Krugman’s Rural Despair Misses the Mark
By Anthony Flaccavento
I have a great deal of respect for Paul Krugman, but his March 18th New York Times piece, “Getting Real About Rural America” badly missed the mark. Like fellow Times analyst, Eduardo Porter, Krugman begins with the premise that “nobody knows how to fix rural America.” In point of fact, a consensus has begun to emerge about a range of strategies that work in rural communities, based on economic revitalization success stories from the Midwest to Central Appalachia, where I live. And we don’t just know what works; it’s also increasingly clear what doesn’t, including specific policies and strategies that are crushing the people and the economies of the countryside. Here then are four challenges to Mr Krugman and the many other analysts wondering aloud what the heck is wrong with us folks in the boonies.
Jobs are being created. Local wealth is being developed. Ecosystems are being reimagined as community assets, rather than a source from which to extract and export wealth.
First, while the economic and social problems of rural America are indeed real, they’ve become the default narrative for city-dwelling commentators and experts, overshadowing tangible progress and effective solutions. In Appalachia for instance, the poverty rate has been cut in half since the launch of Great Society programs in the early 1960’s, and the number of “distressed” counties has dropped from 295 to about 90 (Appalachian Regional Commission). This improvement, even as three out of every four coal jobs have been lost. Nationwide, according to USDA’s Economic Research Service, rural unemployment rates dropped from 10.3% in 2010 to 4.4% in 2017, during which time 650,000 net new jobs were created. And while too many young people continue to leave, 2017 actually saw a net increase in population for rural counties. Broadly speaking then, things are getting better across many parts of rural America, albeit much too slowly and sporadically.
Second, things are getting better in large part because, well, some people do know how to fix things in rural areas. Like Brandon Dennison in southern West Virginia, whose Coalfield Development Corporation is successfully putting miners and others back to work with comprehensive, hands-on training in solar installation, deconstruction and sustainable farming. Or Bren Smith, whose ecologically restorative vertical ocean farming system is being adopted by fisherman along the east coast. Or the folks at We Own It, whose work to reform and open up the leadership of Rural Electric Cooperatives has begun to redeploy some of the $3 trillion in assets REC’s hold to better serve their members and communities. Or the innovators at Windustry, who for more than a decade have been helping farmers, public schools and rural communities increase their stake in community wind power, part of the larger wind industry on course to pay nearly a billion dollars annually to rural landowners by 2030 (Presidential Climate Action Program).
Brandon, Bren and hundreds of others like them, are catalyzing new and better approaches to local economic development in rural communities across the US, usually with meager outside investment from the public or private sector. Jobs are being created. Local wealth is being developed. Ecosystems are being reimagined as community assets, rather than a source from which to extract and export wealth.
Third, as bottom up strategies emerge and mature across rural America, they frequently must confront a lack of sustained investment along with contemptibly bad federal policies that restrain or undermine them. The sense one gets from reading Krugman’s piece is that, like the former East Germany, extraordinary sums of money have been spent in rural communities with little to show in return. The reality however is very different. An analysis by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation revealed that between 1994 and 2001, the feds actually spent between two and five times more, per person, on community and economic development in urban versus rural areas, a disparity that has changed little to the present day. And it’s no better in private philanthropy, where a 2011 Economic Research Service report showed that rural communities garnered less than six percent of foundation grants, even though one fifth of the population lives there. Bottom line: There are plenty of effective initiatives in rural communities, but a paucity of capital to support them.
It’s not just a lack of direct investment in rural areas. Even more destructive are long standing trends in federal policy that promote wealth extraction, economic concentration and undermining of the local economic base. In an outstanding article in Washington Monthly, Claire Kelloway describes how extreme levels of market consolidation have resulted from the lack of anti-trust enforcement and the weakening of laws to combat monopolies. This of course is an enormous problem for the country as a whole, but in rural regions, it is destroying farmers and sucking the life out of small towns. As Kelloway points out, “Farmers are caught between monopolized sellers and buyers. They must pay ever higher prices to the giants who dominate the market for the supplies they need, like seed and fertilizer. At the same time, they must accept ever lower prices from the giant agribusiness that buy the stuff they sell, like crops and livestock.”
When three companies control well over half of the global seed market, and four enormous packers account for 85% of the meat that comes to US markets (USDA), farmers are like serfs, with falling incomes and astronomical debts. And it isn’t just food monopolies. Thousands of community banks – the engine of lending in rural communities – have closed or been bought up by regional megabanks, further eroding the base of local capital. The obeisance of elected officials and the courts to monopolists, the enormous subsidies expended to lure huge, cash-rich corporations to small towns, and the accelerating privatization of public spaces, lands and functions ensure that building strong, self-reliant rural economies is a rare and heroic task.
My fourth and last challenge is simply this: That Mr Krugman broaden his sources and stop relying on assessments from people who neither live in nor understand rural America. Talk to the folks at the Center for Rural Affairs or the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, or the practitioners at Coastal Enterprises, the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development or the Federation of Rural Cooperatives. Or me. What you’ll quickly learn is that rural America is neither a monolith nor a region ‘left behind’ by the dynamic folks in the big cities. Rather, it’s the place from where most of the food, fiber and energy upon which we all depend originates. And it is home to hundreds of innovators, problem solvers and entrepreneurs who do know how to make things better. They just need real investment, and an end to wealth extraction facilitated by federal policy and an endless stream of bad advice.
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The Primary Route – Pathway for Democratic Socialists
By Tom Gallagher
In 2015 prior to the Sanders candidacy Tom Gallagher authored a political pamphlet entitled, The Primary Route: How the 99% Take on the Military Industrial Complex. This short and engaging examination of third party efforts and primary challenges was prescient in predicting the power of Bernie Sanders candidacy in the 2016 Democratic primary. Now over two years after the election of Donald Trump and heading into 2020 Gallagher once again examines the political feasibility of the primary route in building a socialist current in America.
Would active participation in the presidential primary race advance the development of a serious American electoral left? Before 2016, the jury was out on this question. The argument for involvement in the presidential process was that, while success might be more likely in House or Senate races (and certainly in state or local races), a presidential candidacy offered a breadth of opportunity that the lower level races simply did not. Only the presidential election process provides a political forum involving the entire nation – a debate and discussion about where the country is at and where it wants to go, whose importance far surpasses that of any other event in the normal American political cycle. And the argument for participation specifically in the primaries (and caucuses) – as opposed to a “third party” run – rests on the fact that the primaries offer a “safe” option, a situation where candidates of the left are less likely to see their message overshadowed by the perceived danger of their efforts ultimately making matters worse by inadvertently helping to elect a Republican – a debate that has continued for nearly twenty years since Ralph Nader’s 2000 run. After the Bernie Sanders campaign, the question of the value of taking the primary route would appear to be settled.
In the process of taking some unusually “big issues” – universal health insurance, a minimum wage that is actually a living wage, the history of U.S. overthrows of democratically elected governments, etc. – right into America’s living rooms in the debates, the Sanders campaign arguably revolutionized the entire process, and certainly offered much of the country its first taste of “democratic socialism,” that is “democratic socialism” as defined by a friend rather than a foe. The national political debate now included a perspective known throughout virtually all of the free world – but previously not here.
The question of the moment is whether this breakthrough will ultimately prove to be just a one-off historical anomaly or the beginning of a lasting sea change in American politics. Will the future include an American left consistently able to navigate the often murky challenges of real world politics? Or does it fall back to its traditional, largely non-participant critique, generally delivered from the margins?
To the extent that one needs to understand the past in order to plan the future, an accurate assessment of the Sanders campaign seems a prerequisite for any thoughtful advance planning And yet, maybe it’s because the election of Donald Trump followed so close on the heels of Sanders’s run and plunged us into a daily routine of shaking our heads and/or fists at the administration’s latest outrages and follies, but it’s not always totally clear whether the magnitude of the Sanders campaign achievement has really ever fully sunken in. (And the fact that he is again a candidate will only make dispassionate assessment of his last run all the more difficult.)
Simply put, in winning better than 13 million votes in the Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses, Bernie Sanders surpassed the combined vote total of every socialist presidential candidate in the prior history of the country. And yet we still find, on the one hand, self-identified socialists who consider the campaign to have been a failure or a diversion and, on the other, activists and advocates for many of the same causes the campaign championed who appear oblivious or indifferent to its remarkable success in promoting those issues.
It’s difficult to say how many people fall into either of these groups – one suspects that the relatively unimpressed outnumber the actively opposed – but regardless of their sizes, the difficulty and urgency of actually enacting the sort of changes the Sanders campaign moved to the front burner suggest that there’s some value in trying to get all of us who are trying to get to the same place onto the same train.
One strand of thought among the Sanders campaign’s rejectionist opposition simply has it that the ultimate failure to win the nomination demonstrates the futility of the entire venture – we could and should have been doing something better with our time. Another argument faults Sanders for operating within the realm of the Democratic Party and, in doing so, validating the Wall Street types who dominate it, along with their interests and positions, positions that often run antithetical to his – and ours. Yet another viewpoint argues that the people who run the Democratic Party don’t even want us there, so why should we stay where we’re not wanted? Tying them all together is usually a belief that the situation calls for a “third party,” a party of our own, a party that unambiguously shares his/our politics, a party that we control.
“But the question is who would listen to that clear message in the midst of the realities of the system in which we actually live?”
Unfortunately, history suggests that if we wanted a roadmap for a return to the marginality in which the American Left has so long labored, this would be pretty close to being it. Perhaps the most profoundly un- or even anti-political of these arguments is the idea that we ought to leave the Democratic Party because its powers-that-be don’t like us. If we can’t handle the fact that when you try to topple people from their positions of power they don’t like it, we might want to consider devoting our energies to something other than politics. You want to contest for real power? Then expect pushback. These guys know what they’re doing. And the fact that they want us gone is precisely the reason we need to stay: The Democratic Party represents a proven route to power. Specifically, the Democratic nominee has not finished out of the top two in a presidential race since the party’s inception in 1828.
What does a third party option offer? Clarity? Yes, it is true that the creation of yet another new party on the left would enable a certain clarity of message beyond anything we’re likely to achieve in the Democratic Party in the foreseeable future. But the question is who would listen to that clear message in the midst of the realities of the system in which we actually live? A lot of people who study such things will argue the virtues of a parliamentary system, one which allows for fielding candidates running on a distinct party program, after which, absent any party achieving an outright majority – a routine outcome in many parliamentary systems – the various parties have the option of combining with the party or parties closest to them in order to form a government, in opposition to the parties with which they have the least in common. If the U.S. had such a system in 2016, we might imagine Sanders and Clinton backers combining forces against Trump supporters and other hard right elements, forming a government and choosing a prime minister from the larger group to preside over it.
But, for better or worse, we don’t live in such an “additive” system that allows the strengths of different parties to be combined after the voting is done – and we can’t just wish it so. In the American reality, a new third party of the left might very well conduct a unified convention, create a coherent platform and select an articulate presidential candidate to run on that platform. And afterwards? History unfortunately suggests that said candidate would be doing very well to get even as much as three percent of the vote. The last “third party” presidential candidate of the left to reach even that level was Eugene Debs in 1920. (Robert LaFollette also did it in 1924, but he was actually a Republican – yes, there was such a thing as a left-wing Republican in those days.) And if the past be any guide, one thing our imagined candidate would likely win a lot of is – blame. For in the “subtractive” system used in American presidential elections, any third party offering an alternative to the candidate whom its backers might consider the “lesser of two evils” runs the risk of assisting in the election of the greater of the two evils. We just have to imagine the reaction to Trump being reelected in 2020 by electoral votes from states where his edge over the Democratic nominee was smaller than the number of votes cast for a prominent third party candidate of the left, in order to realize the potential for disaster in such a candidacy. Third parties can claim their share of accomplishments, to be sure. And there are electoral arenas in which they can and do thrive – but the presidential level is not one of them.
The failure to acknowledge the significance of the 2016 Sanders campaign is not limited to die-hard third party proponents, though. At the other edge, there appear to be a significant number of people who seemed to fit the profile of Sanders backers, but actually were not – including some leftists of longstanding, many even self-identified socialists. Some of them were wrong-footed by Sanders’s entry into the race, having taken the Clinton nomination for a fait accompli, and/or assuming that Sanders had little electoral potential. For others, the prospect of electing the first female president outweighed the fact that they were otherwise closer to Sanders on the issues. Some may have had specific problems with Sanders as a candidate, a potential stumbling block with any candidate, who, unlike a bill or a ballot question, comes with a specific history and characteristics. Some may have thought, “He should be a Democrat,” or “I didn’t like that thing he did back when he was mayor of Burlington,” etc. And some may simply have gotten so used to the prospect of choosing from a list of the best available Wall Street-oriented Democrats, that they were no longer able to recognize a candidate of a genuinely different stripe when the real thing finally came along.
There’s no telling how large this group actually is, but it would appear to include a fair number of “movement types” who had dug in over the years in left-related activities in areas like fundraising, foundations, social services, advertising, public relations, legal work, journalism, and a few other professions. Whether or not they still consider going with Clinton the right thing to have done under the circumstances is, at this point, a matter of only personal significance. What does matter, however, is whether that past decision is even now blocking their recognition of the degree to which the Sanders campaign changed things – toward ends for which they had long labored. There is no real way to know either the answer to this question or the number of people involved, but the field of journalism, the most public of these professions, suggests there may be a substantial number who have yet to reassess the situation. Consider how many writers wax eloquent over the virtues of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, but did no such thing in the case of Sanders in 16, and have given no indication of having reassessed their stance, seemingly ignoring, or remaining oblivious to how very unlikely it would have been for her to become the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress, absent the Sanders campaign.
Where does this all leave us, then? Early 2019 presents a vista of American politics unimaginable at the start of 2016. The starkest reality is a White House occupied by a man routinely referred to as a liar, presiding over the further enrichment of the already rich, the devastation of environmental regulation, and the poisoning of public discourse regarding those not of his race and gender; a man whose unprecedentedly outrageous behavior has shocked millions of us – every single day of his administration. On the other hand, we see an America potentially on the verge of a paradigm shift also without precedent, an America with a growing recognition that the earth’s clock is ticking, a recognition that the people of this nation and this planet can no longer leave their destiny in the hands of profit-seeking corporations and the power-seeking military industrial complex, a recognition of the need to find the way to take that power into our own, democratic hands.
Next year’s primaries and caucuses will again undoubtedly be a time of dispute and disagreement – that’s what they’re for. But for the first time in the lives of many, if not most, of the participating voters, there seems a realistic possibility of finishing this primary season with a candidate who not only surpasses the exceedingly low hurdle of being better than the current occupant of the White House, but one who is actually up to the challenge of establishing democratic control over the forces currently leading us down the road to ruin.
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Where We are After the Strike
By Peter Haberfeld
Only a coalition of teachers, parents, students and supportive members of the community can fight successfully for public education
It has been clear for some time that public education of our youth cannot be taken for granted. Let’s put it simply. Corporate lobbyists, in recent years, have persuaded legislators, in the name of austerity, to starve the public schools that educate the children of the 99%. At the same time, in the name of privatization, they have facilitated a feeding frenzy by the 1%.
During the past two years, strikes in several states have demonstrated that teachers, parents, students and members of the community have the potential power collectively to reverse that trend. Those stakeholders have fought to protect and promote their common interests: improved terms and conditions of employment (including higher teacher salaries) and improvements in the quality of education (including class size reduction, more time for instruction and less obsessive testing).
Oakland’s history building a coalition of stakeholders to fight for public education:
The recent teachers’ strike in Oakland California was powered by a coalition of public education stakeholders. This was not the first time those partners combined forces to fight for their common interests.
In 1996, a coalition of parents and teachers formed in Oakland California to launch the “Classrooms First” campaign to fight for improvements in the City’s public schools. The Oakland Education Association (OEA), an affiliate of the California Teachers Association (CTA) and the National Education Association (NEA), represented the teachers. The Oakland Community Organizations (OCO), an affiliate of Faith In Action (formerly PICO), represented the parent leaders who attended the forty member churches that are located primarily in the lower income areas of the City.
The coalition, at that time, prepared the community for a strike by Oakland teachers to fight for the campaign’s three “Rs”: raise teacher salaries; reduce class sizes in grades K-3; and reduce administrative staff. OCO held a meeting with over 2000 parent leaders to endorse the demands of Classroom First. OEA organized 115 house parties to discuss the campaign’s demands with parents and teachers. Over 1000 of the parents who attended those meetings formed Parents for Classrooms First and convened a city-wide meeting to advocate for those demands to Oakland’s elected officials.
Some lessons learned in the process:
The results of the campaign were mixed. The initial two-day strike was supported throughout the City. However, its strength diminished as the disfunction within OEA and CTA leadership structures had their impact. The OEA leadership decided to engage in an open-ended strike. Unsolicited, CTA took over the direction of the strike. Its debutante strike manager and the OEA leadership declined to recruit and train site leaders and the lack of internal organization handicapped striking teachers as they faced a hostile School Board. The Board was determined to inflict maximum pain on them by dragging out the conflict for an additional twenty-four days.
The teachers won salary increases and, on paper, class size reductions. Regrettably, however, CTA negotiators betrayed the coalition by agreeing to contract language that promised the proposed reductions of class size but, by secret agreement with District negotiators, adopted language they intended to be unenforceable. Fortunately, OEA managed to save face with the teachers and its coalition partners because, at the same time, the State Legislature adopted and funded identical class size reductions for all California’s elementary schools. The State stopped funding the reform as soon as California faced economic hard times.
By 2019, a new the OEA leadership had been elected that was more energetic and open to advice from experienced labor and community organizers. It engaged to some degree in the labor-intensive work that is necessary to develop a leadership infrastructure capable of expanding participation internally and externally. It began to develop relationships that are committed to waging a long term, multi-phase campaign to make public education a priority at the local and state level.
The 2019 Oakland strike settlement can be the beginning of something better for Oakland’s students:
The goals of the recently settled Oakland teachers’ strike enjoyed unprecedented support by a coalition of teachers, parents, students and others in the community. Yet, the strike settlement merely promises modest improvements. Much more needs to be done to stop the deterioration of public-school education in our City.
Problem: The District has not yet changed its priorities: The District’s budget is merely the spending plan it put together to further its priorities, priorities that do not include paying teachers in line with what surrounding districts pay. In the aftermath of the strike, it has become clear from the District’s $20 million cuts to student programs that students’ educational needs are an even lower priority.
OEA identified District funds that could be allocated to meet its demands. For instance, it pointed to the amounts budgeted for books and supplies. That is a favorite category of school districts for concealing available funds and serving as a slush fund for hidden priorities.
The District has not yet chosen to eliminate costs that are not borne by other school districts: for example, the salaries of its full-time propagandist and bevy of lawyers. Nor has it decided to stop wasting funds on outside consultants instead of using the expertise of many of its full-time teachers and administrative staff.
We must suspect that the District’s cuts to the educational program are not only designed to avoid changing its priorities, they seem intended to punish parents and students for supporting the teachers’ strike. Perhaps the cuts are designed to break up a potentially even more powerful alliance.
Solution: The teacher-parent-student alliance must respond to the District’s cynical either-or posture by intensifying its organizing campaign. It can continue to fight for improvements in both teaching and learning conditions.
Problem: District is dominated by alien corporate interests: Many of the School Board members owe their positions to the corporate interests (represented in part by an organization named “GO”) that financed their campaigns. As intended, they continue to do the bidding of those contributors. Regrettably, their corporate agenda does not further the community’s values. Charter schools, for example, are not governed by a publicly elected school board. They hire employees who are not represented by public employee unions. They are not obliged to accept students who have special needs. When students depart to enroll in charter schools, their former neighborhood schools are depleted of public funds and the School Board orders them closed.
Solution: Stop GO! The coalition must replace the corporate dominated Board members. Each school site community can wage an election campaign in the precincts that surround it. Coalition partners can form a team of leaders that will take responsibility for recruiting and coordinating volunteers to communicate by telephone and at the door with all registered voters. They must discuss the issues, identify voters who support the coalition’s pro-public education candidates, and ensure that they are mobilized to go to the polls on Election Day.
The coalition has the legal right in California to remove members of the School Board before the end of their term. During the last few years, teachers and parents have recalled School Board members in neighboring school districts (Fremont, Vallejo, Santa Clara, etc.) The first step is to gather the required number of signatures and submit a recall petition to the Alameda County Registrar of Voters. (Tip: it is more productive to collect signatures in front of supermarkets and other locations of high-volume foot traffic than it is going from door to door.) The next steps are to select a replacement candidate and carry out the same procedure for contacting voters, identifying supporters and mobilizing them on Election Day as is done in a regular election.
Problem: The Mayor, City Council members, and other politicians representing Oakland have not yet made the public education of Oakland’s children the priority it must become. Although, the educational system is in crisis, elected leaders have not presented bold and creative solutions. They continue to defer to a School Board that does not serve the needs of Oakland’s diverse population.
Solution: The infrastructure developed at school sites to change the composition of the School Board can be used, as well, to elect City and State officials who will make ending Oakland’s educational crisis their priority. The educational coalition’s organizational capacity at each school site to contact, persuade and turn out voters for pro-education candidates in surrounding precincts cannot be replicated by other candidates for public office. Only the coalition has the potential to exercise that degree of electoral power.
Problem: The developers of the multitude of new apartment buildings are new sources of wealth in Oakland, but the City has not yet required them to contribute a fair share of their profits to the well-being of the City’s residents. The developers are beneficiaries of taxpayer payments to the City, but the City has not required them to sign a “community benefits agreement” that gives taxpayers a reasonable return on their investment. Nor has the City required them to provide a large quantity of rentals that are affordable for teachers and others who have been displaced by unchecked gentrification.
Solution: The education coalition’s support of a candidate for local and State office ought to be conditioned on her/his agreement to require developers to pay their fair share of the cost of public education and to provide more affordable housing. That public official’s agreement and the developer’s obligation can be enforced by a full range of well-organized pressure tactics that range from letter-writing, phone calls, office visits by delegations to, if necessary, civil disobedience.
Problem: District pays its teachers the lowest salaries in the area: The District, despite agreeing in the recent strike settlement to grant modest salary increases, continues to pay its teachers the lowest salaries in the area. Last year, one out of five teachers left the District. They can be hired by a neighboring school district that values their skills and pays, on the average, $15,000 more per year for teaching under easier conditions.
Solution: The coalition should remain organized and spring to action when the teachers’ union has its next opportunity to bargain for a salary increase. That will take place when it has a contractual right to negotiate “salary reopeners”, generally at the end of the first year after the contract takes effect. The demand can be that the District place all the “new money” on the teacher salary schedule that it receives from the State during the next few months and, further, that it restore the funding to the student programs it cut after it settled the teachers’ strike.
The powerful new community coalition can build on the infrastructure that OEA and its supporters created before and during the strike. Organizers have identified schools that need help developing local leadership, teams and outreach. A forum for city-wide communication among, and training of, school leaders would advance the effectiveness of the internal and external organizing.
Problem: The argument in favor of charter schools is based on the same fallacy that is used by the political Extreme Right to justify other privatization schemes. It is based on the unproven claim that public institutions are less efficient than private ones. Further, it plays on the dissatisfaction many low income and minority parents have had with public schools. The purpose and effect of converting these public institutions, however, is to create either more opportunities to use public resources for private profit-making or non-profits that pay high salaries to CEOs and low ones to the school’s teachers and other employees.
Many studies have demonstrated that inner-city charter schools do not, on average, have better outcomes than a truly public-school. Oakland proved it. In the late 1990s, parent and teacher leaders connected to the Oakland Community Organization (OCO) persuaded a forward-looking Superintendent and School Board to adopt the “new, autonomous small school reform” that ultimately restructured forty-nine District schools.
Site-based teams of parents, teachers and administrators designed and directed schools that were recognized nation-wide as improving the quality of instruction, broadening participant collaboration and enhancing student outcomes. The process was supported by a team of District administrators that “incubated” the new schools by recruiting, training and guiding school principals to be instructional leaders capable of creating a safe, collaborative environment for teachers and students.
Several of the new schools became highly successful scholastic communities in which parents and teachers were profoundly involved in students’ learning. The former Whittier Elementary School, for example (now called Greenleaf) located near 58th and International Blvd in East Oakland, advanced, in four years, from a State API rating in the 400s to a score in the 800s. Another example is the Melrose Leadership Academy, now at the former site of the Maxwell Park Elementary School, provides excellent bi-lingual education to its students.
Solution: School improvement must continue to be the unifying goal of the militant coalition that came together to support the strike. The new coalition’s credibility requires that its opposition to charter schools include advocacy for improved schools within the District. The pursuit of higher salaries and class size reductions must be combined now with efforts to improve each school’s capacity to guarantee the success of all students.
The coalition partners should take heed, however, from Oakland’s experience. The argument advanced to justify the creation of charter schools (namely, that parents ought to have alternative ways to educate their children), led the District and OCO to diminish their commitment to the reform effort. Both facilitated the creation of charter schools, encouraged an exodus of students and funds, and thereby caused the closing of neighborhood schools.
Oakland teachers at the newly created small schools dedicated themselves to the school reform. The OEA, their union, called for lower class size during its 1996 strike and thereby committed itself to a measure for school improvement. However, although its leadership consistently opposed the creation of charter schools, it did not support the small school reform or any other campaign to bring about district-wide school improvement.
There is a lesson here. The community coalition must apply constant pressure on the stakeholders to sustain educational reform over the long term
Problem: State refuses to forgive its loan to the District: In the late 1990s, the State imposed a trusteeship on the Oakland’s School District because, among other reasons, its expenses exceeded its revenue. Oakland continues to struggle each year to make ends meet, repay that State loan, and pay a $6 million annual interest charge.
There is another perverse feature of the State debt. Charter schools receive the full amount of ADA (average daily attendance) paid per student by the State. However, the District’s debt to the State must be paid out of the ADA Oakland receives for the students who remain in its public schools. Consequently, not only is the District forced to manage with less money because of the exodus of students to charter schools, it must manage with less because of its obligation to repay the debt and pay the annual interest payments on the loan.
The primary reason for the yearly shortfall is that the State does not recognize that students in large urban districts have greater needs and therefore are more expensive to educate. The State could change the formula it uses to fund large urban school districts. It could also increase the “cap” on the District’s special education expenditures. When that “cap” is exceeded, Oakland has no alternative other than raiding its general fund to come up with the difference, a measure that further reduces the money available to the general school population.
Solution: The coalition ought to organize delegations of community representatives to lobby State legislators. Ideally, delegations should consist of representatives from each of its constituent groups as well as allied business owners, religious leaders, elected officials, and District school administrators. The delegations should be trained to function well internally and deliver a common message: allocate more money to public education; end the funding of charter schools; adjust the funding formula to meet needs of Oakland’s children; adjust special education “cap”; and forgive the District’s debt.
The coalition must also organize letter-writing campaigns and phone calls to legislators who serve on key committees. Ask each school site’s election campaign committee to set a goal for the number of contacts it will make, monitor its progress toward the goal, and support it to guarantee success.
Problem: Historically, contract settlements with the District have not guaranteed that it complies with contract terms. The District Administration has not had a mechanism that independently ensures such compliance and that administrators uniformly treat employees fairly. Instead, it relies on employee unions to monitor administrative conduct. When the unions initiate grievances that protest administrators’ violations of the contract, the District Administration’s predictable response has been to delay and oppose the grievance. This practice has placed a heavy burden on the teachers’ union. The time, energy and member dues money expended by union representatives to defend its members against administrative non-compliance with the contract has severely restricted its ability to take affirmative steps to lead its members and the community in the area of educational reform.
Solution: It is in the interest of OEA’s coalition partners to help OEA protect its organizational resources so it can use them to promote educational improvements. The new educational coalition must persuade the School Board and District Administration to monitor administrative conduct and intervene on its own initiative to ensure compliance with contract terms.
Conclusion: The problems that persist can be addressed effectively by the powerful new coalition that has formed to improve public school education in Oakland.
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Book Review: Can the Working Class Change the World? Michael D. Yates
By Peter Olney
The book’s title poses a daunting question; Can the Working Class Change the World? Then in a tidy volume of just over 200 pages it proceeds to answer that question in the affirmative. When I was coming up as a young radical pup and asking that question, we were sat down in Marxist study groups where we poured over original Marxist classics like Capital or Anti-Duhring and later political tracts from Lenin and Mao like What is To Be Done and On Contradiction.
I am sure that Michael Yates would not argue that his work is a substitute for a reading of the classics, but he does the new generation a service of distilling much of Marxist theory into very manageable bites. So as a starter/primer this is an excellent read. Its six chapters give us a survey of Marxist theoretical concepts and some hard-nosed numbers and analysis of the working class, both worldwide and in the USA.
Chapter I, entitled simply The Working Class, presents a quantitative portrait of different sectors of the proletariat. Yates nicely debunks any illusions that all work in the United States is performed by highly skilled technical workers and points out that: “hundreds of millions work in occupations that do not require such skills or education (as in the new tech fields, PO). If you were asked how many people in the US are automobile workers; secretaries; administrative assistants, and office support personnel; clerks; restaurant workers; security employees; custodians; and medical workers, the chances are good you would understate the numbers. In 2015, there were 65 million in these jobs, out of a total national employment of a little over 140 million. That is 45 percent.”
Yates consistently reverts to the hard numbers rather than falling prey to myths of an exaggerated precariat or inflated myths of the “Gig” economy. British academic Kevin Doogan of the University of Bristol has characterized these inflated characterizations as “Left wing harmonies in a neo-liberal chorus” as they obscure real employment relations that remain predominantly of the traditional sort–direct employment by a capitalist enterprise. As one of my mentors in the movement used to say, you have to make a “F….ing concrete analysis of f…ing concrete conditions.” Yates delivers on this score in his descriptions of the working class. He deftly manages the class and income conundrum by discussing professional athletes, who sell their labor power as workers, but are paid at extravagant levels. He anticipates the progressive role of NBA players like LeBron James by discussing their backgrounds and their sympathies with the oppressed.
Chapter 2 delves into Theoretical Considerations simply explaining the Marxist theory of the exploitation of wage labor. The chapter makes an important point of debunking education as the great leveler that somehow class conflict is alleviated by education. “Interestingly, despite ample evidence that education has little effect on the many injustices the system causes, the claim for the efficacy of schooling lives on, which is proof that education serves to reinforce capital’s power.”
On labor’s political activity, Yates advances a strictly independent political action position, a reasonable outlook with which I happen to disagree.
Chapters 3 and 4 Nothing to Lose but Chains and What hath the Working Class Wrought? explore two important themes for present day organizers and socialist activists in the United States and worldwide: the role of labor unions and political parties. Yates provides theoretical grounding on the inherent weakness of unions as revolutionary organizations, given that their function is primarily to band workers together to deal with their immediate economic needs on the job. Working class political parties evolved historically because trade unions were limited in their power over the state and in broader society to advocate for the needs and interests of all workers as a class. Yates explores the failings and shortcomings of unions and political parties.
Again in Chapter 5, The Power of Capital is Still Intact, Yates redelivers a critique of the failure of unions and working class parties to transform the world. He examines not only the United States, but various countries around the world.
In his final prescriptive chapter entitled, Can the Working Class Radically Change the World, Yates offers three important observations:
1) The need for a positive and radical working class program with demands on economics, race and the environment
2) A rank and file strategy for democratization of the unions and the replacing of old tired and collaborationist leadership with new democratic leaders
3) The creation of independent working class parties.
I can find little to disagree with on the programmatic Statement of Principles and Commitments, although as Yates knows in every real political situation the details and the rough edges have to be hashed out and rounded out. On the issue of rank and file strategy, it is important to look at the actual existing movement in labor. The recent wave of teachers’ strikes certainly is rooted in rank and file efforts at reform and in fact the victorious strikes in Chicago in 2012 and most recently in Los Angeles are the result of reform slates coming to power. However, not all successful and important battles with capital are the simple product of reform movements. The recent winning national multi-city strike against the giant corporation Marriott conducted by the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) does not fit neatly into the rank and file model. A level of sophistication in analysis of the various forces in the labor movement at top and bottom is necessary to navigate those waters and build a strong trade union movement. Not all progressive initiatives in labor are the product of a rank and file upsurge. Often the existing leadership has been schooled in an honest trade union experience that leads them to do the right thing by the working class and the members they represent. They too can be part of the configurations that lead to radical social transformation.
On labor’s political activity, Yates advances a strictly independent political action position, a reasonable outlook with which I happen to disagree. Yates argues that “unions shunned Bernie Sanders [in 2016], a left liberal who actively courted those who do society’s work.” This was true of many unions, but not all. In fact, six national unions supported Sanders in the primaries along with 100 union locals and 55,000 union members who joined Labor for Bernie. 13 million votes for Sanders in the primaries and the subsequent uprising within the Democratic Party have sent shock waves through the American political terrain. Now President Trump feels obliged to denounce socialism in the State of the Union address. Who would have thunk it? I would contend that we must confront the present political dynamic, and I suggest that there is a viable inside/outside strategy for the working class and its unions in relationship to the Democratic Party. I fear that pure independent political action at this moment will be very independent of the action, particularly in the Democratic primaries in 2020. Yates mentions the wisdom of Mao and his present-day followers several times in the book. So I would therefore characterize this disagreement on labor politics as Mao did in On Contradiction, as “contradictions among the people.” This issue is certainly worthy of friendly debate and resolution within the working class.
On balance this a great read and a great introduction for young folks. I wish I had it handy back in 1974 when I was the Chief Steward at a machine shop in Roxbury, Massachusetts. At that time, when many of us were discovering the working class by “salting” or “industrializing” in factories and warehouses and hospitals, our readings of the classics outside of time, place and condition often led us to some humorous actions. One night in my Marxist cell we discussed the aforementioned work of Lenin, What is To be Done, written in 1901 before the 1906 failed Russian uprising. This political tract is about the need for the working class to go beyond economic struggles and defend the interests all classes against the Tsarist bourgeoisie. I went to work the next day, and the company fired a supervisor. The supervisor was popular with the workforce, but that was not my consideration. I had a Leninist wet dream and decided that it was important to walk the workforce to protest the firing of this man from “another class” as Lenin had instructed me. The factory was shut down and I called the union’s representative at the hall on a pay phone to tell him we were on strike. He asked why, and I said we were out defending the job of a supervisor. He said, “What the f… and get back to work!”
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Can the Working Class Change the World? Michael D. Yates. Monthly Review Press 2018
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The violence is symbolic and psychological – The film ROMA
By Myrna Santiago
“Roma” represents Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón′s loving gaze at his mixteca nanny, “Cleo” in the film, Liboria Rodríguez in real life, as played by first-time actress Yalitzia Aparicio. But the movie is also about something else: a critique of the multiple facets of patriarchal violence in Mexico. Cuarón gives us a glimpse of personal, family, intimate violence and its mirror image in the state-sponsored violence of the 1970s, personified by the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre against student protesters carried out by Luis Echeverría’s government.
Following Cleo’s every move as the indigenous maid of a middle class family at the point of its dissolution, the film shows the apparent ease with which the male head of household, a doctor, leaves his family, which includes a wife, four children, a mother-in-law, Cleo, and a young mixteca cook. Cuarón shows his father as annoyed with the messiness of the house and the amount of excrement the dog leaves in the driveway—a not-so-subtle jab by the father at the women of the family: a wife who can’t manage her maids and the maids who can’t seem to do their jobs properly. Later on in the film, Cuarón shows the father coming out of a movie-theatre joyously laughing with a new girlfriend, to the point of not noticing that one of his sons has seen him. All the while the father is pretending that he is on a work trip to Canada in the few missives he sends to the children. Child support is not on his agenda. Although the father does not beat his wife or his kids, his selfishness causes them enormous pain. The violence is symbolic and psychological, but certainly no less hurtful. Even in middle class families, the patriarch’s own desires come first, and to hell with the needs of everyone else.
Cleo meets violence closer in the face, as befitting her class and ethnicity. She is at the bottom of the social pecking order in the family, and no matter how much the mother in the house, Sofia, truly cares for her, she becomes the target of the latter’s frustration with her husband. In flashes of anger because her husband has left the family, Sofia lashes out at the teenage Cleo for failing to control the dog or a precocious kid who overhears a conversation that reveals the true nature of the father’s absence. Psychologists may have scientific terms to talk about the displacement of Sofia’s anger, but her behavior also shows that under patriarchy, all the females share the duty of keeping the man at the top of the hierarchy happy. Sofia, as the female head of household, has the additional responsibility of enforcing that idea among women of lesser status. Thus women uphold patriarchal values themselves, without the men getting their hands dirty.
In a moment of recognition and “sisterhood” fueled by apparent drunkenness, Sofia does tell Cleo that women have something in common: they are always alone. Class and ethnicity might separate them, but patriarchy brings them together. Under Mexican patriarchy, women can never trust the men in their lives will remain faithful in any sense of the word. Women will end up on their own, at the mercy of the shifting desires of the patriarch.
What these men are really good at is abandonment or violence.”
Cleo finds that out soon enough. Her first boyfriend, Fermín, impregnates her and abandons her right at the movie theatre when she tells him she’s pregnant. When she seeks him out in that squalid slum of one million people that is Nezahualcoyotl–far removed from the respectability of la Roma–to remind him that she is carrying his child, Fermín promptly threatens her. He tells her he will hurt her and “her” child if she doesn’t leave him alone. Cleo knows he is not joking: he is a martial arts expert, a young man of the lower classes who has seen his share of violence and experienced it from birth. His way out of the structural violence that poverty forces upon him, in fact, is to escalate the violence. He trains his body and transforms it into a tool for further violence.
Eventually the patriarchal drama taking place in the intimacy of the family becomes reflected in the violence perpetrated by the Mexican state. Cleo and the grandmother are shopping for a crib when los halcones, a paramilitary group in civilian clothes, attacks a student demonstration going on outside the store. Fermín, Cleo’s ex-boyfriend, rushes into the store chasing a demonstrator who is trying to hide. He shoots the young man and kills him. Aiming his gun at everything that moves, Fermín turns around and his gun points at Cleo. Fermín is one of the halcones, a thug hired by the Mexican government to repress the students who would protest against poverty, injustice, and the broken promises of the Mexican revolution. The government resents the youth calling it out; they are spoiled children who need discipline. The patriarchal state is happy to oblige. It uses one poor man, Fermín, to wreak violence on middle class youngsters his own age, manipulating a type of class warfare to protect itself. Cleo looks at Fermín with eyes wide open in recognition and fear. He embodies power and violence, cocooned by the impunity guaranteed by the state he now represents. Fermín sees her and hesitates, then runs out onto the street.
Cleo has one last encounter with the family patriarch, at the hospital where she is going to give birth to her baby. He is a doctor there and rushes to reassure her she will be fine and show how much he cares. He would love to be in the birthing room with her, but he says he’s not allowed in there. His fine performance collapses when Cleo’s female ob-gyn tells him he’s welcomed to join her in attending to Cleo. The father of the family is momentarily flustered as he is caught lying, mutters some excuse and like, Fermín, turns around and leaves. The parallel leaves no doubt about the representation of patriarchy. What these men are really good at is abandonment or violence. That’s all.
The end of the film, when Cleo saves the children from drowning despite the fact that she herself can’t swim has generated a lot of commentary. I will only add that Cuarón leaves us with one more thought about patriarchy and female solidarity. In her pain, Sofia might have been correct that women always end up alone. But what she failed to realize in that moment was that women can also end up together, united because of, and in spite of, the viciousness of patriarchy. And they can raise a family together. And bring up a great filmmaker.
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Jeff Adachi, Public Defender
By Pete Brook
An editor’s note: Both Jeff Adachi and Pete Brook are my friends, people I know through my photo work in the criminal justice system. Pete Brook has been concerned with the use and power of images in conjunction with the criminal justice system for many years. I meet Jeff sometime in 1995 when he was a deputy public defender working a murder case. I spent 18 months and we remained friends.
Jeff Adachi was a public servant for over 30 years. From 2002 until his unexpected death on February 22nd, 2019, Adachi served as the head of the San Francisco Public Defenders Office. San Francisco is the only county in California that has an elected Public Defender. Adachi won re-election five times. Such was his suitability, leadership, fierce advocacy and approval in the role, he ran unopposed four times.
In 2015, in association with the photography exhibition Status Update about the changing San Francisco Bay Area, Adachi spoke with curator Pete Brook about images, society and justice. This is a full transcript of the interview published for the first time.
How do images play into the work of the public defender’s office?
The work of defense attorneys is very visual in the sense that we tell stories through images, through pictures. Often those pictures are conjured in the minds of jurors or judges, but more often than not, we use photographs to tell the story of our clients and what happened.
The Black Lives Matter movement and this discussion of race and criminal law that we’re having across the country would not be possible without images. The videos taken of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are indelibly seared into the brains of millions of Americans. [Videos] caused Americans to take action and it changed their perspective.
Is the practice of law easier or harder in an era of total image saturation?
Clarence Darrow would hold court for nine hours in closing argument. Reporters would sit there and hang on his every word, reported verbatim in the newspapers. At trials in the 1930s and 40s! Daily coverage. You don’t see that anymore. Print media doesn’t have the resources for that type of coverage — we have very truncated versions. As a result, the media that comes out about criminal cases is very biased. You only hear about a person who’s arrested and when they’re convicted. We’ve tried to change that.
The Public Defenders Office is active in using media to tell clients’ stories. When they are acquitted, we put out a press release. It’s rare for public defenders to do that. If we have a photograph that captures the essence of a client who’s been wrongfully convicted, or of an officer breaking the law, we’ll use it.
Your office released a video of a public defender being arrested for advising her client in the halls of a courthouse?
Yes, two of my deputies filmed it, so we released the video on YouTube together along with some stills. We had a million-and-a-half hits within a week. The next day we had 1,700 emails of support that came in for her.
What sort of images do you use in court?
The courtroom it’s a very sanitized environment. You have jurors who may or may not be familiar with your client’s neighborhood or lifestyle. So photographs allow us to give the jury a mental picture. Also, if you’re trying to describe the scene of the incident or crime, or if you’re trying to show the importance of DNA evidence, or if you’re showing an eye witness identification, pictures are critical.
There are very emotionally-charged pictures. When you see a picture of somebody who’s dead or someone who was seriously injured, it has an impact on you. Similarly, when you see a picture of a person in jail, a person locked up, a person deprived of their dignity, that’s impactful.
Justice Kennedy used three photographs in the appendix to his majority ruling in when the Supreme Court heard Brown v Coleman/Plata. That caused a lot of consternation because some legal boffins don’t think photographs have a place in any Supreme Court ruling. There also an accusation that photography is emotive and not rigorous or reliable enough.
Anytime you’re stimulating visual senses, you’re going to be accused of manipulation, but the only way that we can completely perceive something is to be able to see it. And even though they justice is blind, jurors and judges are not.
How often have you argued with the prosecution about the inclusion of an image in case proceedings?
One of the things that we often show are photographs of our clients and families. We get an objection to that because the prosecution doesn’t want the jury to see that our clients have a family.
And what do you which to exclude as defense attorneys?
We will typically move to exclude photographs that we find, or believe, are prejudicial — grizzly photos or ones that show a grizzly injury, photos that would inflame the jury.
What are your thoughts on the economic gap between the rich and the poor?
The gap has grown more in favor of rich people. The number of San Franciscans living at the poverty level is at about 13% which is commensurate with other urban areas.
But better than the Bay Area as a whole, in which 20% live at or below the poverty line.
San Francisco is very much a tale of two cities where you have on one hand, very wealthy people who have been living here or who are moving here and can afford the high rents and the multi-million-dollar homes. And on the other hand, you have people that are very poor, living in housing projects, barely scraping by.
Does this inequality have a measurable effect in San Francisco and in the Public Defenders’ work?
Right now, there’s a huge debate about increased incidence of property theft in the city. What’s the reason for this? Is it because Proposition 47 reduced theft offenses from felonies to misdemeanors? What accounts for the increase in auto break-ins and cell phone theft?’ It’s need. And it’s an easy way for people to make money. It’s pretty much a supply and demand society. If you’re walking down the street carrying your cell phone on your open palm and somebody comes up and takes it from you is that really that much of a surprise? Well, you know, most people believe that society is safe and that they’re able to do whatever they can but, unfortunately, our country’s not that way.
Do you have any ideas, either a citizen or as a professional on how you deliver economic justice?
They’ve always said that it’s about jobs. Provide more jobs, then people aren’t going to be involved in crime. That’s partially true. We also have to work, particularly with young people, at changing value systems. If somebody becomes pre-programmed that selling drugs or stealing is the best way for them to survive, then they’re going to continue to do that. Even if you’re getting them a minimum wage paying job.
We have to get people to substitute in new values — hard work or cost-benefit analysis: “Should I do this or do that? If I get arrested, I could be in jail for six months and be out of operation. You know what, I’m going to choose this instead.” Getting people to make better choices based on evolving value systems is a much harder thing to do.
How do you think San Francisco is doing with its allocation of resources? Many compare education and incarceration budgets for example. How are we doing allotting our money and our energies?
Will we define happiness by how much money we have? What can I do with the money? What kind of clothes can I buy? What kind of car can I have? What kind of bicycle can I have? Particularly in an urban city like San Francisco where we’re obsessed with food, about status, about sex. We’re obsessed about entertainment. We have become, in many ways, disenfranchised with who we are as human beings. Many of us don’t relate to the struggles of everyday people
Often, the people who can be on juries are middle class or upper class, and not like our clients who have been convicted of crimes. How do you get them to understand what it’s like to struggle as a poor person in San Francisco? There are a lot of people who live in San Francisco who have nothing and they wind up sometimes in the criminal justice system. We wonder how they got there. Yet, it’s very predictable when you look at the lack of education, or the fact that many haven’t had opportunities to work, or that many live in a situation where racism and discrimination is an expected part of life. As public defenders, we help judges and jurors who have power over a client’s life to exercise that power in a way that’s going to help and support them as opposed to simply bringing them back into the system.
Do we know one another enough in the Bay Area?
We have a social justice programs at our office called the Magic Program. It’s a literacy program but we have a 2-month program where kids from the Western Addition are taken around San Francisco and exposed to different experiences. Some kids had never been to Japantown, the neighborhood next door, and didn’t know its history or the culture. We need to get children experiencing and learning new things. We have to spend more time on gaining cultural, racial and social equity — if we begin to look at our brothers’ or sisters’ problems or our neighbors’ problems as our own then we can collectively solve them.
Of course, in a city like San Francisco a lot of people are new arrivals. Many, as you’ve said, wealthy by comparison and can afford to move here. Solutions can come from the wallet as well as from being open with your neighbors, yes?
The idea that people should give back, in terms of giving hard dollars, to support various (things), whether it’s arts enterprise or something else that you want to see in your community, you just don’t see that as much. I’ve been involved with philanthropy for a long time, and I find that the people who are most giving are San Franciscans who have been here and that have that connection to the city. If I don’t have a connection to my school, I’m not going to help at the school reunion. We want to encourage people to take more of an active role in our communities. That doesn’t just mean volunteering or tutoring but, you know, really putting some dollars behind it.
Do jails work?
No.
Do the jails of San Francisco county work?
Incarceration generally doesn’t work.
If your objective is just to lock somebody up to keep them separated from society, then, sure, that works. Does it make them less violent? No. Because we’re locking them up with other people who may be even more violent. Does it teach them how to get a job when they get out? No. Does it help them evolve as people? No. There’s got to be a rehabilitation part of it. What they found as most effective in deterring bad behavior is when a person knows a penalty is coming and it is executed within a certain period of time and very quickly. So if I tell you, ‘If I see you in this neighborhood again, I’m going to give you two days in jail.’ It works.
A clearly stated and immediate response to an action?
Social science has taught us, yes. Now, does that mean that’s the best use of resources? It depends. If you’re going to lock somebody for using drugs, no, I don’t think so. If you’re going to lock somebody up for stealing a cell phone, maybe.
San Francisco has had some public profile cases of deputy misconduct in the jails and SFPD officer misconduct on the streets. Why?
We need better vetting of officers. Better use of the implicit bias testing to determine whether an officer suffers from bias and help them address that both when they’re hired and when they become police officers. By vetting I mean really looking at their record, talking to people. Just like you would if you worked for the FBI. That doesn’t occur now. You just need a high school diploma. I think officers should be required to publicly disclose when they’ve used force, excessive force and why.
Most cities have officer accountability boards. But what do they really do? In San Francisco, we have the Police Commission that oversees a lot of the day-to-day policy setting, but we’ve never had the police commissioner expose a scandal involving officer. And yet, we’ve had scandals left and right in San Francisco. We had officers who were breaking into people’s rooms and stealing things without warrants, and the Police Commissioner was silent.
As a public defender, our mission is to expose police misconduct. I’d like to see officers who have multiple complaints against them for certain types of misconduct to be terminated earlier. Accountability includes collecting better statistics. One of the things that we worked on was some legislation that requires a police department to report not only the gender and race of people they arrest but also the reason why they stopped them.
And what about law enforcement officers under investigation?
Law enforcement officers are held to a different standard. If you ever see a cop who’s brought into court for some charge, they’re released the same day. They often don’t even have to surrender. How does that happen? Are they part of a royal class? No. They’re treated differently. Why is that a police officer gets in trouble — boom — he’s able to meet bail? How is that law enforcement officers usually get their charges dismissed? I’m not saying that in every case there’s a determination based on money, but I’m just saying that that plays into it. Wealth, privilege, and race effect how people are treated in the system.
The SF Public Defenders office is in favor of body cameras?
I think body cameras are going to be important part of reform. We’re a part of the community that’s determining that policy. We think they will reduce the complaints against police officers, and definitely reduce the use of excessive force and violence.
How do you assess the health, not only of San Francisco and the Bay Area region?
We have to do more to keep families in San Francisco, to address the lack of housing. It’s probably the biggest issue that people are facing here right now.
I don’t know that we need to grow as a city. They’re talking about having a million people living here by 2025. I don’t know what that’s going to look like. I see it changing and I think we have to look at conserving part of who we are. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t modernize with the times, but if we become the kind of city that only tolerates people at a certain income level and housing at a certain price, it’s not going to be a place that I want to live.
Finally, it’s important that we support the arts in San Francisco. Art is a big part of our humanity. It’s really tragic to see a lot of our arts organizations go. Art is the cultural health of the city. That’s one area I’m really worried about because I see a lot of groups either disappearing or moving.
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My View of the Film Roma: The neighborhood too expensive for me to live in
By Joel Ochoa
In his latest film Mexican Director Alfonso Cuarón creates a time: 1970 – 1971, and a space: Mexico City’s upscale neighborhood Colonia Roma were Mexicans of all ages can relate; or in most cases they pretend to relate. The older generation, the ones who in the city during those tumultuous years, are overcome with a sense of nostalgia, the new are filled with curiosity. For the most part, euphoria permeates the national pride for the film, although some negative reaction has emerged both in Mexico and Spain.
The film portrays an upper-middle-class family as their lives unravel through the perspective of their servant, a Zapotec woman from Oaxaca, named Cleodegaria Gutierrez (or “Cleo,” as she is affectionately called). In this context, and using a sense of magical realism, Director Cuarón tells his own childhood story. The movie manages to be autobiographical, while simultaneously presenting an authentic depiction of Cleo’s socioeconomic conditions. On the one hand, he presents a family adapting to the realities of life amid divorce. The father leaves for a new romance and the mother stays behind, not entirely by choice, to pick up the pieces and rearrange her own life. On the other hand, bravely enough, Cuarón accurately depicts the ugliness of the many forms of racism in Mexican society against its indigenous population. The film reveals the conflict between class and ethnicity, that still plagues Mexican society, through exploitation of poor people who come to the city to escape extreme poverty. This exploitation has created a class of people, mostly female, working within a system rooted in slavery and indentured servitude.
This bifurcated story is masterly portrayed in the film. There is a balance in the way two very different realities intertwine. The film’s target audience is mostly urban and semi-professional. As such, the movie is being celebrated for depicting Mexican urban life in the early 1970’s. Ironically, Cuarón is being showered with accolades for depicting a reality that for many never existed. Let’s keep in mind that most Mexicans are not middle-class and never had a chance to live in Colonia Roma or in the type of house where the story develops. Perhaps this is a case of unintended “The Way We Never Were.”
In my view the movie has a much deeper side, one that goes beyond the feel-good vibe created by Cuarón’s own childhood memories: music, the beat of The City, romantic rendezvouses, and even political events (like the June 10th, 1971, massacre depicted in the film where I lost two very close friends). Cuarón challenges the viewer by not dwelling on the tragedies of his own dysfunctional family, and centering the story on the strength of an unlikely hero Cleo, the servant of the house; who in any other narrative might be a totally peripheral character. And here is where things get funky because Cuarón’s “poison pills” in the storyline aimed at short minded viewers who reacted negatively to the fact that the main protagonist is an indigenous woman. And sure enough, right at the time when Yalitza Aparicio has received nominations for her haunting performance of Cleo, some “parochial” critics, as Cuarón gently calls them, dissented because she doesn’t look like a “real Mexican.” In Mexico someone called the actress, who is an indigenous person, “cardboard colored person,” and in Spain the movie was presented with Spanish subtitles in response to Cuarón’s use of Mixtec and Mexican subtitles.
For a brief moment, Cleo is elevated to the status of family savior. But once back home, although celebrated, she resumes her daily life as a domestic worker.
To add insult to injury, Cuarón demonstrates that women don’t need to look like Lynda Carter or Gal Gadot, to name just two, to be an everyday, real-life Wonder Woman. Our real hero here, Cleo, does everything and more to fulfill her role. She takes care of the daily necessities of a family of three adults, four children, and a dog. Domestic work, ranging from cooking, cleaning, caring for the kids, and taking on the emotional labor of the adults are part of her everyday routine. She is the keeper of family secrets and does what she can to absorb the brunt of all traumatic impact for the children. Again, all this while she deals with the top down racism within the house where she is a servant and with her lover, by whom she is pregnant.
There are three instances, or moments, were Cuarón exalts Cleo’s extraordinary virtues and portrays her as the real hero of the movie:
In the first moment, during a hospital visit to find out about her own pregnancy, Cleo finds herself in the maternity ward separated by a glass window from a group of newly born babies. Suddenly an earthquake starts rattling the building, cracking down windows and dropping plaster on the baby’s incubators. As is usual in these cases everybody panics and runs in different directions, except Cleo whom calmly keeps an ever-observant eye on the newly born.
During the second moment, Cleo’s lover, a thug and member of the paramilitary group known as “Halcones,” undergoes training to attack students and other social groups critical of the government. She travels to a remote location in the outskirts of the city where a whole squadron of Halcones are being led by Dr. Zovek (a shadowy real-life character who specialized in martial arts technique). In a moment of levity, the trainer dares the whole squadron of Halcones to mimic him in a mind over body experiment. He also dares the public, among them Cleo, to try to replicate the complicated move he is about to do. Dr. Zovek announces that not even the most qualified athlete was able to master it. He then covers his eyes, strikes a Zen pose and dares everyone to do the same. The group struggles to maintain their balance as they attempt to raise their arms and stand on one leg. Cleo, with tremendous grace and fortitude, calmly maintains the pose.
Finally in the third, and perhaps most heroic, moment, the mother of the house takes the family on a trip to give the father time to retrieve some belongings from the house. She takes the family to the beach in Tuxpan Veracruz, where she plans to officially announce their divorce to the children. Cleo, who coping with the physical and emotional trauma of losing her child at birth, is invited to join the trip. She sits at the beach, not knowing how to swim, and struggles to cope with the pain of her loss. Cleo appears absent minded, distant, and overwhelmed by her thoughts. But suddenly all that stops when Cleo must be Cleo again, and against all odds, she charges into the enormous waves to save the two children who are drowning. All of this, once again, after being terrified by the water because she doesn’t know how to swim.
For a brief moment, Cleo is elevated to the status of family savior. But once back home, although celebrated, she resumes her daily life as a domestic worker. And here is the rub: the movie ends with no expectation of improving Cleo’s condition or socioeconomic status. After a moment that can be categorized as therapeutic on all sides, Cleo regains the old spark in her eyes. She returns to the old Roma house, resumes her life as the servant, and to some degree, the backbone of a family that considers her, out of necessity, part of their own. Cleo will remain part of the family conversation; at least the part when she literally saves the lives of the children, and therefore will remain a Wonder Woman. But having said that, as it happens with thousands of other Wonder Women in Colonia Roma, Colonia Beverly Hills, Colonia Embarcadero, Colonia Little Village and the innumerable other Colonias in the world, she will never sleep in the house (her room is on the roof), never share the same table (Cleo eats in the kitchen), and never share some of the many privileges exclusive of the real members of the family.
Book Review: From Coors to California: David Sickler and the New Working Class
By Peter Olney
From Coors to California: David Sickler and the New Working ClassEdited by Kent Wong, Julie Monroe, Peter Olney and Jaime Regalado – 2019 UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education
25 years ago in the fall of 1994, the California election season was in full swing and Republican Governor Pete Wilson faced a serious challenge from Democrat Kathleen Brown. He weaponized his campaign with racism and xenophobia by pushing for the statewide passage of the vicious anti-immigrant Proposition 187. Its draconian features makes Trump’s “Wall” look relatively tame. Wilson figured Proposition 187 would drive turnout for him, and he was right in that he won reelection but the courts ultimately struck down Prop 187. This was a seminal moment in California history; many political pundits say that the Republicans permanently alienated the Latino community and painted the electoral map a bright and lasting blue!
It isn’t always inevitable that the mistakes our enemies make become positives for us. Organizing and winning requires people of courage and vision. Such a man is labor leader David Sickler. The battle against 187 was a moment that tested the fortitude of labor leaders. Many of the big national unions argued that it was politically perilous to march against 187 with Mexicans and their flags and sombreros and mariachis. This spectacle would be damaging to the effort to mobilize “Encino man” (Reagan Democrats) to support the California Democratic ticket. AFL-CIO Regional Director Sickler vociferously argued that if the labor movement did not march publically against 187 that it would lose a whole generation of workers. Sickler’s leadership carried the day, and 10,000 union members marched with banners and standards on Sunday, October 16, 1994 with over 100,000 marchers from the Latino community.
Coors to California, a new book from UCLA, chronicles Dave Sickler’s life and work in the labor movement. There is a chapter on “Immigrant Worker Organizing” that chronicles the battle against 187. Other chapters tell of his work winning the Coors boycott, defeating the anti-labor Prop 226 in California and organizing construction workers. This attractive volume of 112 pages is very readable and accessible and beautifully illustrated with photos from the trenches and all the battles that Dave fought in his 50 year career as a Brewery workers union rank and filer, labor official and City of Los Angeles Commissioner and labor representative.
The subtitle of the book is “David Sickler and the New Working Class”. “New” means new to this country or in the case of women and people of color “New” to the ranks of organized labor because of years of exclusion. The genius of Sickler is that he was a bridge from the old to the new. He was able to move the “good old boys” (often white boys!) to embrace particularly the new immigrants as the key to the future of labor in California. He more than any other labor leader in my experience was able to sit in on a construction trades union meeting and convince the members to embrace new immigrants often using the earthly homespun language of one of his “Sicklerisms”.
I need to disclose that I collaborated closely with Dave over the last thirty plus years from my arrival in California from Boston in 1983, and I have co-authored with Tom Gallagher a chapter in the book about the LA Orange County Organizing Committee (LAOCOC) and the LA Manufacturing Action Project (LAMAP) that grew out of the work of LAOCOC. When we were launching LAMAP, a very ambitious organizing program to target the half a million Latino manufacturing workers in LA County, the only person who had the credibility to put 20 unions in a room to hear our pitch was David Sickler, then Regional Director of the AFL-CIO.
Dave established that “cred” because of his own working class roots, his deep experience and his fundamental respect for the members, elected leaders and the institutions of organized labor. When it was time to fight the “Paycheck Protection” Proposition 226, Sickler discarded the professional focus group message shaping approach and took the campaign right to the members of the building trades in their union meetings and worksites. He held a total of 111 meetings with most of the AFL-CIO affiliated unions, community groups, colleges, Latino, African American and Jewish organizations. Dave more than some of the organizing hot shots from inside the Washington beltway understood that without the support and commitment of elected leaders and the members of existing unions no external initiatives or political campaigns would be successful for long. As hard it is to slog through the institutions it is a necessary part of moving labor.
Dave’s friends and colleagues write the chapters describing his work that they are most familiar with. The book tells the story of Dave’s leadership of the Coors Boycott rising out of his employment and organizing at the Coors brewery in his home state of Colorado. And always at his side since their marriage in 1980 is the intrepid Carole Chiazza Sickler, a compelling and important figure in her own right and Dave’s soul mate thru all the twists and turns of his career.
The book should be must reading for young labor organizers whether on staff, elected or starting out as industrial salts by entering the work force to organize from within. The only deficiency is the failure to include a list of “Sicklerisms” sayings from Dave that have endeared him to his friends and colleagues and fellow labor combatants. Here is a sampling and maybe the whole list can be incorporated into the second printing:
About Friends: “I’ve got ties older than you” or “She’s as pretty as a brand new pair of bowling shoes.”
About enemies: “I wouldn’t trust him if his tongue was notarized.” “On a hot day he can keep an ice cream next to his heart”
About himself: “I would rather tear tape off a wildcat’s ass than handle that”
General wisdom: “They want everyone to develop their individual healthcare accounts, and now they are passing laws that every worker has to create his own job”
Dave has been an inspiration to a whole generation of organizers because of his humanity, grit, wisdom and vision. Que Viva Dave Sickler!!
There are two book parties:
For Los Angeles on Thursday, the 21st of February, register here for tickets.
For San Francisco on the 28th of February, register here for tickets.
Both events are free.
Pictures that Speak
By Earl Dotter
In his film BlackkKlansman, Spike Lee paired effective dramatization of the KKK in Colorado in the mid-1970’s with traditional film photojournalism of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017. By doing this, Lee brought the currency of that recent live Charlottesville footage to inspire a film that speaks in the most immediate of ways about the long and ever-present history of racist hate in America. The film effectively employs photojournalism to point directly to the visceral bigotry that President Trump has enabled today within the U.S.
As a photojournalist of working people in the United States since 1968, I am aware that the lives of my subjects are often far harsher and more painful than those of my viewers. To bridge the gap, I look for common ground that workers I photograph, share with those who gaze upon them. Often I need only to capture, with a clear photojournalistic view, my subject’s desire for dignity and self-respect. My goal is not just to touch those viewers who are already sympathetic, but to command the attention of those who might just pass them by. My photo form follows its function.
Elizabeth Griffith, pregnant with her first child at the time, leaves the gravesite of her husband. Robert Griffith survived Vietnam only to die in the Scotia Mine Disaster when two methane explosions claimed 26 coal miner’s lives in 1976. Oven Fork Kentucky, located in Letcher County
A Lesson From My Time
In 1968, I was an advertising design student at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan heading toward a career with the “Mad Men” on Madison Avenue of that era. But real world events intervened. The upstart students in my advertising design course arranged a class where we reversed roles with these ad men/our instructors. We assigned them to visually respond to the Bob Dylan song, “Something is happening but you do not know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?”
On the evening of April 4, 1968, we SVA students patiently waited on the top floor of the Young & Rubicam Advertising Agency, as the Carousel projector hummed, for our instructors to make their illustrated presentations about Bob Dylan’s song. After a delay, an instructor reported, “I have sad news, Martin Luther King has been killed.” Hardly a word was said as students and instructors alike quickly packed up. I headed to my Lower East Side 6th floor walkup apartment on the Lexington Avenue subway line at 14th St. Scrawled is still wet red letters on the grimy white tiles as I exited the station was this statement, “The Last of the Nonviolent Men are Gone, Arise and Kill Whitey, The Eternal Target.”
At SVA I had the good fortune to take a photography class designed to prepare future art directors to thoughtfully advise professional photographers to competently execute an ad concept we conceived,
photographically. The core of this instruction, in one word assignments, from our instructor, Paul Elfenbein, required each of us in the class to tap into our personal point of view while exposing one roll of 35mm Kodachrome slide film for each weekly assignment. One other key instruction was we were only allowed use a 55mm normal lens, requiring us to usually photograph our subjects at close range. For me, a very shy individual, this requirement opened my world. The camera gave me the best excuse to engage with subjects I found to be worthwhile. I had to introduce myself, let them know why I wanted to take their picture, and if I was lucky the favor would be exchanged with a collaborative photo session. But it took a lot of photo classes for me and my classmates to learn how to translate what we felt about our subjects into photographs that also expressed who we were as individuals behind the camera.
In the days and weeks after Martin Luther King’s and then Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, I continued to photograph for my class in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where I lived. Soon, my photo instructor put me in touch with Milton Glazer, the Art Director at New York Magazine and boom, my first published image was on the cover of its May 1968 issue. On November 20th, the Farmington Mine exploded, killing 78 coal miners. About to finish at
SVA, it was then I applied to become a VISTA Volunteer, seeking in this way an opportunity to rub shoulders with coal miners, who then worked at the most dangerous job in the United States.
By 1969, I was located in the Cumberland Plateau region of Tennessee, mostly meeting miners sidelined by black lung disease as Richard Nixon signed the Mine Safety & Health Act (MSHA) and the Occupational Health & Safety Act (OSHA) into law with the EPA formed by 1970. But it was the murder of Jock Yablonski, a United Mine Workers leader, along with his wife and daughter at their Clarksville, Pennsylvania home on December 31st, 1969 that resulted in five years of creatively formative work for me. First as the graphic designer and photographer for Miners for Democracy (MFD) and later when that successful campaign to unseat the corrupt UMWA leader, Tony Boyle from the presidency of that union, opened the door to becoming the photographer for the United Mine Workers Journal, a position I held until 1977. By then, the foundation for my 50 year path as a photographer of dangerous occupations had been laid, first as an SVA student; as Vista Worker photographer; Miners for Democracy activist with camera; and then as the photographer for the UMWA. My path forward has always required me to seize new photo assignment opportunities in the midst of political resistance.
In 1977, Gene Thornton, in a New York Times review of my exhibit, In Our Blood, Coal Miners in the 1970s, at Gallery 1199 of the Hospital Workers Union in NYC, said I was one of the most important emerging photographers in the United States then. But one year later he called me an agitprop artist in a review of my Rise Gonna Rise, A Portrait of Southern Textile Workers exhibit. The impact of Ronald Reagan’s presidency had quickly shifted this nation’s political ground. Then Thorne Auchter, Reagan’s first appointee to OSHA recalled 50,000 Cotton Dust Standard brochures, destined for cotton mill workers, illustrated with my photographs. Auchter
said, the photo of an already dead cotton mill worker, Lewis Harrell, on the cover, was too inflammatory. Auchter republished the Cotton Dust brochure without any photos.
By 1998, I was invited by the American Industrial Hygiene Association’s (AIHA) Social Concerns Committee to create an exhibit documenting my first twenty years of photography. An exhibit titled, THE QUIET SICKNESS, A Photographic Chronicle of Hazardous Work in America was presented at AIHA’s annual meeting of 10,000 industrial hygienists in Washington DC in 1997. These occupational health professionals said to me numerous times that the exhibit reconnected them with their original motivations for entering the industrial hygiene profession. The book of the same name, published by AIHA PRESS came out a year later. By that time, the exhibit
and book were hosted at the Harvard School of Public Health, including touring the exhibit throughout all the New England States.
In the twenty years since, I continue to be a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) with my photo projects benefitting from the scientific training of fellow Visiting Scholars and their networks that have offered collaborative projects in New England such as my exhibit: THE PRICE OF FISH, Commercial Fishermen Loose Life and Limb in New England (funded by an Alicia Patterson Fellowship). That exhibit was already to tour when the 9/11 attacks occurred in Manhattan and Washington, DC.
With THE PRICE OF FISH on hold, I traveled to Lower Manhattan on the first day the general public was allowed to return to Lower Manhattan and the perimeter of Ground Zero. Up to that point in my career I had done little work related to the hazardous occupation of firefighting and now 443 had died in and around the collapse of the Twin Towers. With no special access, I was limited to taking pictures of the can do attitude of the emergency responders, an inspiring sight I choose to shoot in color. But for my firehouse memorial tribute visits, black and white film was a far more appropriate choice to record this profound tragedy.
I found the citizens of New York City erecting memorials to the 443 brothers and sisters lost on September 1st, 2001 in rituals of unfathomable sadness. The motto of the fire company in Manhattan’s Theater District, that lost 15, was, “We Never Miss a Performance.” In Red Hook, Brooklyn I saw the turn-out gear of those still missing from the fire company and at the station house in Park Slope, retired fire fighters had returned to duty, looking through the New York Times double page spread to confirm for the first time their lost and missing brethren as residents paid their respects. “Because of You, I Lived,” wrote a neighbor who had been rescued.
While a very important and somber mission to document the loss of fire fighters throughout the city, upon returning to my home in Silver Spring, Maryland, I immediately began to formulate a strategy to photograph on Ground Zero itself.
I learned the Health and Safety Department of the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE), who were running the heavy equipment to open up “The Pile,” had become quite concerned about the air quality on Ground Zero, not only outside the cabs of their heavy machinery, but inside where the operators controlled this vital rescue recovery equipment.
I was granted an assignment with access from the IUOE to accompany Aron Ondu, who was an Industrial Hygienist and a member of that union as he made these critical air quality tests. For the better part of a day I photographed Ondu making those tests but also allowing me to aim my camera wherever emergency responders were working on the site as it still continued to burn. Those air quality tests contradicted the earlier pronouncements of EPA Director, Christy Todd Whitman, that the air and smoke being emitted from Ground Zero was safe.
The exhibit that resulted was called: WHEN DUTY CALLS, A Memorial Tribute to 9/11 Emergency Responders. THE FARMWORKER FEEDS US ALL, The Labor and Health of Migrants in Maine, was an exhibit I created in 2007 after documenting all of Maine’s hand-harvests. I photographed Salvadorian tree planters and broccoli cutters working right next to the
Canadian border, over half of which had legal documentation and were quite proud to show it. I made pictures of Mexican and Native Americans harvesting wild low bush blueberries at the coast in Washington County. In the Fall I photographed Jamaican apple pickers and cranberry harvesters in Madison County bogs. These migrants were farmers back in Jamaica during Maine’s Winters. I shot this exhibit with digital equipment for the first time, allowing me to show my subjects how they looked in my camera as I was photographing them. This exhibit returned a year later to most of
these same workers, presented at local libraries or community centers. I also began to request farmworker’s cell phone numbers or email addresses enabling me to thank them by providing them my digital photos in
exchange for granting permission to take their picture. This exhibit also showed the work of the Maine Migrant Health Program (MMHP) that provided free or low cost health care services to farmworkers from mobile clinics that arrived at harvest sites or labor camps. The trusting relationship the MMHP developed over many years transferred to me, allowing me to photograph the provision of health care services, but also to later follow these same workers to their work sites or camps after work.
In addition, to my current retrospective exhibit: LIFE’S WORK, A Fifty Year Photographic Chronicle of Working in the U.S.A. and book of the same name my exhibit, BADGES: A Memorial Tribute to Asbestos Workers represents an ongoing collaboration with the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.
ADAO advocates for the 15,000 victims that succumb to asbestos related diseases every year, including 9/11 emergency responders and the public exposed by asbestos released into our environment in the U.S. ADAO also seeks enactment of a total U.S. ban on asbestos manufacturing and product use. The workplace photo ID Badges included in the exhibit and poster below personalize asbestos victims, naming the companies that harmed them while employed mining, manufacturing or using asbestos at work.
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A review of Suzanne Gordon’s “WOUNDS OF WAR”
By Denny Riley
Suzanne Gordon’s latest book “Wounds of War” is about the Veterans Healthcare Administration, the healthcare plan under attack by conservative politicians and commentators, the two fabulously wealthy Koch brothers, and Veterans For America, a sham veterans organization financed by the Kochs. They all malign the VHA (often simply called the VA) on the flimsiest of anecdotal facts. Many of us have been convinced by this attack that the Veterans Health Administration is in worse shape than are the men and women who turn to it for care. Many people, even veterans who qualify for VHA care, put their health in the hands of hope. They hope the HMO or private healthcare plan they’re signed up with offers them healthcare professionals who are good. Whether they are good – whether they’ve had malpractice suits settled against them or had their licenses suspended at some time, can be difficult to discover. For-profit healthcare companies and the medical associations keep their disciplinary procedures as far from the public eye as possible. The assumption is HMOs and private healthcare employ good people. They say so in their advertisements. Certainly better than the Veterans Healthcare Administration, one would think.
Gordon swings our attention to a different view of healthcare in America. The RAND Corporation and the MITRE Corporation “confirmed, in great detail, that the quality of the VHA’s frontline care was equal to or superior to that delivered in private sector… wait times for appointments with primary care providers or medical specialists at the VHA were actually shorter than those experienced by patients using private doctors or hospitals.”
Those might be sufficient words to convince a person if discussing the matter over dinner or a glass of wine, but the force amassed in the mission to turn the VHA’s budget ($77 billion annually) over to the private sector has tremendous clout. So Gordon did the work, and with “Wounds of War” the facts are known. They are here in black and white.
Full disclosure compels me to say I am a military veteran who receives healthcare at a Veterans Health Administration facility Suzanne Gordon writes about in “Wounds of War,” and I am satisfied with the care I get, generally pleased. Compared to my friends who are enrolled in private healthcare, I may be the only one pleased with his care.
Gordon hasn’t written “Wounds of War,” however, as a champion of the VHA. She is an award-winning journalist whose eighteen published books are about healthcare, patient safety, nursing, and teamwork, and she goes at this thorough book about the VHA with the mastery she has applied to all of her chosen subjects.
Subtitled “How the VA Delivers, Health, Healing, and Hope to the Nation’s Veterans,” the book covers all of those issues and more. Written in seventeen topical chapters with an introduction, a conclusion, and an epilogue, “Wounds of War” tells it all. The evolution of many VHA programs is explained, usually in the words of the physicians and clinicians who developed them, with brief biographies of veterans who participated. I won’t share the title of every chapter but some of the more expressive names are “Promises Broken and Kept,” “When Wounded Warriors Are Women,” “Mental Health the Way It Should Be,” “Suicide Prevention,” “Transcending Trauma,” “Off the Streets: Reducing Veteran Homelessness,” “Better Care Where?” There is more detail in these chapters than some readers might need but for those with a particular interest in a particular subject, a great deal will be gained. Let’s take the chapter on mental health, a subject everyone is interested in, either for yourself or for a friend or your boss. Gordon approached the VHA not through interviews either in person or in emails or on the phone. No, she visited a VHA facility and spent days with caregivers, in their offices, in staff meetings, and with patients. She visited the psychiatrist Lanier Summerall at a VHA Medical Center in South Carolina and also at a VHA Medical Center in Vermont. Doctor Summerall has been with the VHA several decades. From a mental health point of view Doctor Summerall describes the integrated healthcare unique in the United States to the VHA.
“70% of the United States’ medical residents and 40% of all other healthcare professionals receive some or all of their training at a VHA facility.”
“We have a breadth of psychological services under one roof that is unequaled even in the most well-resourced private-sector environment,” Gordon quotes her. “If a person is homeless, they can get help with a variety of agencies to get housing. If they are having trouble getting a job, we have supportive employment and compensated work therapy. We have residential programs for PTSD and substance abuse and for chronic, hard-to-treat psychiatric illnesses like bipolar or schizophrenia.” Summerville goes on, “Our patients have lifestyle problems, relationship problems, work problems.” She says many of the patients cannot possibly coordinate their own care or take responsibility for self-care. “The paramount thing for these people is that everybody here [the VHA facility] knows each other. We are all on the same team in the same place.” Continuing, Dr. Summerville says, “We have the only system of integrated mental health and primary care in the country.”
As Gordon reveals, the VHA functions very differently from the way it is depicted in most mainstream media coverage. The Veterans Healthcare System has 150 hospitals, 819 clinics, and 300 mental health centers, which employs 250,000 people (a third of whom are veterans themselves) and sees 230,000 patients a day. Among the many VHA innovations and inventions are the implantable cardiac pacemaker, CAT scans, the nicotine patch, the first successful liver transplant, the use of low dose aspirin regimen to prevent heart attacks, and prosthetic technology to help restore the sense of touch for those who have lost an upper limb or use an artificial hand. All of this was done on the Veteran Healthcare Administration research budget where there is no profit incentive, no patents to file, and all discoveries are made available to all Americans.
Then why are problems the VHA may have not simply fixed? Why is there a movement toward privatization rather than getting it operating at the level our veterans deserve? After all aren’t these the people we’ve been told to thank for their service, people often referred to as heroes? Well, first of all there is that $200 billion budget the Koch brothers and their allies would like shifted to the private sector. And to a lesser degree the VHA is in a different light than private healthcare. It is a public institution with the mission to fulfill President Lincoln’s promise “To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan” by serving and honoring the men and women who are America’s Veterans. As a public institution supported by taxpayers, its books are open. We can look behind the curtain and see how it is run. So those with their eye on the big budget can poke and point with ease.
Private sector healthcare has no equivalent damning light. For instance the Cleveland Clinic, a highly regarded general medical and surgery system with eleven hospitals and eighteen health centers, was fined $650,000 for serious lab violations in 2015, paid $1.6 million to the Justice Department to settle “accusations that it implanted cardiac devices in patients too soon after a heart attack or surgery,” in 2016, while the CEO received huge salary increases. The Cleveland Clinic averaged more than $730,000 on lobbying between 2014 and 2018. No one clamored for the CEO’s dismissal or the closing of any of the Cleveland Clinic facilities.
Of course money is the issue, it always is. But 70% of the United States’ medical residents and 40% of all other healthcare professionals receive some or all of their training at a VHA facility. The VHA is the spine of American healthcare. Gordon clearly and extensively makes that point. And the VHA is looking at a stream of disabled veterans for at least the next fifty years (an estimate based on disarmament happening some time soon.) Who among us will be the one to tell the returning soldier we do not care? Anyone who wants the VHA dismantled does not know the facts. Suzanne Gordon delivers the facts in “Wounds of War.”
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“WOUNDS OF WAR: How the VA Delivers Health, Healing, and Hope to the Nation’s Veterans”, Cornell University Press can be ordered here