An Exodus from Central America and Tear-gas at the Tijuana-San Diego Border
By Myrna Santiago
“This is your moment. Gather your friends and grab it!”
This fall has been stressful for everyone. It is sinking in what it means to have an authoritarian in the While House whose heroes are murderous men like Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Mussolini. He proposed a sexual predator for the Supreme Court and Congress shamefully acquiesces. Climate change sets swaths of California on fire, thousands of people lose their homes, and our campus becomes a sunken bowl of toxic smoke until none of us can breathe and we must stay indoors as if we were under house arrest. And the President’s response is that California should rake the leaves off the forest floor—presumably after all the trees have been chopped down by his friends in the logging industry. And now we see pictures of women and children running away from the teargas that the Border Patrol launched into Tijuana to prevent them from reaching the United States after walking weeks and thousands of miles from Honduras and other Central American countries. (Editor’s note: Since this piece at least one 7 year old girl has died from lack of care in a detention facility and migrants on the Mexico side of the border now have numbers on their arms in the manner of the Nazi concentration camps)
What would make it worth leaving your home, your community, the country of your birth, and everything you have ever known?
Honduras has the highest murder rate in the Americas (and competes with other unfortunate countries for the highest in the world), at almost 30 people assassinated per day.
Honduras has 12,000 men and boys in maras, both the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and La 18 (M-18). By comparison, only three cities in the entire United States have police forces that large (Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York). The gangs force all small businesses to pay a “war tax” very week, sometimes US$200. Workers in the maquiladoras, too, have to pay up to US$100 per week, leaving them with next to nothing to support themselves and their families. The police, the military, and public officials get their cut from the extorsion racket, so they look the other way. All of these groups, individuals, and agencies are involved in the drug trade. The president’s brother was arrested in Miami about 10 days ago, in fact, for drug trafficking. In a perverted sort of compulsory draft, the gangs force male children into their ranks; girls are subject to rape.
Under such circumstances, is it any wonder that Hondureños would be leaving by the thousands, like the Exodus of the Old Testament?
“These young men found a country wasted by war, high-caliber weapons by the truckload, and traffickers searching for partners”
How did this happen? Let’s ask the historical question: what are the origins of this horrific social decomposition and massive population flight? It goes back to the 1980s. And it is all linked to American foreign policy.
In the 1980s, the US was involved in wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The motive was anti-Communism, as the US sought to destroy social movements, both armed and peaceful, that struggled against dictators, military governments, and tiny land-owning elites that monopolized power and wealth in all four countries. The wars lasted anywhere from 10 to 40 years. The US supported the status quo in each country, pumping millions of dollars daily to defeat all the social movements and revolutionary guerrillas to the point of genocide, for example, against the Maya people of Guatemala. The wars destroyed all four countries.
In Honduras, specifically, the US built 12 military bases which were used for two purposes: to attack the revolutionary government in power in neighboring Nicaragua; and to traffic Colombian cocaine to the US with the complicity of the Central Intelligence Agency (that led to the crack epidemic in Los Angeles and from there the rest of the urban centers of the US).
In El Salvador, the war caused an early exodus of salvadoreños, thousands of whom ended up in Los Angeles. There the children of refugees formed the MS-13 and the M-18 and learned the violence they would take back to El Salvador in 1996, when Bill Clinton began deporting gangsters. These young men found a country wasted by war, high-caliber weapons by the truckload, and traffickers searching for partners to send cocaine to the United States—the largest drug market in the history of humanity. A match made in hell.
In 2009 President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, supported a coup in Honduras that installed the right-wing faction back into power, at the same time that the dynamic duo put deportations into high gear. By the time he left the White House, Obama had earned the nickname “deporter-in-chief” in the Latino community because he had deported more Latin Americans than any other president in history, 2.5 immigrants between 2009-2015.
The result is what we are witnessing today: hondureños, salvadoreños, guatemaltecos fleeing for their lives to the country that, ironically enough, bears a great deal of responsibility for their misery and pain.
Yes, the US government laid the foundations for this Exodus. The least it should do, therefore, is to welcome and take care of the victims it created.
And you?
On a college campus, your number one duty is to educate yourself about these issues. Find the classes and the professors who will teach you about reality from a Liberal Arts perspective, so you may become excellent critical thinkers and don’t fall prey to lies from the White House, the Congress, the media, or Netflix! So you learn from reliable sources rather than ideologically driven fiction.
Your second duty is to use your liberal arts skills (evaluating information, making informed arguments) to convince all your friends to educate themselves too. You are all active in student organizations: persuade them to find those classes and those professors. Banish ignorance among your peers!
Third, become engaged locally. The College is the real world. Did you know that our mission-driven university that focuses on social justice and talks a lot about educating the poor is not, is not, is not a sanctuary campus (for undocumented students and staff)?
Fourth, become engaged more broadly. California has a real chance to do the right thing. We have a Democratic governor and a Democratic super majority in the State Assembly (including a Senator who is a graduate of Saint Mary’s College, Maria Elena Durazo). Push them to do the right thing. Don’t sit back and figure they will take care of something or another. Push them to make the laws that we the citizens want and need: stronger anti-gun laws; stronger laws against rape, sexual assault, and violence against women and LGBTQ people; education reform that really educates; incarceration reform that puts in the jail the true criminals; drug laws that really work to decrease addiction and provide people the services they need; better environmental laws that mitigate the effects of climate change; improved housing and health care laws that guarantee those basic human rights to everyone who lives in California regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, class, or national origin.
This is your moment. Gather your friends and grab it! Utilize those liberal arts skills that you have been mastering: analyze the problems, figure out their roots and causes, and then unleash your creativity to solve them. Enter to learn; leave to lead! This is a historic opportunity: show, from our corner of the country, that another world is possible. You are not alone in this. We are all right behind you!
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The Man Who Fell From the Sky – Bill Fletcher Jr. – Hardball Press 2018
By Peter Olney
When your friends and comrades write a book and ask you to have a read, there is always a little hesitation. Someone you have known in one context for over 30 years suddenly strikes out in a new direction – a literary one, writing a first novel. Integrity demands that you give them your honest assessment. That could be jarring! However I am not talking here about Bill Clinton’s collaboration with James Patterson on a Presidential thriller, I don’t know “42” nor do I have much use for him and Hillary.
But my friend and comrade Bill Fletcher Jr. has written a wonderful first mystery thriller entitled “The Man Who Fell From the Sky”. I got about 100 pages in, and I texted Bill that I was putting down an important Marxist political economy tract to devote full energy and attention to his engrossing novel. I know Bill as one of America’s finest political public intellectuals, a comrade who has been in the trenches with me in the labor wars over the last 30 plus years. I have followed his work in Boston and Washington, DC in his capacity as organizer and negotiator and top educator for the AFL-CIO where he pioneered a worker education program that tore into capitalism.
Bill shifts gears to write about Cape Cod and the Cape Verdeans that reside there and in Southeast Massachusetts. He creates an investigative reporter protagonist named David Gomes who writes for “The Cape and Islands Gazette” and its mercurial owner, Jacqueline Reynaud. The book is set in 1970 and Gomes investigates the mysterious sniper murder of a respected Osterville citizen.
I spent part of July, 2018 in the section of the Cape around Falmouth that Bill describes in his novel. I can taste the fried clams and lobster rolls that figure so prominently in encounters between Gomes and his police department buddy, Detective Vincent Amato. A mystery novel that educates is rare but this one gives us insights into the history of Cape Verdeans on Cape Cod and their interactions with whites and African Americans. The plot centers on Cape Verdean servicemen and their struggles in WW II in the Air Force.
There is romance with Gomes’s steady girlfriend Pamela Peters who feels the pull between her career and her desire to be with David. There is the charged relationship with Gomes’s publisher Jacqueline Reynard. I can’t risk giving away any more of the plot or the sensuality of this solid first novel. I told Bill that I thought his work approaches that of the immensely popular Sicilian-Italian crime mystery writer Andrea Camilleri of Inspector Montalbano fame. It educates about politics and is a seductive page turning mystery. Comrades, put aside your weighty tomes of post mid-term election analysis and give ”The Man Who Fell From the Sky” a read.
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Il Governo Giallo Verde[1] – A Note on Italian Politics
By Nicola Benvenuti
In the national elections of March 2018 the Five Star Movement (M5S) got 32.7% of the votes because of a strong showing in the south thanks to the promise of “citizenship income”[2] for the unemployed and because much of the left electorate was disaffected from the Partito Democratico (PD). This disaffection with the PD came because the Renzi government, with the passage of the Jobs Act and the rejection of the political role of unions made it clear that the world of work was no longer an important reference point. The second place party was the League (La Lega), whose base is no longer limited to the north. The party got 17.4% of the votes using slogans like “Italians First”, and calling for more security for citizens (despite statistics reporting a decrease in crimes). La Lega wanted to block immigration from outside the European Union (already severely limited by the provisions of the previous Gentiloni government) and the restoration of retirement pensions abolished by the restrictive measures of the unelected technical government of Mario Monti in 2011.
The M5S, the first party in percent of votes, was tasked by the President of the Republic with forming a government. After ascertaining the unavailability of the PD as a coalition partner after several attempts, M5S turned to the League, a right-wing formation with which M5S shares a polemic against the political establishment (in particular against the economic privileges of parliamentarians), the rejection of economic constraints imposed by the European Union (EU)) and the defense of national sovereignty (against the “Brussels bureaucrats”). The agreement was ratified with a “government contract” that indicates the issues on which government activity should be concentrated. The agreement provided that the leaders of the two parties would take two top positions in the new government: Luigi Di Maio of M5S at the Ministry of Labor and Matteo Salvini of La Lega at the Ministry of the Interior.
After the formation of the government it has become apparent that while the League is increasingly successful in dealing with “ideological” issues like immigration, the M5S has not been able to deliver on welfare policies like “citizenship income” or early retirement because of the serious economic situation, marked by the huge public debt that binds Italy to market financing. Hence the controversy with the EU whose opposition to the enlargement of the Italian public debt would prevent the Italian government from providing for the less affluent!
The M5S, in the name of environmentalism and fearful of offering fuel to endemic corruption in the country, looks suspiciously at public works and infrastructure projects. M5S has refused to nominate Rome to host the summer Olympics or Torino for the winter. Above all M5S is against the TAV (High Velocity Train), which would run between Torino and Lyon, France. This section of track has been the site of very tough clashes with environmentalists. M5S opposes the TAV and the trans-Adriatic gas pipeline (favored by the US government because it would allow the European market access to the natural gas of the Caspian Sea, and therefore not be dependent on Russia). But these policies mean blocking public investments that could boost the economy and employment. In October the Italian Statistical Institute (ISTAT) stated that the Italian economy is steady, and tensions between Italy and the European Union on the issue of the expansion of public debt demanded by the Italian government and the commitment of Brussels to policies of economic austerity (moreover never seriously pursued by Italy) are growing. Result: on November 25, 2018 the League is polling at 36.2% (+ 18.8% from March 8, this is thanks also to the drying up of support for the Forza Italia, the party of Silvio Berlusconi), while the M5S fell to 27.7% (- 5%). In contrast, the Partito Democratico, torn by internal conflicts and still unable to build an effective opposition in Parliament and in the country, is slightly down in the polls from the 17% received in the elections in March.
Tensions within the government also grow between the League, pressed by the industrial groups to boost investment and block welfare policies, and the M5S. This tension hinders proposals for tax amnesty advanced by the League (League also proposes amnesty for construction abuses in Ischia, where the earthquake has recently destroyed buildings and human lives). M5S has blocked Salvini’s safety decree (later approving it with some stomach ache, despite deep concerns over the unconstitutionality of the treatment of non-EU citizens). Any economic reforms seem difficult to achieve. This stalemate drives Di Maio and Salvini to sound the campaign themes that resonated for them in the March elections.
The government’s goal seems to be to use the European Parliament elections of May 2019, to dissolve a series of political knots. The first is: if and how Europe will change under the blows of Trump, Putin and populist parties. The second, if M5S and Lega will consolidate the victory of March 2018 and whether there will be a significant imbalance in support for the two parties (with the implicit caveat that a big imbalance between the two parties can push the party that prevails to try to translate their success in the European elections policy into domestic Italian political success).
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[1] Giallo (yellow) and Verde (green) refer to the ballot symbol colors of the Five Star Movement and the League, the coalition partners who govern Italy.
[2] Reddito Minimo Nazionale – Would provide a basic income to all Italian citizens
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Making America White Again – Contemplating the Roots of Racism in My Hometown
By Molly Martin
Americans should not be surprised by the rise of nativism prompted by Trump’s rhetoric. White supremacy, xenophobia and red baiting have a long history in the United States. My hometown makes a good example.
It was said that my grandfather, Ben Wick, and William O. Douglas were the only two Democrats in Yakima, Washington in the early 1920s. Or perhaps they were the only two admitted Democrats. In my hometown at that time being a Democrat automatically labeled you as a Communist.
William O., then known as Orville Douglas, grew up in Yakima but as a young man left to find his fortune in the East. FDR appointed him to head the new Securities and Exchange Commission and then to the Supreme Court. He became the longest serving U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Yakima’s most famous native son but the town reviled him. The New Deal Democrat was far too liberal for Yakima.
This is my mother’s family in the early 1920’s. Mom is the one on the top right with glasses.
My grandfather, a Norwegian immigrant, traveled with his family—my Swedish grandmother and their four daughters—to Yakima in 1921. He and Orville Douglas met at Yakima High School where they both were teachers.
When my mother was growing up in the 1920s and 30s, Yakima, with a population of about 20,000, was a conservative place. Today, with about 91,000 people, it remains a red blot in a blue state. In the 2016 presidential election Yakima County went for Trump/Pence. Washington’s population is concentrated on the west coast around Seattle. Rural Eastern Washington is another world.
Yakima’s story is not unfamiliar. It’s been reenacted in countless towns across this continent. Catholic missionaries had settled in the Valley and white settlers followed in the 1850s as the U.S. Army drove the indigenous population onto a nearby reservation. The Native Americans had fiercely resisted in what were known as the Indian Wars. The Yakama (the tribe changed to this spelling) Indian reservation is home to several different indigenous groups that were forced to settle there in what we call the Lower Valley, a few miles south of the town of Yakima. The sagebrush country with fertile volcanic soil was partly developed and irrigated by Japanese immigrant farmers who began arriving before the turn of the 20th century.
Researching what life was like in my hometown in this period, I found a book written by Thomas Heuterman, who was my journalism professor at Washington State University. The Burning Horse: The Japanese Experience in the Yakima Valley 1920-1942 documents discrimination against the Japanese community in Wapato, a town on the Yakama reservation where the farmers leased land from the tribe. In emails Prof. Heuterman told me he had been surprised to find what his research showed: a long history of racism and exclusion in the Yakima Valley. Japanese farmers in the Valley were persecuted relentlessly. Their houses, barns and crops were bombed and burned.
Heuterman grew up in Wapato. He wrote: “I went into the project predicting that the Valley Japanese were an exception among all the prejudice of the era. That’s what I remembered as a child from my folks’ attitudes. But, as you know, I found just the opposite. Most of the Nisei (second generation) who have read the book also didn’t know that racism was going on; their folks had protected them from that.”
Newspapers stoked the fires of racism. Prof. Heuterman’s research focused on stories in the local and state newspapers. These were headlines in the Seattle Star during hearings to determine the fate of Japanese immigrants in Washington State in 1920.
“WILL YOU HELP TO KEEP THIS A WHITE MAN’S COUNTRY?”
“JAPS PLANS MENACE WHITE CIVILIZATION”
“Japanese plans for expansion at the expense of the white race are a deeper menace to Caucasian civilization than were ever the dreams of Pan-German imperialists”
In the 1920 version of fake news, testifiers at the hearings repeated lies about the Japanese and weird ideas about racial purity that were then amplified by newspapers across the state. A well-organized American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Anti-Japanese League perpetuated the apocryphal threat of the Yellow Peril. Then the Grange took up the cause. Anti-alien laws passed in Washington State were modeled on those of California, which in turn had been promoted by influential Southern whites who had settled in the West after the Civil War.
… 200 men set upon blacks in Wapato, beating them and setting fire to one of their houses. Filipinos and unionists also became targets of harassment.”
Racist organizations gained influence after World War I. In the Red Scare of 1917-20 nativism swept the whole country. During that time Alien and Sedition laws were used to deport hundreds of immigrants deemed by the government to be radicals, the anarchist Emma Goldman among them. In the Yakima Valley anti-immigrant sentiment reached a peak in the 1920s and 30s. I was shocked to learn that the KKK held a rally in 1924 which drew 40,000 people to a field outside the town. A thousand robed KKK members marched in the parade.
This is my Swedish grandmother, Gerda Wick (R), working the line in a fruit processing plant sorting cherries.
The big industry in Yakima was, and still is, agriculture. My mother’s family worked in the apple orchards, hop fields and fruit packing plants. Farmers welcomed migrant laborers during harvest season and when labor was scarce. But when the economic cycle moved from boom to bust, these workers were targets of violence, forced removal and alien restriction laws. American workers who saw their jobs being taken by immigrants who would work for less were some of the worst perpetrators of nativist violence.
In 1938, 200 men set upon blacks in Wapato, beating them and setting fire to one of their houses. Filipinos and unionists also became targets of harassment. In 1933, the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) led a strike for higher wages of white migrant farmworkers that was put down by orchardists with pipes, clubs and bats. Then the strikers were marched five miles to a stockade that had been constructed in the middle of downtown Yakima. Some of those arrested were jailed for six months, and the stockade stayed up as a deterrent for a decade.
In the Yakima of my mother’s youth you could not escape the dominant paradigm. But by the time I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, my generation was ignorant of this history. I grew up near the Congdon orchard where the 1933 “Battle of Congdon Castle” took place. The owner’s summerhouse mansion was called Congdon Castle and we kids thought it was haunted. No one really lived there except caretakers. The wealthy owners had always lived in another state. (My Swedish carpenter uncle was a builder of the castle whose architecture was reminiscent of Medieval Europe.)
Our family often visited Fort Simcoe, the restored Army fort on the Yakama reservation, but I never learned about the Indian Wars as a child. Native Americans and revolution were scrubbed from our textbooks and xenophobia persisted.
My brother Don remembers as a freshman in high school in 1967 defending the rights of Native Americans in history class. The popular teacher launched into a diatribe against him in front of the whole class. She said “Indians” had an inferior culture and deserved to be conquered. She said they were dirty, barbaric and uncivilized. She believed it was the right of a “superior culture” to war against them and subjugate them. This was the inevitable march of history, she said.
In Yakima the xenophobes scorned anyone not of the “white race.” The irony was that these invading whites had themselves displaced indigenous people and it’s difficult to understand how they failed to see this giant contradiction. The trick, of course, was to make them subhuman.
My grandparents had a strong immigrant identity and they can’t have felt completely safe. Family lore tells of …”
The advantage my family had is that they were, in the language of the American Legion, of the “white race.” The white supremacists in Yakima and elsewhere were able to successfully construct a racial identity, the “white race,” made from hundreds of diverse cultures, people who spoke different languages and dialects, people who had themselves been the victims of oppression, as a way to successfully divide the population.
In Yakima white was all right as long as you didn’t upset the status quo. Whiteness didn’t always save you. As a method of exclusion, the definition of white has changed significantly over the course of our history. Europeans not considered white at some point in American history include Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Irish, Scandinavians, Germans, Finns, Russians, French, and Jews.
My grandparents had a strong immigrant identity and they can’t have felt completely safe. Family lore tells of my grandfather Ben enduring taunts for his foreign accent from students at Yakima High School where he taught commercial arts. Mom told me she remembered her father’s troubled reaction to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants whose incarceration lasted from 1920 to 1927. She was 14 years old when they were executed by the U.S. government. Her Norwegian father took the side of the immigrants, who most agreed had been falsely accused.
The Irish side of my family immigrated at the onset of the potato famine of the 1840s, what the Irish call the starvation because the crops they grew and harvested were shipped to their English overlords, leaving them with nothing to eat. In his book, Irish on the Inside, Tom Hayden posits that Irish immigrants had more in common with blacks and slaves than the white rulers who starved and oppressed them. Before epigenetics became a thing, Hayden made the case that we have all been affected by the plight of our ancestors. “That the Irish are white and European cannot erase the experience of our having been invaded, occupied, starved, colonized and forced out of our homeland,” he wrote.
We will become our nightmare without a chance of awakening from its grip.”
Hayden wanted to break the assimilationist mold among Irish Americans.
“If Irish Americans identify with the 10 percent of the world which is white, Anglo American and consumes half the global resources, we have chosen the wrong side of history and justice. We will become the inhabitants of the Big House ourselves, looking down on the natives we used to be. We will become our nightmare without a chance of awakening from its grip.”
One white Yakiman who tried to choose the right side of history and justice was William O. Douglas. My mother was one of the few locals who admired him. She shared his politics, which were shaped by class. He grew up fatherless and poor. When discussing how his personal experiences influenced his view of the law, Douglas said, “I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and the IWWs who I saw being shot at by the police. I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law.”
The anti-communist John Birch Society smeared Douglas as “the only known Communist in Yakima County.” He was no communist but he did defend the concept of revolution in a 1969 screed. He is famously quoted in Points of Rebellion: “We must realize that today’s Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.” He survived four impeachment attempts.
When I asked my civil rights lawyer friend Judy Kurtz about Douglas she said, “Legal standing for trees!” He was famous for defending nature and the environment, often in dissenting opinions. She added, “I wish he was still on the court. Dear god, help us now.”
Douglas called Yakima his “Shangri-La.” He loved the orchards and the nearby Cascade Mountains. He returned often to our hometown and Mom and I ran into him and his wife Cathy in the 1970s. We had decided to splurge on lunch at the Larson Building, the town’s only high-rise, an elegant Art Deco architectural gem built in 1931. Mom spotted them as we walked into the lobby. “Justice Douglas, Justice Douglas,” my mother entreated as she ran up to him. He graciously remembered her father.
My grandfather’s membership in the Democratic Party came at a high price. He was let go from his teaching job at the nadir of the Depression in 1932. After that the family, with four young daughters, struggled to survive.
The wartime internment of Japanese did not happen in a vacuum. Finally, after decades of domestic terrorism, the American Legion and its ilk got their way. In June 1942, 1061 Japanese were evacuated from the Valley, sent by rail to a processing center at the Portland livestock grounds, and then incarcerated at Heart Mountain, Wyoming for the remainder of the war—800 miles from home. Only a few resettled in the Yakima Valley.
Now, a century after my grandparents immigrated, in a time when, once again, militias form to “protect” the white race from foreigners, we can look to our own history for insight. One of my heroes, the labor organizer Sister Addie Wyatt said, “If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re going.” This is where we come from. I fervently hope it is not where we’re going. I’m so glad people like immigrants and Americans of color, the Wobblies, my grandfather and William O. Douglas found the will to resist.
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Politics Is About Power: Assessing the 2018 Mid-Terms
By Max Elbaum
These notes were the basis for a presentation to the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild on November 8, 2018. A version of this piece ran in Portside and is the third in The Stansbury Forum’s 2018 midterm election round-up.
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Politics is about Power. One of the positive things about this moment is that the question of power has moved central to discussion on the left. Not just how to speak truth to power, or how to protest those in power, or pressure those in power. Rather, how to take chunks of power from those who have it now and get it for the exploited and oppressed. I haven’t seen that on the scale of today since 1960s, when the question of a path to power was put before the left in a different way. The differences are important, but the main thing is that radical discussion is again focused on finding a path to power. That’s the context of our discussion tonight.
Elections are also about power. They are a barometer of the relative strength of different social and political forces, and within certain constraints, they can shift power. The constraints vary. Sometimes the outcome of elections can shift things only in the tiniest of ways; other times they have big consequences. In this just-completed election, and likely even more so in the one in 2020, the stakes are quite high. There are three inter-related reasons for this.
SPECIAL DANGER OF TRUMPISM
First is the special danger posed by Trump and the GOP which under him has been captured by white nationalism and is permeated by the politics of racial and imperial revenge. Of course, Trumpism is not some fluke; reactionary anti-democratic blocs anchored in white supremacy have been common in U.S. society because of deep structural factors – a country founded on the genocide of the indigenous people and the enslavement of people of African descent. But if Trumpism represents a pattern in U.S. life, it is also something new. In the context of demographic change, the decline of U.S. global hegemony and failure of the economic model that has dominated the U.S. since the Reagan administration, it is a turn from dog-whistles to bullhorns and an attempt to put in place a semi-apartheid authoritarian system. There’s debate on the left about what Trumpism does and does not have in common with classical fascism, but little debate that this is something different and extremely dangerous.
The second reason, flowing from the first, is that the country is polarized to a degree not seen at least since the early 1960s and more likely since the Civil War. White nationalism’s capture of the GOP has meant that racial polarization in the country and partisan political polarization all but totally overlap and reinforce each other. Add in geographic polarization, and the way media has evolved to the point where different sectors of society use all but completely different sources not just for analysis but for basic facts, and the chasm is even more severe. These and other factors rooted in political economy and the shifting power relations in global politics also mean that the ruling class itself is more divided than it has been in decades. The battle between the Trump and anti-Trump camps has squeezed out middle ground and past patterns of so-called bipartisan cooperation. It is now take-no-prisoners trench warfare.
The third factor, especially important for us in this room, is that within the anti-Trump camp there is a surging social justice motion rooted especially in communities of color, and among youth, women and the LGBTQ community. A host of progressive organizations of different types threw themselves into the electoral fray in ways not seen in decades or longer. More on this later if I have time, but for a quick sampling:
The Texas Organizing Project (TOP), with its strong base among Latinos and African Americans, went all out in the most populous red state this year. TOP deployed at one time 575 staff, reached 882,000 voters, knocked on 300,000 doors, was key in flipping two congressional seats and electing three DAs – including in Dallas – to put Texas squarely on the map in the fight against mass incarceration. The progressive state table in Florida, which includes groups ranging from the Dream Defenders to Florida New Majority and SEIU, pushed through Prop 4, which restored voting rights to 1.4 million formerly incarcerated people. This is the largest since expansion of voting rights since Voting Rights Act of 1965. The collaboration between the Working Families Party and New Georgia Project in Georgia, the leadership in sectors of Stacey Abrams’ campaign by people out of the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice section, the fact that the National Domestic Workers Alliance deployed the largest independent field operation in that state – all this energized young voters, re-energized veterans of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and strengthened the emerging Black-Latino alliance, laying the basis for future wins if Stacey Abrams doesn’t pull it out this time. Add to this the work of Our Revolution, National Nurses Union, Color of Change, fast-growing Democratic Socialists of America chapters, the Movement Voter Project and others across the country. Efforts like these are not just the left wing of the possible, they are expanding the range of what is possible.
MAPPING THE CONTENDING FORCES
Against that backdrop, my charge tonight is to offer a starting point assessment of the election results and their consequences to kick off what is sure to be a continuing discussion. To do that I will say a little about the character of the main forces that went into battle; then talk about results, concentrating on the national level. I will note trends among different sectors of voters, and the new balance between both the Trump and anti-Trump camps and, within the latter, between the corporate and the social justice wings. And finally wrap up with some speculation on what things will look like going forward.
First, the Trump camp. Beginning in the 2016 election campaign, and accelerating since Trump was inaugurated, those Republicans critical of Trump have either been pushed out or brought into line. The GOP has been transformed from a conservative party into a party driven primarily by white nationalism and authoritarianism. The current program of the GOP is “whatever Trump says.” Trumpism has been financed and anchored by right-wing billionaires and sectors of capital rooted in the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. It is also rooted in the most racist layers of white middle-class and working-class people, and those gathered in white Evangelical Churches. The glue keeping the less-well-off sectors within the coalition is the narrative of “hard-working white America as victim of globalist elites, dark-skinned barbarians and uppity women.” Trumps approval ratings going into the voting hovered around 38-40%. There are potential fissures in this cross-class alliance, but going into the 2018 balloting they were all but completely undetectable.
In contrast, the anti-Trump camp is larger – up to 60% – and much more heterogenous. While over-simplified, it is a good first-cut assessment to see it as divided into two wings. The first is the corporate or so-called moderate wing. Anchored in financial and hi-tech capital and encompassing much of the country’s foreign policy and cultural elite, this sector is opposed to Trump because they see him as an unreliable guardian of a system that has served them well. To be sure, many in this sector believe that the naked racism, misogyny and general bigotry that spews from the Trump camp is morally wrong as well as counter-productive. But their main concern is to get back to things as they were: ‘America was always great’ is their counterpoint to Trump’s slogan of MAGA.
The progressive wing of the anti-Trump camp – what has generally been termed the resistance – opposes Trumpism from a whole other standpoint. For this sector, which ranges all the way from humanist liberals to big sectors of the revolutionary left – the problem is that Trumpism represents an especially dangerous threat – a clear and present danger – to the drive for major progressive change that much needed in this country. Bernie Sanders campaign galvanized an important portion of this sector in 2016, though his weaknesses on issues of racial and gender justice meant he failed to attract many of those most interested in change among women and peoples of color. But in the wake of Trump’s victory, the partisans of change whoever they supported in 2016, or if they sat it out, have coalesced into an energetic resistance that has driven the anti-Trump effort from the moment of the first Women’s March up to November 6.
There is a complicated relationship between these wings. They fought like hell against each other in many primaries and when squared off against each other in the general – we saw a vivid example of that right here in the Bay Area in the Buffy Wicks vs. Jovanka Beckles contest. But they hung together in fight vs. Trump. More about that later.
A CHANGED POWER BALANCE
Turning to the November 6 results: They tell us a lot about the relative strength of the Trump camp and the two wings of those opposed to Trump, and what has and hasn’t changed since 2016.
Here are the bottom-line results as of today (November 8):
The Democrats captured the House, as of this evening there is a swing of 30 seats, probably will end up with more as vote counting is completed. They needed 23.
The GOP kept the Senate. It stands at 51-46 now, with three races still to be called.
Democrats flipped 7 governorships, the GOP flipped none. The Democrats now have 23 to GOP 27.
Democrats scored some gains in state legislatures flipped 6 houses in four states and gained seats in many others, in the 300 to 400 seat range.
Adding it up, one activist put it this way:
“We didn’t win what we wanted to, but we won what we absolutely had to.”
Gains in actual power, however, do not match the relative number of voters in each camp. In total House vote, Democrats beat the GOP by 7%. When the GOP won by that amount in 2010, they took 60 seats.
In the Senate vote, the Democrats beat the GOP by even more, 12%. But the GOP gained seats in the Senate rather than lost them.
This puts us face to face with the racist, undemocratic structure of the U.S. electoral system. It was built into the original Constitution to protect slavery and be a bulwark against change driven from below and has continued ever since. It is biased toward small states and characterized by gerrymandering and voter suppression. Disenfranchising people has always been part of U.S. history. We should recall that of 400 years on this continent and 200-plus years as the USA, even formal legal equality in voting for African Americans has only existed for 50 or so years. And that gain started being chipped away at starting about five minutes after passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
And the last few years the GOP has taken voter suppression efforts to a new level.
There is also the basic structure of the so-called “two-party system”- which really should be termed a two-ballot line, state-sponsored electoral system. That system forces us to fight in an unfavorable structure for insurgent politics compared to a parliamentary system. There is a long discussion to be had about how this works and what it means for radical electoral efforts, perhaps we can get into that during the discussion period.
The disparity between the voting numbers vs. the actual allotment of seats is also apparent when we look at breakdown of votes by sectors. Exit polls are not completely reliable, but they are the best guide we have. And they show a shift from red to blue in virtually every sector. And some shifts are very important for long range strategic thinking.
I will flag a few key numbers from the exit poll results for 2014, 2016 and 2018:
African Americans remain the most progressive voting bloc in the country: 90% of African Americans and 92% of Black women voted Democratic this year, roughly the same as in 2014 and 2016.
Voters under age 44 shifted from GOP to Democrat by 8 percentage points from 2016. The biggest shift according to other evidence was in voters under 30.
The biggest shift was among Asian Americans, a point particularly important for us here in California: Asians shifted red to blue by 12 percentage points from 2016 and by 28 points from 2014.
Lower income voters shifted to the Democrats by significant margins while the GOP held steady among those earning more than $200,000 a year. Voters earning less than $30,000/year shifted by 10 points R to D from 2016 to 2018; voters between $30,000 and $50,000 shifted by 5 points and voters between $50,000 and $100,000 shifted by 6 points.
These last figures – the breakdown by income levels – is a sign that a politics which combines the fight against class exploitation with insistence on racial and gender justice has a future in this country if we do the necessary hard work.
Still, the Trump alignment held fast. Democratic turnout increased tremendously, but so did GOP turnout. It was a ‘base election’ – and both sides turned out their bases. Note that this is a big change from 2016. Then the GOP had a near monopoly on grassroots energy with the Tea Party grassroots mobilizations, while the corporate Democrats ran a lackluster campaign for Hilary. And though most progressive groups advocated a vote for her to defeat Trump, there was little enthusiasm and nothing like the voter engagement and mobilization efforts conducted this year.
POLARIZATION WILL GET SHARPER
So, the upshot is there was a reasonable sized blue wave. But not a tide that swept the Trumpists away or weakened their determination to pursue their agenda. Democratic control of the House puts some check on their capacity to push through legislation. And the gain in governorships means the threat of a reaction-driven Constitutional Convention is off the table for the near future, something that the GOP was aiming for if it could get trifectas (control of both legislative houses and the governorship) in 33 states. (They had 26). But Executive Branch power is huge in this country’s imperial state.
And polarization is likely to be even sharper in the next two years than it has been since 2016.
For one thing, in the make-up of elected bodies the polarization is sharper.
The GOP Senate and House delegations are both farther to the right and more tied to Trump. Dissidents to varying degrees – McCain, Flake, Corker – are gone. One-time critics like Graham have fallen into line. The Freedom Caucus in the House will have more power in the GOP Caucus. Everyone in the GOP added their voice to or fell in line behind the last few weeks escalated hate campaign: the demonization of the caravan, migrants in general and the attack on birthright citizenship; the despicable racist smears of Abrams and Gillum; the announced desire to rule that trans people do not exist; the use of conspiracy theories from the nakedly racist right.
And likewise, on the Democratic side, the House and Senate caucuses are farther left. Defeat of centrist Democrats like Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp and the wave of progressives who won in the House moves the center of gravity of Democratic elected officials at the federal level to the left.
And at the state level the chasm and polarization are now all but totally complete. Post-election there is only one state in the country where two Houses of state legislature are divided – Minnesota. It’s the first time in 104 years that’s been the case. Thirty state legislatures are totally GOP, 18 totally Democratic. Minnesota is split, Nebraska is the only state with just one legislative house and its members are technically non-partisan.
Trump’s remarks and actions after the election will further exacerbate polarization. After a nod to bipartisanship (which Nancy Pelosi did as well, sparking anger in the progressive wing) he then attacked the press and threatened his opponents. Trump fired Sessions and appointed a loyalist toady to be Attorney General in his place, which many see as the forerunner to a constitutional crisis over the Mueller probe. And above all, there is the Trumpists’ summation of the result: “Racism and voter suppression works!”
So, there will be no break in the Trump/anti-Trump confrontation.
SOCIAL JUSTICE WING VS. CORPORATE DEMOCRATS
I will turn for a minute to assessing the relative strength of the contending wings on the anti-Trump side, and the nature of relationship between them. It’s complicated.
There were many bitter battles in primaries that pitted corporate backed candidates against progressives. By and large, once the general election came around, both sides focused on beating the GOP in contests against GOP opponents. On the corporate or moderate side, there was nothing like what happened when George McGovern won the Democratic nomination vs. Nixon in 1972. Then big chunks of the party establishment sat it out or tacitly supported Nixon, including hawkish George Meany who was head of AFL-CIO. This time during the run-up to the general election there were some attacks on progressive candidates, the harshest ones from Zionists who hit hard at Ocasio-Cortez and others who support Palestinian rights. These attacks are signs of their near-panic at the fact that the combination of hard work at the grassroots by activists promoting BDS and Palestinian rights, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ever more obvious embrace of Trump and other right-wing nationalists around the globe whether they are Jew-haters or not, is having an impact on public opinion. There are leaps forward in pro-Palestinian sentiment especially among young people and in people of color communities. But the Zionist attacks did not gain generalized establishment momentum and did not lead any significant number of people to defect to the Trump camp.
And on the progressive side, while obviously there was less enthusiasm in social justice groups for campaigning for moderates than for candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Stacey Abrams or Andrew Gillum, in federal and most state races virtually every organization with a mass base threw down to beat the GOP whatever the character of the Democratic candidate. This was for two reasons. First, mass-based social justice groups saw the urgency of defeating the GOP to gain space for further work. As one activist put it, “corporate neoliberalism is horrible, but white nationalist authoritarian fascism is worse.” And second, they saw that working as part of the array of organizations and grassroots energy turning out against the GOP was the best way to build relationships, expand their base and gain strength for the next round. Those that threw down gained some ability to affect the votes of the Democratic candidate if she or he won and built greater capacity to support or field a better candidate next time around.
Still, even as the corporate and progressive wings hung together in races against Republlcans, there were contests characterized by nasty fights between the two wings. We saw some right here in the Bay Area in the Buffy Wicks vs. Jovanka Beckles contest for a State Assembly seat, and in Libby Schaaf’s bid to be re-elected Oakland mayor facing two African American women progressive challengers: Cat Brooks who has long been a stalwart of anti-racist policing battles in Oakland, and Pamela Price, who in the spring had challenged Alameda County’s longtime incumbent DA running on an “End the New Jim Crow” platform. In both these races, the muscle and money of the corporate Democrats, especially from the real estate industry, was mobilized against us. This too is going to be a feature of the next few year’s battles, especially in the “blue states.”
And those are going to be tough fights, as the defeats we suffered in the Beckles-Wicks and Schaaf-Brooks-Price campaigns here in what is considered a very progressive area indicate. The corporate/”centrist” Democrats should not be underestimated. They have money and experience, they are positioned, they have a base. They are not going to be dislodged easily, either from their dominance of the Democratic Party or in other spheres of political action and civil society much less the economy.
Still, the fresh energy and dynamism lies with progressive wing. Demographic trends are also headed in our direction (though gentrification, which we are fighting tooth and nail, is changing previous patterns of population distribution as Blacks and Latinos are being pushed out of urban centers while white professionals largely in the tech sector move in). The strength and sophistication of our organizations have grown by a lot in the last two years. There is widespread motion for groups to break out of silos. Organizations that previously played only the “inside game” are turning out for demonstrations and even civil disobedience, while groups that previously shunned electoral efforts have thrown themselves into electoral battles. And as I noted at the beginning, almost everyone in the social justice world has started to discuss the issue of power and how to get it in new ways. In the years before Bernie’s 2016 campaign, we had virtually nothing going at the national level. Now the social justice forces are a national player. We are much farther along than we were two years ago, but we have a long fight ahead.
THREE FINAL TAKEAWAYS
I will wrap up with these final takeaways.
1: The battle between the Trump and anti-Trump camps is going to be even fiercer in the next two years. It will take place over just about every political issue: There will be fierce fights over immigrant rights, health care, police abuse, reproductive rights. As climate change becomes more and more a matter of today rather than tomorrow the fight to label the fossil fuel companies the enemy of all humanity and make drastic changes in energy policies must move to the fore. The fight for peace and internationalism and against militarism – arguably the weakest component of the current resistance – must be strengthened. Revitalizing the labor movement is crucial. And more.
Trump is going to keep ginning up his supporters. We must be prepared to deal with violence coming from that quarter.
Battles over all these issues and more will have to be fought on the level of winning hearts and minds and shaping public opinion, in the electoral arena; in the streets; on the picket lines, and in the courts. 2020 is going to be even more important than 2018. We need to not only win but win big enough so that Trump cannot challenge the legitimacy of the results.
2: We will have to constantly grapple with and recalibrate a strategy that simultaneously builds the broadest possible front against Trumpism and steadily increases the strength of the social justice wing.
BUILD OUR OWN ORGANIZATIONS
3: To carry out #1 and #2 above, we need to build our own organizations and strengthen alignment and cooperation between them. This is crucial not just for 2020, but for a longer fight against the extreme racist right, and for emerging with clout if and when that specific enemy is pushed back to the margins. We must do our best to prevent the repeat of past times where, after the broad cross class coalition that was absolutely required to defeat the main enemy of their historical moment accomplished its task, that coalition broke apart and the ruling class component was able to push the progressives out of the game. We saw this when the combination of Klan terror and disenfranchisement of African Americans rolled back Reconstruction. We saw this when McCarthyism crushed the left which had emerged as a power via the mass struggles of the 1930s and anti-fascist campaigns of the 1940s.
Today we are experiencing the height of the backlash against the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s. We need the broadest possible front to defeat it. But we need to come out of that victory with the social justice forces, organized and maximally unified, holding enough power at the local, state and federal levels that we cannot be shoved back to the margins. Rather, we need to be strong enough to use that positioning as a platform to move toward more advanced stages of struggle against the system that undergirds all forms of exploitation and oppression.
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Yes We Did! – Flipping the House
By Peter Olney
This is the second of a planned 4 pieces on the recent mid-terms elections
I decided on the day after the Trump election in 2016 that it was all hands on deck for the mid-term in 2018. In some ways this election was our “Spain” a chance to deal blows to advancing right-wing authoritarianism before it consolidated its power. Just as the generation of the 30’s left their comforts, and risked death to fight Franco, we had to do some dramatic things to brake Trump. I told my friends in the Bay Area that it was time to stop hand wringing, hair splitting and latte sipping and get out and flip the House. Many responded. A high school friend of mine came all the way from Australia to work on the 10th in Modesto (which we flipped). This was the kind of exemplary sacrifice needed in this historical moment. I decided to spend September 10 to November 7 in Orange County (OC) working as a volunteer in the California Congressional 39th.
When I arrived for volunteer duty in Orange County, California two months ahead of the Congressional mid-term election, the candidate Gil Cisneros (D) asked me why I had come down 400 miles from San Francisco to join his effort. I told him that it was a choice between District 2 in Northern Maine or his Orange County race. Gil said he was sure that the lobster in Maine was better, but he assured me that the fish tacos in the OC were unbeatable. I choose the OC because it was an easy 25 mile commute from my mother-in-law’s house in El Monte and also because I knew that my comrade and co-author Rand Wilson would cover the Maine 2nd district from Somerville, MA.
Both races, the California 39th and the Maine 2nd have finally been decided. On Sunday, November 18 Young Kim finally conceded to Gil in the 39th. This came after a long process of counting late mail ballots and provisional ballots. Young conceded even though a few days earlier she had attended a new member orientation in Washington, DC and had her picture taken with the freshman incoming class. What hubris in the face of clear evidence that she would eventually lose!
In Maine Bruce Poliquin, the incumbent, had a plurality of votes on election day, but not a majority and therefore under Maine law the election went to Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) meaning that the 2nd and 3rd choices of voters for the two minor candidates would be counted. Jared Golden the Democrat won under RCV although Poliquin attempted unsuccessfully to get a judge to stop the ranked choice system and award him the election. The Maine Republican seat was the last red island in a sea of Congressional blue in New England. The 39th is one of four Orange County seats that were Republican held but in districts that Hilary won in 2016. All four of those seats have been flipped and the OC will be represented by six Democrats in the House.
Cisneros was a newbie to politics and to the District. His principal claim to fame prior to running a very disciplined and solid campaign was that he and his wife Jacki won the California lottery about ten years ago to the tune of $266 million. They set up an educational foundation to fund scholarships for Latino youth to go to college. Gil is a Navy veteran and was a Frito Lay manager before winning the lottery. In his first run for office he bested a field of 8 Democrats in the primary and entered the mid-term running against Young Kim, a Korean American raised and schooled in the district who was a long time aide to the 20 year incumbent, Ed Royce who stepped down. She also had served a term as a California Assemblywoman and was deeply embedded in the Asian Pacific community and particularly the Korean evangelical church.
When I arrived on the scene in early September, I found a very professional ground game, in fact the best political ground game I have ever worked with. Of course there was no lack of resources given the candidate’s personal wealth and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (D Triple C in campaign parlance) money coming in for a crucial race that could have potentially decided control of the House. I found immediate heroes and I told them so. One was Phil Janowicz, a Cal State Fullerton Chemistry professor who was one of the 8 Democratic candidates in the primary. He dropped out of the primary to make sure that a Democrat qualified for the final. There was a real danger that in California’s open primary system Democrats would split all the votes and leave the final field to two Republicans. Janowicz was a profile in courage and I will never forget him.
Then I met countless volunteers, many older white women from the district who were dedicated to flipping the seat. They had suffered for years under Republican rule and physical intimidation. They couldn’t put out Democratic lawn signs fearing retribution. Karen Lawson, another hero, was a stalwart activist from Yorba Linda, the birthplace of Richard Nixon. She told me the City Council had invited Sheriff Joe Arpaio to come to town to be honored for his “heroic” persecution of Latino immigrants in Maricopa County, Arizona. For these women, long time OC residents, the Cisneros campaign was a liberating vehicle and they poured their hearts into it.
My mother in law, Ramona Perez also played an important role in feeding and supporting the ground troops. On three occasions she made lasagna sized trays of cookies, oatmeal and raisin extraordinaire that were eaten by hundreds of volunteers. On one volunteer Thursday evening, mariachis serenaded her with thanks and played one of her favorite tunes, “Hace Un Año”.
The campaign was very persistent and thorough. I was getting texts and calls from staffers who were sitting in another office separated from mine reminding me to participate in events that I was responsible for organizing. My wife received calls in SF from a volunteer who happened to be sitting next to me. She explained that while she couldn’t be on the doors next weekend, she had loaned her husband to the campaign. I jokingly told several male phone volunteers to “Stop calling my wife!”
One feature of the door-to-door work that I had not witnessed before is ballot collection. California law allows campaign volunteers to pick up filled out sealed ballots from voters and deliver them to the polls. I couldn’t imagine handing off my ballot to a stranger at the door, but our volunteers were quite successful in doing just that, a good ground game in California focuses on that tactic, and it often provides the winning margin.
In the end can money, outside volunteers and a very well oiled machine counter indigenous base, organization and name recognition?
Our campaign was headquartered in the City of Brea California with a population of 50,000. The town was supposedly founded by a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The town also achieved a certain amount of fame in 1924 when Babe Ruth at the behest of his friend and fellow Hall of Famer, Walter Johnson (an OC native), appeared at a benefit barnstorming baseball game in the Brea Bowl, a natural canyon with a baseball field. I had a connection to Brea because my wife’s ex husband was once the City manager there so he turned us on to Rusty Kennedy and Anita Varela, local volunteers who were fabulous. They worked the doors and hosted a volunteer at their home.
Now to the difficult questions of demographics and base. The district population is basically a third Latino, a third Caucasian and a third Asian Pacific. As is the case in many California districts the Latino community punches way below their percent of the population when it comes to Election Day. In California while Latinos account for 39% of the population and whites 38%, the Caucasian vote is still 61% statewide. In the 39th in the previous election of 2016 only about 15% of the vote was Latino despite the population being more than double that as a percent of the whole. Cisneros triumphed easily in the part of the district that was in LA County, which was more heavily Latino. The campaign relied on extensive paid staff, upwards of 50 canvassers and phone bankers, largely Latino young people from local colleges and of great talent and discipline. Then there were the volunteers. It was inspiring to see volunteers from all over California including many from my home city of San Francisco. Tom Yankowski and Trinidad Madrigal rolled in from SF’s Noe Valley, over the hill from our house in the Sunset district. They brought inspiring energy and round the clock commitment. There were the usual Congressional staffers released from duty in DC and using their vacation time to work the campaign.
On the last Sunday before the election I did check-in for the volunteers. I counted 408 volunteers registering out of our field dispatch hall in Buena Park, California. Of those 408, only 108 had area codes from the OC. Our volunteer corps were heavily from outside the District. I wonder if the same was true for Kim given her deep and long standing ties and visibility in the District? In the end can money, outside volunteers and a very well oiled machine counter indigenous base, organization and name recognition? Election results say that it did! One would hope going forward that we can combine both. That will be the challenge for the left in keeping Congress people true to the professed ideals that got them elected and moving moderates to embrace winning issues like “Medicare for All”, as hopefully Gil Cisneros will.
I am sure many of these same dynamics played out in D-2 in northern Maine and across the country. This mid-term was as my friend Lou Siegel said “a parliamentary election” After the dust settled on the primaries we were working for Democrats who were not always pure on the issues in order to capture a majority in the House as a brake on Trump.
This was a united front effort. It is odd when Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, two Democrats from SF show up at a rally in the OC and charm the crowd with their speechifying. We in SF know them up close and have a more critical measured opinion of their stands.
I was reminded of this dynamic when I returned to SF this week and immediately walked a picket line with Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) in front of the Palace Hotel, owned by the Marriot, a billion dollar international corporation. We of course all celebrated the fact that J.B. Pritzker an heir to the Hyatt fortune, won the governorship of Illinois taking it away from a right-wing Republican named Bruce Rauner who pushed the toxic anti-union Janus challenge that prevailed in the Supreme Court in June. This is the same Pritzker family that owns a giant hotel chain, which has also clashed with the HERE.
For this election it was important to adopt a laser like focus on winning the Congressional mid-terms.
The period ahead will require us to be nimble preserving the united front on one level against Trump, but clashing with our “friends and allies” in other contexts and all the while advancing a posture and program that supports communities of color and working people and their organizations. This contradiction immediately came to the fore after the mid terms when a fight developed over whether Pelosi should be re-elected Speaker. Many friends argued that in opposing Pelosi we were validating right-wing talk radio, and that she is a shrewd and tactful political leader. That she is, but she has already disappointed in her conciliatory remarks towards a toxic President who played the race card to try and keep the House and the Senate by attacking the Central American caravan and immigrants in general. She also parrots Republican talking points on “Medicare for All” in questioning how we are going to pay for it rather than embracing the principle and fighting for it and taxing the rich to pay for it. For me she is the embodiment of what is wrong with the Democrats, timid corporate liberalism. Whether a viable alternative to Pelosi emerges or not we will have a tumultuous period ahead of us in which we will find ourselves often allied in one arena with political forces who we contend with in others. For this election it was important to adopt a laser like focus on winning the Congressional mid-terms. As a veteran organizer I have learned that we are most effective when we focus our message and our task. Many “Faux” strategists offer us: “But we must remember in the long run, …” In this moment to win it was important to focus laser like on the single task. With winning comes a brake on Trump and new momentum and possibilities for the left.
Looking ahead, I hope everyone is getting ready for 2020 when we will fight like hell for a progressive Presidential nominee in the primaries, but whatever the result we will deploy to take the White House for a (D). I already have my plane reservations for Cincinnati, Ohio. Come join me.
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The Election Within the Election
By Kurt Stand
The mid-term elections have resulted in gains for those leading the resistance to Trump. An unprecedented 67 members of Democratic Socialists of America were elected to municipal and state legislative offices, while two — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from the Bronx, and Rashida Tlaib from Detroit — were elected to Congress. In addition to Tlaib (of Palestinian heritage), another Muslim woman, Ilhan Omar, was elected to Congress, representing Minneapolis. A refugee from Somalia, Omar was one of 68 candidates to win office endorsed by Our Revolution, the progressive organization that emerged out of Bernie Sanders campaign. The Working Families Party played a leading role in the victorious Congressional campaigns by Jahana Hayes from Connecticut and Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts; the first two black women ever to represent New England, and Deb Haaland of New Mexico, who will become one of the first Native American women, to serve in the House of Representatives. The WFP claimed victory too in defeating anti-union governors in Wisconsin and Michigan. Common to all left/progressive campaigns is that, although running as Democrats, they funded their work through small donor (rather than big business) contributions and based on grassroots, volunteer activists (rather than high-paid consultants). Significantly, this was the approach taken by the AFL-CIO. More than 700 union members were elected to office in opposition to Republican Party candidates and pro-corporate Democratic Party policies.
These results were part of a broader wave of support for Democrats as a repudiation of Donald Trump. Yet that repudiation did not go far enough; Trump’s appeals to racism and authoritarianism also registered success. Most Republican candidates for office ran campaigns based on undisguised appeals to fear and hatred, depicting migrants fleeing violence and poverty as themselves violent, disease bearing-menaces that threatened US stability and security. Voter suppression efforts – especially in Georgia and Florida — used tactics developed and refined in the South by those who preferred to see black Americans dead than vote. That suppression aimed not only at keeping blacks from the polls, but equally to encourage whites to vote to prevent “them” from taking over. Although millions reject such appeals, millions fall prey to it; Republican gains in the US Senate attest to that reality. The US public – working people throughout the country – are deeply divided. Every action by the right-wing now in power aims to deepen that divide.
“…Thus the challenge facing DSA and other newly elected progressives is to build unity with …”
The Democratic Party is itself divided. Neo-liberal Democrats are pursuing a strategy resting on the assumption that Trump will defeat himself; that his illegal financial actions and unconstitutional measures will eventually discredit him or force him to resign. They want a return to the stability that existed before the 2007-8 financial crisis. Such Democrats propose only those ameliorative economic measures that do not challenge pro-big business public policy. Unity with mainstream Democrats is needed to preserve threatened civil liberties and to counteract the climate of hate that has already resulted in right-wing violence but such unity cannot be based on acceptance of the limitations of Democratic Party leadership; if that path is pursued, the ultra-right will retain their support and power.
Unity, in other words, cannot turn into acquiescence to a corporate agenda. Instead, a program of redistributive economics – taxing the wealthy, guaranteeing jobs, union rights and higher pay, providing universal health and retirement insurance, making quality public education available to all, ending the housing crisis, implementing programs to overcome discrimination are necessary. Only by firmly linking democracy and civil liberties to concrete programs of social and economic justice can working-class unity be built. This possibility is reflected in the outcome of numerous referendum votes – in several states and municipalities voters approved expansion of Medicaid, approved increases in the minimum wage, ended a racist system of jury decision making in Louisiana (long a center of Ku Klux Klan power). And in Florida, more than 60% of voters approved a law that ends the disenfranchisement of people who have been in prison – restoring the vote to 1.4 million people. In every one of those referendum, many who voted for social justice also voted for Republican candidates who opposed those measures.
Thus the challenge facing DSA and other newly elected progressives is to build unity with mainstream Democrats (and even willing Republicans) to defend civil liberties while also organizing popular unity against corporate power, whether promoted by Democrats or Republicans. Unity at either level means an uncompromising stance for reproductive justice (referendum votes in two states approved anti-abortion measures), for full legal rights for immigrants and for an end to police violence against blacks. Finally, it means principled opposition to US military and global corporate expansion. In that respect, Ocasio-Cortez’s outspoken denunciation of the devastating impact of colonization on Puerto Rico and Rashida Tlaib’s uncompromising advocacy of Palestinian rights, are positive signs.
Trump’s response to the election has been repression and lies. In a country in which poverty and insecurity are growing, that can only be countered by maintaining the connection between democratic rights and economic justice. The next two years will determine how well the left inside and outside of government builds that linkage.
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Is it possible to have Expedition Cruises?
By Robert Gumpert
It’s Sunday morning, the 11th of November, and in San Francisco the sky is as it has been for the last few days: gray and smelling of smoke. Late news last night was 23 have died in the Camp Fire north of Sacramento, where San Francisco’s smoke-filled air originates.
In the south, Martin Sheen and his wife apparently slept on the beach as parts of the Malibu colony of stars either burned or threatened to burn. Reports are two have died here.
Once again California is going up in flames. The President, who canceled a short walk through a WW1 graveyard of fallen soldiers because of a drizzling rain, tweeted that the fires in California are a product of gross mismanagement and his government won’t be sending any help until management of the resources changes. In the meantime he and Rick Scott are claiming fraud in an election not yet decided, in an election time where the real fraud is voter suppression committed by the party in power. When you come right down to it, the Republican’s are sort of Maoist in that they keep saying there needs to be a revolution against the government they are totally in charge of.
However none of this is what brought me to the computer this morning in my somewhat oxygen-starved brain. It is “T” magazine-Sunday at the New York Times, and time to see what “things” await me if somehow I can figure out how to make a lot of money. Mind you “T” is paired this week with the “New York Times Magazine” whose cover story is “How Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism”. Right there on the kitchen table is America: Racism, Money, and Power.
“T” magazine’s readership is extremely well-heeled, hence the number and type of ads. An early one caught my eye, “Where Luxury Roams Freely”. It’s for “Crystal Yacht Expedition Cruises” with a photo of the gleaming white “all-suite, all-butler, all-inclusive luxury expedition ship” motoring through some remote Arctic, or perhaps Antarctic sea.
So here I am in SF. My state is covered in flames and smoke; firefighters and prisoners are battling the flames to try and save what they can during a drought brought on by mismanagement. The mismanagement of corporations and their representatives in government, and I’m wondering just what the hell is a luxury expedition?
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Of Two Minds
By Sarah Shourd
The term “bridging divides” bothers me. Can meaningful dialogue exist between people that are deeply divided? It often feels pretty unrealistic, especially when real conditions in the world are the basis for that division. For example, why would an African-American be interested in “bridging” with a White Supremacist? How can we expect words alone to shift such deeply entrenched and systematic oppression? What’s the point of that?
We can’t, of course. But there’s also very good reason to try and learn from people in geographic, social and identity groups different from our own. Global warming, for example, gun violence, or the future of artificial intelligence, those are good reasons. None of these problems can be addressed with out a lot more people in this country and this world getting on the same page about them.
As a host interested in exploring the nature of difference, this was an obstacle for me
I recently put out a podcast, Of Two Minds, that puts two people in conversation that are deeply divided. The object is to understand the nature of their difference. Is it ideological? Cultural? Do people with opposing views want irreconcilably different worlds or do they just have different ideas about how to get there? I’d love to share a little about what I learned along the way.
It’s not easy to work against the way we’re been wired: socially, experimentally and even neurologically. A lot of our beliefs were formed out of loyalty, to win approval from our friends and family. Or even survival. We individuate as we get farther from our origins, but most of us never veer too far. Yes, we are also rational beings, but we tend to reinforce the beliefs we were given through the books we read and culture we partake in. Often our experiences in life more deeply entrench the emotional core of our belief systems.
In an attempt to challenge this on Of Two Minds, I asked my guests to listen to each other’s back-stories before putting them in conversation. They listened to stories about how the other guest felt as a child, what their parents were like, the first time they fell in love, and times in their lives they felt desperate or scared.
After hearing these intimate details, I often found my guests disarmed. Then, when I put them in conversation, I found they wanted to minimize their differences and focus on what they had in common. These were people who disagrees about whether global warming was real, whether police violence was motivated by racism and now they wanted to talk about what it was like to run in the forest as a child, be parents or cook gumbo. In most cases, they began to like each other.
As a host interested in exploring the nature of difference, this was an obstacle for me. Two people I’d brought together on the basis of their difference were now reluctant to disagree. They didn’t want to come across as rude and judgmental. They just wanted to have a nice chat.
Getting to know a person’s inner life is a little like falling in love, right? All we see at first is what we like, what we have in common, what we can empathize with. And sometimes that euphoria of connection temporarily blinds us.
These, days the legacy of that history feels all too real.
This was exasperated by the fact that most of my guests also came into the conversation with a lot of anxiety and distrust – so much, in fact, that they were sometimes reluctant to go through with the conversation at all. The anxiety, I believe, stems from the deep distrust: a distrust of politics, a distrust of one another and a distrust of journalism.
The distrust of journalists as a group is deeply troubling. On one hand I understand it, a lot of unethical and bad journalism has come out of the Internet age. On the other hand, a lot of powerful people, like our President, want the public to distrust journalists because they don’t want the horrible and unethical things they do to come back to them. They don’t want you to know the stories that aren’t being told because it’s often them that are to blame.
Powerful people in American history have successfully kept America divided along social, political, class, racial and geographic lines since its inception. In the 17th century poor whites and freed slaves were systematically pitted against each other to prevent them from joining forces against plantation owners. These, days the legacy of that history feels all too real.
We live in a huge, astoundingly diverse country. In order to have empathy for our fellow citizens, we have to spend a lot of time trying to understand what their lives are like, why they believe what they do and what makes sense in their context. Someone in San Francisco may never have the chance to meet someone from rural Louisiana or Kansas or DC in person. Yet, we think we can convince them we know what’s best for them in regards to healthcare or global warming, without understanding the context for their beliefs.
What doing these interviews really brought home for me — again and again — is that I was reminded that people navigate the world in their own context, not mine. And every context is different, sometimes in pretty significant ways.
One great thing I found was that when our guests got past their anxiety and dove in, they often came out of the conversation feeling better. Most of them enjoyed the opportunity for an honest conversation with someone with a different point of view.
There are differences that matter and differences that don’t matter. The fact that we both like strawberries, or feel compelled to sit on a bench every time we pass by one, might not be basis enough for us to fall in love, or fight for a clean planet together, but it might open the door just enough to see if that’s even possible.
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Two old salts say get a job at Amazon!
By Rand Wilson and Peter Olney
Amazon plays a key role in the twenty-first-century economy and has shown it’s vulnerable to pressure. Socialists should get jobs there and organize.
Raised up by resistance to the war in Vietnam and the battle for civil rights in the 1960s and seventies, we were part of a generation of young Americans who realized that the industrial working class was the force capable of making major political change in the U.S. This was certainly a stretch for many of us who had grown up in the comfortable suburban middle class with little contact or experience with workers. However, our involvement in social movements exposed us to Marxist concepts of class analysis and the role of class conflict in historical change. The organization of workers is central to that theory and to our own history of social and economic progress.
For thousands of like-minded radicals like us, it was farewell to professional careers and off to the factory.
At that time in greater Boston, it was relatively easy to get a job at one of the three Generals, the giant Fore River Shipyard in Quincy owned by General Dynamics; General Motors in Framingham; and General Electric in Lynn. (Today only General Electric remains — a small shell of its former self.) All three of the Generals employed dozens of idealistic lefties committed to a broad vision of radical change.
There we learned the hard lessons of the challenges of building on-the-job unity and working-class organizing, plus lifelong lessons in humility and respect for the mind-numbing tedium of work and the joys and rewards of successful organizing. Forty years later that was “once upon a time” when revolution was “in the air.”
Fortunately, Bernie Sanders’s candidacy and the resistance to Trump has inspired a new generation of organizers and activists. While much of the resistance has taken the form of street demonstrations and electoral political action, many of these new organizers are grappling with the same thorny questions of how to build working-class power to change the economy and the country.
Naturally, some of that activism focuses on the same macro forces that drive our economy. Young organizers are again looking at big industries and giant companies where a collective effort might affect significant change. While manufacturing and the strategic industries of the past are still important, we see the logistics supply chain as a place where an organized and invigorated working class could exercise power. And the inspiring teachers strikes in West Virginia and elsewhere are harbingers of the kind of mass activity necessary to rock the system in the post-Janus, Trump years.
We urge young organizers inspired by Sanders, the pushback to Trump, and the teachers’ strike wave to look at targeting an employer that plays a strategic role in the economy, symbolizes the melding of technology and high-powered logistics, and has shown it is vulnerable to organized pressure. That company is Amazon.
Amazon in the retail vanguard
Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods and its decision to site a second headquarters in another major city have further raised its profile in the business and popular media.[1]
While Barnes and Noble is closing its bookstores, Amazon is actually opening bricks and mortar bookstores. The company currently has 14 Amazon Books stores open nationwide with three more on the way.[2]
Amazon is now piloting clerkless stores that could become a model for the future of retail.[3] Customers will only need to swipe their credit cards at merchandise and walk out with their goods without interacting with a single human being. Amazon has already used delivery drivers with drones for making deliveries in select markets.[4] Amazon has announced a patent for an employees’ bracelet enabling it to monitor employees’ work at all times.[5]
Amazon’s advanced use of robots in warehouses is already displacing living, breathing human workers.[6] And its management of professional and technical staff (“If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot.”) is setting new precedents for white-collar oppression.[7],[8]
Does Amazon’s disruption of existing distribution systems and retail sales models add up to a company where workers can even dream of organizing to improve their wages and working conditions? One good sign is the company’s recent announcement that it would raise wages for employees to $15 an hour. The pay raise came about as a result of public pressure — led by Bernie Sanders — and a tight labor market going into its peak season. But at the same time it raised wages, Amazon cut other benefits and stock options.
Unilateral actions like this are a shop floor organizer’s dream. Suddenly, there is widespread and open discussion about wages and working conditions. In the hands of a politically conscious organizer, those conversations inevitably lead to a conversation about our collective power and unions.
Could a movement in this environment emerge to demand — and win — collective bargaining? Emphatically yes. And the stirrings at Amazon are worldwide: workers in Italy, Germany, Poland and Spain are uniting for better conditions, while organizers in the U.S. are looking at the giant online distribution network as a strategic imperative for labor’s future.[9] We believe that Amazon’s high public profile and just-in-time delivery model are factors that — if combined with a well thought out strategy — could empower workers to succeed.[10]
The challenge
Amazon is the third-largest retailer in the world (after Wal-Mart and CVS) and is now the largest online retailer edging out Alibaba, the Chinese online distributor.[11] Until very recently Amazon relied solely on online sales, but with its acquisition of Whole Foods, its business model is changing.[12] Amazon operates worldwide with distribution/fulfillment centers in over 18 countries. There are 351,000 employees worldwide and 280,000 in the U.S. alone.[13]
Distribution centers operate in the 25 major metropolitan areas of the United States.[14] Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is now the owner of the Washington Post with vast financial resources and an increasing role in national politics.[15]
Union strategists and organizers have been both inspired and chastened by recent organizing drives at Wal-Mart and ongoing Fight for $15 campaign. While an organizing campaign at Amazon is a daunting prospect, the labor movement was built at key moments by thinking big and acting boldly.
For example, thousands of garment workers were organized in New York City in the “Rising of the Ten Thousand” in 1909.[16] William Z. Foster’s strategic vision inspired organizers to plan and execute a brilliant strike at Big Steel in 1919.[17] While unsuccessful, the lessons and experience from this effort inspired future organizers who would eventually crack the industry 15 years later.[18] And of course, the iconic sit-down strikes in the 30s were conducted by organizers who understood the vulnerabilities in the production chain of giant auto companies like General Motors.[19]
Only twenty-one years ago, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters struck the premiere symbol of on-time deliveries: United Parcel Service. Once UPS’s inter-city “feeder” drivers stopped hauling between the company’s hubs and its package cars stopped deliveries, the strike’s impact was immediate.
Mere hours after the strike began, packages piled up and clogged the sorting belts at its distribution centers paralyzing the workflow. The Teamsters success in framing the walkout as a battle against part time and precarious work was a shining example of workers rising up to challenge one of the largest corporations in America.[20]
Get a Job! Get Rooted!
Looking back on our years of organizing experience,[21] we’d like to encourage young organizers to examine the potential for organizing and rebellion at Amazon.
All major organizing initiatives in modern U.S. labor history have benefited from politically conscious cadres who went to work in industries targeted for organizing. This practice has many names: industrializing, colonizing, rooting or the term we prefer, “salting.” It can be done for a lifetime or for short-term intelligence gathering and committee building.[22]
Success in organizing workers at a corporate giant like Amazon will only come if organizers, strategically placed and coordinated, can agitate and motivate their coworkers from a position of comradeship in the workplace.[23]
The opportunity and the place
Building a workers’ movement within Amazon would reshape the national narrative about labor and unions. However, there won’t be any quick or easy victories. Success will be intermittent and slow. All the aforementioned examples — successes like UPS and instructive failures like the 1919 steel strike — required long term approaches, dedicated cadres of organizers and strategic research.
Workers should approach organizing at Amazon with no less than a five- or ten-year plan. It is incumbent on the new generation of inspired organizers to get in on the ground floor, get jobs at Amazon and be part of fashioning the strategy and tactics that can lead to the creation of a new worker organization.
Amazon facilities are everywhere and there are already salts working together in key metro areas. Being part of an organizing network and connecting your work to a larger international effort is an exciting project. While Amazon is in or near every major city, some key strategic locations include Chicago, Dallas/Houston, Los Angeles, the NY/NJ area and Seattle.
If you are ready to commit to this kind of organizing, then email either of the authors (Peter Olney at olneyrom@gmail.com or Rand Wilson at rand.wilson@gmail.com) and we will help you to establish contacts and think through your placement at an Amazon facility.
While the authors have worked as union staffers for many years, it was our early experience as organizing salts and rank-and-file union members that inspired and informed our work as organizers for the duration of our careers. The rank-and-file experience teaches patience, humility, and respect.
Without knowing firsthand the drudgery of work, the humiliation of having to obey a supervisor’s commands, and the reality of the strengths and weaknesses of shop floor organization, any organizer will be at a serious disadvantage. Should someone undertake salting at Amazon, you will not only be part of shaping a strategy and winning the union; the experience will teach you valuable lessons on what it means to be a working class organizer. Just as importantly, it informs a lifetime of good strategic thinking and sensitivity to workers’ struggles, from the warehouse on up. So, get in touch, and let’s do it.
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Notes:
[1] “Amazon Chooses 20 Finalists for Second Headquarters”
[2] Amazon store listed by state
[3] “Amazon officially opens autonomous ‘Go’ grocery store in Seattle”
[4] “In Major Step for Drone Delivery, Amazon Flies Package to Customer in England”
[5] “If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know. (And Amazon Has a Patent for It.)”
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/technology/amazon-robots-workers.html
[8] For more on Amazon’s abusive labor practices, read “Amazon Is a 21st-Century Digital Chain Gang”
[9] See “There’s Never Been A Better Time To Unionize Amazon” and “A Union at Amazon?” by Marvin Harvey in Notes from Below
[10] “Dear Amazon Workers: Unionize!”
[11] “The World’s Largest Retailers 2017: Amazon & Alibaba Are Closing In On Wal-Mart”
[12] “Remember when Amazon only sold books?”
[13] “Amazon to add 100,000 full-time U.S. jobs in next 18 months, growing domestic workforce 55 percent”
[14] “Amazon’s Newest Ambition: Competing Directly With UPS and FedEx” (Paywall)
[15] “The politics of Jeff Bezos”
[16] “Uprising of 20,000 (1909)”
[17] “The great steel strike and its lessons”
[20] “United Parcel Service strike of 1997,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Parcel_Service_strike_of_1997
[21] For more information about the authors, read about Rand Wilson here; Peter Olney here.
[22] Salting is the most descriptive term with two equally valid explanations. One is that the “Salt” is aggravating and exacerbating the open wounds and sores of capitalism. The other explanation is that a “Salt” brings out the rich ores in an industrial mine.
[23] For two good articles on salting, see Carey Dall and Jonathan Cohen. “Salting the Earth: Organizing for the Long Haul.” New Labor Forum, no. 10, 2002, pp. 36–41. JSTOR, and Steve Early, “Organizing for the Long Haul: Salting to the Rescue?”. And a book on salting, Michael Bussel, From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class
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This piece originally ran in Jacobin on 4 October 2018 under the title “Socialists Can Seize the Moment at Amazon”