The Cornel West campaign, third parties and the nature of the moment
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
The most obvious example of this was the victory of Barrack Obama in 2008 as President. It is not that the victory was without historic significance. Rather, the historic significance dwarfed discussions about program and action, particularly in the first year of his Administration.
I have known Cornel West since 1972 when we met during my first year at Harvard. I have followed him over the years and felt, at points, that I could call him a friend. That said, his campaign for the Presidency raises some very serious questions regarding both his judgement and what seems to pass for strategy, not only for West, but for many others on the Left and in the progressive movements. My views are focused on his decision to run and the campaign that he allegedly is conducting, rather than on personal allegations raised about him, most visibly in Forbes.
Are progressives interested in winning, and if so, what?
Since the late 1970s, progressives have been largely fighting a rear-guard defensive battle against the assaults from capital and the increasingly brazen political Right. The public has observed the morphing of a conservative movement into a rightwing populist movement with fascist or post-fascist tendencies. Though there have been successful defensive fights and periodic offensive victories by progressives, e.g., on LGBTQ, the tendency has remained one of a strategic defensive.
An ideological reflection of the strategic defensive has been the victory of Reaganism through ridicule and dismissing of collective action in favor of individual action and, indeed, individualism and entrepreneurialism. Even in progressive circles, the obsession with “brand” and individual achievement has become pronounced. This has worked its way into non-profit circles, where collective or joint action is rarely championed (or rewarded), whereas the uniqueness of each organization or network is applauded…until it is not. Everyone wants their ten minutes in the Sun, even if it leads nowhere.
In this context, a few things became noteworthy. Victories, when won, became increasingly victories in form rather than substance. The victories of “representation,” in the sense of historically marginalized groups appearing to break through the glass ceiling is a case in point. The most obvious example of this was the victory of Barrack Obama in 2008 as President. It is not that the victory was without historic significance. Rather, the historic significance dwarfed discussions about program and action, particularly in the first year of his Administration.
The net result is that progressives have become used to losing. Losing can be glorious, after all. One can lose by oneself or with others. One can lose ‘speaking truth to power.’ One can lose and be remembered for having taken a heroic stand. Regardless, one loses.
The difficulty with winning, or at least attempting to win, is that it can be messy. Rarely do the advocates for a particular cause, demand, etc., win alone. Normally, victory necessitates alliances, and alliances necessitate compromise. As a result, there is no purity in winning even if one wins exactly what one sought to win.
As such, it is easier and more valiant to lose than to win. In losing, one can hold onto one’s conscience. One said what needed to be said. One need not have made any compromises with those less pure. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, one lost.
Winning necessitates strategy and organization. It is never about pronouncements alone. It involves the cultivation of a base that believes in and is prepared to sacrifice for a particular cause or demand. Winning, except under very unusual circumstances, necessitates the identification of tactical steps necessary to bring about victory. This might range from increasing pressure to building even broader alliances. Victory may come quickly, but normally not. It may, however, come suddenly, sometimes when one least expects it.
And winning must be secured. Once something has been won, it must not only be defended, but used as a launch pad for additional struggles and campaigns, all with the end of decisively defeating one’s opponents and liberating one’s base.
Politics of self-expression and frustration
Which brings us to the Cornel West campaign and other third-party bids during the 2024 election cycle. What is the essence of such ventures?
If one is interested in building a struggle for power, one does not begin by running a Presidential campaign, and certainly not a campaign with no organized base and no possibility of victory. If, however, one is concerned more with asserting one’s beliefs and expressing one’s frustration and antipathy toward the existing system, one can view a campaign for the Presidency as an on-going platform to both hear oneself talk, but also to try to captivate and entertain an audience. Such politics become not the politics inherent in a struggle for power, but the politics of self-expression. The objective becomes expressing one’s views, anger, etc., rather than seeking to achieve anything. In effect, it becomes the politics of defeat, in that one has no plan, knows one cannot win, and therefore cries out in hopelessness.
The West campaign and other third parties will virulently object. They will assert they are taking a stand against the two-party system of the capitalist class; a stand against imperialism; against the criminality of the US support for Israeli genocide. And they will be correct! They are. Yet, they have no plan, nor sufficient organization, to transform their assertions into political power. Thus, they can only rely on magical thinking in the hopes—and this is a best-case scenario—that their plea to the masses will resonate and result in a great wave of revulsion against the system, thrusting them into office…alone.
The moment
Leaving aside, for a moment, that minor parties in the USA have rarely been successful due to the undemocratic nature of the US electoral system, the actions of the Cornel West campaign and other third parties would be comical if less were at stake. And there have been times when comedians have run for President to make a satirical statement, e.g., Pat Paulsen.
Current third-party candidacies, including West and Jill Stein, either ignore or deny the dangers inherent in the current moment. West, for instance, acknowledges the dangers of a Trump victory but asserts, in part due to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, there was no difference between Trump and Biden and, apparently, no difference between Trump and Harris. Stein’s views carry on from the historic and, unfortunately, dogmatic stand of the Green Party on the need for formal political independence from the two-party system.
None of them are coming to grips with the dangers over the horizon. There is nothing, for instance, on the Harris side that is comparable to the plans of the MAGA movement such as Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s hatched idea for a rightwing authoritarian overhaul of the US government. There is nothing comparable on the Harris side to the proposals that the American Legislative Exchange Council’s ongoing work to advance a Constitutional Convention to alter the US Constitution in favor of business and the Christian Right. Nothing.
One cannot conclude ignorance on the part of any of these campaigns. One cannot imagine that any of these campaigns believe that progressive politics and policies will survive a second Trump presidency. Or perhaps they do? As many of us have heard over the months, there are those who believe that Trump will not be but so bad and, yes, there will be suffering, but we will come through it.
Who is “we”? Those picked up in military scoops of immigrants and placed in concentration camps? Those assaulted or killed should Trump utilize the 1807 Insurrection Act against protesters? Those killed through the use of paramilitary extrajudicial violence by fascist supporters of Trump? Workers who lose out when the National Labor Relations Board regresses to the anti-worker animus, or when the National Labor Relations Act is eviscerated? Women, whose bodies increasingly become the terrain of rightwing, male politicians? Or, is the “we,” those from the professional-managerial strata who believe they can hunker down and wait for the turbulence to subside?
The choice has never been between an enemy and one of us
The politics of self-expression makes three mistakes. First, it assumes that we can reject the two candidates and, by doing so, a third will ultimately emerge. Second, that an enlightened leader can emerge without an organized social base and, in the absence of support in Congress, introduce dramatic changes that will bring us closer to utopia. Third, that the two main candidates will demonstrate the corruption of the current system and will encourage the masses to turn in a revolutionary direction. Fourth, a Trump victory will allegedly punish the Democrats so that in four years they will pick a better candidate.
What is striking about each of these notions is that there is no historical basis to see any of this happening. There are, however, plenty of examples where abstention, for instance, has created an opening for a nefarious political force to emerge and win office. In fact, one can look at Germany in 1932 and see one of the results of a failure to build a broad front to oppose the Nazis because, in that case, the Social Democrats and the Communists so hated each other, they lost sight of what could happen should the Nazis win.
The second and fourth mistakes, though, are the ones that are the most interesting. The assumption that a third-party candidate, in the absence of organization at the base and any support in Congress could do anything is mind-boggling. Consider the Obama administration and the difficulties it had in its first two years—when it had majorities but believed it could play adult with Republicans—not to mention what succeeded that after 2010. This thinking evidences the absence of any conception of a fight for power. It is either magical, or it is yet another example that the politics of self-expression is the politics of defeat.
The fourth mistake is one that is heard frequently. It is less the politics of self-expression and more the acceptance of the permanence of the system and the inability to conceptualize that a strategy can be constructed that goes beyond pleasing or punishing the existing parties, and instead offers an alternative based on real mass work, organization, and strategy.
Going forward
It is less important to get inside Cornel West’s head, or the heads of the other candidates, than it is to question not only their intent, but why they garner any attention. The answer is simple. Frustration with the system; the fact that the lives of the majority of people are miserable; and a belief that regardless of what we do, nothing will change, leads to treating the November 2024 elections as if it is an election in American Idol, that is, entertainment where the result will be completely irrelevant to the daily lives of the viewers.
Those of us who appreciate the stakes in 2024 must use the coming weeks to point out precisely what the possibilities are. This is not an election between a hero and a demon. This is an election where a semi-fascist mass movement, MAGA, seeks to upend constitutional democracy in order to introduce rightwing authoritarianism. And this upending will be paradoxically quick as well as spaced out over time. That is the way authoritarians operate. They almost never clamp down on everyone at once, even in military coups. There are always parts of the population who believe—hope—they are exempt from repression. At least until there is that knock at the door…
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Profiles in Political Cowardice
By Max Elbaum
“Throughout the socialist left – and more broadly in almost every sector of the electorate – people are wrestling with what to do when they enter the voting booth. There is a choice to be made.“
Fighting effectively for social transformation is hard. Socialists and revolutionaries don’t square off against our class enemies on any kind of level playing field. The country’s political structures are formidable barriers to radical change. We don’t have the luxury of determining the terrain on which we fight or the timetable on which battles will be waged. We have to deal with the specific circumstances shaped by forces far more powerful than we are.
So, we make the best assessment of the landscape and balance of forces that we can, choose a course of action, and then throw ourselves into implementing it. When a particular campaign or stage of struggle wraps up, we look at the choices we made, learn from what we got right and what we got wrong in both conception and execution, and make the next set of tough choices.
In 2024 the tough choices facing U.S. socialists are front and center. An authoritarian MAGA bloc that incorporates openly fascist elements at all levels of its apparatus is bidding for enough power to impose its white Christian nationalist agenda on the country. The most powerful current in the opposition offers an alternative agenda on numerous important issues but is complicit in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and has caved to right-wing fear-mongering on immigrant rights. A general election is approaching whose outcome – especially at the presidential level – will be decisive in determining whether MAGA or anti-MAGA holds federal power for the next four years. Throughout the socialist left – and more broadly in almost every sector of the electorate – people are wrestling with what to do when they enter the voting booth. There is a choice to be made.
Tempest: Ready, Set… Punt
The Tempest Collective was formed largely by former members of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) soon after the ISO disbanded in 2019. Tempest describes itself as “an organizing and educational project. Our goal is to put forward a revolutionary vision that is clear and understandable, that weighs in on strategic and tactical questions, and that offers concrete guidance about how to put a consistent set of working-class politics ‘from below’ into practice today.”
Tempest has published two articles by Collective members on the 2024 elections this month. Let’s see what “concrete guidance” is offered in those pieces. Author Ashley Smith writes:
“…we must be crystal clear: The two candidates and parties are not the same and it is an ultra-left mistake to characterize them that way. The greater evil is obviously Trump and the far-right GOP. He, not Harris, is threatening the deportation of 13 million human beings and the criminalization of queer people. Harris and the Democratic Party are lesser evils by comparison. But that does not exonerate them of being evil.”
Smith’s article also asserts:
“In this epoch of political instability, socialists must develop a strategic approach to elections. We are not anarchists; we do not dismiss elections as irrelevant to the class struggle. Electoral politics are one of the battlefields of the class struggle.”
Putting those ideas together, the article says:
“…what should the Left do? First of all, we should not argue with individuals about what they do at the ballot box. That is not the key question and debate to have. Instead, we must argue that activists, social movements, and unions should not spend our time, money, and energy campaigning for Harris as the lesser evil.” (The other Tempest article, by Collective member Natalia Tylim, offers the same punchline: “I want to stress that I’m also not going to spend my time or resources arguing with individuals about how they vote as individuals out of their fear of Trump.”)
Wait a minute. The left, and those paying attention to what left groups and leaders think, is debating electoral strategy. That strategy is not limited to – but certainly is commonly understood to include – a stance on who to vote for or against. An electoral strategy that refuses to take a position on who people should vote for is not a strategy; it’s a refusal to make a tough choice. Or in Tempest’s terms, to offer “concrete guidance” to those you seek to influence.
What we have here is a new twist on an old adage:
When the going gets tough, the tough…. change the subject.
DSA Leadership Redefines the Word “Bold”
The new “Workers Deserve More” program for 2024 recently announced by the national leadership of DSA is similar in essential respects. In a vein similar to Tempest, the program declares:
“We recognize that a second Trump victory would be catastrophic for the international working class. Relying on the Democrats to defeat Republicans isn’t working.”
In the preamble, the DSA leadership lays out their view of dilemma US voters face and offer their guidance as to how to proceed:
“In the 2024 elections, working people have few good options. In most races, Americans will have the choice between far-right Republicans and corporate Democrats. In both cases, workers lose, and our politicians will remain controlled by their corporate donors, not the ordinary people who voted for them…. Neither major party is capable of advancing a positive program for the 2024 elections that meets the needs of the majority of Americans. That’s why the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is presenting a bold alternative course of action. In our 2024 program, “Workers Deserve More,” we hope to bring together millions of people throughout the U.S. to fight for a true democracy where working people have control over their own lives, their government, and the economy.”
What follows is a list of 18 demands/programmatic goals (Medicare for All, Tax the Rich, Free Palestine, etc.).
Again, wait a minute. Isn’t something missing? That list of programmatic goals is good. But aren’t similar lists put forward by many progressive and left organizations? And is fighting for them really an “alternative” to taking a stand on who people should vote for in 2024? Doesn’t the DSA text imply that prospects for making headway toward those goals would be immeasurably more difficult under a Trump administration than a Harris one? Isn’t calling it an “alternative” just another way of saying we don’t like the options so we’re taking a pass on making a choice? What is “bold” about that?
And how about some candor about why no recommendation is being made? Pretty much everyone in or anywhere near DSA knows that members of the organization – including members of the national leadership body – are badly divided on who to vote for in 2024. Is there a reason not to come out and say so? Isn’t one of the hallmarks of “democratic socialism” supposed to be that it rejects the practice of a left organization or party projecting an image of monolithic unity to the working-class public when that is not the case? Where is the credibility in an organization saying it hopes to “bring together millions of people across the US to fight for a true democracy” when it won’t offer any guidance on who workers should vote for two months from now or explain one of the reasons it is sitting this one out?
“Revolutionary Phrase-Making”
It’s no secret that I advocate a vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 to prevent the MAGA authoritarians and fascists from taking control of the federal government. I’ve argued in numerous articles and webinars that advocacy of abstention or a third-party vote is a profound error that underestimates the danger of MAGA, misunderstands the way working-class and revolutionary organizations can build political power, and does nothing to strengthen our immediately urgent or long-term Palestine solidarity efforts. (See here, here, here, and here.) But a certain respect is due to those who advocate abstentionism or third-party voting: they put their politics out there and fight for them. That’s a serious way to do politics.
Respect is also due to most issue-based and constituency-based organizations that do not offer a who-to-vote-for recommendation. Matters regarding the specific issue which is their main focus, the sentiments within their base, and/or internal differences in groups whose main focus is not electoral need to be taken into account. And the main thing is that such groups do not promote themselves as offering a revolutionary vision for the US working class or as building a new party that will lead the working class to socialism.
Organizations that do self-identify that way and issue pronouncements about the tasks of socialists in today’s class struggle have greater responsibilities. They need to be held to a higher standard. Part of their responsibility is to make tough choices, or in cases when they cannot make a choice, straightforwardly explain why.
There is an unfortunate history of organizations not doing so and, like Tempest and the DSA national leadership today, substituting “bold” radical pronouncements for biting the bullet and making a difficult choice. There is even a term for this practice – “revolutionary phrasing-making” (or “the revolutionary phrase”) – coined by none other than V.I. Lenin:
“Revolutionary phrase-making…is a disease from which revolutionary parties suffer…when the course of revolutionary events is marked by big, rapid zigzags. By revolutionary phrase making we mean the repetition of revolutionary slogans irrespective of objective circumstances at a given turn in events, in the given state of affairs obtaining at the time. The slogans are superb, alluring, intoxicating, but there are no grounds for them; such is the nature of the revolutionary phrase.”
“Superb, alluring, intoxicating…” – perfect for battles on twitter or Facebook and the publication of “bold” programs. Unfortunately, outside of actual revolutionary situations, practicing working class politics usually involves making choices between less-than-ideal options. No radical organization or party will get those choices right every time. But organizations with an aversion to choosing, and especially those that encase their taking a pass in clouds of radical rhetoric, are avoiding rather than engaging with objective circumstances and are traveling a dead-end road.
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Book Review: Ground Wars – Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns Rasmus Kleis Nielsen – 2012 Princeton University Press
By Peter Olney
“the deciding factor is “not the margin of error but the margin of effort”
Friends and comrades are deploying to battleground states that will be determinative in this year’s Presidential race
Harris will win the popular vote, as Biden did in 2020, but the undemocratic electoral college means that the election will come down to a few thousand votes in states like PA, MI, NEV, AZ, GA and Wisconsin. Therefore, the anti-MAGA majority needs to be motivated and mobilized to vote. The always insightful political analyst Michael Podhorzer keeps saying that the deciding factor is “not the margin of error but the margin of effort” That means that the difficult and often distasteful work of phoning and door knocking is crucial to victory.
Guidance and insight for this work comes from a remarkably surprising place: a Danish Sociologist named Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. In 2008 he embedded himself in two Congressional campaigns: New Jersey Democrat Linda Stender and Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes. Hours of door knocking, phone banking, letter writing and observation of the mechanics of a campaign are reflected in the most evocative description of my own experience in on the ground electoral politics. The book is peppered with episodes describing phone calls, encounters on the doors, or discissions with campaign staff and volunteers.
The book describes three important factors necessary to understanding the “Ground Wars”:
- Temporary Infrastructure – In the earlier days of “machine politics” there were permanent functionaries at the local level, often patronage jobs, who functioned as frontline communicators. Today’s local party apparatus is called into being for a fixed time leading up to the election, often including a primary contest and then the general. By definition and necessity these short-term positions are filled by recent college graduates and folks who can afford committed short term employment.
- Coalition forces – There are the official campaigns of the Party and then there are the Independent Expenditure (IE) operations and the work of organizations like labor unions. The IE work cannot cooperate or coordinate with the campaign by law, and the unions are forbidden from using paid staff and resources to reach anyone but their own members – a limited pool when unions represent only 6% of the private sector workforce.
- Volunteers – Every campaign wants volunteers en masse but coordinating them and dovetailing their often spotty and uneven efforts with that of paid staff is very challenging. Sometimes they think they “know best” and they can be a major irritant.
“… pain in the ass prima donna second guessing the work of the campaign structure”
I thank my longtime friend Henry Hardy from Greenfield, MA for turning me on to Ground Wars. He will be deploying to PA for 5 weeks during the general election. He said the book helped him to avoid becoming a “pain in the ass prima donna second guessing the work of the campaign structure” I came away feeling the same way after reading the book.
I have worked elections every two years since 2016 and as a long-time labor organizer have had certain criticisms of campaign functioning involving basic training and logistics issues. Campaign staffers with little direct experience to lean on train up door knockers, and phone bankers on endless scripts that will not last a minute out on the hustings. Logistics planning can also often be lacking. In 2022 I drove 21 miles for a literature drop in Fullerton, California at 5:30 AM and found out I was the only one there and that the staffer who had sent me there had forgotten to tell me that the drop had been called off. I have learned however to keep my mouth shut in most instances, and Ground Wars was a big help for my psyche in avoiding carping on the campaigns.
Here is Henry’s brief excellent roundup on the book:
“This is a great nitty-gritty description of the contemporary “ground war” in American electoral politics. Nielsen likes to refer to it as “personal political communications” because he likes to view it as one of the main political media (along with direct mail, broadcast/cable advertising, internet advertising, social media communications, and free media coverage). He sees it as making a comeback since the early 90s (volunteer activity up from 2% of the adult electorate to 4%), and as working (estimates one in every 14 door knocks brings an additional voter to the polls). He also makes it clear how boring and stressful the work is for most involved, consisting as it does almost exclusively of cold-calling and door knocking to persuade the persuadable and get the “lazy faithful” to the polls. He also does a great job of outlining the complex improvised organizational “structure” of the ground game, which (in order to be most effective) requires the coordination of various parties, campaigns, allied activist groups, and differently motivated volunteers and wage workers”
It is not too late to get a copy of Ground Wars to read at night after a long day on the doors beating Trump and fighting for democracy.
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For more on working and working on the elections, read the series on the Stansbury Forum:
Why I Keep Coming Back, There Are Many …, and Knocking The Doors #1: Working in CA45th CD
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Why I Keep Coming Back
By Katie Quan
“Some might think I’m crazy, but to me it’s thrilling, because it’s one of the best examples of what a union can do.”
This year I am spending several months of my retirement with the UNITE HERE election campaign in Reno, Nevada, heading its volunteer operation, something I have done now for four election cycles. Why would I volunteer for 12 hours a day, in 100 degree weather in the summer, and snowy conditions in November? Some might think I’m crazy, but to me it’s thrilling, because it’s one of the best examples of what a union can do.
UNITE HERE in Nevada, known as the culinary union, represents more than 60,000 hotel and food workers in the Las Vegas area, and several hundred in Reno. By all accounts, its canvassing operation is a game-changer in Nevada politics. While the Las Vegas area is reliably blue, and the state’s rural counties are reliably red, the Reno area is roughly a third Democrat, a third Republican, and a third independent. So the Reno area swings the state. Every vote really counts.
UNITE HERE’s canvassing operation in Nevada is second to none. I’ve participated in and even led political campaigns in past decades in battleground states, but none compares to the strategy and rigor of the culinary union’s operation. UNITE HERE targets certain voter populations and mobilizes its members to knock on doors. The members are housekeepers, waiters, cooks, and bartenders, and most of them are people of color. Many of them are already leaders in their workplaces, but some are rank and file workers who have been selected by their union as future leaders. They come from as far away as Alaska, New Jersey, and Texas. When they reach Reno, the union trains them to step out of their comfort zone to speak to total strangers, tell stories about what matters to them personally, listen to different points of view, and then advocate for working people’s best interests.
In the Reno environment, this is not always easy. In certain neighborhoods Trump signs create a hostile environment where some residents are scared to open the door and say what they think. African American canvassers may encounter harsh racism, and have been threatened by gun-toting residents. Latino immigrant canvassers may be treated as if their voices are not as valuable as those of native-born people. When these kinds of problems arise, they are brought up in morning and evening team meetings, where canvassers analyze the problem and recommit to build strength together.
Though I sometimes help with training canvassers, my main role is to coordinate the volunteer effort, where friends and allies of the union knock on doors in a parallel effort to the union’s. For the past two cycles we have partnered with Seed the Vote, a network of progressive groups that sends volunteers to battleground states. This year more than 1000 volunteers will knock on over 100,000 doors in Reno. You can join us and donate to our effort by going to “Donate to Seed the Vote”.
Over the many years that I have spent volunteering with UNITE HERE in Reno, I have witnessed many members come forward and take on increased leadership, both on the campaign and in their workplaces. They go home and treat their workplaces like their political “turf,” using the organizing skills they learned in Reno. As individuals these members have become empowered, and collectively these new leaders have made the union more powerful.
That’s why I keep coming back.
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There Are Many …
By Tom Yankowski and Trinidad Madrigal
It is time to stand up and take action this year more than ever to stop Maga extremism. Even if you have never engaged in electoral politics before, there are many easily accessible options available for everyone.
1) Door to Door Canvassing
Direct person to person to contact has been shown to be the most effective means of convincing people to vote. There are many grassroots organizing groups, like Swing Left and Seed the Vote, that will help you find the best fit for you. I need specific answers to the issues below before I make a commitment to canvass:
- Is the race winnable for the Democrats? Will it be a close election? Is the race in a swing district that could have national implications?
- Does the candidate have positions that are aligned with my politics?
- Is the location close enough to my home to make it affordable for my budget? Is transportation provided? Do I have family or friends who could provide lodging for me?
Personally, I will be canvassing for Josh Harder in Congressional District 9, Rudy Salas in Congressional District 22, Derek Tran in Congressional District 45, and Harris/Walz and Senator Jacki Rosen in Nevada.
2) Phone Banking or Broadcast Texting
I actually enjoy phone banking a lot. It takes just one positive interaction with a potential voter to “make my day!” All the campaigns use predictive automatic dialing now so you no longer need to wait endlessly for someone to answer. It can be done virtually on Zoom or in person in some locations. Training with an easy to follow script is always provided beforehand. Volunteers are needed who are multi-lingual…
I also have friends who do not feel comfortable speaking directly to voters. So, they choose to send blast texts to people’s cell phones that can reach thousands of voters. For more information, check out: http://www.mobilize.us/
I try to participate in phone banking 1-2 times a week for a couple of hours each time.
3) Postcard Writing
My wife, Trinidad Madrigal, has been prolific in organizing postcard writing parties with her friends every other week. She enjoys the camaraderie that occurs naturally as people share their stories while writing personalized invites to voters to become engaged. Given all the junk mail we receive, it is amazing that a handwritten postcard will always be perused. Sometimes, the postcard parties are held in people’s homes, and other times, a local brewery or taqueria agrees to host the event. Regardless, food and drink are always involved. If you want to attend or organize such a party, go to: http://www.mobilize.us/
4) Make a Donation
There are so many close races that need your support. We decided to send money to Democratic candidates in close races who need to win in order to maintain control of the Senate and create a firewall just in case. Go to: Swing Left, Seed the Vote
The bottom line is we all need To Do Something! Just think how we will all feel when we wake up on November 6th!
In Solidarity
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Knocking The Doors #1: Working in CA45th CD
By Peter Olney
Today the Stansbury Forum’s co-editor Peter Olney pens a reflection on door knocking for our future.
Many friends, family and comrades are heading to election work in battleground states where the Presidential election will likely be won or lost. As it was in 2020, the difference between winning or losing will be by a few thousand votes!
I was in Maricopa County, Arizona in 2020 knocking on doors for Joe Biden in 95-100 degrees. He won Maricopa, and so goes Arizona. and so went the Presidential election.
This year, as in the midterms of 2022, I am headed to Orange County, California – the OC – where we have the chance to pick up two House seats: CD 45 and 40. Because Katie Porter (D) (CA) vacated her seat to run for Senate, now we need to defend that seat (CD 47) as well. My principal focus will be on the 45th CD, a seat presently held by MAGA partisan Michelle Steel.
In 2022 we were able to motivate a substantial number of members of my union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) to work on the campaign of her opponent Jay Chen. Steel caught our attention and our ire because she sponsored legislation to put the ILWU and other maritime unions under the Railway Labor Act. She did this during our negotiations for a new contract signaling that union strength should be handcuffed in the “national interest”.
We lost by 6% in 2022 in a district that Biden carried in 2020 by 6%. This time we have new energy at the top of the ticket and a Vietnamese American lawyer and small businessman named Derek Tran as a candidate. This district, which feathers its way down from southern LA County east of the beaches, west of Anaheim and Santa Ana, is the home to the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam.
In November of 2023 and July of 2024 the ILWU sponsored day long trainings on door knocking and direct contact for our members. Now those volunteers will be deployed to the OC as part of flipping the House of Representatives!
One of our retired longshore members was kind and committed enough to provide Christina Perez and I an apartment in the City of Signal Hill. This is a “short” LA commute to campaign HQ in Placentia and Westminster in the OC.. Signal Hill is a fascinating place. As its name suggests it is on a hill completely surrounded by the City of Long Beach. There are a little over 10,000 residents and there are still active oil derricks pumping black crude. The derricks are surrounded by residential neighborhoods, and some of the luxury housing would put Beverly Hills to shame. Oil was discovered here in 1921 and the City was incorporated separately from Long Beach to avoid pesky and bothersome corporate regulation. (For a modern day riff on this idea read “A Libertarian Fantasy in the Tropics” on the Stansbury Forum.)
LA never disappoints. On Labor Day there was a big union/labor march in the harbor with contingents of over a thousand workers from the Carpenters and Laborers unions, both Latino immigrant powerhouses, and smaller yer impressive contingents from the ILWU and Teamsters.
Here is the class and demographic diagnostic. The next day, the LA Times published a photo of SAG AFTRA members marching with a caption and no story. The Spanish language paper La Opinion, a subsidiary of the Times published a giant front page photo of the Laborers’ contingent with a headline: “Fuerza Sindical”. Inside there were three pages of photos and story. Can we guess the demographic targets of the two papers?
The dynamism of LA labor captivates me and of course this is the 2nd largest Metro region in the country and it is an economic and political power house. How ironic that the Governor, the Speaker Emerita, a first class Machiavellian pol, and last but not least, the Presidential nominee, all hail from the small City of 800,00 and 49 square miles by the bay: San Francisco!
We have already scheduled a phone bank for our ILWU retirees to call ILWU members in the OC. (For how it worked in 2022: The Union Difference Behind the Orange Curtain – Working the Mid-terms in Little Saigon.) Two Saturday mobilizations are scheduled for the Tran campaign.The work begins in the midst of a brutal heat wave. Drink lots of liquids, brave the freeways and let’s bring home a victory in November, 2024
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A Libertarian Fantasy in the Tropics
By Bruce Nissen
Do you find that right-wing proposals to shred our country’s social safety net to pieces and to unburden giant corporations from regulations that protect the environment, worker’s rights, health and safety, and so forth, to be scary? If so, you should look at experiments being tried in Honduras — experiments that make anything being tried here look like half-hearted amateurish measures.
In early January 2024 I joined a delegation of U.S. and Canadian citizens on a nine-day trip to Honduras that was sponsored by the Cross Border Network and supported by other groups that were also members of the Honduras Solidarity Network (also a sponsor). The purpose of the tour was to learn about the effects that our multinational corporations and governments were having on this country, which is the poorest of all the Central American countries.
I learned a lot about Honduras and the perilous existence of many of its residents, be they laid off and injured workers in a local “maquiladora,” racial minorities, trade union leaders (the country recently earned the dubious distinction of having the highest percentage of its union leaders murdered), and in general a country traumatized by a 2009 coup by the military. But nothing I saw or heard left as lasting an impression as something I had never heard of before: special economic zones known as ZEDES (Zones for Employment and Economic Development) that are designed to bypass or evade almost any form of democratic or governmental control over the behavior of those investing in them. We visited and saw up close the country’s most advanced ZEDE, named Prὀspera, on Roatan, a Honduran island off the north coast.
WHAT IS A ZEDE?
How a ZEDE is defined seems to depend a lot on who is doing the defining. Fans of ZEDES describe them as being massive job creators and prosperity generators due to their cutting unnecessary and job-killing government regulations. Detractors tend to define them as the hyper-capitalist embodiment of right-wing fantasies that empower wealthy owners to evade taxes, mistreat workers, and despoil the environment.
The Prὀspera ZEDE is the country’s most ambitious of the three chartered under the previous government. It has the following features:
- While it remains subject to Honduras’s constitution and criminal code, for non-criminal legal matters the ZEDE has its own civil law and regulatory structure.
- The ZEDE civil disputes are handled by an extremely flexible arbitration structure designed to enforce the laws of whatever country a ZEDE business chooses to place itself under (in other words, it could be enforcing the labor laws of Slovakia or any other country from a list of permissible countries to suit the self-choice of any ZEDE enterprise).
- The administrative governance of the ZEDE is handled by a Technical Secretary (TS) who is responsible to and is overseen by a primary governing body known as the Council of Trustees (see below).
- Honduras Prὀspera, Inc. is a private company that owns the ZEDE. It sits on Prὀspera’s Council of Trustees (aka “The Council”) and has veto power over it. The Council is composed of nine individuals, five elected and four appointed by Honduras Próspera Inc. (Those “elected” are chosen by a complicated process that gives landowners more votes depending on the size of their land plot.) Decisions to change any of these arrangements must have a 2/3 majority, or 6 of the 9. (This means that Honduras Prὀspera Inc. holds a veto over any changes.) The Council is the primary governing body; it has a private police force and its own tax system, with extremely low tax rates.
- A non-elected Committee for the Adoption of Best Practices (CAMP) oversees the Council and has the power to approve all internal regulations and to provide policy guidance. It was appointed by the corrupt Honduran government that initially pushed through the ZEDE law (and whose president at the time, Juan Orlando Hernandez, has subsequently been found guilty of narcotrafficking and was sentenced to 45 years in a U.S. jail in June 2024). Nine of CAMP’s members are from the U.S.; only four come from Honduras. CAMP fills its own vacancies, ensuring no political influences can change its orientation or trajectory.
- All basic services that a government normally provides or regulates, such as water, electricity, education, healthcare, etc. are provided by private entities that contract with the ZEDE Council to provide them.
Looking at the above bullet points, it should be obvious that any normal “government” with governmental powers is basically absent in Prὀspera. Virtually everything is privatized. Anything a government would typically do is to be provided through a private contract either between private citizens and private companies or between a “private government” controlled by a for-profit company based in the U.S. (Honduras Prὀspera Inc.).
The income tax is nominally 10% but since only 10% of business income is taxed, the effective business income tax rate is 1%. Tax avoidance is a major incentive to invest in Prὀspera. Matters of justice are also addressed through contracts and a private arbitration dispute resolution system. There is no room for any kind of welfare measures of a public nature.
In other words, the Prὀspera ZEDE aims to be the embodiment of an economic libertarian’s dream: almost total absence of government and taxes, with all relationships between people and people-created organizations to be governed only by signed contracts. Market relations and enforceable contracts constitute the entirety of economic interactions. Any kind of governmental intervention to regulate the behavior of private corporations are to be eliminated or at least reduced to the maximum extent possible.
The allergy to government regulation even extends to the ZEDE’s currency: the official currency of Prὀspera is the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not issued by any government and theoretically is not subject to any regulation by any government. (This combination of Bitcoin currency, virtually non-existent regulation, and virtually no taxes would seem to make Prὀspera a perfect candidate for money laundering and other illegal financial activities.)
HOW DID ZEDES COME ABOUT?
ZEDES are a product of a military coup in 2009. In 2006 Manuel Zelaya became president following a November 2005 election. Although he came from the landed aristocracy, Zelaya increasingly moved left after his election, increasing the minimum wage by 80%, reducing bank interest rates, providing free electricity to the very poorest residents, and shifting the country’s foreign policy toward allying all Latin American countries into a common block to escape U.S. domination as well as forming friendships with Cuba’s Raul Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. During his administration poverty declined by 10% in two years.
The Honduran elite families that owned much of the country’s land and wealth found Zelaya’s policies to be intolerable, as did the military and apparently U.S. policymakers. A military coup in June 2009 deposed Zelaya and deported him to Costa Rica. The U.S. government did not insist that he be returned to power. Instead, the U.S. supported new elections proposed by coup-leaders, and the consequent conservative/right-wing governments that were installed through widely criticized and rigged “elections” brought about the country’s ZEDE law. Porfirio Lobo Sosa, president from 2010-2014 attempted an initial ZEDE law, but it was overturned by the country’s Supreme Court as unconstitutional and a violation of Honduras’s sovereignty. A majority of the Supreme Court justices were then dismissed, and a new more pliant Supreme Court approved a second slightly amended version which was implemented under the rule of Juan Orlando Hernandez (generally known as JOH – pronounced like “hoe”), Lobo’s conservative/right-wing successor who ruled from 2014 to 2022. (As alluded to previously, JOH was convicted in the U.S. of narcotrafficking and weapons-related charges, along with Lobo’s son Fabio, JOH’s brother Tony, and JOH himself but that is a side-story to this brief history of the genesis of ZEDEs.)
After JOH’s National Party lost the 2021 Presidential elections to Xiomara Castro, wife of ousted former president Manuel Zelaya, her new government passed legislation abolishing the ZEDE law and attempted to dismantle the three existing ZEDES. This attempt to get rid of Prὀspera and other ZEDEs is being resisted, as will be related in a later section.
WE VISIT THE PROSPERA ZEDE IN JANUARY 2024
The leaders of our delegation had arranged for us to visit Prὀspera to see for ourselves what a ZEDE actually looks like. Prὀspera carefully guards who is allowed in (the public is not necessarily allowed to enter), so we had to fill out long and detailed questionnaires about our occupations, purpose in visiting, addresses, etc. before we were allowed in. By filling out these forms, we became “e-residents” of Prὀspera – to this day I receive communiques asking me to report the income I made in the last year within the ZEDE (which for me is of course nothing) for purposes of accounting and registration.
My first impression was not all that favorable. There is a very rough dirt road leading to the ZEDE; it certainly did not give the sense that a lot of commerce of a physical variety was entering or leaving the place. I know that a semi-finished resort is being constructed in Prὀspera and that residential and commercial construction is planned, but I didn’t see much of this. On the other hand, it is located on the northern coast of Honduras and has breathtakingly beautiful views of the sea, and for that reason alone could easily be a prime candidate for tourist development.
We got to meet two of the most important people involved in running Prὀspera. Ricardo Gonzalez is the Assistant ZEDE manager. And Jorge Colindres is the Technical Secretary in charge of its overall operations. Both spoke perfect English and were educated in the U.S. They both spoke to us at some length, especially Colindres.
Both Gonzalez and Colindres are fervent believers in ZEDEs and the philosophy underlying them. They claimed that Prὀspera either had already or would soon attract carpentry businesses, export services, private education companies, restaurants, real estate firms, finance tech companies, medical clinics, and much more. Colindres called it a “Hong Kong in Honduras.”
Colindres noted that Honduras Prὀspera Inc. is a private U.S. company that created the ZEDE as a “platform for investment.” And he claimed that those investments would create prosperity for all and lessen or eradicate poverty. He (correctly) noted the widespread corruption in Honduran society and (dubiously) claimed that the ZEDEs would somehow be immune to such corruption. Everything is to be governed by binding contracts that individuals voluntarily sign, and these are enforceable by arbitration proceedings taken to the Prὀspera Arbitration Center (PAC) or else the business-oriented International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR). This he claimed would settle disputes in a clean way that ordinary laws and regulations would not.
When pressed on the need for some form of regulation to prevent harmful “negative externalities” to others, he did concede that some form of controls is necessary and mentioned that according to the ZEDE’s charter ten industries in Prὀspera are not entirely free of oversight. I got five of these down in my notes: banking, healthcare, education, restaurants, and construction. How are these regulated? A company operating in any of these industries can choose its own regulations from those of 36 different countries. Thus, you could have a restaurant operating under the laws and regulations of, say, Estonia, while a restaurant across the street was governed by the laws and regulations of Brazil. It would be up to the owners of each restaurant to decide. Enforcement would be strictly by arbitrators deciding any disputes. Outside of the 10 industries there would be no regulatory control over the behavior of businesses or investors beyond any individual contracts they may sign.
Our delegation peppered Mr. Colindres with skeptical questions about the absence of regulatory control over especially big businesses. The most interesting thing about his answers is that they fell into two categories. The first category was a variant of the “trust me” justification. Since he is the Technical Secretary and hence the chief administrator of Prὀspera, he had the power to see that things were done properly, and he would never allow any violations of human rights or undue power for moneyed interests: we could count on it.
Second, he claimed (oddly enough for someone praising freedom from government) that many of our worries were addressed by Honduran government regulations that do apply to the ZEDEs. For example, he stated that the Honduran minimum wage (currently ranging from $1.94 US to $2.77 US per hour in manufacturing depending on the number of workers) applied to Prὀspera, so workers could not receive egregiously low payment. (He also claimed that Prὀspera’s charter requires payment 10% above the minimum wage.) Finally, he stated that if no other law or regulation applied to a business or industry, the prevailing standard would be “common law” enforced by the arbitrators, so the absence of firm written laws or rules should not be troubling.
A final guarantor of fairness is the fact that businesses operating in Prὀspera have to have insurance, he claimed. Since insurance companies do not like to make big payouts, they will protect worker rights, the environment, and the like, by refusing to insure companies taking shortcuts in these and other areas. (I found this claim to be especially ludicrous given the track record of U.S. medical insurance companies that raise their premium rates if they have to make a big payout, rather than cancelling coverage or pushing a company to reduce risk.)
Wandering around the room where we were given the lecture by Colindres, I found some interesting things. One was a money changing machine to convert other currencies into bitcoin and vice versa. (I regret I did not get a picture of this machine.) Also interesting were posters and books for sale that were inside bookcases. For example, here are some stickers photographed from one of the laptop computers sitting around the room:
Note the many stickers boosting bitcoin currency as well as the “Less Marx, More Mises” sticker. Karl Marx is of course well known; the “Mises” refers to Ludwig Von Mises, the libertarian Austrian American thinker who argued that any governmental intervention in the economy would inevitably be for the worse.
The books for sale that were inside wall cabinets were also interesting. I’ll start with two children’s books which are take-offs from well-known children’s books in the U.S.:
Goodnight Bitcoin imitates one of the best-known children’s books of all time: Goodnight Moon. If you Give a Monster a Bitcoin emulates the beloved children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. I guess it’s never too early to begin inculcating into the mind of a child the individualist libertarian mindset necessary to make a currency free from any government seem plausible.
Then we come to the adult books. As you might suspect, they were all right-wing libertarian tracts. Here are a few pictures:
Note especially both the foundational book of this type, Von Mises’ The Theory of Money and Credit and a very recent book by modern billionaire and well-known anti-government crank Peter Thiel, Zero to One.
One more picture gives you the flavor of the books favored by and hawked by the Prὀspera ZEDE:
I had to include this picture because it shows perhaps the most famous individualist/libertarian book of all time: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This book has sold many millions and is still selling briskly 70 years after it was published. I also found the title of the book on the far left to be astounding: making a moral case for maintaining fossil fuels.
Our delegation’s trip into the libertarian paradise came at a time when it was in peril, as it still is. This is the subject of the next section.
NEW GOVERNMENT FOLLOWING A GENUINE ELECTION MOVES TO ELIMINATE ZEDES
As noted previously, a reform government led by former first lady Xiomara Castro took power in January 2022 after a November 2021 election. Castro immediately reversed the trajectory of her conservative predecessors. She stopped a wealthy landowner from evicting indigenous people from land south of the capital, citing indigenous rights. She banned new open pit mining to protect the environment, introduced reforms to the tax system that close tax loopholes for the very richest (these tax reforms have not yet passed Congress), made electricity free to the poorest residents who used small amounts of it by billing the biggest users, and took other measures favoring those less well off.
In May 2022 she presented to the Honduran Congress legislation abolishing the ZEDE law. It passed unanimously, with parties from the left, right, and center all supporting it. This move was immensely popular in the country; mass demonstrations had been held opposing the existence of ZEDEs.
Amnesty International of the Americas lauded Castro’s move because they asserted that ZEDEs threatened the human rights of Honduran residents. But Honduras Prὀspera Inc. immediately filed a charge against Castro’s government with the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a business-oriented arbitration mechanism set up by the World Bank to protect foreign investors as an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism for cases like this. They demanded $10.8 billion for the estimated loss of expected future profits from the Prὀspera ZEDE. That amount equals approximately two-thirds of Honduras’s annual state budget; it would cripple the country if the plaintiffs should prevail.
Two treaties with the United States commit Honduras to use this ISDS arbitration system to settle disputes with investors: the Dominican /Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) and a U.S.-Honduras Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT). Castro had declared in her campaign that Honduras would withdraw from these two treaties, but the government has not left either CAFTA or BIT to date. She resisted sending a government representative to the arbitration proceedings that were set up to hear the Prὀspera claim before the ICSID. But eventually she was forced to send a lawyer to the proceedings to represent Honduras. This lawyer argued that private companies had to exhaust national legal remedies before coming to the ICSID tribunal, but this argument has not been accepted.
Eighty-five prominent international economists signed a letter in support of Castro’s move to withdraw from the ICSID, stating,
We economists from institutions across the world welcome the decision by the Honduran government to withdraw from the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). We view the withdrawal as a critical defence of Honduran democracy and an important step toward its sustainable development.
U.S. politicians have weighed in on both sides of the dispute. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) rallied over 30 Congressmen to write U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken asking that he intervene on the anti-ZEDE side. U.S. Senators Bill Haggerty (R-Tennessee) and Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) asked Blinken to do the exact opposite.
Legally the case is tangled and murky: Can Castro unilaterally (without congressional authorization) pull out of these treaties? Can the Prὀspera ZEDE lock in its own existence because it signed a 50-year treaty with Singapore while existing Honduran law guarantees protection of such treaties for a decade? While new ZEDEs are clearly illegal since the ZEDE law was rescinded, can existing ZEDEs also be eliminated retroactively? Answers to these questions are ambiguous at the present time.
Even more important, where does the U.S. government stand on the issue? Since the U.S. has almost-complete hegemony over what happens in a small and poor Central American country like Honduras, where it stands is crucially important. The Biden regime has talked out of both sides of its mouth. Former president Biden fulminated against Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDSs) and vowed to not include them in any future trade agreements. In contrast, Laura Dogu, the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, has strongly endorsed ZEDEs and Prὀspera in particular. She sharply criticized Xiomara Castro’s abolition of the ZEDE law, stating that such “actions are sending a clear message to companies that they should invest elsewhere, not in Honduras.” The U.S. State Department issued a similar statement, criticizing Honduras for having an uncertain “commitment to investment protections required by international treaties.”
WHAT IS THE LESSON FROM PROSPERA? WHAT CAN WE DO?
Rightwing libertarians around the world are attempting to erode and virtually erase governmental measures that protect both people and the environment from corporate misconduct and unrestrained capitalism. Thus, the most important lesson we can learn from the Prὀspera case is that we must remain vigilant worldwide.
To fight the good fight only domestically is to leave us all more vulnerable on a worldwide scale to a dystopian future of unrestrained selfishness, ever-growing inequality, and the consequent authoritarianism and militarism needed to hold down the subject peoples and to keep them from emigrating to wealthier countries like the U.S. In addition, Honduras and similar countries are laboratories for what might be done domestically in the future. This battle must be fought especially sharply in those areas of the world most lacking in resources needed to fight for and sustain a more humane cooperative and people-oriented society. Places like Honduras.
Here in the United States an urgent need is to demand that the administration not only vow to keep ISDS measures out of all future trade agreements (as the President has pledged to do) but take them out of all existing trade agreements. Fortunately, there is already action being taken by citizen groups and members of Congress to do just that. This move could use our help.
Congressmembers Linda T. Sanchez (D-California) and Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) have marshalled 47 members of the House of Representatives to sign a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai demanding that ISDS measures be taken out of CAFTA-DR and other such economic and trade agreements. This letter has been endorsed by Public Citizen, AFL-CIO, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Pride at Work, Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community, Honduras Solidarity Network, Oxfam America, Progressive Democrats of America, and a number of other groups.
We can aid this cause. If your Congressperson in the House has not signed on to this letter, we can pressure them to do so. If they have signed it, we can thank them for doing so and also write to our Senators to demand that they also sign on to this or an identical letter in the Senate. We can also ask the organizations we know and are affiliated with to endorse this letter, get their members to publicize it and contact their congresspersons, and so on.
Here are the materials you need to take action:
- First, you can go to the webpage that explains the issue and contains the letter: https://lindasanchez.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/sanchez-doggett-call-biden-administration-reform-cafta-dr-trade
- Second, you can download, circulate and publicize the letter itself, which is at this link: https://lindasanchez.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/lindasanchez.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/ISDS%20Letter.pdf
- Finally, publicize all of this on social media!
I’m enclosing the entire letter below (minus the 47 Congressional signatories), just for those who lack online access and are only able to read from paper copies.
March 21, 2024
The Honorable Anthony Blinken The Honorable Katherine Tai
Secretary of State U.S. Trade Representative
Department of State Office of the U.S. Trade Representative
2201 C Street N.W. 600 17th Street N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20520 Washington, D.C. 20508
Dear Secretary Blinken and Ambassador Tai,
We commend the administration’s commitment to a “worker-centered” trade agenda that uplifts people in the United States and around the world and helps promote our humanitarian and foreign policy goals. We particularly appreciate President Biden’s opposition to including investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms in trade and investment agreements, which enable foreign companies to sue the U.S. and our trading partners through international arbitration.
On a bipartisan basis, Congress drastically reduced ISDS liability from the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) because ISDS incentivizes offshoring, fuels a global race to the bottom for worker and environmental protections, and undermines the sovereignty of democratic governments. However, the U.S. has more than 50 existing trade and investment agreements on the books, most containing ISDS, including the U.S.-Central America Dominican Republic Agreement (CAFTA-DR) which entered into force in 2006. We urge you to offer CAFTA-DR governments the opportunity to work with the U.S. government to remove CAFTA-DR’s ISDS mechanism.
While there is no evidence that ISDS significantly promotes foreign direct investment, there is ample evidence that the abuse of the ISDS process harmed the Central America and Caribbean region. Multinational corporations have used ISDS to demand compensation for policies instituted by governments in CAFTA countries, undermining their democratic sovereignty and, often, harming the public good. For example, foreign companies have targeted labor rights, environmental protection, and public health policies.This ultimately works to counteract U.S. government assistance intended to address the root causes of migration from the region.
For certain Central American and Caribbean countries, even a single ISDS award (with some claims in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars) could destabilize their economy, as limited fiscal revenues are diverted from critical domestic priorities to cover legal defense expenses, tribunal costs and damages. According to public sources, taxpayers in CAFTA-DR countries paid at least $58.9 million to foreign corporations in ISDS awards, with at least $14.5 billionin pending ISDS claims.Notably, the lack oftransparency in ISDS arbitration makes it impossible to know the full extent of ISDS liability. There are also concerns regarding the fairness of ISDS proceedings as ISDS arbitrators can appear as counsel before tribunals composed of arbitrators with whom they previously served in different ISDS proceedings.
Accordingly, we are eager to work with you to remove ISDS liability from CAFTA-DR and all other trade or investment agreements with countries in Central America and the Caribbean. This would send a powerful signal that the U.S. government is committed to a new model of partnership in the region — a model that uplifts and protects democracy, rule of law, human rights, and the environment. We look forward to working alongside you to bring the CAFTA-DR more into alignment with the current trade agenda and prevent harmful corporate overreach in emerging economies.
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Special thanks to Judy Ancel and Karen Spring for judicious edits and corrections on earlier versions of this article.
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The Next Voice You Hear…
By Gary Phillips
A well-known crime writer of my acquaintance had recently self-produced several of his earlier novels from decades ago as audiobooks. There are various outlets where writers and small press publishers can find voice talent to narrate a book. ACX, essentially a subsidiary of Audible, is one of those venues, with an interactive online presence. There under its FAQs the potential customer is informed, “You can pay by the finished hour, arrange to split royalties, or opt for a hybrid,” if a narrator, or narrators, are interested in working with you on your book. Not for nothing, as Audible will inform you, it is “the United States’ largest audiobook producer and retailer.” The entity was bought by Amazon more than fifteen years ago.
Meanwhile back to this this old school writer. He hasn’t used humans to narrate his older work, he used an AI outfit – that presumably charged less than real life voice talent. Not only does the raw recording have to be done, but editing and other polishing is done to make an audiobook. There are now quite a number of companies wherein the machine, with some human or another doing the fine-tuning, transforms your prose into a simulacrum’s version of dulcet tones. Narrating text is hard work. I’ve had the opportunity to voice a few of my short stories as well as pay out of pocket to additional human beings to self-produce a collection of my short stories.
No matter the level of experience, humans flub lines, screw up pronunciation, or have to re-record entire passages for whatever failing of flesh and/or technology. That’s why the rate, which varies from who is providing the voice talent, is per finished hour. But advances in the development of synthetic voice production are such that nuance, emphases chosen, the cadence the talent brings to the table, sometimes with the intercession of an audiobook director, it’s becoming much harder to distinguish the robot from the mere mortal.
A good number of folks who narrate audiobooks also work in other areas where ones’ voice is the instrument of entertainment and information – and the source of a paycheck. In addition to audiobooks, voice actors are employed in radio and TV commercials, industrial films, documentaries and the mammoth industry of video games. SAG-AFTRA’s video game workers went on strike on July 26. This after eighteen previous months of frustrating negotiations. The workers held a picket at Warner Bros. Games in Burbank, on August 1. At the heart of the strike was the “existential threat” of generative AI.
As SAG-AFTRA has posted to the membership and the public on its site, “Video game performers are fighting for our livelihoods, and we’re facing a pivotal moment: Employers at some of the largest video game companies want to use A.I. to replace us using our own performances without compensation, transparency or consent.”
Can there really be guardrails put in place regarding the ethical use of generative AI? You don’t have to be an economist, Keynesian or otherwise, to keep in mind those who control the means of pop culture production have and always will be concerned with profits and loss. How to increase the former and decrease the latter. If the electricity doesn’t go out, AI doesn’t get tired, doesn’t show up late and can’t demand fair wages or withhold its labor.
An allied union the Animation Guild, held another rally, “Stand with Animators” on August 10 also in Burbank. The rally was a precursor to the Guild’s negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) when the master agreement expired on August 17. From the animators’ point of view, they seek to prevent generative AI being used to replace human art with machine art.
Yet as more out-sourcing, consolidation and downsizing continues, it’s the gig economy manifesting itself in what we collectively call Hollywood. Piece work as opposed to steady work. Not only voice actors, but line producers, editors and on and on aren’t working in their chosen careers but are now teaching middle school, becoming line cooks or have moved out of state to be able to afford housing, looking to start over in some other field.
“This is your opportunity to experience expressive narration, ambient sounds, Foley [sound] effects, and background music tailored to your narrative.” This was part of the come-on I received recently unsolicited in an email. This particular enterprise as part of the sell said I could send them a brief sampling of my writing and they’d produced a five-minute AI version with all the bells and whistles so outlined. I’m not tempted to bite their holographic apple, at least for now.
Reluctantly I’ll admit there’ll be temptation to hear a sample of my work once I get the next generation of this email. The one informing me an entity can deliver full cast recordings, a la radio dramas, incorporating the above-mentioned flourishes as well as multiple voices. Or so the seductive stentorian AI voice will tell me when I click on the link.
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The Black Freedom Movement and Tradeswomen History
By Molly Martin
I want to take us back in time and imagine a world, a culture, in which job categories were firmly divided between MEN and WOMEN. Women were restricted to pink collar jobs that paid too little to raise a family on or even to live without a man’s support. Even doing the same jobs, women were legally paid less than men. Married women were not allowed to work outside the home. Single women who found jobs as teachers or secretaries were fired as soon as they married. Black people were only allowed to work as laborers or house cleaners.
This was the world we fought to change.
Tradeswomen who have jobs today must thank Black workers who began the fight for jobs and justice.
The Black Freedom Movement has advocated for workplace equity since the end of the Civil War.
The movement gained power during and after WWII. A. Philip Randolph headed the sleeping car porters union, the leading Black trade union in the US. In 1940 he threatened to march on Washington with ten thousand demonstrators if the government did not act to end job discrimination in federal war contracts. FDR capitulated and signed executive order 8802, the first presidential order to benefit Blacks since reconstruction. It outlawed discrimination by companies and unions engaged in war work on government contracts. This executive order marked the start of affirmative action.
The fight to desegregate the workforce continued.
In the early 1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area, protesters organized successful picket campaigns against businesses that refused to hire Blacks, including the Palace hotel, car dealerships and Mel’s Drive-In. Many of the protesters were white students at UC Berkeley.
In August 1963, the march on Washington brought 200,000 people to the capitol to protest racial discrimination and show support for civil rights legislation. The civil rights act of 1964, signed into law by President Johnson, is the legal structure that women and POC have used to put nondiscrimination into practice.
But change did not come quickly or easily.
Black workers at a tire plant in Natchez Mississippi were organizing to desegregate jobs. The CIO, Congress of Industrial Organizations, supported them in this fight. In 1967, three years after the civil rights act became law, a Black man, Wharlest Jackson, who had won a promotion to a previously “white” job in the tire plant, was murdered by the KKK. They blew up his truck as he was driving home from work. No one was ever arrested or prosecuted for this crime.
Wharlest Jackson was the father of five. His wife, Exerlina, was among those arrested for peacefully insisting on equal treatment during a boycott of the town of Natchez’s white businesses. She was sent to Parchman penitentiary.
Jackson was just one of many who died for our right to be treated equally at work.
Tradeswomen are part of the feminist, civil rights and union movements. We continue to seek allies because we are few.
Discrimination has not ended, but, because of decades of organizing, our work lives have improved. We owe much to the Black workers who sought equity in employment for decades before us.
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Two Bay Area natives honor their ancestors with public art
By Lincoln Cushing
Recently a Bay Area artist colleague of mine presented a powerful public sculpture honoring her mother. At Berkeley’s Juneteenth celebration Mildred Howard unveiled “Delivered, Mable’s Promissory Note” near the Ashby BART station. The large metal sculpture, based on West African jewelry currency, is a shout-out to Mildred’s mother who fought – and won – to underground the light rail line that would have otherwise disrupted her predominantly Black neighborhood in the 1960s.
Another Bay Area artist did something very much like that in 1996 when Berkeley-born Michael Heizer (1944-) presented a commissioned metal sculpture at the Bruce R. Thompson Federal Courthouse in Reno, Nevada. “Perforated Object #27” was inspired by a Shoshoni artifact created over 1,500 years ago, carved from the horn of a bighorn sheep and perforated by 90 drilled holes. It was discovered in 1936 as part of an excavation led by Michael’s father, U.C. Berkeley anthropology professor Robert F. Heizer (1915-1979) at Humboldt Cave, 100 miles northeast of Reno. Michael’s massive sculpture, like Mildred’s, is a dramatic physical enlargement – 27-foot-long “Object” is 450 times bigger than the 4½” long original. Positive and negative space is a common element in Michael’s works, so the sculpture is accompanied by a rough line of 90 steel rings. Robert was my maternal uncle, who like Mildred’s father, had worked in the WWII shipyards.
Michael’s work did not always formally make historical references. “Platform,” a 30-ton pile of rusty steel commissioned by the Oakland Museum in 1980 and installed at Estuary Park, was purely abstract. Yet even that was described by art critic Allan Temko as “avowedly symbolic, or mythic, recalling the Mayan ceremonial platforms of Chichen Itza, which he saw as a child with his late father.”
Michael began formally connecting his earth work sculptures with indigenous iconography in 1982 with a commission at Buffalo Rock State Park in Illinois. “Effigy Tumili” deliberately evoked Mississippian Culture with mounds and embankments representing a catfish, a frog, a snapping turtle, a water-strider and a snake. He later began producing sculptures of oversized artifacts in 1989 with a series of immense concrete copies of prehistoric hand tools; in 1993, foreshadowing Mildred’s “Delivered,” he made “Small Pendant.”
Anthropology has seen a severe and legitimate reckoning in the past few years. Robert Heizer wasn’t an activist, yet after beginning as a glorified grave robber – as did most of his colleagues – he was inspired by the spirited demands of the Free Speech Movement and evolved to push the boundaries of his academic field in the right direction. Critic Tony Platt’s recent book The Scandal at Cal gives this nod using a word very much in the news today: “Heizer was among the earliest academics to use the g-word when describing the state’s efforts to exterminate Native peoples in the nineteenth century. ‘No one troubled to name what was happening in California a hundred years ago genocide,” he wrote with Theodora Kroeber in 1968.’”
When Michael articulated his goals for his 1982 “Effigy,” he expressed the same respect with the same term: “The Native American tradition of mound building absolutely pervades the whole place, mystically and historically in every sense. Those mounds are part of a global, human dialogue of art, and I thought it would be worthwhile to reactivate that dialogue [ … ]. It’s an untapped source of information and thematic material, it is a beautiful tradition, and it’s fully neglected. And it’s from a group of people who were genocided. So, in a lot of ways, the Effigy Tumuli is a political and social comment.”
Michael’s life’s work, the massive southern Nevada desert project “City,” has been criticized for lack of environmental and cultural sensitivity. But he’s a major artist who understands that all art, and culture, draws from the deep well of our ancestors.
Thank you, Mildred and Michael, for your work.
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