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The Killing of Anastasio Hernández Rojas

April 28th, 2012

From: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/26/the-killing-of-anastasio-hernandez-rojas/

by Joseph Nevins

Eyewitness accounts and video footage shown in a PBS documentary last week provide shocking proof that U.S. federal agents brutally beat Anastasio Hernández Rojas, tased him five times, and ultimately killed him—this while he lay on the ground with his arms handcuffed behind his back—in May 2010. The revelations in Crossing the Line at the Border provide a compelling counter to the official tale of what transpired, and have rightfully led to calls for accountability. Among the questions such calls raise are, what does accountability mean in such a case, and what should the parameters of the process be—that is, if a key goal is to prevent future instances of brutality?

Born in Mexico, Hernández Rojas arrived in the United States at the age of 16. For more than 27 years, he lived and labored here, where he married and had five children. In May 2010, after losing his construction job, he was arrested for shoplifting. When a background check showed that he was in the country without official sanction, the police turned him over to federal authorities, who deported him to Mexico. Not willing to accept exile from his wife and children, Hernandez Rojas quickly crossed back into the United States, but Border Patrol agents intercepted him in a remote area as he tried to head home.

At the detention facility, an agent allegedly assaulted and injured Hernández Rojas, which led him to express a desire to file a complaint. That same agent reportedly was one of two who drove him back—alone—to the port of entry in San Ysidro (the southernmost portion of San Diego) to deport him again. It was there, just a few feet from the actual boundary with Mexico, where the night-time, deadly assault took place, one involving over a dozen agents.

A San Diego County Medical Examiner’s report concluded that Hernandez Rojas’s death was a case of homicide. It was due to a heart attack—one induced by the shocks from the taser. (According to an Amnesty International report, 334 people died in the United States after being shocked with a taser, a supposedly non-lethal device, or a similar conducted-energy weapons between June 2001 and August 2008.) The 42-year-old father also sustained broken ribs; several loosened teeth; bruises all over his body and head, and injury to his spine.

What allowed the beating and electrocution to go legally unchallenged was the uncritical acceptance of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) account of events by authorities at various levels. According to the agency’s official story, agents did what they did because an un-handcuffed Hernández Rojas “became combative,” and the use of batons and the taser was necessary to “subdue the individual and maintain officer safety.”

The blatant nature of the brutality, the cover-up of what transpired, and what appear to be clear violations of the law have helped to provoke widespread outcry. From press conferences, to an online petition and myriad news reports, pressure is mounting on federal authorities to conduct a far-reaching investigation of Hernández Rojas’s death.

More broadly, advocates—such as John Carlos Frey, a documentary filmmaker and an investigative reporter involved with the making of Crossing the Line at the Border—point to an institutional culture of impunity that allows killings by Border Patrol agents to go virtually unexamined outside the agency. Frey also highlights the rush to recruit ever-more agents in the aftermath of 9-11, and lowered standards of recruitment and training, in trying to explain “at least eight documented cases of extreme use of force against unarmed and non-combative migrants resulting in death” at the hands of the Border Patrol since May 2010.

Whether or not relatively new agents recruited and trained under less rigorous criteria are responsible for the deaths is not known as the CBP hasn’t even released the names of the agents involved. But, perhaps more importantly, the effect of such a line of argument is to suggest that better qualified agents are the answer to the problem.

No doubt, rigorous screening of applicants and good training, and some sort of public oversight mechanism, are very preferable to the lack thereof. But in privileging such factors, what gets obscured is the everyday violence—and death and suffering—that federal boundary and immigration enforcement apparatus brings about through its normal practices.

Over the last couple of decades, many thousands of migrants have lost their lives trying to traverse the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and enter the United States—in order to find work, or rejoin loved ones. U.S. authorities have also sent millions into exile abroad, many of them long-standing U.S. residents with almost non-existent ties to their countries of birth. In the process they have separated hundreds of thousands of children from parents. They have also reduced the life spans of many deportees: in a particularly egregious case, one of the first individuals “removed” to Haiti after the Obama administration resumed deportations to the earthquake-ravaged country in 2011 lost his life to cholera soon after his arrival.

The law and the institutionalized nature of the practices that produce these outcomes help to obscure the violence they embody—and the related death and suffering. But just because many do not see the violence for what it is—as death-producing—does not mean it is anything less.

From the very establishment of the U.S.-Mexico boundary, killing people and denying life has been central to what the international divide is all about. After all, its foundation necessitated a war of conquest and the dispossession of the Native and Mexicano populations in the borderlands. And, in the face of so many who refuse to accept the original injustice, its maintenance has required various forms of violence on a regular basis ever since. More broadly, in a world of profound inequality, one predicated on the production of differences such as those based on race, class, and nation, the boundary reflects and helps reproduce who gets what in terms of rights and resources, and the very nature of life and death—and the various states in between.

Anastasio Hernández Rojas was born on the wrong side of the boundary dividing people and places of privilege from those of disadvantage. Like countless others in the eyes of the U.S. ruling class, he thus became disposable. When U.S. authorities deported Hernández Rojas to Mexico and deprived him of his right to be with his family, they effectively denied his right to live. And when they beat and tased him to death, they did so as well.

Realizing justice—achieving true accountability—for Anastasio Hernández Rojas’s murder requires that we go far beyond the parameters of his particular case. It necessitates that we contest the very socio-territorial arrangement that made him disposable in the first place. Otherwise, we will end up affirming and strengthening a boundary that grants life to some, and consigns others to death.

Joseph Nevins teaches geography at Vassar College. He is the author of Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008) and Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge, 2010).

This article was originally published by NACLA.

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May Day’s Radical History: What Occupy Is Fighting for This May 1st

April 28th, 2012

From: http://www.alternet.org

by Jacob Remes

American general strikes—or rather, American calls for general strikes, like the one Occupy Los Angeles issued last December that has been endorsed by over 150 general assemblies—are tinged with nostalgia.

The last real general strike in this country, which is to say, the last general strike that shut down a city, was in Oakland, California in 1946—though journalist John Nichols has suggested that what we saw in Madison, Wisconsin last year was a sort of general strike. When we call a general strike, or talk of one, we refer not to a current mode of organizing; we refer back, implicitly or explicitly, to some of the most militant moments in American working-class history. People posting on the Occupy strike blog How I Strike have suggested that next week’s May Day is highly symbolic. As we think about and develop new ways of “general striking,” we also reconnect with a past we’ve mostly forgotten.

So it makes sense that this year’s call for an Occupy general strike—whatever ends up happening on Tuesday—falls on May 1. May Day is a beautifully American holiday, one created by American workers, crushed by the American government, incubated abroad, and returned to the United States by immigrant workers.

The history of May 1 as a workers’ holiday is intimately tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the labor movement, and to the long tradition of American anarchism.

Perhaps the first nation-wide labor movement in the United States started in 1864, when workers began to agitate for an eight-hour day. This was, in their understanding, a natural outgrowth of the abolition of slavery; a limited work day allowed workers to spend more time with their families, to pursue education, and to enjoy leisure time. In other words, a shorter work day meant freedom. It was not for nothing that in 1866, workers celebrated the Fourth of July by singing “John Brown’s Body” with new lyrics demanding an eight-hour day. Agitating for shorter hours became a broad-based mass movement, and skilled and unskilled workers organized together. The movement would allow no racial, national or even religious divisions. Workers built specific organizations—Eight Hour Leagues—but they also used that momentum to establish new unions and strengthen old ones. That year, the Eight Hour Movement gained its first legislative victory when Illinois passed a law limiting work hours.

The demand for an eight-hour day was about leisure, self-improvement and freedom, but it was also about power. When Eight Hour Leagues agitated for legislation requiring short hours, they were demanding what had never before happened: that the government regulate industry for the advantage of workers. And when workers sought to enforce the eight-hour day without the government—through declaring for themselves, through their unions, under what conditions they would work—they sought something still more radical: control over their own workplaces. It is telling that employers would often counter a demand for shorter hours with an offer of a wage increase. Wage increases could be given (and taken away) by employers without giving up their power; agreeing to shorter hours was, employers knew, the beginning of losing their arbitrary power over their workers.

The Illinois eight-hour law was to go into effect May 1, 1867. That day, tens of thousands of Chicago’s workers celebrated in what a newspaper called “the largest procession ever seen on the streets of Chicago.” But the day after, employers, en masse, ignored the law, ordering their workers to stay the customary 10 or 11 hours. The city erupted in a general strike–workers struck, and those who didn’t leave work were forced to by gangs of their colleagues roaming through the streets, armed with sticks, dragging out scabs. After several days of the strike, the state militia arrived and occupied working-class neighborhoods. By May 8, employers and the state they controlled had won, and workers went back to work with their long hours. The loss of the eight-hour-day movement led also to a massive decline in unions, and the labor movement would not pick up in such numbers for almost two decades.

The Illinois law and its defeat, however, were not forgotten. By the 1880s, a new labor movement had grown up in Chicago. This one was more radical and was dominated by immigrant workers from Germany. They remembered 1877, when a strike by railroad workers spread around the country. For a brief moment, as strikers took control of St. Louis and Pittsburgh, staring down the national guard and local police, nobody knew what would happen. But President Rutherford B. Hayes called out the army and brutally repressed the strike. They also remembered the state was rarely if ever on the side of the worker. Yet they also remembered the brief shining moment when it appeared that there might be an eight-hour day.

So in 1886, the Chicago Central Labor Union again demanded an eight-hour day. Led largely by anarchists like August Spies and Albert Parsons, this renewed movement demanded “eight for 10”–that is, eight hours’ work for 10 hours’ pay. Throughout the winter of 1886, they successfully organized and won a series of small victories, largely in German butchers’ shops, breweries and bakeries, where owners agreed to recognize unions and grant shorter hours. Then they issued a new demand: that again on May 1, Chicago would go on a general strike and not return to work unless employers agreed to an eight-hour workday.

The demands of the militant Chicago anarchists coincided with a massive upswing in other militant movements. Workers and Texas farmers were rebelling against a monopolistic railroad system. The Knights of Labor were rapidly organizing and spreading their vision of a cooperative, rather than capitalistic, society. “What happened on May 1, 1886,” writes James Green, the most recent and most accessible historian to have written about it, “was more than a general strike; it was a ‘populist moment’ when working people believed they could destroy plutocracy, redeem democracy and then create a new ‘cooperative commonwealth.’”

Four days later, it all came crashing down. On May 3, police had shot to death six strikers at the McCormick Works, where a long-standing labor dispute had turned the factory into an armed camp, and beaten dozens more. On May 4, anarchists held an outdoor indignation meeting at a square called the Haymarket to protest the police murders. Anarchist leader Samuel Fielden was wrapping up his speech when the police, led by the same inspector who had led the charge at McCormick the night before, moved in to disperse the crowd. “But we are peaceable!” Fielden cried, and just then somebody wasn’t. Somebody threw a bomb at the police, the police open fire, and the course of American history changed.

To this day we do not know, nor will we likely ever know, who threw the bomb. Some say it was an agent provocateur. Some say it was an anarchist. If it wasn’t an anarchist, it surely could have been, since there were indeed anarchists who made bombs and would have thrown one given the opportunity. But we also know that many of those who died that night, including police, were felled by the police bullets.

We also know that the effect of the Haymarket bombing was far greater on the labor movement than it was on the police. Eight anarchist leaders were rounded up and put on trial for the murder of a police officer. No evidence was ever given that any of them threw the bomb, and only the flimsiest evidence was presented that any of them were remotely involved. All eight were convicted, and seven were sentenced to hang. Two of these had their sentences commuted, and a third—Louis Lingg, undoubtedly the most radical and militant of them—cheated the hangman by chewing a detonator cap and blowing off his jaw. The remaining four—August Spies, Albert Parsons, Samuel Fischer, and George Engel—were hanged on November 11, 1887. They went to their deaths singing the Marseillaise, then an anthem of the international revolutionary movement, and before he died, Spies shouted out his famous last words: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

Before that happened, the state ensured more silence. The strike collapsed. Police around the country raided radicals’ homes and newspapers. The Knights of Labor never recovered. In the place of the radical industrial labor movement of the mid-1880s rose the American Federation of Labor, the much more exclusive and conservative organization that would dominate the labor movement until the 1930s. Meanwhile, it would take until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to finally enshrine the eight-hour day into federal law.

May 1 would live on, mostly abroad. In 1889, French syndicalist Raymond Lavigne proposed to the Second International—the international and internationalist coalition of socialist parties—that May 1 be celebrated internationally the next year to honor the Haymarket Martyrs and demand the eight-hour day, and the year after that the International adopted the day as an international workers’ holiday. In countries with strong socialist and communist traditions, May 1 became the primary day to celebrate work, workers and their organizations, often with direct and explicit reference to the Haymarket Martyrs. May Day remains an official holiday in countries ranging from Argentina to India to Malaysia to Croatia—and dozens of countries in between.

Yet in the United States, with some exception, the workers’ tradition of May 1 died out. Partially this was because the Knights of Labor had already established a labor day in September. Opportunistic politicians, most notably Grover Cleveland, glommed onto the Knights’ holiday in order to diminish the symbolic power of May 1. In 1921, May Day was declared “Americanization Day,” and later “Loyalty Day” in a deliberately ironic attempt to co-opt the holiday. Even that was not enough, though, and in 1958 Dwight Eisenhower added “Law Day” to the mix, presumably a deliberate jibe at the Haymarket anarchists who declared, “All law is slavery.” Today, few if any Americans celebrate Loyalty Day or Law Day—although both are on the books—but the origins of May Day are largely forgotten. Like International Women’s Day (March 8), which also originated in the U.S., International Workers’ Day became a holiday the rest of the world celebrates while Americans look on in confusion, if they notice at all.

Yet May 1 lives on, and indeed has been rejuvenated in the United States in the past few years. In 2006, immigrant activists organized “a day without an immigrant,” a nationwide strike of immigrant workers and rallies. It was perhaps the largest demonstration of workers in United States history. These immigrants, mostly from Latin America, had brought May 1 back to its birthplace, and in so doing they resurrected its history as a day specifically for immigrant workers.

It is appropriate that when the Occupy L. A. first issued its call for a general strike this May 1, it said the strike was “for migrant rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on foreclosures, and peace.” The order was significant, for migrants in the United States have been the ones who have made sure that the voices the state strangled that November day have remained so powerful. And regardless of what happens on Tuesday—and of course an actual general strike, in which cities grind to a halt and workers control what activities occur, is unlikely—we can, through a national day of action for the working class, work toward a new cooperative commonweath. We have a opportunity now to create and renew the labor movement, through new tactics, but ones that pay homage to the generations that preceded us.

Jacob Remes teaches history and public affairs at Empire State College, SUNY’s college for adult learners.

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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General Strikes! Looking Backward, Looking Forward

April 28th, 2012

From: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2012/moore270412.html

by Jay Moore

It began on July 14, 1934.  That day the San Francisco Labor Council pushed by radicalized rank-and-file workers declared a General Strike, and this led to four days of intense class struggle, the likes of which has rarely if ever been seen in this country.  The aim of the General Strike was to support the port’s longshoremen who had been striking with other longshoremen up and down the coast from Seattle and Portland to San Pedro since early May — and joined by unions for the merchant seamen — for a coast-wide contract, a union-controlled hiring hall, reduced working hours, and a wage increase.  Faced off against them was a common front of the cities’ big business communities, the mayors, a competing company-aligned union, sell-out national union officials, and the right-wing Hearst-owned newspapers.  Two members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) had been shot to death by the San Francisco police on July 5th, “Bloody Thursday,” during a pitched day-long battle between thousands of workers and hundreds of cops to stop strikebreaking trucks from going into the docks.  The solemn and dramatic mile-long funeral procession for the two men was attended by thousands of dockyard and shipboard workers, their supporters, and onlookers.  But the Governor of California had subsequently called out the National Guard who came armed with machine guns to reopen the docks and provide protection for the scabs, thus endangering the strike.

The General Strike took off and bit back.  Workers of all sorts around the Bay Area left their jobs.  Truck drivers in the Teamsters Union refused to make deliveries.  Over 60 different unions got involved, and many non-unionized workers picked up the spirit of fight-back against the bosses as well.  Business executives were annoyed that they had to carry lunch boxes to work like blue-collar workers did because the restaurants they favored were closed and that they had to walk up the stairs to their offices since the building elevator operators refused to run them.  Small businesses — even movie theaters and night clubs — shut their doors in a show of sympathy for the striking port workers.  The powers-that-be turned loose savage vigilante violence against the “Reds” whom they blamed for the strike, but the city was basically shut down except for those operations which the unions permitted to operate.  The employers’ economic losses were mounting into the millions of dollars.  After the General Strike was called off on July 20th, the employers agreed to submit the issues to federal government arbitration — from which the longshoremen ended up with much of what they had been fighting for.  Their union, renamed the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), remains to this day one of the most militant at defending workers’ rights in the United States and at taking up broader political causes.  With help from members of the Occupy Movement, the ILWU recently won a battle against an anti-union grain port operator in Longview, Washington.

Now that Occupy Los Angeles has issued a call, taken up enthusiastically by Occupies around the country, for a nationwide General Strike on May Day, it behooves us to take a look at the history of General Strikes.  In a regular strike, workers put down their tools, leave their jobs, and refuse to go back until their demands are met at a particular workplace or against a particular employer.  A General Strike is a mass strike across workplaces and employers.  It may be citywide or nationwide.  Commonly, as in the case of the 1934 San Francisco strike, General Strikes have been launched by the labor movement to put additional pressure on particular employers (or, in that case, an association of employers) to settle with their workers who are on a long, hard-fought strike, although sometimes General Strikes have raised economic and political demands directed at governments.  During General Strikes, striking workers and their unions have often organized systems of distribution for food and medicine and kept other essential services running in ways that are prefigurative of a new kind of society without the need for the capitalist and managerial classes.  This has empowered workers — much as the Occupy Wall Street park encampments have done lately — and the capitalists (along with their class-collaborationist buddies in the mainstream unions) have deplored them also for this reason.  Some anarchists, especially anarcho-syndicalists (like the Wobblies here in the U.S.), and some Marxists (like the German firebrand Rosa Luxemburg) have put forward the General Strike as the most effective (and least violent) way to get rid of capitalism.  A General Strike was nearly successful at bringing down the Tsarist Regime in 1905.  But other revolutionaries since Engels have challenged the notion that all or most workers in an advanced capitalist country could ever be organized to stop work together and bring down the state as improbable and said, in any case, if workers had become that powerful already then a General Strike would not be a necessary step for making a revolution.

In Western Europe, non-revolutionary General Strikes are not that uncommon.  A huge General Strike spearheaded by the coal miners, railway workers, and dockers paralyzed Britain for nine days in 1926.  Just this year, on March 29th, the two largest unions in Spain organized a countrywide General Strike against the new conservative government’s severe cuts to social spending, wage freezes, and privitizations.  Here in the United States, while there is some historical tradition for us to learn from and build on, General Strikes have been rather less common.  A five-day General Strike occurred among workers in Seattle in 1919 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution (and there was a radical General Strike that same year in Winnipeg, Canada).  Also happening in 1934, coming before the San Francisco General Strike, other unionized workers had struck in Minneapolis in order to support striking teamsters there.  And, of course, May Day as the International Working Class holiday upon which Occupy this year is calling for a nationwide General Strike originated right here in the U.S. from a General Strike for the 8-Hour Day on May 1st, 1886.  To commemorate the Haymarket Martyrs from that epic battle, the Socialist International adopted May Day in 1891 as an official labor holiday and its celebration spread around the world where it continues to this day (although falling on harder times here in the country of its birth since the repression of the 1950s McCarthyite period and not really being resuscitated in a big way until the immigrant rights marches in the last few years).

The last General Strikes to take place in the U.S. — that is, prior to Occupy Oakland’s attempt to pull off one last November as a protest against police brutality and to support port workers there — occurred way back in 1946.  During that one year alone, which was a year of widespread industrial strikes, the biggest strike wave ever in American history, there were eight General Strikes (although often referred to at the time as “labor holidays”) — Stamford and Hartford, Connecticut; Rochester, NY; Lancaster and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Camden, New Jersey; Houston; and Oakland.  These were citywide General Strikes either starting spontaneously or called by unions to support workers who were already out on strike or who had been fired for seeking union recognition (a right supposedly protected by the National Labor Relations Act enacted during Roosevelt’s New Deal).

So why are General Strikes less common in the U.S., with none having taken place since 1946?  A big reason is that the notorious anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 1947 prohibits political and solidarity strikes (along with sit-down and wildcat strikes).  It also led to the purge of a great many radicals from the AFL-CIO unions.  Ever since then, these mainstream unions and their leaders have largely become loyal partners of the capitalist system willing only to bargain collectively and occasionally, if at all, to risk a strike for somewhat better wages and working conditions.  Today, since the economic crisis has hit hard and taken its fearful toll, the number of strikes has fallen to a historically low level, with only five strikes involving more than 1,000 workers in 2009.  Nevertheless, while unions may well face fines and jail time under Taft-Hartley, its strictures do not apply to Occupy or other groups that may try to call for a General Strike.  Recently, some union leaders have realized they need Occupiers to do things on behalf of workers and the 99% that they feel they cannot openly, legally endorse.  In some places as with West Coast dock workers and New York City subway workers, unions have given Occupy actions their sub rosa approval and support.  And, as one of my comrades in Occupy Central Vermont has observed, hopefully this year’s May Day General Strike — with various actions to interrupt business-as-usual scheduled for 115 cities across the country — will put some sharper teeth back into the strike tactic in general.  Even though a true (and unprecedented) nationwide General Strike against capitalism does not seem to be in the offing this year — it’s more a wishful dream (thank goodness for the dreamers in Occupy!) — with the crisis brought on by the 1% showing no end in sight and the populace angry as hell, May 1st 2012 promises to be a major and perhaps turning point occasion in the history of U.S. class struggle.  Don’t miss it!

For more on the history of General Strikes, see “General Strike!”; “Seattle General Strike Project”; and the Holt Labor Library’s resource page on the San Francisco General Strike.

Jay Moore is a radical historian who lives and teaches (when he can find work) in rural Vermont.

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Occupy 1914

April 27th, 2012

From: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/27/occupy-1914/

by Ron Jacobs

Anti-capitalist protests in Union Square brutally attacked by police. Economic hardship among the workers. Ostentatious expenditure by the wealthy.  This scenario sounds like the news headlines of the past couple of years, yet the period referred to is the year 1914 and the story is the one told in More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives and New York’s Year of Anarchy.  This book is a history that includes some of history’s most famous anarchists, a progressive president determined to use government for good but indebted to the finance house of Wall Street.  That indebtedness leads him into war and repression.  There’s also a progressive mayor of the world’s largest city whose plans include using government to lift people from poverty and despair.  His social engineering ends up making very few people happy: not the wealthy and not the poor.

The city was New York.  The year was 1914.  The anarchists included Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.  The mayor was John Mitchel and the president was Woodrow Wilson.  Despite the best-laid plans, it was as if the weather itself conspired with the plutocrats in a relentless effort to prevent Mitchel from ending the corrupt tradition of politics in Manhattan known colloquially as Tammany Hall.  The economy that had already shrunk the employment rolls worsened in the wake of a series of snowstorms and bitterly cold weather that forced thousands into the streets without work, shelter or income.  When a city agency decided to use the unemployed to shovel snow out of the streets and sidewalks, not only did the task turn out to be beyond the capabilities of those involved, the measly pay offered became one more cause for radicals to organize around.  The popularity of the cause proved the rationale of the organizers.

There was no communist party in the United States in 1914.  The lead in the protests was taken by the anarchists.  Their success at engaging the urban unemployed while enraging the wealthy and middle class encouraged the leadership to take increasingly provocative actions.  This in turn intensified the wrath of the wealthy and their guardians, the police.  After it was determined that the aggressive and violent tactics of the police only served to increase the popularity of the protests, a new chief was appointed who changed tactics.  He allowed protests while simultaneously building an intelligence network among the radicals.  This network involved the recruiting of spies, provocateurs and, ultimately, the use of those provocateurs to instigate actual crimes designed to incriminate individual radicals, thereby painting the entire movement as criminal.  In short, anarchists were the “terrorists” of the period and the tactics used by the authorities against them were the same as those being used against todays “terrorists” and radicals.

Jones, whose previous work includes a memoir (A Radical Line) that is partially about his childhood growing up underground with his Weather Underground parents, provides the reader with an incredibly detailed, impeccably researched look at this period in New York’s history.  Not only do the characters come alive in Jones’ telling, so do the issues.  Of course, this is in part due to the fact that the issues continue to be relevant in today’s climate of corporate domination and willful destruction of the dreams of working people.

For many people, reading history can be a chore.  A good history text must either tell a story so good that one puts up with the dryness of the text or it must be told in a way that keeps the reader’s interest.  In More Powerful Than Dynamite, Thai Jones provides both, thereby creating a compellingly written tale of an incredibly interesting time.

Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the Weather Underground and Short Order Frame Up. Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His collection of essays and other musings titled Tripping Through the American Night is now available and his new novel is The Co-Conspirator’s Tale. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.  He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.

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Martyrs for Justice

April 27th, 2012

From: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/27/martyrs-for-justice/

by Jerry Elmer

May 1st is May Day, the international workers’ holiday honoring the labor movement. May Day is celebrated in at least 80 countries worldwide, from Argentina to Vietnam, but not in the United States. Here, our “Labor Day” was carefully put into September – by President Grover Cleveland in 1894 – specifically so that we would not observe May Day, with all of its radical roots in syndicalist labor history. This is deeply ironic, for the event that gave rise to May Day observances the world over occurred right here in the United States: the bombing at Haymarket Square, Chicago, on May 4, 1886, during a labor rally.

The context for the Haymarket riot in 1886 was the movement for the eight-hour work day. The movement had started at least as early as 1877, when the Workingmen’s Party in Chicago called a general strike beginning July 25 in support of the eight-hour movement. The next day, on July 26, 1877, thousands of strikers were attacked and beaten into submission by police and U.S. Army infantrymen with fixed bayonets. Thirty strikers, including a number of children, were murdered by the police and federal troops. During that strike, typesetter Albert Parsons, later one of the Haymarket martyrs, was fired from his job because of a speech he had given during the strike. The bloody suppression of the 1877 strike caused another of the Haymarket martyrs, upholsterer August Spies, to join an armed worker’s self-defense organization.

The national movement for the eight-hour day reached a crescendo in the mid-1880s. In 1885, there were 645 strikes nationwide at over 2,400 businesses in support of the eight-hour goal. In 1886, the year of the Haymarket riot, the number of strikes had more than doubled to 1,400, affecting over 11,000 businesses!

On Saturday, May 1, 1886, a nationwide general strike in support of the eight-hour day was observed. In Chicago alone, 60,000 workers walked off their jobs. In a truly prescient headline, a Chicago labor newspaper that day announced: “The Dies Are Cast! The First of May, Whose Historical Significance Will Be Understood and Appreciated Only in Later Years, Is Here!” The general strike for the eight-hour day continued on Monday, May 3. On the afternoon of May 3, August Spies was addressing a rally of striking workers that had been locked out of the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago, when hundreds of police officers simply began shooting into the crowd of workers. Several workers died, and many others were wounded. That night, Parsons, Spies, and other anarchists printed leaflets calling for a labor rally the next afternoon in Haymarket Square to protest the massacre of unarmed strikers by police at the McCormick plant.

The labor demonstration in Haymarket Square in the afternoon of Tuesday, May 4, 1886, was peaceful until the very end. Parsons spoke to the group and then left the rally to meet his family at a nearby labor hall. Spies spoke at the rally, urging peaceful action to protest the massacre of the previous day and to support the cause of the eight-hour day. Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison attended and reported to the police that the demonstration was “tame” (Harrison’s word) and peaceful. But near the end of the rally, an unknown person threw a bomb into the phalanx of police officers attending the rally. In response, the police officers attacked the unarmed laborers. Hundreds of police officers fired into the terrified, fleeing crowd. An unknown number of people were killed and many others were wounded. Many police officers were wounded, some seriously, by gunfire. Every such wounded police officer – every one! – had been shot by other police officers. In the bloody police riot that followed the bombing, police officers shot wildly and at random; labor protesters and police officers alike were shot down.

In the days after the riot, eight local Chicago anarchists were indicted and arrested: Parsons, Spies, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden, Louis Lingg, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, and Oscar Neebe. The indictment acknowledged that the bomb had been “thrown by an unknown person” but alleged that the unknown bomb-thrower had been “aided abetted, and encouraged” the indicted anarchists. In the aftermath of the indictments of the eight anarchists, a kind of brutal martial law was imposed on Chicago. Anarchist and labor meeting halls were closed down. Hundreds of suspects were rounded up, interrogated, and held by police without charges being brought. Mayor Harrison closed down Chicago’s leading labor newspaper and banned public meetings – all by ukase. Mainstream newspapers blamed the eight-hour movement for the bombing and ensuing bloodshed, and in the Red Scare that followed, the eight-hour movement fizzled for a time. In fact, the eight-hour work day did not become law in the United States until the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.

All eight of the defendants were tried and convicted. Seven were sentenced to death. Fielden and Schwab later had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Lingg died on the eve of his scheduled execution, probably assassinated by the police, although some accounts say that Lingg died by his own hand. Neebe was sentenced to 15 years. Parsons, Spies, Fischer and Engel were hanged. In a final gesture of retribution, the ropes used to kill the prisoners were made too short, so that instead of dying instantly when the trap doors opened on the gallows, each prisoner was made to suffocate to death slowly and excruciatingly. American justice.

There were two big things wrong with this situation.

First, at least seven (and maybe all eight) of the defendants were actually innocent. By “actually innocent,” I do not mean that there was some hyper-legalistic technicality working in their favor. What I mean by “actually innocent” is that they had nothing whatever to do with the bombing. Some of them were not present when it happened. (For instance, Parsons was at a labor hall, and Engel was at home on Milwaukee Avenue.) The defendants had not known that the bombing would occur; they had not been involved in any planning or abetting; they had had nothing whatever to do with the crime. That is, they were actually innocent. (Some historians have argued that the one of the eight defendants, Louis Lingg, may have been tangentially involved in bomb-making; however, everyone agrees that if this were the case, no scintilla of evidence of that fact was introduced at his trial.)

The second problem with the execution and imprisonment of the Haymarket martyrs is the extreme injustice of their trial. On July 15, 1886, prosecutor Julius Grinnell made his opening statement, stressing the need to convict the dangerous anarchists in the dock. The next day, Judge Joseph E. Gary delivered a daylong address to the jury, repeating most of the points that had been raised by the prosecutor, and re-emphasizing the importance of all the defendants being convicted. Judge Gary was very clear on this point: the defendants needed to be convicted not for what they had actually done, but for what they believed. The defendants, after all, were admitted anarchists. No one was surprised. Judge Gary had spent weeks carefully selecting a jury that was bound to convict. When prospective jurors claimed that they were prejudiced against anarchists, Judge Gary put them on the jury. When prospective jurors said they believed that these specific defendants were guilty, Judge Gary put them on the jury. Judge Gary even seated a juror who was a relative of one of the slain police officers! Prosecution witnesses proffered wholly invented testimony, riddled with obvious contradictions and impossibilities. The defense offered the proverbial parade of witnesses who testified that the defendants had not thrown the bomb or were elsewhere when the bomb had been thrown.

All the defendants were convicted. Four (or, depending on how you look at it, five) were executed.

There was an international outpouring of support for the condemned Haymarket anarchists. Protest meetings, some featuring prominent people, were held in Paris, London, The Hague, Vienna, Brussels, Lyon, and elsewhere. This was, in fact, the etiology of the worldwide observance of May Day. In the United States, however, the Haymarket trial led to reaction and a Red Scare – the first of several Red Scares in U.S. history. Illinois passed a law making it illegal to advocate “destruction of the existing order.” Similar laws were passed in other states and at the federal level. Cornell Professor H. C. Adams was one of many who lost his job after speaking out about the injustices of the Haymarket trial. Later Red Scares in the United States included the post-World War I Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920; and, of course, the post-World War II McCarthy era. (Emma Goldman was deported as part of the Palmer Raids; a fine book has recently been published about the Palmer Raids: “Young J. Edgar Hoover and the Red Scare 1919-1920,” by Kenneth D. Ackerman, Viral History Press, September 27, 2011.)

On September 13, 1886, the Illinois Supreme Court rejected the appeal of the Haymarket defendants. The Anarchists’ Case, 122 Ill. 1, 12 N.E. 865 (1887). The case report of the Illinois Supreme Court decision takes up 130 pages in the Northeast Reporter and 265 pages in the Illinois Reporter. The overwhelming sense one gets from reading the case is that the Haymarket martyrs were convicted, imprisoned, and executed not for what they had done (for there was no evidence of that) but for what they believed and said.

The first thirty pages of the case in the Northeast Reporter (67 pages in the Illinois Reporter) are a collection of newspaper articles that appeared in Chicago labor newspapers with which the defendants were associated and reports of speeches given over the years by one defendant or another.

Let us examine the newspaper clippings first. The clippings come from three Chicago-area labor newspapers of the era. What is most interesting in this vast collection of articles cited and quoted by the Illinois Supreme Court is that the Court makes not the slightest attempt to connect any article(s) to any defendant(s). The trove of clippings is merely provided to explicate why the defendants are dangerous and deserve the sentences they received. The articles date back to 1884; many advocated in favor of the eight-hour work day. For example, on May 1, 1886, one newspaper published these dangerous, inflammatory words: “For twenty years the working people have been begging extortioners to introduce the eight-hour system, but have been put off with promises. Two years ago they resolved that the eight-hour system should be introduced in the United States on the first day of May, 1886. The reasonableness of this demand was conceded on all hands.” 122 Ill. at 26-27, 12 N.E. at 880. There was another dangerous newspaper article the very next day: “Even where the workingmen are willing to accept a corresponding reduction in wages with the introduction of the eight-hour system, they were mostly refused.” 122 Ill. At 28, 12 N.E. at 880.

Then there were the speeches. For example, the Court tells us that Parsons gave a speech on April 24, 1886 urging workers to demand an eight-hour day. 122 Ill. at 48, 12 N.E. at 888-889. He gave another speech on April 3, 1886 urging an “attempt to inaugurate the eight-hour system.” 122 Ill. At 48, 12 N.E. at 888. Indeed, the Illinois Supreme Court tells us that: “During the years 1885 and 1886 the defendants Fielden, Parsons, Engel, Spies, and Schwab made numerous speeches to workingmen.” 122 Ill. at 889, 12 N.E. at 50. The Court goes on to recite the dates and locations of some of these speeches, which defendants spoke (and in what sequence) and that the defendants were advocating the eight-hour work day. “At a meeting at Twelfth Street Turner Hall on October 11, 1885, Mr. August Spies was introduced . . . and offered a resolution . . . for the establishment of an eight-hour work-day, to begin May 1, 1886 . . .” 122 Ill. at 52, 12 N.E. at 890.

After losing in the Illinois Supreme Court, the defense team, led by lawyers William Perkins Black and Ben Butler, sought review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Their argument to the U. S. Supreme Court was a novel one for the time. They argued that the procedural irregularities of the trial violated guarantees of the Bill of Rights, which, they argued, were made applicable to the states through the due process clause of the (then-recently-enacted) Fourteenth Amendment.

This was an audacious argument (perhaps a better word would be “unwise”). The United States Supreme Court made short shrift of the argument of the Haymarket defendants’ defense team. The Anarchists’ Case, 123 U.S. 131, 8 S.Ct. 22, 31 L.Ed. 80 (1887). “That the first 10 articles of amendment were not intended to limit the powers of the state governments in respect to their own people, but to operate on the national government alone, was decided more than half a century ago, and that decision has been steadily adhered to since. [The Supreme Court here collects cases for the abecedarian proposition, starting with Barron v. Baltimore in 1883.]” 123 U.S. at 166, 8 S.Ct. at 24.

It was not until the twentieth century, starting with Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925), that the Supreme Court began making the guarantees of the Bill of Rights applicable to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment – and then only on a piecemeal basis. And, although Gitlow was the beginning of this process, the victory for Mr. Gitlow himself was rather a pyrrhic one. Ben Gitlow was convicted of violating New York State criminal anarchy statute (enacted in 1902, re-enacted in 1909). 268 U.S. at 653, 45 S.Ct. at 654. His sole offense was that he had published an Anarchist Manifesto. New York’s criminal anarchy statute made it illegal to advocate anarchism in speech or in writing, regardless of how theoretically or abstractly. Gitlow appealed from the highest appellate court in New York, the Court of Appeals, to the U.S. Supreme Court. “The sole contention here is, essentially, that as there was no evidence of any concrete result flowing from the publication of the Manifesto or of circumstances showing the likelihood of such result, the statute as construed and applied by the trial court penalizes the mere utterance, as such, of doctrine having no quality of incitement.” 268 U.S. at 664, 45 S.Ct. at 629.

Gitlow argued that this circumstance violated the First Amendment, made applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. In dictum (that is a portion of the opinion not directly deciding the case at hand), the Court said (and this is why the case is famous): “For present purposes we may and do assume that freedom of speech and of the press – which are protected by the First Amendment from abridgment by Congress – are among the fundamental personal rights and ‘liberties’ protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairment by the States.” 268 U.S. at 666, 45 S.Ct. at 630. The Court then upheld the constitutionality of New York’s criminal anarchy statute, and upheld Gitlow’s conviction. Justice Holmes issued a brief dissent (in which Justice Brandeis joined) repeating his view that there should be no punishment of speech absent “a clear and present danger” of resulting violence. 268 U.S. at 672, 45 U.S. at 632. Ben Gitlow went to prison for publishing a manifesto.

As the twentieth century progressed, one after another of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights were made applicable against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. Today, as Yale Law School Professor Akhil Reed Amar points out in The Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, 101 Yale L. Journal 1193 (1992), the parts of the Bill of Rights that have been applied to the states “reads like the greatest hits of the modern era”: freedom of speech and the press (New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)); privilege against compelled self-incrimination and right to counsel (Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966)); right to counsel (Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963)); right to a jury trial in a criminal case (Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145 (1968)).

But when plied in 1886 by the lawyers for the Haymarket defendants, the argument that the Bill of Rights applied to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was a sure-fire loser. The Supreme Court declined even to hear the Haymarket appeal. 123 U.S. at 182, 8 S.Ct. at 32.

Today, I would hazard that not one American in 100 knows about the Haymarket riot, even though it provided the basis for the worldwide observances today of May Day. Probably not one American in a thousand could identify Albert Parsons or August Spies (much less Michael Schwab or Adolph Fischer). Today, May Day is the international workers’ holiday, observed in much of the world – but ironically not here in the United States where the events occurred that originally gave rise to the holiday.

Jerry Elmer is an attorney in Providence, Rhode Island. He was a Vietnam-era draft resister, and was the only convicted felon in his graduating class at Harvard Law School. He is the author of Felon For Peace (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), which was published in Vietnam as “Toi Pham Vi Hoa Bing” (The Gioi, 2005); this was the first book by a U.S. peace activist ever published in Vietnam.

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Free market (Chris Hedges)

April 27th, 2012

All the promises of the free market have turned out to be lies.

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The US Labor Movement and China

April 27th, 2012

From: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/27/the-us-labor-movement-and-china/

by Alberto C. Ruiz

The statistics are chilling.   In a country where workers have no real right to organize a union, they face an ever falling standard of living.   The workers’ attempts to organize independent unions are faced with repression – 25% of the companies illegally fire workers who try to organize; active union supporters indeed have a 1 in 5 chance of being fired; over half of the companies threaten to have undocumented, foreign laborers deported during organizing campaigns; over half of the companies threaten to close the plant if it is organized; and nearly half of companies that are unionized never reach a labor contract with the union.   Of course, this country is not China, but rather, is, according to the AFL-CIO, the United States.

Notwithstanding this dismal situation for labor rights in this country, the U.S. labor movement is fixated on vilifying China and its human and labor rights situation as a cover for protecting U.S. workers from competition from albeit much lower paid Chinese workers.  Of course, U.S. labor has every right, and indeed a duty, to protect the workers it represents.   However, the obsession with China as an economic rival – an obsession which sometimes devolves into a racist stigmatization of the Chinese people themselves — is a distraction from the real and most pressing problems of U.S. workers:  the ever growing economic and power disparity between capital and workers in this country, and a legal regime in the U.S. which only encourages this disparity.

This was brought home for me by a recent meeting at my union with visiting labor law professors from China.    Very tellingly, it was our Chinese guests who were much more candid about the problems facing their working class than their American hosts.

The master of ceremonies (MC) who led the discussion for the U.S. trade unionists – a quite typical labor leader who harbors profound anti-Chinese resentments — met in advance with all of us who would be attending the meeting to go over the ground rules, the primary rule being that, notwithstanding the shortcomings we know to exist in U.S. labor law, we were not to share those openly with our Chinese visitors lest they go back home and use this as propaganda against us.

Then, during the meeting itself, our MC gave a revealing history of the U.S. labor movement, though it was most revealing in the details and large time period it left out of the history.   Thus, he started the meeting discussing the struggles of workers to organize in the late 19th Century; the critical strikes of the early 20th Century which eventually gave rise to the CIO and the unprecedented union drives in the U.S.; the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 which gave workers’ the right to legally organize; and the post-war period which was punctuated by a strike wave motivated by workers’ attempts to get a fair share of the growing economic pie as well as the pent-up frustration they felt as a result of the strike ban during World War II.   He then stated that all of this led to the period of the 1950’s which saw unparalleled prosperity for this country and a workforce which was 40% unionized.   He concluded his oral history there, and asked if there were any questions.

Of course, what was not discussed was the period from the 1950’s till the present day during which time union density shrunk to around its present figure of 12%.    Also not mentioned was the outlawing of Communists in the labor movement – though, without a doubt, Communists were critical to the founding of the CIO, to the organizing drives of the 1930’s and to the New Deal itself – and the disarming of the labor movement which flowed from the patricidal purge of the Reds who had helped build it.   Also missing was any discussion of the AFL-CIO’s decades-long period of prostrating itself to the foreign policy aims of the U.S. government – regardless of which party was in power – and its activity abroad in helping the CIA overthrow democratic governments (such as those of Arbenz in Guatemala and Allende in Chile) and install military dictatorships in their stead which were anti-labor and indeed fascist.

These facts are undoubtedly inconvenient, for they underscore how the U.S. labor movement is not so different from the caricature it has painted of the official labor movement of China.   Thus, while U.S. unions criticize the Chinese labor movement, known as the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), as being government-captive and controlled, the AFL-CIO itself can be similarly critiqued.   Indeed, the AFL-CIO’s interventionist foreign policy in support of U.S. expansion is the starkest example of this, and no other union movement in the world can be accused of such thoroughly pro-government and treacherous anti-labor policies.

And, while this period ended largely with the end of the Cold War – though not entirely, as can certainly be seen in the labor movement’s anti-communist rhetoric against China itself and the AFL-CIO’s complicity in the coup against Chavez in 2002 — the AFL-CIO’s unquestioning linkage to the Democratic Party continues unabated.   And, this linkage continues even though the Democratic Party is more and more indistinguishable from its ostensible rival and even though the Democratic Party has delivered nearly nothing to the American working class for over three decades except job-killing trade deals and the assault on the social safety net.  Moreover, I would suggest that the AFL-CIO’s uncritical support of the Democratic Party with millions of dollars of its members’ contributions, as well as its keeping its ranks mollified by fixing their focus and energies on an electoral process which produces nearly no return for them, rivals any service the ACFTU performs for or at the behest of the Communist Party of China.

Meanwhile, the fascinating fact we discussed about China is the unprecedented strike and protest wave occurring throughout that country and being led by workers – 90,000 of such “mass incidents” taking place last year alone.   And, as the labor professors from China explained, much to our surprise, these strikes are being led by workers with no unions at all, are indeed uncoordinated (leading our MC to candidly compare these strikes to those in the U.S. which were led by the Wobblies in the 1920’s), and are being tolerated by both the Chinese government and the ACFTU.   The result of this is an increase in wages for workers in China.   We also discussed, quite ironically, that if, as the labor professors do in fact desire, China adopts some type of U.S.-style labor law, it will be done for the very reason that the U.S. government and employers acquiesced to our labor law in the first place – because it will lead to “industrial peace” and quell the strike wave now impacting China.

In other words, China needs a U.S.-style labor law, the argument goes, in order to control its workers better and to obtain the type of compliant and acquiescent work force we see in this country – a workforce which continues to see its standard of living drop further and further with barely a peep in response.

Finally, at the end of the meeting, our Chinese guests were asked what we could do to help them with their struggle in China.  They answered that we could put pressure on U.S. companies doing business in China to treat their Chinese workers better and to provide them with better wages and benefits.   They explained that, while workers in the U.S. may view the Chinese as taking their jobs, the Chinese view the situation differently – as U.S. companies coming over to China to exploit them and to pay them low wages to manufacture goods which Americans can then buy at cheap prices.

Our guests then looked at us and asked, in relation to the hostility they know the U.S. people have towards China, “didn’t Marx say something at the end of the Communist Manifesto about the workers of the world uniting?”  And all we could say was, “yes he did, yes he did.”

Alberto C. Ruiz is a long-time unionist, peace activist and associate member of the left-wing World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).   He recommends the following website for serious reading on the struggles of labor in China: http://chinastudygroup.net/

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In Debt Debate, Most US Voters Prefer Tax Fairness to Cuts

April 27th, 2012

From: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107590

by Matthew Cardinale

ATLANTA, April 26 (IPS) – A giant digital “clock” on Sixth Avenue in New York keeps track of a number, currently at 15.6 trillion dollars and counting. As the number soars ever higher into the stratosphere, so U.S. voters are increasingly concerned, for the number represents the debt of the United States.

“High government spending, the budget deficit and taxes” are among the two top concerns for 37 percent of U.S. voters, according to recent polling by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (GQR) on behalf of Democracy Corps.

Though many agree that national debt is a major issue, there is less political consensus on how to address it. Aside from agreeing on cutting defence spending, the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party have entirely different approaches for reducing the national debt.

The Tea Party, a loosely structured activist group, and the Republican Party have made national debt a key theme during recent political campaigns, saying the growing debt underscores the need for cutting federal spending.

“We don’t address our problems with more spending,” Julianne Thompson, state director of Tea Party Patriots of Georgia and co-organiser of the Atlanta Tea Party, told IPS.

The Tea Party calls for significant cuts to the federal budget, as opposed to new revenues, to address the federal debt. These cuts, however, would come out of a host of different programs.

When asked if the Tea Party supports cutting education, Thompson replied that “the problem with the federal Department of Education and the problem with the state is the overly inflated salaries of administrators, versus actually putting the money into the education for the children and good quality teachers”.

Regarding cuts to food stamps, Thompson said she personally believed “they should be available to those who are extremely poor and children – people that need assistance. There’s absolutely no denying there are people that need assistance”.

The problem, Thompson said, “is the fraud and abuse when it comes to our federal and state programs”. She called for cracking down on fraud and abuse, adding, “When we do, we’ll see substantial cuts and the money will be going to people that need it”.

Thompson said that the Tea Party generally supports cutting defence spending, including pork barrel projects that benefit certain Congressional districts, and that she personally supports ending the occupation of Afghanistan.

Occupy’s plans

When the U.S. Congress Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction – a bipartisan, bicameral, so-called supercommittee created to identify ways to cut federal spending but failed to come up with a unified approach – met between August and November 2011, Occupy Washington, D.C., held its own “supercommittee”.

“We issued a report based on a hearing called the 99 Percent Deficit Reduction Plan,” Kevin Zeese, an activist with Occupy Washington, D.C., told IPS.

Occupy’s strategy for dealing with the national debt has three parts.

“First, taxing the one percent (wealthiest individuals) in a more progressive tax system, including corporate taxes, higher income taxes on wealthy Americans and Social Security taxes going up in terms of the income cap. Second, cut the bloated military budget. Third, grow the economy,” Zeese said.

“If you focus on cutting spending in an austerity measure approach, you’re not going to cut the deficit… it’s too big… the way to cut the deficit is the three things we talk about,” Zeese said.

Supporting social programmes

U.S. voters generally do not favour cutting social programmes such as those that comprise an economic safety net for the poor, according to the GQR poll when it asked respondents which programmes they would cut.

80 percent oppose cuts to food safety programmes, 78 percent oppose cuts to education, and 73 percent oppose cuts to local government funding, meals for elderly people, or Head Start early childhood education programmes.

Despite popular beliefs fuelled by the media, nearly two-thirds of U.S. voters oppose cuts to funding for programmes which benefit impoverished families, such as food for women with infants and small children, and funding for poor neighborhoods.

GQR also produced interesting results from focus groups conducted during President Obama’s recent State of the Union addresses, where voters are asked to turn a dial to indicate their level of support for – or opposition to – various statements Obama makes during the speech in real-time.

In Obama’s 2011 address, voter support jumped when he stated, “I recognise that some in this chamber have already proposed deeper cuts, and I’m willing to eliminate whatever we can honestly afford to do without. But let’s make sure that we’re not doing it on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens.”

Their research also showed that when voters watched the speech, they responded well to Obama’s messages about tax fairness and wealthy people paying their fair share. Voters did not respond well, however, to Obama’s statements about the economy getting better, because for most voters the statements are not true.

U.S. voters generally support progressive tax policies. 64 percent of those polled support eliminating tax breaks for companies who outsource jobs to other countries; 63 percent support raising the Social Security payroll tax cap on incomes higher than 107,000 dollars; and 62 percent support taxing excessive Wall Street profits.

54 percent of U.S. voters support allowing the tax cuts for wealthy individuals making more than 250,000 dollars per year, enacted under the former president George W. Bush, to expire.

The Tea Party, however, is opposed to this. “We don’t want to end those tax cuts,” Thompson said. “I don’t believe in punishing a person for being successful.”

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Occupying the Farm: A Model of Resistance

April 27th, 2012

From: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/27-4

by Antonio Roman-Alcalá

We all know that “Every Day is Earth Day” and many environmentalists feel that their eating habits are their daily affirmation of a commitment to the planet. But what does it look like to take action for the environment, beyond the fork? There are many options, of course, but one particularly inspirational tactic manifested this past Earth Day in Albany, CA.

On April 22, a week after the International Day of Peasant Struggle, hundreds of Bay Area food sovereignty activists and community members broke the locks on a huge piece of urban agricultural land, tore up mustard weeds, and planted veggies. “Occupy the Farm” was organized as an occupy-style protest, including tent encampments and a “farmers assembly,” but with one very meaningful difference: This act of “moral obedience” (AKA civil disobedience) was the direct outgrowth of years of neighborhood organizing around the piece of land in question.

The “Gill Tract” is a 10-acre parcel that has been owned by University of California, Berkeley since 1928. The university’s founding as a land grant college made the purchase of this Class 1 agricultural land an obvious choice for experimentation, and for years much of the property was used for biological and chemical pest control research. By the late 1990s, however, the future of the site was unclear, and UC began seeking other uses.

Then came the formation of the Bay Area Coalition for Urban Agriculture (BACUA), composed of UC professors in the College of Natural Resources, food justice and sustainability organizations, and local citizens. They petitioned UC to consider a proposal to develop the site into a community-focused educational farm showcasing sustainable practices. According to their mission, “The center would conduct fundamental technical, economic, and sociological research and education into ways cities can create food systems that serve citizens and the environment well through localized, economically healthy and ecologically sustainable production and distribution.”

The UC administration completely ignored this effort (and many similar efforts: see here and here) and instead made plans to sell development rights to various interests, including Whole Foods Market and a for-profit home for the elderly. This move might be a surprise for someone under the impression that a public institution’s mandate is to serve the public, not private interests. But understanding the force of “neoliberalism” on governance in the past 40 years means that we instead can expect such acts: governments are now expected to solve societal problems with increasingly austere budgets, and to turn to entrepreneurship (like the sales or rental of their assets) to bolster those budgets. Privatization and the dismantling of public programs in favor of “public-private partnerships” are only logical outcomes of this condition. Austerity (seen in reduced state funding for UC and resulting tuition increases) combines with deregulation (which led to the most recent recession) and the consolidation of corporate power within the government to create the neoliberal framework.

“Occupy the Farm” poses an alternative framework: Food sovereignty. Instead of profit seeking as the ultimate factor in decision-making around land use, food sovereignty puts public benefit in the foreground. Instead of distant bureaucracies headed by neoliberal capitalist heroes like Richard Blum (i.e., the UC Regents), food sovereignty demands local and democratic control over our public institutions. And instead of a historically and logistically impossible division of “government” on one side and “markets” on the other, food sovereignty promotes a market that is accountable and humane because it is built up from the lives and decisions of those who are affected by it. This may all sound very theoretical, but land occupations like the effort to Take Back the Tract make these ideas real, immediate, tangible, and imaginable.

Discourses of “growth” and “development” on the world scale are mirrored in fights like the one over the Gill Tract. Like World Bank and IMF promotion of a constantly growing world economy and the supposed “trickle down” of benefits from neoliberal policies, UC apologists are likely to react to the Gill Tract takeover by arguing that selling the land is the most “reasonable” act, and one that will benefit the public…eventually.

They will demonize the protestors as much as they can, belittling their image, intent, or naiveté–much like neoliberals belittle “protectionist” or “socialist” government moves (see the Economist’s recent critique of Argentina renationalizing its previously privatized oil company). If neoliberalism myopically seeks to grow markets, its opponents push for real development: of democracy, equality, and environmental health, and yes, of markets which can coexist with these values. We could attempt, as the BACUA did, to petition those in command to support development over growth. But as the Occupy Farmers decided, waiting around for powerful people to “do the right thing” can be a fools’ errand and at times it takes people rising up in powerful acts of disobedient love to force the hand of defensive elites.

In this particular case, UC elites in question are already reeling from many recent losses of legitimacy: A massive student movement perpetually protests their fee increases and union busting; their mishandling of these protests with overly zealous police violence reaps world and official condemnation; reports on the Regents’ financial conflicts of interest breed further distrust; and the general occupy movement has put the one percent on the defensive. Combined with the thoughtful planning that went into the Earth Day action (and the clear community support for it), UC’s hands have been relatively tied, and its only retaliatory act thus far has been to shut off the new farm’s water supply. This is itself a powerful show of how an occupation can be daring, illegal, inspiring, and strategic; challenging the power of a delegitimized elite while building up power from below.

Land takeovers have been more common in parts of the global South, and Occupy the Farm was enacted in solidarity with La Via Campesina, an international peasant’s movement whose largest organizational member, the Landless Peasant Movement (MST) of Brazil, has settled over 150,000 families on land expropriated from that country’s largest landholders. The action can also be linked to the struggles of independent farmers in Honduras (who took land this past week, in a political move that ties in to their already-pressing concern for the reintroduction of their democratically elected president who was deposed in a coup 2 years ago).

The Berkeley occupation may seem anomalous for it having occurred in a first world country. People have said these kinds of actions couldn’t work here: After all, we lack the peasant population of most third world countries, and we are stricken with a deep cultural commitment to the sanctity of private property. Less than one percent of the U.S. population is full time farmers. Many Americans when they hear about the Gill Tract action will probably be incapable of seeing beyond “trespassing.”

Still, no matter how important property rights are to society, their primacy must be challenged if we are to achieve a sustainable future. With such extensive control of the global food system by profit-minded corporate conglomerates, it’s an act of faith to expect them to suddenly prioritize environmental, consumer, or worker concerns. It’s equally naïve to expect our public institutions to stand up to those corporate interests, considering how deeply vested the neoliberal ideology is, and how completely beholden elected officials are to moneyed interests.

Occupying the Farm is a valuable tactical next step for the Occupy Movement, the Food Movement, and all those who care about creating a just, sustainable, and democratic life for our children. Let’s continue to occupy the food system in creative, loving, challenging, and unexpected ways.

© 2012 Civil Eats

San Francisco native Antonio Roman-Alcalá has been irrationally dedicated to urban sustainability since he decided that there wasn’t enough “land” for all dropouts to go “back to”. Attempting to live both a well-examined life and a joyful one, he splits his time among such pursuits as: teaching farming and permaculture through Alemany Farm; playing drums, guitar and singing; writing about the sustainable food movement as a perpetually critical insider; promoting his film In Search of Good Food; organizing the urban farm movement via the SFUAA, and resisting–yet submitting to–the dominant paradigm of institutional learning environments.

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The Legacy of Chernobyl

April 27th, 2012

From: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/27-2

by Laura Flanders

Twenty-six years after the meltdown at Chernobyl, the legacy of the 1986 explosion lives on.

“It is a disaster that left a 30-kilometre uninhabitable exclusion zone, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and still threatens the lives of tens of thousands,” wrote Greenpeace on Thursday.

All these years and a triple meltdown at Fukushima later, the industry and its supporters have yet to learn.

“The nuclear industry still hasn’t realized or admitted that its reactors are unsafe. Reactors are vulnerable to any unforeseen combination of technological failures, human errors and natural disasters. That puts the tens of millions of people living near the worlds more than 400 reactors at risk,”  writes Greenpeace’s Justin McKeating.

To get a sense of just what those tens of millions live at risk of, take a look at these photographs by award winning photographer Paul Fusco. Earlier this month I had a the honor of participating in the fourth Schuneman Symposium held at the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. Among the speakers was Fusco, an extraordinary MAGNUM photographer who traveled to the Ukraine to see the legacy of Chernobyl after twenty years. Fusco expected to stay two weeks. He stayed for two months, following parents, children, nurses and cancer patients.

“It changed my life. I couldn’t leave. It was so immense in its implications. There is so much damage to so many people in so many ways…” says Fusco.

Yet his extraordinary photographs, which you can see here in a short promotional slideshow, aren’t printed in US papers. They’re like his pictures of US military funerals, his current project, which is called Bitter Fruit. “The pictures are printed a lot in Europe. Never here,” Fusco told the Scripps students. “Why do you think that is?”

© 2012 The Nation

Laura Flanders was the founder and host of GRITtv and is the author of the books BUSHWOMEN and Blue Grit. She’s the editor of At the Tea Party

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