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H The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. —Karl Marx H MARCH/APRIL 2014 VOL. 14 NO. 2

20 degrees below zero, can living wage jobs thaw the freeze? Read A Cold Winter in Northern Wisconsin on page 2.

On the Front Cover: s National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa. Read South Africa: Forging a New Movement page 26.

From Texas to California, drilling for oil and gas is using billions of gallons of water in the country’s most drought-prone areas. Read Fracking is Depleting Water Supplies in America’s Driest Areas on page 39.

Write a Letter Supporting Pvt. Manning’s Request for Clemency! Read how on the inside front cover.

A Cold Winter in Northern Wisconsin - Page 2 Workers’ Power, Workers’ Control - Page 3 Inequality of Wealth and the Role of the Unions - Page 5 South Africa's NUMSA Solidarizes with Korean General Strike - Page 32 A conscious, directed effort to save postal services in the United States and Canada should be a priority of the movement for eco- nomic democracy. Read Now is the Moment to Save Our Postal Commons on page 10.

Women buried in the Federal Prison System. Read Women in Soli- Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT BC tary Confinement on page 41. Write a Letter Supporting Pvt. Manning’s Request for Clemency!

Under the Uniform Code of Military sentence is reduced. The letter Oakland, CA 94610 USA Justice, Convening Authorities are should NOT be anti-military Major General Jeffrey S. Buchanan Com- granted the power to reduce or elimi- and/or anti-Buchanan, as this manding General, U.S. Army Military District nate a convicted soldier’s sentence. will be unlikely to help. of Washington September 12, 2013 They use this power when they feel the • A suggested message: “Pvt. Man- court martial failed to deliver justice. As Dear Maj. Gen. Buchanan, I write to urge you ning has been punished enough to use your authority as the Convening Author- Commanding General of the Military for violating military regulations ity in the case of U.S. v. Bradley E. Manning to District of Washington, Major General in the course of being true to his reduce Pvt. Manning’s 35-year confinement Jeffrey S. Buchanan is the only other conscience. I urge you to use your sentence to time served, and upgrade his “Dis- honorable Discharge.” individual besides President Obama authority as Convening Authority As a former enlisted U.S. Marine Artilleryman, with the power to ameliorate WikiLeaks to reduce Pvt. Manning’s sentence whistle-blower Pvt. Manning’s sen- I understand the military s desire for good order to time served.” Beyond that gen- and discipline. However, this is not an average tence in the immediate future. eral message, feel free to personal- case of misconduct. Instead, Pvt. Manning’s We are now requesting letters from ize the details as to why you believe actions were motivated purely by conscience. professors, law experts, human rights Pvt. Manning deserves clemency. Pvt. Manning took responsibility for violating miscellaneous regulations covering the use of advocates, politicians, artists, veterans, and • Here is an example letter, written by concerned citizens urging Major General classified information. For those actions, he has Jeff Paterson of Courage to Resist already been punished having spent every day Buchanan to reduce Pvt. Manning’s sen- and the Pvt. Manning Support Net- since May 29 2010 in military confinement. tence. These letters will be submitted as work (yes, you can plagiarize).1 Pvt. Manning was subjected to approximately part of an application for clemency from nine months of illegal pre-trial punishment at the • These letters will be formally sub- Pvt. Manning’s legal defense. These letters, hands of the Marine command at Quantico, Vir- once completed, should be sent to emma@ mitted to General Buchanan by Pvt. ginia. Military judge Colonel Denise Lind granted privatemanning.org Manning’s attorney David Coombs Pvt. Manning 112 days confinement credit for as part of a larger clemency packet. this abuse; however, that is clearly inadequate There are some important guide- given the lengthy sentence he was given. • Please send your letter to emma@ lines you should follow to ensure we’re Justice was not served when prosecutors were able to use your letter: privatemanning.org as soon as allowed to trample on Pvt. Manning’s rights to possible. We will review these let- a speedy trial. Additionally, prosecutors were • Your letter should be approxi- ters prior to forwarding them to allowed to change the Charge Sheet to match mately one page long. Pvt. Manning’s legal defense, and the evidence presented—after both the prose- • It should be composed on per- may request that you make cution and defense rested their cases! sonalized letterhead. changes if necessary. Sincerely, Jeff Paterson • The letters must be printed, signed, Courage to Resist, the organization then scanned (so that they have sponsoring the Private Manning the signature) in PDF format. Support Network, has successfully con-

• Pvt. Manning’s recently vinced Convening Authorities to reduce Sign the petition to pardon announced that her preferred the sentences of conscientious objec- Pvt. Manning: tors in the past (see the cases of Travis name is Chelsea, and that folks http://www.privatemanning.org/pardonpetition should use female pronouns. Bishop and Cliff Cornell). Pvt. Manning However, she also understands is unjustly imprisoned because the Help us continue to cover 100 percent that for efforts such as these, it is things she witnessed in the Iraq War of Pvt. Manning’s legal fees: most effective for supporters to compelled her to follow her conscience. https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default. use her legal name and military Now, through creating compelling and aspx?wid=38591 rank, “Pvt. Bradley E. Manning,” personal letters, it is time to call upon along with male pronouns. Major General Buchanan to honor his COURAGE TO RESIST conscience in turn. • The letter should focus on your http://couragetoresist.org support for Pvt. Manning, and 484 Lake Park Ave #41 1 Jeffrey Paterson especially why you believe justice Oakland, CA 94610 Project Director, Courage to Resist will be served if Pvt. Manning’s 510-488-3559 484 Lake Park Ave. #41

FC SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 SocialistViewpoint March/April 2014 Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT www.socialistviewpoint.org CONTENTS email: [email protected] (415) 824-8730 U.S. Politics and the Economy Injustice, Resistance Rising in India ...... 33 A Cold Winter in Northern Wisconsin ...... 2 By John Pilger An Editorial Commentary By Joe Johnson Mass Murderer Ariel Sharon is Dead ...... 35 Workers’ Power, Workers’ Control ...... 3 By Steven Katsineris By Bonnie Weinstein The Legacy of Ariel ‘The Bulldozer’ Sharon ...... 36 Inequality of Wealth and the Role of Unions ...... 5 By Jonathan Cook By Jack Heyman Environment Instant Injustice ...... 8 Fracking is Depleting Water Supplies ...... 39 By Bonnie Weinstein By Suzanne Goldenberg Imagine: If Mayor DeBlasio Really Were a Socialist . . 9 Incarceration Nation By Cliff Conner and Michael Steven Smith Mentally Ill in South Carolina’s Prisons ...... 40 Now is the Moment to Save Our Postal Commons . . . . . 10 By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway By Matt Stannard Women In Solitary Confinement ...... 41 A Festival of Lies ...... 13 By Victoria Law By Glen Ford American Courtrooms Dangerous Places for Blacks . .43 Black Madness Under Obama ...... 14 By Charlotte Silver By Glen Ford Private Probation Companies Extort from Poor . . . 45 Victory in Seattle Inspires By Aaron Cantú Chicago Socialist Campaign ...... 16 Prosecuting Black Victims ...... 46 By Andrew Mortazavi By Margaret Kimberley Seattle Teacher Elected to City Council ...... 17 Obama, the State of the Union and the Prison State . .47 By Mark T. Harris By Bruce A. Dixon Drop the Charges Against Snowden! ...... 18 A Smoking Gun ...... 49 By Barry Sheppard By Bruce A. Dixon Medicare’s Rollout vs. Obamacare’s Glitches Brew . . 20 12th Man ...... 50 By David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhander By Raymond Nat Turner Your Mind, Privatized ...... 21 Legalizing Oppression ...... 51 By Steven Strauss By Chris Hedges The Menace of the Military Mind ...... 22 Abandonment ...... 54 By Chris Hedges By Torrey Real End Drone Killing ...... 24 Lorenzo Johnson’s Case ...... 55 How Low Can Capitalism Sink? ...... 25 An Interview by Shuja Moore By Ted Newcomen Is the USA Above the Law? ...... 56 South Africa: Forging a New Movement ...... 26 By “Shakaboona” By Leonard Gentle Fighting the Oppressor ...... 57 Black South Africa Rediscovers Itself ...... 29 By Kevin Cooper By Glen Ford Razor Wire Plantations ...... 58 Freedom Charter is Key to Struggle for South Africa . 30 By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson By Glen Ford For the Rosa Luxemburg Conference ...... 62 NUMSA Solidarizes with Korean Gen. Strike . . . . .32 Speech By Mumia Abu-Jamal Presented By His Son at the Conference Half Of Global Wealth Owned By 85 People . . . . . 33 SCI-Mahanoy Officers Trample First Amendment Rights63 By Asa Bennett By Bryant Arroyo

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Vol.Vol.Vol. 14, 14,3, No.No. 22 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 1

U.S. Politics and the Economy U.S. AND WORLD POLITICS

A Cold Winter in Northern Wisconsin An Editorial Commentary By Joe Johnson

It is winter and is cold here in and give time to rebuild a far better soci- ruling class. The American ruling class northern Wisconsin; twenty degrees ety than what we have now, but we need went on to use the workers to become below freezing, bone cracking, killing to dig our ditches now and correctly. the strongest imperialist nation that cold. Lake Wissota, a large man made We look closely and see the natural the world has ever seen. Then the deep- lake is frozen solid; a pick-up truck can lay of the land. Where are the very low freeze of the American Century. Its be driven out on it. But I feel spring areas and how are they likely to channel expansion into “the far East” was and a hot summer coming, and soon, I the movement of the floods? And on a stopped with the Korean War. Now feel it in my old bones. The sun is com- bright sunny day in late winter we can new revolutionary floods are coming ing up earlier every day, and every day see a small trickle of water moving down that are world wide in nature. its rays are hotter. Soon the ice will thin one of the natural channels. The occupy The American working people have and crack, the heavy snow will melt movement was one such trickle. It lasted found a banner that they can unite and there will come destructive and a short while and showed us the lay of around. It is “$15 dollar minimum unstoppable floods. The people native the land; gave us very important infor- wage.” This gives people a living wage, to this region are preparing, as they do mation before it was frozen with the and given the high level of labor pro- every year for the floods of spring. force and violence of the capitalist state. ductivity it can be given to all. This is There is much to be done, now before what they voted for in Seattle, what they come, for the floods, to some they will fight the bosses for all across extent, can be controlled and directed the nation. so that they will help the land and the ...low wageworkers don’t This is the slogan of “Bread” for the people who live on it. want their old jobs back; U.S. today, as “Bread” was the slogan I can remember the early spring of they want new jobs at a for the Russian revolution of 1917. All 1934 in Minneapolis. One of the big who struggle to save the earth from songs was “Brother can you spare a living wage. destruction, all who want a new world dime?” another was “I don’t want your in birth today will unite around the millions mister, all I want is my old job new banner. back.” Demoralization, cynicism, Now there is a little stream of water How is this to be done? The workers depression was the mood of the nation. starting to move. It’s the $15 dollar-an- in unorganized low paying jobs are cut- There were some protests, a few small hour minimum wage for all, now. It ting edge; truly these people have noth- strikes, but the strikes were quickly unites the very small trickles of water ing to lose but their chains and a world defeated. But Marxists’ red mole was into a small stream. It unites and gives to win. They now have the support of working underground and the ice direction. But, as all small streams the majority of the people. They need cracked, the snow melted and the must, it follows the contours of the now to break their chains and move floods came. land and can be blocked by very small their banner forward into the ranks of Now the earth has turned and spring rocks. Our job is to smooth its path, to the capitalists and their supporters. comes once again. Spring on a scale help it move past and through the The capitalists could pass a law giv- never seen before, worldwide in scope. rocks to give it space and time to grow. ing a $15 dollar per hour minimum The question is what ditches in the The 1934 strikes won major victo- wage. They can do it, but they will not; good earth shall we dig to control and ries against the big bosses. The strikers to do so would show weakness. Also, direct the floods so that they will help built a fighting union movement in the they are arrogant and feel all-powerful; this land and the people who live on it. C.I.O.; but they had to stop short of a having defeated the unions time after We do not start nor can we stop the victory and the bosses were able to time, they are sure they can defeat this flood of revolt, but what we can do is regroup and build giant dams to hold new union-like development of the direct it. Directed correctly, it can stop back the flood of revolution. Then lowest of their wage slaves. Given their the earth from becoming unbearably hot came WWII that saved the American many victories, they do not rethink the

2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 situation, but rather simply repeat the actions that gave them victory before. Workers’ Power, Workers’ Control They will, I believe, act much like By Bonnie Weinstein they did with the Occupy movement. First, black out as much as possible. Electoral campaigns are an impor- We also understand that working When they can’t do that any longer tant component to raising the con- people have tremendous power if it they lead it down paths they control, sciousness of workers about the real can be organized. That has been shown get it into giant cement dams and into power we have to improve our lives. over and over again. artificial lakes. Control is what they Independent, working class campaigns The whole history of labor struggles want to do; but if they can’t control are important vehicles for raising is the history of labor solidarity and the they use the full force of their state ter- demands to increase the minimum power that comes from it. From the rorism to kill and destroy. They need wage; free childcare, education and fight for the 40-hour workweek, to the to get their slaves to sing, to sing, “All I healthcare for all from cradle to grave; establishment of unions, pensions, want is to get my old job back.” They or to register our opposition to war, public education and health benefits, have been successful in getting the very racism or sexism, etc. these battles have been won only strong union at Boeing to accept a Winning an election campaign is a through the united, mass actions of union-destroying, five-year contract good measure of the level of con- workers organized independently of on the promise that they will be able to sciousness and acceptance of the the capitalist class. keep their old jobs. demands raised in the campaign. The In our strongest periods we built However, their victory is very thin; drawback of such campaigns alone is our own, democratically-controlled, 51 percent to 49 percent and the fight that winning is no guarantee that the industry-based organizations—indus- is not over. The low wageworkers don’t demands voted for will be fulfilled. trial unions—in our own common want their old jobs back; they want Time and again voters have elected interests and in opposition to the capi- new jobs at a living wage. They have candidates and have passed resolutions talist bosses and their political parties. nothing to lose but their chains. only to find out after the elections that That was at the foundation of the gains It is the unorganized, weak, low nothing would be done to actually ful- of organized labor in the U.S. paid worker that can come to the aid of fill the demands we voted for. In the process of each mass workers’ the powerful Boeing union. The low To see that demands won in an elec- struggle an effective leadership—a paid workers are not tied into the toral campaign are actually brought to vanguard—emerges from the ranks Democratic Party, that is a party of the fruition takes an ongoing, organized because they have proven, through the capitalist class, and they are not tied fight that can continue to mount mass struggle, to have the most effective into a corrupt international union. But pressure for these demands. It’s also strategy that leads to victory. Many most importantly, they are not forced important to educate the ranks that do socialists have been in the vanguard of to keep the struggle inside the iron box the day-to-day work and the masses of these struggles. of capitalist rulers, but can make their workers that we seek to reach about own rules. They can shut down the just who is keeping us from gaining A workers vanguard industry for a little while, they can use these demands. But at the moment, socialist organi- just a little of their potential power. zations across the globe are fragmented This takes a conscious leadership and most often, in competition with One thing the low paid worker can that understands the inherent nature each other for “hegemony”—to do right now is to go to their brothers of capitalism to squeeze as much as become “the vanguard” that will lead and sisters at Boeing and ask for soli- they can from the working class in masses of workers to victory over capi- darity, ask to work together for unity in order to increase profits. struggle. They will get it if they ask! talism by “beating out” the other As socialists, we understand that the socialist organizations. This is the There is work to be done in smooth- struggle to make the lives of workers antithesis of a workers’ vanguard. ing the way for the coming socialist better is a never-ending, contentious Theoretically speaking, a socialist revolution. battle as long as capitalism exists. But, party or group participates in the class With warmest comradely greetings; capitalism is in its death agony. The struggle (including electoral politics) in the spirit of Crazy Horse, capitalists will stop at nothing to pre- to help workers win. Joe serve their power and increase their wealth no matter how difficult the lives A natural outcome of participating of working people become. and, in fact, leading an independent,

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 3 democratically-principled united An attack against one is an attack ent places in the country and around struggle for worker’s needs and rights against all! Solidarity forever! the world to organize a real working that is victorious is that it’s bound to A real vanguard party comes out of class resistance to the increased auster- build the ranks of those socialist parties the active class struggle of workers. ity, war, oppression, incarceration and and organizations in the process. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. A environmental catastrophe the capital- Effective performance in the class real vanguard party understands that ists inflict on us. struggle is what creates the vanguard working class unity and solidarity is The Sawant campaign and Socialist leadership and builds a vanguard party. our power. Alternative is in a good position to But such a dynamic only works dur- A real vanguard party sets an exam- organize an independent, ongoing ing an actual class struggle of work- ple of how best to organize that vitally struggle, not just because they won, but ers—when workers are in motion and needed unity and solidarity—putting because their openly socialist victory organizing in our own defense and in aside our differences—in order to build shows that there are real possibilities solidarity with each other and with our an independent force that can actually out there to build independent, work- own, democratically agreed-upon succeed in winning our demands. ing class struggles and win. demands such as the current fight for an increase in the minimum wage. The Sawant victory The road to socialism The goal of a socialist society is to The exact figure suggested for the The victory of the Socialist end the wars, violence, poverty, and minimum wage ranges anywhere from Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant brutality dictated by the capitalist class. a meager ten to fifteen dollars-an-hour for Seattle City Council is an opportu- (not a living wage in cities like New nity to build a united front to continue Socialism is a society where humans York, San Francisco or Boston) to thirty the fight for the demands the campaign can share the wealth of the world equal- or thirty-five-dollars-an-hour—a much raised, and that got her elected in her ly and create a world in which the free more realistic figure for a half-way openly socialist campaign.1 Those development of each is the condition decent life. Every worker realizes this. demands obviously resonated with for the free development of all; a world workers in Seattle; and in Minneapolis where we can all benefit from each What we don’t realize is that we where Socialist Alternative candidate according to our individual and multi- have the right to determine the mini- Ty Moore ran for City Council, Ward ple abilities and talents; and provide to mum wage we need to get by on, since 9, and lost by only 229 votes. each according to our individual needs it’s we who do the work and produce and wants while pristinely preserving the profits the capitalist class steals And certainly that means that the our planet and all the life on it. from us. same conditions exist in many differ- We who consider ourselves part of a revolutionary socialist vanguard are obligated to set the most exemplary example of workers democracy and cooperation, put aside our differences, and build an independent, democratic united front of the working class and our allies that can win, and get down to the business of saving the world.

1 Campaign Platform, VoteSawant.org, click on “Issues” http://www.votesawant.org/issues

4 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 Inequality of Wealth and the Role of Unions By Jack Heyman

I headed home for the holidays to Jersey town. Its predominantly Hasidic decent contracts and striking to achieve Lakewood, New Jersey, once a beauti- Jewish community runs the local pub- that, if necessary. But they’re not doing ful resort renowned for its lake, pine lic school board, not without contro- that. In countries like Spain, France, forests and clean air. At the turn of the versy. Their kids go to private religious Greece and South Korea, unions have last century, it was home for some of schools yet they receive public largesse been fighting back and even organizing the wealthiest in this country. Railroad in the form of transportation and edu- general strikes. But in the U.S., the magnate George J. Gould, then the sev- cational programs, provoking the ire of trade union bureaucracy has cowered enth richest man in America, built a townsfolk including secular Jews. in the face of attacks against workers palatial estate with Italian gardens by Yet, the most glaring change in and, indeed, continues to support the the town’s lake. His financier father, Lakewood is its Tent City for the home- twin party system. railroad mogul, Jay Gould, once infa- less, situated in the Pine Barrens for the In New Jersey, Republican Governor mously proclaimed, “I can hire half of last couple of years. While I was there a Christie relished bullying teachers in the working class to kill the other half.” man died at Tent City the day before front of cameras at town hall meetings, John D. Rockefeller, the richest cap- Thanksgiving, freezing to death out- as he pushed to cut benefits of public italist in the world at the time, built a side his tent. A week later four home- workers. He demagogically blames 30-room summer residence with a golf less men died during a cold snap back schoolteachers and other public work- course and stables on 300 acres. in Santa Clara County, California. ers not the bankers for the economic Lakewood is only a short train ride Homelessness is not confined to crisis. Unions in New Jersey have done from New York City. So, these social Lakewood, New Jersey or San Jose, little to challenge Christie by withhold- elites would pack up their entourage— California. Appallingly, it’s a national ing labor power, i.e., striking. ladies’ maids, cooks, stable hands, problem with homeless encampments In Wisconsin unionized state work- chambermaids, governesses, china, lin- in every state. ers tried to maintain their standard of ens, jewelry and clothing—and take The September 11, 2013, Los Angeles living by courageously fighting to the train to Lakewood. Times article (“Income Gap Between defend collective bargaining rights When I was growing up in the ’50s Rich and Poor is Biggest in a Century”) against attacks from Republican Lakewood was a small, ethnically- reads: “The wealth gap between the top Governor Scott Walker by occupying mixed, working class community of one percent and the bottom 99 percent the state capitol. They inspired work- some 15,000 people. The Gould and in the U.S. is as wide as it’s been in ers, many of whom were calling for a Rockefeller estates had been turned nearly 100 years, a new study finds.” In general strike, but union leaders into a college and county park, respec- other words it’s worse now than since derailed that struggle into Democrat tively. Skating on Lake Carasaljo was a the Great Depression and even back to Party electoral campaigns to recall favorite winter activity of the townsfolk the time of the robber barons, Gould Walker and elect Democrats. It failed and we prided ourselves in our local and Rockefeller. miserably. Now union officials have sports heroes who made it to the pros, For trade unions: class struggle or turned to the courts, the other part of Jack Arden in basketball and my friend, capitulation the political system which is tilted Dickie Estelle, pitcher for the San The U.S. is the most unequal of all heavily toward the wealthy, the capital- Francisco Giants. Lakewood, like advanced industrialized countries ist class. Petaluma, California, was the center of because the political system here has Democrat pundits like Robert Reich, a community of Jewish chicken farm- shaped the economy in ways that have former Secretary of Labor under ers, which during the McCarthy period led to powerlessness of the working Clinton, and economist Paul Krugman was riven with anti-communist Zionists class. In short, both political parties, rail against the ever-increasing disparity on one side, leftists on the other. The Democrats and Republicans, represent in wealth, blaming the Republicans. chicken farmers are long gone. the same capitalist class interests. There The fact of the matter is the Democrats Nowadays, Lakewood is a city of is no mass party that represents the have been playing a concomitant role in nearly 100,000 people, looking more working class. Unions have the power holding down workers. Just recently like a Williamsburg, Brooklyn ghetto to reshape the wealth gap between rich they agreed to a federal budget that of 30 years ago than a small, central and poor to some extent by negotiating eliminates 1.3 million workers from

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 5 receiving extended unemployment became demoralized. Few showed up Neo-liberal free trade agreements sup- benefits in the midst of this crisis. for picket duty. Then a tentative agree- ported by both parties seal the capital- Hypocritically, Obama calls income ment was signed, but before the ink ist’s deal on a global level. Then, there disparity the greatest challenge of our was dry, BART Board of Directors are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, time. To garner workers’ votes in the stunningly announced that they’d the longest lasting wars in U.S. history. coming election they’ll call for raising “mistakenly” included the Family And overt acts of government repres- the minimum wage minimumly for the Medical Leave Act, a paid benefit. The sion at home have occurred with both working poor. The Democrats in New San Francisco Chronicle (December 3, parties at the helm, sending a chilling Jersey are calling for a measly increase 2013) reported “After six months of message to organized labor—from of $1 an-hour to the minimum wage of contentious negotiations, two strikes Reagan’s shackling and arresting of the $7.25 tied to the Consumer Price Index and, finally, a hard-won labor agree- leaders of the PATCO air traffic con- (CPI). Christie also supports raising the ment, BART’s two largest unions are trollers’ strike in 1980 to Obama’s minimum wage $1 but over three years. not about to give in.” But that’s exactly sending an armed Coast Guard cutter And both parties in a bipartisan effort what they did and the membership, to protect a strikebreaking ship loading cut food stamps for the poor. Still, angry but demoralized by the unions’ grain at the multi-national EGT dock Obama wants to lower social security misleadership, ratified the contract. As being struck by the longshore union in benefits by using a “chained CPI” which Marx said, “History repeats itself, first Longview, Washington last year. does not reflect real inflation and could as tragedy, second as farce.” Since Historically, when workers’ leaders reduce seniors’ income by some $20,000 BART workers set the standard for have stood up to represent workers in in ten years. Elephants or Asses: a choice transit and other public workers in opposing imperialist wars or organiz- of worst or worse for workers trying to northern California, much was at stake. ing strikes, the might of the political level the playing field. Thus, the inequality of wealth in this cudgel has been wielded against them: In California this summer when Bay country is magnified. imprisoning Socialist railroad union Area transit workers were striking, leader Eugene V. Debs and Black Democrats shackle labor Democrat Governor Brown appealed Wobbly Philadelphia longshore leader to the union officials to call off an Worse still, Jerry Brown’s former Ben Fletcher during World War I and effective strike on its fourth day. They advisor, Steve Glazer, running for State Trotskyist James P. Cannon, leader of readily complied and without a mem- Assembly during BART negotiations, the organizers of the Minneapolis bership vote called the strike off. After ran a despicable, high profile electoral teamsters’ strike just before World War further delays, Brown then imposed campaign petitioning constituents to II, or the move to deport West Coast the state’s version of Taft-Hartley, outlaw transit strikes. That was no longshore union president and self- forcing transit workers to work while fluke. Former Clinton NLRB chair proclaimed Marxist Harry Bridges and negotiations were supposed to have Gould opined in the Los Angeles Times maritime labor’s great orator, Jamaican- continued but didn’t. When Taft- that banning strikes is insufficient. He born Communist Ferdinand Smith, Hartley Act, tagged the “slave labor” says it’ll require binding arbitration as during the McCarthy witchunt. All this bill, first passed, organized labor was well! (Los Angeles Times, Aug. 15, was done by Democratic presidents. outraged and protested. Now BART 2013). This is on a par with Scott union officials actually pleaded for Walkers’ move to ban collective bar- Which way forward for the Brown to use his “silver bullet,” as they gaining. It’s clear that the twin political unions? fondly referred to it. parties—Democrat and Republican— In the midst of the repressive Reagan Even after the 60-day “no strike” work to advance capitalists’ interests years, the longshore workers in San ban expired, union officials didn’t against labor thereby widening the gap Francisco were able to organize an resume the strike as threatened. A week of wealth. Is there any more proof nec- 11-day anti-apartheid cargo boycott on later two strikebreakers repairing the essary to show that American workers a ship from South Africa. After his track were killed by BART managers need their own working class party to release from prison, Mandela on his driving a scab train. Public anger which defend their interests? 1990 world tour acknowledged the role had been orchestrated by the media More? The repeal of the Glass- of the longshore union in helping to Steagall Act occurred under Clinton’s bring down the apartheid govern- against the workers, quickly turned 1 against the BART Board of Directors. administration. This act built a firewall ment. But with union officials calling the between commercial and securities Black South African workers were strike on again and off again, the mem- firms. According to many economists, able to bring down the apartheid berships of SEIU 1021 and ATU 1555 its repeal precipitated the latest crisis. regime but not its buttress, capitalism.

6 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 So capitalism’s depredations have ties in Portland, Oregon and across the strike against imperialist war. When the intensified wealth inequality. The Columbia River in Vancouver, employers’ Pacific Maritime Association median net worth for Black house- Washington, the homeport of ILWU threatened to sue under Taft-Hartley, holds in the U.S. is worse than for President “Big Bob” McEllrath. In an the union warned there’d be no nego- Blacks under apartheid according to unprecedented waterfront scene, scabs tiations under such coercion. PMA Sampie Terreblanche, a professor have been doing longshore work for dropped the suit in short order. emeritus of economics at Stellenbosch months there. Longshoremen from Today, with grain monopolies pil- University, (Worse Than Apartheid: those locals have been picketing those lorying ILWU in the Northwest ports, Black in Obama’s America). docks diligently in the face of police PMA is eager to jump in the ring for A few corrupt Blacks, like former and scab harassment. What’s needed is negotiations. Yet, another crack was NUM mineworkers’ leader now bil- a mass mobilization of longshore work- spotted in the ILWU. In the port of lionaire mineowner, Cyril Ramaphosa, ers in all West Coast ports in solidarity Oakland, the most militant port, some one of the richest men in all of Africa, with the grain ports. In 1990, when longshoremen in violation of the join whites in extracting wealth while strikebreakers in Stockton were doing union’s long-standing principles, egged sitting atop the Black masses. longshore work, all ports in Northern on by a few union officials, crossed a California were shut down and long- Ramaphosa called on the government picket line of port truckers, mostly shore workers marched on Continental to repress the striking miners at immigrant workers trying to organize. Grain to chase off the scabs and defend Marikana last year. Thirty-four were Unless ILWU shuts down all West their jobs. That’s what’s needed now to massacred by police in an act that has Coast ports to stop the scabbing now win union jurisdiction. been compared to some of the bloodi- in the Northwest grain ports, PMA will est during the apartheid regime. Soon, the ILWU will be engaged in have their way. The present ILWU In December, the world glimpsed as master contract negotiations for the leadership won’t do it. It’ll take a fire President Jacob Zuma was roundly coast. Before the last negotiations in from below, the rank and file, in the booed by Blacks attending the Mandela 2008, longshore workers voted at the militant tradition of the ILWU, to do it memorial; a sign of the disenchant- Coast Caucus to shutdown all West and to win. Coast ports to protest the imperialist ment with the ANC government’s cor- Another longshore action organized wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Former ruption and their impoverishment. a few years ago shows the way forward. ILWU President Dave Arian opposed NUMSA (National Union of In response to AFL-CIO President it, arguing that it would be foolish for Metalworkers of South Africa), the Trumka’s call for solidarity actions in the union to organize such an illegal militant metalworkers’ union, the larg- support of the embattled Wisconsin est union in South Africa, has just work stoppage, that it might under- mine upcoming negotiations. The workers, S.F. longshore Local 10, in announced that they are forming a defiance of the Taft-Hartley Act which workers’ socialist party committed to union could be fined. And President McEllrath wasn’t happy with it but bans sympathy strikes, shut down all expropriating the mines to redistribute ports in the Bay Area. Again, employ- the wealth to the impoverished masses. when Los Angeles longshore president Jo Jo Cortez balked at shutting down ers threatened a suit but dropped it. Challenge for the West Coast the largest port in the country with 60 Shamefully, Trumka didn’t even raise a Longshore Union percent of the ILWU longshore mem- finger to aid the only union to con- cretely respond to his call for solidarity Today, the U.S. trade union bureau- bership, it was questionable whether actions. That was two years before the cracy, by and large, accepts the domina- the antiwar action had enough wind in ILWU quit the AFL-CIO. tion of the employers at the workplace its sails. Maritime employers had and collaborates by negotiating conces- banked on disunity of longshore work- Apparently, Trumka, a former sionary contracts. Even in the once- ers on the Coast with some ports shut- mineworkers’ union leader like militant ILWU, the West Coast long- ting down and others, like Los Angeles, Ramaphosa, believes that capitalism is shore union, officials show little sign of working. To their surprise rank-and- the only way society can be organized. being up for the fight with grain file unity prevailed and the whole West But workers’ leaders who led historic monopolies. They signed a hugely con- Coast was shut down on May Day, strikes—like Debs, Cannon and cessionary contract with multi-national international workers day, to protest Bridges—believed, in their own way, grain monopoly, EGT terminal, two the wars. If unity hadn’t prevailed, that socialism is a better system for the years ago, which whetted the appetites there wouldn’t have been any real con- working class because it eliminates the of the other grain monopolies. Now, tract negotiations and the ILWU would inequality of wealth by abolishing capi- the union is locked out of grain facili- not have achieved its historic May Day talism and establishing a system based

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 7 on human need, not profit. The phleg- matic U.S. labor movement, now 11 Instant Injustice percent of the workforce, will continue By Bonnie Weinstein to atrophy as the wealth disparity grows unless the class collaborationist trade In a February 11, 2014 New York try to come back. (An illegal re- union bureaucracy is replaced by a Times article by Fernanda Santos titled entry conviction carries a maximum class struggle leadership. Developments “Detainees Sentenced in Seconds in of two years in prison, but it can be in the South African metalworkers’ ‘Streamline’ Justice on Border,” up to 20 years if the migrant has union, NUMSA, offer a beacon of hope Magistrate Judge Bernardo P. Velasco been deported before and has an aggravated-felony conviction.)” for the future. Will other trade unions, of Federal District Court claimed, “My in South Africa and around the world, record is 30 minutes,” describing the “Defense lawyers” (I put these follow? time it took him to sentence 70 words in quotes because 25 seconds of Jack Heyman, a retired longshore- migrants caught crossing the U.S. bor- legal representation in court is not a man, was one of the organizers in der—that’s 25 sec- defense) are paid ILWU’s 1984 anti-apartheid action, the onds each to hear $110.00 per hour to May Day 2008 anti-war ports shutdown the charges against represent migrant and the march on the Stockton docks to them, enter a plea Obama holds the presi- workers, seven at a stop the scabbing. and be sentenced. dential record with over time, in these “Streamline” mass —Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, According to the 1.9 million deportations trials. (The word January 3-5, 2014 article, under his belt so far. “streamline” in the http://www.counterpunch. “Men and last sentence should women arrested org/2014/01/03/inequality-of-wealth- really read, and-the-role-of-unions/ along the border, the chains around “Railroaded.”) their ankles and wrists jingling as they This is a classic example of, as (Endnotes) move, are gathered to answer to the Malcolm X put it, “turning the victim 1 http://www.youtube.com/ same charges—illegal entry, a misde- into the criminal and the criminal into watch?v=NtiIkA2oGD4&t=15m58s meanor, and illegal re-entry, a felony. the victim.” People driven by poverty They have not had an opportunity to looking for work where they can find it bathe since they set off to cross the is not a crime. desert; the courtroom has the smell of sweaty clothes left for days in a plastic How hypocritical is this president bag. Side by side in groups of seven as and this government? The long-term they face the bench, they consistently unemployed mired in poverty in this plead guilty to a lesser charge, which country are accused of being lazy and spares them longer time behind bars. not looking for work hard enough, The immigration charge is often their while those desperately risking their only offense.” lives, crossing the border in rugged and Obama holds the presidential dangerous terrain to work at the most record with over 1.9 million deporta- difficult and lowest paying jobs, are tions under his belt so far. also called criminals. Damned if you According to the article, do and damned if you don’t! “Sentences range from 30 days to The demand for unconditional six months and are served in federal amnesty for all and an increase in the prisons, county jails and private minimum wage to at least $15.00-per- detention centers that operate under hour starting immediately go hand in contract with the government. hand and should be a rallying cry of Keeping the migrants from their the entire labor movement. families and the possibility of jobs to sustain them is one part penalty, Poverty is a crime of capitalism not one part incentive for them not to of the poverty-stricken!

8 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 Imagine: If Mayor DeBlasio Really Were a Socialist By Cliff Conner and Michael Steven Smith

For a lot of people lately, “socialism” City, 50,000 individuals make more • Dismantle the police state sur- is not a dirty word. Trying to smear Bill than $500,000 a year and 60,000 per- veillance of New Yorkers. Take DeBlasio by falsely calling him a social- sons, mostly children, are homeless on the street cameras down. Get the ist seems not to have hurt his campaign any given night. police spies out of the mosques at all. In fact, his support continued to A socialist mayor could be a tribune and Muslim communities. Stop grow and he won by a landslide. of and for the people. What agenda police collaboration and office- Proving that socialists can be elected might he advance? Here are some pos- sharing with Wall Street bankers. in America, a young woman named sibilities: Get the police out of our grass- roots political organizations. Kshama Sawant recently ran a bold • Launch a mass action campaign socialist campaign for City Council in for single-payer healthcare, • Allow for street protests without Seattle and, with a great deal of union “Medicare for All,” free for every- pens and nets and videotaping of and community support, defeated a one, recognizing health as a activists. Apologize for collabora- long-tenured Democrat. A 2012 nation- human right. tion with the FBI and the Depart- al Pew poll discovered that 49 percent ment of Homeland Security in • Put the city’s resources on the of people under the age of 29 had a raiding and breaking up the side of the poorest workers, like favorable reaction to the word “social- Occupy Wall Street encampment. those in the food chains and gar- ism,” and the two most looked-up Restore the Handschu consent words in the Merriam-Webster online decree1 limiting how police can dictionary last year were “socialism” spy on New Yorkers. and “capitalism.” Pope Francis recently in New York City, 50,000 • Prosecute the banksters who described capitalism as a “new tyranny” crashed the economy in 2008 and that has created a “throwaway culture individuals make more then got bailed out with our money. that discards young people as well as its than $500,000 a year and • Work to implement a municipal older people.” None of this should be 60,000 persons, mostly tax code that eliminates all regres- surprising, given the failure of real sive taxes like the sales tax. wages to rise over the past 40 years and children, are homeless Replace them with taxes on Wall the quantum leap in economic hope- on any given night. Street financial transactions and lessness brought about by the 2008 support higher corporate taxes. crash and the current great recession. • March on picket lines with teach- Imagine if Bill DeBlasio were really ment shops, and demand a ers and students to roll back cuts a socialist and came into office with in education financing and tuition. socialist goals. What might he do as $15-an-hour minimum wage, Mayor of New York City? He would sick days, pensions, and vacations • Declare New York City a “Demil- have one potent weapon to wield: the with pay. itarized Zone” within the USA “bully pulpit” of which Theodore • Find or build housing for every where the peace movement is Roosevelt spoke. He could mount that homeless person. encouraged in its opposition to our country’s illegal, immoral, pulpit to rally public support to fight • Support tenants defending rent for socially progressive measures. obscenely expensive, and seem- controls and extend rent control ingly endless wars abroad. Socialist Mayor DeBlasio could to small businesses as well. • Make education and actions about continue to emphasize that he is telling • End the illegal stop-and-frisk prac- human-caused climate change the a tale of two cities, one of the 99 per- tice of the Police Department by number one priority which, if not cent versus the ruling one percent. withdrawing Bloomberg’s appeal controlled, will doom us. (The disparity is actually much more and abiding by Judge Scheindlin’s stark; more like 99.99 percent against decision that 600,000-persons-a- Michael Moore, echoing FDR, pro- .01 percent.) The latter are the finance, year, mostly young people of color, posed a second Bill of Rights in our real estate, and insurance interests that had their 4th and 14th amend- visionary new book Imagine: Living in a really run our city, where, in New York ment rights violated. Socialist USA. Moore wrote of the goals

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 9 that might guide a socialist mayor: “That every American has a human Now is the Moment to Save Our Postal right to employment, to healthcare, and Commons a free and full education; to breathe By Matt Stannard clean air, drink clean water, and eat safe food; and to be cared for with dignity In 21st century late capitalism, But compared to private carrier and respect in their old age.” defending the commons means defending UPS, the U.S. Postal Service performed Socialism has a tradition in America. public spaces and public services that are just fine over the holidays. By itself, it’s Our most famous thinker, Albert irreducible to mere profit-value. There a win for the Post Office and an anec- Einstein, was a socialist. Martin Luther are few better examples of common spac- dote refuting the dominant privatiza- King said, “If we are going to achieve es than conduits of public and private tion narrative. Government-run ser- real equality, the United States will communication. A conscious, directed vices often outperform private ones, have to adopt a modified form of effort to save postal services in the United and citing that evidence is important. socialism.” Mayor DeBlasio, as you States and Canada should be a priority of Yet something even bigger is at stake take office, we remind you of the song the movement for economic democracy. in the discussion about post offices. of another socialist, John Lennon, who For some, the postal service has Because postal services owned by the wrote in “Imagine” that “You may say become an ideological punching bag, people are part of the commons, rather I’m a dreamer / But I’m not the only proof that “government programs” than simply an effort to increase effi- one / I hope someday you’ll join us / don’t work and that the state inevitably ciency and prosperity, the attack on pub- And the world will live as one.” bureaucratizes services better left to lic postal utilities amounts to an attack Mr. Mayor, this expresses the desires the private sector. In the case of the on the commons itself—part of the rul- of humanity since the days of the proph- postal service, this narrative lacks a ing classes’ ongoing effort to privatize ets. The majority of the people who critical element: fidelity to truth. and profitize every sphere of social life. elected you would be for it. Do you dare? As an independent agency under The Postal Commons Cliff Conner is on the faculty of the the umbrella of the federal govern- For a long time, postal services in School of Professional Studies of the City ment, the United States Postal Service the United States and Canada epito- University of New York Graduate Center, receives little-to-no government fund- where he teaches history. Michael Steven mized the commons. They provided a ing; it pays for itself through sales of its center for neighborhoods and commu- Smith is the co-host of the radio show stamps and services, and is only in Law and Disorder and on the Board of nities. They facilitated short- and long- financial trouble because of a vindic- distance communication. And people the Center for Constitutional Rights. tive, unfair law that forces it to fund its Both contributed to and Smith co-edited even banked there. From 1910 to 1967, pensions seventy-five years into the the U.S. Postal Savings System served with Frances Goldin and Debby Smith future. As Jim Hightower points out, the book, Imagine: Living in a Socialist millions of customers, peaking in 1947 the postal service hasn’t taken a penny at nearly $3.4 billion in deposits. USA, published by HarperCollins. from taxpayers since 1971. —Black Agenda Report, January 7, 2013 And it wasn’t only America. Ethan Whatever the reasons for the pub- Cox reports that “Canada had a postal http://blackagendareport.com/con- lic’s conception of the postal service as bank for over 100 years, which was tent/imagine-if-mayor-deblasio-really- an institution weighted down by scrapped under pressure from the [pri- were-socialist socialistic bureaucracy, current events vate] banking lobby in 1968.” The sys- suggest otherwise. Over the 2013 holi- 1 “ Originally proposed in December 1980 as tems largely paid for themselves, and part of the settlement of a May 1971 lawsuit day season, it was a private carrier, postal carriers were both highly- brought against the New York Police Depart- United Parcel Service, which collapsed respected public servants and mem- ment’s Bureau of Strategic Services (the infa- under the weight of demand and inef- bers of powerful labor unions. mous “Red Squad”) by Barbara Handschu, ficiency. When it happened, UPS’s Abbie Hoffman and 14 other people, the Hand- spokespersons and the usual gang of During the Great Depression, beau- schu Consent Decree (“HCD”) created the bourgeois media shifted into high gear tiful post offices were constructed in Handschu Authority, which was supposed to the United States featuring splendid make sure that the NYPD abided by a set of in defense of the corporatist paradigm. guidelines that regulated the police’s use of At least one retail spokesperson said architecture and fine art. Post offices photographs and videotapes to surveill the consumers shared the blame; other were markers of community. political activities of people who were not sus- fluffy critics pinned the debacle on Corporate capitalism, however, pected of engaging in any criminal activity.” consumerism itself. cannot tolerate examples of public suc- http://www.notbored.org/handschu.html

10 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 cess. Alongside attacks on other public Senator Feinstein has lobbied both But such private groups need the institutions, lobbyists began attacking the FDIC and the Postal Service on help of elected officials to stop the pil- the postal service, incredulous that behalf of her husband’s company. The laging. What is at stake, beyond the their overlords weren’t making a profit senator has repeatedly obtained value of public postal services, is the from people’s correspondence. Pushed updates on which facilities were slated preservation of the commons and its by the administration of George W. to be sold by her husband’s compa- protection from “enclosure” by private Bush in 2006, Congress passed the ny—even as those sites were under interests. In “The Parallel Economy of Postal Accountability and Enhancement review by her husband’s company. The the Commons,” Jonathan Rowe writes: Act, a law with no antecedent reason deal between the post office and Blum’s “Enclosure is the process by which and no empirical justification, which company is exclusive. a commons is taken for private use required the USPS to pre-pay the Gray Brechin, founder and project and gain. It has a long history. War healthcare benefits of all current scholar of the Living New Deal Project and conquest excepted, the original employees and employees who will at UC Berkeley, says of the ransacking enclosures in Anglo-American histo- retire in the next 75 years. of postal property: “Towns and cities ry largely were the work of the British Parliament, which parceled out the As Jim Hightower notes, “no other throughout our entire country are los- ing their historic post offices and often common lands to private owners, agency and no corporation has to do often with inadequate compensa- this.” The absurd mandate costs USPS the New Deal artworks designed for them. The giant real estate company tion—if any—for the commoners $5.5 billion-per-year. That, and not whose rights and subsistence were CBRE advises the USPS on what post some imagined socialist inefficiency, is taken in the process.” the true source of economic woes at offices to sell and then profits by repre- senting both the seller and buyer.” Rowe lists as examples of enclosure the post office, and both conservative the “parceling out of the broadcast air- A June audit by the Office of and liberal pundits will use those woes waves to private corporations.” Just as Inspector General raised conflict of to justify shutting the service down— the sky belongs to everyone, he argues, interest concerns and noted “poor over- even though, as evidenced last public communication also belongs to sight” of the CBRE contract. CBRE Christmas, the USPS routinely out- everyone—which is why post offices represents both buyers of postal proper- performs private services and receives have come to epitomize communities no taxpayer money to do so. ties (including Goldman Sachs) and the seller: the post office itself. In a recent in such a powerful way. Again, this is not a crisis limited to conversation I had with Brechin, he The stakes are not merely philo- the U.S. The Canadian postal system called the selling off of postal property sophical. The postal service has data- has also come under attack. Canada the “Teapot Dome scandal of our time.” bases for disaster relief and civil emer- Post is ending home delivery in urban gency purposes, making it a designated areas and laying off employees. The In that scandal, President Warren Harding’s Secretary of the Interior was deliverer of medicines in public health move comes as a result of questionable emergencies. Privatizing postal deliv- allegations of declining letter volume. convicted of accepting bribes from powerful people to whom he had leased ery means privatizing or, if corporate Playing postal politics valuable public lands. “Of course,” capitalism deems them unprofitable, completely eliminating such services. But adding to the USPS’s woes is a Brechin pointed out to me, “the U.S. at graft scheme being engineered by the that time had an active and competi- Jim Hightower calls the USPS “an spouse of one of America’s most power- tive press willing to cover the investiga- unmatched bargain, a civic treasure, a ful senators. Richard Blum, the husband tion into the scandal.” genuine public good that links all peo- of Democratic California Senator Dianne Ralph Nader recently wrote to ple and communities into one nation. Feinstein, chairs Coldwell Banker Feinstein concerning CBRE-brokered Myriad studies have produced conclu- Richard Ellis, or CBRE, a company that sales, citing journalist Richard Byrne’s sions suggesting that post offices, and a brokers the sale of USPS facilities. investigation into the sales, and point- government-mediated postal system, Through CBRE—a Fortune 500 compa- ing out that 20 percent of the postal establish a “commons,” a system of ny headquartered in Los Angeles that real estate has been sold to CBRE’s own community spaces that provide for the bills itself as “the world’s largest com- clients and business partners. The public good and are irreducible to pri- mercial real estate services and invest- Berkeley-based group National Post vate profits. These spaces include an ment firm”—Blum and his senator wife Office Collaborate is one of many infrastructure to respond to national along with their business friends have groups “fighting the sale of our prop- emergencies and re-establish commu- benefited directly from legislation under- erty and the dismantling of the USPS,” nications when disasters strike; money mining the viability of the post office. according to Brechin. transfer services for those without

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 11 access to banks; low-cost delivery of charge low fees and improve accessibil- ties. Also, it could create more jobs.” goods to rural areas (something private ity . . . The largest bank in the world is And finally, a postal bank needn’t con- carriers refuse to provide at reasonable Japan’s Post Bank.” fine itself to consumer banking. The cost); and possibly even increased pub- Public banking advocate Ellen National Association of Letter Carriers lic safety and community security. Brown has also called for a postal sav- also suggests a national infrastructure In April 2012, a report estimated that ings bank, pointing out that, like the bank—a development bank run the closing of rural post offices would postal service itself, such a bank through the postal service, issuing result in economic losses five times wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime. The bonds, backing public-private partner- greater than any money saved by the APWU’s Davidow also lists banking as ships, and guaranteeing “long-term closings, and incur environmental dam- a way to increase postal revenue. The low-interest loans to states and invest- age as a result of people having to drive National Association of Letter Carriers ment groups willing to rebuild.” to post offices far away. Not only that, We may never convince privatizers “post offices are often the social hubs of and corporatists that public services smaller communities and shuttering “Towns and cities are desirable. But for those sitting on them has strong negative implications the fence, it’s important to provide the for social capital (chances for neighbors throughout our entire facts about postal services: they are to see one another, renew ties, share country are losing their self-funded, they provide more consis- stories, and help each other out).” historic post offices and tent and less expensive services than private carriers, and above all they So what solutions should we often the New Deal demand? First, in the United States, the belong to us. Postal Accountability Act should be artworks designed for The answer to inefficiency, heavy- repealed and benefit-funding require- them. The giant real handedness and abuse of power is more ments restored to standards comparable democracy, transparency and account- to other public utilities. American Postal estate company CBRE ability—not less of it. Those who claim Workers Union spokesperson Sally advises the USPS on private corporations are more account- Davidow says eliminating the funding what post offices to sell able than public entities ignore the requirement would eliminate the USPS ways private corporations abuse the financial crisis altogether. She also says and then profits by rep- democratic process with impunity. package volume is up at the post office, resenting both the seller Checks and balances over public enti- which will surprise critics who are stuck and buyer.” ties do not have analogies in the private in the privatization narrative. sector, whose patrons fight every pro- Peter DeFazio and Bernie Sanders posed regulation tooth and nail. have sponsored bills to prevent closures reports that one out of four people In 21st century late capitalism, or curtailment of postal services, and don’t have access to a bank and are defending the commons means defend- facilitate new opportunities for the post forced to use pre-paid debit cards, ing public spaces and public services office. Along with making funding check cashing services and payday that are irreducible to mere profit-val- requirements fair for the Postal Service, loans—all sapping their money away ue. There are few better examples of the practice of auctioning off postal from basic services that could be pro- common spaces than conduits of pub- buildings and art should end immedi- vided by publicly-owned banks, facili- lic and private communication. A con- ately. The public is not benefiting from tated by post offices. scious, directed effort to save postal these sales; instead, private interests, con- services in the United States and nected to elected officials, are grabbing The solution would also work in Canada should be a priority of the up valuable pieces of the public good. Canada. As David Bush recently wrote: movement for economic democracy. “The Canadian Union of Postal Beyond that, both Canada and the After all, “communication” and “com- Workers has long advocated for the mons” have a common origin expressed United States can restore postal bank- expansion of postal services into areas ing as a means of increasing services to in the Latin word comm_nic_re, mean- such as banking. This is what hap- ing “to share.” constituent communities, and provid- pened in countries such as Italy, France ing a valuable mechanism to fully fund and New Zealand. Offering banking —Portside, January 20, 2014 all postal endeavors. As Ethan Cox services would allow people in smaller points out, postal banks, wherever they communities to access banking servic- https://portside.org/2014-01-20/ have been, have made “huge profits, es in otherwise unserviced communi- now-moment-save-our-postal-commons

12 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 A Festival of Lies By Glen Ford

“Believe it,” said the current totally eviscerating the meager gains of of the two million shows he has no Prevaricator-in-Chief, in the conclu- three generations of African Americans. intention of using his full powers to sion to his annual litany lies. President Yet, the closest Obama came to even an ameliorate taxpayer-financed poverty. Obama’s specialty, honed to theatrical oblique allusion to his great crime-in- We can also expect Obama to issue near-perfection over five disastrous the-making, was to announce that waivers to every firm that claims a years, is in crafting the sympathetic lie, “new trade partnerships with Europe hardship, as is always his practice. designed to suspend disbelief among and the Asia-Pacific will help [small What is Obama’s jobs program? It is those targeted for oblivion, through businesses] create even more jobs. We the same as laid out at last year’s State displays of empathy for the victims. In need to work together on tools like of the Union, and elaborated on last contrast to the aggressive insults and bipartisan trade promotion authority summer: lower business taxes and bluster employed by Republican politi- to protect our workers, protect our higher business subsidies. When you cal actors, whose goal is to incite racist environment and open new markets to say “jobs,” he says tax cuts—just like passions against the Other, the sympa- new goods stamped ‘Made in the the Republicans, only Obama first cites thetic Democratic liar disarms those USA.’” Like NAFTA twenty years the pain of the unemployed, so that you who are about to be sacrificed by pre- ago—only far bigger and more diaboli- know he cares. “Both Democrats and tending to feel their pain. cally destructive—TPP will have the Republicans have argued that our tax opposite effect, destroying millions Barack Obama, who has presided code is riddled with wasteful, compli- more jobs and further deepening over the sharpest increases in economic cated loopholes that punish businesses inequality in U.S. history, adopts the worker insecurity. The Trans Pacific Partnership expands the legal basis for investing here, and reward companies persona of public advocate, reciting that keep profits abroad. Let’s flip that wrongs inflicted by unseen and global economic inequalities—which is why the negotiations are secret, and equation. Let’s work together to close unknown forces that have “deepened” those loopholes, end those incentives to the gap between the rich and the rest of why the treaty’s name could not be spoken in the State of the Union ship jobs overseas, and lower tax rates us and “stalled” upward mobility. for businesses that create jobs right here Having spent half-a-decade stuffing address. It is a lie of omission of global proportions. Give Obama his crown. at home.” Actually, Obama wants to tens-of-trillions of dollars into the lower tax rates for all corporations to 28 accounts of an ever shrinking gaggle of The president who promised in his percent, from 35 percent, as part of his financial capitalists, Obama declares 2008 campaign to support a hike in the ongoing quest for a Grand Bargain with this to be “a year of action” in the oppo- minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011, and Republicans. For Obama, the way to site direction. “Believe it.” And if you do then did nothing at all to make it hap- bring jobs back to the U.S. is to make believe it, then crown him the Most pen, says this is the “year of action” American taxes and wages more “com- Effective Liar of the young century. when he’ll move heaven and earth to petitive” in the “global marketplace”— get a $10.10 minimum. He will start, Lies of omission are even more the Race to the Bottom. despicable than the overt variety, Obama told the Congress and the In the final analysis, the sympathetic because they hide. The potentially most nation, by issuing “an executive order corporate Democrat and the arrogant devastating Obama contribution to requiring federal contractors to pay economic inequality is being crafted in their federally-funded employees a fair corporate Republican offer only small secret by hundreds of corporate lobby- wage of at least $10.10 an hour because variations on the same menu: ever ists and lawyers and their revolving- if you cook our troops’ meals or wash increasing austerity. Obama bragged door counterparts in government. The their dishes, you should not have to about reducing the deficit, never Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade live in poverty.” Obama neglected to acknowledging that this has been deal, described as “NAFTA on ste- mention that only new hires—a small accomplished on the backs of the poor, roids,” would accelerate the global fraction, beginning with zero, of the contributing mightily to economic Race to the Bottom that has made a two million federal contract workers— inequality and social insecurity. wasteland of American manufacturing, will get the wage boost; a huge and Obama offers nothing of substance, plunging the working class into levels conscious lie of omission. The fact that because he is not authorized by his of poverty and insecurity without par- the president does not even propose a corporate masters to do so. He takes allel in most people’s lifetimes, and gradual, mandated increase for the rest his general orders from the same peo-

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 13 ple as do the Republicans. That’s why Obama only speaks of minimum wage Black Madness Under Obama hikes while Republicans are in power, African Americans More Pro-NSA, rather than when his own party con- Anti-Snowden Than Whites and Hispanics trolled both houses of Congress. Grand By Glen Ford Bargains are preferred, because they are the result of consensus between the In yet another example of African Something ugly has happened to two corporate parties. In effect, the American moral and political deteriora- Black America since 2008, eroding—if Grand Bargain is the distilled political tion in the Age of Obama, a new Pew not reversing—the progressive Black will of Wall Street, which feeds the Research poll shows Blacks are more in historical consensus on issues of peace, donkey and the elephant. Wall Street— favor of NSA spying on Americans than civil liberties and social justice that has the one percent—believes the world is are whites or Hispanics. Moreover, the prevailed since pollsters began solicit- theirs for the taking, and they want all data indicate that Blacks are probably ing Black opinion. One must conclude of it. Given this overarching truth, more likely to favor prosecution of that, either Black progressivism was a Obama has no choice but to stage a Edward Snowden for his NSA spying much shallower political current than festival of lies. revelations, than are other ethnic groups. previously believed, or that the pres- —Black Agenda Report, January 29, Back in September, polling history ence of a Black president has been 2014 was made when Black Americans were such a shock to Black consciousness, more in favor of air strikes against so profoundly disorienting, that it has http://blackagendareport.com/con- grievously distorted collective Black tent/american-state-union-festival-lies Syria than whites and Hispanics—the first time, ever, that African Americans perceptions of reality. The African were ranked as the most bellicose American worldview has been man- major ethnicity in the United States. gled beyond imagining. Back in June of last year, when MSNBC’s Black plantation hands Melissa Harris-Perry and Joy-Ann Reid were calling for Edward Snowden’s head on a platter, and Black South Carolina congressman James Clyburn was telling people that Snowden’s NSA revelations were nothing more than “an effort to embarrass the president,” 60 percent of Blacks and an equal pro- portion of Hispanics approved of “the government’s collection of telephone and Internet data as part of anti-ter- rorism efforts.” Only 44 percent of whites wanted the NSA’s metadata col- lections to continue. Pew Research pollsters asked the same questions after President Obama’s speech on NSA spying, last Friday. The survey showed that NSA’s stock had fallen consider- ably over the past six months, but Blacks remain more NSA spy-friendly than whites and Hispanics. Forty-three percent of African Americans still approve of the agency’s telephone and Internet data collection, compared to 39 percent of whites and 40 percent of Hispanics, while majorities of whites (55 percent) and Hispanics (52 per-

14 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 cent) opposed Obama on spying. Only telephone and internet data-gathering her relatives and friends would imme- 49 percent of Blacks would break failed by only seven votes.) diately suspect an emotional break- with administration policy. In conven- Forty percent of Blacks told a down, and seek professional help. tional political terms, African Washington Post/ABC poll, in late Caregivers would try to identify the Americans—who are subjected to August and early September, that they cause of the mental collapse, and find hyper-surveillance like no other group supported President Obama’s threat- ways to avoid further harm. in the U.S.—are most heavily repre- ened airstrikes on Syria. Although Actually, a diagnosis of collective sented on the far Right on this issue, majorities of Blacks (56 percent), African American mental illness, steadfast with “their” president. whites (58 percent) and Hispanics (63 brought on by the sudden and unex- Democrats are substantially more percent) opposed Obama’s air war, pected advent of a nominally Black likely than Republicans to favor crimi- African Americans were the most sup- president, is the kindest analysis avail- nal prosecution of Edward Snowden, portive of war—the first time that has able. The alternative diagnosis is that according to the Pew poll. Sixty-two ever happened. Given that Blacks were Black folks were always closet reaction- percent of Democrats, versus 54 percent far more pro-peace than either whites aries, who were just waiting for the of Republicans, want to throw the book or Hispanics in the pre-Obama era, the emergence of a Black chief executive to at Snowden. African Americans make conclusion is inescapable: substantial show their true colors. up one quarter of the Democratic Party. proportions of Black Americans are I’ll go with sudden onslaught of col- The data indicate that Black zeal to pro- now more concerned with defending lective mental illness. The second theo- tect Obama contributed significantly to Obama than with preventing the death ry is even crazier than the first. the Democrats’ lynch-mob mentality. of thousands of innocents abroad, at U.S. hands. In siding with the NSA’s —Black Agenda Report, January 22, The polls show that the “Obscene 2014 14” Black lawmakers that voted to spies, Blacks have shown they are pre- shield the NSA’s meta-data trolling pared to sacrifice their own civil liber- http://blackagendareport.com/con- from congressional defunding, in July, ties in order to safeguard the prestige tent/black-madness-under-obama-afri- represented the majority of Black opin- of the icon in the White House. can-americans-more-pro-nsa-anti- ion at the time (60 percent). Put anoth- If an individual exhibited such life- snowden-whites-and-hispanics er way, Black majorities appear pre- long personality and values reversals, pared to take even the most right-wing positions if they perceive it to be in defense of the First Black President. (The House effort to curtail the NSA’s

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 15 Victory in Seattle Inspires Chicago Socialist Campaign By Andrew Mortazavi

If a socialist can win an election in where to run a candidate, as aldermen while also registering new voters, Seattle, why not Chicago? That was the must reside in their own ward. By whom they see as key to the movement spirit at the University of Illinois- February, the research committee plans because many potential supporters do Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull House to have identified four wards condu- not vote for either major party. Museum on Wednesday night, where cive to electing a socialist candidate The sense that the major political close to 100 Chicagoans gathered for based on community support and parties had failed to represent the the founding meeting of the Chicago incumbent vulnerability. One ward masses pervaded the room on Socialist Campaign. will be ratified by vote in a February Wednesday. Organizer Eugene Lim Drawing on the example of Seattle’s open meeting. said the campaign was not just about Kshama Sawant—who in November Attendees expressed belief that a winning office, but reclaiming the became the first socialist in recent suitable candidate would arise organi- word “socialist” to mean those who memory elected to a city council—the cally from grassroots organizing. But fight for the proletariat and the disen- campaign seeks to run a socialist candi- organizers did identify the type of can- franchised. “If we go forward in those date for alderman in Chicago’s 2015 didate they hope for—a socialist who arenas,” he says, “We have won.” city council race. Activists also plan to would represent a multitude of com- Andrew Mortazavi is a Spring 2014 use the electoral effort to amplify the munity voices. editorial intern for In These Times. demands of popular movements in Ervin Lopez, a local teacher and —In These Times, January 24, 2014 Chicago, such as the call for a $15 community organizer, noted that the minimum wage. movement was seeking to represent a http://inthesetimes.com/ittlist/ The January 22 meeting drew mem- population that wasn’t necessarily in entry/16171/victory_in_seattle_ bers of several socialist organizations— the room. “Right away my first obser- inspires_chicago_socialist_campaign/ including Solidarity, Socialist vation was that it seems like another Alternative and the International predominately white-Left socialist Socialist Organization—as well as group,” Lopez said of the event, adding members of community organizations that local labor and activist leaders and unions, such as Chicago Teachers from the South and West Sides of the Union, AFSCME and Service city weren’t present. Employees International Union. The Chicago campaign is also seek- Overall, the mood was hopeful. Shaun ing an independent socialist candi- Harkin, a member of ISO, called the date—someone without a socialist campaign “an exciting opportunity,” party affiliation. In doing so, it is mak- and his sentiment appeared to be ing an important departure from the shared by an ebullient crowd. Seattle model, where Sawant ran as a Inspired by Sawant’s victory, Chicago member of the Socialist Alternative organizers first held an impromptu party. Chicago is home to many exist- meeting last month to gauge interest in ing socialist organizations and inde- a similar effort in the Windy City. They pendent socialists who, organizer Isaac emerged with a vision statement that Silver believes, must be brought togeth- calls for building a “people-centered” er to achieve operational unity. movement to “make real and lasting Organizers hope to have a candidate change” to the system. by late spring, but the deadline is On Wednesday, they turned to fine- August 26, 2014, when the campaign tuning that vision statement and dis- can officially begin collecting signa- cussing organizing and campaigning tures for the ballot. A minimum of 473 plans. The biggest question, of course, valid signatures is needed to gain ballot is who to choose as a candidate. The access. Campaign organizers aim to campaign plans to begin by deciding secure at least four times that many,

16 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 Seattle Community College Teacher Elected to City Council Socialist Kshama Sawant’s Win Signals New Openings for Political Change By Mark T. Harris

The city of Seattle has long benefit- It’s a sign of a changing political cli- Seattle Labor Temple. There plans were ed from the fresh ocean breezes that mate that an avowed socialist, a member unfurled to educate and train a small flow in from Puget Sound. Now, a dif- of the Socialist Alternative organization, army of activists to begin organizing ferent kind of breeze is sweeping could win election to citywide office in a what is described as Neighborhood and through the state of Washington’s larg- major American city. In fact, Sawant is Campus Action Groups to win support est city. It’s the air of political change the first socialist elected to city office in for the proposal throughout Seattle. represented in economist Kshama Seattle since Anna Louise Strong, who The goal is to hold a week of political Sawant’s new position as the first elect- later earned fame as a writer, won elec- events, marches, and rallies from March ed socialist to the Seattle City Council. tion to the school board in 1916. 7 to 15th, with a large mass demonstra- tion planned for May 1. Sawant, a member of AFT Local Not surprisingly, her election has 1789, is a part-time economics instruc- generated quite the media buzz. Of course, there’s strong business tor at Seattle Central Community Despite the local nature of the election, opposition to this living wage propos- College. In a dramatic upset, the inde- news reports of her victory went world- al, and a fight ahead, but the fact that pendent candidate garnered some wide, including coverage in her native the new mayor has come out in favor 93,000 votes last November to defeat India. Even at the January 6, 2014 of the raise (as well as three other long-time Democratic councilman swearing-in ceremony for the new city council members) testifies to which Richard Conlin. government, which included inaugura- way the winds of grassroots change are What’s remarkable about Sawant’s tion of the city’s first gay mayor, Ed currently blowing in Seattle. victory is that her campaign did not Murray, much of the news coverage It’s a refreshing turn of events to see downplay her openly socialist politics. centered on Sawant. The swearing-in a dedicated, pro-union activist elected Just the opposite. As a socialist, she included a record crowd for such an to an important city position. In no championed raising the minimum event, most of them Sawant supporters small part Sawant’s election is a reac- wage to $15 per hour and implement- with more than 1,000 in attendance. tion to the dismal reality of long declin- ing a new “Millionaire’s Tax” on the Sawant is cut from a different politi- ing real wages and benefits for many very wealthy to expand funding for cal cloth in other ways, too. With a working Americans, with cutbacks in public services, including mass transit salary of $120,000 a year, Seattle City public services and education resourc- and education. In media interviews Council members are among the high- es having devolved into a kind of and elsewhere, she also made clear her est paid elected city officials in the default setting for bipartisan politics in support for unionizing low-paid ser- country. Sawant has pledged not to the United States today. vice workers, rent control, support for take more than the average Seattle As Sawant herself noted in her women’s and minority rights, and income, donating the rest of her salary January 6 inauguration speech, “This other progressive causes. to social justice campaigns. city has made glittering fortunes for A grassroots campaign But beyond any demonstrative mea- the super wealthy and for the major corporations that dominate Seattle’s Significantly, the newly elected city sures, Sawant’s election appears poised landscape. At the same time, the lives council member, who began to make a to give a concrete boost to progressive of working people, the unemployed name for herself locally during the activism in Seattle. Buoyed by a grass- and the poor grow more difficult by Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, had roots, volunteer base of hundreds of the day. The cost of housing skyrock- the backing of a majority of unions in supporters, Sawant is pledged to build a new grassroots Fight for 15 campaign ets, and education and healthcare the M.L. King County Labor become inaccessible.” Council. This included her own AFT to raise the minimum wage in Seattle. local, as well as CWA Local 37083, It’s a proposal that’s already won voter Where is the economic recovery? AFSCME Local 1488, IBEW Local 46, approval in nearby SeaTac, where As a teacher, Sawant wants to and the American Postal Workers Seattle’s international airport is located. increase corporate taxes to ensure Union-Greater Seattle Local. (A two- The new living wage campaign got schools and colleges get all the money thirds “super-majority” vote would have underway at a packed January 12 orga- and resources they need. With corpo- been required to earn the Labor nizing rally, where 300 plus supporters rate profits at record levels, this should Council’s official endorsement.) of the Fight for 15 initiative met at the be an obvious solution. Instead, most

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 17 politicians talk as if austerity and cut- backs and “no new taxes” (by which is Drop the Charges Against Snowden! usually meant taxes on the super By Barry Sheppard wealthy) are our only viable choices. Why? The economic “recovery” has Division continues to deepen in present only when FISA decided to benefited the very rich, but the rest of U.S. and international ruling circles have them. us—not. Sawant is reminding us that about what to do about the revelations The word “foreign” in FISA’s name the country is not poor; it’s just that of NSA spying. is misleading. FISA is the only court wealth is hoarded in fewer hands than The speech by President Obama, that oversees NSA’s operations, includ- ever before. which was supposed to move the dis- ing the sweeping up of all “metadata” Will Sawant’s election prove to be cussion forward, was a flop; polls indi- of every phone call, tweet, email or text the first sign of new opportunities for cate it didn’t change anyone’s mind. of all U.S. citizens, which it has given independent activist politics in other Obama gave his usual “on the one carte blanche to. cities? That remains to be seen. For hand, and on the other” speech attempt- now, it is certainly a promising devel- ing to appease both sides, but came Scathing report opment. As Kraig Schwartz, member- down in defense of the NSA program. On January 23, six days after ship chairman of AFT Local 1789, Obama’s speech, an independent fed- Where he did seem to offer changes, remarks in a recent Seattle Times op-ed, eral privacy watchdog issued a 238- there were caveats. For example, he “Sawant is a smart, articulate, fresh page report concluding that the NSA’s said the NSA’s bugging of foreign lead- voice for the 99 percent. Her campaign, collection of bulk “metadata” of U.S. ers would cease—except in cases of and the activism it has brought to the citizens provided only “minimal” ben- “national security.” But that is the jus- fore, has already enlarged our political efits in counterterrorism efforts, is ille- tification for the whole NSA spying space, offering new ideas with hopes of gal and should be shut down. program. bringing a more balanced power equa- This was the first major public state- The New York Times reports that in tion to our city and country.” ment by the Privacy and Civil Liberties the case of Germany, attempts to come Indeed. The ground-level activism Oversight Board, which Congress to an agreement on spying on each that swept Kshama Sawant into office made an independent agency in 2007. other’s leaders are “floundering.” The reflects the desire by many to challenge sticking point is, “American officials Commenting on the report, the the austerity mind-set that has come to have refused to extend the ‘no spying’ New York Times says it “lays out what narrowly define mainstream politics. guarantee beyond [Chancellor] may be the most detailed critique of Her campaign both as a candidate and Merkel, telling German officials in pri- the government’s once-secret legal the- now as an elected official instead puts vate sessions that if the White House ory behind the program: that a law its hopes in the twin forces of grass- agreed to forgo surveillance on German known as Section 215 of the Patriot roots activism and independent politi- territory, other partners would insist Act, which allows the FBI to obtain cal leadership to reshape the American on the same treatment.” business records deemed ‘relevant’ to political landscape. Most important, an investigation, can be legally inter- These discussions don’t even touch the political message of her election preted as authorizing the NSA to col- on the spying on hundreds-of-millions victory is that it is possible for ordinary lect all calling records in the country. working Americans to get organized of citizens in Germany and elsewhere and make this country a better, more in Europe. Reports of views of most “The program ‘lacks a viable legal prosperous place to live. Europeans are dismissive of Obama’s foundation under Section 215, impli- speech. cates constitutional concerns under Mark T. Harris is a political com- the First and Fourth Amendments, Another example: Obama promised mentator reporting from Seattle for The raises serious threats to privacy and to find a way to provide some kind of Advocate. civil liberties as a policy matter, and advocate for targets of NSA spying —The Advocate, February 5, 2014 has shown only limited value,’ the brought before the kangaroo Foreign report said. ‘As a result, the board rec- http://www.aft1493.org/component/ Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). ommends that the government end the content/article/23-advocate-e-mail- But the targets themselves would not program.’” edition/236-february-2014-advocate- be present and would not even know community-college-teacher-elected-to- of the secret FISA proceedings. Such The Times noted that the “report seattle-city-council.html “advocates” would be chosen from a also scrutinizes in detail a handful of government-appointed list, and be investigations in which the program

18 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 was used, finding ‘no instance in which on us. Polls now show that around 70 Senate’s in accusing Snowden, without the program directly contributed to the percent of U.S. citizens think NSA spy- a shred of evidence, of working for discovery of a previously unknown ter- ing on them should be curtailed or Russian spy services. rorist plot or the disruption of a terror- eliminated, for example. Rodgers said that Snowden’s pos- ist attack.’” The division over the NSA program session of a “go bag” to get out of Of course Section 215 and the whole also extends to differences over how Hawaii and his smooth entry into Patriot Act are a violation of civil liber- Edward Snowden should be treated. Hong Kong indicated preplanning ties. The “war on terrorism” is a bogus Previously, the New York Times edi- beyond his individual capacity. rationale for the wars the U.S. has tors called for clemency for Snowden, “I don’t think it was a gee-whiz luck waged since and the setting up of this given the great value of his revelations. event that he ended up in Moscow vast spy operation. Calls for clemency have increased in under the handling of the FSB [the Growing divisions the last several months by other news Russian spy agency],” Rodgers said. organizations as well as civil liberties “He may well have [been a Russian Snowden’s revelations of the extent organizations. Attorney General Eric spy],” Feinstein chimed in. of international spying, including eco- Holder rejected those appeals. He said nomic spying, have also caused con- Last month, Jesselyn Radak, a legal that Snowden should return to face the cern. On January 23, the World adviser to Snowden and a lawyer with charges against him, and then and only Economic Forum in Davos, the Government Accountability then the government would consider a Switzerland, set up a commission to Project, already replied to this non- plea deal. “scrutinize the future of the web in the sense: “I absolutely think the tide has wake of the Edward Snowden revela- A bipartisan attack on Snowden was changed for Snowden. All these things tions,” according to the Financial launched by the heads of the House taken together counsel in favor of some Times. and Senate Intelligence Committees on sort of amnesty or pardon.” the Sunday Meet the Press TV program “Marissa Mayer, chief executive of on January 19. Yahoo, said [in Davos] trust in her —Red Flag, January 25, 2014 company and others had been dam- Mike Rodgers, the Republican head aged by the disclosures.” Her concerns of the House committee, was joined by http://redflag.org.au/article/drop- were echoed by other company heads. Democrat Dianne Feinstein of the charges-against-snowden Microsoft has now said it will not store international users’ information in the U.S. The Financial Times reports: “Brad Smith, general counsel of Microsoft, said that … it had become necessary after leaks showed the National Security Agency had been monitoring data of foreign citizens from Brazil to the EU.” Whether this move by Microsoft will calm concerns, given the worldwide reach of the NSA, remains to be seen. Why is it important when such divi- sions occur in ruling class circles? Because it helps our side, the working class side, to expose ruling class attacks

EXPOSING CRIMES IS NOT A CRIME

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 19 Medicare’s Rollout vs. Obamacare’s Glitches Brew By David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhander

The smooth and inexpensive rollout Moreover, Medicare and Medicaid of different plans, with premiums, co- of Medicare on July 1, 1966 provides a (which was passed at the same time) payments, deductibles and provider sharp contrast to the costly chaos of displaced several smaller federal health networks that vary county-by-county; Obamacare. assistance programs, saving about $376 Medicare offered a single, uniform We won’t rehearse the chaos part million on their overhead costs. plan. The exchanges must calculate here, just the costs. Signing up most of the elderly for subsidies for each applicant after first verifying income, family size and As of March 2013, federal grants for Medicare was simple; they were already known to the Social Security immigration status; Medicare offered Obamacare’s state exchanges totaled free hospital coverage, with a minimal $3.8 billion.1 Spending for the federal Administration, which handled enroll- ment. To find the rest,4 the feds sent ($22) uniform premium for doctor exchange is harder to pin down coverage. Instead of setting up a new because funding has come from mul- out mailings to seniors, held local meetings, and asked postal workers, bureaucracy to collect premiums from tiple accounts, including: the $1 bil- millions of enrollees and funnel them lion Health Insurance Implementation forest rangers and agricultural repre- sentatives to help contact people in to private insurers, Medicare relied on Fund; Department of Health and the existing payroll and income tax Human Services’ (DHHS) General system to garner funds. Departmental Management Account and General Departmental A single payer plan Obamacare’s byzantine complexity reflects the contortions required to Management Account; Centers for that excluded private Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) simultaneously expand coverage and Program Management Account and insurers could save appease private insurers. And private the Prevention and Public Health hundreds-of-billions insurers will exact a steep ongoing toll. Fund. CMS estimates fiscal 2014 Medicare’s overhead is just two per- in transaction costs. 5 spending for the federally-operated cent, vs. an average of 13 percent for exchanges at $2 billion.2 So it’s safe to private plans (on top of the Exchanges’ say that the costs of getting the costs, roughly three percent of premi- exchanges up and running, and (hope- remote areas. The Office for Economic ums). A single payer plan that excluded fully) enrolling seven million people in Opportunity spent $14.5 million to private insurers could save hundreds- the program’s first year will exceed $6 hire 5,000 low-income seniors who of-billions in transaction costs. billion. went door-to-door in their neighbor- Medical quality improvement hoods. Bear in mind that the exchanges experts often advise hospitals to “avoid won’t actually pay any medical bills, Despite predictions of chaos, and workarounds;” fix system defects rath- just sign people up for coverage. So bil- worries that the newly-insured seniors er than force doctors and nurses to lions more in overhead costs will show would flood the healthcare system, sidestep problems like faulty equip- up on the books of the private insurers there were few bottlenecks. Hospitals ment, understaffing, or illegible hand- and state Medicaid programs that will continued to operate smoothly and no writings. This advice is equally valid for actually process medical claims. waiting lists materialized. The only real health reform. To avoid glitches and “glitch” was that many hospitals in the wasteful expense, design the system Back in 1966, Medicare started pay- Deep South initially refused to inte- right; eliminate private insurers and ing bills for 18.9 million seniors (99 grate their facilities—which Medicare cover everyone under a single payer percent of those eligible for coverage) required for certification and payment. program. just 11 months after Pres. Johnson But by the end of the first month, 99.5 David Himmelstein is a professor of signed it into law. Overhead costs for percent of hospitals had signed on. the first year totaled $120 million3 public health at the City University of (equivalent to $867 million in 2013— Obamacare’s start-up has been New York, a visiting professor of medi- all subsequent figures are given in 2013 rocky because complexity is “baked in” cine at Harvard Medical School, and a dollars). But that figure includes the to the design, just as simplicity was cofounder of Physicians for a National cost of processing medical bills, not “baked in” to Medicare. Obamacare’s Health Program with Woolhandler. He just the enrollment costs. exchanges must coordinate thousands received a medical degree from Columbia

20 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 University; completed a medical resi- dency at Highland Hospital in Oakland, Your Mind, Privatized California, and a fellowship in general By Steven Strauss internal medicine at Harvard University; and has practiced primary care internal I am a practicing neurologist. To it did for Bush’s unscientific, anti- medicine for three decades in Cambridge me, the brain is the most fascinating education No Child Left Behind fiasco. and the South Bronx. entity in the universe. A physical struc- And DARPA, established in 1958, is Dr. Steffie Woolhandler has earned ture which enables us to manipulate charged with protecting “U.S. national degrees from Stanford University (BA tools and communicate using lan- security” by “maintaining the techno- Economics), LSU Medical Center (MD), guage, it also allows us to rationally logical superiority of the U.S. mili- and U.C. Berkeley (MPH) as well as an probe the unknown and progress in tary.” U.S. “warfighters,” says DARPA, honorary degree from Harvard (MA). our ability to satisfy human and plan- “perform under the most challenging She has worked as a primary care inter- etary needs. It is the most advanced operational condition,” so “harnessing nist for decades, has authored over a achievement of evolution. the capabilities of neuroscience” may hundred scientific articles on health and So I should have help sustain mental health care policy, and is a well-known been overjoyed to alertness during advocate for non-profit, single-payer learn last April that ... no capitalist govern- prolonged mis- national health insurance. She is cur- President Obama sions. rently a professor of public health at was proposing a ment invests $100 mil- Scientific CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter $100 million initial lion dollars for strictly American blogger College. fund for advanced humanitarian reasons and veteran jour- —Health Affairs Blog, January 2, research to fully map nalist John Horgan 2014 out the human rightly criticized http://healthaffairs.org/ brain, to identify its BRAIN (May 22, blog/2014/01/02/medicares-rollout-vs- numerous neural circuits, each one a 2013) for what he calls the “militariza- obamacares-glitches-brew/ complex interconnection of the living tion of brain science.” This is nothing wires we call “nerves.” Finally we’ll be new. In the 1990s, the U.S. Army able to offer something meaningful to Research Institute studied neurosci- our patients with devastating diseases ence to help develop cognitive 1 Federal grants for Obamacare’s state like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, for enhancement for the battlefield. It exchanges totaled $3.8 billion: http://www.gao. which there are currently no cures or advocated exploiting neuroscience to gov/assets/660/654994.pdf satisfactory treatments. Even the proj- aid both the military and private 2 CMS estimates fiscal 2014 spending for the ect’s title is catchy—The BRAIN employers in “personnel selection and federally-operated exchanges at $2 billion: Initiative—for Brain Research through training” by identifying subtle mental http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/655291.pdf Advancing Innovative Neurotech- traits. 3 Overhead costs for the first year totaled $120 million: http://www.cms.gov/Research-Sta- nologies. Big business is drooling over tistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and- But I was skeptical, not overjoyed, BRAIN’s big dollar signs. The pharma- Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/National- because I am not only a neurologist, ceutical industry, for example, will HealthAccountsHistorical.html but also a socialist. I have learned, acquire publicly funded scientific 4 To find the rest: http://www.ssa.gov/history/ ssa/lbjmedicare3.html using my brain, that no capitalist gov- information to help manufacture its 5 Medicare’s overhead is just two percent: ernment invests $100 million dollars expensive, privately-owned, neuropsy- http://jhppl.dukejournals.org/content/ for strictly humanitarian reasons. And chiatric drugs. And writing for the early/2013/02/11/03616878-2079523.abstract whenever they employ a catchy title, Wall Street Journal (April 15, 2013), there’s also a catch. Gregory Sorensen called for promot- Obama earmarked three funding ing BRAIN by eliminating corporate recipients—the National Institutes of taxes on the medical-technology Health (NIH), the National Science industry. Foundation, and the Defense Advanced But corporate America is also wor- Research Projects Agency (DARPA). ried. Forbes Magazine contributor But beware! The NIH, for example, David DiSalvo asked in an April 3, does research for political agendas, as 2013 article, “Are we too late?,” refer-

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 21 ring to the European Union’s billion- euro Human Brain Project and China’s The Menace of the Military Mind Brainnetome. It’s never too late to By Chris Hedges share knowledge, but DiSalvo is talking about being too late to cash in on the February 3, 2014—I had my first not pleasant men. They are vain, impe- booty. experience with the U.S. military when rial, filled with rage and violence. And To understand BRAIN, we also need I was a young reporter covering the Homer’s central character in “The to consider capitalist patents, an exclu- civil war in El Salvador. We journalists Odyssey,” Odysseus, in his journey sive ownership right to an invention. were briefed at the American Embassy home from war must learn to shed his Helen Mayberg, a neurologist at Emory each week by a U.S. Army colonel who “hero’s heart,” to strip from himself University, identified a neural circuit at the time headed the military group the military attributes that served him deep in the brain that influences major of U.S. advisers to the Salvadoran in war but threaten to doom him off depression. Using an already available army. The reality of the war, which the battlefield. The qualities that serve technology to stimulate nerves with lasted from 1979 to 1992, bore little us in war defeat us in peace. electrical wires, she was able to provide resemblance to the description regur- Most institutions have a propensity dramatic relief to her patients. Now gitated each week for consumption by to promote mediocrities, those whose Mayberg holds a patent on this tech- the press. But what was most evident primary strengths are knowing where nique, whose only novel component is was not the blatant misinformation— power lies, being subservient and obse- the circuit she identified. Researchers this particular colonel had apparently quious to the centers of power and must pay to use such patents, which learned to dissemble to the public dur- never letting morality get in the way of impedes medical investigations. ing his multiple tours in Vietnam— one’s career. The military is the worst Imagine how many patents BRAIN will but the hatred of the press by this man in this respect. In the military, whether generate! and most other senior officers in the at the Paris Island boot camp or West If all of this sounds like one grand U.S. military. When first told that he Point, you are trained not to think but scheme to further enrich the one per- would have to meet the press once a to obey. What amazes me about the cent and sharpen the mental weapons week, the colonel reportedly protested military is how stupid and bovine its of imperialist warfare, welcome to sci- against having to waste his time with senior officers are. Those with brains ence under capitalism. those “limp-dicked communists.” and the willingness to use them seem Science is a social enterprise, where For the next 20 years I would go on to be pushed out long before they can individual researchers build on accu- from war zone to war zone as a foreign rise to the senior-officer ranks. The mulated knowledge. But capitalism correspondent immersed in military cul- many Army generals I met over the uses this knowledge for the benefit of ture. Repetitive rote learning and an years not only lacked the most rudi- the few. Searching for a solution to its insistence on blind obedience—similar mentary creativity and independence latest crisis, this moribund economic to the approach used to train a dog— of thought but nearly always saw the system seeks to turn our brains into work on the battlefield. The military press, as well as an informed public, as private property and weapons of mass exerts nearly total control over the lives impinging on their love of order, regi- destruction. We need a radical alterna- of its members. Its long-established hier- mentation, unwavering obedience to tive—a sane, socialist world, where archy ensures that those who embrace authority and single-minded use of science serves the interests of humani- the approved modes of behavior rise and force to solve complex problems. ty, minimizes suffering, and keeps our those who do not are belittled, insulted So when I heard James R. Clapper planet sustainable. and hazed. Many of the marks of civilian Jr., a retired Air Force lieutenant gen- life are stripped away. Personal modes of eral and currently the federal govern- Dr. Strauss is a neurologist in Baltimore, dress, hairstyle, speech and behavior are Maryland, author of The Linguistics, ment’s director of national intelligence, heavily regulated. Individuality is physi- denounce Edward Snowden and his Neurology, and Politics of Phonics: cally and then psychologically crushed. Silent “E” Speaks Out (Erlbaum), and “accomplices”—meaning journalists Aggressiveness is rewarded. Compassion such as Glenn Greenwald and Laura co-author of the forthcoming book, is demeaned. Violence is the favorite Reading: The Grand Illusion. Poitras—before the Senate Intelligence form of communication. These qualities Committee last week I was not sur- —Freedom Socialist Party, December are an asset in war; they are a disaster in prised. Clapper charged, without offer- 2013 civil society. ing any evidence, that the Snowden http://www.socialism.com/drupal- Homer in “The Iliad” showed his disclosures had caused “profound 6.8/?q=node/2894 understanding of war. His heroes are damage” and endangered American

22 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 lives. And all who have aided Snowden turned. We are now trying to go to the being promulgated and reinforced is are, it appears, guilty of treason in Supreme Court. Section 1021 is a chill- the military metaphysics—the cast of Clapper’s eyes. ing reminder of what people like mind that defines international reality Clapper and many others who have Clapper could do to destroy constitu- as basically military.” come out of the military discern no dif- tional rights. They see no useful role This is why people like James ference between terrorists and report- for a free press, one that questions and Clapper and the bloated military and ers, and by reporters I am not referring challenges power, and are deeply hos- security and surveillance apparatus to the bootlicking courtiers on televi- tile to its existence. I expect Clapper, if must not have unchecked power to sion and in Washington who masquer- he has a free hand, to lock us up, just as conduct wholesale surveillance, to ade as reporters. Carry out an inter- the Egyptian military has arrested a carry out extraordinary renditions and view with a member of al-Qaida, as I number of Al-Jazeera journalists, to imprison Americans indefinitely as have, and you become in the eyes of including some Westerners, on terror- terrorists. This is why the nation, as generals like Clapper a member of al- ism-related charges. The military mind our political system remains mired in Qaida. Most generals I know recognize is amazingly uniform. paralysis, must stop glorifying military no need for an independent press. The The U.S. military has won the ideo- values. In times of turmoil the military munchkins who dutifully sit through logical war. The nation sees human and always seems to be a good alternative. their press briefings or follow them social problems as military problems. It presents the facade of order. But around in preapproved press pools and To fight terrorists Americans have order in the military, as the people of publish their lies are the generals’ idea become terrorists. Peace is for the weak. Egypt are now learning again, is akin to of journalism. War is for the strong. Hypermasculinity slavery. It is the order of a prison. And When I was in Central America the has triumphed over empathy. We that is where Clapper and his fellow U.S. officers who were providing sup- Americans speak to the world exclu- generals and intelligence chiefs would port to the military of El Salvador or sively in the language of force. And like to place any citizen who dares to Guatemala, along with help to the those who oversee our massive security question their unimpeded right to turn Contra forces then fighting the and surveillance state seek to speak to us all into mindless recruits. They have Sandinista government in Nicaragua, us in the same demented language. All the power to make their demented did not distinguish between us journal- other viewpoints are to be shut out. “In dreams a reality. And it is our task to ists and the rebel forces or the leftist the absence of contrasting views, the take this power from them. Sandinista government. We were one very highest form of propaganda war- —truthdig.com, February 3, 2014 and the same. The reporters and pho- fare can be fought: the propaganda for tographers, often after a day or two of a definition of reality within which only http://www.truthdig.com/report/ hiking to reach small villages, would certain limited viewpoints are possi- print/the_menace_of_the_military_ report on massacres by the Salvadoran ble,” C. Wright Mills wrote. “What is mind_20140203 army, the Guatemalan army or the Contras. When the stories appeared, the U.S. officers usually would go vol- canic. But their rage would be directed not at those who pulled the triggers but at those who wrote about the mass kill- ings or photographed the bodies. This is why, after Barack Obama signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the U.S. military to seize U.S. citizens who “substantially sup- port” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associ- ated forces,” to strip them of due pro- cess and to hold them indefinitely in military detention centers, I sued the president. I and my fellow plaintiffs won in U.S. District Court. When Obama appealed the ruling it was over-

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 23 End Drone Killing, Drone Surveillance and Global Militarization United National Antiwar Coalition Call for Spring Days of Action 2014

Today we issue an international call 3. How drone attacks have effec- The campaign will also urge partici- for Spring Days of Action—2014, a tively destroyed international and pation in the World Beyond War coordinated campaign in April and domestic legal protection of the rights movement. May to end drone killings, drone sur- to life, privacy, freedom of assembly The following individuals and organizations veillance and global militarization. and free speech and have opened the endorse this Call: Lyn Adamson, Co-chair, Canadian Voice of The campaign will focus on drone way for new levels of surveillance and repression around the world, and how, Women for Peace; Dennis Apel, Guadalupe bases, drone research facilities and test Catholic Worker, California; Judy Bello, sites and drone manufacturers. in the United States, increasing drone Upstate NY Coalition to Ground the Drones & surveillance, added to surveillance by End the Wars; Medea Benjamin, Code Pink; The campaign will provide infor- the National Security Agency and Leah Bolger, Former National President, Veter- mation on: police, provides a new weapon to ans for Peace; Canadian Voice of Women for 1. The suffering of tens-of-thou- Peace; Sung-Hee Choi, Gangjeong Village repress black, Hispanic, immigrant and International Team, Jeju, Korea; Chelsea C. sands of people in Afghanistan, low-income communities and to intim- Faria, Graduate student, Yale Divinity School; Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Gaza idate Americans who are increasingly Promoting Enduring Peace; Sandy Fessler, who are under drone attack, docu- unsettled by lack of jobs, economic Rochester (NY) Against War; Joy First; Bruce K. menting the killing, the wounding and inequality, corporate control of politics Gagnon, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space; Holly Gwinn Graham, the devastating impact of constant and the prospect of endless war. Singer/songwriter, Olympia, WA; Regina drone surveillance on community life. We will discuss how the United Hagen, Darmstaedter Friedensforum, Germa- 2. How attack and surveillance States government and corporations ny; Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonvio- lence; Malachy Kilbride; Marilyn Levin and Joe drones have become a key element in a conspire secretly to monitor U.S. citi- Lombardo, Co-Coordinators, United National massive wave of surveillance, clandes- zens and particularly how the Antiwar Coalition; Tamara Lorincz, Halifax tine military attacks and militarization Administration is accelerating drone Peace Coalition, Canada; Nick Mottern, Know- generated by the United States to pro- surveillance operations and surveil- Drones.org; Agneta Norberg, Swedish Peace tect a global system of manufacture and Council; Pepperwolf, Director, Women Against lance inside the United States with the Military Madness; Lindis Percy, Coordinator, oil and mineral exploitation that is cre- same disregard for transparency and Campaign for the Accountability of American; ating unemployment and poverty, law that it applies to other countries, all Bases CAAB UK; Mathias Quackenbush, San accelerating the waste of nonrenewable with the cooperation of the Congress. Francisco, CA; Lisa Savage, Code Pink, State of resources and contributing to environ- Maine; Janice Sevre-Duszynska; Wolfgang Sch- The campaign will encourage activ- lupp-Hauck, Friedenswerkstatt Mutlangen, mental destruction and global warming. ists around the world to win passage of Germany; Cindy Sheehan; Lucia Wilkes Smith, In addition to cases in the Middle local laws that prohibit weaponized Convener, Women Against Military Madness East, Africa and Central Asia, we will drones and drone surveillance from (WAMM), Ground; Military Drones Commit- tee; David Soumis, Veterans for Peace; No examine President Obama’s “pivot” being used in their communities as Drones Wisconsin; Debra Sweet, World Can’t into the Asia-Pacific, where the United well as seeking national laws to bar the Wait; David Swanson, WarisACrime.org; Brian States has already sold and deployed use of weaponized drones and drone Terrell, Voices for Creative Nonviolence; Unit- drones in the vanguard of a shift of 60 surveillance. ed National Antiwar Coalition; Veterans for percent of its military forces to try to Peace; Dave Webb, Chair, Campaign for Nucle- The campaign will draw attention ar Disarmament (UK); Curt Wechsler, Fire control China and to enforce the to the call for a ban on weaponized John Paki Wieland, Northampton (MA) Com- planned Trans-Pacific Partnership. drones by RootsAction.org that has mittee to Stop War(s); Loring Wirbel, Citizens for Peace in Space (Colorado Springs, CO); We will show, among other things, generated a petition with over 80,000 how this surge of “pivot” forces, greatly Women Against Military Madness; Ann Wright, signers: Retired U.S. Army colonel and former diplo- enabled by drones, and supported by mat; Leila Zand, Fellowship of Reconciliation. the U.S. military-industrial complex, http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/ action/public/?action_KEY=6180 United National Antiwar Coalition will hit every American community [email protected] with even deeper cuts in the already And to efforts by the Granny Peace UNAC fragile social programs on which peo- Brigade (New York City), KnowDrones. P.O. Box 123 ple rely for survival. In short, we will org and others to achieve an interna- Delmar, NY 12054 connect drones and militarization with tional ban on both weaponized drones 518-227-6947 “austerity” in America. and drone surveillance. www.unacpeace.org

24 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 How Low Can Capitalism Sink? Look to Mandela’s ‘New’ South Africa By Ted Newcomen

Readers of Socialist Viewpoint may structed in such a way to form a “Pricing (including value added be curious to know how low the capi- small ‘house’ or shelter where they tax) Sleeps four: R850; Breakfast talist system can sink? Well, the answer make a normal living. A paraffin optional: R110.”1 is pretty far if you look at the webpage lamp, candles, a battery operated If they awarded Oscars for sick radio, an outside toilet (also referred for the Emoya Experience in advertising then this must be a winner. to as a long-drop) and a drum where Bloemfontein, South Africa. Now they make fire for cooking is nor- There is something seriously disturbing remember, this is the new “democrat- mally part of this lifestyle. Now you (not to say downright evil) about an ic” South Africa, not the old apartheid can experience staying in a Shanty economic system that makes money out regime. This is the young nation, which within the safe environment of a of play acting disenfranchised slum recently celebrated the life of Nelson private game reserve. This is the dwellers. What’s next? Slumdog Mandela and is held up as a model of only Shanty Town in the world sleepovers? Cookery lessons at peace, reconciliation, and economic equipped with under-floor heating Auschwitz? The Gulag Experience? development, which only the capitalist and wireless Internet access!’ Weekend slave camps in Georgia? At system can provide “The Shanty Town is ideal for just over $82 a night these shacks may The webpage promises a unique team building, braais [outdoor be something of a bargain for rich bank- tourist experience for visitors, reveal- grills], fancy theme parties and an sters on a leadership course or a fun ing what it is like to actually live in a experience of a lifetime. party for the privileged children of the Accommodates up to 52 guests. Our Third World Shantytown. Enough. Let one percent. The advertisement doesn’t Shantys are completely safe and say if you have to pay a supplement to the priceless advertising blurb speak child friendly. for itself: experience poverty, hunger, disease, “This is an experience you will and an optional dose of dysentery. “Millions of people are living in never forget! informal settlements across South Africa. These settlements consist of “Shanty Town offers the follow- thousands of houses also referred to ing: under floor heating; donkey gey- as Shacks, Shantys or Makhukhus. A sers [water heaters]; electrical geysers 1 Emoya Luxury Hotel and Spa Shanty usually consists of old cor- [electric heaters]; long-drop effect http://www.emoya.co.za/p23/accommodation/ rugated iron sheets or any other toilets; electricity; bathroom with shanty-town-for-a-unique-accommodation- experience-in-bloemfontein.html waterproof material, which is con- shower; braai facilities upon request.

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 25 South Africa: Forging a New Movement National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and the Shift in South Africa’s Politics By Leonard Gentle

The decision of the National Union express in legislation and in practice unions indulging in collective bargain- of Metalworkers of South Africa what people had envisioned from that ing within the range prescribed by (NUMSA) to cut ties with the African movement. In practice, the anti-apart- labor relations law. They too would National Congress (ANC) has received heid movement was laid to rest. Politics have their parliamentary officers track- poor analysis. Comment has tended to therefore became the exclusive terrain ing new labor laws and the press con- focus on the possibility of a new politi- of political parties, particularly those ference replacing the factory general cal party in 2019 or whether all this represented in parliament. And parlia- meetings and the mass rallies of their means that suspended general secre- ment replaced the streets, factories and constituencies. tary of the Congress of South African communities where political parties So the movement was replaced by a Trade Unions (COSATU) Zwelinzima were expected to earn their credibility. party and the party by its leadership Vavi will get his job back. The greater The people, as political agents in a and the leadership by a few individuals. significance of the biggest trade union broad mass movement, were replaced And political comment has become in the country throwing in its lot with by the individual voter participating in obsessed with the cult of individuals. a growing movement in opposition to secret at the ballot box once every five We have even lost the language to dis- the neoliberal order, and thus to the years. Occasional flare-ups or disputes tinguish between a movement, parties, left of the ANC, rather than the line up were settled through the courts. The organizations and individuals. to the right, is being missed. press conference replaced the mass For the past ten years we have had This very week NUMSA is holding a rally as the means whereby politicians community protests in every township national political school, which culmi- talked to the people. Journalistic com- across the country. But because these nates in an “expo” of forces of resis- ment and media reports therefore only did not fit the mold of political parties tance, to which activists and commu- knew about political parties and their and press conferences, they did not nities that have been active in service press conferences. make the media. And where commen- delivery struggles have been invited. This is not a uniquely South African tators reflected on these it was only, This is part of NUMSA’s declared com- phenomenon. Globally this passive until recently, as instances of “unrest” mitment to what it calls a “united citizenry has, until now, been the stuff and criminality. front” from below. of the political terrain in all countries A movement is not the same as a In discussing the events unleashed for nearly 30 years. The last three party, although parties may seek hege- by the Marikana massacre, some of us decades were also the years of the tri- mony within a movement. A move- have been declaring that the seeds of a umph of neoliberal capitalism and the ment is also not the same as an organi- new movement have been sown. But biggest attacks on the living standards zation, although myriads of organiza- equipped only with the notions of of ordinary people since World War I. tions, large and small, may make up a political parties, trade unions and other Neoliberalism relies on the passivity movement. Sometimes commentators such organizational forms, commenta- of ordinary people and the complicity failing to understand this notion of a tors have been ill equipped to grapple of all political parties that have con- movement call acts of popular resis- with the meaning of this notion of a fined politics to the world of the ballot tance, which make up a movement, movement. box and the press conference. But “spontaneous” because they cannot Movements in motion South Africa had an active mass move- identify well-known leaders. Thereby ment until the 1980s, so our neoliber- denying the agency of ordinary people We have lived for the past 20 odd- alism would have to await the triumph and their capacity for tactical and stra- years with the marginalization of ordi- of an ANC de-linked from that mass tegic acumen. nary people from any power over their movement—transformed in its own own lives. For at least half those years The movement that grew to a peak language from a “liberation movement millions of people were not active in in the 1980s was one that had a num- to a political party.” campaigns and in contesting the qual- ber of features. First, there was a com- ity of their lives, as they gave the ANC Our trade unions also evolved from mon enemy that unified the move- (the party that had stood at the head of a labor movement seeking broader ment. That enemy was apartheid and the liberation movement) a chance to social transformation to a set of trade all the associated 1970s reforms that

26 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 the government tried, which were seen into the movement it was in the 1980s. This may well be the position of as mere attempts at prolonging apart- It meant that all the local struggles in those COSATU affiliates who have heid. Second, all localized struggles communities of the past 15 years and championed a special congress to against this or that instance of injustice all the workplace struggles that broke review Vavi’s suspension. But, like were seen as code for resisting apart- out after Marikana no longer look to Malema’s EFF, the background events heid. So local struggles fed into the the ANC and its allies for strength. to the NUMSA fight in COSATU can national movement. All reforms were They look to themselves. be traced to the make-up of disgrun- rejected and institutions boycotted. It now means that any development tled forces that overthrew Thabo Mbeki This was not because this or that orga- in the political or labor sphere will be as ANC president. The South African nization issued such an instruction, measured against the rising tide of a Communist Party (SACP), COSATU but because the movement had estab- movement, which no longer looks to and the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) lished this as its prerogative. This the ANC or any of the parties in parlia- were a coterie of conspirators who sometimes meant that even a small ment, or any labor desk in the tripartite made a pact with Jacob Zuma that in organization could call for a march or National Economic Development and return for seats at the table of the state, a boycott way beyond its actual organi- Labor Council (NEDLAC) for any they would champion a deeply flawed zational capacity because such a call hope of a better future. Even Julius individual into the highest office. corresponded with the mood of the Malema [former leader of ANC-Youth] Mbeki had had no truck with those movement. has recognized this—giving up his for whom the state was merely a vehi- The ANC had sunk deep roots in career as a chicken farmer to start a cle for private wealth projects and lost the 1950s movement and its status was new party, the Economic Freedom little time dealing with Zuma, his own cemented after going into exile. But the Fighters (EFF), which speaks, opportu- deputy president, who was caught ANC did not “organize” the move- nistically, the language of this new doing precisely this. But this opened ment, let alone prescribe what people movement. This is what the Association the door for a layer of disgruntled ele- should do. When the ANC contem- of Mineworkers and Construction ments—some with their own agendas plated some tactical turn, which went Union (AMCU) is discovering now. of seeking a state for rentier capitalism against the tenets of the movement, it Workers swamped its ranks because it and others with political axes to grind. had to tread warily and try very hard to wasn’t the National Union of These forces rallied together behind persuade the movement, and the out- Mineworkers (NUM). Now workers the SACP, COSATU and the ANCYL come wasn’t guaranteed. want AMCU to be part of a new move- to drive Mbeki out after making a ment and to be a broad church. And Faustian pact with Zuma. “Broad church?” AMCU is simply not equipped to be so. By definition a movement is hetero- And what did the Zuma project The aftermath of Marikana also geneous, comprising such a range of deliver? Cabinet positions for individ- revealed that the Congress of South experiences and organizational forms ual COSATU, SACP and ANCYL lead- African Trade Unions (COSATU) that no party or single organization can ers and a veritable culture of cronyism stood outside and in opposition to this encompass that range. The mass move- and looting of the state. Then the lad- new movement. Such a position for a ment of the 1980s recognized the ANC der of advancement was whisked away federation that once had deep roots in as having the leading role, but the ANC and when Malema over-reached him- the working-class was surely going to was by no means the only political self, he was expelled; and so the erst- precipitate tensions within its ranks. force, and when people joined the while-unified forces of disgruntlement ANC they brought all these different The anti-Mbeki forces unravel unraveled. tendencies and experiences to the ANC So, to the NUMSA Special National Meanwhile throughout the Mbeki and made it what ANC-apologists love Congress of December 2013 and its years the victims of his neoliberalism— to call today, a “broad church.” decisions. the new working-class of urban and Which is why the Marikana massa- Most comment has without fail rural poor, the youth and the unem- cre was such a historic moment. It sig- reduced this to the decision not to back ployed—have been in increasing revolt, naled that the ANC is no longer a the ANC in the 2014 elections and a revolt of service delivery protests car- “broad church” but a party of the very largely to ascribe this to the suspension ried out beneath the radar of middle- rich—those whose interests must be of Vavi. This makes for facile comment class public opinion. The system of defended, violently, if necessary. In so and for easy but false resolution. All labor relations and compliant trade doing, it freed activists from any fur- COSATU needs to do is reinstate Vavi unions kept a lid on the rising dissatis- ther illusions of transforming the ANC and the war will be over. faction in the industrial sphere until

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 27 the revolts spilled over into the com- And unlike the public sector unions up a mass anti-apartheid movement munities surrounding the platinum that dominate COSATU (from whence since the 1950s. mines in the North West and found a its Zuma-loyal president, Sdumo For years many have bemoaned the disgraced National Union of Dlamini, comes) and where the mem- fact that the quality of South Africa’s Mineworkers (NUM) incapable of bership is a new middle class of white- democracy is hampered by the absence having any moral authority to police collar workers, NUMSA still has the of a political alternative to the left of the dissent. And then came Marikana. blue-collar workers of its militant days the ANC. All the political parties in Of all the conspirators, the SACP is in the steel and engineering companies parliament support the quest of South most distant from struggles and cannot of the Witwatersrand, KwaZulu-Natal African corporations to be internation- fathom an independent existence out- and the Vaal. ally competitive while endorsing the side the state. The SACP has nowhere With the break-up of the old Zuma neoliberal GEAR (Gallatin Economic else to go except to act as the Rottweiler alliance, it is therefore not surprising Development Agency) economic pro- of the Zuma regime, turning first on that it is NUMSA that has responded in gram and the privatization of public Malema and then on COSATU. Vavi’s the way that it has. It is also significant services. All base themselves on the sexual power games may have provid- that NUMSA members took their deci- flawed compromises that established ed the ammunition but it was the sions at a special congress preceded by the constitutional order at Kempton SACP that turned on its ex-ally. But a process of political discussion and Park. instead of kowtowing to the SACP line, democratic debate from their locals For long now that absence has been Marikana has also emboldened a and regions. seen as rectifiable simply by conjuring NUMSA leadership to contemplate Obsessed by the forthcoming 2014 up a left party to fill the gap. mutiny. general elections and with only a short- After the Marikana massacre and its Why NUMSA? term understanding of politics, the subsequent strike wave, there was media have struggled to understand NUMSA has always been the left much talk about the seeds of a new the NUMSA developments. So it’s critic within COSATU. Its roots can be movement being sown. The signifi- either about making up an alliance found in the traditions of the indepen- cance of the NUMSA initiative is pre- with EFF (you see they’re all left wing, dent socialism of the Federation of cisely that it takes forward this narra- so they must be together) or it’s all South African Trade unions (FOSATU) tive. Why? Because it states unequivo- about personalities like Vavi (where and the Metal and Allied Workers cally that the future of South Africa lies NUMSA’s initiative is viewed as little Union (MAWU), which precede the in a movement to the left of the ANC more than a ploy to save Vavi’s career). formation of COSATU—a tradition to and, by seeking to find common cause the left of the SACP and long castigated If we’re only looking at the 2014 with township activists and militant as “workerism” by the SACP and the general elections or if we examine this workers on the platinum belt who have ANC since the 1980s. situation only through the lens of trade been struggling for the past decade. It unionism, then we miss the signifi- is an implicit acknowledgement that a Not that NUMSA was ever politi- cance of the NUMSA split entirely. new movement is already underway. cally monolithic. Its leadership cadre make up was always an entente between All great parties in the world, con- This does not mean that there will a political group located within the servative or progressive, came about as not be difficulties, as NUMSA seeks to Eastern Cape SACP, an old indepen- outcomes of long-gestating social find space within this new movement. dent socialist layer coming from the movements. The U.S. Democrats can For one, NUMSA has not yet begun to Witwatersrand region and a layer of trace their roots to small farmers of the reflect politically on the sources of the syndicalist policy technocrats. This South resisting the freeing of slaves and ANC’s shift to becoming a neoliberal entente made NUMSA unique within the struggles of the Civil War, while the party and even mistakenly takes the COSATU and saw it campaign for a Republicans were the party of the National Development Plan as that Workers’ Charter in 1987 and for northern industrialists. The British Rubicon-crossing moment, rather than COSATU to break with the tripartite Labor Party has a social movement the compromises at Kempton Park or alliance in 1993. Already in the run-up lineage going back to the Chartist GEAR. For another, it hasn’t yet done to the ANC’s 2009 Polokwane confer- movement of the 19th century and an assessment of the appropriateness ence there were moves within COSATU emerged out of struggles by trade of the trade union form in the context to discipline NUMSA for not being unions to find an electoral voice. The of the changing working-class under enthusiastic enough backers of the ANC outgrew its elite roots amongst neoliberalism. Rather, it seeks to keep Zuma project. chiefs and “educated natives” to head the union form, but merely organize

28 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 workers within the “pipeline” of man- ufacture. Black South Africa Rediscovers Itself—Will Nevertheless, NUMSA’s commit- Black America? ment to a movement for socialism is By Glen Ford appropriate as is the idea of a “united front” from below, understood as a African Americans and Black South In South Africa, in 1994, the Black program of joint campaigns with other Africans have shared a special relation- majority did win the right to elect a movements and community groups ship within the larger African Diaspora. government that looked like them, rather than a political party. It seeks to Both peoples struggled against although—just like in majority Black start the process by convening a politi- entrenched white settler regimes American cities—whites still ran the cal school, which creates spaces for obsessed with racial separation and show, economically. The leaders and social movements to participate. This European supremacy, societies that had media of the rich white world declared may overcome a long-standing weak- grown fantastically rich on stolen land Nelson Mandela a saint for abandon- and labor. Gil Scott-Heron expressed ness whereby working-class communi- ing the Freedom Charter’s blueprint the Black American-South African ties have been struggling, while union- for nationalization of banking and affinity in 1976 when he asked, lyrical- ized workers have been dormant. In industry and redistribution of land. ly, What’s the word in Johannesburg— Mandela’s party, the African National doing so, it offers the possibility that Detroit’s like Johannesburg, New Congress, devolved into a fat and cor- the nearly ten-year revolt of the poor York’s like Johannesburg, where “free- rupt partner of white capital, and the may be complemented by an industrial dom ain’t nothing but a word.” partner and so help to forge such a security forces turned their guns on Of course, Blacks have always been national movement worthy of that Black miners at Marikana, massacring the great majority in South Africa, and a cause. 34 of them. Yet, while Mandela lived, distinct minority in the United States. his symbolic aura shielded the ANC. It Leonard Gentle is the director of the But there are many cities in the U.S. was not until the first Black president International Labor Research and where Blacks are the majority, and yet of South Africa was buried that the Information Group (ILRIG), an NGO rich white people still run the place. On country’s biggest union, the that produces educational materials for both sides of the Atlantic, we have learned 338,000-member National Union of activists in social movements and trade that there is no magic in numbers; that Metalworkers, could bring itself to unions. This article first published on the people still have to fight for power. break ties with the ANC. The metal- South African Civil Society Information It is also true that long-suffering workers say they will fight to imple- Service (SACSIS) website. people who are hungry for recognition ment the Freedom Charter and work —The Bullet, February 5, 2014 as human beings are often vulnerable to the seductions of symbolism. Having towards creation of a new, socialist http://www.socialistproject.ca/bul- no memory of ever holding actual party that will represent the interests of let/933.php#continue power, they take pride in beholding the working people. trappings of power among notables of With the death of Mandela, the their own race—just as poor church spell has been broken in South Africa. congregations clothe their ministers in Symbolism will no longer substitute the finest garments and buy them for real People’s Power. In the United expensive automobiles. States, three years from now, the big African Americans thought they’d hangover will begin, as Black America won something when the corporate pol- is forced to ponder the damage that it itician, Barack Obama, entered the has allowed Obama to get away with White House five years ago. Vicariously, on the basis of shared complexion. they were on top of the world, while in Hopefully, we will begin the historic reality, Black America’s economic con- and necessary process of casting out dition had become catastrophic. At the the Black misleaders in New York and very historical moment when Blacks Detroit and Atlanta and Chicago—just needed most desperately to defend like in Johannesburg. themselves, they chose instead to defend Obama, the servant of Wall Street. Black —Black Agenda Report, January 6, 2014 America allowed itself to be utterly http://blackagendareport.com/con- defeated by racial symbolism and self- tent/black-south-africa-rediscovers- delusion—at least for the time being. itself-%E2%80%93-will-black-america

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 29 Freedom Charter is Key to New Struggle for South Africa By Glen Ford

Nelson Mandela’s voice filled the economic demands: the redistribution symbolic aura shielded the ANC from hall at New York City’s historic of land and nationalization of the the harsh verdict of history. Then, in Riverside Church, last Saturday. A film mines, heavy industry and banking— 2012, as “Madiba’s” health began to showed Mandela’s speech of July 26, steps the Cubans had taken soon after fail, police massacred 34 workers 1991, in Matanzas, Cuba, the African the triumph of their revolution. demanding higher wages at a platinum National Congress deputy president’s By the time he took the stage at mine in Marikana—the worst state first trip abroad since his release from violence since the white regime’s Matanzas, Mandela and his African imprisonment, the year before. “Our slaughter of Black demonstrators at National Congress colleagues had goals remain achievement of the Sharpeville, in 1960. The ANC govern- already discarded the key elements of demands of the Freedom Charter, and ment was no less rabid than its white the Freedom Charter except those that we will settle for nothing less than predecessor in denouncing the dead as called for a government elected by a that,” said Mandela, with Fidel Castro the agents of their own destruction, for common franchise. Ronnie Kasrils, a standing nearby. having broken away from the giant Mandela thanked the Cuban people veteran of the ANC’s armed wing who mineworkers union, a cornerstone of for their heroic sacrifices in defeating joined the cabinet of the new ANC the Congress of South Africa Trade the armed forces of the apartheid government in 1994, described “How Unions (COSATU), which is the third regime, at Cuito Cuanavale, Angola, in the ANC’s Faustian pact sold out South leg of the nation’s ruling triumvirate, 1988. Twice more in the speech, Africa’s poorest” in an article pub- along with the ANC and the South Mandela mentioned the Freedom lished in The Guardian, in June of African Communist Party (SACP). 2013. “From 1991 to 1996,” Kasrils Charter, the ANC’s 1955 promise to Today, the once 300,000-strong wrote, “the battle for the ANC’s soul the people. He cited the Charter’s mineworkers union has lost at least half got under way, and was eventually lost rejection of “the racist state” that still its membership to more militant rivals. to corporate power: we were entrapped ruled South Africa, and quoted the No wonder, since its founding secretary, by the neoliberal economy—or, as document’s declaration that “The peo- Cyril Ramaphosa, went on to become a ple shall govern.” But the man who some today cry out, we ‘sold our peo- fabulously wealthy ($675 million, would assume the presidency of South ple down the river.’” according to Forbes) member of the Africa four years later made no men- While he still breathed, Mandela’s board of directors of the multinational tion of the Freedom Charter’s core corporation that the Marikana miners were striking against, and a high-rank- ing official in the ruling African National Congress. Emails sent by Ramaphosa during the Marikana crisis indicate he encouraged the government to make an example of the strikers. The National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA), now the biggest trade union, with 380,000 members, has announced it will not support the ANC in coming elections, and urges COSATU to leave the ruling alliance. Instead, NUMSA general secretary Irvin Jim calls for formation of a genuine work- ers party that will fight to fulfill the demands of the Freedom Charter, and for “a new United Front that will coor- dinate struggles in the workplace and in communities, in a way similar to United Democratic Front of the 1980s”—the

30 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 period when the ANC was banned and which is all but inseparable from the the ANC as the post-apartheid ruling largely in exile. ANC/SACP, refuses to call a special party. Mandela was compelled to cite The metalworkers, backed by eight congress—despite the fact that the Freedom Charter in Cuba, even as of COSATU’s 19 unions, are demand- COSATU’s constitution requires such a he and his colleagues were discarding ing a special congress to battle it out congress if demanded by two-thirds of it, at home. with ANC loyalists. NUMSA’s Irvin Jim affiliated unions. Instead, they threaten The Freedom Charter is South derided ANC secretary general Gwede to suspend the metalworkers, which Africa’s unfinished business. The ANC, Mantashe, who pretended to act as a would almost surely split COSATU having repudiated it, in word and deed, mediator in the COSATU dispute, as a right down the middle. ANC leadership must now be forced to run against the man who “feigns ignorance of neoliber- has long treated COSATU as a mere Freedom Charter, through the forma- alism” and “talks about cushioning the appendage to its rule, and would prefer tion of a workers party opposition. We working class, but he does not even a paralyzed union confederation to a will then likely see a split in the ANC, mention what class force is responsible politically independent one. itself—which is necessary to allow the for the suffering of our class. This is However, the arrogance of the new honest elements within its ranks to because some of [his] colleagues in Black capitalists may prove their undo- escape the institutional grasp of Black [the] top six of the ANC are capitalists.” ing. For many millions of South capitalists and opportunists. Capitalists like Cyril Ramaphosa, Africans, the psychological break with The Freedom Charter has been dor- are the most prominent beneficiary of the ANC has already happened. mant for a quarter century, during BEE, Black Economic Empowerment, Marikana was the great shock to the which time multinational capital has the ANC’s alternative to the socialist national consciousness, and Mandela’s been reinforced by a Black comprador path set forth in the Freedom Charter. death brought a final end to the pre- class, headquartered in the African Not only did the ANC and the South tense of social transformation. South National Congress. It is now impossi- African Communist Party choose the Africa sees itself much more clearly: ble to defeat multinational capital’s neoliberal path, in the critical first half the most unequal country in the world, grip on South Africa, without also con- of the 90s, they set the stage for cre- in which the struggling poor are said to fronting the party that claims to have ation of a Black capitalist class to be stage more demonstrations than any “liberated” the country. Fortunately, grafted onto existing corporate struc- other nation on earth—out-protesting the process well underway. tures. The economic ruling class was, the Chinese!—confronting a killer police force that was never weaned —Black Agenda Report, February to a degree, racially integrated, while 12, 2014 the ruling party, the ANC, was con- from its apartheid mission, to suppress verted to capitalism. The revolution the Black lower classes. http://blackagendareport.com/con- was defeated—or, rather, never It is also the South Africa where the tent/freedom-charter-key-new-struggle- begun—and everybody knew it, but it Freedom Charter is a living memory, south-africa took Marikana and Mandela’s death to the socialist document that legitimized bring contradictions to a head. In addition to the metalworkers, the nine dissident unions, who proba- The Freedom Charter bly represent a majority of union members in South Africa, are: the Communication Workers’ Union, The People Shall Govern! Democratic Nurses Union of South All National Groups Shall have Equal Rights! Africa, the Food and Allied Workers’ The People Shall Share in the Country`s Wealth! Union, Public and Allied Workers’ Union of South Africa, South African The Land Shall be Shared Among Those Who Work It! Commercial and Catering Workers’ All Shall be Equal Before the Law! Union, South African Football Players’ All Shall Enjoy Equal Human Rights! Union, South African Municipal There Shall be Work and Security! Workers’ Union and the South African State and Allied Workers Union. The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened! COSATU’s current leadership, There Shall be Houses, Security and Comfort! There Shall be Peace and Friendship!

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 31 South Africa’s NUMSA Solidarizes with Korean General Strike

On December 22, 2013, the right- The Chair • That in all our constitutional wing government of Park Geun-hye ille- Transport Workers’ Solidarity Committee structures, there should be a standing agenda item on com- gally attacked the offices of the Korean th Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) 4001 7 Street munity struggles, their nature with 5,000 police and military troops. Oakland, California and NUMSA’s attitude to these Claiming the strike was illegal the gov- February 24, 2014 community struggles. ernment later arrested the leaders of the RE: Solidarity rally with the KCTU • Side by side with the establishment Korean Rail Workers Union (KRWU) General Strike on February 25, 2014 of the new UNITED FRONT, we for waging a rail strike, the longest in and NUMSA protest action on the false in NUMSA must explore the South Korea, to stop the privatization of solution on youth unemployment on establishment of a MOVEMENT the railways. February 26, 2014 and national strike FOR SOCIALISM as the working class needs a political organization The South Korean Consulate in San on March 19, 2014. Francisco organized conservative Koreans committed in its policies and to disrupt a solidarity demonstration for Dear Comrades, actions to the establishment of a the KRWU on January 17th, 2014 orga- We send you warm and militant socialist South Africa. nized by the Transport Workers’ Solidarity greetings from 350,000 metalworkers NUMSA will be embarking on pro- Committee in San Francisco, CA. organized under NUMSA. We are very test action on February 26, 2014 and a Another rally took place February humbled by your solidarity rally at the general strike on the March 19, 2014 in 25th in front of the Consulate. Below is a time workers internationally are bat- protest against a law that enables the solidarity statement sent to the Transport tling for organization and policies to government to subsidize employers for Workers’ Solidarity Committee demon- take control of their lives. employing young people. The law is stration from the militant 350,000-strong Our hearts are with the Korean similar to rescue packages offered to the banks for causing the 2008 crisis. National Union of Metalworkers of workers as they battle the Park Geun- South Africa. hye regime against its campaign to This is the first of series of general strikes we will embark upon this year —Socialist Viewpoint annihilate unions in the railways in the preparation of the privatization of against neoliberal policies enacted by these assets. As NUMSA we expect less the ANC government since 1994. from our bourgeois state in South We are keenly aware of the pitfalls, Africa as demonstrated during the difficulties and pains we will endure as Marikana massacre that it will stop at we pursue our struggles against neolib- nothing to defend capital. eral policies in our country, but with NUMSA Special Congress in your support and perseverance of our December 2013 resolved that we should members in factories, mines, working not be in bed with bourgeois parties or class communities and social move- pseudo working class parties that ments we are certain that we will turn implement neoliberal policies that con- the tide against the enemy. tinue to destroy workers’ jobs, produce It is better to die standing than National Union of Metalworkers of inequalities, and deepen poverty, even kneeling down. South Africa at the cost of openly murdering work- Yours sincerely, 153 Bree Street ers. We therefore resolve that the union Newtown, Johannesburg 2001 must establish a UNITED FRONT and: National Union of Metalworkers of P.O. Box 260483 South Africa • That our members and shop Jenny Grice Excom 2023 stewards must be active on all pp Irvin Jim Email: [email protected] or fronts and in all struggles against General Secretary [email protected] neo-liberal policies, whether President, Cedric Gina; 1st Deputy President, Tel: 011-689-1700 these policies are being imple- Andrew Chirwa; 2nd Deputy President, Chris- Fax: 011-834-4320; 011-833-6330 mented in the workplace or in tine Olivier; National Treasurer, Mphumzi Office of the General Secretary communities. Maqungo; General Secretary, Irvin Jim; Deputy General Secretary, Karl Cioete

32 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 Half Of Global Wealth Owned By 85 People Oxfam Reports By Asa Bennett

January 21, 2014—Half of all the and of disadvantage will continue —The Huffington Post UK, January world’s wealth is owned by 85 people, down the generations. We will soon 21, 2014 who could all fit onto a single double- live in a world where equality of oppor- decker bus. tunity is just a dream. In too many http://www.huffingtonpost.co. The shock finding from anti-pover- countries economic growth already uk/2014/01/17/ ty campaigners Oxfam came as world amounts to little more than a ‘winner oxfam-bus-wealth_n_4616103. leaders, business chiefs and academics takes all’ windfall for the richest.” html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003 are set to gather this week in Davos for the World Economic Forum. Injustice, Resistance Rising in India In their new report “Working for By John Pilger the Few,” Oxfam have found citizens around the world strongly believe that In five-star hotels on Mumbai’s sea- the 1990s when “Shining India” was the economy is “skewed” in favor of front, children of the rich squeal joy- invented by a United States advertising the rich. fully as they play hide and seek. firm as part of the Hindu nationalist According to polls carried out for the Nearby, at the National Theatre for BJP party’s propaganda that it was firm in the UK, Brazil, India, South the Performing Arts, people arrive for “liberating” India’s economy and “way Africa, Spain and the U.S., most people the Mumbai Literary Festival: famous of life.” believe the laws are skewed in favor of authors and notables drawn from Barriers protecting industry, manu- the rich. Two-thirds of Brits polled India’s Raj class. They step deftly over facturing and agriculture were demol- thought “the rich had too much influ- a woman lying across the pavement; ished. Coke, Pizza Hut, Microsoft, ence over the direction the country is her birch brooms laid out for sale, her Monsanto and Rupert Murdoch entered headed,” while just one-in-ten disagreed. two children silhouettes in a banyan what had been forbidden territory. Oxfam executive director Winnie tree that is their home. Limitless “growth” was now the mea- Byanyima said: “It is staggering that in It is Children’s Day in India. On sure of human progress, consuming the 21st Century, half of the world’s page nine of the Times of India a study both the BJP and Congress, the party of population—that’s three-and-a-half- reports that every second child is mal- independence. Shining India would billion people—own no more than a nourished. Nearly two million children catch up China and become a super- tiny elite whose numbers could all fit under the age of five die every year power, a “tiger,” and the middle classes comfortably on a double-decker bus. from preventable illness as common as would get their proper entitlement in a “We cannot hope to win the fight diarrhea. Of those who survive, half are society where there was no middle. against poverty without tackling stunted due to a lack of nutrients. As for the majority in the “world’s inequality. Widening inequality is cre- The national school dropout rate is largest democracy,” they would vote ating a vicious circle where wealth and 40 percent. Statistics like these flow like and remain invisible. power are increasingly concentrated in a river permanently in flood. No other There was no tiger economy for the hands of a few, leaving the rest of us country comes close. The small thin them. The hype about a high-tech to fight over crumbs from the top legs dangling in a banyan tree are poi- India storming the barricades of the table. gnant evidence. first world was largely a myth. “In developed and developing coun- The leviathan once known as This is not to deny India’s rise in tries alike we are increasingly living in Bombay is the center for most of India’s pre-eminence in computer technology a world where the lowest tax rates, the foreign trade, global financial dealing and engineering, but the new urban best health and education and the and personal wealth. Yet at low tide on technocratic class is relatively tiny and opportunity to influence are being the Mithi River, in ditches, at the road- the impact of its gains on the fortunes given not just to the rich but also to side, people are forced to defecate. of the majority is negligible. their children. Half the city’s population is without When the national grid collapsed in “Without a concerted effort to tack- sanitation and lives in slums without 2012, leaving 700 million people pow- le inequality, the cascade of privilege basic services. This has doubled since erless, almost half had so little electric-

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 33 ity, they “barely noticed,” wrote one and signed a U.S.$700 million contract The 2006 Sachar Commission found observer. to supply Hawk fighter-bombers. that in the elite institutes of technolo- On my last two visits, the front Disguised as “trainers,” these lethal gy, only four out of 100 students are pages boasted that India had “gate- aircraft were used against the villages of Muslim, and in the cities Muslims have crashed the super-exclusive ICBM East Timor. They may well be the fewer chances of regular employment (intercontinental ballistic missile) Cameron government’s biggest single than the “untouchable” Dalits and club” and launched its “largest ever” “contribution” to Shining India. indigenous Adivasis. aircraft carrier and sent a rocket to “It is ironic,” wrote Khushwant Mars: the latter lauded by the govern- It is Children’s Day in Singh, “that the highest incidence of ment as “a historic moment for all of violence against Muslims and us to cheer.” India. On page nine of Christians has taken place in Gujarat, The cheering was inaudible in the the Times of India a the home state of Bapu Gandhi.” rows of tarpaper shacks you see as you study reports that every Gujarat is also the home state of land at Mumbai international airport second child is malnour- Narendra Modi, winner of three con- and in myriad villages denied basic secutive victories as BJP chief minister technology, such as light and safe ished. Nearly two mil- and the favorite to see off the diffident water. Here, land is life and the enemy lion children under the Rahul Gandhi in national elections in is a rampant “free market.” age of five die every year May. With his xenophobic Hindutva Foreign multinationals’ dominance ideology, Modi appeals directly to dis- of food grains, genetically modified from preventable illness possessed Hindus who believe Muslims seed, fertilizers and pesticides has as common as diarrhea. are “privileged.” sucked small farmers into a ruthless Of those who survive, Soon after he came to power in 2002, global market and led to debt and des- mobs slaughtered hundreds of Muslims. titution. More than 250,000 farmers half are stunted due to a An investigating commission heard that have killed themselves since the mid- lack of nutrients. Modi had ordered officials not to stop 1990s—a figure that may be a fraction the rioters—which he denies. Admired of the truth as local authorities willfully by powerful industrialists, he boasts the misreport “accidental” deaths. The opportunism is understand- highest “growth” in India. able. India has become a model of the In the face of these dangers, the great “Across the length and breadth of imperial cult of “neoliberalism”— India,” says the acclaimed environmen- almost everything must be privatized, popular resistance that gave India its talist Vandana Shiva, “the government sold off. independence is stirring. The gang rape has declared war on its own people.” of a Delhi student in 2012 has brought The worldwide assault on social vast numbers into the streets, reflecting Using colonial-era laws, fertile land democracy and the collusion of major disillusionment with the political elite has been taken from poor farmers for parliamentary parties—begun in the and anger at its acceptance of injustice as little as 300 rupees a square meter; U.S. and Britain in the 1980s—has and a modernized feudalism. developers have sold it for up to produced in India a dystopia of 600,000 rupees a square meter. extremes and a specter for us all. The popular movements are often led or inspired by extraordinary In Uttar Pradesh, a new expressway Whereas the democracy of India’s women—the likes of Medha Patkar, serves “luxury” townships with sport- first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru Binalakshmi Nepram, Vandana Shiva ing facilities and a Formula One race- succeeded in granting the vote—today, and Arundhati Roy—and they demon- track, having eliminated 1225 villages. there are 3.2 million elected representa- strate that the poor and vulnerable The farmers and their communities tives—it failed to build a semblance of need not be weak. This is India’s endur- have fought back, as they do all over social and economic justice. Widespread ing gift to the world, and those with India; in 2011, four were killed and violence against women is only now corrupted power ignore it at their peril. many injured in clashes with police. precariously on a political agenda. —Green Left Weekly, January 22, For Britain, India is now a “priority Secularism may have been Nehru’s 2014 market”—to quote the government’s grand vision, but Muslims in India arms sales unit. In 2010, Prime Minister remain among the poorest, most dis- David Cameron took the heads of the criminated against and brutalized https://www.greenleft.org.au/ major British arms companies to Delhi minority on earth. node/55643

34 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 Mass Murderer Ariel Sharon is Dead By Steven Katsineris

War criminal and former Israeli In August 1971 Sharon again com- The Israeli invasion began in early Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has died. manded troops in repressive opera- June and despite stiff resistance the In the 1950’s Sharon was a major tions to control the restive Gaza Strip. heavy Israeli air, sea and land bom- and led an infamous Israeli army terror Some 2,000 houses were destroyed, bardment demonstrated the over- group called Unit 101, nicknamed the leaving over 16,000 people homeless. whelming military superiority of the “avengers” that operated without uni- Hundreds of young Palestinian men Israeli army. There was massive forms. The unit countered Palestinian were arrested and many deported to destruction and nearly half-a-million resistance with terror attacks. Lebanon and Jordan. And 104 people were made homeless. Within a Palestinians were also killed. week the Israeli army had laid siege to It carried out many outrages inside Beirut, but could not break its defens- Israel and across its borders. Like so many Israeli military men Sharon entered politics and was elected to es. The siege was to continue for In August 1953, unit 101 attacked parliament as a M.P. for Likud. He was months and casualties mounted. By the refugee camp of El-Bureig, in Gaza, appointed Minister of Agriculture and the end of July, the Lebanese govern- where fifty refugees were massacred. Settlements. Sharon applied the same ment, church and aid agencies stated In October 1953, Sharon’s unit Zionist fanaticism and many of the strate- that at least 14,000 people had been attacked the Jordanian village of Qibya. gies he had used in the Gaza Strip. He killed and twice that number seriously Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote, became the champion and architect for wounded. Over 90 percent of those “Sharon’s orders were to penetrate expanded Jewish colonies on the West killed were civilians. Qibya, blow up houses and inflict Bank, creating an Israeli settlement boom. After three months of warfare an heavy casualties on its inhabitants. The To increase the numbers of Zionist agreement was reached to end the village had been reduced to rubble: settlers Sharon transferred much of fighting. The terms of the agreement forty-five houses had been blown up Israel’s industrial complex to seized were that the Palestinian forces would and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of Palestinian land and provided govern- withdraw from Beirut, the USA prom- them women and children, had been ment grants to contractors to build ised the safety and security of the killed.” Sharon later claimed he did not private housing for settlers. Palestinian and Lebanese civilian pop- know the buildings were occupied. Sharon was credited with the Israeli ulation and Israel would not enter Israel’s then foreign minister, Moshe demographic transformation of the Beirut. Sharett said, “this stain (Qibya) will West Bank and entrenching an endur- The last contingent of Palestinian stick to us and will not be washed away ing Israeli presence. defenders left the city on September 1, for many years to come.” In 1981, Sharon was appointed 1982. On September 15, the Israeli Between February 1955 and October Defense Minister. Sharon sought to army entered the city and the USA did 1956, Sharon led a paratroop brigade in crush the Palestinian resistance in nothing. After surrounding the similar cross-border raids in Gaza and the Lebanon, believing it would demoral- Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and West Bank. In the West Bank village of ize the Palestinian people and pave the Shatila the Israeli army allowed a force Qalqilya, Sharon’s squad killed 83 people. way for Israel to impose a settlement of 150 Phalangists into the camps. This In 1967, Sharon was given the task advantageous to Israeli aims. Israel also Phalange militia group was not a seri- of pacifying the Palestinian resistance wanted the Palestinian refugees in ous fighting force, but it was the intel- in the Israeli occupied Gaza Strip. He Lebanon scattered among other more ligence unit headed by Eli Habeika, a undertook a policy of brutal repres- distant Arab countries as a part of a unit famous in Lebanon for the mas- sion, blowing up houses, bulldozing solution to the “Palestinian problem.” sacres it had previously committed. So large tracts of refugee camps, imposing Israel had for a long time supported, began the massacre of Palestinian and severe collective punishments and trained and supplied the Phalange Lebanese civilians, many tortured and imprisoning hundreds of young Party, a Lebanese fascist militia group raped before being murdered. It is esti- Palestinians suspected of being fight- founded in 1936 and modeled on the mated that at least 2,000 people were ers. Many Palestinians were killed and Nazi Party of Germany. In early 1982, killed during the two days of mass kill- due to his oppressive tactics resistance Sharon visited them to coordinate ings. Almost all those killed were elder- activity decreased dramatically. plans for an Israeli invasion. ly, women or children.

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 35 After publicity of the massacre and an international outcry, Israel held an The Legacy of Ariel ‘The Bulldozer’ Sharon inquiry. Despite its shortcomings, with By Jonathan Cook some parts of the commission’s report kept secret, it was still a damning It is easy to forget, with eulogies Later, as defense minister, Sharon indictment of Ariel Sharon. Sharon casting him as the unexpected “peace- would be the moving force behind the was found guilty of indirect responsi- maker,” that for most of his long mili- decision to invade Lebanon in 1982, as bility for the massacre, rather than tary and political career Ariel Sharon a bloody way to expel the Palestinians direct responsibility based on the was known simply as The Bulldozer. from their strongholds there and desta- premise that he was not present during That is certainly how he will be remem- bilize a northern neighbor. the killings. bered by Palestinians. Along the way, and in the spirit of The commission’s report said that His death was announced on Israeli Unit 101, his commanders oversaw the Sharon had received Israeli intelligence army radio on Saturday, January 10. horrific massacre of hundreds, and warnings that there were no armed He was 85 years old and had been more likely thousands, of Palestinian Palestinian fighters in the camps and comatose since 2006. refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps that the Phalange might go on a ram- by Israel’s Phalangist allies—an event page if allowed in the camps. In part Mikhael Warschawski, a founder of the joint Israeli-Palestinian advocacy for which an Israeli inquiry found him the report stated, “In our view, even “personally responsible.” without such a warning, it is impossi- group the Alternative Information ble to justify the Minister of Defense’s Centre, describes Sharon as one of only Today, Sharon’s military philoso- (Sharon) disregard of the danger of the two “political visionaries” in Israel’s phy is reflected in the Israeli army’s massacre.” (The Kahan Report.) In history, along with the country’s first Dahiya doctrine—its policy in recent 1983, Sharon resigned as Defense prime minister, David Ben Gurion. confrontations to send Israel’s neigh- Minister and retired to his farm. “Yes, he was brutal, but he was bors in Gaza and Lebanon “into the more than that,” Warschawski said. dark ages” through massive destruc- In 1996, he returned to politics and tion of their physical infrastructure. re-entered the Israeli government as “Like Ben Gurion, and unlike modern Minister of National Infrastructure. politicians such as current Israeli Prime But his military thinking chiefly Later he became the Prime Minister of Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he was served political ends. Israel. Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in uninterested in petty party politics. He According to Warschawski, Sharon 1982 cost over 20,000 Palestinian and had a project he would not be dis- explicitly refused to accept that the 1948 Lebanese lives. At the massacres in the tracted from—a view of what Israel is war that established Israel was over. As refugee camps of Beirut he was respon- and what it should be.” a result, he rejected efforts to define the sible for the deaths of 2,000 people. That vision was ultimately forged extent of Israel’s territorial ambitions. Reading the record of Sharon’s life by Sharon’s military and political Instead, says Warschawski, Sharon shows he is a terrorist leader and war experiences. upheld a view that “the borders are criminal. Israel accuses others of ter- wherever Israelis plant the last tree, or rorism, yet not only does it not bring Military philosophy plough the last furrow.” It was a phi- its own terrorist leaders to justice, it According to Menachem Klein, a losophy of creating change and new elects them to run the country. politics professor at Bar Ilan University, realities through bold action; in prac- —Via Email, January 24, 2014 near Tel Aviv, Sharon created Israel’s tice it involved taking as much as land modern “military norms” through his from the Palestinians as possible. founding of a secretive “retribution The late Israeli sociologist Baruch squad,” named Unit 101, that operated Kimmerling famously coined a term through the 1950s and 1960s. for Sharon’s policy: politicide. In this In Israel’s early years, Unit 101 car- view, Sharon’s goal was to create con- ried out reprisals against Palestinian ditions that “lower Palestinian expec- fighters across the armistice lines, in an tations, crush their resistance, isolate attempt to deter future enemy raids them, make them submit to any into Israeli territory. In practice, how- arrangement suggested by the Israelis, ever, the price was paid as much by and eventually cause their ‘voluntary’ civilians as fighters. mass emigration.”

36 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 But Sharon saw this as a long-term At the same time, inside Israel, he sible for the campaign of terror, the process. “He wanted to delay an agree- devised ever-more inventive land-grab- so-called “price-tag attacks,” that are ment for at least 50 years,” says bing schemes to ensure Israel’s own slowly driving Palestinians out of most Warschawski. “In his view, Israel need- large Palestinian minority was barred of the West Bank, concentrating them ed as much time as possible, time to from living in most areas of the coun- into the cities. implement his vision.” try. Exclusive Jews-only communities became part of a renewed “Judaization” Operation defensive shield “Father of settlements” program in the Galilee and Negev, sym- Later, as prime minister, Sharon As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry bolized by the vast private ranch he more directly reversed Oslo by launch- recently headed back to the region to built for himself in the Negev. ing Operation Defensive Shield, a rein- vasion of areas that were supposed to re-energize peace talks between Israel A proposal revealed by Sharon in have been passed to the control of a and the Palestinians, Israeli columnist 2003 to dispossess the Bedouin of their Palestinian government-in-waiting, Chemi Shalev observed that “Sharon’s ancestral lands in the Negev was the the Palestinian Authority. spirit hovers” over the proceedings: genesis of the Prawer plan, adopted by “Sharon, the ‘father of settle- Netanyahu—if, for now, temporarily He would finally pen the Palestinians ments’ had probably done more on hold—to force tens-of-thousands into a series of enclaves by approving than anyone—certainly more than of Bedouins from their homes. and starting construction of a 700 kilo- meter steel-and-concrete “separation Netanyahu—to erase the 1967 bor- After years of helping to establish ders, separating Israel and the occu- barrier” across the West Bank. settlements in the occupied territories, pied territories, from the map and to The wall he began has dramatically undermine the establishment of a Sharon vigorously opposed the signing expanded in subsequent years to Palestinian state.” of the Oslo peace accords in 1993. become a series of fortifications—from Five years later, as the final-status In his early political career, Sharon new wall-building ventures such as the talks neared, he urged young settlers to used various lowly government posi- recent bid to separate Israel from Egypt “run and grab as many hilltops as they tions to work out his grand vision. In to missile defense systems like Iron can” in an attempt to foil any hope of a the early 1980s he established exclusive Dome—designed to turn Israel into an Palestinian state being conceded. Jewish communities, known as the star invulnerable “Jewish fortress.” points, along the Green Line to erase His injunction spawned more than Yet, in the months before he fell for Israelis the physical distinction 100 so-called “outposts,” whose fanati- into a long-term vegetative state in between Israel and the West Bank and cal inhabitants—known in his honor early 2006, many analysts were all too bring the settlements “back into Israel.” as the hilltop youth—are today respon- ready to revise their assessments of Sharon. In death, he is again being feted as the military hawk who ended his days a “man of peace.” Nothing, however, could be further from the truth, according to Klein and Warschawski. The reason cited for reassessing Sharon’s legacy is his decision to with- draw some 7,000 Jewish settlers, as well as the soldiers protecting them, from the Gaza Strip, in the so-called “disen- gagement” of 2005. This move was widely interpreted as Sharon’s first brave step in a process intended to end the occupation so that a Palestinian state could be born. In reality, however, it represented some- thing equally dramatic but far more cynical.

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 37 Warschawski says the disengagement “Sharon’s real enemy” The physical separation has usefully marked a strategic shift in Sharon’s The reality, adds Klein, was that the divided the Palestinian national move- thinking, one still influencing Israel’s disengagement set in motion two ment, with the Fatah-controlled approach to the occupied territories. achievements that severely harmed Palestinian Authority nominally in “Sharon finally accepted that the Palestinian interests. charge of the West Bank, Gaza run by Hamas, and an orphaned East Palestinians could not be made to First, it helped to undermine Jerusalem struggling under hostile disappear. He wanted a Greater Israel Palestinian nationalism—the real but understood that he could not Israeli rule. enemy for Sharon. expel the Palestinians to achieve it.” Second, Sharon was able to focus on By withdrawing from Gaza, observes He also understood, adds Klein, the West Bank—the real prize—and his Klein, Sharon entrenched its physical that Israel could not afford to main- efforts to turn the Palestinian Authority separation from the West Bank. Parallel tain, long term, a direct reoccupation from a government-in-waiting into a moves, banning the Palestinian of the West Bank—either in terms of “sub-contractor” of the occupation. the financial cost or the expected price The key to this was manipulating the in soldiers’ lives. succession so that Palestinian leader Instead, Sharon devised what Sharon upheld a view Yasser Arafat would be followed by the Warschawski calls the “Swiss cheese that “the borders are weak Mahmoud Abbas. model.” “He treated the region like a wherever Israelis plant “After he disengaged from Gaza, big block of Swiss cheese, with Israel as Sharon preferred that a strong group— the cheese and the Palestinians as the the last tree, or plough Hamas—take control internally to pre- holes. Any bits he did not care about the last furrow.” vent chaos,” says Klein. “But in the could belong to the Palestinians. It was West Bank he did not want a strong about creating cantons, and the largest leader. That was why he was so against was Gaza.” Authority and the Islamic movement Arafat, who he saw as a demon. Sharon appreciated, says Klein, that Hamas from East Jerusalem, would “Operation Defensive Shield [in the disengagement was a boon to further isolate the Palestinians into 2002] was about crushing the Israel’s image, looking, as it did to three disconnected territories. Palestinan Authority. When he later succeeded in bringing Abbas to many outsiders, like an end to the Today, Gaza, the West Bank and power, he knew he would co-oper- occupation of Gaza and a prelude to East Jerusalem are increasingly losing a similar moves in the West Bank. ate on security matters, that he sense of an overarching national proj- would serve as a sub-contractor. In Instead, the occupation of Gaza ect, and are instead developing along that way, Israel got to control all of continued, but from arm’s length. different political trajectories. the West Bank.” Warschawski, however, points out that Sharon fell into a coma too early to have foreseen many of the events that now overshadow current peace efforts. “The world has changed since then, as has this region. There has been the decline of U.S. hegemony, and the return of Russia as a regional power. China and India are also wait- ing in the wings. And then the Arab revolts have to be accounted for. Sharon saw none of that coming.” —Jonathan Cook: the View from Nazareth, January 11, 2013 http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2014- 01-11/the-legacy-of-ariel-the-bulldozer- sharon/

38 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2

Environment ENVIRONMENT Fracking is Depleting Water Supplies in America’s Driest Areas From Texas to California, drilling for oil and gas is using billions of gallons of water in the country’s most drought-prone areas By Suzanne Goldenberg America’s oil and gas rush is deplet- years—and where production is expect- ground and surface water is already ing water supplies in the driest and ed to double over the next five years. stretched between farming and cities, most drought-prone areas of the coun- Farming and cities are still the big- the report said. It said water demand try, from Texas to California, new gest users of water, the report found. for fracking in the state was expected to research has found. But it warned the added demand for double to 6 billion gallons by 2015—or Of the nearly 40,000 oil and gas fracking in the Eagle Ford, at the heart about twice as much as the entire city of wells drilled since 2011, three-quarters of the Texas oil and gas rush, was hit- Boulder uses in a year. were located in areas where water is ting small, rural communities hard. In California, where a drought scarce, and 55 percent were in areas “Shale producers are having signifi- emergency was declared last month, 96 experiencing drought, the report by cant impacts at the county level, espe- percent of new oil and gas wells were the Ceres investor network found. cially in smaller rural counties with located in areas where there was already Fracking those wells used 97 billion limited water infrastructure capacity,” fierce competition for water. gallons of water, raising new concerns the report said. “With water use The pattern holds for other regions about unforeseen costs of America’s requirements for shale producers in the caught up in the oil and gas rush. Most energy rush. Eagle Ford already high and expected to of the wells in New Mexico, Utah and “Hydraulic fracturing is increasing double in the coming ten years, these Wyoming were also located in areas of competitive pressures for water in rural counties can expect severe water high water stress, the report said. some of the country’s most water- stress challenges in the years ahead.” Some oil and gas producers were stressed and drought-ridden regions,” Local aquifer levels in the Eagle beginning to recycle water, especially said Mindy Lubber, president of the Ford formation have dropped by up to in the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania, Ceres green investors’ network. 300 feet over the last few years. the report said. But it said those savings Without new tougher regulations A number of small communities in were too little to offset the huge on water use, she warned industry Texas oil and gas country have already demand for water for fracking in the could be on a collision course” with run out of water or are in danger of run- coming years. other water users. ning out of water in days, pushed to the —theguardian.com, February 5, “It’s a wake-up call,” said Prof James brink by a combination of drought and 2014 Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the high demand for water for fracking. http://www.theguardian.com/envi- University of California, Irvine. “We Twenty-nine communities across ronment/2014/feb/05/fracking-water- understand as a country that we need Texas could run out of water in 90 america-drought-oil-gas more energy but it is time to have a days, according to conversation about what impacts there the Texas commis- are, and do our best to try to minimize sion on environ- any damage.” mental quality. It can take millions of gallons of Many reservoirs in fresh water to frack a single well, and west Texas are at much of the drilling is tightly concen- only 25 percent trated in areas where water is in chron- capacity. ically short supply, or where there have Nearly all of the been multi-year droughts. wells in Colorado Half of the 97 billion gallons of water (97 percent) were was used to frack wells in Texas, which located in areas has experienced severe drought for where most of the

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 39

Incarceration Nation INCARCERATION NATION Mentally Ill in South Carolina’s Prisons Suffer Decades of Abuse and Neglect By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

A court ruling out of South Carolina cases: South Carolina today mis- after year with frivolous defenses for this week deserves the attention of any- treats these ill people without any prison policies? Where were the reli- one concerned with the use of solitary evident traces of remorse. Even gious leaders, the ones who preach confinement and other brutal condi- though there are few disputed mate- peace and goodwill? tions and practices on the hundreds-of- rial issues of law or fact in the case, “No one in power came forward. even though the judge implored the thousands of people with mental illness Even as the evidence became more state to take responsibility for its clear and compelling that something who are held in our nation’s prisons. conduct, South Carolina declared The best reporting on the ruling comes horrible was happening inside those before the sun had set Wednesday prisons.” from The Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen, in a that it would appeal the ruling—and lengthy piece titled “When Good People thus likely doom the inmates to Cohen delves into the history of the Do Nothing: The Appalling Story of years more abuse and neglect. That’s problem, from the early 1990s, when South Carolina’s Prisons.” not just “deliberate indifference,” “South Carolina did reasonably good “On Wednesday, in one of the the applicable legal standard in these job of caring for its mentally ill prison- most wrenching opinions you will prison abuse cases. That is immoral. ers,” through decades of growing pris- ever read, a state judge in Columbia “But what makes this ruling dif- on populations and decreasing budgets ruled that South Carolina prison ferent from all the rest—and why it for prison healthcare. He traces more officials were culpable of pervasive, deserves to become a topic of nation- than a decade of scathing reports, law- systemic, unremitting violations of al conversation—is the emphasis suits, and whistleblower efforts that the state’s constitution by abusing Judge Baxley placed upon the failure clearly documented what was going on and neglecting mentally ill inmates. of the good people of South Carolina in South Carolina’s prisons. The judge, Michael Baxley, a deco- to remedy what they have known rated former legislator, called it the was terribly wrong since at least Judge Baxley wrote in his opinion: “most troubling” case he ever had 2000. Where was the state’s medical “The evidence in this case has proved that seen and I cannot disagree. Read the community while the reports piled inmates have died in the South Carolina ruling.1 It’s heartbreaking. up chronicling the mistreatment of Department of Corrections for lack of “The evidence is now sadly famil- these prisoners? Where was the basic mental healthcare, and hundreds iar to anyone who follows these state’s legal community as govern- more remain substantially at risk for seri- ment lawyers walked into court year ous physical injury, mental decomposi- tion, and profound, permanent mental illness.” Cohen provides more detail as to “what these words mean:” “They mean that one mentally ill inmate, James Wilson, was kept in solitary confinement for at least 2,491 consecutive days. It means that an intellectually disabled (and schizophrenic) man named Jerome Laudman was abused and neglected, and then left to rot in his own feces and vomit, until he died of a heart attack. It means that force was used 81 times on a severely mentally ill inmate named James Howard. It means that some mentally ill inmates were restrained at length in what they called a ‘crucifix position.’

40 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 “It means some mentally ill pris- oners were ‘routinely placed’ naked Women In Solitary Confinement ‘in shower stalls, rec cages, interview booths, and holding cells for hours Buried Inside the Federal Prison System and even days at a time.’ It means By Victoria Law that suicidal prisoners who were supposed to be receiving anti-psy- This past September, in response to contact with the rest of the prison chotic medication were not receiv- continued criticism around its use of population. ing them. No surprise, the judge solitary confinement, the federal Prison officials labeled this a High wrote, since SCDC’s ‘computer sys- Bureau of Prisons (BOP) began an Security Unit. Rosenberg described tem cannot retrieve the names or internal audit of its “restricted housing conditions in the High Security Unit: numbers of all inmates referred’ for operations.” As noted earlier by “Every day was filled with con- mental health treatment, ‘the num- Solitary Watch, no women’s prisons ber of inmates who have made seri- frontations between us and the COs are listed in the Scope of Work pro- [correctional officers] over every ous suicide attempts; or the number vided by the team hired to conduct the of inmates whose psychotropic human need: getting hot water for a medications have expired without Special Housing Unit Review and cup of instant coffee, taking a show- being timely renewed.’ Assessment. The BOP’s Public er, going outside, getting medical Information Office was unable to com- attention, getting a book. We were “It means that mentally ill inmates ment on this apparent omission. allowed to come out of our cells and are routinely caged for days in their talk with each other but stayed own feces and urine, having to eat Although they are absent from the locked on the tier, not allowed literally where they shit. It means, audit, each women’s prison has its own beyond the gates. There was a cam- Judge Baxley wrote that ‘the deposi- Special Housing Unit (SHU) where tion testimony of some psychiatrists era at each end of the tier and three people are locked into their cell 23 ½ gates between the end of the tier and reveals an alarming lack of knowledge to 24 hours each day. In some cases, about the policies and procedures at a hall that led to the rest of the unit. women are confined because of behav- SCDC.’ One such psychiatrist did not Our cells had windows we could see know ‘what mental health counselors ioral problems or rules violations. But out of only by standing on tiptoe on do, and had no idea who drafted the BOP also has a recent history of the bed; the view was of shrubs at treatment plans’ for inmates. And isolating people based solely on their ground level in the main inner even if the mental health profession- political beliefs. courtyard of the prison.” als knew what they were doing, they In 1986, the BOP opened a segre- Human rights advocates, attorneys, wouldn’t have been able to do much. gated unit specifically for women family members and outside support- The ratio of inmates needing treat- political prisoners. It was built in the ers launched a campaign to shut the ment to professionals able to provide unit down while the women filed suit. it was astronomically high.” basement of the federal prison at Lexington, Kentucky. “I looked around In 1988, following Rosenberg’s testi- The article, which combines solid and was overcome by the sheer white- mony in court, a judge ordered the unit facts with appropriate outrage, can be closed immediately. The women were 2 ness of the space,” recalled former read in full here . Cohen concludes: political prisoner Susan Rosenberg in transferred to other federal prisons. “This epic ruling forces South Carolina, her memoir An American Radical. “It While the High Security Unit was and the rest of us, to make a choice was a bright, gleaming artificial white, shut down, the practice of solitary con- about what we want our prisons to say the kind of white that with any lengthy finement continues inside every wom- about who we are as a people and what exposure could almost sear your eye- en’s prison. The Federal Medical Center we represent as a civilized society.” balls. It was the kind of white that can at Carswell, Texas, opened in July 1994 —Solitary Watch, January 11, 2014 make you go mad.” Rosenberg and with an Administrative Maximum Unit http://solitarywatch. Alejandrina Torres, a member of the for women who are labeled “special com/2014/01/11/mentally-ill-south-car- Puerto Rican independence movement management concerns” because of olinas-prisons-suffer-decades-abuse/ who had been sentenced to 35 years for escape attempts, violence or other plotting the bombings of U.S. military 1 http://www.mentalhealth4inmates.org/ behavioral problems. But, as in the docudepot/T%20R%20%20et%20al%20%20 bases, were the first two women trans- High Security Unit, women impris- v%20%20SCDC%20final%20order%20and%20 ferred to the unit. They were later oned for their political actions, such as judgment%20for%20Plaintiffs%20%28Rich- joined by political prisoner Silvia war resister Helen Woodson, eco-activ- land%29%2001-08-14.pdf Baraldini and two women not con- ist Chelsea Gerlach and Pakistani 2 http://www.theatlantic.com/national/ victed of political actions, Debra national Dr. Aafiyah Sidiqui, have also archive/2014/01/when-good-people-do-nothing- Brown and Sylvia Brown. They had no the-appalling-story-of-south-carolinas-pris- been confined there. Not much is ons/282938/

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 41 known about the unit other than that any of their personal property with building, Guanipa remembers. “There the women are entirely separated from them. Women passed the time by talk- was a small window in the wall at the the larger prison population and are ing to each other or by reading the top so at least you could see the light. often subject to lockdowns. books from the cart brought around by And you can hear noise.” Oftentimes, Other federal women’s prisons have staff members on a weekly basis. that noise was the sound of other peo- Special Housing Units where people The overcrowding too led to longer ple screaming. “Many had mental cycle in and out. However, as the BOP’s stays in the SHU. Etheridge-Bey health issues. There would be someone Special Housing Unit Review and recalled being written up and sent to screaming all day or pounding her Assessment indicates, these units have the SHU for smoking a cigarette. (The head against the wall.” When the garnered much less attention and out- federal Bureau of Prisons banned women screamed, the officer on duty rage than SHUs in men’s prisons. smoking in 2004.) Although her sen- would simply tell them to shut up. Only when medication was dispensed Lashonia Etheridge-Bey has had tence was twenty days, she spent anoth- would the screaming stop—but only repeated experiences with the SHU at er 22 days in the SHU waiting for a bed temporarily. the federal prison in Danbury, to open up in general population. Connecticut (the prison made famous In Florida, Yraida Guanipa experi- After being transferred to the by the Netflix series Orange is the New enced being locked in two separate Federal Correctional Camp in Black). Etheridge-Bey recalls that the SHUs. In 1996, shortly after her trial, she Coleman, Florida, Guanipa submitted SHU was always overcrowded, forcing was sent to the SHU at the federal prison requests for more programs for moms prison staff to place two people in each in Miami. Guanipa recalls that, even to be able to spend time with their chil- cell. “At some points, they were so before her arrest, she had experienced dren. She received no response. “The overcrowded that we’d be triple years of problems with her menstrual Bureau of Prisons rules state that when bunked with one woman sleeping on periods. During her trial, her bleeding a prisoner goes on hunger strike, she is the floor,” she recalled. The women was so heavy that her trial had to be put supposed to be placed in a medical stayed in their cells nearly twenty-four on hold. Nevertheless, while incarcerated institution, not solitary confinement,” hours a day. Women did their best to in Miami, she was told that the Bureau of she recalled. “So, being the trusting get along under such cramped condi- Prisons would not provide medical ser- person that I am, I believed them.” Fed tions. “You couldn’t just move to a vices unless there was an emergency. “I up with the lack of programs and lack different cell unless there was a physi- told people I was bleeding too much, but of response, Guanipa went on hunger cal fight,” Etheridge remembered. no one listened,” she recalled. strike in 1999. In response, BOP offi- “You were just stuck.” At the time, Guanipa worked in the cials transferred her to the federal pris- Staff shortages prevented the prison kitchen. “I spent ten to fourteen on in Tallahassee where she was placed women from being taken outside to hours a day standing on my feet and in the SHU. “It was solitary confine- the yard during the scant hours they doing dishes,” she said. One Sunday, ment inside solitary confinement,” she were allotted for out-of-cell recreation. she informed her supervisor that she remembered. “Those cells are just for Instead, they were taken from their cell had been heavily bleeding for a week one person. Other SHU cells [such as to another cell. “It was just an empty and requested medical attention. He the ones in Miami] are for two people, cell. There was nothing in it,” she stat- refused. Guanipa then told him that, if so at least you can talk to someone. It ed. Women were not allowed to bring she could not receive medical care, she was the worst inside the worst.” wanted to go to mass. Inside the one person cell was a sink “My supervisor told and a toilet. Guanipa remembered that me that I could not go prison staff did not provide her with to mass and that I water. “The only water you could get is could not go to medi- the water from the sink, which is next cal, so I refused to do to the toilet. It smelled awful.” the dishes,” she stated. After 16 days on hunger strike inside Guanipa was sent to Tallahassee’s SHU, Guanipa passed the SHU for “disobey- out. She was taken to the hospital ing a direct order.” inside the prison where a nurse told The SHU in Miami her that her kidneys were failing and took up one floor administered an IV. Less than a week inside the prison later, Guanipa was returned to the

42 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 SHU where she remained for another two weeks. Why American Courtrooms Are Dangerous “The SHU was separated from the Places for Young Blacks rest of the prison in its own building. Going to trial can be a dangerous gamble, as the harrowing tale of Within that building, there’s the ‘soli- Travion Blount shows tary confinement inside the solitary confinement,’” she described. Unlike By Charlotte Silver the SHU in Miami there were no win- January 20, 2014—Before leaving Virginia’s incarceration rate is one dows. “You don’t hear anything, you office last week, Virginia Governor of the highest in the country. Mirroring don’t see anything. I was afraid I was Bob McDonnell commuted Travion the rest of the country, those behind going to lose my mind.” Blount’s sentence of six life terms plus bars are disproportionately Black: Twice a day, the prison psychologist 118 years, to 40 years. Blount had Virginia’s African-American popula- walked past the SHU cells. “But in the been convicted of taking part in an tion is just 20 percent of the state’s SHU, if you tell a doctor you’re feeling armed robbery that resulted in no total, but they represent around 60 suicidal, they put you in a worse situa- serious injuries and netted him $60 percent of state prison inmates and 47 tion—in the hole without your clothes and a few joints. percent of all arrests, according to the on, so you don’t say anything,” she said. Blount was 15 years old when the Justice Policy Institute. Similar over- representation of African Americans When she was finally released from original sentence was handed down to occurs among youth arrests and incar- the SHU, the experience had shaken him after a two-day trial in 2007. The ceration rates. her to the core. “I was so scared after sentence survived two appeals: first in that that I vowed never to do another Virginia’s Court of Appeals, and then In 2006, 15-year-old Travion Blount hunger strike again,” she said. in the Virginia Supreme Court. decided to join two 18-year-old friends According to a statement by his secre- who were planning to rob a local drug As in state prisons, women who tary to the Virginian Pilot, McDonnell dealer’s home in Norfolk, Virginia. A few report sexual assault by staff are pun- considered the 40-year sentence a “just days later, all three youths were appre- ished with solitary confinement. punishment.” But for Blount, his fam- hended. Blount was eventually convicted Guanipa recalled a woman whom she ily, and his lawyer, John Coggeshall, of 49 criminal offenses, sufficient to lock met at FCI Tallahassee who had been the commutation that was announced him up for the rest of his life. sexually abused by an officer. After the is not a victory for justice. officer ejaculated on her, she took the An interactive breakdown of the evidence to the investigative unit. The “On any measure, it’s a positive 20-minute robbery demonstrates how prison responded by placing her in the step. But that’s all it is, a first step,” each of Blount’s movements—as SHU, then transferring her to a differ- Coggeshall told AlterNet. According to recounted by the victims—translates ent prison. Guanipa never saw her McDonnell’s “conditional pardon,” to distinct crimes, each contributing to again, although she did see the officer Blount will live the next four decades his outsized sentence. As he moved regularly. Nothing happened to him. in a maximum-security prison, nearly through rooms in the house, waving ten hours away from his family. But his alleged gun at 12 individuals at the When asked about the practice of Coggeshall says his fight for a fairer party, the count-ticker was running: solitary confinement, Guanipa, who sentence for his client is not over. for each person, he got one count for has been out of prison since 2007, abduction, one for attempted robbery, declared, “It doesn’t serve any purpose. How did a Virginia courtroom one for use of firearm, and so on. Of It’s derogatory. It scars you for the rest place a young teenager in a maximum- note, according to Coggeshall, the guns of your life. You lose the capacity to security prison with no chance of mak- alleged to have been at the crime have communicate. I would not recommend ing it out alive? Like most other states yet to be recovered, and in any case this type of treatment for any human in the 1990s, Virginia made it much were likely to have been fake. beings or for animals. It’s torture.” easier to try a juvenile as an adult. Furthermore, the harsh sentence The interactive map does not, how- —Solitary Watch, January 24, 2014 reflects mandatory sentencing laws ever, show the fatal mistake Blount that helped bloat Virginia’s—and the made eight years ago: he did not accept nation’s—prison population over the the plea bargain offered to him. http://solitarywatch.com/2014/01/24/ last 30 years, as well as the pernicious Coggeshall says Blount believed that women-solitary-confinement-buried- degradation of the right to trial because he was a juvenile, he could not inside-federal-prison-system/#more-11918 throughout the country. be locked away past the age of 21. This

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 43 belief was wholly based on a fiction to the Sixth Amendment by penalizing without the possibility of parole. A called “juvenile life,” that is commonly those individuals who go to trial: even large portion of these sentences bandied about among detainees and the judge knew that a plea bargain occurred between 1993 and 1998, when others in juvenile facilities. would be the only means of delivering juvenile transfers to adult courts surged. Prosecutors placed a “bargain” on anything resembling a fair sentence. According to the Sentencing Project, the table of 18 years, but “I’m sure I John Coggeshall knew a trial would prosecutors’ aggressive trying of juve- could have negotiated it down, if I’d result in calamity for Blount—a poor niles as adults has waned since 2000. been given the chance,” Coggeshall black youth affiliated with a violent But there is still a long way to go, as the told AlterNet. gang, with 12 witnesses ready to testify case of Blount demonstrates. While the The two other teens who planned the against him. “He was just a kid.” Supreme Court ruled in Graham v. robbery, who were older than Blount by Coggeshall first met Blount at Florida in 2010 that juveniles could not three years, escaped the hammer of Virginia’s Juvenile and Domestic be sentenced to life without parole in Virginia’s judicial system by dutifully Relations Court. “It was my duty day. I non-homicidal cases, some states, like accepting the plea bargain offered to was appointed his attorney. That’s Virginia, have found a way around them; both will be released from their where the case started.” implementing the ruling. prison terms within the next five years. But the case was quickly transferred “Virginia has refused to recognize At the time Coggeshall pleaded with to criminal court, where all juveniles that they have life without parole sen- Blount to accept the deal, and accord- accused of anything “heavy duty,” tences,” Steven Chu, a lawyer with the ing to reports, so did the judge: “This is Coggeshall explains, “including robbery, Equal Justice Initiative, told AlterNet. an incredible gamble, this trial is,” murder, malicious woundings, get sent.” “They rely on their geriatric release Judge Charles Griffith told Coggeshall “Years ago you could appeal to a provision, which was passed around and prosecutor Amy Cross before the judge to convince him to keep a case in the same time as their ‘truth in sen- trial began 2007. the juvenile jurisdiction, but the ways tencing’ laws. In theory, a juvenile Approximately 95 percent of cases the laws are written now, it’s out of the sentenced to life has the possibility of in the United States are resolved with judge’s hands.” being released on geriatric parole when plea bargains. “Criminal justice today he turns 60. This provision allows the According to a report commissioned state to say they are in compliance with is for the most part a system of pleas, by the Department of Justice in 1997, not a system of trials,” wrote Justice the Graham decision while still sen- between 1992 and 2000, 45 states passed tencing children with life sentences.” Anthony Kennedy in the majority or amended legislation to make it easier opinion of Lafler v. Cooper in 2012. to prosecute juveniles as adults. Today, Travion Blount is one of at least 22 The ubiquity of plea bargains has effec- 2,500 to 3000 juveniles in America have people in Virginia serving life without tively done away with our entitlement been sentenced to life imprisonment parole for crimes they committed as juveniles that did not involve homi- cide. According to the Campaign for Youth Justice, children as young as seven can be tried in adult court in 23 states, making them subject to harsh adult sanctions. During the mitigation phase of Blount’s sentencing, Coggeshall says he provided copious amounts of evidence that should have led the judge to lessen the sentence, including evidence indicat- ing Blount was merely following the orders of his older, influential friends, and psychologists’ opinions that 15- and 18-year-olds have a significant neurologi- cal difference in maturity and rationality. “Because there’s no legislation that says juveniles sentenced to lengthy sen- tences should get a review,” Coggeshall

44 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 said, “there’s nothing in the Commonwealth of Virginia preventing Private Probation Companies Extort Payments this from happening again.” from Poor Defendants Senator Dave Marsden has intro- Human Rights Watch finds more than 1,000 courts across the south duced legislation that would give indi- viduals who were sentenced to life delegate huge coercive power to private, unregulated companies sentences when they were under 18 a By Aaron Cantú chance to stand before a panel of four, Private probation companies and larger companies within the private after serving at least 20 years of their local courts are colluding to hustle probation industry. life sentence. low-income misdemeanants across the HRW issued a number of recom- “This panel would have the author- South out of tens-of-millions of dollars mendations for state governments to ity to reduce the sentence. A law like in legal fees and fines, and jailing those reassess how probation companies are this could prevent instances like who cannot pay, says a new report regulated. Overall, the advocacy group Travion’s from happening again,” today released by Human Rights suggests that courts be prohibited from Coggeshall said. Watch. imposing supervision fees on proba- Coggeshall told AlterNet he hopes to HRW found that in some states, tioners when they cannot pay court further reduce the time Blount spends especially Georgia, Alabama and fines upfront, that a public entity assess in prison, but the first order of business Mississippi, probation has been repur- probationers’ abilities to pay (rather is to get him transferred out of Wallens posed to resemble a debt-collection than a probation company), and that Ridge, the maximum-security facility service, in which poor defendants who the state conduct more frequent audits he’s been held in for the last five years, cannot pay their court fines are placed of the industry’s collection practices. which is a prohibitively long distance on probation with private companies HRW also implores probation compa- away from his family and his lawyers. that aggressively try to extract payment nies to publish data on how much Earlier this year, after Coggeshall regardless of defendants’ abilities to money they collect from the defendants and Norfolk NAACP petitioned the meet financial obligations. While on they supervise, the number of warrants departing governor of Virginia for a probation with a private company, a they issue, and the number of proba- conditional pardon, Blount expressed defendant must pay court fines in tion sentences they revoke every year. his remorse. In an interview with a addition to company supervision fees. The report comes at a time when local TV station, Blount said in a pris- If probationers fail to make pay- the state legislature in Georgia— on interview, “It feels bad. Not because ments on time, companies prepare ground-zero for the expanding indus- I got all this time, but now I know it’s arrest warrants that must be signed by try—is debating whether to give even not right.” a judge. HRW revealed that many local more legal authority to probation If the salient facts of this case teach judges approve such warrants without companies. A bill in the Georgia House us anything, it’s that a courtroom scrutiny or even with complicity, of Representatives “would allow com- might be the most dangerous place in despite a legal obligation to consider panies to request that a judge reinstate the U.S. for a young Black male. defendants’ financial standing. supervision, along with fees, even if the Once misdemeanants are jailed, original term of probation had run Charlotte Silver is an independent out,” says NBC. The bill would also journalist based in San Francisco. She they are often pummeled with even more fines and fees by the court, and increase companies’ immunity from writes for Al Jazeera English, Inter Press liability in the event of legal challenges. Service, Truthout, the Electronic their probation sentences are extended Intifada and other publications. in order to lengthen collection time. —AlterNet, February 5, 2014 The Brennan Center for Justice previ- —AlterNet, January 20, 2014 ously compared the entrapment of http://www.alternet.org/civil-liber- http://www.alternet.org/civil-liber- poor probationers in this cycle of debt ties/scandal-courts-allow-private-pro- ties/how-going-trial-can-be-dangerous- to the system of debtor’s prisons in the bation-companies-extort-payments- gamble-juveniles?akid=11421.229473. 19th century. poor-defendants?akid=11479.229473. PCILr_&rd=1&src=newsletter949443 AlterNet previously reported on the zelU4i&rd=1&src=newsletter955161 &t=4 legal scandals incited by some of the &t=8

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 45 Prosecuting Black Victims By Margaret Kimberley

The United States is a country which more than he did anyone else. He was the police don’t rank on their list of openly and unashamedly targets Black originally charged with menacing, drug priorities. If district attorneys knew that people for police surveillance, prosecu- possession and resisting arrest. they would face opposition at the ballot tion, incarceration and death. Racism Prosecuting him lets the police off the box or an outcry from the public and is the fuel which feeds the monster of hook and aids the city of New York in prominent people, Felton and Broadnax criminal injustice, making a mockery defense against law suits, but a man would not be facing jail time now. of any claims of democracy and equal guilty of not taking his prescribed The state of New Jersey has a NAACP treatment under the law. medication is facing the possibility of and Black office holders and groups of Those words are backed up by cold, up to 25 years in prison because of an attorneys but none of these organiza- hard facts. The United States has the act carried out by other people. tions or individuals took action to make dubious distinction of putting both a The Broadnax story isn’t even the Kwadir Felton’s name a household greater percentage of its population worst case of police abuse turned word and his cause a rallying cry. and the largest number of people over- against a victim. On January 10, 2010, Protest and publicity could not only all in jail and prison than any other 18-year-old Kwadir Felton was shot in have stopped this gruesome punish- country in the world. The country with the head by a Jersey City, New Jersey ment from being carried out but might five percent of the world’s population police man and blinded as a result. He also have forced the police officer who has 25 percent of all prisoners. Black was recently tried and convicted of blinded Felton to face justice himself. Americans, who make up roughly 13 assaulting the officer and faces a possi- As for the Manhattan district attor- percent of the population are 38 per- ble penalty of 35 years in prison. ney, he should have feared that prose- cent of all those behind bars. The case against Felton is an outrage cuting Broadnax would endanger his The situation has always been an ugly and should be well known around the chances of successfully running for re- one for Black people when faced with country. It ought to be a rallying cry for election later this year. The harsh pros- the wickedness of the law enforcement anyone who wants justice and equal ecution facing Mr. Broadnax should system. Many people have been brutal- treatment for all citizens. Instead his have been unthinkable, but there is no ized by police only to have insult added story is just a blurb on the police blot- one to speak up for him. New York to injury and been charged with resist- ter in the local paper. City is full of the high and mighty and ing arrest or assaulting an officer. While The district attorney of New York famous but if they don’t raise their the tactic isn’t new, the punishments are County is an elected official and the voices to speak up for those on the low- becoming more cruel and indefensible. Hudson County, New Jersey, prosecu- est rungs of society, their prominence On September 14, 2013 in New York tor is appointed by the governor. As is worthless. City, a mentally ill man, Glenn Broadnax, such they ought to be accountable to How many more Feltons are serving walked into vehicular traffic in Times the people on whose behalf they file hard time because they were victim- Square. There are laws against this charges. Unfortunately there is no orga- ized? The American gulag has a vora- behavior and rightly so. Unfortunately nized citizen constituency that keeps cious appetite indeed. If all the victims officers of the New York City police them from committing prosecutorial of brutality were to be heard, the pro- department, trained to be trigger happy, abuse. There should be groups of Black test would be endless. fired at Broadnax, claiming that they elected officials, attorneys, and activist Kwadir Felton is scheduled to be thought he had a gun. Broadnax was citizens prepared to voice disapproval sentenced on January 14, 2014. It is late brought down with a police Taser but when prosecutors run amok in their in the process to stage protest or advo- New York’s so-called finest also shot quest to find more Black lives to destroy. cate for lenience but it would be even and injured two innocent bystanders in If this were so, these egregious cases worse if he were imprisoned amidst their efforts to subdue him. would not see the light of day. silence. Endless protest should be the Now Manhattan’s district attorney, Prosecutors are rewarded for mis- order of the day. Cyrus Vance Jr., has chosen to prose- conduct and overreach in part because —Black Agenda Report, January 6, 2014 cute Broadnax for assaulting the two the Black misleadership class is uncon- victims who were in fact shot by the cerned with the plight of the people http://www.Blackagendareport.com/ police. Broadnax has a history of men- who are targeted by the system. content/freedom-rider-prosecuting- tal illness and put himself in danger Mentally ill men and teenagers shot by Black-victims

46 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 Obama, the State of the Union and the Prison State By Bruce A. Dixon

January 29, 2014—In the days tion of the persistent gap between the regimes in supermax prisons across before this year’s State of the Union Black and white unemployment, or the the country constitute torture. It’s time address, we heard a lot about how widening gaps between Black and to look for that presidential pen. Barack Obama was finally about to white wealth, and reaffirmed his com- The president could take public unleash the mighty executive powers of mitment to “Race To The Top,” an notice of the alarming militarization of his office to accomplish some of the initiative to privatize public education police forces across the country and the many great things he’s always wanted in poorer communities across the wave of police shootings of civilians. to accomplish, those mostly unspeci- country. Far more persons die in the U.S. of fied things which evil and immoral And of course, no cluster of issues police gunfire than of terrorist inci- Republicans have prevented him from impact Black America more savagely dents and school shootings. The feds doing. From long experience dating and disproportionately than police play an enormous role in the funding, back at least to the Clinton era, the practices, the drug war and the prison training and arming of thousands of White House and Democratic party state. African Americans are one- local police departments across the know this is an attractive picture to eighth the U.S. population, but more country, through its grants to the state- many, one that conveniently excuses than 40 percent of its prisons and jails. level training and certification agencies, Democrats in office from even trying Together with Latinos, who are anoth- and its authorization of the sale of mili- to accomplish the real demands of the tary equipment to police departments. millions who vote them into office. er eighth and make up nearly 30 per- cent of U.S. prisoners, people of color The result is that every county and Barack Obama campaigned in 2007 are a quarter of the U.S. population town in the U.S. now has a SWAT and 2008 saying he would pass legisla- and more than 70 percent of the locked team, employing shoot-first-question- tion raising the minimum wage and down. No cluster of issues would ben- later tactics, and although African making it easier to organize unions so Americans are far from the only victims efit more from a few presidential initia- people could stand up for their own of unchecked police violence, a Black tives and well placed strokes of the pen rights in the workplace. The president person is killed by police, security offi- than police practices, the drug war and apparently lied. Once in office with a cers or vigilantes once every 28 hours. the prison state. thumping majority in both houses of Again, this is a case for a presidential Congress the president promptly froze Here are just a handful of things statement, a few orders to underlings the wages of federal workers, and made President Obama and his party could and and that mighty executive pen. no move to protect union organizing would do, things that Republicans are The president could order his Justice or to raise the minimum wage. Four powerless to prevent, which would make Department to reconsider its objec- and five years later, with the House of a large and lasting impact upon the com- tions to the retroactive reduction of Representatives safely under munities they purportedly represent. unfair and disproportionate sentences Republican control, the president has With the stroke of a presidential to crack cocaine defendants. When the begun to make noises about how pen, Barack Obama could halt the con- president signed the so-called Fair “America deserves a raise” and has struction and opening of the new fed- Sentencing Act reducing the crack to finally declared that federal contract eral supermax prison at ADX Thomson powder cocaine penalty ratio from 100 workers will soon have to be paid a in Illinois, also called “Gitmo North.” to 1 to 18 to 1 thousands of defendants minimum of $10.10 per hour. Citizen activists in the president’s should have been eligible for immedi- Although Barack Obama’s career, home state last year managed to close ate release. But Obama’s and Eric and those of the entire Black political down the state’s brutal supermax pris- Holder’s Justice Departments have class are founded on the notion that on at Tamms because they know that gone to court repeatedly to keep them they and the Democratic party some- supermax prisons do not rehabilitate, behind bars. Our civil rights establish- how “represent” the aspirations and they are instruments of torture pure ment from the Mark Morials and Al political power of African Americans, and simple. Ordinary citizens know Sharptons down, seem more invested the policy concerns of Black America that torture should not be a career, or a in the prestige of the president than were nowhere to be found in last business governments engage in. Even doing justice to prisoners, and so have night’s [January 28, 2014] state of the Obama’s own Bureau of Prisons is on politely refused to call Obama and union. The speech contained no men- record as wanting to examine whether Holder on this glaring disconnect

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 47 between their public pronouncements him a new trial, in which he might well of their lives. Right now a number of and their actual policies. The mighty prove his innocence. prisoners at Menard Penitentiary in presidential pen in the hands of Barack The president could pardon or grant the president’s home state of Illinois Obama could have made a big differ- clemency to Leonard Peltier, a Native are waging a hunger strike, with ence here any time in the last several American leader who has served a demands that differ little from those years, and still can, if only he will. decade longer in prison than Nelson raised by prisoners in California’s The president could use his mighty Mandela did for an offense that nobody Pelican Bay last year, and those in executive powers to release some long- at his trial even alleged he actually Virginia, Georgia, Ohio and elsewhere. time political prisoners. There’s Iman committed. Peltier is recognized We must not imagine that rolling Jamil Al-Amin, the former H. Rap around the world as a political prison- back the carceral state is something no Brown who distinguished himself lay- er. His continued imprisonment shows government on earth has ever done. ing the foundations for what passes for that many wounds from the 60s and Right now in Venezuela, that nation is Black political empowerment, risking 70s were never healed, and his release confronting a crisis of crime, the prac- his life registering voters and conduct- would demonstrate that this president tical limits of prison expansion, and of ing Freedom Schools in rural Alabama acknowledges the need for this healing. what kind of society they want to build. with the Student Nonviolent After almost 40 years, Leonard Peltier They’re taking a different path than so- Coordinating Committee in the mid surely deserves to come home. called “progressives” here, who seem and early 1960s. After repeated upset only about prisoners who are attempts by Georgia officials in the factually “innocent” and only about 1990s to frame Al-Amin for shootings, ...people of color prisons if they’re privatized. Venezuela is frankly committed to shrinking its one of these stuck long enough to get a are a quarter of the U.S. shaky conviction in 1999. As pressure prison population and exploring mod- for a retrial from local community population and more els of restorative rather than punitive activists built up and even in the face of than 70 percent of the justice. There really are other ways to protests from establishment figures go, if we have the will and the vision like former Atlanta mayor, congress- locked down our Democrats and Republicans lack. man and ambassador Andy Young, Obama’s Attorney General has Georgia officials transferred Al-Amin learned how to let the words “mass into federal custody in the dead of President Obama could acknowl- incarceration” roll off his lips fluently, night, and the feds spirited him away to edge the wave of hunger strikes and after his recent discovery that such a the hellhole at ADX Florence in protests in prisons across the country, thing actually exists. The president Colorado where he has been for more and name a commission to investigate opined that Trayvon Martin could than a decade. With a stroke of that how we can reverse the expansion of have been his own son, minus the sta- mighty executive pen, President prisons, guarantee the re-absorption of tus, the privilege, the neighborhood Obama could send Al-Amin back to former prisoners into society, and and a few other things. But that mighty Georgia where his family and attorneys reverse the culture and law which dis- presidential pen that can call commis- could visit him, and pressure would criminate against and punish former sions, impose directives, re-set priori- mount on Georgia authorities to give prisoners and their families for the rest ties and make all manner of changes by executive order, changes that no evil and immoral Republicans can block or Total Population Locked Down reverse, at least until they re-take the oval office, is still in that desk drawer, or wherever Barack Obama keeps it. He hasn’t found it the last five years in office. Maybe he will discover it in these last three. —Black Agenda Report, January 29, 2014 http://Blackagendareport.com/con- tent/barack-obama-state-union-and- People of Color Other prison-state

48 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 A Smoking Gun Online DEA Manuals Show How Feds Use NSA Spy Data, Train Local Cops to Construct False Chains of Evidence By Bruce A. Dixon One of the least remarked upon to use what they know is illegally brown people are the majority of drug chunks of Edward Snowden’s volumi- obtained information in order to con- defendants, charged with stiffer offens- nous revelations about government struct false chains of evidence. es and given longer sentences than spying on civilians has been the fact This is a literal smoking gun that white drug defendants. Illegal surveil- that the Drug Enforcement depicts how the intelligence apparatus lance, turned into illegal evidence, Administration, the federal police seamlessly blends with federal and local backed up by an officially-condoned agency created to fight the war on cops to prosecute the 40 years failed web of lies about how that evidence drugs, has funneled illegal NSA surveil- war on drugs, the greedy front end of was obtained, have long been a crucial lance to local police agencies around the U.S. prison state. It’s not “con- element in the unfolding of the prison the country. spiracy theory.” It’s a fact. state to enclose poor Black and brown communities. New disclosures now allow us to see There have been plenty of African online the DEA training manuals with American voices who have pooh- If Edward Snowden hadn’t told us which Drug Enforcement poohed the significance of Edward the NSA was gathering this evidence, Administration agents are taught to Snowden and his revelations. TV talk- and the DEA was using it, we’d never coach local police departments across ing heads Joi Ann Reid and Melissa have known. So if Snowden is indeed a the country how to lie about their Harris-Perry have called him a traitor traitor he betrayed the cops not us. If chains of evidence and sources, how to and said he ought to be locked up. he’s a spy, he’s spying for the people, willfully violate the law and cover their Congressional buffoons like not for the prison state, which is a tracks in thousands or tens-of-thou- Representative Jim Clyburn say he only problem for some of our Black mis- sands of cases every year in order to fill did it to embarrass the Black president, leadership class. the cells of the U.S. prison state with and others insist that his whistleblow- —Black Agenda Report, February 5, drug defendants. ing has nothing to do with Black life as 2014 This is not hype. This is not exag- we live it. http://www.Blackagendareport.com/ geration. It’s the literal truth. You can But chronic over-policing only hap- content/smoking-gun-online-dea-man- read the DEA’s own manuals online at pens to Black and brown people, and uals-show-how-feds-use-nsa-spy-data- Muckrock.Org. MuckRock.org is a proj- chiefly the poorest of those. Black and train-local-cops-construct-fal ect funded by the Sunlight Foundation to assist journalists and citizens make and disseminate the results of Freedom of Information Act requests from fed- eral, state and local agencies. Thanks to one such recent request, you can now go to the MuckRock.Org site and view copies of the DEA’s own training mate- rials. These materials depict an amoral, out of control police regime respecting no Constitution and no laws. DEA agents are told the evidence is uncon- stitutionally obtained, and that this has to be concealed from prosecutors, judges and above all from the public, some of which is still under the quaint notion that there are laws even cops and prosecutors must obey. The man- uals cynically spell out how DEA agents should coach local police departments

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 49 12th Man By Raymond Nat Turner

From “Yes, we can” to The 12th Man Loud as Apache and CUT-CUT-CUT? The one percent’s calling all the power plays— Blackhawk Helicopters Where’s the coach that Bootlegging, blitzing, sacking our For Herman Wallace? Will argue over calls like daze… Leonard Peltier? Or Hugo Sunday we sat slurping beer, Where’s The 12th Man— Pinell and Albert Woodfox— Gobbling pizza and buckets All 137.6 decibels— Four decades in bathroom- Of chicken like madmen, ‘til For Mumia and Maroon? Sized, windowless, torture Heartburn and boredom set Chambers, cut off from fresh In, ‘til The Questions came Where’s The 12th Man— Air, sunlight, Vitamin D Whizzing past like pockets full Bursting eardrums for 22-24 hours a day? Cruel, Of cherry red challenge flags: Whistleblowers Manning, Slow deaths, strip sacking

Snowden and Assange? Spirits, bodies and minds of Where was The 12th Man Political prisoners & prisoners Shrieking, screaming, loud Where’s the quarterback, Of war who, game faces on As an Aircraft carrier’s flight The field general, that Against water hoses, cattle Deck for Marilyn Buck? Comes up to the line prods, German shepherds,

Barking: ANGOLA Where was The 12th Man ATTICA #77A4283 Shouting full-throated, Bullets and buckshot,

Took the field for us all Quadruple, triple, double Overtime, or sudden death, This game’s been going On too long— Where’s the Terrible Towels, the Lambeau Leap Where’s the raucous carrying On in the Dog Pound, boisterous Behavior in the Black Hole, where’s The Wall of Fame, Ring of Honor Where’s The 12th Man for our Political prisoners & prisoners of war? Raymond Nat Turner © 2014 All Rights Reserved

50 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 Legalizing Oppression The Case of Lynne Stewart By Chris Hedges

The lynching and disbarring of civil thing that you did because you were trial as the Middle East bureau chief for rights lawyer Lynne Stewart, who answering a higher voice.” The New York Times. I remember being because she has terminal cancer was “I don’t want to make anything a stunned at the repeated mendacity of recently released from prison after kind of religious thing, it wasn’t that, the government prosecutors, who serving four years of a 10-year sen- but you know, you defended people blamed Abdel Rahman for terrorist tence, is a window into the collapse of because they were up against the might- attacks he had, in fact, publicly the American legal system. Stewart— iest organism in the universe: the gov- denounced. The prosecutors, for who has stood up to state power for ernment of United States, whether they example, accused him of orchestrating more than three decades in order to were state or federal,” she said Thursday the killing of 62 people in 1997 in give a voice to those whom authorities evening [February 6, 2014] as we sat Luxor, Egypt, although the sheikh at seek to crush, who has spent her life with her husband, Ralph Poynter, at the time condemned the attack and defending the poor and the marginal- her son’s dining room table. had no connection with the Egyptian ized, who wept in court when one of group that carried out the massacre. her clients was barred from presenting Stewart, working with former U.S. When the guilty verdict was read, a credible defense—is everything a Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Stewart burst into tears, “the only time lawyer should be in an open society. lawyer Abdeen Jabara in 1995, was the I ever cried in the courtroom.” But we no longer live in an open soci- lead trial counsel for Omar Abdel ety. The persecution of Stewart is the Rahman, an Egyptian Muslim known Stewart continued to visit the sheikh persecution of us all. as “the Blind Sheikh,” who was con- after the sentencing. Three years after victed in October of that year for the trial the government severely cur- Stewart, 74, is living with her husband tailed his ability to communicate with in her son’s house in New York City after alleged involvement in the 1993 bomb- ing of the World Trade Center. He the outside world, even through his being released from a Texas prison a lawyers, under special administrative month ago. Because she is disbarred she received life in prison plus 65 years, a measures known as SAMs. cannot perform any legal work. “Can’t sentence Stewart called “outlandish.” even work in a law office,” she said softly She said Abdel Rahman was put on Abdel Rahman asked Stewart dur- last week when I interviewed her at the trial not for any crimes he committed ing a prison visit in 2000 to release a Brooklyn home. “I miss it so terribly. I but because the Egyptian government statement from him to the press con- liked it. I liked the work.” of Hosni Mubarak, as well as cerning a negotiated cease-fire between Washington, was frightened of his the Egyptian government and mili- Her career as one of the country’s influence over the Egyptian masses. tants. The Clinton administration did most renowned civil rights lawyers The United States, along with Egypt, not prosecute Stewart for conveying coincided with the fall of our legal sys- wanted to “take him off the scene” and the press release, although she was tem. She said that when she started “get him put away where he would no admonished and prohibited from see- practicing law in the 1970s it was a longer exert the influence he had.” The ing her client for several months. The “golden era” in which a series of legal cleric, now 75 and in poor health, is Bush administration, however, in April decisions—including rulings affecting imprisoned in the medical wing of the 2002, with the country baying for police lineups and what information Butner Federal Correctional Complex blood after the attacks of 9/11, decided and evidence the government had to in North Carolina. to prosecute her for the two-year-old turn over to defendants on trial—cre- press release. Stewart says she never ated a chance for a fair defense. But The court, through numerous rul- expected to be charged for releasing the these legal advances were reversed in a ings, refused to let Stewart mount her press statement. string of court decisions that, especially defense, ensuring that the government after 9/11, made the state omnipotent. prosecutors would not be challenged. Minutes before her arrest on April As citizens were stripped of power, she The proceedings were a tawdry show 9, 2002, her husband, who later would said, “a death of the spirit of the bar” trial, a harbinger of the many judicial organize the successful fight to win her occurred. Lawyers gave up, she said. assaults against Muslims in the United a compassionate release from prison They no longer saw defending people States after the events of Sept. 11, 2001. after she was diagnosed with breast accused of crime as “a calling, some- I was based in Egypt at the time of the cancer, was outside on the stoop of

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 51 their house, which, she said, “in New sary” and that, in the same circum- Federalist Society had pressured the York is where you go sit on the steps in stances, she would “do it again.” university to rescind the invitation. the summertime when you can’t afford Subsequently, a federal appeals court Sympathetic students found her a place to go to East Hampton.” She heard under the Barack Obama administra- to talk, and Federalist Society members him in a heated conversation. tion demanded that the district judge peppered her with hostile questions at “I go to the door and I hear him say- reconsider her sentence. She was hand- the event. She was able to knock back ing ‘I don’t see any badge, I don’t see ed a new sentence by Koeltl—10 years. their verbal harassment because, she any warrant, what are you doing here, The federal government’s orches- said, she was “a trained trial attorney anyway?’” she said. tration of fear, Stewart said, has made who had been in the business for almost 30 years” at that time. Assuming Ralph was being arrested, the country increasingly deferential to she told him to take it easy, she would authority—especially white, male The federal government by the have him home by lunchtime. authority. In the Carswell maximum- 1980s, she said, was “mopping up” the security prison, the women’s facility remnants of radical activists, many of “I come around the door and the where she was incarcerated, she heard whom had been underground for guy looks and says—and he was clearly numerous accounts of gross injustices years. She and other civil rights attor- a cop, you know, the cheap shoes—and endured by poor women. She fre- neys were able to battle on behalf of he says, ‘We’re not here for you. We’re quently asked some of these women these political radicals, but by the end here for her,’ pointing to me,” she said. why they had not demanded a trial of the 1980s the state had finished its “I was flabbergasted.” rather than submit to a plea deal, or hunts for underground activists. And FBI agents took her from her home, why they had not stood up and pro- lawyers, Stewart said, “were no longer and she was released later on a $500,000 claimed their innocence. The answer, part of the game.” bond signed by her three children. she said, was always the same: “I was Stewart, who spent a decade in the U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft afraid. I was afraid.” Harlem school system as a librarian came to New York in April 2002 to She blames the wrecking of the legal before going to law school, said work- announce that the Justice Department system, in part, on the skyrocketing ing with those considered by society to had indicted Stewart, along with a costs of law school. Law graduates, she be “throwaway kids” meant that she paralegal and an interpreter, on said, have to “mortgage their souls in knew the injustices of the system. The grounds of materially aiding a terrorist order to go to law school.” When she system, she said, has “failed them [poor organization. Ashcroft that night went applied to Rutgers Law School in 1971 children] from beginning to end.” This on “Late Show With David Letterman” the school’s commitment to making failure to provide elemental justice, to tell the nation of the indictment as sure half the class was women allowed spawned by the so-called war on drugs part of the Bush administration’s “war her to get a scholarship. The financial and massive rates of incarceration, on terror.” aid, along with the low state tuition, especially for poor people of color, was In Stewart’s trial the government made it possible for her to attend. soon replicated within the courts in the again endlessly spewed myths about In later years she operated a law name of the war on terror. And this Islamic terrorism. It demanded a stag- practice in Greenwich Village for poor corrosion has spread. Basic legal pro- gering 30-year sentence. U.S. District clients. Her office was above her hus- tections, stripped first from the poor Judge John Koeltl instructed the jury band’s motorcycle shop on the ground and then from Muslims, have been more than 750 times that the photos of floor. “I could take whatever pay stub I stripped from us all. Osama bin Laden and the 2001 World wanted,” she said. I asked Stewart if there had been a Trade Center attacks shown to the jury The rise of corporate-backed orga- specific moment when she lost hope in by the government on a 10-by-12-foot nizations and think tanks designed to the judicial system. screen were not relevant to the case. veer every public institution away from “I always believed, Chris, that I Stewart was sentenced, to most peo- traditional liberal democratic values could do it,” she said. “You know, it’s ple’s astonishment, to 28 months. has dismantled our civil society, she like, you’re the last man. You’re like After the sentencing, Stewart pub- said. The right-wing Federalist Society, the kicker [when the opposing team is] licly declared that passing along the after its founding in 1982, mounted a running the ball back. You’re the only information from Abdel Rahman had frontal assault on the legal system. one between the goal post and every- been “based on my understanding of Stewart, after Stanford University thing. But I was there. They had to get what the client needed, what a lawyer asked her to speak there in 2002, by me. If they couldn’t get by me, then was expected to do” and “was neces- arrived on campus to find that the they couldn’t win. I have enough ego

52 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 and belief in myself to say I didn’t I asked her what she had learned women incarcerated with her lacked believe they could do that every time, from being incarcerated. self-esteem. that I could win, that I could make a “I don’t think I ever appreciated the “The women I’ve left behind” are difference. I think I did make a differ- unrelenting stress” of being in prison, “the one real shadow on my tremen- ence for a lot of people, even people she said. “That you’re always waiting dous joy at being home,” she said. “I who got convicted.” for something to come down. That can no longer even communicate with The climate in the nation’s court- there’s such arbitrary authority. Guard [them] because the conditions of my rooms changed irrevocably after 9/11, A says, ‘Go down those stairs, use the probation are that I may not associate she said. The occasional victories she stairs.’ Guard B says, ‘You can’t use the with any felons. So I can’t even write to and other civil rights lawyers were able stairs, you’re not permitted on the dear Mara, what happened with your to win before then became nearly stairs.’ And you say, ‘But Guard A just case? Someone who got 20 years impossible to replicate. said. ...’ ‘I don’t care what he said, this because she sold some heroin and then “The playing field suddenly changed is my rule!’ That kind of arbitrary a guy died a week later, and they used and everything favored the prosecu- thing, you’re always guessing. What that murder to enhance her sentence, tion, certainly in federal cases,” she does this guy, what does this woman, completely contrary to everything we said. “There was no level playing field want me to do? Where am I? Where is ever learned.” this? And that’s 24/7.” anymore. It was like if you were the last One of the saddest moments in guy standing and you had to keep them “You’re always on the cusp of doing prison, she said, was mail call. The from making the goal you were at the the wrong thing, or getting in trouble names of those who had letters would six-inch line trying to do it. It was for something,” she said. “I wrote a let- be read. Some women “waited for their impossible to stop them. They con- ter for a woman, and in order to make name to be called and it never hap- trolled it. They controlled what the a copy I emailed it to Ralph.” She went pened.” Those who did not get mail or charges were. They controlled whether on: “It was basically asking a judge to visits, she said, “become more and an adjournment would be given. They stay any decision because they were more institutionalized.” determined whether the cooperation is going to take all of her pension as pay- “The world of the prison is the only worthy, and everybody must cooper- ment for what she had done. And she world; the outside world does not exist ate, and it changed into a very different wanted to get this letter in right away. for them anymore,” she said. system, certainly on the federal level.” So I emailed it to [Ralph] and for that I lost, I think, about three months of “I’m not waiting for the working In her own trial the government commissary, and email.” class to make the revolution,” she said. presented audio recordings of her “I think that’s a day long gone by. That meetings with Abdel Rahman in the She said, “It’s almost impossible to might have happened in the ’30s. It prison in Rochester, Minnesota. The organize prisoners in this day and age didn’t. We have to look at a new way, taping of her conversations, which to stand up, to become a unit, to say no some new force.” before the federal Patriot Act would to certain things.” have violated attorney-client privilege, “I found it virtually impossible to She said that although she is dis- is now legal. convince the women at Carswell that barred she will continue to be a catalyst She said of the 9/11 attacks, “We’ve they should not be always thinking that for change. She quoted Rosa never explored why. Why does this what happened to them was personal,” Luxemburg, who said that radicals happen? Why, what compelled 21 she said. “They should be looking at should at once alleviate human misery young men to give up their lives to do political answers, that where they and do political work. Stewart said she this thing? No, we’ve never, we don’t ended up was not because of some per- will continue to fight for the some 150 want to look at that. We don’t want to sonal lack or weakness but because the political prisoners, mostly African- know why.” political system has designated them to Americans, who have been in prison be there as one of the kick-arounds, as for decades because they belonged to “We continue the façade that we are one of the not-for-consumption.” radical groups such as the Black fair,” she said, “that we have this Panthers or the Black Liberation Army. Constitution we respect, and we can “Why do you think that is?” I asked. rely on, and that we can embrace. You “I think ... television has a lot to do “My other goal is not to turn my can’t do that, that’s my constitutional with it,” she said. “There’s a certain back on the women in prison,” she rights, etc. When really they’re [our idealized life. People that are in trouble said. constitutional rights] a puff of smoke. get there because they have done it to She stressed the importance of com- They don’t really exist.” themselves.” She said that many of the munity.

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 53 “The most important thing is don’t let yourself get isolated,” she said. Abandonment “Don’t feel that you’re the only one in By Torrey Real the room that thinks this way and you must be crazy or something, and “The most devious and efficient mur- ple get discriminated against. It’s no they’re going to get you because you’re der weapon ever devised by man is a mystery! The aspect that I want to talk the only one. Find the other people judge and prosecutor forged together in a about, is the test of time, perception, who think like you. They’re out there. mutually sought corrupt purpose... Legal and acquiescence that people have There are people out there. There are researchers have already reported on gravitated towards over the past few groups. There’s everyone from the rag- Pennsylvania’s corrupt judiciary. It is decades—with a “little” help from ing grannies right up to the very seri- usually discovered either by those willing media propaganda—to the state that ous lefties, but there’s somebody out to do tedious research, or by its victims we now have today. In summary, I like there, make sure you’re not all alone. serving decades in prison.” —Kevin to call it abandonment: the second, That’s the worst part of what we face Brian Dowling, “The Walls of Jericho,” and equally damning face, to this two- these days. As long as you’re with other GRATERFRIENDS, September 2013. headed beast. people you have a fighting chance, and I couldn’t have stated this better Sadly, the victims of this corrupt you can organize more people.” myself. What is the unique strength of judiciary, more often than not, come “This is a pretty loveless world we this so-called power—the ability to face-to-face with the second half of this live in,” she concluded. “We have lots destroy innocent people’s lives? That is conjoined monster, at one stage or of romantic love. We have lots of ‘Sex the major question that everyone needs another. Some experience it very early, and the City.’ But real love, love that is to look deeper into. For it is a complex when they look for their support dur- the kind that saves people, and makes mechanism of doubt. Doubt, that lies ing preliminary or trial stages. Some, the world better, and makes you go to within the minds and hearts of every- after serving a particular amount of bed with a smile on your face, that love one who has witnessed some part of time, when the label of confinement is lacking greatly. You have to search this corrupt judiciary. It is amazing, becomes more and more attached to for that.” how, there is such a thing that can them—the point where abandonment —truthdig.com, February 9, 2014 make an innocent man appear guilty, really takes a bite out of your ass. For if http://www.truthdig.com/report/ then be treated as such; and in turn, your support dwindles down to nil, item/legalizing_oppression_201402091 allow a guilty man to get off with noth- how does one recover? ing more than a slap on the wrist, if No one knows the orphan as, Joe that. Though, the defining aspect, is Blow, the 17-year-old guy that got rail- whether he’s privileged or unprivileged. roaded at trial, anymore. Once sub- Some things, which play a part in stantial time has passed, you “meta- being under-privileged are attributed physically” (in the minds of onlookers) to: poverty or class; race or ethnicity; are perceived as, Freddy Kruger, the lack of education; etc. However, this is 33-year-old felon, who’s preaching the not the point I want to touch on, for same ol’ song, that no one wants to we all have a strong sense of how peo- take a chance of getting to know. The corrupt judiciary is the modern day sorcerer, masquerading as the pro- verbial Sultan’s good natured advisor, with the power to cast enduring spells— taking advantage of the land’s paupers, and condemning as many as possible to the “cave of wonders.” The only ques- tion left, is: Where are the genies? Write to Torrey Real: Torrey Real #EL-1916 SCI-Mahanoy 301 Morea Road Frackville, PA 17932

54 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 Lorenzo Johnson’s Case An Interview by Shuja Moore

January 18, 2014—After almost two Lorenzo Johnson: I have a Post through what I’ve been through and decades behind bars, Lorenzo “Cat” Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) petition we share the same mission. My case has Johnson won his freedom from a wrong- pending that includes stronger issues support from people in 31 states and ful conviction. But a controversial deci- than the one that originally freed me. 11 countries! sion by the U.S. Supreme Court rein- For 18 years the police and prosecutors Shuja Moore: What is your strategy stated it. Now, Cat is out to prove his have withheld evidence that would for fighting your case? innocence, expose police corruption and have cleared me at trial. The prosecu- Lorenzo Johnson: Since I’m inno- show that truth always prevails. tion’s main witness made a statement cent, I stand on truth. I fight my case in the day of the crime that if turned over Shuja Moore: For those people who the court and through social media. to my lawyer would’ve cleared me at don’t know you, who are you? What’s Like I said in one of my recent articles, trial. One of the detectives involved in your story? “Social media is injustice’s worst night- the investigation has signed an affidavit Lorenzo Johnson: I’m a New Yorker mare.” supporting this. I also have witnesses who was wrongfully convicted of a coming forward about how they saw Shuja Moore: What do you think of crime in Pennsylvania that I didn’t the criminal appeal process? commit and was sentenced to a life other people commit this crime and prison term. I spent sixteen-and-a-half that the prosecution’s main witness Lorenzo Johnson: Without ques- years in prison before my conviction was with them. But the police threat- tion I feel that the bar of justice is was vacated on October 3, 2011 by the ened them to not come forth and help warped! I’m one of many that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. They me. And the prosecution’s only witness appeal process has failed. held that there was an insufficient has even admitted that she wasn’t in Shuja Moore: Since coming back, amount of evidence to find me guilty. I the bar where she testified she saw me! how have inmates responded to you? was released in January 2012 pending This coupled with some other issues Prison staff? raises a solid actual innocence claim. the Attorney General’s appeal to the Lorenzo Johnson: Although nothing U.S. Supreme Court. On May 29, 2012 Shuja Moore: The question that is came directly to me, there has been a lot the Supreme Court granted the Attorney on every prisoner’s mind is why did of gossiping behind my back. And that General’s appeal and reinstated my con- you turn yourself in? was disappointing because I’m fighting viction without giving my legal team Lorenzo Johnson: I’m surrounded not only for myself but all of us. I could any chance to argue our position. by a unique support system. People have been selfish and ran but my sup- Shuja Moore: We were so happy to who believe in me and my injustice and porters mean everything to me. If I see you go and devastated to see you who are willing to do all that is neces- would have run not only would I have return, how’s it been Big Homie? sary to see that I am freed. They are the lost my appeal rights, I would’ve been Lorenzo Johnson: It’s been a rough people I’m dedicated to. I strive for labeled the new “Mud Man” because it ride. peace, freedom and justice and I’m on would be that much harder for others to my way to exactly that! get bail while on appeal. Everybody has Shuja Moore: One thing I will say different concerns. Now that the juve- though, since you’re back, your fight Shuja Moore: Courageous. Speaking nile lifer issue is on the forefront I hope for justice is on another level. of supporters, how were you able to get my actions help them in their struggle Lorenzo Johnson: Fighting is all I so many people on your side? because they can’t make the excuse know. Lorenzo Johnson: I refuse to be about them not being able to operate in Shuja Moore: What are the lessons silent and worry about everything but society or return if they violate. Those learned from spending so much time myself. Most of my funds are spent on who think strictly about themselves are incarcerated? postage and copies. I try to reach who- normally the ones wondering why all ever is willing to listen to my story. their bridges are burned. As for the Lorenzo Johnson: Education is When I was released I spoke on wrong- prison staff—some do their eight and everything. ful convictions. I spoke to troubled roll, some have their preconceived Shuja Moore: So what’s happening youth in different communities. I made notions of me whether good or bad. I with your case right now? allies with people who have been don’t get caught up in that.

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 55 Shuja Moore: What do you recom- mend for that 20-year-old kid with a Is the USA Above the Law? life sentence and no clue who has just By “Shakaboona” arrived upstate? CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and the the government honest. Lorenzo Johnson: If you do not other corporate-owned news networks have an education make that a priority. It is utter hypocrisy to, in one of America have been asking the ques- Never stop learning. Get in the law breath, tell our society of people it is tion, should former NSA contractor their moral and patriotic duty as law- library and learn the basic procedures turned whistle-blower, Edward of law and continue learning from abiding citizens to call government Snowden, be given amnesty? But the hotlines and report crimes they witness there. Do not take everything that your correct questions that should be posed being committed in the streets, while lawyer says at face value. Learn your are: Will the Attorney General crimi- in the next breath, tell people not to case inside out because there’s nobody nally indict NSA officials for breaking report crimes they witness being com- who is going to fight for you better federal law for spying on 250 million mitted in the backrooms of govern- than you. Do not get caught up in American citizens without probable ment agencies. This double standard of prison politics. Surround yourself with cause? And, will the Obama adminis- crime doesn’t fly here. Basically, the people who share the same goal as you. tration let the NSA off the hook after government is saying the law does not It’s about getting back to family as committing criminal offenses, like they soon as possible. Don’t view yourself as let the CEOs of big banks and corpora- apply to them, and that they are above a lifer; always have the state of mind tions off the hook after the sub-prime the law. Are they above the law? that you will return to your family. mortgage scam? As it stands, not a single NSA offi- Shuja Moore: I agree. I suggest to The Obama administration has cial has been criminally indicted for people to first learn how to learn. Then conceded the fact that the NSA com- violating federal law and the civil rights study the book the Rules of Court (sec- mitted a criminal offense of spying on of 250 million citizens when it spied on tions: criminal procedure, rules of evi- American citizens by mining citizens’ them. The NSA officials are the crimi- dence, appellate procedure); the PCRA electronic communications for per- nals here, not Edward Snowden. The statute; and legal analysis, research, sonal information, tracking citizens NSA is the traitor of America, not writing and how to craft a legal docu- travels and creating behavioral profiles Edward Snowden. ment. Well, any last words? of citizens, all of which are collected The major news corporations have Lorenzo Johnson: All is well with and stored as meta-data at secret facili- repeatedly shown themselves to be me; and if we as a whole continue to ties, and used by God knows who— another branch of government, and fight against injustice and not our- CIA, FBI, military intelligence, govern- the protector buffers of government, as selves we got something special com- ment contractors, private security cor- their interests are one and the same. ing. Rumble, young man, rumble! porations and Google. Such NSA spy- Their cable news networks have pur- ing on American citizens clearly vio- Write to Lorenzo “Cat” Johnson at: posely deflected the focus and anger of lates our First Amendment right of the people away from the criminal www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org privacy under the United States www.facebook.com/LorenzoJohnson actions of the NSA, and in true part- Constitution and violates Federal stat- nership with the Obama administra- Twitter: @FREERENZ ute laws of the Antiterrorism and Sign Lorenzo Johnson’s Freedom Petition! tion, have placed the news spotlight on Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) Edward Snowden, disingenuously http://www.freelorenzojohnson.org/sign-the- and the U.S. Patriot Act. petition.html claiming that Edward Snowden broke It is the moral and legal duty of the law by whistle blowing on the NSA Write to Shuja Moore at: Edward Snowden, and all American breaking the law. Incredible! Shuja Moore DOC # GU4039 citizens employed by the government, Let’s make no mistake about it; 301 Morea Rd. to blow the whistle on government Edward Snowden is the hero of this Frackville, PA 17932 agencies and officials that deliberately story and the Obama administration, commit criminal acts as the NSA did. corporate-owned news networks and And once a citizen has blown the the NSA are the villains. whistle on government agencies break- Write to: ing the law, the whistle-blower must be Kerry “Shakaboona” Marshall #BE-7826 protected by law from retaliatory crim- SCI-Rockview inal prosecution and threat of impris- Box A onment, for such patriotic action keeps Bellefonte PA 16823

56 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 Fighting the Oppressor By Kevin Cooper

This essay speaks to one of the many that has us all imprisoned, and is trying back! Why?” forms of oppression. to execute us—this system that is made This is exactly what is going on As an African American who is to destroy us mentally, emotionally, within this and other modern day committed to fighting, and ending psychologically, and every other type plantations to one degree or another. I oppression, no matter where it hap- of way that it can before it murders us must also ask “Why?” As I and other pens, or who it happens to, I have to physically. Whether these inmates do inmates continue to do our part in this speak the truth. And my truth is what I this consciously or unconsciously isn’t historical struggle for our collective have witnessed and personally experi- known by me or other inmates who human rights we do so consciously, enced here in San Quentin Prison on also see this and shake their heads in and we refuse to do the oppressors’ Death Row since 1985. disbelief like I do. What we do know work for him! however is this truth: The oppressor I find myself in a real life-and-death and his supporters love for this to hap- Though I, and others, are forced to situation here on Death Row, live in such a place against our will where hate, and for certain people, self- doesn’t mean that we have given up or hatred, is an ongoing situation. Of “The most powerful given in. It doesn’t mean that we will course, this is not true concerning all let the oppressor make us turn on each the death row inmates, and I would be weapon of the oppressor other in a negative way. We will con- lying if I said that it was. is the minds of the tinue to work to end all of our collec- tive oppression as best we can. But what I am writing about happens oppressed!” enough to deserve attention. Here, in this Those inmates who choose to work institution, as well as in all other modern against us and for the oppressor day plantations there are only two types either don’t know, or don’t care that of people. They are the Oppressors and pen, and they love to see it happen. they are being misused by the oppres- Oppressed! I am an oppressed person, They want and need to keep us sor. As the late Bantu Steven Biko, who and in truth, all the other inmates within oppressed people fighting each other. is the father of Black Consciousness in these walls are oppressed, even if some of The good old game of divide and con- South Africa once said: “The most them don’t think that they are, or aren’t quer is one of their most effective tools. powerful weapon of the oppressor is aware that they are. These so called Brothers who are doing the minds of the oppressed!” There are certain inmates, who the oppressors’ work for them claim to Many of us on these modern day instead of uniting as one strong know all about this game of divide and plantations refuse to give our minds or oppressed people in order to make all conquer, yet they still keep participat- our spirits to these wholesale oppres- of our lives more peaceful and better, ing in this game to the detriment of we sors. Those that do, “That’s their bad.” would rather (and in fact do) raise who are oppressed! Only in acknowledging what is going their fists in violence rather than raise In 1964, the late Malcolm X stated on, can some of us avoid this trap that is their voices. They speak words of disre- to a crowd of people in Harlem that, easy to fall into here behind enemy lines. spect towards other oppressed inmates “If you aren’t careful, the newspapers In Struggle and Solidarity from for whatever reason, (even if that rea- will have you hating the people who Death Row at San Quentin Prison, I’m son is a made-up one), in order to hate are being oppressed, and loving the Kevin Cooper and start trouble and keep madness people who are doing the oppressing!” —February 20l4 going among us. Yet, these very same He further stated, “The Oppressor is inmates refuse to raise their voice to fighting you in the morning, fighting Write to Kevin Cooper at: the oppressor. They refuse to even raise you at noon, fighting you at night, and Kevin Cooper C-65304, 4 EB 82 an ink pen to write about the oppressor fighting you all in between, and you San Quentin State Prison and this oppressive system of death still think it’s wrong to fight them San Quentin, CA 94974 FREE KEVIN COOPER

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 57 Razor Wire Plantations Amerika’s ongoing addiction to slavery, cruelty and genocide By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Brutality by design illustrates clearly that the South had nitely ain’t colorblind. As was the focus of a recent article1, become a society that was compelled Indeed the boon of mass imprison- to resort to the use of coercive force the Texas Department of Criminal ment on the last several decades is aptly because of the ultimate failure of law Justice (TDCJ) has been recognized by to support or enforce subservient recognized as a “New Jim Crow” sys- the federal courts to be among behavior in slaves.”3 tem for disparaging and disposing of Amerika’s most abusive prison systems, marginalized racial and national And because slavery is the basis of where a “culture of sadistic and mali- minorities. But what accompanies this the U.S. prison system, (as embodied cious violence” reigns, involving the system, that many aren’t aware of, is in the 13th Amendment to the U.S. seeming inability of correctional offi- raw slavery, which could not exist Constitution), this same resort to bru- cers to keep their hands off prisoners.2 without dehumanizing and brutalizing tality and violence to exert “control” its victims. Though this is acknowledged, Texas pervades it. officials have done nothing to rein these Once U.S. prisons are recognized to So as was done with the slaves of yes- abuses in. And why? Because—like the be a system of enslavement, and the lie terday, U.S. prisoners are projected to inherently abusive and oppressive is exposed that slavery in Amerika was the broader public as objects of suspi- nature of the overall Amerikan criminal ever abolished, the abusive conditions cion, fear, ridicule and hate. In this injustice system—it’s all by design. that pervades them make perfect sense. sense, we are the new “niggers.” And Let’s take the TDCJ where I’m pres- when guards wish to demean us, we’re Compelling submission to slavery ently imprisoned for example. often told that we’re only “inmates,” Government sanctioned brutality “offenders,” etc., which means, some- Post-bellum slavery underlies the U.S. prison system; just thing less than human. Yet in reality, the With 109 prisons and over 152,000 as it did the U.S. chattel slave system of only thing that differentiates us from the prisoners, Texas operates Amerika’s which the prison system is a continua- “public” (and who among them can largest state prison system. And every tion; and just as it did the German Nazi honestly say they’ve never violated any prisoner confined in Texas is forced to concentration camp system. of the innumerable laws of the oppres- work without pay. Only those very few Under the old North Amerikan sive state?), is we’ve suffered the formal with documented serious medical or slave system it was openly admitted indignity of having the government mental health conditions, which impair that people simply will not willingly brand and stigmatize us “criminals.” work performance, and those held in submit to bondage and unremunerat- But on the other hand, the same the TDCJ’s torturous segregation units, ed forced labor. The human spirit nat- guards who run these prisons frequent- are not made to work. Often those with urally rebels against such a condition. ly admit to us the only difference documented medical and mental Therefore the wealthy interests whose between us and them is they’ve “never health exemptions are still forced to economic domination, power, prestige been caught,” which makes them the work—their exemptions being simply and wealth itself relied on slave labor, worse sort of hypocrites, who devote ignored. Those who refuse to work are had to devise a system which would their lives to punishing others (break- punished, thrown in segregated con- compel the submission of those to be ing up homes, families and communi- finement, and their imprisonment is kept in bondage. ties, and subjecting us to all manner of typically extended. So they dehumanized their victims to abuses in the process) for violating The entire Texas prison system is strip them of all claims of entitlement to laws that they don’t respect themselves. organized around its prisoner labor, human dignity, compassion and consid- There’s also the fact that in Amerika with the prisoners literally performing eration. But this alone was not enough people of color and the poor (the tradi- every job short of running the cell- to force them to submit to slavery. tional “niggers” and poor social blocks. Actually, until the federal courts “This was to be done... by means “trash”) are the primary targets of banned it in the 1980s, prisoners were of beatings, whippings, or any other aggressive policing of their communi- doing this too, working as “building similar form of violent and mutila- ties, criminal prosecution and mass tenders” whom the guards armed with tive punishment or humiliation. imprisonment. Criminal injustice in pipes, street knives and bats, and gave Sociologically speaking, this then Amerika is far from blind—and defi- impunity to terrorize other prisoners

58 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 (through stabbings, beatings, rapes and underwear (thermals), gloves, hats, and in the Nazi concentration camps. extortion) to keep order for the TDCJ shorts, t-shirts, etc. Instead we must Which is why those slaves were starved, administrators.4 The same sort of purchase such items from the prison denied healthcare, and literally worked unholy and oft denied alliance that commissaries (remember these are to death. But it was only called genocide police have long maintained with clothes the prisoners make themselves when its focus was on “white” people. “organized” criminal elements in poor without payment), using whatever Real genocide urban communities, to supply, protect money we can manage to get friends and secure graft from drug operations and family to send us. Most prisoners Many overlook or don’t realize that and other “crimes” and to remove have little to no outside support, and it was the exploitation of slave labor competitors and compel residents’ the TDCJ doesn’t encourage our devel- that helped drive the German Nazi’s submission. TDCJ prisoners also sub- oping or maintaining communication genocidal program against Poles, stituted for licensed medical staff.5 lines to the outside. Those of us who Gypsies (Sintis and Romanis), Jews, Slavs, the mentally disturbed, and oth- Otherwise today TDCJ prisoners still don’t receive money are allowed to mail only five one-ounce letters per month, ers. These people were swept up en do everything from growing all the food masse into concentration camps where we eat (and which the TDCJ also sells the cost of which is set up as an out- standing debt that we must repay if and many were worked to death, perform- commercially for profit), raising live- ing forced labor to enrich and sustain stock and crops on hundreds of thou- whenever we may receive any money. Prisoners are therefore forced to devise German corporations and the Nazi sands of acres of TDCJ-owned farmland state and military that served them. (which are aptly called “colonies”), to all sorts of hustles and schemes to gen- building and maintaining the prisons erate means of acquiring clothes, Similarly TDCJ’s prisoner health that hold us. The prisoners plant, tend hygiene supplies (which the TDCJ also care system has long been recognized and harvest everything from cotton, does not give us), and even food (I will to be unresponsive to the health needs beans, carrots and potatoes, to peanuts discuss the grossly inadequate nutrition of its prisoners. As said, but for federal and more. This work is performed by we receive below). court intervention in the 1980s, pris- “hoe squads” of prisoners using primi- Also, most TDCJ prisons lack air- oners were made to rely on only their 7 tive manual labor methods like those of conditioning, so this slave labor is per- peers for healthcare. the field slaves of yesterday or Third formed in the sweltering Texas heat, And just as the Nazis did to those World peasants, while armed guards on which is of course worse for those who they captured under their Aryanization horseback “oversee” them. The prison- work inside unventilated buildings. programs, the property of U.S. prison- ers, like the old slaves, refer to these Even the guards who serve as little ers is typically confiscated and kept by overseers as “bossman.” To see them at more than overseers (armed watchers arresting police under “civil forfeiture” work is to witness a scene like some- and disciplinarians,) protest the lack of laws. We should remember that the 6 thing ripped from an old slave movie. climate-control in the prisons. Indeed Nazis, as did the slavers of yesterday’s prisoners have been dropping dead North Amerika, legitimized their inhu- The TDCJ also runs an in-house from these conditions and have been mane practices by embedding them in enterprise called Texas Correctional forced to refuse life-sustaining medica- law. Industries, which uses prisoners’ slave tions to avoid the potentially fatal labor to make everything from the effects that these medicines can cause Then too there’s the high incidence clothes we and the guards wear (which from extreme exertions in hot weather. of communicable deadly diseases like are made from the prisoner-grown And of course, TDCJ administrators, chronic hepatitis (HCV), HIV and cotton) and also commercially sold who ensure their own offices are air- AIDS, which commonly circulate in garments, boots, state and U.S. flags, conditioned, could care less. U.S. prisons at pandemic levels and go linen, etc., to the steel cell doors, beds, Which brings us to the cruelest fea- largely untreated. One documented lockers, sink/commode units, and even ture typical of such mean systems of example was found in the Virginia walls and other fixtures that go into the enslavement. Namely the “owners” who Department of Corrections (VDOC) prisons’ constructions and cells. Texas live in luxury and comfort at the slaves’ where I was originally confined (for 21 prisoners literally forge the chains that expense, generally care nothing about years), and for whom Texas is pres- bind them. the health of their workers, especially ently holding me. As a further abuse and insult, the when, as here, the slaves are easily and The situation was exposed by the TDCJ does not provide its prisoners readily replaced from a steady supply of ACLU in a 2003 report which found with seasonal clothing for cold winters surplus workers; as was also the case the VDOC was deliberately allowing or Texas’s scorching summers, like long during the trans-Atlantic slave trade such deadly diseases as HCV to circu-

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 59 late untreated among its prisoners, many others demonstrates, as admitted labor in factories, lower-class black while in violation of Virginia’s laws in a Washington Monthly editorial: men were hauled off to prison in droves. They were vilified in the VDOC officials deliberately falsified “War crimes tribunals would be media and condemned for their reports on the levels of prisoner HCV the worst thing that could happen, condition as part of a well-orches- infection and those dying from it.8 The [because] they would amount to... a trated political campaign to build a report, which was hushed up, revealed system of legal guilt for top [U.S.] new white, Republican majority in that the VDOC was outright refusing officials.”12 the South. Decades later, curious to treat over 10,000 known HCV cases And just as the Nazi propaganda onlookers in the grips of denial (over a full third of its entire prison industry did, the Amerikan govern- would wonder aloud, “where have population). It stated: ment and media join together in vil- all the Black men gone?” “Although it is estimated that up lainizing minority groups by perpetu- “...The new system does not seek to half of chronic HCV patients can ating criminal images of them to the primarily to benefit unfairly from be cured if treated early with an national “majority.” And they selec- Black labor, as earlier caste systems appropriate regimen of interferon tively criminalize actions stereotyped have, but instead views African and ribavirin, only 50 Virginia as behaviors typical of these groups. Americans as largely irrelevant and inmates out of an estimated 12,800 Too, both these societies systematically unnecessary to the newly structured infected were receiving Hepatitis C used prisons to dispose of mentally economy—an economy that is no treatment as of November 1, 2002, longer driven by unskilled labor. and only 320 have received the thera- disabled people, and angled to portray “It is fair to say that we have wit- py since the treatment protocol was “criminal” inclinations as biologically nessed an evolution in the U.S. from implemented. Liver biopsies—proce- innate to certain undesirable minority a racial caste system based entirely dures performed to assess liver dam- groups. on exploitation (slavery), to one age prior to initiating HCV treat- More telling is the fact that while based largely on subordination (Jim ment—have fallen considerably in New Afrikans/Blacks are only 13 per- Crow), to one defined by marginal- recent years. Only 33 inmates were cent of the U.S. social population, we ization (mass incarceration). While scheduled for biopsies as of November are over half the prison population, a marginalization may sound far pref- 1, and the number of liver biopsies erable to exploitation, it may prove dipped dramatically last year, from population that is forbidden to procre- to be even more dangerous. Extreme 204 in 2000 to 127 in 2011.”9 ate. This per se has genocidal implica- tions. While the Nazis were explicit in marginalization, as we have seen It should be noted that one of the their eugenics policies, the U.S. objec- throughout world history, poses the practices for which the Nazis were tively carries out similar practices in risk of extermination. Tragedies found guilty of “crimes against human- imprisoning Black males at their most such as the Holocaust in Germany or the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia (or ity” during the Nuremberg Trials for fertile ages and thereby undermining the genocide against Native peoples war crimes, was their confining German births within this social group.13 citizens and others under conditions here in North Amerika) are trace- where epidemics ran rampant.10 Legal scholar Michelle Alexander able to extreme marginalization and revealed the economic incentive behind stigmatization of racial and ethnic If such acts were crimes for which mass imprisonment/disappearances of groups. As legal scholar John A. German leaders were punished with New Afrikan/Black males, because we Powell once commented only half in executions, they are no less crimes no longer have any economic worth to jest, ‘It’s actually better to be exploit- when committed by U.S. officials. Amerika on the streets. She also ed than marginalized in some respects, because if you’re exploited Indeed U.S. Supreme Court Justice and observed that genocidal policies have presumably you’re still needed.’ Nuremberg prosecutor Robert H. been historically applied to those peo- Jackson stated this as a basic principle: ples who find themselves in this unfor- “Viewed in this light, the frantic “If certain acts and violations of tunate position. accusations of genocide by poor treaties are crimes they are crimes Blacks in the early years of the War “The collapse of inner-city econ- whether the United States does them on Drugs seem less paranoid. The omies coincided with the conserva- or whether Germany does them. We intuition of those residing in ghetto tive backlash against the Civil Rights are not prepared to lay down a rule communities that they had suddenly Movement, resulting in the perfect of criminal conduct against others become disposable was rooted in storm. Almost overnight, Black men which we would not be willing to real changes in the economy— found themselves unnecessary to the have invoked against us.”11 changes that have been devastating American economy and demonized to poor Black communities as facto- But of course this is typical U.S. by mainstream society. No longer ries have closed, low-skilled jobs rhetoric, since as the present case among needed to pick cotton in the fields or have disappeared, and all those who

60 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 had the means to flee the ghetto did. which, as I’ve noted, calls for their as it may be for some to accept) that The sense among those left behind engaging in side hustles, theft and what they’re really promoting is slavery, that society no longer has use for preying on other prisoners—anti- genocide, crimes against humanity and them, and that the government now social behaviors that will follow them a system that only teaches and rein- aims to simply get rid of them, back to society. This is what so-called forces criminality, not rehabilitation. reflects a reality that many of us who rehabilitation boils down to. claim to care prefer to avoid simply Dare to Struggle Dare to Win! by changing channels.”14 Slavery doesn’t teach people how to All Power to the People! be free. It only dehumanizes, which is Slavery does not teach freedom why international law to which the 1 Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “U.S. Prison As one Texas prisoner recently U.S. is a signatory outlaws slavery in all Practices would Disgrace A Nation of Savages pointed out to me, the TDCJ’s slave its forms. Texas. A Case on Record” (2013) system teaches prisoners how to become 2 Ruiz v Johnson 154 F. supp. 2d 925, 986 With the vast majority of Texas’s (S.D. Tex. 2001) thieves, swindlers and predators. As prison population being people of 3 “Securing the Leg Irons: Restrictions of already noted, most prisoners have lit- Legal Rights in Virginia and Maryland.” tle or no outside financial support, and 4 See, Ruiz vs Estelle, 503 F supp. 1265 (1980) where the TDCJ doesn’t pay them any Texas prisoners literally 5 Ibid. wages for work, they can only obtain 6 Larie Lowry, “In Texas, Inmates and Offi- things they need and want by stealing, forge the chains that cers Swelter.” New York Times, November 22, conning or preying on others. In some bind them. 2013 cases they are driven by necessity. 7 Op cite, note 4 Like in the Nazi ghettoes and prison 8 Laura Lafay, Accountable to No One: The camps, TDCJ prisoners do not receive Virginia Department of Corrections and Prisoner color and Texas being one of the coun- Medical Care (ACLU, 2003) nutrition adequate to maintain good try’s most notoriously racist states, and 9 Ibid, p. 9 health under conditions of hard labor. its prisons openly practicing old style 10 See, “Four Power Agreement,” 59 Per its own policy, the daily calorie slavery, it requires no major stretch of Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, September 10, intake of TDCJ prisoner diet plans the imagination to recognize that a 1945, in Burns H. Weston. et al., eds., Basic does not exceed 2500 calories, which is large percentage of its staff are the Documents in International Law and World Order (St. Paul, MN West, 1990) the minimum daily calorie intake worst sort of racists. In fact in a recent 11 Richard A Falk, “The Circle of needed for a sedentary-to-only-mod- New York Times article written by a TDCJ guard, it was admitted that in Responsibility,” Nation, January 20, 1970. p 27 erately active adult to maintain good (quoting Jackson). health. Remember, these prisoners are Texas, “Employment screening for 16 12 Townsend Hoopes, “The Nuremberg performing the same grueling labor as correctional officers is inadequate.” Suggestion.” Washington Monthly, January yesterday’s chattel slaves, and thus But prison systems don’t screen their 1970 require at least the same level of daily employees to determine racial views. In 13 The international Convention on nutrition. Yet TDCJ prisoners are pro- Virginia I often heard racist white Genocide defines the crime of genocide as vided less nutrition than were the slaves guards sarcastically confess, “it’s not “imposing measures intended to prevent births against the law [or rules] to be racist.” within” any national, or ethnic or racial group, of yesterday. Chattel slaves were recog- such as destroy that group in part or whole. Furthermore, TDCJ guards have the nized as needing 4200 to 5400 calories- 14 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim per-day to remain fit to perform their nation’s highest arrest rate for prison Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Color- 17 labor, particularly as field hands.15 employees, demonstrating that blindness (The New Press, N.Y. 2010) pp 207-08 there’s indeed no difference between us The TDCJ also does not serve any 15 Richard Sutch, “The Care and Feed- and them, with quite a few of them ing of Slaves,” in Paul A. David, et al. Reckoning fresh fruits to its prisoners, and serves even getting caught. With Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantita- desserts at only one meal per week. tive History of American Negro Slavery (N.Y.), This denies basic nutrients and daily So when we hear tough-on-crime Oxford University Press 1976) glucose needed for health and energy. and prison industry financed politicians 16 Op cite note 6 Leaving prisoners hard pressed to find howling about the need for more pris- 17 Matthew T. Clarke “Record Number ways to supplement their diets and get ons and to stay the course of mass incar- of Texas Prison Guards Arrested,” Prison Legal sweets from the prison commissaries ceration we should remember (as hard News (May 2007), p. 26

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT 61 For the Rosa Luxemburg Conference Speech By Mumia Abu-Jamal Presented By His Son at the Conference on January 11, 2014

Friends, Brothers, Sisters, Comrades, sting, but he is free today—a survivor services like education, housing and I greet you all through my son, of that monster. healthcare gets cut. Jamal, and thank you for your work to I thank you for receiving him. We are seeing it in Greece, with the free those in American dungeons, and You have asked about the rightist emergence of Golden Dawn. We see it to shut down the U.S. Death House. trend emerging in several states, and in England, in France, in the Nordic We know that Red Rosa spent time what that portends for the future. nations and yes—in Germany. in prison (in Breslau), but I doubt she History teaches us that rightist; These forces draw people apart, and dreamed of the size and scope of what xenophobic forces arise in nations utilize fear and enmity to waken the the American system of mass incarcer- where economic anxiety heightens. We working class. ation has come to. can see this quite clearly in nations fac- That’s why the rulers seek austerity. Because he is my son, he has felt that ing austerity measures, where social It serves their economic interests. For when people are divided and fighting each other, they cannot fight the System. For young people, it’s especially important to build racial and resis- tance movements, for by so doing they deny that energy to reactionary move- ments, and they also give hope to other social movements and activists to stand their ground. Young people must—must—resist the call of the austerity supporters to turn inward and ignore what’s happen- ing in those countries. They must engage, build move- ments, and create greater social cohe- sion, to resist the ideology of austerity. I thank you all for your work and your support! Ona Move! Mumia Abu-Jamal © ’13 maj

62 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 SCI-Mahanoy Officers Trample First Amendment Rights By Bryant Arroyo

On August 10 and September 13, privilege of the opportunity to have Legal research references: 2012, my visiting friend, Shireen photos taken in the visiting room for See Hudson v. Buckson, 310 F, Supp 528 (D. Parsons, and I posed for photos with all inmates and visitors. With all privi- Del. 1970); Pell v. Procunier, (417 U.S. 817, our clenched fists raised in the univer- 1974)(re: “any system of prior restraints of leges, rules are established to continue expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy sal hand-sign expressing solidarity in the privilege.” Such rules, however may presumption against its constitutional validity.” the visiting room at SCI-Mahanoy in not obviate our First Amendments (Citing): New York Times v. U.S., 403 U.S. 713, Frackville, Pennsylvania. On both rights under which speech includes 714 (1971).); Turner v. Safely, 482 U.S. 78, occasions we were told that our raised symbolic, nonverbal expression, such (1987)(“...[W]e have found it important to fists were in violation of Visiting Rule inquire whether regulations restricting inmates’ as the clenched, raised fist, and Policy First Amendment rights operated in a neutral No. 5. No. 5 carries a chilling effect, which, as fashion, without regard to the content of On the initial Grievance Review described by constitutional law, dis- expression.” This amendment indeed guaran- Response No. 427110, dated September courages the exercise of a First tees the right to express such attitudes toward 6, 2012, Lieutenant D. Malick respond- Amendment right—in this case, the the government, and it is the strength of our democracy that they are tolerated in almost all ed, stating both Officers Cole and First Amendment right to freedom of their public manifestations. That tolerance (31) Martin were merely enforcing SCI- expression. F. Supp. 535) is not only a benefit flowing from Mahanoy rules, adding that, “We offer As citizens—incarcerated or free— diligent protection of fundamental freedom; it is a Sine Qua Non of their continued enjoyment. the privilege of the opportunity to have we must challenge any and all encroach- The Voice and Face Inside the Nation of Pris- photos taken in the visiting room for ments upon our civil rights. We must all inmates and visitors. With all privi- oners... raise up our clenched fists in solidarity Write to: leges, rules are established to continue and outrage over the Pennsylvania the privilege.” Bryant Arroyo #CU-1126 Department of Corrections’ chilling SCI-Mahanoy The salient point, however, is that effect on our First Amendment rights, 301 Morea Road the ambiguous Policy No. 5 clearly vio- and demand reform and justice. Frackville, PA 17932 lates inmates’ and visitors’ right to freedom of expression, as guaranteed under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of reli- gion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The institution asserts that the opportunity for inmates and visitors to have photographs taken in the visiting room is a privilege. At issue, however, is that our freedom of speech is not confined to the spoken or written word, but includes symbolic expres- sion as well. Lt. Malick responded that both Officers Cole and Martin were simply enforcing rules, stating, “We offer the

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64 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 Petition: Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent! Free Mumia, Now!

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent The notorious trial judge, Albert We demand: Free Mumia Now! man. For almost three decades he faced Sabo, a self-proclaimed racist and Release Mumia Abu-Jamal Immediately a “legal lynching.” In December 2011, openly biased against Mumia declared from the Hellhole of Prison! the Philadelphia District Attorney before the trial, “I’m going to help fry For more information: See, “Long (DA) and Fraternal Order of Police, the n-----.” All elements of due pro- Distance Revolutionary”1 and backed by Edward Rendell, former cess—the right to a fair trial—were “Manufacturing Guilt.”2 Pennsylvania Governor, Philadelphia violated. Every part of the prosecu- Mayor and the DA who prosecuted tion’s case—witness testimony, Demand Issued by Mumia’s Family, Mumia, conceded defeat in trying to Mumia’s supposed confession and bal- c/o Keith Cook, Mumia’s eldest brother. execute him. Mumia is now sentenced listics—is a lie. P.O. Box 370, Hillsborough, NC to “slow death row,” life imprisonment The police, prosecution and Justice 27278 without parole. Department colluded to secure www.Freedom4Mumia.org Life imprisonment is an outrage! Mumia’s conviction and death sen- tence for a crime he did not commit, Free Mumia Now! Name: ______Mumia’s conviction for the shooting including hiding that the ranking offi- death of police officer Daniel Faulkner cer on the scene, Inspector Alfonzo was a political and racist frame-up. Giordano, was under federal investiga- Address: ______(Street, City, State, Zip Code) Mumia was a spokesman for the Black tion for police corruption. Panther Party; exposed the murderous Mumia continues to be outspoken Date: ______treatment of the MOVE organization; and truth-telling, in defiant resistance and was an award-winning journalist— to state repression and racial oppres- Phone: ______the voice of the voiceless. sion. The state wants to silence and From moments after the shootings, entomb for life this man who is known the police and prosecution manufactured as a “long distance revolutionary.” Email: ______Mumia’s guilt and actively suppressed his We stand with Mumia. Mumia’s innocence—evidence that someone else freedom is part of our own struggle for 1 http://www.mumia-themovie.com/ shot and killed officer Faulkner. justice and human liberation. 2 http://www.freedom4mumia.org/ldr--mg.html

An Urgent Fundraiser for Lynne Stewart’s Medical Needs

Because of a determined people’s “I fought lions, I fought tigers, and movement, Lynne is finally home with I’m not going to let cancer get me,” her family. But she has urgent medical Stewart said. needs and costs. Lynne’s Stage 4 breast Lynne has always come to the aid of cancer spread a year ago to lungs, back, those who needed her. Now it’s our bones and lymph nodes. Now 74, she turn to stand by Lynne. has lost weight and has trouble breath- ing; doctors estimate her lifespan at 12 Send a donation to help cover months. Lynne will soon begin treat- Lynne’s healthcare costs: ment requiring her to pay deductibles and co-payments. To boost the odds, Lynne Stewart Defense Committee she’ll use a special diet, vitamins, and 1070 Dean Street other healing methods—some costly and none covered by insurance. Brooklyn, New York 11216 Lynne’s spirit is indomitable—help http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ her fight to survive! lynne-stewart-s-medical-fund

Vol. 14, No. 2 SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT BC $4 at Newsstands and Bookstores SocialistViewpoint

H The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. —Karl Marx H MARCH/APRIL 2014 VOL. 14 NO. 2

20 degrees below zero, can living wage jobs thaw the freeze? Read A Cold Winter in Northern Wisconsin on page 2.

On the Front Cover: s National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa. Read South Africa: Forging a New Movement page 26.

From Texas to California, drilling for oil and gas is using billions of gallons of water in the country’s most drought-prone areas. Read Fracking is Depleting Water Supplies in America’s Driest Areas on page 39.

Write a Letter Supporting Pvt. Manning’s Request for Clemency! Read how on the inside front cover.

A Cold Winter in Northern Wisconsin - Page 2 Workers’ Power, Workers’ Control - Page 3 Inequality of Wealth and the Role of the Unions - Page 5 South Africa's NUMSA Solidarizes with Korean General Strike - Page 32 A conscious, directed effort to save postal services in the United States and Canada should be a priority of the movement for eco- nomic democracy. Read Now is the Moment to Save Our Postal Commons on page 10.

FC SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT Vol. 14, No. 2 Women buried in the Federal Prison System. Read Women in Soli- tary Confinement on page 41.