Solving a WWII-era mystery – My mother kept her abortions secret
By Molly Martin
The most personal most shocking secret my mother never told me I had to find out from my cousin Sandy.
In 1974 Sandy had just returned from a decade working for the U.S. Army in Germany. She came home and she came out, returning with a female lover and a seven-year-old stepson. Sandy is ten years older than I, and so represents a generation of lesbians different from mine, women forced to live in the closet before the gay liberation and feminist movements burst upon our scene. Running away to Europe had been a good way to keep her secret.
Sandy and I hung out together in Seattle and one night after a bit too much whiskey (she’s been sober now for many years) she asked me if I’d ever heard the story about my mother’s trip to Paris during the war. My mother, Flo, had told me many stories about working for the American Red Cross as a “donut girl” during World War II in Europe, but I’d never heard that one.
“What was so special about a trip to Paris?”
“Did you know Flo had an abortion?”
“Wow! No kidding! She never told me. How do you know?
“Mom told me. I guess she was sworn to secrecy, but she couldn’t keep the secret. She had to tell someone.”
Sandy’s mother, Ruth, had told her that my mother had traveled from the front lines to Paris, where their sister Eve was working as an Army nurse, to get an abortion. This would have been in the fall of 1944. I had many questions, but Sandy couldn’t answer most of them. We speculated about who the father was and whether Eve had been involved in the abortion.
I was shocked. Flo and I were close and I couldn’t believe she hadn’t told me, her only daughter, about this significant part of her own history.
When Sandy told me the story of the abortion, my mother was still living and she still had three living sisters. I had time and abundant resources. I resolved to find out the answers.
There were times during my childhood when Flo talked about her experiences in Europe. She showed us kids the big scrapbook she had made after the war and I remember looking through it often. Our favorite part was a series of colored pencil drawings made by Liz, one of the Red Cross gals she traveled with in the Army’s Third Division. They showed the “girls” washing their hair in helmets, peeing by the side of the road, driving big trucks, and roughing it in tents. It wasn’t until I opened the album again as an adult that I looked more carefully.
Flo did a pretty good job of documenting her time in Europe, taking photographs with a tiny Minox camera. She had traveled on a hospital ship to Italy in 1943. Her Red Cross unit followed General Mark Clark into Rome as it was liberated by the Allies. She was in France, Germany and Austria as well. She was the only person to photograph the field ceremony honoring war hero Audie Murphy and the photo from her album was later used in the making of a movie about him. She got lots of street cred from that, and several post-war newspaper stories about it are included in her album.
She hated Nazis and that translated into a hatred of Germans, whom she called Krauts. She distrusted Germans as a people, and believed they were all culpable for war crimes, even and maybe especially, those who claimed ignorance. She had witnessed the liberation of Dachau and took pictures, which were “lost” by a German photo shop. But she didn’t really talk about that part of the war until the 70s, sparked by a TV show, QBVII, based on a novel by Leon Uris. That discussion of concentration camp life allowed her to start thinking and writing about her experiences again. But until then she didn’t talk about the Holocaust and of course her album contained no pictures that might have induced questions from us kids.
She did tell us about her fiancé who was killed by a mortar shell, but she didn’t say much. Most of what I know I learned from the album, which includes photos of her and her fiancé, Gene, and letters from his mother in Oregon. There are also letters from other paramours, but she was clearly heartbroken by Gene’s death and not interested in settling down with any other, at least then.
Was she pregnant when he was killed? Did she have an abortion in Europe? Why wouldn’t she ever tell me about it? Why couldn’t I ever bring myself to ask her point blank?
In 1979, Flo and I traveled to Sweden and Norway together to visit our relatives and visit the town in Norway where her father was born. We felt particularly familial. This seemed like a good time to ask and I put some thought into how to approach the question. I didn’t think she would give me a straight answer if I asked her directly. I would have to work up to it.
Me: It must have been difficult to avoid getting pregnant while you were with the Red Cross. Did they issue you birth control?
Her: What!!
Ok, poor opening line, I know. I guess I was implying that she had sex with lots of men. Which would have been understandable. That’s what I was doing.
I felt her withdraw and knew, I think, that she would not have told me the truth even if I’d asked point blank. I didn’t have a Plan B.
In 1983, my mother died without ever giving up the story. But there were still two living sisters, Eve, the nurse, and Ruth, to whom she had told the story. Ruth wrote me a note after a story of mine was published in an anthology about the deaths of our mothers. The story was about Flo’s funeral. Ruth took issue with some of the “facts” of my story. I wrote back to say, essentially, this is my story and I get to tell it my way. If you want your story told, write it. Ruth responded with a wonderfully detailed descriptive story about her childhood. This made me hopeful she might “remember” other details about the family. Might she tell me something more about Flo’s trip to Paris?
After I got Aunt Ruth’s letter, I considered how to respond. Should I start with trivia and slowly up the ante before she caught on? Should I just blurt out what I wanted to know and hope for the best? I decided on a compromise strategy. I did come right out and ask the Paris question, mixed in with a few other family history questions. I don’t believe I ever heard from Ruth again, except she did send me Xmas cards every year, filled with trivia. Then she died.
Aunt Eve must know something, I reasoned. After all, she had been in Paris when Flo visited right after her fiancé was killed. Eve, the nurse, was terribly practical. She also had a knack for talking non-stop over anyone about her boys and her cats. I didn’t think she would lie to me. She asked me to edit a personal history she had written about her time as a nurse in WWII and I used that opening to question her.
When I finally asked the question Eve seemed genuinely perplexed. She knew Flo had been pregnant. Was she pregnant by the fiancé who died? No, Eve didn’t think so. Well, who was the father then? She thought it might have been another guy Flo was dating. Really? I’m thinking: your fiancé dies, you are disconsolate, and then you get pregnant by another guy? I didn’t think so. But Eve remembered that Flo had told her she had miscarried while carrying heavy packages when moving to a new camp. She didn’t think Flo had had an abortion at all. My assumption that Ruth had gotten the information from Eve did a back flip. Flo hadn’t told Eve! She had only told Ruth, her closest sister, and sworn her to secrecy.
Flo and I got feminism together. As every new book came out about the movement, we rushed to the bookstore to buy it. I still have my copy of Sisterhood is Powerful, which she inscribed to me. She got angry about how she was treated at work. She was paid too little for what she did. When I went through her things after she died, in her jewelry box was a little pad of notes that could be pulled off, licked and stuck on something. They read “This Insults Women.” So many things then insulted women. We were sticking stickers on the world.
In 1972 the first Issue of Ms. Magazine was published. Flo had kept it and I found it in her collections. In the very first issue was a section about abortion. Famous women, so many of them, admitted publicly to having had an abortion. It was liberating! Until then abortion was not talked about. I didn’t imagine at that time that my mother had had abortions. I myself had been very careful not to get pregnant. But by the time I became sexually active, birth control pills had become available and I made sure I was on them before I chose to have sex with men. It seemed to me that getting pregnant would be the end of my world. In high school (before I ever had sex) I once asked my parents what they would do if I got pregnant. They said they would find an abortionist. Later, when I became a feminist activist in college, I realized this was not so easy.
I wondered if my dad knew about Flo’s trip to Paris and the abortion. After Flo died, he came to visit me in San Francisco with one of his many girlfriends.
“Hey, tell me something. Did you know Flo had an abortion when she was in Europe?”
He said he hadn’t known, but, he said, “I bet I know something that you don’t.”
“What?”
“She had an abortion before you were born. We had just gotten married and we didn’t see how we could afford kids. I drove her to Portland for the abortion.”
I was flabbergasted. Here was another secret she had kept from me! Now I wonder if my parents were even married then. In 1947 you didn’t go around telling folks you were pregnant and unmarried. Also, we could never believe anything Dad said; he was full of blarney.
Later I learned of Ruth Barnett, the abortionist who ran her business in Portland from 1918 to 1968. After she became pregnant in 1911 at 16 and had an abortion, she was convinced that all women should have the opportunity to receive an abortion if they wanted one. Barnett was the target of frequent raids, and was in and out of jail, but she kept it going for 50 years, retiring only after being convicted and sent to prison.*
Flo had kept the story of both her abortions secret from me, and she’d kept the Paris abortion secret from her husband all her life. Was she afraid of having to talk about Gene, the love of her life, to her husband? Maybe, like the concentration camps, she just didn’t want to go there again. Or maybe the shame was too deep.
World War II was a global conflict on an unprecedented scale. Women all over the world were recruited to serve the armed forces in many different roles. Approximately 400,000 American women served in the armed forces. What did the Army do when they got pregnant? Logic would indicate the military had some sort of policy, written or informal, to handle pregnancies for women who didn’t want to bear children. I hope so. I hope my mother didn’t have to seek an underground abortion in Paris.
…
*Ruth Barnett memoir: They Weep on My Doorstep. Also The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Lawby Rickie Solinger
Zero Population Growth Starts Here
By Eve Goldberg
The following stories are true. The first two are the memories of friends – which I recorded and edited. The final story is my own.
— E.G.
1 – DONNA
When my aunt found out that Aaron was Jewish, she told me to move out of her house.
It was 1951. I was working as a probation officer in Cleveland, Ohio. It was my first job after college. I had been dating Aaron, a reporter for the local paper, for about a year.
After I left my aunt’s house, I rented a room on the second floor of a house nearby where I had my own bathroom and tiny kitchenette.
Then I missed my period. I had been using birth control, a cream called Norform, but my periods were usually very regular, so I was worried. I told Aaron about it and we went to see a doctor who was a friend of his. The doctor gave me a pregnancy test and it came back positive.
So there I was. I was pregnant, unmarried, and 23.
In that time and place, my friends and family would have considered it shameful if I got pregnant without being married, and also shameful to get married just because I was pregnant. But more to the point, I just plain didn’t want to get married. I wasn’t ready for it. And I definitely didn’t want to have a baby — it was the furthest thing from my mind.
So we asked Aaron’s doctor friend if he would do an abortion. “Oh, no!” he said. “I’d lose my license.” He did tell us, though, that if a psychiatrist vouched that an abortion was necessary for my mental health it could be done legally.
I remember the psychiatrist vividly. He was tall and skinny and kind of bent over, and he and wore glasses with thick black rims. He listened while I told him the full story about my relationship with Aaron, that I’m pregnant, and not only did I not want to get married under the gun, I didn’t want a baby. Period. I told him that I didn’t think I could handle having a baby. I remember so well what happened next. This psychiatrist looked at me and said, “I think you can handle it.” And you know what? That’s when I really came into my own. Because it’s true, I probably could have “handled it.” But it wasn’t what I wanted. He didn’t give a flying fuck about me. It made me mad. Really mad. That’s when I knew I’d have to get an illegal abortion.
So Aaron checked around and found a doctor who’d had his license revoked for giving abortions. We made an appointment and drove out to his house which was in a suburb of Cleveland. The street was lined with maple trees, and it was autumn, so the trees were full and bright red. The doctor lived in a two-story white house with a deep front porch.
We knocked and the doctor let us in. He was a middle-aged man, probably about 50. There were a couple of chairs set up in the entry area where we sat, and the doctor asked me questions like: Why did I want an abortion? Was I sure about this decision? Things like that. I told him the truth. Aaron stayed in the entry area, while I followed the doctor into a room which might have once been a study. It was setup with one of those high examination tables and stirrups. I was way too nervous to really check it out. I was scared. I wasn’t scared about it being illegal, but I cared about my body. I didn’t want to be hurt or injured. I put my feet in those stirrups, and I remember feeling very vulnerable. I didn’t know what he was going to do. The details after that are a blur. Afterwards, the doctor told me to expect passing some blood clots within the next 24 hours, at which time the abortion would be complete.
The next day nothing happened, no blood clots. I called Aaron that night and told him that nothing was happening, I wasn’t passing anything. So, he called the doctor and we went back the next day and he did a second abortion. I was feeling fine, so Aaron dropped me at the place where I was living, and he went home. This time, though, I started to cramp and bleed — lots and lots of blood, for hours — so much that I got really scared. I thought I was going to bleed to death. I felt isolated and afraid. Other than Aaron, I had nobody to talk to about it, nobody to turn to and ask questions. I frantically called Aaron and told him what was happening. He called his doctor friend — the one who did the pregnancy test.
That doctor came immediately that night to my place. He examined me and gave me a shot and some medicine, it might have been antibiotics, I’m not sure. The profuse bleeding stopped, but I kept spotting for six weeks. I knew I’d better go see to a regular, legal doctor. I went to an ob-gyn. I was nervous about telling him that I’d had an abortion because I didn’t know if he’d report it to the police, or what. But I felt like my health and maybe my life was at stake, so I told him the truth. He examined me and told me I needed a D&C, which would clean out my uterus. He arranged for me to go to a hospital to have it done.
So, I had the D&C in the hospital, and that was finally it.
The whole abortion ordeal definitely influenced my life. To cut to the chase, after Aaron and I broke up, I married the next man I dated — Jack. I thought to myself: You sleep with him and you’re going to get pregnant again. Then what are you gonna do? I didn’t want another illegal abortion. And I was also thinking, I need to get married. All my high school girlfriends were already married. I was the last one. I was 24. So, we got married. I never regretted marrying Jack — he was a very sweet and decent person — but there was also that pressure I felt, it was definitely part of the picture. Jack and I had three children, and I was so relieved that they all came out healthy and whole.
For many years, I never told a single person about the abortion, not because I was ashamed but because it was socially frowned upon. The first person I ever told was my second husband, Frank. I fell in love with him, and I told him right away. I wanted him to know everything about me. I said, “I had an abortion.” And he said, “So?”
That was the right guy for me.
2 – LINDA
I was living underground in New York City when I found out I was pregnant. It was 1970 and I was a member of Weatherman — a radical, anti-imperialist organization. Some of us, including me, were doing anti-war organizing on college campuses. Others of us were making bombs.
We all went underground because of the Townhouse Explosion. Some Weatherman members had been constructing a bomb in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse, when the bomb blew up. Three members of Weatherman were killed. It was huge national news. Right after that we all went underground. We realized we might be arrested for having an organizational association with the Townhouse Explosion. We went underground to figure out what to do and to avoid arrest.
We severed ties with family and friends, got false IDs, and began living under false names.
What I remember about living underground in New York was having a large set of keys with me at all times — keys to the apartments of supporters who were willing to let me crash and hide out at their place. Mobility was important because we never knew when the FBI would come around. I had been living like this for a month or two when I realized I was pregnant. I didn’t know who the father was. I had been in a monogamous relationship with Scott, but there was a “smash monogamy” campaign in Weatherman, so most of the couples had broken up. I didn’t have much sex after that, but I did sleep with someone other than Scott.
The main thing I knew was that my life was not conducive to raising a child. I was committed to being a revolutionary, to changing the world. So, no matter what, I wasn’t going to have a baby.
I was trying to figure out how to get an abortion, which was illegal at that time, when I was arrested during an undercover FBI sting operation. I was charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot, the riot being the Days of Rage action we had organized in 1969 in Chicago. My parents bailed me out, but a condition of my release pending court was to live with my parents under house arrest. I went back to their home in Fort Dodge, Iowa. I was 23 years old.
It was very intense to be arrested and pregnant. To be dealing with, oh my god if I don’t get an abortion, I’ll have a baby and might be in prison and what would that mean? Would my mother raise this kid? On top of that, I was rebelling against my parents at that point, so it was psychologically very weird to be back at their house again. My parents were conservative Republicans and couldn’t comprehend my politics. They didn’t understand my lifestyle; collective living and not getting married were unheard of to them. Plus, here in Iowa I was isolated from all of my friends and comrades. I felt a lot of pressure to get the abortion quickly because I knew I might go to prison, for how long I didn’t know. I felt really stressed out and alone.
Immediately, I told my mom that I was pregnant. She was a very straight, middle-aged, middle-class woman. But she understood that I didn’t want to have a baby and that I couldn’t take care of one, so she was supportive of my decision to get an abortion. It was a big deal for her to say, “Sure, I’ll help you get an illegal abortion.” We didn’t tell my dad.
Through my attorney I made arrangements to get an abortion while I was in Chicago for a court appearance. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without one or both of my parents, so my mother and I flew to Chicago to go to court. After the hearing, she and I walked over to a nearby Woolworths. It was a hot, sticky summer day and I remember sweating through the nice blouse I’d put on for the court appearance.
We entered Woolworths together, and as my mom pretended to shop for thimbles and thread in the notions aisle, I went into the bathroom, then out the back door. A car driven by a man I had never met was waiting for me outside. The man told me to get in back. “Lie down on the seat,” he said. “Don’t get up or look up until I tell you.”
We started to drive through Chicago. With my head pressed sideways against the seat, I could see only light and dark shadows pass by the window. I began to worry. How would the abortion turn out? Would I go to jail or prison? Would I ever see my friends again? I was nervous because the abortion wouldn’t be in a doctor’s office or hospital, but on the other hand I had confidence in my attorney hooking me up with the right network of people to make this all happen. But what if I was putting this network in danger? I knew that the FBI had been following me prior to my arrest, and I didn’t know if they still were. We had taken precautions to see that we weren’t being followed, but I really didn’t know for sure. Lying silently on the back seat, my mind was a sea of stress and anxiety.
Finally the car stopped and the driver said I could get out. We were in a neighborhood of old, tall apartment buildings, brick and sandstone. I followed the man into one of the buildings, we went up to the second floor, and he knocked on an apartment door. A black woman in a turban answered. I followed her up many flights of stairs to another apartment where I met the doctor, a white man. This second apartment was completely empty except for the kitchen where an ordinary kitchen table had been modified with medical stirrups. I felt comforted because at least the room was clean and the doctor had on an immaculate white medical smock. He was kind and reassuring. I got up on the table and the doctor did the procedure right there.
After the abortion, we drove back to Woolworths. My mom was still inside, pretending to shop. How she managed to pull off the fake-shopping act for several hours, I don’t know. But there she was in her crisp navy dress with a blue and white scarf around her neck, carefully examining baseball gloves in the sporting goods aisle.
It was such a relief to get the abortion over with. And really what my mother did was quite amazing and brave, doing this clandestine errand with her daughter. We hugged briefly, not wanting to bring attention to ourselves. Then we took a taxi to the airport and flew back to Iowa.
3 – EVE
I was pedaling my white ten-speed from our apartment in Santa Monica to UCLA when the nausea hit. By the time I reached campus, the feeling had subsided. The next day the nausea was worse, again occurring while I rode my bike to school. I thought maybe it was caused by the fumes from the trucks and buses and cars that passed. Or maybe it was stomach cancer. Eeks!
That day after class, I biked over to visit my mom at her job on campus. She had gone back to school after raising her kids and was now a post-doc fellow in neuroscience. I locked up my bike and took the elevator up to her lab. We chatted for a while, and then I mentioned the nausea. Without a pause, she said:
“Do you think you’re pregnant?”
Oh. That thought hadn’t crossed my mind. “I guess it’s possible.”
“Well, get yourself a test. Do you have a gynecologist?”
“Of course.” (I didn’t.)
“And let me know if you need anything.”
“Mom, please. David and I can take care of it.”
“I know you can, dear. I’m just offering.”
“Okay. I know. Thanks.”
Yup. Pregnant. I was 20 years old and it was 1974. David and I had been living together for less than a year. He was 29, an assistant professor in Anthropology, with sole custody of his 5-year-old daughter. The three of us lived in an apartment with a view of the ocean, green shag carpet (really!), and rent so low it’s embarrassing. Our life worked and we were basically happy.
“What do you want to do?” David asked. “I’m up for another child if you are. We could get married too…uh, if you want.”
There was only one thought on my mind: How soon can I get the abortion?
The answer was two weeks. Two weeks of morning sickness which, it turns out, yields slightly to Saltine crackers and 7-Up.
The funny thing is, I don’t remember the actual abortion. I have a memory of going to a doctor’s office in Westwood, and the doctor telling me that she was going to perform a Vacuum Aspiration. She said that I might have some cramping which would feel like menstrual cramps, but that the procedure would be essentially painless and short. My next true and clear memory is being in the passenger seat of David’s VW and saying, “I would really like to eat some meat.”
We drove to Zucky’s, an old-fashioned deli in Santa Monica, where I ordered bratwurst sausage and sauerkraut. I remember this because, while I wasn’t a true vegetarian and did eat fish once in a while, that was it. But this day, right after the abortion, I wanted meat. Like, really wanted it. Like a craving or a need. I wanted to eat something that bled. So we had lunch at Zucky’s and then we went home.
There was no coda to my abortion. No hemorrhaging. No infection. No guilt. If anything, it felt like an initiation. Like getting braces on your teeth in junior high — not something you want or wish for, but once you’re there it’s almost like joining a club. My friend Holly had had an abortion the year before, and just a few months prior to mine I had accompanied my friend Cristina to get one. It was a safe, legal, minor medical procedure. And it saved me from adding more children into a world which I believed already had plenty.
** This essay is dedicated to Norma McCorvey—aka Jane Roe; to the Jane Collective, which from 1969-1973 helped women in the Chicago area get illegal abortions; and to my cousin Katherine Morrison, ob-gyn extraordinaire, who has risked her life and livelihood to provide low-cost, full-choice health care options for women.
…
Can Workers Overseas Provide: Tips for U.S. Labor Organizers?
By Steve Early
The worldwide spread of Covid-19 created major challenges for workers and their unions throughout the globe. Very similar pandemic disruptions provided a timely reminder of the inter-connectedness of the global economy—and the need for cross-border links that enable workers to share information about their own struggles and learn from organized labor in other countries.
What are some of the “best practices” abroad that might be reproducible in the U.S. to help strengthen workplace protections here? Two labor-oriented academics, Kim Scipes and Robert Ovetz, have recently published collections of case studies that answer that question in great detail. Their new books will be useful to both union organizers and campus-based observers of comparative labor movements.
In Building Global Labor Solidarity (Lexington Books), Scipes brings together his own past writing on international labor struggles over the last four decades. A retired professor of sociology at Purdue, he is the author of several previous books, including KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994 (New Day Publishers, 1996) and AFL-CIO’s Secret WarAgainst Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lexington Books, 2010). Earlier this month in Philadelphia, he was involved in efforts to inform national AFL-CIO delegates about what’s wrong with their federation’s continuing dependence on U.S. government funding of its international operations.
Shop Floor Internationalism
With a focus on “social movement unionism” that overlaps with Ovetz’s, Scipes describes workplace organizing by South African and Filipino workers—and how it was supported by left-leaning unions like the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). As Scipes explains, U.S. workers are far more likely to embrace what he calls “shop floor internationalism” if their own union has a tradition of militancy and democracy like the ILWU. But many labor organizations are not as rank-and-file oriented. And changing their leadership or structure is not easy, at home or abroad. “While building global labor solidarity is a necessary task,” according to Scipes, “it is not sufficient: we must revitalize our domestic labor organizations.”
In Workers Inquiry and Global Class Struggle (Pluto Press), Ovetz showcases the work of trade union researchers and organizers engaged in this project, in different ways, on four continents. They report on shop floor organizing and/or strike activity by truckers in Argentina, teachers in Mexico, tech workers in the U.K., auto makers in India, and other manufacturing workers in China and South Africa. Drawing on his own experience in the California Faculty Association (CFA) at San Jose State University, Ovetz critiques past contract campaigning in America’s largest public university system which, in his view, failed to produce a “credible statewide strike threat.” The result has been “modest wage gains cancelled out by concessions on productivity, two-tier medical coverage, and the growth of contingent lecturers.”
Other contributors to Workers Inquiry also try, in Ovetz’s words, to identify “new organizational forms, tactics, and strategies that can be deployed by workers to win, be it in their workplace, community, sector of the economy, or as a class.” In Mexico, public school teachers could not depend on their notoriously corrupt national union to defend them from neo-liberal “education reform.” So, in 1979, they created a grassroots network which expanded to 100,000 union activists around the country, particularly active in rural areas. This dissident caucus, known as CNTE, has maintained its political autonomy and continues to resist “privatization of a vital and highly lucrative public service,” even under the more labor friendly government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Under conditions of far greater repression, Chinese factory workers, as described by Hong Kong labor researcher Jenny Chan, have found ways to fight for better conditions with or without the support of the country’s only legal labor organization, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). As reported by Marxist scholar Anna Curcio, highly exploited immigrant workers in Italy’s logistics sector—many of them female and non-white—have resisted harassment, discrimination, and sexual violence in warehouse jobs by using “their disruptive power” and forging alliances with “students and other precarious workers.” In post-apartheid South Africa, workers have used wild-cat strikes and sit-ins to confront former allies, like Cyril Ramaphosa. He led the South African miner’s union before becoming one of his country’s richest men and then a successful African National Congress candidate for president.
A Social Movement Union
In Building Global Labor Solidarity, Scipes returns to the subject of insurgent unionism in the Philippines. He recounts the history of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), a radical labor federation that developed during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (whose kleptocratic family just returned to power via the election of his son, Ferdinand, Jr. as president of the country). KMU was the product of militant union organizing in manufacturing plants, copper mines, sugar plantations, and other forms of agriculture. When founded forty years ago, the new labor center had only 50,000 members. But, as an alternative to traditional unions that sold out their members and failed to organize against foreign domination of the economy, KMU quickly expanded to include nearly 750,000 workers by the late 1980s-early 1990s.
By 1989, KMU had played a catalytic role in several nationwide general strikes, while surviving the arrest, detention, and, in some cases, murder of key militants. Its organizing model, according to Scipes, emphasized “rank-and-file member, not just steward level, education, building new relationships with sectoral organizations across the social order; and uniting with workers and labor organizations around the world.” In addition to putting thousands of workers through a 3-day popular education course on “Genuine Trade Unionism,” the KMU was a key part of BAYAN. This broader community-labor coalition included several million people involved in women’s rights campaigns, organizations of the urban poor, and opposition to U.S. military bases.
In the Philippines during this period, KMU activists not only experienced state-sanctioned violence under the original Marcos regime. They also had to compete with the AFL-CIO-backed Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), which championed “Christian values” and fervent anti-communism. Created with government support during a period of martial law, the TUCP received millions of dollars from the U.S. labor federation’s Asian-American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI). This cold-war institution was far more concerned about reducing radical labor influence than challenging the exploitation of Filipino workers by multi-national companies.
As a leading U.S. backer of the KMU for four decades, Scipes has helped educate fellow trade unionists here about the negative role played by AFL-CIO operatives in the Philippines and other less developed countries, during the Cold War and today. As noted above, he’s part of a new pressure group, called the Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International Operations (LEPAIO).
Its members are trade unionists opposed to US government funding of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center or the international work of any individual affiliate, via grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Instead, LEPAIO calls for “direct worker to worker links” with union members throughout the world and solidarity actions that target the multi-national companies that have become their common adversaries. That’s a common sense approach whose feasibility and effectiveness is well documented in both Building Global Labor Solidarity and Workers Inquiry and Global Class Struggle.
…
Click on this link to order Building Global Labor Solidarity and use code: LXFANDF30 when pre-ordering/ordering the paperback.
“How many Mozarts are working in steel mills?”
By Trae James
The title of this post comes from Edward Sadlowski, steelworker. He was a labor activist and a past Director of United Steelworkers of America, District 31 in Chicago.
“Who among you is a musician, poet, rapper, or dancer?” This is one of my first questions on Day One of any organizing or bargaining training I teach for the Building Trades Academy. When worker musicians and artists self-identify we have a talent show at the end of the four-day class. Glenn Perusek, my training partner, and I believe that these talent shows are fundamental to building class camaraderie and solidarity. Organizing involves tapping the emotional soul of workers and music and art are a key component.
Trae James, a member of the Plasterers and Cement Masons union who attended our most recent training in Ft. Lauderdale, wrote the poem and notes below.
Peter Olney
.
Seasons Most Apparent
Many years have gone by us sweet friend of mine
Seasons most apparent
Our spring but a tick to the piece that tells time in our lives
As if our seeds just bloomed
Reasons almost apparent
Our days in the sun
Free willed and strong in our prime
We thought we were valiant
Our summer was vibrant
Now the velvet petals fly away in the wind
They tear free and fall to the dirt with a thunder that screams our worth
With winter incoherence
Seasons most apparent
Trae C. James, Plasterer, union leader, poet Milwaukee, Wisconsin
.
As I dug through my box of dribble and poems, I came across this newspaper photo. This was taken by a Milwaukee Journal (now the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) reporter, moments after I penned “Seasons Most Apparent” on the wall inside of the upper floor’s balcony doors. I was unaware of the photographer, but was given the article by a family member, some days later. That is me (circled in red) on the balcony, still sporting the long hair that I wore after the military and into my early 30’s.
The building was originally a Schlitz brewing company family home in Milwaukee. A religious sect bought it, lived there, and translated the Bible in the building for 25 years. Warren Buffet’s youngest son Peter bought it from them. The third floor was his recording studio. Upon his divorce in 1993, the building sold again. The new owner renovated and restored the property. I was fortunate to be apprenticing for the plastering company awarded the plaster restoration.
The balcony below me, is the shared bathroom for the presidential guest rooms. The lady of the house was a college and lifelong friend of Hilary Clinton. The rooms on either side of the lower balcony, went on to be used by Hilary and Chelsea when they would visit.
I went on to put poems in many other structures throughout the region. There are poems behind a niche wall in a Vaudeville era Theatre in Sheboygan, WI. Another of my poems is in the domed swimming pool ceiling at the Grand hotel in Milwaukee and one is behind the repaired ornamental cornice above the Plaza hotel’s dining room. Many other commercial and residential projects as well are plastered with my poems.
…
The Stansbury Forum obit for Sadlowski.
For more on working class art and culture: Local 1199 Bread and Roses Cultural Project Files
Trench Warfare in California Hospitals
By Cal Winslow
Kaiser Clinicians Prepare to Strike: 91% in favor of walking out
Two thousand northern California Kaiser Permanente mental health practitioners, members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) have voted to strike the giant California health maintenance organization (HMO). The result of the late May balloting was 91% in favor of walking out – the date yet to be determined.
The vote follows a three-day strike in Hawaii. In May, Hawaiian psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and chemical dependency counselors walked picket lines on Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island to protest Kaiser’s severe understaffing at clinics and medical facilities. Staffing, patient loads, working conditions, these issues are the same right throughout Kaiser’s vast system. The wealthy and powerful corporation that self-advertises as non-profit and patient centered cynically refuses to meet minimal government mandated staffing requirements while enforcing working conditions that demoralize clinicians and place mental health patients in danger – severe, sometimes fatal – all in the name of the bottom line.
These hospital strikes are the workers’ fightback; they represent a sort of trench warfare, front lines in a war of attrition, with Californians’ lives and livelihoods at stake.
There have been half a dozen such strikes at Kaiser in the past decade, as mental health care workers, unheralded, have fought to make it possible to meet patients’ needs with the attention and treatments they deserve and have paid for. They are part of a much wider movement seeking to raise mental health care to, if not a right, at least parity with medical care.
This country is experiencing a deep crisis: depression, addiction, suicide and COVID 19. Added to the mix, yet another group of massacres, a political malaise, and the specter of war. Stress is high and it undermines resilience and resistance causing more medical illness and more mental health issues.
Through all that California health care strikers then are truly heroes and still on the front lines of care through COVID, high stress, and cutbacks.
Kaiser CEOs are compensated handsomely. Salaries compared to workers: 231-1!
The California health care industry is massive, a corporate kingdom employing hundreds of thousands, cashing in with billions in profit – for profit and not for profit alike.
Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest not-for-profits in the country, is the pacesetter in California. Kaiser is based in the Bay Area and has 39 hospitals and some 700 medical facilities in Washington State, Oregon, Hawaii, Colorado, Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia. Since just before COVID its membership had grown by 600,000; it now employs some 300,000 workers, including 80,000 nurses and doctors. In 2020, its profits were $6.4 billion. In 2021, its net worth, according to the California Department of Managed Health Care, was $43.3 billion. CEOs are compensated handsomely. Salaries compared to workers: 231-1! Greg Adams, the chief executive in Oakland HQ received $17.3 million in total compensation in 2020. He and the 100 top executives have the benefit of eight separate retirement plans.
The NUHW represents 4000 Kaiser mental health technicians, clinicians (psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and chemical dependency counselors), this including another 2000 in southern California who settled earlier in the year.
Ken Rogers works at Kaiser’s South Sacramento/Elk Grove clinic. He is a psychologist and NUHW shop steward and an elected member of the NUHW’s executive board. He’s been at Kaiser for nineteen years. “There are two overriding issues here,” he insists. “We have been pushing Kaiser to increase staffing and invest more in behavioral health care so that we can actually address the needs of our patients, but Kaiser keeps refusing.” In response to the union’s demands and threatened by the state, Kaiser has, at times, increased hiring. Even when Kaiser does hire therapists, however they “rarely last.” Therapy, Rogers explains requires “face to face time” but “we aren’t allowed that time, the time we need and the patients deserve. More time for face-to-face visits, more visits and more time for all the other things we have to do -–charting, answering emails and phone calls. COVID has made this all that much worse.” So patients “endure unconscionable delays, and we’re always behind, we just keep working, no breaks, always ‘above and beyond.’ This isn’t what we were hired to do,” he says, “this isn’t what the new hires expect.”
Shay Loftus is a psychologist at Fairfield Mental Health and Wellness Center in Sonoma County. She’s a steward, a member of NUHW ‘s executive board, and a member of the bargaining committee. She too says this is all about patient care and provider retention. “We’ve been in bargaining since July. These sessions,” she says,” move at a glacial pace. Most proposals come from the union. Management will listen (sometimes), go into caucus but come back out with nothing. Kaiser does not present proposals and does not respond to ours.”
“Kaiser just doesn’t get it,” says Rogers. “Kaiser is highly bureaucratic. Its reps think bargaining is just about wages and benefits, that’s all.” So, there’s been a long stall. “There are negotiations, but they get nowhere. Kaiser management,” Rogers agrees, “doesn’t seem interested in bringing this to a conclusion. We present our proposals, Kaiser presents nothing. We end up negotiating against ourselves.”
In the meantime, the staffing crisis continues, there’s burnout (turnover now is higher than ever, more people leave than are hired); “the new people cycle in and out, disappearing into greener pastures, while the patients wait… and wait.”
Loftus explains just how this works (or doesn’t work), “Someone phones in and spends ten minutes in virtual (phone or video) triage, then, within ten days, is assigned thirty minutes with an intake coordinator, who, as required by law, must schedule the patient with a secondary appointment. At that point, though this may take four to eight weeks, they see an assigned therapist. They have one session with the therapist, only then wait four to eight weeks for follow-up. I’m getting appointments now for August.” And when confronted with acute illness? “We find ways to squeeze them in,” says Loftus, “on our lunch time, during administrative time, or at the end of the day, but this just doesn’t work. It’s not sustainable.” Kaiser likes to say “it offers group sessions as a more-timely alternative, but these sessions can include at once seventy or eighty participants.”
Will the threat of an open-ended strike, move Kaiser? Possibly, And, if not, these clinicians will strike. They’ve done it before and Kaiser knows it.
Kaiser is bringing in thousands of new members
Astonishingly, we learn now that Kaiser is bringing thousands of new members into the system. Earlier in the year, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, struck a deal, outside the normal bidding process, to expand its Kaiser’s Medi-Cal enrollment, perhaps by as much as 200,000 new members, many of whom, of course, will require mental health treatment.
There are reasons, members suggest, that Kaiser has consistently played hard ball (and worse) with NUHW – clearly apparent in comparison with any of the other half dozen unions that represent Kaiser workers. First: NUHW is a union that is present on the “shop [hospital] floor,” that fights for its members, that doesn’t do concessions. Second: NUHW’s Kaiser workers have steadfastly refused to give up their watchdog role – their responsibility to their patients and to the community; it has consistently rejected Kaiser’s insistence on “gag rules” imposed in contracts and elsewhere. Why? The union and its members have from the beginning joined other mental health campaigners in advocating for patients and in exposing Kaiser’s negligence, while calling for parity with medical health care and supporting the rights of mental health care patients. Just this year, they joined with others in pressing for the passage of senate bill 221 (SB221), a bill that hopefully will but some teeth into existing California staffing laws and regulations – laws and regulations “that have resulted in failures to provide enrollees follow up appointments with nonphysician providers of mental health and substance use disorder services within the time frames consistent with generally accepted standards of care.” (SB221)
Now the California Department of Managed Health Care has informed Kaiser Permanente that it will be examining whether the company is providing adequate mental health care services to its twelve million members. “This non-routine survey is based on complaints received from enrollees, providers, and other stakeholders concerning the plan’s behavioral health operations,” said Amanda Levy, the department’s deputy director of health policy and stakeholder relations.
Levy says regulators “would evaluate Kaiser’s internal and external provider networks, timely access to care, processes for intake and follow-up appointments, appointment scheduling processes, levels of care and associated decision-making processes, medical record documentation and retention practices, and monitoring of urgent appointments.”
The California Department of Managed Health Care “Help Center “received a 20% increase in behavioral health complaints for Kaiser in 2021 compared to 2020,” writes Rachel Arrezola, a spokesperson for the department.
This is scandalous, more so in a corporation that began as union friendly and was supported by unions as it recruited tens of thousands of members from Bay Area unions in the years following World War II. It is, however, industrial healthcare in California, where any distinction between profit and not for profit is long gone and corporate corruption rules.
In the trenches NUHW carries on its own fight, today in its contract fight “pushing Kaiser to increase staffing and invest more in behavioral health care so that we can actually address the needs of our patients,” says Rogers. “Hopefully these investigations will finally force Kaiser to stop denying that is failing its mental and behavioral patients and start working with us to improve its services.”
NUHW will continue to call out the corporation when necessary, as it has done repeatedly, above all in the acclaimed report, “Care Delayed is Care Denied” and on the union’s website, a goldmine for advocates of mental healthcare reform.
NUHW president Sal Rosselli sees the hospitals and the health care industry as situated squarely in the corporate world. As others did, they were quick to adopt the strategy of the “lean” corporation, always alert to the bottom line, with “just in time” the mantra in regard to staffing, resources and facilities.
Predicably this was catastrophic in the face of the most severe public health crisis and economic collapse in recent memory. It also exposed the health system’s weaknesses that left the US unprepared for COVID-19. Rosselli says, “there were shortages of everything from doctors and nurses to beds and PPEs. They had no plan for a real emergency.”
In the US today, the health care system is highly unequal in its care especially for people of color but for virtually all working-class families, seen vividly in the debacle of testing and vaccine distribution. The primary care system is in crisis, it is disappearing in rural and impoverished urban settings. Life expectancy is in decline. The insurance system leaves millions uninsured, while millions more face exorbitant commercial insurance prices – prices that fuel growth in health spending exposing people to high premiums and deductibles. The elderly face bankruptcy; they lose their homes. Working people with plans tied to their employers are forced to make wage concessions to keep their benefits. Anxiety and depression have become near universal.
In the face of all this, Rosselli insists, Kaiser “is doing nothing,” even as health care workers abandon their careers in tens of thousands, leaving Kaiser and the industry just that much more unprepared for the next crisis. “This is why we fight,” says Rosselli.
The hope now is that the new movements of teachers, baristas and warehouse workers signal the beginning of a new labor movement and can join the fight. “It’s about time. I think the conditions are right. That’s our experience.” At the same time, Rosselli still has hopes that here in California Medicaid for All can be forced back on to the table. “I’m sure it’s coming, if not this year, then next,” he says. “We’ve never needed it more. We’re all for it, we have to get it.”
In the meantime, they will – when necessary – strike! They deserve our support.
…
Myth and Reality
By Hardy Green
The violence of the Old West has been widely described—and magnified in countless Hollywood productions. But a look at the record of Wild West violence shows that it was nothing like as bloody and horrific as the current spate of AR-15 murders across the U.S.
A little background: In the immediate post-Civil War years, a number of “cattle towns” sprouted up across Kansas, encouraging great drives of the immense Texas longhorn herds to these railheads. Dodge City, Abilene, Wichita, Ellsworth, and Caldwell all came into being and flourished between 1867 and 1885. In 1867, a mere 35,000 head of Texas beef were driven to Abilene, with perhaps 20,000 being shipped to points east. Wichita and Dodge City, each with links to the Santa Fe railroad, rose as important shipping points in the 1870s. In 1882, 200,000 head of cattle were sold in Dodge City alone; by 1910, 27 million cattle had made the trek from Texas to the Kansas towns.
But famously, when cattle drives ended, they unleashed upon the towns dozens of rowdy cowboys—suddenly flush with end-of-drive pay and eager to cut loose. Catering to their wants were legions of prostitutes, gambling halls, and 24-hour saloons. Brawls of every sort resulted: During Abilene’s second cattle season, 1869, one cowboy rode his horse into a saloon, pulled a gun on the bartenders, and upon exiting, engaged in a shootout with numerous other “desperate characters.” The towns were thus compelled to effect a variety of peace-keeping mechanisms—one of the most common being hiring a crew of former gunfighters as a police force.
All the same, in the words of historian Robert R. Dykstra’s 1970 work, The Cattle Towns, there were relatively few fatalities. “Many legendary desperadoes and gunfighters sojourned in the cattle towns at one time or another, but few participated in slayings,” he writes. These notable badmen included Doc Holliday, Clay Allison, and the teen-aged gunman John Wesley Hardin. Nor did badge-wearing gunslingers contribute much to fatality stats: “Wild Bill” Hickok killed only two men during his one term as Abilene city marshal; Dodge City’s Wyatt Earp, only one; and “Bat” Masterson, also of Dodge, killed none at all.
According to Dykstra, between 1870 and 1885, total homicides in the five cattle towns amounted to 45.
Many of the wanton cowpokes were likely no older, and probably no less unhappy, than the Uvalde, Texas killer, Salvador Ramos. But a six-shooter bears no comparison to the AR-15 that in only a few minutes fired off over 100 rounds in Uvalde—or to the other AR-15s used in every recent U.S. mass killing from Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue to the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut to the Buffalo, N.Y. supermarket.
It’s no wonder the Uvalde police were afraid to face the shooter.
…
This article appeared previously on Hardy Green’s blog
Winning (Time) Isn’t Everything
By Byron Laursen
Winning Time (the HBO series) is based on writer Jeff Pearlman’s 2014 book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s.” I didn’t write that book and remain dismissive of its reliance on gossip-y, horny-porny topics. But the emergence of the series has brought many questions my way, including some from Peter Olney, a long-term friend (and co-editor of the Stansbury Forum), an admirable worker for “la gente,” the common folk.
The book I did write, which was my first, is “Show Time: Inside the Lakers’ Breakthrough Season”, done with and for Pat Riley, the former player who became the Lakers’ coach and guided them through the 1980s, first as assistant coach then as head coach beginning in 1982.
If memory serves, Sports Illustrated called them the best team of the century – in any sport.
When the book behind the series came to my attention, I couldn’t help noticing they’d borrowed the title Pat and I had used in 1988, giving it a minor typography tweak. Since titles can’t be copyrighted, I didn’t begrudge the author for borrowing it. It had been conferred by our publisher anyway, not by us, because it was marketable. And the book became a strong best-seller, for which the publisher paid us a nice wad of bonus money. I’m still grateful to Pat for choosing me to write it.
Winning Time is enormously successful as entertainment, not as documentation, but entertainment fulfills important needs. The first season also covered a time span before I got lucky enough to be a fringe character around the Lakers organization. Still, I have some bones to pick.
Let’s start with the late Jerry Buss, owner of the Lakers. He was angry that we’d used “Show Time” because in his mind he believed he would one day write a book with that title. He didn’t leave behind any book, as it turned out. But he did leave some impressions. My exposure to Buss was limited. In fact, the friendly hour or so I spent interviewing him was more time than I needed or desired. The charisma in John C. Reilly’s performance as Buss exceeds that of the man he portrays by a huge multiple. In my experience, Buss exuded beyond-ripe body odors from the pits of his single-color silk shirts, and in scoring his numerous “dates” had the services of a couple of guys anyone would describe as pimps. They sorted and culled from the female talent hanging around after games in hopes of making it with one or more of the players, found the one(s) willing to settle instead for the rich guy who paid the players’ salaries, and guided them to Buss.
Jerry West I barely met. But I never saw or heard evidence that he was the tantrum-throwing hothead he’s portrayed to be in the series. Still, he was tightly wound. When I asked him a potentially ticklish question – about a trade Buss wanted to make, one that would have proved stupid – he refused to answer. I shelved the question and moved on. Within two minutes he circled back and answered the question at length, as if needing to unburden.
Kareem, Michael Cooper, Jamaal Wilkes, and many other insiders also disagree with how West was characterized. West has threatened the series producers with a suit. I imagine he could win.
Chick Hearn, the announcer, was his own greatest fan and in my experience a miserable s.o.b. I didn’t know about his alcohol habit until seeing the series, but it fits with his personal behavior. His shtick was so tedious that when I watched from home, I turned off the sound. He liked to believe that he was a power in the organization. But when word went around that Hearn said he disapproved of a certain trade and would make his feelings known, West reacted with laughter.
I should add that Riles never spoke ill of either Buss or Hearn, both of whom were instrumental in his career and deserving of his respect.
Pat may feel honored to have a great actor like Adrien Brody portraying him, I doubt he was ever as stylistically clueless as the Winning Time wardrobe department has made him – no doubt to build contrast for the closet full of bespoke suits he began assembling when his paychecks grew. Before the Armani connection was made, he liked his pants with a welted seam on the legs – a flashy choice, but subtle. In more recent years, Pat has acquired a lead-sled customized postwar Mercury from ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons, and some vintage electric guitars, so he remains a fan of the things that were cool when he was a kid.
Kareem has complained that the portrayal of Magic makes him seem like a simpleton easily led around by the sexual honey constantly being offered, and that his own portrayal makes him seem like “a pompous prick.” Kareem is in fact a complex guy, the “brother from another planet” to many of his teammates, and not comfortable with being the focus of all the personal attention that comes with being extremely tall, talented, intellectual, trail-blazing and fame-worthy. There were times when I saw him as a prick, but I’ve also seen the shy guy who would like to be left alone with his headphones and his music.
What else?
In Magic’s first game and first win as a Laker, he didn’t feed Kareem in the post for the game-winning hook shot. That was done by teammate Don Ford, with a long inbounds pass. I’m sure there are plenty of other halfway-true elements from on-court and off. But Winning Time is no documentary. It’s reductionist, slappy, heavy on the gossip, and it pushes limits in order to convey how much excitement Los Angeles felt for their Lakers through the 1980s. In that pursuit, the show needs to be hyperbolic because the reality was that Magic and Company, Riles and staff, gave L.A. fans an amazingly enormous and long-lasting lift through the decade. It was a generous gift. Magic – Earvin to his family and Buck to his teammates – really is a great presence in any room, magnetic and joyful, with a sense of appreciation for his fan support, even when he might wish to have some time off from the adulation.
Theresa Volpe Laursen, my wife, worked in costuming for the 1989 Eddie Murphy film Harlem Nights. At the cast and crew wrap party, Murphy and other celebrities (Arsenio, etc.) had their party in an exclusive room. We never saw them. But Magic spent much of the evening rubbing shoulders with the drivers, costumers, camera operators, and other down-to-earth folk. Asked to pose for photos, he always obliged, and his smile never faded. Just as he did while running the Lakers to greatness on the court, he made sure everybody had their moments of glory and belonging.
Maybe the second season of Winning Time will give him, and all the Show Time Lakers, a more grown-up and truer to life representation.
…
They Built This City?
By Hardy Green
The current issue of MIT Technology Review is focused on so-called cybercurrencies and contains a jaw-dropper of its own: Crypto millionaires have plans to build their own private cities in Central America.
In an article entitled “Cities Built by Crypto,” tech writer Laurie Clarke describes how, in a plan endorsed by El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, that country is selling $1 billion worth of debt in U.S. dollars to fund the construction of Bitcoin City and Bitcoin mining operations.
The Salvadorean project is not alone: Other crypto investors are leaning on governments from Puerto Rico to Honduras to create semi-autonomous enterprise zones that, they say, will stimulate growth and enrich the locals.
Sounds like more enterprise-zone flapdoodle, you say?
Yes, it seems the Ayn Rand-devotee crowd intends to keep plugging its dubious no-downside, rugged-individualist social vision until there’s a real meltdown.
There’s more to the Salvadorean plan: Bitcoin City’s economy will run on that cybercurrency, be powered by geothermal energy from Conchagua Volcano, and be largely free of taxes…if things go according to the plan.
There’s even a non-profit foundation dedicated to the proliferation of such crypto-cities around the planet, the Free Private Cities Foundation. In such cities, as envisioned by foundation President Titus Gebel and former World Bank economist Paul Romer, residents pay an annual fee for such services as policing—and if the services aren’t provided, these “contract citizens” can take the supposed provider before an independent arbitration tribunal.
To me, the author of a book about company towns, it all sounds a bit like a company town…as envisaged by a lawyer. But there’s a lot yet to be disclosed: Would the managing enterprise own all institutions—from the hospital to the newspaper to housing and the company store—as in such company towns as Kannapolis, N.C. or the original Lowell, Mass.? I mean, there’s already company “scrip,” a.k.a. Bitcoin…so why not?
And what happens when the next pandemic hits? I mean, if such towns’ citizens are all just independent free actors, just what entity will tell them there should be curfews or a lockdown? Who would tell people they must wear masks or get vaccinations?
Oh, I see—forget about public health. In this life, you’re on your own.
…
For more reading:
The Conversation
Fortune
Rest of the World on Próspera
This article appeared previously on his blog
At the Border of the American dream: The Hidden World of New Mexico’s Colonias 
By Photos/Story by Don J. Usner - Searchlight New Mexico
Rural communities near the border lack amenities, but thousands call them home.
Fidel Pérez made his way from Durango, Mexico, to Juárez and then to Chaparral, New Mexico, in 1970. He was cleaning yards and working in the agricultural fields of nearby Anthony when border patrol officials arrested him. When they asked why he had come to the United States, he replied, “Because I’m hungry! And it’s easier here to make money for tortillas than it is back in Mexico.”
Later, after he’d married an American, he returned to Chaparral. It was one of many informal communities known as colonias, a word that, in the Southwest borderlands, connotes just the kind of place where he’d landed: a rural unincorporated settlement populated almost entirely by Mexican immigrants and lacking such amenities as paved roads, electricity, water systems, wastewater treatment and decent housing.
Right: Pérez, in his kitchen, shows his green card, which he keeps handy in his wallet. After 52 years in the United States, he owns three rental units in addition to his own home.
Pérez is one of the thousands of laborers who’ve traveled north of the border in search of work. Squeezed out of established housing markets by price — and by overt racism — these low-wage workers have sought new places to settle. Landowners and real estate developers in New Mexico, seeing an opportunity, have found ways to offer what the newcomers wanted: cheap land. And the lax laws outside of established municipalities allowed landowners to subdivide property without providing basic infrastructure.
The resulting small, poorly designed subdivisions started as little more than clusters of makeshift houses and mobile homes — often with only a few dozen residents. They grew rapidly, offering people like Pérez the possibility of land and homeownership. Hundreds of colonias soon sprang up along the Mexican border from Texas to California, and today there are more than 2,000 of them. In New Mexico alone, there are more than 140 colonias, home to some 135,000 people.
Lots were often sold using unscrupulous contract-for-deed arrangements and other predatory lending practices. Buyers — who often didn’t speak or read or write in English — had to navigate through loosely regulated real estate contracts in a legal system they may not have understood well. A purchase often left them without a legal title for their small, unimproved lots of land without electricity, gas, a sewage system or indoor plumbing. Some buyers wound up locked into a cycle of debt that exacerbated their poverty.
Appalling conditions in New Mexico colonias prompted local and regional governments to reckon with them in the 1990s. The state attorney general attempted a crackdown and subdivision laws were amended to close loopholes, but by then the colonias were well established.
Today, it’s easy to drive right by a colonia and not even see it. In New Mexico, they are typically situated between towns within a couple hours’ drive of the border — the majority within striking distance of the Interstate 10 and Interstate 25 corridors and smaller feeder roads. Amid the rush of semis bouncing between urban centers, commuter cars carry laborers from the colonias to their jobs in farm fields, factories and service industries in El Paso and around Las Cruces.
Immigrants chasing home ownership can still find relatively inexpensive land in the colonias. Infrastructure has improved for the most part, thanks to local activism and government and nonprofit programs. A few colonias have incorporated and grown to include a few thousand or more residents. Some have gained a measure of status as bona fide towns. But despite their ubiquity and the large numbers of people who live in them, they remain largely invisible to most New Mexicans. I traveled to southern New Mexico this year to bring them into view.
.
Voices from the colonias
“I’ve lived here in Palmeras, maybe about two months. But I’ve been here in the States for a good long while. Like 25 years. I come from Mexico, from Delicias, Chihuahua.
“My woman, she is working now, in Anthony. She is from Coahuila. We are renting here. My landlord was very cool. He was Mexican. He owned all of this, and he just died. Now the one who is in charge is his son-in-law. He’s very good, too. He’s charging me cheap — $175 per month.”
— Cecilio Salinas
“Well, I lived in El Paso, but I am Mexican, from Juárez. And that man next door, he’s from Juárez, too. I am originally from Meoqui, in the state of Chihuahua, but I was actually born in Delicias, Chihuahua. I’ve been living here 10 years.
“A gentleman sold us this property, but it was a fraud. We paid $18,000, and that was because it was a friend of that man and he sold it to him, and now he doesn’t want to give us our money, and he wants to throw us out of here. But he doesn’t have the title. And now we’re not paying rent. We’re just here. We don’t give him any more money.”
— Marisela López
“I’ve lived here almost five months. I was working in El Paso at a tattoo shop and studying to become a professional tattoo artist. But the transportation into town was an issue. So I couldn’t add to my education. I’m from El Paso originally. My parents ended up moving here when I was like, 10. And now I’m 29. I live here in this place, part trailer and part house. And all the way in the back of this property is my neighbor. And then over there, all the way in the back over there, there’s another neighbor. This neighborhood is pretty crowded, but everybody gets along. It’s pretty chill here. There are a lot of Mexicans here. I was born here in the U.S. I guess you would call me, like, a Chicano.”
— Bryant Chacón
“I am from Jiménez, Chihuahua. I’ve lived here about 10 years. … There is not much crime here. It is very quiet. Very nice here. Very comfortable because nobody messes with us.
“We go to Mexico for vacations — when they give us vacations. Because I work, yes, I work, in a dairy. We work 12 hours, from three in the afternoon until three in the morning. Four days a week. That’s why I was asleep, because today I got out at three in the morning, milking the cows, with machines.”
— Celia Rey
“I’ve been here 20 years. In this trailer. I am from Guadalajara. And I came here to work. And I lasted 12 years working, and then I got sick with epilepsy. And then I broke my leg. I didn’t feel good anymore. I am disabled. I’m here in the chair, or just in bed. Due to epileptic seizures and high blood pressure.
“Once I was about to get married, but my woman cheated on me with a friend. There in Mexico. And I was traumatized. The trauma has gone away a bit. But I’m afraid of falling in love. Because they say that people here, the women just want papers. And I have papers.
“But I no longer go out. I get bored, I get sick, I go to bed, it’s my routine. Sometimes I feel depressed or something, I go out, I get distracted with my babies — that’s what I call my dogs, babies. If sometimes I feel like this, I put them inside here, and they see that I feel bad, and they see that I fall asleep, and they see that I don’t wake up, they start crying, they think of cheering me up, they get on my body here. And they let me know when people arrive.”
— Vicente Fuentes
“I came to the U.S. 15 years ago and we have lived here in Milagro for 12 years. I come from Guanajuato, Mexico. Far away, by car, almost 24 hours. My father arranged papers for us. He lives in Hatch. We have resident status. And I started to work the moment that I arrived. I worked in the fields, or in the dairy. There are a lot of dairies here. And there’s lots of work in the fields here. Onions, chili.
“This colonia was really small. Maybe just 12 houses here. Way back then the road was just rough dirt, there was no drainage, and now there’s a good road that drains, and there are more houses. We have potable water, but no natural gas. Just propane. And yes, we have electricity.
“It’s very quiet, peaceful. Relaxing. I come from work, get up on that chair, sleep really well on the trampoline. No problems, no nothing. When I married my wife, I wanted a house, a home in Hatch, but it’s very expensive there. So, I saw this house trailer, already here on this land, and a man told me, ‘Hey, do you want to buy my land?’ And in those years the price was good, it was a whole lot to buy here. ‘Give me this much,’ he said. ‘OK.’ And I paid every month, and now it’s paid off — thanks to God.”
— Miguel Diáz
“I was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, in a little town called Los Garcias, near Meoqui. My mother was born in the U.S., and that’s how we were able to arrange our resident status. She’s Mexican, but she was born in Pomona, Calif. She married my father and they moved to Mexico. They had all their children there, nine in all. And none of us are left in Mexico — we all moved here — my parents, too.
“When we first arrived here, in 1974, we came to La Union, near Anthony, and we worked on farms. Then I worked for nine years in Amarillo, Texas, in the slaughterhouses. And then I found this valley, and I liked it — the climate and the people. It’s really peaceful here.”
— Enrique Garcia
“I was born in El Paso and I grew up in Chihuahua, Mexico. I have citizenship, and so do my kids, who were born here, too, in Las Cruces. I came to the U.S. six years ago, for my kids and the schools. I have three kids, 14, 11 and 9. I drive every day to El Paso, 20 miles, to take them to school. … We have been living here in La Mesa for three years. And thank God everything’s OK, so far so good.
“My husband works. Somebody has to work! We’re a team: He works, and I’m in charge of the kids. He works with livestock, for a company in Del Rio, Texas. It’s seven hours from here. He works with cattle that come across the border. Around 300,000 head cross the border and they’re taken in trucks to feedlots. He comes home on weekends.
“We have a very good life here. We bought this trailer, and the land, and everything is paid off, thanks to my husband. I travel to Texas for the schools, because they’re better there. But we’re very lucky. We’re very happy here. We’re going to stay here.”
— Cecilia Moya
…
The Stansbury Forum is grateful to @SearchlightNM (Twitter) @SearchlightNewMexico (Facebook) who produced and first published this piece. They are an absolutely great site for news of New Mexico and all issues that affect the country whether rural and non-rural. We strongly recommend you visit them on a regular basis.
Searchlight New Mexico is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to investigative reporting in New Mexico.
Peter and the Peloton!
By Peter Olney
The 105th running of the Giro d’Italia begins on May 5, Friday. The Stansbury Forum is happy to present the cycling exploits of co-editor Peter Olney in Florence, Italy on March 20th of this year.
.
One of the first tasks upon arriving in San Frediano, our neighborhood in Florence, is to rent a sturdy “bicicletta” for our two months in Italy. At the corner of our street, Via del’Orto and Via del Mago di Oro, is Cicleria Iandelli run by Riccardo Iandelli who was an up and coming junior cyclist in his youth. He found me a sturdy city bike, which means no clip ons for the pedals and wider tires for the cobblestones. He threw in a lock and a helmet for 200 Euros for two months.
Each day I would try to ride to explore a new place. I am hoping to mail home “proletarian postcards” from places off the tourist trails. As you can imagine they are places with working class communities, often near manufacturing locations like Sesto Fiorentino, Campi Bissenzi and Nuovo Pignone in the northwest, and hill towns like Bagno a Ripoli and Impruneta to the southeast. These are longer excursions, often 15 or 20 kilometers. But perhaps my most challenging ride is to Fiesole, the hill town just north of Firenze and just ten kilometers from my door. My usual route to Fiesole includes an ascent to Piazzale Michelangelo where the iconic postcard panorama of Florence is the first stop on any guided tour.
On Sunday March 20, I arrived on my “bici” at Piazzale to find cycling team support cars with roof racks full of replacement bikes, chase cars, ambulances, and a ton of motorcycle cops. I even saw a van emblazoned with the azure blue of the Italian national cycling team. They were parked, massing on the piazzale. It looked like a race was to begin shortly. I kept on riding from the Piazzale and descended to the Arno, crossed the river and after a short flat traverse started the ascent to Fiesole, a five-kilometer ride, but at 7% grade. I tooled along in the lowest gear and was passed several times by younger and lighter riders with state-of-the-art racing bikes. When I finished the final climb into the main piazza di Fiesole I rode towards the statue of Garibaldi and King Vittorio Emanuel II, both depicted on horseback. I saw Carabinieri directing traffic and diverting traffic. I saw a mass of spectators look up to see a lone cyclist: me, entering the piazza. A little ripple of chatter: “Oh the leader, there has been a breakaway….” Then the momentary murmur subsided as the expectant spectators realized the oversized rider wearing no colorful spandex and riding a pedestrian city bike was not part of the “gara per onorare Alfredo Martini” (a race in honor of Alfredo Martini, renowned Italian cyclist and coach of the Italian national team, deceased in 2014).
Soon after I dismounted, the real deal “peloton” came roaring around the corner and further up the hill from Fiesole.
The Gara is 172 kilometers and weaves up and down Florentine hills before finishing in Sesto Fiorentino, the birthplace of Martini. My brief moment as a “breakaway rider” reminded me of the wonderful masterpiece movie made by Charlie Chaplin in 1936, Modern Times. This depression era story features Chaplin as the Tramp, an unemployed worker who sees a red flag fall off a construction truck. He picks up the flag and yells to the driver to stop and take back the flag. Just at that moment a march of the unemployed turns the corner and falls in behind Chaplin carrying a red flag. Then the police attack to break up the march and descend on Chaplin assuming he is the leader of the march.
I suffered no arrests or beatings, but for one solitary Chaplinesque moment, I was the leader of the “peloton” in Fiesole.
…
Readers are owed my “proletarian postcards” from those sites in the Metro Firenze area that are off the tourist trail of museums and cathedrals. They will be forthcoming on the pages of The Forum.