Editor’s Note: I lived in the neighborhood that is the subject of this article for 28 years and therefore have my own lived experience and bias of how I negotiated the people and history of the Wealthy/Division area.
Earlier today on MLive, there was an article about the expansion of downtown Grand Rapids, in the Wealthy/Division area.
Like most coverage up to this point, the article is very one-sided, taking the pro-development/pro-gentrification point of view. Much of the article presented a listing of all the “new developments” in the area and why they will make that area of the city, “a hot destination and a cool new gateway to downtown Grand Rapids.”
Such a statement is an observation of privilege and at the same time it denies history. The Wealthy/Division area has always been a destination of commerce, even though people would not like to compare it to the future forms of commerce.
People will come to shop at stores along Wealthy or stop in at the new downtown market upon its completion, but make no mistake about it, this area has been a destination of commerce for decades.
The more stereotypical forms of commerce that this area has been known for is the commerce of street drugs and sex trafficking. People, not from that neighborhood, would drive to the Wealthy/Division area to buy drugs or pay a sex worker. It was our observation through the past three decades that virtually none of those “buyers” were from that neighborhood and most were White men with money, based on the kind of vehicles and clothing they would wear.
In fact, those selling and buying drugs and those engaged in sex trafficking were never really from the neighborhood, but they used that neighborhood as a place to do commerce. Those of use involved in the neighborhood association and block club did our very best to discourage this kind of commerce, often at great risk to our own safety, but the main factor that empower the street commerce was the absentee landlords in the area that allowed their properties to be spaces were drugs and sex trafficking could be sold. It was also our contention for years that some of those absentee landlords were financial beneficiaries of the street commerce.
It is ironic that one of the people cited in the MLive article is the owner of the Shell gas station on the corner of Division and Wealthy. He made derogatory comments about how unsafe the neighborhood was, yet he made a ton of money off of that neighborhood, particularly since his prices for gas and basic food staples have always been outrageously high.
Those of us who were homeowners in this area, struggled to maintain safe spaces and were always fighting off outside investors who had set their sites on the neighborhood for land speculation or other projects that disregarded those who lived there.
Some examples of this outside land speculation are as follows. In the late 1980s, there was an attempt by a bus company to purchase a whole city block. This bus company did bus tours around the state and needed more land for parking buses than their existing location. However, part of this plan included to displacement of several families and their homes, so the neighborhood fought against it and won.
In the mid-90s, Catholic Central High School was looking to have an outdoor athletic facility closer to their downtown campus and proposed turning the same city block that the bus company looked at into an outdoor track & field space. Again, this would displace homes and families and the neighborhood said no.
In the late 90s there was an attempt to build a youth center in the area, with recreation space and computer labs. This project had some appeal, but upon further investigation, the neighborhood decided that these services were offered in many spaces near our neighborhood and that what we wanted was more homes to be built in the vacant lots that were being coveted by numerous outside groups. This project was also defeated.
Recognizing that outside interests would not go away, we began organizing neighborhood planning meetings. We organized a long-term neighborhood planning session in 1998 and then ICCF organized two additional planning sessions in 2000 and 2002, something I have written about previously. I do not want to repeat much of that previous writing, but do want to point out that in all three of those neighborhood planning meetings we made it clear that we did not want to displace people. In fact, in the 2002 Wealthy – Jefferson Development Initiative, it states, “All current home owners will be able to continue to enjoy their homes, including some form of protection against tax increases that could threaten their ownership in the future.”
Unfortunately, this did not happen and several home owners left, when ICCF bought the vacant land and then offered to buy them out in order to undertake a completely new development project, one that the neighborhood had no say in.
When MLive presents this neighborhood in the way it does with today’s article, it ignores history – a history of the lives of working class people, and it disregards the lives of people who struggled to make ends meet, mostly Black and Latino lives.
There are those, who out of ignorance and privilege, will say, “but isn’t the neighborhood better off with these new developments?” My response would be, it’s not an either or question. One cannot ignore history and people, just because they do not make for hot destinations. The great Indian freedom fighter Mohandas Gandhi once said, “there is no beauty, even in the finest garments, if it causes the oppression and suffering of some people.” Likewise, there can be no complete jubilation in changes taking place at Division and Wealthy if in the process people were displaced, discounted and forgotten.
Paternalism and Ass-Covering in Spielberg’s “Lincoln”
This article by Louis Proyect is re-posted from CounterPunch.
Which film about the abolition of slavery was intended to burnish the reputation of a contemporary President? If you answered that it was Spielberg’s lavishly praised “Lincoln”, you were right. When asked in a November 15th NPR interview whether he saw parallels with the Obama administration, screenwriter Tony Kushner replied:
I think Obama is a great president and I feel that there is immense potential now for building – rebuilding a real progressive democracy in this country after a great deal of damage has been done to it. And I think that it faces many obstacles, and one of its obstacles is an impatience on the part of very good, very progressive people, with the kind of compromising that you were just mentioning, the kind of horse trading that is necessary.
But you would have also been right if you guessed “Amazing Grace”, the 2007 biopic about William Wilberforce, the British parliamentarian who opposed slavery. Its producer Philip Anschutz, the rightwing billionaire who also recently unleashed the toxic defense of charter schools “Won’t Back Down”, clearly intended to promote the agenda of the Christian right and the Bush administration it supported. By turning the abolitionist movement in Britain into a Church-based enterprise, Anschutz sought to legitimize new missionary operations in Africa all too familiar to people with painful memories of the bible and the gun.
The paternalism embodied in both screenplays transcends narrow party affiliations. It is wrapped up in the idea that “good people” on high delivered Black people from their oppression. The chief difference between the two films is Kushner’s decision to eschew hagiography and portray Lincoln as a kind of down-and-dirty dealmaker. This Lincoln had more in common in fact with LBJ than Barack Obama whose pugnaciousness is most often directed at his voting base rather than the billionaires who financed his campaign.
Conservative pundit David Brooks told New York Times readers on November 22nd that this is what “politics” is all about:
To lead his country through a war, to finagle his ideas through Congress, Lincoln feels compelled to ignore court decisions, dole out patronage, play legalistic games, deceive his supporters and accept the fact that every time he addresses one problem he ends up creating others down the road.
Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir not only embraces the idea that “legalistic games” must be played; he goes one step further and likens Lincoln’s maneuvers to Obama’s use of a secret “Kill List”:
Like many other people, I’m profoundly disturbed by the way the last two presidents have employed extra-constitutional authority to send purported terrorists to secret prisons, and to order the killing of both foreign civilians and American citizens who aren’t enemy combatants in any ordinary sense. But as “Lincoln” makes clear, in practice, we have entrusted our presidents with the power to violate the law on our behalf for most of our history.
Well, of course. Deploying Predator Drones against wedding parties and freeing the slaves—what’s the difference?
A counter-attack has been emerging against this interpretation. Eric Foner, a leading civil war historian of the left, wrote a letter to the N.Y. Times on November 27th taking issue with Brooks. He reminded its readers that emancipation was as much a product of struggle from below as horse-trading in Congress:
The 13th Amendment originated not with Lincoln but with a petition campaign early in 1864 organized by the Women’s National Loyal League, an organization of abolitionist feminists headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Moreover, from the beginning of the Civil War, by escaping to Union lines, blacks forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda.
His letter was in line with an op-ed piece by historian Kate Masur that appeared in the November 12th NYT:
But it’s disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them. For some 30 years, historians have been demonstrating that slaves were crucial agents in their emancipation; however imperfectly, Ken Burns’s 1990 documentary “The Civil War” brought aspects of that interpretation to the American public. Yet Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” gives us only faithful servants, patiently waiting for the day of Jubilee.
Like a speck of sand whose irritating qualities can generate an oyster’s pearl, Spielberg’s film might ultimately do some good by stimulating left scholars—both paid and unpaid—into taking a new look at the civil war.
It is likely that Kushner anticipated criticisms from the left and made sure to include a scene of Black soldiers imploring Lincoln to meet their demands for freedom at the beginning of the film. Once this ass-covering business was out of the way, he could go on to what he saw as the far more interesting scenes of Congressmen wrangling with Lincoln over what perks could be received in exchange for a vote for the 13th Amendment—something that to me was equivalent to watching CSPAN with a bad hangover.
The real story of Black soldiers deserves to be told in all its rich detail and all the more so without the paternalism of the 1989 “Glory” that starred Matthew Broderick as the aristocratic Col. Robert Gould Shaw leading a company of bumbling ex-slaves.
According to Guyora Binder, the author of “Did the Slaves Author the Thirteenth Amendment? An Essay in Redemptive History” (Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, Vol. 5, 1993), the Black soldier did a bit more than imploring:
[O]nce the war was won, the presence of a large number of blacks under arms continued to exert pressure on federal policy. Black soldiers were willing to remain mobilized longer than whites and hence played a greater role in maintaining the military occupation of the South after the Civil War. By constituting a substantial portion—in many areas the bulk—of the occupation army, blacks were suddenly in a position to influence the terms of the peace. This was a situation that Northern and Southern whites alike found acutely uncomfortable, impelling efforts to speed the demobilization of black troops: “In addition to charges of incompetence and insubordination, Union generals charged that black troops were hostile and insulting to Southern whites, threatening to white women, and encouraged militancy and insolence among civilian blacks.” Mary Frances Berry has argued that the quickest way literally to pacify these armed guardians of black liberty was to constitutionalize emancipation by passing the Thirteenth Amendment.
One can be relieved that Tony Kushner decided not to depict such “hostile and insulting” black troops since the film would have been a lot closer in spirit to “Gone With the Wind” given his rather shocking remarks to the NPR interviewer:
I think that what Lincoln was doing at the end of the war was a very, very smart thing, and it is maybe one of the great tragedies of American history that people didn’t take him literally after he was murdered, the inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way without any question was one of the causes of a kind of resentment and the perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote/unquote “noble cause” and the rise of the Klan and Southern self protection societies and so on. The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe and led – helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering.
For Tony Kushner’s information, the North did “reconcile” with the South in 1877, when Federal troops were withdrawn from the South and the Klan was given a free rein to terrorize Black people. The notion of an “abused” South is rather obscene given the reality of lynching, prison chain gangs, and all the rest.
With respect to Black soldiers and emancipation, there’s more to the story than meets the eye. By 1864, when the 13th Amendment was being drafted, the South itself was ready to abolish slavery and draft the ex-slaves on behalf of the secessionist cause. James McPherson’s magisterial “Battle Cry of Freedom” reports the following:
Robert E. Lee’s opinion would have a decisive influence. For months rumors had circulated that he favored arming the slaves. Lee had indeed expressed his private opinion that “we should employ them without delay [even] at the risk which may be produced upon our social institutions.” On February 18 he broke his public silence with a letter to the congressional sponsor of a Negro soldier bill. This measure was “not only expedient but necessary,” wrote Lee. “The negroes, under proper circumstances, will make efficient soldiers. I think we could at least do as well with them as the enemy… Those who are employed should be freed. It would be neither just nor wise … to require them to serve as slaves.”
In other words, Robert E. Lee advocated the same exact policy as contained in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln saw the Black soldier as means to an end: preserving the union. For his part, Lee saw them as a means as well: to preserve the confederacy. Black rights were never considered as an end in themselves.
From what I have observed on the Internet, Kushner’s defenders have begun to rally around a talking point, namely that he chose to tell a story about the passage of legislation that did not directly involve Blacks. Since they were not members of the House of Representatives, who could blame him or Spielberg for leaving them out? To fully comprehend how ludicrous this argument is, we can move forward in history to imagine a film about LBJ’s pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that included not a single important Black civil rights leader: no Martin Luther King Jr., no Bayard Rustin, no Stokely Carmichael, no Andrew Young. People would scream bloody murder. How could you leave them out?
It is easier for Kushner to get away with this sleight of hand by referring to historical events a century earlier about which Americans have little knowledge. Most assume that Lincoln “freed the slaves” and know nothing about the likes of Frederick Douglass. If you refer to a “Radical Republican”, the average American of today would think you were referring to Rush Limbaugh rather than Thaddeus Stevens.
Speaking of which, one of the biggest travesties of “Lincoln” is the way that Stevens (played by Tommy Lee Jones) is represented. He is an irascible cartoon figure akin to Yosemite Sam who when given the floor in the House is more likely to call a Democrat a “nincompoop” than make the case for Black equality. Of course, since the proposal of the Thirteenth Amendment was calculated to sidetrack such a “divisive” discussion, it was in some ways accurate to depict a House with little to say about the social and economic demands of the African-American.
Kushner decided to leave out the Black struggle for full equality and to turn Stevens into some kind of comic relief for obvious reasons. He believes that progress is made through incremental steps orchestrated by wise and beneficent leaders like Lincoln or Obama.
If Hollywood was interested in bankrolling directors like Ken Loach or the late Gillo Pontecorvo, then our expectations might be different. We understand that there are class affinities between someone like Steven Spielberg and Barack Obama. Spielberg donated $1 million to Obama’s Super-PAC, the same committee that attracted $300 thousand from Sam Walton, the Walmart boss whose company Michelle Obama shills for. One big happy family.
Some day when a radicalization as deep as the 1930s or 60s grips American society once again, we might look forward to the making of a film that dramatizes the Black struggle of the 1850s and 60s—something that I and arguably most Americans would find far more interesting than the horse-trading that constitutes the lion’s share of Kushner’s dreadful screenplay.
It would focus on the elections of 1864 when those who Kushner patronized as “very good, very progressive people” but not enlightened enough to see the need for compromise (the people Obama’s ex-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs once described as needing to be “drug tested”) asserted themselves politically in the same fashion as the Black troops: “encouraging militancy and insolence”.
That year the Republicans gathered in Baltimore to deliberate on proposals being submitted to the national convention. A contingent from the Sea Islands of South Carolina—the home of the Gullahs—sought to be seated. Among the group of sixteen was one Robert Smalls, who had won fame early in the war for commandeering a Southern ship and navigating his way to freedom in the North with a group of runaway slaves. The Republicans refused to seat them since they were not prepared to accept Blacks as equals.
Some things never change. On November 26th an obituary for Lawrence Guyot appeared in the Times. It noted:
Mr. Guyot (GHEE-ott) was repeatedly challenged, jailed and beaten as he helped lead fellow members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and student volunteers from around the nation in organizing Mississippi blacks to vote. In many of the state’s counties, no blacks were registered.
He further pressed the campaign for greater black participation in politics by serving as chairman of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, formed to supplant the all-white state Democratic Party. It lost its challenge to the established Mississippi party at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, but its efforts are seen as paving the way for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In the long struggle for freedom, both parties have found it convenient to deny recognition to the likes of a Robert Smalls or a Lawrence Guyot. If anything remains true after all these years, it will take this to establish full equality, not horse-trading:
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
–Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation, speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857
On Thursday, Michigan Senators Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin both voted for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013.
This recent voted was an just an amended version of the original legislation that was proposed by Senator Levin last year, which was widely condemned by human rights and civil liberties groups, such as the ACLU, since it allows for the detention of US civilians by the US military.
In a statement released on Friday, Senator Levin said:
“Now again, Senator Feinstein’s amendment does not prohibit the military detention of U.S. citizens who are captured or apprehended inside the United States, if it is expressly authorized by law – which I read the statute authorizing the use of military force itself, or some other Act of Congress. Now, this is a major difference from the amendment that Senator Feinstein offered last year, which included no exception for congressional authorization.”
In response to the Feinstein Amendment to the NDAA, the ALCU has this to say:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein has introduced an amendment that superficially looks like it could help, but in fact, would cause harm. Feinstein was a forceful leader last year against the NDAA detention provisions and believes that she is doing the right thing this year. But the problem is that the actual text of her amendment is bad.
It might look like a fix, but it breaks things further. Feinstein’s amendment says that American citizens and green-card holders in the United States cannot be put into indefinite detention in a military prison, but carves out everyone else in the United States.
There are three problems with her amendment:
- It would NOT make America off-limits to the military being used to imprison civilians without charge or trial. That’s because its focus on protections for citizens and green-card holders implies that non-citizens could be militarily detained. The goal should be to prohibit domestic use of the military entirely. That’s the protection provided to everyone in the United States by the Posse Comitatus Act. That principle would be broken if the military can find an opening to operate against civilians here at home, maybe under the guise of going after non-citizens. This is truly an instance where, when some lose their rights, all lose rights — even those who look like they are being protected.
- It is inconsistent with the Constitution, which makes clear that basic due process rights apply to everyone in the United States. No group of immigrants should be denied the most basic due process right of all — the right to be charged and tried before being imprisoned.
- It would set some dangerous precedents for Congress: that the military may have a role in America itself, that indefinite detention without charge or trial can be contemplated in the United States, and that some immigrants can be easily carved out of the most basic due process protections.
The executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League just wrote to Congress:
The [Feinstein] amendment is of particular concern to the Japanese American Citizens League because of our historic concern stemming from the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II. Nearly half of the internees were not United States citizens, and would not have been protected by this amendment. In consideration of due process and the rule of law within the United States, we urge you to oppose the Feinstein amendment, unless revised to protect all persons in the United States from indefinite detention without charge or trial.
The Senate on Thursday approved by a 67-29 vote to adopt the Feinstein amendment, with the vote mostly following partisan lines. This does not mean that the GOP is really in favor of protecting civil liberties, but it is clear that on this issue the Democrats are in favor of taking away our liberties.
COP18, Another ‘Conference of Polluters’
This interview between Patrick Bond and Busani Bafana is re-posted from ZNet.
There is no political will among rich nations to find funding for developing countries experiencing the brunt of changes in global weather patterns, and the current climate change conference will fail to do so, according to Professor Patrick Bond, a leading thinker and analyst on climate change issues.
“The elites continue to discredit themselves at every opportunity. The only solution is to turn away from these destructive conferences and avoid giving the elites any legitimacy, and instead, to analyse and build the world climate justice movement and its alternatives,” Bond, a political economist and also the director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, told IPS.
As the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) began in Doha, Qatar on Monday Nov. 26, Bond described past COPs as “conferences of polluters”. He believes COP18 will be no different.
“Qatar is an entirely appropriate host country for the next failed climate conference. On grounds of gender, race, class and social equity, environment, civil society voice and democracy, it’s a feudal zone, and the Arab world’s best mass media, Doha-based Al Jazeera, can’t tell the truth at home,” said the professor and author of the book, “Politics of Climate Justice”.
Excerpts of the interview follow:
Q: What is in it for Africa? What is Africa likely to get or to lose from this conference?
A: The most hopeful opportunity is that with the passing of (Ethiopia’s prime minister) Meles Zenawi a few months ago there is a chance for fresh leadership, unencumbered by revelations about Washington’s influence.
Meles was unveiled as purchasable in the WikiLeaks’ U.S. State Department cables from February 2010 … Meles’ pro-Washington stance meant that though he was the loudest official African voice for climate debt and lower northern emissions, it was hard to take the continent seriously.
Sadly, since the quietening of the eloquent Sudanese voice from Copenhagen, Lumumba di Apeng (Sudanese diplomat and chief negotiator for developing countries at COP15), no African leader has made a positive impression.
And though there is a possibility that adaptation funding may flow a bit more to Africa, evidence so far confirms that the West pays elite Africans instead of the people most adversely affected. The Qatar meeting won’t change these crippling problems.
Q: What progress do you anticipate on the Kyoto Protocol in Doha?
A: None at all. The only hope they have is to boost the Green Climate Fund – but already the main polluters like the U.S. have signalled that in spite of Hillary Clinton’s 100 billion dollars a year promise at Copenhagen in 2009, they won’t support it financially, so it is empty and cannot begin to meet either mitigation or adaptation requirements.
Q: From your writings, you hold quite strong views about the Green Climate Fund. Why?
A: Although a vast “climate debt” payment mechanism from the global north to the global south is urgently required, probably on the scale of a trillion dollars a year, we must be critical of the proposed Green Climate Fund from the outset, because its huge potential was destroyed even at the level of design.
This is in part because African elites like the late Zenawi and (South Africa’s former minister of finance) Trevor Manuel played critical co-chairing roles from 2009 through last year.
Because of their pro-market ideology, Manuel especially bought into the insane argument that emissions trading can provide up to half the fund’s revenues, when in reality, these markets are sputtering to their deaths, as witnessed in 2010 at the main U.S. market, in Chicago, and the collapse of the European market over the past 18 months.
That means that there’s insufficient pressure on the north to raise funds through penalising polluters by fining – and then rapidly banning – emissions. It is also likely that the fund’s tiny revenues will be squandered on what we term “false solutions” – a variety of corporate-designed gimmicks to allow them to continue polluting.
What is needed is wide-ranging investment in a post-fossil society, as well as a reparations mechanism to get resources to people suffering from climate change – such as a “basic income grant” for those in affected areas, without interference by the likes of local tyrants – and one leading pilot study for this comes from rural Namibia, funded by German churches, whose results are most encouraging.
Q: How are we doing then on global climate governance?
A: As the (COP17) Durban disaster proved, the idea of global management of the climate catastrophe, given the present adverse balance of forces, is farcical in general…
It is beyond doubt now that any progress at the multilateral level will require two things: first, a further crash of the emissions trading experiment, so as to finally end the fiction that a market run by international bankers can solve a problem of planet-threatening pollution caused by unregulated markets; and second, a banning of delegations from Washington – the U.S. government and Bretton Woods Institutions – since that’s the city most influenced by climate denialists. Hence every move from the U.S. State Department amounts to sabotage.
Q: What of the 2012 climate change negotiations prior to Doha?
A: For every tip-toe step forward taken in Durban – in a context in which during this century, 200 million additional Africans are expected to die early because of extreme droughts and floods – there were reversals by leaps and bounds…
Because of WikiLeaks, we know in great detail that the U.S. State Department is slyly bribing even the occasional courageous delegation, such as the one from the Maldives right after the Copenhagen fiasco. So given the degree of bribery, bullying and corruption from Washington, why would we expect the COP system to suddenly become functional?
Q: What is the future of climate change negotiations?
A: To sum up, the 1987 Montreal Protocol should have immediately been expanded to incorporate greenhouse gases, but instead, because Washington insisted on ineffectual carbon trading a decade later in Kyoto – we have simply not seen an appropriate degree of political will and strategic sophistication, and until this changes, we will not be successful at the multilateral scale.
That means the future of any potentially successful negotiations is actually between activists and the popular support they rally to the cause on the one hand, and governments – and the corporations that often control those governments – on the other.
Even public consciousness has shifted quickly, as a result of extreme weather in the most backward regions of the world, like the northeastern U.S. These are the only bright lights in the world’s efforts to halt climate change, and I feel that if more people know these stories, they would lose their despondency and take action against both their local polluters and crony-corporate governments.
Strike Launches Largest Union Drive in U.S. Fast Food History
This article by Peter Rugh is re-posted from Dissident Voice.
While the emblems of Wendy’s, McDonald’s, KFC, Domino’s and other greasy dynasties are hard to escape in the American landscape, those who cook, clean, ring up orders and otherwise serve as the fulcrum of these franchises often go unnoticed. These workers, however, were hard to miss today as they stepped off burger assembly lines across New York City and into the street, picketing in front of their workplaces. The strike, which took place at numerous restaurants across the city, is the start of the largest effort to unionize fast food workers in American history.
Organizers are calling the campaign Fast Food Forward.
Revenues in the fast food industry are expected to near $200 billion this year. Yet the demands of their workers are modest: $15 an hour and the right to unionize with the Fast Food Workers Committee.
“We’re out here for better wages, better working conditions, and union protection,” said Michael, an 18-year-old employee of a Burger King located not far from Wall Street. Michael says that growing up he was encouraged to “go the right way and get a job,” but now that he has a job he’s having trouble getting by. “There’s people my age that try to let this stabilize them. We got bills, we got rent. We’re living from check to check, hoping the next one will be better and it’s not. We can’t live on this.”
Gregory, an East Harlem KFC worker several years older than Michael, said he and his coworkers earn minimum wage ($7.25 an hour), receive food stamps and still don’t have enough to get by and provide for their kids. Gregory lives in Rockaway, Queens — an area that was inundated with floodwaters from Superstorm Sandy. When he sought back pay from his employer for time lost during the storm, his request was denied. He was given a meal on the house instead.
Working conditions at fast food franchises tend to be about the same across the board: highly exploitive. The fast food industry provides cheap, warm meals to those pressed for time, who often cannot afford more nutritious forms of nourishment. Simultaneously, these corporations take advantage of economic desperation in the black and brown, immigrant and working-class communities where they can get away with paying starvation wages and reaping gargantuan profits. Wendy’s, for instance, took in $615 million in 2011, an increase of 6 percent. But workers say checks from their employer often bounce, and some check cashing outlets won’t accept them.
Organizers with New York Communities for Change (NYCC), which has been working behind the scenes for months to build the strike, say that McDonald’s recruits in homeless shelters. Nearly every “benefit” listed on the company’s website, including free uniforms, appears with an asterisk beside it, indicating that the supposed perks are “subject to availability and certain eligibility requirements and restrictions.” Profits at McDonald’s have ballooned 130 percent in the past four years.
The largest of the fast food behemoths, McDonald’s, was also the swiftest to shift into damage control mode today, issuing a statement informing the public that the company is committed to a dialogue with their employees “so we can continue to be an even better employer.”
Asantewwa Ricks with NYCC said that before she began working on the strike drive, she thought fast food employees were “18-, 19-year-old kids who wanted cash for Beats headphones and True Religion jeans.” She has since learned that is not the case. Often, workers remain in the industry for years and see little to no bump in their salary. The minimum wage they receive often forces tough choices on them, such as whether to work late, or to make it back before the shelter where they reside locks its doors. At an organizing meeting early on in the campaign, Ricks asked a room full of fast food workers if they had ever suffered on-the-job injuries. Just about everyone present lifted up scars from grease on their arms.
A coalition of unions and community-based workers’ rights groups gathered ahead of the strike on Tuesday in a meeting room at the Service Employees International Union headquarters in Manhattan to discuss ongoing campaigns seeking dignity and improved pay for the working poor citywide. More than 100 people attended, representing roughly 40 organizations, along with a cluster of clergy from a variety of faiths. The coalition had helped spearhead a day of action on July 24, which saw hundreds of low-wage workers from the city’s five boroughs congregate in Union Square, and it has also been working with car wash employees demanding raises above the $5.25 hourly standard and, in some cases, back pay. Workers at four car washes have already won union representation in recent months.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who spoke at the July 24 rally, sent an aide to Tuesday’s meeting. Quinn is currently ahead in the upcoming mayoral race, but she has drawn ire from workers’ rights advocates over her opposition to sick pay legislation. While NYCC is circulating a petition for her to back the bill, the Daily News reports that wealthy business owners — who have already thrown over a quarter of a million dollars her way — sent a letter of their own to Quinn demanding just the opposite. Jonathan Westin, a lead organizer with NYCC, said while the group disagrees with Quinn on the issue of sick pay, he views it as a positive sign that she appears interested in the demands of fast food workers.
Perhaps seeking an edge on Quinn, two other Democratic contenders for mayor were on hand, Bill Thompson and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. The candidates stood in pressed suits, at opposite ends of the room, grinning at one another. It is with good reason that politicians are showing an interest in the fast food workers’ fight for a union; bystanders receiving leaflets from picketers Thursday were widely sympathetic to the cause.
“These guys shouldn’t be making 7.25 an hour,” said Steve Carlson, a union carpenter. “That’s crazy. Especially in Manhattan, the cost of living is so high.”
Still, while politicians might lose campaign contributions that sway an election by standing up for a cause like this, workers could lose their jobs. By organizing in the workplace, walking off and gambling on solidarity, they have risked the only means of subsistence available to their families and themselves. Westin said that since workers began the union drive six months ago there have been instances of retaliation from management, but he declined to elaborate because these cases are currently being dealt with in court. For those on strike and their supporters, however, the potential benefits outweigh the risks.
“The goal of this strike is for workers to be able to put food on their table and buy their children presents for Christmas,” Westin said, though he admits this is a long term battle and likely won’t be resolved by the holidays.
The fast food strike that broke out today may have larger implications than are immediately apparent. There are 50,000 fast food workers in New York City, and while those who walked off were few in number by comparison, the strike could galvanize workers elsewhere to take a stand as well. If the push for a union is successful, it will be an illustrative example to those both in the industry and in other low wage professions that standing up to the boss can pay off.
For Michael and his fellow Burger King employees, walking off the job was about more than a wage hike or forming a union. These demands are a means to a higher end. “We work hard, as if we were slaves,” he said. “It’s not only the wages. It’s also about how we get treated. We deserve respect.”
Snyder on Michigan’s Energy Future and Fracking
On Wednesday, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder delivered a talk in East Lansing on the future of the State’s energy and environmental policy.
The summary of the Governor’s message on the government site is of course glowing, naming the talk as Affordable and Reliable Energy, A Cleaner Environment, No Regrets for Our Future.
In his talk on the state’s energy future, Snyder tends to focus on the need to get home owners to make their homes more energy efficient and relying on the private sector to solve some of our problems of energy generations and transmission.
Snyder perpetuates the notion that the state needs to produce more energy in order to be more economically prosperous. The Governor is operating within the Capitalist framework, thinking that economic growth can co-exist with environmental sustainability, which we believe to be an impossible outcome.
On the matter of how Michigan should generate more of its own energy, Snyder identifies three areas of what he believes would create energy independence for the state. First, he identifies Nuclear Power, but only talks about waste disposal and that Yucca Mountain seems like a reliable solution for Michigan’s nuclear waste. This has been an ongoing debate in Congress and there has been substantial public resistance as well. In addition, there has been plenty of new evidence of safety concerns over both the Palisades and Davis Besse reactors, an issue that Snyder never addresses in his recent talk.
The second area of energy that Snyder addresses is electrical energy, generated by coal-powered plants. Snyder focuses on the issue of a national grid and then states, “I know people disagree about the new EPA rules for coal plants, but I think we can all agree it’s not in the best interest of the environment or the country to risk massive outages to get there at a breakneck pace.” Seems like Snyder is not in a hurry to cut Michigan’s dependency on coal for electricity generation, which would be an unsustainable and environmentally destructive route to continue.
The third area of energy the Governor addresses is natural gas. Snyder states:
A recent presidential order recognized the benefits of natural gas as a reliable, affordable, clean and domestic part of our energy future. The President got this right and we need him to follow through. We need timelines that will let us look seriously at transitioning existing plants to this fuel, a commitment to pipeline infrastructure and a stable, environmentally protective set of regulations that allow companies to create a business plan built around new natural gas supplies. Michigan has done what it can in leading the way on this issue. We will do whatever we can to help our federal partners develop and implement a consistent strategy in short order.
Snyder makes it clear that he is sold on natural gas being the savoir of the state’s energy needs. Later on in his talk Snyder addresses the issue of horizontal hydraulic fracturing.
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has received increased attention lately. This technology is being used in combination with horizontal drilling to reach some natural gas and other resources that otherwise could not be developed. This innovation is already benefitting Michigan in the form of unusually low natural gas prices and additional money from state leases that goes to our public lands and our parks. But some have expressed concerns about what these technologies mean for Michigan’s environment.
Neither fracking nor horizontal drilling is a new technology—they have been used in Michigan for many decades. None of the fracking that has been done in Michigan has resulted in a single water quality problem. In fact, fracking’s deeper wells likely pose less risk to our groundwater than the shallower wells we are more used to. With our water withdrawal statute, as well as our strong regulatory history of natural gas drilling, we are better prepared – more adaptable – than most other states.
That said, it’s important that our citizens understand what fracking is really all about. That’s why the University of Michigan’s Graham Sustainability Institute is undertaking an evaluation of fracking. At their invitation, the state is participating in the steering committee for this effort alongside environmental and industry groups. At the end of the process, the public will have well-reasoned, objective explanations of what this technology is and is not. We will also have a Michigan-focused evaluation of the various implications of fracking. This is a great example of collaboration and a public university serving the needs of the state, and I am looking forward to seeing the results.
Snyder is clearly embracing the coming explosion of fracking in Michigan and the lie about it not being a risk to environmental destruction and public health. Snyder presents the illusion that the state is engaged in doing research to determine that the fracking is safe and beneficial for the state. The University of Michigan’s Graham Sustainability Institute might sound like a bastion of environmental integrity, but the Institute often promotes a Green Capitalism approach to environmental issues and their advisor’s are made up of the Big Green Groups and corporations such as Dow, neither of which have a commitment to environmental or climate justice.
Snyder’s position on fracking should be a clarion call to activists across the state that we need to get ready for a serious battle to stop the fracking onslaught coming our way.
Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign comes to GVSU
The international group 350.org is spearheading a campaign to get campuses across the US to divest from investing in any companies making a profit from the extraction or burning of fossil fuels.
The campaign has its own website http://gofossilfree.org, which includes regular updates and some well-designed resources on how and why to divest from the fossil fuel industry. There is also a listing of the Top 200 Fossil Fuel Companies, companies that will be targeted in this campaign.
As of this writing there are about 100 campuses nationwide that are participating in the Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign, with Grand Valley State University being one of them.
There is an online campaign to send letters to GVSU President Thomas Haas, which includes the following text:
Climate change is accelerating. We are witnessing the increasing impacts of a warming planet more and more consistently; in this last year alone our country experienced record-breaking heat, droughts, and hurricanes, which impacted hundreds of thousands of people and cost our country hundreds of billions of dollars. Hurricane Sandy alone caused $50bn in damages. Experts agree that global warming caused by humans burning fossil fuels will continue to accelerate and intensify these tragic climate disasters. The scientific consensus is clear and overwhelming; we cannot safely burn even half of global fossil-fuel reserves without dangerously warming the planet for several thousand years.
As public pressure to confront climate change builds, we call on Grand Valley State University to immediately freeze any new investment in fossil-fuel companies, and to divest within five years from direct ownership and from any commingled funds that include fossil-fuel public equities and corporate bonds. We believe such action on behalf of Grand Valley State University will not only be a sound decision for our institution’s financial portfolio, but also for the wellbeing of its current and future graduating classes, who deserve the opportunity to graduate with a future not defined by climate chaos.
Grand Valley State University is known across the country and the world for being one of the most environmentally-friendly universities in the world. As an institution and a community we are well on our way to initiating action geared toward sustainability and the environment. We need to continue on this path and continue to lead other institutions and universities on the path of sustainability and environmental action.
If any additional efforts are organized at GVSU around this campaign, we will report on those efforts in the future.
This article by Amy Mall is re-posted from EcoWatch.
The George Washington National Forest in Virginia is currently a target for natural gas leasing, yet this area is home to the headwaters of the Potomac and James Rivers.
The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is in the process of developing new rules for fracking on more than 750 million acres of public and private land across the country. A final rule could be released as early as December.
The current rules are woefully inadequate and need to be dramatically strengthened to protect health and the environment. Even Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has said that the current rules “… are in many ways outdated …”
BLM has the opportunity and obligation to be a leader in regulating fracking. But the BLM’s current draft for new rules is too weak. The rules need to be strengthened in many ways that the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has detailed in previous blogs, such as requiring companies to disclose the chemicals they use before fracking begins; requiring baseline water testing in an area before fracking begins in order to determine if contamination has occurred; establishing the highest standards for well design and construction; and prohibiting the use of open air pits to store or dispose of toxic fracking waste.
The stakes are high—fracking comes with serious risks and stronger rules are essential to protect the health and safety of millions of people nationwide.
It’s not only wildlands like the pristine mountain ranges and magnificent red rock canyons in the western U.S. that fall under the category of “public lands.” It’s true that BLM’s new rules will govern oil and gas fracking in California, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. And protecting those lands for wildlife and wilderness qualities is critical.
Drinking water for millions at risk
But in addition, the rules will also apply to national forests nationwide that are the sources of drinking water for tens of millions of Americans. Priority drinking watersheds, and other sensitive natural, scenic and recreation areas, should be made off limits to fracking in BLM’s new rule. The toxic waste that can spill or leak, dangerous air pollutants, harms to streams and forests, and threats to drinking water from contamination in watersheds that serve millions of people are too severe to allow oil and gas development to proceed in places like this. A map below illustrates federal lands and their importance to surface drinking water supplies.
Take, for example:
Washington, D.C.: The George Washington National Forest in Virginia is currently a target for leasing, yet this area is home to the headwaters of the Potomac and James Rivers. The waters in this forest feed the drinking water supplies for approximately four million people, including all of Washington, D.C., northern Virginia, and Richmond (see our map below), and more than 260,000 residents of the Shenandoah Valley. While the U.S. Forest Service has proposed keeping horizontal drilling and fracking out of here, its plan has yet to be finalized, and would still allow vertical drilling with fracking in nearly the entire area if it is approved. Not only are the risks of fracking here far too great—whether horizontal or vertical—but the proposed new BLM rules are inadequate to properly safeguard the drinking water resources that depend on this forest from any kind of fracking that might move forward here, regardless of the outcome of the Forest Service’s new plan.
Denver and western Colorado: The White River National Forest in Colorado, where oil and gas leasing is in the works, is home to the main reservoirs for Denver’s drinking water and parts of water projects that serve Aurora and Colorado Springs, among other cities. Its crystal clear streams provide drinking water to many local communities, including Glenwood Springs, Silt, New Castle, Carbondale, Redstone, Vail, Aspen, Basalt, Eagle, Gypsum and Rifle. And it is also the source of most of the water in the Upper Colorado River—which ultimately sustains 30 million people downstream in Arizona, Nevada and California. Additionally, the White River National Forest is the most visited national forest in the nation because it is home to some of America’s most spectacular wild beauty, unparalleled outdoor recreation opportunities including Aspen and Vail, incredibly valuable wildlife habitat and prized hunting and fishing spots.
Athens, Ohio: The Wayne National Forest is facing oil and gas leasing of more than 3,000 acres. Most of the acreage lies directly along the Hocking River and the underlying aquifer that serves as the sole source of drinking water for more than 70,000 people in four Ohio counties: Athens, Hocking, Perry and Morgan. This includes major metropolitan areas like Athens and Nelsonville, and Ohio University. According to the City of Athens, the sole-source aquifer is shallow, averaging a maximum of 60 feet below ground level, and is therefore “especially susceptible to pollution from surface level and near-surface level contamination.” The Burr Oak Regional Water District opposes any fracking near the aquifer, saying that contamination would pose a “serious and catastrophic health risk to the people and communities that depend upon this water source.”
The BLM has more work to do in order to deliver a stronger and more, protective fracking rule to help safeguard the health of the millions of people and the more than 700 million acres across the country it will govern. From California to Virginia, Michigan to Texas, and the many places in between, our drinking water sources, communities and wild places are too precious for anything less.
Here is a map of areas in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region that are primarily served by water from the Potomac River; this map does not include areas in Frederick County, MD:
And here is a map of federal lands nationwide and their importance to surface drinking water supplies, based on data from the U.S. Forest Service “Forests to Faucets” program:
Gaza Quiz
This quiz by Stephen Shalom is re-posted from ZNet.
An uneasy cease-fire has been declared ending Israel’s attack on Gaza, Operation Pillar of Defense. Take this quiz to see how much you know about the situation.
1. How did the people of Gaza come to be where they are?
a. A majority of them are descendants of refugees who in 1948-1949 fled or were driven out by Israeli forces from territory that was supposed to be part of the Arab state of Palestine but was taken over by Israel, and they were never permitted to return.
b. Some of them are descendants of residents of the Arab town of Majdal, who, after the 1948-49 war were evacuated from different parts of the town and concentrated in a neighborhood surrounded by barbed wire (to make way for Jewish settlers) and then expelled to Gaza.
c. Gaza was conquered by Israel in October 1956 and subjected to massacres; Israel withdrew under international pressure in March 1957.
d. Gazans came under Israeli occupation in 1967 when Israel—in a war in which, in the words of Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1982, “we had a choice … We decided to attack [Egypt]”—conquered the Sinai (since returned to Egypt), Gaza, East Jerusalem (annexed), the West Bank, and the Golan Heights (annexed).
e. All of the above.
2. In 2005, Israel under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “disengaged” from Gaza. Which of the following statements about the disengagement is true?
a. Israel’s Gaza “disengagement” was a unilateral move, not worked out with any Palestinian leaders at all.
b. Israeli settlers were removed from Gaza, but more new settlers moved to the West Bank in 2005 than left Gaza and more Palestinian land was taken over on the West Bank than was given up in Gaza.
c. Ariel Sharon’s chief aide, Dov Weisglass, told an interviewer for an Israeli newspaper: The significance of the disengagement plan “is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely.”
d. All of the above.
3.Israel says that its occupation of Gaza ended in 2005. Which of the following conditions that exist to this day raises a question about whether there has actually been an end to Israeli control of Gaza?
a. Israel prohibits Gaza from engaging in air commerce with or air travel to or from other nations.
b. Israel prohibits Gaza from engaging in sea commerce with or sea travel to or from other nations.
c. Israel prohibits Gazans engaged in fishing from going more than 3 nautical miles off shore, denying them access to 85% of their fishing waters.
d. Israel has declared a formal no-go zone for Palestinians inside Gaza covering more than 3 percent of the total land area and another 14 percent within which entry is effectively restricted due to a real risk of gunfire, excluding from Palestinian use 35% of the land suitable for farming.
e. The Israeli army carries out incursions into this zone a number of times a week.
f. All of the above.
4.Which of the following reflects the Israeli attitude toward Gaza and its people?
a. The statement in a 1956 Knesset speech by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion: “If I believed in miracles, I would pray that Gaza would be washed down into the sea.”
b. The statement by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993: “If only it [Gaza] would just sink into the Sea.”
c. The fact that in Israeli slang, “go to Gaza” means “go to hell.”
d. All of the above.
5.The Palestinian organization Hamas rules within Gaza. Which of the following is true regarding Hamas?
a. A descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood, it was promoted in its early years by Israel and the United States, which were eager to establish a counterweight to the then-dominant secular Palestinian organization Fatah.
b. It won a plurality in the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006.
c. It took over Gaza in 2007 after Fatah, working with Israel and the United States, launched a failed coup against it.
d. All of the above.
6. Hamas refuses to accept the three Israeli-U.S. conditions: that it recognize Israel, renounce violence, and agree to accept all agreements previously accepted by the Palestinian Authority. Which of the following is true?
a. Israel and the United States have refused to recognize an independent Palestinian state, with Washington even blocking UN recognition of nominal Palestinian statehood.
b. Neither Washington nor Tel Aviv has renounced violence (to say the least).
c. Nonviolent protest against the Israeli occupation has been brutally repressed.
d. Israel “previously accepted” the Fourth Geneva Convention, but when the World Court found Israel’s construction of the Wall on the occupied West Bank to be in violation of that convention, Israel refused to remove it and the United States supported its refusal.
e. Israel signed the Oslo Accords which state that “The two sides view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit, whose integrity will be preserved during the interim period” and yet has pursued a policy of trying to separate Gaza from the West Bank.
f. Hamas has indicated on numerous occasions that it was willing to accept an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, along with a truce that could last 20, 30, or 50 years, or even indefinitely.
g. All of the above.
7.Israel says it can’t trust Hamas to maintain cease-fires. Which of the following is part of the historical record?
a. A study found that from 2000 to 2008, it was “overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict” and that this pattern “becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses,” with Israel unilaterally having interrupted 96% of the periods of nonviolence that lasted longer than a week and 100% of the periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.
b. In 1997, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal made an offer to Israel through King Hussein of Jordan for a thirty-year cease-fire. Israel ignored the offer and then tried to assassinate Meshal in Amman.
c. Following its 2006 electoral victory in Gaza, Hamas secretly conveyed a message to the Israeli government that it “would pledge not to carry out any violent actions against Israel and would even prevent other Palestinian organizations from doing so,” if Israel stopped its undercover assassination program and ended its military attacks in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel did not reply.
d. In June 2008 a six-month truce was arranged between Israel and Hamas, and broken by Israel on the night of Nov. 4-5, 2008.
e. All of the above.
8.Israel claims that its blockade of Gaza is simply a means of keeping out weapons from the territory. Which of the following is true?
a. The blockade has always included a ban on almost all exports from Gaza, crippling the economy, while having no connection to weapons imports.
b. Dov Weisglass, an adviser to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, explained that “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
c. The Israeli Ministry of Defense did a study in 2008 of the minimum daily humanitarian food needs of Gaza and then, until June 2010, Israel proceeded to allow in less than that amount.
d. Among the items Israel prohibited being imported into Gaza before June 2010 were notebooks, cilantro, sage, jam, chocolate, French fries, dried fruit, fabrics, and toys.
e. Even though food is now allowed into Gaza, Israel still restricts exports, imports of basic construction materials, despite a shortage of approximately 250 schools and some 71,000 housing units, and restricts travel between Gaza and the West Bank.
f. All of the above.
9.Which of the following describes conditions in Gaza on the eve of Operation Pillar of Defense?
a. The people of Gaza have lower per capita incomes than they did in the 1990s, despite improvements over the past three years.
b. The unemployment rate in 2011 was 29% and during the first quarter of 2012 unemployment stood at 47% for women and 58% for people between 20 and 24 years old.
c. 44% of households were food insecure in 2011 and another 16% were vulnerable to food insecurity.
d. 10% of children suffer from stunting (long-term exposure to chronic malnutrition).
e. 39% of people lived below the poverty line.
f. Currently, more than 90% of the water supplied through Gaza’s aquifer does not meet the safety standards of the World Health Organization and is unfit for drinking.
g. All of the above.
10.Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense on November 14, 2012, claiming it needed to respond to an unrelenting barrage of rockets from Hamas. Which of the following is an accurate statement of the lead-up to November 14?
a. From October 30, 2012, until Nov. 10, 2012, there were a total of 2 rockets fired from Gaza, which fell in open areas causing no casualties or damage.
b. On November 4, Israeli forces shot and killed a 23 year-old mentally-challenged Palestinian walking approximately ten meters from the fence on the Gaza side. The Israeli military did not allow a Palestinian ambulance to retrieve the body for two hours.
c. On Nov. 8, Israeli troops operating within Gaza were fired on by Palestinians; Israeli fire killed a Palestinian boy.
d. On Nov. 10, Palestinian armed factions fired on an Israeli military vehicle patrolling on the Israeli side of the fence, injuring four soldiers. Israel responded by firing tank shells hitting a residential area, killing 5 civilians, including 2 children, and injuring 36 civilians, including 9 children.
e. Palestinian rocket attacks began on Nov. 10, after more than a week of quiet.
f. All of the above.
11.What happened on November 13, the day before the Israeli targeted assassination of Ahmed al-Jabari, Hamas’ military chief?
a. Palestinian rocket fire decreased from 64 on Nov. 11, to 35 on Nov. 12, to 1 on the morning of Nov. 13.
b. Palestinian rocket fire ended, but then, in the words of the Israeli government, “Following the launch of Israel’s operation Pillar of Defense … rocket fire from Gaza resumed on Wednesday evening (14 Nov)…”
c. Reuters reported that “After five days of mounting violence, Israel and the Palestinians stepped back from the brink of a new war in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, [Nov. 13,] sending signals to each other via Egypt that they would hold their fire unless attacked. … Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of Gaza’s Hamas government, praised the main armed factions in the enclave for agreeing on Monday night to a truce. ‘They showed a high sense of responsibility by saying they would respect calm should the Israeli occupation also abide by it,’ he said.”
d. A draft proposal for a long-term cease-fire, with mechanisms to ensure compliance, had been agreed to by an Israeli negotiator and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, and was being submitted to Ahmed al-Jabari and Israeli security officials for their consideration. Jabari, who had authorized the negotiations, received a copy of the proposal the day he was assassinated.
e. All of the above.
12.Israel (and the United States) claim that the Israeli attack on Gaza was a lawful act of self-defense. Which of the following statements about self-defense conform to international law and morality?
a. Military force in self-defense must be a last resort, having exhausted non-military means (such as accepting a cease-fire, negotiating a long-term cease-fire, and, most decisively, ending the occupation of Palestinian territory).
b. Self-defense is not permissible against someone legitimately resisting illegal occupation (and so, for example, Japanese troops in China from 1937-45 had no right of self-defense against attacks from Chinese forces).
c. Even when self-defense is permitted, the measures taken must not disproportionately endanger civilians.
d. All of the above.
13.If a cease-fire was possible without Operation Pillar of Defense, which of the following is a plausible explanation for why Israel launched its attack?
a. Because Israel always wants to maintain its deterrent power, meaning that fear of its massive military response will keep subject people in line.
b. Because an election is coming soon in Israel and wars and Palestinian rockets tend to help politicians’ electoral prospects.
c. To test out the Iron Dome system and send a message to Iran.
d. Because Pillar of Defense weakened Mahmud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, while strengthening Hamas, which serves the Israeli interest in being able to insist there is no partner for peace.
e. All of the above.
14.Which of the following statements was made by an Israeli official or personality?
a. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai: “We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages, destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water.”
b. Israel Katz, Israel’s transport minister and member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, on 11 November: “we must detach from Gaza in a civilian manner—electricity, water, food, and fuel—and transition into a policy of deterrence, just like in Southern Lebanon.”
c. Avi Dichter, Israel’s Minister of Home Front Defense: “there is no other choice, Israel must carry out a formatting action in Gaza, actually format the system and clean it out, the way we did in Judea & Samaria during Operation Defensive Shield.”
d. Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari of the National Union party: “Brothers! Beloved soldiers and commanders—preserve your lives! Don’t give a hoot about Goldstone! There are no innocents in Gaza, don’t let any diplomats who want to look good in the world endanger your lives[;] at any tiniest concern for your lives—Mow them!”
e. Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, son of Israel’s former Chief Rabbi and spiritual leader of the Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef: “The army has got to learn from the Syrians how to slaughter and crush the enemy.”
f. Gilad Sharon, the son of former prime minister Ariel Sharon, in the Jerusalem Post: “The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas. The Gazans aren’t hostages; they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences….We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima—the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.”
g. All of the above.
15.Which of the following is a UN statistic regarding the casualties of Operation Pillar of Defense?
a. More than twenty-five Palestinian civilians were killed for every Israeli civilian killed (103:4).
b. More than twenty-five Palestinian combatants were killed for every Israeli combatant killed (55:2).
c. Israel, with its arsenal of highly advanced “smart” weaponry, fired without being under pressure, killed as high a percentage of civilians among all those it killed (65%) as did Hamas (67%), with its inaccurate rockets fired under great pressure.
d. All of the above.
16.Which of the following is true regarding U.S. military aid to Israel?
a. Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance in the world since 1945, having received $115 billion in bilateral assistance, about two-thirds of which has been military aid and which in recent years has been almost entirely military aid.
b. U.S. military aid to Israel has helped transform Israel’s armed forces into one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world and has helped Israel build a domestic arms industry that ranks as one of the top 10 arm exporters.
c. One of the main Israeli weapons used to attack Gaza have been F-16 aircraft, provided by the United States. From 2000 to 2009, the United States paid for and delivered at least 93 F-16D fighter jets, valued at $2.48 billion, and licensed and paid for at least 13,559 spare parts and co-production parts for Israel’s arsenal of F-16s.
d. All of the above.
17.In which other way has the United States aided Israel in its assault on Gaza?
a. The Obama administration blocked a United Nations Security Council statement calling for a cease-fire on November 20, 2012 to end Operation Pillar of Defense.
b. President Obama told Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “no country can be expected to tolerate rocket attacks against civilians,” but failed to note that no people should have to live under occupation, with bombs and shells falling on them, killing far greater numbers of innocent civilians.
c. The United States has blocked efforts to hold Israel responsible for its previous assault on Gaza, by rejecting the Goldstone Commission Report.
d. President Obama declared that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with Hamas.
e. The United States has defended Israel’s right to stop humanitarian aid ships bound for Gaza.
f. The Obama administration, by its use of targeted drone killings, has normalized the practice that Israel now uses to such murderous effect.
g. The United States has over many years blocked efforts to move in the direction of a long-term solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, among many other acts vetoing a Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories.
h. All of the above.
18.Which of the following is a way to put pressure on the Israeli government to end its occupation of Palestine, and on the United States government and corporations which support that occupation?
a. Support the work of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation to cut off U.S. military aid to Israel.
b. Support the work of Jewish Voice for Peace and its “We Divest” campaign to pressure TIAA/CREF to divest from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation.
c. Support the work of Code Pink and its Stolen Beauty campaign to boycott beauty products made in the occupied territories.
d. Support other campaigns that aim to achieve justice for Palestinians.
e. All of the above.
Answers and Sources, click here.
AIDS and Activism Part III – ACT UP and the power of direct action
This is the third of a three part series that began earlier this week. In Part I, we posted the chapter on AIDS and the Gay Community in Grand Rapids from the film “A People’s History of the LGBTQ Community in Grand Rapids. In Part II, we focused on the silence of the US government in the 1980s and the homophobic response to AIDS by the Religious Right.
We left off in Part II of this series talking about the virulently homophobic responses from the Religious Right in the 1980s around the issue of AIDS. In Part III, we want to focus on the creation and work of the group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP).
ACT UP was founded in 1987, at a time when the US government was in some ways ignoring the AIDS crisis and at the same time blaming the gay community for this new deadly disease. ACT UP was both a response to the brutally homophobic climate of the 1980s and the lack of any real movement to challenge the systemic inadequacies of the US health care system.
ACT UP was not interested in charity, reform or working within the system, they used direct action and confrontation to demand health care rights and challenge the institutional homophobia of that permeated most of society.
One of the early ACT UP activists, Sarah Schulman, recounted years later what motivated the strategy of the new movement:
The group operated in a way Martin Luther King, Jr., advocated, which was to “educate yourself so you really understand the issue, make a demand that’s reasonable and doable, present that demand to the powers that be who can enact it, and when they refuse, you do civil disobedience until they are forced by pressure to take that action.”
Jerry Kramer, another one of the early leaders of ACT UP, during one meeting asked half of those in the room to stand up as a way of making a point about the urgency of this issue. He said, “you will all be dead from AIDS in a year, what are you gonna do about it?”
This is the kind of passion and rage that people brought to the movement in ACT UP and it manifested itself in the following ways:
- Catholic Cardinal John O’Connor, was not only preaching against the gay community, he was on the Reagan appointed AIDS Commission and refused to acknowledge the crisis, which was taking the lives of thousands of people in New York City alone. In 1989, ACT UP members and the Women’s Health Action Network (WHAM!) held marches outside St. Patricks Cathedral in New York, once with a banner that read, “O’Connor Public Health Menace.” On one occasion the group did an action in the church during mass and held a die-in to dramatize the seriousness of AIDS. Some members yelled during the mass and said, “You are killing us, stop killing us, we’re not going to take it anymore.” Over 100 people were arrested for this action, known as the Stop the Church Campaign, which was later made into a 24 minute documentary.
- In March of 1987, 250 members of ACT UP protested in front of Wall Street to demand greater access to HIV/AIDS drugs and a more coordinated national policy to deal with the crisis. The group chose Wall Street to confront large drug companies that were more interested in making money that providing drugs to fight AIDS. Seventeen members of ACT UP were arrested at this action.
- In April of 1987, ACT UP held an action at the main post office on the last day to file income tax returns. The group knew that the news media always reports on late filers and would have to report on their action, plus the group began its Silence = Death campaign, with the now infamous logo.
- In 1988, members of ACT Up took action against Cosmopolitan Magazine, because it had published misleading and harmful information about AIDS and sex. About 150 people protested outside the Hearst building, which is the parent company of Cosmo. People chanted, “Say no to Cosmo,” and ACT UP had a film team there to document the action and produce a new video for this campaign.
- When the US War in the Gulf began in 1991, ACT UP took the opportunity to draw the connections between military spending and lack of funds for AIDS. One action involved getting into the studio of CBS and disrupting a live broadcast, where Dan Rather was reading the news. The very next day ACT UP members went to the Grand Central Terminal in New York and released banners that said, “Money for AIDS, not for war.” These actions were part of what ACT UP called Days of Desperation.
In essence, what ACT UP accomplished was to have a profound and lasting impact on HIV/AIDS, not just from the greater awareness their actions brought, but because they challenge systems of power that perpetuated violence, suffering and social exclusion against those who were and are HIV positive.
ACT UP did not play nice, they did not ask for marginal reforms, they did not create public/private partnerships and they didn’t rely on either the government or the so-called free market to solve the problem.
What we can learn from ACT UP
There were and still are numerous chapters of ACT UP all across the country, with sister organizations around the world that continue to fight against institutional violence, oppression and homophobia.
This fight continues today, despite the gains made by grassroots activism to address the class, gender and class disparities within HIV/AIDS. Corporations are motivated by profits rather than people, AIDS still disproportionately impacts poor communities, the LGBTQ community, communities of color and immigrant populations and the lack of adequate funding for resources is still a major part of the fight.
What we can learn from ACT UP about how we organize today is important. First, we have to take bold action, the kind of action that will challenge power systems in whatever form they take. We cannot allow government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, trade policies and religious institutions to prevent anyone from having access to HIV/AIDS testing & medication.
Second, our demands should not just be for access, it is about justice and part of that fight for justice today is to radically change social structures and power dynamics that perpetuate the spread of such diseases – classism, racism, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, heterosexism and imperialism.
Third, ACT UP understood the importance of an intersectional analysis, which is why they did not shy away from making the demand of money for AIDS, not for war. As of today, roughly $212 million has left Grand Rapids to fund the US occupation of Afghanistan. Imagine if just 1% of that much money, $2.1 million, was available to groups like The Red Project. Imagine what kind of work they could accomplish if money was never an issue. The Obama administration, like all previous administrations always puts its priority in military spending and not human rights issues like HIV/AIDS.
Fourth, we have to target those structures, which benefit from the current systems of oppression. Pharmaceutical companies still profit while people unnecessarily die. Governments still deny or avoid making HIV/AIDS a priority, within a larger context of public health justice. Religious institutions still marginalize and promote hate around the issue of HIV/AIDS. Commercial media still misinforms or minimally informs on the larger social and historical context of HIV/AIDS.
Lastly, we need to learn from ACT UP, in terms of their ability to a have creative and impacting media strategy. We must avoid doing things that are media friendly, instead do things that 1) provoke the media, and 2) we need to make more of our own media that both documents actions and challenges power. We must not be content to just make media that is symbolic, rather media that makes those in power feel terribly uncomfortable.
Films About ACT UP in West Michigan
In the next week, we highly recommend that people in West Michigan attend one of the screenings of two separate documentaries that deal with the history of ACT UP. The LGBT Resource Center at GVSU will be screening the film How to Survive A Plague, on Monday, December 3 at noon on the Allendale Campus (Grand River Room – Kirkhof Center) and at 6:00PM at the downtown campus (Loosemore auditorium). UICA will be screening the film United in Anger, on Wednesday, December 5 at 7:00PM.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 