Defeat Trump and Fight Racism the Struggle for Democracy Continues

Defeat Trump and Fight Racism The Struggle for Democracy Continues

Dialogue & Initiative 2019-2020

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Dialogue & Initiative 2019-2020 Edition

Defeat Trump and Fight Racism: the Struggle for Democracy Continues

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Table of Contents

Part One: Elections and Building an anti-Trump Movement

It’s Showtime: Rolling Up Our Sleeves to Beat Trump. By Paul Krehbiel. Page 1.

Moving Left and Challenging Trumpism in 2020. By Harry Targ, Page 8.

Western Pennsylvania: Organizing against Trump in Trumpland. By Janet Tucker, Page 21.

Bernie: Torpedoed by the Corporate Class and Media, but Wins the Battle of Ideas. By Paul Krehbiel, page 27.

The Progressive Majority and the Struggle against Trumpism. By Mark Solomon, page 40.

The U.S. ‘Six Party System’ 4.0: Revising the Hypothesis Again. By Carl Davidson, page 45.

Part Two: Racism and Ethno-nationalism

Interview: Angela Davis Supports Uprising for Black Lives, De- mands an End to Racist Capitalism. With Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Page 59.

Report from National Alliance Against Racist And Political Repression Conference: Angela Davis, Young Activists Reignite the Intergeneration- al Fight For Black Lives By Lee Edwards, Page 72.

Book Review: Frank Chapman’s ‘The Damned Don’t Cry.’ By Alex Krehbiel. Page 77. iv Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Public Health, Covid 19, And Racism. By Mildred Williamson. Page 86.

The History of Policing in the United States: An Excerpt. By Dr. Gary Potter. Page 91.

The Roots of Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist Resistance In The U.S.: On the Predecessors to Antifa. By Robin D.G. Kelley. Page 97.

The Danger of the ‘Ethno-Nationalist’ State. By Bill Fletcher Jr. Page 106.

Online Gathering Remembers the Life and Legacy of Jack O’Dell. By Karl Kramer, Page 108.

Jack O’Dell: A Beacon of Social Justice Unionism and the Civil Rights Movement: A Long Correspondence with Jack O’Dell. By James E. Campbell. Page 116.

Poetry: Henry Winston’s Laugh . By Rafael Pizarro, Page 125. Dialogue & Initiative v

Introduction: Defeat Trumpism, Protect Black Lives, End Covid 19 Pandemic

When we started planning for the 2020 Dialogue and Initiative, we began to assemble articles on the elections, class, race, imperialism, socialism, and reviews of progressive books. As the months unfolded, it became clear that top priorities for the left and progressives included the upcoming elections, the struggle against racism, and the rising Covid-19 pandemic. Consequently, the editors decided to publish now the articles relating to these current imperatives. The other articles assembled on labor, imperialism, socialism, and other subjects will be issued later.

The first article below, by Paul Krehbiel, lays out the key tasks for progressives to undertake between now and the election to defeat Trumpism and lay the ground for winning social justice struggles. It refers to all the progressive groups who are already in the field and the need for us to join them and do more. The threat of fascism, if Trump wins reelection, is real. The consequences for workers, women, people of color, the environment, and the prospects for war over diplomacy, are clear. The article has a suggested agenda, particularly phone-banking voters in battleground states - where the election will be won or lost, to get the vote out. It was initially published by Organizing Upgrade, an on-line left unity project. It can be linked to there and distributed widely.

Some argue that while the threat of a Trump second term is enough to justify mobilizing the electorate, the second article below, written before the primary season, argues that many, perhaps most, people support progressive policies: on healthcare, on jobs, on social security, on a living wage, and peace. In addition, the article argues that voter demographics are changing with more young and diverse possible voters. Also, the article points out that over the last thirty years, there has been a general decline in trust in government. vi Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Putting all this together, part of our get out the vote efforts should include emphasizing the importance of the policies we support, their importance for younger voters, voters of color, and women, and the recognition that many of us want the same progressive policies. And, while a lack of trust in government has had a material base, positive changes cannot be achieved unless we all participate in the elections and continue to advocate afterward for what we support.

As the Krehbiel article points out, a Trump victory will lead the country in a brutal contrary direction. Finally, we should remind people that the pandemic and the pain and suffering it has caused has made clear that United States policies must change, literally to save humanity.

The other articles develop further the electoral arena and the struggle against racism. Dialogue & Initiative 1 PART ONE: Elections and Building an Anti-Trump Movement

It’s Showtime: Rolling Up Our Sleeves to Beat Trump

By Paul Krehbiel

We are in an unprecedented moment in our country’s history. Will we move toward a more rightwing authoritar- ian fascist state, or will we defeat this threat? What we do between now and November 3 will answer that question.

Miles Taylor, former Republican chief of staff of Homeland Security under Trump, described a meeting with a Trump staffer who told him,

“Just wait until the second term. It will be no holds barred. It will be shock and awe. We will do whatever we want.” We got a taste of that with Trump’s encouragement of killer cops, armed vigilantes, and his Republican Convention’s hate-and-lie fest.

Phone Voters In Battleground States

Our strategy debates will continue. But we must have a laser-like focus on getting down to nitty-gritty work on five key tasks to defeat Trump and all Trumpists, and the armed neo-nazi white supremacists that he’s empowered:

•Generate the highest number of votes against Trump so that his defeat is so overwhelming that any attempt to contest the election will fail. This requires large-scale targeted contact with voters, especially in battleground states, to turn out votes for Biden-Harris. Keep pressure on Biden and Harris, but this is about defeating Trump. 2 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Phone banking in California 2020

•Combine this work by targeting vulnerable Republican Senators to end GOP control of the Senate. If we don’t, nothing good will pass.

•Turn out the vote for progressives and socialists running for office, especially workers, women, people of color, and youth.

•Intensify preparations underway to protect the outcome of the election by flooding the streets to show that the country will not stand for an election stolen by Trump, GOP-controlled state legislatures, courts, armed federal forces, or rightwing vigilantes acting as Trump’s personal Gestapo.

•Continue to strengthen the mass grassroots movements that prepare us for battle after Trump. We must ensure that Biden-Harris, from day one, make the right appointments, set the correct agenda, and open the doors to the people’s voices.

Contacting Voters, One-By-One

The road to winning votes for Biden-Harris is direct voter contact. COVID-19 nixes door-knocking, so we must phonebank, text, and send postcards. Dialogue & Initiative 3

Many groups are organizing phone banking to voters, especially in battleground states. That is where the presidential election will be won or lost. Many unions, the Poor People’s Campaign, Generation Rising, Seed the Vote, Water for Grassroots, state-based organizations like Pennsylvania Stands Up, LUCHA (Arizona), and New Florida Majority, and other efforts such as Flip the West, Heartland Rising, and Swing Left, have programs underway. So does Biden’s campaign and Democratic Party organizations in every state. Activists can call from any state to voters in battleground states.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has launched an ambitious Black Voices Change Lives campaign to phonebank Black voters in 12 battleground states – Ala- bama, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

I decided to test the voter-calling program of the Biden campaign. I had some initial difficulty getting started, but once I got into the program and followed the prompts, it went more smoothly. The Biden campaign offers phone-banking training.

The Biden-Harris campaign has identified six battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wis- consin. Other battleground states will likely be added as November approaches. The phone banking format has been changed slightly but begin by going to joebiden.com, and then on the first page at the top to “Continue to Joebiden.com,” then “Action Center,” and “Make Phone Calls for Joe.”

Calling into Pennsylvania

I live in California, but all my calls have been to voters in battleground states. I began calling on Monday, August 3, and spent one hour a day, five days a week. For those two weeks, I made 192 calls to voters in Pennsylvania in nine one-hour shifts. I averaged slightly over 21 calls each shift. Many voters didn’t answer, but I left a voice mail message from the script to vote for Biden (and Harris when she was added) and “other Democrats up and down the ticket in Pennsyl- vania” for 133 other voters. I spoke directly to 25 voters. All 25 said they would vote for Biden. Twelve volunteered.

Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes in 2016. If we had 500 co- workers, friends, and allies call Pennsylvania voters one hour a day for five days a week, from my first day until election day, we would 4 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism have talked to or left a message with 79,000 voters. If we persuaded just over half of those voters to vote for Biden-Harris, who may not have voted otherwise, that could make the difference in defeating Trump in Pennsylvania and depriving him of Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes. That could mean Trump’s losing the Elec- toral College and the election. Many other anti-Trump and pro-Biden people are calling voters in battleground states too, so Biden’s “yes” votes will be multiplied in all of them.

The Biden campaign changed to a broader universe of voters, so the responses are more varied, from supportive, to indifferent, and even some who are negative. But this allows us to weed out the negative and “No” voters so the campaign can concentrate on consolidating “Yes” voters and getting their commitment to vote.

Flip The Senate

We can and must defeat Trump decisively. But without flipping the Senate, nothing good will get passed into law. Arizona is a battleground state in the presidential election and a target to end GOP control of the Senate. Trump won Arizona by 91,234 votes in 2016. Current polls show Biden beating Trump by three percentage points there, though polls change. A high number of calls to Arizona can help shift Arizona’s 11 Electoral Votes to Biden-Harris, and help Sen- ate candidate Democrat Mark Kelly knock out the Republican incumbent, Martha McSally. Polls currently show Kelly with a 4% lead.

Colorado is another battleground state, not yet designated by the Biden campaign, but it is a swing state where another U.S. Senate seat is contested. By the end of July, Biden was ahead of Trump 54% to 40% in Colorado. Those polls are tightening. Massive phone calls to voters in Colorado could push Biden-Harris over the top and deliver Colorado’s nine Electoral College votes to Biden. It is also possible to flip Colorado’s Senate seat. Democratic Senate challenger John Hickenlooper is ahead of incumbent Republican Senator Cory Gardner by 48%-42% as I write this. Polls can change or be inaccurate, so massive get-out-the-vote calling must be done daily until Novem- ber 3, not only in Arizona and Colorado but in all the battleground states.

Democrats need 3-4 Senate pick-ups in order to gain control of the Senate. This would make Congress more open to grassroots organizing and pressure by our people’s movements to introduce and pass crucial progressive legislation. Dialogue & Initiative 5

Besides the Senate, expanding Democratic control of the House – and electing more Representatives who will join the Squad in pushing radical programs and inspiring grassroots activism – is a key task. Ending GOP control of as many state legislatures and governorships as possible is a priority, especially with 2021 being a redistricting year. Progressives and socialists will be contending for other offices at the local and state level, and the more that win, the stronger the left will be in both the short and long run.

Fight Voter Suppression, Protect The Results

Voter suppression has been with us since the founding of our country, by denying the right to vote to Blacks, women, ex-offenders, and others. The GOP has mastered new techniques of voter suppression, detailed expertly by Professor Carol Anderson in her book, “One Person, No Vote.” The latest and most far-reaching act of voter suppression is Trump’s effort to destroy the U.S. Postal Service and disenfranchise many millions of voters who want to vote by mail, especially with the COVID-19 health threat.

If tampering with mail ballots doesn’t work, Trump is laying the groundwork to steal the election through other forms of voter ma- nipulation and suppression tactics, racist fear-mongering, and physical force.

Tim Wirth, former Senator from Colorado, outlined a likely scenario in a July 3 Newsweek article. Wirth suggests that if Trump loses the election, he will declare that there was massive voter fraud in states that Biden won, corrupt mail ballots, and Chinese “interference” – all without a shred of evidence. After manufacturing a hysterical atmo- sphere and ginning up his supporters, Trump would declare a national emergency and invoke presidential emergency powers. The December 1 deadline for states to designate electors to the Electoral College would pass without a resolution of the alleged vote “dispute,” which would then go to the House of Representatives. But presidential election disputes are not decided by counting one vote for every Congressperson, but by giving each state one vote based on its party majority. Since 26 states have a Republican majority, and 24 states have a Democratic majority, the Republican majority states can “out- vote” the Democratic majority states and declare Trump the winner.

If this scenario doesn’t work, Retired U.S. Army Colonial Lawrence Wilkerson speculates that Trump may be planning to stay in office by force, posing the question, what if Trump calls his armed rightwing 6 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism vigilantes into the streets? Wilkerson says there could be bloodshed. If Trump gets support from federal armed forces and combines them with his vigilantes, that could pose a very serious threat to peace, democracy, and our country – resulting in a fascist coup. One good piece of news is that active-duty military troops favor Biden over Trump by 49.9% to 37.8% in a poll by Military Times in late July-early August of 2020, and Biden’s lead is increasing. But if Biden’s military supporters are passive, and Trump’s military supporters act, all bets are off. The best defense is to destroy Trump at the polls and mobilize mass resistance.

Both left, and mainstream organizations have begun to prepare for any “steal the election” scenario. See the Protect the Results campaign and “What If Trump Won’t Leave?” by Frances Fox Piven and Deepak Bhargava. Let’s learn their lessons.

Build Unity, Strengthen Social Justice Movements

Successfully removing Trump from the White House will be a big victory. It will energize the people’s movements. While working for this triumph, we need to do all of the tasks discussed here in a way that strengthens grassroots social movements and builds stronger infrastructure and unity on the left.

Formations like the recently organized United Against Trump alignment, which brings together Center for Popular Democracy Action, People’s Action, Mijente, Black Voters Matter, and a number of other groups, should be strengthened. Forging new progressive alliances, as well as building greater unity among those groups and individuals whose long-range goal is socialism, should be high on our agenda as well.

Professor George Lakey described how the Norwegian people stopped a home-grown fascist movement from seizing power in Norway in the 1930s. He wrote, “Progressive movements of farmers and workers, joined by middle-class allies, launched nonviolent direct action campaigns that made the country increasingly ungovernable by the economic elite.”

Today in the U.S., the Black-led multi-racial uprising sparked by the police murder of George Floyd is leading the way. Workers’ strikes, tenants’ strikes, boycotts, and other acts of resistance and non- cooperation must be encouraged, organized, and supported. We must work hard, including calling millions of voters in battleground Dialogue & Initiative 7 states daily until November 3, to deliver a crushing electoral defeat to Trump and all the Trumpists – so massive that it will be impos- sible for Trump and his supporters to force their will on the American people. That is our task. Defeat the Trumpists, and we can build a better tomorrow.

Paul Krehbiel is a life-long trade union, anti-racist, and socialist activist. He is the coordinator of Los Angeles Labor for Bernie, a member of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for De- mocracy and Socialism. 8 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Challenging Trumpism and Moving to the Left in 2020

By Harry Targ

This essay came from a presentation that was given at the June, 2019 meeting of the Global Studies Association. It was based, as indicated below, on a variety of data sources which collectively led to the conclusion that there is a progressive majority in the United States. The article has been slightly updated to account for more recent events, particularly the withdrawal of Senator Bernie Sand- ers from the presidential race.

The author still believes that the conclusion is correct and that, given demographic changes, younger generations, people of color, women, and a “new working class” of gig workers and precariat will constitute growing proportions of the voting population.

Since 2019, the political landscape has changed. Leaving aside the spring 2020 coronavirus crisis, which makes any predictions prob- lematic, the progressive presidential candidates suffered major defeat.

Senator Warren was forced to drop out of the Democratic Party race for party nomination as a result of poor showings in key primaries and Senator Sanders, as of April, 2020, was trailing centrist candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden by about 300 delegates. On April 8, 2020 he suspended his campaign.

Is there still a progressive majority among the voting population in the country or is the data or analysis incorrect? Or if the core conclusions of the argument below remain true, why have the progressives performed so poorly in the Democratic primaries? Dialogue & Initiative 9

The author thinks the core data remains sound but the centrist Dem- ocrats, the rightwing and white supremacist supporters of President Trump, the corporate media, and finance capital have done all they could to undermine a proposed progressive political agenda.

At the national, state and local levels, many of the demographic groups who would support a progressive agenda are denied a vote, via the use of various techniques designed to limit voter participa- tion. For example Wisconsin Republicans in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic refused to allow postponement of the April 7, 2020 elections for state and local offices and the presidential primaries. Wisconsin residents, especially the sixty percent of the Milwaukee population who are African Americans who would be more likely to vote Democrat, had to risk their lives by voting.

And finally, many of those potential progressive voters, experienc- ing lives of harsh economic inequality, the prospect of a destructive future, and increasing racism and misogyny, have been discouraged and not voted. In short, candidates and social movements with a progressive agenda, at the national, state, and local levels, must struggle all the harder to make their vision of a better future come to pass. Citing Senator Bernie Sanders:

“It is not just the ideological debate that our progressive movement is winning. We are winning the generational debate,” Sanders said. “While Joe Biden continues to do very well with older Americans, especially those people over 65, our campaign continues to win the vast majority of the votes of younger people. … Today, I say to the Demo- cratic establishment, in order to win in the future, you need to win the voters who represent the future of our country, and you must speak to the issues of concern to them.” (Democracy Now, March 12, 2020).

Since Sanders made that speech he has withdrawn from the presidential race. But to defeat Donald Trump in November, 2020, progressives must pressure the presumptive Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden to “win the votes of younger people…and speak to the issues of concern to them.”

Demographics: Who Are the Inside/Outside Activists?

On April 11, 2019, the Pew Research Center posted a document called “6 Demographic Trends Shaping the U.S. and the World in 2019.” These trends could be the basis for thinking about a new politics for the 21st century. 10 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

First, the Center pointed out that so-called Millenials (ages 23 to 38) will outnumber Baby Boomers (ages 55 to 73) in 2019. Millenials are more educated, diverse, slower to marry than prior generations at the same age. While the younger generation are earning more than those at comparable ages in earlier generations, they have less wealth. In part, this is because they are saddled with more student debt than their elders.

Second, the next cohort, Generation Z (ages 7 to 22) are expanding with the projection that nearly half the Zers will be racial or ethnic minorities. By 2020 13.3 percent of the population are projected to be Latinx, Blacks 12.5 percent, and whites declining from 76.4 percent in 2000 to 66.7 percent in 2020.

Third, there is an increase in the percentage of parents who are not married and the percent of children living with unmarried parents has doubled from 13 percent in 1968 to 32 percent in 2017. “Stay- at-home” parents constitute only 18 percent. Majorities of Americans see radical changes in families in the years ahead: less marriage and less children. Twentieth century sociologists used to regard the traditional nuclear family as the anchor of societal stability, the transfer of norms, the unit of consumption, and source of personal discipline. Fourth, the immigrant percentage of the total population has increased modestly over the last one hundred years, the numbers of “unauthorized” immigrants in the U.S. has declined.

Finally, the Pew Research Center confirms that while incomes are rising, inequality has grown as well. What they call the middle class has declined. And about 56 percent of Americans recognize that being white is being advantageous (compared with Blacks and Latinx) in terms of economic advancement.

An Emerging Progressive Public

Peter Dreier, Professor of Politics, Occidental College, reported on polling data in 2017 (see the Appendix for a summary of the polling data) confirming that majorities of Americans are liberal or progressive on most issues relating to the economy, the distribution of wealth and income, money in politics, taxes, minimum wage and workers’ rights, health care, education, climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and gender issues. (see Peter Dreier, “Most Ameri- cans Are Liberal, Even If They Don’t Know It,” The American Prospect, November 10, 2017). Dialogue & Initiative 11

Data for Progress, a progressive data-analyzing organization issued a report commissioned by Justice Democrats in April, 2018 called “The Future of the Party: A Progressive Vision for a Populist Demo- cratic Party.” http://www.futureoftheparty.com Data for Progress seeks to employ sophisticated social science techniques to gather information that might be of use to activist groups. They reported that Democratic primary voters want a tax on millionaires, increased regulation of banks, a government guaranteed program of health care, and policies to reduce economic inequality. Polling data suggests a shift toward more opposition to racial discrimination and support for immigrant rights.

Perhaps the most important findings for the future were that nonvoters preferred Clinton over Trump by a nine-point margin in 2016 and tapping a broader population of citizens “nonvoters and marginal voters are more supportive of progressive policies” than not. The report concluded that based upon a variety of responses that Democratic Party candidates “…are not representing the progressivism of their constituents.”

Using the Rahm Emanuel strategy of appealing to centrists in prior elections, the report concluded that, even if it was a good strategy in 2006 to achieve Congressional victory, it was inappropriate for 2018 and beyond. For the base of the Democratic Party and those who are a part of the base but are less likely to vote, pursuing a progressive policy agenda is the only recipe for victory over Trumpism. And by implication, pursuing the centrism trope may be a recipe for disaster on 2020.

Finally, a Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reported that the idea of a Green New Deal has bipartisan support among the public. A sample survey indicated that 81 percent of registered voters either “strongly support” or “somewhat support “Green New Deal policy proposals. Researchers asked respondents to indicate their support or opposition to various policy components of the Green New Deal, including shifting from fossil fuels to green energy and a jobs agenda to train and reemploy workers.

Most respondents had not heard of the GND and consequently had not heard that this was a key component of left/progressive Demo- cratic politicians. In other words, disconnected from the toxicity and partisanship most registered voters, on their merits, saw the policies as worthy of support. And 82 percent of respondents indicated that 12 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism they had heard “nothing at all” about the Green New Deal. https:// climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/the-green-new-deal- has-strong-bipartisan-support.

Anti-Trumpism: Black Lives Matter, the Women’s Movement, and the Emergence of Democratic Socialism

The rift within the Democratic Party was on full display at the Califor- nia Democratic Party Convention on May 19 (2017) in Sacramento, California. Progressives from the Bernie Sanders movement joined members of National Nurses United to protest the Democratic Party establishment’s refusal to support (a) single payer health care system, and came just 60 votes short out of 3,000 cast to elect a Bernie Sanders supporter as the next state chair of the California Demo- cratic Party . Rather than follow through with Democratic rhetoric that health care is a human right, corporate and many establishment Democrats have responded to voters by scolding and attacking them. (Michael Sainato, “Tom Perez Bombs Speech, California Dem Chair Tells Protesters ‘Shut the F* Up’” Observer, May 20, 2017).

Since its inauguration, The Trump administration has been embroiled in a series of crises, with new ones emerging on almost a daily basis. The president is bombastic, ill-informed, and narcissistic. In response to his critics he engages in dangerous and unconventional efforts to transform the dominant narrative about his incompetence. He authorized ruthless bombings in Syria and Afghanistan and threatened war against North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela. In a 2017 diplomatic trip to the Middle East and Europe, he reached a deal to sell $110 billion in weaponry to a Saudi Arabian regime which supports terrorism throughout the Middle East and a devastating bombing campaign against Yemen. And at home he appointed cabinet members and advisors with long histories of white supremacy and anti-Semitism (almost in defiance of accepted minimal qualifications for public office). In 2019 his remaining foreign policy advisors, Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State and John Bolton, National Security Advisor – Bolton has since left, represent the most extreme elements of the neocon- servative war faction of the two main political parties.

Trump’s core constituency all along has been sectors of finance capital, insurance, real estate, the military/industrial complex, and drug companies whose profits have come from domestic investments or sales and speculation overseas. It also includes portions of small and medium sized businesses whose viabilities have been threatened, Dialogue & Initiative 13 not by big government, but by the further monopoli- zation of the economy.

In addition, some workers displaced by the underside of neoliberalism, including capital flight, automation, and trade, have supported Trump because they saw no positive economic future in a Clinton presidency. Finally, the Trump constituency includes a sizeable percentage of voters who are ideological legatees of white supremacy.

Therefore, the Trump coalition consists of fractions of capital who will gain from a more muscular and economically nationalist policy agenda, marginalized portions of the so-called “middle class,” sectors of the working class, and portions of all of these whose political learning has centered on the history and consciousness of white supremacy (“make America great again”).

Trump’s major adversaries come from a core sector of the ruling class that has dominated the policy process at least since the 1980s, the neoliberal globalists. In response to the loss of profits of the 1970s, the capitalist elites began to promote a dramatic shift in the character of the economy in the direction of “neoliberalism.” Drawing upon an economic ideology with a long history from Adam Smith, to Milton Friedman, to mainstream neoclassi- cal economists of the late twentieth century, every administration from Carter to Trump has engaged in deregulation of economic life, reducing government programs that help the poor and working classes, reducing the rights of unions, and privatizing virtually all public institutions. They “went global,” that is developing a network of economic ties via trade agreements, the globalization of production, and integrating corporate boards. Capitalist elites from every continent began to develop common approaches to national policy via such informal organizations as the Trilateral 14 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Commission, meetings of the G7 countries, and the annual World Economic forum.

Debt poor countries were the first to be forced to embrace neoliberal policies, followed by the former Socialist Bloc countries, then the Western European social democracies, and finally the United States. A significant portion of this qualitative change in the way capitalism works has involved increased financial speculation (as a proportion of the total gross domestic product), dramatic increases in global inequality in wealth and income, and increasing economic marginalization of workers, particularly women, people of color and immigrants. Candidate Donald Trump orchestrated a campaign against the neoliberal globalists who dominated the political process in the United States since the 1980s. While he epitomized finance capital, albeit domestic as well as foreign, and represents the less than one percent who rule the world, he presented himself as a spokesperson of the economically marginalized. He attacked the capitalist class of which he is a member. In addition, he blamed the marginalization of the vast majority on some of their own; people of color, women, and immigrants.

Resistance Grows

Since the November 2016 election masses of people have been mobilizing in a variety of ways against the threatened agenda of the newly elected president. The women’s marches and rallies of January 21, 2017, and International Women’s Day on March 8 were historic in size and global reach. There have been huge mobilizations to reduce the use of fossil fuels and prevent climate disaster, to support immigrant rights, and to provide basic health care. Many of these mani- festations of outrage and fear have occurred as planned events but also there have been numerous spontaneous acts at Congressional town hall meetings and even in airports challenging Trump directives to refuse people entry into the United States, well prior to Covid 19.

A multiplicity of groups have formed or increased in size since Janu- ary, 2017: Bernie Sanders supporters; anti-racists campaigns; those calling for sanctuary cities and defending the human rights of immigrants; progressive Democratic organizations; and women’s mobilizations. Traditional left organizations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America, benefiting from the Sanders campaign and Trump’s election, increasing it’s membership by ten times. And organizations such as The American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood have reported large increases in financial contributions. Dialogue & Initiative 15

The mobilization of millions of people has bolstered the spirits of progressives everywhere. They feel that at this point in history a new progressivism is about to be born. But the story is made complicated by the nature of the opposition to Trumpism.

Oppositions to Trumpism: Neoliberal and Progressive

Paradoxically, while this is a teachable moment as well as a movement building moment, progressive forces are struggling to be better organized. In and around the Democratic Party there is a conflict over the vision and the politics it ought to embrace at this time and in the coming period. The Sanders supporters, inside and outside the Democratic Party, have marshalled much support for a progressive agenda: single-payer health care, a green jobs agenda, protecting the environment, tax reform, building not destroying immigrant rights, defending women’s rights, and cutting military spending. With the brutal policies advocated and already instituted by the Trump administration, progressive democrats and their allies on the left are struggling mightily to articulate a program and create some organi- zational unity to challenge Trumpism.

However, on almost a daily basis stories have appeared in the mainstream media about Trump’s incompetence and irrational and ill-informed statements. Most importantly, allegations of the connection between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian spying, have dominated the news.

As a result, the neoliberal globalist Democrats, activists in the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and leaders of the Democratic Par- ty, have consciously embraced the Trump/Russia connection as the real reason why their candidate lost the election. By implication, they deny that there was anything perceived negatively about mainstream Democratic Party policies on trade, health care, mass incarceration, bank regulation, jobs and wages, and other neoliberal approaches to policy in the years when Democrats were in the White House. Clearly, Hillary Clinton was identified with this neoliberal agenda. But understanding the election outcome through the lens of Russiagate is a recipe for disaster.

The dilemma for progressives is that opposition to Trumpism and all it stands for has been and must be a key component of reignit- ing a progressive majority. But if it does not expose and address the fundamental failures of the neoliberal agenda and it’s harsh attacks on the working-class, including challenging neoliberal globalization, 16 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism the current stage of capitalism, Trump’s grassroots support will continue. Working people who ordinarily would vote for more liberal candidates for public office need to believe that future candidates are prepared to address the issues, often economic, that concern them.

Therefore, the fundamental project for progressives today includes mobilizing against Trumpism while articulating an alternative political and economic analysis of the current state of capitalist development. In concrete terms, this approach means challenging the legitimacy of the Trump administration and its allies in Congress while articulating the perspective that corporate Democrats, the neoliberal globalists, are part of the problem, not the solution. This alternative analysis requires a bold challenge inside the electoral arena and in the streets that calls for radical reforms: single-payer health care; cutting the military-budget; creating government programs to put people to work on living wage jobs in infrastructure, social services, and public education; addressing climate change; and fiscal and regulatory policies that reduce the grotesque inequality of wealth and income which has increased since the 1980s.

The tasks are challenging but another world is possible.

A Postscript:

So far the data indicates that there is a base of solid support for a whole range of progressive policies and an additional subset of the population who might be inclined to support a progressive agenda. However, the Pew Research Center recently reported that “trust in government” is at an all-time low (17 percent) https://www.people- press.org/2019/04/11/public-trust-in-government-1958-2019/ One can assume that those with distrust in government are less likely to vote. Therefore, since the potential base for building a progressive majority is great, there is a need to articulate and campaign around an agenda that can appeal to the disenchanted. Therefore political mobilization should first concentrate on mobilizing its activist progressive base and then mobilize the “uncommitted” who as some of the data suggests would embrace progressivism. The final, and perhaps least plausible, population to engage would be those who oppose a progressive agenda.

Reflecting upon the globalization and perniciousness of neoliberal globalization, its transformation of the political economy of the Unit- ed States and the global political economy, the increased marginalization of all who work, rising global inequality in wealth and income, Dialogue & Initiative 17 the particular impacts of this system on people of color, women, and other socially marginalized groups, the progressive project of the near-term future is clear, both for working inside and outside the Democratic Party. Boldly, convincingly, and with passion and respect, we must articulate a progressive agenda.

Appendix: Peter Dreier’s Data

The Economy • 82 percent of Americans think wealthy people have too much power and influence in Washington. • 69 percent think large businesses have too much power and influence in Washington. • 59 percent—and 72 percent of likely voters—think Wall Street has too much power and influence in Washington. • 78 percent of likely voters support stronger rules and enforcement on the financial industry. • 65 percent of Americans think our economic system “unfairly favors powerful interests.” • 59 percent of Americans—and 43 percent of Republicans— think corporations make “too much profit.” Inequality • 82 percent of Americans think economic inequality is a “very big” (48 percent) or “moderately big” (34 percent) problem. Even 69 percent of Republicans share this view. • 66 percent of Americans think money and wealth should be distributed more evenly. • 72 percent of Americans say it is “extremely” or “very” important, and 23 percent say it is “somewhat important,” to reduce poverty. • 59 percent of registered voters—and 51 percent of Repub- licans—favor raising the maximum amount that low-wage workers can make and still be eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, from $14,820 to $18,000.

Money in Politics • 96 percent of Americans—including 96 percent of Republi- cans—believe money in politics is to blame for the dysfunction of the U.S. political system. • 84 percent of Americans—including 80 percent of Republi- cans—believe money has too much influence in politics. • 78 percent of Americans say we need sweeping new laws to reduce the influence of money in politics. • 73 percent of registered voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. 18 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Taxes • 80 percent of Americans think some corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes. • 78 percent think some wealthy people don’t pay their fair share of taxes. • 76 percent believe the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes. • 60 percent of registered voters believe corporations pay too little in taxes. • 87 percent of Americans say it is critical to preserve Social Security, even if it means increasing Social Security taxes paid by wealthy Americans. • 67 percent of Americans support lifting the cap to require higher-income workers to pay Social Security taxes on all of their wages.

Minimum Wage • 66 percent of Americans favor raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. • 59 percent favor raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour. • 48 percent support raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour. (A survey of registered voters found that 54 percent favored a $15 minimum wage.) • 63 percent of registered voters think the minimum wage should be adjusted each year by the rate of inflation. Workers’ Rights • 61 percent of Americans—including 42 percent of Republi- cans—approve of labor unions. • 74 percent of registered voters—including 71 percent of Re- publicans—support requiring employers to offer paid parental and medical leave. • 78 percent of likely voters favor establishing a national fund that offers all workers 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. Health Care • 60 percent of Americans believe “it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage.” • 60 percent of registered voters favor “expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American.” • 58 percent of the public favors replacing Obamacare with “a federally funded healthcare program providing insurance for all Americans.” • 64 percent of registered voters favor their state accepting the Obamacare plan for expanding Medicaid in their state. Dialogue & Initiative 19

Education • 63 percent of registered voters—including 47 percent of Re- publicans—of Americans favor making four-year public colleges and universities tuition-free. • 59 percent of Americans favor free early-childhood education. Climate Change and the Environment • 76 percent of voters are “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about climate change. • 68 percent of voters think it is possible to protect the environment and protect jobs. • 72 percent of voters think it is a “bad idea” to cut funding for scientific research on the environment and climate change. • 59 percent of voters say more needs to be done to address climate change.

Gun Safety • 84 percent of Americans support requiring background checks for all gun buyers. • 77 percent of gun owners support requiring background checks for all gun buyers. Criminal Justice • 57 percent of Americans believe police officers generally treat blacks and other minorities differently than they treat whites. • 60 percent of Americans believe the recent killings of black men by police are part of a broader pattern of how police treat black Ameri- cans (compared with 39 percent who believe they are isolated incidents).

Immigration • 68 percent of Americans—including 48 percent of Repub- licans—believe the country’s openness to people from around the world “is essential to who we are as a nation.” Just 29 percent say that “if America is too open to people from all over the world, we risk losing our identity as a nation.” • 65 percent of Americans—including 42 percent of Republi- cans—say immigrants strengthen the country “because of their hard work and talents.” Just 26 percent say immigrants are a burden “because they take our jobs, housing and health care.” • 64 percent of Americans think an increasing number of people from different races, ethnic groups, and nationalities makes the country a better place to live. Only 5 percent say it makes the United States a worse place to live, and 29 percent say it makes no difference. • 76 percent of registered voters—including 69 percent of Re- publicans—support allowing undocumented immigrants brought to 20 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism the country as children (Dreamers) to stay in the country. 58 percent think Dreamers should be allowed to stay and become citizens if they meet certain requirements. Another 18 percent think they should be allowed to stay and become legal residents, but not citizens. Only 15 percent think they should be removed or deported from the country.

Abortion and Women’s Health • 58 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. • 68 percent of Americans—including 54 percent of Republi- cans—support the requirement for private health insurance plans to cover the full cost of birth control. Same-Sex Marriage • 62 percent of Americans—including 70 percent of indepen- dents and 40 percent of Republicans—support same-sex marriage. • 74 percent of millennials (born after 1981) support same-sex marriage.

Harry Targ is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Purdue Uni- versity. He is currently a co-chair of the Committees of Correspon- dence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). Dialogue & Initiative 21

Western Pennsylvania: Organizing Against Trump in Trumpland

By Janet Tucker

The 2016 election of Donald Trump had a profound effect on the American public and has influenced the 2020 elections in many and varied ways. Many thought 'it can't happen here'. His white supremacist and mi- sogynistic views and actions have moved people to get involved around the county starting with the Women's Marches right after the inauguration and actions at airports around his Muslim ban. This has continued with opposition to his policy of separating families and the concen- tration camps at our southern border as well as many other issues.

I live in a small town in rural western Pennsylvania--part of the rust belt. It is one of a number of rust belt towns up and down western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. I grew up here, moved away, and returned in 2016 about 6 months before this fateful election.

When I was growing up New Castle was a thriving steel mill town of about 50,000, with a strong union base and solidly Democratic. Now New Castle has a population of 21000 to 22000. With good union jobs gone, it is overall a town of low income workers and retirees. The surrounding county has a population of 80,000. It has a higher average income than the city but is still below the average of the state as a whole. On so many fronts this area has its challenges. In 2016 Trump won this area by a significant margin.

Building a front against Trumpism and the far right

Even in this conservative area the election impact was shocking. I did phone calling and knocking on doors with the local AFL-CIO prior to 22 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism the 2016 election. There were many difficult conversations and the livid anger about the hardship that many people suffered was apparent. Some from here went to DC to the women's march. In addition, there were local marches and rallies here bringing out impressive numbers against Trump’s election. People began to organize several groups, including Indivisible, to challenge Trump’s presidency.

In my county, Lawrence County Action was started by two retired school teachers which developed a strong and active base. Monthly meetings packed the large library room where we met. The group was largely women. While some had a history in progressive politics, many were active for the first time. Some were former Republicans. All were united in opposition to Trump and his policies.

Joining with Mercer County (the county to our north), Democratic women and Indivisible, we mobilized many actions to protest our Republican Congressman, Mike Kelly. both at his office in Sharon and his auto dealership in Butler. We protested around healthcare and once had as “die-in” in front of his office. We protested the detention of immigrants and separation of families. We rallied and marched in Mercer around gun violence along with high school students from the area. We protested in Grove City when Vice President Mike Pence came to deliver a commencement address. We had letter and post- card writing parties. We also joined with our friends in Beaver County to our south working on a variety of issues including impeachment.

During the 2018 midterm election we supported a progressive candidate running in the primary to oppose our republican congressman. He stood for Medicare for All and increasing the minimum wage, among other progressive platform points. Many hours were spent knocking on doors and calling. We talked to a lot of people. While he won in our county he lost in the district as a whole.

In leading up to the fall election we put countless hours working for the Democratic Party candidate. While the Republican won, the margin of victory was narrowing than the prior Congressional election. After working with the local Democratic Party closely through the election we were asked to become a committee of the local party. We in Lawrence County Action had a thorough discussion and decided to maintain ourselves as a independent organization.

During that same time we brought the Lawrence county League of Women Voters back to life. In coalition with the NAACP we spent many hours doing voter registration. While we registered a modest Dialogue & Initiative 23 number of new voters, it was discouraging to see how many young people declined to register. In addition, a number of older white men filled out voter registration cards to change their party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. But for the 2020 election we developed a bold plan of going door to door to do voter registration in specific neighborhoods, particularly ones which are low income and largely neighborhoods of color.

Now confronted with COVID19 and the economic downturn we are faced with very different conditions. We are under 'stay at home' orders and our April primary has been moved to June 2nd. Many of our plans have been put on hold. But we are still active. Now it is Zoom conferencing and phone banking. Pennsylvania just passed a law to allow mail-in ballots. We are phone-calling encouraging people to sign up for mail- in balloting and explaining how to do that.

Bernie supporters as the core

We had a solid but small core of Bernie supporters, myself included, but the overwhelming majority among us were not. Even some who were for Bernie in 2016 were not for him in this election.. Some cite his age but most, like what is being reported elsewhere, suggest that Bernie is winning in ideas but Biden was winning on “electability.” Some are leery of Bernie supporters who they believed did not vote in 2016. It's important to recognize that there is a large mass of the Democratic Party who are remaining very loyal to the political center, seeing that as the path forward to beating Trump even while supporting Bernie's policies. People are still reeling from the shock of the Trump victory in 2016.

But what is most important here his how Bernie's platform issues have taken hold: Medicare for all, increasing the minimum wage, supporting the Green New Deal, etc. This partly comes from the congressional candidate we supported in the 2018 primary as these were the core issues of his campaign. Also we also have had some educational programs. This past year Carl Davidson came up from Beaver county and did a program on the Green New Deal which was well received. We need to keep pushing and doing education around these policies!

Also important are the down ballot races. A progressive woman, a school teacher, from Erie is running against our Republican Con- gressman. She has had a number of on-line events trying to reach out to as many people as possible. We are strongly in support of her. 24 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Candidate forun in New Castle, PA

This will be an uphill fight. We can already see the voter suppression going on around with names being removed from voting rolls. In Ohio the League of Women Voters got the list of those purged from the voting roles and are contacting them to register. We are looking into doing the same here. In primaries held already we see the long lines a polling places, and read of other state policies which have been put in place to make it more difficult for people to register and vote. This is only a small part of what will come in November. With our 'stay at home' orders we are working with one hand tied behind our backs, because we know face to face contact is so important. But there are things we can do and we will do them the best we can.

Putting class, race, and gender front and center

Under this administration and with the election approaching, we see increasing racism, attacks on immigrants and on those of Asian de- Dialogue & Initiative 25 scent. Islamophobia has gotten more virulent. As we all practice social distancing (Those of us who are privileged enough to be able to do so), the Trump administration pushes forward with its white supremacist agenda. And we see women under attack more and more whether it be to take away the right for them to control their own bodies, pay equity, and being able to protect their families.

We have done some on these fronts but need to do more. New Castle is about 20% African American. Lawrence County is 3-4% black. We have worked with the NAACP on several projects including voter registration. We worked with others to publicize Black History Month events. We advertised, supported, and participated in MLK Day events. This past January New Castle held its first Women's March. In previous years it had been in neighboring counties. This was a first for our small town, We brought out 100 people in the middle of a snow storm. Through the League of Women Voters we were holding events around the 100 year anniversary of women's suffrage.

Race and COVID19

During this COVID19 crisis black, brown, and working-class people are being hit the hardest. They are either out of work and out of money or working in situations dangerous to their health. The same is true for the infection rate of this virus. It is hitting black and brown communities the hardest. Dr Fauci stated “We’ve known, literally forever, that diseases like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and asthma are disproportionately afflicting the minority populations, particularly the African Americans.” In Chicago the death rate among blacks is 72% while blacks are 40% of the population,

At this writing Pennsylvania has the 4th largest infection rate in the county according to John Hopkins. While I am at this time unable to find data for this part of the state there is no reason to think that it varies from this picture. In Philadelphia Ryan Briggs and Nina Feld- mam reported on WHYY PBS/NPR “The city’s recent demographic data echoed these figures, indicating that Black Philadelphians continue to contract the virus at a rate more than double that of white residents in a sampling of cases where racial identity was established.”

Opposing war and militarism

During the 2018 midterm election the local Indivisible group paid close attention to see that questions around US wars and foreign 26 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism policy were raised in candidate debates. Not much follow up has been done since then.

Trump has placed devastating sanctions on a number of countries and refuses to lift them during this pandemic. Instead he threatens war around the world from Venezuela to Iran. There is a need to do education and action around opposing wars, aggression and sanctions. And as the wealth gap increases the 1% makes even more in- vestment in weapons of war and destruction. More and more we also see that same militarism used here in the US.

Moving Forward, The November election and beyond

Even thought Bernie dropped out of the race his bold program is still out there and he is showing his leadership as no one else is doing, Under the COVID 19 disaster he has shown his policies are really what the country needs right now.. Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, are already well thought of among mainstream democrats. We all need to unite and move forward to defeat Donald Trump in No- vember.

Trump has been horrendous in dealing with the coronavirus crisis. And the inadequacies of capitalism have been laid bare. It seems that this alone would motivate people to vote this fall. But not being able at this point to do face to face organizing puts us at a disadvantage. At the same time Trump’s daily press conferences have also emboldened his supporters and his is rating has actually gone up. This means we need to work much harder with tools we do have.

Between now and November we will work to get as many people out to the polls as possible. Regardless of who wins in November it is important to keep our organizations together, sum up our experience and come out of this even stronger. That will be needed after November 3rd and through 2021. History doesn't end in November. Dialogue & Initiative 27

Bernie: Torpedoed by the Corporate Class and Media, But Wins the Battle of Ideas

By Paul Krehbiel

Senator Bernie Sanders, Ver- mont’s independent democratic socialist, stunned the political establishment by winning the popular vote in the first three Democratic Primary contests, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, in February 2020.

With these victories, election experts proclaimed Sanders the frontrunner. In Nevada, Bernie finished first with 46.8% of the vote, Biden was second with 20.2%, Pete Buttigieg was third with 14.35, Elizabeth Warren was fourth with 9.7%, Tom Steyer was fifth with 4.7%, and Amy Klobuchar was sixth with 4.2%. Some said that Bernie’s commanding 2-1 win in Nevada on February 22, over second place finisher Joe Biden, had created momentum that could carry him to the Democratic Party nomination for president.

Panic set in among the corporate elite. On February 29, Biden won the South Carolina primary handily with 48% of the vote. Sanders came in second with 20%, Steyer third at 11%, Buttigieg fourth at 8%, War- ren at 7%, and Klobuchar with 3%. The corporate donors and political handlers closed ranks behind Biden.

Just before the March 3 Super Tuesday, politically moderate corporate-funded contenders, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, dropped out and threw their support to former vice president, Biden, also a 28 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism moderate. Multi-billionaire candidate Mike Bloomberg quickly followed after super Tuesday, March 3, throwing his political support and potentially billions of dollars to Biden. Bloomberg had publicly stated that a major goal in running was to stop Bernie Sanders, whatever the cost. Bloomberg had spent an unbelievable $900 million – almost $1 billion, on his failed three-month long campaign.

Biden was expected to do well in South Carolina, but Super Tuesday was still up in the air. As results started coming from Super Tuesday, an up- set was in the making. Bernie won vote-rich California, as well as Colo- rado, Vermont, and Utah, but Biden won the rest: Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennes- see, Texas, and Virginia, and moved well ahead of Bernie in convention delegates. The political world was stunned again. What happened?

It is not the intention of this article to do a comprehensive analysis of what happened. We will do that as we collect and analyze more data. But I do want to point to several arenas that played an important role tipping the scales away from Bernie and toward Biden. One was the role of the mass media. Another had to do with the political consciousness of American voters after 40 years of the dominant ideology of neo-liberal austerity and budget cuts. A third area had to do with how the candidates conducted their campaigns. For Bernie, who had to overcome more hurdles than Biden and the other candidates, where his campaign organized a good grass-roots field operation focused on mass direct voter contact, especially by knocking on voter’s doors, Bernie did well and won. As Bernie put it, he won the ideological battle and the young generation, but not the electability battle. We need to understand why that happened.

In this article I will focus on the mass media. Not because it is necessarily the most important, factor, but it did play an important role. It helped frame the entire election campaign. Those of us on the left were not surprised that the corporate mass media worked hard to defeat Bernie. While counter measures were taken, the Bernie campaign and larger movement needed a more powerful counter-strategy to blunt the attacks by the media, and all opposition sources. We will look at this later in this issue of Dialogue & Initiative. Since the media wasn’t the only factor, it alone can’t take all the blame. But a brief look at how the mass media handled Bernie’s campaign helps give us part of the answer to Bernie’s downfall.

First, we must recognize that Bernie was treated differently by the media than the other candidates. Every candidate was criticized by Dialogue & Initiative 29 the mass media, and they all criticized each other, especially during the national televised election debates. But the attacks on Bernie were of a different magnitude. One commentator went so far as to suggest that Bernie’s socialism could lead him to conduct mass ex- ecutions in the public square if he were elected president. No other candidate faced such vicious, inflammatory, spurious, and frighten- ing charges, not even Trump during his own hate-mongering 2016 election campaign or first term as president.

Bernie: Greatest Threat to Corporate Power

Bernie was targeted, above all the others, because his program and track record, and his alone, would lead to a shift in wealth and power from the corporate class to the people. His program would be a cor- rective, and then some, to four decades of corporate-directed cuts or inaction on life-sustaining programs to stop rampaging poverty by doubling the minimum wage, providing millions of good union jobs and doubling union membership, providing free college, guarantee- ing Medicare for All, stopping the climate crisis, and much more. Bernie, and only Bernie, put forward the most progressive agenda, one that it would change the direction of our country.

It was Bernie’s program, his 40-year track record, and the huge and growing nation-wide progressive grassroots movement he inspired, that changed and continues to change the political atmo- sphere and agenda in our country. That is what sent chills down the spines of more than a handful of corporate elite. That’s why Bernie had to be stopped. The corporate cry went out: anyone but Bernie.

Here's an overview of how the mass media played an important role in the Stop Bernie movement. We’ll focus more narrowly on the liberal mass media, because of its appeal to especially millions of young, liberal and progressive voters – Bernie’s base. Weaken that base, even a little, and Bernie will lose. Here’s the strategy: First, create enough doubt that voters believe there is a “risk” of something bad happening if they vote for Bernie Sanders. Then, promote an “elect- able” progressive sounding candidate (that is really more moderate and amenable to capital), and do it under the umbrella of a progressive news platform. If the liberal leftwing media is saying we can’t risk voting for Bernie, maybe they’re right, many voters told themselves. This won’t move the solid Bernie supporters. They will stay with him through thick and thin. But it could peel away enough of the softer Bernie supporters to bring him down. 30 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Chris Matthews of MSNBC Take MSNBC. MSNBC is seen by many as the most liberal, even leftwing, national television station in the country, listened to and trust- ed by millions of progressive and left-leaning Democratic voters from coast to coast. MSNBC seemed like it should be a natural supporter Bernie Sanders, many viewers hoped. It has strong progressive bona fides. MSNBC has strongly opposed Trump since before his election, and blasts him every day as one of the worst presidents ever. It reports on a host of important issues, exposing corruption, greed and waste. It takes the people’s side in fights with entrenched power. It reported favorably on some of Bernie’s ideas, like raising the minimum wage, an issue that most of the other moderate candidates also adopted. Balanced and fair, right? Not quite.

More Media Bias

In August and September 2019, as the election campaign was well underway, media watchdogs reported that Bernie Sanders received the least frequent coverage from MSNBC, and the most negative coverage, of the three top Democratic contenders.

On election coverage, Biden was discussed 64% of the time, Warren 43% and Bernie 36%. Of the 240 episodes examined, Bernie had the highest negative comments made about him, 20.7%, to just 11.3% negatives about Biden, and 7% for Warren. (“MSNBC’s Bernie Black- out,” Fairness and Accuracy in the Media, reported in In These Times, December 2019.) This anti-Bernie bias held throughout the campaign. It wasn’t new. It had its origins in the 2016 campaign. Dialogue & Initiative 31

One of MSNBC’s popular bright stars is Rachel Maddow. In 2016, she had Hillary Clinton on repeatedly and gave her a platform to present her campaign proposals. When she had Bernie on her show in that 2016 election cycle, she attacked him with Republican talking points: ‘you’re too radical for the American people.’ This continued throughout 2016. That planted the anti-Bernie seed. Repetition of the same messages and behaviors over time has an impact on viewers.

Another, related task, was to shore up the mainstream of the Demo- cratic Party after Hilary’s embarrassing loss to Trump in 2016. For over two years since the 2016 debacle, Maddow hammered home Hillary’s point that her loss was because of Russian election interference. Russian interference is a valid point for discussion and critique, as are all shady electioneering tactics from any source. But Maddow’s laser-like focus on Russian interference, as the primary or even sole reason for Hilary’s defeat, was misleading. Other factors were involved but were ignored.

The Russia focus diverted public attention away from weaknesses in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign (like failing to campaign in rust-belt swing states that she lost), and her mostly status quo program. MC- NBC’s goal was to assure voters that Hilary’s program was and still is compatible with the Democratic National Committee’s version of regulated free-market capitalism, and that that program is still sound and winnable among voters. Combine that with the fact that Hilary and a number of Democratic Party leaders, repeatedly and publicly, blamed Bernie and his “radical” ideas, and the normal give-and-take criticisms of some of her programs, for her loss. Conveniently ignored by MSNBC and the rest of the media was Bernie’s tireless cam- paigning for Hillary from the moment she got the nomination to election day in November 2016. The stage was now set for 2020.

In 2019 Maddow continued on this track. She regularly gave a platform to a select number of progressive-sounding but more moderate Democratic candidates, except Bernie. Many adopted significant parts of Bernie’s program and presented them as if they were their own, recognizing that his ideas had broad popular support across much of the country. Yet, with the exception of Elizabeth Warren, most candidates were moderate Democrats, based on their voting record and behavior on any number of important issues. Being on MSNBC and Rachael Maddow’s was an open door to millions of liberal and progressive Democratic voters. In the run-up to the 2020 election cycle, in March 2018, The Rachel Maddow Show was the highest rated cable news show, averaging 3.058 million viewers that month, 32 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism besting Sean Hannity’s program at Fox News at 3 million. Fox generally led in viewership, so this was an important achievement for MSNBC.

Moderates and the ‘Electability’ Dilemma

One of Maddow’s earliest and most frequent guests for the 2020 election cycle was Amy Klobuchar, Democratic Senator from Minne- sota. Klobuchar was invited onto Rachel Maddow’s show before she announced she was a presidential candidate, and was prodded by Maddow on-air to run. Klobuchar came back on February 5, 2019, and announced she was running. Rachel was ecstatic. Klobuchar returned six days later to Rachel’s show, on February 11, 2019, and talked about her campaign and program. She became a regular guest on MSNBC. Even after months on the campaign trial Klobuchar rarely rose above 5% in polling. But she was often introduced as a “frontrunner,” by Maddow in an effort to give her a boost. This open cam- paigning for Klobuchar was disgraceful, in the eyes of many viewers. Some of us joked that Maddow had become Klobuchar’s chief of communications. Klobuchar got many hours of free TV face-time, as did other moderate Democrats, especially after Klobuchar seemed stuck well down in the Democratic pack. But there was no such face- time for Bernie. He was mostly ignored.

Yet, Bernie Sanders was running in double digits in polling, second only to Biden in much of this early going, and was raising more money from more individual donors than the other candidates, and not taking a penny in corporate cash. He was attracting huge crowds at his rallies and a groundswell of grassroots support, way beyond what support other candidates were receiving. It wasn’t until July 10, 2019 that Bernie was invited on Rachel’s show, and it was only one of his very few appearances on MSNBC.

Despite this increasingly obvious bias, MSNBC, and the other media, made an effort to appear even-handed. MSNBC hosts would often show polling numbers for all the candidates. Some commentators noted that Bernie, Biden and others were doing well in the polls. Some pointed out that Bernie’s programs were popular, or that Mayor Pete said something noteworthy. That kind of reporting was meant to reassure viewers that MSNBC was trying to be even- handed, and thus trustworthy and credible. But as the campaign progressed, that veneer started to fade. Bernie’s consistently good polling data was increasingly undermined by commentators who would add negative remarks, without evidence, such as ‘how will Dialogue & Initiative 33 he pay for his wish list,’ even though Bernie had specific plans to finance his proposals.

Klobuchar, Biden and other candidates gave their own versions of “universal” health care, which wasn’t universal, and criticized Ber- nie’s Medicare for All, as well as his advocacy of free public college, the Green New Deal, a tax structure that would increase taxes on the very wealthy. Yet, conveniently, Bernie hadn’t been invited on to respond. The bias was becoming clearer.

Next up was the charge that Bernie “couldn’t get elected.” Polls were presented showing that voters preferred a candidate that could get “elected” to beat Trump, over a candidate who voters most “agreed” with. Yet, numerous polls showed Bernie beating Trump, often in either a statistical tie with another top Democratic candidate, or by a higher winning margin. Newsweek, for example, published a poll (SurveyUSA) on January 22, 2020 that showed Bernie beating Trump 52% to 43%, which was by a larger margin than the other contenders. Biden had the second-best win ratio in that poll at 50% to 43%. (“Bernie Sanders Leads Donald Trump by Widest Margin of All 2020 Candidates.”) None of the other Democratic candidates were labelled as being unelectable, even those with low polling numbers. It didn’t matter. The steady drumbeat of “Bernie can’t win,” that he is “unelectable,” continued. It eventually had an impact on voters. Why vote for someone who can’t win, many reasoned. In contrast to Bernie’s constant negative coverage, Biden received an estimated $72 million worth of free positive coverage from the mass media, according to media-tracker, Critical Mention, even though Biden’s program was less defined and weaker politically, matching Biden’s weaknesses as a campaigner.

Red-Baiting

Then there was the red-baiting. It started early. After Bernie beat all the Democratic candidates in the popular vote in Iowa, Marc Thiessen, columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, (February 10, 2020) criticized mainstream Democrats for an unsteady hand on the tiller: “The Democrats’ failure in Iowa stemmed from the same fundamental flaw that has caused socialism to fail wherever it is tried… (Their) “grand visions and lack of humility far exceed their ability to deliver.” Did Thiessen mean that the “socialists” in the Democratic Party screwed up the election count in Iowa with untested new technology? That new technology was introduced by mainstream Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton, not 34 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

“socialists.” Or did he mean that mainstream leaders of the Dem- ocrat Party failed to reign in democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, which somehow “allowed” him to win? Who knows? It doesn’t matter. Any time Bernie’s opponents could hang the mantle of “failed socialism” around his neck, no matter how deceitful and ridiculous, they hoped to score points, and peel away more Bernie votes.

The “socialist” bogey-man has been around for over a century, and it’s still dragged out in an effort to crush anything humane. Presi- dent Franklin Roosevelt was called a “socialist” and a ”communist,” intent on “destroying” our country, when he introduced Social Secu- rity, the Works Progress Administration to put people back to work during the Great Depression, the National Labor Relations Act which protected workers who wanted to join a union, unemployment insurance, and other social programs under his widely popular New Deal program. This was in response to the demands of millions of families fighting to survive, millions of workers who went on strike and organized unions and mass protests along with the broader community. The New Deal built a social safety net under the working-class, saving millions from total destitution and starvation, allowing them to get back on their feet. FDR’s “socialism” rebuilt our country. It did not destroy it. Capitalism had nearly already done that.

Red-baiting sunk to a new low after the Presidential Debate on Friday, February 7, 2020, where Bernie was grilled about his belief in democratic socialism. Chris Mathews, another MSNBC host, suggested on a post-debate panel that if Bernie got elected president, people would be “executed” in the public square. Mathews exclaimed, “I believe if Castro and the reds had won the Cold War there would have been ex- ecutions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. I don’t know who Bernie Sanders supports over these years, I don’t know what he means by socialism.” It was outrageous. None of the commentators on the panel took Mathews to task for uttering such dishonest, insulting, and inflammatory accusations.

No other candidate faced such a vicious attack. Mathews knows full well what Bernie means by socialism. Bernie has been advocating the same democratic socialist program his entire public life, for over 40 years: increase the minimum wage, create millions of good union jobs and increase union membership, guarantee healthcare as a human right with Medicare for All, provide free public education through college, end income inequality, reign in the greed and power of the corporate and banking elite, end racism, sexism and Dialogue & Initiative 35 all forms of discrimination, protect the environment and reverse climate change, and promote a foreign policy based on peace and mutual respect. Bernie has always advocated accomplishing these goals through peaceful elections. A national firestorm of protest erupted in social media against Mathews and MSNBC. Then, on February 21, 2020 Bernie was charged with receiving help from the Russians. Bernie vehemently denied and condemned it, and stated that when he became president he would put a halt to any Russian interference in our elections. But this charge dovetailed nicely with the constant warnings of Russian election interference, bringing back memories for older voters who lived in fear during the Cold War that a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union could end life on earth as we know it.

Nazi Takeover

The next night, Bernie won big in Nevada. It seemed that voters saw through these unfounded scare tactics. Two weeks later, after another nationally televised presidential debate, Mathews went un- hinged again on a MSNBC post-debate panel. He angrily compared Senator Sanders’s victory in Nevada to Nazi Germany’s take-over of France in the early days of WWII. Millions of viewers were shocked at this insult. As Mathews and the country well knows, Bernie Sanders is Jewish, and many in his family were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. To liken Bernie’s Nevada win to the Nazi takeover of France is the height of viciousness, and incredibly offensive. A second firestorm of nationwide protest erupted against Mathews and MSNBC. MSNBC acted quickly to save its threatened credibility and canned Mathews. But the damage had been done. To add fuel to the fire, Democratic political consultant, James Carvell, commented on MSNBC that if Ber- nie got the Democratic nomination it would be “political suicide,” and that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the “happiest person right now,” after Bernie’s big win in Nevada.

Who is MSNBC? Just how politically “left” are they? For much of the public they are, or at least were, a group of talented liberal and leftist journalists who regularly exposed the dirt on the rich and powerful. However, many MSNBC viewers were learning, by witnessing such biased coverage, that was not a full or accurate picture. But why? Here’s the back story that the general public doesn’t know about.

MSNBC liberal television hosts are employees of MSNBC. But MSNBC was not established as a company for liberal or progressive journalists. It was created in 1996 by General Electric’s NBC’s Division/NBC 36 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Universal, and Microsoft, two multi-billion, profit-making, capitalist corporations. Their goal was to cash in on the growing cable TV market. In 2011, Comcast, a giant communications and technology conglomerate, bought a majority stake and became the owners of MSNBC. In 2014, Comcast expanded its media empire again by buying Time Warner Cable for $45 billion. Comcast is worth over $173 billion. Comcast is also the second largest broadcasting and cable company in the world by revenue, the largest pay-TV company, the largest cable TV company, and the largest home internet service provider in the United States. Comcast employees 190,000 workers, and has 33 million customers. When one-third of Americans with cable TV pay their bill, they are paying their hard-earned dollars to Comcast.

Inside MSNBC

MSNBC’s earliest on-air personalities were right-wing commentators, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham. They both are now with Fox News. As MSNBC jockeyed for viewers, it hired some liberal reporters and moved to the left to differentiate itself from Fox News, the leader in the cable TV news market. MSNBC’s viewership exploded. While reporters had some leeway in the content of their programs, if you went too far left, you were canned. That happened to the very popular and leftist reporter Keith Olbermann, who after boosting MSNBC ratings and viewership, was fired in 2011. (Other progressive hosts were fired earlier. One of the earliest was Phil Donohue who was fired for criticizing the US war on Iraq in 2003.) MSNBC had been planning Olberman’s exit. In 2009 they hired Rachel Maddow, a young, dynamic, upcoming cable TV star, who was more politically moderate. As her star rose, and she helped increase viewership, Ol- bermann got the boot. Other solidly left reporters were also shown the door.

One was Ed Schultz, a champion of workers and unions. In 2008, before joining MSNBC, Ed Schultz was ranked # 17 nationally, with a weekly audience of more than 3 million. He was hired by MSNBC in 2009 and had high ratings for years. MSNBC pulled the plug on Ed in 2015, for at least two reasons. One was his strong support for workers and unions. This came as no surprise for those with knowledge of NBC and Comcast’s history of anti-unionism. During Comcast’s move to purchase MSNBC, the Writers Guild of America-East charged NBC Universal and Comcast with union-busting when workers at Pea- cock Productions, which is owned by NBC/Comcast and produces some of MSNBC’s programming, were trying to organize a union. Dialogue & Initiative 37

Justin Molito, Organizing Director of Writers Guild-East, said that the company ran a “textbook anti-union campaign that you would see at companies like Wal-Mart.” (Salon, “’Fear and concern’ keeping MS- NBC hosts quiet in union dispute, AFL-CIO suggests,” December 19, 2013.) Krystal Ball, another MSNBC host during this period, said that MS- NBC never wanted Ed Schultz’s working-class ideas nor his working- class audience. “I find it ironic that they (MSNBC) took this incredibly pro-working class voice off the air right before the Trump era when obviously you had a lot of working class voters who didn’t feel like they had a home in the Democratic Party any more,” she said on TheHill TV, July 6, 2018. The second reason for canning Ed Schultz was that he supported Bernie Sanders for president in 2015. Schultz had prepared a report on Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidate an- nouncement that year, but was ordered not to run it by then MSNBC president Phil Griffin. Ed objected, said it was important news, and said he wanted to run it. Griffin fired him.

Krystal Ball, a very popular progressive MSNBC host in her own right, got the axe too. She got hers after she counselled Hillary Clinton in 2015 not to run for president, and spoke positively about Bernie Sanders. She’s now co-host of the hard-hitting show Rising, on The- Hill.com, where she talks about class, and said capitalism should be “suspended” during the coronavirus crisis.

It’s no surprise that Comcast doesn’t want to see Bernie Sanders become the next president of the United States. Bernie, is by far, the most pro- worker, pro-union candidate in the 2020 race. His detailed Workplace Democracy Plan would empower workers and unions, and double union membership to 32 million workers during his first term in office. Bernie would also help those Peacock Productions workers get their union, as he has so many other workers over his 40-year career.

What’s more, the top officers at Comcast are billionaires with great political power, the very billionaires that Bernie criticizes for creating increasing income inequality. Brian Roberts, CEO and Chairman of Comcast, is worth $1.7 billion. He was founding co-chair in 2000 of the Host Committee of the 2000 Republican National Convention, where George W. Bush was nominated for president. Roberts is listed today as a Democrat. He has donated to both Democratic and Republican candidates. Comcast’s political reach is massive. The National Review ran an article titled “How Comcast Bought the Demo- cratic Party,” detailing massive financial contributions (investments) in the Democratic Party (April 5, 2014). How true that is, or not, it 38 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism raises a warning flag. In 2016, Roberts supported Hillary Clinton for president, not Bernie Sanders. And not Donald Trump.

MSNBC. Comcast and others could be held accountable for undermining Ber- nie Sanders’ campaign by spreading bias and unfounded scare tactics. But we must also recognize they are not right-wing Trumpists. There is a big difference between Krupp Steel of Germany (which was a big funder and supporter of Hitler and the Na- zi’s), Koch Industries (a big funder of many right-wing causes and Republican can- Paul Krehbiel introduces didates), Exxon Mobil (ma- Bernie Sanders at a rally in California. jor climate change denier), Coors beer (funder of anti-union and other rightwing organizations) on the political right, and many other companies that oppose the right-wing and fascism. There are other big media that are much worse than MSNBC.

Fox News is at the top of that list and should not be let off the hook for the hate, white supremacy, lies, and reactionary policies and behavior that it promotes. Fox News and other corporate media attacked Bernie ruthlessly too. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson exclaimed, “Sanders is a socialist bomb-thrower who praises Fidel Castro.” (Fox News, March 11, 2020.) Trump said that red-baiting Bernie would be his chief line of attack, and it would have been on the scale of Chris Mathews, Tucker Carlson, and worse, no matter how bizarre and un- true. Would the electorate have been able to dismiss it as ridiculous and unfounded, like they did when Barak Obama was falsely charged with associating with a “terrorist” from the 1970’s and ‘80’s?

Mass Movement and Votes

The goal of the grass-roots Bernie movement was to build such a huge mass movement that it’s sheer size and close connections with Dialogue & Initiative 39 broad constituencies would counter the attacks and lies thrown at Bernie by his opponents. Polls repeatedly showed that a majority of the voting public supported virtually all of Bernie’s program. (See Harry Targ’s article, “Moving to the Left in 2020,” in this issue). Why weren’t those sentiments turned into votes? That’s an important question. The media played a big role, but many other factors were at play. One of those factors was the ground game of Bernie’s campaign.

I’ll end by urging people to read and listen to, and promote, the progressive independent media. We must help it grow to counter the bias of the corporate media. Here are just some of many good progressive, independent media. They include radio, web-based sites, and print. Overall, they present the side of the people, workers, woman, people of color, and justice. Pacific Radio and Democracy Now; Portside, initiated by members of CCDS; Leftlinks, and Online University of the Left, both also initiated by CCDS; The Mobilizer by CCDS; The Real News, Common Dreams; Truthout; The Intercept; People’s World; Democratic Left, Labor Notes and union newspa- pers, the Black press and the media other oppressed national groups, women’s media; student and youth media; The Rag Blog, Daily Kos, Alternet, Truthdig; Krystal Ball on TheHill.org, Thom Hartman Re- port, The American Prospect; In These Times; CounterPunch, Mother Jones, The Nation, Monthly Review; Huffington Post, FightBack News; Jacobin; Free Speech TV, Link TV.

The goal must be to inoculate voters against the lies and attacks on all progressive candidates. This is done through direct personal contact with voters, and promoting the consumption of progressive books and media.

Paul Krehbiel is a long-time labor movement, progressive, and socialist political activist. He was the managing editor of the Furniture Workers Press, national newspaper of the United Furniture Workers of America, AFL-CIO. He was coordinator of Los Angeles Labor for Bernie, and is a co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. 40 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

The Progressive Majority and the Struggle against Trumpism

By Mark Solomon

(Editor’s Note. The following presentation was made before a meeting of the Nation- al Coordinating Committee of CCDS on July 1, 2019. While there are references to events that took place in 2018 and early 2019, the analysis and lessons are still relevant in 2020.)

The old Dickens aphorism that this is the worst of times and the best of times -- seems more relevant than ever.

Trump's brutal attacks on four congresswomen of color, on vener- able Rep. Elijah Cummings and his other calculated racist outrages are consciously aimed that plunging the country into the darkest of places. Such attacks are fascist at their core - cultivating fear of looming demographic change and the loss of the mythical "white man's country." They employ the old fascist tactic of enflaming white racial resentment at liberal "elites" while concealing the real corporate sources of their frustrations.

Added to that volatile brew is red baiting - resurrected from the darkest chapters of the country's history. That combination of racism and red baiting has historically been aimed at dividing the working class and its allies and forging pseudo-populist political fronts that promote toxic white nationalism while subverting democratic norms.

There should be no underestimation of the dangers ahead as the 2020 elections loom. Trump's political base (measured in electoral terms) is an unshakeable 35 percent with another roughly 10 to 12 percent vacillating between Trump and alternatives. The potential exists for Trump to fashion enough Electoral College support to win Dialogue & Initiative 41 the election while losing the popular vote by a greater margin than his 2016 popular loss.

One of the most compelling tasks of all progressives is to produce a substantive, overwhelming majority in electoral engagement - building upon the power generated by issue-driven non-electoral campaigns.

At the core of the resistance is the fight against voter suppression, gerrymandering, denial of voting rights to inmates and other tactics spawned by corporate capital to destroy the democratic rights and transforming potential of communities of color and their allies. Look- ing towards 2020 it is mandatory to produce a massive electoral turnout of the broadest constellation of progressive forces to salvage and nourish the vestiges of democracy.

The Progressive Majority

There is good news. Resistance to Trump's proto-fascism is becoming broader and deeper. The 2018 election of a stellar multiracial group of progressive women was a high water mark in a process that unfolded in 2016 with the Sanders campaign.

The progressive majority continues to grow. Revulsion towards Trump's misogyny has brought large numbers of women, especially suburban women into anti-Trump progressive ranks; African Ameri- cans, especially black women are providing powerful coherence and stability to the progressive majority. Sectors of the LGBTQ community are increasingly adding energy and vision. Latino women and men are playing a growing galvanizing role in building the resistance. More and more young people facing dire futures are being drawn into progressive activism. Union labor is becoming strongly assertive.

Within an expanding progressive majority, a left component is growing and is advancing a distinct anti-capitalist outlook. (The phenom- enal growth of DSA is an example of rising left and socialist influence within the broader movement.) While still a minority within the growing left, socialists are connecting potentially transformative issues such as universal health care, free public college, gun control, fighting income inequality, the Green New Deal, reforming criminal justice - into a politically integrated and coherent whole, evoking silo-busting "intersectionality." Even contentious issues such as repa- rations, free health care for immigrants, etc., are now part of expanding debate among left and center forces largely within the Demo- cratic primary arena. 42 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

A serious weakness among nearly all leading progressive voices is a failure to place existential issues of endless wars and the ever-looming danger of nuclear war prominently on their agendas. All left forces among the progressive majority have a duty to raise those issues and demand that they be forcefully addressed by all who seek the support of the progressive majority.

The most politically conscious elements of the progressive majority have to wade in vigorously on the strategic debate over advancing substantive, systemic change versus corporate incremental change.

The argument that increasingly popular issues like Medicare-for-all, or fifteen dollars an hour, fighting income inequality or free pubic college, etc. are "too radical" and likely to drive away "moderate" voters, can be challenged; polling persistent- ly shows that tepid centrism leads to deflation of turnout and is a prescription for abandonment of electoral struggle by millions, especially youth. Conversely, imagi- native, transforming programs with popular support are genera- tors of excitement, activism and full engagement that produce the numbers to attain victory for progressive policies and progressive candidates. (Among the pundits cluttering TV screens are defeated office-holders who rail against alleged "free stuff" advocated by recent winners.)

The gradual maturing of the progressive majority into a stable, permanent left force is confirmed by the growing influence of that force (both in elected office and in the streets) upon "blue dog" Democrats who are beginning to feel the pressures mounted by the growing strength and cohesion of the progressive majority. Democratic politicians who in the past would run from LGBTq rights or the Dream Act would not dare to do that today. There is a long way to go in building an unassailable, permanent progressive majority, but there is little Dialogue & Initiative 43 doubt that the political center is feeling the winds of progressive change and is beginning to respond.

Strategic Considerations

In plotting strategy for 2020, there is a need to recognize that electoral success is dependent on mass action on issues in the public non-electoral arena. Socialist and other left formations within the progressive majority should wherever possible push for cooperation and consolidation of various single issue movements into a coherent, mutually supportive and unified force.

Socialists and left activists, wherever they have influence at the grass roots or on various leadership levels should demand that the ongoing debate on electoral strategy (see above) be conducted on a re- spectful, non-antagonistic basis, building and preserving the needed cooperation between left and center forces. (At the same time, the combined strength, thus far, of the Sanders and Warren campaigns - augmented perhaps by the Castro and Harris camps - generally outpolls Biden. That should inspire the left to press its positions with confidence, but also with magnanimity.)

In sum, there is a need, looking to2020, for advanced left forces to maneuver effectively through complex political shoals - encouraging sharp debate on electoral strategy, while preserving the primary need for left-center unity to defeat Trump and his ultra-right corporate enablers.

Within the gathering progressive majority, socialist ideas should continue to be advanced, with understanding that debate and discussion of transformative ideas add to the strength and clarity of the entire movement for change.

Regarding the Sanders-Warren conundrum: Rooted in its impressive gains in 2016, the Sanders campaign continues to be the paceset- ter in the fight for meaningful change, oriented as much to movement building as to winning elections. Warren has added an effective voice, among other qualities representing the ascendancy of women to leading roles in electoral politics. While their specific proposals are similar, Warren remains more ensconced in Democratic politics. How that contest plays itself out is unforeseen. However, at the grass roots, voices should be raised advocating cooperation to maximize progressive strength, especially in joining forces to overturn right wing control of the Senate. 44 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

The progressive majority continues to grow in the face of existential challenges. Yet it has not yet become a dominant, permanent force in the country's political life. At this moment, the growth and strength of the progressive majority runs through a mass effort to defeat Trump and to open the door transforming change. Now is the political moment to advance voter registration, electoral mobilization of the progressive majority, activate a decisive youth vote, galvanize the voting strength of communities of color, etc. Those are the roads to consolidating the progressive majority. Along those roads, CCDS with its experience and political majority has a modest but important role in advancing a socialist critique and contributing to the unity and growth of the progressive majority.

Mark Solomon is past national co-chair of the United States Peace Council and of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He is author of ‘The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936’ and is currently working on a mem- oir/narrative at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University on the freedom and peace movements in the 1940s and 1950s. Dialogue & Initiative 45

The U.S. ‘Six-Party System’ 4.0: Revising the Hypothesis Again

By Carl Davidson

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heav- en and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.” –Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Successful strategic thinking starts with gaining knowledge, in particular gaining adequate knowledge of the big picture, of all the political and economic forces involved (Earth) and what they are thinking, about themselves and others, at any given time. (Heaven). It’s not a one-shot deal. Since both Heaven and Earth are always changing, strategic thinking must always be kept up to date, reassessed, and revised.

This statement above was part of the opening to a widely circulated article I wrote three times, about two, four, and six years ago. With the upcoming November 2020 elections, it’s time to take my own advice again and do another update. The electoral strategic terrain is always changing, and we don’t want to be stuck with old maps and faulty models.

In the earlier versions, I suggested setting aside the traditional ‘two- party system’ frame, which obscures far more than it reveals and making use of a ‘six-party’ model instead. The new hypothesis, I suggested, had far more explanatory power regarding the events unfolding before us. Some critics have objected to my use of the term ‘party’ for what are factional or interest group clusters. The point is taken, but I would also argue that U.S. major parties, in general, are not ideological parties in the European sense. Instead, they are constantly changing coalitions of these clusters with no firm commitment to program or discipline. So I will continue to use ‘parties,’ but 46 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism with the objection noted. You can substitute ‘factions’ if you like. Or find us a better term.

For the most part, the strategic picture holds. The ‘six parties’, under two tents, were first labeled as the Tea Party and the Multination- alists under the GOP tent, and the Blue Dogs, the Third Way New Democrats, the Old New Dealers, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, under the Democratic tent. In the second version, we had three ‘parties’ under each.

There are still a few minor players outside of either tent—the Howie Hawkins Green Party presidential campaign, Kshama Sawant’s ongoing battles in the Seattle City Council, the local independent candidates of the Richmond Alliance, and a few more. They might be quite important in local areas, but still lack the weight to be featured in this analysis.

First and most important for us on the left now is the persistent rise of Senator Bernie Sanders, who keeps showing far more strength than imagined. We would today add the campaign of Senator Eliza- beth Warren (D-Mass) and the gains made by DSA members and other progressives in the Congress and several state legislatures, most notably, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) and ‘the Squad.’

The second is the growing power of President Donald Trump and rightwing populism on the right. It now includes the full integration of the GOP national and state apparatus into the Trump campaign machine as well as the informal alliance and growth of fascist militias and related groups. In the White House, Steve Miller is the hatchet man on ‘white nationalist’ immigration policy and serves as their voice at the top. According to Foreign Policy in March 2017:

“This is how [they] view the modern world: The West is threatened by hordes of swarthy outsiders, especially Mexicans and Muslims, and they are lonely defenders of the white Christian race against this in- sidious threat. There is no evidence that Trump has given this matter as much thought as they have, but, based on his public pronounce- ments, he has reached similar conclusions. That helps to explain why the administration is building a border wall, expanding deporta- tions, and trying to keep out citizens of as many Muslim countries as possible. This isn’t about fighting terrorism or crime; it’s about fighting changing demographics. And it’s premised on an unspoken assumption that only white Christians are true Americans; all others are ‘somebody else.'” Dialogue & Initiative 47

Both factors, then, from different directions, challenged, narrowed, and weakened the old dominant neoliberal hegemonic bloc, which had spanned both the GOP transnationals and those transnational globalists in the Third Way Democrats for decades. This new dynamic also saw the Tea Party divide into Rightwing Populists and Chris- tian Nationalists. (Although ‘Judeo-Christian’ is sometimes used to include Jewish figures). The result: Trump has hegemony in the GOP today, pulling some GOP neoliberals under its thumb.

Back in 2016, Politico had characterized these three GOP ‘parties’: “After the Iowa caucuses” the GOP emerged “with three front-runners who are, respectively, a proto-fascist, [Trump] a Christian theocrat [Cruz] and an Ayn Rand neoliberal [Rubio] who wants to privatize all aspects of public life while simultaneously waging war on the poor and working classes.”

Here’s the new snapshot of the range of forces for today (including a graphic map). The three main changes are the persistence of the Blue Dogs, connected to a three-way breakup of labor from the globalist and corporate liberal center bloc, the growth of the Sanders Social Democratic bloc, and the reduction and even the split-off of the traditional ‘Never Trumper’ GOP globalists and multinationalists from the GOP tent. In brief, today, Trump has drawn the theocrats around Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)into his administration while and holding Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and other Koch libertarians at a distance.

Starting from the left upper corner of the map:

The Rightwing Populists

This ‘party’, as mentioned, has now taken over the GOP. Trump was originally an ‘outlier elite’ with his own bankroll, but now supple- mented with funds from Russian oligarchs and Arab oil fortunes (See ‘Proof of Conspiracy‘ by Seth Abramson). He is also still directly connected to the Robert Mercer family fortune, the 4th ranking billionaire funding rightwing causes. For example, the Mercers keep Breitbart News afloat and funded the career of Steve Bannon, former Trump ‘strategist’ that took him to victory in the last stretch. Now along with Breitbart, Fox News is the hourly mouthpiece for Trump’s war against the mainstream ‘fake news’ mass media.

Trump is also pulling in new wealth. In January 2020, Alternet reports: “One example is Dan and Farris Wilks, two billionaire siblings who have worked in the fracking industry in Texas and have “given 48 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

a combined $100,000 toward the president’s reelection.”

The Wilkes Brothers supported Sen. Ted Cruz over Trump in the 2016 GOP presidential primary but are supporting Trump in 2020.”

A major event, natu- rally, is that the House impeached Trump in 2019. The Senate followed up by acquit- ting him in a sham ‘trial’ in early 2020. This was a major result of Trump’s fierce ongoing political war- fare against the ‘Deep State.’ The battle is actually a contest for a new ‘America First’ white nationalist hegemony against the neoliberal globalists under both tents, the old GOP ‘Establish- ment’ and the Democrat’s Third Way. The ‘Deep State’ is basically the federal civil service, but also includes the ‘Intelligence Community,’ with a long list of Trump-targeted CIA and FBI ‘corrupt leaders,’ of which FBI director James Comey was the first to fall. ‘Corruption’ was their refusal to pledge loyalty to Trump personally, like an old-style Mafia boss. The ongoing purges of the security apparatus this way creates a personalized fascist-like clique among them.

Trump also formed a strong alliance with the Christian Nationalist faction (Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos, et al.), and the DeVos family (Am- way fortune), which represents another billionaire donor to the GOP right. Devos’s brother, Erik Prince, has also amassed billions from his Blackwater/Xe firms that train thousands of mercenaries to serve as Dialogue & Initiative 49

‘private contractors’ for U.S. armed intervention anywhere. Prinz is now reportedly preparing to spend a few million sending spies into ‘liberal groups.’

These two blocs under the Trump RNC tent grew in strength since 2016. At the same time, the Establishment Neoliberals shrank and divided a dozen ways, and they were defeated with some humiliation one by one. The sole breakaway vote of Romney on Article One of Impeachment in the Senate symbolized this. Romney, with consider- able wealth himself, is also a Mormon bishop, and his LDS church recently listed holdings of over $37 billion with the SEC. This is a factor in Romney’s ability to stand alone. At the moment, however, the much-weakened GOP Establishment is left with the choice of sur- render, or crossing over to the Third Way bloc under the Dem tent. A good number already did so in order to vote for Biden in the Dem 2020 primary, expanding the Dem electorate to the right.

Trump also reached under the Dem tent to form an alliance with the Blue Dogs. But it remains tactical, stemming from his appeals to ‘Rust Belt’ Democrats and some unions on trade and tariff issues, plus white identity resentment politics. The economic core of rightwing populism remains anti-global ‘producerism’ vs. ‘parasitism.’ Employed workers, business owners, real estate developers, small bankers are all ‘producers.’ They oppose ‘parasite’ groups above and below, but mainly those of ‘the other’ below them—the unemployed (Get a Job! as an epithet), the immigrants, poor people of color, Mus- lims, and more.

Recall that Trump entered politics by declaring Obama to be an il- legal alien and an illegitimate officeholder (a parasite above), but quickly shifted to Mexicans and Muslims and anyone associated with ‘Black Lives Matter.’ This was aimed at pulling the fascist and white supremacist groups of the ‘Alt-Right’–using Breitbart and worse to widen their circles, bringing them closer to Trump’s core. With these fascists as ready reserves, Trump reached farther into Blue Dog ter- ritory, and its workers, retirees, and business owners conflicted with white identity issues—immigration, Islamophobia, misogyny, and more.

Trump’s outlook is not entirely new. It has deep roots in American history, from the anti-Indian ethnic cleansing of President Andrew Jackson to the nativism of the Know Nothings, to the lynch terror of the KKK, to the anti-elitism of George Wallace and the Dixiecrats. In- ternationally, Trump combines aggressive jingoism, threats of trade 50 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism wars, and an isolationist ‘economic nationalism’ aimed at getting others abroad to fight your battles for you. At the same time, you pick up the loot (‘we should have seized and kept the oil!’). Trump is now consolidating his gains, and the November 2020 election will bring to light the new balance.

Trump’s successes, however, also still contain his internal weaknesses: the support of distressed white workers. At present, they are forming a key social base of his victories, assuming they will get lush jobs or rising 401Ks from the ‘Make America Great Again!’ promises. But the problem is that Trump has not implemented any substantive programs apart from tax cuts. These mainly benefit the top 10% and create an unstable class contradiction in his operation, one bound to surface as promises are unfulfilled. His obvious inability to deal with the coronavirus emergency is undermining the confidence of some of his base. Most of what Trump has paid out is what WEB Dubois called the ‘psychological wage’ of ‘whiteness,’ a status position. Thus white supremacist demagogy and misogyny also continue to unite a wide array of all nationalities of color and many women and youth against him.

The Christian Nationalists

This subset of the former Tea Party bloc has been strengthened by the recent addition of William Barr as the Attorney General. It’s made up of several Christian rightist trends, which gained more coherence under Vice President Mike Pence. It includes many who are simply conservative evangelicals. For Barr’s part, he brings in the Catholic far-right, a minority with the American Catholic Church.

A good number, however, are the Protestant theocracy-minded fun- damentalists, especially the ‘Dominionist’ sects in which Ted Cruz’s father is active. They present themselves as the only true, ‘values- centered’ (Biblical) conservatives. They argue against any kind of compromise with the globalist ‘liberal-socialist bloc’, which ranges, in their view, from the GOP’s Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders. They are more akin to classical liberalism than neoliberalism in economic policy. This means abandoning nearly all regulations, much of the safety net, over- turning Roe v. Wade, getting rid of marriage equality (in the name of ‘religious liberty’) and abolishing the IRS and any progressive taxation in favor of a single flat tax. Salon in April 2018 reported:

“This rightwing Christian movement is fundamentally anti-democratic. Their “prayer warriors” do not believe that secular laws apply to Dialogue & Initiative 51 them, thus making it acceptable, if not honorable, to deceive non-be- lievers in order to do God’s work. Many evangelicals in the Christian nationalist or “dominionist” wing of the movement want the United States to be a theocracy. In some ways, this subset of the evangelical population resembles an American-style Taliban or ISIS, restrained (so far) only by the Constitution.”

Their classic liberalism is a key reason they attract money from the Koch Brothers networks, while the Koch’s hold Trump and his populists in some contempt. As mentioned above, the Christian National- ist faction also has some access to the DeVos fortunes. Effectively, Christian nationalist’ prosperity economics’ amounts to affirmative action for the better off, where the rise of the rich is supposed to pull everyone else upwards, so long as those below also pay their tithes and pull upward with their ‘bootstraps.’ They argue for neo-isolation- ism on some matters, but favor an all-out holy war on ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ to the point of ‘making the sand glow.’ They pushed for moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and ripping up the Iran nuclear deal. All this is aimed at greasing the skids for the ‘End Times,’ the ‘Rapture, ‘and the ‘Second Coming.’ With Cruz, Pence, and Devos as leaders, they have become the second most powerful grouping under the GOP tent, and the one with the most reactionary platform and outlook, even more so than Trump himself in some ways.

The Establishment Neoliberals

This is the name now widely used in the media for what we previously labeled the Multinationalists. It’s mainly the upper crust and neoliberal business elites that have owned and run the GOP for years, but are now out in the cold. It included the quasi-libertarian House’ Freedom Caucus,’ the smaller group of NeoCons on foreign policy (John Bolton and John McCain), and the shrinking number of RINO (Republican In Name Only) moderates. The Establishment also favors a globalist, U.S. hegemonist and even, at times, unilateralist approach abroad, with some still defending the Bush-Cheney disaster in Iraq. Their voice in the Senate is now Romney.

Keep in mind that the process of technology-driven financialization has divided the ruling class of capitalism in every major country into three—a local sector of the transnational capitalist class, the nation-based multinationals, and an anti-globalist national sector. Thus among traditional U.S. neoliberals, some are U.S. hegemonists, but many have a transnational globalist understanding of the world 52 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

with vast amounts of their money in foreign stock. China and global value chains integrate them with other global capitalists. This is why Trump’s trade policy is so controversial with Wall Street elites of both Republican and Demo- cratic leanings. U.S. economic hegemony makes no sense at this level of financial and productive integration)

This subordination is a big change for the traditional GOP top dogs. They would like to purge a weakened Trump and rebuild but so far lack the ability. They could try to form a new party with neoliberal Dems. Or more likely, they could join the Dems and try to push out or smother those to the left of the Third Way grouping. Now let’s turn to the Dem tent, starting at the top of the graphic.

The Blue Dogs

This small ‘party,’ funded by the medical industry and some defense firms, has grown and gained some energy. One reason is that the United Steel Workers and a few craft unions decided ‘to work with Trump’ on tariffs and trade. The USW also got firmly behind Connor Lamb (D-PA) for Congress. Lamb won a narrow victory in a Western PA CD in a rural and conservative area, but with a good number of USW miners. He was endorsed by the Blue Dog PAC, although he is not yet a formal member of the caucus.

Since then, P.A.’s earlier gerrymandered lines have changed. Lamb had to run again in the new 17th CD, which is Beaver County and part of Pittsburgh itself, where Trump has less support. Support for ‘Medicare for All’ is strong in this area. Lamb claims to favor it but claims it’s ‘unaffordable’ for now. Lamb has also broken with the Dem leadership to vote with the GOP on several military issues. This is a sore point for a good number of left progressive Democrats. They’re still likely to vote for him, but shift their organizing energies into working for better state district candidates running for legislative seats in Harrisburg. Rep Dan Lipinski, a Dialogue & Initiative 53 well-known Blue Dog in Chica- go, is targeted in 2020 by a left-progressive Democrat.

The Blue Dog resurgence may not last. On the one hand, the DNC Third Way gang currently loves people like Lamb and wants to see more candidates leaning to the center and even the right. On the other hand, Trump is unstable on tariffs. If he doesn’t follow through on those he has put out as proposals and folds up on major infrastructure plans save for ‘building The Wall,’ the unions involved may turn against him.

Working to win them to his campaign Biden recently spoke at a Blue Dog fundraiser in California. “Rep. Lou Correa (D-Calif.), the communications co-chair of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, is listed as a host on an invitation for the event,” reported the Jan 8, 2020 Sludge, an online newsletter.

The Blue Dogs, Sludge continues, “also operates a political action committee, Blue Dog PAC, that raises millions of dollars each election cycle, mainly from corporate PACs, and spends money to help elect more conservative Democrats. Corporate PACs that donated to Blue Dog PAC in the 2018 election cycle include those affiliated with drug company Pfizer, defense contractor Northrop Grumman, oil company ExxonMobil, and Wall Street bank Citigroup.”

The Third Way New Democrats

First formed by the Clintons, with international assistance from Tony Blair and others, this dominant ‘party’ was funded by Wall Street fi- 54 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

nance capitalists. The founding idea was to move toward neoliberalism by ‘creating distance’ between themselves and the traditional Left-Labor- Liberal bloc, i.e., the traditional unions and civil rights groups still connected to the New Deal legacy. Another part of ‘Third Way’ thinking was to shift the key social base away from the core of the working class toward college-educated suburban voters, but keeping alliances with Black and women’s groups still functional.

Thus the Third Way tries to temper the harsher neoliberalism of the GOP by ‘triangulating’ with neo-Keynesian and left-Keynesian policies. But the overall effect is to move Democrats and their platform generally rightward. Now that HRC was narrowly defeated, the Third Way’s power in the party has diminished somewhat but gaining clout with the candidacy of Senator Joe Biden (D-DL). As mentioned above, its labor alliances have weakened, with unions now going in three directions. Most of labor has remained with the Third Way. Some moved rightward to the Blue Dogs while others—Communi- cations Workers, National Nurses United, and the U.E.—are part of the Sanders bloc. In terms of the current relation of forces in the party apparatus, the Third Way has about 60% of the positions and still controls the major money. In California in 2018, for example, the Regulars kept control of the state party committee only with extremely narrow margins over Bernie supporters. This percentage will likely change after the final votes totals from the California 2020 primary are returned.

The key test is the November battle with Trump: Who will inspire and mobilize the much-needed ‘Blue Wave’, give it focus and put the right Dialogue & Initiative 55 numbers in the right places? The measured Third Way moderates? Or the Social Democrat insurgents? This question brings us to the last of the six’ parties.’

The Social Democrats

This description is better than simply calling it the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), as in the first version of this article. I’ve also taken off ‘Rainbow’ from the second version because the Third Way, which has kept the older and more pragmatic voters of the rainbow groupings under its centrist influence, shares it as well.

As explained before, the ‘Social Democrat’ title doesn’t mean each leader or activist here is in a social-democrat group. It means the core of the CPC, Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), Working Families Party (WFP), Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Justice Democrats, and Our Revolution platforms are roughly similar to the left social democrat groupings in Europe. This is made even more evident with Bernie’s self-description as a ‘democratic socialist’ in the primaries, where it only seemed to help. The platform, however, is not socialist itself, but best described as a common front vs finance capital, war, and the white supremacist right. This is true of groups like Die Linke (‘The Left’) in Germany as well, which met recently with PDA and CPC members.

Finally, there is the dramatic growth of the DSA due to their wise tactics in the 2016 Bernie campaign. They went all-in for Bernie but also lost no opening to make themselves visible. Prominent Justice Democrat and DSAer Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), who has been a firebrand in the House, has made the ‘Green New Deal’ a household term, and joined Sanders on his campaign trail. Now with over 60.000 members with chapters in every state, DSA has already won a few local and statehouse races the first time out. They are now an important player in their own right within this cluster.

This growth is all to the good. The common front approach of the Social Democratic bloc can unite more than a militant minority of actual socialists. Instead, it has a platform that can also unite a progressive majority around both immediate needs and structural reforms, including both socialists and non-socialists. Apart from winning 46% of the 2016 Dem convention delegates and a good number of statehouse seats, this ‘party’ is now noted for two things: first is 56 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism the huge, elemental outpourings of young people–mainly women, students, and the young workers of the distressed ‘precariat’ sector of the class–in the elemental risings of millions after Trump took office. Second, with mass groups like Our Revolution and Indivisible, it added a higher degree of organization to this dynamic and growing cluster.

What Does It All Mean?

With this brief descriptive and analytical mapping of the upper crust of American politics, many things are falling into place. The formerly subaltern groupings in the GOP have risen in revolt against the Neo- liberal Establishment of the Romneys and the Bushes. Now they have rightwing populist and white nationalist hegemony. On the other hand, the Third Way is seeking a ‘restoration’ and control, through Vice President Joe Biden’s candidacy, of the earlier Obama coalition, with all its constituency alliances. At the same time, the Third Way wants to co-opt and control the Social Democrats as an energetic but critical secondary ally.

The Sanders’ forces have few illusions about this and don’t want to be anyone’s subaltern without a fight. So they are continuing to press all their issues and policies of a common front vs. finance capital, war, and the white supremacist right, building more base organizations, more alliances, and more clout as they go.

This ‘big picture’ also reveals much about the current budget debates, which are shown to be three-sided–the extreme austerity neoliberalism of all three parties under the GOP tent, the ‘austerity lite’ budget of the Third Way-dominated Senate Democrats, and the left Keynesian, progressive and social democratic ‘Back to Work’ budget and ‘Green New Deal’ projects of the Social Democrats and the Con- gressional Progressive Caucus.

We must keep in mind, however, that favorably ‘shifting the balance of forces’ in election campaigns is mainly an indirect and somewhat ephem- eral gain. It does ‘open up space,’ but for what? Progressive initiatives matter for sure, but much more is required strategically. We are interested in pushing the popular front vs. finance capital to its limits, and within that effort, developing a 21st-century socialist bloc. If that comes to scale in the context of a defeat of the Trumpist right bloc, the Democratic tent is also going to be stretched and strained. It could even collapse and im- plode, given the sharper class contractions and other fault lines that lie within it, much as the Whigs did in the 19th Century. Dialogue & Initiative 57

This ‘Whig option’ tactic would demand an ability on the part of the left to regroup all the progressive forces, inside and outside, into a new ‘First Party’ alliance. Such a formation also includes a militant minority of socialists, which will then be able to contend for power. The tricky part is to do this in a way that keeps the right at bay.

An old classic formula summing up the strategic thinking of the united front is appropriate here: ‘Unite and develop the progressive forces, win over the middle forces, isolate and divide the backward forces, then crush our adversaries one by one.’ In short, we must have a policy and set of tactics for each one of these elements, as well as a strategy for dealing with them overall. Moreover, take note of warning from the futurist Alvin Toffler: ‘If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy.’ Then finally, as to tactics, ‘wage struggle on just grounds, to our advantage and with restraint.’

To conclude, we still need to start with a realistic view of ourselves as an organized socialist left. Save for DSA, we are quite small as organizations, but now we can see we are swimming in a sea of millions open to socialism. What can we do now? If you can see yourself or your group honestly working to achieve DSA’s stated program, by all means, join them and make them even larger. Or set up Jaco- bin/In These Times Reading Groups in your living rooms and unite socialists with them. Or join CCDS, CPUSA, Left Roots, or Liberation Road—socialist groups which largely share some or most of the perspective here. Join or start PDA or WFP chapters everywhere, use organizations and broad ‘Third Reconstruction’ alliances and popular rainbow assemblies to build mass mobilizations, register new voters, and defeat the GOP in November.

With both socialists and rainbow progressives, start at the base, focus on city and state governments, and expand the Congressional Progressive Caucus. We rarely gain victories at the top that have not been won and consolidated earlier at the base. Most of all, in order to form broader and winning coalitions, you need base organizations of your own to form coalitions and alliances WITH! Seize the time and Git ‘er done!

Resource:

For the complete chart of the 6-parties 4.0, go here: http://ouleft.org/wp-content/uploads/Six-Party-System-4.png 58 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Carl Davidson is a national committee member of the Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a DSA member in the Steel Valley, an activist with Progressive Democrats of American in Western PA's 17th CD, and a LeftRoots Compa. The views expressed here are his own.

Dialogue & Initiative 59

PART TWO: Black Lives Matter and the Struggle Against White Supremacy

Angela Davis Supports Uprising for Black Lives, Demands an End to Racist Capitalism

Editors Note: The following interview with Angela Davis was done by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, June 12, 2020. It was slightly edited for clarity and space.

Amy Goodman: Amid a worldwide uprising against police brutality and racism, we discuss the historic moment with legendary scholar and activist Angela Davis. She also responds to the destruction and removal of racist monuments in cities across the United States; President Trump's upcoming rally on Juneteenth in Tulsa, the site of a white mob's massacre of Black people; and the 2020 election, in which two parties "connected to corporate capitalism" will compete for the presidency and people will have to be persuaded to vote "so the current occupant of the White House is forever ousted.

As the nationwide uprising against police brutality and racism continues to roil the nation and the world, bringing down Confeder- ate statues and forcing a reckoning in city halls and on the streets, President Trump defended law enforcement Thursday, dismissing growing calls to defund the police. He spoke at a campaign-style event at a church in Dallas, Texas, announcing a new executive order advising police departments to adopt national standards for use of force. Trump did not invite the top three law enforcement officials in Dallas, who are all African American. The move comes after Trump called protesters "THUGS" and threatened to deploy the U.S. military to end, quote, "riots and lawlessness."

Many argue reform will not fix the inherently racist system of policing. Since the global protest movement began, Minneapolis has pledged to dismantle its police department, the mayors of Los An- 60 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism geles and New York City have promised to slash police department budgets, and calls to "defund the police" are being heard in spaces that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago.

We are spending the hour with the legendary activist and scholar Angela Davis, professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. For half a century, Angela Davis has been one of the most influential activists and intellectuals in the United States, an icon of the Black liberation movement. Angela Davis's work around issues of gender, race, class, and prisons has influenced critical thought and social movements across several generations. She's a leading advocate for prison abolition, a position informed by her own experience as a prisoner and a fugitive on the F.B.I.'s top 10 wanted list more than 40 years ago. Once caught, she faced the death penalty in California. After being acquitted on all charges, she's spent her life fighting to change the criminal justice system.

Angela Davis, welcome back to Democracy Now! It's great to have you with us today for the hour.

ANGELA DAVIS: Thank you very much, Amy. It's wonderful to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, do you think this moment is a tipping point, a turning point? You, who have been involved in activism for almost half a century, do you see this moment as different, perhaps more different than any period of time you have lived through?

ANGELA DAVIS: Absolutely. This is an extraordinary moment. I have never experienced anything like the conditions we are currently ex- periencing, the conjuncture created by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the recognition of the systemic racism that has been rendered visible under these conditions because of the disproportionate deaths in Black and Latinx communities. And this is a moment I don't know whether I ever expected to experience.

When the protests began, of course, around the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Tony McDade and many others who have lost their lives to racist state violence and vigilante violence - when these protests erupted, I remembered something that I've said many times to encourage activists, who often feel that the work that they do is not leading to tangible results. I often ask them to consider the very long trajectory of Black struggles. And what has been most important is the forging of lega- Dialogue & Initiative 61 cies, the new arenas of struggle that can be handed down to younger generations.

But I've often said one never knows when conditions may give rise to a conjuncture such as the current one that rapidly shifts popular consciousness and suddenly allows us to move in the direction of radical change. If one does not engage in the ongoing work when such a moment arises, we cannot take advantage of the opportunities to change. And, of course, this moment will pass. The intensity of the current demonstrations cannot be sustained over time, but we will have to be ready to shift gears and address these issues in different arenas, including, of course, the electoral arena.

AMY GOODMAN: Angela Davis, you have long been a leader of the critical resistance movement, the abolition movement. And I'm wondering if you can explain the demand, as you see it, what you feel needs to be done, around defunding the police, and then around prison abolition.

‘Defund’ means shifting money

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, the call to defund the police is, I think, an abolitionist demand, but it reflects only one aspect of the process represented by the demand. Defunding the police is not simply about withdrawing funding for law enforcement and doing nothing else. And it appears as if this is the rather superficial understanding that has caused Biden to move in the direction he's moving in (to call for increased funding and training for police-the editors).

It's about shifting public funds to new services and new institutions - mental health counselors, who can respond to people who are in crisis without arms. It's about shifting funding to education, to housing, to recreation. All of these things help to create security and safety. It's about learning that safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety.

And I would say that abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It's not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but it's about re-envisioning. It's about building anew. And I would argue that abolition is a feminist strategy. And one sees in these abolitionist demands that are emerging the pivotal influence of feminist theo- ries and practices. 62 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that further.

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, I want us to see feminism not only as addressing issues of gender but rather as a methodological approach of understanding the intersectionality of struggles and issues. Abolition feminism counters carceral feminism, which has unfortunately assumed that issues such as violence against women can be effectively addressed by using police force, by using imprisonment as a solution. And of course, we know that Joseph Biden, in 1994, who claims that the Violence Against Women Act was such an important moment in his career - the Violence Against Women Act was couched within the 1994 Crime Act, the Clinton Crime Act.

And what we're calling for is a process of decriminalization, not - recognizing that threats to safety, threats to security, come not primarily from what is defined as crime, but rather from the failure of institutions in our country to address issues of health, issues of violence, education, etc. So, abolition is really about rethinking the kind of future we want, the social future, the economic future, the political future. It's about revolution, I would argue.

AMY GOODMAN: You write in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, "Neoliberal ideology drives us to focus on individuals, ourselves, individual victims, individual perpetrators. But how is it possible to solve the massive problem of racist state violence by calling upon individual police officers to bear the burden of that history and to assume that by prosecuting them, by exacting our revenge on them, we would have somehow made progress in eradicating racism?" So, explain what exactly you're demanding.

Institutional change needed

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, neoliberal logic assumes that the fundamental unit of society is the individual, and I would say the abstract individual. According to that logic, Black people can combat racism by pulling themselves up by their own individual bootstraps. That logic recognizes - or fails, rather, to recognize that there are institutional barriers that cannot be brought down by individual determination. If a Black person is materially unable to attend the university, the solution is not affirmative action, they argue, but rather the person simply needs to work harder, get good grades and do what is necessary in order to acquire the funds to pay for tuition. Neoliberal logic deters us from thinking about the simpler solution, which is free education. Dialogue & Initiative 63

I'm thinking about the fact that we have been aware of the need for these institutional strategies at least since 1935 - but of course, before, but I'm choosing 1935 because that was the year when W.E.B. Du Bois published his germinal Black Reconstruction in America. And the question was not what should individual Black people do, but rather how to reorganize and restructure post-slavery society in order to guarantee the incorporation of those who had been formerly enslaved. The society could not remain the same - or should not have remained the same. Neoliberalism resists change at the individual level. It asks the individual to adapt to conditions of capitalism, to conditions of racism.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Angela Davis, about the monuments to racists, colonizers, Confederates, that are continuing to fall across the United States and around the world. In St., Paul, Minne- sota, Wednesday, activists with the American Indian Movement tied a rope around a statue of Christopher Columbus and pulled it from its pedestal on the state Capitol grounds. The A.I.M. members then held a ceremony over the fallen monument. In Massachusetts, officials said they'll remove a Columbus statue from a park in Boston's North End, after it was beheaded by protesters early Wednesday morning. In Richmond, Virginia, protesters toppled a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from Monument Avenue Wednesday night. In the nearby city of Portsmouth, protesters used sledgehammers to destroy a monument to Confederate soldiers. One person sustained a serious injury, was hospitalized after a statue fell on his head. In Washington, D.C., House Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined other lawmakers demanding the removal of 11 Confederate statues from the Na- tional Statuary Hall in the Capitol.

Meanwhile, President Trump said he would "not even consider" re- naming U.S. Army bases named after Confederate military officers. There are 10 such bases, all of them in Southern states. Trump tweeted Wednesday, "These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a history of Win- ning, Victory, and Freedom," unquote. Trump's tweet contradicted Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Mark Milley, who suggested they're open to discussion about renam- ing the bases. And a Republican committee in the Senate just voted to rename these bases, like Benning and Bragg and Hood, that are named for Confederate leaders.

Meanwhile, in your hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, Angela, co- median Jermaine Johnson is pleading not guilty to charges of "incit- 64 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism ing a riot" after he urged protesters at May 31st rally to march on a statue of Charles Linn, a former officer in the Confederate Navy.

Did you think you would ever see this? You think about Bree New- some after the horror at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, who shimmied up that flagpole on the grounds of the South Carolina Legislature and took down the Confeder- ate flag, and they put it right on back up. What about what we're seeing today?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, of course, Bree Newsome was a wonderful pio- neer. And I think it's important to link this trend to the campaign in South Africa, Rhodes Must Fall. And, of course, I think this reflects the extent to which we are being called upon to deeply reflect on the role of historical racisms that have brought us to the point where we are today.

You know, racism should have been immediately confronted in the aftermath of the end of slavery. This is what the Dr. Du Bois' analysis was all about, not so much in terms of, "Well, what we were going to do about these poor people who have been enslaved so many generations?" but, rather, "How can we reorganize our society in order to guarantee the incorporation of previously enslaved people?"

Now, attention is being turned towards the symbols of slavery, the symbols of colonialism. And, of course, any campaigns against racism in this country have to address, in the very first place, the conditions of Indigenous people. I think it's important that we're seeing these demonstrations, but I think at the same time, we have to recognize that we cannot simply get rid of the history. We have to recognize the devastatingly negative role that that history has played in charting the trajectory of the United States of America. And so, I think that these assaults on statues represent an attempt to begin to think through what we have to do to bring down institutions and re-envision them, reorganize them, create new institutions that can attend to the needs of all people.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think should be done with statues, for example, to, oh, slaveholding Founding Fathers, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, you know, museums can play an important educational role. And I don't think we should get rid of all of the vestiges of the past, but we need to figure out the context within which Dialogue & Initiative 65 people can understand the nature of U.S. history and the role that racism and capitalism and heteropatriarchy have played in forging that history.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about racism and capitalism? You often write and speak about how they are intimately connected. And talk about a world that you envision.

Racism and capitalism linked

ANGELA DAVIS: Yeah, racism is integrally linked to capitalism. And I think it's a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place. As Cedric Robinson pointed out in his book Black Marxism, capitalism is racial capitalism. And, of course, to just say for a moment, that Marx pointed out that what he called primitive accumulation, capital doesn't just appear from nowhere. The original capital was provided by the labor of slaves. The Industrial Revolution, which pivoted around the production of capital, was enabled by slave labor in the U.S.

So, I am convinced that the ultimate eradication of racism is going to require us to move toward a more socialist organization of our economies, of our other institutions. I think we have a long way to go before we can begin to talk about an economic system that is not based on exploitation and on the super-exploitation of Black people, Latinx people, and other racialized populations.

But I do think that we now have the conceptual means to engage in discussions, popular discussions, about capitalism. Occupy gave us new language. The notion of the prison-industrial complex requires us to understand the globalization of capitalism. Anti-capitalist consciousness helps us to understand the predicament of immigrants, who are barred from the U.S. by the wall that has been created by the current occupant. These conditions have been created by global capitalism. And I think this is a period during which we need to begin that process of popular education, which will allow people to understand the interconnections of racism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism.

AMY GOODMAN: Angela, do you think we need a truth and reconciliation commission here in this country?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, that might be one way to begin, but I know we're going to need a lot more than truth and reconciliation. But certainly, we need truth. I'm not sure how soon reconciliation is going 66 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism to emerge. But I think that the whole notion of truth and reconciliation allows us to think differently about the criminal legal system. It allows us to imagine a form of justice that is not based on revenge, a form of justice that is not retributive. So I think that those ideas can help us begin to imagine new ways of structuring our institutions, such as - well, not structuring the prison, because the whole point is that we have to abolish that institution in order to begin to envision new ways of addressing the conditions that lead to mass incarceration, that lead to such horrendous tragedies as the murder of George Floyd.

Trump and Tulsa Massacre

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump has announced he's holding his first campaign rally since the quarantine, since lockdowns across the country, since the pandemic. He's holding it in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 19th - a highly symbolic day. It was June 19, 1865 that enslaved Africans in Texas first learned they were free, two years after Abra- ham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The day is now celebrated as Juneteenth. California Senator Kamala Harris tweeted in response, "This isn't just a wink to white supremacists - he's throwing them a welcome home party," unquote.

Well, Tulsa recently marked the 99th anniversary of one of the dead- liest mass killings of African Americans in U.S. history. In 1921, a white mob killed as many as 300 people, most of them Black, after a Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman. The white mobs destroyed a thriving African American business district known at the time as the Black Wall Street of America.

Well, this all comes as a Tulsa police major is coming under fire after denying systemic racism in the police force there and saying African Americans probably should be shot more. Listen carefully. This is Major Travis Yates in an interview with KFAQ.

Taped voice of MAJOR TRAVIS YATES: If a certain group is com- mitting more crimes, more violent crimes, then that number is going to be higher. Who in the world in their right mind would think that our shootings should be right along the U.S. census line? All of the research says we're shooting African Americans about 24% less than we probably ought to be, based on the crimes being committed.

AMY GOODMAN: "We're shooting them less than they probably ought to be"? Tulsa's mayor and police chief have both blasted Dialogue & Initiative 67

Travis Yates, mayor and police chief of Tulsa

Yates for the comment, but he remains on the force. And on Fri- day, President Trump will be there. Angela Davis, your thoughts on the significance of the moment, the place?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, that's - well, you know, I can't even respond to anything he does anymore. It's just so, so, so, so ridiculous. And it is, however, important to recognize that he represents a sector of the population in this country that wants to return to the past - "Make America great again" - with all of its white supremacy, with all of its misogyny. And I think that at this moment, we are recognizing that we cannot be held back by such forces as those represented by the current occupant of the White House. I doubt very seriously whether the people who come out to hear him in Tulsa on this historic day - of course, all over the country, people of African descent will be observing Juneteenth as an emancipatory moment in our history. (Mass protest forced Trump to cancel his rally on Juneteenth and hold it the next day - editors)

But I think that our role is to start to begin to translate some of the energy and passion into transforming institutions. The process has already begun, and it can't be turned back, at least not by the current occupant of the White House. I'm not suggesting that it's easy to create lasting change, but at least now we can see that it is possible. 68 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

When someone like Roger Goodell (Commissioner of the National Football League - editors) says "Black lives matter," even though he did not mention Colin Kaepernick (Black player who took a knee at NMFL game to stand with Black lives - editors) and even though he may have - he probably did not really mean it, what that means is that the N.F.L. recognizes that it has to begin a new process, that there is a further expansion of popular consciousness.

In New York, of course, you need to ask whether you really want to create new jails in the boroughs in the aftermath of closing Rikers, or whether you need new services. You know, I've been thinking about the case of Jussie Smollett, and I'm wondering why - in Chicago, given the conditions surrounding the murder of Laquan McDonald, the police department should be thoroughly investigated. And we need to ask: How is it that the public could so easily be rallied to the police narrative of what happened in the case of Jussie Smollett?

So, there is so much to be done. And I think that the rallies that the current occupant of the White House is holding will fade into - don't even merit footnotes in history.

AMY GOODMAN: Angela Davis, I wanted to ask you about another event that's taking place on Juneteenth, on June 19th. The Bir- mingham Civil Rights Institute is finally going to issue you the Fred L. Shuttlesworth Award during a virtual event on Juneteenth. And I wanted to ask you about this because you returned to your hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, last February after the institute had at first rescinded the award due to your support for B.D.S. - Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement - and your support of Palestin- ians. After outcry, the institute reversed its decision. More than 3,000 people gathered to see you talk at an alternative event to honor you, which was hosted by the Birmingham Committee for Truth and Rec- onciliation. This is a clip of your comments that day.

ANGELA DAVIS: It became clear to me that this might actually be a teachable moment. That we might seize this moment to reflect on what it means to live on this planet in the 21st century and our responsibilities not only to people in our immediate community but to people all over the planet.

AMY GOODMAN: We were there covering this amazing moment, where the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute had rescinded the award to you, the Fred L. Shuttlesworth Award, went through enormous turmoil. The mayor of Birmingham, so many people Dialogue & Initiative 69 across the spectrum, criticized them for it, but then this process happened, and you are going to be awarded this. Can you talk about the significance of this moment? And what do you plan to say on Juneteenth, the day that President Trump will be in Tulsa?

Palestinian and Black Solidarity

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, thank you for reminding me that these two events are happening on the same day. And, of course, that was, I think, the last time I actually saw you in person, Amy, in Birmingham. A lot has happened over the last period, including within the context of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. They have completely reorganized. They have reorganized their board. They have been involved in conversations with the community. Of course, as you know, the mayor of Birmingham was threatening to withdraw funding from the institute. There was a generalized uprising in the Black community.

And, you know, while at first, it was a total shock to me that they of- fered this award to me, and then they rescinded it, I'm realizing now that that was an important moment, because it encouraged people to think about the meaning of human rights and why is it that Pales- tinians could be excluded from the process of working toward human rights. Palestinian activists have long supported Black people's struggle against racism. When I was in jail, solidarity coming from Palestine was a major source of courage for me. In Ferguson, Pales- tinians were the first to express international solidarity. And there has been this very important connection between the two struggles for many decades, so that I'm going to be really happy to receive the award, which now represents a rethinking of the rather backward position that the institute assumed, that Palestinians could be excluded from the circle of those working toward a future of justice, equality, and human rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking about what's going on in the West Bank right now and about the whole issue of international solidarity, the global response to the killing of George Floyd. In the occupied West Bank, protesters denounced Floyd's murder and the recent killing of Iyad el-Hallak, a 32-year-old Palestinian spe- cial needs student who was shot to death by Israeli forces in occupied East Jerusalem.

He was reportedly chanting "Black lives matter" and "Palestinian lives matter," when Israeli police gunned him down, claiming he was armed. These links that you're seeing, not only in Palestine 70 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism and the United States but around the world, the kind of global response, the tens of thousands of people who marched in Spain, who marched in England, in Berlin, in Munich, all over the world, as this touches a chord and they make demands in their own countries, not only in solidarity with what's happening in the United States? And then I want to ask you about the U.S. election that's coming up in November.

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, yes, Palestinian activists have long supported Black people's struggle against racism, as I pointed out. And I'm hop- ing that today's young activists recognize how important Palestinian solidarity has been to the Black cause and that they recognize that we have a profound responsibility to support Palestinian struggles, as well.

I think it's also important for us to look in the direction of Brazil, whose current political leader competes with our current political leader in many dangerous ways, I would say. Brazil - if we think we have a problem with racist police violence in the United States of America, look at Brazil. Marielle Franco was assassinated because she was challenging the militarization of the police and the racist violence unleashed there. I think 4,000 people were killed last year alone by the police in Brazil. So, I'm saying this because -

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, the president of Brazil, a close ally of President Trump. We only have two minutes, and I want to get to the election. When I interviewed you in 2016, you said you wouldn't support either main-party candidate at the time. What are your thoughts today for 2020?

Trump must be ousted

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, my position really hasn't changed. I'm not going actually to support either of the major candidates. But I do think we have to participate in the election. I mean, that isn't to say that I won't vote for the Democratic candidate. What I'm saying is that in our electoral system as it exists, neither party represents the future that we need in this country. Both parties remain connected to corporate capitalism. But the election will not so much be about who gets to lead the country to a better future, but rather how we can support ourselves and our own ability to continue to organize and place pressure on those in power. And I don't think there's a question about which candidate would allow that process to unfold. Dialogue & Initiative 71

So I think that we're going to have to translate some of the passion that has characterized these demonstrations into work within the electoral arena, recognizing that the electoral arena is not the best place for the expression of radical politics. But if we want to continue this work, we certainly need a person in office who will be more amenable to our mass pressure. And to me, that is the only thing that someone like a Joe Biden represents. But we have to persuade people to go out and vote to guarantee that the current occupant of the White House is forever ousted.

AMY GOODMAN: Angela Davis, I want to thank you so much for this hour, world-renowned abolitionist, author, activist, professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, author of many books, including Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. I'm Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us. Stay safe.

Angela Davis is a founder of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and is on our Advisory Board. 72 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Famed political freedom fighter Angela Davis gives a keynote speech at the NAARPR Re-founding Conference in Chicago in Novem- ber 2019.Photos by Morgan Elise John- son [The TRiiBE]

Angela Davis, Young Activists Reignite the Intergenerational Fight For Black Lives

Report on the National Alliance Against Racist And Political Repression Conference

By Lee Edwards Reprinted with permission from the Tribe

A multi-generational collective of social justice activists and political freedom fighters, including famed political freedom fighter Angela Davis, convened in Chicago over the Nov. 22, 2019 weekend with one goal in mind: bridging the gap between generations of Black activists while gaining community control of police.

The National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression’s (NAAR- PR) Re-Founding Conference kicked off on the opening evening with a rally held at the Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) headquarters. The rally featured remarks from CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates; political activist Carlos Montes; Black Lives Matter Chicago lead organizer Aislinn Pulley and more. Each gave a short speech in front Dialogue & Initiative 73 of an estimated crowd of 1,200 individuals from across the country and abroad. The rally concluded with a keynote address from Davis. “The questions we face today are different,” Davis told the crowd. “We might say that we have acquired more complex approaches to issues of repression that refused to go away.”

During her remarks, Davis spoke about the differences between today’s movement for Black lives and the 1970s Black Power movement. Although the social injustices she and other activists endured in the early 1970s still persist today, she said the nature of combat- ing them had evolved too. In today’s movement work, it is imperative to be inclusive to other marginalized communities fighting against systemic forms of repression.

During her era of activism, Davis said, many issues were not viewed through the lens of women, non-binary people, and disabled people when encountering police, or through the eyes of immigrants facing expulsion or detention upon entering the U.S.

With today’s activists keeping intersectionality in mind, Davis said “new insights” have been gained with regards to “how to address state repressive apparatuses.

“Even though impulsively we are all happy when we hear that a police officer has been convicted, we have also to ask ourselves whether or not we are thinking about different modes of justice,” Davis said, “And whether we should also be thinking about ways of addressing existing problems that do not necessarily rely on the police and prisons.”

Builiding a New Framework

Most of the two-day conference attendees participated in panel discussions and workshops. Behind the scenes, though, members of the NAARPR and the Chicago Alliance Against Racist & Political Repres- sion (CAARPR) discussed the framework for re-establishing a national collaborative effort.

When asked about NAARPR’s next steps following the conference, former NAARPR executive director and current CAARPR field organizer and educational director Frank Chapman, 77, said the organization would establish a continuations committee tasked with organizing the next national conference. A date for the next conference hasn’t been determined yet. 74 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Frank Chapman speaking in front of the NAARPR crowd.

The focus of the next conference will be creating bylaws, electing officers, and setting up a national office. Chapman said decisions regarding the NAARPR would be made “democratically.”

“Function determines structure in nature and society,” Chapman said. “We’re going in and telling them we should have united action as the basis of all that we are doing in these different communities. And we should have an agenda that says we want community control of the police.”

There was a significant number of millennials in attendance. Chap- man said the Re-Founding Conference’s 800 attendees — consisting mostly of “young people” from 28 states and more than 140 cities — was larger than the original conference years ago.

“A new movement has emerged around the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and Rekia Boyd — primarily a Black youth- led movement that is calling for the same kind of systemic changes that we called for back in the 1960s,” Chapman said.

Chapman said the murders of Martin and Laquan McDonald are the result of a police state working diligently to stop another Black liberation movement from coming into existence. “[The younger gen- Dialogue & Initiative 75 eration] realizes those are racist, repressive moves to deny people the organizing space they need in order to overturn new oppression,” he added.

“But the movement today is in a more advanced place,” Chapman explained, “Because they realized today that we’re not going to buy our way out of capitalism, that this system is designed to do what it does to us. It’s not broken.”

One of the speakers at the conference, Ariel Atkins, 28, a lead organizer for Black Lives Matter Chicago, recalled her first encounter with Chapman and CAARPR. It happened about three years ago following the election of President Donald Trump. She was among several young organizers invited to attend CAARPR meetings.

Because of her movement and community work, Chapman thought Atkins could help bridge the generational gap between the old and new guards of activists. At the time, Atkins, who said she first began with her activism by hosting food drives out of her Chicago apartment, got involved “because I felt like I needed to do something.” While at the CAARPR meeting, she recalled Chapman saying to her, “we need you,” and it was at that moment she decided to work with the organization.

“What’s really incredible about Frank is that he has so much knowledge and has such a strong desire to share that knowledge and develop the next group of leaders,” Atkins said. “Frank believes in the youth. And he fully believes in allowing them the power and access they need in order to grow.”

Prior to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the national presence of the Black social activism movement appeared dormant in the 1980s and 1990s when compared to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Atkins said the dormant decades were the direct result of national policies orchestrated by President Richard Nixon and later by President Ronald Reagan to deconstruct Black communities.

“If you completely destroy communities, then they can’t fight for their own power because they don’t have the energy. They don’t have the strength, and they have no hope,” Atkins said. “When Trayvon Martin was killed, I think that was when the next wave of organizers really took place because there were people organizing, but you know, they didn’t have the means and the energy to mobilize people to really base build.” 76 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Chapman echoed Atkins’ sentiments in a separate conversation. He attributed the Black community’s decline after the Civil Rights Move- ment to a “law-and-order doctrine,” which was pushed by conservatives during the Nixon and Reagan administrations. Both presidents also pushed for the War on Drugs, which became a platform to increase incarceration rates throughout the country.

“The War on Drugs became the policy of the land. That’s how we got to mass incarceration,” Chapman said. “That’s how we got to prison nation.”

Atkins credited today’s technology for its ability to rapidly spread information, which allows the younger generation to stay on top of what’s going on locally, nationally, and internationally.

“I definitely think it’s super accurate to say that there was a lull [in the movement], but I think that that was by design,” said Atkins. “They did it on purpose to mute. But now, they can’t really do that as much as way too many people and information move so much quicker, so much faster now than it ever did before.” Chapman added the lull in the movement was led by “right-wing ex- tremists” who desired to create a police state to eliminate the social justice movement and ensure it never rose again.

Or so they thought.

Chapman said some of the negative comments from the old guard of his generation that are directed towards today’s generation of activists are mostly unfounded, especially from those active in the social justice ecosystem. He said he and others from his generation immediately embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and wished to help them succeed moving forward.

“You know, young people in this movement have shown me great respect. But I earned that respect because I wasn’t just keeping the trenches warm for them to show up. When they showed up, that’s when they found me. They found me in the trenches, you know, and we were glad to see them coming,” Chapman said.

“Do young people make mistakes? Hell yeah. I [also]made a bunch of them,” he said. “But it is our responsibility and duty as their elders to make damn sure that they don’t make the mistakes that we made, because we made it for them. They’re supposed to start out on higher ground. That is our purpose for existing.” Dialogue & Initiative 77

Book Review: The Damned Don't Cry: Pages from the Life of a Black Prisoner and Organizer

By Frank Edgar Chapman, Jr. Changemaker Press, 2019

Reviewed by Alex Krehbiel

Frank Chapman's autobiography, The Damned Don't Cry, is the gripping story of a young African American who was sentenced to 150 years in prison, and how he became a revolutionary organizer of the oppressed and gained his freedom and the freedom of many others. Frank's story shows how the interpersonal became politicized after brutal encounters with police and prison guards over a half a century ago.

But it is uniquely relevant today as mass outrage over the police murder of African American George Floyd sweeps the country, demanding an end to police killings with impunity.

Right from the start, Chapman begins his narrative from a familiar standpoint of those who are oppressed and exist at the margins of class-stratified society. Beginning at the tender age of 13 in the ghettos of St. Louis, Frank recounts his tumultuous trajectory from a troubled adolescence to early adulthood. At age 18, he was arrested and erroneously charged with robbery and homicide, and convicted and sentenced to life plus 50 years. 78 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Like other oppressed subaltern masses, living precariously at the bottom of society's proverbial totem pole, Frank's deep introspection and reading while in jail led him to gain a world view that was imbued with class consciousness. This class consciousness was informed by Frank's reality of both the subtle and pronounced character of capitalist society, with its white supremacy and brutal anti-Black racism, and other forms of discrimination.

Frank read and understood the wise observation that one's social being determines one's social consciousness. This social consciousness developed under a very particular circumstance, specifically under the juggernaut of the modern slave plantation in the form of the prison-industrial complex. Prison afforded Frank with ample oppor- tunity to think deeply and seriously about the severe circumstances with which he found himself. He found solace, and guidance, in reading.

"My mind found escape from my present problems by becoming sub- merged in the history of humankind and its problems," Frank wrote. In this process, he saw that his life was linked to all African Ameri- cans and all oppressed people everywhere.

Marxism in theory and practice

But, more importantly, Frank realized that his objective and subjec- tive salvation revolved not only around his intellectual grappling with his dire straights in life, which was significantly determined by the racist and oppressive nature of capitalist class society. More specifically, Chapman found and understood the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism to guide him. This fundamental insight into what the prerequisites of social change are is captured in the Marxist idi- om, which is summed up in its philosophy of praxis. Marxist praxis, or practice, is the class struggle informed by a correct theoretical appraisal of the state of class conflict, at whatever stage of its development. It was exactly this incisive insight that propelled Chapman to engage in a directed struggle against the repressive tendencies in the carceral belly of the beast. He looked beyond the Black-on-Black dynamic that seeks to obscure the true social relationship: that of the struggle between oppressor and oppressed, as opposed to an inverted struggle between different segments within the oppressed class as a whole.

Racial segregation is a known fact in most prisons. It is a time-tested form of divide-and-conquer. Wherever it predominates, it pres- Dialogue & Initiative 79 ents one of the foremost obstacles to ameliorating injustices that would otherwise be resolved through common class solidarity in a clearly defined class-divided society. The struggle for human dig- nity of all prisoners must be paramount in the struggle against the much less numerous jailers and wardens, who profit from these divisions. Although internecine conflicts and separation hurt both segments being pitted against one another in the oppressed class as a whole, unfortunately we see that one distinctive group within this class will become the veritable stepping stone over the other. This concept was captured in WEB DuBois's explanation of the racial bribe. Frank recounts how racial segregation was utilized to divide and conquer:

Racial segregation and degradation

"I remember standing in front of this huge medieval structure called A Hall… the only cell block for black people in the whole joint... We slept in cells of four and six men in double and triple stacked bunks. There were 700 prisoners in A Hall, which made it the most overcrowded cell block… these were, without a doubt, the most degrading and humiliating years of incarceration. Twice a week we were herded 150 at a time into the showers like cattle…(T)here were more physical assaults and murders in A Hall than all six white Halls together. The white halls had one and two men cells, so most of their rumbles and killing scrapes took place in the yard…. Racial segregation was literally killing Black prisoners. And nobody cared except their family and friends."

Though the pitting of inmates against each other was an all-per- vading fact of life for prisoners, for some, it was a learning experience. This lesson, in differing degrees, would provide the moral/ spiritual where-with-all to fight against these internecion pressures foisted upon them by the powers that be. The connection between social conditions, rising social consciousness, and relevant practical political activity is shown in Frank's growing understanding of the applicability of Marxian dialectics to his carceral circumstances. For example, after achieving some preliminary self-taught educational benchmarks while incarcerated, Frank recounts an anecdote that is useful in demonstrating the point at hand.

"One thing about A Hall was very personal to me; it convinced me immediately that I needed to apply myself to the law books (and to erudition more generally -AK) so I could find a way out of this medieval torture chamber." 80 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Frank discussed his experiences with incarcerated Black Muslim, who sought him out in the hopes that he would be willing to teach them about Black history. Chapman wrote:

"…(T)o prepare myself for the task I plunged into the study of Black history and culture …I started with WEB DuBois…I became a devot- ed disciple of DuBois. At this time, I was already familiar with the economic works of Karl Marx, and I considered myself a Marxist. It was fascinating seeing how DuBois was moving toward Marxism, and how he pioneered and inlayed the scientific basis for the study of the Negro problem in America and of racism in general."

Teaching classes

"Now I was ready to study scholars like OC Cox, who had written Caste, Class, and Race, showing the relationship between capitalism as a system of economic exploitation and racism as a class as sociological concepts….Armed with this, I proceeded to offer classes to the Muslim brothers. I went to their meetings on the yard and gave them lessons of Black history from a DuBoisian and a Marxist perspective."

I've quoted Frank above at length to show the relationship between prior revolutionary thought, namely, as it pertains to WEB DuBois and other Marxists, and Frank Chapman's own evolution in thought and in practical political activity. It is this organic linking of the applicability of past lessons with current problems that help activists solve problems today. The lessons that Frank drew from his struggles would be a central benefit for today's activists and organizers as they grapple with their own struggles and campaigns.

The practical application of these sociological insights found their expression in particular experiences Frank had in prison, which led to class solidarity, including the solidarity of prisoners across racial and other demographic lines. This multi-racial unity was necessary to combat injustices that affected everyone, or which could be borne by all in the future.

Chapman presented an example of this early on when he recounted a story about prison authorities disbanding the impromptu educational group on Black History that Chapman taught, and barred Chapman from the school facilities for "teaching communism." Frank wrote: "they confiscated all my books and writings and sent me to the hole… Dialogue & Initiative 81

The prisoners were also furious because they clearly understood the racist nature of the attack. Also, I knew some of the white prisoners, like…Walter Noland, who also opposed the attack on me by the warden…Walter Noland, who was the greatest legal mind of all the jailhouse lawyers, decided to help me fight the warden. .."

Frank continues in the next paragraph: "Noland was by no stretch of the imagination a red, or a partisan for racial equality, but he understood the relationship between civil rights and criminal justice…(W) ith Noland's help, I was able to draft a serious civil rights complaint against the warden in which I not only raised the issue of first amendment rights to pursue knowledge and an education…but also the issue of racial discrimination and segregated facilities."

Not only did this sort of unity redound favorably for Chapman personally, it also culminated in higher educational pursuits been granted at the behest of Frank and other prisoners, which in the case of Chapman himself, ultimately would result in him earning a BA and opening up a path toward the eventual and complete extrication from the prison system entirely.

Frank's rising political and social consciousness weighed effectively in the balance, not only in ameliorating his own circumstances, but of those in his incarcerated class, and this irrespective of race.

Multi-racial unity

After Frank got out of the hole, he and his close friends started a Marxist-Leninist study group. It did political education, but also "took on certain practical tasks, such as fighting to desegregate the prison facilities, to unite Black and white prisoners around issues of common concern…and to establish strong links to the progressive movements on the outside."

In this struggle against barbaric penal conditions, Frank would initiate and co-facilitate a plethora of links binding himself and others to the broad progressive movement across a whole spectrum of issues and causes, both inside and outside the prison walls.

Ultimately, we come to see that it was this network of activists from the social justice movement that would provide the essential component of the alignment of forces, which eventually propelled Chap- man to see freedom beyond the cement and razor wire that was meant to contain and smother him. The catalyst came from read- 82 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

ing a prominent leftist political publication that spoke to him directly. That set him on the path to freedom.

Frank came across in prison a copy of the black liberation journal, Freedomways. He wrote to them and submitted articles, which were published. Hershel Walker, an African American leader of the Com- munist Party in St. Louis, read Frank's articles and became interested in his case. A Defense Committee was formed to help Frank.

When Angela Davis was arrested and put on trial for murder during this period in the early 1970s, a broader defense committee took up both cases. Since their cases overlapped, and the defense committees worked on both cases. Frank explains:

"Fortunately, Comrade Walker became interested in my case and asked me to write a brief biographical sketch. About three years later a defense committee was formed on my behalf… (…My Defense committee was formed in 1969). Without going into a lot of detail now, let me just say that it was the mass movement to Free Angele Davis that paved the way to free me, and many other political prisoners." This culminated in the formation of "an organization in Chicago called the National Alliance, and… the people who were doing this were the National United Com- mittees to Free Angela Davis and all Political Prisoners…The Ken- tucky people were working with this committee as well as the Black Panthers, and they (formed) a new organization called the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression….They included in their definition of political prisoners also persons who stated advocating for civil rights once they got to prison. Prisoners advocating for civil rights increased the possibility of being kept in prison longer. This definition included me as a political prisoner." Dialogue & Initiative 83

Frank had been working for years to make change in prison. One of those included forming the first NAACP prison chapter. Frank was also struggling to establish a program for prisoners seeking a higher education. He was successful. He himself enrolled, and he completed his AA degree and then wanted to continue to get a BA. His campaign for the educational program included the proviso that if a prisoner successfully completed his courses and received an AA, they could be eligible to attend a four-year university outside the prison to get a BA. Upon completion of a BA, they would be eligible for parole.

Frank's successful completion of his BA made him eligible for parole. He went before the Parole Board and was granted parole. This program helped other prisoners get a BA and get out of prison until reactionary politicians abolished it.

Upon Frank's re-introduction into society in the mid-1970s, he worked with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker-based organization. His main work there was to work on a committee to help end apartheid in South Africa.

National Alliance

He then went to work for the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR). He explained his work there, first for members of the Black Panther Party who were facing heavy charges and long prison terms, and later many other victims of racist and political repression.

"Here are some of the campaigns we initiated. Struggles we organized and victories we won. We filed the first petition with the United Nations calling attention to the plight of political prisoners, particularly the victims of COINTELPRO in the Black Pan- ther Party…Dhoruba bin Wahad (whose) "conviction was reversed March 15, 1990, and he was released without bail.

“Geronimo's conviction was vacated on June 10, 1997, and he eventually received a $4.5 million settlement from the City of Los Angeles and the U.S. Department of Justice. Geronimo (Pratt) died in Tanzania at age 63, June 2, 2011; he spent 27 years in prison. Assata Shakur, and Pete O'Neal, also COINTELPRO victims, have been in forced exile for over two decades and there are many other Panthers mentioned in our U.N. petition who are still languishing in prison, some have died in prison." 84 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

He mentioned the case of Lolita Lebron, one of the Puerto Rican nationalists, imprisoned for her role in trying to free Puerto Rico from US imperialist control and plunder, and Leonard Peltier, a Native American indigenous leader who has been in prison for 42 years. Frank wrote, "He and the Panthers are the longest-held political prisoners in the world."

He went on to write about other cases, including "Joan Little, who was a 21- year old Black woman accused of killing her jailer, Clarence Al- ligood (white, age 62) who tried to rape her in her jail cell. She was facing the death penalty. Joan Little was the first woman in U.S. history to be acquitted even though she used deadly force in resisting sexual assault."

Frank wrote about the "massive campaign that freed Johnny Imani Harris from death row and prison," a campaign that stopped "at- tempts of the state of Mississippi to execute Mayor Eddie James Car- than on trumped-up murder charges," and others.

The National Alliance also took up labor union cases, including working with the labor movement to defeat a right-to-work for less effort in Missouri in 1978, and the group supported the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in a successful national boycott of J. P. Stevens sheets and bedding products that helped the union organize Stevens' textile mills in North Carolina.

In 1981, the National Alliance organized a National People's Hearing on Police Crimes, held in Los Angeles with Congresswoman Maxine Waters addressing the forum, where the first model legislation was developed for civilian control of the police. Fittingly, Frank Chapman is leading that campaign today in Chicago, and with the re-founding of the National Alliance in 2019, similar campaigns are underway in other cities.

Frank Chapman's life and struggles have been an inspiration and model for me. I urge everyone to buy this book and read it. Better yet, organize a study group around it. Even better yet, join or organize a National Alliance chapter in your area so we can win community control of the police in every city, town, and village from coast to coast.

Alex Krehbiel is a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). He organized a study group among prisoners while incarcerated in a California prison, and founded the Dialogue & Initiative 85

CCDS Prison Chapter. He also participated in the state-wide hunger strike of 29,000 California prisoners in 2013, sparked by the inhu- manity of solidarity confinement.

To order Frank Chapman's book, The Damned Don't Cry, Go To https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/frank-edgar-chapman-jr/the- damned-dont-cry/paperback/product-1567q447.html For bulk orders at reduced rates, contacr Carl Davidson ar carld717@gmail. com 86 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Public Health, Covid 19, And Racism

By Mildred Williamson

(Editors note: This article was prepared from a presentation given by Mildred Williamson, Ph.D. Social Work, at a virtual meeting of the National Coor- dinating Committee of CCDS on April 5, 2020. Williamson works in public health in Chi- cago. Numerous reports have revealed that Black, Latinx, and other people of color have been hardest hit by COVID 19. ProPublica published a report recently that found that 72% of Chicago's deaths from COVID 19 are African American, while African Americans make up just 30% of that city's population.

Similar patterns exist across the country. The reasons for this include: (1) underfunding and lack of medical facilities in communities of Blacks and other people of color, and lack of health insurance, which has resulted in higher rates of disease and poorer health for African Americans and other people of color for generations which make them more susceptible to COVID 19, and (2) People of color are disproportionately front-line workers who have the greatest exposure to COVID 19 - hospital workers, maintenance workers, grocery workers, food preparation workers, transit and delivery workers, and other service workers. Williamson gives us an inside look at the Cook County medical system and COVID 19. Her presentation was transcribed by Erica Carter).

I wish to provide information on the pandemic in our state and local area (Illinois and Cook County). I also will discuss what we have learned from the human rights approach to public health. Dialogue & Initiative 87

In addition, I will discuss what was predictable about the type of pandemic itself.

It should be of interest to lawmakers and policymakers about the pandemic in this moment of crisis that there are agencies with the appropriate information: FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency); Homeland Security, within the HHS (US Department of Health and Human Services), and particularly the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) which develops operations for emergency preparedness. All of these emerged after 9/11 and the anthrax scare several years ago. These agencies also were influenced by Cold War concerns with the protection of assets, rather than human life.

One of the things that developed under the Obama Administration during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was a procedure established in the White House to pull agencies together to get a better handle on how to respond to infectious disease outbreaks as well as to study resource deployment and predictability, including math- ematical modeling. However, one of the first things that the Trump Administration did was dismantle these operations as well as reduce the amount of dollars to the CDC for these kinds of purposes.

The Poor and People on Color Bear the Brunt

We should recall the outbreaks and disasters of recent years-the Ka- trina and Puerto Rico catastrophes and the heatwave in the Chicago area that killed many people. And, every one of these catastrophes, regardless of the proportion of the population in the areas involved, people in poverty, people of color bore the brunt of those outbreaks. There were communities in Chicago side-by-side, north and south Lawndale, for example, where the death rate amongst elderly African Americans outstripped the death rate of a community literally next door.

In South Lawndale, there were more Latinos with more younger people in households, but most of those African Americans, poor and elderly, were living alone without air conditioning and without people to look in on them. We are now learning in the data that is beginning to emerge (although slowly and interestingly enough, there are only a few places that I know about that are collecting data by race, but Illinois happens to be one of them). In Illinois, as of this date (April 5, 2020), there are 10,357 positive cases and 243 deaths. There are about 4,296 exactly that are in the city of Chicago and 76 deaths, and the bigger circle is really around the county of Cook and the adjacent 88 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism counties of DuPage and Lake. When you look at this data by race, and I am looking at our health department webpage, interestingly enough, for the 10,357 cases listed, there were 2,384 entries where race was left blank. But for those that remain, we know the racial composition of the rest. 3,120 cases are among African Americans, 2,965 white, just under 1,000 Latinos, and just under 800 amongst other nationalities where the race was indicated.

We know that among the earliest positives of reported COVID-19 cases, many occurred in Chicago. O'Hare airport was designated as one of the original airports that would accept people coming into the country from the province of Wuhan, China. The earlier cases tended to be people whose residence was in the affluent areas-north shore suburbs, north of Chicago-including those first arrivals from Wuhan province. In fact, our Cook County Department of Public Health, which has jurisdictional responsibility for suburban Cook County, followed and took care of those original first patients and among those leaders of that first effort was our own Dr. Rachel Rubin.

Inequality in Underlying Conditions

So we know that those earlier cases were mostly among affluent people in our area. Still, we know that the first death recorded in the state of Illinois was an African-American woman, in a neighborhood not too far from me called Auburn Gresham. It was particularly of major interest because the profile of having underlying health conditions, like diabetes, makes people disproportionately at risk, and many of the elements that lead to diabetes and many of these other health conditions are disproportionately born by poor people, people of color, people who live in food deserts, people who live in communities where there is such a stark inequality, in terms of how resources, including jobs, benefits and services, are distributed. That woman, the first death, happened to be one of our patients in the Cook County health system. Then we heard just about a week ago that her sister died as well.

Now I'm going to get into the data for my own health system where I work, which is the Cook County health system. Right now, there are 81 people in our main hospital, Stroger Hospital, who are positive for this virus. There are, and this is our biggest area of concentra- tion right now, there are 204 people who are positive for this virus at Cook County Jail, and they are also served by Cermak Health Servic- es, which is part of the Cook County Health System. In fact, there is a major effort to reorganize our health system to do redeployments. Dialogue & Initiative 89

Our second hospital, Provident Hospital, has now, as of this weekend, closed its ED and ICU units to leave them more available to service these patients who are more COVID-19 specific. Therefore, it is not accepting more people so that we can try to be ready for what we feel is coming. We've had exponential growth every day. Of the 204 people who are positive at the county jail, 45 of them tested positive just last Sunday. We have these big clumps every day. The first eight people who were positive in our Stroger Hospital, 4 of those eight people, were health care workers. Thankfully, those four people are well on their way to recovery.

Another element of our health system is that to accommodate the surge, changes were needed in our 16 health centers, of which I manage. Our largest free-standing health center, which is the CORE Center, for mostly the infectious disease population, has a majority of patients that are HIV patients. We also have HIV programs in six other health centers in our system. We have all converted our rou- tine visits to telephone visits and still accept people coming in with urgent care, new patients, who are first time positive for HIV. Unfor- tunately, we have now had a couple of new positives for HIV and new positives for COVID-19 at the same time. In the conversion of those visits to telephone visits that has allowed for a more robust remote working policy, including for medical providers, but there has also been redeployment of nurses and other medical providers into the hospital, into the jail at Cermak health services. And increasingly, in our own employee health services, many people are coming up with symptoms and testing positive themselves.

Just Friday, I covered our Austin Clinic on the west side for the HIV program because the site team leader there, herself, is under isolation. It's very much a moving target and an all-hands-on-deck situation. I know for all my colleagues and me for the last month, or so this has been the case. In the supply situation, we also have the same issues. Just this week, for the first time, we had enough masks for every patient coming and all staff at the same time. Before, we were just giving masks out to patients, and before that, a health care provider might be able to wear a mask if they were working with a patient with virus symptoms.

Supplies were being rationed. Hand sanitizers now seem to be like Chanel perfume. They are a hot commodity. It's quite extraordinary to see how these kinds of things are such a major element of healthcare. It does reflect, illuminates, if you will, all the things I think most people on the left or many people who are just liberal now see: 90 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism what is woefully absent and terrible about having a decentralized, for-profit healthcare system if you can call it that.

I won't take up too much more time other than to say we also have to look at social determinants, not just from the point of view of people with underlying conditions, people in poverty, and so forth. But there are other things about a pandemic of this magnitude that brings other inequalities out in society as well. One is, if you are in an intimate partner violence situation, a pandemic like this can make your safety that much more precarious with the shelter-in-place requirements that are necessary.

Another is If you live in a food desert or you lack transportation, and you lack the ability to have the food delivered to your house because you don't have a credit card or the necessary means or that some organizations that make deliveries don't deliver to your neighborhood.

Another impact is the digital divide. Schools now being closed some have already announced they would be closed all the way through the end of this school year. And it is questionable whether or not they will open up again in the fall. Not all students have the technology, and those who don't have the appropriate internet access.

There are so many things about this pandemic that reveal the vast inequality in society. While the stimulus package and other things have some temporary help to them, I think much needs to be done. We need to take this extraordinary moment and make that illustration not just stand there. It must illustrate the need to improve the qual- ity of life for everyone permanently, so that as these things emerge, and they will emerge again. The society can respond in a much more robust way in keeping with basic human rights Dialogue & Initiative 91

The History of Policing in the United States: An Excerpt

Dr. Gary Potter

The development of policing in the United States closely followed the development of policing in England. In the early colonies policing took two forms. It was both informal and communal, which is referred to as the "Watch," or private-for-profit policing, which is called "The Big Stick" (Spitzer, 1979). The watch system was composed of community volunteers whose primary duty was to warn of impending danger. Boston created a night watch in 1636, New York in 1658 and Philadelphia in 1700. The night watch was not a particularly effective crime control device.

Watchmen often slept or drank on duty. While the watch was theoret- ically voluntary, many "volunteers" were simply attempting to evade military service, were conscript forced into service by their town, or were performing watch duties as a form of punishment. Philadelphia created the first day watch in 1833 and New York instituted a day watch in 1844 as a supplement to its new municipal police force (Gaines, Kappeler, and Vaughn 1999).

Augmenting the watch system was a system of constables, official law enforcement officers, usually paid by the fee system for war- rants they served. Constables had a variety of non-law enforcement functions to perform as well, including serving as land surveyors and verifying the accuracy of weights and measures. In many cities constables were given the responsibility of supervising the activities of the night watch. These informal modalities of policing continued well after the American Revolution. It was not until the 1830s that the 92 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism idea of a centralized municipal police department first emerged in the United States. In 1838, the city of Boston established the first American police force, followed by New York City in 1845, Albany, NY and Chicago in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853, Phil- adelphia in 1855, and Newark, NJ and Baltimore in 1857 (Harring 1983, Lundman 1980; Lynch 1984).

By the 1880s all major U.S. cities had municipal police forces in place. These "modern police" organizations shared similar characteristics: (1) they were publicly supported and bureaucratic in form; (2) police officers were fulltime employees, not community volunteers or case- by-case fee retainers; (3) departments had permanent and fixed rules and procedures, and employment as a police officers was continu- ous; (4) police departments were accountable to a central govern- mental authority (Lundman 1980).

The Southern Variety

In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the "Slave Patrol" (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992). Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules.

Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of con- trolling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultur- al caste system, and enforcing "Jim Crow" segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system. The key question, of course, is what was it about the United States in the 1830s that necessitated the development of local, centralized, bureaucratic police forces? One answer is that cities were growing. The United States was no longer a collection of small cities and rural hamlets.

Urbanization was occurring at an ever-quickening pace and old informal watch and constable system was no longer adequate to control disorder. Anecdotal accounts suggest increasing crime and vice in urban centers. Mob violence, particularly violence directed at immigrants and African Americans by white youths, occurred with some Dialogue & Initiative 93 frequency. Public disorder, mostly public drunkenness and sometimes prostitution, was more visible and less easily controlled in growing urban centers than it had been rural villages (Walker 1996). But evidence of an actual crime wave is lacking. So, if the modern American police force was not a direct response to crime, then what was it a response to?

More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to ‘disorder’

What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to "disorder." These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. Private and for profit policing was too disorganized and too crime specific in form to fulfill these needs.

The emerging commercial elites needed a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly work force, a stable and orderly environment for the conduct of business, and the maintenance of what they referred to as the "collective good" (Spitzer and Scull 1977). These mercantile interests also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state. Maintaining a stable and disciplined work force for the developing system of factory production and ensuring a safe and tranquil community for the conduct of commerce required an organized system of social control.

The developing profit-based system of production antagonized social tensions in the community. Inequality was increasing rapidly; the exploitation of workers through long hours, dangerous working conditions, and low pay was endemic; and the dominance of local governments by economic elites was creating political unrest. The only effective political strategy available to exploited workers was what economic elites referred to as "rioting," which was actually a primitive form of what would become union strikes against employers (Silver 1967).

The modern police force not only provided an organized, centralized body of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to use force 94 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism to maintain order, it also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power.

Defining social control as crime control was accomplished by raising the specter of the "dangerous classes." The suggestion was that public drunkenness, crime, hooliganism, political protests and worker "riots" were the products of a biologically inferior, morally intemperate, unskilled and uneducated underclass. The consumption of alcohol was widely seen as the major cause of crime and public disorder. The irony, of course, is that public drunkenness didn't exist until mercantile and commercial interests created ven- ues for and encouraged the commercial sale of alcohol in public places. This underclass was easily identifiable because it consisted primarily of the poor, foreign immigrants and free blacks (Lundman 1980: 29).

This isolation of the "dangerous classes" as the embodiment of the crime problem created a focus in crime control that persists to today, the idea that policing should be directed toward "bad" individuals, rather than social and economic conditions that are criminogenic in their social outcomes. In addition, the creation of the modern police force in the United States also immutably altered the definition of the police function.

Policing had always been a reactive enterprise, occurring only in response to a specific criminal act. Centralized and bureaucratic police departments, focusing on the alleged crime producing qualities of the "dangerous classes" began to emphasize preventative crime control. The presence of police, authorized to use force, could stop crime before it started by subjecting everyone to sur- veillance and observation. The concept of the police patrol as a preventative control mechanism routinized the insertion of police into the normal daily events of everyone's life, a previously un- known and highly feared concept in both England and the United States (Parks 1976).

Dr. Gary Potter is a professor of online and on-campus courses for the EKU School of Justice Studies. His current research areas include transnational organized crime, human trafficking and the sex industry, and drug trafficking by teenagers in rural Kentucky. From “The History of Policing in the United States” https://plsonline.eku.edu/ sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-history-of-policing-in-us.pdf) Dialogue & Initiative 95

Sources

Barkan, Steven, Criminology: A Sociological Understanding 2nd edition, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2001 . Bordua, David and Albert Reiss, Jr. "Law Enforcement," In The Uses of So- ciology, edited by Paul Lazarsfeld, William Sewell, and Harold Wilensky, New York, New York: Basic Books, 1967.

Crank, John and Robert Langworthy, "An Institutional Perspective of Po- licing," The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 83, no.2 (1992).

Fogelson, Robert, Big-City Police, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977. Gaines, Larry. Victor Kappeler, and Joseph Vaughn, Policing in America (3rd ed.), Cincinnati, Ohio: Anderson Pub- lishing Company, 1999.

Harring, Sidney, "Policing in a Class Society: The Expansion of the Urban Police in the Later Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," In Crime and Capitalism, edited by David Greenberg, Palo Alto, California: May- field, 1981.

Harring, Sidney, Policing in a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1983.

Harring, Sidney, "The Taylorization of Police Work: Policing in the 1980s," The Insurgent Sociologist 10, no. 4, (1981).

Kappeler, Victor, Richard Sluder and Geoff Alpert, Forces of Deviance: Understanding the Dark Side of Policing, 2nd edition, Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1998.

Lundman, Robert J., Police and Policing: An Introduction, New York, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980.

Lynch, Michael, Class Based Justice: A History of the Origins of Policing in Albany, Albany, New York: Michael J. Hindelang Criminal Research Justice Center, 1984.

Parks, Evelyn, "From Constabulary to Police Society: Implications for So- cial Control," In Whose Law? What Order?, edited by William Chambliss and Michael Mankoff, New York, New York: Wiley (1976).

Platt, Tony, "Crime and Punishment in the United States: Immediate and Long-Term Reforms from a Marxist Perspective, Crime and Social Justice 96 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

18 (1982). Potter, Gary and Philip Jenkins, The City and the Syndicate: Organizing Crime in Philadelphia, Boston, Massachusetts, Ginn Press. 1985.

Reichel, Philip L., "The Misplaced Emphasis on Urbanization in Police Development," Policing and Society 3 no. 1 (1992).

Silver, Andrew, "The Demand for Order in Civil Society: A Review of Some Important Themes in the History of Urban Crime, Police and Riot," in The Police: Six Sociological Essays. edited by David Bordua, New York New York: Wiley, 1967.

Spitzer, Stephen, "The Rationalization of Crime Control in Capitalist So- ciety," Contemporary Crises 3, no. 1 (1979).

Spitzer, Stephen and Andrew Scull, "Privatization and Capitalist Develop- ment: The Case of the Private Police," Social Problems 25, no. 1 (1977).

Uchida, Craig, "The Development of American Police: An Historical Over- view," In Critical Issues in Policing: Contemporary Readings, edited by Robert Dunham and Geoff Alpert, Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1993.

Walker, Samuel, The Police in America: An Introduction, New York, New York: McGrawHill, 1996. Dialogue & Initiative 97

The Roots of Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist Resistance In The U.S.: On the Predecessors to Antifa

By Robin D.G. Kelley

"No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!" has been a popular protest chant since the New York real estate mogul and former reality TV star became America's 45th president. This was no mere rhe- torical flourish. We saw a surge in the ranks of white nationalists and the "alt Right," an escalation of domestic terrorist attacks on black and brown people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and the LGBTQ community. The road to a "Fascist USA" took a deadly turn after Trump indirectly con- doned the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which an assembly Klansmen, "alt Knights," neo-Nazis, and white nationalist militias inspired one of their number to mow down anti-racist protesters with his car. A consensus took hold that Trump's election, along with the campaign to remove Confederate monuments following the 2015 massacre of nine Black worship- pers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church, emboldened militant white supremacists. Books, articles, and blogposts linked Trump's ascendance directly to white nationalism, even reminding readers of his daddy's ties to the Klan.

A fair share of liberal intellectuals and pundits set about to explain the roots of contemporary white supremacy by tracing the events in Charlottesville to the history of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. This is understandable. The "second" Klan enjoyed a high degree of legitimacy, and its xenophobic slogans "America First" and "100% Ameri- canism" were echoed by the Trump administration. Besides, most of the recent scholarship on the Klan focuses on the 1920s, precisely 98 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism because, in spite of its virulence, its values and ideology were not far from the American mainstream.

But why go back to the 1920s when the current generation of militant white supremacists are either products of, or influenced by, the "third Klan" of the 1970s and '80s? Between 1974 and 1981, Klan membership grew from about 1,500 to over ten thousand. In the course of a decade, a resurgent Klan formed paramilitary units, burned crosses, organized rallies in cities such as Chicago, Wash- ington D.C., and Meriden, Connecticut, and prepared to patrol the US-Mexico border as an auxiliary to the Immigration and Naturaliza- tion Service. Their leaders also attained enough legitimacy to enter mainstream politics and run for public office. In 1980, Tom Metzger, the "Grand Dragon" of the Ku Klux Klan, garnered enough votes to win the Democratic primary in Southern California's 43rd Congres- sional district. Similarly, in 1989 David Duke, former Klansman and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives.

Opening the Floodgates of Terror

The spectacular rise of the Klan, the American Nazi Party, Skin- heads, and various white Christian nationalist militias opened the floodgates for a reign of terror by adherents and lone wolves targeting African Americans, Jews, Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants. Homes, churches, synagogues and schools across the country were firebombed. Between 1979 and 1980, two dozen black people and two white women in interracial relationships were murdered in seven different cities. In Buffalo, two black taxi drivers were found dead with their hearts cut out, and two weeks later in that same city a white sniper in took the lives of four African Americans. Meanwhile, between 1979 - 1981, twenty-eight children, adolescents, and adults were mysteriously murdered in the city of Atlanta. Other murders were not so mysterious. In Mobile, Alabama, in 1981, members of the United Klans of America kidnapped, tortured, and hanged a black teenager named Michael Donald.

Why, in an effort to understand the Trump era, have the pundits, the press, even some of our finest historians ignored this crucial period of white racist violence? Why do most Americans believe that such virulent expressions of white supremacy died with Jim Crow, leaving in its wake more indirect or benign forms of racism-i.e., employment and housing discrimination, a biased criminal justice system, the dismantling of affirmative action, and the like? One recent exception Dialogue & Initiative 99 that has garnered significant attention is Spike Lee's Oscar-nominated BlacKKKlansman, based on the true story of how a black undercover cop, Ron Stallworth, infiltrated the Klan in Colorado Springs in 1978. But Lee's film elides the fact that Stallworth also infiltrated the Klan's chief opposition, the International Committee Against Racism, a mass organization formed by the Progressive Labor Party. By transforming an undercover cop into a Black freedom fighter and present- ing the police as the first line of defense against white nationalists, BlacKKKlansman fundamentally distorts the history of the Klan, the police, and the period.

Fortunately for us, Hilary Moore and James Tracy have written a mag- nificent book that not only corrects the record but helps explain the mercurial rise of white supremacist organizations in the 1970s, how the Klan was (temporarily) defeated, and why this period has been largely ignored. No Fascist USA! is not a history of the Klan, per se, but rather a history of anti-racist, anti-fascist resistance in the United States, from the post-1968 insurgencies through the Reagan- era counterrevolution. We learn that opposition to the Klan was militant, uncompromising, and effective, mobilizing more white people to confront violent white supremacist organizations than at any other time in history. And contrary to popular stereotypes, the Klan was no joke. They were not poor, frustrated, ignorant outcasts out of step with modernity but often men and women of standing who held positions of power and authority in state institutions - police, prisons, jails, and local government.

No Fascist USA! radically shifts our perspective, challenging the prevailing wisdom that racist terrorism rises in response to economic downturns, white downward mobility, or in a vacuum created by progressive alternatives. On the contrary, the Klan's resurrection was a reaction to the radical insurgencies of the era-Black and Brown rebel- lions, struggles for gender equality and sexual freedom, the defeat of U.S. imperialism from Vietnam to Tehran, real movements for democracy and social transformation.

The same can be said for the original Klan, formed in 1866 as a reaction to emancipation and the struggle of formerly enslaved people to establish a real democracy in the South. With the military defeat of the first Klan in 1871, the Southern Bourbon democrats resumed the reign of terror, though it took them another three decades to crush abolition democracy and install the Jim Crow regime. And even then, Black resistance to white supremacy persisted. Indeed, the resurrection of the Klan in 1915 and its growth in the 1920s ought to be s 100 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Ku Klux Klan members hold a march in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 9, 1925. seen as a reaction to a new wave of democratic insurgencies--notably black, immigrant, and labor radicalism and women's rights.

Its initial inspiration derived from a national campaign to erase the history of Reconstruction. "Colonel" William Joseph Simmons revived the Ku Klux Klan after seeing D. W. Griffith's masterwork of racist propaganda, "The Birth of a Nation." The film was historical alchemy, turning terrorists into saviors, rapists into chivalrous protectors of white female virtue and racial purity, and courageous and visionary black men and women into idle, irresponsible ignoramuses, rapists, jezebels, and sexually depraved mulattoes. By circulating old racial fabulations and new fictions in the service of New South capitalism and modern white supremacy, "Birth of a Nation" attempted to oblit- erate all vestiges of the Black struggle for social democracy during Reconstruction.

Respectable white supremacists such as the Ladies Memorial Associ- ations and the United Daughters of the Confederacy waged their own soft power campaign of building Confederate monuments throughout the region and around the nation's capital. One of the most elab- orate statues, erected at Arlington cemetery in 1914, depicted an enslaved black man marching into battle alongside his master, and a faithful "mammy" caring for her charge as the child's uniformed father heads off to fight the dreaded Yankees. In a particularly ironic twist, the myth of "mammy" was weaponized by the federal government to buttress the hard power of Jim Crow. In 1922, the U.S. Senate approved a monument dedicated to "Mammy" in Washington, Dialogue & Initiative 101

D. C., just weeks before allowing a Southern filibuster to defeat an antilynching bill. Not surprisingly, Black leaders not only excoriated the Senate's failure to pass the bill but thoroughly rejected commem- orating a stereotype. The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, proposed an alternative monument to the "White Daddy" showing an adult black woman ("mammy") looking on helplessly as the white master assaults a small child-presumably his child with "mammy" born of rape.

The truth is, neither the soft power of historical revision and erasure nor the hard power of lynch law could keep Black people down. De- spite the Klan's best efforts, Black people fled the old plantations for the industrial plantations of the urban North. They founded new organizations, exercised the franchise, continued the fight for democracy, called themselves "New Negroes." These New Negroes refused Griffith's racial and national fabulations; fought back with pickets and boycotts, speeches and editorials, scholarship and art, and out- right rebellion; called on their country to get out of Haiti, the Do- minican Republic, the Philippines, Mexico; and exposed the United States for what it was-the tyranny of white supremacy masquerading as enlightened democracy.

The new Klan hoped to make America great again by purging it of un-American (read: radical) influences: Negroes, immigrants (except for those of Anglo and Scandinavian stock), Catholics, and Jews. The Klan's pursuit of severe immigration restriction was driven not only by xenophobia but anti-communism. Immigrant workers from Eu- rope, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia populated the burgeon- ing socialist, anarchist, and communist organizations and were often outspoken opponents of the First World War. The Second Klan emerged against a backdrop of state and federal anti-sedition laws, the Mexican Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and a wave of de- portations of immigrants accused of subversive activities. In January 1920 alone, some four thousand people were rounded up all over the country, held in seclusion for long periods of time, tried in secret hearings, and deported.

The Rise of the ‘Third Klan’

So we should not be surprised that the Third Klan arose at the height of insurgent movements in the U.S., when the FBI's Counter-Intelli- gence Program (COINTELPRO) and local police red squads surveilled and jailed key leaders just as prison organizing had reached its apex. According to Moore and Tracy, the catalyst for the John Brown Anti- 102 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Klan committee (JBAKC) came from Black activists within the prisons who warned that the Klan was not only growing but occupied important positions within prison administration. The call to resist the Klan galvanized white radicals on the outside engaged in prison solidarity work. In other words, the JBAKC was formed not by naïve do- good liberals but by folks associated with the organized Left. Many of their principle leaders came out of cadre organizations committed to the larger project of socialist revolution and self-determination for oppressed nationalities. They saw themselves as comrades, not allies, in a life-and-death struggle to stop fascism in its tracks.

The perils of fighting the Klan were made abundantly clear on No- vember 3, 1979, when the members of the Communist Workers Party held an anti-Klan march at a predominantly African American housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina. As the demonstration was about the begin, a nine-car caravan pulled up carrying thirty-five armed members of the United Racist Front, an umbrella organization consisting of Klansmen and Nazis. In the space of eighty-eight seconds, they emptied over twenty rounds of ammunition into the multiracial crowd, wounding a dozen people and killing five of the march leaders, Dr. James Waller, William Sampson, Sandra Smith, Ce- sar Cauce, and Dr. Michael Nathan. Three of the victims were white men, Cauce originally a Cuban immigrant, Sandi Smith an African American woman. All were veterans of the student antiwar and black liberation movements, and all but Nathan were members of the Com- munist Workers Party.

Despite the fact that a local news station captured the entire ambush on camera, two all-white juries acquitted Klan-Nazi defendants of criminal charges in the Greensboro murders. In a civil trial in 1985, a third jury held two Greensboro police officers, the Klan-police in- formant, and four Klan-Nazi gunmen liable for wrongful death. The trials not only exposed the complicity of the local police but that a federal agent of the Bureau Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Bernard Butkovich, who was working undercover in the American Nazi Party, encouraged members to come to the demonstration armed and never informed the police or FBI of their plans. As a consequence of the civil suit, the city of Greensboro paid a paltry $351,000 to Dr. Martha Nathan, widow of Dr. Michael Nathan.

How could this be? Why, as we prepare to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Greensboro Massacre, is this incident not part of our collective memory, our national trauma? For the same reasons that so little is known about the JBAKC. In the political culture of the Dialogue & Initiative 103

Cold War, Communists spouting "Death to the Klan" were the principle threat, not armed white supremacists. Indeed, Klan-Nazi defense in the second trial rested on the argument that they were fighting communists and therefore their actions had no racist intent! CWP members, like their counterparts in the JBAKC, would not play the victim or turn the other cheek. They believed in armed self-defense and famously refused to testify in the first trial out of principled opposition to a criminal justice system that targeted them.

The JBAKC showed unfathomable courage. Their numbers were always small; unlike Antifa and other anti-fascist protesters today, the JBAKC rarely outnumbered the racists. The Klan and local police could identify them by name, knew where they lived and what kind of cars they drove. Committee members endured potentially deadly attacks-cut brake lines, slashed tires, burglaries, rocks and even gun- fire were not uncommon. And yet, despite the dangers some members, such as Linda Evans of Austin, Texas, went undercover and infiltrated the Klan. Moreover, in exposing the depths of the Klan's paramilitary operations and the level of violence JBAKC members were up against, No Fascist USA! overturns one of the most common narratives of the era: that the Black freedom movement's presumed shift from non-violence to violence led to its downfall. Instead, the 1970s and early 1980s were marked instead by the unabated escalation of violence among white supremacists, often with tacit support or indifference from federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities. As No Fascist USA! demonstrates, the police and feds appeared to devote more energy and resources to surveilling and prosecuting anti-Klan activists than the Klan itself.

John Brown’s Real Plan

Members of the JBAKC understood this all too well, and like their namesake, they recognized that the resurgence of white terrorism was not a regional problem but a national one. Lest we forget, John Brown initially planned to initiate a war against slavery by dis- patching guerrilla armies to raid plantations in Virginia and retreat to the hills, freeing slaves and causing havoc, until the system was no longer profitable. He assumed that once an armed attack began, enslaved people would join the revolt. But by 1857-58, the U. S. Supreme Court's ruling on Dred Scott convinced Brown to strike the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry instead. Why? Because the Dred Scott decision proved to Brown that while slaveholders were morally accountable for holding human beings in bondage, it was the federal govt that sanctioned and sustained the institution of slavery. 104 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Slavery was a national crime, and the federal government was slavery's prime source of authority and protection. We tend to remember one line from Chief Justice Roger Taney majority opinion: that Black people "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." But Brown and his crew understood that what was at stake extended beyond Black citizenship. The ruling effectively rendered the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, opening the door to make slavery legal everywhere in the U.S. The majority ruled that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories because it never had the power to govern territories, and that denying the right to own slaves violated the Fifth Amendment to the constitution which declared that no person can be deprived of "life, liberty, or property without due process of law." Brown now understood the task ahead as a struggle to remake the country.

So in 1858, in preparation for the raid on Harpers Ferry, he drafted: "A Dec- laration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America" and what he called a "Provisional Con- stitution and Ordinance for the People of the United States." Its preamble called slavery "a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion, the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination," and it declared their newly created body a provisional government committed to the destruction of slavery.

While the prevailing consensus has deemed John Brown's raid a failure, it, more than any other event, provoke Southern secession and launched the Civil War, which ultimately ended chattel slavery. It terrified the planter class who never imagined that a direct attack on slavery would involve so many white men - thus giving credence to the Southern conspiracy that a revolution was about to take place. Dialogue & Initiative 105

The raid forced many white antislavery sympathizers to commit to action, demonstrating that there is no moderation on the question of slavery.

The key take-away for John Brown is also the chief lesson this book. In 1859, a ragtag army made up of sixteen white men and five black men took on the federal government and the Southern planter class in what seemed like a foolhardy attempt to free four million Black people held in bondage. They were defeated, Brown was hanged, but just two or three years later the system swiftly began to collapse. When Black folks sang "John Brown's Body," declaring that his "truth goes marching on," they recognized that even in death his militant commitment and example continued to inspire, and perhaps more importantly, that the struggle is not over. The JBAKC took on the Klan, Nazis, Skinheads, and a variety of fascists, as well as the federal government, and prevailed. While they did not eliminate the Klan, its membership fell dramatically and the conviction rate of Klans- men slowly began to rise. Anti-Klan activists changed the discourse, compelling juries to see Klan violence for what it was-domestic terrorism. They exposed the fact that the federal government, again, did not always stand on the side of justice, which partly explains why the JBAKC became the FBI's target.

But they, too, knew the struggle wasn't over and that the task ahead was to remake the country and the world. They continued to fight- against racism, sexism, class exploitation, state violence, on behalf of the incarcerated and HIV/AIDS victims, for justice for all people. So, as we face the latest wave of fascist violence, sometimes behind tiki torches, other times behind a badge or a body camera, rest as- sured that their truth goes marching on.

Robin Davis Gibran Kelley (born March 14, 1962) is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of Ameri- can History at UCLA.. He is the author of many books on the African American experience including Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Commu- nists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). This essay is reprinted with the author's permission. 106 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

The Danger of the ‘Ethno-Nationalist’ State

By Bill Fletcher Jr.

NNPA NEWSWIRE - Ethnic regimes were largely ignored in the mainstream media of the global North until the early 1990s, even when troubling events, such as genocide in Burundi, were unfolding. It was only with the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and the Rwanda genocide (1994) that it became more than apparent that another wave of ethnic cleansing and ethno-nationalist regimes were unfolding.

One of the most common features of right-wing populist and fascist movements is the demand for ethnic and/or racial purity. During the course of the 20th century we saw it in its most egregious forms in colonial and white minority regimes in the global South, and in the Nazi-led persecution and, later, Holocaust against the Jews.

Ethnic regimes were largely ignored in the mainstream media of the global North until the early 1990s, even when troubling events, such as genocide in Burundi, were unfolding. It was only with the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and the Rwanda genocide (1994) that it became more than apparent that another wave of ethnic cleansing and ethno-nationalist regimes were unfolding.

Openly privileged ethnic groups

What are ethno-nationalist regimes? They are political systems that quite openly privilege the alleged rights of a given ethnic or so- called racial group. Apartheid South Africa was certainly an example of a long-running such regime. But the Rwanda genocide when rightwing Hutus went to war to openly eliminate Tutsis (and those Hutus Dialogue & Initiative 107 who allied with Tutsis) using the pretext of a civil war, was yet another example.

Right-wing populist leaders such as Donald Trump in the USA, Ben- jamin Netanyahu in Israel and Narenda Modi in India are quintes- sential examples of leaders who promote ethno-nationalist regimes. Contrary to early 20th century fascists and 19th century "scientific racists," they do not rely on the rhetoric of racial superiority or infe- riority in justifying their politics. Rather they argue either the incom- patibility of different racial/ethnic groups and/or that the specific racial/ethnic group which they claim to represent has been, allegedly, aggrieved over the years.

The situation in India at this very moment is illustrating the evolving and serious dangers of ethno-nationalist regimes. The political forces around Modi and his political party-the BJP-have been promoting anti-Muslim rhetoric and practices for years. Their objective is nothing short of eliminating the secular basis of India and replacing it with a Hindu ethno-nationalist state. The recent legislation advanced by Modi and passed in Parliament that offers citizenship to refugees from neighboring countries UNLESS they happen to be Muslim demonstrates the depths of depravity of such regimes. It is, therefore, not surprising that India is exploding.

Israel and ‘Infiltrators’

Netanyahu is a close cousin-politically speaking-of Modi's. He and his party-the Likud-have always aimed to eliminate the Palestinian presence from not only the occupied Palestinian territories, but from Israel itself. But it is not only the Palestinians that Netanyahu, et.al. wish to eliminate. The language of the regime when it comes to other alleged outsiders is particularly provocative and echoes that of Hindu fascists in India in describing undocumented immigrants, in the case of Israel, as "infiltrators."

Right-wing populism and ethno-nationalism have become major parts of the global political landscape. It is not only the appearance of Don- ald Trump; nor is it just Britain's Boris Johnson. It has emerged, like chicken pox, in numerous places. And, if one is not careful, it can emerge even within the ranks of the oppressed when, in desperation, we sometimes seek to distinguish ourselves from some "Other."

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the executive editor of globalafricanworker.com, the former president of TransAfrica Forum. and a NNPA Newswire Contributor. 108 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Online Gathering Remembers the Life and Legacy of Jack O'Dell

By Karl Kramer

A webinar to commemorate the life and work of Jack O'Dell, who passed away on October 31 at the age of 96, was held on February 24, 2020 sponsored by the Social- ist Education Project of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Social- ism of which O'Dell was an advisory board member.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. led a round table conversation with people who worked with O'Dell, including Jane Power, Nikh- il Singh, James Campbell, Leslie Cagan, Sharon Maeda, Gene Bruskin and Michael Zweig.

According to Nikhil Pal Singh, O'Dell embodied three social movements of the second half of the 20th century. He was a labor radical in the merchant marines during the founding of the Congress of In- dustrial Organizations (CIO). Sailing the world, he saw international struggles against colonialism. He came back to the United States to join in the struggle for Black freedom.

Singh teaches history and runs a Prison Education Program at New York University. For many years, he taught at the University of Wash- ington in Seattle. He first met O'Dell in 2004, regularly interviewing him in Vancouver, British Columbia, where O'Dell lived, and edited the book, "Climin' Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writ- ings of Jack O'Dell," which was published in 2010.

O'Dell boarded a munitions ship headed to the Panama Canal Zone in 1943 to join the National Maritime Union (NMU), part of a cluster of progressive maritime unions within the CIO that saw racial egali- Dialogue & Initiative 109 tarianism as the key to overcoming the disparity in wages and working conditions in the South. During the rise of McCarthyism, NMU president Joe Curran committed himself to driving all Communists and sympathizers from the union. O'Dell was expelled in 1950, in Galveston, Texas, during a period of dry-dock from his home port of New York City, for circulating a peace petition on his ship. An underlying reason was that he had supported the rival union leadership slate of ousted union leader Ferdinand Smith, a Jamaican-born radical who had been its secretary-treasurer and the highest-ranking Black official in the CIO.

O’Dell: If I’m being red-baited, I might was well join

If he was going to stand accused of being one, he may as well become one. O'Dell joined the waterfront section of U.S. Communist Party in New York in 1950. The Party sent him to the South where he worked for voting rights in Louisiana and served as a member of the Party's regional organizing committee. He spent a summer organizing sharecroppers in Pointe Coupee parish and a year in building a union at a cookie plant outside Baton Rouge.

Bus boycotts took place in Baton Rouge in 1953 and then in Mont- gomery, Alabama, in 1955. According to James Campbell, O'Dell saw a qualitative change in the Black church in Montgomery, and had a militant epiphany, observing the African American struggle and its links to the Bill of Rights and upholding the aims of the American Revolution. Three years after the Montgomery bus boycott, O'Dell decided to leave the Communist Party, given the political stigma and marginalization, concluding that the country would have civil rights before it would have socialism.

Mississippi Senator James Eastland subpoenaed O'Dell to appear before his Internal Security Subcommittee in Washington, D.C., in 1956, where he invoked the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, but not before denouncing Eastland. He returned to Alabama to work with the Alabama Christian Movement for Hu- man Rights in Birmingham, that was founded when the Alabama state legislature outlawed the NAACP. In September 1958, O'Dell was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee to appear in Atlanta in its hearings on "Communist Activities in the South." He refused to recognize the committee's authority and invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination. Afterwards, he left the South for New York City, where he worked with his NMU comrade Jesse Gray as a tenants' rights activist. 110 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

James Campbell met O'Dell in New York City in 1958 as O'Dell and Bayard Rustin were setting up the office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Harlem. O'Dell was organizing and fundraising for SCLC on an ad hoc basis. He was invited to join the staff of SCLC in 1961, and became director of fundraising for the New York office. He was also responsible for voter registration operations in several southern states.

The FBI leaked information about O'Dell's Communist past to the southern press to put King on the defensive and damage SCLC's fundraising capacity. King was considering O'Dell for the position of executive director of SCLC. O'Dell distanced himself from the SCLC in 1962.

"JFK [President John F. Kennedy] and the FBI went after Jack, part of the nefarious activities conducted against King, to say that you have Communists in your organization, Stanley Levinson and Jack O'Dell," Singh said.

"King basically said 'I don't care what his political background is.' Jack made it easy for him, and said 'if you need me to resign, I will.' Jack's role as a Communist in the 1950s had been brought before the committee by James Eastland and Jack called him a dictator. In that climate, red-baiting for any association with the far left was a kiss of death. It is still the reason that Jack is not well known today," Singh continued.

In 1959, friends of Dr. Du Bois began discussing starting the journal "Freedomways," fashioned as the successor to Paul Robeson's newspaper "Freedom," and in 1960 the first copy came out, edited by Es- ther Cooper Jackson, former secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and wife of Communist Party leader James Jackson. O'Dell was invited to become the associate managing editor.

"Jack came into the SCLC office and said some friends of Du Bois are putting together a magazine based on Robeson's," Campbell said. "Through 'Freedomways,' the group that came from the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Louis Burnham, Sallye Davis, Aptheker, became mentors to the young radicals of the Sixties, who were also contributors in conjunction with anchoring articles from elders."

After King's assassination, Dorothy Cotton, Andrew Young, Carl Far- ris and others persuaded O'Dell to return to the SCLC in 1969, and he Dialogue & Initiative 111

Segregationists placed red-baiting billboards across the South became acting executive director in 1970. O'Dell joined a campaign in support of Charleston's striking municipal hospital workers, a col- laboration between New York Local 1199 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, SCLC and a group of predominately Black women hospital workers who were seeking union representation.

O’Dell moves to work with Jackson and PUSH

In late 1971, Jesse Jackson left SCLC to form People United to Save Humanity, or PUSH. He asked O'Dell to serve as his chief of staff and director of national expansion. After the Soweto uprising against apartheid in South Africa in 1976, O'Dell suggested PUSH create an International Affairs Department and he directed a series of international initiatives for the organization.

"When Jack went back to run SCLC as interim director, they brought Jack back as someone who had tremendous credibility to knit together fractious movements," Singh said. "When Jesse pushed off to form PUSH, Jack went with Jesse. He had experience with internation- alist movements, and a new impetus to move forward. He was always looking for new place where he could be useful."

In the 1970s and 1980s, Jack taught courses on colonialism and U.S. history at the Antioch Putney Graduate School of Education in Wash- ington, D.C., and served as chair of the board of the Pacifica Founda- tion, which pioneered listener-supported radio. 112 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

In early 1973, Jane Power, working for the National Educational As- sociation, was driving home when she passed a little house where Antioch had set up a master's program for teachers, who could take classes after work on economic history and Marxism - "a program in Red Studies," as she called it. O'Dell was teaching a colonial history class. Power took two courses. She was in a conference about a paper and O'Dell asked her if she liked Indian food.

"He said, 'Miss Power, do you like the ballet?' I had been in class for one semester. He was very quiet, not pushy. I just kept seeing him. I kept seeing him for 46 years," Jane said. "Over the years, I found out more and more about him and learned more and more from him. I found ways to introduce ideas to him."

Sharon Maeda met O'Dell in 1980 when she interviewed for the position of executive director of Pacifica. O'Dell was chair of the board from 1977 to 1997.

"His role changed with what was happening internally. There has always been some kind of turmoil. He was bringing some kind of calm- ness," Maeda said.

"When I got there it was $1 million in debt. Pacifica would not be around today if he had not intervened in his calming way," Maeda added.

"He did not want to be the person on stage. He rarely spoke on the air," Maeda said.

An exception was an editorial. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the June 16, 1976, massacre in Soweto, Black South Af- ricans were planning to have a big commemoration. Starting the week before the date, the South African military was staging outside of Soweto. The Pacifica board agreed to the first on-the-air editorial. O'Dell gave the editorial as the chair of the board.

"Resistance to apartheid continues to grow, with the liberating ideas of the Freedom Charter, and is gaining new supporters especially among white youth. This is a revolutionary moment, but marked by bloodshed, as isolation of the racist regime from the international community grows. We must make our voices heard by the Reagan administration to stop supporting the Botha regime. Phone, write or wire to break with apartheid," Jack said. Dialogue & Initiative 113

"Multiple times we blew out the D.C. comment line. Each Pacific station carried the editorial. A woman in the Capitol said that they were getting calls after the hour, because each station was airing the editorial on the hour. We do believe it saved the people of Soweto," Maeda said.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Jack traveled as a citizen-diplomat in apartheid South Africa and occupied Palestine. In the spring of 1979, at the invitation of the Association of Arab American University Gradu- ates, O'Dell and Mrs. Jacqueline Jackson led a delegation to Beirut, where they met with the leaders of the Palestinian Liberation Organi- zation, including Yasser Arafat. Andrew Young, whom President Jim- my Carter had appointed as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, met with Mrs. Jackson, O'Dell and the delegation to hear a report on their trip to Beirut. Later that summer, Young met with the Palestin- ian representative to the United Nations, which caused a backlash that led to Young being forced to resign.

O'Dell worked on Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign. At the 1988 Democratic Convention, Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign, with 1200 delegates and seven million Democratic primary votes, forced the first significant U.S. public debate on the idea of a two- state solution in the Middle East.

Michael Zweig was at the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta. He was passing out fliers supporting Jackson's plank on Palestine.

"It was the only time that I had handed out fliers, and people would come back to give me a hug," Zweig said. "That was Jack's influence in Jesse's campaign."

O'Dell working as a member of the national board of the peace organization SANE/FREEZE on disarmament issues and opposition to a permanent war economy.

Leslie Cagan first began working with Jack in organizing an anti- nuclear demonstration in 1982.

"The coalition had lot of internal problems, and disagreements. It was very contentious. Someone said maybe it would help us if Jack O'Dell could play a more active role," Cagan said.

"He played an incredibly important role in the coalition, and its ability to carry out the work of a massive mobilization," Cagan said. "He had 114 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism an uncanny ability to listen to people. He helped different parts of the coalition, more behind the scenes but critical. Each organization put aside its own agenda to carry out the project."

Gene Bruskin met O'Dell in 1990 when he moved into the building where O'Dell lived in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washing- ton, D.C. Bruskin began working in the Rainbow Coalition as labor deputy. He worked at the Rainbow Coalition for a couple of years with O'Dell.

"It was fascinating to watch the incredible respect that Rev. Jackson had for Jack. At some point in a discussion, he would turn to Jack and say 'what do you think?' If he disagreed, he would understate it and then afterwards they would meet," Bruskin said.

"In the office in 1991 and 1992, in the last moments of reviving the Rainbow Coalition out of the '88 election, the Rev. was reluctant. Jack took a leadership role. He would take the side of staff that the Rain- bow Coalition needed to have democracy and have local chapters," Bruskin said. "He was disappointed that it did not happen, but he did everything he could."

Bill Fletcher met O'Dell in 1990. "What do you say when you meet an icon?," Fletcher said. "Jack could really listen. He would ask you good questions, in that way you knew you were dealing with a good listener."

Zweig was teaching at Stony Brook University, where every two years they would hold a "How Class Works" conference. They invited O'Dell in 2004 to give him an award for a lifetime of fighting for social justice. In his acceptance speech, he gave the outline for a charter modeled on the South African struggle against apartheid.

"Jack had the idea for a Democracy Charter for the United States based on the Freedom Charter written in 1955 by a People's Con- gress," Zweig said. "We reproduced it in a pamphlet, 'The Fierce Ur- gency of Now.'"

"The Democracy Charter is a new version of the Bill of Rights and Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights. It is a continuity of American radicalism, and the promises of the American Revolution," Campbell said.

O'Dell's intent was to put the Democracy Charter out in the public do- main as a vehicle for in-depth political discussions, in which people Dialogue & Initiative 115 would propose how it should be changed, and add to it. He saw it as a living document. In the tradition of grassroots organizing as it developed in the Civil Rights Movement in the South, and carried through in the farm worker movement, discussions of the democracy charter would build up to having regional people's assemblies, percolating up to the leadership of national organizations that would convene a Congress of the People to hold a national discussion on a vision for substantive democracy.

A group in San Francisco created a website, www.asej.net, that has the text of the Democracy Charter and a discussion platform in which people can comment, propose amendments and add points to the Democracy Charter. They are inviting groups around the country to have house meetings and coffee klatsches to get together to study the Democracy Charter and contribute the results of their discussions on the website.

The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism is starting a Democracy Education Project to continue the work of O'Dell in propagating the Democracy Charter. Anyone interested in being a part of these on-line meetings, email [email protected]. (some of the historical background is informed by "Learn Your Horn," the introduction to "Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: the Black Freedom Writings of Jack O'Dell," edited by Nikhil Pal Singh)

Karl Kramer is a long-time political activist around issues of racial justice and Latin America solidarity. 116 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Jack O'Dell: A Beacon of Social Justice Unionism and the Civil Rights Movement

A Long Correspondence with Jack O'Dell

By James E. Campbell

(Editor's Note: Jack O'Dell was born to a Black working-class family in 1923. He joined the racially integrated and leftwing National Maritime Union of the CIO at age 20 to fight fascism during WWII. In early 1945, on a long trip around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, he read Black Reconstruction and Black Folk Then and Now by WEB Du Bois. Discus- sions with CIO Communist shipmates opened up a new world to Jack of the injustices of capitalism, imperialism, and racism, and the hope of a better world with socialism.

In Calcutta, India he saw workers with wicker baskets piled high on their heads loading ships with the names of slave traders lettered on the ship's sides. Those experiences, and many others during his six years sailing as a member of the NMU, propelled him into the labor and civil rights movements, including working closely with Dr. Mar- tin Luther King, Jr., on a journey that spanned over 70 years until his passing on October 31, 2019 at age 96. James E. Campbell, a close friend and comrade of O'Dell for 60 of those years, gives us a first-hand impression of this remarkable organizer, leader, and un- sung hero of countless people's struggles for justice. This article was transcribed from a recent interview that Karl Kramer did with Jim Campbell. Some of the historical background is informed from the introduction to the book, Climin’ Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Writings of Jack O'Dell.) Dialogue & Initiative 117

What Jack recognized was generational page-turning. The younger generation turns the page in the history of struggle. Jack had the ability to listen closely. A comment that Ossie Davis made described Jack well: "Is Jack still that old man taking notes from the back of the meeting?" Jack had the brilliant ability to formulate the question that is at the heart of the matter. He presented this question as a threshold to the next stage of struggle: "How do people who were sold in the market-place fit into a market economy?"

Photo: O’Dell with Black and white members of the National Maritime Union worked together to protect each other and build a progressive multi-racial union.

After a stint as a merchant marine, Jack returned to the South in 1946 to help organize restaurant workers in Miami Beach under the auspices of the Congress of Industrial Organization's postwar "Op- eration Dixie." The drive to organize workers into unions in the anti-union South was eventually broken down by McCarthyism and red-baiting. On a rare occasion, Jack would mention having received a "Citizen of the Year" award from the Miami Times, a local African American newspaper, for organizing a successful consumer boycott of a white-owned store where the owner's family members badly beat an African American youth employee, accusing him of stealing.

Organizers of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), hearing of Jack's organizing in the South, invited him to be a delegate to its ninth annual convention in Columbia, South Carolina, in October of 1946. The SNYC was founded in 1937 by leading African American Commu- nist Party activists Ed Strong, James Jackson and Louis Burnham, whom Jack would often reference in a quote. SNYC included African American women among its leadership, such as Esther Cooper Jackson, who was a moving force in putting the ninth annual convention together, Doro- thy Burnham, Rose Mae Catchings, Dorothy Hunton, and Sallye Davis, mother of Angela Davis. Most of them later were the network around Freedomways, the pre-eminent Black left political journal. 118 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Paul Robeson and WEB Du Bois

The 1946 SNYC convention had a few thousand delegates and was the biggest interracial gathering in the history of South Carolina. Paul Robeson sang and W.E.B. Du Bois gave the keynote address, "Behold the Land," that called for youth unity in the South, presaging what the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Stu- dent Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) did in the 1960s. Herbert Aptheker, was also at the convention. The convention dis- played outstanding African Americans throughout the venue, which impressed Jack, especially those who had been Senators and Repre- sentatives during Reconstruction. Years later, I visited Esther Jackson in New York. She showed me a printed program, addressed to Dr. Du Bois, signed by many participants whom I recognized were from prominent African American families in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1947, the SNYC was added to the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, and by 1949, it disbanded.

Jack characterized his time organizing in the South, particularly in Louisiana and Alabama, as a lesson in learning how to base oneself in the community. He spoke often of how church folk he was living with or visiting would help him out the back door of their home as federal agents on a surprise raid would be coming in the front door. "To have rootedness among the folk of the community means everything," he would say.

In 1958, Jack left the South for New York City, where he worked with his National Maritime Union comrade Jesse Gray, who, as a tenants' rights activist, was organizing rent strikes. Jesse Gray later became a New York State Assemblyman.

At the same time, I had just secured a regular substitute teaching job in New York City schools, and was living at the Harlem YMCA. The secretary working at the YMCA was moving her parents into a co-op because of their age and health. She told me about the apartment that they were leaving. I took over their seven-room apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue and 135th St. in Harlem.

Also, in 1958, I had heard that Bayard Rustin was in New York working for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. setting up a SCLC office on 125th St. near 8th Ave. in an extension of the office of union leader A. Philip Randolph. I had heard Rustin speak at Morgan State College in the 1950s after he came out of prison having served a term for being a conscientious objector. I designed a button taking the title from a Dialogue & Initiative 119

Jack O’Dell was brought before the Senate Internal Security committee in 1956 during the McCarthy leftist witch-hunts and refused to answer its red-baiting questions. Jack defied the committee’s authority, and was told to “stop talking,” by the committee’s attorney. Jack responded, “What do you mean stop talking? I have as much right to talk here as you. What are you? Some kind of dictator?” Jack continued, saying committee chairman James Eastland should be expelled from the committee because he was “anti-Labor and anti-Negro.”

New York Times editorial on the emerging sit-in and freedom ride movement, "Heed their Rising Voices," and located a shop in lower Manhattan that would make 10,000 buttons for $200. I went to the new office and approached Bayard with an offer to contribute 10,000 buttons that the SCLC could sell at $1 each at its rallies. Bayard accepted the offer and then asked politely if he could make some sug- gestions on my design and message. He came back with an entirely different design and message. Feeling humbled, I took the admit- tedly improved design to the shop to print 10,000 buttons. Jack was new in the office, having just come up from the South and asked me to volunteer there. He also told me he was looking for a place to stay. I rented the front part of my apartment to Jack. I had the back part. We shared a common television room, which also served as the common library, and a kitchen. 120 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Planning 1963 March on Washington

Jack became the key fundraiser for the SCLC. He would have me go to pick up envelopes of money that were contributions from New York labor unions. He had me go to a subway stop to meet voting rights activist Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, after she had been beaten in a Mississippi jail cell, and to bring her to our apartment to stay. She came to New York for medical treatment, and a conference with Dr. King's lawyer, Clarence Jones, at his home. A small group of us met at his home.

Along with Jack and I, also in attendance were Lawrence Guyot, an activist in SNCC, and Annell Ponder, a young African American woman who had just finished her Masters degree at Atlanta University and had been beaten along with Mrs. Hamer in the Mississippi jail. We met on a Sunday evening and then Mrs. Hamer went to Washington, D.C., on Monday to meet with then Attorney General Robert Kennedy about the attack. At a SNCC anniversary celebration years later, I was able to shake the hand of Harry Belafonte for having paid for the medical treatments of Mrs. Hamer in New York.

The Greensboro Sit-Ins

In 1960, the sit-ins among African American students targeting segregation in public accommodations, began in Greensboro, North Carolina. Rustin headed a team of organizers who pulled together a benefit concert that was held on May 17, on the occasion of the 6th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, featur- ing Harry Belafonte, Diahann Carroll, Pete Seeger, and Sidney Poitier. The event filled Harlem's 369th Armory with 12,000 people. I sus- pect that this was part of building Bayard's mailing list for the 1963 March on Washington. Jack was the fundraiser and Bayard was the organizer. It was the first big event on which I had worked. Belafonte and Poitier were meeting with us as part of the planning committee.

Next Jack worked on the fundraising with Bayard Rustin organizing civil rights marches, that they called prayer pilgrimages, at both the Republican and Democratic party conventions that summer. This also was building towards the 1963 March on Washington.

Jack was invited to join the staff of SCLC in 1961. He became director of fundraising in the New York office. He was also responsible for voter registration operations in several southern states. He took an Dialogue & Initiative 121 evening course at New York University on finances and fundraising to prepare for the job. After the FBI orchestrated a red-baiting attack on him, Jack resigned from the SCLC in 1962. It was the only time I saw him depressed in the apartment. He didn't say anything, but it affected his mood deeply.

Freedomways

In 1959, Jack introduced me to Esther Cooper Jackson, former secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and her hus- band Communist Party leader James Jackson, and William and Louise Patterson. William Pat- terson had led a team that drafted "We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People," a formal petition to the United Nations in 1951 against the United States. Jack had been in conversations with them since they had begun planning Freedomways as the successor to Paul Robeson's newspaper, Freedom. Jack was later invited to become associate managing editor.

Jack helped to organize a 1961 benefit concert by Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and other members of the "Rat Pack" at New York's Carnegie Hall, for Freedomways, what became a series of "Freedom- ways Galas." I worked on most of them, and wrote a script of ex- cerpts from the writings of Dr. Du Bois for the Afro-American Folk- loric Troupe from San Francisco State University, directed by Marc Primus, and performed at Town Hall.

Some early discussions in our apartment became national discussions in the pages of Freedomways. Jack did a series on institutional racism, tracing its development in the university system in the 19th Century, particularly at Oxford, Harvard, Yale and Stanford. The Teutonic Ori- gins theory was an ideology of racism that subscribed to a belief in the superiority of having genetic roots in the Teutonic tribes of ancient Germany. Leading proponents were John Burgess, a professor from 122 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

Amherst College who started the school of political science at Colum- bia, and Herbert Baxter Adams, who founded the Johns Hopkins studies in Historical and Political Science. Another discussion that went on for a period of time was the status of African American citizenship in relation to the state as a form of domestic colonialism.

After Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam in early 1964 to set up the Organization of Afro-African Unity, he held an introductory meeting in Harlem, and I approached him about working as an educator with his group, and he referred me to his education committee. I joined the organization and began setting up a liberation school, modeled after the freedom schools of SNCC in Mississippi. One of the first people who did a series of lectures was Jack. I asked him to give three lectures on an issue as a course. He picked Du Bois' Black Reconstruc- tion, and spoke to people who walked in off the street. That was the class. They really gravitated to him. He used the example that they were supposed to make $100 week in salary as a job advertised, but when they got their first check, it was for $65. He posed the question, "where is my $35?" The system was short-changing them. This they understood and remembered.

Later, I invited Malcolm to come up to the apartment to meet Jack. They had good meeting. Malcolm, just having coffee, sat there for a good while, discussing the possibilities of how the Civil Rights movement could link up with the Pan-Africanist movement that Malcolm was building. Jack and Malcolm only had one meeting. It was cordial.

In our apartment, Jack and I would discuss and analyze what we were reading, exploring "what ifs," possibilities and alternatives, along with their relevance in the Movement. I had taped all the liberation school lectures. Jack had taped his interview with Mrs. Hamer. And there were other tapes of meetings in Harlem with local activists. Around 1970, someone broke a back window to gain entry and stole all the tapes off the mantle where I had stacked them in the apartment. Jack's comment on this to me was "junkies don't steal tapes." Also, we would receive strange letters and postcards, all accusatory. Then there were two white dudes in suits and ties sitting in a parked car in front of our building. This was in Harlem!

Black studies and political education

In 1966, Tom Porter and a couple of other student activists at An- tioch College, Ohio, started the Antioch Putney DC Center in Wash- ington, D.C., and wanted me to come and set up a black studies pro- Dialogue & Initiative 123 gram. They had access to teachers and schools in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in Washington, D.C. They started a work study program in which 18 to 20 teachers from Adams Morgan schools came after work to classes to pursue an M.A.T. in education. I decided to take a year's leave of absence from New York schools to be the educational director of the Antioch Put- ney Center program. Among the lecturers in the program were Hor- ace Mann Bond, dean of the School of Education at Atlanta University and father of civil-rights leader Ju- lian Bond; Doxey Wilkerson who had taught at the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Communist Party adult educational institution in New York, and who taught as a professor of education at Yeshiva University, the Jewish university in Manhattan; civil rights activist Ella Baker; Bob Rhodes who as a graduate student at the University of Chicago gave informal lectures on Marxism and black history; and Tony Monteiro from the University of Pennsylvania, who was a key theoretician in the Communist Party. Jack was visiting on regular basis to teach there. I directed the program for two summers and the intervening school year. Jack stayed on as a key teacher of courses on colonialism and U.S. history for eight years. In 1974, the dean of faculty for Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, converted the Washington, D.C., school of education to a school of law.

Jack worked on Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns. I had just returned from Tanzania in 1982 and also became active on both of Jackson's campaigns.

Working with Jesse was the first time that Jack worked in the inner circle on a national presidential campaign in the United States. It put him in touch with different constituencies around the country. Jack learned a lot about organizing a national movement. Each section of the country is qualitatively different, with differences in geogra- phy, economic interests, economic centers, history and culture. It is a challenging and complex organizing job to organize this country 124 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico.

I think the lessons learned from this furthered Jack's thinking on writing the Democracy Charter, a political concept he developed, where he combined the wisdom in the U.S. Bill of Rights and its ad- vances, along with Frank- lin Delano Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights, the "economic bill of rights," in conjunction with the long continuity of Ameri- can radicalism. This is still today fulfilling the promises of the American Jack O’Dell with family members. revolution, and the radical populist elements in these contradictions, what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described on the mall as a promissory note. The active essence of generational page- turning is a pillar of movement continuity and challenge. Jack was a master at connecting progressive threads of US history, and different generations. Jack's Democracy Charter, and many other important lessons live on in his book, Climbin’ Jacob's Ladder: The Black Free- dom Movement's Writing's of Jack O'Dell. Committees of Correspon- dence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) established a Democracy Charter committee to study and promote Jack's work. Jack was a member of the Advisory Board of CCDS.

James E. Cambell is an educator, writer, political organizer, and civil rights leader who served as a contributing editor of Freedomways journal. He is a former national co-chair of the Committees of Corre- spondence for Democracy and Socialism, and lives in South Carolina. The James E. Campbell Papers, 1930-2009, are archived at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Literature at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. Dialogue & Initiative 125

Henry Winston's Laugh

Editor's note: The following poem, written by CCDS leader Rafael Pizarro, was presented to the Communist Party on it’s 100th anniversary at its national convention in June 2019.

Henry Winston was the national Chair- man of the Communist Party, USA from 1966 until his death in 1986. He was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1911, where his grandparents had been enslaved. Winston grew up in a poor working-class family under the vicious Jim Crow system and Klan terror. During the Great Depression, he became a leader of the unemployed council movement, which led him to join the Communist Party. He was a leader of the mass movements to free the Scotts- boro youth, Angela Davis, and Nelson Mandela, fought for working- class Black-white unity and international solidarity, and provided leadership to many other critical movements for social justice and socialism. During the McCarthy period, Winston was sentenced to ten years in prison for his communist beliefs under the notorious Smith Act, where he lost his eye sight due to prison neglect. After a mass campaign demanding that Winston be released from prison, he emerged from incarceration and proclaimed, "They have robbed me of my sight, but not my vision."

By Rafael Pizarro

Henry Winston paces his cell. Five steps and back, five steps and back. How do you not run into the wall, his cell mate asks, "Three steps forward, two steps back," he jokes. The boy with bad teeth and little education doesn't get it, but he loves how Winston laughs. It makes him laugh too. 126 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism

At night, the boy cries - he's too young to be here. What can Henry do. He tells the boy stories, stories of life and struggles. He knows not to make speeches, polemics, for what would that mean to this boy, far from home, jailed for crimes of poverty. He knows the boy likes a joke but he knows not to make one when the boy is in his bunk, humming songs of rural Georgia. Better be silent then and let him work through his suffering. There's time for laughter in the morning.

But in the morning, the guard says, the one that would be kind if his job allowed it, You have a visitor, Winston, be ready in ten. Who could it be, the boy asks.

It's a reporter from a small newspaper; he didn't want this assignment but he does need his paycheck and so does his family.

The boy lays on his bunk, face to the wall, and only listens. The reporter asks, Do you regret your crime. What crime. Being a red. A man can't help what he thinks. But is it worth losing your freedom, the reporter asks. Henry lifts his head, I don't know what you mean, I haven't lost my freedom. The reporter looks lost, confused - but you're in jail for who knows how long. I see, says Henry, I see your error:

The man who works day and night and still doesn't have enough to feed his family, that man is not free; Dialogue & Initiative 127

The woman who must accept the abuse of her employers' children, lest she lose her job - she is not free;

The child forced to go to work at an early age rather than get an education, that child is not free;

The men who are torn from their homes to kill men in far off lands who offend God no more than they, those men are not free;

The woman, bereft of everything a woman should have except her body, which she gives so she may live, she is not free;

The men who have been stripped of their souls and fill the space with sweet poison that only kills them slowly - those men certainly could be said to have lost their freedom.

Henry leans back and laces his fingers behind his head and says, Me, I'm perfectly comfortable.

The boy snickers, knowing when Henry is having a little joke. The reporter stands up abruptly, thinks he's been had, calls the guard - None of this will appear in his article. When he leaves, Henry and the boy burst out laughing.

The guards don't like this. Tomorrow he'll be moved to another cell, 128 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism alone, where he cannot make friends, where there will be no one to read the papers to him.

In the morning Henry is told to take his blanket and the gate clanks open. He embraces the boy, ignores his tears as he knows this will embarrass him. Henry says no words, they would hurt and he is determined that his jailers will not hurt him.

The gate slams shut behind him and as he's led away by the arm he hears the boy call out one last time, so that everyone can hear, as if grasping for a round buoy - Henry, Henry, wait! - what's the name of that book you told me about?

Rafael Pizarro is national co-chair of the Committees of Correspon- dence for Democracy and Socialism. A long-time time trade union activist, he is a leader in the movement to close Trump's cruel con- centration camps that have imprisoned and separated immigrant children from their families. Dialogue & Initiative 129 130 Defeat Trump and Fight Racism We Need You To Join Us!

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The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) is a national organization dedicated to the struggle for justice, equality, democracy, peace and socialism. The annual membership is $36 for individuals; $18 for unemployed, seniors, youth, and others with low income; $48 for households Contributors: James E. Campbell, Carl Davidson, Angela Davis, Lee Edwards, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Amy Goodman, Robin D. G. Kelley, Karl Kramer, Alex Krehbiel, Paul Krehbiel, Rafael Pizarro, Gary Potter, Mark Solomon, Harry Targ, Janet Tucker, Mildred Williamson.

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