Second, there is a continuity in the flight to freedom from slavery to the present. In the 1980s, during the Reagan wars on Central America, refugees came north to avoid death squads or because of desperate economic circumstance. Central American activists in the United States risked arrest providing sanctuary for those fleeing repression. Today, modern day bounty hunters, federal agents, and local police pursue immigrants, defined as illegal, who were driven from their homes by global economic policies. They are often kidnapped, detained, and deposited in their home countries irrespective of the local circumstances. The anti-immigration movement and draconian state laws such as those in Arizona are contemporary variants of the story of the Fugitive Slave Law.

On the other hand, resistance, in the best of the tradition of the Underground Railroad, continues as those most victimized rise up to seek their freedom. They work in solidarity with political progressives in common struggle to create a better world for economic and social justice, and for freedom.

It is an old story: “Follow the drinking gourd.”

I AM PREPARED TO ANNOUNCE (say next week) THAT I WILL BE A CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

2011-06-17T08:58:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

After extensive reflection and beholden to no one (because no one knows me), I have decided to announce my candidacy for the presidency of the United States. While my own views have evolved over time I guess I will run for the nomination of the Democratic Party for president.

Until about two weeks ago I had been a socialist, believing that we as a society need to provide for the basic human needs of all people. I was disgusted that as a very rich country 50 million of our citizens had no health care. Official unemployment rates of nine percent and nearly double that figure for people of color and even more for youth drove me crazy.

In world affairs, I was outraged by ten years of war against the people of Afghanistan, eight years of war and occupation of Iraq, immoral massive bombing of targets in Libya while we support dictatorships in the Persian Gulf such as Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The fact that we practice “clean” war, targeting peoples virtually everywhere with drone attacks, just figuratively blows me away. And finally, I was horrified that the United States has transferred billions of dollars in military and economic assistance to the state of Israel while that country starves the citizens of Gaza and the West Bank. And all this costs the American people a trillion dollars in military spending a year.

About two weeks ago, however, I changed my views on all these subjects. I decided that the American people are a bunch of whiners. I realized that there always will be poor people but it is the rich that have made this country what it is. And, I now understand the peoples of the world need to follow our guidance and leadership. If they don’t, then they bear full responsibility for those drone attacks on their towns and cities.

You might ask: “Why did you change your views so radically since mid-May?” Some people might viciously claim that I am running for president because I just published a new book, Diary of a Heartland Radical, Changemaker Publications.

Some of these same people might claim that I changed my views because I wanted to run for president so that I could sell my book. I deny these charges. It would be so easy to make such claims. I know Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and a host of other candidates for high office have been accused of using the political process to make a quick buck. I say this is unfair.

Now I will be making my presidential announcement at Quirps Mortuary in Lafayette, Indiana on June 24, 2011. I will then attend campaign rallies at Kischke’s Delicatessen in Fort Wayne, Indiana and the Small Size bookstore in Earl Park, Indiana. Since my supporters demand it, I will have copies of my new book, Diary of a Heartland Radical, Changemaker Publications (or did I mention this already?) available for purchase.

After these significant campaign visits in Indiana I will take my campaign to Upper Michigan, Western Iowa, and Southern Nebraska.

Now some skeptics, particularly those who see this candidacy as a publicity stunt to sell more books, would want to know what positions I plan to take on the issues we face today; on the economy, on health care and education, on the environment, and foreign policy. While I admit these are good questions, I do not want to clutter political discourse today with a lot of arguments about policies and programs.

However, in my long public life I have lived by one principle that I promise the American people I will work to achieve (along with selling my book, Diary of a Heartland Radical), that is I will campaign around the principle of “Pot for every chicken!” So support me for president, send campaign contributions, and most importantly buy my new book, Diary of a Heartland Radical.

Order Diary of a Heartland Radical at at http://stores.lulu.com/changemaker
(or did I say this already)

HERB MARCH AND VICKY STARR: CHICAGO ORGANIZERS OF THE UNITED PACKINGHOUSE WORKERS OF AMERICA (UPWA-CIO)*

2011-06-09T13:47:00.003-04:00

Harry Targ
To be presented at the Working Class Studies Association, 2011 Conference, Chicago, Illinois

Abstract

Worker ferment, including uprisings in Minneapolis, Toledo, and San Francisco, reverberated inside the U.S. labor movement in the 1930s. John L. Lewis stormed out of a 1935 national meeting of the American Federation of Labor to create by1940 what would become the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) with 4 million industrial workers marching to the banner of trade union militancy.

Herb March was sent by the Communist Party USA to Chicago to help organize workers in the meat packing plants on the south side of Chicago. The slaughtering and distribution of meat products in the 1930s was centered in a small number of locations. The Chicago Stockyards constituted the largest site. Work on the line was brutal as graphically described earlier in the century by Upton Sinclair in his classic novel, The Jungle. Workers tried to organize at the time in which Sinclair wrote and again after World War I. Such efforts failed, often because of racial divisions.

When March was sent to Chicago in the 1930s, he and other activists knew that racism would have to be overcome along with monopoly control of the industry by “the Big Four packers.” March recruited a young émigré Michigander, Vicky Starr, to help organize in the “yards.” They networked with college students from the nearby University of Chicago and worked with Communist, Socialist, and religious activists from the plants to build a militant CIO union that for a time represented meat packing workers in their struggles to improve wages and working conditions and end racism and sexism in the plants.

This paper examines the political theory and practice of March and Starr as they helped organize the UPWA CIO in the 1930s and 1940s with particular attention given to possible meanings for 21st century organizing of the working class.

Class and Race in the US Labor Movement

Historic connections between organized labor and African Americans have been problematic.

During the period of modern labor history, that is, from the formation of the CIO in the 1930s, to its merger with the AFL in 1955, and into the present, labor's struggle against racism has been mixed. On the one hand, as Philip S. Foner describes it, the American labor movement throughout much of its history has practiced racism in its internal organizational policies, in its efforts to organize new workers under the banner of labor, and in regard to its advocacy of political positions. Writes Foner, “from the formation of the first trade unions in the 1790s to the mid-1930s, the policy and practice of organized labor so far as Black workers were concerned were largely those of outright exclusion or segregation.”[i]

As a prominent institution in American life, perhaps it is no surprise that organized labor has reflected the currents of racism that run deep throughout American history. However, a close reading of labor history will also uncover significant exceptions to the rule. That is, various trade union confederations, such as the Knights of Labor in the 1880s, and the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) of the 1930s and 40s, reflected through words, and sometimes in deeds, the position articulated by Robert Baker in 1902, that the organization of workers should encompass “the cause of all humanity, regardless of race, color, or sex.” Said Baker: "The more organized labor champions the cause of all labor, unorganized as well as organized, Black as well as White, the greater will be the victories; the more lasting, the more permanent, the more beneficial and the more far-reaching will be its successes.”[ii]

One of the most striking successes in the struggle against racism in the modern labor movement is a little studied labor union, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), which formed as an organizing committee in 1937 and continued to represent packinghouse workers until its merger with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters in 1968. During its 30-years' existence UPWA struggled to organize and fairly represent workers in meat packing plants and collateral industries, fought to overcome racism within the union, and played a major role in building and supporting a burgeoning civil rights movement during the 1950s. In the words of Michael Goldfield: "The racial practices of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) are especially inspiring."[iii]

On Labor History

The industrial revolution in the period following the Civil War planted the seeds for a transformation of the workforce in the USA, shifting workers from farm to factory. With the emergence of modern manufacturing came increasing patterns of control and exploitation of workers. While many workers were initially skilled crafts persons who enjoyed autonomy and expertise, owners and managers of capital sought to increase control over the processes of work, especially in an effort to speed up production. Profits could be enhanced further by extending the length of work days as much as physical survival would allow. Of course, as capitalism grew and grew, profits also would be increased if wages were reduced as much as possible. Increasing managerial control of the work process, speeding up the pace of work, extending the work day, and cutting wages all stimulated the creation of labor movements to challenge capital's prerogatives.

In the 1880s a confederation of unions that embraced the skilled and unskilled, men and women, Black and White, organized as the Knights of Labor. While its history was short–lived, it fought for the eight-hour day and introduced into USA labor history a principle of inclusiveness that would flower and grow in the 1930s and beyond. Also in the 1880s, a trade union confederation called the American Federation of Labor formed, bringing together unions representing primarily skilled workers. Under the leadership of its first president, Samuel Gompers, the AFL built an organization that, despite ups and downs, survives to this day. Whereas the Knights practiced inclusiveness, the AFL as it unfolded gave primary support to the organization of skilled workers, and over time tilted toward segregation among affiliated unions, so that Black workers would be represented in totally Black unions. The AFL also accepted unions into the federation that constitutionally prohibited Black workers from membership.

From 1905 until World War I, a militant union, the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, organized hard rock miners, textile workers, and others. The IWW rejected political action, championing a syndicalist vision of a new world order, organized around worker control of the economic life of the country. Since the IWW rejected electoral and other more conventional politics, it was not involved in struggles around de-segregation and voting rights. However, the IWW championed the inclusiveness of all workers and rejected racism. Given their brand of revolutionary activity, Wobblies were hounded by the state and by vigilantes until, by the 1920s, they were virtually crushed.

After an interregnum of state repression, company unions, and company welfare schemes to keep workers from organizing, the 1930s saw a huge wave of political mobilization and labor organizing that led to the formation of the CIO. Some union leaders, led by John L. Lewis of the miners, withdrew from the AFL to form the CIO, because the former group refused to organize industrial, or so-called non-skilled, workers. Between 1935, at its founding, until 1940, the CIO unionized four million workers. Unions emerged in such industries as automobile manufacturing, electronics, steel, rubber, and meat packing. The great flurry of working-class mobilization was stimulated by the exigencies of the Great Depression, the exclusiveness of the AFL, and the groundbreaking work of communists and other leftists on the shop floors, who had worked for years to plant the seeds of the idea of industrial unionization. By 1955, over thirty percent of the American workforce was in unions. The AFL and CIO, the two major trade-union confederations, had over 100 member unions in them. Then the two confederations united, the legacy of which survives today as the AFL-CIO. This constituted the melding of the old craft unions founded before the 20th century with the newer industrial unions of the 1930s.

Meat Packing

The processing of meat was one of the earliest mass-production industries, developing a detailed division of labor that became a model for most subsequent manufacturing. The corralling, slaughtering, and dressing of meat products for shipment around the country became possible when the refrigerated railroad car was developed. By the turn of the century, meat was processed in huge centers in Chicago, Omaha, and Fort Worth, with smaller operations around Iowa and Minnesota. Meat packing plants were scattered throughout the South and Northeast as well. The meat processing center from the 1880s to the late 1950s was in Chicago. The stockyards, housing the ‘Big Four’ packers (Armour, Cudahy, Swift, and Wilson), employed thousands of workers. Because the work was so dangerous and unpleasant, it was largely carried out by the most marginalized sectors of the working class. First, this included primarily immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. During the great migrations from the South, both before and after World War I, Black workers gravitated to the packing plants, leaving behind their lives as sharecroppers.

Packinghouse workers, experiencing horrible working conditions and insufficient wages, sought to secure union recognition as the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. Two long and bloody strikes (1904 and 1921) were defeated by the companies. During both strikes, many African-American workers were temporarily employed to break the strikes. Since Black workers suffered from economic circumstances as desperate as those faced by the striking White workers, and since they were excluded generally from unions and consequently the benefits they would gain from unionization, these so-called ‘scab’ workers felt no loyalty to the strikers or the union. In the aftermath of the two defeats, hostility towards Black workers rose, and Black resentment of Whites increased as well. For years, remembrances of racism and scabbing impaired any effort to create a common front against the packers.

UPWA (CIO)

The atmosphere and historical circumstances changed in the 1930s. First, the depression hit working people very hard. Twenty-five percent of the work force was unemployed by 1933. Industries were working at 40 percent of capacity. In big cities, vibrant radical movements began to surface. Communists organized Unemployment Councils whose task it was to protect debtors from being evicted from their apartments. Also the Councils organized mass rallies and marches against unemployment and poverty and, on occasion, marched with throngs to city welfare departments demanding relief. Communists and other radicals were particularly active in Black communities. Also, the Communist Party mobilized mass campaigns to save the Scottsboro Boys who had been charged with raping two White women in Alabama, a charge that was clearly untrue. The mood of despair turned to militancy in cities and towns around the United States. Many Black citizens began to participate in the street militancy. These militants included those who were to work in the packinghouses. Inside the packing plants, Black workers had the most difficult and demeaning jobs and worked for lower wages. However, in terms of meat processing, Black workers were situated in strategic locations such as the killing floor. If they chose to stop working, the whole process of slaughtering and dressing meat would grind to a halt. Also in the major packing center, Chicago, the percentage of the work force that was Black was as much as 30 percent by the 1930s.

Both Black and White workers had come to the view that wages and working conditions would only improve when the work force became unionized. Also, Black and White workers both realized that successful unionization would not occur until and unless they combined to support unionization. This recognition, combined with the experience of working with radicals on community action, the clear role of communists in the effort to organize a packinghouse workers union, and the demonstrated work of the left in anti-racism campaigns nationally, all influenced the militant African Americans who assumed significant roles in organizing the union. White workers, often former union members from the days before World War I, and cognizant of the pragmatic necessity for solidarity, joined the struggle as well.

The first independent local of packinghouse workers was formed in Austin, Minnesota, by some old Wobblies in 1933. In 1934 there were general strikes of workers in various industries in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Toledo, Ohio. In 1935, John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, walked out of the national convention of the AFL to form the CIO. Thus was launched the effort to organize unskilled industrial workers all across the industrial landscape. Also, in 1935, Congress passed the Wagner Act, which legalized the effort of workers to form unions. In this multidimensional context, Herb March, a communist organizer who had been working in Kansas City, arrived in Chicago to initiate the drive to organize the packing houses. In 1937, Black and White packinghouse workers with CIO approval formed the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC) to begin the union building process.

The ‘Big Four’ meat-packing companies resisted the initial organizing efforts. Armour, the first target of the PWOC, resisted efforts to get a master agreement that would apply to all plants. Such a master agreement would institutionalize the union in the industry, an outcome that all the packing companies opposed. However, despite efforts of a discredited AFL union (the Amalgamated Meat Cutters) to counter PWOC presence in the Chicago Armour plant, and despite a pre-election visit to Chicago unions by the newly formed House Committee on Un-American Activities, the PWOC won majority support from workers for the new CIO union in 1939. Shortly thereafter, PWOC signed separate agreements for all Armour plants, a clear prelude to the master agreements the union sought. The initial accords, while not involving wage issues, did increase vacations, guaranteed at least 32 hours of work, and improved grievance procedures. Almost two years later, contract negotiations between Armour and the PWOC led to the signing of the industry's first master agreement in September, 1941. The accords included a ten-cent-an-hour wage increase. This was followed by agreements with Cudahy in November and Swift in April 1942. Finally, Wilson was forced to sign an agreement in March, 1943 by the National War Labor Board. Also in 1943, PWOC became the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). CIO militancy, the tidal wave of organizing throughout American industry, the particular role of White left activists and Black militants, and the emerging production needs brought by the onset of World War II all together stimulated the successes of unionization efforts in the meat packing industry.

While a wage-freeze agreement in support of the war effort was accepted by government, the corporate sector, and the leadership of the labor movement, PWOC was able to secure a variety of improvements in fringe benefits and working conditions during the war years. While labor, capital, and government all endorsed wage and price controls over the course of the war, government and capital did agree to not challenge the presence of unions in plants across the country (so-called ‘maintenance of membership’ agreements). However, as the war drew to a close, many unions in the CIO made demands for increases in wages. They claimed that prices in fact had increased by 45 percent during the war, while real wage increases were capped at 15 percent. While workers at the home front saved money, both because of much overtime and limits on commodities to purchase, their wages fell further and further behind prices and company profits. When corporations resisted pay hikes right after the war, unions in auto, steel, electronics, railroads, and meatpacking went on strike. The 1946 strike wave was the largest in U.S. history, affecting 4.6 million workers or 14.5 percent of the work force.

The strike in packing began on January 16, 1946. The next day, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters offered to settle in those plants in which they had locals with a 15-cents-an-hour raise. The packers refused, but a government fact-finding board was established to investigate the claims of the competing sides. Further, the Secretary of Labor ordered the meat-packing plants seized under provisions of the War Labor Disputes Act. After UPWA threatened not to return to work under the order, Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson assured the union that he would urge adoption of any recommendations of the fact-finding board that were accepted by the packing companies’ unions. By March, a 16-cent hourly wage increase was recommended by the board and accepted by the packers and the unions. The Office of Price Administration granted the packers a raise in meat prices to compensate for the wage increases. Later in 1946, at its national convention, the UPWA elected Ralph Helstein as its new union president with the broad support of a ‘left-center’ coalition in the union. Over the course of the next several years, the UPWA leadership would tolerate Communist Party members and other radicals in the leadership and rank and file of the union, while walking a careful, straight line in support of mainstream CIO policies that became increasingly anti-communist.

The political stances of each of the ten UPWA districts varied, with radicals particularly popular in Chicago’s District One; District Three covering Iowa, Nebraska, and Colorado; and District Six in the Northeast. As the cold war and anti-communism heightened, some districts would pass resolutions supporting Henry Wallace or opposing USA foreign policy, while other districts would refrain from such positions or overtly oppose them. As packer-union struggles deepened in 1947 and 1948; as the coalition of manufacturers, Republicans, and Southern Democrats moved more actively against labor; and as the AMC sought to gain control of locals in packing plants, conflict between the left-center coalition and right-wingers known as the ‘CIO Caucus’ heated up dramatically in the UPWA. Many of the conflicts involved issues revolving around the cold war and anti-communism, and different conflicts emerged in the late 1940s around issues of racism in UPWA locals and how active UPWA should be in the struggle against racism in communities and the nation at large.

Anti-communism and racism

In 1948 UPWA again engaged in a general strike against the ‘Big Four’ resistance to wage increases. Because the USA cold war policy was developing, along with anti-communist zeal and the opposition to the campaign of progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace, the level of support to strikers was not as strong. After nine weeks in which the meat packers held firm, injunctions were issued, police hounded strikers in various locales, and nonunion labor replaced striking workers, the UPWA called off the strike and returned to work. Six weeks after the strike, the UPWA met for the most contentious convention during the entire life of the organization.

In an intensely fought election for union leadership, president Helstein was reelected after a challenge from the CIO Caucus. The Caucus warmly endorsed the Truman presidential candidacy and his cold war foreign policy, favored purging the left from the union leadership, and generally took an anti-communist stance. Helstein's reelection allowed for the continuation of a left-center coalition that would more or less remain intact until the union merged with the AMC in 1968. This left-center leadership would remain critical of USA foreign policy, would endorse trade union militancy, would encourage rank-and-file political activity in communities, and would take a pro-active stance against racism in the union and the nation. Subsequent to the 1948 convention, and throughout the 1950s, UPWA would investigate racism in the union, establish Anti-Discrimination Committees at the national level of the union and in each local, would run workshops on racism in American life, and would fund and actively work for the burgeoning civil rights movement. UPWA would become a significant political force in those communities where it was strong (such as Chicago) and nationally.

To a considerable degree the transformation of the USA political economy was shaped by technological change. In the meatpacking industry, automation decreased the number of workers needed to produce the meat product and increased the possibility that production could be decentralized in hundreds of small-sized processing plants (where work forces are smaller, less organized, and more vulnerable). While UPWA was growing as a progressive political force in the USA in the 1950s, technological change was destroying the material base of the work force in the industry itself. Ultimately, with declining workers in the industry, declining UPWA membership, and continuing competition between UPWA and the old AMC, the leadership realized that it must consolidate to maintain any presence in the meatpacking industry. Consequently, in 1968 AMC and UPWA agreed to a merger. In 1978, the enlarged AMC merged with retail clerks into the current United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), a much larger union with a meat packing division.

The Herb March Story

Herb March grew up in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. He was raised by parents who were sympathetic with socialism. His father voted for Eugene V. Debs for president, for example. Being around rent strikes and other street actions in the neighborhood, March was exposed to the public meetings of the predecessor to the Communist Party USA. He joined the Young Communist League (YCL). The visible presence of the left and the developing sentiment that “I didn’t think it was right for some people to be poor and some people to be so damn rich” shaped his consciousness and political life.

As the YCL expanded its organizational commitments to the struggle against racism, that became a focus of March’s attention, including working on anti-lynching campaigns, and campaigns to free African American males wrongly accused of rape: the most famous of which was the so-called “Scottsboro Boys” trial and conviction in Alabama. In the late 1920s, March was sent as an organizer for the YCL to Kansas City. He organized rallies and marches of the unemployed, suffered police beatings and jail, and organized a large unemployment movement. Reflecting on the YCL and organizing campaigns, March reported that “In many respects, you have a narrow, sectarian organization, and a lot of theoretical discussion operating in an atmosphere in which, in the United States, there was considerable unrest, exploitation, unemployment. And even as sectarian as they were, people were just looking for some way out to do anything.”

While the Communist Party supported organizing efforts, it was the Young Communist League, locally grounded, that took the lead in shop floor mobilizations at Armour and Swift plants. Many workers experienced or heard about the big strikes of 1921. March met with Croatian packinghouse workers who came out of left wing backgrounds.

In 1933, Herbert and Jane March moved to Chicago, and became major organizers of the incipient Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC) which would become the United Packinghouse Workers Union (CIO) in 1943. The combination of massive stockyards on Chicago’s south side, the history of class struggle in “the yards” in 1904 and 1921, the newly passed National Recovery Act that authorized trade unions, the presence of unemployment councils, and branches of the CP and YCL in the neighborhood provided a context for the massive organizing in Chicago over the next decade. Jane March, a YCL member, worked with the University of Chicago settlement House, not to far from the stockyards and young organizers such as Vicky Starr, discussed below, networked with radical students from the University of Chicago.

March identified racism, which went back to the failed organizing efforts earlier in the century in the stock yards, as the primary hurdle to union organizing that is racism:

“People were very afraid. Very much for unionism. Fearful that it would not be possible to achieve unionism because you had the split of black and white and too many nationalities…There was all this fear that they would play one nationality against the other…The idea that there should be a union was generally acceptable, but people were afraid. And the whole job was breaking down the fear.”

The history of the struggle for unionization after World War One led by the Stockyards Labor Council illustrates the desperate effort of union leaders of that period (portrayed in a PBS docudrama called The Killing Floor) to create an integrated union leadership and overcome the justified suspiciousness African American had concerning their white counterparts. After the failed strike in 1921, and throughout the 1920s meat packers sought to maintain the rifts between Black and white workers. Overcoming this long history was central to building the PWOC.

March played a leading role in the period from 1933 until the end of World War II building the PWOC and finally UPWA. He organized huge rallies in the Back of the Yards in 1937, recruited workers into the CIO and CPUSA, and engaged in efforts to remove CIO imposed leaders on the PWOC who had little connection to meat packing. Some of these leaders according to March and others were more interested in stabilizing the union, reducing conflicts with the Big Four meat packers, and eliminating Communist influence in the union, than expanding grassroots trade union militancy.

March reported that while he avoided engaging in the disputes in the Communist Party between William Z. Foster and Earl Browder in the 1930s, his public declaration that he was a member of the CPUSA contradicted party policy. But he said that many workers joined the party because he had demonstrated his effective trade union leadership. “Most of my time was spent on union work…. Just by functioning and playing a role as an effective leader and organizer, why, I was able to attract people into the party.”

After World War II, March, and comrade Jesse Prosten, played a leading role in the selection of staff attorney Ralph Helstein as president of the new UPWA. Helstein represented in the union the “left-center coalition” against insurgent campaigns by the “CIO-Caucus” to de-radicalize the union. Helstein served as UPWA president from 1946 until 1968 when the union folded into the Amalgamated Meat Cutters.

March characterized UPWA union politics in the period of the Cold War as, for the most part, progressive: fighting rising anti-communism in the labor movement, insisting that all UPWA locals and the international itself take the lead in fighting racism, and opposing escalating Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union (The Packinghouse Worker, April, 1953 in a special issue of the paper declared its opposition to the U.S./Korean war policy).

However, March claims that with increasing anti-communist attacks on the union from outside and inside the labor movement, growing demands from Black workers for more leadership positions in the union, and continuing tensions between him and the national leadership of the CP, he left the union and the party in the mid-1950s.

Defending the early tradition of shop-floor militancy and spontaneous work stoppages March critiqued the evolution of the US labor movement, including the UPWA after the great organizing CIO organizing drives of the 1930s: “When people develop the concept that what they do is have an organization that pays dues and is respectable, and that is the objective of the union, it’s business unionism. Unionism is a business. It’s no longer a labor movement.”

Reflecting on UPWA, March said that “all things considered, it was the closest thing to a decent union around in CIO. It didn’t develop, as far as the national leadership is concerned, the same sort of bureaucracy that existed in steel and other unions.” However, he added, “it grew more and more timid and hesitant.” Perhaps, he suggested, the merger of the CIO with the AFL had a lot to do with the diminution of the old labor militancy. While he fell prey to charges of white chauvinism in the party and the union in the 1950s, he praised UPWA for fighting against racism in the union. Blacks, he said, were always key leaders in the union and this was due to the policies of the union and their leadership skills.

Summing up March reflected” “We initiated the union, and developed the union, and carried it through as a union of Black and white workers from the inception. It wasn’t a question of white trying to bring forward Blacks, it was just an integral part of the union
and its thinking from the word go.”

And March concluded his 1986 interview with prophetic words: “I’m still convinced that what this world needs is socialism in some form….What’s going to happen is that the whole burden of declining economy in this country is going to be placed on, to the degree that it can be managed, on the shoulders of working people in this country…A new re-awakening of the labor movement is going to have to take place.”

The Vicky Starr Story

As a teenager, Vicky Starr left the family farm in Michigan and arrived on the Southside of Chicago in 1933. She stayed in the home of Herb and Jane March, Communist activists who had come to Chicago to organize the packing house workers in the huge Stockyards. Under March’s tutelage she sought employment in the Yards and almost immediately began to network to build a union of workers in the days leading up to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

The processing of meat from the 1880s until the late 1950s was centered in Chicago. The Stockyards, housing the Big Four packers (Armour, Cudahy, Swift, and Wilson), employed thousands of workers. Because the work was so dangerous and unpleasant, it was largely carried out by the most marginalized sectors of the working class.

In the era of Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle, workers were primarily immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. After World War 1 and the “the Great Migration,” African Americans secured the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs in the Yards. Historic union organizing drives in 1904, and 1921 faltered because of racism and ethnic conflict among workers. Communist and socialist organizers in the Yards, such as March, realized that combating racism was central to organizing industrial unionism in the meat packing industry.

And it was rank-and-file activists like Vicky Starr who tirelessly met with workers, helped write leaflets and newsletters, interacted with the radical students from the University of Chicago who had offered their assistance to union organizing drives, and communicated with sympathetic members of the influential Catholic Church.

As a member of the Young Communist League, Starr and her comrades would read classic Marxist and Leninist texts. Since Starr would be identified with organizing campaigns by her bosses she often lost her job in the yards. When that occurred she would apply for work at another packing house company using a different name.

She told Alice and Staughton Lynd (Rank and File, 1973) many years later: “When I look back now, I really think we had a lot of guts. But I didn’t even stop to think about it at the time. It was something that had to be done. We had a goal. That’s what we felt had to be done and we did it.”

In 1937, workers established the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC). Despite resistance by the major meat packers, state violence, red-baiting against union organizers by the state and the American Federation of Labor’s Amalgamated Meat Cutters (AMC), the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA-CIO) was constituted in 1943. Until its merger with other unions, it remained a militant trade union that fought racism and red-baiting and publicly opposed United States foreign policies such as participation in the Korean War. And during its formative years in the mid-1940s Vicky Starr served for a time as Education Director for District 1 of UPWA.

Central to Starr’s contribution to the working class from the time she was a member of the Young Communist League, to the budding labor movement, the formation of the UPWA, and later as an organizer of clerical workers at the University of Chicago was her constant struggle against racism and sexism. After the formation of UPWA Starr said “We tried to make sure that there were both Negroes and whites as officers, stewards…in all the locals.” She fought residential segregation and participated in building the Back of the Yards Council on Chicago’s south side, and worked to end the exclusion of African Americans from professional sports. And in the end she recalled that the most militant trade unionists on the shop floor, the beef kill, were African Americans.

As an organizer in the 30s and a UPWA staffer in the 40s she combated sexism as well. “Women had an awfully tough time in the union because the men brought their prejudices there.” Women often had the most demeaning jobs in the Yards, wage rates discriminated against them, their special needs, such as child care received no attention, and they often were fearful of demanding their rights on the shop floor and in the union. As a socialist, Starr reflected on those halcyon days of UPWA-CIO organizing. She said that there was a sense that workers were ready to come together. There was a growing feeling of working class solidarity. Union organizers would show up at the Stockyards with literature and speeches. And at the grassroots she and others were on the shop floor spreading the word informally about the union.

And socialism needed to be addressed in terms of the concrete benefits of people’s lives. “You had to talk about it in terms of what it would mean for that person. We learned that you can’t manipulate people but that you really had to be concerned with the interests and needs of the people. However, you also had to have a platform--a projection of where you were going.” Starr left the Yards in 1945, was forced underground for a time in the McCarthy period, raised four children and returned to work as a secretary at the prestigious University of Chicago. She still had “a platform” at the university, organizing all non-professional staff. Despite predictable resistance from the bastion of liberalism in higher education she applied the grassroots organizing skills she learned as a teenager in the stockyards to achieve victory for clerical workers. Teamsters Local 743 was recognized in 1978. Vicky Starr became the first shop steward of the new local.

But Starr’s contribution to the American working class, Black and White, male and female did not remain unnoticed beyond the shop/office. Alice and Staughton Lynd captured her remembrances of CIO organizing in the 1973 book Rank and File and the clerical workers struggle in the 2000 book New Rank and File. And especially, “Stella Nowicki” was one of three stars (the others were Sylvia Woods and Kate Hyndman) in the wonderful documentary (Union Maids, 1977) about women organizing in the CIO in the 1930s.

This last project made Vicky Starr a major celebrity. It brought to the attention of new generations of activists the fighting spirit of the 1930s, the central role Communists played in the battles, and the absolute centrality to organizing the working class of fighting racism and sexism.

Still relevant today, Union Maids (and the Lynds collections of interviews), can help inspire, educate, and inform activists about tactics, strategy, and basic principles of organizing.

Vicky Starr concluded her 1973 interview saying: “It was a privilege and a wonderful experience to participate in the excitement of those times.”

It is important to remember Vicky Starr for what she did for the working class, particularly industrial and clerical workers. And reflections on her life and work can still inform activists as they struggle for economic justice today.

Conclusion

There are several reasons for reviewing the history of the labor movement and UPWA in the twentieth century and highlighting the activism of two prominent organizers of this special union.

First, as Halpern suggests, meatpacking was an anchor for the industrialization of Chicago, “the hog butcher of the world.” The Stockyards, on the near south side of Chicago represented a focus of manufacturing in Chicago paralleling the great steel plants on the far south side and the Pullman plant producing railroad cars. Of course, this manufacturing triangle was paralleled with clothing and textile manufacturing further north and as well as electronics. The dramatic CIO organizing in the late 1930s hit each of these sectors, such that labor militancy in Chicago figured prominently in the massive mobilization of industrial workers to militant trade unionism.

Second, organizing in meatpacking from the late 19th century until the 1960s drew upon a number of heroes and heroines, mostly grassroots workers, committed socialists and communists, and militant trade unionists. Studying their union lives and their politics can give insight into what motivated them to be engaged, how their politics shaped and was shaped by their concrete struggles, and what if anything can be learned today by their role in the construction of militant trade unionism.

Third, with the use of rich detailed interviews and accounts of shop floor and community activism, a “methodology” linking the individual to the collective, the personal to the political, and in this case study the union and the political party is offered here for further refinement. This refinement could involve the selection of other key players in the meat packing industry for in-depth analysis as well. While March and Starr are for grounded here, any number of other leaders of PWOC and UPWA could be identified for further reflection.

Fourth, a number of “hypotheses” emerge from this study:

-Overcoming racism was the number one priority for any successful trade union organizing in the meat packing industry. This was so because of the history of racism in America, the racist elements of the labor movement since the formation of the AFL, and the particular efforts, usually successful, by the industrial giants in meat packing to divide workers by race, ethnicity, and gender.

-The leading political force in the construction of PWOC and UPWA was the minority but militant Communist Party USA. It is no accident that the CPUSA identified as a national priority, the struggle against racism in America. From campaigns in the 1920s to the Scottsboro case of the 1930s, the heretofore small party gained much visibility which attracted many of the growing numbers of African Americans in the meat packing industry to the labor movement, in which party members were active.

-The formation of the UPWA cannot be understood without taking account of the history of the industry, major packer/worker battles, the Great Depression, and the vision of a new American political economy governed by a partnership between politicians, workers, and corporate elites (a New Deal).

-Any reflection on the struggles, failures, and successes of organizing in the meat packing industry requires a theoretical lens that priorities class, race, and, gender. Women were marginalized on the shop floor, received wages significantly less then men, and had to fight for recognition as co-equal workers by their male counterparts.

-PWOC and UPWA were products of grassroots organizing, increasingly challenged by the leadership of the CIO and the CPUSA. The March and Starr stories are stories of activists who were guided by ideology and organizational affiliation and practical political work inspired by their views of the local context. To some degree, national leadership needed to be pressured to give support to local organizing efforts. When they did, grassroots work became more effective.

-Finally, this sketchy history (drawn from the work of others) and the stories told by March and Starr suggest that PWOC and UPWA organizing began at the base, what might be called “bottom up organizing.” But, ferment at the base, in packing plants around the Midwest, the West, the South, and the East, led national movements, the CPUSA and the CIO in the late 1930s, to join the struggles to support them. “Bottom up organizing” was conjoined with “top down organizing.” It may be that this is the lesson that still should resonate with activists today: organize where we can because of local history and context and network with national campaigns and organizations to make the local work more effective.

[i] Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973 (International Publishers, 1976).
[ii] Speech by Robert Baker, presented to the Central Labor Union of Brooklyn, January 1902.
[iii] Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics (Ann Arbor; University of Michigan Press, 1997).

*This article draws upon prior publications on the Packinghouse Workers including :
Harry Targ “Class and Race in the USA Labor Movement: The Case of the Packinghouse Workers” in Greg Moses ed. Liberation between Selves, Sexualities, and War, Radical Philosophy Association, Vol 3. 2006, 33-45.

Harry Targ“Vicky Starr dies at 93: Socialist, labor organizer, feminist, film star,” in The Rag Blog, January 13, 2010 (an electronic blog).

In addition the article uses the excellent interviews conducted by Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz of Packinghouse Workers in the 1980s and housed at the State of Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin. Much of the history of UPWA comes from Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904-54, University of Illinois Press, 1997 and Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White United and Fight!” A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90, University of Illinois Press, 1997.

REMEMBER THOSE WHO PROTESTED WARS TOO!

2011-05-30T16:25:00.001-04:00

Harry Targ

"In a society where it is normal for human beings to drop bombs on human targets, where it is normal to spend 50 percent of the individual's tax dollar on war, where it is normal...to have twelve times overkill capacity, Norman Morrison was not normal. He said, 'Let it stop.' "(a gravesite speech by John Roemer at the funeral of Norman Morrison quoted in Hendrickson, Paul. The Living and the Dead. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996).

On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison brought his daughter with him to the Pentagon. Outside the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Morrison set himself on fire to protest the escalating war in Vietnam. His daughter, Emily, somehow was passed to others and survived the flames. Morrison, however, died as he had lived, protesting the bombing of villages in South Vietnam, killing innocent men, women, and children.

I was part of an educational tour to Vietnam last March. We were taken to a powerful museum, known as the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. On the second floor an exhibit featured images of international solidarity with the Vietnamese people during the American war. Included there was a framed copy of an American newspaper account of Morrison’s self-immolation. Earlier, in Hue, we had seen an exhibit of the automobile used by a Buddhist Monk, Thích Quảng Đức, who killed himself in protest of the brutality of the Diem regime in South Vietnam. Presumably this act inspired Morrison’s tragic protest.

I had forgotten Morrison’s dramatic act, and the acts of several others who bravely sacrificed their bodies and lives to oppose the murderous war in Vietnam. Today, Memorial Day, 2011 I thought about Morrison, the exhibit at the Vietnamese Museum, and parallel acts of self-sacrifice.

First, on reflection, I am in awe of the courage and self-sacrifice of the acts of these brave and principled people. Yet, I wish they had not made the ultimate sacrifices they did and had put their courage and willingness to sacrifice to the long-term struggles of the peace movement to end war.

However, I believe we must “take back” Memorial Day from those who celebrate war, see sacrifice only from those who kill and die, and ignore the bravery of the men and women everywhere who fight to end war. We mourn those who were sent off to fight in ignoble wars in the name of the United States. Also we must declare Memorial Day as a day to remember all the Norman Morrison’s who have said “no” to war and empire.

MEMORIAL DAY: SALAMIS NOT BOMBS

2011-05-28T13:23:00.001-04:00

Harry Targ

Since I live in North Central Indiana I use every opportunity I can to import bagels from Chicago. In the past I have publically defined socialism as including “bagels for all” (particularly garlic or onion ones). Also I have written about the political economy of the bagel, arguing on good authority that during periods of intense class struggle workers have used day old bagels as weapons against the ruling class.

On a recent visit to a Chicago area bagel bakery, I came across a big sign in front that puzzled me. The sign said:

“Naborhood* Bagel and Delicatessen
Join Naborhood and
the USO Sending
A Salami to the Troops”

*Fictitious name

My first reaction was to laugh. This sign sounded pretty funny. But on reflection I began to ask myself what it meant. I began to think of different responses to the question and after sending a picture of the sign some of my friends offered their views on the subject as well.

One interpretation, the patriotic one, suggests that the delicatessen wishes to mobilize all its customers to support our troops in Afghanistan. From a delicatessen point of view, sending salamis is a way that it could support the troops. Salamis could reflect support for the troops alone or for the troops and the US military presence in Afghanistan.

Another, perhaps more neutral, interpretation is about selling salamis, using the patriotism in the old neighborhood to make a few extra bucks. Since the salamis they sell are really good it could entice troops and Afghan peoples to want more salamis. Before you know it, they could be hooked on them. Who knows bagels could be next. But this view, I think, is unfairly harsh in its evaluation of the motivations of the delicatessen; too economistic.

Finally, it can be argued, and frankly this was my first thought, that the delicatessen saw the US war in Afghanistan as a mistake that had to be ended as soon as possible. The salami, from this perspective, was a metaphor for a “dud,” a smelly, greasy, and heavy food that can lead to ulcers or heartburn. The ten year war in Afghanistan therefore was a colossal heartburn in the body politic. (One of my friends wrote that Bush and Obama already had sent Afghanistan the salami).

This intellectual puzzle, I realized, reflects the various ways in which the sign could be interpreted. Perhaps the delicatessen owners wanted to create a mental construct that could be appreciated by every side of the issue.

That is classic American politics. I bet the Democrats and Republicans who are debating resolutions on the war in Afghanistan in Congress right now would love to come up with a metaphor like this. Maybe Congress should pass an appropriations bill HR 111: The US/Afghanistan Military Nourishment and Rehabilitation Act or the Send Salamis to Afghanistan Act.

This Memorial Day, as we reflect on the pain and suffering that our wars have caused, perhaps we would all agree that sending salamis overseas is preferable to sending drones and bombs.

MORE ON IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY:THE EDUCATION SYSTEM

2011-05-19T10:12:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

I have been thinking a lot about “ideological hegemony;” how and why we think about the political world in the ways we do. I do so not to add another layer of theory to an already complex set of arguments about economics and politics. Nor am I interested in immobilizing political activists. Rather, I think progressives need to think about how to challenge the ideas that most of us are supposed to accept and believe.

Of course, the primary public institutions that transmit ideas and ways of thinking to people, from the start to the end of their educational careers, are schools. Our friends on the Right know how important it is to shape schools at all levels. Early in this century I remember hearing Rush Limbaugh say on one of his radio programs that “the only institutions we do not yet control are the schools”

With this as a goal, just the other day we read stories about Koch brothers’ money financing faculty positions at Florida State University in economics (presumably Marxist or structural economists need not apply). Just a week earlier a story broke about rightwing efforts to cut and splice public recordings of lectures in a labor studies class at the University of Missouri to leave the impression that the instructors are advocates for labor violence. Using the methods of vilification and distortions that worked successfully against green jobs advocate Van Jones, community action group ACORN, and Shirley Sherrod, an African American employee of the Department of Agriculture, attacks on education are growing. The use of more sophisticated technologies than in the days of McCarthy or David Horowitz’s print crusades against “dangerous professors” are becoming common.

In addition to smear campaigns and using money to shape hiring practices at universities, access to varieties of knowledge remains very much constrained by institutional and political pressures, from kindergarten through high school and college. For example, we can talk about two subject areas, militarism and economic orthodoxy. Both subjects were prominently featured at an elementary school, Mayflower Mill Elementary School in Lafayette, Indiana.

As the local newspaper, the Journal & Courier reported approvingly on May 12, 2011:

“When Mayflower Mill Elementary students were told they would be able to hear the approaching helicopter that would land behind the school before they saw it, their ears perked up.” Although the noise they first heard was only a delivery truck, soon a Bell UH-1H Huey helicopter which was used in Vietnam, and piloted by a group of veterans, arrived. The pilots were part of an organization committed to maintaining a positive public image of the helicopter.

The helicopter and its veteran pilots spent the day at the elementary school, called by the school “Operation American Pride,”

“After Wednesday’s landing, students broke into groups…..including lessons on flag etiquette and the life of the soldier.” Kids got to go in the helicopter, sit behind a Humvee, and a military truck. The whole day was a celebration of the military, military values, super-patriotism. One student referred to experiencing the helicopter as “cool” and “exhilarating.”

Organizing the day’s activities took combined efforts of members of military families, community donations, support from the Army National Guard and members of Purdue University’s ROTC. Of course, the activities required the full cooperation of teachers, the principal, and members of the school board.

I wonder what would have happened if a parent or brave teacher had proposed that “Operation American Pride” include an historical discussion of the millions of Vietnamese people who died in the U.S. war in that country; or perhaps, if course material include reference to the 57,000 American soldiers who died in the war or the lingering effects of Agent Orange on subsequent generations of Vietnamese and U.S. veterans.

In addition the J & C reported on May 16, that fourth and fifth graders at the same school recently completed a class project simulating commerce and manufacturing. Students designed and sold products to their school mates (and the money earned went to recognized charities such as the American Heart Association and the local fire department). Kids produced “slime,” decorated pencils, and chocolate coated plastic spoons. Students designed their products, shopped for supplies, and produced and sold them. The teacher, it was reported, has done a similar project every year because she said about students that “they need to understand finance.”

The newspaper reported that the project was supported by long-time economics education lobbyist and think tank, the Indiana Center for Economic Education. An ICEE spokesperson, who offered a program that the teacher had taken years ago, spoke about the lessons kids learned: “The basics of operating their own business, the fact you’ve got to produce a product customers want and counter the cost of resources you need.” The spokesperson claimed the exercises such as at Mayflower Mill highlight real issues which sometimes get lost in teaching more dominant subjects.

I wonder if students learned anything about the historic role of organized labor in the state, high unemployment in Indiana, growing economic inequality, the forty year deindustrialization of the state economy, and the differences in economic opportunity between African Americans, other minorities, and whites, and between men and women.

Almost accidentally, I accessed stories about political struggles from 2004 until today at my old high school, Senn High School, in Chicago. It seems that the high school which over forty years ago was white and middle class was now populated by young people from working class and poor African American, Latino, and immigrant families.

By the new century it was experiencing problems in reference to academics and social order. The authorities, the City alderwoman, the head of the Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan, Mayor Daley, and the military came up with a “great” idea. They created in 2005, over the objections of students, teachers, and community activists, the Hyman Rickover Naval Academy which occupies a large physical space in the high school and has enrolled at least 25 per cent of the student population.

Meanwhile programs to teach English as a second language and advanced placement courses for college preparation were reduced. The teaching staff in the non-military portion of Senn High School was cut by 33 per cent. CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators) continues to challenge the militarization of the Chicago school system.

In our communities we need to work in solidarity with those immediately involved in educational institutions. Where issues of militarism and economic orthodoxy shape school curricula our voices need to be heard. Our political agenda, in sum, needs to address as best our resources allow what we learn, how we learn it, and who controls the institutions that shape our thinking and the thinking of young people.

CHALLENGING IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY: TAKING ON THE MEDIA

2011-05-13T15:23:00.001-04:00

Harry Targ

The media and political, economic, educational, religious, and entertainment institutions shape our consciousness. People are told, inspired, coerced, and manipulated to think in certain ways, usually ways that support the economic and political interests of the rich and powerful.

Sometimes theoretical arguments about “ideological hegemony” are too abstract or too immobilizing. However, specific efforts at thought control at the community level can be understood and identified. And campaigns to challenge it are feasible, as many examples in cities and towns illustrate.

For example, I live in a Lafayette/West Lafayette, Indiana, twin cities with about 100,000 permanent residents. The greater metropolitan area, like most small and big communities, is “served” by one newspaper, the Journal & Courier. The J & C has a circulation of about 33,000 and is owned by the Gannett Corporation. While its editorial board changes from time to time the general tone and framing of news in the paper is conservative. From time to time stories appear about trade union events and occasionally stories are published which are critical of the major employer in the area, Purdue University. But for the most part the J & C serves as a booster for conservative politics and values, highlighting patriotism, businesses, religion, sports, personalities, and local crime over serious political issues in the community, the state, or the nation. The interests and perspectives of working people are almost never reflected in its pages.

To illustrate we can take a look at one issue, Saturday, May 7, 2011. That day the paper had four sections: news and views; local stories; sports and business; and entertainment. The first section consisted of nine stories, four of them local in content. Page one, with a photo of an American flag in technicolor and a helicopter in the background, featured the honoring of seven medal of honor winners from American wars such as Vietnam who were flown into Lafayette to dedicate the new “Medal of Honor Bridge” in the county. They arrived by Huey helicopter landing at the Faith Baptist Church. “As the recipients carefully exited the helicopter, they mingled with the children and other grateful spectators.” The second story, with a picture, was of a resident of Monticello, Indiana, 20 miles away, who admitted to a murder. Both these stories jumped to inside pages.

Page three, called “Nation & World,” featured a few longer stories and “In Brief” two paragraph accounts of events going on around the world. The two biggest stories on this page reported on Al Qaida’s warning of revenge and the special role of stealth helicopters in the raid on bin Laden’s residence. Page four was a full-page ad for an auto dealership and five was the “Opinions” page. The J & C does publish letters to the editor, though edited, and on Saturdays’ statements by local residents called “My Life, My Story.” This time the question two residents were asked to address was “If you could live forever, would you? Why?” One respondent said she would live for ever in heaven “as all Christians have been promised eternal life in John 3:16.”

The editorials often endorse conservative politics. On this Saturday it praised a former executive of a local Eli Lilly pharmaceutical laboratory that was going to be closed. He saved the firm from closing, and with it 700 jobs, by finding a German purchaser.

On the back page of the first section were three stories and a large segment of the story of medal of honor winners, helicopters, and the new bridge continued from page one. One of the stories, in my view buried, was about President Obama’s visit to Indianapolis, just 60 miles away. Obama visited Allison Transmission’s Plant No.7 which had received “a heavy flow of federal cash for the President’s vehicle of choice, a hybrid that runs on electricity and less gasoline.” The article cited the President’s claim that in plants like these the American economy would be rebuilding and new jobs would be created. A smaller story just under the one about the President’s visit was about Governor Mitch Daniel’s welcoming of the President. It said that this was President Obama’s fifth visit to the state and only the first time the Governor welcomed him.

Since the paper I am describing was a Saturday edition it included the glossy magazine insert “US Weekend” magazine. The special highlighted story, front cover and all, was on “Our Warrior Moms.” Of course inside the magazine were such features as “Who’s Hot in Hollywood,” and “Birthday Buzz.” (I found out I am just a bit older than half the distance in age between Billy Joel and Don Rickles).

While the J & C distributes 33,000 of their papers with enormous resources from Gannett and lots of large local advertisers, a new monthly newspaper, Lafayette Independent, has almost completed its first year of publication, based on the hard work of about 20 progressives. LI prints from 2,000 to 3,000 copies, is produced by a volunteer editorial committee, draws upon local and internet writers, and is distributed by a network of peace and justice activists, progressive Democrats, and others. It replaced another alternative monthly newspaper, The Community Times, which had a ten-year career.

The May issue of LI is dense with copy, perhaps too dense. It is a 12- page paper. The front page included a story about a food drive organized by union letter carriers and an account of the desperate need for prison reform in Indiana. Interior pages had stories on such subjects as on Workers Memorial Day, the Midwest Peace and Justice Summit held in Indianapolis, costs of the war in Iraq and what that has meant for Hoosiers, the threat to public education in Indiana, the consequences to reproductive health due to elimination of funding for Planned Parenthood in the state, and the need to end reliance on nuclear power. In addition, there was an interesting article on the rich jazz scene in the community.

Ads are inexpensive and draw upon the labor council, crafts persons, community organizations, and local businesses. Each issue has a detailed calendar of events, particularly those sponsored by local progressive groups.

Thinking seriously about local progressive responses to ideological hegemony and its print media expression some ideas come to mind:

1. Progressives need to rigorously define what that hegemony is. What kinds of information, media frames, and ideologies are being distributed through the dominant news outlets? What are the priorities given to information: through stories, story placement in the papers, photos used, column inches of stories with different emphases AND what items never find their way into news print?

2. Who pays for the news papers? Who are the local advertisers? Can they be influenced to withdraw their vital financial support from newspapers that do not represent what citizens need and want to know? Can they be prevailed upon to support alternatives?

3. Who are the 33,000 subscribers to the J & C? Are they avid readers of the news coverage or primarily people checking out community calendars, comics, crossword puzzles, and obituaries? Can alternative papers address these interests as well? Have questions ever been posed to the 33,000 about whether they think the newspaper in town really meets their needs.

4. Can we create alternative media that appeal to, draw upon, and fulfill the needs of the vast majority of peoples living in our communities: workers, women, minorities, and youth?

5. As we discuss strategies for change, should we be thinking about alternative newspapers, radio stations, websites, and/or other venues for public communication of our ideas in our communities? Should we invite these potential consumers of progressive media to work for it, write its stories, and pay for its production? And is organizing around a progressive media project at the local level a good way to build networks of activists?

WE NEED TO CHALLENGE HOW MOST PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THE WORLD

2011-05-04T11:28:00.001-04:00

Harry Targ

I read about the dangers of federal deficit, the connection between markets and democracy, capitalist institutions and human well-being, insurance companies and quality health care, and the historic victories for peace and justice resulting from killing Osama bin Laden, and the son and grandchildren of Muammar Gaddafi.

I am reminded of Antonio Gramsci’s perceptive analysis about how people are ruled as much by what they learn to think and believe as by the use of force. Ideological hegemony refers to the idea systems that ruling classes construct to create willing and pliant citizens in political regimes that lack moral legitimacy or economic rationale.

I am also reminded of theorists from the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, particularly Herbert Marcuse, who wrote about how the fundamental contradictions in peoples’ lives-- capitalists versus workers and rule by the few versus the possibility of the rule by all-are transformed into unanimity of thinking among people whose interests should make them adversaries not collaborators. I thought that Marcuse’s postulate of a “one-dimensionality” in political thinking in the United States was exaggerated--lots of Americans, particularly the exploited and oppressed, identified far less with the United States in its war on the Vietnamese people than was believed. It was the lack of ideological homogeneity that exacerbated the campaigns of the ideological institutions-- media, education, and political process--to try to construct it.

Ken Kesey, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, used an interesting metaphor for society, a ward in an institution for the mentally ill ruled by a nurse who sought to dominate the patients through discipline, sedation, and the projection of the belief system that any independent thought was pathological. Somewhere in the novel Kesey refers to an ideological “fog machine.” The reader could almost feel how the patients of the mental ward experience the thick and blinding fog in the air hampering vision and even breath. Kesey gives the reader hope by describing the arrival of a new patient in the ward, Randle McMurphy, who sees through the fog machine and commits his life to helping his fellow inmates rebel against it. While he personally does not survive the struggle, some of the most docile of inmates escape, destroying the ideological hegemony of the system.

I am also reminded of the great Hoosier writer Kurt Vonnegut who describes an Indiana woman who roams through airplanes looking for Hoosiers. Vonnegut describes her quest as pursuit of a “false karass.” It is false because there is nothing about being a Hoosier that automatically leads to shared interests.

For years we have been sold an ideological package of lies. The recent rendition begins with 9/11. The world consists of large numbers of persons of color, especially Muslims, who want to kill us. We need to kill them first. Preemptive attack on those who we would expect to hate us is OK. International Law says so. U.S. diplomatic history says so.

Why should we be afraid? Why should we be prepared to kill? We must be vigilant because they hate our freedom. They want to destroy the natural evolution of societies from autocracies to market-based democracies. We must be fearful, vengeful, and ready to act for the benefit of the world.

Over the last four months, mass movements emerged projecting very different, even counter-hegemonic ideas about building a better world. Young people, workers, women, secularists, started going out in the streets in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain. They demanded democracy and economic justice. They began to mobilize in public spaces, such as schools, union halls, and mosques and churches. They communicated via cell phones and sent messages in shorthand sentences and (to me) incomprehensible letters. The sun and warmth of the Arab Spring blossomed.

In very different places economically, politically, and geographically, the bitter heartland of America, revolt was stirred up as well: Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan for starters. Workers, students, women, political progressives, health care advocates, educators began to stand up and say “no” to the steamrolling right-wing political machine, now not too different from the historic “centrist” consensus in U.S. politics. Like their comrades, the heartland radicals too haltingly began to suggest that another world is possible.

So by May Day, what an irony, the United States carried out an assassination mission and killed Osama bin Laden. The media had already begun to salivate over the killings of Gaddafi’s family members. And stories about the need for deficit reduction continue. For both Democrats and Republicans the problem is not capitalism, or neo-liberal economic policies. No for them the problem is government. The answer is compromise between a near draconian Obama plan and a right-wing proposal to eliminate most governmental programs, except for the military.

So the forces of ideological hegemony say we need to keep our guard up and be prepared to kill those who threaten us or who are claimed to be threats. Criminal justice systems and norms against violence are to be ignored. At home we must challenge the idea that government must serve the needs of the people.

We on the left must respond to the ideological crusade. While Randle McMurphy in the Kesey novel was a lone actor, progressives need to work together to challenge the fog machine. We need to convince our brothers and sisters that killing and capitalism are antithetical to human needs.

BUILDING A NEW SOCIETY AND LESSENING THE PAIN OF THE OLD

2011-04-27T19:54:00.001-04:00

Harry Targ

Many progressives grew up following the activities of Cuban revolutionaries as they battled and won the war against imperialism and the global capitalist system. We were drawn to the transcendent meaning of Che Guevara, advocate for the new “man,” defender of the proposition that human beings can be for more than themselves, and believer in the power of creating transformative institutions. Socialism was to be about empowerment, betterment, and the maximization of an individual’s creative potential in the context of solidarity in communities. What Che stood for we stood for: the replacement of greed, avarice, competition, violence, self-aggrandizement, and “human nature” with sharing, love, cooperation, peace, selflessness, and a new nature. In our hearts and minds capitalism stood in the way of creating a humane world. Most of us still believe in Che’s vision but we understand now that its achievement is fraught with struggle and requires patience.

A delegation of socialists recently returned from a study tour of Vietnam. Hosted by the Vietnam Women’s Union and sponsored by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), participants visited women’s shelters and a meeting hall, museums, workplaces, a university, ethnic communities near the Chinese border, large cities and small villages including Hanoi, Da Nang, Hue, Ho Chi Minh City, and Sa Pa. We saw a society in transition; expanding education, growing economic infrastructure, facilities for poor women, booming tourism, and increasing exports of agricultural and manufactured products. We also saw a burgeoning system of commercial and manufacturing capitalism.

The second day of our visit to Hanoi, our hosts booked cycle rides for us around the downtown area. We recoiled at the thought of older men peddling bicycles with overweight tourists on front seats. But most of us did not want to make a fuss and on reflection we decided that these men at least had work.

I began to think of Marx’s concept of “contradiction” as my driver pushed me through the busy streets of Hanoi past stores with names such as Gucci on them. Next to streets with the expensive Western stores were those with densely packed shops and sidewalks with street vendors. We learned that most of the vendors were women. Many came from rural areas, desperate to earn enough money to support their families in the countryside. Some lived 10 to a room when they were in town selling flowers, cooked food, crafts, or vegetables and fruits. The totality of the experience was of a cacophony of bicycles carrying passengers, elegant shops, street vendors, and thousands upon thousands of speeding motor bikes. Nothing seemed further from Che Guevara’s image of pristine socialism.

The fourth day of our visit we traveled by train and bus to an ethnic minorities region near the Chinese border. When we arrived at the town of Sa Pa we encountered aggressive bands of Hmong sales persons, mostly women and girls, who were trying to sell their wares to tourists. The Hmong women would not accept no or negative waves of arms or hands. They continued to pursue prospective customers until the latter escaped to newly-constructed hotels overlooking beautiful valleys and terraced rice paddies. Again, the image of the reality of commerce erased long-held mental pictures of socialism.

While capitalism seemed in the air to the superficial foreign observer, and particularly to the foreign observer steeped in the passion for building Che’s communism, the reality of Vietnam is more complicated. As our site visits reminded us, only 35 years ago a brutal war on the Vietnamese people ended. Three times more bombs were dropped on the country than all the bombs dropped during World War II. Vast stretches of the land, one-seventh of the rice paddies, were laid waste. Three to four million Vietnamese people, mostly non-combatants were killed in the American war between 1964 and 1975. And we saw the lingering impacts of the war as second and third generation victims survive who were directly or indirectly exposed to the 10 million gallons of Agent Orange. An estimated 4.8 million people were touched by the poisons dropped from the skies by American airplanes.

What often slips the minds of observers are the centuries of foreign invasion and conquest. These include the thousand year Chinese occupation of the country, the 100 year colonial control by the French, and the World War II presence of Japanese militarists. And all this preceded the American war which began in 1950 when President Harry Truman decided to fund the French effort to beat back Vietnamese anti-colonial forces.

Because of invasion, occupation, colonialism, massive bombing campaigns, and genocide against the country, the vitality of the people had been channeled toward the struggle for independence. Since the end of the American war (and after the short war with China in 1979) the Vietnamese had to redirect their energies, creativity and human resources to economic development in a global political economy not of their making. In the context of underdevelopment and poverty, the leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1986 adopted a set of development policies called “doi moi,” or renewal. These were to constitute what translations refer to as a socialist market economy. With government oversight foreign investments and limited domestic capitalism would be encouraged. Vietnamese party and government leaders decided that markets, investments, and profits were necessary to develop the country. So Vietnam created an economy open to foreign assembly plants, exports (especially rice), and tourism, In a global economy dominated by neo-liberal institutions and policies, the Vietnamese people felt they had no choice.

So foreign investments were encouraged, Vietnamese were allowed to participate in joint capitalist ventures, and peasants and workers could establish their own modest businesses. The significant negative byproducts of almost 25 years of doi moi are readily visible; foreign infusions of commercial images and products, inequalities among the Vietnamese people (particularly between urban and rural peoples who still represent 70 per cent of the population), and serious environmental problems.

However, and this to me is the bottom line, the basic living conditions of the Vietnamese people have markedly improved since the state adopted the socialist market economy. BBC and Financial Times journalist Bill Hayton, whose book,Vietnam Rising Dragon, 2010, was largely critical of Vietnam, reluctantly admitted that:

“Vietnam’s achievements in reducing poverty are impressive. In 1993, according to government figures, almost 60 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line. By 2004 that figure was down to 20 per cent. The country has met most of its Millennium Goals, the development targets set by the United Nations, early and escaped the ranks of the poorest countries to join the group of ‘middle income states.’ People’s living standards are soaring, their horizons are widening, and their ambitions are growing” (3-4).

Although many commentators emphasize the negative, it is important for sympathetic observers to remember the history that Vietnam has experienced, the contemporary context of the global political economy, and the fundamental obligation of the state, indeed every state, to participate fully in the economic and social uplift of the people. While socialists are very much aware of the danger of capitalist penetration, they also realize that prioritizing the needs of the people come first. Observing mass organizations, such as the Vietnam Women’s Union (see Harry Targ, “The Vietnamese Women’s Union: An Effective Mass Organization,” www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com) makes it clear that at this stage of Vietnam’s renewal, the doi moi policies do put the people first. And, it is the task of the Vietnamese people to maintain the socialist character of the development of Vietnamese society. International solidarity activists should follow the lead of our Vietnamese friends and give support as best we can.

THE VIETNAM WOMEN'S UNION: AN EFFECTIVE MASS ORGANIZATION

2011-04-17T22:40:00.004-04:00

Harry Targ

We arrived in time to be ushered into a meeting of a rural Vietnamese women’s club, just outside of Hue. Discussion among the 75 single women was animated, self-assured, and clearly engaged. Members listened to each other, respected what each had to say, and evidenced not one iota of shyness even though their discussion of women’s health, environmental, and other immediate issues was being observed by eight American guests and a Vietnam Women’s Union official from Hanoi.

We had already been to a briefing at the Center for Women and Development’s new building, and the Women’s Museum in Hanoi. We had visited Peace House, a shelter for Vietnamese women victimized by sexual trafficking, part of the CWD project to provide shelter, training, and advocacy for women victimized by domestic violence or sexual trafficking. All of these venues-- the CWD, the Women’s Museum, the rural single women’s club, the Peace House shelter project-- were part of the national activities of the Vietnam Women’s Union. The VWU was clearly well- organized at the center, clear of purpose and commitment, and connected to regional and local bodies of women throughout the country.

Our introduction to the VWU was part of a 14-day educational tour of Vietnam in March, 2011 organized by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) and hosted by the Vietnam Women’s Union. In addition to our request to receive information about the VWU, we expressed interest in briefings on the Vietnamese policy known as Doi Moi, or the social market economy, and the lingering long-term impacts on the Vietnamese people of the 10-year use of Agent Orange during the American war. These issues and more were covered on our travels, briefings, museum visits, and conversations with Vietnamese people. The focus of this essay is the VWU.

The Vietnam Women’s Union, one of six major mass organizations in the country, was founded in 1930 just before the Indochinese Communist Party. In socialist theory and practice, mass organizations are designed to mobilize major populations who require and are committed to social change in their societies. While their ideas and programs parallel those of local Communist parties, they are committed to meeting the needs of workers, women, youth, farmers, war veterans, and others whether they are members of political parties or not. Also effective mass organizations require both leadership and authentic and active participation from the grassroots.

As far as we could tell, the VWU is a model mass organization. It has levels of activity and participation at the national and provincial levels as well as in districts and small village communes. There are an estimated 13 million VWU members. As indicated in a VWU pamphlet: “Since its foundation, VWU has transformed itself fully into a women’s social-political and developmental organization, which is mandated to protect women’s legitimate rights and strive for gender equality.”

Levels of organization of the Vietnamese Women’s Union consist of a National Congress, a Central Executive Committee, a Presidium and provincial, district, and communal organizations. The VWU has 16 departments including communication and education, family and social affairs, international relations, ethnic and religious affairs, law and policy, and departments overseeing museums, a newspaper, and publishing. Our tour was organized by one of the departments, Peace Tours.

The VWU emphasizes organizational tasks ranging from supporting and building women’s skills and autonomy at the local level to greater political influence at the national level. The commitment to goals which were identified as critical for the recent period, 2007-2012, were reflected in what we saw. These included raising women’s consciousness, knowledge, and capacity, promoting gender equality at all levels of society, promoting economic development, building the VWU as a national organization, and building networks of relationships with progressive organizations around the world.

VWU short-term goals, identified in their literature seemed plausible based on our brief observation. These included targeting 70% of poor women for support “… to reduce poverty and eliminate hunger,” and “supporting more than 90% of female-headed poor households, with the goal of 40 to 50% escaping from poverty.”

One of the VWU departments, the Center for Women and Development, concentrates particularly on giving support to victims and overcoming violence and sexual trafficking of women. Peace House, with aid from overseas NGOs, was opened in March, 2007, to construct a model shelter for abused Vietnamese women. A CWD report indicated that “The Peace House has supported women and children who suffered from domestic violence from all over the country. The numbers of women and children receiving the services of the Peace House are increasing and after leaving the Peace House they are new persons, more independent and able to protect themselves and their children.”

Reflecting on guided tours such as the CCDS visit to Vietnam can have profound long-term impacts on participants, even though it is recognized that such tours are designed to show host successes while minimizing problems or organizational deficits. However, among the indisputable strengths of the VWU are the following:

1.VWU is truly a mass organization in the best sense of that term. It carries out policies representing the interests of a large percentage of women in Vietnamese society at all levels--from the rural commune to the nation.

2.A fundamental component of all VWU work is the belief that there is dignity in each member. Each Vietnamese woman has the right to fulfill her life to the full limit of societal resources and to be an active agent in that fulfillment.

3.Government, party, and mass organization, all have as their uppermost obligation serving the people. This means that these entities continue to struggle to overcome class exploitation, gender oppression, and racial and ethnic discrimination.

Several of the tour participants only partially in jest wondered if progressives in the United States could hire Vietnam Women’s Union organizers to help us reorder institutions and policies in the United States.

Vietnam Women's Union website: http://hoilhpn.org.vn

UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY AND THE VIETNAM WAR:PART III

2011-04-09T10:55:00.002-04:00

From: Harry R. Targ,
Strategy of an Empire in Decline: Cold War II MEP Publications, Minneapolis, 1986, 167-172.

(Eight political activists recently returned from a two-week educational tour of Vietnam, hosted by the Vietnam Women’s Union, and sponsored by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). Every tour participant was touched by the seeming resilience of the Vietnamese people and their capacity for mobilizing talents and resources to reconstruct their country after the brutal American war.

As the essay below suggests, the last phase of the war was characterized by brutal air attacks on rural and urban populations all across the country, particularly during the period of the “Christmas bombing” in 1972. That in the end was President Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam.

What we saw on our tour was evidence of the successful policies adopted by the Vietnamese people to withstand the brutality of the war and the collective commitments since the war to rebuild and modernize their country. While much remains to be done and progressive people can debate aspects of the social market economic project that is underway, the skill, motivation, and passion evidenced by the government, the party, and mass organizations as they work toward constructing a better future for the Vietnamese people cannot be denied).

U.S. Brutality and the End of the Vietnam War

During the 1968 presidential campaign, candidate Nixon declared that he had a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam. This secret plan had to be one in which the United States pursued victory in Southeast Asia and, at the same time, reduced the levels of U.S. blood and resources expended on the war. Nixon policy during the next four years involved just such a scheme: pursuit of victory and withdrawal at the same time. The ultimate failure of this duplicitous policy is attributable to the courageous struggle of the Vietnamese and the significant resistance from the antiwar movement at home.

In June, 1969, President Nixon met with his South Vietnamese counterpart, President Nguyen Van Thieu, on Midway Island. At this meeting the policy called "Vietnamization," an application of the "Nixon Doctrine," was unveiled. The United States would withdraw all its ground troops from South Vietnam over the next four years. This would undercut the primary reason for opposition to the war at home. The United States would substitute a massive, unrestrained bombing campaign for the withdrawn troops. Almost all the target restrictions in the South and North would be lifted. A secret bombing campaign against North Vietnamese supply routes would ensue, with bombings in neutral Cambodia as well as the continuation of secret bombing in Laos. At the meeting, Nixon and Thieu planned for the withdrawal of 85,000 of the 550,000 U.S. troops by September, 1969. This new Vietnam policy illustrated what Nixon meant by giving assistance to allies while they carried the major burden of regional conflicts. The South Vietnamese army would shed its blood while the United States provided the materiel and the air power to defeat the enemy.

The announcement of some of the Nixon plan, namely, the proposed troop withdrawals, did not stifle the opposition to the war in Congress or in the streets. A Vietnam Moratorium Day was held all across the country in October, with a full and immediate pullout emphasized as the central demand. Two hundred and fifty thousand antiwar activists had a "March Against Death" in Washington on November 15, 1969. During this time news of the brutal U.S. massacre of five hundred people at My Lai reached the public.

In March, 1970, the neutralist regime of Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia was overthrown by the right-wing general Lon Nol, no doubt supported by the United States. Although Sihanouk had tried desperately for several years to keep his country out of the war, the North Vietnamese did have bases in Cambodia, and the United States had been bombing and raiding areas in which the bases were thought to be located. Sihanouk's opposition to the U.S. incursions and his cordial relationship with the Chinese were an annoyance to the United States.

On April 30, 1970, one month after the coup in Cambodia, Nixon announced that a force of South Vietnamese and 16,000 U.S. troops had invaded Cambodia to destroy the Vietnamese bases. This escalation of the war into another country was defended as a vehicle to accelerate the U.S. withdrawal. The reaction on college campuses in the United States was unprecedented. Campuses all over the country were closed down, with huge demonstrations occurring at many more. At two such campuses, Jackson State University in Mississippi and Kent State University in Ohio, student activists were shot--by police authorities in the former case and by the Ohio National Guard in the latter. These shootings were seen as part of a national policy encouraged by the Nixon administration to kill or jail dissidents of all kinds under the call for "law and order." Nixon's attorney general had already instituted a policy of extermination of members of the Black Panther party in 1969, and the shootings on privileged campuses suggested an escalation of repression of dissent, even middle-class dissent.

Even members of the U.S. Senate were outraged by the invasion of Cambodia. They passed the so-called Church-Cooper amendment, which ended funds for making war in Cambodia after July 1, 1970. The Senate also repealed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Sixty percent of the U.S. public, according to opinion polls, favored withdrawal from Vietnam as well.

After the withdrawal of the invading army, the Nixon administration claimed that the assault had been a great success. What was not said was that the presumed North Vietnamese command headquarters, believed to be in Cambodia, had never been located. The impact of the Cambodian coup and the invasion following it was criminal, since the fabric of another Indochinese society had been destroyed. By 1975, 700,000 Cambodians had died as a result of the invasion and the civil war that resulted from the coup. Two hundred and fifty thousand tons of bombs had been dropped on Cambodia. One-half of the population was. homeless by 1975. By the time the forces of Pol Pot had gained control of the country, after his victory over Lon Nol in 1975, the land had been devastated. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge then engaged in policies that led to the deaths of more than a million people. They supported border attacks on Vietnam. Finally, in December, 1978, Vietnam sent troops into Cambodia, now called Kampuchea, to put an end to the murderous Pol Pot regime. The tragedies experienced by Cambodians since 1970 have to be seen as linked to the destruction of that society by U.S. military power from 1969 to 1975.

In February, 1971, South Vietnamese troops invaded Laos to capture the Ho Chi Minh trail, the major supply route from North to South. The United States provided air support for the operation. The invasion was a military disaster, as one-half the South Vietnamese troops were killed. Morale in the South Vietnamese army declined markedly.

Elsewhere, significant moves were being taken by the Nixon administration. Along with the "stick" of repression of dissent at home (surveillance, arrests, killings, infiltration of radical groups to provoke irresponsible actions, etc.), the "carrot" was applied as well-the draft laws were changed. First, a lottery system made some young men exempt from military service, through the luck of the draw. Second, there was movement toward an all-volunteer army. Changes in the draft laws reduced the intensity of commitment among many antiwar activists. These changes were also supposed to reduce the level of dissent, which had reached dramatic proportions, within the military itself. Blacks and poor whites, who primarily populate the military, were deserting, disobeying orders, refusing to fight, and escaping the brutality of the battlefield through the use of drugs.

The progressive withdrawal of U.S. troops continued as the United States supplied the South Vietnamese with new weapons, more training, and supported the return of South Vietnamese officials to the villages. All of this failed. The NLF and their sympathizers continued the struggle with even greater determination, while conscripted South Vietnamese soldiers were less than enthusiastic about their fate. Corruption, brutality, and repression continued to characterize the Thieu regime.

The negotiating process between the North Vietnamese and the United States, which began formally in January, 1969, continued with little result. The United States called for a cease-fire in place and a withdrawal of all "foreign" troops, while the North Vietnamese denied that they had troops in the South and refused to accept a cease-fire that would benefit the Thieu regime to the detriment of the mass of the Vietnamese people, who opposed this regime.

Kissinger and the North Vietnamese began secret negotiations in 1971. Nixon publicized these talks in January, 1972, to further forestall the critics of his policy. The North Vietnamese, for their part, resented this violation of secret diplomacy, and hostilities on the battlefield increased. On March 30, 1972, seven days after the United States indefinitely suspended the peace talks in Paris, the North Vietnamese and the NLF launched a new offensive. The United States responded on May 8, 1972, with massive bombing of the North and the mining of the international harbor at Haiphong. This dangerous escalation of the war-Soviet supply ships docked at Haiphong-was carried out just before Nixon was scheduled to go to Moscow.

Talks were held in Paris periodically in the summer and fall of 1972, while the bombing in North and South continued. On October 26, 1972, just before the presidential elections, Kissinger announced that "peace is at hand" in Vietnam. Apparently Kissinger and his counterparts had reached some agreements on a cease-fire. President Thieu, however, raised many objections to the accords, and when Kissinger brought these back to Paris, the North Vietnamese countered with their own objections. Peace was not at hand, but Nixon won a major electoral victory against antiwar candidate Senator George McGovern twelve days after the Kissinger claim.

During November and December the negotiations had been brought near completion but were stalled because of the intransigence of Thieu (supported by Kissinger); then the Nixon administration began the saturation bombing of Hanoi and the rest of North Vietnam on December 18. This so-called Christmas bombing lasted until December 30. Nathan and Oliver claim this bombing was designed to force the North to sign a cease-fire and to encourage the support of a recalcitrant President Thieu from South Vietnam, who had not been adequately consulted during the negotiation process. Therefore, the barbarity of Nixon and Kissinger's decisions until the very end was based on backing a dictatorial regime that never had any support among the Vietnamese working people. "Thieu, now satisfied that the North had been seriously weakened and mollified by the U.S. show of force, finally went along, and the negotiations were concluded on January 27, 1973" (Nathan and Oliver 389).

From the cease-fire of January, 1973, to the spring of 1975, the NLF and South Vietnamese armies jockeyed for military advantage. For example, within three months of the Paris accords the South Vietnamese army launched many operations against areas held by the Provisional Government of the opposition (PRG). Finally, in 1975, the PRG capture of two strategic district towns initiated a fifty-five day battle that led to the final defeat of the South Vietnamese army/clients of the United States (Burchett 1977).

The Pol Pot forces were victorious in Kampuchea, followed by Communist-led forces in Laos. President Ford, who had replaced Nixon after the Watergate scandal, called for military support for the South Vietnamese army in early 1975, but Congress would not go along. After a thirty-year struggle in Vietnam, years of civil war in Laos, and five years of war and civil war in Kampuchea, the workers and peasants of Indochina were victorious against imperialism. The respite from violence was brief, however, and the horrendous impact of war on society and environment was to persist. Unfortunately, conflicts indigenous to Southeast Asia and infused by imperialism's refusal to leave the people of the area alone would involve different struggles after 1975.

The failed U.S. effort to win the imperialist war in Southeast Asia, or, as some say, the effort to postpone losing the war, had such horrendous consequences for the local population that genocide is the best label to describe the twenty-five year policy of the United States. As a result of the war, 1.3 million Vietnamese civilians were killed, three million were wounded. Huge areas of fertile land were made waste and rubble. Three times the amount of bombs dropped in World War I1 were dropped on the Vietnamese. The U.S. suffered from the grotesque war as well: 56,000 U.S. soldiers died during the course of the war and 303,600 were wounded. The cost of the war, which in no small way was reflected in poverty and immiseration at home, was $155 billion from 1955 to 1974 (De Conde 380). The facts about this mass murder and waste of human resources would not be forgotten by progressive peoples around the world, who would work all the harder to destroy the structure of imperialism that necessitates such policies.

UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY AND THE VIETNAM WAR: PART II

2011-04-03T23:04:00.002-04:00

Harry R. Targ Strategy of an Empire in Decline: Cold War II MEP Publications, Minneapolis, 1986, 150-157.

(I was one of eight members of a socialist delegation to Vietnam in March, 2011. We visited the tunnel system used by the Vietnamese to escape U.S. military action and the “peace village” where victims of agent orange are cared for. Our travels took us to Sa Pa in the North, Hanoi, Da Nang, Hue,’ and Ho Chi Minh City. We saw budding new societies, energetic young people, development projects everywhere, carefully documented celebrations of the Vietnamese culture of resistance and painful remembrances of the American war in Vietnam. The history below is a reminder of that war in the 1960s.)

The Vietnam War Escalates

The U.S. concern for the Third World in the 1960s is most brutally exemplified in its growing involvement in the Vietnam War. During the Eisenhower years the United States replaced the French as the predominant colonial power in South Vietnam. What later became referred to as "America's commitment" resulted from the U.S. statement of respect for the Geneva Accords, the Eisenhower promise to aid Diem, the commitment to the security of Indochina in the SEATO treaty, and the full-scale military assistance received by Diem from 1955.

Kennedy acknowledged the escalating civil war in South Vietnam shortly upon taking office. Vice-President Johnson was sent to South Vietnam in May, 1961, to assess the progress of the counter guerrilla war there. He recommended that the United States continue its support to the Diem regime: “The basic question in South East Asia is here. We must decide whether to help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a 'Fortress America' concept. More important, we would say to the world in this case that we don't live up to treaties and don't stand by our friends” (Sheehan 129).

The Kennedy administration added four hundred Special Forces troops to the contingent in South Vietnam and one hundred civilian advisors to aid in setting up the "strategic hamlet" program, designed to move peasant villagers away from areas influenced by NLF forces. In the fall of 1961 General Maxwell Taylor, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Walt Rostow were sent to South Vietnam to study the situation. They returned recommending the introduction of U.S. ground troops, advice that was endorsed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Rusk and McNamara argued that the fall of South Vietnam would be a prelude to the fall of the rest of Southeast Asia and Indonesia. A loss in Vietnam would also create a right-wing backlash within the United States, much like the backlash that followed the "fall of China."

With these recommendations, the Kennedy administration began a gradual escalation of direct U. S. involvement in the South Vietnamese civil war. U.S. troop strength went from several hundred to ten thousand by 1963. Meanwhile, the stability of the Diem government was declining. The strategic hamlet program was generating recruits for the NLF, since it was disrupting life in the countryside. Casualties among the South Vietnamese army and government officials grew. Opposition from Buddhists and students to Diem's harsh rule was becoming more intense.

On May 8, 1963, the army shot into a nonviolent Buddhist demonstration. Buddhists later committed suicide in public protest against the Diem regime. In August, 1963, the South Vietnamese police and military invaded Buddhist pagodas and schools and arrested many dissidents. After a visit to Vietnam in September, 1963, McNamara and Taylor predicted that the United States would be able to end its involvement in the country by 1965. The head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, General Harkins, predicted in November, 1963, that victory was just months away. While these optimistic assessments were being made, as they were to be made throughout the war, opposition to Diem within the ruling clique itself was growing. South Vietnamese generals were ready to oust Diem. U.S. officials in South Vietnam agreed in their evaluations of Diem's chances to maintain control of the country. Some U. S. officials, like former Ambassador Frederick Nolting, were personal friends of Diem and remained committed to him, while others, such as the then-acting ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, and members of the CIA were opposed.

Finally, on November 1, 1963, with the support of Lodge and the CIA, Diem was overthrown by the South Vietnamese military, and one of the generals assumed office. This was to be the first of eleven governments during the remainder of South Vietnamese history. John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

At the time of his death, there were fifteen thousand U.S. troops in South Vietnam, a dramatic increase from the Eisenhower commitment but a small amount compared with what was to follow shortly. Troop commitments during the Kennedy administration were small, but Kennedy and his advisors established the military infrastructure, mobilized the academic expertise, and communicated an official rationale for escalating the U.S. struggle against the Third World. Military intervention was coupled with policies designed to encourage "economic development." The impression Kennedy wished to leave with the world was that the interests of the United States and the Third World were in fact identical. The Vietnamese people were to learn just the opposite.

President Johnson's Confrontation with the Vietnamese People

Shortly after Kennedy's death, Secretary of Defense McNamara reported to the new president, Lyndon Johnson, on South Vietnam. McNamara said the situation was bad, that if the United States did not act a new Communist or neutral government would be in power in South Vietnam within three months. The government that replaced Diem was indecisive, and the NLF was gaining support in the countryside. The secretary of defense counseled that the United States should keep a close watch on Southeast Asia and be prepared to act.

From December, 1963, until the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August, 1964, the Johnson administration had been supporting secret military operations in South Vietnam and against the North, and at the same time was planning broader U.S. involvement in the war. U.S.-supported raids and attacks on the North were carried out in the spring of 1964, air strikes were made against targets in Laos, and destroyer patrols were maintained in the Gulf of Tonkin in North Vietnamese waters. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had proposed escalation of the war and extensive bombing in January, 1964. William Bundy of the State Department was preparing a scenario for U.S. escalation in May, 1964, a scenario that would include requesting a resolution of support for administration action by Congress. Meanwhile, members of the administration were making public statements warning of the need for greater U. S. involvement and periodically claiming that U. S. participation in the Southeast Asian war could end within two years.

President Johnson, planning for his own campaign for election against right-wing Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, gave no public clues to the conclusions being reached by his advisors concerning the U.S. role in Vietnam. While Johnson was preparing for brutal war in Vietnam, U.S. liberals were supporting him as the "peace candidate." The Gulf of Tonkin incident provided the immediate pretext for implementing the scenario of escalation. Two U.S. ships were purportedly attacked by North Vietnamese boats on August 2 and 4, 1964, in the Gulf of Tonkin. As a result of the "attack" the United States sent fighter-bombers to counterattack North Vietnam. The president then brought a resolution to Congress asking for authority to do what he deemed necessary in support of the "independence and territorial integrity" of South Vietnam and Laos.

What does seem clear is that the Johnson administration had been planning escalation in support of the South Vietnamese government in early 1964, and that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was the vehicle used to generate congressional and public support for the actions already planned. Tom Wicker reported an unnamed official as saying: "The Tonkin resolution was then brought out of Johnson's pocket to be used as the basis for legitimizing the planned expansion of the war-all that had been needed was an event to set things in motion" (224-25). The Gulf of Tonkin incident, then, could have been a third "staged" event in the critical junctures of U. S. foreign-policy history: the exploitation of the Greek civil war in February, 1947, being the first and of the North Korean "invasion" of South Korea being the second. Staged or not, all three events provided opportunities for marshaling public support for escalating U.S. imperial policies.

After the election of the "peace" candidate in November, the Johnson administration continued its planning for escalated war to defend the faltering South Vietnamese government and army. An NLF attack on a U.S. military installation at Pleiku in February, 1965, created the rationale for beginning the bombing of North Vietnam that would continue unabated for three years. The Pentagon Papers suggest that the bombing of North Vietnam had been decided on in September, 1964, when presidential candidate Johnson was opposing Goldwater's bombing proposals. The bombing campaign, code-named Operation Rolling Thunder, was designed to force the North Vietnamese to sue for peace and hence pressure its allies in the South to stop fighting. The effect of the bombing was just the opposite. North Vietnamese resolve to support the NLF increased, the Soviet Union continued material support of the North, and the efforts of the NLF in the South were increasingly successful in winning popular support. Then Johnson ordered U.S. troops into offensive action against the NLF and sent twenty thousand more combat troops to South Vietnam, while trying to restrict public access to information about this new commitment. In a significant speech at Johns Hopkins University, the president called for a major Marshall-Plan effort to rebuild all of Southeast Asia, and, at the same time, likened the North Vietnamese to the Nazis in the 1930s. If the United States acted like the Europeans after Munich, then all of Southeast Asia would fall to this new form of totalitarianism. Johnson also raised what may be called the "puppet" theory of aggression in Southeast Asia: the NLF, still largely indigenous South Vietnamese, was a puppet of the North, which, in turn, was a puppet of the Chinese Communists and ultimately of the Soviet Union.

In June, 1965, because of the deteriorating situation in the South, General Westmoreland, head of U.S. forces in Indochina, requested forty-four battalions of troops. By July, Johnson had agreed to the Westmoreland request, and by year's end there were 184,314 U.S. soldiers engaged in ground combat in South Vietnam. The pattern of requests for more men, coupled with promises of victory, was to continue for three years as death and destruction were unleashed on Vietnamese society. By this time opposition to the U.S. war effort had begun to grow. A largely student-based antiwar movement began demonstrations, first on campuses and later in the streets. Dissent began to appear from more "legitimate" sources as well. Senator J. William Fulbright and other members of his Senate Foreign Relations Committee held public and televised hearings on the war and in the process attacked the following official administration arguments: that the United States had a moral commitment to support the South Vietnamese government, that the war was really "aggression from the North" rather than a civil-war situation, that the United States had to crush this "war of national liberation" so that Communists would learn the lesson that such wars never work, and that U.S. prestige was at stake. Despite the growing movement against the war, U.S. escalation continued.

In 1966 more bombings were ordered and troops sent. The latest of several generals heading the South Vietnamese government, Nguyen Cao Ky, had taken power in 1965 after several coups. His statement of admiration for Hitler was broadly reported in the mass media, since it had become impossible any longer for the media to portray the United States as preserving democracy.

In 1967 the level of bombardment was again raised, from sixty to eight hundred raids per month. Johnson did not support proposals by the military to increase troop strength to 670,000, to end bombing target limits, invade Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, and attack the harbor of Haiphong in the North. Even with the "constraints" placed on the military, however, large areas of South Vietnam had been declared "free fire zones," one-third to one-half of the people of Southeast Asia had become refugees, 100,000,000 pounds of herbicide were dropped on South Vietnam between 1961 and 1971, one-seventh of South Vietnam had been sprayed to destroy crops, and thirty-six percent of rice-growing swamps had been made unfit for cultivation by 1974. Between 1965 and 1971, 142 pounds of explosives per acre had been dropped on Vietnam (584 pounds per person), 118 pounds detonated per second-all of this equivalent to 450 Hiroshima bombs. The land was being mutilated by the murderous Johnson policies, malaria was spreading, and timber and rubber industries destroyed (Nathan and Oliver 369-70). During the Johnson years the population of Saigon had swelled, and with wartime profiteering came incredible corruption, prostitution, and drug trafficking. Finally, by the end of 1967 more bombs had been dropped on Vietnam than had been dropped during the entire European phase of World War II.

Despite the enormous firepower unleashed against the Vietnamese people, the NLF and North Vietnamese armies launched a massive assault on several South Vietnamese cities on January 31, 1968, during the Tet holiday. The Vietnamese suffered large casualties but gained military control of cities and rural areas throughout Vietnam. The U.S. military defined their counterattack as a victory, but key decision makers and the public knew that the war was leading to defeat. Three years of genocidal application of force had not reduced the spirit or resistance of the Vietnamese people.

In broad historical perspective, the Tet offensive may have provided the decisive impetus to the decline of U. S. global power. General Westmoreland requested another 206,000 troops after Tet. Clark Clifford, a corporate lawyer who had advised Democrats on foreign policy since the Truman administration and had recently replaced McNamara as secretary of defense, began a quick review of U.S. Vietnam policy. He communicated to Johnson his conclusion that the war was not winnable and therefore that Westmoreland's request should not be granted. Dean Acheson, the longtime cold warrior, told Johnson the same thing. While still wishing to pursue the war, Johnson gave in to the advice of Clifford and Acheson. The war had been so costly in men (139,801 casualties) and materiel, the value of the dollar had declined on the world market, the image of U.S. military power had been so tarnished, and the opposition in the streets had reached such a fever pitch that key sectors of monopoly capital, whom Clifford and Acheson represented, had become war critics.

On March 31, 1968, President Johnson announced that he was restricting the bombing to below the nineteenth parallel in the hope that the initiative would bring negotiations, and that he would not be a candidate for the presidency in 1968. The North Vietnamese responded with an offer to negotiate a full bombing halt. The Johnson administration insisted upon a reduction of North Vietnamese battle activities in the South. Despite a verbal stalemate, offensive action declined during the summer of 1968 and increased in the fall as the United States failed to respond to the decreased intensity of combat.

Finally, with the Democratic presidential candidate trailing in the opinion polls, Johnson fully halted the bombing on October 31, 1968. The primary source of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was the Vietnamese people. Domestic opposition to the brutal war played its part as well, however. The U.S. working class, not as demonstrative as students, had opposed the war more than any other group in society, according to polls; even so, worker opposition increased after Tet.

Activities of the antiwar movement also became more intense and incorporated more and more people. Radical groups, while not developing sophisticated theory, began to talk of the interconnections between war, racism, and poverty. Groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) talked of the Vietnam War as a by-product of the structure of imperialism. These views countered earlier explanations that emphasized a misguided and overly zealous anti-Communist outlook.

Corresponding to the antiwar sentiment among the corporate elites represented by Clifford and Acheson was a reformist electoral movement to end the war. Senators Eugene McCarthy and later Robert Kennedy entered presidential primaries and scored victories over President Johnson. Tensions within the society were heightened when Senator Kennedy and civil rights leader and later antiwar activist Martin Luther King were assassinated. Finally, in the summer of 1968 thousands of antiwar activists and other dissidents came to the Democratic national convention in Chicago, where they were brutally beaten by the Chicago police. The Democrats ignored McCarthy's victories in the primaries and the massive protest against the war outside the convention and selected Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as the presidential candidate. To a large extent, as slogans of the time ran, the war had indeed been brought home.

THE UNITED STATES IS BOMBING AGAIN

2011-03-30T08:37:00.002-04:00

Harry Targ

In February, 1999, President Bill Clinton spoke about “our values and interests” and how they should be defended in the world. He warned against those who might say that “we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa, or some piece of parched earth by the Jordon River.”

Clinton went on to suggest that “measure of our interest lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names.” The question, he said, is “what are the consequences to our security of letting conflict fester and spread.”

He was cautious. “We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.” This speech reflected what has been labeled the Clinton Doctrine.

One month later, under the banner of the NATO alliance which was formed during the Cold War to protect the “free world” from the spread of Communism, the United States and European powers launched a 79 day bombing campaign against targets in Serbia for its participation in a civil war against a secessionist Albanian army in Kosovo, then a province of Serbia. One thousand aircraft were used to fly 38,000 bombing missions, using Tomahawk Cruise missiles to hit Serb targets. Claims of Serb genocide and the innocence of Kosovo were used to justify this extraordinarily aggressive war on Serbia. Clinton officials dubbed the action an application of the post-Cold War policy of “humanitarian intervention.”

Clinton policymakers already had identified some nation-states as “rogue states,” that is states that violated accepted principles of international law, conduct, and discourse, They also worried about “failed states,” that is states that had insufficient control of their territory and population. Humanitarian crises, rogue states, and failed states justified the new militarism such that, as the president said, we might be compelled to act even if we cannot pronounce the names of the states we bomb. Our interests and values would determine our action any place in the world.

Looking at the history of United States foreign policy since the industrial revolution, official excuses for U.S. militarism vary but the outcomes, conquest and murder remain the same. This is so whether the reasons are explained as pursuing the Open Door, promoting self-determination, fighting Communism, spreading the word of God, using our rights as the “last remaining superpower,” or promoting human rights. The only real change is that now more and more military interventionism can be carried out technologically with virtually no risk to the lives of U.S. soldiers.

Today we have Libya. President Obama, using words that remind us of Clinton’s arrogant defense of global interventionism in 1999, explained U.S./NATO policy Monday night March 28.

Obama proclaimed to the nation that: “For generations, the United States of America has played a unique role as an anchor of global security and advocate for human freedom. Mindful of the risks and costs of military action, we are naturally reluctant to use force to solve the world’s many challenges. But when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act. That is what happened in Libya over the course of these last six weeks.”

While President Obama is too smart to say that we do not have to be able to pronounce the names of the countries we bomb, he used the same rationale to justify mass murder that has been used from Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and the two Bushs.

We should talk about oil, territory, imperialism, geopolitical position and all the interconnected causes of superpower drives for world domination. But we should also challenge the arrogance, religious orthodoxy, and racism that over and over again are used to justify the bombing and killing of people virtually everywhere “whether we have trouble pronouncing their names” or not.

UNITED STATES FOEIGN POLICY AND THE VIETNAM WAR

2011-03-12T08:49:00.003-05:00

Harry R. Targ
from. Strategy of an Empire in Decline: Cold War II
MEP Publications, Minneapolis, 1986, 125-128, 150-157, 167-172.

(I am going on an educational visit to Vietnam sponsored by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) and hosted by the Vietnam Women's Federation. I am motivated by a compulsion to revisit our political past. This essay covers briefly the history of the U.S. policy toward Vietnam, 1950-1960 which I will be reflecting upon as we observe Vietnam today. I will follow in weeks ahead with essays on the escalating U.S. war in the administrations of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. These will be interspersed from time to time with my impressions of Vietnam today. Perhaps these brief descriptions will stimulate your memories and thoughts about ways in which United States foreign policy has not changed since the Cold War) .

The Cold War in the Third World: Indochina

During this period the Eisenhower administration concerned itself increasingly with the Third World. The peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were actively opposing colonialism and neocolonialism. European and U.S. imperialism in the Third World required markets, resources, cheap labor, and investment sites for profit making. To Europeans in Africa and U.S. interests in Asia national liberation meant the threat of an end to foreign control of indigenous economies. The best opportunity for international capital, then, required continued opposition to anticolonial struggles (as in Indochina, Algeria, Kenya, Ghana, Malaya, etc.) and opposition to movements challenging neocolonialism (as in the Philippines, Guatemala, Iran, and Egypt).

The United States continued its commitment to the reactionary forces in Vietnam, for example. Vietnam had been a colony of France since 1859. During World War II the French collaborated with the Japanese, who had occupied Vietnam. After the Japanese had surrendered at the close of the war, the nationalist and Communist-led Vietminh forces controlled much of the country, and Ho Chi Minh, the movement leader, issued a declaration of independence. The French returned and sought to reestablish their dominance of the country. After the French attempted to achieve full control of Vietnam by means of negotiations, war broke out in 1946 and continued until 1954. The French formed their own Republic of Vietnam in June, 1948, and appointed the collaborationist Bao Dai as leader of the new state. The Bao Dai regime was opposed by a broad front of political forces, of which Ho Chi Minh's Communists were in the lead. The Communist-led movement had the unqualified support of the Vietnamese people.

In February, 1950, the United States recognized the Bao Dai regime. In May, Acheson called for the support of the French war effort in Vietnam, and an aid package was announced on June 27, after the Korean War had begun. From 1950 to 1954 the United States funded eighty percent of the cost of the French war. In February, 1954, France and other nations agreed to plan a conference at Geneva to discuss the continuing civil war. To improve their bargaining position the French simultaneously began an offensive by landing twenty thousand troops at the northern outpost of Dienbienphu. Within two months the French post was near capture.

During this last phase of the French war, the Eisenhower administration was seriously considering increased support for the French. Admiral Radford, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for the use of atomic weapons in keeping with the Dulles strategy of "massive retaliation" to defend the losing French effort. Dulles proclaimed that "communist domination" of Indochina and Southeast Asia would be a "grave threat to the whole free community." Eisenhower talked of "falling dominoes": if Indochina fell, then so would Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia, then India, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan as a series of falling dominoes. Vice President Nixon said on April 17, 1954:

"The United States as a leader of the free world cannot afford further retreat in Asia. It is hoped the United States will not have to send troops there, but if this government cannot avoid it, the Administration must face up to the situation and dispatch forces."

Dulles and Radford met with members of Congress in late April to discuss U.S. air and troop support for the French, who were on the verge of surrender at Dienbienphu. The congressional leaders said they would support the military commitment only if the British would cooperate. When Dulles conferred with the British, the latter claimed that an act of intervention just shortly before the Geneva conference would be counterproductive. Thus, the U.S. drive toward intervention was temporarily stalled.

The Geneva Conference on Indochina opened on May 8. 1954, the same day that Dienbienphu fell to the forces of Ho Chi Minh. The signatories to the July, 1954, conference accords recognized the independence of Laos and Cambodia, temporarily split Vietnam at the Seventeenth Parallel, called for elections throughout Vietnam to occur by' June, 1956, and agreed not to introduce outside military force into the temporarily divided country. The United States did not sign the accords but agreed to honor them if the signatories did. Dulles's displeasure with the conference and with the need to meet with representatives from the People's Republic of China was evidenced by his personal withdrawal in the middle of the conference.

After the conference the Eisenhower administration exerted pressure on Bao Dai and the French to install a hand-picked client, Ngo Dinh Diem, to serve as South Vietnam's new prime minister. Diem, who had lived in the United States from 1950 to 1953, was a friend of Cardinal Spellman, Senator John F. Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas, and other U.S. notables. In the fall of 1954, President Eisenhower sent his famous letter to Diem promising U.S. military and economic assistance to South Vietnam if the government would carry out social reforms.

One year after the Geneva accords were signed, Diem announced that South Vietnam would not participate in negotiations for the holding of elections throughout Vietnam. He claimed that no elections in North Vietnam would be free. In October, 1955, Diem ousted Bao Dai from his honorific post as chief of state and, with selected members of his family, assumed ultimate power in South Vietnam. One analyst said that the United States had its Syngman Rhee for South Vietnam. The U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group then assumed full responsibility for training the South Vietnamese Army, contrary to the Geneva accords.

While the United States was replacing the French in South Vietnam, Secretary of State Dulles was expanding a network of alliances with client states around the world. The United States had already established a twenty-one-nation Western Hemispheric alliance, guaranteeing mutual consultation if any nation was attacked. NATO, created in 1949, represented fifteen north Atlantic and Mediterranean nations. The United States had joined in alliance with New Zealand and Australia. Finally, Dulles organized the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September, 1954, to counter the advance of communism that he saw as the result of the Geneva accords. Member countries were Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, and the United States. The SEAT0 Treaty called for the protection of the Indochinese states, despite the fact that the latter were not members. Several Asian states, including India, refused to participate in the SEAT0 pact. Later, Dulles was to add the Baghdad Pact, or CENTO, as an alliance of client states in the Middle East. The United States also had treaty commitments to nations on a bilateral basis. All together, the United States had committed itself to the defense of at least fifty-four nations by the mid- 1950s.

From 1957 to 1960 a rapid escalation of violence occurred in South Vietnam as Diem sought to crush his growing opposition. During 1957-58, the United States entirely funded the Vietnamese armed forces, eighty percent of other government expenditures, and ninety percent of its imports. The Diem regime failed to carry out land reforms, and the countryside continued to be controlled by a small number of landlords. The repression against opposition of various political tendencies led finally to the formation of the National Liberation Front (NLF), in December, 1960, to oust the ruthless Diem regime, which maintained itself in power solely through U.S. support.

INDIANA LABOR MOVEMENT GETS PNEUMONIA

2011-03-10T23:56:00.001-05:00

Harry Targ

On Thursday morning, March 10, three buses left the parking lot of a large supermarket in Lafayette, Indiana bound for the huge workers rights rally at the Indianapolis State House. The buses were sponsored by the United Steelworkers Local 115A and the NAACP. About 100 workers, teachers, and peace and justice activists were on the buses. About two miles away another three buses left for Indianapolis with 100 activists from the Building Trades Council of Tippecanoe County and the Northwest Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO).

The buses were warm, cozy, and the spirit of solidarity pervaded the atmosphere. Travelers were determined to demonstrate their outrage at the rightwing onslaught on workers and education being planned by Indiana Republicans. Arriving about one hour later, riders disembarked from the warm and fuzzy atmosphere of the trip to a bitterly cold, cloudy, and windy rally in downtown Indianapolis.

The rally consisted of speeches, chants, prayers, and exhortations. Thousands of Hoosier workers withstood the cold to express their anger and their clear realization that the quality of their lives was in jeopardy.

Local 115A passed out some literature to articulate the reasons for enduring the cold and shouting for economic justice. They said that:

1.The struggle in Indiana was inspired by the events in Wisconsin.

2.The rally was about worker rights, including so-called Right-to-Work legislation and proposals to eliminate the right of teachers to organize.

3.The right-to-work bill that was not dead as some media had reported would negatively impact workers in both the private and public sectors.

4.Public sector rights, which need to be defended, had already been weakened by Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels.

5.The struggle in Indiana was not a publicity stunt, copying the movement in Wisconsin. Democratic House members walked out of the legislature and traveled to Illinois to forestall the Indiana body from passing the draconian legislation.

6.Taxpayers of the state were not funding the walkout by State House Democrats.

7.The so-called Right-to-Work bill was not the only threat posed to workers in Indiana. One bill would eliminate the secret ballot in union certification elections. Another would remove the right to collective bargaining from public employees at the local level. Another bill would prohibit local communities from establishing living wage laws in excess of the state determined minimum wage.

8.The struggle in Indiana is about protecting public education. Bills would authorize private firms to be hired to evaluate teacher performance, without any teacher input. School funding could be used to provide vouchers for use in private schools. Schools that did not meet certain performance standards would be transferred to private for-profit corporations.

9.The campaign to protect public education also required resisting the cutting of funds for colleges and universities.

10.The struggle for workers rights was relevant to the economy of the entire state of Indiana, not just the 300,000 unionized workers.

Another USW Local 115 document made the motivation for action crystal clear:

“We stand at the statehouse as one people, one labor movement, one united group of citizens. We are proud to be union members and union supporters because together we have built Indiana! Whether we are construction workers, teachers or students--whether we clean buildings, deliver health care or manufacture useful products-we stand together!”

There were different assessments of the State House rally in Indianapolis. The conservative Indianapolis Star, on the one hand estimated that only 8,000 workers rallied in Indianapolis, but on the other hand pointed out how cold, windy, and rainy the weather was, suggesting that attendees were truly committed.

One trade unionist, recalling the rally of 20,000 Building Trades workers in 1995 indicated that he could not tell if this rally was bigger or smaller than that one. Another worker said that we needed at least 100,000 at the rally to make a difference.

Several speakers expressed their appreciation for those that attended the rally. AFL-CIO leaders from Kentucky and Wisconsin pointed out that the Indiana struggle was part of a larger movement involving workers from Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and everywhere that the basic standard of living of workers was being challenged.

Perhaps the most poignant statement came from an Iraq war vet who reminded the crowd that $3 trillion had been spent on two costly, foolish wars in the 21st century that helped create today’s economic crisis.

The outcome of the ferment, anger, and rebelliousness all around the world remains unclear. But one fine folk singer, after leading the crowd in a rendition of “This Land is Your Land,” wished the movement well. He recalled Woody Guthrie’s injunction: “Take it easy, but take it.” Perhaps that is where we are at today.

CO-REVOLUTIONARY THEORY BECOMES PRACTICE

2011-03-06T14:16:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

A while ago I wrote about David Harvey’s “co-revolutionary theory” of change. In this theory Harvey argues that anti-capitalist movements today must address “mental conceptions;” uses and abuses of nature; how to build real communities; workers relations to bosses; exploitation, oppression, and racism; and the relations between capital and the state. While a tall order, the co-revolutionary theory suggests the breadth of struggles that need to be embraced to bring about real revolution.

Harvey’s work mirrors many analysts who address the deepening crises of capitalism and the spread of human misery everywhere. It is increasingly clear to vast majorities of people, despite media mystification, that the primary engine of destruction is global finance capitalism and political institutions that have increasingly become its instrumentality. Harvey’s work parallels the insights of Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Noam Chomsky, and a broad array of economists, historians, trade unionists, peace and justice activists and thousands of bloggers and Facebook commentators.

Of course, these theorists could not have known the ways in which the connections between the co-revolutionary theory and practice would unfold. Most agreed that we are living through a global economic crisis in which wealth and power is increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands (perhaps a global ruling class), and human misery, from joblessness, to hunger, to disease, to environmental devastation is spreading.

But history has shown that such misery can survive for long periods of time with little active resistance. Even though activists in labor, in communities of color, in anti-colonial/anti-neo-colonial settings are always organizing, their campaigns usually create little traction. Not so in 2011. Tunisians rose up against their oppressive government, Larger mobilizations occurred in Egypt. Protests spread to Yemen, Algeria, Oman, Bahrain, and Libya.

Assuming that working people, youth, women, and various professional groups would remain quiescent in the United States, right wing politicians saw the opportunity to radically transform American society by destroying public institutions and thereby shifting qualitatively more wealth from the majority to the minority. In Wisconsin, and later in Ohio, Indiana, and around the country a broad array of people began to publicly say “no,” “enough is enough.”

The resistance in the Middle East has been about jobs, redistribution of wealth, limiting foreign financial penetration, and democracy. In the United States the issues are even more varied: the right of workers to collectively bargain, opposition to so-called Right-To-Work laws, beating back challenges to public education, raising demands for free access to health care including the defense of reproductive health care, and greater, not less, provision of jobs, livable wages, and retirement benefits.

Where do we go from here? I think “co-revolutionary theory” would answer “everywhere”. Marxists are right to see the lives of people as anchored in their ability to produce and reproduce themselves, their families, and their communities. The right to a job at a living wage remains central to all the ferment. But in the twenty-first century this basic motivator for consciousness and action is more comprehensively and intimately connected to trade unions, education, health care, sustainable environments, opposition to racism and sexism, and peace. So all these motivations are part of the same struggle.

It is fascinating to observe that the reaction to economic ruling class and political elite efforts to turn back the clock on reforms gained over the last 75 years have sparked resistance and mobilization from across a whole array of movements and campaigns. And activists are beginning to make the connections between the struggles.

It is way too early to tell whether this round of ferment will lead to some victories for the people, even reformist ones. But as Harvey suggests, “An anti-capitalist political movement can start anywhere….The trick is to keep the political movement moving from one moment to another in mutually reinforcing ways.”

WORKERS MOBILIZE IN INDIANA

2011-02-26T17:08:00.003-05:00

"A word on apathy--I generally consider it to be a non-issue. Workers are not apathetic; there are lots they care about. But they have to have restored faith in their unions and legislators to act--we are working on that one. Apathy is a label used by the hegemonic few to cover fear, intimidation and hopelessness."

Ruth Needleman, Professor of Labor Studies, Indiana University/Gary and author of Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism,2003, in an e-mail, February 24, 2011

Until late last week, the general media practice, including NPR and Democracy Now, had been to ignore labor militancy in Indiana. However, the movement here in Indiana has been much more energized and larger than many expected. A state issues forum that was held during the afternoon, February 20, in Lafayette, Indiana on the draconian Republican legislative agenda drew a standing room crowd, about 150, largely public school teachers but with a number of Building Trades, Steel and UAW unionized workers. The event was sponsored by the Obama group Yes We Can Tippecanoe with support from the Lafayette Area Peace Coalition.

The response to the threats to workers, teachers, and public education was a collective expression of anger coupled with a general recognition that the Indiana Republican agenda was a threat to the entire working population of the state.From Monday to Friday with an anticipation of continuation next week trade unionists and other activists have been traveling to the state capital building in Indianapolis to protest an array of bills including Right-to-Work, promotion of charter schools, establishment of student-performance-based evaluation of teachers, an Arizona style anti-immigration bill, and a ban on same-sex marriage. (At the February 20 forum articulate spokespersons drew connections between all these issues and even the concept of "class struggle" was raised).

An estimated 10,000 trade unionists and other progressives mobilized at the State House on Tuesday. February 22. Democratic members of the Republican controlled legislature began to absent themselves from sessions, forestalling a required quorum. Similar to Wisconsin politicians Hoosier legislators assembled in Illinois. Their agenda was to say “no” to Right-to-Work legislation and to demand real dialogue on a variety of bills on the legislative docket that would radically transform education in the state and hit employed and unemployed workers even harder than RTW alone.

I attended the Thursday State House rally organized by the Indiana State AFL-CIO. As we were going through the security check we heard a roaring crowd inside the rotunda of the old-fashioned State House building. As we entered the rotunda we saw about 2,000 workers from the ground level to the third floor cheering a militant speech from the president of the Kentucky AFL-CIO. Other speakers condemned the attack on workers, exhorted them to continue the struggle, and connected the issues--Right-to-Work, draconian cuts in unemployment benefits, threats to pensions and benefits, destruction of collective bargaining for public employees, and all the efforts of Governor Mitch Daniels to privatize and destroy public education. Angry workers showed placards from the UAW, SEIU, various Building Trades unions, including locals representing electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and painters. A speaker from the Indiana State Teachers Association thanked the State AFL-CIO for connecting the fight-backs of manufacturing, service, and construction workers with those of education workers.

Talking to business agents and other labor leaders, I learned that the Republicans had offered a deal to the construction and manufacturing unions to take RTW off the table if rallies were ended. The leaders made it clear that organized labor in Indiana saw this proposal for what it was, an effort to split the labor movement and the working class.

One labor leader claimed that a deal beneficial to teachers had been offered the Indiana State Teachers Association, which is not affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Apparently the teachers rejected it. Workers of all kinds have become aware of this standard practice political elites use to split the working class and it has been rejected. Protestors were also suspicious of press reports that the Governor and the legislature had “pulled” RTW off the table. Legislative procedures, several said, made the situation fluid. The discourse, speeches, informal conversations, chants, and picket signs all spoke to the emergence of real class consciousness this time.

Over the next days and weeks the trick will be to keep the momentum, militancy, and sense of solidarity alive. And, as one friend put it, rank-and-file trade unionists, particularly younger members, need to understand that whatever the outcome of this immediate campaign, vigilance will be necessary. A good labor history lesson would make it clear that factions of the capitalist class resumed the struggle to push labor back even before the ink was dry on President Roosevelt’s signature making the Wagner Act of 1935, labor’s “Magna Carta,” law. By 1947, Republican majorities successfully turned back significant worker rights with the Taft-Hartley Act which made state laws, such as Right-to-Work, possible.

The Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio cases show the possibilities that can be achieved by progressives, including trade unionists, working with some members of the Democratic Party. The legislators in Indiana and Wisconsin have been forced to act in ways that demonstrate their real support of workers. The level of worker anger and mobilization made it clear to Senators in Wisconsin and House members in Indiana that they need to give concrete support to the mass mobilizations that are taking place.

As an old labor film ends, a life long activist is quoted as saying “You think this is the end? It’s just the beginning.” The fight-backs in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and elsewhere have rekindled labor militancy, and the rudiments of class consciousness. The most reactionary sectors of the capitalist class will not bow to mass movements without much more mobilization and struggle. Without falling prey to romantic comparisons with the ferment in the Middle East, it may be the case that, as with Egypt, a general strike is the only action that will stop the drift toward unbearable and deepening misery of the working class.

THE ATTACK ON PLANNED PARENTHOOD PART OF A LONG REACTIONARY TRADITION

2011-02-20T12:03:00.001-05:00

Harry Targ

Vivay Prashad, in his fascinating book, The Darker Nations, traced the rise and subsequent demise of the Third World Project from the 1950s to the 1980s. The Third World Project, mainly the mobilization of poor and marginalized peoples around the world, envisioned the construction of progressive governments that would provide for basic social and economic needs and institutionalize democratic participation in political life.

This project was derailed for several reasons. One of the most significant was the willful construction by threatened elites of fundamentalist religious institutions.

In the Middle East, the tottering dictatorships plowed financial resources into the creation of fundamentalist Islamic organizations. “Political Islam” was introduced into global political culture to divert and divide social movements for fundamental change. Political Islam called for a return to the past and a rejection of modern secular ideas about social and political institutions. Religious dogma worked to replace visions of egalitarian societies. Ironically, in order to maintain stability, United States foreign policy supported insurgent Islamic fundamentalist movements in various places such as Afghanistan.

In Latin America, religious fundamentalism took a variety of forms. The leadership of the Catholic Church launched a frontal assault on newly created radical regimes, such as in Nicaragua, that based their political principles on a theology of “liberation.” Also, Evangelical Christian organizations, with funding from worldwide economic elites, infiltrated Latin American countries experiencing revolutionary ferment, urging the poor to reject earthly solutions to their problems.

In North America, the religious right mobilized financial resources to appeal to an electorate frustrated by challenges to U.S. hegemony overseas and economic stagnation at home. In each political venue, whether dominated by Islam, Christianity, or Judaism in the case of Israel, religion was used to divide and conquer.

The sector of the population most impacted by fundamentalisms of every kind is women. Women are forced out of the political process as patriarchies reinstitute top down control of their political, economic, and cultural lives and their bodies. Women’s institutions, particularly ones that encourage progressive public policies, are marginalized. Often politicians using religious dogma as their rhetorical tool, support public policies that punish poor women, women of color, and progressive women in general. In sum, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism has been used to divide majorities of people along various lines that defuse their solidarity and the targets of such assaults are most often women.

A current example of this strategy of attacking women by raising the specter of religious orthodoxy occured Friday February18 when the House of Representatives approved an amendment to budgetary legislation which would end all funding of Planned Parenthood, a national organization that provides vital reproductive health services to low-income women. Congressman Mike Pence (IN), who introduced the proposal, declared that American taxpayers should not have to pay for abortions. He failed to mention that they don’t because the government currently forbids the use of federal dollars for most abortions. Consequently, that could not have been the motivation for this legislation.

Rather, most of the 240 House members who voted to cut all allocations to Planned Parenthood wished to raise the religious issue to justify their general goal of ending public health care and guarantees for basic public health services for all. Pence failed to make note of the fact that Planned Parenthood gives contraceptive assistance to poor women, does HIV tests, screens women for cancer, and provides reproductive health care for women. Planned Parenthood, like ACORN the community organization that was victimized last year, is under assault to achieve political goals. The attacks serve to divide the electorate to destroy another organization that serves the needs of the working class, in this case working class women.

Data from the Guttmacher Institute point out that in recent years almost half of women who need reproductive health care are not able to afford it. Four in ten women of reproductive age had no health insurance.

The health care reform legislation of 2010 opens the door for expanded insurance coverage for reproductive health and family planning. Among those without health care as of 2009 were 14 million women of reproductive age. According to the new health care law, if not defied by state governments, Medicaid programs will expand family planning services to lower income families in years ahead.

As the Pence amendment suggests, existing health services for women and prospective new ones are under threat by health care opponents. They want to destroy major providers of health care for women such as Planned Parenthood. And, in the end, they want to destroy any form of public health for people.

How to do it? Transform the discourse from providing health care for the people, a broadly accepted idea, to religious dogma, in this case anti-abortion dogma.

It is time for progressives to respond. Attacks on Planned Parenthood are attacks on the working class, especially people of color, and women, and the very idea that governments are created to serve the needs of the people.

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

2011-02-15T20:42:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

From the Streets to the Classroom

I am teaching a course this semester on United States relations with the Caribbean and Central America. I use the course to explore the historic patterns of United States foreign policy from the industrial revolution to the present. I open the course with reference to Greg Grandin’s thesis that U.S. conduct in the Western Hemisphere has served as a template or experiment for its global role as an imperial power.

The course also examines the rise of dependent capitalist regimes in the region but most importantly resistance to the Colossus of the North. Course discussion includes assessments of revolution in Haiti, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, and El Salvador and how the United States sought to forestall them and undermine their successes.

This time I chose as the first text a book that reframes world history from a “bottom-up” perspective. I am using Vijay Prashad’s book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, which presents a view of twentieth century world history that gives voice to the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It turns out that the Prashad book has become extraordinarily timely (I make no claims about whether my students agree or not) in that it describes in historical and theoretical terms the rise of what we used to call “The Third World,” or what he calls “The Darker Nations” beginning with the era of global colonial empire. It identifies leaders, nations, movements, organizations such as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), policies, successes and failures. Although it was published in 2007, it leads the reader to reflect on the burgeoning mass movements today in the Middle East, suggesting pitfalls and possible strengths in terms of global progressive social change.

The Rise of the Third World: An Historical Project

Prashad’s book identifies three periods of the history of the Darker Nations that he identifies in chapters as “Quest,” “Pitfalls,” and “Assassinations.” In each period there are dominant actors--individuals and nations, visions, policies, and patterns of interaction with rich and powerful countries.

The chapter Prashad called “Quest” summarizes the coming together of anti-colonial movements and the successive victories that occurred against the European colonial powers that occupied much of the world’s land mass from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of World War II. “Quest” begins with an interesting discussion of the meeting of the new League Against Imperialism held in Brussels in 1927. It is there that the Third World project is formulated. It is a project inspired by Communists, Socialists, and Nationalists who abhorred colonialism and sought to build a global movement to overthrow it.

In subsequent chapters Prashad traces the development and institutionalization of the movement, from anti-colonial struggle to independence to the drive to establish a Third World bloc that would stand between western capitalism and Soviet socialism. The early leaders of this movement were the leaders of independence in their own countries: such figures as Jawaharlal Nehru (India); Ahmed Sukarno (Indonesia); Marshall Tito (Yugoslavia); and Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt). These and other leaders, representing countries from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, had diverse political ideologies but all supported political sovereignty and economic development. In general, their vision was a Social Democratic one.

For a time, given the East/West competition the Third World Project had some influence on debate and policy primarily through the United Nations. The Third World Project advocated for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), designed to regulate and control unbridled global capitalism. As the Socialist bloc deconstructed the advocacy for the NIEO declined.

Prashad discusses a second “stage” of the Third World Project that surfaced in the 1970s and beyond. The movement of Darker Nations becomes compromised by the rise of political elitism, bureaucratization, the demobilization of masses of people, the crushing of left forces, the rise of particular institutions such as the military that challenge grassroots politics, and the failure to bring rural agricultural reforms to the process of modernization. Perhaps most important to the Prashad narrative is the growing debt crisis, the incorporation of many Darker Nations into the grip of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the rise of a new generation of post colonial elites who did not share the passion, vision, or experience of their predecessors.

The third part of Prashad’s book, loosely covering the 1980s to the present, he calls “Assassinations.” It describes, through case studies, the continuation of the deformations of the Third World Project described above. The “neo-liberal” policy agenda embraced by many leaders reduced the role of states in shaping their own economies, deregulated and downsized public institutions, opened economies to foreign investors, and shifted from production for domestic consumption to export-based economies. Gaps between rich and poor grew and as a result political institutions, particularly armies and police, became more repressive. However, a few regimes experienced economic growth, the so-called “Asian Tigers” for example. Others, Saudi Arabia being a prime example, supported and fostered on a global basis religious fundamentalism and ethnic hostilities to debase and virtually eliminate the unity embedded in the original vision of the Third World Project.

The Project of the Darker Nations Today

What we have witnessed over the last twenty days perhaps constitutes what Preshad might regard as a new stage in the development of the Third World Project.

First, the Middle East revolution, if we wish to call it that for shorthand reasons, can be seen as a direct reaction to the profound global economic crisis that has been brought on by neo-liberal globalization.

Second, it clearly is motivated by goals similar to those NAM endorsed in the 1950s, that is some kind of New International Economic Order.

Third, the movements seem to be largely secular, perhaps reflecting a rejection of the counter-revolutionary programs of Third World elites who promoted division and reaction to further their own interests.

Fourth, the movements appear to incorporate vast numbers of young people, men and women, workers and small business people, intellectuals and artists, as well as those who identify with their religious traditions.

Fifth, the labor movement and the growing percentages of unemployed and underemployed workers have been playing a passionate and committed role in the struggles. The estimated forty percent of the world’s population in the so-called “informal sector” have a stake in revolutionary change as do workers in transportation, electronics, construction, and manufacturing.

Sixth, this revolution is a non-violent revolution. “Revolutionaries” are saying no or enough, and are doing so in such numbers that the institutions of government and the economy can not continue to operate. This culls up memories of the Gandhi struggles against the British empire and the civil rights movement in the U.S. South.

Seventh, this is an electronic revolution. As a result of the computer age time and space as factors confounding communicating and organizing have been eliminated. Cell phones and social networks do not make revolutions but they facilitate the kind of organizing that historically was more tedious and problematic. And, the new technology insures that revolutionary ferment in one part of the world can be connected to revolutionary ferment elsewhere. In a certain sense, now all youth can be participants, not just observers.

In a recent interview Prashad summarized some of these elements of the ongoing struggles:

The Arab revolt that we now witness is something akin to a “1968” for the Arab World. Sixty per cent of the Arab population is under 30 (70 per cent in Egypt). Their slogans are about dignity and employment. The resource curse brought wealth to a small population of their societies, but little economic development. Social development came to some parts of the Arab world….The educated lower-middle-class and middle-class youth have not been able to find jobs. The concatenations of humiliations revolts these young people: no job, no respect from an authoritarian state, and then to top it off the general malaise of being a second-class citizen on the world stage…was overwhelming. The chants on the streets are about this combination of dignity, justice, and jobs. (MRZINE. Monthly Review.org, February 4, 2011)

Some of the Differences From Before

Comparing the period of the Third World Project with today suggests some differences and similarities. As Prashad and other historians of the Third World make clear, the rise of the non-aligned movement gained some influence because of the Cold War contest between the Soviet Union and the United States. Now the world consists of a variety of new powers, some from the original movement (such as India, China, Egypt, and Brazil) whose economic, political, and military capabilities are challenging the traditional power structures of international relations. Also, global capitalism is in profound crisis and the causes of the revolutionary ferment as well as its escalation are intimately connected with the Middle East revolutions.

Today the danger of escalating state violence and repression remains significant. Global capitalism is in crisis. Some third world regimes are still driven by fundamentalisms of one sort or another. And, finally, key decision makers in centers of global power seem committed still to archaic ideologies, for example suggesting that Islamic fundamentalism will take over revolutions, democracy is dangerous, and that the one “democracy” in the Middle East, Israel, will be further threatened by the movements in the region.

In addition, the Egyptian revolution, while exciting and inspirational suffers from some of the same weaknesses Prashad described at the dawn of the Third World Project. Looking back fifty years, the leaders, and the various participating sectors of the mass movement, had not articulated a systematic and compelling ideology, beyond the programmatic demands of the NIEO.

Several countries in the forefront of the NAM were military regimes.Placards of Nasser were prominently displayed in Liberation Square last week. Nasser was a military leader of the “Free Colonels” movement that overthrew King Farouk in 1952. The same “revolutionary” military created a Hasni Mubarak many years later. While the military in Egypt today may act in ways that curry the favor of the protestors, it must be clear that military institutions are driven by their own interests, not the interests of the people.

So the mass mobilization of the last twenty days that is so exciting, inspiring hope for the world, is fraught with danger. The people now must struggle to articulate, advocate for, and institutionalize a program of humane socialism in every country where they are victorious. The task of progressives in the Global North is to support the new project and to link its causes and visions to the struggles that are experienced everywhere.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

2011-02-03T10:01:00.004-05:00

Harry Targ

I'm not big on lengthy e-mail debates (I prefer Blog pontification). While I am a long-time Marxist, when I joined The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) I realized perhaps for the first time that we needed to be cognizant of our resources and the possibilities for change. Socialist visions need to be connected to proximate possibilities.This means to me being aware of and working in the electoral arena, working to build coalitions with organized labor, progressive religious groups, and working in mutual solidarity with single issue groups around gender, race, peace, and environmental issues.

I also realized that there were no quick fixes for us, even though capitalism is in crisis. And as a Marxist, I came to see social change as an historical process, frought with victories and defeats. In my view, we must continue the struggle as best we can using our available resources as effectively as we can. Also, it means to me reaching out to others with like minds and interests and particularly organizing, including organizing and building CCDS.

This is what CCDS has been haltingly pursuing since its formation in 1992. Along with our efforts to revive the socialist vision and dialogue (see our statement of principles for example), we have worked in the streets, the halls of congress, and in educational arenas to advocate both short term and long term solutions to the problems of the working class. (Some of us are privileged in that we have good paying jobs and are from time to time invited to articulate our views , which is to the good).

At this point in time I support the CCDS jobs, employment, government as employer of last resort, green jobs agenda. I feel we can best articulate our vision of a full employment economy by using the Conyers Bill (see below) to mobilize around. And, since most Americans see "politics" as involving elections and legislation, that is where progressives need to be.

I would also throw in the stew support for efforts by Congressmen Barney Frank and Ron Paul to cut the military budget. We might not win this one either, and if we do, the victory would be only very partial, but the struggle reshapes the dialogue. And, if we can link jobs for all and cutting wasteful and violence-serving military spending all the better.

While in a different context I can't help but remember Joe Hill: "Don't Mourn! Organize!"

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“The 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act” HR 5204

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN CONYERS, JR.

Background

The Full-Employment and Balanced Growth Act was signed into law by President Carter in 1978. The law was the nation’s first attempt at officially establishing a national full-employment policy for the United States. Although Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Representative Augustus Hawkins of California were the primary sponsors of the bill, the legislation was also supported by civil rights and labor organizations who saw the bill as a way to mitigate the economic hardships being felt by low-income Americans.

The sponsors of the legislation intended that the Act would create a full-employment society brought about by direct hiring policies. If the private sector was unable to create a full-employment society through gradual economic growth after 10 years, the Act would obligate the government to step in and create “last resort jobs” to fill the employment gap.

Unfortunately, the intent of the Act’s sponsors was frustrated when the bill reached the United States Senate, where a coalition of Republicans and pro-business Democrats were able to successfully weaken the bill.

Summary

Representative Conyers has introduced legislation that is tailored to fit our current economic realities, but which also embodies the spirit of the original Humphrey-Hawkins legislation: the “21st Century Full Employment and Training Act.” The Act aims to create a full employment society over the next decade.

The bill establishes targets for unemployment:

9 percent unemployment after 6 months; 8 percent unemployment after 2 years; 6 percent unemployment after 5 years 5 percent unemployment after 8 years 4 percent unemployment (full employment) after 10 years. The Act establishes of a Full Employment and Training Trust Fund” with two separate accounts. These two accounts will direct funding to job creation and training programs.

If these unemployment benchmarks are not met, 90 percent of the funds in each account will be automatically disbursed.

67 percent of all revenues deposited into the trust fund will accrue in the job creation grant program account 33 percent of the total funds will accrue in the job training trust account.

Dual Job Creation Focus: Direct Jobs Grants and WIA Training Programs

The first trust fund account will direct funds to a new innovative direct jobs program. Funds will be distributed by formula through the Department of Labor to larger cities, and to states to be passed through to smaller localities and rural areas.

The program would allocate funds based on the CDBG formula modified to consider unemployment data. Local elected officials who are closest to our communities and needs on the ground would work with community groups and labor leaders to identify critical projects and connect workers to projects right away.

Jobs could be located in the public sector, community-based not-for-profit organizations, and small businesses that provide community benefits.

The Program will adopt a two stage approach to ensure immediate job creation and allow for a longer term planning process that involves community input and a focus on education and career development.

The program will be open to individuals who are either: Unemployed for at least 26 weeks; or Unemployed for at least 30 days and low-income. Positions will be for up to 30 hours per week, for up to 12 months. They will pay comparable or prevailing wages, averaging $12-15 per hour, as well as benefits. Appropriate safeguards and strong anti-displacement protections will help to prevent substitution and ensure that workers are placed in new positions. The second trust fund will distribute funds to job training programs covered under the Workforce Investment Act.

These funds will fund innovative job training initiatives including 1-Stop Job Training Programs and the Job Corps.

Revenue: Taxing Wall Street Speculation to Pay for Main Street Jobs

Revenue for the trust fund will be raised through a tax on Wall Street financial speculation, i.e. on stock and bond transactions. The tax will cover:

Stock transactions (tax rate will be 1/4 of 1 percent--0.25%), Futures contracts to buy or sell a specified commodity of standardized quality at a certain date in the future, at a market determined price (tax rate will be 0.02%),

Swaps between two firms on certain benefits of one party's financial instrument for those of the other party's financial instrument (tax rate will be 0.02%),

Credit default swaps where a contract is swapped through a series of payments in exchange for a payoff if a credit instrument (typically a bond or loan) goes into default (fails to pay) (tax rate will be 0.02%),

And options, which are contracts between a buyer and a seller that gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy or to sell a particular asset on or before the option's expiration time, at an agreed price (at the rate of the underlying asset).

LET'S BE CLEAR: THE REAGAN ERA BROUGHT US DEPRESSION, WAR, AND MASS MURDER IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

2011-02-01T14:17:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

The rightwing media, including the Lafayette-West Lafayette Journal and Courier, have resumed the historical revisionism that portrays Ronald Reagan as a great president. The occasion for this is the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth. He is being trotted out by Republicans and Tea Party spokespersons to celebrate the political life of “the great communicator,” the savior of America.

Let us be clear: the policies and programs instituted in the 1980s that led to thirty years of economic decline at home, dramatic increases in military spending, and massive killing of peoples of color in the Global South have their roots in the demands of economic and political elites before President Reagan assumed office. In addition, the disastrous thirty years of public policy was created with the willful collaboration of powerful figures in both political parties and a political economy that makes such pain and suffering likely.

However, the Reagan era (preceded by the rise to power of Reagan’s mentor, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister in Great Britain) can be seen as introducing a qualitative shift in public policy from state and market collaboration as exemplified by the New Deal (1932-1976) to the celebration of the market as a source of economic well-being and political stability. While government grew enormously during the last thirty years, the official ideology was used by Republicans and Democrats alike to reduce or eliminate government programs that were targeted to assist the vast majority of the people, the working class.

Looking at economic policy, the Reagan Administration launched a campaign to destroy the U.S. labor movement, reduce rudimentary public services and supports for the poor (President Clinton finished the job), radically reduce corporate taxes, provide tax incentives to encourage manufacturers to move plants overseas, and expand the deregulation of banking and financial speculation (begun by President Carter).

The impacts of these policies included reducing the rights and living conditions of workers, resuming the historic process of shifting the wealth and income of the country to the top one percent of the economic elite, reducing the middle class, and increasing the percentage of the people living below the poverty line. While the proportion of the society’s wealth controlled by the economic ruling class grew, the rate of economic growth of the economy as a whole since Reagan declined by one-third compared to the period from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Reagan’s global economic policies, commonly referred to as “neo-liberalism,” used debt, induced by the IMF and private banks, and military power to force virtually every country in the world to cut back on public services to their citizens, privatize their economies, shift from producing goods and services for their own people to producing for exports (to earn foreign exchange so that they could pay back western banks that forced them to borrow billions of dollars).

As the economic vulnerability of workers grew in poor countries, they became desperate, pliant, and cheap labor forced to manufacture goods for ten percent of the wage costs of workers in the United States. By 2000, half the world earned $2 a day or less. In the United States, wages stagnated; earnings at the dawn of the new century in real dollars were no higher than the early 1970s.

Also, the Reagan administration of the 1980s increased war-making and complicity in the deaths of millions of people around the world. As a candidate, Ronald Reagan convinced many Americans that a “window of vulnerability” had opened in America’s security posture because of the escalation of military spending by “the evil empire,” the former Soviet Union. Thus as president, Reagan launched the biggest arms buildup, aside from World War II, in United States history. And, as was the case in 1960 when candidate John F. Kennedy campaigned with claims of a “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union, the claim was a lie.

Hamstrung by the post-Vietnam fear Americans held about the U.S. getting involved in another quagmire, what beltway policy wonks called “the Vietnam Syndrome,” Reagan defense intellectuals shifted to what they called “low-intensity conflict.” LIC meant that the United States would fund anti-communists, reactionaries, and militarists who would fight our wars for us. The United States funded anti-government rebels in Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, including followers of Osama Bin Laden. Arms sales to rightwing regimes, such as those in El Salvador, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Pakistan skyrocketed as Reagan lifted Carter administration sales limitations. Conservatively two million people in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East died because of these policies.

Finally, the Reagan administration shifted strategic doctrine from Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) which emphasized maintaining the capacity to deter a Soviet surprise attack on the United States to a “counter force” strategy that called for plowing resources into developing a first strike nuclear capacity, which included the Hollywood fantasy, the “Strategic Defense Initiative” or “Star Wars.” Given the Reagan public discourse concerning “evil empires,” threats that the Soviets better give up their system or expect war, and the new military doctrines, the world was lucky to survive the 1980s without nuclear war.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of the threats to human survival waned but the neo-liberal global agenda continued through the first Bush presidency and the Clinton years. The global military agenda resumed in the new century as the creators of the Reagan era military programs assumed positions of power in the Bush administration. The Rumsfelds, Cheneys, and their subordinates, who gained experience back in the Nixon days and became foreign and military policy influentials in the Reagan (and George H.W. Bush) periods and who had organized out of power in the Clinton period, were back in the saddle. They used the 9/11 tragedy to project military power on a global basis.

So when home town papers publish articles with headlines like “ ‘Great Communicator’ Still Resonates” (Journal and Courier, Monday, January 31, 2011)be prepared to remind people what really happened in the 1980s and that the public policies adopted then have caused so much pain ever since. Probably some of these newspapers will continue to expand their revisionist project in other subject areas as well; for example, suggesting that the Founding Fathers opposed slavery in the United States.

BIRTHDAYS AND SELF-CONCEPTS CHANGE

2011-01-29T10:27:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.- Mark Twain

I know celebrating a birthday is a bourgeois idea. But in a capitalist society we desperately seek ways to maintain a sense of identity and purpose. Once a year we want people to remember us as individuals even though we need to see ourselves as part of larger communities.

Well January 30 is my birthday. I was born in 1940, a year before the United States formally entered World War II, and nine months before Franklin Roosevelt was elected to his third term as president.

Ever since I was a kid I knew I was connected to the personage of FDR because WE HAD THE SAME BIRTH DATE! This connection was formalized in 1942 when an aunt of mine who had been the press agent of "fan dancer" Sally Rand in the 1930s got a picture of me dressed in a soldier suit in the old Chicago Sun. The picture showed me in uniform, celebrating my birthday the same day President Roosevelt was celebrating his.

In another Chicago paper a whole story connected me with the President:
"PATRIOT 2, HOLDS SOLDIERLY BIRTHDAY
This is the birthday of the president of the United States and it is also the birthday of Harry Targ 2....Harry, with some help friom his elders, is to have a special kind of birthday party, for which he has organized what he calls the Junior Soldiers Corps..."

So I grew up pridefully connecting myself to this great President. Probably my aunt's efforts to give this 2 year old some visibility shaped my political consciousness and self-concept. (Unfortunately when I showed the picture and story to my draft board in the 1960s arguing that I had already worn the uniform of the United States army back in 1942 my appeal for deferment based on prior service was denied).

All was well with my self-concept until the new century when trivial information became more readily available to us all. I was able to google birth dates and their significance. I discovered two that were very troubling. First, on January 30, 1933 President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. And if that wasn't bad enough, I discovered that former Vice President Dick Cheney was born on January 30, 1941.

So this year I celebrate my birthday confused and dismayed. Maybe in the end I need to come to grips with the fact that celebrating birthdays is at best frivolous and at worst depressing.

JFK AND OBAMA: LEADERS KNOW NOT WHAT THEY ARE CREATING

2011-01-22T19:21:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

A Young College Kid

I walked to campus one fall morning 1960 and came upon a large crowd surrounding the main quadrangle at the University of Illinois. I asked someone hanging around what was up. He said that Democratic candidate for president John F. Kennedy was going to appear at the steps of the auditorium building at one end of the large area surrounded by classroom buildings.

I stayed and found his talk mildly interesting. I was studying journalism, found politics intriguing, and wanted to grow up to be a columnist like Walter Lippman. I was impressed by JFK’s youth, energy, glamour, as politicians go, and in total the polar opposite of the boring Republican choice, Richard Nixon.

I had not yet begun to read the Beat poets, Paul Goodman, William Whyte’s The Organization Man, or other such analysts of the 1950s “dark ages,” but I intuitively grasped the moment. I began to see the emergence of a new political generation in America. Later that fall Eleanor Roosevelt appeared at the YMCA to campaign for JFK. I did know that she spoke for the legacy of the New Deal of the 1930s and I admired her greatly. I probably saw a connection between that liberal legacy and the possibilities for the 1960s.

JFK as President

Two months later JFK won the election, probably with a significant assist from late night reports of Cook County votes which made Illinois a win for him. His election, of course, was followed by a stirring inaugural speech, one in which he called upon young people particularly to do things for their country, not just for themselves. I was too naïve to ask: “What did you have in mind?”

JFK launched a figurative shuttle from Harvard Yard to the White House. Bright, young intellectuals, policy analysts with connections to big corporations, theorists of modernization and development in the so-called “Third World,” liberal anti-Communists, and academics with a preference for moderate Democrats flew in to help the Kennedy team craft policies to expand capitalism on a worldwide stage. Their project included developing policies that would transform the growing opposition to colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into a set of regimes that would be sufficiently anti-Communist to accommodate global capitalism.

The 60s

While many people of my generation grew more excited by the new administration and how we could participate in the construction of radical change at home and abroad, Kennedy was expanding US military activity in Vietnam, authorizing an invasion of the island 90 miles from our shores by Cuban counter-revolutionaries, dramatically increasingly military spending and shifting the Pentagon from old-style professional militarism to new techniques of scientific management. At home the administration was trying to figure out ways to “cool out” Southern militancy, temper opposition to segregation, and maintain support for the Democratic Party in the weakening “Solid South.”

I remember all this as we reflect on the fifty year anniversary of the dawn of the Kennedy era. We may quibble about when “the 60s” really began. Some might begin their narrative with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 or the publication of The Catcher in the Rye or Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” in the Bay area or manifestations of enthusiasm as Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement marched into Havana in January 1959. However, alternatively, a case could be made that the 60s began with the Kennedy inaugural address.

The Irony

The main point I take from my remembrances of JFK is the fact that he did turn on a generation to the possibilities of changing America at home and abroad. He presented a vision of a political regime in which citizens would want to participate for their own betterment and the betterment of others. While he surely did not mean to address these issues, his campaign, speeches, and persona conveyed a message of anti-imperialism, social and economic justice, and profound opposition to racism. Ironically, he meant none of these but 60s youth assumed that that was what he stood for and wanted us to commit our lives to achieving. If Kennedy had lived, he would have opposed the movements against racism, war, and gender equality even more than his successor LBJ, but he turned us on to want to achieve these goals. That is the significance of JFK for the 60s and what followed.

Fast forwarding 48 years, a young Barack Obama, by his style, language, gestures, and some of his words, alluded to the same images of fundamental changes we derived from JFK in his day. Young people flocked to the Obama campaign with a gusto not seen by young people politically really since the 60s. The record is still out but we can only hope that the fire and passion that stimulated youth for Obama in 2008 will ignite the radicalism in the years ahead as JFK did in the 1960s; hopefully with Obama’s support, but if not, without it.

WE SHALL NOT FORGET: THE STRUGGLE FOR LIBERATION CONTINUES

2011-01-16T13:07:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

O black man, beast of burden through the centuries
Your ashes scattered to the winds of heaven,
…
Barbaric centuries of rape and carnage
…
You will make the Congo a nation, happy and free,
In the very heart of vast Black Africa(from “Weep, Beloved Black Brother,” Patrice Lumumba).
. . .
“We are not alone, Africa, Asia, and free and liberated people from every corner of the world will always be found at the side of the Congolese….To my children whom I leave and whom perhaps I will see no more, I wish that they be told that the future of the Congo is beautiful and that it expects for each Congolese to accomplish the sacred task of reconstruction of our independence and our sovereignty; for without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men (Lumumba’s last letter to his wife, December, 1960).
. . .

Lumumba is the greatest Black man who ever walked the African continent. He didn’t fear anybody (Malcolm X, June 28, 1964).

The basic cause of most of the trouble in the Congo right now is the intervention of outsiders--the fighting that is going on over the mineral wealth of the Congo and over the strategic position that the Congo represents on the African continent. (Malcolm X, November, 28, 1964).

. . .

The adventures that Africa afforded were tawdry enough, but it became the setting for a sudden epiphany…of the pressing necessity for expounding my America for the 20th century.…It was given to me, equally disconsolate on the edge of a jungle of central Africa, to have thrust upon me the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States… (from Harvard intellectual historian Perry Miller’s remembrance of working on a barge in the Belgian Congo, recorded in his Errand Into the Wilderness, 1956).

On January 17, 1961 Patrice Lumumba, the kidnapped leader of the newly independent government of what now is called Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) was assassinated by a group of army officers encouraged by many imperialist powers including the United States. DR Congo, endowed with enormous riches and a large population, had been under the yoke of Belgian colonialism since the powers of Europe divided up the African continent at the 1884 Berlin Conference. King Leopold II, occupied the land and enslaved the inhabitants of it to work huge rubber plantations. Those who resisted enslavement were brutally murdered, their body parts put on public display to serve as a warning to those who had similar thoughts.

But, as Lumumba’s words suggest, masses of people rose up to extricate colonial rulers not only in the Congo but throughout Africa: including Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and later in Portuguese colonies (Guinea Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique). Following the uprisings in India in the 1940s, the spirit of independence gripped virtually the entire Global South.

Lumumba, inspired by the freedom currents spreading like wildfire in the 1940s and 1950s helped form the Congolese National Movement (MNC) in 1958. The MNC movement joined with the broad Pan African forces at the All-African People’s Conference in Accra, Ghana in that year. Sensing the growing demands for change in Africa’s third largest country, the Belgian government began to extricate itself from its colony. National elections were held in May, 1960 to establish the first independent government of the Congo. The MNC won the elections and Patrice Lumumba became the government’s first prime minister, and Joseph Kasavubu its president.

Shortly thereafter, political leaders from the resource rich Congo province of Katanga, encouraged by the Belgians, seceded. Internal strife spread to the Congolese capital. In the fall of 1960 Lumumba, who had become a world renowned symbol of African liberation, was kidnapped by dissident members of the new Congolese army and killed in 1961. Both the United Nations and the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States have long been viewed as being complicit in the assassination.

Before the kidnapping Lumumba appealed for assistance to quell civil war in his country. UN peacekeeping forces failed to support the newly created government. Since Lumumba asked for military equipment from the former Soviet Union the Eisenhower administration became convinced that now Lumumba, the African nationalist, had become an agent of international communism.

After Lumumba’s death, and years of internal political conflict, Colonel Joseph Mobutu, the leader of the plot to capture and kill Lumumba seized state power. In 1971, Mobutu (now Mobutu Sese Seko) renamed the Congo, Zaire, and for over twenty years robbed the country of its wealth. When his regime collapsed in the 1990s, due to internal and external forces, a civil war, often referred to as “Africa’s World War,” ensued. Bloody violence, estimated deaths range from 3 to 5 million people, involving Congolese forces, intervening armies from Uganda, and Rwanda, and indirect support of one side or another from European powers and western economic interests continued from 1998 to 2003. After a short ceasefire and the creation of a new DCR government, civil war in parts of the country resumed.

The history of the Congolese people is complicated but several historical and contemporary lessons can be drawn as we reflect on the fifty-year anniversary of the death of Patrice Lumumba.

First, Patrice Lumumba represents that great generation of African anti-colonial leaders, who, through their words and deeds, encouraged African masses to rise up against colonial masters, neo-colonial leaders tied to traditional empires, and to do so celebrating independent nationhood. Leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, and Nelson Mandela inspired the transformation of the political, economic, and cultural life of the African continent. While their struggles remain incomplete, they did succeed in leading the African masses to overthrow the formal colonial order that had been in place for four hundred years.

Second, Americans, such as historian Perry Miller, experienced Africa only as the backdrop for their own musings about America’s identity. Others described Africa as a continent devoid of people, history, and culture, and ignored leaders like Lumumba who had a tremendous impact on the consciousness of peoples victimized by colonial exploitation and racism everywhere.

Third, as Penny M. Von Eschen points out (Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism 1937-1957, 1997), during the time of anti-colonial struggles there were over 200 newspapers in African-American communities across the United States. Their readers knew much about colonialism and the struggles against it in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Members of Black communities in the United States read reports on Asia, Africa, and Latin America from such prolific writers as George Padmore, W.E.B. DuBois, and Paul Robeson. Fighters for freedom in the United States, such as Malcolm X, knew full well about the trials and tribulations of Patrice Lumumba and drew analogies between struggles against colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa and campaigns for racial justice in the United States.

And finally, the disintegration of one of the largest countries in the world and its replacement by a brutal dictatorship from the 1960s to the 1990s, had its roots in the 1960 murder of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first prime minister. In addition, the “African World War” of the last decade must be scene as connected to the assassination of the proud African nationalist leader, Patrice Lumumba, fifty years ago.

…

SPEECHES THAT SPEAK TO OUR TIMES

2010-12-31T01:15:00.002-05:00

Harry Targ

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes…

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research…. a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity….

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific/technological elite (Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961).

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Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967).

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In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends (Jimmy Carter, July 15, 1979).

Words Still Matter

We have become so drugged by politicians that we often fail to reflect on the power of their words. Seeing books on library shelves with titles like “Speeches of Great Americans” culls up in our minds Readers Digest, the History Channel, Sunday morning sermons, and all the crap that passes for political discourse in the 21st century. Even profound speeches, and the lives of profound political actors, are transformed, debased and normalized, such that the power of words or deeds becomes acceptable to ruling classes and even made to have commercial value.

Every once in a while though a politician or activist says something that is rich with theoretical insight and inspiration and begs for action. The power of the words cannot be demeaned, delegitimized or made palatable to all. And, it behooves progressives to revisit those words and use them for practical political work.

The Military/Industrial Complex

When President Eisenhower gave his final address to the nation on January 17, 1961, 50 years ago, he warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence” of a military/industrial complex. He originally included the word “academic” but later eliminated it, probably for reasons of length. He was alerting Americans to the breadth and scope of military power over the world and American society.

The President’s words constituted a shocking challenge to the soon-to-be Kennedy era defense intellectuals who criticized the outgoing president’s reluctance to spend even more than the $40 billion he invested on the military. Even his direct orders to subordinates to overthrow Guatemala’s President Jacob Arbenz and Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and his declaration of the Middle East as a free-world sanctuary was not enough for the 1960s theorists and practitioners of “modernization,” “development,” and “democracy.”

Although Eisenhower warned us of the impacts of the military/industrial complex he could not foresee the magnitude of the controls on America’s public life that soon resulted. First, he only dimly saw the changes that would occur in the techniques of empire. CIA money ensured election outcomes in other countries. American intelligence and military forces engineered brutal military coups. Military advisors revamped armies and repressive police forces in countries threatened by revolutionary change. The United States used “low intensity conflict” to train anti-government reactionaries. And then to mollify domestic critics, the U.S. initiated the privatization and outsourcing of the military as an adjunct to the over 700 U.S. military bases in more than 40 countries. Most recently, high tech weapons, unmanned aerial vehicles, are used to kill people without endangering U.S. soldiers. Technological advances and the globalization of U.S. violence continue.

Eisenhower was inalterably opposed to the militarization of the U.S. economy. While he was willing to allot $40 billion in 1950s currency, he resisted the demands from Beltway liberals and defense contractors to double military spending. By the 1960s, half of the federal budget began to go to the military and one in ten workers derived wages from defense contracts. And that continues, but with less public criticism.

Finally, Eisenhower spoke to the militarization of American culture. The university became a research arm of the complex. Students were taught about the virtues of military “readiness,” “the communist threat,” the problem of “human nature” and perpetual war, and, more recently, the endless danger of “terrorism.” Virtually every large corporation, producing such products as toothpaste, toys, breakfast cereal, medications, automobiles, electronics, or energy, is steeped in military contracts. The public airwaves, the internet, movies, and sports are laced with war, violence, killing, and competition. As Eisenhower put it: “Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved: so is the very structure of our society.”

Making War Overseas and Advancing Hunger At Home

In April, 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King spoke at Riverside Church in New York City and made it crystal clear that wars elsewhere not only kill the designated enemies, but impoverish poor working people at home. Dr. King made a critical contribution to the discussion of the link between war and foreign policy and people’s lives. Killing in other lands is an immoral abomination. While that needs to be critically understood, the unequal distribution of wealth and income within the United States is stark and is intimately connected to foreign adventures. And, in fact, the more resources that are allocated for killing others, the less there are to serve the needs of those at home.

President Lyndon Johnson, who increased the U.S. troop commitment from 16,000 in 1963 to 540,000 in 1968 and who launched daily bombing of targets in North and South Vietnam in 1965 that went unabated until 1968 tried to create a “war” on poverty at home. Dr. King knew that this country could not do both: that there was an inverse relationship between war-making and domestic prosperity. As he put it: “I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam.” And as the years unfolded and the United States shifted from a military draft to a volunteer army, the percentage increased of those who could not find jobs and earn a decent income and became the foot soldiers for future wars.

Corporate/Financial Elites and the Creation of Self-Indulgence

Perhaps the least known of the prophetic speeches cited above is the one presented on television in July, 1979 by President Jimmy Carter. He was called to speak about the growing energy crisis, dramatic increases in the price of oil, growing dependency on foreign oil, concentrated economic power in Washington, and the celebration of a culture of self-indulgence, consumerism, materialism, and competition.

While this speech did not address foreign and military policy as directly as the other two, it warned the American people about the dangers of war, foreign dependency on oil, and an international system driven by oil giants and oil-rich countries. He linked these to a domestic culture that defined its success on the basis of how much it could consume.

President Carter challenged the basic precept of the corporate culture that evolved out of industrial and monopoly capitalism in the twentieth century; its basic paucity of meaning and purpose. “But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

What Can We Learn From These Famous Speeches

We should bring to our political work the idea that words still matter. In addition, we must reflect upon the possibility that mainstream politicians, presidents for example, may say things that should and could be appropriated to build a progressive agenda. And, perhaps more difficult, we need to cut through the propaganda which often leads political figures to be lionized and thus transformed into everyday icons. Dr. King was a radical, against racism, sexism, and classism. He opposed war. He saw the vital interconnections between massive governmental waste and human suffering. And he saw that the direction U.S. society was heading in was pure “madness.”

Substantively, we should revisit these speeches to raise again our opposition to war and empire and military spending. We need to stand with our brothers and sisters who are demanding jobs and justice. And we must stand with those, whether secular or religious, who argue against a self-indulgent, consumption-based and competitive society.

ACHIEVEMENTS AND DISAPPOINTMENTS DURING THE OBAMA YEARS: WHY?

2010-12-27T14:23:00.004-05:00

Harry Targ

Changing Media Frames of Political Reality

I am an inveterate watcher of MSNBC, the “liberal” spectrum of the “mainstream” media. Reflecting on the last two years of American political life, often through their eyes but also through other mainstream media outlets, I have been fascinated by the swings in interpretations of the performance of the Obama administration and Congress.

During the campaign, Obama was doomed, according to the media, several times by such crises as the remarks by Reverend Wright and Obama’s alleged snobbish rendition of the flaws of working class consciousness. On the other hand, the media presented Obama as the savior of the United States reputation overseas, the committed anti-war activist, the environmentalist, union supporter, and the African American candidate who could bring the country together in a post-racial era. We cried as the President-elect celebrated victory with the slogan “Yes We Can.”

Within a month of Obama’s entering office riding a massive swing to the Democratic Party in the House and Senate, media pundits were speculating about an historic shift in national politics and whether it would equal the transformation of political life that occurred in the 1930s.

But then, the Obama administration and its allies in Congress began to experience roadblocks in efforts to provide an adequate economic recovery stimulus package and to radically reform health care. Climate change legislation and pro-union legislation went off the table. Congress and the White House launched a two-year discussion about ending discrimination against gays in the military. And most importantly, economic recovery, jobs and growth stalled. To top it off, after an extensive in-house review of United States foreign policy toward Afghanistan, the Obama administration chose to escalate U.S. military involvement in that country.

Media frames shifted dramatically (in all but the rightwing Fox empire which was hostile all along) from the new political alignment in American politics to discussions of incompetence in Congress, Obama’s inability to lead, Obama’s reluctance to go back out to the people to mobilize support for his policies, to critiques of Obama’s strategy of compromising with the rightwing in Congress even before negotiations begin.

Then the Tea Party emerged. The American politics in crisis frame dominated stories, at least on television. Names like Sarah Palin, Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Jim DeMint, dominated the news. While anger and frustration, particularly with the enormous economic suffering, was real the media exaggerated the strength of the Tea Party movement. And on November 2, the elections showed a dramatic shift to the Republican Party at the national and state levels. The savior of our economic and political life of 2008 had become, as the media told us, the pariah of 2010.

Lame Ducks and Triumphal Returns

After the elections, right wingers licked their chops eagerly waiting for 2012 and the prospects of electing representatives of the ruling class who would return America to the Gilded Age. Many progressives saw in the Obama presidency and the Democratic Party majority future adversaries, not potential allies for change. And many, particularly youth, were seen as losing their enthusiasm for any and all politics. Finally, liberals, including Obama, claimed that the answer to the “shellacking” of 2010 was more compromise with Republican foes in the future. No one thought the “Lame Duck” session of Congress, November and December 2010, would create anything other than stalemate and acrimony among the two parties and a further sense of despondency among the progressive majority.

But to everyone’s surprise, Congress, led by Obama, secured passage of the repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy that discriminated against gays in the military. The Senate passed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and Congress passed legislation giving some financial support to 9/11 responders who are suffering from health infirmities resulting from their rescue efforts.

And, in addition, Obama, almost despite his Democratic colleagues in the Congress, secured a piece of mega-legislation that extended Bush tax cuts to the super-rich but also the vast majority of Americans, continued unemployment insurance for those out of work between 26 and 99 weeks, saved Pell grants for needy college students, and added additional tax breaks for worthy and unworthy purposes. However, Congress resisted passing the DREAM Act which would have provided a path to citizenship to young people who came to the United States without papers, attended college, and/or enlisted in the military.

The Lame Duck session since mid-December has been touted as an enormous victory for progressive forces. MSNBC commentators have begun to say that maybe they had been too harsh on Obama all along. Reviewing the list of legislative accomplishments and executive orders since 2009, they have concluded that this has been the most activist (and progressive) period in American political history since the days of Lyndon Baines Johnson. For some, the most recent victory, DADT repeal, symbolizes the slow but dogged determination of an administration that must struggle against dysfunctional legislative hurdles to achieve any success at all.

So now the media frame, everywhere but FOX, Limbaugh and the rest of the neo-fascist crowd, is back to Obama the crusader, and Democrats the progressives.

What to Make of All This?

Well from the standpoint of building a progressive majority, the incumbent administration has made some significant advances. Several policy changes, such as reauthorizing U.S. aid to international agencies that provide family planning advice, remain below the public radar. Repeal of DADT is worthy of celebration. Support for 9/11 responders is basic to a humane society. Some health care reform is better than none. Pell Grants need to be extended if we do not want our colleges and universities to be populated only by sons and daughters of the wealthy. And the inadequate economic stimulus package saved jobs and whole industries, such as auto.

But the other side of the story is instructive. This administration has participated in tax reduction for the super wealthy, froze wages for federal employees, did not struggle to save unemployment for the 99ers, has signed off on a U.S./South Korean trade agreement that Lori Wallach, Global Trade Watch, claims will be of the magnitude of NAFTA. In essence U.S. and South Korean workers will be the victims of an agreement that reduces barriers to capital flight and financial speculation. While this list can be expanded, I only add that the foreign policy agenda of this administration has been one of extending, not retracting empire, in South Asia, in the Gulf, in Africa, and in Latin America.

In sum, lame duck aside, the Obama administration has continued to support the interests of finance capital at home and abroad at the expense of workers everywhere. What the world calls “neo-liberalism,” that is policies to cut government programs, extend privatization and deregulation of economies, and reduce wages and living conditions is the operant vision at home and abroad. The issue in the end comes down to “class,” and “class struggle.”

We can and should applaud the progressive victories (many of which are part of the social agenda) at the same time that we build a political movement that demands jobs and income now and an end to empire. By assessing the policies, the issues, and their impacts, progressives can determine where to go from here. And at this stage the class and anti-imperial issues must remain central to our work.