Under Guise of “Choice”: Trump Launches D-Day Assault on Veterans’ Care
By Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early
On June 6th, the Trump Administration launched what it calls a “revolution” in veterans’ health care.
If that date rings a bell, it’s because, on June 6, 1944, American soldiers and their allies stormed ashore in Normandy, establishing a critical beach-head in the campaign to defeat Adolph Hitler and Nazism.
In the aftermath of that and other World War II battles, tens of thousands of injured veterans were treated, back home, in a nationwide network of hospitals and clinics run by the federal government. Most patients of what’s now called the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) appreciated the specialized, high-quality care they received from our nation’s best working model of socialized medicine.
But, on this D-Day anniversary, Donald Trump is rolling out a program, favored by his right-wing backers, that directly attacks public provision of veterans’ healthcare. On June 6, the VHA’s salaried care-givers will be required, by law, to refer many more of their nine million patients to private doctors and for-profit hospitals, even when the VHA could serve them better and at lower cost.
This expanded out-sourcing creates a beach-head for the health care industry, which hopes to expand its market share to 40 percent or more of all VHA patients. Trump’s “counter-revolution” in veterans’ care will divert billions of dollars from a national healthcare system uniquely equipped to serve the poor and working-class veterans who qualify for VHA coverage.
Empowered Patients?
In typical Trump fashion, this scheme is being deceptively marketed. On Fox News and other media outlets, White House appointees, like Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie, claim that giving veterans greater “choice” will “empower” them as patients. (For more on Wilkie see here.)
“… few realize that, every dollar spent on private sector care will be taken from federal budget allocations for direct care in veterans’ hospitals and community clinics.”
In Wilkie’s rosy scenario, veterans can stick with VHA care, if they want it—but also get the same access to private sector providers that other Americans have through their private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid coverage.
In reality, the list of “community care” providers hastily assembled since passage of the VA Mission Act last year, includes many with little or no experience treating the complex service-related problems of many veterans. Wait times for appointments outside the VHA will, in many cases, be no shorter than inside—and sometimes longer. Plus, few hospital systems outside the VHA treat mental and physical problems in a systematic, coordinated way—a necessity for veterans whose substance abuse or suicidal thoughts are a product of traumatic brain injuries and chronic pain.
Veterans are not being warned that, if they enroll in private practices for primary care or mental health treatment, they may be dropped from the VHA rolls and find it difficult to get back into the system. And few realize that, every dollar spent on private sector care will be taken from federal budget allocations for direct care in veterans’ hospitals and community clinics.
First starved of resources and then patients as well, more VHA facilities will become targets for down-sizing or closure by the Trump Administration. Where this occurs, it will eliminate the first choice of most veterans and force others to remain outside the VHA system, whether they want to or not. Already, the VHA has more than 40,000 vacancies, which the White House refuses to fill, creating stressful conditions for remaining care-givers, many of whom are paid less than their private sector counterparts.
Anti-Privatization Protests
On June 5, members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest union of VHA employees, National Nurses United, and Veterans for Peace did their best to blow the whistle on what Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) now warns may be a public policy “train wreck.” Their “National Day to Save The VA” included protest rallies, press conferences or informational picketing in San Francisco, Portland, San Diego, Long Beach, Milwaukee, Boston, Albuquerque, Tucson, Minneapolis, Rochester, St. Louis, and Las Vegas.
Unfortunately, Tester and almost every other Senate Democrat voted in favor of the VA MISSION Act, which mandates the far wider out-sourcing that begins this month. Only Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders, former chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, two Democrats and two Republicans voted “No.” In the House, 70 Democrats including Nancy Pelosi opposed MISSION.
But that leaves many other Congressional Democrats who should not be allowed to get away with vague claims that they’re against VA “privatization” when, in fact, most of them went along with Trump’s “bi-partisan” plan to implement it.
As Vietnam veteran and VHA patient Skip Delano points out, “the private sector healthcare system does not have the capability or the capacity to meet the needs of veterans. They will be sent to providers who may know little or nothing about their special problems and may fail to diagnose critical conditions like PTSD, Agent Orange, or burn-pit exposure, or military sexual trauma, to name only a few.”
A former postal worker, coal miner, and New York City teacher, Delano has decades of experience with good, union-negotiated, job-based medical coverage. Nevertheless, he believes that, for many patients pushed out of the VHA, “private sector care will be less veteran-centric, of lower quality, require longer wait times, and end up with many veterans getting lost in the system because of poor care coordination and lack of accountability.”
A key organizer of this week’s Veterans for Peace “Save Our VA” protest in Manhattan, Delano also spends a lot of time reminding his fellow veterans about the need to be labor allies. The Trump Administration is currently seeking major contract concessions from VHA workers, one third of whom are veterans themselves.
According to Delano, if this effort succeeds, VHA staff will be stripped of the union protections needed to be effective patient advocates and more active foes of privatization. “Without that collective voice, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professional will have far less ability to speak out on behalf of veterans,” he warns.
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The Challenges of Organizing Precarious “Gig” Workers
By Wade Rathke
When we think about organizing precarious “gig” workers, the task may be biblical. The workers may be ready, or not, but the spirit and the flesh are weak. We all bemoan the rise of gig workers. Low pay, few hours, no benefits are some of them, worsened by the uncertainty of a position where you can only work to deliver something being demanded by consumers at a premium you are powerless to control. App companies misclassify workers as independent contractors rather than employees in order to pass on all of the maintenance and capital costs, aside from web work and marketing, to the workers, avoiding the personnel benefit and equipment costs that are routine and inescapable for regular employers. Worker conditions seem to cry out for a union, but unions have to be wary at answering the call no matter how loud.
A recent “strike” by Uber drivers in Los Angeles illustrates the problem. The company had triggered the strike by increasing its percentage of the fare, thereby decreasing drivers’ pay. In response, the drivers turned off the Uber application on their phone and by doing so did not respond to any calls or inducements to drive. Stated more plainly, they went on strike.
Did it work? Who knows? How would any of us, whether organizers, curious observers, or company officials, know how to measure the number of drivers protesting in this way versus those who just decided not to drive on any given day or got ticked off and responded to Lyft instead or whatever? ACORN tried a similar approach in the early 1970s when we were fighting increases by the Arkla Gas Company in central Arkansas. Our “Turn Off Arkla Day!” action got a bit of press, as the Uber drivers did in Los Angeles. But in both cases, the company yawned since there was no way to measure whether the strike affected their cash flow at all.
Organizing gig workers can be challenging, but there’s some good work going on for bicycle deliver drivers in Europe, where companies like Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and others have become ubiquitous. Last fall one of ACORN’s affiliates organized a meeting in Brussels that brought together union activists interested in organizing European bicycle delivery drivers with fledgling groups of drivers from a dozen countries from the UK, Netherlands, Germany, and others. That meeting highlighted several active organizing projects:
– Bike Workers Advocacy Project (BWAP), a new group seeking to organize cycling workers and, eventually, lead to some kind of unionization or union-style representation. Drivers at Postmates and Caviar in New York City and some bicycle shops seemed to be stirring the pot in 2018, but nothing seems to have emerged formally to date.
– Bike delivery workers at Foodora and Dilveroo in Germany have raised issues about low wages and their independent contractor situation while advocating for a union.
– In 2016, London gig workers for delivery services Deliveroo and Uber Eats organized protests and strikes for higher wages. There was also an outcry in Philadelphia when a rider for Caviar was killed while working.
– Legal action has managed to win back employment rights, such as a recent ruling in Spain that declared that a Deliveroo rider was in fact an employee and not an independent contractor, as the company claimed. Caviar is in mandatory arbitration in California on the same issue. As importantly, riders in London struck for three days in 2018, and joined with striking McDonalds’s workers to demand higher wages, largely organized by a chapter of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
While these examples seem promising, unions clearly lack any real commitment to organize these workers, and the workers have limited leverage. David Chu, who directs the European Organizing Center, a joint project between European unions and the US-based Change to Win federation, told me recently that he hears a lot of talk about organizing gig workers but sees little action in that direction, but perhaps the spirit – and many workers – are willing to organize, but the flesh-and-bones unions are not?
Serious organizing efforts in the United States have been contradictory and embryonic. Uber in New York City and San Francisco reacted to organizing efforts by attempting to coopt the organizations into agreeing that the workers were not employees in exchange for consultation rights on rule changes and other issues like receiving tips. More concerted efforts to create a mini-National Labor Relations Board representation mechanism were launched at the municipal level in Seattle, but the organizing effort is currently mired in litigation over preemption by the National Labor Relations Act and the question of employee status.
Local efforts reflect the way companies keep changing their practices, as Marielle Benchehboune, coordinator of ACORN’s affiliate, ReAct, noted recently in Forbes. “What will make the difference,” she suggested, is workers organizing “on the transnational scale.” Perhaps her analysis is correct. Perhaps a rare global organizing plan could create enough pressure and leverage among these competing companies that could weld a workers’ movement together from the disparate pieces of independent worker mobilizations that are cropping up around the world.
Given the challenges, how much should we invest in organizing gig workers? Labor economists in the US caution that despite all of the hype from Silicon Valley and even some labor officials about the emerging gig economy, it involves a very small percentage of the workforce. Others, like Louis Heyman in the recent book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream became Temporary, argue that gig workers are just the pimple on the elephant’s ass of contingent and temporary labor that has been hollowing out the American workforce for decades, just as consultants have chipped away at management jobs as well.
I heard something similar fifteen years ago, when I asked a leader of the Indian National Trade Union Congress if they were doing anything to organize call center workers in India. He answered that they estimated that there were 30,000 such workers, but there were 450 million workers in India at the time and hardly 9% were organized. He then shrugged. That’s all he said, but we got the message. There’s much to be done in organizing the unorganized, and resources and capacity are always restrained, whether in India or Europe or North America.
Is that a reason for not finding ways to organize workers who are attempting on their own to find justice on their jobs? Or is it just another rationale for doing little or nothing? The one thing that seems clear is that if unions are going to be relevant to the modern workforce and the irregular and precarious forms of work that are being created by technology married to avarice, we must debate and address these challenges. It may be difficult, but unions and organizers need to devise practicable strategies that allow workers to organize, win, and build enough power to force companies to adapt and change.
I wish we had the answer now, because the workers seem ready, but one way or another, we need to figure this out quickly!
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This article orginally appeared on the blog Working-Class Perspectives
The Immigration Issue & The Politics of Deceit
By Harry Brill
It is certainly a challenging problem for progressives on how to address the gap between themselves and conservatives. The difficulty is not just due to the immense ideological differences. Progressives have to confront the considerable deception employed by many conservatives.
Apparently conservatives have persuaded a substantial number of Americans that illegal immigration is bad for Americans. According to the polls not only Republicans accept this rhetoric, so do a majority of independent and Democratic Party voters. In fact about two-thirds of the public believes that the U.S. military should defend the southern border from the “invasion” of immigrants. Not only Caucasians but also a majority of Blacks and non-white Hispanics share the same perspective. Generally speaking a CBS poll found that 72 percent of those who watched President Trump’s State of the Union address agrees with his ideas on immigration.
President Trump’s interest in building a wall on the southern border of the U.S. is wrong. It is a deceptive effort to convince working people that he wants to protect their interests.
Yet according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, at least 60 percent of the country’s farm workers are undocumented. The Trump administration has not made any serious effort to crack down on the Agricultural industry’s employment of illegal immigrants. In California there are about 2 1/2 million undocumented immigrants, man work on the fields as well as construction and manufacturing.
The Trump administration has engaged in raids of enterprises that employ undocumented workers – always touted in his tweets and Fox News – to convey the impression that the government is seriously attempting to curtail the employment of undocumented workers. However the real intent is not to discourage use of undocumented workers, these raids are intended to discourage efforts to engage in labor action that workers might use to improve their conditions and protect their rights.
In reality while Trump urged that a wall be built to discourage illegal immigration he has employed undocumented workers at his golf course and his private clubs.
What elected officials in both the Democratic and Republican parties have failed to acknowledge is the important role government has played in encouraging illegal immigration. For example, soon after the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was adopted, the federal government subsidized American corn growers so they could sell corn in Mexico at an artificially low price. As a result, Mexican corn growers could not compete and went out of business. So not as a matter of choice but to survive, they attempted to cross the border to find jobs. In the case people from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to migrate to the U.S., it is in large part a result of their dictatorial regimes that were installed or supported by the United States. Yet the Trump administration claims that their decision to flee from many of these countries has been entirely voluntary.
Progressives must continue to find opportunities to reach out to the public. The country deserves nothing less.
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The Classic Organizer – Bob Moses
By Mike Miller
Bob Moses was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) “field secretary”(organizer) who in 1962 began the voter registration and community organizing work that broke the wall of Mississippi segregation. Moses became a legend, but he refused to become a public spokesman for “The Movement”, insisting on the classic organizer role of developing and projecting others. An initial dozen African-American young people, many themselves local Mississippians, began the patient work of encouraging local people to go to the county courthouse to register to vote. By 1964, almost 1,000, mostly northern white, students, and legal, health and other workers, had joined them in the Mississippi Summer Project that was directed by Moses. One result was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) challenge at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention to the seating of the State’s racist “regulars”. The rejection of that challenge, led by President Johnson and the leadership of the Party, was a key event in the radicalization of the student movement.
Moses refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. He left the country, quietly returning after a sojourn working in Africa. More recently, he has developed a pedagogy for teaching algebra to lowest quartile students. That work led to a McArthur “genius” award and The Algebra Project.
Mike Miller
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Bob Moses on “Earned Insurgency”. (From YouTube, 2007)
“My point about insurgency is that we need to have insurgencies to have democracy. In the ‘60s, the sit-ins were insurgencies; the sit-inners were insurgents; they earned their insurgency by people beating up on them, by dressing up in suits and ties so that they could present themselves to the country so that the country could see them.
“Like it or not, if we’re going to have an insurgency that’s going to be effective we have to figure out how we earn our insurgency. We earned the insurgency of the right to vote in Mississippi by adopting nonviolence as a way to go on the offensive. That’s actually what I think happened.”
“You have to earn the right [to speak]. You have to figure out how to mount such a movement… You have to pull together the numbers of people, and the way in which you pull it [together], so that the people in power can’t ignore you; they have to go along with you.
“In Mississippi, we earned our insurgency with local people: we’d get knocked down, and we’d get back up; we didn’t run; we didn’t abandon the local people. We earned our insurgency with the country: the children of the country came to Mississippi for the Summer Project of 1964. And we earned our insurgency with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division by carefully developing the case for their intervention. That intervention was based on a provision of the 1957 Civil Rights Act that said the Justice Department could act if local authorities were denying people the right to vote. That provision was the “crawl space” that gave us a way into the Justice Department. Without their intervention, we would have been rotting in jail.”
“I think, basically, we ran what I think of now as an earned insurgency. And we had to earn it at three different levels. One was the actual farmers and sharecroppers that we were working with. We had to earn the right to ask them to join us in this work, ’cause they were threatened, they were murdered.
“The way we earned their respect was every time—we, as organizers, had to get knocked down enough times and stand back up.
‘We were asking people to risk their lives, so we had to show them that we were actually also willing to do that ourselves. So we did that just by getting knocked down and standing back up. So every time we got knocked down, we stood back up. So you do that enough, then people think you’re real, it’s not just talk.
“[We also had to earn the respect of] the Justice Department, they didn’t have to, they weren’t required to turn the jailhouse key. …They were permitted to do it, but they weren’t required…And so we had to be disciplined ourselves to work on the voter registration, so that every time we got arrested, there was the presumption that that’s what we were arrested for. They were not going to interfere around something other than voter registration, this little legal crawlspace of the ’57 Civil Rights Act.
“And then we had to earn the right to call on the whole country to come take a look at itself in Mississippi, ’cause, yes, we were asking white students to come down into this danger, but we had earned the right by risking that danger ourselves and thinking this is an American issue, this is a constitutional issue, this is not just black people’s problems.”
On responsibility
“You’ve got to take responsibility for your government. In the end, you are the government. If you are not involved in this government, it will take you places where you do not want to go.
“The government can take us where we don’t want to go only because we don’t see ourselves as the government.
“We have to develop a culture in which we can have conversations about what we want to do about our condition.”
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You should also read Mike Miller’s review of Keri Leigh Merritt’s Masterless Men.
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The importance of Fostering Community and Social Support
By Kelley Cutler
As of this writing, there are 1,212 people on the single adult shelter waitlist waiting for a temporary bed.
We went on outreach to the encampments yesterday. The City had come through and done sweeps earlier in the day so we didn’t see many tents, but we checked in with quite a few people sitting on the street with the remainder of their belongings. We asked if they were offered a bed in the Navigation Center, but no one we spoke to had.
I took this picture of the barricades that line the streets in the City where encampments used to be. These barricades are ridiculous. This is the location where a sweep destroyed the belongings of a 70-year old disabled Veteran named Neil Taylor. Neil was in the emergency room when they hit and trashed all of his belongings — including his walker. This is the same location where Neil died on two years ago on April 1.
Last week, I received information that a block the City had “resolved” in the past now had a pretty large encampment on it. In other words, it’s the latest area folks went to seek a little relief from the relentless sweeps by the City. I’m told they got hit by sweeps over the weekend. The block was empty except for two tents that were put up a couple hours before we arrived.
We’ve been having to spend so much time in hearings at City Hall, at the Port Commission and at a seemingly endless series of meetings lately so it was a relief to be back on the street talking with rad folks. The drama over the Embarcadero “SAFE Navigation Center” — SAFE standing for “Shelter Access for Everyone — has been emotionally taxing.
The narrative regarding the Embarcadero drama has been framed as having two sides: the good vs. the bad; the wealthy condo owners who hate poor people vs. a social justice mayor fighting for homeless folks — although she didn’t support Prop. C — and a belief that Navigation Centers are the be-all, end-all cure for homelessness. This isn’t the reality.
The handful of folks running that “Safe Embarcadero” campaign against the Nav Center opening there are a real piece of work! They seem to get pleasure from pulling fake data and fake research out of their asses to strike fear in the residents and to pressure the City. It’s been a very hateful and gross campaign. I think the majority of folks are reacting out of fear — and I believe their fear is mostly unwarranted, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are afraid.
The reality is that no matter the neighborhood, the housed residents will pitch a fit if the City suggests opening a homeless services facility in their hood and will fight to keep them out. It happens all the time. If you don’t believe me, look into how the rad organization Homeless Youth Alliance in the Haight has gotten screwed over and their program has been homeless for years. Go donate money to them because they are badass and do amazing work!
We usually stay out of the drama when it comes to Navigation Centers. It’s complicated. We want and need more resources so we support that, but the devil is in the details. Details such as the plan for the “Outreach and Safety Zones” Commander David Lazar presented at the Port Commission hearing. “Outreach and Safety Zones” is code for enforcement zone — areas that will get hit by sweeps relentlessly — areas that the City will deem “resolved” and the presence of people experiencing homelessness will be criminalized. The same thing happened after they opened Navigation Centers in the Mission. If the SAFE Nav Center has a limited stay, where do you think people will go when they end up back on the street? This “safety zone” will be off limits.
“It was such a great addition, a great tool for spending quality time and bonding with others.”
What is a SAFE Navigation Center anyway? We are still working on figuring that out. We keep hearing it will serve more people than other shelter, but that it will be more cost effective. Hmm … that’s something to keep an eye on. We have an idea of the model based on other shelters and Nav Centers, but again the devil is in the details, and that’s still getting sorted out.
We’ve started doing surveys with folks on outreach: we ask about their experience staying at the Navigation Centers and what they would include in a shelter if they were to design it.
We hear different feedback about Navigation Centers based on which organization is running the particular site. Certain Nav Centers have a really bad reputation for treating people poorly. We hear a lot about the seven-day beds SFPD give out. Folks tell us seven days isn’t enough time to get anything accomplished — can’t even get your ID in that amount of time.
The answers to the question of what things folks would include if they designed their own Nav Center was fascinating to me. Great stuff! Very thoughtful and compassionate as well. Everyone I did a survey with felt it was very important for the City to set aside beds for special populations, such as seniors, people with disabilities and pregnant women.
Folks spoke about the importance of creating an environment that fosters community and social support. There was a lot of focus on the program providing support, such as benefits assistance, vocation training, counseling, drug counseling/safe use site and medical support. Something that came up a lot was the need to have adequate food and the option for folks to store and cook their own food as well.
Folks said they want the programs to listen to what the clients have to say about what they want and need — folks want to be asked. And frankly, their input is extremely important. For example, if folks are asked what they think about the seven-day beds the management will discover that folks think it sucks, that it’s just being used as a tool for enforcement for SFPD to do sweeps.
I have kind of an obsession with something I believe Navigation Centers can benefit from — a fire pit! I’m totally serious! Many years ago I worked at a rehab and I bought a fire pit for the program. It was such a great addition, a great tool for spending quality time and bonding with others. Yeah, totally random, but I’m obsessed with the idea. Others think it would be a great addition, too. City officials don’t seem to think it’s a good idea, but I wasn’t asking their opinion.
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Reprinted by permission of the author, this piece first ran on Medium, 1 May 2019
“Masterless Men” by Keri Leigh Merritt – Reviewed Mike Miller
By Mike Miller
It was a story you don’t see told in history — and an interaction of poor people that we don’t talk about. Keri Leigh Merritt
Introduction
Those seeking to break the white working class from Donald Trump’s grip would do well to read Masterless Men, the story of the white poor in the antebellum and postbellum Deep South. They are people with deep social and economic problems that could become social and economic justice issues, and that could make southern white working class people allies of positive change rather than its hard-core opponents. That is the democratic faith. I want to place it against the authoritarian solution explicit in Donald Trump’s Presidency, and his campaign to win it: “No one knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” “The one that matters is me, I’m the only one that matters.” “I am the only one who can fix this. Very sad.”
Democratic faith requires democratic education, exemplified in the experiential learning pedagogy of Myles Horton and Paulo Freire. They used experience as opportunities for education, and kept their teaching within the experience of those who were their “students”. The experience is what people gain when they are organizing. Contrary to the democratic faith is telling, really lecturing, “poor whites” about what their “real interests” are—an approach now all too common. It might be a “correct analysis” for a term paper, but in the practical world it only deepens the divide between those fighting the “isms” and those who hold them. This problem is not solved by many current “popular education” approaches that disguise their lectures with participatory methods while, in fact, the presenter does not want a process of exploration at all.
A Stunning New Treasure To Help Us
During the four+ years I was a “field secretary” for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, there was an awareness among some SNCC members that organizing poor whites was essential if black liberation was to be achieved. A “Poor Whites Project” sought to accomplish that end. It never got off the ground. We lacked the experience and understanding to accomplish the result. Support for the project was tenuous. Among people who would react angrily to use of terms such as “Spik,” “Wop”, “Kike” or similar slanders, the use of “Honkie” drew a chuckle.
As black consciousness and pride rose, and the slogan “Black is beautiful” sought to overcome the internalized oppression of “if you’re black stay back; if you’re brown stick around; if you’re white you’re alright”, it occurred to me that while African-Americans could name prejudiced whites and the “white power structure” as their enemy, poor whites really had only themselves to blame for their circumstances. There was no other consensus or emerging consciousness available to them to explain their poverty. Today, of course, supported by the country’s President, they blame “The Other” who is taking their jobs, pushing them aside on the American status ladder and threatening their country.
Enter Keri Leigh Merritt! I just finished her Cambridge University Press-published Masterless Men. It is an indispensible resource for those who want to overcome racism in the South, in particular, and in the country as a whole—a result that cannot be accomplished without specifically addressing it among the white working class, often characterized as “poor white”. And, in turn, present approaches that ignore or minimize the oppression of poor and working class whites will not work to overcome racism.
Keri Leigh Merritt
Merritt is a white southerner, born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, raised in the South, and educated at southern universities. You can tell reading the book that her interest is more than academic. That led me to learn more about her in the History News Network interview with Robin Lindley, November 15, 2017:
“I started studying poor whites and the nineteenth century South as an undergraduate and realized their story was largely untold. They were nearly always left out of history simply due to the fact that they were illiterate. I knew I wanted to go on to graduate school and study this topic, because I believe it adds a lot of nuance to how race and class interact – and how racism is perpetuated in America.”
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“I come from impoverished whites myself on my mother’s side…I still remember visiting my grandmother during the summers and seeing not only the poverty of the area but how it affected both whites and blacks in her area of town. All the rest of the town – the upper middle class and upper-class sections – was segregated. But the really poor area was completely integrated. That didn’t mean that the poor whites weren’t racist, but they still lived with black people. They worked with black people. They had an underground economy. It was a story you don’t see told in history — and an interaction of poor people that we don’t talk about.”
Merritt was relentless in her search for information and documentation: oral histories with slaves who talk about poor whites, the Tennessee Civil War Veterans questionnaires, southern newspapers, coroner’s inquests, contemporary books written by defenders and critics of slavery, court testimony, census data, petitions to the powerful from poor whites, jail records, minutes of meetings, records of the sale of slaves and whatever else she could find. “I used as many different sources as possible to form a more complete picture of the lives of the Deep South’s poor whites,” she said.
In brief, here’s what she discovered. Southern white society was divided into three classes: a relatively small aristocracy of large plantation owners who had slaves numbering from 20 to the hundreds and in a few cases thousands, and who were the oligarchy that ruled the south; yeoman farmers who owned relatively small parcels and struggled to make ends meet, though some owned one-or-two slaves; and “masterless men” and women who lived in deep poverty. They hunted, fished, marginally farmed and stole to survive. They traded with slaves, providing homebrew liquor in exchange for food the slaves appropriated from their masters. The depth of their poverty sometimes exceeded that of slaves who, to be productive property, had to be fed the minimum required to work.
The exchanges between poor whites, slaves and freedmen weren’t limited to secretive trading. They gambled and socialized together; friendships developed in some cases. Throughout the antebellum period, they conspired and acted together in defeated rebellions, leading the slave-owner aristocracy to pursue carefully constructed divide-and-conquer strategies. In some cases, they had children together, including those of white women, who, because of southern law, were born free (the same wasn’t true of the children of black women who were fathered by whites).
As slave numbers increased, their owners realized they could use them to do work previously done by whites hired in the market. Poor whites became increasingly marginalized and increasingly hostile to slavery. They recognized that while legally free, they were, in fact, in bondage to the same system. In some cases, they formed associations or unions that petitioned southern state governments to disallow slave competition. In almost every case, they failed. It became increasingly clear to poor whites and their advocates that the plantation aristocracy was their oppressor as well.
The period approaching southern secession was marked by increased conflict. Laws against vagrancy, loitering and begging led to the incarceration of poor whites, typically in horrific jails. It became clear to those who ruled that they could not count on the support of poor whites in the civil war that was coming.
As the war developed, evasion of military service was widespread. Counties where there were few plantations, usually “hill country”, remained loyal to the union, as did large numbers of poor whites. To counteract this threat, Confederate leaders created myths proclaiming the horrors whites would face if slaves were freed. Illiteracy due to poor or non-existent public education left poor whites unable to read about alternatives. Unionists, and especially abolitionists, were jailed, tarred and feathered, beaten, run out of town (and the state) and sometimes killed.
Poor whites bore the brunt of Confederacy fighting. Owners of plantations with 20-or-more slaves were exempt from the draft. As the war proceeded, poor whites deserted in large numbers joining draft dodgers in swamp lands, forests and other areas where they could hide from army recruiters and local law enforcement.
Postbellum it can fairly be said the oligarchy South won the Civil War in substance if not form. Poor whites and blacks were better off, but everything is relative. It is difficult to say their lives substantially improved. Now, however, it was blacks who were at the bottom of the social, economic and political hierarchy. Whites were better able to sell their labor in the absence of slave competition. The system of white privilege was erected by the South’s militarily defeated elite. Briefly challenged later by the Populists, its structure persisted, and persists today—as the continuing public presence of symbols of the Confederacy attests.
Weaknesses
I wish Merritt had explored more deeply the Union Leagues that for a brief period created alliances between poor and poorer whites and blacks within the Republican Party. Near the conclusion of her book, she notes Eugene Genovese’s “hints of mutual sympathy and compassion in a world in which so much conspired to sow distrust and hatred suggest that the Reconstruction era was not fated to end as it did.” The outcome that prevailed was the opposite: poor whites now became the lowest class in a caste system in which they pride fully knew they were not black. Failures of the Federal Government clearly played a role. Without enforcement of emancipation, laws and practices created slavery by another name. Without land reform, freedmen and women had no economic base upon which to build. (Merritt discusses the Homestead Act and Southern Homestead Act, which provided land for tens of thousands of poor whites to “finally join the ranks of landholders”. No such opportunity was created for former slaves. Yet another failure also took place: the one that might have built organization and social movement on Genovese’s “hints of mutual sympathy”. Why were those efforts few, and why did those few fail? I wish Merritt had given these questions more attention.
Though it would have taken her on a bit of a detour, some comment could have been made on what newly emerging Reconstruction black leadership, including elected officials, might have done to engage poor whites more deeply with the Republican Party. Did their own status as more educated people, often coming from leadership backgrounds in the black church, create in them the same attitude that I saw in SNCC people who spoke of “Honkies”?
My organizer eyes found her sometimes fuzzy on what constitutes “education” for social change. She focuses on illiteracy and the absence of public schools for poor whites, but says little about the kind of education that can take place in the context of action if there is time and space for reflecting on what is being done. During the slavery era, that time and those spaces didn’t exist. Did they during Reconstruction and, especially, Radical Reconstruction?
Masterless Men would have benefited from some tighter editing, and the footnotes are sometimes difficult to follow.
All these, however, are minor points about a book that is a must read for out times.
Conclusion
In her interview Merritt describes a new generation of southern historians, white and black, who are going deeply into the gritty day-to-day lives of slaves, freedmen, poor whites and white yeoman farmers. It is a welcome development.
Her book is an essential read for anyone who cares about the future of the country.
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I Am Immigrant Twice Over and I Am Working Class
By Antonio Olmos
When I was young, I was quite an Anglophile. I listened the BBC World Service, I watched Monty Python’s films and TV shows, I watched gritty British cinema set in Thatcher’s 80’s landscape, and I listened to all the British punk and new wave bands that came in the wake of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Looking back the only thing I didn’t consume was contemporary British Literature. Only the classics from George Orwell and older. I never imagined that I would one day come to the UK and live in London for 25 years. Half my life now.
It is not the sort of thing that A Mexican kid from Mexicali dreams about. It was not part of any plans I had as we illegally emigrated to the United States and ended up in Fresno. I wanted to please my family, so I studied hard and had ambitions to study law, politics and history. Not once under the age of 20 did I dream of living in Europe. I also never dreamed I would end up being a Photojournalist.
And yet here I am living in the London Borough of Enfield. It seems as normal as anything and only when I reflect on my journey does it seem slightly preposterous.
My mother was a cleaner. A single mom who worked in a hospital raising me and my three younger sisters. My mother grew up about 70 miles south of Ensenada on a family farm which grew corn and watermelons. My grandfather was a refugee from the Mexican Revolution which ravaged his home state of Puebla. He worked as a farm hand both in Mexico and Southern California when the border was open. He worked almost 20 years in the fields of Orange County before saving up enough money to buy land in Baja California. His first 5 children were born in the United States and are American Citizens.
I tell you this brief incomplete backstory of myself because I wanted to illustrate one point. I am immigrant twice over and I am working class. It is something I am proud of. I look back now of the time I lived in America and I think the political culture tried to beat that consciousness out of me. The culture ingrained in me some unspoken desire that I should strive to be and identify as middle class and if I was lucky, be rich.
Living in London, the UK, Europe and one thing I know is that class matters here. Thatcher tried to import that American Dream mentality and it has in some respects succeeded. Many Brits now think that the only thing that matters is our own personal initiative. Failure and poverty is a personal fault. Don’t blame society for your ills. The Labour Party under Tony Blair came to power soon after I settled here. Under Blair, The Labour Party ditched its socialist label and co-opted a lot of Thatcherite ideology in order to become “electable”. Winning elections seem to redeem this policy direction.
To me this was part of a wider trend in Western Democracies since the end of the Cold War that pronounced Capitalism the victor and Communism (but really they mean Socialism) the loser. No longer in fear of Communism, a lot of western democracies stopped paying lip service to equality, good social services, and a generous welfare state. And since 1989 inequality has grown and grown because the Bolsheviks don’t seem to be coming and taking all of our stuff away anytime soon.
Once I became a British Citizen I voted for the Labour Party in 2001. Soon after came 9/11 and the “War on Terror” which Tony Blair happily signed up to and I stopped voting for Labour in protest. I voted Green in 2005 and in 2010 general elections. In Britain’s first past the post system, it was really a protest vote. In 2015 I voted for Labour again because the new leader Ed Milliband seemed to be stepping back from Blair’s policies and once again talking of Socialism. The Labour Party lost anyway, The Conservatives won and soon they gave us Brexit.
Ed Milliband resigned after the defeat and under a new system he created there was one man, one vote elections from Labour Party members who chose the party’s new leader. As a photojournalist I covered those Leadership elections and as a Labour Party member (I joined in 2015) I participated. I was going to vote for Yvette Cooper because I thought the party needed a female leader. But watching the campaign I listened to her and her fellow candidates Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall say the same things over and over again as though reading from a script. And what that script said was the Conservative’s austerity plans must be continued, that addressing inequality must take a back seat to fixing the economy after the financial collapse of 2008, that the neoliberal policies of Thatcher and Blair must be maintained, that basically there was nothing really wrong with how things were. The fourth candidate in this election was Jeremy Corbyn. A long time unapologetic left wing member of the Labour Party, Corbyn wasn’t given a hope in hell of winning. Corbyn himself probably didn’t think he would win so he just stated what he actually believed which was in Socialism.
I have never been this excited about politics, ever. Living in Europe I realise how right wing the Democrats in the USA have been until recently.
Corbyn espoused taking back all the public services privatised under Thatcher and Blair – like the railways and utilities. He supported higher taxes to properly fund the National Health Service, public housing and public education. He espoused higher taxes for the rich to address inequality and he wanted a completely different foreign policy that abandoned the war on terror, ditched the British Nuclear arsenal and promoted peace. And he wanted to tackle Climate Change in a meaningful way.
Corbyn won and in 2016 after being challenged again in the wake of Brexit, won again.
In the 2017 general election when every single pundit predicted that the Labour Party would be wiped out under Corbyn, they did as best as is possible without winning and deprived The Conservative Party under Theresa May a working majority in Parliament.
I have never been this excited about politics, ever. Living in Europe I realise how right wing the Democrats in the USA have been until recently. Corbyn represents real change from the neoliberal agenda that has dominated since Reagan and Thatcher.
But since his election as Leader of the Labour Party Corbyn has been vilified not only by the right wing press but also by many people who I consider myself very closely aligned to politically … or so I thought.
Corbyn was at first vilified for being an apologist for the IRA and for being a Marxist. Corbyn long espoused speaking to the Irish Republicans during the Troubles when no one dared. One of the great things Tony Blair did was talk to the IRA which led to the Good Friday Agreement. So the argument of talking to the IRA made him a terrorist sympathiser seemed ludicrous in the context of recent history. He was vilified as a Marxist for his unapologetic socialism even at the height of the cold war. He was vilified as a peacenik for being against Reagan’s Cold war policies, for being against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and countless other military interventions. But on reflection History seemed to vindicate his views over and over again.
But now the biggest and in my view the most damaging attack on him has been that he is anti Semitic.
Corbyn has long been a supporter of the Palestinian struggle. He has supported the Palestinian Liberation Organisation since he became an MP. In the 80s of course the PLO was treated as a terrorist organisation. Corbyn talked to the PLO, the ANC and the IRA in the 80s when almost all mainstream politicians didn’t in fear of being labelled apologists for terrorism. Now every mainstream politician talks to them. But Corbyn has also not been afraid to speak to Hezbollah and Hamas. The ANC, the IRA and the PLO all had left wing, socialist, anti imperialist tendencies, while Hamas and Hezbollah have their ideology in their struggle rooted in political Islam. Before Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party no one to my knowledge ever accused him of anti Semitism. Maybe this was due to the fact that as an MP on the fringes of parliament no one took much notice of him. The Labour Party under Blair and Gordon Brown had large majorities and did not need Corbyn’s support.
We have a grown comfortable with our free spending capitalist consumerist society. Probably anyone reading this is …
After he became leader the right wing press as well as many pro Blair Labour party MPs accused Corbyn of being an apologist for the IRA and of being a Marxist. Both charges didn’t really stick since the world had moved on from the politics of the 80s. They tried to unseat him for his lukewarm support for staying in Europe during the referendum campaign. Something I admit bothered me a bit because I am very much in favour of staying as part of the European Union. Corbyn won a leadership challenge decisively after the referendum even though the party is heavily pro European. Corbyn’s policies as described in the election manifesto of 2017 nearly led to victory.
So in my opinion, this is what has led us to the charges of anti Semitism. His critics have failed to dislodge him over policies and over Europe and have turned to charges of anti Semitism to get rid of him.
When Ed Milliband reformed the election rules of Labour, he basically got rid of the Union’s block vote in which unions in effect voted for their members and could deliver thousands of votes for any candidate they favoured. In its place was one member, one vote, along with an ease to joining the membership through low fees and via the internet. Corbyn’s leadership campaign as it gained momentum inspired many to join the party and vote for him. By the end of his victorious campaign the membership swelled to over half a million, making it the largest party in Europe based on active membership. There is no doubt that among those vast numbers, anti Semites, possibly who liked Corbyn’s criticism of Israeli policies, joined the party. Among those numbers it is also highly likely that campaigners and sympathisers of the Palestinian struggle also joined because they saw Corbyn as like minded. I don’t defend anybody who is anti Semitic. Any racists should be kicked out of the party once identified. Problematic too is that many pro Palestinian members don’t have the ability to articulate criticisms of Israeli policies without venturing into the language of anti Jewish rhetoric. They may not mean to be anti Semitic but they write stuff that sounds like age-old tropes of anti Semitism. The trouble with mass membership in which joining is quite easy is that no one is vetted until they do or say something stupid. And critics of Corbyn have used the undoubted stupidity of some new members to blame him personally for the views of every one of these idiots. The charge that can be laid on Corbyn’s doorstep is that he and the Labour leadership did not take it sufficiently seriously to deal with it promptly.
There is a lot of hostility to Corbyn over Israel. The political mainstream is still very sympathetic to Israel even if they always make sure to mention that they are supporters of a two state solution. But I truly believe the winds of change are coming. Decades of settlement building and the right wing nationalist policies of Likud led Israel have turned many young people and people of colour to view Israel very critically.
I don’t think Corbyn is anti Semitic. In my experience of life Racists don’t tend to be selective of who they hate. Corbyn has a long tradition of anti racist causes. He has always maintained that his inspiration in politics and activism has been the “Battle of Cable Street”. In 1936 the police were sent to protect a march by fascists led by Oswald Mosley through Cable Street, a then predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. Left wing groups and the Jewish community turned out in force, 20,000, to stop the march by 2,000 fascists and 7,000 policemen. The left won. Corbyn has also famously been photographed being arrested in the early 1980s for demonstrating against Apartheid.
What Corbyn represents is real change. And that is what scares people. After 38 years of Neo Liberalism in the UK, even people who purport to be left wing are scared of real change. Neo liberalism has got us loving our mortgages, our credit cards, our far-flung holidays, and our consumerism. Climate change and growing inequality are a threat to this consumerist lifestyle. Many purported left-wingers are in fear of the value of their bubble inflated home coming down. We all say we want to tackle these problems without any costs to us. But a growing consensus, especially among the young, is that the world has to change. We have a grown comfortable with our free spending capitalist consumerist society. Probably anyone reading this is not homeless, not near bankruptcy, not in fear of their kid’s education. Everyone reading this probably recycles, tries to use public transport as much as possible, and is aware of the problems facing this planet. What we all fear is real change, even change that we know we need. The most to lose out under a Corbyn government will be the rich and the corporations. Their taxes are going to go up and they will probably start to be taxed not just on their income but on their wealth. And the means by which they accumulate wealth will probably also begin to be heavily regulated.
A lot of vested interests are afraid. The rich and the corporations have their hands on the levers of power, they have the ears of the lawmakers in a way we don’t. They own most of the media on who we depend on our information to make educated choices in our democracy. They own the wealth that has increased exponentially unchecked since 1989. I don’t think Corbyn is radical to the degree that he will actually try to end capitalism, but he will probably tackle inequality and climate change in a way that FDR tackled the Depression. I am tired of talk and I want change. I doubt the world will be fixed completely if Corbyn is elected. He will still be the leader of a reluctant moderate party wary of radical change. Change in a democracy has to be consensual by default and the very act of legislating will be slow. But my hope is that it will be in the right direction. My life path has been a strange one, but at least I have seen a lot of the world and have been witness to many amazing events. I always tell people that I was dealt a bad hand in life but I made the most of it. I am aware that a lot of luck and chance took place to be where I am at. Only recently in speaking to my mother have I truly realised how precarious we were economically. One broken leg or serious illness and my family could have been destitute. My mother never shared stress over late payments, of having to borrow money from family and friends so me and my sisters could eat. The first time I truly began to realise how poor we were was when I had a chance to do a London semester while in high school. All the kids that wanted to go went, except me. The costs were way beyond what my mother could ever manage. I was upset but I accepted the decision. So my chance to visit what became my future home was delayed by 13 years. I think I honour my mother and her struggles when I make my political choices. So I don’t buy all the scare tactics that tell me I shouldn’t vote for Corbyn. My gut feeling and life experience tell me he is someone who will steer my adopted country in the right direction.
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Freelancing: The New Road To Poverty
By Harry Brill
The issue of worker exploitation refers obviously to the unfair treatment of employees, who are underpaid and given very few or no benefits. That doesn’t only include employees on the payroll, but also refers to workers who are misclassified as independent contractors. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if workers were properly classified, the various additional costs to employers, including paid sick leave, medical coverage, and unemployment insurance, would be about 40 percent more.
But in recent years there has been another unfortunate development, which involves working people who are neither on an employer’s payroll nor misclassified. I am referring to the phenomenal increase in freelance workers. Just in the last four years, the number of freelancers increased by more than 8 percent compared to only a 2.6 percent for the entire U.S. workforce. These workers, rather than being employed by a company, are instead self-employed. This has been viewed by the mass media as a tremendous gain because so many working people have decided to set up their own business.
For a long while, when our economy was expanding in ways that created new opportunities for workers, that perspective was appropriate. But no longer. Too many freelancers earn very little and receive no benefits from their clients. As the climbing number bankruptcies reveal, the chances of becoming a successful entrepreneur are very small.
“According to a study by the Freelancers Union, which represents many freelancers, the average freelancer is stiffed by businesses about $6,000 a year.”
The advantages to the business community of doing business with freelancers are immense. Instead of maintaining a staff that receives regular, uninterrupted wages and benefits, they dole out work to freelancers at a relative low cost because the freelancers usually compete with other freelancers to obtain work. The lowest bidder typically gets the business. (Editor’s note: in some sectors, for instance journalism, rates and conditions are set without bidding by the company – in either model all power rests with the client.)
The number of freelancers exceeds 57 million, which is about 35 percent of the workforce. For many it is not their only source of income. But more than 15 million are now freelancing exclusively. The percentage who earn their living only by freelancing rose substantially during the last four years from only 17 to about 25 percent of all freelancers. This trend is likely to continue.
Although many freelancers make a good living most are financially stretched. Two-thirds of freelancers have to dip into their personal savings at least once every month to pay their bills. That is three times more than non-freelancers. Except for very few freelancers, their work situation is unpredictable. They have to endure periods when they do not get any work at all. When work has not come their way, their income is zero dollars. Only their expenses remain.
To obtain contracts for a particular assignment they often bid for jobs that are posted. One commentator noticed that bids could be made as low as one dollar an hour! Since they are not employees, the minimum wage laws do not apply. Obviously the fierce competition for business between freelancers keeps the average income fairly low. In addition, many corporations don’t pay their bills for as long as 45 to 60 days. The long waiting period is a burden for many of these workers. In fact, some business customers violate their contract by not paying at all. In the last year, 40 percent of freelancers reported that at least one of their customers failed to pay them. According to a study by the Freelancers Union, which represents many freelancers, the average freelancer is stiffed by businesses about $6,000 a year.
Nevertheless, the number of freelance workers continues to increase. If present trends continue by 2027 freelancers will make up a majority of the workforce. A combination of factors including job loss, more employers converting full- time to part- time jobs, and stagnant wages are forcing many workers to strike out on their own. But in this increasingly competitive environment, finding job assignments on a regular basis is very difficult. For most freelancers, their work is intermittent. In short, what is characterized by the establishment as upward mobility is really downward mobility.
Ironically, since freelancers are self-employed, they are not counted as unemployed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics even during those periods when despite their efforts they are not obtaining any work. This anomaly contributes to misunderstating the official unemployment rate.
There is an important lesson to learn from the experience of most freelancers. For the vast majority of working people, individualistic rather than collective solutions do not work in the current economic environment. What gave working people a tremendous advantage in the past was adopting mainly collective rather than individualistic alternatives, particularly by organizing and joining labor unions. Workers cannot generally make major achievements by just working alone. They must continue their collective efforts on behalf of ALL workers — no tribal stuff — to improve their standard of living and quality of life.
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This article originally appeared in Berkeley Daily Planet
The Play’s the Thing
By Peter Olney and Gene Bruskin
Gene Bruskin, Author and Organizer interviewed by Peter Olney, Stansbury Forum co-editor, and long time friend and colleague about his new play.
Peter O: Gene you have written a new musical play entitled “The Moment Was Now”, which takes place in 1869 in post civil war Baltimore. Can you give us a brief synopsis?
Gene: This was really a turning point in US history when America almost did the right thing. Under Reconstruction, instituted by Congress, the South was writing new state constitutions and African Americans were getting elected to local and national offices. Baltimore was a border state with a history of being half slave and half free. The play centers on the impassioned search for unity among dynamic leaders of powerful movements during this period. The conflicts and possibilities unfold at a fictional meeting convened by Frederick Douglass.
The echoes of the current moment are everywhere.
Peter O: William Sylvis, Susan B. Anthony, Isaac Myers and Frances Harper are your four protagonists, with Douglass sort of setting the stage. These are real historical characters. Can you tell us a little about each one of them? And how does Jay Gould fit in?
Gene: This is quite a remarkable group of people – all revolutionaries in their own way, but all with fatal flaws that become apparent in the course of the show. The conclusion of the civil war and the emergence of 4 million free African-Americans created a tremendous momentum for change, just as the civil rights movement of the 60’s in the US set the stage for the blossoming of the civil rights, women’s and gay liberation movements.
Of course Douglass is the legendary abolitionist and civil rights visionary, arguably the seminal figure of the 19th Century, along with Lincoln. Susan B Anthony is the most widely recognized among the others. She was an abolitionist, a suffragette and during this period, she began organizing women workers.
Isaac Myers organized a union of African American shipyard workers in 1866 in the same Baltimore shipyard where Douglass worked when he escaped. Myers went on with Douglass to found the [Colored] National Labor Union, which for a time had a national presence.
William Sylvis, an ironworker, organized the National Labor Union which represented several hundred thousand workers by 1869.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an abolitionist, African American Feminist, teacher, and author, who spent years in the Reconstruction south.
Jay Gould, who lurks ominously in the background, was one of the early railroad kingpins who helped usher in the industrial revolution.
Peter O: Why is such a play relevant to today’s turbulent times?
Gene: This was a “moment” filled with opportunities and pitfalls, and unfortunately they were unable to build unity. They clashed around the issues of racism, sexism and class. Jay Gould, among others of his ilk, was able to take advantage of their divisions. This was a moment when the two-party system became consolidated and the white supremacy of the Klan was decisive in the retrenchment of the southern aristocracy.
We are at a moment now, again where white supremacy is central and there are massive movements from below and enormous wealth and power consolidating at the top. The two parties are in crisis. But moments come and moments go – clearly we must, as the saying goes, “seize the time.” This play has many lessons and we hope it both inspires and teaches, as well as entertains.
Peter O: Lin Manuel Miranda has achieved fame with “Hamilton”, and he has also been a strong advocate for the Puerto Rican people in the face of Trump’s attacks on the island and its inhabitants. Did his work inspire you to use the medium of a musical play?
Gene: “Hamilton” was a remarkable piece of musical theater and I have great respect for Miranda. It used spoken word, music and choreography to teach history. But it tells the story of a man who was in no way a revolutionary – in fact not even a progressive. It’s a story of the elite of that time, all slave owners. (Hamilton wasn’t personally but his wife came from a wealthy slave owning family) Although the characters are all actors of color, a statement in itself, there is barely a word about slavery. There are 46 songs but none about slavery.
After seeing the play I thought, wow, if music and spoken word can be used so powerfully to tell this somewhat traditional history, what if I used that format to tell the story of an exciting and relevant moment in history. “The Moment Was Now” is almost entirely in spoken word and musical format. After extensive research I was able to use the characters own words throughout, with some poetic license of course. These characters all knew each other but never met as a group. We have been assembling a talented group of actors and musicians with the help of my artistic director, Darryll Moch, and my music director, Glenn Pearson and it is coming to life.
Peter O: “Hamilton” has certainly been a blockbuster but is that cultural form the best way to reach labor audiences? What was your experience with your previous musical, “Pray for the Dead”?
Gene: I wrote “Pray for the Dead – a Musical Tale of Morgues, Moguls and Mutiny” in 2016 and it played for unions and community groups. People loved it because it talked about them, about class and power, with music and humor. At some shows the workers yelled out at the boss and behaved raucously during the show, more like they were in a union hall than at a theater. I loved it. “Moment” is also what I call “theater for the, 99%,” written for people who don’t normally go to theater. We are partnering with unions, women’s groups and others to fill the theater.
There is something about the immediacy of theater that is powerful and theater, particularly earlier in the 20th century, has a history in the US as a force for change. We intend to have audience discussions after each play -that worked very well with “Pray” – people want to talk about this stuff.
Successful movements need people’s culture – can you imagine the 60’s civil rights movement if there was no singing?
Peter O: You have a long and impressive 40 year plus career of labor and people’s justice organizing, why did you get the theater bug now?
Gene: I grew up in South Philly and my dad was a big fan of musicals – the records were always playing. I co-wrote some original plays for community theater in the 70s, But once I got involved in the labor movement I had to put it aside. After I retired, in addition to keeping one foot in the labor movement, I decided to give myself the gift of writing again and it’s been a great experience.
Peter O: Obviously producing such a musical play requires resources. How do you intend to get the funds necessary to produce such a musical?
Gene: That is a challenge. One other major difference between “Moment” and “Hamilton” is that our tickets will be very affordable – no $1,000 seats.
No big investors and in fact many foundations aren’t interested in so-called “political” plays. But we intend to pay our talented crew as fairly as possible. And there are many other costs involved. So we are scrambling.
Peter O: How can our readers help you to put on this important work?
Gene: The play will open in Baltimore on August 23rd and show for three weekends.
We have launched a Go Fund Me that makes it easy for folks to contribute.
They should go to: https://www.gofundme.com/the-moment-was-now
Also they can find us on Facebook at: “The Moment Was Now”
If someone wants to reach me directly they can email me at genebruskin@gmail.com
Baggage Reclaim: Chaos, uncertainty and …
By Robert Gumpert
A year ago I was in London. It was a year since the UK voted to leave the EU and there was a year before it was to be implemented. There were disturbing signs the whole enterprise was not as advertised.
The UK and London, in particular, are home for me as much, if not more, than the USA and San Francisco. My time as a journalist has given me a taste for going to events I thought important milestones. In relatively recent times that has meant Obama’s first inauguration for obvious reasons. And Trump’s, because it seemed/seems to me he represents America at a crossroads between the future and the past, between a pluralistic and relatively democratic society and authoritarian rule by an even smaller and more homogenous elite than have held the reins of power in my life time. So here I am, in London, for Brexit, the UK’s “divorce” from the EU.
“If you are not confused you haven’t been following things properly” BBC Brexit correspondent on 30 March 2019
I assume most reading this piece are looking for a bit clarity on what the hell is going on here in the UK. You won’t find it these words. I have followed the circus that is Brexit now for two years and the best I can tell you is no one seems to know. So I am going to write down a few of the recent low points, what seems to be their effects and a few thoughts and questions.
With time running out on the two year period since officially serving papers (Article 50) to the EU that the UK was leaving, the PM Theresa May (Tory), managed at long last to put together an exit deal with the EU, a deal that if signed essentially “divorced” the UK from the EU but would not be the final word in settlement. It would serve as a foundation to work out details over time – how much time, who knows?.
There were problems from the very beginning – meaning the moment it was decided there would be a referendum on EU membership and how it would be worded. In the end the absurdly complex idea of separating the UK from the EU was boiled down to a simple yes we stay, no we don’t. Then campaigned for by using dark money, wildly crazy promises, conspiracy theories, and fear/hated of others. On the remain side, the campaign was a mix of confused messages and indecision. The result was a surprise to both sides. The UK voted to leave – or at least voted on the idea to leave, and Brexit took its first political causality, Tory PM David Cameron resigned. In came Theresa May and events have spiralled downhill ever since.
In short: May wanting to increase her Tory majority in Parliament to insure a smooth vote on whatever final agreement she managed to hammer out with Brussels, called a “snap election”. In what seems now a pattern of failing to “read the room” the election was lost. Nor was it won by Labour. The Tories retained the most MPs but had need support of the right-wing DUP of Northern Ireland to remain in power, a feat accomplished by May arranging a billion pound “pay off”.
“like so many landowners, newspaper barons, hedge fund managers, firebrand back-bench M.P.s, ex-pat billionaires and Russian oligarchs, they thought it was high time the ordinary people of UK got a chance to send a strong message to an out-of-touch elite”. From “The Story of Berexit”, A Ladybird Book
With her government somewhat secure May entered into negotiations with Brussels. They did not go well but eventually a deal was fit for submission to Parliament. Issues remained – how to deal products such like Airbus built across many national borders and copyright litigation, amongst many. But most of all how to deal with the Irish/Northern Ireland border. When the the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 largely ended the “Troubles”, the Northern Ireland – Ireland border opened for free movement. Since Ireland remains in the EU and Northern Ireland, as part of the UK will leave, border controls will reappear and, the fear is, so will the “Troubles”. As a stop gap the EU separation agreement had the “Backstop”, a temporary solution if no agreement on trade and material movement between the EU and the UK was worked out in the near future. The DUP and other UK “hard” Brexiters see this as nothing more than betrayal and continued EU dominance over UK sovereignty and won’t vote for any agreement with such a clause.
It is at this point, starting about 2 weeks ago, that a strange, disquieting situation descended into complete chaos, and to some political watchers the worst and most dangerous British political crisis since World War Two.
In the last two weeks Parliament has voted down the May negotiated agreement three times. But as the late night ads go, there is more. After vote number one, May returned to Brussels where EU ministers had been saying for sometime that the deal was the deal and the UK was going to have to take or leave it by 29 March. However May was able to get a “legal” letter of clarification on the “backstop” – characterised by some as changed in font and character size only – to present. When the government’s own legal expert characterised it as not binding in any meaningful way, May lost the second vote and The Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow ruled that without real change the government could not present the agreement for a third vote. But a third vote did indeed happen after May, again failing to read the room, offered to resign once the agreement was approved thus leaving the post agreement negotiations to another. The MPs were not impressed, in no small part because May at this point appears to be a “dead man walking”, regardless of any developments.
About this time, many in the public wanting a second public vote begin a petition drive, it started slowly. And then, again demonstrating her blindness to conditions, May gave a speech alleging that she has her finger on the pulse of the great British public and they overwhelmingly want her agreement – that the failure to finalise Brexit is purely with the MPs. MPs reacted by taking over the process of what is to be done and the public petition drive for a new vote went from 1 million signers to 3.5 million, literally overnight. On Saturday, the 24th of March, a million people marched in London for a new vote. Not to remain, but a new vote to determine in a more informed what should happen: take the current deal, exit without a deal or remain. This would not be a general election. Hard Brexiters, lead by Nigel Farage, began their march to London in support of leaving on the 29th. There are about 150 of them.
Taking control of the process a number of MPs tabled proposals for different avenues of leaving, and even perhaps remaining. In the end Bercow choose 8, some of which had been sponsored in a bipartisan effort by MPs from a number of parties, to be voted on. All lost.
May returned to Brussels to plead for more time, to have a fourth vote on her proposal and if it fails to work out something new. The EU agreed to hear her out, taking time out from trade negotiations with China to do so. But after talking with her, hearing no hint of hope that an extended deadline will result in anything different, and May failing to have any idea of a plan B, the EU ministers, reported by The Guardian, ask her to go outside and sit-down, to wait to be called back. The ministers asked the Chinese to come back the following day and then workout a proposal to extend the Brexit deadline to 12 April May’s deal is signed and 22 May if it is not.
It’s Sunday, 31 March, two days past the original Brexit deadline, and 13 days before the new one of 12 April. This coming week May will try for a fourth time get MPs to pass her proposal. This time she is threatening them with a general election. It is hard to see how such a threat would work as Labour has been calling for just that for quite awhile now and the proposal needs Labour votes to pass. MPs plan, it is reported, to have a run off of the two (meaning the least no votes) of the eight losing proposals.
What is going to happen? Have no idea. It’s possible May will no longer be PM having lost in some sort of Tory coup. This would leave the Tories still the dominant member of a coalition government but with a new head to lead them into new general elections in the event they happen. But recent polls are mixed and Corbyn says he would welcome a general election.
Will there be another referendum type election? The petition, now almost certainly with over 5 million signatures, has been dismissed. The march of 1 million, yesterday’s news. Labour has waffled repeatedly about such an election. So again, I don’t know.
Here are a few observations:
Brexit has torn at the fabric of the two main political parties in UK. MPs have left both parties and more have threatened to follow. May was, two years ago, a remainer. Now she sees only one path, her’s and seems determined to follow it over a cliff. She appears to be as mean, blind, vindictive and anti-democratic as Trump, but without the ability to read the room or garner the loyalty that he does.
Within the Tories there are groups looking for a “hard Brexit” to those wanting to remain.
Labour, by any measure of conventional wisdom should be dominating the polls, but isn’t. At least in the ones I’ve seen. Corbyn has never shown strong support for remaining in the EU believing that it is mainly a “bosses” endeavour. Within Labour there are factions that agree with him, those strongly “leave”, a group agreeing the EU is a bosses club but believe leaving a mistake, and neo-liberals who want to remain.
Labour seems, for the most part, to support a new referendum. The stated belief among some in both the Conservative and Labour parties that a second referendum is someone anti-democratic because “the people” have spoken I find ludicrous and dishonest.
The “hard” Brexiters say the EU will have no choice but to come around, that the EU needs UK more than UK needs the EU. But I wonder how long this position can be sustained with the number of stories appearing about major sectors of the British economy taking hits – finance moving from London to Dublin, car plants closing and doubts about manufacturing .
Forgetting the irony of depending on foreigners in the guise of tourism as an economic model, in a world economy is the British economy big enough and healthy enough to successful negotiate advantages agreements with such as the United States, China or the EU? Case in point, Trump administration attempts to get the UK to buy “chlorinated” chicken from the US. While it provided a nice focus point, the issue was rooted in differences in industrial farming practices of the two countries. Alone the UK may not have the clout to dictate what kind of product practices they will accept.
It is interesting to me that the “leave” folks seem to have no issue with certain forms of cultural dictation: Starbucks and Star Wars be two examples.
Lastly, to a larger degree than in the USA Brexit has taken over the discourse. It is a truly momentous decision on multiple levels with structural and political implications for the UK and the world, but all other issues around how society is organised should not be crowded out. The effects of an austerity government on society, there just isn’t air in the room for debate. To Corbyn and Labour’s credit, they have talked about these issues, about homelessness, the decline of the NHS, the gap between rich and poor but the voices have been muted. It will be interesting to see if these issues come to the fore if Labour is successful in forcing a general election.
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