It was announced on Tuesday that local NBC affiliate WOOD TV 8 would host a “Town Hall” meeting with Michigan Governor Rick Snyder.
The channel 8 posting states, “A diverse group of West Michigan community members, from a variety of demographics, will be selected by WOOD TV8 to attend the live broadcast and participate by asking questions directly to the governor.” There are no details about how this diverse group will be selected, but based on previously broadcast events that WOOD TV has held in their studio it would be safe to say that this will be a highly scripted and controlled event.
Today, people with Michigan Stands for Democracy announced that there will be a protest outside of the WOOD TV 8 facility located on College Avenue, just north of Cherry Street. The protest is schedule for next Tuesday, September 13.
The Facebook announcement says the protest will take place from 7 – 8pm, the same time as the live broadcast that channel 8 will host with Snyder. The Michigan Stands for Democracy is part of the campaign to reverse the Emergency Financial Managers law that Snyder imposed on the state earlier this year.
Food Charity or Food Justice? Reporting on Hunger in Grand Rapids
Yesterday, a new project between the Grand Rapids Press and The Rapidian began in what they are calling the Grand Rapids Hunger Challenge.
Hunger Challenge Week is September 14 – 20, a these two local news entities decided that as a way of making people aware of hunger and food insecurity they would have a writer from each news outlet try to live off of a $30.59 a week food budget.
The Day 1 article on MLive talks about how both of the writers went shopping for food with their limited budget. The Press writer talked about being at a birthday party and not being able to eat ice cream and cake, while The Rapidian writer talks about how she was once herself on food assistance.
The Rapidian also has an opinion piece that has some useful statistics on hunger and the number of people who rely on food stamps, but the article, like the ones by the writers taking the “hunger challenge” do little to really address hunger and poverty in West Michigan.
Having people who have a certain level of class privilege try to follow a budget of people who are truly poor is a bit disingenuous. These kinds of exercises are like the “poverty simulations” that charity groups put on or the Planned Famines that high school church groups organize so that privileged kids can somehow understand what starving and malnourished children feel like. However, these attempts to sensitize people do not ask the fundamental and important reasons for why people in the richest nation in the world are going hungry.
Both the Press article and the Rapidian pieces never address the causes of hunger in the US. Having their writers try to live on a fixed food budget tends to put the emphasis on personal responsibility instead of systemic factors.
One of the oldest anti-hunger education organizations in the US is Food First. Food First has been working on both dispelling the myths about hunger and providing analysis of both food insecurity and how to actively organize against it. Food First looks at Food Deserts and how large monopoly grocery chains are buying up land in urban areas with little access to real food with their claim to “serving” poor communities.
Food First also addresses issues of economic and racial inequality and how that impacts who has access to food and what kind of food people have access to. In an excellent report on youth and food justice, the report looks at how there is a relationship to Jim Crow policies and the kind of food system we have in the US.
There is also a growing movement in the US that is advocating food justice, not food pantries. Food justice involves more urban food production, access to land for people to grow more of their own food, limitations on fast food restaurants being built in poor communities, community kitchens, Community Supported Agriculture and the efforts to challenge the grossly unjust food system we have in the US that is publicly funded through the Farm Bill.
In fact, Food and Water Watch is doing a national campaign to address the failed food system we have in the US and is even organizing in Grand Rapids. Their first meeting on this project to reform the Farm Bill will be held on September 21st at 7pm in the WMEAC building in Grand Rapids.
This kind of information and local analysis would not only address systemic reasons why people go hungry in West Michigan, it would challenge the charity-based food efforts that drive too much of hunger awareness in this community.
At Least Some Ministers Tell the TRUTH: Hip-Hop, Social Media and Revolutionary Politics
(This article by Jared Ball is re-posted from BlackAgendaReport.)
“To move from prank to political act and beyond will require more than industry-sponsored pop icons breaking trends and becoming radicals.”
In a recent editorial from The TRUTH Minista Paul Scott took only a few hundred words to raise some of the more relevant questions regarding hip-hop, Black radical politics and social media. What can be learned from a popular rapper, an allegedly misused Twitter account and some scared police? I think Scott’s editorial points us in some very important directions.
The issue is a dust up from last month where one of the industry’s latest and greatest, a rapper known as The Game, had posted to his Twitter account the phone number to the Los Angeles sheriff’s office. The lines were jammed, cops were scared and The Game faced claims that he would do time. But as Scott said, this is “a whole lot bigger than an Internet prank. It is about the potential power of Hip Hop artists and social media to provoke social unrest and political change.” Scott connected this story with the claims that social media spurred on the uprisings in London and then reminded his readers that, “this is the real fear of the authorities, not some sophomoric prank. Their greatest fear is that one-day rappers like The Game will stop playing games and start mobilizing the masses for political power. In 2011, every thug with a Blackberry is a potential revolutionary.”
Of course, it is not just thugs with Blackberrys. Anyone, and in this case, any Black woman or man is a potential revolutionary. And this is the point to which we are directed by the very nature of Scott’s editorial. Another is his juxtaposing prank with political act. As we’ve argued before, social media are no more a guarantee of revolution than the disorganized collective use of any previously existing technology. To move from prank to political act and beyond will require more than industry-sponsored pop icons breaking trends and becoming radicals. It will require organization. As Dhoruba bin-Wahad correctly said recently of the so-called Arab Spring, Twitter didn’t do a thing; pro-longed organization finally culminated in mass public calls for change that may indeed one day result in some. The same can likely be said of London. Some prior organization was facilitated in later-stage activity by new social media with instant communication capability culminating in mass public calls for change that may indeed one day result in some.
“In 2011, every thug with a Blackberry is a potential revolutionary.”
But organization is the key. The current drive by New Jersey’s People’s Organization for Progress to truly honor Dr. King with a year-long daily protest demanding jobs and justice is just one example of pre-existing organization moving ahead of any social media. That media may now be deployed to assist their efforts but here the chicken certainly did not come before the egg. Organization also means that the outcomes, good or bad, of this extended 381 day planned protest will either be best put to use or mitigated by an organized and prepared body of activists. Pranks, on the other hand, often lead to unexpected outcomes for which the pranksters are not prepared to exploit or defend against.
Organization is also an issue as it reminds those involved of the fact that our political enemies are also organizing, are themselves already using social media and, more importantly, they actually control it. Protestors last month in San Francisco found their phones entirely disabled by Bay Area Rapid Transit (B.A.R.T.) officials in order to prevent them from on-the-fly preparations. British Prime Minister David Cameron said he might do the same in London to prevent what he said was a misuse of the “flow of communication” for “violence.” Even Obama and the Republicans used Twitter to help reach their debt agreement. Now, that – the violence of empire and capitalism – is the real misuse of social media.
So it is true. Some ministers do tell the TRUTH. And this is a good one; pranks are cute, even inspiring, but we need to organize to go from prank to political act. Because the next question is, what is done while a police force has its communications knocked out?
New Media We Recommend
Below is a list of new materials that we have read/watched in recent weeks. The comments are not a “review” of the material, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these items are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.
Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in Twenty-First Century America, by Michael Ratner & Margaret Ratner Kunstler – For anyone looking to understand what your legal rights are to dissent in the US today, this book is an excellent resource. The co-authors not only present what the US government has done in recent years to crack down on dissent, they provide useful tips and information on what to do if you are arrested, approached by law enforcement, given a subpoena, faced with a Grand Jury and how to deal with surveillance. One section of the book is entitled, “If an Agent knocks,” and is presented in a “know your rights” fashion. The book also includes a section on current US Attorney General Guidelines, which is useful for understanding the parameters in which the legal system is operating to identify and target dissidents. A great book that could be a useful tool for a workshop.
Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution, by David Carter – It is the general belief that the Stonewall rebellion is what ushered in the contemporary LGBT movement. The 1969 riot in New York is what is in principle the reason for the annual Pride Celebrations across the country. Looking at original source material and conducting interviews with both protestors and police officers, David Carter sheds light on what really happened at Stonewall. Carter provides excellent contextual information and great detail of what happened over the 3-days of rioting by angry members of the LGBT community that were sick and tired of being harassed by the cops. Carter also spends several chapters looking at other organizing that took place shortly after the riots and the formation of both the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance. An important contribution for understanding the history of the LGBTQ movement.
Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, by Andrew Nikiforuk – The Obama administration just gave the green light to continue the US/Canadian Tar Sands Project, a project that the author calls one of the worst environmental disasters in recent years. Nikiforuk, a Canadian journalist, presents a well documented case for why the Tar Sands Project will be devastating for the environment, for indigenous people and how it is contributing to global warming on a massive scale. The book also helps connect the dots on who is financing the project, who is profiting and how money is influencing politics in both Canada and the US. Tar Sands is an important book for those who care about the environment and for anyone who cares about the future of humanity.
Capitalism is the Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity (DVD) – With all the global turmoil since the 2008 economic crash and the ongoing resistance to that crash, few writers or films have laid the blame properly where it belongs…….with capitalism. This film relies on both numerous writer/activists to critique the current push towards “austerity,” it also looks at key events of resistance that helps frame the state of desperation that global capitalism finds itself in. One of the resistance actions the film looks at is the G20 Summit in Toronto, which not only shows the desperation of capitalism, but the brutal force it is willing to use against anyone who disagrees. This is an important film not only because of the analysis it provides, but because of its call to action for systemic change.
Getting What We Want? Unions and the Democrats
Yesterday, President Barack Obama spend part of his Labor Day in Detroit speaking to organized labor, rank and file members and their supporters.
The President’s speech was filled with rhetoric that received some occasional applause. He talked about rebuilding the Middle Class, fighting for better wages and even acknowledged what unions have done for the US, such as fighting for the 8-hour work day.
However, rhetoric doesn’t pay the bills or put food on the table, especially not when there are millions in this country who are unemployed, underemployed and living in poverty. These statistics are on poverty are even worse in Michigan, particularly for children.
Further indication of the administration’s claim to care about working families, means we need to look at the actual record on policies over the past 2 and one-half years. Here is a partial listing of the Obama administration’s voting record that has not been good for working people:
- Despite his campaign promise in 2008, the Employee Free Choice Act has not been passed.
- The Obama administration has continued to pass policies that benefit Wall Street.
- The average CEO salary continues to increase while the average worker pay is decreasing.
- The Obama administration has continued the Bush tax policies, which benefit the rich, but not working people.
- During the 2008 election, Obama promise new fair trade policies, but has continued to embrace corporate trade policies and is looking to push through more devastating trade policies.
- Funding for war has increased under Obama, while funding for social programs has dropped.
These are just some of the policies the current administration has adopted, which have been devastating for working people and their families in the US. This begs the question – why do unions continue to support Democrats?
In May, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka claimed that he wants a union movement that is independent of the Democratic Party, but is there any clear indication that this will happen? One way of determining if the labor movement is independent of the Democratic Party is to look at how much money they give to Democratic candidates.
In a recent posting at OpenSecrets.org, researches provide us with some data on labor financing of Democratic candidates and how much money they spend lobbying. At the federal level, unions have spent over $771 million since 1990 on financing political candidates. In the 2008 election cycle, unions gave just short of $75 million to Democratic candidates, over $96 million in 2010 and over $12 for the 2012 election to date.
A similar scenario is at play in Michigan with labor unions giving thousands to Democrats in 2010 and thousands more already in 2011.
Clearly organized labor has given a great deal to the Democratic Party, but the question must be asked, what have the got in return? It seems to this writer that if organized labor wants to have the kinds of policies they want put in place in this country that they either create a worker movement that is independent of partisan politics or they force the Democrats to actually do what working people want.
What if organized labor in the US said to the Democrats, we will not vote for you in 2012 if you do not pass the kinds of legislation that we demand? What if they don’t give the Democrats another cent until their demands are met? You would never see corporations giving money to politicians and not get what they want in terms of policies. Organized labor needs to use the only power it has, which is the power of numbers and not continue to fund the Democratic Party and get token returns.
After 9/11, Was War the Only Option?
(This article by Noam Chomsky is re-posted from ZNet.)
This month marks the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world.
The impact of the attacks is not in doubt. Just keeping to western and central Asia: Afghanistan is barely surviving, Iraq has been devastated and Pakistan is edging closer to a disaster that could be catastrophic.
On May 1, 2011, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan. The most immediate significant consequences have also occurred in Pakistan. There has been much discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden. Less has been said about the fury among Pakistanis that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor had already intensified in Pakistan, and these events have stoked it further.
One of the leading specialists on Pakistan, British military historian Anatol Lieven, wrote in The National Interest in February that the war in Afghanistan is “destabilizing and radicalizing Pakistan, risking a geopolitical catastrophe for the United States — and the world — which would dwarf anything that could possibly occur in Afghanistan.”
At every level of society, Lieven writes, Pakistanis overwhelmingly sympathize with the Afghan Taliban, not because they like them but because “the Taliban are seen as a legitimate force of resistance against an alien occupation of the country,” much as the Afghan mujahedeen were perceived when they resisted the Russian occupation in the 1980s.
These feelings are shared by Pakistan’s military leaders, who bitterly resent U.S. pressures to sacrifice themselves in Washington’s war against the Taliban. Further bitterness comes from the terror attacks (drone warfare) by the U.S. within Pakistan, the frequency of which was sharply accelerated by President Obama; and from U.S. demands that the Pakistani army carry Washington’s war into tribal areas of Pakistan that had been pretty much left on their own, even under British rule.
The military is the stable institution in Pakistan, holding the country together. U.S. actions might “provoke a mutiny of parts of the military,” Lieven writes, in which case “the Pakistani state would collapse very quickly indeed, with all the disasters that this would entail.”
The potential disasters are drastically heightened by Pakistan’s huge, rapidly growing nuclear weapons arsenal, and by the country’s substantial jihadi movement.
Both of these are legacies of the Reagan administration. Reagan officials pretended they did not know that Zia ul-Haq, the most vicious of Pakistan’s military dictators and a Washington favorite, was developing nuclear weapons and carrying out a program of radical Islamization of Pakistan with Saudi funding.
The catastrophe lurking in the background is that these two legacies might combine, with fissile materials leaking into the hands of jihadis. Thus we might see nuclear weapons, most likely “dirty bombs,” exploding in London and New York.
Lieven summarizes: “U.S. and British soldiers are in effect dying in Afghanistan in order to make the world more dangerous for American and British peoples.”
Surely Washington understands that U.S. operations in what has been christened “Afpak” — Afghanistan-Pakistan — might destabilize and radicalize Pakistan.
The most significant WikiLeaks documents to have been released so far are the cables from U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad, who supports U.S. actions in Afpak but warns that they “risk destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis in Pakistan.”
Patterson writes of the possibility that “someone working in (Pakistani government) facilities could gradually smuggle enough fissile material out to eventually make a weapon,” a danger enhanced by “the vulnerability of weapons in transit.”
A number of analysts have observed that bin Laden won some major successes in his war against the United States.
As Eric S. Margolis writes in The American Conservative in May, “(bin Laden) repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them.”
That Washington seemed bent on fulfilling bin Laden’s wishes was evident immediately after the 9/11 attacks.
In his 2004 book “Imperial Hubris,” Michael Scheuer, a senior CIA analyst who had tracked Osama bin Laden since 1996, explains: “Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. (He) is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world,” and largely achieved his goal.
He continues: “U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.
The succession of horrors across the past decade leads to the question: Was there an alternative to the West’s response to the 9/11 attacks?
The jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11, if the “crime against humanity,” as the attacks were rightly called, had been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered in the rush to war. It is worth adding that bin Laden was condemned in much of the Arab world for his part in the attacks.
By the time of his death, bin Laden had long been a fading presence, and in the previous months was eclipsed by the Arab Spring. His significance in the Arab world is captured by the headline in a New York Times article by Middle East specialist Gilles Kepel: “Bin Laden Was Dead Already.”
That headline might have been dated far earlier, had the U.S. not mobilized the jihadi movement with retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Within the jihadi movement, bin Laden was doubtless a venerated symbol but apparently didn’t play much more of a role for al-Qaida, this “network of networks,” as analysts call it, which undertake mostly independent operations.
Even the most obvious and elementary facts about the decade lead to bleak reflections when we consider 9/11 and its consequences, and what they portend for the future.
This article is adapted from 9-11: Was There an Alternative?, the 10th-anniversary edition of 9-11, by Noam Chomsky, just published by Seven Stories Press.
Labor Day and the Spirit of Joe Hill
(This article by Clancy Sigal is re-posted from Common Dreams.)
l eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
– “The Preacher and the Slave”, a parody hymn written by rebel singer and labor icon Joe Hill
Anyone who is a fan of Billy Bragg, as I am, or Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie or the sixties protest singer Phil Ochs knows that radical America’s greatest songwriter-educator Joe Hill is still alive in the young-in-heart on this besieged Labor Day.
Joe, a Swedish immigrant and wandering troubadour-troublemaker, was a “Wobbly”, an agitating member of the One Big Union, the red flag International Workers of the World, a harum-scarum, mad-as-hell, happy-in-fellowship bunch of hoboes and gypsy workingmen who scared the pants off business leaders, pious church-goers, police chiefs, governors and all right-thinking citizens in the early part of the last century.
As a just published, terrific biography of Hill, The Man Who Never Died, by William Adler, makes clear yet again, Joe Hillström (né Joel Hägglund, his birth name) was framed on a murder charge in Salt Lake City, Utah, strapped into a chair and shot by a firing squad.
In my house, wherever we moved, my mother always put up two pictures, the labor lawyer who once defended her, Clarence Darrow (after whom I’m named), and the seditious martyr Joe Hill. As Joe may have shrewdly deduced on his last day, when the guards came for him – and a possible reason why he refused to testify for himself at his rigged trial – he may have been more valuable to the movement as a bullet-punctured corpse than he would have been alive: a reminder that the class struggle for which he was surrendering his life was – and is – as undying as his legacy on this Labor Day, 2011.
My mother, a skilled craftswoman on a sweater-making machine, felt split between her conservative union motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” and the IWW’s revolutionary preamble – “Abolition of the wage system is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.” In her lifetime – she witnessed the 1911 Triangle Fire annihilation of 146 immigrant young women – most of her co-workers took the “class war” as a obvious fact of life; they held a consensus that, in the IWW’s ringing words, “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”
In pre-first world war America, the employing class had no ethical problem deploying federal and state troops to murder working people. The massacres at Ludlow, Cripple Creek, Thibodaux, Coeur d’Alene, Pullman, Everett and so many other bleeding grounds are burned into what’s left of labor’s institutional memory. Or as a New York judge told striking female garment workers, “You are on strike against God.”
“The copper bosses killed you Joe
They shot you Joe, says I
Takes more than guns to kill a man
Says Joe I didn’t die…
Joe Hill’s IWW believed in head-on, confrontational direct action based on what we now fashionably call participatory democracy or self-management. Hence, you rolled into town in a box car and met spontaneously with other bindlestiffs and bums like yourself, and did what had to be done on a voice vote and no Roberts Rules of Order. You struck industrially, sabotaged when appropriate, and constantly tested the limits of free speech laws. Arrested en masse (and beaten, sometimes lynched), you whistled for your socialist, anarchist, what-the-hell comrades who poured in from all corners of the United States to fill the Podunk jails where you drove the sheriff and his deputies nuts with your tactics. One of which was to jump up and down in the jailhouse in unison until the flimsy wood structure broke apart around you as in a Buster Keaton movie.
The IWW was unique in its time for admitting African Americans, illegal immigrants, Asians and women – an inclusiveness that was revolutionary in its day. That’s when labor really sang. Before Lieber and Stoller, before Irving Berlin and Tin Pan Alley, there was Joe Hill, who would, when the spirit moved him (usually in a bar or doss house), plunk-plunk a tune on his guitar, often a witty takeoff on a religious hymn or a current popular ditty. His verses, like “Rebel Girl”, “There is Power in the Union” and “Casey Jones: Union Scab”, soon included in the IWW’s bestselling ten-cents-a-copy Little Red Songbook, became for workers – all over the world – their version of platinum. Wherever “wheat bums” (migrant farm workers), miners, railroad stiffs, dockers and sailors, the unemployed and hungry gathered, they sang their hearts out from the Little Red Song Book.
To “be union” was to sing songs at the top of your voice; melody, Marxism and militancy were braided into One Big Union.
Labor today doesn’t have much to sing about. Organized labor – organized into structured unions tied to collective bargaining contracts, that is – is on the ropes. By all indices, Americans are working harder for less money – that is, when they are working at all. Unemployment and under-employment numbers at anywhere from 25 to 30 million, and the angry, unorganized jobless have yet to fight back except for the self-destructive manifestations of frustrated rage. Republicans in Congress hate the unemployed. If they could, they’d get rid of unemployment insurance altogether, which GOP minority whip Jon Kyl sneers at as a “disincentive for them to seek new work”.
Kyl and his Republican and Blue Dog Democrat colleagues – direct descendants of Gilded Age barons who ordered workers shot down – with an enabling President Obama, who hasn’t lifted a finger to help unions he once promised to meet on the picket line, have united to declare old-fashioned class war on working people. Joe Hill and his spirited IWW comrades like the “rebel girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, anarchist Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood and Gene Debs would immediately get it. The same victims, same union-busting tactics only now with $1000-per-hour billable lawyers: and the same enemy.
Except that Joe Hill didn’t believe in victims, only fighters. The day before his execution, he told friends:
“Tomorrow I expect to make a trip to the planet Mars and, if so, will immediately commence to organize the Mars canal workers into the IWW, and we will sing the good old songs so loud that the learned stargazers will once and for all get positive proof that the planet Mars is really inhabited … Don’t mourn for me – Organize!”
At its peak, the IWW could count on half a million supporters in the US. Today, albeit in the thousands, in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, they’re the fighting young, between ages 20 and 30, with websites and strong hearts. And they’re organizing – New York immigrant food workers, panhandlers in Vancouver, Chicago bike messengers, City of London cleaners – even at your favorite Starbucks.
You can’t kill the spirit of Joe Hill.
Dave Agema, MLive and Islamophobia
Today, MLive ran a story about legislation introduced by Rep. Dave Agema, that some are referring to as an anti-Muslim bill.
The legislation that Agema introduced in June is HR Bill 4769. However, the MLive article does not give any information on what the bill states, it only provides a forum for Agema to give his opinion on why he thinks the bill should be adopted.
Agema is using the introduction of this legislation to promote his own brand of Islamophobia, by suggesting that Muslims want to impose their religious laws on the US legal system. Agema’s Islamophobia is right in line with the kind of systemic anti-Muslim hysteria that has been promoted in much of the US mainstream media as has been well documented in a report by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, entitled Smearcasting.
Agema’s use of Islamophobia is also consistent with what has been happening in political circles all across the country. The Center for American Progress just released a report entitled Fear Inc: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America. This report sheds light on those who are financing anti-Muslim sentiment, the front groups, think tanks and politicians who are at the forefront of the Islamophobia effort in the US at the federal level.
Agema even presented information about his anti-Muslim legislation at a Pro-Israel rally held in downtown Grand Rapids last week, a message that fit well into the anti-Islam messages of the other speakers.
The MLive story does provide a counter perspective by citing Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). However, the quote from Walid was just a recycled comment from a previously posted MLive article, which does not provide the same opportunity to respond to this issue in the way that Agema was able to.
There is a more detailed response by Walid in a video statement posted one week ago that you can watch below. Many Muslim groups in the state as well as the Michigan ACLU and the NAACP are calling on people to resist this legislation and there is an online petition people can sign if they oppose HR Bill 4769.
Four Heretical Thoughts and More in the Wake of the Obama Disaster
(This article by Paul Street is re-posted from ZNet.)
I do not gently contemplate the possibility of an evangelical proto-fascistic dolt like Texas Governor Rick Perry walking into the White House. That is not a pretty prospect for anyone with hopes for the future. Ditto for Michelle Bachman and others in the Republican presidential field. As the Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin noted three years ago, well before the rise of the much ballyhooed Tea Party phenomenon: “The character of the Republican Party reflects a profound change: radicalism has shifted its location and meaning. Formerly it was associated with the Left [but now it is] the property of those who, quaintly, call themselves ‘conservatives’ and are called such by media commentators….It is hard to imagine any power more radical in its determination to undo the social gains of the past century.” 1
1. Dismal Democrats Empower the Right
Still, as I look across the ever more right-tilting landscape of America’s one-and-a-half party system, I can’t escape four basic thoughts that are certain to strike many “liberal” Democrats as unforgivable heresy. My first thought, hardly original, is that the Democrats have opened the door to the ever more right wing Republicans with their own excessive tepid corporatism and related class elitism. Given the closeness of the 2004 race and the unpopularity of the heavily plutocratic George W. Bush administration by the summer of 2004, the spectacularly wealthy Democratic presidential candidate John Forbes “I am Not a Redistribution Democrat” Kerry (the quote comes from a comment he made at a posh Manhattan fundraiser during the 2004 campaign)[2] would likely have won the election if he’d run further to the populist left after achieving the Democratic nomination. (With all due respect for the roles played by Republican shenanigans in Florida and a preposterous and partisan vote in the U.S. Supreme Court in the installation of George W. Bush, the same is probably true of Al Gore’s centrist campaign in 2000).
His failure to do so followed in accord with Thomas Frank’s reflections on why many working class Americans vote Republican in Frank’s widely read book What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Released just before Bush defeated Kerry with no small help from working class whites, Frank’s book has generally been taken to have argued that plutocratic Republicans have cleverly conjured working class whites away from their own supposed “pocketbook interests” in the Democratic Party with “cultural wedge issues” like abortion, gun rights, religion, and gay marriage. At the end of his book, however, Frank blamed the shift of the post-New Deal Democratic Party to the corporate right and away from honest discussion of – and opposition to – economic and class inequality for much of whatever success the GOP achieved in winning white working class voters.
“‘New Democrats’…rule out what they deride as ‘class warfare’ and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness with business. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for working-class voters who were until recently the party’s very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans….The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school prayer; it’s that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be overshadowed by material concerns.”3
Contrary to Frank, the Democrats’ difficulty is not so much the loss of working class votes to the racist, homophobic, and sexist “rancid populism” (William Greider’s excellent phrase) of the right as it is about shutting down and depressing a critical mass of the Democrats’ support base.[4] The problem continues even when the Republicans screw up badly enough to lose control of both the White House and (briefly) Congress. As predicted in my 2008 book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, the dismal dollar Democrats’ demobilization of the working class, minority, and progressive forces (such as they are) deepened a dangerous anger and activism vacuum on the left and has played itself out with standard rightward consequences that are all too chillingly reminiscent of pre-Nazi Germany. As I documented in my 2010 book The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power and in my 2011 book (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics, the in-power Obama-Pelosi-Reid Democrats steered to the business-friendly center-right, savagely betraying their “progressive base” on numerous issues of economic and social justice and war (not to mention civil liberties and ecology), thereby opening the door for an epic “conservative” victory in the 2010 mid-term elections. The Democrats suffered from significant declines in voter participation on the part of segments of the electorate that played key roles in their triumphs in the 2006 (Congressional) and 2008 (Congressional and presidential) elections – union households; young voters, black voters. By contrast, voters who identified themselves as “conservative” increased their share of the active electorate significantly from 2006 and 2010.[5] This was all it took for the right to clean up in a mid-term, when turnout is considerably smaller than during a race that includes a presidential contest.
Wolin easily foretold this Democratic performance in his chilling 2008 book Democracy Incorporated:
“The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working-class, anti-corporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf. And this despite the fact that these elements are recognized as the loyal base of the party. By ignoring dissent and assuming the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans. Unlike the Democrats, however, the Republicans, with their combination of reactionary and innovative elements, are a cohesive, if not a coherent, opposition force.”
Obama’s liberal apologists complain about how their supposedly progressive President is now checked at every turn by terrible Republicans. As the Associated Press reported two weeks ago, “liberal angst has surfaced repeatedly over the past year as Obama has faced the reality of divided government in the aftermath of the 2010 congressional elections, in which Republicans won the House.”[6] But it is questionable how blocked Obama feels, since he appears to be something of a Republican in his own right. And Obama and other top Democrats bear no small burden of responsibility for the exaggerated power of the right in the U.S. What did they deliver to their purported popular constituency in 2009 and 2010, prior to the onset of “divided government,” when they held not just the White House but also a significant, filibuster-proof majority in the Congress? With its monumental bailout of hyper-opulent financial overlords, its refusal to nationalize and cut down the parasitic too-big (too powerful)-to-fail financial institutions that have paralyzed the economy, its passage of a health reform bill that only the big insurance and drug companies could love (consistent with Rahm Emmanuel’s advice to the president: “ignore the progressives”), its cutting of an auto bailout deal that rewards capital flight, its undermining of serious global carbon emission reduction at Copenhagen, its refusal to advance serious public works programs (green or otherwise), its disregarding of promises to labor and other popular constituencies, and other betrayals of its “progressive base” (the other side of the coin of less advertised promises kept to its corporate sponsors), the “change” and “hope” the 2009-10 Obama presidency and Democratic Congress starkly demonstrated the power of what Edward S. Herman and David Peterson call “the unelected dictatorship of money.” As the left liberal author Bill Greider noted in a Washington Post column titled “Obama told Us to Speak but Is He Listening?” in early 2009: “People everywhere [have] learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t. They [have] watched Washington run to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They [have] learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it.”[7] The “right people” include the top military contractors and the Pentagon, as the “new” White House has escalated Superpower violence in South Asia, passed record-setting “defense” (Empire) budgets, rolled over George W. Bush’s not-so counter-terrorist assault on human rights (in the name of “freedom”), extended the imperial terror war to Yemen and Somalia, disguised escalated U.S. occupation of Haiti as humanitarian relief, and aided and abetted a thuggish right wing coup in Honduras. “Liberal angst” is coming rather late in the game if it surfacing just this year.
Though the Republican Party remains highly unpopular and is having difficulty finding a serious presidential candidate, it is hardly guaranteed that cringing corporate centrism will not cost the Democrats the “big prize” – the White House – in 2012. Most of the “progressives” and liberal activists who express “disappointment” and “surprise” at “our black president’s”[8] predictable (and predicted) center-right policy record can be counted on to vote for him again out of fear and hatred of the terrible Tea.O.P. But some, perhaps many, angry and disenchanted liberals will refuse to volunteer to make phone calls or knock on doors and to make modest campaign contributions (I have spoken with a number of such liberals in recent weeks). Working class, minority, and youth turnout for Obama and the Democrats will be considerably lower and “grassroots” get-out-the-vote energies will be slighter, thanks to Obama’s “New Democrat” approach. The New York Times’ political reporter Jackie Calmes asked the leading liberal activist Robert Borosage (co-director of Campaign for America’s Future) what price the Democrats might pay in the next election for the fact that the president “has adopted the Republicans’ language and in some cases their policies.” Borasage noted that “the activist liberal base will support Obama because they’re terrified of the right wing” but added that “the voting base of the Democratic Party — young people, single women, African-Americans, Latinos — are going to be so discouraged by this economy and so dismayed unless the president starts to champion a jobs program and take on the Republican Congress that the ability of labor to turn out its vote, the ability of activists to mobilize that vote, is going to be dramatically reduced.”[9] That’s a big “unless” – one that Obama is unlikely to overcome in his forthcoming Labor Day jobs speech.
2. The Moral and Practical Price of Lesser Evil-ism
My second heretical thought is that liberals and leftists only encourage this kind of deadly nonsense by announcing in advance they will vote for Democrats to block Republicans. The great left intellectual Noam Chomsky has long advised (with no particular strong emphasis or enthusiasm, it should be noted) leftists to vote tactically for Democrats in contested American elections since the winner-take-all and narrow “two party” nature of U.S. elections means that a third party vote can swing a contested race to the right and because even small differences between the two reigning business parties can carry big consequences for millions of disadvantaged people in a system of vastly concentrated power and wealth like that one the prevails in the U.S. It’s an important moral point to keep in mind if and as one enters that venerable “coffin of class consciousness” (to quote the late radical historian Alan Dawley) known as the American ballot box in an election where the two viable candidates are in a closely matched battle. But we must also weigh the moral and practical price of telling the Democrats in advance that they – and not the only other party that can actually defeat them under the rules of the U.S. elections system – can count on our votes no matter how far right they drift, Listen to the following remark from Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, who spoke to the New York Times four weeks ago about Democratic voters will line up with Obama no matter how far right he drifts because of how bad the G.O.P is: “Whatever qualms or questions they may have about this policy or that policy, at the end of the day the one thing they’re absolutely certain of — they’re going to hate these Republican candidates. So I’m not honestly all that worried about a solid or enthusiastic base.”[10] Progressives’ less-evil-ism is at least partly to blame for Mellman’s smugness, which nicely captures elite Democrats’ basic attitude towards those beneath and to the left of their party’s capitalist and imperial behavior: “screw ‘em, they’ve got nowhere else to go.”
We might, moreover, examine the moral price of helping put into power the business party that is better at cloaking neoliberal policy and imperialism in fake-progressive clothing – at putting a supposedly human and popular face on corporatism and militarism. The Republicans are at least more transparent and explicit in announcing their plutocracy, nationalism, militarism, sexism, nativism, and racism.
3. Outrages That Are Wrong Under Republicans Become Acceptable Under Democrats
My third heretical thought, intimately related to the last reflection, is that we almost seem to need to have Republicans in power for much of the nation’s progressive and liberal community to engage in meaningful social protest and movement-building. Last summer when then White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called for “drug testing” for the “professional left,” I proposed an “ObamaLaid test.” My examination would have been applied all those supposedly left and liberal Americans who opposed criminal wiretappings, immoral and illegal wars, plutocratic bankers’ bailouts, corporate environmental outrages, and other vile policies when they were implemented in the name of a white Republican moron from West Texas but who became all too strangely silent when those same policies were enacted under the portrait of a supposedly eloquent black Democrat from Chicago. As Cindy Sheehan noted in 2009, thinking of all the liberals she could no longer interest in opposing Washington’s imperial policies, “Wars that were wrong under Bush become acceptable under Obama.” She could have made much the same point in relation to numerous Orwellian police state policies, to bankers’ bailouts, to U.S. enablement of criminal right wing coups in Latin America, and to much more.
Consistent with Sheehan’s complaint, a major study published by University of Michigan political scientist Michael Heany and his colleague Fabio Rojas of Indiana University last spring found that the U.S. antiwar movement demobilized as Democrats withdrew from antiwar protests when the Democratic Party achieved electoral success, first with Congress in 2006 and then with the presidency in 2008. Democrats had been sparked to participate in antiwar activities when the war (the invasion and occupation of Iraq) they purported to oppose was being conducted by a Republican president. “As president,” Heany notes, “Obama has maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war inAfghanistan…The antiwar movement should have been furious at Obama’s ‘betrayal’ and reinvigorated its protest activity. Instead, attendance at antiwar rallies declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement have dissipated. The election of Obama appeared to be a demobilizing force on the antiwar movement, even in the face of his pro-war decisions.” [11]
Looking at Heany and Rojas’ study the other day, I was reminded of my futile counsel to the local campus antiwar group in Iowa City (the now defunct “University of Iowa Antiwar Committee”) in the summer of 2008: “protest at the [Obama-nominating] Democratic national convention in Denver, Colorado, not the [McCain-nominating] Republican national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. Obama,” I told disbelieving “activists,” is “the next president, the empire’s next and new clothes. He will continue the war on Iraq and expand the one in Afghanistan.” There is no longer an antiwar movement in Iowa City, thanks to the departure of the best activists, the nefarious activities of an FBI informant, internal squabbles over personalities and Israel, and – last but not least – the significant demobilizing impact of an imperial Democratic president who deceptively ran as an antiwar candidate.
Look at the remarkable mass protests that broke out in Madison against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s brash public sector union-busting offensive last February and March. They seemed like an inspiring monument to Howard Zinn’s call for citizens and activists to remember that how the really important question isn’t “who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in—in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories.” Still, the ease with which the giant marches and protests were shut down and rank and file energies directed into Democratic Party campaigns to recall Republican state legislators and Walker after mid-March makes it hard not to suspect that the protests had quite a bit to do with the party identity of who was sitting in the governor’s mansion and state senate. The state-level labor rebellion that emerged in response to right wing provocations in Wisconsin (and also in Ohio and Indiana) is a most welcome development – no small step in the direction the nation’s all-too hidden, under-reported and under-mobilized progressive majority needs to take if political and social democracy and sane, balanced, and egalitarian policy are going to survive and advance in 21st century America. Still, it is one thing for existing labor institutions and leaders (themselves heavily integrated into the nation’s reigning state-capitalist order) to rally popular masses in defensive response to the worst policy outrages of the most reactionary politicians in the rightmost wing of America’s corporate-ruled “one-and-a-half party system.” It is another thing to wield and expand popular pro-actively and against the richly bipartisan neoliberal business agenda and to capture and act meaningfully on the legitimate popular anger that “the Tea Party” and the broader right has at times been able to exploit and misdirect. The political observer Chris Green raised a good question in a private communication with me (via the mostly disastrous medium called Facebook) on February 22, 2011. “Is this progressive movement going to operate,” Green asked, “within traditional limitations, especially those imposed by the union leadership? That is, are they only going to protest Republican governors and not pro-cut Democrat governors in places like New York, California and Illinois? This will be the challenge, not to get co-opted by the Democrats.” Indeed, the Austerity Party is not limited to the Republicans. The left commentator Doug Henwood offered some sage and sobering advice at the end of a generally quite favorable and optimistic take on the eruption of labor protest in Wisconsin:
“It may be that had Walker not gone for such a maximalist agenda, this sort of protest might not have happened. Other governors may take note and opt instead for the death by a thousand cuts instead of one giant machete chop. But of course, it’s not just Republicans. Democratic governors like Jerry Brown and Andrew Cuomo also have it out for public sector workers, since, as everyone knows, you just can’t tax the fat-cats these days. And you do have to wonder how aggressive unions in California and New York will be in protesting Democratic governors.”12
A correspondent from California recently wrote me with a poignant reflection on what passes for a left in his state. Many liberal and progressives he knows are sitting on their hands in response to anti-labor and other regressive provocations from the California governors’ office because that office’s current occupant is a Democrat named Jerry Brown. “It is amazing and dumbfounding,” my correspondent writes, “to watch this every-4-year cycle of hopes hyped then predictably smashed. We live in California and Jerry Brown is getting a pass, from the same folks that if [the Republicans’ 2010 gubernatorial candidate] Meg Whitman had won and was doing exactly what Brown is doing, would be having a cow.” With Whitman running Sacramento, “left” activists would be in the streets, protesting policies they seem unable to openly oppose with Brown in nominal power atop corporate California.
4. John McCain for President?
My fourth heretical thought is that insofar as anything remotely progressive can actually take place within the American one-and-half party political system (I’m not sure it can, in all honesty), we’d be better off in the medium term if John McCain had won in 2008. Think about the counter-factual scenario from the perspective of a Democratic Party “progressive.” The corporate crack white- nationalist neoconservative Republican Party rather than the corporate Coke neoliberal Democrats would wear the Herbert Hoover yoke of the greatest capitalist slump since the 1930s – a slump that McCain would have done little or nothing to alleviate. Democrats rather than Republicans would have gained in the mid-term elections. Liberal and left progressives would be in the streets and building movements and sparking actions without the paralyzing Kool Aid of a Democrat (what’s more a Democrat with a non-traditional ethno-cultural identity) in the White House. It is doubtful that the Scott Walker and David and Charles Koch “Tea Party” would have arisen as a vehicle for the most crazed wings of concentrated wealth to push U.S. politics yet more rightward had a Republican (even a McCain) sat in the White House during the last two and half years. Had McCain won, a Democrat would be poised to roll into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with a long-building mandate for progressive change from a furious working and lower class majority, its anger stoked by the continuation of a Great Recession that would be clearly owned by the party of Hoover, Bush, and McCain. Instead, of course, we got a premature, pre-emptive, and popular expectation-managing brand shift toward the Democrats just as the financial crisis kicked in, followed by a neoliberal Barack O’Hoover administration (definitely NOT the “Franklin Delano Obama” White House that leading national liberal Paul Krugman dreamed about[13]) that may or may not hang on to prevent the emergence of a new Christian Fundamentalist presidency with potentially lethal consequences at home and abroad.
Beyond the Electoral Delusion
Ah, but what am I thinking? The ruling class always has the option of pulling the other major party brand out from the back of the shelf when the one in power (out front) runs into trouble and the populace-pacifying Democrats are always waiting in the wings to calm and co-opt the angry masses and their “populist rage” (the dominant corporate media’s condescending term) if things get too hot and alienated under the more explicitly authoritarian rule of the Republicans.[14] A McCain administration would have helped Democrats continue to avoid any blame for wars and other corporate and imperial outrages they support – to blame everything on the Republicans and to pose as a meaningful popular opposition party. What really matters is that citizens and activists develop the capacity to build energetic rank and file social and political movements whichever party beneath and beyond the “two party system” and the narrow spectrum big money big media candidate-centered “electoral extravaganzas” (Noam Chomsky’s term [15]) the masters stage for us every two and four years, telling us “that’s politics” – the only politics that matter. We must develop the capacity for such activism with Democrats as well as Republicans in the Washington saddle. Such activism is currently on display with the significant action being undertaken by Bill McKibben and thousands of other courageous ecological activists in opposition to the Obama administration’s revolting alliance with Big Oil’s Keystone Pipeline Project – an environmentally disastrous assault on Canadian ecology, global climate, and U.S. American water safety. 16
Though I protest-voted (in a “safe,” that is, un-contested state) for Nader in 2008, I wanted Obama to win the election for what might seem like on odd reason. I thought there was radical potential in U.S. voters and citizens, especially younger ones (for whom war, empire, and plutocracy seemed to be all about George W. Bush and Republicans), experiencing corporate and imperial rule under a Democratic administration. I wanted Americans to come into more direct and visible contact with the bipartisan nature of the American imperial and business system and to confront the gap between their rising and ridden expectations and the harsh reality of persistent top-down corporate, financial and military rules with Democrats at the nominal helm of the ship of state. I wanted them to be subjected to the reality that (in Marxist writer Doug Henwood’s words) “everything still pretty much sucks” when Democrats hold the top political offices – that the basic institutional reality stays the same with the other business party in official charge. As the antiwar activist, author, and essayist Stan Goff put it last year, “I’m glad Obama was elected. Otherwise, people would blame the war on McCain and the Republicans and continue with the delusion that elections can be our salvation. The modern nation-state was created by war, of war, and for war. That is its only real purpose, and all others are subordinate to it. You can change the executive director but he/she is still the commander in chief. That’s the job description.” The Age of Obamanistic betrayal would, I hoped, be a very teachable, left-moving moment for serious American progressives. Thinking of many reported and under-reported examples of popular resistance that have occurred this year – U.S. Uncut’s actions against corporate tax breaks and loopholes enjoyed by Bank of America[17] and other big government bailout recipients, the Midwestern public worker rebellion sparked in Madison earlier this year, the recent Verizon strike, recent mass Latino protests against the Obama administration’s, mass-deportation-ist “Secure Communities” program[18], the current protest of the Keystone project, and (looking ahead) a forthcoming October convergence against war and corporate greed in Washington[19]– I have yet to give up on that possibility and the notion that a critical mass of Americans can undertake significant action against concentrated wealth and power with dismal fake-progressive Democrats as well as radical messianic Republicans holding down the White House.
Selected Notes
1 Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 206.
2 Paul Street, “Kerry’s Predictable Refusal to Make Bush Pay for Rising US Poverty,” Dissident Voice (September 8, 2004) at http://dissidentvoice.org/Sept04/Street0908.htm
3 Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 242-43, 245.
4 For early reflections, see Paul Street, “Frank Discussion: Moral-Economic Abandonment, Race, Security, and Psychological Wages,” ZNet(November 6, 2004).
5 Karlyn Bowman, “What the Voters Actually Said on Election Day,” The American (November 16, 2010), citing CBS exit polls at http://www.american.com/archive/2010/november/what-the-voters-actually-said-on-election-day. For a detailed analysis of the November 2010 mid-term elections, see Paul Streetand DiMaggio, Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011), Chapter 7: “Elections 2010: The Democrats’ Mid-term Disaster, the Tea Party, and the Challenge to Progressives.”
6 Associated Pres, “Liberal Democrats Complain About Obama: Will it Cost Votes?” The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA), August 20, 2011, 7A. Relating yet another terrible story of Obama’s servility to “the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire”…at the Lucy Parsons Center in Boston, August 24, 2010.
7 William Greider, “Obama Asked Us to Speak But is He Listening?” Washington Post, March 22, 2009.
8 Paul Street, “Whose Black President? Getting Things Done for the Rich and Powerful,” CounterPunch (July 30, 2011) at http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/07/30/whose-black-president/
9 Jackie Calmes, “Rightward Tilt Leaves Obama with Party Rift,” NYT, July 30, 2011, A1.
10 Calmes, “Rightward Tilt.”
11 Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, “The Partisan Dynamics of Contention: Demobilization of the Antiwar Movement in the United States, 2007-2009,” Mobilization: An International Journal, 2011, 16 (1): 45-64, read at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mheaney/Partisan_Dynamics_of_Contention.pdf. As the University of Michigan press release explains: “Heaney and Rojas analyzed the demobilization of the antiwar movement by using surveys of 5,400 demonstrators at 27 protests mostly in Washington,D.C., New York, Chicago and San Francisco from January 2007 to December 2009. The surveys asked questions on basic demographics, partisan affiliations, organizational affiliations, reasons for attending the events, histories of political participation, and attitudes toward the movement, war and the political system…. In addition, the researchers observed smaller, more informal events at which antiwar activists gathered, including Capitol Hill lobby days, candlelight vigils, fundraisers, small protests, planning meetings, training sessions, parties, the National Assembly of United for Peace and Justice and the U.S. Social Forum. They also interviewed 40 antiwar leaders about their personal backgrounds, the inner workings of the antiwar movement, political leaders and the Democratic Party…Their study found that the withdrawal of Democratic activists changed the character of the antiwar movement by undermining broad coalitions in the movement and encouraging the formation of smaller, more radical coalitions….After Obama’s election as president, Democratic participation in antiwar activities plunged, falling from 37 percent in January 2009 to a low of 19 percent in November 2009, Heaney and Rojas say. In contrast, members of third parties became proportionately more prevalent in the movement, rising from 16 percent in January 2009 to a high of 34 percent in November 2009….’Since Democrats are more numerous in the population at large than are members of third parties, the withdrawal of Democrats from the movement in 2009 appears to be a significant explanation for the falling size of antiwar protests,’ Heaney said. ‘Thus, we have identified the kernel of the linkage between Democratic partisanship and the demobilization of the antiwar movement.’…Using statistical analysis, the researchers found that holding anti-Republican attitudes had a significant, positive effect on the likelihood that Democrats attended antiwar rallies. The results also show that Democrats increasingly abandoned the movement over time, perhaps to channel their activism into other causes such as health care reform or simply to decrease their overall level of political involvement. ‘Overall, our results convincingly demonstrate a strong relationship between partisanship and the dynamics of the antiwar movement. While Obama’s election was heralded as a victory for the antiwar movement, Obama’s election, in fact, thwarted the ability of the movement to achieve critical mass.’”
12 Doug Henwood, “Wisconsin Erupts,” Left Business Observer, February 16, 2011 at http://lbo-news.com/2011/02/16/wisconsin-erupts/
13 Paul Krugman, “Franklin Delano Obama,” New York Times, November 10, 2008. See Paul Street, “The Economics of Barack O’Hoover: Obama and the Business Culture,” CounterPunch (August 12,, 2011) athttp://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/12/the-economics-of-barack-ohoover/
14 See Lance Selfa’s sophisticated Marxist presentation in his book The Democrats: A Critical History (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008). As Selfa notes, the two reigning U.S. business parties are not identical. To be sure, the differences that separate the Democrats from the Republicans are “minor,” “in comparison to the fundamental commitments that unite them” (p. 13). Still, Selfa reminds us, corporate America would have no reason to embrace a two-party system if there were no differences at all between the two competing “subdivisions” of what Ferdinand Lundberg once called “The Property Party.” The U.S. ruling class profits from a narrow-spectrum system wherein one business party is always waiting in the wings to capture and control popular anger and energy when the other business party falls out of favor. The parties are not simply interchangeable, however. It is the Democrats’ job to police and define the leftmost parameters of acceptable political debate. For the last century it has been the Democrats’ special assignment to play “the role of shock absorber, trying to head off and co-opt restive [and potentially Left, P.S.] segments of the electorate” by posing as “the party of the people.” The Democrats performed this critical system-preserving, change-maintaining function in relation to the agrarian populist insurgency of the 1890s, the working-class rebellion of the 1930s and 1940s, and the antiwar, civil rights, anti-poverty, ecology, and feminist movements during and since the 1960s and early 1970s (including the gay rights movement today). The “such absorber” role continues into the 21st century.
15 Noam Chomsky, Interventions (San Francisco: City Lights, 2007), pp. 97-100.
16 See Amy Goodman, “D.C. Protests that Make Big Oil Quake,” Truthdig, August 23, 2011, athttp://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dc_protests_that_make_big_oil_quake_20110823/
17 Lucia Graves, “Liberal Tea Party? U.S. Uncut Disrupts Service at Bank of America,” Huffington Post (February 28, 2011) at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/27/us-uncut-bank-of-america-liberal-tea-party_n_828782.html
18 “Latino Activists Take Aim at Obama Administration’s Secure Communities Program,” LatinoPoliticsBlog.com, August 17, 2011 athttp://latinopoliticsblog.com/2011/08/17/activists-take-aim-at-obama-administrations-secure-communities-program/; Latinos Across America Protest Obama’s Deportation Policies,”’ AlterNet, August 15, 2011 athttp://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/650572/latinos_across_america_protest_obama%27s_deportation_policies
19. http://october2011.org/quotes/kevin-zeese
Despite 2-weeks of protests in DC, Obama administration backs oil pipeline from Alberta to Texas
(This article by Suzanne Goldenberg is re-posted from The Guardian.)
The Obama administration has given an important approval to a controversial pipeline that will pump oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the Texas coast.
In a blow to campaigners, who have spent the last week at a sit-in at the White House, the State Department said the proposed 1,700-mile pipeline would not cause significant damage to the environment.
The State Department in its report said the project – which would pipe more than 700,000 barrels a day of tar sands crude to Texas refineries – would not increase greenhouse gas emissions. It also downplayed the risks of an accident from piping highly corrosive tar sands crude across prime American farmland.
Campaigners accused the State Department of consistently overlooking the potential risks of the pipeline.
“The State Department… failed to acknowledge the true extent of the project’s threats to the climate, to drinking water and to the health of people who would breathe polluted air from refineries processing the dirty tar sands oil,” Friends of the Earth said in a statement.
But Kerri-Ann Jones, the assistant secretary of state, rejected the charges. She argued that other government agencies had still to sign off on the project.
“This is not the rubber stamp for this project,” Jones told reporters, adding that the pipeline would not lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, claiming Alberta was going to produce the crude anyway.
“The sense we have is that the oil sands would be developed and there is not going to be any change in greenhouse gas emissions with the pipeline or without the pipeline because these oil sands will be developed anyway,” she said.
Jones said that the State Department review had addressed some safety concerns, directing TransCanada, the pipeline operator, to bury the pipeline deeper.
The State Department will hold a series of public meetings on the pipeline next month and into October.
But with Friday’s decision the pipeline is now expected to come on line in 2013.
Over the last three years, the pipeline has become a central focus of environmentalist concerns, and Friday’s decision was rendered at the midpoint of a two-week sit-in at the White House against the project which has seen more than 100 arrested.
But the Canadian government and oil companies with a stake in tar sands production fought back with an intense lobbying effort.
Environmental campaigners argued the pipeline would encourage production of Alberta tar sands, which imposes a far heavier carbon footprint than other oils.
There was also opposition from homeowners along the Keystone’s proposed route through South Dakota, Nebraska, and Texas.
They warned the highly corrosive nature of tar sands oil put the pipeline increased the risk of accidents, and damage to important sources of groundwater.
Bill McKibben, who helped organise the protests at the White House, said the approval from the State Department had been expected. The secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, indicated last year that she favoured the pipeline.
“Everyone has known exactly what they would say all along. And everyone knows that they’ve valiantly ignored the elephant in the room – the fact that this would go a long ways towards opening up the world’s second-largest pool of carbon,” he wrote in an email.
However, McKibben held out hope that Obama – who still has final authority over the project – might step in to stop the pipeline.
