Harry Targ : My Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013.

My Nelson Mandela

Real historic figures get lionized, sanitized, and most importantly redefined as defenders of the ongoing order rather than activists who committed their lives to revolutionary changes...

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / December 10, 2013

One of the ironies of 21st century historical discourse is that despite significantly increased access to information, historical narratives are shaped by economic and political interest and ideology more than ever before.

Widely distributed accounts about iconic political figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King stun those of us who are knowledgeable about the times in which these figures lived. Real historic figures get lionized, sanitized, and most importantly redefined as defenders of the ongoing order rather than activists who committed their lives to revolutionary changes in the economic and political structures that exploit and oppress people.

Most of the media reviews of the life and achievements of Nelson Mandela fit this model.

However, most of my remembrances of Nelson Mandela are different.

First, he committed his life to the cause of creating an economic and political system in his homeland that would provide justice for all people.

Second, Nelson Mandela was part of the great wave of revolutionary anti-colonial leaders who participated in the mass movements for change in the Global South in the 20th century. These movements for independence led to the achievement of liberation for two-thirds of the world’s population from harsh, inhumane white minority rule. The campaign against apartheid in South Africa was part of this anti-colonial struggle.

Mandela shared the vision of such figures as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharial Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, Amical Cabral, Franz Fanon, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara. These leaders were spokespersons for mass struggles that transformed the world in the 20th century.

Third, Nelson Mandela gave voice and inspiration to young people in the Global North who sought peace and justice in their own societies. Mandela inspired movements that went beyond the struggle against racism and imperialism to address sexism and homophobia as well.

Nelson Mandela, c.1950. Photo by Apic/Getty Images.

Fourth, Mandela made it clear to many of us (despite sanitized media frames) that he saw himself as part of the movements of people who themselves make history. He worked with all those who shared his vision of a just society: grassroots movements, the South African Communist Party (SACP), the South African labor movement (COSATU), the Black Consciousness Movement, and progressives from faith communities.

To quote from Mandela’s first speech upon release from prison on February 11, 1990:

On this day of my release, I extend my sincere and warmest gratitude to the millions of my compatriots and those in every corner of the globe who have campaigned tirelessly for my release.

I send special greetings to the people of Cape Town, this city which has been my home for three decades. Your mass marches and other forms of struggle have served as a constant source of strength to all political prisoners.

I salute the African National Congress. It has fulfilled our every expectation in its role as leader of the great march to freedom.

I salute our President, Comrade Oliver Tambo, for leading the ANC even under the most difficult circumstances.

I salute the rank and file members of the ANC. You have sacrificed life and limb in the pursuit of the noble cause of our struggle.

I salute combatants of Umkhonto we Sizwe...who have paid the ultimate price for the freedom of all South Africans.

I salute the South African Communist Party for its sterling contribution to the struggle for democracy. You have survived 40 years of unrelenting persecution.

I salute General Secretary Joe Slovo, one of our finest patriots. We are heartened by the fact that the alliance between ourselves and the Party remains as strong as it always was.

I salute the United Democratic Front, the National Education Crisis Committee, the South African Youth Congress, the Transvaal and Natal Indian Congresses and COSATU and the many other formations of the Mass Democratic Movement.

I also salute the Black Sash and the National Union of South African Students. We note with pride that you have acted as the conscience of white South Africa. Even during the darkest days in the history of our struggle you held the flag of liberty high. The large-scale mass mobilisation of the past few years is one of the key factors which led to the opening of the final chapter of our struggle.

I extend my greetings to the working class of our country. Your organised strength is the pride of our movement. You remain the most dependable force in the struggle to end exploitation and oppression...

I pay tribute to the many religious communities who carried the campaign for justice forward when the organisations for our people were silenced...

I pay tribute to the endless heroism of youth, you, the young lions. You, the young lions, have energised our entire struggle.

I pay tribute to the mothers and wives and sisters of our nation. You are the rock-hard foundation of our struggle. Apartheid has inflicted more pain on you than on anyone else.

On this occasion, we thank the world community for their great contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle. Without your support our struggle would not have reached this advanced stage. The sacrifice of the frontline states will be remembered by South Africans forever.

Finally, Nelson Mandela inspired many of us in our own ways to commit to the historical march of people to make a better world. That commitment is powerfully described by a friend, Willie Williamson, a retired teacher from Chicago:

As a young man I learned about Nelson Mandela serving time in prison in South Africa. At that time I was politically ignorant about international affairs, but became curious about the Apartheid racial system because it reminded me so much of the small Mississippi town that I grew up in.

Already angered, after completing a stint in the Vietnam War, I became outraged and somewhat withdrawn. But it was the fight to free Mandela that brought me around to understanding that I had to become a part of a movement with justice at its core. I have Mandela to thank for my understanding of how to relieve an unjust power of its stranglehold. The fight must always be for justice throughout the world!

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Academic Freedom and the Mitch Daniels/Howard Zinn Kerfuffle

Political cartoon by Gary Varvel / Indianapolis Star

Academic freedom under fire:
The Mitch Daniels/Howard Zinn kerfuffle

If education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / August 7, 2013

WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana -- On July 17, 2013, an Associated Press story was published in several newspapers quoting from 2010 e-mails Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, now the president of Purdue University, wrote to “top state educational officials.” The e-mails encouraged the suppression of popular historian Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States in Indiana public education, including university level teacher training courses.

Upon the death of popular historian Howard Zinn, Daniels e-mailed that “this terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.”

When challenged on the seeming threats to academic freedom, Daniels claimed that his directives “only” referred to K through 12 instruction despite the fact that his e-mails made it clear he opposed instruction that used Zinn’s writings as tools for in-service training for teachers.

Ninety Purdue University faculty (including this author) signed a letter to President Daniels objecting to his implied threat to academic freedom. In addition to defending the university as a place for debate among competing ideas, the faculty objected to the negative characterization of Zinn’s scholarship as an historian.

They also objected to Daniels’ claim that although he was not interested in censoring scholarship and teaching at the university, when he was governor he had the responsibility to oversee school curricula from kindergarten through high school.

Faculty pointed out that restricting what was being taught to teachers pursuing advanced credits and restricting the right of teachers to use Zinn’s work in pre-college curricula violated academic freedom. Many Purdue faculty believed that extreme statements damning the substance of Zinn’s work cast a pall on the university and made serious reflection on American history in elementary and high schools more difficult for young people and their teachers.

It is important to note that the Daniels e-mails, and their threat to free discussion and debate in educational institutions in Indiana, reflect the deep struggles being waged in the American political system. Rush Limbaugh once remarked on his radio show to the effect that “we” have captured most institutions in the society with the exception of the university.

Since politics is usually about the contestation of ideas and the development of ideas comes from an understanding of the past and its connection to the present and the future, schools and universities can aptly be seen as “contested terrain.” That is teachers and students learn about their world through reading, writing, debating, and advocating policies, ideas, and values in educational settings.

Consequently, if one sector of society wishes to gain and maintain political and economic power they might see particular value in controlling the ideas that are disseminated in educational institutions. During the dark days of the Cold War professors who had the “wrong” ideas were fired. Professional associations in many disciplines rewarded scholars who worked within accepted perspectives on history, or political science, or literature, or sociology and denied recognition to others.

The preferred ideas trickled down to primary and secondary education. In most instances, professors and teachers who suffered as a result of their teaching were merely presenting competing views so that their students would have more informed reasons for deciding on their own what interpretations of subject matter made the most sense.

American history was a prime example of how controversial teaching would become. Most historians after World War II wrote and taught about the American experience emphasizing that elites made history, men made history more than women, social movements were absent from historical change, history moved in the direction of consensus rather than conflict, and the United States always played a positive role in world history. European occupation of North America, the elimination of Native Peoples, building a powerful economy on the backs of a slave system, and a U.S. pattern of involvement in foreign wars were all ignored or slighted.

Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, A People’s History of the United States, which has been read by millions, compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions.

He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most importantly, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places -- and there are so many -- where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

In the 1970s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed by wealthy conservatives and corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and AT&T which invested millions of dollars to organize lobby groups, support selected politicians in all 50 states, create “think tanks,” and in other ways strategize about how to transform American society to increase the wealth and power of the few.

ALEC lobbyists and scholars developed programs and legislation around labor, healthcare, women’s issues, the environment, and education that were designed to reverse the progressive development of government and policy that social movements had long advocated.

Speakers at ALEC events have included Governors Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jan Brewer, John Kasich, and Mitch Daniels. ALEC legislative programs include lobbying for charter schools, challenging teachers unions, revisiting school curricula to include materials that deny climate change, and more effectively celebrate the successes of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history.

The conservative Bradley Foundation, has awarded $400 million over the last decade to organizations supporting school vouchers, right-to-work laws, traditional marriage laws, and global warming deniers. Two of the four recipients of the organization's 2013 award for support of “American democratic capitalism” were Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News, and Purdue President Mitch Daniels.

Associations which lobby for restricting academic freedom in higher education include David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the National Association of Scholars, funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations among others. NAS seeks to bring together scholars whose work opposes multiculturalism, affirmative action, concerns about climate change, and the “liberal” bias in academia.

NAS current president Peter Wood contributed a blog article in the Chronicle on Higher Education on July 18, 2013, entitled “Why Mitch Daniels Was Right About Howard Zinn.” Wood wrote that “a governor worth his educational salt should be calling out faculty members who cannot or will not distinguish scholarship from propaganda, or who prefer to substitute simplistic storytelling for the complexities of history.”

Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States is a history of how social movements of workers, women, people of color, native peoples, and others often left out of conventional accounts have made and can make history. This is a part of history that political and economic elites, influential organizations such as ALEC, the Bradley Foundation, and education-oriented groups like NAS do not want included in course curricula; in middle school, high school, or the university.

If education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view. It is in an environment of discussion and debate that rigorous and critical thought emerges. Efforts to expunge certain scholars such as Howard Zinn from educational curricula contradict the spirit of free and rigorous thought.

A version of this essay appeared in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, August 5, 2013.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Egypt, Popular Uprisings, and 21st Century Social Movements

Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged as a powerful charismatic figure in Middle East politics. Image from The Majalla.

Egypt, popular uprisings, and complexity
of 21st century social movements

On one side are those who remember military coups supported by the United States all around the world. On the other, the case can be made that each rupture in a society must be understood in its own historical context.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2013

Egyptian history

Egypt secured its formal independence from British colonial control in 1922. Nevertheless, the British continued to dominate Egyptian military and political life until 1952 when the “Free Officers” Movement led by Gamal Abdel Nasser launched a coup that toppled King Farouk, the British man in Egypt.

Following Egypt’s real independence Nasser emerged as a powerful charismatic figure in Middle East politics, seeking to create a zone of  "Arab Socialism.” He established economic and political ties with the former Soviet Union, initiated efforts to construct a “United Arab Republic” with Syria, and militarily opposed former European colonial powers and Israel in reference to control of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the “Six Day War” against Israel in 1967.

Nasser died in 1970 and his successor Anwar El Sadat led the Arab assault on Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Before Sadat was assassinated in 1981, Egypt reversed course, ending ties with the Soviet Union; tilted toward the West; signed the Camp David Accords with Israel under the tutelage of President Jimmy Carter; and began its long-term relationship with the United States, despite anger from the Arab world.

Egypt became one of the major recipients of United States military assistance from 1980 to the present (receiving $1.3 billion per annum). By the 1980s, the Egyptian military gained control of a large portion of the economy of the country. After Sadat’s assassination Hosni Mubarak, the third leader from the military, began his 30-year rule.

Arab Spring, the massive street mobilizations in the Middle East which started in Tunisia in January 2011, quickly spread to Egypt and elsewhere in the region. These revolts had large representations from the working class, youth, and women and others demanding democratization.

As a result of the revolt in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in February 2011, the military stepped in to replace the former dictator, Hosni Mubarak, to stabilize a country on the verge of fundamental social and economic change; established an interim military government; and constructed a new constitution that would mollify protestors, provide for elections, and at the same time would maintain its own institutional power.

Elections were held in 2012 and Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi was elected president. In the year Morsi served as Egyptian president, he declared the presidency’s ultimate power over the courts, used his position to expand the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood over the political system, repressed the 10 percent of the population affiliated with the Coptic Christian Church, stalled efforts to expand the rights of women in Egyptian society, and most recently declared Egypt’s full support of the rebels fighting against the government of Syria.

Two weeks ago a movement of young people calling themselves the rebels (the Tamarrud) circulated a call to rally in Tahrir Square. On June 30, a massive mobilization (some say the largest in modern history) was launched demanding the ouster of Morsi from office. The military issued a statement urging the Egyptian president to achieve some sort of compromise with the protestors and, when he refused, they carried out a coup putting in place an acting president. Subsequent to the coup there have been massive mobilizations in opposition to and in support of Morsi.


Economic context

In a recent article in The Guardian (July 4, 2013), Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development, scholar and reporter, discussed the state of the Egyptian economy.

Generally he characterized the Egyptian economic policy embraced at least since the 1990s as involving “structural failures rooted in an unsustainable global model of industrial civilization -- addicted to fossil fuels, wedded fanatically to casino capitalism, and convinced, ostrich-like, that somehow technology alone will save us.”

Ahmed pointed out that oil production has declined by 26 percent since 1996 and a once food sustaining economy now requires the importation of 75 percent of its wheat. Inflation has increased in recent years, particularly regarding the price of food. Egyptian debt constitutes over 80 percent of GDP and the Egyptian government began to institute neoliberal structural adjustment policies in the 1990s. The population has experienced declining safety net policies and generalized programs of austerity as experienced elsewhere in the world.

Meanwhile, financial support of the military remains unchanged. Austerity programs and increased taxes have been designed to get approval for a new $4.8 billion IMF loan. And most critical, “with 40 percent of Egyptians already below the UN poverty line of less than 2 pounds a day, Morsi’s IMF-inspired policies amounted to a form of economic warfare on the Egyptian people.”


What Now?

Debate about the legitimacy of the ouster of Morsi from office has begun to occur within the peace movement. On one side are those who remember, with good reason, military coups supported by the United States all around the world.

The brutality of the U.S.-sponsored coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, comes to mind. The Chilean people suffered from a brutal dictatorship leading to thousands of assassinations and people “disappeared,” the end to formal democracy, the crushing of trade unions, and the imposition of a brutal program of neoliberal economic policies that increased economic inequality, reduced the quality of life of most Chileans, and conformed to the dictates of the transnational capitalist class.

On the other hand, the case can be made that each rupture in a society must be understood in its own historical context.

• First, the mobilizations of June 30 can be seen as continuation of a “revolutionary” process that began in 2011 (if not earlier). Many activists at that time argued that the ouster of Mubarak is just the beginning of what will be a long process of societal transformation. They articulated the view that there were no “quick fixes;” that Mubarak, the military, and the rest of the capitalist class were the product of a larger global political economy.


• Second, even though powerful military forces should not in the main be relied on for social transformation, contexts and militaries vary. For example, Hugo Chavez came out of the Venezuelan military and he was saved from a U.S.-engineered coup by his military comrades. Most important in the Egyptian case, the military has dominated Egyptian political life since the Nasser-led ouster of British/American Egyptian puppet, King Farouk. Nasser remained enormously popular with his people until his death. On the other hand, as Democracy Now!’s Sharif Abdel Kouddous points out, the political instability brought on by Morsi’s policies threatened not only his regime but the special status of the military.


• Third, Egyptian history, conveniently forgotten by the media and political pundits, suggests that Nasser led a campaign to create a coalition of secular states, even using the word “socialism” to describe his vision. Even though his vision and practice were flawed, Nasser was one of those first generation of post-colonial leaders supporting what Vijay Prashad called “the third world project.” In other words, he was a secular, radical nationalist. From the 1950s on, ironically, United States policy has often tilted toward supporting “Political Islam,” that is regimes and movements which embrace religious fundamentalism and represent little or no threat to the global political economy. United States funding of Osama Bin Laden in his war against the secular regime in Afghanistan is a glaring example.


• Fourth, political analysts, from academia and the Left, have a fetishized conception of democracy. Democracy as it is conventionally understood is about process. While important, periodically going to a voting booth and choosing between a selection of candidates for public office is only part of a more holistic conception of democracy. Democracy is procedural and it is substantive. In other words, democracy is about choosing candidates and policies and it is also about providing for the fulfillment of human needs. If 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, democracy in the substantive sense is woefully inadequate.


• Finally, what we may call 21st century social movements are spreading all across the globe. Tunisia, Tahrir Square in Egypt, Greece, Spain, Chile, Quebec, the industrial heartland of the United States, and occupiers everywhere constitute a new politics that only partially conform to traditional models of mobilizing for social change. Indeed we celebrate the mass movements for the eight-hour day, the right of industrial workers to form unions, poor people’s campaigns, anti-war mobilizations, and public campaigns to save the environment.

The historic role of socialist organizations and visions remains critical to 21st century social transformations. But the programmatic character of contemporary mobilizations; the inspirational connectivity of movements across borders, classes, genders, and races; and the recognition by participants that each is part of a historic process may be somewhat new.

Social movements today often see the need to “compromise” with institutions such as the military to advance the condition of the people. At the same time, as the movement in Egypt suggests, they remain mindful of the limitations of alliances of convenience.

Therefore, there are lessons from Egypt for the peace movement in the United States. Peace activists should analyze moments of instability and change in their historical, economic, cultural, and political complexity. They need to assess specific situations to understand which social forces are more likely to represent the values that they support.

Then in each concrete case they should ask how activism in the United States can best support the just struggles of 21st century social movements.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Social Movements and the Forces of Reaction

Image from KXL.com.
Progressive social movements and
the reactionary forces that oppose them

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / February 29, 2012

“Of course, Big Labor's coercion of employees into paying union dues to subsidize its political agenda isn't new, since this practice is as old as the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). But with AFL-CIO president John Sweeney beating his chest about the Federation's political spending, the coercion of workers to fund the AFL-CIO's political operations became news.” -- National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Inc, September 9, 1997

“A source with direct knowledge of decision-making at Komen's headquarters in Dallas said the grant-making criteria were adopted with the deliberate intention of targeting Planned Parenthood. The criteria's impact on Planned Parenthood and its status as the focus of government investigations were highlighted in a memo distributed to Komen affiliates in December.” -- Associated Press, February 7, 2012

"WHEREAS, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was founded in 1970 with the mission of increasing voter participation, delivering services to inner-city neighborhoods, community organizing, and carrying out issue campaigns; (followed by a list of financial and other transgressions)

THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that ALEC calls on all states to immediately end support for ACORN and groups linked to ACORN." -- From the website of the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC)

Academics define social movements in different ways and believe they arise for a variety of reasons. They can come from groups that already exist, a growing availability of resources, the rise of crises of one sort or another, and/or from specific issues.

Such movements may take a long time to gestate and grow, or emerge in moments of spontaneity, sometimes rising from inspirational examples. Often they have their roots in the need to react to powerful and negative initiatives by opposing political or economic groups.

The forces of reaction may have as their project immediate efforts to destroy existing rights or prerogatives embedded in public policies. In addition they may see in the policies and groups they oppose the seeds of new ideas that could lead to fundamental social changes that must be challenged.

While reactionary forces may arise to oppose specific changes in policy, their most important legacy is the long-term efforts they employ to crush organizations of people that could see the need for fundamental social change. Therefore, as in the cases of labor, women’s rights, and people’s movements, reactionary forces are fundamentally committed to long-term organizing, rolling back the very forces that have provided some services to those not part of the ruling class.

We can see examples of the rise of social movements out of reactionary programs in the recent battles over “Right-to-Work for less” legislation in the state of Indiana and the spreading campaigns to bring similar legislation to states throughout the industrial heartland. Right-to-Work campaigns have followed on efforts to diminish worker power to destroy rights of public employees to organize and to make difficult worker organizing in any venue.

The data comparing the conditions of workers in Right-to-Work states with others clearly shows that the former experience lower wages, health benefits, ashop-floor safety, and their families fewer rights to health care and retirement security.

More generally, in a thorough recent report on the role of unions in American life, the authors of a Center for American Progress Action Fund study (David Madland and Nick Bunker) point out that virtually every positive social change in the United States has received strong support from organized labor. Historically, during periods of high union density (high percentages of workers in unions), all American workers have benefited in terms of wages, benefits, and workplace rights.

In addition, organized labor has been among the strongest institutional supporters of the Democratic Party, and on occasion, some trade unionists have supported progressive third party campaigns (from the Henry Wallace campaign for president in 1948 to Green Party campaigns by candidate Ralph Nader).

Further, the existence of a vibrant labor movement is vital for workers everywhere. Those who oppose organized labor, such as the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation quoted above, do so for reasons of short term gain. Right-to-Work laws may weaken unions, lead to declining wages, and create larger profits.

But more important, destroying the labor movement and the very idea that workers have rights and those rights have the potential of being realized in strong organizations of their making seems vital to economic and political elites who are always striving to create a society dominated even more by industrial and finance capital.

Trade unions, while driven by the defense of basic interests today, imply the possibility of creating a society that privileges worker rights and democracy. From the standpoint of big capital, this remains the ultimate danger that must be stamped out.

Just as trade unions embody the possibility of real democracy for workers, women’s rights to make choices about their own bodies constitute the same kind of immediate and long-term reality. The signature target of the reactionary right is Planned Parenthood of America. Planned Parenthood provides a broad array of reproductive health services for women, particularly poor women. Only a small percentage of their resources are allocated for abortions.

In addition the mission of Planned Parenthood is to create the conditions in which each individual can manage his/her own fertility, what they refer to as “reproductive self-determination.” To achieve this goal Planned Parenthood works to provide reproductive and comprehensive health care, including advocating public policies to achieve the mission.

Reactionary forces, from the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) to various national anti-abortion groups, and most recently Susan Komen for the Cure (ostensibly apolitical) have mobilized not only to shrink Planned Parenthood services to women but to eliminate the organization itself.

For some, abortion is anathema for theological reasons. But for most, Planned Parenthood represents institutionally the basic rights of women to control their own bodies and by implication the provision of accessible and comprehensive health care.

The rising of the poor, women and men, black and white, employed and unemployed, the young and old, constitutes another fundamental challenge to the economic and political power of reactionary forces in America.

Organizations such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), until it was destroyed by an orchestrated campaign of lies in 2010, received public funding to support programs for low and moderate income families. It promoted voter registration in communities, and advocated for health care reform, public housing, and living wage legislation.

From the vantage point of economic and political elites, power and privilege could be challenged in cities and towns across America if community organizations such as ACORN developed programs of action and service.

These three organizations together represent labor, women, and grassroots poor people’s campaigns. They are the embodiment of popular forces which seek to end exploitation, sexism, and racism. Implicitly they stand for the construction of a different kind of society in which these pathologies do not exist.

That is why all three -- organized labor, Planned Parenthood, and ACORN -- have been and continue to be under assault. And that is why progressive campaigns need to be organized around the fundamental connections between class, gender, and race and to defend labor, women’s, and community organizations.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Robert Jensen : The Power and Limits of Social Movements

Image from The Democracy Center.
The power -- and limits -- of social movements

Dissidents not only have to be willing to tell the truth about the delusions of the dominant culture, but make sure we don’t fall into delusions of our own.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2011

Listen to Thorne Dreyer's July 8, 2011 interview with Robert Jensen on Rag Radio, and watch Jeff Zavala's video of the show, posted on The Rag Blog.

[A version of this essay was presented in a talk to the Houston Peace and Justice Center conference on July 9, 2011.]

In mainstream politics in the United States, everyone agrees on one thing: We’re number one. We’re special. We’re America. We’re on top, where we deserve to be.

In dissident politics in the United States, we have long argued that this quest for economic and military dominance can’t be squared with basic moral and political principles. We’re on top, but it’s unjust and unsustainable.

Whether or not the United States has ever had a legitimate claim to that top spot -- or whether there should be spots on top for any nation(s) -- the days of uncontested dominance are over: Our economy is in permanent decline and our military power continues to fade. We are still the wealthiest society in history, but we are no longer the dynamic heart of the global economy. Our military is still able to destroy at will, but the wars of the past decade have demonstrated the limits of that barbarism.

How should the U.S. public react to this shift? One approach would be to acknowledge that predatory corporate capitalism based on greed and First World imperialism based on violence have produced obscene levels of inequality, both within societies and between societies, that are inconsistent with those basic moral and political principles. Our task is to reshape systems and institutions before it’s too late.

That kind of critical self-reflection also leads to the conclusion that our society not only fails on the criterion of social justice but also is ecologically unsustainable. We are a profligate, consumption-mad society, in a world in which unsustainable living arrangements are the norm in the developed world and spreading quickly in the developing world.

We can’t predict the time frame for collapse if we continue on this trajectory, but we can be reasonably certain that without major changes in our relationship to the larger living world the ecosphere will at some point (likely within decades) be unable to support large-scale human life as we know it.

These crises, if honestly acknowledged and squarely faced, would test our capacity to analyze and adapt -- there’s no guarantee that enough time remains to prevent catastrophe. Without such honesty, there is no hope of a decent future.

So, the bad news is that we’re in trouble.

The worse news is that the mainstream political culture cannot face this reality.

Dissident political organizing must take into account the fact that contemporary America is deeply delusional. Our collective life is shaped by a propaganda-driven political system that ignores and evades. Political leaders -- from the reactionary right of the Republican Party to the liberal left of the Democratic Party -- are not interested in creating new systems to face these challenges but instead are mired in trivial debates about how to duct-tape together the existing social, economic, and political systems to allow us to live in our delusions a bit longer.

In addition to critiquing the delusions of the dominant culture, we dissidents have to make sure we don’t absorb those same delusions. We have to be honest not only about the promise of social movements but their limits.

My fear is that many -- maybe even most -- people who identify with progressive/left/radical politics are in denial about the depth of the crises and, therefore, prone to misjudge the potential of traditional social movements. Those of us who define ourselves by our commitment to social justice and ecological sustainability -- those who want to make the world a better place -- have to be careful to avoid delusions of our own. Here’s how this often plays out:

A dissident speaker offers a critique of some aspect of the dominant culture’s political, economic, or social systems. The task of taking on those systems seems overwhelming, and someone in the audience asks, “Is there any hope that we can change things?” The speaker acknowledges the difficulty of the task, but points out that social movements in the past have faced great challenges, lost many battles along the way, and persevered to make the world a better place.

In the United States, the speaker often cites the civil rights movement as an example: Courageous people organizing over centuries to challenge the deeply entrenched white supremacy that defined the country, ending first slavery and then formal American apartheid. The speaker reminds the audience that the work of popular movements remains incomplete and that we owe it to generations past and future -- and to ourselves -- to press on.

I’m familiar with that exchange because I’ve both been in those audiences and also been the speaker offering that analysis. It’s an honest response -- historically accurate and morally defensible -- but these days I’m less comfortable with that stock answer. Yes, we must remember the promise of social movements, inspired by past successes. But we also need to be clear about their limits in the present and future.

Let’s push the example of the civil rights movement a bit:

When Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the 1963 March on Washington, he spoke of “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” He argued that “the architects of our republic” had signed “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” which guaranteed “the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

For black Americans, that note “has come back marked insufficient funds,” King said. “We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

In 1963, King was speaking in a world that promised endless bounty, and his claim was that black people had a right to their fair share of that bounty; the metaphor of checks and banks was not only metaphorical. He spoke of political liberty, but the assumption was that with the “riches of freedom” would come, if not actual riches, certainly a more equitable share of the country’s wealth.

White America didn’t particularly like letting black -- or indigenous, Latino, Asian -- people into the winner’s circle, but once it became impossible to maintain apartheid-by-law, white folks gave a bit of ground. White society grudgingly gave that ground in the middle of a post-World War II boom that promised endless expansion. The fight for racial justice took place on a relatively stable platform of U.S. global political power and economic growth.

The same context applies to other social movements of that period fighting for workers’ rights, women’s rights, lesbian/gay rights, ecological awareness. Moving into the 1990s, it also applies to the global justice movement that focused on the economic imperialism of the First World, and even to the anti-war movement of the early 2000s.

There were, of course, ups and downs in these decades. The U.S. debacle in Southeast Asia led to doubts about U.S. power and methods, but those were washed away by the demise of the Soviet Union and the American “victory” in the Cold War at the end of the 1980s.

There were economic recessions, but they didn’t disturb a widely shared belief that the economy, over the long haul, would grow indefinitely. There was a brief period of concern in the 1970s about environmental limits, but when predictions of short-term disaster proved imprecise, most people quit worrying.

Most of the dissident political analysis and organizing of the past half century also has gone forward with an assumption of economic growth and ecological stability. The goal of much of this organizing was to make that stable, growing world a fairer place with a more just distribution of power and resources. I believe that even many of those fighting against U.S. domination of the world expected -- and wanted -- to live in a world in which the United States remained if not central and obscenely wealthy, at least important and comfortable.

The old future? Art by A.C. Radebaugh / x-ray delta one / Flickr.
To borrow a phrase from songwriter John Gorka, that is the old future, and the old future’s gone -- dead and gone, never to return. While the dominant culture may indulge its delusions of endless bounty, that’s not how the cards are falling. What does that mean for political dissidents? With so many variables and contingencies, any attempt at specific prediction can’t be taken seriously. But we have to do our best to anticipate what is coming so that we can organize as effectively as possible.

The key shift: We will be organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion. There will be less of a lot of things we have come to take for granted (energy and natural resources) and more of other things we’ve been hiding under the rug for a long time (toxic residue and environmental disruption).

That less/more reality in the physical world will no doubt have an effect on our political/economic/social worlds. It may well be that the liberal tolerance that has been hard-won by subordinated groups will evaporate rather quickly with intensified competition to acquire energy resources and avoid toxic disruptions. A willingness to share power and wealth during times of abundance doesn’t automatically endure in times of scarcity. Scapegoating, a time-honored tactic, is especially useful during hard times.

My concerns about this are exacerbated by two trends in contemporary society: a diminished capacity for empathy and a dwindling connection to the natural world.

On empathy: Capitalism defines human beings as primarily greedy, self-interested animals designed to maximize their own position, especially in the acquisition of material goods and status. That instinct obviously is part of our nature, but -- just as obviously -- that is not all there is to human nature; given the long evolutionary history of humans in band-level societies defined by solidarity and cooperation, we should assume the greedy instincts probably are not primary.

Yet in capitalism that sociopathic instinct is rewarded and reinforced. With each generation that lives in such a system, our capacity for empathy is undermined. This is not an argument against individuality or for complete subordination to the collective, but merely recognition of one of the ugliest aspects of capitalism -- the belief that we can ignore the fate of others and still make a decent world.

On nature: In a high-energy/high-technology society that is increasingly mass-mediated, with each generation we grow more alienated from the larger living world. Just as capitalism undermines our connections to each other, industrial society undermines our connections to other species and the ecosystems on which we depend. The industrial world is a dead world, and our immersion in that world makes it harder for us to see what is dying.

This is not an argument against all technology or human’s use of our creative capacity to change our environment, but merely recognition of one of the scariest aspects of modernity -- the belief that we can ignore the living world and still live in the world.

There is nothing terribly new in these warnings. Let’s go back to the civil rights movement and another of King’s memorable speeches,"Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” delivered on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. In his critique of the U.S. attack on Vietnam and the larger forces behind that attack, King said:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Ask yourself, where do we stand on the struggle to move from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society? What about our obsession with machines and computers? The culture’s worship of profit motives and property rights? How much progress have the past four decades of progress brought?

None of this is a call to abandon organizing or sink into the paralysis of despair. It’s simply a suggestion that we deal with reality. Is the sky falling? Of course not, because the sky doesn’t fall -- that’s the wrong metaphor. Better to ask, is the sky darkening?

What is my program for organizing in a world beneath a darkened sky? I have no program, only some observations and tentative conclusions, maybe nothing more than gut instincts.

First, we should focus on creating more actual physical spaces and real human networks based on progressive/left/radical values, putting as much energy as needed to anchor and solidify them, even if it takes time away from issue-oriented campaigns. As we work on specific policy issues, let’s organize with an eye toward building not coalitions but communities. In hard times, coalitions evaporate, but communities have a shot at surviving.

Second, whatever projects we pursue, there should be a component that connects people to the non-human world and includes physical work in that world. We need not disconnect completely from our abstract analytical work and computers, but every project should give us a chance to do physical work with others, outdoors as much as possible.

Those first two instincts have led me to redirect a considerable amount of my time, energy, and money to a progressive community center we are building in Austin, Texas, called 5604 Manor. There is important and exciting organizing and advocacy work going on there, but just as important is the community-building activity as we renovate the building, clean up the back yard, plant gardens, and get to know each other across lines of age, race, and language.

These instincts are captured in the first stanza of William Stafford’s poem, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”:

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

My third instinct may seem obvious: We need to tell all the truths that we know and feel. My sense is that this is our most difficult task, to speak honestly of the darkening sky. In the dominant culture, such talk is most often ignored -- people either refuse to listen, laugh it off, or deride it as defeatist. Even in dissident circles, attempts to discuss these subjects bluntly often lead people to disengage or demand that I only speak in a positive manner.

But every day there are more people -- though still a small minority -- who want to face what is coming, even though such a reckoning deepens our grief. Our task is to speak aloud what others may feel but may be afraid to voice. Perhaps the most radical act today is to speak the truth about a darkening sky and remain committed to organizing, knowing there is no guarantee we can endure, let alone prevail.

This spirit is captured in the last stanza of Stafford’s poem:

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give -- yes, no, or maybe --
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

The potential power of social movements at this moment in history flows from this commitment to speaking the truth -- not truth to power, which is too invested in its delusions to listen -- but truth to each other.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009) and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Zaid Jilani : Arab Countries Where the 'Jasmine Revolution' Could Spread

Algerian riot Police scuffle with protesters in Algiers, Algeria, Saturday. Thousands defied a government ban on demonstrations,but were outnumbered by police. Photo by Sidali Djarboub / AP.
Who's next?
The ‘Jasmine Revolution’ and the Arab world

By Zaid Jilani / ThinkProgress / February 14, 2011

Last month, the world was shocked as the Tunisian autocrat Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled his country for 23 years, was overthrown in a protest movement that lasted only 29 days. The event was soon dubbed the “Jasmine Revolution,” a symbolic reference to a blooming flower.

While many doubted that this revolution would spread, it was only days later that massive protests rocked Cairo, resulting in the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power for more than 30 years. While the fate of both countries is still unresolved, one thing is clear: the people are demanding democracy, and they have forced massive changes in their government to get it.

Now, many are wondering if this pro-democracy movement that swept Tunisia and Egypt will spread throughout the rest of the Arab world. ThinkProgress has assembled a short list of other autocratic regimes in the region that are facing protests, particularly today, and which may soon be the next to go in the Middle East’s next “Jasmine Revolution”:

• ALGERIA: Algeria has been in the iron grip of a military government since 1991, when the regime canceled elections after an Islamist party won the first round. This set off a bloody civil war in the country, which peaked in violence between 1993 and 1997. In recent days, Algerians, inspired by their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbors, have organized large protest marches demanding democratic reforms.
  
  On Saturday, Feb. 12, despite officials outlawing the protest, nearly 10,000 people marched in Algiers anyway, facing off with three times as many riot police. Perhaps fearing that they will be the targets of the next revolution, Algerian officials recently announced that they will be lifting the country’s own emergency law -- which has been in place for decades -- in the “very near future.”


• BAHRAIN: Bahrain’s Sunni leader, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, has long oppressed his country’s Shi’a-majority population. Last August, his ruling party arrested hundreds of Shi’a activists and shut down the main opposition party’s websites right before the parliamentary election, fearing that it may lose its grip on power.
  
  Yet recent events in the Middle East have the king fearing for his rule, too. He has ordered “a hike in food subsidies and reinstated welfare support for low-income families to compensate for inflation,” and was to deliver a speech Sunday where he was expected to offer further concessions. Additionally, Bahrain’s government announced that it will be giving $2,650 to each Bahraini family. Yet pro-democracy activists planned to march Monday anyway, demanding real reforms in the country.


• JORDAN: Likely also fearing a Tunisian-style revolution, Jordan’s King Abdullah sacked his government and appointed a new Prime Minister at the beginning of this month. Yet some of the largest protests in modern history have rocked the nation in recent weeks, indicating that Jordanians do not see the concessions as enough. In perhaps a sign of the regime’s weakness, President Obama dispatched Adm. Mike Mullen, the head of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to meet with Abdullah this weekend.


• SYRIA: Earlier this month, protesters planned a “day of rage” where they would protest their grievances against the unelected president Basher al-Assad. While the protesters ended up being few in number, the regime did deploy its security services in increased numbers across the country, visibly fearful of a protest movement like the ones in Egypt and Tunisia. The government also lifted a five-year ban on Facebook, in a move widely seen as appeasing a nascent protest movement.


• YEMEN: The president of Yemen, “one of America’s foremost allies” in the region, promised to step down in 2013, as his people began to demonstrate against the ruling elite. Saturday, thousands of pro-regime demonstrators attacked anti-government demonstrators with clubs and knives, an eerie parallel to an Egyptian tactic that failed to quell protests and destroyed the regime’s public reputation and international support.

An American abroad in Yemen captured the protests there, where Yemenis spontaneously erupted in protest and began marching to the country’s own iconic capital square — which is actually named Tahrir, just like Egypt’s. Watch it:



This list is far from comprehensive, as movements are being organized in a number of other countries such as Saudi Arabia and Oman. Whether these movements will ultimately be successful is unknown, but they symbolize a growing grassroots call for democracy that has been virtually unseen in the region. Given that the United States is a sponsor of many of the intelligence and military apparatuses of these countries and a close ally to their governments, we have not just an opportunity but a responsibility to work with the people towards a more democratic future.

• Update: Algeria has moved to restrict access to Facebook and Twitter in order to stop protests

[Zaid Jilani is a reporter for ThinkProgres and The Progress Report at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. He is a co-founder of Stand Up Magazine, a co-editor at the Georgia-based blog Georgia Liberal and on staff at BasedonBooks, the first website ever dedicated to movie reviews of book adaptations. This article was originall posted at ThinkProgress and was distributed by Truthout.]

ITN News has coverage of the protests in Algeria and Yemen:



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Carl Davidson : Obama, the Democrats, and the Months Ahead

Carl Davidson. Photo by Thomas Good / Next Left Notes.
A report and perspective from the rust belt:
Obama, the Democrats and the months ahead

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / December 28, 2009

Carl Davidson will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Tuesday, December 29, 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. Carl will reflect on Obama's year and take a look at what's ahead for the Left. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

BEAVER COUNTY, PA -- I've been hearing from too many left activists who are simply fed up with the Democrats and want to leave the electoral arena -- and just when the battles there are getting really interesting, even if we don't have prospects of major victories. To my way of thinking, our present task is to deepen the divisions there, not walk away from them.

The sooner we stop thinking of the "Democratic Party" as if it were a single entity, the better off we will be. That's why "Democrat control of Congress" is an illusion. The GOP Blue Dog faction in the Democratic Party combined with the regular GOP make it at least a draw. That's why everything positive gets gutted and turned into its opposite.

The progressive majority's forces are pretty much limited to the Progressive Caucus, the Black Caucus and the Latino Caucus, and not even all of them. We are a minority force in those upper spheres, not an emerging majority like we are at the base. We can grow to a larger minority in Congress, but to get a true majority, we'd likely have to split both major parties, and we are not close to having that strength yet.

Otherwise, we are mainly limited to passing things where there is a deep divide in finance capital and other big capital at the top, and where one side of it becomes an indirect ally. That may be shaping up on the Afghan war.

But small and medium-sized capital, as well as some larger sectors of productive capital, have yet to stand up to finance capital on HR 676 even though it's in their interest to do so. We'll just have to continue our "long march through the institutions" to get it. A carbon tax, immigration reform, and EFCA are going to be even more difficult.

At this point, we have two interconnected mass democratic tasks. Building the left-progressive pole inside and outside the Dems with groups like PDA and other independent forums, and dividing the GOP right to smash the Teabaggers and their allies. Neither is easy, but starting with a clear head helps a lot.

Here in Beaver County in western Pennsylvania we have about 200 or so PDA people and another few dozen Beaver County Peace Links activists. Almost all are blue collar workers or retirees. We, in this sense, are the active antiwar forces here, as well as the active left-progressive side of the spectrum among the unions and a few other groups.

There isn't much else, save for the Tom Merton Center, the religious-liberal-green-anarchist bunch in nearby Pittburgh. Together with the unions, they pulled out 10,000 for the G20. We took part in it as best as we could. All told, about 6,000 of the 10,000 were from the wider Pittsburgh region and the nearby campuses. That's our activist core viewed more widely.

Nonetheless a majority of our county, and certainly a majority of Dem voters, are critical of the wars -- but they have yet to take any action other than voting. It's our task to find the activities they will take up, like coming to a vigil or attending an antiwar educational, or even just honking their horns at our weekly vigils.

For the Healthcare not Warfare Afghan war protests here a few weeks ago, we got out about 60 people in the rain and cold. Not bad, considering. At least half those attending were wearing their union jackets. Besides us, the speakers were union folks and local Dem officials, plus Tim Carpenter from PDA. The speeches pushed and warned Obama, but didn't attack him personally. They told him what he had to do in order to succeed.

If we didn't take this approach, working with local Dems, I'd guess we could get out less than 10 people, if anyone bothered at all.

Our next project is to make use of Bob Greenwald's Rethink Afghanistan from Brave New Films. One of our allies showed it last month at a college in the next county. Plus finding ways to work with the Steelworkers on their new collaborative with the Mondragon Coops.

If you think our strategy is reducible to "supporting Obama," you don't understand it. To be precise, our strategy here is to aim the main blow at low-road neoliberal finance capital and its right wing populist allies, allying with high road neoKeynesian initiatives at the top, while developing the left-center coalition among labor, minorities, women and youth at the base.

We do that in the form of expanding our PDA group; it's platform is Out Now, HR 676, Green Jobs, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), Carbon Tax and Debt Relief. Within that, among the advanced, a few of us do revolutionary socialist education that targets neo-Keynesianism as well. We work with Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and that way we grow CCDS in size, too.

That's the political and class substance of it. Where Obama stands, and where we stand in relation to him, depends on the ebb and flow. We oppose him where he's wrong, support him where he's right, and defend him versus the racist onslaughts of the right.

So yes, I'm suggesting that people elsewhere do likewise -- although I'm well aware that conditions vary, and adjustments are required.

If one of the left antiwar coalitions thinks they can pull off a march on DC, we'll probably rent a bus or two, fill them, and go to it. If we do, we'll try to network horizontally with others like ourselves, perhaps even meet after the march for a confab of some sort.

But we are not interested in wasting energy or resources getting into national pissing matches and intrigues over slogans and speakers. We'll simply bring the slogans that make sense to us. But in the end, the antiwar forces need to be reoriented and rebuilt at the base, in alliance with the growth in class struggle activity around the economy.

That's what we're doing, and have been doing for some time. Other approaches may point to the future as well, and I'm wide open to hearing about them.

Carl Davidson became widely known in the American left as a national officer of SDS (1966-68), as a writer and editor of the New Left newsweekly The Guardian, and as a leader of the anti-Vietnam war movement. In later years, he took up the study of the social impact of technology and the revolutions in communication and high-tech production. Together with Jerry Harris, he is the author of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age.

Most recently Carl worked as webmaster for Progressives for Obama, an independent left-progressive voice in the campaign (now renamed as Progressive America Rising). He is also a leader in the U.S. socialist movement, serving as a national co-chair of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. A longtime resident of Chicago, he recently moved back to the Western Pennsylvania milltowns where he was born and his family resides.

• For previous articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog, go here.
• Also see One Worker, One Vote: U.S. Steelworkers to Experiment with Factory Ownership, Mondragon Style by Carl Davidson / SolidarityEconomy.net / Oct. 27, 2009.

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Deadly Environment : Latin American Anti-Mining Activists Murdered

A close up of murdered anti-mining activist Marcelo Rivera's eyes on a mural painted in front of the cultural center that he founded in San Isidro, El Salvador. Photo by Dominque Jarry-Shore / The Dominion.
Grassroots movements met with deadly violence:
Mining faces challenges in Latin America

By Val Liveoak / The Rag Blog / December 27, 2009

See 'Who Killed Marcelo Rivera? Prominent anti-mining activist murdered in El Salvador,' by Dominique Jarry-Shore, and 'Chiapas Anti-Mining Organizer Murdered,' by Kristen Bricker, Below.

There are many grassroots struggles against corporate domination going on in the Empire that we hear little about. I would argue that the military coup in Honduras was triggered in large part by these issues, and I am aware of similar struggles in Mexico, Colombia, and Costa Rica, not to mention West Virginia, Canada and the American West. And now, with the article below, in El Salvador.

Mining companies are the epitome of an extractive industry; typically flaunting concerns about health, labor issues, and the environment, they focus on ripping out tons of earth to get ounces of ore, which is almost always exported outside of the region (and in many cases outside the country) in which it is produced.

And the profits also leave the area as fast as possible. In order to increase their profits, companies must pay the lowest possible wages for hard, dangerous and dirty work, and generally use poisonous chemicals on site, mostly failing to keep them from entering local water, and air. Then they leave behind an ugly and ravaged landscape that can never return to a condition that will even minimally support life without costly rehabilitation -- which they never do voluntarily.

The growing world concern with environmental issues has little success when up against these multinational corporations. Not only is it hard to take on the powerful behemoths, but they do their work (their dirty work) in isolated areas, and often control access to their sites, preventing most people from seeing the ugliness, the near enslavement of the miners, and the effects of the poisons -- many slow acting -- that seep into the earth. Think black lung, mercury poisoning, massive fish kills, hundreds of acres of moonscapes where before there were verdant mountains.

And like other industries that would exploit and extract the most from "their" resources, they are always ready to persecute, threaten, or kill opponents, whether they are labor leaders, environmental activists, concerned local residents, or terminally ill employees.

While global warming was on most minds at the climate conference in Copenhagen, Ecuador offered an innovative way to confront both the local negative effects of the petroleum industry -- an archetype of an extractive industry -- and the long term effects to the earth and the atmosphere of the consumption of the product: they offered to leave newly found Amazonian petroleum in the ground in exchange for financial support for other types of investment in their country.

It is a shame that El Salvador's celebrated FMLN President does not have such a -- dare I say it -- revolutionary offer to make. Instead, as we see from the article below, he will need to be pushed to provide even the simplest protection for Salvadorans who are struggling against a goliath of a company.

Please see the two stories about murdered mining activists in El Salvador and in Chiapas, Mexico, below.

[Texan Val Liveoak is a nonviolent activist currently dividing her time between El Salvador and San Antonio. She coordinates Peacebuilding en las Americas, the Latin American Initiative of Friends Peace Teams that also has programs in the African Great Lakes region and in Indonesia.]

Esaparición y asesinato del activista Marcelo Rivera

His relatives, friends, neighbors. His students from the school, attendees of his art workshops, colleagues of the association (ASIC). His comrades from the party, his partners in the anti-mining fight [in El Salvador]. Everyone. Perhaps even his murderers.

Almost always it is the family members and closest friends who say goodbye to a fallen one by crying profusely. It is rare at a funeral to see everyone in attendance crying. The burial of Gustavo Marcelo Rivera Moreno is one of those exceptional cases, hundreds of children, youth and elders, men and women, all crying together...

-- The Media Coop

Who Killed Marcelo Rivera?
Prominent anti-mining activist murdered in El Salvador

By Dominique Jarry-Shore / December 16, 2009

SAN ISIDRO, El Salvador -- Death and violence are an unfortunate part of everyday life in El Salvador. Local and national newspapers, with their graphic photos of bloodied corpses, track the daily tally of homicide and crime in a country that has one of the highest murder rates in the world. But even by those standards Marcelo Rivera’s torture and death were shocking.

During the evening of June 18, 2009, the community leader and anti-mining activist disappeared when he was lured away from a routine trip a few kilometers from his home in San Isidro. Twelve days later, his body was removed from an empty well 27 meters deep. His body had no hair or fingernails, his trachea had been broken and the thumb of his right hand was stuck in his mouth like a baby’s, tied in place with a piece of rope around his naked body. He had been beaten and his face was unrecognizable.

Rivera was a respected member of the community. He founded a cultural center popular with youth in San Isidro, and had been in charge of the finances of the local chapter of the FMLN, the country’s leftist and currently ruling political party. He had also campaigned vigorously against the El Dorado mining project in Cabanas, owned by Canadian company Pacific Rim Mining Corp.

Vancouver-based Pacific Rim is a publicly traded company that has subsidiaries in El Salvador and the U.S. The company is a junior exploration company that specializes in gold exploration. Pacific Rim has invested $80 million into the El Dorado project in about seven years. They claim to have invested several million dollars in social programs in Cabanas.

But the project has generated conflict in a region characterized by poverty and a dependence on remittances from family members in the U.S. Money provided by Pacific Rim for health and education is seen as a way of buying support from the people and tension is high between those for and against the mine.

The environmental effects of the mine, such as the contamination of soil and water sources like aquifers and wells, are a big worry among residents in Cabanas. Some community members have also complained about the displacement of communities to make room for the mine. On a social level, the arrival of Pacific Rim has generated conflict and violence in the area.

Apart from Rivera’s death, there have been two assassination attempts that seem to be related to anti-mining activism: In July, a priest who hosts a local radio show used as a platform for his anti-mining stance was run off the road. A few weeks later, the leader of a local community development association that is against the mine was shot eight times. Both men now have 24-hour police protection.

Rivera’s brother Miguel Rivera said his brother’s murder has caused fear among those opposed to the project. “People we work with who are against the mining project are afraid because someone has died,” he said. “They say, ‘I could be the second one. I could be next.’”

According to lawyer and activist Hector Berrios, Marcelo Rivera had already been the victim of death threats and at least one assassination attempt near his home in January 2009. “The question is,” Berrios said, “who benefited from Marcelo’s death?”

For his part, Pacific Rim CEO Tom Shrake said the company condemns violence and has spoken to employees to see if they know anything about the murder.

“They have assured us that they had absolutely nothing to do with it,” Shrake said in a telephone interview from his hotel in San Salvador.

“As far as they know—and I’ve heard this from the local police as well—his death had nothing to do with his mining activism. Now whether that’s true or not we’ll see. But we have no knowledge of it.”

That police theory -- that Rivera’s death was related to a gang dispute after a night of drinking and not his anti-mining activity -- didn’t make sense to Rivera’s family when they heard it. Rivera was not someone who associated with gang members and he didn’t drink alcohol.

“The police invented a scenario to be able to tell people something, because a lot of people were asking about Marcelo,” Miguel Rivera said. “The police theory was that he was killed the same day he disappeared, or early the next day.” But the doctors who examined Marcelo’s body told Miguel that his brother died about eight days after he disappeared.

That was just one of several inconsistencies in the case. Following a complaint they received from Marcelo’s family, El Salvador’s Public Attorney’s Office for the Defense of Human Rights found there had been negligence on the part of the police.

“We found some failures in terms of the lateness in mobilizing to do inspections in places where the body could be,” Gerardo Alegria, a lawyer for the Public Attorney for the Defense of Human Rights, said. “That includes where they found the body. The police had known for a few days already that the body was there.”

Alegria also said the police failed to gather information at the scene that would have helped solve the crime. His office is now keeping an eye on the investigation and Alegria said things have improved. Five adults and one minor have been arrested so far and are awaiting a hearing. But in this part of the world, there is a lot to be said about intellectual versus physical perpetrators of a crime, and questions remain about who was really behind the killing.

Meanwhile El Dorado has been at a standstill. The company stopped investing serious money into the mine about two years ago, when Tony Saca, president of El Salvador at the time, made public statements indicating Pacific Rim’s permits would not be honoured.

Pacific Rim has since filed for arbitration under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), although Shrake said he is confident a settlement will be reached.

As for local opposition to the project, Shrake said that is something that was expected all along. “There’s just a huge international industry that opposes any extractive industry anywhere in the world at this point. So if you don’t expect opposition to any extractive project, you’re living in a closet,” he said.

“You will have people who are emotional about it and are in your face about it but you have to act like Mahatma Ghandi. You cannot react in any way, shape or form.”

Gold mining, a practice that relies on cyanide or mercury for extraction, has long come under fire from environmentalists because of its potential for contamination. Pacific Rim markets itself as an environmentally responsible company that has “raised the bar for environmental protection.”

According to Shrake, the El Dorado design will use two impermeable liners to prevent tailings from coming in contact with the ground. They’ll also use a process called INCO to destroy the cyanide used and they’ll build their own water reservoir instead of using groundwater, purifying the water before it goes back into the water system.

Environmentalist Luis Gonzalez works with the Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UNES) in San Salvador. “It’s a concept, but on an industrial level, green mining doesn’t exist,” he said. “By definition what you’re doing is extracting a non-renewable resource.”

Gonzalez said the INCO process recycles only part of the cyanide and the rest goes into the ground. “Exploration is like exploitation on a smaller scale,” he said, noting people in Cabanas reported their wells and watering holes dried up after exploration activity by Pacific Rim.

Shrake said that was one incident involving some shoddy work on the part of a contractor and that it won’t happen again.

“Once we realized what had happened, within a day we set up a series of tanks so that they’d have water while we corrected the problem... We went back to the drill holes and cemented them from bottom to top and plugged up this disruption to the fracture system and the water’s flowing again, and has been flowing since we made the correction.”

While the future of El Dorado remains unclear, Miguel Rivera has gone ahead and set up the Marcelo Rivera Justice and Freedom Committee. He is holding out hope that his brother’s murderer will be brought to justice.

“He was my brother. Ever since we were little we spent a lot of time together and shared ideas. When we started finding out more about the impacts of mining we started spreading information to people. Marcelo was the person who had a relationship with the community.”

[Dominique Jarry-Shore is a freelance journalist based in Chiapas, Mexico. She traveled to El Salvador with the help of a grant from the International Development Research Center in Ottawa.]

Source / The Dominion

Anti- mining activist was shot to death Dec. 27. Mariano Abarca. Photo from narocsphere.

And in Mexico:
Chiapas anti-mining organizer murdered

Mariano Abarca led a growing movement to kick Canadian mining companies out of Mexican communities

By Kristin Bricker / December 1, 2009

CHIAPAS, Mexico -- Mariano Abarca Roblero, one of Mexico’s most prominent anti-mining organizers, was shot to death on the evening of November 27, 2009, in front of his house in Chicomuselo, Chiapas. He left behind a wife and four children. Another man was wounded in the shooting.

The incident came just days after Abarca filed charges against two Blackfire employees, Ciro Roblero Perez and Luis Antonio Flores Villatoro, for threatening to shoot him if he didn’t stop organizing against Canadian mining company Blackfire’s barium mine in Chicomuselo.

According to a formal complaint filed by a government employee who works in the Chicomuselo municipal building, Roblero Perez arrived at the municipal building to say that he had gone to look for Abarca to “fuck him up in a hail of bullets.” He also reportedly said that Abarca and other people were on a list of people Blackfire management wants to hurt. Blackfire public relations manager Luis Antonio Flores Villatoro was mentioned in the government employee’s complaint as one of the people responsible for the list.

Ejido authorities from the Nueva Morelia ejido in Chicomuselo county took the complaint seriously and helped Abarca launch an investigation. The day before the murder, Roblero Perez and Flores Villatoro were summoned to testify regarding the alleged death threats, but they failed to appear.

[An ejido is commonly-held land traditionally managed by assembly.]

A history of harassment

Even though local authorities acted to try to protect Abarca, the Mexican Network of People Affected by Mining (REMA) blames the Chiapas state government for failing to protect the mining leader. On the contrary, the state government seems to have been complicit in Blackfire’s legal harassment of Abarca.

On August 17, 2009, unidentified armed men in unmarked cars kidnapped Abarca as he was leaving an elementary school in Chicomuselo. He had visited the school to request permission on behalf of his organization, REMA, to use the building for an anti-mining meeting scheduled for August 29-30.

The kidnappers turned out to be police. They had arrested Abarca on charges filed by Blackfire regarding a June-July 2009 highway blockade REMA set up to prevent the passage of Blackfire trucks. REMA was protesting the company’s failure to comply with promises it allegedly made regarding community development projects and environmental stewardship. According to community leaders, Blackfire’s open-pit barium mine uses too much of the area’s scarce water resources. They are concerned that the pollution could effect their crop cultivation in the near future.

Acting on Blackfire’s formal complaint, the state government charged Abarca with attacks against public roadways, criminal association, organized crime, and offenses against the peace. Theoretically, organized crime charges are reserved for drug, arms, and human traffickers, and other members of Mexico’s expansive mafia network. However, the Chiapas government has been known to accuse activists and community organizers of organized crime in order to take advantage of restricted due process rights for people accused of organized crime.

That is what happened in Abarca’s case. The organized crime charge allowed the Chiapas government to imprison him under the highly controversial and internationally criticized legal instrument of “arraigo” or pre-charge detention. Under arraigo, the government can arrest a suspect and isolate him or her for months while it pressures and sometimes tortures the person into confessing.

The state government detained Abarca for eight days before it ceded to international public pressure to release him. Abarca was released and the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence. His lawyer, Miguel Angel de los Santos, criticized the Chiapas government for ceding to the mining company’s pressure to arrest Abarca. “There was no legal justification for his arrest and detention. Preliminary investigation began on June 12th, two days after the blockade, and was only just beginning to come together. The investigation had not advanced,” he told Proceso in August following Abarca’s release.

Structural adjustment strikes again

Social discontent regarding mines in Mexico has been steadily building over the past 10 years, beginning when the effects of a World Bank-mandated mining sector deregulation scheme were first felt. A confidential World Bank document entitled “Implementation Completion Report: Mexico Mining Sector Restructuring Project,” which Narco News makes available to the public, outlines exactly how a nine-year loan project drastically transformed Mexico’s mining sector.

The project, first proposed by the Word Bank in 1989 and quickly adopted by the Mexican government, aimed to deregulate the mining industry in Mexico. The Bank proposed the project because, as its Implementation Completion Report (ICR) explains,

Past lending of the Bank for mining in Mexico was oriented towards specific investment projects, with direct lines of credit to the sector... The lessons learned from those operations were that the continued development of the mining sector required increased access to land rights, reduced ownership limitations, revision of the tax legislation, a restructuring of existing institutional setups, as well as policies that stimulate private investment in mining by both domestic and foreign firms. The Bank Mining Sector Review identified an inadequate regulatory and institutional framework as the major constraint to increase private investment and further growth of the sector.

One of the Bank’s main goals for the project was to open up Mexico’s previously protected national mining industry to foreign companies; the Bank listed “open the sector to foreigners” as its first “strategy to restructure the sector.” It hoped to do so by privatizing state-owned mining companies, slashing taxes, awarding mineral and land rights to private companies, and facilitating foreign companies’ ownership of Mexican land in order to “contribute to the increased exploration and exploitation of the vast mining potential of the country, to take advantage of Mexico’s strategic location near the United States and Canada.”

The Bank proposed a set of changes to Mexican law in its Mining Sector Report, and the Mexican government -- at that point still under one-party rule -- rushed to implement them under a plan called the National Mining Modernization Program. In just four years (1990-1994), the legal framework for mining in Mexico underwent a radical change. Before the ink on the new laws was dry, the Bank began to dole out money to private mining companies to “help finance the surge in demand for investment funding that was expected to result from the improved policy and institutional setting for mining operations.”

The Bank was thrilled with the results of the National Mining Modernization Program and its subsequent loans. According to the Bank, over the course of the project, which ended in 1998, over 8.7 million hectares of land were released and 17,220 new mining concessions were granted.

As a result of the legal changes mandated by the loan, the time required for processing mining concessions went down from five years to five months, and the Mexican government’s backlog of about 14,000 concession requests that were pending since 1989 disappeared virtually overnight.

The Bank was so pleased with the results of the Mining Sector Restructuring Project that it wrote, “Future Bank participation in the sector does not seem justified anymore, in view that mining exploration/exploitation is now open to domestic and foreign investors.”

The Bank’s structural adjustment of Mexico’s mining sector has played a key role in the battle for “land and territory” (as the Zapatistas refer to it) in the country. Private ownership, increased economic pressure on small and subsistence farmers, and top-down “development” projects are acutely felt in mineral-rich communities.

According to Gustavo Castro Soto of the Chiapas-based non-profit Otros Mundos, “Beginning in 2000, almost 10% of the national territory has been ceded to transnational companies through mining concessions.” REMA notes that in Chiapas, 15.21% of the state’s total territory has been ceded through mining concessions. Many of those concessions don’t expire until the year 2050. If the social unrest that frequently follows mining concessions is any indicator, Mexicans are not willingly handing over their land to foreign mining companies.

Mining industry under fire

Mariono Abarca’s murder comes at a time that the mining industry in Mexico is feeling the heat from Mexico’s social movements. Inspired by the national movement of communities affected by hydroelectric dam projects, mining-affected communities are joining forces in a unified front against destructive mining practices.

In 2008, representatives from Chicomuselo travelled to the state of Jalisco to found REMA during the First Encounter of the Mexican Network of People Affected by Mining. Representatives from mining-affected communities in eleven states and the Federal District participated in the historic event: Chihuahua, Sonora, Nayarit, Jalisco, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, Mexico City, México State, San Luis Potosí, Coahuila, and Veracruz.

REMA agreed at that meeting to raise consciousness about the social and environmental effects of mining. It also pledged that member organizations would support each other in their struggles against destructive mines in their communities.

One of the most high-profile joint actions that REMA carried out was a protest encampment in front of the Canadian Embassy in Mexico City this past July. Abarca and representatives from other communities affected by Canadian mining companies participated in the encampment, which demanded the withdrawal of Metallic Resources/NewGold, a Canadian company, from Cerro de San Pedro, San Luis Potosi. At the protest, Abarca spoke about Canadian mining companies’ contamination of traditional water sources.

Following the protest, mining-affected communities won a temporary victory: just last month, a federal judge ordered that the Cerro de San Pedro mine be closed because the mining company had failed to comply with environmental stipulations. The closure comes after 10 years of struggle waged by a broad coalition of San Luis Potosi civil society organizations, which include organizations linked to Mexico’s center-left Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) and groups affiliated with the Zapatistas' Other Campaign. They opposed the gold mining project because, in addition to environmental concerns, the Cerro de San Pedro is an official historic monument. NewGold has promised to appeal the ruling.

In Chiapas, Abarca led a previously mentioned highway blockade that prevented Blackfire trucks from entering and leaving the Chicomuselo mine this past June and July. The community was protesting the company’s excessive use of scarce water supplies, its failure to follow through on commitments it reportedly made to the community, and its back-door maneuverings that allowed it to purchase 13.5 hectares of ejido land without the required approval of the ejido assembly. Blackfire claims it lost $120,000 pesos ($9,334 dollars) as a direct result of the blockade.

This past August, REMA held its Second Encounter of the Mexican Network of People Affected by Mining in Chiapas. Guatemalan communities who are resisting mining projects traveled to Chiapas to participate and share their experienes. Abarca helped organize the Encounter, and as previously mentioned, it was during the Encounter’s organizing process that state police kidnapped Abarca and charged him with organized crime at Blackfire’s request.

A communique signed by 25 Mexican organizations from six states and Mexico City holds Blackfire’s owners responsible for Abarca’s shooting and any resulting violence in the region. They called for a protest encampment outside of the Canadian Embassy and the Ministry of Economy headquarters in Mexico City on December 3 in solidarity with the people of Chicomuselo.

Source / NarcoSphere

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