“It was imagination that I set aside”
By Michael Marcum
Ever since my prison days I have been a prison abolitionist. I quickly learned that people were not cut out to cage others or be caged; it destroyed both. I wanted, and still do, a world that did not require cages. Initially I lacked the imagination to apply the same perspective to policing, the profession with more power over a citizen’s liberty than the courts or various branches of government. To tame the word a bit, abolition simply means starting over, creating a society and social contract free of white supremacy—something we have never managed to do. Acknowledge our history, once and for all, and apologize and develop means to atone, with a clean social contract. It begins with imagination. And it was an imagination that I set aside during my 40 year professional career of correctional reform. My focus was on humane conditions of imprisonment, and opportunity for those released back into our communities.
After my violent years in prison, I worked for almost 40 years under two Sheriffs—several years for Richard Hongisto, and then for 32 years for Sheriff Mike Hennessey. We were committed to reform, and we accomplished much. However, while our budgets ballooned, prisons multiplied and police fortified, we “defunded” education, infrastructure, health care, and all manner of safety nets. Perhaps a relationship? I missed the forest for the trees. And the reform? Fragile.
“Defund the police” means to take a fresh look at why we have created policing that mirrors mass incarceration. Back in the 90’s when Clinton was sending surplus war material to police and sheriffs, departments all over the country received armored personnel carriers, riot gear, CS weapons, the works. A “warrior culture”, already incipient, grew quickly. Our guys (SF deputies) wanted to change from khaki to black uniforms. Seemed innocent enough at the time. In hindsight, the color change was not so innocent. Then the competitive olympics between departments became exercises that resembled war games. Police unions became power players in both political parties; virtually untouchable.
Abolition moved our country forward, saved our country, once before: From John Brown to Frederick Douglass to Lincoln we kept alive the forces that yearn to be free.
Defund the police is a process of reflection and accountability and redistribution of resources. Until we have national leadership—currently absent—it will play out in various cities and states. I believe much progress will be had, just not easily. It does not mean no police effective tomorrow. It means take control of our resources and apply them sensibly. And we have a lot to undo. Much of that is entwined with our treatment, since our founding, of people of color—that has to be the starting point. Germany pulled it off after Hitler; South Africa pulled it off after apartheid. Fine role models for the United States. Acknowledge, atone, repair.
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Bob Dylan thanks his audience
By Martin Colyer
Bob Dylan owes you nothing, but he loves you all the same.
“I’m sitting on my terrace, lost in the stars,
Listening to the sounds of the sad guitars,
Been thinking it all over and I’ve thought it all through,
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you…”
— Bob Dylan, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” from Rough and Rowdy Ways
In 2000 I made my way to a slightly tired municipal hall on England’s South Coast. I had gone there to see Bob Dylan in the kind of provincial setting that he’d played on his now-legendary 1966 electric tour. He’d gone from Colston Hall in Bristol [now subject to an imminent name-change, post-BLM] to the Capitol Theatre in Cardiff, from the De Montfort Hall in Leicester to the Gaumont Theatre in Sheffield, and on to the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. It was a nostalgic idea, perhaps, to choose not to see him in the yawning auditorium of Wembley Arena, but when he came on at the Guildhall in Portsmouth, it was clear that nostalgia was not on the agenda. With his killer band, Dylan tore the place up, with old songs reimagined in new settings, new songs given a turbo-charged delivery, and a setlist that wandered all over an, at that time, thirty-nine-year-old back catalogue.
At one point, having left the crowd breathless with the menacing high-energy strut of Gotta Serve Somebody – featuring an intense, preaching vocal – the band downshifted a few gears for the gentle country strum of If Not For You. This innocuous song featured an extraordinary moment: after playing his solo right at the third attempt, Bob looked down into the audience with a piercing stare, a hint of a smile at the corners of his lips, and sung the middle eight straight at them – “If not for you, my sky would fall / Rain would gather too… / Without your love I’d be nowhere at all / I’d be lost if not for you…”
It struck me as absolutely genuine. You felt that playing these songs live, night after night, gave Dylan a compelling reason to keep going around and around the world, on to another stop on the Never Ending Tour — another day, another year, another town. He once called himself a song-and-dance-man, implying that he saw himself as a working musician, in the footsteps of his early heroes. When he was 21, he talked of the tradition in which he wanted to do that work: “I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they’re older people. You see, in time, with those old singers, music was a tool – a way to live more, a way to make themselves feel better at certain points.”
“I’m giving myself to you, I am…
From Salt Lake City to Birmingham,
From East LA to San Antone,
I don’t think I can bear to live my life alone.”
When Love and Theft came out a year later, I was struck by a verse in the song, “Mississippi”. Aside from the intimations of mortality that had crept into Dylan’s work since 1997’s Time Out of Mind (” Every step of the way we walk the line / Your days are numbered, so are mine”), there was this, aimed at his bandmates, or his audience: “Well my ship’s been split to splinters, and it’s sinking fast / I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past / But my heart is not weary, it’s light, and it’s free / I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.” On a late-autumn tour the next year, Dylan started including songs by Warren Zevon in his set. One cover was “Mutineer”, a song that some writers feel Zevon aimed at the fans who stuck by him: “I was born to rock the boat,” he sings, “Some may sink, but we will float / Grab your coat, let’s get out of here / You’re my witness; I’m your mutineer.” Dylan inhabited the song – made it sound like one of his own.
A year after that, I wrote a piece for The Guardian’s “Why I Love…” column as Bob was playing small London venues to round off a European tour. I tried to put in perspective how long he’d been doing this, and why it was still vital. “Last Saturday it was forty years ago that JFK was assassinated, yet by November 1963, Bob Dylan had already been performing in Greenwich Village for two years, since leaving his home in Hibbing, Minnesota. Think about that for a moment, as he finishes his European 2003 Fall Tour tonight at the Brixton Academy. Now in his mid-sixties, Bob’s been pretty much on the road for over forty years. As Leonard Cohen said, only Picasso has had such a career, making extraordinary art in so many creative periods.” It almost sounds like I think that career wouldn’t last much longer, but the next 17 years would bring exhibitions of paintings, drawings and welding, eight albums of new songs and covers, ten Bootleg Series Box sets, a Rolling Thunder Live box, an autobiography, a stint as a radio DJ and a touring schedule that doesn’t let up.
As Sean Wilentz has written, “People still have this idea that the record is the real thing and shows are just kind of the unreal thing, but, in fact, the shows may be the real thing.” Dylan told Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone, “Songs don’t come alive in a recording studio. You try your best, but there’s always something missing. What’s missing is a live audience.” And one of the strengths of not necessarily nailing songs down in the studio is that they become malleable. They can take different guises, different tempos, different tunes, even. If Coldplay sing ”Yellow”, or Oasis “Wonderwall”, or the Stones “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” or Bowie “Five Years”, they have to sound like the record, or they just don’t work. But “Visions of Johanna” works as a soft acoustic mumble, a mariachi waltz, even as an angular rock song, when Dylan tried it out with The Hawks in the studio in 1965.
“My eye’s like a shooting star,
It looks at nothing here or there, looks at nothing near or far,
No-one ever told me, it’s just something I knew,
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.”
Five years ago, as he trod the boards of the Royal Albert Hall, forty-nine years after that ’66 tour, I felt he set out a manifesto by using the words of another songwriter, Cy Coleman. It came in the middle eight of “Why Try to Change Me Now”, sung on his then newly-released album of Sinatra songs, Shadows in the Night. “Why can’t I be more conventional?/ People talk, people stare, so I try / But that’s not for me, cause I can’t see / My kind of crazy world go passing me by…” After the concert, I kept thinking back to that verse. It struck me as both the fulcrum of that night’s set and his entire career. “I don’t think you’ll hear what I do ever again,” Dylan told Douglas Brinkley in 2009. “It took a while to find this thing.”
“Take me out traveling, you’re a traveling man,
Show me something that I’ll understand,
I’m not what I was, things aren’t what they were,
I’ll go far away from home with her…”
Rough and Rowdy Ways is blurry like a polaroid, sharp as a sword, cool like a mint julep, creepy as a Charles Addams cartoon, and deeply strange. It’s also a record that could be made by no other performer. When it’s good, it’s really good, when it isn’t, well… who cares. It’s not a competition. All the tests have been passed. If you’re not signed up to Bob, you may not be convinced; if you are, then there’s much to enjoy. One song struck me as being particularly relevant to my theory, and its verses are scattered through this piece. “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” can be read as a song to the Deity, but I fondly think Bob’s singing it to his loyal audience. I love the gentle lapping waves of “I Contain Multitudes”, and the B-movie glide of “My Own Version of You” – I’m always game for songs that find room for St Peter and Bo Diddley’s maracas player in one line (“You can bring it to St. Peter, you can bring it to Jerome”).
There’s Jimmy Reed, king of the slurred blues shuffle, as a touchstone. The r&b of “False Prophet”, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” and “Crossing the Rubicon” are all poked and prodded by the guitars of Charlie Sexton, Bob Britt and Blake Mills, just off-centre enough to keep true to the source while adding a pleasing angularity. There’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”, like a bizarre manifesto from a character in one of Carl Hiassen’s Florida novels. “Black Rider” starts like late Cohen and turns into a sinister and blasted song about fighting the Grim Reaper.
I initially thought there were no songs other singers would attempt, but that didn’t stop an Italian with a guitar doing “Murder Most Foul” a day after it dropped. I thought that because these songs are mostly sui generis, lyrically unapproachable, and more spoken than sung. Then I heard Emma Swift doing “I Contain Multitudes” and recognised a melodic line direct from the Oh Mercy songs “What Good Am I” and “Most of the Time.” So it’s possibly not as weird as it sounds on first hearing.
There have been long recitations before (“Highlands”,” Brownsville Girl”), songs that reference the Civil War or bloody battles (“Cross the Green Mountains”, “Pay in Blood”) – and late-night reveries (“Soon After Midnight”, “When the Deal Goes Down”). But here Dylan takes a more impressionistic tilt at all these types. Watching an arts programme the other night, our friend Susie came on, talking about JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. “Turner’s early work was all about the detail”, she said. “With late Turner, it’s all about the atmosphere and the light.” Yes, I thought, as late Dylan came into focus and out again, with Key West on the horizon line…
“Well, my heart’s like a river, a river that sings,
Just takes me a while to realise things,
I’ve seen the sunrise, I’ve seen the dawn,
I’ll lay down beside you when everyone’s gone…
I’ve travelled from the mountains to the sea,
I hope that the gods go easy with me,
I knew you’d say yes, I’m saying it too,
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.”
NOTES
There are many fascinating and thorough reviews in the media, all easily found. Two of my favourites are Anne Margaret Daniel in Hot Press or Richard Williams in Uncut. Daniels also references “Mutineer” in her piece.
Bob’s live performance of “Mutineer” can be heard on Enjoy Every Sandwich, a 2004 Zevon tribute album.
Emma Swift’s “I Contain Multitudes” can be found here
For an insight into Dylan’s working methods, listen to the “Tell Ol’ Bill” sessions. In 2005 Dylan, during a tour, stops by a studio in Pennsylvania to record a song for a movie, North Country. Dylan changes tempos, keys and even the melody, through multiple takes and the song that comes out at the end is nothing like the one at the start.
Why I love… Bob Dylan is here.
“Why Try to Change Me Now”. Will Friedwald, in Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer’s Art, says that the last Sinatra Columbia recording was the first song of note by the twenty-three-year-old composer Cy Coleman. Coleman reported that, on the date, Sinatra slightly altered the melody of the original opening interval. “I listened to the record, and it sounded so natural, the way Frank did it, that I thought to myself, He’s right! So I left it that way. So I changed the music! That’s the first and only time I’ve ever done that.”
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For more by Martin Colyer on Dylan, music and culture in general take a look at Martin’s “Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week“
WORKERS’ STRIKES ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF TODAY’S MOVEMENT
By David Bacon
There have been over 800 strikes since the coronavirus crisis began, according to Payday Report, with many especially since the murder of George Floyd. Regardless of the exact number, it is clear that something new is developing among workers.
There’s a lot of variation in these actions. Some have been protests, like those at Amazon, over the death of workers and lack of PPE. Some, like the strikes in the apple sheds in Washington, have been demands for safe work and compensation. Some have been protests over racism and in solidarity with Black Lives Matters.
These strikes don’t compare in size or number with the outpouring of rage over the murders by police, which have been enormous and ongoing. But they are very significant for a number of reasons.
They are class-based protests by workers, over the underlying conditions that have brought people into the streets in general. Overwhelmingly they have been organized by workers themselves, indicating both a deep level of anger over the conditions, and an understanding that striking is an effective form of protest and a means to change them.
In most cases unions have been slow to respond and overly cautious about action at the workplace. There are important exceptions to this, however. Familias Unidas por la Justicia, the new farmworkers’ union in Washington, immediately sent organizers to support apple shed workers who struck against the virus. The achievements of those strikes was the result, not just of spontaneous action, but of FUJ’s ability to organize support for them.
The longshore union organized a one-day strike and mass demonstration on Juneteenth, using the day celebrating the official end of slavery to mobilize support for dismantling police departments. Other unions locally and elsewhere have organized labor marches supporting Black Lives Matters as well. Bus drivers in Minneapolis refused to drive busses to transport police to demonstrations, or people arrested in the protests.
These strikes and actions show an intersection between the impact of the coronavirus and the protests over the murder of George Floyd. The actions against the virus and its impact, and against police murders, are clearly responses to a deeper social and economic crisis.
All these protests focus on a growing race-based economic inequality, especially impacting Black people. In the first twelve weeks of the coronavirus crisis, the combined wealth of all U.S. billionaires increased by more than $637 billion. The top 12 U.S. billionaires have a combined wealth of $921 billion. The entire value off all the homes owned by Black families, over 17 million households, is less than that.
This inequality isn’t a result of bad policies. It is historically and structurally part of American capitalism itself. The system has been built on the exploitation of all workers, but the super-exploitation of Black workers produced extra surplus value. Slavery and the exploitation that followed produced U.S. capitalism’s extraordinary growth.
That extra exploitation imposed permanent conditions of inequality on Black people – in jobs and wages, services, social benefits, and education. Today it is the basis for the racist impact of the coronavirus. The inequality imposed during slavery became the model for social inequality imposed on other racially and nationally oppressed people.
Race more than anything else determines who will live in crowded, segregated neighborhoods, who will be exposed to lead-poisoned water and toxic waste, and who will live with polluted air and suffer illness from asthma to heart disease. It is no surprise that when a new disease arrives, COVID-19, these same factors determine who will be the most affected in large numbers.
For every 100,000 African Americans, 62 die of the virus, 36 of every 100,000 native people, 28 of every 100,000 Latinos, and 26 of every 100,000 Asian Americans and every 100,000 white people.
While 70% of the people who die from COVID-19 in Louisiana are Black, Black people are only 33 percent of the population. In Alabama, 44 percent of the COVID-19 deaths are of Black people, who are 26 percent of the population.
… calling them essential means that employers can fire them if they don’t come to work. It does not require employers to pay them extra, provide health benefits, or pay them if they get sick and can’t work.
The coronavirus has created a crisis of unemployment for all workers in the U.S., but especially for Black workers, and workers of color generally. As of late May, 38 million people had lost their jobs during the pandemic, and the overall unemployment rate was 13.3%. A year earlier it was 3.6%. But Black unemployment was 16.8% (a year earlier 6.2%) and Latino unemployment was 17.6% (a year earlier 4.2%). Over 44 percent of Black households have suffered a job or wage loss due to the pandemic, and 61 percent of Latino households.
The government’s response to economic crisis has been to create the category of essential industry, and therefore, of the essential workers who labor in it. It is true that some kinds of production and economic activity are essential for survival. But the real-life result of calling people essential is that they are forced to work at a time when they are risking their lives.
Farmworkers are just one example. Their work is socially necessary, but calling them essential means that employers can fire them if they don’t come to work. It does not require employers to pay them extra, provide health benefits, or pay them if they get sick and can’t work.
Half of all farm workers are undocumented and excluded from the Federal CARES Act benefit package intended to help people survive the crisis. By denying any alternative means of buying food and paying rent the Federal legislation was an important pressure forcing them to go to work.
Trump forced Black and immigrant workers to go to work in meatpacking plants when the virus was everywhere by denying them unemployment benefits. He used the Defense Production Act to announce that nothing could get in the way of food production to ensure that meat would continue to be available in supermarkets.
The hypocrisy of this announcement was revealed when meatpacking companies admitted that in April, as the coronavirus crisis was raging, they exported 129,000 tons of pork to China, the highest amount in history.
About 37.7 percent of Black workers work in essential industries, compared to 26.9 percent of whites. They leave home to go to their jobs because they cannot stay home and work on computers. In California over half of essential workers are low wage workers, and are Latino or Black, including farmworkers, healthcare workers, custodians, building cleaners and truck drivers. Half of all immigrant workers are essential workers.
And because workers of color are concentrated in the essential categories, they are the ones exposed to the virus. At least 333 meatpacking and food processing plants, and 46 farms have confirmed cases of COVID-19. At least 32,099 workers have contracted it. At least 109 have died.
One company, JBS, has had a wave of infected workers and deaths. A black Haitian immigrant, Enock Benjamin, died in a Philadelphia plant where he was the union steward. Tin Aye, a Burmese immigrant and grandmother, died after working in a JBS plant in Colorado for ten years.
The impact of the virus is a terrain of social struggle. Meatpacking alone has seen a wave of protests and strikes. In mid-June JBS workers and supporters marched in the streets of Logan, Utah, demanding it close its Hyrum plant for cleaning and pay during the coronavirus outbreak. Some 287 workers from the plant tested positive for the virus.
In Stearns County, Minnesota, a protest outside a plant was organized by the Greater Minnesota Worker Center and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In Springdale, Arkansas Venceremos, a poultry workers’ rights organization, tried to deliver a workers’ petition to Tyson managers.
Meatpacking workers protested outside Quality Sausage Co. in Dallas after some died. The wife of one worker said, “The virus was the gun that killed him, but Quality Sausage was the hand that pulled the trigger.”
These worker strikes and protests are part of a broader movement led by African American organizations responding to police murder and racial inequality. One of the most important organizations leading it is the Poor People’s Campaign led by Rev. William Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis. It has a program with five basic demands:
- Establish Justice and End Systemic Racism – Democracy and Equal Protection Under the Law
- The Right to Welfare and an Adequate Standard of Living
- The Right to Work with Dignity
- The Right to Health and A Healthy Environment
- Cut the military budget
The campaign’s statement of principles says, “We know that poor and dispossessed people will not wait to be saved. Instead, people are taking lifesaving action borne out of necessity to demand justice now … We are demanding voting rights, living wages, guaranteed incomes, health care, clean air and water and peace in this violent world.”
These demands help to give a framework of radical reform, on a national level, to the individual demands put forward in the strikes and protests. In particular, they reiterate the thinking of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in his speech condemning imperialism and war, when he charged that the bombs dropped on Vietnam were exploding in U.S. cities.
In the language of the Poor People’s Campaign, “if we cut military spending, implement fair taxes, cancel the debts of those who cannot pay, and invest our abundant resources in demands of the poor — we could fundamentally revive our economy and transform our society.”
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This is a presentation made to a webinar organized by the Economics Faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico on June 24
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Reparation: Confessions of a White American
By Ernest DiStefano
UPDATE: Ernie DiStefano’s interview on Sports360 with Jeff Fannell can be heard here on SoundCloud
As many of you know, in January 2020, the Forum published my essay, “The Rippling Manifesto,” which made the case for Negro League Reparations. This sparked numerous radio interviews, which created a groundswell of support for the cause. This, in turn, inspired me to create the Ripple of Hope Initiative, a movement to achieve direct monetary reparations for Negro League players and their surviving family members. As a follow-up to my January essay, I would now like to share with you my life’s path, as a white American, that steered me to becoming a passionate advocate for African-American justice.
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1968
I was in second grade. Schools were closed for the funeral of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. My understanding of Dr. King’s life and legacy at that time was restricted to the realization that because of his death, I had the day off. As my mother and I watched the televised funeral march for Dr. King, I asked her what happened.
“Honey,” she said, “some people in this world hate other people just because of the color of their skin.”
I was stunned by Mom’s answer. It made no sense to me. Yet after Dr. King’s funeral and the reopening of my school, I returned to carefree life as a white child in America.
1969
We had one African-American classmate in our entire third grade class, a little girl named Frieda May. Frieda was constantly bullied, ridiculed and isolated. One day, I was eating lunch with my white classmates in the school cafeteria. One of these classmates (let’s call him “Howard”) leaned over and whispered in my ear.
“Hey Ernie,” Howard said, “Watch this.”
He looked at Frieda, who was sitting at the same table across from us.
“Hey Frieda,” he said, “Are you in the Brownies?” Frieda shook her head no.
“Well you should be!” he said.
Other children laughed; I did not. But I also did not confront my classmate or do anything to stop him.
1995
I was standing in line with my wife and daughter at a restaurant in Virginia, waiting to be seated for dinner. Also in line in front of us was an older African-American gentleman. The restaurant’s host walked passed him, stopped in front of us, and asked how many people were in our party. I turned to the gentleman.
“Are you waiting for a table, sir?” I asked.
“I thought I was,” he replied.
With that, the host reluctantly walked him to his table.
My anger was palpable as we sat down to eat. I glanced over at the gentleman. He was looking back at me. I quickly turned my face back to my plate of food, wondering what he was thinking. Was he grateful that I did not take advantage of the restaurant host’s racist behavior, or was he disappointed that we stayed and gave them our business? This question has haunted me for the past twenty-five years.
2008
We elected the first African-American president in the history of our nation. I blissfully celebrated the election of our first African-American president with my many friends and colleagues of color. My white man’s naiveté allowed me to believe that Barack Obama’s election signaled the beginning of the end of racism in America. Not even the murder of Trayvon Martin or the many incidents of police brutality against people of color during that time could awaken me to the fact that racism was alive and well in America.
2016
The Klu Klux Klan’s public endorsement of one of the presidential candidates, the winning candidate no less, finally provided my wake-up call. The 2016 election also provided the reason for the unprecedented hatred and hostility shown toward President Obama: racism is alive and well in the United States.
Benjamin Franklin said that, “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged by those who are.” So why did I start the Ripple of Hope Initiative? I did it for Frieda May, the gentleman in the restaurant, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and all of my African-American brothers and sisters to whose pain and suffering I was oblivious for far too long. And what’s in it for me? Reparation.
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Bernie Is Right: Unite to Dump Trump
By Rand Wilson and Peter Olney
Since the horrible police murder of George Floyd, thousands of Americans of all races have taken to the streets in impressive displays of movement power. The recent Juneteenth actions even featured some dramatic actions by unions across the country and labor’s ideological spectrum. For example, the left-leaning International Longshore and Warehouse Union shut down the West Coast Ports and the more traditionally conservative Boston Building Trades Council organized an 8 minute, 43 second work stoppage.
Now legislative bodies, sports leagues and the U.S. military are racing to make concessions that can calm the roiling waters of mass protest and disgust. And while our November 3 election day may seem a long way off, it will be here before we know it. Between now and then, the street protests must continue and hopefully escalate. However, without a decisive political verdict at the ballot box to remove Donald Trump, our protests will not reach their potential.
LESSONS FROM THE 2018 MID-TERMS
For some of us, this poses some hard choices. Undoubtedly, millions of union members and workers who wholeheartedly supported Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries are now feeling disillusioned and demoralized about the prospects of former Vice President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee. As organizers and volunteers for Labor for Bernie, we feel your pain. However, every political decision requires a concrete analysis of the specific conditions in that moment. This is the moment to learn lessons from our recent history.
In 2018, we argued forcefully that the political task of the moment was “Flipping the House.” We called on our sisters and brothers in the labor movement to go “all in” to recapture the House of Representatives. We believed this was of importance for two simple reasons:
- The necessity to put the brakes on Trump’s disastrous agenda;
- The opportunity to create more political space for labor and the left in the remaining years of his term.
Those of us who volunteered in the 2018 mid-term campaign often elected “corporate” Democrats whose politics were far from our progressive values. However, by electing these less than perfect candidates, we flipped the House in stunning fashion. In California alone, seven historically Republican seats flipped to Democrat.
The results were exactly as predicted. The majority Democratic House impeached Trump, exposed his misdeeds, and blocked some of his most regressive legislative measures. The fact that the Democrats controlled the House gave meaningful voice and space to the left – especially to the “Squad” led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Of course, they were often at odds with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, but they were omnipresent precisely because the Democrats were in the majority. Absent that majority, they would have been obscure backbenchers in a Republican-led house.
A VEHICLE TO STOP TRUMP
We are confronted with a similar dynamic in November 2020. That’s why it is so important for Sanders’ supporters to rise to the occasion and become a powerful force in support of Joe Biden for President.
Biden is a vehicle to stop Trump, preserve our democratic rights, and give the left and labor more breathing space as Leo Panitch argued on Jacobin Radio. This will not be an easy task. The Orange Monster will continue to brilliantly play his game of divide and conquer. He will sow division by playing on racism and threatening a military crackdown because Democratic governors are too soft on anti police violence protesters.
And then there is “sleepy Joe” Biden who, completely tone deaf to the moment, suggests that cops should be trained to fire at people’s legs rather than their hearts. As much as “blundering Biden” discredits himself and makes a parody of the “lesser of two evils,” our responsibility as partisans of the working class and all those facing racial oppression remains clear: We must unite all who can be united in November to Dump Trump – and that can only be done by voting for and working for Joe Biden in every state in the union. Any razor thin margin in the popular or electoral vote could actually encourage Trump to stay on.
As historian Van Gosse recently wrote, “Given the real possibility of Trump winning again via votes suppressed and votes bought, just enough to take the Electoral College, we face a stark necessity. The majority must mass together to defeat Trump and crush Trumpism. We cannot stay where we are, we will move forward or we will move back. Democracy, all that we have fought for and not-yet achieved, is on the line.”
For labor organizers, the recent National Labor Relations Board decision that there cannot be any union discussion between workers on the clock should be a motivation enough. Talk sports, talk politics, talk family, but no union talk.
So our message must be clear: Time’s up for Donald Trump! You will get blasted in the popular vote and crushed in the Electoral College.
BEYOND NOVEMBER
A legitimate concern for many of us is that when Biden is inaugurated in January 2021 we will return to the same Obama-era neo-liberal agenda that created much of the suffering and discontent that led to Trump’s election. How do Sanders’ supporters maneuver while campaigning for Biden and entering a popular front with forces that have no interest in our agenda?
Our Revolution – the Sanders-sponsored national network of grassroots groups – has proposed three key ways that we can best function in 2020, recognizing that an historic and crushing defeat for Trump – in which we play an important part – will advance our agenda:
- Winning progressive issue fights by continuing to fight for the Sanders’ program of economic and social justice: Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, good jobs for all, Black Lives Matter and (in the COVID-19 pandemic moment), defending our democracy with vote by mail. This platform needs to be our message on the doors (or barring the doors because of the pandemic), in the emails, texts and phone calls we make.
- Electing progressive, down ballot candidates who stand for our values by engaging in a coordinated campaign with allies to defeat Trump and elect progressive candidates at the federal, state, and local levels. We must continue to organize locally in order to win nationally by mounting an integrated and independent campaign that focuses on key local and state elections. Swing Left has identified battleground states that offer a Tri-Fecta: 1) Flip the state from Red to Blue, 2) Flip a US Senate seat, 3) Flip a state legislature. Arizona for example, is a Tri-Fecta state and already is the focus of work for many in the Southwest.
- Transforming the Democratic party at every level by continuing to elect Bernie delegates and continue the push for major party reforms in the rules committee and a progressive platform that clearly define the party’s values, policies, and its candidates at every level. We need to push beyond the gains made in the 2016 platform and then hold candidates seeking endorsement to adhere to these standards.
BUILD CROSS=UNION SOLIDARITY
To Our Revolution’s three we would add a fourth goal:
- Expanded cross-union solidarity – by putting together electoral ground games that combine the best practices of the unions in this country. For example, Labor 2018 in Orange County organized an excellent ground operation to flip four traditionally Republican Congressional Districts. Out of that effort emerged a cadre of election workers from many unions who are ready to deploy to Arizona and other key battleground states.
Our collective work to defeat Trump will be an imperfect but necessary alliance inside the Democratic Party — with at best an imperfect program. But to quote a famous German philosopher, “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”
If there ever was a real movement to unite with then it is of course Black Lives Matter and the protests sweeping the country and the world over the murder George Floyd. Much of the participation in these protests, particularly by thousands of young people of all races, has been fueled by veterans of the Sanders’ campaigns and the radicalization of youth in the United States. The protests are impacting culture, sports and politics as usual. When NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell apologizes to Colin Kaepernick, we know there has been a major shift in public opinion.
STOP TRUMP AND TRANSFORM AMERICA
Trump has already demonstrated his disdain for the protests and has threatened the use of the U.S. military to quell the demonstrations. This could even be a dress rehearsal for the day after the election when he is declared the loser – and contemplates refusing to leave. The street protests that we are seeing now will need to be amplified by millions more people in November – erasing any doubt about attempting to use military power to remain in office.
For Bernie’s supporters, it is not too early to identify down-ballot races, particularly in “Tri-Fecta” states, and make plans for building cross-union solidarity to power a blue wave across the country. The same approach applies to “safe” blue states. Find down ballot races and find union partners across industry and craft to run up the popular vote totals for Joe Biden so that we rid the outcome from any uncertainty and end the Trump nightmare.
The Black Lives Matter mass uprisings for racial justice, the movement for workers’ rights and health care for all in the midst of the pandemic, and the urgency of providing massive public assistance in an emerging economic depression send a message to a President-elect Biden. It puts Biden and Congress on notice that the agenda of a new administration must go beyond platitudes and neo-liberal payoffs to the corporate elites. If we can stop a fascist takeover at the ballot box and in the streets, so too can we transform America.
When there are only two viable electoral choices, the decision to choose a neoliberal over a neofascist does not mean support for the neoliberal cause. Our campaign to Dump Trump is an essential next step to building working class power by combining class-based electoral work with an ongoing effort to expand and transform the labor movement.
This article is being published simultaneously on Organizing Upgrade and The Stansbury Forum.
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Cops in Our America
By Gary Phillips
“Cops” has been canceled in the wake of criticisms of the fictions this supposed reality show created in its years of heavily edited ride alongs with street cops. Several years ago the show had previously been canceled but was picked up by Spike TV, a “young adult male” oriented network at the time – which had aired such fare as a cartoon superhero called “Stripperella” and a lot of reruns of the “A-Team,” in 2013. Spike TV eventually became the Paramount Network.
It’s telling the then beleaguered Los Angeles Police Department in 1994 agreed to have the Fox originated show video their exploits. This was two years following the conflagration seen around the world post the acquittal on criminal charges of the four LAPD officers who, among other law personnel, viciously beat speeding motorist Rodney King. If surreptitious video could damn the police, then possibly edited footage could reframe them. Rebrand them. An outcome various departments sought when partnering with the program over the years.
“Cops” was always on somewhere, 15 to 20 times a day. Dan Taberski and producer Henry Molofsky and their screeners watched 846 episodes, about 86% of the shows. They collected 90,000 data points doing a deep data dive. The result was the six-part podcast “Running From Cops” that included interviews with “Cops” creator John Langley, the cops who appeared on camera and even a few of those who’d been arrested.
The most revealing though were the results of all that viewing and number crunching. Two percent of traffic stops in the real-world end in arrest. On the show, it’s 92% of the time. “Cops” portrays almost four times as much violent crime as occurs in reality, three times as much drug crime, and 10 times as much prostitution. Significantly the police on “Cops” became more effective in policing. In the second season 61% of the segments ended in arrest. By season 30, it was 95%.
“Basically, it presents a world that is much more dangerous than real life,” Taberski said, quoted in an L.A. Times article in June 11, 2020. “It presents the police as being much more successful than they really are. It misrepresents crime by people of color — the raw numbers are about the same but the show front-loads crime, and especially violent crime, by people of color.”
The flipside of the “Cops” narrative, putting you in the driver’s seat as it were, can be had in the virtual reality prototype Our America. Bryant Young is the game’s creative director and a game designer graduate from USC. He was recently interviewed by A Martinez on the “Take Two” program on KCRW. When you slip on your VR headset, Young related, you are a middle-aged, middleclass black father taking his kid Malcolm to school. There are several interactions with you and your son during this bright and sunny morning as you start the car and head out.
In talking with Malcolm, you find out the reason he’s intentionally missed the bus is because he’s getting racially name called at school. Trying to deal with that, your boss calls on the hands free and is pissed. The father is already late for work to do a presentation he’s supposed to be leading. He continues to give you as the unnamed father grief to ratchet up the pressure. As you’re driving the familiar blurt of a police siren is heard and in the rearview is the blare of the red and blue lightbar. What infraction did you commit the driver speculates.
Pulling over, Young continued, there’re always four choices you’ll be able to make at any given juncture in the game. He categorized them as some that black people will do, some that black people might think to do and two others are traps, to get you to say what you would not be able to say if you were black. Ominously he added a good outcome was being arrested as opposed to the various ways the driver could wind up being shot.
On Our America’s website, the designers note: “Virtual reality is an incredible tool for allowing people to view the world through a different perspective. We seek to use this technology to help people understand the fear, intensity, and helplessness of these situations that Black people must deal with every day.”
Here’s to a day when the norm is not fear and intensity that a black person has to feel when stopped by the police.
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Black Players matter, Black players really matter!
By Peter Olney
In the midst of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising I got together via Zoom with a bunch of aging white guys of my vintage and political profile to talk current events. This is a monthly gathering that used to feature dinner and discussion, but now because of the pandemic it features solely discussion. The topic was the BLM uprising, and we went around the Zoom panels offering each participant a chance to express their views on the moment. My turn came and I echoed the sentiments of others but added that one of the most significant signs of the times was the reaction to the BLM in pro sports. NASCAR eliminating the Confederate flag from its events would have been unthinkable a month ago.[1] Roger Goodell’s apology to NFL players for not supporting their right to protest ala Colin Kapernick was amazing, and for me it recalled the actions of Dave Meggyesy during the last major moment of massive social unrest in 1968.[2] Meggyesy, an NFL linebacker with the St Louis Cardinals, protested war, racism and imperialism during the playing of the Star Spangled banner and was promptly benched by the Cardinals.[3] At the time I was a high school footballer, and I took inspiration from his actions. The next speaker on our Zoom call said he was not impressed by the actions of “billionaire athletes”. The Zoom format does not lend itself to back and forth, so I remained silent, but what I wanted to say was: “What fucking world are you living in!!”
In the world I live in, along with most Americans, sports are huge. They are a huge industry and the actions of players on and off the field are a reflection of the times and prominent players influence the times. Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber held the heavyweight boxing championship from 1937 thru 1949. Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color line in 1947. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. These athletes became icons in the black community, and their actions propelled the struggle for social justice forward. Beyond these barrier breaking moments, we find ourselves in a very different situation now in two of the top sports leagues of the world, the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA). In all sports the players are the game. These super skilled workers are the league. The owners provide the capital for stadiums and marketing, but nobody comes to see Jerry Jones, the owner of the Cowboys, throw or catch the pigskin. In fact, the earliest baseball teams were worker owned cooperatives led by German socialist brewers in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The revenues of the NFL in 2019 were almost 11.4 billion, the richest sports league in the world. The NBA was the third most prosperous at $6.3 billion. The power, prestige and social consciousness of the NBA players have been demonstrated in their early support and public endorsement of Black Lives Matter after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 who had murdered Treyvon Martin in Florida in 2012 and then the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. The longtime owner of the LA Clippers, Donald Sterling was forced to divest his team in 2014 after his racist screed was captured on the Internet. Lebron James said, “There’s no room for Donald Sterling in the NBA-there is no room for him”[4] The players of all teams threatened a strike if Sterling stayed. Sterling is gone, and it is clear that under Commissioner Adam Silver (and to his enduring credit) the players call the shots. Over 78% of the players in the NBA are African American.
The NFL on the other hand has been slower to move despite the fact that over 70% of the players are African American. Colin Kapernick’s protests of police murders were sparsely supported in 2016 and his blackballing has not been countered by player unity. Partly this is a reflection of the uber conservative ownership of the NFL and its historically tighter identification with the military industrial complex and martial jingoism. It is also a reflection of the fact that many of the stars of the NFL, mostly quarterbacks, are white and many have been hardly progressive in their politics. Witness Tom “Terrific” Brady’s embrace of Donald Trump. But the times they are a changing even in the NFL as reflected by Goodell’s apology. Richard Sherman the outspoken star corner back from the 49ers sees change even among these white stars, “I’m impressed with the white QBs speaking up because those are voices that carry different weight than the black voices for some people,” Sherman said. “Which means the people who refuse to listen to a black athlete’s perspective will hear the same thing said from a white athlete, but receive the message much differently. So it’s awesome that more people are speaking out, because in sports, you really have a love and appreciation for your fellow man, regardless of race.”[5] I can’t wait for the first game and a massive show of force by black players and their allies: protesting, kneeling, engaging in whatever forms of struggle they choose. Players have already been marching, and I think they are feeling their power. In fact despite my discussion circle comrade’s dismissal of Billionaire players, they are in one of the most powerful positions in society as workers and black people. Their dominant presence and percentage of the workforce in the two aforementioned leagues is a potential power in industry unrivaled by any labor organization. And their influence in society particularly in the NFL, which is America’s game, and white America’s game is enormous. The American population while not 80% white as in 1968 is still majority white at about 60%. The black population is at 12 % of the country, and while this is a very solid political block and still a very reliable voting bloc, it has no where near the force and power that the huge African American population has in two of the biggest sports in the world. My union brothers and sisters would die for that kind of market power in the private sector. Private sector unions are at 7% of the US workforce.
Rather than being dismissive of millionaire athletes let’s recognize that their increased activism is a reflection of a positive and dramatic societal shift. Let’s also recognize that they have the potential to demonstrate the power of organized workers in their industries. Let’s recognize the incredible change that Black athletes can help leverage in America. Fox news host Laura Ingraham famously said, “shut up and dribble” to NBA players supporting BLM. Donald Trump said “Get those sons of bitches off the field” in response to Kapernick. How puny and weak those blustering comments look now in light of the last few weeks’ developments and the looming specter of black worker power in their sports leagues and society at large.
Black players really matter!
[1] https://www.nfl.com/news/kamara-supports-bubba-wallace-at-first-public-nascar-race-since-march
[2] https://www.nj.com/giants/2020/06/nfls-roger-goodell-finally-gets-it-right-apologizes-to-players-colin-kaeperick-who-kneeled-to-protest-police-killing-black-people.html
[3] https://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp-1968-nfl-anthem-protest-20180717-story.html
[4] https://www.espn.com/nba/truehoop/miamiheat/story/_/id/10844906/lebron-james-no-room-donald-sterling-nba
[5] https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2894351-49ers-richard-sherman-impressed-with-the-white-qbs-speaking-up-against-racism
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Planting hope amid a plague
By Sonnie R. Clahchischiligi and Photos/Story by Don J. Usner - Searchlight New Mexico
This is the first in Searchlight New Mexico 5 part series that “chronicles the impact of COVID-19 on five New Mexico towns. The co-editors of the Stansbury Forum urge you to explore Searchlight New Mexico for stories you just won’t be seeing or reading many other places. We appreciate them allowing us to repost this piece.
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Older generations on the Navajo Nation have passed down stories of scourges, resilience — and survival. New generations are bringing the tales to life.
SHIPROCK, N.M. — Four miles down Farm Road, just off U.S. Route 491 in northern Navajo, a group of young Diné used what was left of daylight in early May to plant onions and potatoes on Yellow Wash Farm.
As the novel coronavirus stretched its way through Navajoland, leaving a trail of heartbreak and uncertainty, the four Navajo men, a mixture of family and friends from Shiprock, picked up their seeds and broke the earth with their shovels.
By month’s end, the Navajo Nation would have the highest per-capita infection rate in the country, surpassing even New York state. The outbreak cut a swath across the vast reservation, from outposts in Arizona to the mesas and high desert in northwest New Mexico, where Shiprock, or Naatʼáanii Nééz — the largest Navajo community — became a hotspot seemingly overnight.
Zefren Anderson, one of the farmers, was among hundreds of Shiprock residents who’d been tested for COVID-19; today he was awaiting the results.
But amid all the anxieties, the men felt a sense of purpose. They had the land to tend to. They were planting, because that’s what their family stories told them to do.
“If the stores close tomorrow, we have a backup plan. We have enough to survive till winter for whatever we’re creating on the farm,” Anderson said, taking care to stand six feet away from the other farmers. “We’re hedging our bets.”
There is no safe haven today on the Navajo Nation, where generations of families have lacked running water, food, electricity, indoor plumbing, safe housing and access to health care — the basic necessities for fighting disease. As of June 1, the Navajo Nation reported 5,250 positive COVID-19 cases, 1,745 recoveries and 241 deaths. In the Shiprock area last month, three siblings who buried their mother, father, and brother were forced to watch the burial services remotely because they, too, were infected with the disease.
Guidance from the past
While the staggering numbers have left many feeling hopeless, some in Shiprock have found solace by looking to history, traditions and family stories to push back against the pandemic. They are returning to a way of life depicted in tales passed down by elders, generation after generation.
Anderson, 38, a weaver and self-proclaimed family historian, found the blue corn and cantaloupe seeds his late grandmother left behind and started planting to prepare for a potential food shortage. He changed his weaving style from large, time-consuming museum works to simpler, utilitarian items: blankets, winter clothing and small pieces that he can trade for food or supplies.
He grew up hearing the old stories from his paternal grandparents. He revisited the tales his late grandmother told him about the early 1900s, when his great-aunt survived the 1918 flu pandemic. Thousands of Navajo were lost to the flu and other scourges. The Diné learned to fend off the plagues by practicing social distancing, washing their hands and whispering with their heads down to keep outbreaks from spreading. They learned to leave supplies for families and neighbors at the gates of their homes.
“Shiprock was always the epicenter for big disease outbreaks in the last 100 years — the Spanish flu, different types of lung diseases, meningitis,” Anderson said.
During the 1918 flu, some in Shiprock were so afraid of spreading the virus that, if they knew they were dying, they boarded up their families in their hogans, the traditional Navajo homes made of mud. A boarded up hogan — or hook’ee ghan — alerted other Navajo to stay away.
Tooh (water)
The people of Shiprock, or Tooh, meaning water, were mostly farmers and sheepherders, connected to the land, to the San Juan River that runs through it, and to Tsé Bitʼaʼí (winged rock), the famed Shiprock pinnacle whose existence is explained in Navajo creation stories.
Because early homes had no plumbing or running water — a problem that continues today — children typically got a bath only once a week. Anderson heard stories about crude washing machines that arrived by wagon in the early 1900s and a linen service that appeared in Shiprock, making it easier to clean bedding and clothes.
Handwashing, he recalled, was strictly enforced. “When I lived with my grandma, anytime I came in from outside the first thing she told me to do was to wash my hands.”
Grandmothers had learned about handwashing during their own childhood, when they heard chilling stories from elders about the 1918 flu. “We’re here because they did that” — they washed hands, he said. “And the people who didn’t, aren’t. It’s the same thing that’s happening right now.”
Anderson’s own prevention efforts have been fierce. He shaved his head after learning from a medical journal that the coronavirus can live on a strand of hair. He wears a full-length homemade lab coat when he leaves the house, an added precaution he takes because he lives with and cares for his father, a stroke victim.
To make sure he was healthy, Anderson also got two COVID-19 tests. The results of the first test came back negative.
To make doubly sure, he got tested again in May. The results arrived shortly after the day of planting with the trio of farmers. This time, he tested positive.
“I’m surviving,” he wrote in a recent Facebook post. He has been able to stay home, surrounded by his yarn, fighting off fever and a COVID brain fog. “I was ready to go if it was going to be my time,” he wrote. “But apparently there are more weavings to be woven and more fields to be planted.”
Fighting to save lives
Right now, as Navajo Nation Attorney General Doreen McPaul describes it, “the Navajo Nation has been devastated by COVID-19.” Communities lack resources at every level. “We are literally fighting for dollars to save lives,” McPaul said in May.
National and international media have descended to tell the story. Actor Sean Penn spent days on the Navajo Nation to offer help from his nonprofit Community Organized Relief Effort. Mark Ruffalo collaborated with Navajo entertainers to launch a grassroots response. A Game of Thrones star sent more than 1,000 cases of water to the reservation, where 30 percent or more households lack running water for drinking or washing hands.
But the needs in Navajo Country run too deep to be solved with celebrity fundraising. The reservation’s roughly 175,000 residents lack health clinics, hospitals, schools, roads, broadband access and housing — things that the federal government is sworn to provide but has flagrantly refused to address. The U.S. is obligated by treaty to protect the nation’s health and welfare. It has ignored the responsibilities for more than a century.
Shiprock, in many ways, is more fortunate than other chapters, as the communities are known. With an estimated 8,300 residents, it is the reservation’s largest chapter, home to the Northern Navajo Medical Center, an Indian Health Service hospital with an emergency room and a handful of ICU beds. (Elsewhere, the nearest 24-hour hospital might require a four-hour drive across terrain too rough for an ambulance.)
Shiprock is also home to a branch of Diné College, a commuter campus that’s now mostly empty, aside from the parking lot. Students drive there to use the wifi, which many don’t have at home; others have had to drop their classes because they don’t have laptops.
Thirty to 40 percent of homes on the Navajo Nation don’t have basics like electricity, indoor toilets, cell phone service or computers, studies show. Most people get their information from local radio stations, including an all-Navajo channel that broadcasts in Diné.
Many of the 110 chapters are so remote, they’re little more than a scattering of mobile homes along treacherous dirt roads. Shiprock, by comparison, has a grocery store with fresh produce (a rarity) and a few fast-food restaurants. A series of potholed streets pass as a downtown, marked by a fairground, vacant lots, boarded-up buildings, a small shopping center, and a few local businesses that have survived for generations. One hamburger shack opened in the days when customers arrived on horseback.
Today, most residents live in government housing and in the hills beyond town, in overcrowded homes and singlewides; many generations of a family live together, sometimes along with friends. Doubling up is a way of life in a place where there is too little housing. An open-door policy is part of tradition.
Anderson’s home was also open to extended family. He believes he might have been infected by a relative who had contact with a healthcare worker, a viral daisy chain he never could have predicted. He is relying on family and friends to drop off supplies and food. As in the old days, they are leaving them by the gate.
Seeds of the past
Just south of Yellow Wash Farm, Gloria Emerson, 82, shuffles toward a pile of red bricks tainted with graffiti, at what was once known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs compound. The bricks are all that is left of the apartment she once shared with her parents on the top floor.
Adjusting her ill-fitted cloth mask, the artist, writer and advocate points to the rubble and talks about her memories of the Shiprock that once was.
After graduating from high school, Emerson left Shiprock to get a college degree. She returned home and worked in social services on the Navajo Nation, launching an expansive career devoted to education, art and Navajo communities. She attended Harvard University, where she received a master’s degree in educational administration. She returned to Shiprock again in 2000, to help her aging parents.
Emerson eventually took over their farm in east Shiprock at mile marker 31, the last farm before leaving the reservation. She planted corn, melons and alfalfa when she could. This season, she had to hold off due to the pandemic.
“There’s a lot of beautiful memories here,” she said. “I always thought Shiprock represented the love and passion for the river and planting.”
The BIA compound where she grew up once looked like a mini college campus, with administrative offices around a quadrangle of lawn and trees. She spent her childhood along the San Juan River, admiring trees and flowers that created a safe haven. The BIA assigned garden plots to residents, encouraging Navajo people to plant.
But as the old Shiprock decayed, so did its relationship with the federal government. Washington historically has refused to address the reservation’s crumbling infrastructure and health disparities. At least one in five Navajo has diabetes. Heart disease and cancers are widespread, due to entrenched poverty, subpar health care, a scarcity of healthy food and contamination from uranium mines, among many ills. Government foot-dragging is endemic.
“They’re incredibly slow, and it’s not just the BIA, I think it’s the Navajo tribe, the chapters — there’s something very wrong with the way we’re governing ourselves,” Emerson said.
The pandemic laid bare the problems. The Navajo Nation waited six weeks before receiving the federal aid promised in the CARES Act, signed by President Trump in late March.
The tribal government finally got word in early May that it would receive a portion of its rightful $600 million. The Navajo and more than a dozen other tribes had to sue the federal government to get the proper funding in the first place.
“It’s shameful that the first citizens of this country are having to fight over and over for what is rightfully ours,” Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said.
The delayed aid left people scrambling for already scarce supplies of water, soap, food, propane, personal protective equipment and other essentials. During the weeks of waiting, the number of positive cases on the reservation skyrocketed.
Emerson despairs at the destruction the virus has caused, and the lives lost. One of the few remaining members of her family, she spends most of her time alone, isolated on the farm.
Once long ago, she recalls stopping in her car to pick up an elderly woman along the road. The woman spoke very little except to say in Diné that where she was going was not that far. Emerson ended up driving the woman for more than an hour into the Arizona side of the reservation, where she lived.
“I just felt so bad when I saw how isolated she lived and no one there to help her … and then I remembered that’s the case with so many of our people,” Emerson said.
“I can’t stand being here isolated — I can’t stand it,” she added, suddenly overwhelmed. “It’s so hard to see and to have our relatives go on.” She misses the old days, the bustle of Shiprock, the company of other people. How could this have happened so quickly? she wonders. “A lot of it is, I think, that our people just don’t understand the dangers, and a lot of us just ignored the early signs. But it’s hard for me.”
Sidelined warriors
Early May mornings were still too crisp for Duane “Chili” Yazzie to tuck in the first seeds of planting season in his farm near Ditch Number Eight. Yazzie, 70, who is in his third term as Shiprock Chapter president, has spent every day at home since March 30, when the Navajo Nation stay-at-home order was put in place and tribal government offices closed their doors.
He can’t remember the last time he was sidelined or the community shut down. “Never,” Yazzie said, sitting in his family’s hogan, used for ceremonial purposes. “It never happened.”
The only disaster that comes close, he said, was the Gold King Mine spill in 2015, which contaminated the river with such huge amounts of toxic waste that the water turned yellow. Even then, Yazzie was able to walk into his office and come up with solutions.
Today, with government offices closed, he’s had to learn to work from home, trying to protect a community from a mostly unpredictable virus. A recent hard-fought battle with pneumonia also prevents him from going to his office; it permanently affected his lungs and puts him at high risk.
Planting gives him time to think.
“For the first time in a long time I’m a farmer again. It’s always been my therapy,” he said, gazing out the window toward his fields. “As a community leader it’s overwhelming to know that there’s very little that you can do proactively to prevent or mitigate the impact of the virus. We’ve just been scrambling around doing what we can, trying to keep people from not going hungry and making sure they’re OK.”
The virus has left people feeling paralyzed. They are supposed to stay home, but they’re at risk when they’re inside, crowded next to generations of family members who might have the virus and don’t know it. They’re afraid to leave home but have to: They need to get water, food and medicine, and take care of sick relatives.
There are grimmer problems, as well: Those whose loved ones die are forced to speed up the mourning process or scratch it altogether. Funeral services are in disarray.
At one recent service, only five family members were allowed to attend, including women who had to carry the heavy casket, typically a job for male relatives of the deceased. The funeral home sent no one to the gravesite to help.
Funerals are expensive, furthermore, and funeral homes are known to take advantage of the grieving, who can end up agreeing to services and expensive caskets they can’t afford. People can ask the tribe for financial help. But the funeral dispensations are often too small to cover all the needed services.
Some family members end up doing things like dressing the body and driving the casket to the grave themselves. Worse, those who go to funerals aren’t allowed to hug each other for comfort: They’re expected to grieve at six-foot distances.
Chapters are like large families; almost everyone is connected by friendship or kinship. That means almost everyone in Shiprock knows someone who has struggled with COVID-19 or died from it. Each day can bring a new round of worry, grief and fear.
An equilibrium upset
Yazzie refuses to give in. And he keeps searching for solutions. He knows, for example, that the most vulnerable people — the elderly — don’t speak English and don’t have the internet or social media to turn to for the latest news and instructions. So for them, he prepares a recording that explains safety precautions and relief efforts in Diné, the Navajo language. He sends it to the local radio station to play throughout the week.
To address local worries about dwindling food supplies, he encourages people to return to farming, canning and traditional ways of storing food. Yazzie also helped initiate the Northern Diné COVID 19 Relief Effort, which distributes food and supplies in Shiprock and the surrounding region, the Northern Navajo Agency.
The Northern Agency is often forgotten by the tribal government, he said, so the group took it upon themselves to respond. “Shiprock has always had that kind of resilient spirit that calls for independence,” he explained. “Our people have always been warrior people, all through the years.”
It’s been a time of great reflection, of trying to understand why this is happening, Yazzie said. He’s come to one conclusion that he’s heard traditional Navajo concur with: The world is in a great disorder; the equilibrium of the Earth is greatly upset.
“Perhaps the pandemic is the great discipline whip of the Earth, from having irretrievably damaged the Earth,” he said, and paused to search for the right words. “This virus is a force to be reckoned with,” he offered. “It is alive with death.”
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The Narrative of Change
By Gary Phillips
Trying to get a breath in a time of COVID 19 and knees to the neck.
I belong to several dues paying mystery writer associations. These groups do not have the collective bargaining power for its membership like my white-collar Hollywood union the Writers Guild of America (WGA). The WGA has a past when its members got in the face of the studio bosses and some got their heads knocked in for their efforts and others blacklisted. Different then from the WGA, these aforementioned associations don’t exact a floor for book advances, set a standard pay for a short story of a given length, or seek to establish working conditions for the writer – which in the case of prose writers as distinct from script writing; it’s a solitary undertaking. But not for nothing the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), a national board I once served on as well as past president of the local chapter, does have as its motto, “Crime doesn’t pay…enough.”
To that end the 75-year-old MWA has used the bully pulpit to advocate for a better status of genre writers, intervened in contract disputes, called to task shady publisher practices, and more than anything, provided a way for established pros to interact with first timers or those looking to get published. This through formal talks and seminars as well as bending an elbow at a neighborhood tavern or the bar in the evening during a mystery convention. And like the history of a lot of unions, the MWA wasn’t always diverse. It would be fair to say the MWA was something of a white old boys club for many a year. In fact, Sisters in Crime (SinC) was founded in 1987 by 26 woman crime writers including bestseller Sara Paretsky specifically to address the frustration they had with the obstacles they faced in publishing, and not receiving their fair share of book reviews in a field then dominated by male reviewers.
Today matters are different. There is not only diversity of gender and race/ethnicity on the board of the MWA as well as sister misters on the SinC board, the membership reflects a changed landscape of the types of writers penning these stories. While the police procedural is still told, it could be a story of cop who’s a black woman confronting departmental racism to do her job right. Or about an Asian-American private detective who not only is perceived a certain way by others but is investigating the questionable death of a suspect at the hands of the police or some other so-called authority.
No surprise then when in 2018 the MWA awarded former prosecutor turned author Lina Fairstein its Grand Master award and the membership rose up in opposition. Fairstein to many, me included, helped railroad, along with the police, five black and brown teenager into prison for serious time, convicting them of rape and beating a victim half to death in a “wilding incident” in the infamous Central Park Five case. A case where DNA finally exonerated the now grown men and the city paid out $41m in a settlement. The award was soon rescinded.
Fairstein who has a solid record of pursing justice for years in cases of sexual offenses, maintained the youths were involved in some way in the rape in an op-ed piece she wrote for the Wall Street Journalin June 2019. Really the surprise was the MWA board picking Fairstein and claiming not to know the controversy surrounding her.
Now in the wake of nation-wide protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, captured agonizingly on smartphone video, by fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin (now charged with 2nddegree murder), the MWA and SinC (and I’m a sister mister) have both stepped up. The organizations issued statements in support of efforts at reform of the police.
From SinC’s statement, “The murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd are only three recent reminders of the 400-year history of violence visited upon Black people of the United States.”
“Listening leads to understanding, and action leads to change,” the MWA’s statement read in part.
On a listsev I’m part of, Crime Writers of Color, various discussions fly back and forth via email among the loose-kinit group – some of whom are part of the MWA and SinC. The morning following the publishing of these statements, folks on the listserv heard of examples of pushback from the membership, and the nature and character of such was bandied about.
More importantly, reality demands that writers of color and their white colleagues have to re-evaluate what they write and how in they tell the story. There is no getting around the way in which black and brown communities are policed, be the cops white or not or a mixture as was present at Mr. Floyd’s demise. In this time of the virus that too will have to be depicted in some way in our fictions. Yet not every mystery story has to be about that (though I can imagine a story where a murderer kills someone and tries to make it look like complications from COVID) or the use of excessive force and race. But me and my fellow crime writes are challenged to consider the point of view, of who is telling the story and thus who controls the narrative…from the hardboiled to the cozy.
Fiction doesn’t bring about change. Clearly it’s because organizations such as Black Lives Matter, L.A. Community Action Network, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and others being in the streets and testifying at police commission hearings, let alone what’s happening now, has culminated in the Mayor of Los Angeles proposing a $100-$150m cut in the police budget (not a decrease by the way) and redirecting those monies to “jobs, education and healing.” Fiction can though reflect those changes. It has no choice if it’s to remain relevant and resonate.
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Washington Farm Workers Become Covid-19 Guinea Pigs
By David Bacon
“The lives of these workers are being sacrificed for the profit of growers”
On March 12 a H-2A visa guest worker living in a Stemilt Growers barracks in Mattawa, Washington, began to cough. He called a hotline, was tested and found out he had COVID-19. He and five of his coworkers were then kept in the barracks for the next two weeks.
A month later three Stemilt H-2A workers in a barracks in East Wenatchee began to cough too. Before their tests even came back, three more started coughing. Soon they and their roommates were all in quarantine. Doctor Peter Rutherford of the Confluence Health Clinic called Stemilt and suggested that they test all 63 workers in the barracks. Thirty-eight tested positive. Then some of those workers who’d tested negative began to test positive too.
Since the H-2A workers infected in the Stemilt barracks arrived in February, and didn’t manifest symptoms until March and April, they must have contracted the virus in the U.S. Guest workers, therefore, are getting infected once they arrive.
The novel coronavirus continues to spread throughout Central Washington. By mid-May rural Yakima County had 1,203 cases – 122 reported on May 15 alone – and 47 people had died. The county has the highest rate of COVID-19 cases on the West Coast – 455 cases per 100,000 residents. For over a week now, hundreds of workers in the same area have been walking out of the apple packing sheds to demand better protections and more money for working in a situation where they may be exposed. Two have now begun a hunger strike.
“Workers are trying to call attention to the danger to the whole community,” says Rosalinda Guillen a longtime farmworker organizer and director of the advocacy group Community to Community. Meanwhile, thousands more H-2A guest workers are scheduled to arrive in the area, first for the cherry harvest and then to pick apples.
H-2A workers (named for the visa program through which they enter the country) are recruited to work in the U.S. on temporary contracts; they can only work for the employer that recruits them and must leave once the work is done.
For the last decade prefab barracks have been springing up in the middle of Washington’s blossoming apple trees, in orchards often miles from the nearest town. Inside, H-2A workers usually sleep in bunk beds, four to a room, and cook their meals in a common kitchen. Some barracks are ringed by a chain link fence topped by barbed wire, while others have no barriers. If workers want to go into town to buy groceries or to a clinic, they depend on the grower to provide transportation.
The fate of thousands of these workers is at stake in a regulation handed down last week by Washington state’s departments of Health and of Labor and Industries that permits housing conditions that could cause the virus to spread rapidly. Sleeping in bunk beds in dormitories, according to these state authorities, is an acceptable risk. Yet according to Chelan-Douglas Health District Administrator Barry Kling, farmworkers are more vulnerable to getting COVID-19 because they live in these very close quarters. “The lives of these workers are being sacrificed for the profit of growers,” Guillen charges.
Washington State ignores the science
The barracks for Stemilt’s infected workers, like those housing thousands of others, are divided into rooms around a common living and kitchen area. Four workers live in each room, sleeping in two bunk beds. Stemilt says that it has 90 such dormitory units in central Washington, with 1,677 beds. Half are bunk beds.
Maintaining physical separation, especially in labor camps, “will be impossible under conditions H-2A workers typically experience in the United States,” concludes a report in April by the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM — the Migrant Rights Center). There is no testing for H-2A workers as they enter the country, and until the infected group was found in Washington, there was no testing for them here either.
According to Drs. Anjum Hajat and Catherine Karr, two leading epidemiologists at the University of Washington, “People living in congregate housing such as the typical farmworker housing … are at unique risk for the spread of COVID-19 because they are consistently in close contact with others … crowding increases the risk of transmission of influenza and similar illnesses. If individual rooms are impractical, the number of farmworkers per room should be reduced and beds should be separated by 6 feet. Bunk beds that cannot meet this standard should be disallowed.”
Washington’s state agencies decided to ignore Hajat and Karr’s testimony, however. In contrast, the same scientific analysis was the basis for a decision by Oregon’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration banning bunk beds. Its regulation issued in May tells employers: “Do not allow the use of double bunk beds by unrelated individuals,” and “beds and cots must be spaced at least six (6) feet apart between frames in all directions.”
Oregon authorities resisted pressure from employers to change the rule, but after a Farm Bureau survey of 323 growers claimed that it would result in losing housing for 5,000 farmworkers, its implementation was delayed until June 1.
Oregon, however, isn’t even among the top 10 states importing H-2A workers. California growers last year were certified to fill 23,321 farm labor jobs with H-2A recruits, yet no agency keeps track of the number of workers sleeping in bunk beds less than six feet apart. How their health has been impacted, therefore, is basically unknown.
Washington’s growers, however, have become much more dependent than California’s on bringing in H-2A workers. Last year employers estimated that 65,358 people were employed picking apples in Washington, making it by far the largest apple-producing state in the U.S. Its growers were certified for 26,226 H-2A workers. The vast majority worked in apples – as much as a third of the workforce. One company alone, Zirkle Fruit Company, was certified for 3,400 workers, while Stemilt was certified for 1,517.
The state’s new rule for housing those workers says, “Both beds of bunk beds may be used,” for workers in a “group shelter,” consisting of 15 or fewer workers who live, work and travel to and from the fields together. Most Washington State growers would have little trouble meeting this requirement, since their barracks arrangement normally groups four bedrooms in the same pod. Stemilt also has vans that normally hold 14 people, conveniently almost the same number as in the bed requirement. A work crew of 14 to 15 workers would not be unusual.
Who benefits from the new regulation?
By framing the bunk bed requirement in this way, Washington’s Department of Health effectively told growers that they did not have to cut the number of workers in each bedroom, and in each dormitory, in half. The rules of the H-2A program require growers to provide housing. If the number of workers safely housed in each dormitory were halved, growers would have two options. They could build or rent more housing, which would be an additional cost. Stemilt, with 850 bunk beds, would have to find additional housing for over 400 workers, and Zirkle perhaps even a thousand.
Dan Fazio, head of the Washington Farm Labor Association (WAFLA), one of the largest H-2A contractors in the U.S., called restrictions on beds to keep workers safely separated “catastrophic” and “a political stunt by unions and contingency-fee lawyers.” (Attempts to reach Fazio and other grower representatives for comments for this story were unsuccessful.)
Alternatively, growers could bring fewer H-2A workers to the U.S., and instead hire more workers either locally, or attract workers living in other parts of the country. This is what growers did until the H-2A program began to expand rapidly 10 years ago. In 2010 they were certified for only 2,981 guest workers. “Farm workers living in California and other states knew there were jobs here, and they’d come,” explains Ramon Torres, president of Washington’s new farm labor union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. “Most of them had been doing this for many years. But when growers started hiring H-2A workers, they stopped coming. They couldn’t spend hundreds of dollars to get here, and then find out that the jobs were already filled.”
If the number of H-2A workers were cut in half because of the bunk bed requirement, however, Fazio and WAFLA would lose money, since their income is based on the number of workers they supply to growers. Last year WAFLA brought 12,000 H-2A workers to Washington, charging growers for each worker (although it doesn’t disclose publicly how much).
WAFLA has made the H-2A program very attractive, helping to find contractors to build barracks, taking care of paperwork required for government certification and even pushing for lower wages. In the apple harvest most workers are paid a piece rate that used to reach the equivalent of $18 to $20 hourly. In 2018 WAFLA asked the state Employment Security Department (ESD) and the U.S. Department of Labor to eliminate any standard for piece rates for H-2A workers, effectively slashing wages by up to $6 per hour. The ESD and DoL agreed. Fazio boasted, “This is a huge win and saved the apple industry millions.”
Many of the growers’ H-2A barracks were financed with Washington state funds that are allocated for building farmworker housing. Daniel Ford at Columbia Legal Aid, Washington’s legal service organization for farm workers, protested to the state Department of Commerce that growers shouldn’t be allowed to use public funds, since the state’s own surveys showed that 10 percent of farm workers who are Washington residents were living outdoors in a car or in a tent, and 20 percent were living in garages, shacks, or “in places not intended to serve as bedrooms.” The department, however, refused to bar growers from using state subsidies to house H-2A workers.
Immigration status makes H-2A workers vulnerable
One 2017 case convinced many farm worker advocates that the state had no enthusiasm for protecting the welfare of H-2A workers. Honesto Silva, brought from Mexico to harvest blueberries, collapsed in a field belonging to Sarbanand Farms near the Canadian border, and later died. According to a suit filed by Columbia Legal Services against Sarbanand Farms, Nidia Perez, who supervised workers on behalf of the company’s recruiter, told them that they had to work “unless they were on their death bed.” Yet the Department of Labor and Industries announced that Silva had died of natural causes, and that the company was not responsible. Labor and Industries fined Sarbanand Farms $149,800 for not providing breaks and meal periods, and a local judge even cut that in half.
Unions and worker advocates charge that the immigration status of H-2A workers makes it difficult and risky for them to complain about conditions in the barracks or at work that would expose them to the virus. If an H-2A worker is fired for complaining or protesting, they lose their visa status and have to leave the country immediately, at their own expense. This took place at Sarbanand Farms where 70 workers protested the death of Honesto Silva. They were fired, thrown off the company property, and had to leave the U.S.
Guest workers who complain are often blacklisted and denied jobs for the following season. One large recruiter, Consular Services Inc. (CSI) – a company closely associated with WAFLA, brings more than 20,000 workers to the U.S. every year. It has them sign a pledge that authorizes a blacklist: “I understand that if I don’t follow the rules at work, in housing or conduct, or my productivity on the job isn’t adequate, the boss has the right to fire me and I will lose all the benefit of my work visa, I will have to go back to Mexico, and the boss will report me to the authorities. This will obviously affect my ability to return legally to the United States in the future.”
The Centro de los Derechos del Migrante report casts doubt that the bunk bed regulation proposed by Washington state’s Department of Health, even with its weakened protection, can be adequately enforced. “The problem with protecting workers merely by promulgating regulations,” it emphasizes, “is that regulations cannot overcome the profound power imbalance between employer and worker under the H-2A program.”
That vulnerability, however, makes immigrant labor attractive to employers like Stemilt. Before employing H-2A workers, the company employed others whose immigration status made them easy to pressure. In the late 1990s many of its employees tried to join the Teamsters Union, which lost an election to represent them in 1998. One worker testified to the National Labor Relations Board that she worked without legal immigration papers, with the full knowledge of the company, until the union organizing began. “Before we started organizing Stemilt didn’t mind if we didn’t have papers. It is only now that we have started organizing that they have started looking for problems with people’s papers … and it is only now that they have started threatening us with INS raids … being deported is a very powerful threat.”
Fear rose a year later when 562 apple shed workers throughout Yakima Valley were fired for lacking legal immigration status. The immigration-related threats eventually led to the invalidation of the election lost by the union, but Stemilt never had to sign a contract and remains union-free to this day.
Federal government protects growers, so states must act
In the spring of 2019 Community2Community, Familias Unidas por la Justicia and other farm worker advocates convinced the Washington State legislature to pass a bill to force state agencies to require protections for H-2A workers. The bill, SB 5438, “Concerning the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program,” was signed by Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee. It funded an oversight office and advisory committee to monitor labor, housing, and health and safety requirements for farms using the H2A program. It also required employers to advertise open jobs to local workers. Representatives from Familias Unidas por la Justicia, the United Farm Workers, legal and community advocates, and representatives from corporate agriculture were appointed to the committee.
When the coronavirus crisis began in early 2020, worker advocates asked the Department of Labor and Industries to issue regulations to guarantee the safety of the H-2A workers. Washington state, however, only issued “guidelines” that were not legally enforceable. Familias Unidas por la Justicia, Community to Community, the United Farm Workers, Columbia Legal Aid and the Northwest Justice Project then filed suit against the state, demanding enforceable regulations.
Skagit Superior Court Judge Dave Needy gave the state a deadline of May 14 to answer the suit, and the Department of Health finally issued the emergency regulation permitting bunk beds the day before the deadline. The unions sharply criticized the new regulation. Ramon Torres, from Familias Unidas por la Justicia, said, “We do not agree with this. They are treating us as disposable, as just cheap labor.” Erik Nicholson, vice-president of the United Farm Workers, said, “We are disappointed that the rules remain ambiguous and don’t provide the scope of protections that farmworkers living in these camps need to protect themselves from the COVID-19 virus.”
Additional news: One farm in Tennessee distributed Covid-19 tests to all of its workers after an employee came down with the virus. It turned out that every single one of its roughly 200 employees had been infected.
The Washington court decision will have an enormous impact, not just on the state’s apple pickers, but on farmworkers nationally, because of the huge expansion of the H-2A program in recent years. Last year growers were certified to fill a quarter of a million farm labor jobs, and the Trump administration seeks to make the program as accessible and inexpensive for growers as possible.
Federal enforcement of protections for H-2A workers is almost nonexistent. The CDM report found that every worker it surveyed reported violations of labor rights and contracts. Nevertheless, of 11,472 employers using the H-2A program, last year the U.S. Department of Labor only filed cases against 431 (3.73 percent), and of them only 26 (0.25 percent) were temporarily barred from recruiting. “It’s deeply concerning,” Nicholson said, “that the federal government has been completely absent in ensuring that the essential women and men who harvest our food are protected.”
States have had to step in. California adopted regulations last year for H-2A housing, barring the use of public funds to build barracks. Washington State passed its law setting up a board to review standards and practices for H-2A recruitment. But the bunk bed ruling effectively makes Washington’s law toothless and leaves H-2A workers exposed to the virus.
California’s anti-barracks law would likely be the next one targeted by those growers intent on keeping labor costs low. They’ve already been promised help by the Trump administration, including a promise on a Federal level to cut the legally required H-2A wages. WAFLA’s Dan Fazio predicts, “If that happens, if it’s lowered to the state minimum wage, growers will bring [more] workers up.” The mandated wage in Washington for H-2A workers would be cut by $2.33 per hour under Trump’s proposal.
In a Memorandum of Understanding on May 19 the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration warned that even regulations like the bunk bed ruling might be too much for the Trump administration. The agencies, they said, may invoke the Defense Production Act to override any state actions that cause “food resource facility closures or harvesting disruption [that] could threaten the continued functioning of the national food supply chain.”
Bruce Goldstein, President of Farmworker Justice, a farmworker advocate in Washington DC, called the MOU a “cold-blooded approach [to] the potential for widespread illness and death of farmworkers.” He added, “The Administration is claiming the right to prohibit states and local governments from requiring workplace safety precautions that might reduce the food supply while saving the lives of people needed in the food system.”
Protecting growers’ profits at the expense of the lives, health and wages of farmworkers has been the historical norm. But in the current COVID-19 crisis, calling farmworkers “essential ” acknowledges not just that the country depends on their labor to eat. It also acknowledges that thousands of people go into the fields every day risking the virus. Farmworkers wonder if they then should be treated as vulnerable guinea pigs.
“The logic of declaring bunk beds acceptable is that some degree of infection and some deaths will happen, and that this is an acceptable risk that must be taken to protect the profits of these growers and this industry,” Rosalinda Guillen charges. “And what makes it acceptable? Those getting sick, and who may die, are poor brown people, and the families and communities who will mourn them live in another country two thousand miles away.”
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