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Illegal People. by David Bacon
For two decades David Bacon has documented the connections between labor, migration, and the global economy. In Illegal People he explains why our national policy...
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Morristown: in the air and sun
Morristown: in the air and sun a film by Anne Lewis documentary 59:40 min. “Brings the complex issue of globalization …
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by Anne Lewis
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ON THE IMMIGRATION “PROBLEM”
April 22, 2924, 9 pm Eastern, 6 pm Pacific
Presenty by:
The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
The Socialist Education Project
4 th Monday Webinar
Woody Guthrie wrote his famous song “Deportees” in 1948 decrying that “All they will call you will be ‘deportees.’” And “they chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.” He wrote at a time when the US political economy depended upon temporary immigrant labor.
Since the 1940s particularly, the globalization of the economy, increased violence and repression
within countries (largely involving United States interference), growing income and wealth
inequality and poverty, climate catastrophes and the rise of repressive regimes everywhere,
emigration has increased. The United Nations has estimated that “the number of international
migrants has been robust over the last two decades, reaching 281 million people living outside
their country of origin in 2020, up from 173 million in 2000 and 221 million in 2010. Currently,
international migrants represent about 3.6 per cent of the world’s population.” And today, they
represent a large and growing percentage of the agricultural and manufacturing work force.
Now, “the immigration problem” is the issue dominating campaign and election debate. Both
parties conceive of immigration as a problem. Is it? What are its causes? What role have
immigrants played in America’s economy? How should the left respond to the vicious attack on
immigrants and the draconian proposals made by political candidates to address “the problem.”
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Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIocO6gpjooHtEaQQpxL9YDVdaS6IOmEjRA
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To address this issue the webinar will hear from: | |
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David Bacon
writer, photographer, labor organizer.
http://dbacon.igc.org/
""David Bacon is the conscience of American journalism: an extraordinary social documentarist in the
rugged humanist tradition of Dorothea Lange, Carey McWilliams,
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Anne Lewis
Anne comes out of a movement to make media that helps create opportunity for social change. She has made documentary films (always with limited resources) since the 1970¹s and was associate director and assistant camerawoman for HARLAN COUNTY, USA.
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Toward a Just and Sustainable Immigration Policy
by Jay D. Jurie
Member, CCDS Peace & Solidarity Committee
For more than two decades much has been made of an immigration "crisis" along with oft-reported federal mismanagement of the US southern border. There is some truth to a lack of coherent public policy as well as inadequate implementation of existing immigration and border protocols. Congressional gridlock is largely to blame for inaction and the dramatic media coverage that has been periodically produced. Presidential action has sporadically sought to apply band-aids that have occasionally alleviated, but at other times have worsened the situation, or at best been ineffectual (see Suzanne Gamboa, NBC News, May 9, 2023).
Behind these widely perceived governmental failures is a push-pull effect created by large-scale private interests. The "push" involves the ways in which First World transnational corporations have exploited and otherwise created underdevelopment in the Third World, as eloquently described in the work of Eduardo Galeano and Walter Rodney, as well as many others. These conditions have pushed those living in dire circumstances to immigrate to North America or Western Eurpope in search of better lives.
Those seeking to improve their life circumstances have been "pulled" by appealing images promoting such fulfillment, as well as by both public and private policies that actively generate such attraction; implicit if not explicit promises of employment and higher standards of living. Of course, the reality often does not live up to the expectations that have been manufactured.
A final component of this manufactured crisis is political, seeking to pit First World workforces against immigrant labor "competition." In order to foster intra-class competition and infighting, to smash solidarity, and to keep wages as low as possible across the board, propaganda has been used extensively to promote fear-mongering, racist bigotry, xenophobic nativism, ethnocentrism, ultra-nationalism and economic insecurity (for one example, see Amy Fried, Bangor Daily News, April 9, 2024).
Alongside other comparatively powerless groups in society, immigrants have been subjected to scapegoating. They have been accused of delivering "anchor babies" on US soil so as to create permanent resident status for children. (see Alexandra Villarreal, the Guardian, March 16, 2020). They have been accused of being agents of "replacement theory," that is, of replacing white workers, or of outnumbering white voters at the polls. They have been accused of placing a burden on US social services.
They have been accused by far right conspiracy theorists not only of destroying US culture, but physical infrastructure. According to former Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and immigrant workers were responsible for the recent disaster involving a cargo ship that hit a Baltimore bridge (see Fred Graham, Orlando Sentinel, March 31, 2024). They have been castigated for "poisoning the blood," that is, diluting the purity of the white race, and they have been referred as "animals" by Donald Trump (see Nathan Layne, Reuters, December 16, 2023; Nathan Layne, Gram Slattery & Tim Reid, Reuters, April 4, 2024).
The so-called immigrant "crisis" is among the gravest threats we face in today's society. To express it in one popular term, immigration has been "weaponized." How might we confront this challenge?
First, we need to redouble efforts to reverse the narrative about immigrants. Every opportunity should be taken to point out that beyond indigenous peoples and those brought to this country as slaves, everyone else is descended from immigrant predecessors. It doesn't matter if they came "legally" as that was a convenient fiction established by those who dispossessed the original inhabitants (see David McCullough, The Pioneers, 2019).
At this point in time no racial, ethnic, or gender pedigree have greater inherent claim to this land or productive apparatus than others, except as noted above those who are entitled to reparations, but that's another story. So for all the rest we must respect and celebrate their contributions. It was largely immigrant labor that made this country what is today.
That does not mean "average Americans" who are not part of the large-scale propertied or ownership class should be compelled to "share" with others, but it does mean all who are not on a sound economic footing must be meaningfully accommodated. Organized labor had taken some strides in this direction, with the AFL-CIO offering citizenship programs. Rather than allowing themselves to be manipulated into opposing a false "foreign threat," they have welcomed diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Those new to this country are welcome to join a union and ought to be encouraged to do so under no threat of retaliation or deportation. Guest worker visa programs such as the H-1B and L-1 need to be tweaked to ensure they are effective and do not compete with the existing US work force. The entire immigrant employment process needs to be streamlined (see Jasmine Garsd, NPR, August 29, 2023).
There is an ongoing debate as to the economic value vs. the costs of "legal" vs. "illegal" immigrants. It is clear the contributions of "legal" immigrants far outweigh the economic costs they may pose (see Sherman, Trisi, Stone, Gonzales & Parrott, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, August 15, 2019). As to "illegal," it has been mentioned they are taxed for certain benefits they will not receive. So as to regularize these factors, clear and expedited pathways to citizenship must be set up.
A similar situation is that involving crime. Immigrants, often without recourse to whether they are legal or not, are often accused of contributing to higher crime rates. Evidence suggests that there is not a significant correlation. Overall, it has been seen immigrants have lower crime rates than the US-born (see Stephanie Kulka, Northwestern News, March 12, 2024).
However, as seen with economic costs, legalization would suggest outweighed benefits as opposed to costs. Most immigrants are hard-working, they have come to the US for economic opportunity which they do not want to jeopardize through illegal activity. It has been suggested that at least some illegal immigrants do not want to get driver's licenses or carry car insurance due to their status. If so, yet another reason to expedite permanent status or citizenship.
Immigrants have been accused of drug trafficking or a desire to commit terrorism. No substantial evidence backs up these allegations, so they should be challenged and countered when and wherever possible. According to one source, "Virtually none [fentanyl] is seized from migrants seeking asylum" (see Joel Rose, NPR, August 9, 2023). Indeed, the only real criminals are the "coyotes" who smuggle immigrants across the border for what is sometimes an exorbitant fee (see Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2019).
Border operations must be conducted in an orderly fashion. Chaos or a lack of procedures is in the interest of no one except political demagogues. The US must partner with Mexico and others to ensure that a reasonable flow of border crossings can be effectively processed. There must be absolutely no repeat of the cruel and disgraceful separation of children from their parents experienced under the Trump regime. It must be made clear in the US that the border is a federal, not a state responsibility.
In conclusion, changes in US foreign policy are inherently necessary if improvements in immigration and border policy are to be sustained. The US needs to drastically change direction. Significant efforts must be aimed at the establishment of economically-just and low-crime environments in countries that are driving people from their homes in search of better prospects elsewhere.
The desperation of some of these migrants is evident, risking their lives aboard rafts on the Mediterranean or Caribbean or crossing the dangerous Darien Gap through Panama. Rather than insisting these people be stopped at the US border and sent back, First World governments and corporations must be held accountable for the improvements so sorely needed in the human condition.
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The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
ON THE IMMIGRATION “PROBLEM”
Immigration is a Global Issue
Woody Guthrie wrote his famous song “Deportees” in 1948 decrying that “All they will call you will be ‘deportees.’” And “they chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.” He wrote at a time when the US political economy depended upon temporary immigrant labor.
Just like the Woody Guthrie the arts have been a important part of our progressiver history and movements. We are honored to hear of two such people that that tell us these stories. We have learned so much from them.
Since the 1940s particularly, the globalization of the economy, increased violence and repression within countries (largely involving United States interference), growing income and wealth inequality and poverty, climate catastrophes and the rise of repressive regimes everywhere, emigration has increased. The United Nations has estimated that “the number of international migrants has been robust over the last two decades, reaching 281 million people living outside their country of origin in 2020, up from 173 million in 2000 and 221 million in 2010. Currently, international migrants represent about 3.6 per cent of the world’s population.”
One of the ironies of world history is that capital in the form of investments, trade, the purchase of natural resources, the globalization of production, and military interventions have been common and necessary features of capitalism since its emergence in the sixteenth century. But, paradoxically, and except for the global slave trade, the movement of people has been “illegal.” The idea of national sovereignty is mostly used to justify branding some human migrants as “illegal.” If capital is and has been legal, the movement of people should be legal as well. It makes no sense, nor is it humane, to brand any human beings as “deportees.
A Left Response
What about migration as the immediate problem, the one where we can find more immediate solutions? First, we should be welcoming. To take away profits of ‘coyotes’ in illegal crossings, we need more proper legal points of entry, and we need to welcome those who arrive there. We need not be ‘open’ without limits. Health checks should be required, along with IDs, if possible, and information concerned relatives here who might care for them. Asylum seekers need to be assigned court dates. Anti-trafficking queries need to be made regarding young women and children.
Another truth often overlooked is a sector of our capitalist and farm owners are in dire need of immigrant labor. If migrants at our ports of entry are seeking work, we need to determine their skills, offer temporary work permits and EIN numbers on the spot. If they don’t have a host family, we can offer a list of places in need of workers like them. If they need help getting there, offer a bus ticket voucher. They can pay later via taxes.
Finally, our stand as a left, and as a progressive workers movement, is we want to bring these workers into our fold on the basic of solidarity and democracy, into our unions and community organizations. It not only helps the immigrants, it’s the key to curbing abuse, wage theft, undue child labor and their deployment as strike breakers. If we look to our own history on these matters, nearly every wave of migration, apart from those that served to exterminate the Native Peoples, worked in various way to improve the lot of all.
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Monday, June 7, 2021
OPEN BORDERS: A PROGRESSIVE RESPONSE
TO THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS (a repost)
Harry Targ
Why Migration
People migrate from one place to another for a variety of reasons. A good part of that migration has to do with international relations, national economies, and the increasingly globalized economy. Literally millions of people have moved from one geographic space to another in the twenty-first century, in most cases for reasons of physical fear or economic need. Two prominent causes that “push” people to leave their communities and homeland relate to “hybrid wars” and neoliberal globalization.
Hybrid wars refer to the long-term policies of imperial powers to systematically undermine political regimes that pursue policies and goals that challenge their global hegemony. Over long periods of time imperial powers have used force, covert operations, supporting pliant local elites, and funneling money to disrupt local political processes. If targeted countries still reject outside interference the imperial power uses force to overthrow recalcitrant governments. In the 1980s all these tactics were used by the United States to crush revolutionary ferment in Central America. Of course, the US hybrid war strategy has been a staple of United States policy in the region ever since President Franklin Roosevelt declared the policy of “The Good Neighbor.”
Neoliberalism refers to the variety of policies that rich capitalist countries and international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization have imposed on debt-ridden poor countries. These policies require poor countries to cut back on public services, deregulate their economies, reduce tariffs that protect their own industries and agriculture, and in other ways insist that poor countries open their economies to foreign investment and trade penetration. The impacts of neoliberalism have been to impose austerity on largely marginalized populations. Their agriculture and industries have been undermined by subsidized agribusinesses from the Global North and global investors. Since the initiation of neoliberal policies in the 1970s gaps between rich and poor nations and rich and poor people within nations have grown all across the world, with a few exceptions such as China.
In sum, peoples everywhere have experienced the creation of repressive regimes and economic policies that have shifted vast majorities from modest survival to deep poverty. (Susan Jonas once wrote that the Guatemalan people lived more secure lives before the arrival of Spanish colonizers in the fifteenth century than ever since). The globalization of the economy, increased violence and repression within countries (largely involving United States interference), increasing income and wealth inequality and poverty, and the rise of repressive regimes everywhere, has led to massive emigration. Some estimates indicate that 37 million people left their home countries (some 45 countries) between 2010 and 2015 for humanitarian reasons.
One of the ironies of world history is that capital in the form of investments, trade, the purchase of natural resources, the globalization of production, and military interventions have been common and necessary features of capitalism since its emergence in the sixteenth century. But, paradoxically, and except for the global slave trade and selected periods of history, the movement of people has been illegal. (Sometimes branding migrants as “illegal” has been a device to cheapen their labor). The idea of national sovereignty has been used to justify categorizing some human migrants as “illegal.” If capital is and has been legal, the movement of people should be legal as well. It makes no sense, nor is it humane, to brand any human beings as “illegal.”
The Concept of Open Borders
This sketchy analysis of the “root causes” of emigration suggest the need to oppose imperialism, both in the form of hybrid wars and promotion of neoliberal economic policies. This traditional task of peace and anti-imperialist campaigns is ongoing and needs to continue. And the analyses of the deleterious effects of hybrid wars and neoliberalism should be linked to movements fighting against cruel and inhumane immigration policies in recipient countries, such as the United States. In addition, drawing on history, law, ethics, and a humane and socialist vision of the universality of humankind, progressives should expand on a conversation raised by some about the concept of “open borders.”
The idea of open borders has not been sufficiently discussed as the immigration crisis in the United States and Europe has unfolded. The core concept, with much room for discussion of implementation, suggests that, as a recently endorsed Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) statement calls for, there should be an “uninhibited transnational free movement of people….and a pathway to citizenship for all non-citizen residents.” The idea of open borders implies that no human being by virtue of her/his presence in any geographic space can be defined as “illegal” and that the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights apply to everyone, everywhere.
In a 2017 article Aisha Dodwell, Global Justice Now, wrote in defense of open borders (Aisha Dodwell, “7 Reasons Why We should Have Open Borders,” New Internationalist, November 29, 2017, https://newint.org/blog/2017/11/29/why-open-borders) . Among her arguments are the following:
-Borders are tools to separate the rich and powerful from the poor.
-Borders do not stop efforts to emigrate but exacerbate violence against already victimized people.
-Immigrants are erroneously blamed for declining employment and jobs when, in fact, it is the demonization of immigrants that divides workers from each other.
-Open borders would allow for emigres to return home when the brutal repressive and economic conditions that led them to flee were reduced.
-Open borders would lead to greater employment, increased earnings, rising demand for goods and services, and through income repatriation, more money sent back to families in countries the emigres fled. In short, open borders would be a stimulus for economic growth in both the country of origin and the host country of emigres.
-Open borders would mean the equalization of the rights of people to emigrate; thus avoiding the current policies that allow for immigration of certain populations (such as skilled workers) and not others.
-Historically, open borders have always existed for corporations, banks, the super-rich, tourists and other select populations who are beneficiaries of the global capitalist system.
Earlier Roque Planes, Latino Voices, (“16 Reasons Why Opening Our Borders Makes More Sense Than Militarizing Them,” Huffpost, September 2, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/open-borders_n_5737722?guccounter ) adds to the list of reasons justifying open borders. Planes quotes an immigration expert who has argued that, with glaring exceptions such as Asians, open borders existed until the 1920s. “‘Legally’ meant something very different then than it does now. At the time, the United States accepted practically everyone who showed up with few restrictions other than the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and a brief health examination. The foreign-born share of the population, 12.9 percent, is lower today than it was during the entire period from 1860 to 1920, according to data published by the Brookings institution.”
Planes posited arguments pertaining to open borders:
-Today capital and goods flow across borders but not always labor.
-Rich people have the privilege of open borders.
-the US immigration system is broken.
-Open borders within the European Union, while increasingly volatile politically, did not lead to the collapse of European economies.
-‘Illegal’ immigration is a direct resultant of US policies. Planes sites overthrowing governments, financing militaries in poor countries, promoting policies that destroy domestic agriculture in poor countries, and, he could have added, the war on drugs.
-Open borders increase the possibility of immigrants returning to their homelands.
-Immigrants, in the main, are not the cause of stagnant wages in the United States. Using anti-immigrant and racist policies divert attention from the primary causes of economic exploitation.
-The broken immigration system has provided huge profits for the prison/industrial complex and large budgets for law enforcement agencies.
As to the last point, Todd Miller, Empire of Borders: The Expansion if the U.S. Border Around the World, Verso Books, 2019, argues that United States policy is “pushing out the border,” such that allies tighten their own borders to serve the needs of expanding imperial control. In addition, by pressuring other countries to tighten their own border security, the U.S. is expanding its border security apparatus, to include new special forces and expansion of State Department and other agency activities.
A reviewer of Miller’s book, (Cora Currier, Pushing out the Border: How the U.S. is Waging a Global War on Migration,” Portside, August 4, 2019, https://portside.org/2019-08-04/pushing-out-border-now-us-waging-global-war-migration) quotes Miller who writes that U.S. Customs and Border Protection “has trained new patrol and homeland security units for Kenyan, Tanzanian and Ugandan borders.” The reviewer points out from Miller’s study that “…the U.S. Department of Homeland Security can be found assisting border projects in the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, India, Poland, Turkey, and Vietnam.” In addition the Border Patrol has offices in Mexico and Canada and a presence in Puerto Rico to oversee the Caribbean. Quoting Miller: “Hundreds of millions in U.S. funds have flowed to Central American borders to turn them into U.S.-style defensible zones.” And soldiers from around the world are flown to the U.S. southwest to gain experience in border control. Clearly, Miller is describing a growing military/corporate/immigration complex. The ideological glue justifying this massive enterprise are claims about national sovereignty and presumed racist threats that people fleeing repression and starvation represent.
What To Do?
Along with the panoply of proposals for immigration reform, campaigns to combat racism, and the movements to provide sanctuary to desperate migrant peoples, progressives need to look at the history/ theory/ and practice of anti-immigrant policies. A central conclusion that needs to be raised is to call and work for open borders as suggested by the DSA resolution on open borders.
In sum central elements of a truly radical and humane response to the immigration crisis in the United States and the world should include:
-Increased efforts to challenge imperialism everywhere in both its political/military dimensions and its intrusive neoliberal economic policies
-Rejection of the idea that people can be deemed “illegal.”
-Mobilizing around the concept of opening borders to people fleeing repression and economic deprivation, similar to the U.S immigration policies of the early part of the twentieth century.
-Using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a guide to law and practice all across the globe.
-Revitalizing programs of humanitarian assistance on a global basis including revisiting the possible value of instituting economic regulations of global capitalism that were once proposed in the United Nations, referred to as “The New International Economic Order.”
-Work to dismantle the military/corporate/immigration complex.
While these larger demands will be difficult to achieve, working for them and articulating a vision of the world where human beings are not deemed illegal will add clarity to the reasons behind more modest demands for reform.
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April 7th, 2024
OPEN LETTER: End the Health Crisis in Gaza
This World Health Day, April 7th, 2024, marks six months since the start of Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip, which has killed over 30,000 and resulted in an unprecedented public health catastrophe requiring urgent intervention.
We, the undersigned – scholars, students and practitioners of global public health – have watched in horror since October 7th as the people, land, and built environment of Gaza have been decimated. Action is urgently needed to prevent further devastation and escalating crises of hunger, thirst, sanitation, displacement and healthcare access.
Click here to sign the open letter
Exactly six months ago, on October 7th, 2023, a Hamas-led incursion into Israel resulted in the killing of nearly 1200 Israelis and the capture of 240 hostages, including children and the elderly. In response, Israeli forces have carried out a brutal six-month military assault on Gaza.
The physical destruction of Gaza and its people since October 7th has been widely reported. During six months of air, ground and maritime attacks, the Israeli military has dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs on Gaza, a tiny enclave home to over 2.3 million people. The onslaught is historic, constituting one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns of all time, and the single most destructive military campaign on any territory since World War II.
In six months, at least 32,623 Palestinians have been killed, the vast majority of whom are civilians. Women and children make up over 70% of the dead. Thousands more are missing, most trapped under the rubble of their former homes and communities and presumed dead. Whole extended families have been wiped out, along with their lineages, cultures, memories, and the hopes and dreams of the young and of future generations. Approximately 75,000 have sustained injuries, and thousands require urgent medical evacuation. In all, at least 4.5% of the population of Gaza have been killed or injured in 180 days of violence, in a campaign that likely amounts to genocide.
Gaza: A Worsening Public Health Catastrophe
Gazans who have survived Israel’s incessant bombardment and ground invasion face a public health catastrophe. The very essentials of survival are in short supply as the people of Gaza brave hellish conditions. Urgent crises of hunger, thirst, sanitation, displacement, and healthcare access affect everyone within Gaza’s borders, and are worsening by the day.
Widespread, man-made starvation has overtaken the Strip. As food has become increasingly inaccessible as a result of the miniscule volume of aid permitted to enter Gaza by Israeli officials, desperate families have turned to eating animal feed and birdseed in order to survive. As even those supplies have dwindled, some have resorted to eating weeds, grass and leaves.
Half of Gaza’s pre-war population – 1.1 million people – are now facing “catastrophic levels of hunger.” In its recent Provisional Measures Order dated March 28th, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) observed that “Palestinians in Gaza are no longer facing only a risk of famine...but that famine is setting in.”
The volume of food aid entering Gaza remains a trickle, when a flood of supplies is what is needed to meet even basic nutritional needs. Moreover, the destruction of agricultural lands by Israel’s bombardment, and the military’s strict policing of ocean access, mean that addressing the hunger emergency through farming or fishing is virtually impossible for Palestinians in Gaza.
As of February, an estimated 12.4 to 16.5% of children under 5 in the northern part of Gaza were acutely malnourished. Prior to October 7th, that figure was only 0.8%. As a result of the hunger crisis, a whole generation of children face potentially permanent physical and cognitive deficits. At least 27 children have now died of malnourishment and dehydration. That number is certain to rise.
The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food found that Israel was intentionally using starvation as a weapon of war. These findings were echoed by Oxfam and Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, who reported that the deprivation of food aid, water and sanitation equipment, and other supplies is a deliberate result of Israeli military policy and the enduring siege. The failure of an occupying power to ensure access to basic necessities like food is a war crime.
Gaza’s water and sanitation systems – already inadequate before the war due to decades of de-development – have also been severely compromised. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attacks, the Israeli Defense Minister threatened to cut off water, food, electricity and fuel to Gaza. Within days, the population’s access to clean and potable water from all sources dropped precipitously, immediately raising concerns about dehydration risk and the spread of infectious diseases. Without adequate power, all of Gaza’s wastewater treatment facilities and most of its sewage pumps stopped functioning in November. Meanwhile, Israel’s bombardment has destroyed much of the remaining water infrastructure.
For months, as much as 95% of Gaza’s population hasn’t had consistent access to clean water. The population is currently surviving on an average of 1.5 to 1.8 litres of water per person per day, less than 2% of the WHO daily recommended allowance. With 62% of homes damaged or destroyed, and some 1.7 million people internally displaced and living primarily in overcrowded shelters and makeshift tent cities, the availability of sanitation facilities is woefully inadequate. A UNICEF report last month found that toilets were being shared, on average, by 341 internally-displaced persons. Those with access to a shower were sharing it with 1300 others on average. Predictably, infectious diseases are running rampant through the population of Gaza. Rates of acute respiratory infections, Hepatitis A and diarrheal disease are at alarming levels. No one is more vulnerable than Gaza’s children.
The effects of all of these crises are compounded by the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system.
The Israeli army has systematically targeted healthcare facilities in Gaza, destroying infrastructure and killing or imprisoning healthcare workers. The WHO has documented 417 such attacks in six months. Just last week, Israeli military units withdrew from Al-Shifa Hospital – the largest medical facility in Gaza – leaving 400 Palestinians dead, 1000 homes in the surrounding area destroyed, and the medical complex in ruins after a two-week raid. Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s crumbling healthcare system have impacted 100 health facilities and over 100 ambulances, and have killed over 600 Palestinians. Well over 100 healthcare personnel have been abducted or detained by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 7th.
Two-thirds of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are no longer providing services, and only ten hospitals are partially functional, meaning that they “provide limited services, are overwhelmed with patients, and face critical shortages of fuel, medicines, medical supplies, and health personnel.” No primary healthcare centres are functioning. The dire situation is exacerbated by Israel’s import restrictions, which have blocked entry of items as innocuous as medical scissors and insulin pens. Some 9000 critical patients require immediate medical evacuation, including over 6000 trauma patients and 3000 needing urgent treatment for chronic conditions like cancer. Maternal healthcare is almost non-existent, leaving Gaza’s 60,000 pregnant women with little or no prenatal care. An average of 183 women give birth each day without the support of healthcare providers or facilities during or after delivery. In short, the healthcare system of Gaza is barely surviving.
Click here to sign the open letter
Restore the Human Right to Health in Gaza
The theme of this year’s World Health Day is “My Health, My Right,” reinforcing the global community’s commitment to the Right to Health: the principle that every human is entitled to quality healthcare, good nutrition, safe drinking water, quality housing and decent environmental conditions. Nowhere is the disregard for the Right to Health so glaring as it is in Gaza.
We, the undersigned – scholars, students and practitioners of global public health – demand urgent action to remedy the public health catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.
All parties to the conflict and the international community must take immediate action to:
1. End the violence now
The single most impactful public health intervention that could be implemented in Gaza today would be a cessation of hostilities. We therefore call, unreservedly, for an immediate, unconditional and sustained ceasefire to address the untenable, unacceptable and unconscionable conditions faced by every person living in Gaza today. Israel must immediately call off its planned ground offensive in Rafah, which the UN Secretary General has correctly said “would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare.” The time is now for the genocidal violence to come to an end.
2. Protect health workers and facilities and ensure unimpeded access to medical care
Attacks on healthcare facilities, workers and patients are war crimes and must stop immediately. Emergency medical and humanitarian personnel must be permitted to enter and move freely throughout the Strip. Furthermore, in concert with Egypt and the international community, Israel must immediately implement a routine medical evacuation process to ensure access to healthcare for the injured, elderly and those with chronic medical conditions.
3. Restore essential public health services and water and sanitation infrastructure
The survival of the population depends on access to safe, clean drinking water and reliable sanitation services. Israel must immediately cease their targeting of essential public health infrastructure and work to restore water, sanitation and hygiene services in Gaza. To achieve this, Israel must guarantee the free entry and safe movement of water and sanitation maintenance and technical personnel, and facilitate the repair and return to full capacity of the three water pipelines that feed water from Israel into Gaza.
4. Flood Gaza with much-needed aid
As the occupying power, Israel is legally obligated to ensure that the population of Gaza has access to adequate food, water, shelter and medical care. Israel must open all land crossings into Gaza to aid convoys without delay and, as unanimously ordered by the ICJ on March 28th, ensure unobstructed access, at scale, to food, water, electricity, fuel, clothing, shelter and medicine. It must also significantly relax its aid truck inspection regime. The international community should immediately restore, and increase, funding to UNRWA, the only organization with the capacity to ensure that aid rapidly reaches those most in need.
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To sign the open letter, please click here.
We will accept signatures from anyone identifying as a researcher, teacher, student or practitioner of public health (broadly defined).
Endorsements from any public health-related organization, agency, School or professional association are also welcome.
Signatures will be accepted through the month of April. Minor modifications to the letter (e.g. to update statistics) will be made until April 7th, World Health Day. Please direct queries to Dr. Ben Verboom, b.verboom@qmul.ac.uk.
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Libby was a founding member of CCDS, along with her husband Mort, who proceded in death, They are both greatly missed. | |
Life of Libby: Chasing Peace & Justice
with Humor, Guts, & Passion
by Libby Frank (Author), Heather Shafter (Author)
5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars
4 ratings
This is a book about the life of Libby Frank and her story of chasing peace and justice with humor, guts, and passion. Libby Frank was an activist for peace and freedom since the 1940s. She participated in public swimming pool desegregation actions, support for farm and factory worker strikes, and actions to end the war in Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, Libby was the Director of the Bergen County, NJ Peace Center, which provided draft counseling and hosted Jane Fonda (and others) to speak against the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, Libby volunteered with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Middle East Committee and developed international coalitions to work for a just peace in the Middle East. In 1981, Libby became the Executive Director of the U.S. section of WILPF. Libby relied on her bonds with fellow activists, folk music, and her sense of humor to keep her going through decades of activism. Her story shows us that the power of change lies in working with others for a common cause.
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BettyBrown was an active member of the CCDS. ?She will be missed by CCDS along with the broad peace and justice community.
Elizabeth “Betty” Brown, died peacefully in her home on Friday, January 12, 2024. She was 97 years old. Betty was born on Jan. 3, 1927, to her parents Kate and Henry Blake on the family homestead in Firesteel, South Dakota, land that Betty would later in life recognize as stolen from the Cheyenne River Sioux.
The family left South Dakota during the dust bowl era and relocated to Oregon, then moved to Richmond, California to find work in the shipyards during World War II. Betty attended Richmond High School where she began her lifelong activism for peace, and social and environmental justice. Throughout her life, she carried on the humanist traditions of her parents, who were founding members of the Richmond NAACP.
Betty met her husband Wallace Donald Brown while attending Richmond High. They would marry upon his return from WWII. Betty graduated from the University of California, San Francisco with a degree in nursing, which was followed by a year-long course of study in public health at the University of California, Berkeley.
Betty worked as a school nurse for the Richmond Unified School District (West Contra Costa County Unified School District) for 30 years, identifying children with special needs and referring them to specialists who could help them achieve success as school students.
Wally and Betty had two children and enjoyed the out-of-doors in a variety of forms including building cabins, hiking, camping, and traveling throughout the western U.S.
Following the Wally’s death in 1972, Betty redoubled her devotion to a variety of progressive causes including peace through diplomacy and the intertwined causes of environmental and social justice. She continued as the co-Chairperson of East Bay Peace Action through 2023, living out her desire to remain an activist all her life. She was also a passionate advocate for health care for all people.
Betty is survived by daughters Janice Brown-Silveira and her husband Mitchell of Reno, NV; Paula Brown-Williams, and her husband Theodore Williams of Bishop; grandchildren Erin and Nathan BrownSilveira of Reno, NV and numerous cousins and their children and grandchildren.
A celebration of Betty’s life will be held later in the year. In lieu of flowers, those who would like to remember her may make contributions to Peace Action, Healthcare for All, or the Sierra Club or simply speak out for a more just and peaceful world.
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KINDNESS IN ACTION
by Barbarba Blong
This poem was originally written for Betty Brown's 90th birthday celebration in 2017.
It is modified here for CCDS Mobilizer readers and friends to remember
Betty who died January 12, 2024 at age 97.
Betty was Wonderful!
She was Actively Kind throughout her Long Life!
Betty was Kindness in Action!
The many people who attended the celebration of Betty Brown in 2017 had worked with
her in Peace Action and many other local civic groups in Contra Costa, Northern
California. All of us had memories of years of working together with Betty on different
projects. This is a tribute of all those years of community building - a hallmark of
Betty's life.
The original poem was loosely based on
California's "Woman Warrior" poet Maxine Hong Kingston's
"Idea! Four-Word Poems! An Old Chinese Tradition."
Betty's fine character traits:
Always Took Full Responsibility
Independence Was Her Way
Caring Defined Her Being
Everyone Shared Her Strengths
Her Integrity Was Constant
Steadfastness For Old, Young
Reliability Created Trust
Always Was Civic Minded
Her Openness Guided Us
She Modeled Great Kindness.
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A weekly vigil in front of the Courthouse in Beaver PA. by Beaver Countgy Peace Links | |
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Dr. King Speaks: Economic Consequences of the
Capitalist/War System
Some Remembrances of Dr. King Who Was Killed 56 Years Ago
by Harry Targ
Dr. Martin Luther King, in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York City, April 4, 1967, spoke of the devastating consequences of the Vietnam War on the Vietnamese people and the poor and oppressed at home. To him, the carnage of war not only destroyed the targets of war (their economies, their land, their cultures) but the costs also misallocated the resources of the nation-states which initiated wars.
Every health and welfare provision of the government, local, state, and federal, was limited by resources allocated for the war system. Health care, education, transportation, jobs, wages, campaigns to address enduring problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental revitalization, and non-war related scientific and technological research were reduced almost in direct proportion to rising military expenditures.
Over half the US federal budget goes to military spending past and current. And the irony is that the money that is extracted from the vast majority of the population of the United States goes to military budgets that enhance the profits of the less than one percent of the population who profit from the war system as it exists
“I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”
See a description of the 2024 military budget- https://www.peaceaction.org/what-we-do/campaigns/pentagon-spending/
Since 1967 when he made that speech, Dr. King would surely have added a long list of other wars to the Vietnam case: wars in Central America and South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. and the more than 1,000 bases and outposts where US troops or hired contractors are fighting wars on behalf of capitalist expansion. Meanwhile the gaps between rich and poor people on a worldwide basis have increased dramatically with some twenty percent of the world’s population living below World Bank defined poverty lines.
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CARL DAVIDSON
APR 7
LeftLinks Weekly April 5, 2024
President Biden's recent phone call with Israel's Netanyahu brings two metaphors to mind: a 'can of worms' and 'Pandora's box.'
The first is largely about the past and the second is about the future. Both are highly problematic.
For starters, both Biden and Bibi have presided over prolonged carnage. Biden backed George W. Bush in immediately declaring 'war' in 2001 when 9/11 was more accurately a 'crime against humanity' than a ‘war.’ Crashing two planes into the Twin Towers were criminal deeds by non-state actors, and those who carried out the actions all perished in doing so. However, the U.S. failed to pursue it as a crime, and use the help of Interpol as well as others, to arrest and bring those responsible to a court of justice. Instead, the result was 20 years of war against two countries that had nothing or very little to do with the actual deed. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and at war's end, Iraq is governed by allies of Iran. Afghanistan has the Taliban back in power. Plus the remnant of ISIS, created by the invasion of Iraq, remains an unwelcome presence back in remote areas of Afghanistan.
As for Israel, under the false banner of claiming 'a land without people for a people without land,' its various governments have been waging war with the Palestinian people living there, and in varying degrees, with their neighboring Arab allies, ever since 1948. The current Likud government, in practice, has been reasserting the original goal of making it a land for one people only, Jews from anywhere in the world, while killing, imprisoning, or 'transferring out' the indigenous population.
On Oct 7, 2023, Hamas launched an operation to enter Israel for several hours to kill 1200 Jews and capture just over 200 hostages. After unexplained hours of delay, Bibi declared 'war' rather than a crime, and vowed to liquidate Hamas. The result? Over 30,000 have died in Gaza so far, mostly children, and the population of Gaza faces a genocidal famine and the destruction of nearly all their homes and means of survival. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, has even suggested driving everyone from Gaza, then using bulldozers to level anything still standing, and commencing to building sea-front resorts and condos for Israelis.
So much for the can of worms. What about Pandora's box? Israel faces the same dialectic the U.S. faced in Vietnam and elsewhere. The more armed insurgents it kills, the more new insurgents will join the fight in more than a simple multiple of one. Hamas had about 30% approval in Gaza before Oct 7. It now has about 70% in the West Bank, where it had even less than 30% before. What does Netanyahu think all the surviving brothers, sisters, and cousins of all the children killed are going to think about Israel five or ten years from now?
In continuing to arm Israel, the U.S. has found itself utterly isolated in the world. Why does it cling to Israel? We know, or we should know by now, about all the imperialist and economic reasons the U.S. offered in the past for backing Israel in the first place. It was supposed to be our 'aircraft carrier on land' to protect U.S. interests in an oil-rich region while exercising hegemony over all the countries there who had turned or might turn to the USSR.
Now, the USSR is gone, and the Arab oil-producing countries have formed alliances of their own in a wider, nonaligned Global South. Still there are deeper reasons, going back to the can of worms. The U.S. and Israel are both settler states suppressing indigenous peoples. Due to numbers, technology, and military might, the U.S. won its 'Indian Wars,' even if much-reduced Native American survivors continued to resist. But the territory of Israel is about half Jewish and half Palestinian, about 6 million each. And as Israel discovered in 1948, not all of them, by far, are going to be pushed out at the point of a gun. Neither side is going anywhere. So now it faces the ironic contents of Pandora's box: the earlier victims of a terrible genocide are now themselves engaged in genocide.
Here in the U.S. we also face the dilemma of the two boxes. On one hand, we face those who want to 'Make America Great Again.' On the other hand, we see others proclaiming 'We have always been great, and still are. We are the United States of America.'
But who has the better claim? In fact, there has always been 'Two Americas' on a common terrain. In a sheer time, the MAGA people can claim dominance in over 200 of 250 years since 1776. The anti-MAGA people can claim some top status in about 50 of them. These were the years of multiracial democracy that pushed up from below, the Three Reconstructions--the first during and after the Civil War, the second from 1955 to 1975, and now the third beginning in 2008, but still vacillating.
What does this mean today? Both the U.S. and Israel face the common task of redefinition and reconstruction. To survive, Israel has to become a bi-national region with a state, federated or unitary, with equal rights for all peoples and religions. For the U.S. to survive becoming a fascist country with more wars on the horizon, the America of popular democracy has to defeat the Neo-confederacy of Trump, the America of war, slavery, and empire.
Neither of these is easy or guaranteed. But it's worth recalling the last item in Pandora's box after all the nasty Devils flew out: the Angel of Hope. When combined with optimism of the will, it might just see our third reconstruction go through to a new and much better order.
Carl’s LeftLinks Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscribe
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The Fascist War on Women is Internantial
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21st century Indian fascism, corporate capital and the rhetoric of ‘women’s empowerment’
Kalpana Wilson
4 April, 2024
First published at CPI(ML) Liberation.
The rise of fascism in India has long been characterised as a ‘war on women’. This is not surprising. Globally and historically, patriarchal oppression and violence has been central to fascist ideologies and regimes. But how exactly does India’s Hindu supremacist fascism wage its ‘war on women’? And how is this shaped by the specificities of Hindutva ideology, by neoliberal capitalism, and by imperialism?
Fascism and far-right nationalism everywhere has constructed the bodies of women of the dominant community as both vehicles for reproducing the nation and as marking the boundaries of the nation, therefore requiring constant policing and control. One of the openly stated goals at the heart of the Hindu supremacist project of establishing a Hindu Brahmanical state is the replacing of India’s Constitution and the rights embedded in it with the Manusmriti, which explicitly states that women must be under the control of a man, whether father, husband or son, throughout their lives, and dehumanises oppressed castes and queer people. We can observe too the day-to-day moral policing by the stormtroopers of Hindutva who function as extensions of the state, the legitimacy granted to the gender and caste violence of patriarchal village councils, khaap panchayats, now being invoked by the government as an authentically Indian form of democracy; the institutionalised violence against those who choose their own partners, especially if these relationships are intercaste or interfaith – and in the latter case, the laws which actually criminalise such relationships in the name of ‘love jihad’ and those which facilitate their policing and harassment such as Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code and its provisions regarding live-in relationships.
Conversely, women of the demonised minority communities are seen as embodying a demographic threat to the majority making them the targets of horrific violence. India has witnessed what feminist historian Tanika Sarkar has called the ‘almost inexhaustible violence’ which the Hindu supremacists have directed at Muslim women – violence which incorporates the genocidal horror of pogroms like that in Gujarat in 2002, and the day-to-day war of attrition exemplified in the open calls by hate-preachers for mass rape of Muslim women, the police atrocities against Muslim women, as witnessed again recently in Haldwani, and the vicious online targeting of Muslim women journalists, activists and others critical of the current regime. We witness the protection, leniency and even felicitation offered to rapists of Muslim and Dalit women. The regime’s political prisoners, including women like Gulfisha Fatima and Shoma Sen, languish in jail on false charges, endlessly denied bail. Meanwhile we find that even after Bilkis Bano’s immensely courageous struggle had succeeded in sending her rapists back to jail, these ‘sanskari’ rapists and murderers are granted parole and furloughs on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Meanwhile, although ‘feminists’ are not always explicitly listed as enemies of the state, we can see the demonisation of the so-called Urban Naxal woman who is described as free-love practising, cosmopolitan, Marxist, Pakistan-loving, and terrorist-supporting.
All of this has much in common with the gender ideologies of European fascism which of course provided inspiration for Hindu supremacism from the 1920s onwards. The RSS was formed in 1925 modelled on Mussolini’s fascist youth organisation. And Hindutva ideologue MS Golwalkar notoriously hailed Nazi Germany as a ‘model of race pride’ which India should emulate.
But a marked difference with these earlier fascisms lies in the fact that central to Hindu supremacist gender discourses is the figure of the ‘excessively patriarchal’ Muslim man who represents and epitomises gendered oppression and violence. This allows core Hindutva policies such as the Uniform Civil Code or even the revocation of Article 370 in Kashmir to be championed as promoting women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, even when such false claims are thoroughly debunked.
This approach is in fact shared with Modi’s close ally and model Israel’s Zionist ideology, which weaponises the rhetoric of ‘women’s rights’ to legitimise the genocide against the Palestinian people – even pointing to Israeli women soldiers being on the front line when Israel commits its genocidal atrocities as an example of liberation. It also evokes the US imperialist wars on Afghanistan which claimed to be ‘saving’ Muslim women. More generally Hindutva shares with contemporary US-led imperialism the identification of Muslims with a series of interlinked tropes including terrorism; fanaticism; allegiance to forces external, and hostile, to the nation; illegal immigration; population growth; and women’s subordination.
Along with this, the Hindu supremacist state promotes a particular notion of women’s empowerment/naari shakti as something authentically Hindu, especially of course, when it involves the mobilisation of women within the Hindutva project and their incorporation as perpetrators of violence.
On one level, it is easy to see that the government’s ‘women’s empowerment’ rhetoric is simply a veneer designed to try to win women’s votes, as with the passing of the flawed Women’s Reservation Bill with no date for implementation, and the seemingly endless announcements of flimsy new government schemes aimed at women.
But today’s Hindutva is also inextricably entwined with neoliberal corporate capital. And its brand of naari shakti/women’s empowerment is also inseparable from a neoliberal discourse of gender equality mobilised for expanding corporate profits in various ways. It is used to legitimise policies of incorporating women as underpaid or unpaid workers into labour markets, without challenging the gender division of labour in which women continue to do the lion’s share of domestic work. As the State of Working India 2023 report explains, female employment rates have risen in India since 2019, a time when growth was slowing down. Underlying this is the fact that women have been forced into precarious work, including unpaid work as ‘family helpers’ often categorised as self-employment, by falling household incomes. And crucially, the report reminds us that ‘a shift in current weekly status from domestic duties to employment need not mean a reduction in hours spent in care work and other domestic activities…we find that increased workforce participation may be accompanied by constant or even increased time spent in housework for women’.
The Indian state’s women’s empowerment discourse is used to promote the financialisation of women’s debt through self-help group and microfinance schemes which are increasingly integrated into global financial flows and profit-making. Women taking these loans find themselves harassed and persecuted for repayments, only escaping the clutches of microfinance companies when they have organised vibrant collective movements against debt.
This neoliberal form of naari shakti/women’s empowerment is also invoked to promote population policies which are shaped at global as well as national level. These have long been partially driven by commitments made by the Indian government under global population control programmes like FP2030, which was set up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations alongside US and UK governments and the UNFPA. Women from poor households – mainly Dalit, OBC and Adivasi women, instead of being given access to safe contraception which they can control, continue to be targeted for coercive sterilisations and unsafe injectable and implantable contraceptives, practices which have long been a focus of feminist resistance. As with the Chhattisgarh sterilisation massacre of 2014 this targeting often coincides with campaigns of dispossession and displacement to make way for mining and environmental destruction by transnational corporates like Adani and Vedanta.
At the same time calls for coercive population control explicitly directed at Muslim women’s bodies have become a key part of the Hindu supremacist arsenal. In UP under Yogi Adityanath, alongside the bulldozing of Muslim homes and the mass killing of Muslim youths by the police in fake encounters, the government introduced the Uttar Pradesh Population (Control, Stabilisation and Welfare) Bill, ahead of the 2022 elections in the state. This proposes restricted access to food distribution schemes, disqualification from applying for government jobs, a bar on promotions for existing government employees, and ineligibility for receiving any government subsidy for people who have more than two children. Further, sterilization of one partner, which in practice means almost exclusively tubectomies for women, is specifically mandated to access certain benefits after two children. These laws invoke and legitimise the ongoing stream of false claims and hate speech about Muslims in India being set to ‘outnumber’ Hindus’. In BJP-ruled Assam, in the context of the violent campaigns against its Muslim minority who are demonised as ‘Bangladeshi immigrants’ a similar bill was introduced in 2021, with the Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announcing the formation of what he called a 1,000 strong 'Population Army' to distribute contraceptives and create awareness about population control in Muslim-dominated areas of the state. This January he further announced that a new welfare scheme aimed at ‘developing entrepreneurship among women’ would only be provided to women with three children or less.
Understanding these intimate connections between Hindu supremacist fascism, neoliberal corporate capital and the women’s empowerment discourse perhaps makes it easier to understand why Melinda Gates, a leading advocate of the neoliberal approach to gender equality, could be all praise for Yogi Adityanath, who notoriously wrote in 2014, echoing the Manusmriti, that ‘Women must not be left free and independent’. In the midst of an epidemic of rapes and murders in which Dalit women and girls were especially targeted and state forces repeatedly shielded upper caste and powerful perpetrators, Gates actually enthused that “Uttar Pradesh is a model not only for India but for the whole world” praising it in many fields including women’s empowerment.
Confronting this 21st century fascism in India, resistance to the ‘war on women’ takes many different forms. We have seen it in the students rising up against sexual harassment and violence and administrative collusion and repression, in the iconic Shaheen Bagh occupations of public space by Muslim women in the anti-CAA movement, in the resistance by Adivasi women to the acute gendered violence of the state and corporate land-grabbers, in the demands of women scheme workers and sanitation workers for decent wages and conditions, recognition and dignity. We see it in the insistence of Kashmiri women who refuse the erasure of mass rapes by the Indian Army, in the voices of Kuki-Zo women demanding an end to the atrocities in Manipur, and in the trans activists resisting exclusion from citizenship. This resistance continually exposes the lies of patriarchal, Islamophobic, neoliberal and imperialist claims to women’s empowerment, reaffirming radical visions of hope, possibility and freedom.
India feminism Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation Asia
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Global Days of Action on Military Spending Protest
and Stand for Peace
April 13, Saturday, Noon to 1 PM
April 13- US Army Reserve Drill Center 4850 W Silver Spring, Milwaukee, WI
Global Days of Action on Military Spending.
War is costing us the Earth! The environmental impacts resulting from conflicts and militarization underscore the pressing need for peace. It’s time to end over $1 trillion a year being spent on wars and the military, and to halt the Pentagon’s $2 trillion plan to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its delivery systems, and not to spend $250 billion to replace U.S. first strike and vulnerable land-based ICBM’s with new Sentinel Missiles.
No More US Military Aid to Israel!
--
MLK: “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
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Campaigns, Movements, and Organzing Strategies
with Bill Fletcher Jr.
and Carl Davidson
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Progressives Unveil 10-Point Agenda To 'Prevent Fascist Takeover
"With our support and voice, progressives may persuade and enable President Biden to achieve more progressive policy objectives during his second term and prevent a fascist takeover."
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A coalition of national progressive advocacy groups on Monday released a list of 10 policy objectives that it believes President Joe Biden should embrace to consolidate support for his high-stakes electoral rematch against presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
The platform—released by Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), and the State Democratic Party Progressive Network—frontloads the threat that Trump and the fascist movement at his back pose to basic freedoms and democracy itself.
"The 2024 presidential election presents a challenge for progressives to preserve and amplify our voice while fighting the most dangerous threat to U.S. democracy in our nation's history," reads the platform's introduction. "Our best strategy to advance both goals is to become state and national Biden delegates at the state and national Democratic Party conventions, and to elect Joe Biden for a second term. Throughout this process, we must advocate for a progressive policy agenda that builds and expands upon progressive elements of President Biden’s original Build Back Better (BBB) plan."
"With our support and voice," the document adds, "progressives may persuade and enable President Biden to achieve more progressive policy objectives during his second term and prevent a fascist takeover."
The first plank of the agenda urges Biden and the Democratic Party to "develop and repetitively use more aggressive messaging against and educate the public about the dangers of fascism including exposing and condemning Project 2025, the fascist blueprint for a second Trump administration."
It also calls for more concrete policy changes such as filibuster reform, term limits for Supreme Court justices, and the passage of robust voting rights legislation in the face of l arge-scale Republican attacks on the franchise.
Other planks of the agenda include working to end the privatization of public goods such as housing and healthcare, using "all means available" to raise the long-stagnant federal minimum wage and slash poverty, raising taxes on billionaires and corporations, overturning the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, canceling student debt and establishing tuition-free public college, expanding Medicare benefits, declaring a climate emergency, and conditioning U.S. aid to Israel.
The groups said Monday that they plan to submit the policy agenda to the Democratic Party Platform Committee ahead of the Democratic National Convention in August.
"We intend this to be a unifying effort, urge the second Biden administration to fulfill the 10 policy objectives outlined in these proposals, and invite the Democratic presidential campaign to engage in dialogue with us to achieve unity and progressive electoral support around them," the progressive coalition said Monday.
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Inside the Election
Denial Groups Planning to Disrupt November
by David Gliberyt April 8th 2024
reprinted from Wired
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As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.
All the evidence states otherwise. But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims they’re launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of “data elements” on every single US citizen.
These groups could have a major impact on the 2024 election. In addition to disenfranchising voters and putting additional pressure on already overstretched election offices, they could convince more and more people that US elections are fraudulent.
Catherine Engelbrecht and her organization True the Vote have effectively tried to disenfranchise voters for more than a decade by claiming that voter rolls are filled with phony voter registrations. Engelbrecht’s rhetoric was given an unprecedented boost in the wake of 2020, when Trump and other elected officials mainstreamed conspiracies that the elections had been rigged in favor of Democrats. Hundreds of national and local election denial groups were formed, and many of them amassed huge followings on social media platforms like Telegram. As the 2024 presidential election looms, they are ramping up efforts to do it again.
“It could be exponentially worse than what we saw in 2020, but we're going to be awake, we're going to be engaged, we are going to understand the process, and we're going to have options to continue to hold to those truths,” Engelbrecht said during a March webinar titled “Election Integrity Team Building 101.” “We're not going to back down. There's too much to lose.”
The hour-long presentation was delivered from a hotel room in Denver, with Engelbrecht laying out what could sound like a relatively benign plan to monitor elections and check voter rolls. “Keep a soft heart, keep a kind word in your mouth, approach people irrespective of party with love. You will find that things will be much better if that is the approach that is taken,” Engelbrecht said. The session, she said, was overbooked.
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Engelbrecht then began speaking about elections being “perilously close to cracking in half,” and her presentation became a highlight reel of election conspiracies, references to crystals, Christian nationalist rhetoric, and militaristic jargon. “If this republic’s to be saved, it's because [of] people like all of you that are on this webinar right now. There are some bad actors out there and we live in particularly chaotic and caustic times,” said Engelbrecht. “If we wait on somebody to do something, we will watch freedom slip away on our watch. That's how close we are.”
“These groups are trying to lay the groundwork to potentially make later claims about the election that very well may be false. But the more chaos that can be caused along the way will give more fodder to that disinformation,” Andrew Garber, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, tells WIRED. “It's not just bad if there's a mass voter challenge because people might get kicked off the rolls. It's also bad if people then take that challenge and say, ‘See, look at all these ineligible voters,’ when in fact that's not the case.”
Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2010, when she was an activist for the right-wing populist Tea Party movement. After the 2020 election, Engelbrecht and her collaborator Gregg Phillips became central figures in the Stop the Steal movement, and starred in the widely-debunked election conspiracy film 2000 Mules. They were also arrested for contempt of court after refusing to identify their source behind allegations that the Chinese government had accessed US election data. True the Vote also made wild allegations of widespread ballot stuffing in Georgia during the 2020 vote and a subsequent runoff in 2021. Earlier this year, True the Vote was forced to admit in court that the group had no evidence to back up its claims.
In 2022, the group rolled out a slick new software tool known as IV3, based on technology developed by Phillips, that compared names on voter rolls to a database maintained by the US Postal Service, allowing anyone to challenge voter registrations across the country if they spotted a discrepancy. A WIRED investigation, however, revealed that the information used to challenge the registration of hundreds of thousands of people was based on unreliable data.
Undeterred, True the Vote announced last week that it was relaunching IV3. Phillips claims that the software’s database now has close to “100 billion data elements about every single voter in the United States.” WIRED has not seen proof of this claim. The new IV3 system will soon be available in all 50 states, the organization said. On Thursday, the group held a webinar to train local activists on how to use it. The new system also relies on data from the US Postal Service, but Engelbrecht claimed during the presentation that Phillips and his team had “normalized” the data from all 50 states to ensure the system would not produce inaccurate results. She also said that thousands of people across the country were already registered, and that they had a long waiting list.
Additionally, she said that another software tool developed by Phillips’ team, called Ground Fusion, would be released soon; it is aimed at organizations and PACs looking to identify voting irregularities across larger geographic regions.
Engelbrecht declined to comment, claiming without evidence that WIRED had “written unfairly about True the Vote and IV3 in the past.”
True the Vote is not the only group seeking to leverage technology to supercharge the spread of election conspiracies. A secretive Georgia-based firm called EagleAI NETwork has developed a voter information database to fast-track the deletion of ineligible voters from the system. Voter rights groups have advised against its use, as insignificant errors—such as a missing comma before the suffix “Jr.”—have led to eligible names being removed. Still, at least one county in Georgia has agreed to use EagleAI to review voter challenges and conduct list maintenance activities.
One of EagleAI’s key backers is former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, who in the past two years has become central to the push to spread election conspiracies on a national level through her well-funded Election Integrity Network.
The group has held in-person training seminars in recent years, with session topics including how to protect “Vulnerable Voters from Leftist Activists” and “Monitoring Voting Equipment and Systems.” More recently, the group has made its training sessions available online, and is now once again ramping up its efforts ahead of the 2024 election with an initiative called Soles to the Rolls, aimed at boosting challenges to voter registration.
Mitchell, EagleAI, and the Election Integrity Network did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Another training webinar called “We the People” was also hosted last month by the America Project and its offshoot, Vote Your Vision. Broadcasted online to hundreds of attendees, the webinar featured a lineup of election conspiracists, Republican lawmakers, a guy who wrote a book about fifth-generation warfare, and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
The webinar, the group’s website said, was designed to give people “the secrets to reclaiming our power and reshaping history” by using “state-of-the-art election tools,” including those involving artificial intelligence technology. While the details of exactly what these tools will look like and how they will be used are unclear, the America Project has already scheduled more training sessions in the coming weeks to give supporters more information. The group also did not reply to requests for comment.
The America Project was cofounded by disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO and conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who also funds part of the organization. Both Flynn and Byrne reportedly attended a White House meeting in late 2020 to urge Trump to essentially declare martial law and seize voting machines.
While Flynn didn’t speak during last month’s webinar, he has arguably done more than anyone since 2020 to push the notion that America’s elections are fundamentally fraudulent, appearing at conferences, in podcasts, and on right-wing news shows on a near-daily basis. Trump has also indicated that Flynn will be brought back into his administration should he win.
These efforts have been given the seal of approval by the Republican National Committee, which was recently restructured by Trump to include election deniers and family members in top positions while cutting minority outreach efforts. One of those election deniers is Christina Bobb, who will be running the “election integrity unit.” A former Trump lawyer and TV presenter on far-right channel One America News, Bobb is a major promoter of the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The RNC’s election-related priorities, according to an internal memo recently obtained by NPR, include “a broader effort over the coming months to [legally] challenge voter identification and signature verification rules which were put into place for the 2020 election.”
During the America Project webinar last month, one of the hosts apologized to listeners for being unable to get Bobb to join the call that day, but promised that she would join a future session—highlighting just how closely these conspiracy-focused groups work with the mainstream GOP apparatus.
“These groups have a playbook nationally that they tend to deploy locally,” says Garber. “Some of these playbooks that have an intended national reach are then deployed through local activists, and it's concerning because it's the voters at the local level who suffer the effects. It's the election officials at the local level trying to keep order at the polls, trying to make sure their voter rolls are up to date, who have to deal with this stuff.”
One of Flynn’s core messages over the past four years has been that “local action equals national impact” —an expression that revolves around a concept called “precinct strategy,” which aims to get people into key positions on local committees in order to push their narratives at the local level. In 2024, that strategy has been primed and polished.
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“This concept of precinct strategy was actually endorsed by President Trump in the last election cycle,” Yehuda Miller, a Republican county committee member in New Jersey, said during the America Project seminar. “We want to take the strategy to the next level. We want to get more organized, we want to start organizing across multiple counties in a state, we want to start organizing across multiple states. We have the power to direct our elected officials.”
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Buy this book in honor of incredible woman!
click HERE to purchase
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Understanding and Countering Fascist Movements
From Void to Hope
By Joan Braune
This book is based on the premise that understanding fascism is crucial for defeating it.
Understanding and Countering Fascist Movements suggests fascism must be understood according to two “dimensions.” First, fascism is a social movement seeking power, always already connected to sources of power. Hence, fascism cannot be defeated by policing it as a crime problem, nor therapeutically treating it as a pathology of mental health. Second, fascists have cognitive and emotional needs they are seeking to fulfill through their participation in the movement, but the presence of these motivations must be held in tension with the fact that fascists are responsible for their choices and that these individual motivations also exist in a wider social context of capitalism and systems of supremacy.
The book opens by examining some psychological elements of recruitment and disengagement from fascist movements, before addressing broader social narratives, concluding with the limitations of an approach that is grounded in the national security state that relies on individualized, perpetrator-centered interventions. Rejecting centrist paradigms that see fascism as “extremism” or “accelerationism,” Braune argues that fascism must be addressed in its specificity and uniqueness as an ideology and movement. Ultimately, she argues, fascism can only be defeated by countervailing social movements that not only demand radical social change but offer alternative spaces of belonging, community care, and the search for meaning.
Understanding and Countering Fascist Movements is a philosophical contribution to antifascist theory and practice that will be appreciated by academics, students, and activists concerned about fascism today. https://www.routledge.com/
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RADICAL CONNECTICUT – PEOPLES HISTORY IN THE.CONSTITUTION STATE - Andy Piascik and Steve Thornton
Who really makes history?
Radical Connecticut: People’s History in the Constitution State tells the stories ofeveryday people and well-known figures whose work has often been obscured, denigrated, or dismissed.
There are narratives of movements, strikes, popular organizations and people in Connecticut who changed the state and the country for the better.
Unlike a traditional history that focuses on the actions of politicians, generals,
business moguls and other elites, Radical Connecticut is about workers, the poor,people of color, women, artists and others who engaged in the never-endingstruggle for justice and freedom. It offers a fresh look at history that should especially inspire young people engaged in social justice work in an increasinglydangerous world.
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PRESENTE, A DOCKWORKER STORY
Herb Mills
What would you do if ordered to load military weapons on a ship that was bound for a government that was brutally killing the people?
In December 1980, a union steward with the longshoremen’s union in San
Francisco learned that a shipment of arms on the docks was soon to be loaded onto a ship bound for the fascist government of El Salvador. While the
Salvadoran regime murdered thousands of its citizens, in the United States,
Ronald Reagan was an elected president on a conservative, anti-union platform.
Herb Mills, an officer in the ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse
Union), led his union’s campaign to refuse to load the weapons. But such a direct
violation of their union contract could lead the government to jailing the officers
and putting the union into receivership.
How could the union stop the shipment and keep out of jail? Would the public
support them and, if so, how? Would the press vilify or praise them?
Based on his personal archives and historical union records, Mills fashions a
gripping fictional account of that campaign. The names have been changed, but
the courage and the daring of the union men and women are not made up, they
are all real, and now their story is told.
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Children, did you know that you have real superpowers?
It’s true! Even if you are young, even if you are small, you and
your friends and schoolmates have the power to make the world a
better place.
Want to know how to release your powers? Read Little Meena and the
Big Swim/ La Pequeña Meena Y El Gran Nado and you will see that
when many little people all get together and speak in one voice, big
people have to listen. And change.
It is called Solidarity/ Solidaridad!
Release: June, 2024
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Hard Ball Press is helping preserve indigenous languages through
partnering with the Maya Book Project. Little Heroes author Andy
Carter has released his wonderful children's book Margarito's Forest
in English-Mam and English-K'iche, the two most common indigenous
languages spoken by the Maya.
In Guatemala, the Ministry of Education, in partnership with the
Maya Book Project, is including the Spanish/K’iche and the
Spanish/Mam editions in their indigenous bilingual curriculum.
Children in schools across the country will be able to practice
their native language.
In addition, Little Heroes Press has released two new editions: Mam/
English and K’iche’/English. We published these versions for
children in North America to help Maya children (and parents!)
practice their indigenous language.
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The Man Who Changed Colors
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
When a dockworker falls to his death under strange circumstances, investigative journalist David Gomes is on the case. His dogged pursuit of the truth puts his life in danger and upends the scrappy Cape Cod newspaper he works for.
Spend a season on the Cape with this gripping, provocative tale that delves into the
complicated relationships between Cape Verdean Americans and African Americans, Portuguese fascist gangs, and abusive shipyard working conditions. From the author of The Man Who Fell From The Sky.
“Bill Fletcher is a truth seeker and a truth teller – even when he’s writing fiction. Not unlike Bill, his character David Gomes is willing to put his life and career in peril to expose the truth. A thrilling read!” − Tavis Smiley, Broadcaster & NY TIMES Bestselling Author
Review by John Bachtell
Click HERE to purchase
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From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University
Essays on the Ongoing Transformation of Higher Education
By Daniel Morris
and Harry Targ
Paperback USD 17.00
This is a unique collection of 15 essays by two Purdue University professors who use their institution as a case-in-point study of the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education' from 1923, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then and brought it up to date with more far-reaching changes today. time. They also include, as an appendix, a 1967 essay by SDS leader Carl Davidson, who broke some of the original ground on the subject.
Click HERE to Purchase
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From the CCDS Socialist Education Project... | |
A China Reader
Edited by Duncan McFarland
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project and Online University of the Left
244 pages, $20 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
The book is a selection of essays offering keen insight into the nature of China and its social system, its internal debates, and its history. It includes several articles on the US and China and the growing efforts of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
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Taking Down White Supremacy
A Reader on Multiracial and Multinational Unity
Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project
166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/changemaker
This collection of 20 essays brings together a variety of articles-theoretical, historical, and experiential-that address multi-racial, multi-national unity. The book provides examples theoretically and historically, of efforts to build multi-racial unity in the twentieth century.
Click here for the Table of contents
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CHANGEMAKER PUBLICATIONS: Recent works on new paths to socialism and the solidarity economy
Remember Us for Gift Giving and Study Groups
We are a small publisher of books with big ideas. We specialize in works that show us how a better world is possible and needed. Click Gramsci below for our list.
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