Historic. Irrelevant? Sunday’s Italian Election
By Matt Hancock
On September 25 Italians go to the polls to elect a new parliament, following the collapse of Mario Draghi’s “government of national unity.” Polls point to two alarming results:
– The victory of a rightwing coalition led by the Brothers of Italy (literally the direct descendant of Mussolini’s “National Fascist Party”); and
– Levels of abstention never before seen in Italian democracy. In fact, many journalists speak of abstention as the true “victor” in the upcoming elections.
How did we get here?
Clean Hands
The context for understanding what’s happening today has to be “Tangentopoli” (Bribesville) and the consequent collapse of the mass parties that dominated Italian politics since the enactment of the modern Italian constitution. For all of their faults, the Christian Democratic Party, the Italian Communist Party and the Socialist Party inspired millions of ordinary Italians, involving them in the construction of a new society. These parties did not chase public opinion, but rather represented a political home for ordinary Italians (and of course in the case of the Christian Democrats and—later—the Socialists also for elites) that engaged millions in the construction of public opinion and an agenda that was translated—for better or worse—into the work of successive governments.
Inherently unstable, this is the system that nonetheless created one of the world’s highest union densities, an economic miracle, the strongest cooperative movement in the world, a workers’ bill of rights second-to-none, a national health system that, in certain regions to this day, produces some of the best outcomes in the world.
Organized into mass parties, ordinary Italians were not just voters, they were participants in the construction of their new society. That all ended in 1992 when activist prosecutors uncovered an elaborate system of bribery involving politicians, members of parliament, ex-prime ministers and members of the judiciary. Between 1992 and 1996 in the famous “mani pulite” (clean hands) trials, judges investigated and prosecuted thousands. Some committed suicide in prison awaiting trial. Others, like Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi, fled to Tunisia where he died in 2000.
In the wake of this earthquake, new parties emerged on the national stage, like the separatist “Northern League” which went from receiving less than 1% of the vote to over 8% following the initial arrests. Most famously, billionaire entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi created his “Forza Italia” (“Go Italy”) party which would come to dominate Italian politics in the 90s and 2000s, ushering in a new era of personality and media-driven politics. One of the results of this tumult was to fuel distrust in politics and political institutions, a deep cynicism among average Italians in government and the institutions of the state, which paved the way for the appeal of anti-establishment parties, like the “Northern League”, the “Five Star Movement” and, today, the post-fascist “Brothers of Italy”.
Vaffa!
Beppe Grillo is a George Carlin-esque, highly popular Italian comedian. His comedy revolves around denouncing the absurdities of Italian bureaucracy and economic and political elites. He was most famous for his punchline “vaffa” (literally “f you”) with which he would liquidate members of the elite through his comedic routine. In the mid 2000s, Grillo began encouraging like-minded Italians to run for office. In 2009, in a move derided by party leaders as a mere provocation, Grillo attempted to join the “Democratic Party” (PD) and run in their primaries. The PD’s then leader, Piero Fassino, infamously said “if Grillo wants to get into politics, he should start his own party, run for office and then let’s see how many votes he gets.”
Following the PD’s refusal to let him join, Grillo officially founded the “Five Star Movement” (M5S), based on the five cardinal points of connectivity, environment, water, development, and transportation. The party, often described as populist, was essentially progressive and anti-establishment, committed to direct participation of its members via a blog and online voting platform. In reality, the party is rigidly controlled by Grillo whose punchline “vaffa” became the semi-official slogan of the party. The M5S attracted thousands of young and disaffected voters, including many older voters from the left, who saw the PD move further and further away from an unabashed pro-worker, left agenda.
In 2013, the M5S participated in parliamentary elections—independent of any coalition on the right or left—and garnered just over 25% of the vote, edging out the PD by just over 1/10th of a percent. (Talk about instant karma.) That year they elected 109 members of parliament and 54 senators. Luigi Di Maio, “political leader” of the M5S, then 26, became the youngest ever vice president of parliament. Following Matteo Renzi’s hostile takeover of the PD in 2014 and his party’s hard right turn, the M5S chose to remain in the opposition.
In the 2018 parliamentary elections the M5S won in a landslide, beating all expectations, and obtaining over 32% of the vote to become the top-voted party in Italy. The M5S did so well that year that they won more seats in parliament than they had candidates for. (To resolve this dilemma Italy’s Supreme Court assigned party members to empty seats in parliament, one of whom became the much derided minister of education.) Many factors account for the unexpected M5S victory, including being the only party that could legitimately claim to be anti-establishment, their focus on an internal process of direct democracy through online discussion and voting which at least created the illusion of popular sovereignty. They also were advocates of broadly popular policies, including a swift transition to a 100% renewable energy economy and the “citizenship wage” — a type of universal basic income for the long-term jobless. This last policy was highly popular in the south of Italy and is often credited as the single reason for their unexpected performance in that year’s election.
On the right, the coalition of right parties won 37% of the vote, this time with the “Northern League” the top coalition partner, with 17% of the vote. (By the 2018 elections the party had dropped “Northern” from its name to become the “League,” in an opportunistic and effective move to appeal to voters in the South, as the party shifted the focus of its racism from southern Italians to immigrants). The center-left coalition led by the PD won just 23% of the vote. These numbers meant that the Five Star Movement was in the driver’s seat for the formation of the new government.
While the most obvious coalition partner in 2018 for the M5S would have been the “Democratic Party” (PD), mutual distrust prevented this from happening and the M5S entered into a “governing contract” (a term invented by the M5S to justify the move) with the right-wing League who’s anti-immigrant, pro (Italian) worker discourse obscures a fundamentally neo-liberal platform (flat tax, less regulation, etc.). At that time the “League”, led by racist, anti-immigrant Matteo Salvini, commanded over 17% of the vote, while the post-Fascist Brothers of Italy amounted to a paltry 4%.
The early days of the “yellow-green” government, headed by the improbable and completely unknown law professor Giuseppe Conte (who termed himself “the people’s lawyer”) included the introduction of the citizenship wage after which the M5S announced, while uncorking a bottle of champagne, “the abolishment of poverty;” while Matteo Salvini, the leader of the “League” and then Minister of the Interior, promulgated a set of “security decrees” and refused to allow boats carrying sick and starving refugees from docking at Italian ports (a move that has landed him in court on charges of kidnapping; that case is ongoing).
Matteo Salvini, in a Mussolini-esque move, sought “full powers” as minister of the interior to combat Italy’s real and imagined threats. This precipitated the fall of the yellow-green coalition and convinced the center-left that it was in their, and Italy’s, interest to form a government with the problematic M5S. This gave rise to the second government headed by Giuseppe Conte, this time termed the red-yellow government. This government, which included the M5S, the “Democratic Party”, former prime minister Matteo Renzi’s breakaway “Italy Alive” party (essentially a neo-liberal party for young members of the PMC), along with minor left parties like Article One and the Italian Left.
In many ways the red-yellow government was remarkable, especially given the instability, inexperience, and immaturity of the M5S: they made legitimate efforts to combat abuses against farmworkers (conditions that often amount to modern day slavery) and led Italy’s initial reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic, intervening with redistributive policies aimed at supporting employment, wages and families, including a ban on layoffs during the pandemic. Most remarkable was Giuseppe Conte’s leadership within in the EU. Conte succeeded in convincing the EU’s fiscal hawks to create a Covid-19 rescue package for member states, backed by debt issued in common by all EU member states (a first in the supra-national body’s history), which included a mix of debt and grant financing to help EU member states recover from the impact of Covid 19 through investments like funding for healthcare and the green transition. Receiving these funds was not predicated on more austerity measures.
Also significant was the experimentation that the “Conte 2” government led to on the local and regional level in the form of the construction of broad alliances among the M5S, Democrats and minor left parties in municipal and regional elections: a model that members of “Article 1” and the Italian Left had fought for and saw as a type of 21st century popular front, capable of limiting the right and advancing pro-worker, pro-environment redistributive politics.
Conte’s government was perhaps too family and worker-friendly for Italy’s ruling class. In the winter of 2019 Matteo Renzi, whose miniscule “Italy Alive” party commands just enough votes in parliament to make a government fall, began to warn of Giuseppe Conte’s unsuitability to administer the EU rescue package (despite his deftness in negotiating the passage of the historic aid package). Conte’s detractors warned that keeping him in power meant risking access to the 222 billion euros Italy was entitled to under the EUs post-Covid recovery package. On January 26, 2021 Giuseppe Conte tendered his resignation, marking the end of the red-yellow government and what “Sinistra Italiana” leader Nicola Fratoinni deemed an “experiment” at “dialogue between north and south, between the productive forces and the world of work, a coming together between those in need of protection and those that can offer it during the difficult crisis, that is between public institutions and politics as service.”
Super Mario
Long before Conte tendered his resignation, the name Mario Draghi was being tossed around in the halls of power as an appropriate replacement. Super Mario, as he was called after his famous declaration that under his leadership the European Central Bank would do “whatever it takes” to save the Euro following the subprime crisis, was seen by his supporters as someone with an impeccable reputation in Europe and throughout the world, someone who commanded respect and enjoyed the kind of reputation needed to guide Italy in the spending its portion of the recovery package. Most of all it was Draghi’s credibility in the halls of power that appealed to his supporters. As if to prove his supporters right, the cost of Italian debt plummeted after Draghi formed his government.
Draghi was chosen to serve as prime minister by Italian president (the head of state, elected by parliament) Mattarella, on the condition that he could form a government of national unity. Draghi was sworn in on February 17, 2021, supported by a broad coalition of nearly all the major parties, from the right to the left. It was unclear whether or not Beppe Grillo would be able to convince his M5S to support this new, clearly establishment government. In the end, the Genovese comedian was able to convince party militants to support Draghi by assuring them that Draghi would create a “super ministry” to guide the green transition (he would end up doing nothing of the sort), and through the use of manipulative wording in an online referendum to garner support among party members.
In a politically deft move, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the post-Fascist “Brothers of Italy Party”, chose not to support the new government—a move that would earn her significant credibility among anti-establishment voters and rocket her party to number one in the polls. Members of the Italian Left decided as a party to urge its members of parliament to vote against the new Draghi government. Fratoiannia, SI’s leader, eloquently argued that the threat of an authoritarian turn had subsided after the fall of the M5S-League government and that the Draghi government, which objectively represented a shift to the right at least in terms of the ministers he chose, amounted to a “restoration” following the prior government’s attempts at introducing more boldly redistributive policies. The best role for the left was to oppose such a government. (In practice, individual SI MPs voted to support the new Draghi government, arguing they could best influence the shape of the government from the inside rather than from outside.) “Article 1”, the other notable left formation in parliament, chose to support the new Draghi government. Matteo Renzi gloated that Italians happy with Mario Draghi as Prime Minister should thank him.
Initially, Mario Draghi enjoyed widespread support, with a majority of Italians viewing him favorably. Markets rewarded Italy by lowering the cost of its public debt, and Draghi began to carry out a series of reforms required in order to receive Italy’s portion of the EU recovery funds. Draghi was so popular initially that members of his governing coalition, especially the PD, seemed to be vying for the spot of “party most supportive of Draghi.”
Both Draghi’s supporters and detractors seemed to be correct about him: Italy gained from his reputation within the EU, and he was successful in pushing through some difficult reforms. At the same time, his government did represent a shift to the right: key posts influencing the economy and labor relations (the ministries for public administration, economic development and tourism) were occupied by politicians from the Italian right, while the highest profile position given to a labour-left party (“Article 1”) meant the left’s most visible role was to require Italians to get vaccinated, wear masks, and quarantine if you came into contact with someone with Covid.
The Draghi government was to have been a “technical” (as opposed to political) government. But even the “technicians” appointed to important positions, for example the Ministry for the Green Transition (what Beppe Grillo promised members of his party would be a “super ministry”) was highly political: Roberto Cingolani, a physicist-entrepreneur and former Ferrari board member, has been a staunch opponent of EU efforts to transition away from fossil fuels, advocating specifically for carve-outs for Italian luxury automakers like Ferrari. His detractors have named him CingolEni (Eni being the main Italian oil company). The PD received the post of Labor Ministry but has been unable, despite the minister’s best intentions, to achieve much for labor in concrete policy terms. Under the Draghi government unions found the door closed on consultations, and key reforms like a reform of Italy’s tax system provided more relief to the wealthy than to working people. The green transition, if stalled prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, is now moving in reverse, with efforts underway to increase the use of coal to produce energy domestically, expanded drilling off Italy’s coasts and increased imports of petrol products to prevent rationing in the winter. Meanwhile, the government has made no progress in easing up on regulations that make large-scale solar and wind projects costly and time consuming.
Government of National (dis)Unity
On July 21, 2022 Mario Draghi tendered his resignation, unable to garner enough support to keep his government of national unity together. The Draghi government’s crisis was sparked by the M5S’s leader, former prime minister Giuseppe Conte. Conte was responding to internal pressures following the high profile split from the party by Luigi Di Maio, who took with him 51 members of parliament, to form a competing party, “Together for the Future”. Conte then met with Draghi, on July 6, to announce nine policies which constituted the conditions which the M5S required to continue to support Draghi, conditions which Draghi refused. The “Northern League” seized on Conte’s move to demand the formation of a new government with all the same parties, but excluding the M5S, a move that Draghi refused on the grounds it was inconsistent with his mandate from President Mattarella (the M5S is after all the largest single bloc in parliament).
It Pays to Yell from the Sidelines
A quick look at the latest polling might explain the behavior of both the M5S and the “Northern League” in precipitating the crisis: participation in government, despite Draghi’s high approval ratings, has not translated into better polling for parties in the governing coalition. The M5S has seen their support drop to just under 14% (recall in 2018 they won 32% of the vote), and the “Northern League’s” support has fallen to 11%.
Meanwhile “Brothers of Italy”, who have remained in opposition since 2018 and became vocal opponents of the widely loved Mario Draghi, are now polling above all other political parties at 24.6%. While the rest of the world seems to be worrying about her roots in Italy’s post-fascist political movements, Italians seem far less worried: 36% of Italians report trusting her, while only 23% say they trust Enrico Letta, the leader of the PD. At a recent conference, the Meeting in Rimini sponsored by the mainstream Catholic movement Communion and Liberation (an event considered a bellwether of Catholic voter sentiment), the only politician to receive a standing ovation was Giorgia Meloni.
The “Democratic Party”, which had tried to position itself as the party most faithful to the “Draghi agenda,” has not benefited from the Prime Minister’s coattails nearly as much as Meloni has through her opposition: the latest polls place the PD at 22.6% (compared to the 18.7% of the vote they received in the 2018 parliamentary elections).
Finally, from the Right’s position there was not much downside to precipitating the government’s fall: while the center-left is fragmented (more on that later) the center-right will participate in the upcoming elections as a coalition, polling at over 40%.
So, Now What?
The State of Play
Initially, few expected the drama of the summer to lead to early elections. Italians, in their history, have rarely voted in the fall since the summer is a time when most tune out and turn off the television, making a summer electoral campaign highly problematic. There is also the fact that normal elections would have been held in the spring of 2023, in just a few months. In fact, when Draghi initially tendered his resignation, President Mattarella refused to accept it, asking him instead to try and patch together another government of national unity, on the hope that his government could last until the regular elections in 2023, to continue to push through the reforms necessary to receive the EU Recovery funding, and to begin to spend that funding. Neither the M5S nor the “League” seem to have shared Mattarella’s concerns.
From the very beginning, Giorgia Meloni was the frontrunner as next prime minister, given her unusually high approval ratings for a post-Fascist, and the fact that years of opposition and deft maneuvering to make her seem more mainstream and moderate to those outside of her core of support had propelled her party to number one. The center-right, despite being split over supporting the Draghi government of national unity, remained highly coordinated throughout and will present itself in the elections as a coalition. This is important, since the current electoral law combines proportional voting with winner-take-all, and this ensures that in the winner-take-all elections, the right doesn’t dilute its vote.
On the other hand, the center-left has never been more divided, with the “Democratic Party” essentially running alone, against the M5S, a united right, and an extreme left grouping. This despite years of careful work, in municipalities and in the regions, to create a broad, “popular front” grounded in the alliance between the “Democratic Party” and the M5S. This strategy produced, in the recent municipal elections in Bologna for example, a city council that included the Democrats, M5S and the leftwing formation “civic coalition,” which had prior to 2021 acted as a left-opposition to the majority within city government. Proponents of this strategy saw this as the best way to block the right and advance a progressive agenda throughout Italy.
When the M5S decided to no longer support the Draghi government, the PD announced it would not run in the elections in coalition with the M5S. Giuseppe Conte counter-attacked by announcing days, before regional primary elections to determine the center-left candidate for governor in Sicily, that the M5S would no longer support the winner of those elections and instead would run on their own against the PD. The PD reacted by taking the M5S to court for violation of contract. As a result, the two single biggest parties on the center left are running against each other in the September 25 elections.
Following the PD-M5S split, PD party leader Enrico Letta began a series of public negotiations with Carlo Calenda, the leader of the party “Azione” (yes, that’s what it means: “action.”), to run in partnership in the upcoming elections. Calenda, a protege of businessman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo best known perhaps as the former president of Ferrari, had served in various roles in different governments, including as Minister for Economic Development where he won wide praise for his policies to encourage the adoption of “Industry 4.0” technologies in the Italian economy. At the time of negotiations with the PD, Calenda’s party was barely polling above the threshold to win a single seat in parliament. Days after negotiating an agreement wtih Azione, Letta also negotiated an agreement with the Greens and the Italian Left (who had not supported the Draghi government). Following this opening to the left, Calenda publicly announced he was backing out of the deal with the PD, on the grounds that the opening to the left would lead to an alliance with the M5S, and within days had formed an alliance with Matteo Renzi’s “Italy Alive” party. They called it the birth of the “third pole.” Not right, not left, but center. (Calenda has since publicly spoken of the idea of a new “government of national unity” including his party and the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, while his partner, Matteo Renzi, is promising voters that a vote for their coalition is a vote to return Mario Draghi as prime minister.)
“Article 1”, the group that broke away from the PD following Matteo Renzi’s rise, which is likely in the process of rejoining the Democrats will run on the democratic party ticket.
To the extreme left there is “Unione Populare” (Popular Union), an attempt to combine forces among smaller left parties. But it is unlikely that UP will garner enough votes to be assigned any seats in parliament.
So What’s the Big Deal?
The divisions on the center-left would not matter so much if Italy had a purely proportional system. Everyone runs for office, and you get the number of seats that correspond to the percentage of the vote you received. Then after the election we can form a government. But Italy doesn’t have a purely proportional system.
The current electoral law, just like the one before it, was written to benefit the parties in power, and assigns 60% of the seats in parliament on a proportional basis, and 40% of the seats based on winner-take-all. This means that different parties must run on the same “list” (as is the case with the breakaway Labor-party Article 1 and the PD) or at least have an agreement not to run against each other (as in the agreement with the Greens and the Italian left).
Americans will immediately understand the bind that thoughtful, left voters are in: if I vote for a candidate or party whose values I prefer, but that is not in coalition with or have a formal agreement with the Democrats, I risk splitting the vote and turning the winner-take-all districts over to the right wing. At a minimum, this means running the risk of giving the right a significant enough majority that the next government could last the full five-year term. But if the right, through outperforming in the winner-take-all districts, is able to win a super-majority, that means that they can pass constitutional reforms on their own. Top on their list of reforms: the merging of the head of state and head of government through direct, irrevocable, popular election of the president.
On the Left
Disaster is certainly an appropriate term for the state of the left. The two biggest progressive parties, the PD and the M5S, are at war with each other. And the PD is running a campaign focused on abstract ideas that appeal to a narrow portion of the electorate (“more discrimination or equal rights,” “fossil fuels or renewable energy”). Enrico Letta, the PD’s leader, is fond of talking about his party being the only thing that can stop Italy from becoming like Hungary; an odd campaign premise considering that his Orban-friendly opponent, Meloni, is far more trusted by Italians than he is.
The right’s messaging, instead, is much clearer and more straightforward, speaking in concrete terms about how they will defend Italians and Italy from real and imagined threats. A good example of this are two billboards, placed near each other, in Bologna:
- The PD billboard says “Housing is a Right: 500,000 More Affordable Housing Units in 10 Years through Agreed Fee.” (Agreed fee is a process by which the tenants union negotiates rent maximums with the landlords’ union; in exchange for lower rent and better terms to the tenant, the landlord gets a tax benefit. It’s a great system that few voters are likely to know anything about!) “Below the PD logo it reads: Ideas win.”
- The billboard for the League, on the other hand, reads: “No sales tax on bread, pasta, rice, milk, fruits, vegetables. We believe that no Italian should be left behind.”
The extreme left, despite laudable efforts and a solid program, is unlikely to achieve any seats in parliament since they probably won’t meet the minimum threshold. That leaves Article 1 (essentially re-absorbed into the PD) the Greens and Italian Left to carry the banner in parliament. At best they may receive 4-5% of the vote.
Labor appears to be divided as well. The most popular party among working class Italians, at least until recently, has been the League. This should not be too surprising, as the League was born in the industrial, highly unionized northern regions and is the only party that continues to have some semblance of the kind of rootedness in communities once characteristic of the PCI. Among labor activists, there appears to be a split, primarily among those supporting the PD, others supporting the Green-Italian Left coalition, and still others the M5S. Officially the position of labor’s leadership is to remain neutral, while encouraging Italians to vote in droves, and to vote against parties proposing a flat tax and presidential system (i.e., the right).
All of this, of course, is symptomatic of the deeper crisis of representative democracy in Italy and the disconnect between Italy’s popular classes, their movements, and electoral politics.
Conclusion
Working parents, raising kids in Italy have an extremely long summer. School gets out on June 3 or 4 and doesn’t start up again until September 15. Parents rely on a patchwork of grandparents and summer camps to survive until school starts again. In places like Bologna, despite the attempts of policy makers to make summer camp more affordable through public subsidies, camps can run up to 200 euros a week, for one child. For a family without grandparents nearby that can amount to 1,800 euros or more for the summer, nearly 300 euros more than the average salary. This year, miraculously, my two kids and I survived the summer through a combination of different camps, time off from work and patience and help from loved ones. I don’t know about my kids, but I was counting down the days until September 15. No sooner had my daughter started school than we learned that her school would serve as a polling location for the September 25 elections. To prepare the school for the Sunday polling, they would need to send kids home at 1 PM on Friday September 23. School would remain closed on Monday September 26 to allow workers to remove polling equipment and sanitize the building, with the kids not returning until Tuesday September 27. I’m lucky, because we have grandparents nearby who can help, and as freelancer my work is flexible. But not everyone has the same flexibility and support I do.
One commentator recently wrote that the upcoming elections, which will end up causing actual disruption in my life through the closure of my daughter’s school, are both historic and irrelevant. The elections are certainly historic: they are the first to occur after a popular referendum slashed the number of seats in parliament and happen at a time when war rages in Europe, poverty and inequality increase, the climate crisis deepens, and we continue to face a global pandemic.
The elections are also historic because, for the first time since Italy’s liberation from Nazi-Fascist occupation, the party that is the direct descendent of Mussolini’s Fascist Party is the frontrunner. Of course, the historic conditions that gave rise to Mussolini are today absent (his rise was preceded by two years of terroristic attacks on the Left and sieges of cities by fascist squads while the liberal government and state stood by and did nothing) and the threat of actual Fascism is low. However, the relative wide popularity of Meloni is troubling. It is an indication of the distress of ordinary Italians, the level of comfort among a portion of elites for a post-Fascist party, and the increasing distance in time and spirit of the Italian people from the memory of the anti-Fascist resistance.
There is one other factor that is important in explaining the recent, meteoric rise of Meloni and the “Brothers of Italy”, and it is a phenomenon rooted in the cynicism of the contemporary Italian voter. Many Italians think all politicians will let me down at some point, so I’ll vote for the politician that hasn’t yet let me down. And it is just a matter of time before Meloni, or whoever is the next prime minister, will let Italians down, for no mainstream party is proposing real solutions to the urgent problems of the day: Wages that have been stagnant since the ‘90s, poverty and inequality, participation, and the impending collapse of the earth’s ecosystem.
And no one is proposing solutions that will help me figure out what to do with my daughter now that she has two days off from school, so that I can go vote in an election that one can only hope will also be irrelevant.
…
Book Review: “Power Concedes Nothing”, Edited by Linda Burnham, Max Elbaum and Maria Poblet
By Peter Olney
My wife stood aghast as I pounded on the passenger side window of a late model sedan exiting a driveway in Salem, New Hampshire in the fall of 2016. The car stopped, and a woman rolled down her window and listened patiently to my rap on why she should vote for Hillary Clinton for President. She replied that she was planning to vote for Hillary as her husband said “harrumph” and bent over the steering wheel. This was our lot in Rockingham County across the border from Massachusetts. Dueling lawn signs in the same yard: Trump and Hillary – husband and wife. We carried New Hampshire for Hillary and elected Maggie Hassan to the Senate but lost Rockingham County, which was heavily populated by white working class refuges from the Greater Boston area. I had worked passionately for Bernie in the primary and knew that many of those voters supporting Trump had voted for Bernie. No matter, from the moment that Trump launched his campaign announcing his white supremacist anti-immigrant agenda it was clear that he presented a danger to democracy and he was an avatar for all the evils that have plagued our republic since its founding. 2016 was not a moment for equivocation or support for quixotic candidates like Dr. Jill Stein. History has absolved this viewpoint and the reversal of Roe vs. Wade is the most stunning result of a failure to pivot to support for Clinton in the general election as candidate Sanders did in 2016.
Power Concedes Nothing is a consolidated anthem of unions, immigrant rights, civil rights and community groups that have learned the lessons of 2016 and went all out in 2020 to defeat Trump and his minions up and down the ballot. There are 22 individual chapters written by over 40 organizer-authors. They have grasped that as a serious left we do not stand on the sidelines and make excuses for our inaction by critiquing the obvious and enduring campaign and policy defects of corporate Democrats. We enter the fray eyes wide-open understanding that we are in a united front that requires clarity on our enemy and sobriety about the weaknesses and duplicity of our temporary allies. The Trump years have schooled a lot of folks about the necessity of this united front. Many of the groups in this anthology took a pass in 2016, but to their great and enduring credit were on the front lines in 2020. Seed the Vote reflected on the Trump danger the day after the election in 2016: “On November 9th, a few people got together and started discussing what was to be done. We realized that we needed to pay attention to national work in a way that we had not prioritized before, because Trump and his politics were an existential threat to the communities and issues important to all of us.”
My son, Nelson, and I were on the ground with Seed the Vote (STV) in Maricopa County in 2020 living in a motel yards away from the Scottsdale Stadium spring training home of the San Francisco Giants. In my youth it had been the spring training site of my beloved Boston Red Sox. The splendid splinter Ted Williams used to thrill the spring training Bo Sox fans in that Cactus League park. Maybe that is why his family decided to cryogenically freeze his brain in the Phoenix area after his death. Pretty kooky stuff, but remember that Arizona produced the ultra right 1964 Republican nominee for President, Barry Goldwater. Goldwater carried only his home state and 5 others in 1964 as Johnson got 61% of the popular vote. Goldwater’s slogan was “In your heart you know he is right” and Johnson responded with “In your guts you know he is nuts.” Goldwater was a portrait of civility when compared to today’s MAGA fanatics! Our work in Maricopa County was made possible by the work of community groups like LUCHA who have labored for years to rid Arizona of the anti-immigrant sheriff Joe Arpaio and State Senator Russell Pierce. Power Concedes Nothing presents a whole chapter written by Cesar Fierros Mendoza on this ten-year struggle that electorally transformed Goldwater’s home state from “red” to “blue”.
The authors of most of the chapters acknowledge that 2022 and 2024 will pose equally dangerous challenges to democracy and that we face an uphill climb given the present configuration of the minority rule structures of the senate, the electoral college and the increasingly rabid state legislatures in red states that may soon benefit from a Supreme Court decision codifying their ability to deny the popular will of the people and send their own electors to the College!
Several excellent chapters detail the mechanics of the “ground” game: knocking on doors and motivating people to vote. This of course was a difficult challenge in the COVID moment and many organizations declined to do the doors – a huge error that probably cost us 1 to 2% points in the vote in many states. Heroically however the UNITE HERE (Hotel Workers Union) union did the doors and their work coupled with that of other forces who write chapters for this collection saved us from 4 more years of Trump. In Maricopa County where my son and I were for the Presidential, the doors were no picnic. Strict COVID protocols dictated that we wear a mask covered by a plastic visor and that we maintain a six foot distance from the doors and our fellow canvassers. Our daily quota for house calls was 80 doors! All of this in 95-degree desert heat! But the Trumpers were certainly on the doors, and we ran into them in gated communities where we faced down often-angry neighbors and rent a cop security. On the critical and razor thin margins of battleground states these door-knocking warriors were key to victory:
Arizona – 10,457 votes!
Georgia – 11,779 votes
Nevada – 17,217 votes
All the contributors of course grapple with the challenge of uniting all who can be united to defeat Trump and fascism but advancing at the same time a positive progressive program to support and fight for. The chapter by Working Families Party Chair Maurice Mitchell does an excellent job of describing his organization’s endorsement process in the primaries, and the controversial decision to support Sen. Elizabeth Warren over Sanders, then the pivot to working for Biden, and at the same time pushing a solid progressive agenda into the planks of the Democratic Party platform. Mitchell summed up the WFP stance as follows: “Neither of the progressive candidates won the Democratic presidential primary, but we were clear eyed going into the general election. Joe Biden became the standard-bearer and the pick to take on Trump, and progressives knew we had to push the Democratic nominee as far to the left as possible. Donald Trump was an existential threat, a global leader of the far right, and we had to defeat him at all costs.”
The chapters all have a very similar quality in that they attempt to balance their immediate and essential electoral work with long-term power building. This requires deeper examination and would involve a clearer exposition in the future of what constitutes membership in such organizations, how they are funded and what their leadership structures are. We can answer these questions for the labor organizations, UNITE HERE or the Gulf Coast Labor federation, who are funded by membership dues and have leadership structures that reflect internal elections. It is important to note however that HERE lost 90% of their membership because of the pandemic and the crash of the hospitality industry so their fabulous efforts in the field received generous funding from other labor organizations and foundations. Yes indeed we were in a united front moment with Michael Bloomberg! Long time organizer and strategist Deepak Pateriya expresses it clearly in his chapter: “it is “united front” time right now for leftists, progressives and liberals, and will be for a number of years and elections to come. Much of our collective energy and power has to be aligned in the short and medium term toward beating white supremacist authoritarianism and the hegemony of capitalist economics and consciousness (rather than arguing among ourselves over our relatively smaller differences). For the long term we have to organize and grow our power.”
Today there is much hand wringing and doom saying about the coming mid terms. Pundits point to voter suppression, the economy and inflation, Joe Biden’s approval ratings and the historic trend of the party in the White House getting shellacked in the mid terms. But remember that we have factors in our favor: Roe v Wade, the January 6th hearings masterfully orchestrated by the Dem leadership and Trump himself. We lose if we don’t engage. On July 10, Michael Podhorzer, an AFL-CIO assistant to the President for political affairs, wrote about the midterms and our prospects, “Against the usual headwinds facing presidents’ parties in their first midterm, Democrats have on their side the historic reservoir of voters who joined the electorate in 2018 and 2020 to reject Trump and MAGA. To barely oversimplify – 81 million people voted against Trump less than two years ago. How we Democrats do depends on how many of their supporters who had not been voting in the mid terms come back, and how many of the independents and Republicans who pulled the lever for Trump decide they can’t again.”
Read Power Concedes Nothing. The authors are all combatants who will be out in the field again in the fall. Choose a state, choose some key races, reach out to the organizations in the book and get cracking.
I’ll be on the ground in Orange County, California this October working to elect Jay Chen (D) to Congress against the incumbent Michele Steel (R). This is one of two R seats in the OC that we can flip back into the Democratic column. It is home to more Vietnamese anywhere in the world outside of Vietnam. Democrats out register Republicans by 4%. It will all be determined by the enthusiasm of our voters and our ability to get them to the polls. The population is 33% API, 25% Latinix. Not your John Birch Society Orange County. The midterms are not a foregone conclusion. It is the work of the contributors to Power Concedes Nothing that helped save us from 4 more years of Trump. It is our calling to take inspiration from them and get on the phone, the texts and the doors again. Victory on November 8th; hold the House! Enlarge the Democratic Senate!
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Power Concedes Nothing published by OR Books and can be ordered at all the usual places
First published in Washington Spectator
The Power of Poetry to Speak Back to Hunger
By Hiram Larew
“Fighting Hunger One Poem at a Time” – Poet Willeena Booker
This is an article about hunger and poetry – two topics that may not seem related at all. But, if you are willing to read a bit further, you’ll hopefully be convinced otherwise.
Hunger is everywhere. It’s in our neighborhoods, on our campuses, throughout our farming heartland, and in our towns and cities. Yes, it’s in every nook and cranny of our country. It’s also rampant around the world. COVID- caused disruptions to food streams and incomes has extended hunger’s reach. Worldwide, 40% of our fellow humans face hunger – that’s about 3 billion people (Source: United Nations). Similar statistics are also available for most zip codes in the U.S. thanks to the important work of Feeding America.
For as long as poetry has been written, it has roused public support for social causes. One of the most widely known contemporary examples of such powerful work is Emma Lazarus’s poem, The New Colossus, which was enshrined in 1903 on a bronze plaque at the base of The Statue of Liberty. Its clarion call to the “huddled masses” of immigrants has stood as our country’s prideful welcome to any and all ever since. And, I dare say, the poem has helped to shape our Country’s immigration policies.
Yes, poetry can stand up and speak out.
So, how about poetry of hunger? Well, Basho’s haunting haiku from nearly 500 years ago notwithstanding (Quote by Bashō: “For a lovely bowl Let us arrange these flowers….” (goodreads.com), until recently very few poems about hunger of the stomach have been available. This lack of inventory is why I founded Poetry X Hunger – to encourage poets from near and far to write about hunger.
Poets have responded! Using special calls and contests, we now have more than 300 poems by poets from many countries and of all ages posted on the Poetry X Hunger website. Nutrition, famine, food waste, health and well-being, sustainable agriculture and historical hunger are just some of the topics covered. And, many of the poems are accompanied by recordings of the authoring poet wonderfully reading her/his poem. There are also a few poems in other languages including Cheyenne. And here’s the kicker — All of the poems are freely available for use so long as the authoring poet is acknowledged.
To make it easy for anyone to find useful poems, we’ve published a selection of them in an e-book. It’s available free-of-charge on the front page of the Poetry X Hunger website. Check it out! In fact, here’s what Irish Poet, Deirdre McGarry says about the e-book– What makes this [collection] intriguing is that hunger is a universal basic urge which rears its head for every human being every few hours. And every one of these poems from so many different writers addresses it in a fresh way, so that the reader thinks anew about it.
To give you an idea of what’s included in the e-book, here’s a sample from it. I think you’ll agree that in this moving poem, the poet helps us to feel hunger’s pain.
From the Balcony by Forestine C. Bynum from Maryland
Overlooking my balcony, I often saw
A gathering of women and children
Mothers with babies tucked tightly in their arms
They were quiet, rather orderly
Not causing a disturbance, walkers passed by politely
Busying themselves as not to see, scurrying to
Catch the bus or get to their cars
I saw women taking turns scavenging
Through a dumpster nearby
I hadn’t noticed before, for food
The only sound heard was a tiny cry asking
Mommy, when will we get food
And a voice saying, Feed My People, Feed My People
And a mother’s soft voice replying
Tomorrow, tomorrow my child, I hope
To mor row, to mor row
What more are we doing to bring poetry to the anti-hunger cause? As much as we can! In powerful partnership with the food banks, arts councils and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Poetry X Hunger has ensured that poems like From the Balcony don’t just sit on the shelf. Indeed, many have been showcased by anti-hunger leaders, community organizations, houses of worship, and countless teachers and professors to help reach all kinds of people. We are also hosting online poetry readings and gatherings during which we raise funds for anti-hunger organizations. And, of course, we’re making sure that Poetry X Hunger signs on to letters that urge Congress to keep fighting hunger.
In addition, food banks are picking up on poetry as well. They are establishing Poet-in-Residence programs as a way to wave the poetry flag. The poems that result from such residencies are being used in food banks’ messaging campaigns and outreach programs.
And, very recently, with an eye on the role that all of the Arts can play in the anti-hunger cause, we’ve begun to collaborate with groups like AgArts and The Poartry Project. The resulting partnerships between visual artists and poets are bursting with creativity. Watch for the forthcoming artwork – it may be offered for auction on the Poetry X Hunger website with proceeds benefiting the artists and anti-hunger causes.
Will poetry end hunger? Of course, it won’t. Can it help fight hunger? Indeed, it can! Poetry moves people to take action. It can speak to the heart and even change minds. So, if you want to take up a pencil or pen, consider writing a poem and submitting it to Poetry X Hunger (see the submission guidelines on the website). We’d welcome you to the cause.
What better way to close this article than to share a poem by a teenager in Honduras? She wrote it in Spanish and her teacher kindly translated it into English. The complete poem is on the Poetry X Hunger website. But, here is the closing stanza of Hambre (Hunger) by Heyssel Mariel Molinares Sosa.
¿En verdad creen que esto se debe tomar a la ligera?
¿Ignorar a la persona que en agonía desespera?
Alimento limpio, nutritivo y seguro,
no es una opción, es un derecho.
Que sean atendidas las personas en apuro
Y que no solo sea una promesa, sino un hecho.
Levántense, gigantes que duermen al ver la necesidad.
Que se acabe ya la falta de comprensión y crueldad.
Que sean atendidos los sollozos de este pueblo
Dios interviene para que haya un arreglo.
Así que seamos consientes y ayudemos a todo el que podamos
en esta tierra,
y juntos contra el hambre, ganemos esta guerra.
Do you really think this should be taken lightly?
Ignore the person in agony in despair?
Clean, nutritious and safe food,
It is not an option; it is a right.
That people in distress be cared for
And that is not just a promise, but a fact.
Arise, giants who sleep when you see the need.
Let the lack of understanding and cruelty come to an end.
Let the sobs of this town be attended to
God intervenes so that there is an arrangement.
So let’s be aware and help everyone we can on this earth,
and together against hunger, let’s win this war.
Here are some links to resources of organizations and programs that are fighting hunger wherever it occurs.
- United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization works globally on all aspects of agriculture, food security, and hunger. FAO Publications offer useful worldwide overviews.
- Bread for the World, a faith-focused organization, works in the U.S. and overseas to end hunger. Bread’s website includes lots of useful background info.
- The Alliance to End Hunger is a collective of organizations from across the hunger prevention landscape, including groups that work primarily in the US and those that focus on hunger overseas.
- Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP, as administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is the federal government’s food assistance program (SNAP used to be called food stamps.)
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“Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground” – Division Street
By Martin Colyer
In 1977 Carl Sagan and his team chose blues musician Blind Willie Johnson’s 1927 song, “Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground”, to go on the Voyager probe being sent into deep space in the hope that it would explain Earth to other life forms in the universe. It was included, according to Sagan, because “Johnson’s song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight.”
On the title page of his new book on San Francisco’s unhoused, Division Street, photographer Robert Gumpert includes the song’s title as a kind of marker, a reminder that even one of Earth’s richest societies cannot solve the issue of homelessness.
The aptly-named Division Street, Gumpert says, “dead-ends in the city’s famous tech development district, and it serves as a metaphor for the disparity between the wealthy few and the expendable many. It’s a story,” he continues, “of lives lived on hard streets, amidst staggering wealth and empty promises”. A long-time resident of the city, his eye sees the streets of San Francisco as a place far from the beautiful ‘city by the bay’ of popular imagination.
In an essay for Harper’s Magazine to accompany some of the Division Street pictures, cultural commentator Rebecca Solnit wrote: “Here is Mark Zuckerberg, the sixth-richest person in the world, in his house on the western edge of the historically Latino and working-class Mission District. Here is Division Street, where more than 250 housing-deprived people settled in tents in early 2016, seeking shelter from both the rain and the mayor’s sweeps of the homeless as he primped the city for Super Bowl visitors.”
Robert Gumpert has never taken the easy road. He started out in the Coal mines of Harlan County, and there found a way of working that gave him a focus as a photographer — illuminating the lives of the people who deal with the everyday, often hidden from public view or in the shadows, whether a farmworker in California’s orange groves, a cop on the midnight beat, a nurse at the end of an emergency ward shift, or a public defender in the court system.
He gained their trust by listening and empathising with their situations — how they had ended up incarcerated, or how they faced the challenges in their lives and work. In the county jails, he would trade a print of their portrait for a story. This became Take a Picture, Tell a Story, an exhibition in California in 2018.
For these long-form projects, fitted in between jobs for international newspapers and magazines, he honed a stark and intense visual style — he shot in saturated black and white, with an often-intimate closeness —and came away with photographs that absolutely demanded your attention.
His work with all these groups often had a textual element to it — part of his method was to talk to people to discover their stories and use them as powerful adjuncts to the photographs. He had once seen a three-volume series of books entirely made up of texts from newspapers and been inspired by it. He started to take notes of overheard conversations and photographed “street messages” written on lampposts or freeway columns and newspaper headlines.
This approach has reached a zenith with Division Street, a narrative told with all these tools supporting his powerful photography. The harsh studies of an unfeeling city alongside portraits of people on the street, in their tents or even, in one case, sleeping in the maw of a large digger, make up two-thirds of the book. But Division Street concludes with a more hopeful coda: in a section called Home, Gumpert has transcribed his subjects’ feelings and thoughts about what “home” means to them. The black-and-whites of people in tents and boxes are leavened with about a dozen colour portraits of families pictured against backdrops of Mexican and African fabrics in the supportive environment of Compass Family Services, an organization that helps find them homes. “The first part of the book represents how most people experience their fellow citizens who are unhoused in the city,“ says Gumpert, “and the second part is the way they should see these folks — as regular people telling their personal stories.”
Division Street is available from Dewi Lewis Publishing: In the U.S. In the United States for $49 (U.S.). Or £35 (UK) everywhere else.
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This review first ran in Eye Magazine
Robert Gumpert is co-editor of the Stansbury Forum with Peter Olney
Gentrification, Homelessness and Elections: When Does a Difference Make a Difference?
By Kurt Stand
The primary elections in Washington, DC and Maryland are over. For many of the down ballot local races in the District, and neighboring Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, that means the outcome is known, given the predominance of one-party rule in much of our area. At the time of writing, the results are a mixed bag. Some genuinely committed activists for social justice, including DSA members, were elected, and there is now a possibility that some too long-delayed social reforms and protections may be enacted in suburban Maryland. Yet institutional barriers blocking those who would challenge existing power remain high. Moreover, more than a few of those elected are content to let business as usual remain unchanged — for even in relatively liberal communities, in which public officials say all the right things, the gap between words and deeds is enormous and too many people go tumbling down that gap. Co-governance, a form of collaborative engagement in which elected officials meet and work with community groups before and after an election campaign, offers one possible way to overcome that reality.
Nonetheless, for many people in and around our nation’s capital and for millions across the country, elections don’t seem to carry much meaning. That is true of federal races, even in today’s polarized political climate, where candidates spew promises unlikely to be fulfilled, appearing, and disappearing like actors on a stage. And this is true on the local level where even office holders who live within shouting distance too often seem uninformed regarding intimate questions of food, transportation, school, jobs, health, public safety, and prices. In both cases, such attitudes reflect an eroding of political democracy that lies in the background of our eroding rights. Withdrawing from electoral activity is no answer; but if we fail to understand why so many feel ready to do just that, if we fail to understand that such attitudes are rooted in experience, we will be unable to preserve existing rights – let alone build a transformative politics rooted in alternative power.
Glancing through the July issue of Street Sense – a newspaper of, by and for the unhoused – one can read multiple reflections on the reality of powerlessness in the face of official hostility. In the aptly titled article “Breaking up encampments is worse in the summer heat,” writer Amina Washington, herself homeless, details the DC government’s practice of destroying shelters set up by those without other housing. Washington makes the simple point that those in power choose to evade: “It is unfair to target homeless people and jail them for trying to survive. Sleeping outside should not be a crime.”
Also in the issue, in an article headlined “Watchdog group finds profits soaring for real estate company facing several lawsuits,” Holly Rusch touches on the reason behind the cruelty in police destruction of encampments: realtors profit by raising rents to a level that few can afford, facing no accountability for legal violations they commit enroute to making even more money. So it is that the rich become richer, no matter what the law says. Unstated is that the poor are unwanted in neighborhoods in which they once lived because, much like unkempt lawns, they might lower the value of overvalued properties. Criminalization of homelessness is simply the reverse side of the gentrification coin.
These articles are reporting on realities that have a multi-year lineage – go back to any past issue of Street Sense DC (and editions of Street Sense in other cities across the country) and similar themes of officially sanctioned police repression and unsanctioned landlord profiteering recur with depressing regularity. Washington’s Mayor Muriel Bowser falls into a long line of those in government who pretend concern for those without, shelter yet implement policies that seek a solution by pushing the unhoused out of sight, rather than housing them. The fact that she was an avid supporter in 2020 of Michael Bloomberg – real estate and news magnate, one-time Republican turned anti-Trump but pro-gentrification Democrat – in his presidential primary campaign reflects the deep-rootedness of the problem.
The paper does try to give readers hope, and so there are articles about hearings and investigations that purport to be looking for solutions. These, too, have an air of familiarity to them, for the problem of lack of housing, of lack of services, of lack of health care, of lack of well-paying jobs, of a lack of government accountability to the overall community which it allegedly serves and in whose interest it allegedly acts, are “problems” endlessly discussed, studied, analyzed, legislated for, and yet ever unresolved. Street Sense’s community speaks with more honesty in poems and bits of autobiographical writing that seek meaning in personal relationships or spirituality – graspable in a way our political system should be but is not.
That is the challenge which newly elected or re-elected public officials now face: how to act in ways that become meaningful for those whose needs are greatest; how to bring about reforms that challenge existing injustice; how to rearrange the current power structure into one that is more fair and sustainable. In both DC and in Maryland, progressive legislation around hours, wages, sick leave for workers and police accountability have all passed in recent years. These matter enormously. Yet the fact remains that for far too many, words on pages have not translated into a difference in conditions of life.
PHoto of young boys on stope 3 blocks from the Capital, 1972 now an area with high property values and well to do residents
That gap is not only experienced by those of us with the least. Renters, homeowners, working people doing better, people defined as “middle class” (in all that term’s ambiguity) continually find themselves navigating changes in the quality of their lives due to fluctuations in the housing market without any meaningful say in the process. Living in a neighborhood that forms part of a community is valuable in and of itself, something most people desire, but it is not a value that market forces put on property. A home that becomes an asset to be flipped loses an intangible quality of what “home” could be.
Unwanted change as a fact of life came through in a performance of Green Machine at Capital Fringe Festival earlier this month (an annual independent theatre program back after two Covid-canceled seasons). Written by Jim McNeill and directed by Catherine Aselford, the one-act play gives voice and dimension to the lived reality of a neighborhood in transition and the accompanying lost sense of community that arrives when real estate interests “improve” an area by raising home prices beyond the beyond. Gentrification is a fancy name for that process; another word for it might be displacement, as those who can’t afford simply “disappear” — forced out of their homes, forced to start over again, moving in with family or winding up on the streets. Other losses occur too, less tangible yet no less real – and such losses are those to which the play’s characters give voice.
Set in D.C.’s Mt. Pleasant neighborhood – a community which had its own vibe as a mixed black, white Central American community with more street life than is commonly found in our nation’s capital. The play is rife with references that speak to an understanding of what was as well as what is, as it depicts a community where a house originally purchased for tens of thousands of dollars might now be worth millions. Upward prices increase the push-pull of high turnover – whether selling is designed to cash in before a price fall, or forced as rising taxes, interest rates, insurance make what has long been home, unaffordable. Winds of change for homeowners hit tenants with gale-like force as their rents and rights are ever less protected. In the process, the vibrancy of what had been disappears. Wealth comes attached with its own bland uniformity and multiple layers of segregation – be it by race, income, age – ultimately enforcing complete homogeneity of lifestyle, as what is or is not “acceptable” narrows.
Those details are implied in Green Machine, which focuses on how longtime residents try to make sense of what has happened to their lives, to the world they lived in. A community where people knew each other, where someone would feel safe enough to lend a stranger a helping hand, where neighbors befriended multiple generations of a family, somehow vanished without any single event marking the beginning (or end) of the transition.
Breathing life into this narrative is that every time someone spins too rosy a picture of the past, someone else brings back a moment of reality with a reminder that it wasn’t just about peace and love, that crime existed, that money mattered. However, problems were community problems. They weren’t brushed aside, ignored or dealt with by moving out or forcing “undesirables” away.
Green Machine‘s plot revolves around the opening of a marijuana dispensary – of questionable legality in the here and now as only regulated medical marijuana dispensaries are currently permitted – aiming to cash in on the possibilities of the likely soon-to-come full legalization without abandoning the sense of trust that was part of the bygone counterculture. Those illusions, too, are shattered: we can’t go back to all the past, all the more so because that alternative culture was itself never able to overcome either the pull of market forces nor the social dysfunction that lies just beneath the surface of our lives. The thin line between drugs as a means of social connection and drugs as a force of destruction is not glossed over, as the fate of ungentrified neighborhoods left behind are noted in the play as a reminder of other, deeper losses. Yet, failure doesn’t deny the fact of what was: the vibrancy, the sense of possibility around which neighbors tried to build a life was real and was lost when neighbors become strangers. One character recalls falling down drunk on a winter’s night and how a neighbor whom he didn’t know took him in, an example of trust in a stranger who was thereafter no longer a stranger. Even when characters differ in memory they share memories of people over time, people without anything else in common but whom they knew because of the community that existed.
The play never loses sight that while property values have gone up, the change that came was for the worse – as notes included on the playbill back up:
In 1968, following the violence that erupted in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, white flight led to Mt. Pleasant becoming a majority black neighborhood. 1980s;
a large influx of immigrants from El Salvador and other Central American countries creates its own beauty, widening the cultural contours of each block, as well as bringing new tensions that burst forth in street violence in response to a 1991 police shooting;
the millennium, housing prices went up, community diversity went down. The 2010 Census uncovered the fact that the Mt. Pleasant/Colombia Heights/Park View zip code ranked amongst the 25 most “whitened” in the country;
and by 2020’s zip code, the black population had fallen to 12%, the white population, now the majority, risen to 52%;
overall – and the raw fact behind these changes – the Playbill notes that a friend of the playwright purchased a home in Mt. Pleasant in 1972 for $22,000 – today the same home is assessed at $1.2 million.
All those numbers don’t tell what the play recounts: that for about three decades a thriving community was built in Mt. Pleasant. Now take those numbers and look at the unhoused, look at the reality facing residents of Congress Heights, of Deanwood or other left-behind neighborhoods in DC where jobs are scarce, social services few, housing dilapidated and violence all too common – or look at the similar disparities in Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties – and a picture emerges of few winners and more losers, of a preponderance of insecurity whatever one’s income, an insecurity made exponentially worse when it is wrapped within a life of poverty.
No one voted for this change – it just “happened.” Or rather, the cash ballot has more heft than the one in the voting booth. Changes brought about by market forces never just happen; public policy set in motion by specific legislation creates or inhibits the cycles of boom and bust that mark our lives, leading to the monetization of all aspects of life that hover around the characters in Green Machine and the vendors selling Street Sense.
Unions, community associations, churches, social justice groups, and socialist and other left-wing organizations exist in Mt. Pleasant as they do more broadly in DC and suburban Maryland. Many were aware of encroaching gentrification and displacement, and tried to push for an alternative. Yet these organizations were too small, too weak to have the needed impact. Or perhaps, better put, they had not been sufficiently integrated into the daily life of the communities within which they work and thus were (and are) relatively powerless. This is a problem for local officials as well –the most principled elected social justice advocate in the world will lack effectiveness if their work is not intimately linked with grassroots organizations that are themselves part of popular daily life.
This is the challenge we face now. Elections matter – legislative and political alternatives can redirect society, reveal conscious choices that lay hidden when the “market” is blamed for the consequences of a system built on greed. Moreover, all we need do is look across the Potomac and see the Republican sweep in Virginia last year to understand that complacency jeopardizes the rights we so urgently need to make life better for all. If we turn back to the 1990s (the midway point in the sweep of time that forms Green Machine’s characters’ understanding of the world), we can see the cost when we are unable to resolve community pain in a human and humane fashion.
That was the time of the crack epidemic and inner-city destruction in our area and across the country. This also marked the Reagan-era devastation of the gains made by civil rights and liberation movement struggles and laid the groundwork for the wave of gentrification and displacement we now experience. After all, the economics of profiteering goes hand-in-hand with the racism that makes it so easy for some to talk of “neighborhood improvement” that drives out those who would most want and need the benefits of the promised change – just as it makes it easy to see the unhoused as a problem to be removed from sight rather than as people with problems that need to be resolved. Writing in 1991, Clarence Lusane took note of connections we still need to make:
“A radical redistribution of wealth and an examination of the prejudices of the capitalist economic system must be at the core of a movement led by people of color and working people for fundamental economic reform. … While economic parity alone will not end either individual or institutional racism, it is the foundation upon which to build the movement for an egalitarian society. None of these suggestions are remotely possible without increased economic and political power on the part of those most dispossessed in our society, particularly communities of color. … Strategies for increased and responsive political power and economic development must come from those communities most in need.”
(Pipe Dream Blues: Racism & the War on Drugs, South End Press, Boston, 1991, p. 220).
Despite often heroic and determined efforts, popular movements in the 1990s were unable to realize such power. So the initiative passed to the hands of those who found a source of wealth in others’ poverty – money making money by undermining community, by devaluating neighborhoods, by raising the cost of housing, thereby destroying the sense of home so crucial to us as human beings. How that can be made different is the dilemma posed by Green Machine, is the moral imperative that cries out from the pages of Street Sense, and is the challenge elected officials face today, as violent assaults on democratic rights in any form loom as a direct threat.
Co-governance, as noted, is one way to create a social justice alternative to the lobbyists who push forward the notion that only incremental change is possible, incremental change only permitted when accompanied by giveaways to those who already have too much. It is a way to ground politics that can build the change people need by creating wider bonds of unity (such as between homeowners and the homeless) rather than new divisions. It is up to us to build organizations of all those impacted, organizations that are part of the fabric of life. It is up to us to create a political culture connected to the rhythms of life, to ensure that we can and do use and expand our rights. It is up to us to create the communities we long for, rather than those imposed by the logic of the dollar. Only if we do so will we find an escape from the atomized, displaced existence that continues to threaten us today.
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Lessons of 1998: The Fight to Defeat Prop 226
By Peter Olney
As the 2022 midterms near, there is increasing optimism about our ability to stem the white supremacist fascist tide and hold the House of Representatives and increase Democratic margins in the Senate. The vote on abortion in Kansas should give us all heart and cause us to recommit to doing the work of knocking on doors and getting out our vote. Recently I interviewed David Sickler retired Southern California Director of the State Building Trades Council and long time AFL-CIO Western Regional Director. Dave is a working class organizer and a hero and mentor to many.
I wanted to learn from the lessons of defeating Proposition 226, the so-called “Paycheck Protection Act” placed on the California Ballot in 1998. I sat down with Dave Sickler.
Q: What was Prop 226? What would it have done to labor and who was behind it?
Sickler: On June 2nd, 1998 Prop. 226 was promoted as the “Paycheck Protection” initiative by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) an extreme right wing national organization created and backed by the US Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, Koch Industries, Grover Norquist, California Governor, Pete Wilson and other wealthy donors. 226 in California was supposed to be the model for the nation. Grover Norquist said if it passed in California it will pass in every other state in the nation and will reduce labors strength by 80%. Prop. 226 was promoted as a benefit to union members because it required unions to get the approval of union members to spend union money on political campaigns. Unions would have to contact every single union member every year and have them sign a form agreeing to have union money for every campaign and issue facing union members. The goal was to cripple labor’s ability to protect itself by raising money to fight back. The Economic Policy Institute said because of the measure’s excessive and onerous bureaucratic roadblocks it would seriously hamper Union leadership’s ability to protect its members.
Q: What were the polls saying? What was some of Labor saying?
Sickler: Polls showed 226 to be very popular with rank and file union members by 76%. Many labor leaders threw up their hands and said they wouldn’t even waste money fighting it. We in the Building Trades had been fighting Governor Pete Wilson over the prevailing wage issue and his attack on the 8 hr day for a long time, and we were totally against giving him a free pass on #226. We knew we could beat him and his right wing cronies.
Q: What did you do to turn things around?
Sickler: What I did was to meet with Miguel Contreras Executive Secretary of the LA County Federation of Labor who told me the County Fed. would not fight 226 because most of the affiliates were not going fight it, and many attorneys said it would pass no matter what we did, and we would just piss off the membership. I told Miguel that I knew we could beat 226 and I asked him to support me, and I would at least build him an army. I told him I needed office space and supplies, and I told him I wanted to speak at every delegates’ meeting because I wanted to be invited to every union meeting in Los Angeles County. I knew if I could go one on one with every union member I could convince them that 226 was a direct assault on them.
Q: How did those meetings go?
Sickler: I ended up attending a total of 111 meetings. I also met with many community organizations. What I said to union members was that 226 sounds very attractive and reasonable when you first hear about it or even read it, but the closer you look into it you discover the people behind it don’t care about your paycheck. As a matter of fact they all have a track record of attacking your paycheck. Let’s just look first at Governor Pete Wilson. He had a history of trying to eliminate prevailing wages for construction workers and had just finished trying to eliminate the 8 hr. Day. At every meeting I went to I brought a sign up sheet for volunteers to phone bank and walk precincts. Of course I got permission from the officers to solicit volunteers. The response from the rank and file members was fantastic and once the officers saw the reaction they got excited too and jumped on board. This might sound crazy, but I didn’t encounter a single union member in those meetings who argued with me or said they were supporting 226.
Q: What was the result?
Sickler: We won! We overcame the two-to-one polling in favor of the measure winning the state by 53 to 47 percent. In Los Angeles County we won by 63%. The victory over 226 was hailed as a modern political miracle. I disagree! It wasn’t a miracle. It was union members seeing through the bullshit and fighting back and knowing they could win! The lesson here is you can’t win a fight if you don’t fight.
Q: What are the lessons from 226 going into these critical 2022 congressional midterms. Sickler: The lesson we learned from 226 was that you don’t let fear cripple your will to fight back. In the beginning many labor leaders were paralyzed by fear and believed that there was no way we could win so they didn’t even want to try to fight back. When I met with rank and file members and showed them who their enemies were, and what they trying to do to their union, they got very angry and wanted to fight back. We took that anger and channeled it into a positive, mighty and exciting campaign, and we beat the bastards
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Bill Russell, “played for the Celtics not for Boston.”
By Jay McManus
No one, especially basketball fans, in the Boston area could escape the shadow of Bill Russell and his Celtics in the 1960’s. He and his teams were so good that it was news only when they lost. That greatness has been acknowledged non-stop since Russell’s recent death, but it is still very difficult, even for us Bostonians who lived through them, not to be amazed by his core accomplishments: eleven NBA championships in thirteen years, including eight in a row. Russell was, unmistakably, at the heart of the engine for the Celts, just as he was at the University of San Francisco, where he won two national titles, and on the 1956 gold medal-winning US Olympic team.
He revolutionized the NBA. In stark contrast to today’s play, Russell emphasized defense, leading schemes that were near impenetrable and utilizing a style that epitomized teamwork and selflessness. It’s arguable that no athlete ever, in any sport anywhere, has subjugated his supreme skills for the good of his team like Bill Russell did. Personal accomplishments and glory meant nothing to him. That Russell was able to add to such an incredible legacy by winning two championships as a player-coach—a role virtually unheard of at the professional level of any sport worldwide before or since—underscores the singular talent, intelligence, and commitment of the man.
Many in Boston ignored it all. Despite their historic run, the Celtics often played before a half empty Garden; even the playoffs didn’t guarantee sellouts. No parades, player endorsements, and public clamor awaited these champions. Instead, as another Boston legend, Bob Cousy, put it, a “nice dinner” capped their winning seasons. Meanwhile, their hockey counterparts in Boston, the Bruins, were celebrated by locals notwithstanding their history of losing.
It was difficult back then, as it is now, to believe that race was not the primary reason for the seeming indifference exhibited by Bostonians toward the Celtics. The team was the first in the NBA to start five Black players. Russell was one of the first Black men to play, or certainly star, in the league, and he was later the first to assume the role of head coach for a major professional sports franchise. He also freely expressed his views about the unwelcoming atmosphere in which he and his Black teammates were forced to work.
Russell considered Boston to be one of the most segregated cities in the country, famously referring to it at one point as a “flea market” of racism. On numerous occasions he and his family suffered personal indignities because of their skin color. What ensued in the city only a few years after his retirement in 1969—Black children in school buses being stoned in white neighborhoods, white politicians spewing racist hate, Alabama’s segregationist Governor George Wallace finding a welcome in parts of the city, among other damning indicators—proved his point. It also helps explain another famous sentiment of his that he “played for the Celtics not for Boston.”
That honesty from Russell, his willingness to speak truth to power, led to his assuming a leadership role in our country’s fight for racial justice. Along with several prominent athletes and entertainers he was—at no small risk to his life and career–part of many of the US civil rights movement’s seminal protests throughout the sixties. The man’s integrity and courage, particularly at such a tumultuous time in our nation’s history, were alone worthy of acknowledgement and formal recognition.
Yet, those achievements, like his historic Celtics run, were also largely ignored, if not clearly resented, by many in Boston including, apparently, its power brokers. More than four decades went by before the city gave serious consideration to paying public tribute to the man, and even then it was only at the urging of then-President Obama who, after awarding Russell the Presidential Medal of Honor in 2011, expressed his wish that “one day, in the streets of Boston, children will look up at a statue built not only to Bill Russell the player but Bill Russell the man.”
It’s not as though Boston didn’t have opportunities to pay proper respect to a civil rights champion who also happened to be professional sports’ greatest ever winner. Years before Obama prodded the city, other Boston sports luminaries, all white if keeping score, had gotten their due with sculptures or equivalent tributes. One of them, Red Sox great, Ted Williams (for the record, no championships in his career), had a major tunnel running through the city named for him in 1995, prompting Russell’s late Celtic teammate, Tom Heinsohn, to offer his own unique take on the disrespect accorded by the city to his friend: “Look all I know is the guy won two NCAA championships, 50-some college games in a row, the ’56 Olympics, then he came to Boston and won 11 championships in 13 years and they named a fucking tunnel after Ted Williams!”
A statue of Bruins great, Bobby Orr, was erected in 2010 in front of TD North Garden, the home of the Celtics. In addition to his tunnel, Ted Williams had a sculpture in his honor placed in front of Fenway Park in 2004. Russell’s coach, Red Auerbach, was memorialized in 1985 with a statue at Faneuil Hall. Scores of other notable Boston athletes, from Harry Agganis to Doug Flutie, Larry Bird, and Rocky Marciano, have had their achievements commemorated through statues, or even had arenas named after them. No doubt there will be a likeness of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady soon gracing the front of Foxboro Stadium.
Boston’s monument to Bill Russell, by far the most accomplished and consequential icon of them all, erected at last in 2013, is found off to the side of Government Center Plaza, hardly a hub of activity for people in the city, and especially for tourists; blink and you’d miss the statue. The setting does not befit an athlete and man of Russell’s stature. Worse, it fuels the lingering perception, if not reality, that in Boston only our white sports heroes are deemed worthy of true honor.
Bob Ryan, a long-time sports columnist, and former Celtics beat writer for the Boston Globe recently penned a tribute to Bill Russell in which he cited the varied, and incomparable, contributions he made to the city of Boston. Ryan ended his piece with this question: “Did we deserve him”? For many of us Bostonians the answer, sadly, is self-evident.
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Pro-Israel Lobby Drops Millions to Influence US Congressional Elections
By Larry Hendel
One of the most closely watched races in the May primary cycle pitted Texas conservative Democrat incumbent Henry Cuellar against progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros, an immigration attorney. Cuellar, an eighteen-year incumbent, is terrible on the environment, labor rights and immigration, and the only remaining House Democrat to oppose abortion rights. Cisneros almost beat Cuellar when she ran against him in 2020. In this year’s rematch, Cisneros came up 289 votes short. Cuellar squeaked by with 50.32% of the vote .
Were it not for major infusions of cash from outside organizations, Cuellar would undoubtedly have lost. One such group was AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This decades-old, Jewish organization has been the primary force in Washington when it comes to pro-Israel lobbying. But this year, for the first time, the organization formally involved itself in the electoral arena, contributing to endorsed candidates and participating heavily in independent expenditure campaigns. According to AIPAC spokesperson Marshall Whittmann their mission is simple: “We are engaged in the democratic process to elect candidates who will support the U.S.-Israel relationship and oppose those who will not.” In other words, they won’t be looking at candidates’ views on the economy, race relations, guns, abortion, the environment, or any other issue important to American voters. Only Israel. This could be devastating for progressives running for office.
Last May, AIPAC, along with its sister political action committees (PACs) the United Democracy Project (UCD) and the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), spent over $10 million on five Democratic party primary races. (For the purpose of this article, I will use “AIPAC” to represent all three PAC’s, since they are definitely partners in crime.) This equates to $2 plus million per election. Besides the Cuellar-Cisneros race, AIPAC was involved in two primaries in North Carolina, one in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania. Their candidate won in four out of the five. Until this cycle, AIPAC didn’t have a super PAC. Now, with millions in contributions from both Democratic and Republican multi-millionaires, it’s on pace to become one of the most influential political funders in the country.
In the Ohio race, Nina Turner, a close ally of Bernie Sanders, was ahead in the polls for most of the campaign. But in the final lap her opponent’s allies bombarded the airwaves with hit pieces. AIPAC was the leading spender, dropping $1.5 million. Turner eventually lost by a two to one margin. The AIPAC money wasn’t the only reason she lost, but it made a huge difference.
As they do in many cases, AIPAC did not make support or non-support of Israel a major topic in the campaign. Often AIPAC prefers their signature issue to remain in the background, so there are fewer fingerprints. In this case they hit Turner by saying she wasn’t a “true” Democrat.
On July 19, AIPAC dropped $6 million to help Glen Ivey beat Donna Edwards in the Maryland’s fourth Congressional District Democratic Primary 52% to 35%. And on August 1, AIPAC invested $4 million in Michigan to successfully defeat Andy Levin’s efforts to stay in Congress. Levin, a Jew, a former synagogue president and a former union organizer, supports the concept of a Jewish state in Israel but is unabashedly in favor of Palestinian rights. AIPAC backed a more pro-Israel candidate, Haley Stevens. Stevens won with 60% of the vote.
AIPAC is not just dabbling. They intend to be players in electoral politics, and they bring major money to the table.
AIPAC’s foray into the campaign world is bad for progressives in three major ways.
First, in general elections, if there is a Republican who is more pro-Israel than the Democratic candidate, whether that candidate is a “progressive” or “moderate” Democrat, AIPAC is likely to back the Republican, probably with major dollars. Whatever we think of the weaknesses of the mainstream Democrats, if we don’t keep a Democratic majority in Congress, this country will move to the right at an even faster clip. AIPAC has already endorsed 37 incumbent Republicans who would not vote to certify Biden’s election, including notorious Trumpers Jim Jordan from Ohio and Scott Perry from Pennsylvania. Perry, by the way, is the Congressman who recently compared the Democrats to Nazis. Apparently the organization is more concerned about Israel’s financial and military wellbeing than with the future of democracy in the United States. This “my way or the highway” approach to politics is about as self-centered and opportunist as one can get, and it’s frightening that AIPAC is creating a situation where our elections will be heavily influenced by people acting, in essence, as agents of a foreign country.
Second, within the Democratic Party, AIPAC’s willingness to pour millions into elections based on the single issue of support for Israel will force progressives to make a choice: support Palestinian rights and risk AIPAC’s wrath, or fight for what they believe in. This will make it harder for progressives, and if the progressive wing of the party doesn’t grow, and there is no left-wing opposition to the Pelosi/Schumer middle of the road approach to politics, we will probably never get, national healthcare, reduced militarism, requisite environmental legislation and other critical reforms. We need Democrats to expand their majority, and we need progressive Democrats to gain power within the party. It’s a both/and situation, not an either/or, and AIPAC’s involvement will make both more difficult to achieve.
Third, if AIPAC’s efforts are successful, the US will be spending even more resources strengthening Israel, an apartheid state that started out as a settler colonial land grab in 1948 and has been grabbing more land every year since. Occupied Palestine is the only area in the world in which millions of civilians have lived for over 50 years both without a state and without citizenship of any country.Palestinian villages are routinely destroyed, houses demolished, and people jailed without due process or probable cause. Close to 700,000 Israeli settlers have illegally established what they view as permanent communities on Palestinian territory, and often attack and terrorize nearby Palestinian villages. Israel possesses state of the art military technology, including nuclear weapons, and has become a dangerous, aggressive, nationalist state. There is insufficient opportunity here to get into details about the history of Israel, its degrading and oppressive treatment of the Palestinians, and its toxic, race based, hierarchical, anti-democratic view of human society. But I recommend the following books: The Hundred Years War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi and Understanding the Palestinian Israeli Conflict: a Primer, by Phyllis Bennis.
How Israel has swallowed up Palestinian land since 1947
So why is AIPAC jumping into electoral politics now when it never did before?
In a nutshell, AIPAC sees the “special relationship” between the US and Israel being threatened by the growing American support for the people of Palestine, and it is playing offense in an attempt to reverse that trend.
First let’s talk about that “special” relationship, and then let’s talk about the growing support for Palestine in the US.
After World War II, creating a Jewish state in the Middle East relieved the US of accepting hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from post war Europe and provided a western outpost in the Arab world, something the British and the Americans had wanted for decades. On May 15, 1948, the western powers “gave” historical Palestine to the Jews. Immediately armed Israelis attacked Palestinian towns and villages and 720,000 Palestinians, or 85% of the Palestinian population were forcibly expelled from their homes or forced to flee to avoid being attacked.
Since World War II, the US has been Israel’s most fervent supporter. From that time until now the US has given Israel $244 billion in military and economic aid, in inflation-adjusted dollars, making Israel the largest cumulative recipient of US assistance by far in that time frame.
Today Israel receives $3.3 billion annually in foreign military financing from the US. Earlier this year, our government decided that wasn’t enough and gave Israel an extra $1 billion to replenish their “Iron Dome” anti-missile defense system. The two countries continue to conduct joint military training and coordination.
Washington politicians seem to love all this. There are more congressional junkets to Israel than any other country, by far, most of them paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, an AIPAC affiliate. The percentage of trips made to Israel exceeded any other foreign destination. House members made nearly 1,400 trips to Israel, while total subsidized visits to foreign countries other than Israel were 2,500. See chart below from the Arab-American, July 7, 2022.
Of the 3900 privately funded Congressional visits to foreign countries between 2014 and 2018, nearly one third were to Israel. This past February twenty-seven Democrats and fourteen Republicansvisited Israel.
Under Trump, the Republicans embraced Israel like a long-lost brother. Traditionally American support for Israel has stemmed from the Jewish community, but over the last few decades, white evangelicals have made Israeli domination over the Palestinians a major objective for the Republican party.
But the tide of public opinion is starting to turn.
Over the last few years, young Jews and young evangelicals have been backing away from Israel and towards the Palestinians. A poll of American Jewish voters revealed that a quarter of them now agree that Israel is an apartheid state – a number that shoots up to thirty-eight percent among those under age forty. Twenty-two percent of Jewish voters overall agree that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, a figure that rises to an astonishing thirty-three percent among the younger group.
In the evangelical community we see the same trend. Among evangelicals between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, rates of support for Israel have fallen from 69% to 33.6%!
The primary reason for this change is, of course, the steadfast organizing efforts of Palestinians, in the United States and internationally. Publicity around the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)campaign, launched in Palestine, has provided an excellent vehicle for explaining Israeli apartheid to an American audience. True, it has engendered a backlash, but the backlash just heightens the contradiction and keeps the issue on the front burner. The movement for Palestinian rights in the US has taken hold on college campuses, particularly under the leadership of Students for Justice in Palestine. Inspired by Palestinian resistance, progressives have organized in non-evangelical churches, such as the Presbyterians and Baptists, and many church groups now condemn Israeli apartheid.Over the last fifteen years more communities of color have been won over to the Palestinian cause. Palestinian flags were displayed at many Black Lives Matter demonstrations and at Standing Rock. George Floyd’s image can be seen throughout Palestine. Activists have been stressing similarities between settler colonialist conquest in Israel and in the United States, exposing Israel’s lie that it is a democracy. Also, media coverage of Israel’s brazen brutality and arrogance towards the Palestinians is changing somewhat. Coverage is still very biased towards Israel, but the Palestinian side of the storyis beginning to creep through. The raw footage of the bombing of Gaza, the house and village demolitions, the military intrusions into the Al Aqsa Mosque, and most recently the murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh are enough to make any honest person realize that Israel is an occupying power and is doing terrible things to the Palestinians. The attack by the Israeli military at Abu Akleh’s funeral made the whole world gasp.
This brings us back to Congress and why, after all these years, AIPAC wants to start investing in electoral politics. For the first time, there are now people in Congress willing to speak out against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, and they are getting some traction. At this time, it’s a small group: The Squad, Bernie Sanders, and several dozen others, depending on the issue. But it’s growing. Minnesota Congressperson Betty McCallum has thirty-two cosponsors on her bill prohibiting the use of US funds for unlawful detentions of Palestinian minors. Rep. Stansbury (D-NM) (not related to this site) and Senator Merkley (D-OR), obtained signatures of over eighty members of the House of Representatives and nineteen Senators on a letter calling on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to convince Israel to halt the planned expulsion of over 1000 Palestinians from Masafer Yatta, a small area of villages in the West Bank. Fifteen progressive House Democrats, led by Cori Bush (D-MO), sent a letter that was more forcefully worded, calling the expulsion of the villagers a “war crime.” Recently twenty-four US Senators, almost half of the Democrats in the Senate, called on President Biden to launch an investigation into the killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh after the Israeli government determined that Israeli troops had nothing to do with it, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
By themselves these are small, mostly symbolic actions. But as young people become more conscious, and the contradictions in Israel/Palestine continue to intensify, the movement will grow. The Israel lobby does not want this ember to burst into flame, and it is using the new PAC’s to try to stomp it out before it gets to that point.
Additionally, around the same time as AIPAC made its move, another leading Jewish organization, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), upped its level of jingoistic rhetoric against those standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people. This past May, in a major speech ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt denounced three prominent groups that support Palestinian rights –the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) – and said they contribute to the spread of antisemitism as much as white nationalists. He described them as “the photo inverse of the extreme right,” and said the ADL plans to bring the full scope of its capabilities to bear upon left-wing opponents of Israel. Even though it has been well documented that antisemitism is far more prevalent on the right than the left, the ADL is so fixated on Israel that they are often willing to forgive the right-wing’s antisemitism because of its support for Israel. And both AIPAC and ADL equate criticism of Israel as antisemitism, by definition, in an attempt to discredit any criticism of the state’s actual attitudes or practices as “antisemitic” and therefore invalid.
What should we do about all this?
It’s a cliché but nonetheless a truism, that all things are connected. We can see that as Israel moves further to the right, its leaders will continue to unite with the right- wing in the US, and try to move both countries to the right, possibly towards fascism. Just look at the bromance between Trump and Netanyahu. Conversely, as working people and people of color become increasingly conscious of how they are being screwed over, they will move to unite with other oppressed people, here and in Palestine. The best way to stop AIPAC’s efforts, is to: 1) demand that the Democratic party do something to stop this theft of democracy. Their silence so far is deafening. And 2) work like hell for the candidates who are pro-Palestine and beat the machine. It’s critical that all progressives move Israel/Palestine closer to the top of their priority list. We have to educate liberals and moderates about the nature of the Israeli state and normalize the Palestinian narrative among the general population. We have to fight for justice in Palestine to counter the efforts of right-wing, racist, settler-colonialists in both countries.
But it’s not all bad news. Summer Lee, running for congress from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was able to withstand AIPAC’s attack. In 2018 Lee was elected to the stage legislature. She continued to build her community and activist base, supporting Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, strong environmental protections, Palestinian rights and other progressive programs. When the local Congressional seat opened up, she and anti-union lawyer Steve Irwin, competed for the Democratic nomination. In March, Lee was 25 points ahead in the polls. At that point UDC dumped $1 million in negative campaign ads against her. This was on top of the $1.3 million they had spent earlier in the campaign. Irwin gained rapidly in the polls. But Lee’s solid base in the district helped her beat him by a fraction of a percent. Her reputation and her organization were key to her withstanding the onslaught of negative ads, and points to how we can win in future elections.
Ilhan Omar had it partly right. Sometimes it is all about the Benjamins. But candidates with a strong community base, and solid, progressive politics can prevail over deep pockets if movements can be built around them. As progressives, building these movements must be one our primary tasks.
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ELVIS: A Study in Talent Mis-Management
By Byron Laursen
Baz Luhrman’s recent movie, Elvis, was on my Maybe list, but never jumped into Must-See. Watching his Moulin Rouge (2001) had left me feeling like I’d binged on custard-larded pastries. His The Great Gatsby (2013) didn’t win me back. When a friend wrote that Luhrman seemed to have dumped a load of Elvis lore into a Cuisinart and pressed Puree, I quit thinking about seeing it.
I was far more interested by a quote I came across recently, John Lennon saying that none of the Beatles’ recordings could equal Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” (I agree.)
While perceptions of Elvis, if we’re playing fair, can include his Glittering White Vampire attire from the Las Vegas years, it needs to be said that his early work – when he was an expression of racially different yet congruent strands of old American traditions – constitute the Elvis movie most worth watching. All of it was shot before mismanagement, greed, and bad contracts sapped the best out of a great American star. As they have long done for far too many workers in our dog-eat-dog society.
My own Elvis movie was conceptualized around the time I lived on the eastern outskirts of Fresno and was waiting for puberty to hurry up and assert itself. Courtesy of a big brother I entrusted with a folding dollar, whose friend had a car that could travel to downtown Fresno, I bought the two-sided monster, “Hound Dog” b/w “Don’t Be Cruel,” just as it was climbing the charts.
For years my teachers had sent my parents notes like this: “Byron responds to music and should have an instrument of his own.” They were on the right track, but surely had no idea how powerfully I’d respond to a musical guy who no girl could possibly reject. I wanted to be cool, or at least to fake it successfully. I wanted girls to like me a whole bunch. Elvis Presley seemed to have the opposite-sex-attraction thing going, effortlessly, with no end in sight. So when he released his second album, Elvis (March 1956), I invested the $2.95. It had a country crooner vibe, not the raw and visceral personality of his first album (Elvis Presley, October 1956), and nothing as powerful as, say “Blue Moon” on the essential collection called The Sun Sessions, recorded when he was only 19 and not released until 1976, five months before he kicked from multiple forms of overindulgence. Which, again, I blame on mismanagement, greed, and bad contracts.
Those pre-fame tracks re-engineer the DNA of American music. They press the Black and white elements closer, until a few diverse chromosomes bond onto the same strands. Some have said that Elvis got famous because he was a good-lookin’ white guy who copied Black artists. That’s just as shallow as saying Chuck Berry was a Black guy who got over by borrowing from white country artists. (Note: You can sing “Promised Land” over the chord changes for “Wabash Cannonball.” So Chuck and Elvis did much the same thing from opposite starting points.)
Elvis did much more than copy. Cherokee and Jewish genes helped shape his soulful looks, along with both old-style blues shouters like Big Boy Crudup and postwar jump-blues shouters like “Good Rockin’” Roy Brown, Wynonie Harris, and Elvis’s go-to R&B songwriter, Otis Blackwell.
But as William Carlos Williams wrote in 1923, and Greil Marcus quoted to kick off his essay on Elvis for The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll:
“The pure products of America
go crazy – ”
Elvis went crazy because he was thwarted as an artist by a terrible contract with a greedy manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker. Luhrman tried to make Parker more palatable, casting Tom Hanks, but the facts of his life are these: He was a carney with exceptional sucker-fleecing skills: painting sparrows yellow to sell as canaries, shorting hot dog buyers with sleight of hand. He saw Elvis as a cash machine, and induced him to sign a contract that lasted for way too many years, and which gave him half of everything Elvis brought in. Such contracts are no longer legal, but tricking up-and-coming performers remains a strong tradition. Which explains why Steve Stills (of Crosby, Stills and Nash) wrote:
“Somebody tell me – Have I been gifted or robbed?”
Being effed by his manager allowed Presley to experience something well known by the Black artists who inspired him.
When Parker was asked if he took 50% of everything Elvis earned, he said “That’s not true at all. He takes fifty percent of everything I earn.” It gets worse. Earlier, he had failed as a manager to register Presley with BMI, losing his songwriting royalties on 33 songs. When Parker in 1973 sold RCA the rights to 700 Elvis songs, he got $6.2M and the guy who’d sung them to the world got $4.6M. In the three years after Presley died, Parker took an estimated $7-8M rakeoff.
A 1982 suit by the Presley estate recouped some but was settled out of court.
A couple of years before Parker’s death he was seen standing in front of a slot machine in Vegas, a cigar in his jaw and a fistful of silver dollars in his right hand, which rested on his full belly, facilitating insertion of money earned by others into the slot machine for the amusement of an epic greedhead. A fitting final scene for the old bandit.
What happened between Presley and Parker is parallel with all exploitation of workers. As Woody Guthrie wrote:
“Some rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.”
The researches of Dr. Paul Zak, a founder of the neuroeconomics discipline, have shown conclusively that inequality destabilizes nations. Lack of trust rips a nation’s social fabric.
America’s current passage through Trumpian/Repuglican hell is only one of several examples around the globe. It’s too late to turn around Elvis’s degradation, but America may recapture its promise – to the extent that equity replaces “trickle down” mythology. But if you’re reading The Stansbury Forum, you already agree, and are probably doing plenty to restore American integrity.
So, as a bonus, here are my suggestions for reflecting on the Elvis legend. “Just Like New,” by Jesse Winchester, a songwriter who decamped to Canada during the Vietnam war and returned following Carter’s granting of amnesty, and “Elvis Presley Blues,” by Gillian Welch, whose haunting songs exemplify the “No Depression” category of America’s musical traditions.
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It’s a “Movement Moment” In the U.S.
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson
During the worst moments of the COVID pandemic, employers and the public recognized front-line workers as “essential.” Workers were given special “hero” pins and sometimes hazard pay. But far too often, “essential” did not mean proper safety equipment, or increased dignity and respect on the job.
Since the start of the pandemic nearly 8 million workers left the labor force, according to federal statistics. It’s a phenomenon known as the Great Resignation. So now as employers compete for staff in a tight labor market, wages have risen by about 5.6 percent in the past year.[1]
U.S. workers are discovering their power.
An uptick in private sector strikes at companies like John Deere, Kellogg’s, and Nabisco last fall — termed “Striketober” — indicated renewed willingness by workers to participate in workplace actions. Stephanie Luce, a professor of labor studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies observed, “As someone who’s studied labor issues for the last 30 years or so, I’ve never seen anything like it in terms of the level of interest and excitement from people who want to fight back at the workplace.”
And workers are organizing new unions at an unprecedented number of companies. The NLRB is overwhelmed with petitions for union representation elections.[2] Amazon and Starbucks workers have upended the old common sense for how to organize unions.[3] Now is the time for union leaders to retool their organizing tactics to fit a moment when — finally — workers are leading the way.[4][5]
At the time of this writing, workers affiliated with Starbucks Workers United have filed for union elections in nearly 300 stores across 35 states and have won more than 150 of them. [6]
As long-time labor organizer Wade Rathke recently noted, “Amazon workers have not only organized in Alabama and New York, they have already won one election and more are pending. Groups like Amazonians United have agitated in another dozen locations on issues inside warehouses, distribution, and delivery centers. Starbucks workers have filed for election in hundreds of stores and are winning most of the elections held to date. Apple retail workers are organizing, as are tech workers at game companies, on-line news platforms, and elsewhere. Google workers have kicked up their heels.”[7]
More than a tight labor market
Workers’ experience in the COVID pandemic, the job resignations, a tight labor market, and the increasing popularity of unions have created the conditions for this “movement moment.” But so has the political context.
US President Joe Biden declared his intent to be the “most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in history.”[8] It’s proved to be more than rhetoric. Under the Biden administration, the NLRB is finally protecting employees’ rights to engage in protected concerted activities by issuing 10(J) injunctions.[9] The board has already issued twelve 10(j) injunctions in federal district courts against employers to stop unfair labor practices.[10] The Labor Board’s more aggressive support for workers’ rights has emboldened workers to take action.
A note of caution
Despite so many positive signs for the movement, labor in the US remains relatively weak and faces a number of political and economic challenges. A sobering reminder is that union density has continued its decline. Membership is down to 10.3 percent of the workforce in 2021, from its peak of 35 percent in 1954.[11] Private sector membership is hovering at 6.7 percent, down from a high of 35 percent in 1955.
Will labor take advantage of this “movement moment?”
At its recent convention in June, the AFL-CIO committed to organize one million new workers in ten years.[12] One million per year would be ambitious, but only organizing one million workers over ten years means labor’s density (the percentage of total eligible workers), would continue to drop dramatically.[13]
Ironically while labor’s membership density is dropping, its treasuries are booming. A union researcher has calculated that the labor movement is sitting on a huge multi-billion dollar surplus. Now is the time for unions to spend their money on the massive task of organizing giant corporations like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Starbucks.[14],[15]
However, if these organizing initiatives are to be successful, they will need a strong presence of internal workplace organizers. Unions must cultivate and support young people to take jobs in key industries with the sole purpose of organizing. There is no better experience for recently radicalized socialists than participating in labor’s organizing renaissance than from the ground up.[16]
The national collective bargaining agreement between the Teamsters Union and United Parcel Service covering over 350,000 workers expires on August 1, 2023. Amazon is an existential threat to the wages and workplace standards that Teamsters’ union has negotiated at UPS and many other warehouses and transportation companies. Teamster organizers are urging that the contract campaign (and possible national strike) be tightly linked in support of the workers organizing at Amazon.
UPS Teamster Anthony Rosario, a member of New York Local 804 said, “When Amazon workers see us fighting for a good contract [at UPS], they will have a better understanding of what the labor movement is. And when we win a good contract, we’re helping them too. By taking on UPS, Teamsters will be setting the standard for the entire warehouse and delivery sector. We can show the world what a labor movement really looks like!” [17]
UPS Teamster activists are taking time off to enlist their coworkers at UPS to help Amazon workers’ organize and giving aid and support to Amazon workers who are building their union.[18]
Already workers from the Amazonians United network have engaged in coordinated strike action in geographic areas like the Northeast corridor and Chicagoland. These strikes, while small and short term, are great proving grounds for building solidarity and worker confidence. More strategic strikes are likely in the future at key nodes of the Amazon supply chain.[19]
The midterm elections of 2022 and the quadrennial Presidential election loom large for the future of American democracy. The growth of unions, particularly in key nodes in the economy is one of the best antidotes to the fascist appeals of Donald Trump and his acolytes.[20]
…
[1] “Worker-led win at Amazon warehouse could provide new labor playbook,” by Jacob Bogage, Aaron Gregg and Gerrit De Vynck, Washington Post, April 2, 2022,
[2] “The NLRB is overwhelmed with petitions for union representation elections,” NLRB Office of Public Affairs, April 06, 2022
[3] “Staten Island workers vote ‘yes’ for first Amazon union in U.S.,” by Rand Wilson and Peter Olney, Stansbury Forum, April 6, 2022
[4] “How Amazon and Starbucks Workers Are Upending the Organizing Rules,” Chris Brooks, May 31, 2022
[5] “Three Paths Forward for Labor After Amazon,” by Harmony Goldberg and Erica Smiley, Boston Review June 6, 2022, Boston Review
[7] “A Movement Moment and a Real NLRB,” by Wade Rathke, Working-Class Perspectives, May 9, 2022,
[8] “Remarks by President Biden in Honor of Labor Unions,” SPEECHES AND REMARKS, SEPTEMBER 08, 2021
[9] “Protected Concerted Activity“
[10] “NLRB General Counsel Launches New 10(j) Injunction Initiative When Employers Threaten or Coerce Employees During Organizing Campaigns,” February 01, 2022, NLRB Office of Public Affairs,
[11] “Union membership rate declines in 2021, returns to 2019 rate of 10.3 percent,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, January 25, 2022.
[12] “AFL-CIO committed to organize one million new workers in ten years,” Ian Kullgren, Daily Labor Report, Bloomberg Law, June 13, 2022
[13] “The AFL-CIO’s Official New Goal: Continued Decline,” HAMILTON NOLAN, In These Times, JUNE 14, 2022
[14] “Now Is the Time for Unions to Go on the Offensive,” by CHRIS BOHNER, Jacobin
[15] “AFL-CIO Budget Is a Stark Illustration of the Decline of Organizing,” By Hamilton Nolan, Splinter, May 16, 2019
[16] “Socialists Can Seize the Moment at Amazon,” Jacobin Magazine, , and a second suggestion for young socialists in 2020, “Amazon Workers Desperately Need an Insurgent Union Campaign,” Jacobin Magazine
[17] “THE UPS CONTRACT AND ORGANIZING AMAZON“, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, JUNE 24, 2022
[18] “HOW WORKING TEAMSTERS ARE HELPING ORGANIZE AMAZON,” Teamsters for a Democratic Union, JUNE 24, 2022, and TEAMSTER AMAZON ORGANIZERS SPEAK OUT, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, JUNE 24, 2022
From volunteer organizing to solidarity rallies, members are stepping up to meet the Amazon challenge.
[20] “Winning Back The Factory Towns That Made Trumpism Possible,” by Mike Lux, Jun 7, 2022