by Ernesto Cortes JR.*

Good afternoon. I want to thank, first of all, the Philosophical Society of Texas for inviting me here. If it hadn't been for you, I would have never, ever been to a city that I'd only heard about in song. I'm told it's the prettiest town anybody's ever seen, or, at least, that's what the song said. I hope that that becomes evident to me as I drive through it.

I was struck, as I was listening to Ms. Edelman, that maybe the best thing for me to do is to say "Amen, ditto, I agree." What more can I say? What more can anybody say about the challenges and the opportunities we have to really renew our most important and hallowed traditions of fairness, and equality and participation? But I guess I can't get away with that. So, I'll try to figure out if there's another angle that I can come at, notwithstanding that Ms. Edelman has just about stolen all of my thunder, taken most of my stories and made them better, and given me very little to work with. I'll have to throw away my script and try something new.

When I grew up in San Antonio-Ms. Edelman's talk reminded me about my early childhood-things were kind of like they were for her. The way I used to put it was that when I grew up, there were 250 adults organized against me. My father had six brothers and six sisters, my mother had eight brothers and five sisters, and we came from a Mexican Catholic family. My grandfather was kind of the patriarch, on my mother's side, of all of us. And, of course, all of my aunts and uncles had commadres and compadres. We want to St. Cecilia's Catholic Church and at that time, a Mexican Republican was somebody you just looked at, but didn't stare at. At least, that's what my father said. "Look, but don't stare." Okay. "Don't be impolite." Because we were all part of the Democratic Party. In fact, one of the highlights of my young life was when my Uncle Raul Cortes brought Adlai Stevenson as the first Democratic national candidate to the West Side of San Antonio in 1952. My father worked for Pepsi Cola for a while at the time, because they were hiring Mexicans. This was kind of an early version of affirmative action. And he got into trouble with all of his brothers and sisters, because he sort of suggested that maybe in '52 that voting Republican wouldn't be an evil act. Anyhow, I just want to give you a sense of kind of the culture that I grew up in, which was one where there were all these networks of relationships of family and congregation and church. When I went to school in the morning, the bus driver knew who I was. When I walked to school as a young person, it was kind of like walking through Checkpoint Charlie at different places, because everybody kind of would make sure that I was going where I was supposed to go.

So at the tender age of seventeen, I got out of town as fast as I could to go to not any place nearly as wonderful as Spelman, but A&M.

But I guess what Marian's remarks remind me of is how important those intermediate institutions were, those networks of relationships were to my own development and my own upbringing. And I was particularly struck by my own upbringing when I began to organize, in East Los Angeles in 1976, to create what became the United Neighborhood Organization of East LA. When my wife and I went to a parish festival and met with the leaders of what became the UNO organization, they were lamenting how that particular festival had been a fiasco, a failure, nobody came, because there had been a drive-by shooting. And what struck me more and more, as we began to try to find people who were interested in getting involved in building what became the UNO organization, that instead of 250 adults organized against one kid, as it was for me in San Antonio, it was the reverse, fifty kids organized against every adult, and the adults living under virtual house arrest, afraid to go out, afraid to go to church, afraid to go to work, afraid to go out anywhere, and the city's virtually living under a state of martial law. Informal, to be sure, but martial law nonetheless. Curfews, self-imposed curfews by adults, leaving the streets run by their children.

Now, unfortunately, when I got back to San Antonio and went back to Houston to begin organizing, we saw the same patterns begin to emerge. I was struck that Texas was beginning to go the way of Los Angeles. And now, as I go back to Los Angeles and look at what's going on there today, I'm reminded of Lincoln Steffens' remark, that I've seen the future, but it doesn't work. Because what you're beginning to see in places like Los Angeles, or places which are undergoing incredible polarization of class, and race, and ethnicity. This past Friday there was a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times, a very disturbing, disquieting article, about the fact that the African-American middle class has virtually left the city of Los Angeles and moved to Ventura and outlying counties, and even back to the south, afraid of the violence, afraid of the turbulence that exists in inner city Los Angeles. Places like the historic African-American communities, like Compton, and Watts, are left to only those who are very, very old and those who are very, very young and very vulnerable. The only immigration into these communities that is taking place is among people who are immigrants from other countries, who also, unfortunately, have to be counted among the most vulnerable. What's going on in Los Angeles reminds me of some analyses that I've read by people, like Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, who have written a book called, Teaching the New Basic Skills, which talks about the growing inequality of power and wealth in our society, and the decline in real wages that is taking place. Even white males who have high school diplomas have seen a precipitous decline in their real wages during this period of time, notwithstanding what's happening to African-American, or Hispanic, or Latino males, or females. I'm also reminded of Rebecca Blank's book, It Takes a Nation. She talks about how the economic growth is no longer an effective anti-poverty program, that, in fact, unlike the 1960s, where you saw economic growth reducing poverty, in the late '80s and '90s you've seen just the opposite, that as we become more and more affluent, as we see our real gross domestic product increasing, we're also seeing poverty rates increasing at the same time. There has been this fundamental disconnect between increases in GDP, and even increases in productivity. I was always taught, when I took economics as a young freshman, that the whole neoclassical theory hinged upon John Bates Clark's notion that as productivity increased, real wages were supposed to go up. There was this historic social compact, which existed in the United States from 1865 to 1973, that as productivity increased, real wages increased. I know that there were some things you had to do, in order to get those wages to go up. There was a fellow cited by Harry Johnson that said-it was a University of Chicago economist, no liberal, by the way-that there're two ways to get those wage rates up to the productivity increases. One is by investment in human capital. The other is class conflict. I used to tell people that I preferred the first, but I'm not unwilling to do the second, regrettably.

Unfortunately, at the same time that we've seen productivity go up, we've seen real wages go down. And, of course, there are some people who argue that that's partially because you've seen the power of organized people decline at the same time you've seen the power of organized money increase. Alinsky used to teach us at the Industrial Areas Foundation that there're two ways to get power; one is to organize money. People like Bill Gates have got lots of power. People like Rupert Murdoch have a lot of power. People like Warren Buffet have lots of power. Then the other way you get power is to organize people. And, unfortunately, as my friend, Frank Levy, says, organized capital has got organized labor on the run right now, because we have seen a significant decline in our capacity to organize working people to be able to negotiate and bargain. We've seen a significant decline in our capacity to participate effectively. We've seen both political parties kind of disconnected from their constituencies, or the constituencies that they traditionally represented. I used to say that the Republican Party represents those people who make over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, and the Democratic Party represents those people who make over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. The rest of us folks have got to make do.

And I was kind of reminded of this even further when my friends in the BUILD Organization went to see Barbara Mikulski and began to talk to her about strategies for the Democratic Party, and she said to them, in a candid moment, "What do you mean? There is no Democratic Party. What we've got are franchise agreements." Lloyd Bentsen and Ann Richards, they got the Texas franchise, but there are no political parties. What we have are these permanent campaign, marketing campaign organizations. In fact, I'm reminded that a woman by the name of Kathleen Jameson, who used to teach at the University of Texas until she went to the University of Pennsylvania, used to tell her students, "If you want to understand electioneering in the United States, you should not take political science courses, because in political science courses we will teach you a lot of irrelevant stuff. Particularly, we'll teach you about all those dead white, European males, like Aristotle and Montesquieu, and we'll also talk about issues, and we'll talk about the great movements. And if you really want to understand electioneering, you really need to understand marketing campaigns. Because elections today are not about issues, and debates, or negotiations or agreements. Elections are now about how we persuade people to buy our product versus another, and that means you've got to master marketing technique. You've got to master the thirty-second spots and attack videos, and all that sort of thing." So, like I said, I don't think we do politics anymore. Every four years we have what I think is this quadrennial electronic plebiscite, which has nothing to do with real politics. And, to me, that's tragic, because I think if there is one thing, one idea that the United States has to contribute to the rest of the world, it is its understanding of democratic politics.

Alexis de Tocqueville, I'm told, when he came to the United States to study ostensibly prisons and other eleemosynary institutions, was really here to study American politics. And he thought it just might work. You know about Tocqueville, of course. He was a French aristocrat whose father had been guillotined, and for that reason, was not too keen on revolutionaries or revolutions. He was concerned because when he saw the counter-revolution take place, he thought that they were making the same mistakes again. So he came to the United States and hoped to find something different. And he found a couple of interesting things. One was that even though we kind of went crazy every four years with national political elections, the politics that really mattered to people was not the politics of national elections, but the politics of the local communities, the politics of the school board and the township.

The second thing that impressed him was the way in which people conducted politics-he said that Americans had this disposition to form all kinds of associations. But what he was interested in about this kind of associational democracy, which he wrote about, was, number one, this democracy was based upon understanding of people's self interest. Number two, is that it involved all kinds of bargaining and reciprocal arrangements, so that people would get together and work on, for example, raising a barn, and then those people would get together and work on organizing a school district. So what impressed him about was this bargaining, and negotiating, and reciprocal relationships that emerged, which began to build some kind of trust between those folks.

The third thing which impressed him was the fact that the leadership that emerged, that developed, was institutionally connected. It was connected to congregations, connected to townships and to other institutions. So, Tocqueville thought that maybe it might work, although he was concerned about the fact that there were some dark undersides to this whole American experiment, and that was that whole groups of people were left out, to wit, African-American males, women, and white men without property, and, of course, slaves. Because of this, Tocqueville developed a political philosophy, which I kind of share, which is to be conservative about family, and community and tradition, tradition meaning the living ideas of the dead versus traditionalism, the dead ideas of the living, and liberal about civil rights, and radical about power and participation.

Tocqueville also gave us another interesting insight. He thought that we had, what Americans had, what he called an Augustinian soul. And part of that Augustinian soul was our capacity to withdraw into ourselves, to become self-absorbed, to become only concerned with that which was our private interests. But he felt that that was not so bad, because there was an antidote to that Augustinian soul. And that antidote was participation in face-to-face local political activity, which enabled people to kind of transcend their private interests, to transcend their egotism, their narcissism, and their contentment. The other dimension of the Augustinian soul, which he was concerned about, was our inclination, which came out of our enterprise culture, which he thought was good and positive, our inclination and our capacity to generate wealth and prosperity, but also to overreach and to make larger claims on life than were appropriate.In a word, greed. But he felt that there was an antidote toward that inclination, and the antidote was the existence of families, and networks of families, and other intermediate institutions, and religion, congregations and faith-based institutions. And he felt those institutions, those networks of relationships would constrain this inclination to overreach and to make larger claims on life than were appropriate.

Now, obviously, you know where I'm going with this, and that is given the fact that we have now created this new technological revolution, this globalization of our economy, this thrust towards transcending national sovereignty, we have also, at the same time, given its potential for creating large amounts of economic wealth and creating all kinds of opportunities, undermined our capacity to form local communities. Peter Drucker wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review, where he talked about the fact that given the imperatives of technology and the logic of the marketplace, community values have to suffer. And that's the way it'll have to be. But then he lamented, if that's so, then how do we begin to seek some sort of understanding of what is the common good?

Now, I'll argue that if we are going to create, in fact, those values of trust and reciprocity, and solidarity, which I think are foundational not only for the creation of a democratic culture, but also for our enterprise culture as well-Kenneth Arrow wrote a very fine book called The Limits of Organization, where he talked about those values of reciprocity and trust that are essential for the creation of our enterprise culture. And Walter Oken has written Why the Market Has Its Place, because the market is this wonderful, powerful institution for generating wealth and making choices, and has its place, but the market has to be kept in its place. And not just by government, but also be society. But if we do not have those thick networks of relationships, which enable us to constrain that enterprise culture, if we do not have those thick networks of relationships that enable us to develop what Bellah describes as habits of the heart, those patterns of behavior which Tocqueville thought were so important to associational democracy, then we have to think about ways in which we can recreate them.

Now, the other insight that I thought Ms. Edelman gave us was that we cannot go back to the 1950s. We cannot recreate that kind of wonderful time, which wasn't always so wonderful, when I had to undergo all the constraints of those 250 adults. But we can begin to think seriously about trying to initiate a strategy to recreate or to revitalize the institutions of family, congregation, neighborhood, labor union, and professional association, which can establish a different kind of politics. A politics which is centered on the values and visions of a free and open society, democrat with a small 'd', and the responsibilities of a republican culture, republican with a small 'r'. I would argue that in order for such a politics to work, it has to be also connected and centered in the values of our three great faith traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We are all people of the book. But if we are going to understand the imperatives of those traditions, we are also going to have to recognize that we cannot be people of the book, we cannot be true to those values, unless we understand that we have to create the mixed multitude, the mixed multitude where our traditions of Sinai and Pentecost enable us to create the sense of peoplehood, people who are able to engage in a covenantal relationship with our creator.

Several years ago a fellow by the name of Sheldon Wolin wrote an essay in a book called The Presence of the Past. He had some reflections on a great biblical story, which I'd like to share with you, about two brothers in the Book of Genesis. Well, they were twins, and these twins, of course, were Esau and Jacob. And Esau and Jacob were born to one of the great patriarchs, Isaac, and his wife, Rebecca. Now, you know about Esau. Esau was his father's favorite. He was Isaac's favorite. Esau was a wild kind of a guy. He kind of got his mother all upset because he used to like to roam around. But Esau was also hairy, he was a hunter. He was a man of few words. He was kind of what I call a '50s kind of a guy, all right. Now, his brother, Jacob, was a bit different. Jacob was his mother's favorite. He was a great cook. He was smooth of skin. Jacob knew his way around a tent. A cunning, shrewd guy, he was kind of a '90s kind of fellow. Now, one day Esau was out hunting and had been unsuccessful, and he was starving and he was famished. And he saw his brother, Jacob, making this stew. I guess it was lentil stew or pottage stew, I forget which. He saw his brother, Jacob, making this stew, and he came to Jacob and he said, "Jacob, I'm starving to death. I've been unsuccessful. Feed me." Jacob says, "Brother, you know you can count on me, but what do I get for it?" And Esau says, "Brother, what do you want?" Jacob says to Esau, "Sell me your birthright." Esau says, "Well, my birthright is not going to feed me right now. What good is it? I'll starve to death with my birthright. It's not going to keep me warm at night. I can't make love to my birthright. After all, my birthright is my identity, my father's obligations, it's a burden to me. Of course, I'll sell you my birthright." And we're told in the Book of Genesis that from that day forward, Esau despised his birthright. Wolin suggests, and I tend to agree, that you and I, we are Esau, because we have been willing to sell our birthright for material things.

What is our birthright? Wolin argues that our birthright is our politicalness, our capacity to come together and to negotiate, and to deliberate about the issues that concern us; the raising of our children, the education of our children, the disposition of our families, and what happens to our communities. Or as Aristotle defined politics: that which has to do with those deliberations, which take place around the Agora, the public square, those deliberations about family, property and education.

Now, of course, Aristotle was a fairly limited fellow. He was one of these dead, white, European males that my daughter always tells me about and thinks are irrelevant. And to be sure, Aristotle had a very, very limited perspective, because Aristotle thought that only certain groups of people should be able to do this political thing, because he thought that what made us human was our capacity to do politics, because there was something about us which only emerged when we were able to engage in these kind of deliberations. But, unfortunately, Aristotle didn't think that all of us were human. He thought some of us, because we were so absorbed with our needs and our necessities, that we were so absorbed with our private interests, and I'm told, and political theorists here can correct me if I'm incorrect, that the way Aristotle described the word 'private,' or the Greek word for 'private,' meant idiot. Somebody who was totally concerned with his needs and necessities, or her needs and necessities. Aristotle thought, therefore, that those who were idiots were women, slaves, immigrants and people who work with their hands. Wolin argues that one way of looking at our political tradition, one way of thinking about our birthright is that it is about the struggle of those people that Aristotle thought were idiots, gaining their rightful place at the Agora, at the public square. It was the struggle of working people in the Labor Movement, of African-Americans and other people of color in the Civil Rights Movement, of immigrants, of women in the Women's Movement. It was a struggle for Jacksonian Democracy. It was the very basic struggle, which was a source of our own political traditions and our foundational documents. That is our birthright. No question.

There are some other dimensions to our birthright. Our burden, racism, oppression of women, oppression of white working people, certain imperialistic kind of tendencies, and indications of our limits to overreach ourselves. There are some things that we ought to apologize for. The Japanese aren't the only people that ought to apologize, to people that they've kind of picked on. And I know that's probably an unpopular thing. I wish that someday the rest of you would apologize to us Mexicans, I mean, I like being part of the United States, but you still owe us an apology, okay. And particularly, you owe me an apology for having to have to go through what I went through in San Antonio, because every year I had to celebrate, for one solid week, the defeat of the Mexican Army at the Battle of San Jacinto. Now, I'm a kid who grew up in a town which is 53 percent Mexicano, and I always wondered how come we celebrate the defeat of the Mexican Army every year. Anyways, I don't want to go on and on. Yes, I do, but I won't. Anyhow, that's also a part of our birthright. That's also part of our heritage. And we have to embrace that burden unless you believe that what's a little slavery between friends, and I didn't do it, so I'm not responsible.

Anyhow, my point is that Wolin has said that we are like Esau, willing to sell our birthright for material things. Or, as Ms. Edelman suggests, willing, because we are ahistorical, to give up our responsibilities and rights as citizens, to become consumers and clients.

Somebody asked the question about the role of Madison Avenue. I'm told that a child who is born in America, who lives to be seventy-five years of age, will spend three years of their life watching television commercials. Three years of their life watching television commercials. I happen to think that that's a formative dimension in their development. I happen to think that helps shape who they are and how they behave. There was a fellow by the name of Danby, who's a book critic of the New Yorker magazine, who wrote an essay about three summers ago. In that essay he argued that in order to raise a child today, you have to be a bully. And I've gone through those kind of tough, hard negotiations with my own sixteen-year-old son. I've won some of them. I won the battle against Nintendos, I won the battle against hundred and twenty-five dollar shoes, but I've lost some other battles. But it's hard to fight a sixteen-year-old articulate, tough kid, when you don't have any allies. And he's got enormous allies, okay. He's got enormous leverage about what other kids do, and how other kids behave. Danby argues in that article that it used to be that kids, before the credit cards and the charge accounts that so many kids have today, would grow a soul and develop a personhood. They would develop a soul before they became consumers and customers. But now, he says, it's the other way around. Most of our kids are becoming consumers and customers long before they develop a soul, long before they develop a personhood. That, unfortunately, is the product or function of our willingness to sell our birthright.

The great Czech poet, Havel, talked about how in 1968 when the Russian tanks came into Prague, the Czech people, the intellectuals and the middle class, made a deal with the nomenklatura, and the deal was as follows: that we, the nomenklatura, will provide you, the Czech intellectuals and middle class, with all the goods and services of a mass consumption society, the good restaurants, the good homes, the fine cars, the summer places to retreat to, in exchange for which we will make all the political decisions. And so, you can quit your civic associations and quit your political movements. Havel argues that the Czech people, as a result of that deal, underwent an internal migration. They withdrew into themselves and they became self-absorbed with their private lives and their private concerns. Of course, they had a pretty good excuse; they had Russian tanks at their head.

Hannah Arendt argues in her book Men in Dark Times that the German middle class, during Nazi Germany, underwent the same kind of internal migration. They also withdrew into themselves. They also became self-absorbed. They also became concerned with their private concerns of raising families, and getting jobs, and having the goods and services of a mass consumption society. Of course, they had an excuse, too; they had gone through the turbulence of World War I, the Great War, in defeat, and all that it implied. We see the same phenomenon, unfortunately, occurring here in the United States. Christopher Lasch talks about the culture of narcissism. John Kenneth Galbraith calls it the content of the contented class. Robert Reich calls it the secession of the successful, the withdrawal of those who are affluent, those who are cosmopolitan, those who are well off, well read and well connected, into their private concerns. And so, they all argue that more and more of upper middle class suburbanites are becoming disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people. I just read an article in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly, which talks about how the Reagan Revolution has produced this group of upper middle class Republican yuppies, who have very little concern with their communities and very little concern with any other children other than their own, and who are now also withdrawing into this kind of self-absorbed, narcissistic kind of world. I will argue with you that unless we begin to restore the vibrance and vitality of our political institutions, unless we begin to restore the connectiveness of our intermediate institutions of family, congregations and schools, that we will eventually undergo the same kind of polarization, the same kind of discontent as Nazi Germany, and other countries as well. We will see increasing polarization between young and old and between races.

Now, there is an antidote. There is a story. There is hope. And that hope is that we can begin to recreate that social fabric, to reweave that social fabric, to reclaim our traditions. Now, that's what organizing is all about for me. It's not just about service. It's not just about being nice and being good. It's about learning that wonderful thing that we all have to learn from our political tradition, and that is politics. Not the politics of electoral activity, but the politics of negotiation, deliberation, and engagement. Now, in order for that kind of politics to occur, it requires that literally hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women begin to tap their energies and to tap their capacities. And that requires an understanding of a universal that we try to teach in the Industrial Areas Foundation, called The Iron Rule. The Iron Rule is: never, ever do for anybody what he or she can do for themselves. It's as important to an organizer as The Golden Rule, because what The Iron Rule says is that people have the capacity to act on their own behalf, if they're mentored and if they are taught. Now, The Iron Rule-don't let me be confusing-The Iron Rule does not rationalize social Darwinism. It does not rationalize root, hog or die. What The Iron Rule says is that we have to invest in the development and the capacity of ordinary people. But what is inimical to the development of an Iron Rule is another unfortunate tradition in our polity and in our institutional structure, and that tradition is embodied in another story. And that story comes from a book written by a great, I like to say Mexican author, but my wife always gets mad at me, because the guy's name is Dostoevsky. And she says he's not a Mexican, he's a Russian.And I say yeah, but he understood the Mexican soul. Therefore, I'd like to claim him as a Mexican, but anyway he was a Russian.

Dostoevsky wrote this book called The Brothers Karamazov, which is a great book. And in the book is a chapter called "The Grand Inquisitor." And I know all of you, because you're members of the Philosophical Society, have read and memorized that book, so you'll permit me if I kind of summarize it very, very quickly. And summarize that particular chapter, which has to do with the nightmare that one brother tells to the other. Ivan tells his younger brother that this nightmare, which takes place during the middle of the Spanish Inquisition, Christ comes back to Earth. And he's recognized by all the people. And they make a big to-do of him, miracles are performed, a young girl was brought back to life. But he's also recognized by The Grand Inquisitor, who has him arrested, and them throws him into a dungeon. The Grand Inquisitor comes to see Christ in the dead of night. He says, "Why did you come back? You had your shot. We tried it your way. It doesn't work. For 1,400 years we tried it your way. We offered men freedom. We offered them hope. We offered them opportunity. They don't want to be free. They want to be taken care of. They want magic and mystery and authority in their lives. And after frustrations and pain, and sorrow, and agony and despair we finally got smart. And we went over and we did a deal with the other guy. And today in your name using your words we serve him. And we give people what they want.

They want to be told what to do. They can't even feed themselves. They have to give us the bread, so that we can give it back to them. They can't accept the responsibility and the anxiety. They don't want to be free. So be gone, lest we have to crucify you one more time. So the story ends. Christ kisses him and then goes into the dead of night.

Now, unfortunately, the Grand Inquisitor, from my perspective, is alive and well in most of our institutions. The Grand Inquisitor is alive and well in our universities. The Grand Inquisitor is alive and well in our workplace, in our churches, and in our schools, where the definition of a lecture course is where the notes of the instructor go from his notebook to that of the student, without ever going through the head of either one of them. Neal Poston, in his book The End of Education, says that our children enter schools as question marks, with energy and vitality, and leave as periods. Seymour Sarason says, "Public education is the only legalized form of child abuse we have in the United States."

Well, the antidote for the Grand Inquisitor, for his attitude that adults are children, for his attitude that they have to be taken care of, is what we call The Iron Rule, which is lifted up in another story. And, unfortunately, Ms. Edelman took the thunder out of that story, because that story is of another great leader by the name of Moses.

Now, as Marian Wright explained to all of you, Moses was raised in the House of Pharaoh by the daughter of Pharaoh, to be a leader. But he was also raised by a Hebrew woman. Now, the word 'Hebrew' is an interesting term. It does not refer to ethnicity. It does not mean Jewish. It means someone who lives on the margins, someone who is outcast, someone who is considered desperate, an outlaw. David becomes Hebrew to Saul, and Moses becomes Hebrew to Pharaoh. Well, Moses was taught to identify with those who are Hebrew. So one day he came across an Egyptian overseer striking and beating up on a Hebrew. And the Book of Exodus tells us Moses, seeing no one-now, I used to think that that meant that there was nobody else around. But then I learned later that what that meant was that there was nobody who was willing to act like a human being, or like a mensch. And Moses, seeing no one, struck and killed the Egyptian, buried him deep in the sand.

The next day he comes across two Hebrews fighting with each other, and says, "You should be brothers. You should be organizing. You should be in solidarity with each other. You shouldn't be fighting." And they say, "Oh, yeah, Moses, okay, you want us to follow you and get us in trouble, like you're in trouble. Who gave you the right to tell us what to do, Moses? Who made you our lord? And what are you gonna do to me, Moses, if I don't do what you tell me? Are you gonna kill me, like you did the Egyptian?" Well, Moses realizes he's in trouble now. So he splits. And realizes that he's not just in trouble but that his own people have turned against him, because the Egyptian didn't squeal on him. So who squeals on him? Well, his own people. So Moses says "I don't need this. I'm a smart guy." So he goes to the suburbs. He becomes part of the culture of narcissism. Gets a big home, marries Jethro's daughter, the boss's daughter.

But Moses has got a problem. His problem is his identity, his memory, his story. His story, which was taught to him by that Hebrew woman. And that story's so powerful, and so meaningful, and so significant to him that it confronts him. And it's like a burning bush, a fire that doesn't consume. It's what we call, in the eye of tradition, the kind of anger which is cold and calculating, anger with is different from rage, anger which comes from loss and grief.Anger, which is understood in the Norse word 'ang', which means loss and grief.

Anyhow, Moses realizes what he's got to do, and when Yahweh confronts him and says, "I want you to go out and free my people," he says to Yahweh, "Wait a minute. The people have rejected my leadership. Who will I say sent me?" And Yahweh says, "Don't worry about it, Moses. I'm gonna organize a sponsoring committee for you. You tell them that the God of Abraham and Sarah, and Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Rachel, tell them that God sent you." Moses says, "Wait a minute, Yahweh. Wait a minute, God. You know, I've been away a long time. I don't know the language of the streets anymore. I stutter. My Spanish is rusty." God says, "Look, Moses, you're not supposed to be the charismatic leader. They've got lots of charismatic leaders. They've got your brother, Aaron, your sister Miriam. They've got Joshua. They've got Caleb. Your job is to be the organizer. The job of the organizer is to identify, test out, and train leadership. The job of the organizer is to put together organizing teams in parishes and schools. The job of the organizer is to teach people how to act on their own behalf, never violating The Iron Rule. The job of the organizer is to get people to start off small with small issues, and then get in bigger and bigger fights, and to begin to build larger and larger coalitions. That's the job of the organizer, Moses. That's the kind of work you've got to do." So Moses finally realizes he's got to do that, so he does it.

You know, the big story, and I don't have any time to go through it too much, but, you know, he frees the people from Pharaoh's army. They ask for a day off and then he gives them manna from Heaven. But the Hebrews are like a lot of us. They say to Moses, "Moses, what have you done for us lately? This manna is boring, it tastes terrible. Back in Egypt we used to have it good. Back in Egypt we used to have garlic, and leeks, and cucumbers, and we had fish every day for free, and now we've got nothing to eat but this crummy manna. It tastes terrible, it's boring. We want some meat." Now, can you imagine, 500,000 people all screaming, "We want meat." And it gets louder and louder. 500,000 people screaming for meat! And so, finally, Moses goes to God and says, "God, why do you stick me with this problem. First of all, you're the one who made them the chosen people. You're the one who made the commitment to them, not I, but I'm stuck with them. I've got to carry them around on my breast like a wet nurse. Where am I gonna get meat for 500,000 people? If this the way you want to treat me, why don't you kill me right now and get it over with?" This is all in the Book of Numbers if you want to read it. God says to Moses, "Look, Moses, you're being a jerk. Your father-in-law, Jethro, explained it to you. You gather your seventy best leaders, people that you know you can rely on, people that you can trust. Bring those seventy to the tent of presence for a meeting. Don't just get anybody, Moses. You've got to understand organizing is being selective. It means going after people who are relational, people who you've tested out in small group meetings and small actions. People you know you can count on to be reciprocal, to understand the need for deliberation. You bring those people, and you tell them that they've got to accept the burden that's on you, because you're not going to violate The Iron Rule." So Moses finally does what he's told. He gathers his seventy best elders, brings them to the tent of the presence, and puts the responsibility that he's feeling on them. He tells them, "You want meat to eat? There's some quail out there. Go out and organize some foraging parties. I'll work with you, I'll guide you, but I am not going to do it for you."

Now, I told that story to the Valley Interfaith Leaders in the Rio Grande Valley when we were going through, a big freeze in 1983. The Reagan Administration sent down a fellow by the name of Tom Pauken, who was supposed to bring us bread, but ended giving us scorpions. And you can read his side of the story in the book that he wrote, where he doesn't say very many kind things about me. At any rate we went through a kind of beleaguered situation, and we began to regroup and reorganize, and I told that story to our people. But I brought with me a scripture scholar, because I knew I would be saying some things which maybe they weren't used to. And he was okay with what I said, except he said to me, "You know, you only told half the story." I said, "What do you mean, I told only half the story?" He said, "Well, the other half of the story is in Luke's gospel, but it's not quail in Luke's gospel. It's loaves and fishes. It's not Moses in Luke's gospel, it's the disciples. It's not Yahweh in Luke's gospel, it's Jesus of Nazareth. But it's the same story. The disciples come to Jesus and say, 'We've got all these people. We cannot feed them. Send them away. Send them back to Mexico. Send them back to Haiti. Send them back where they came from. We can't take care of them. We can't educate them. We can't feed them.' And Jesus says to them, "Feed them yourselves." They said, 'We can't. All we've got are these five loaves and two fishes.'" This is my interpretation, the Cortes interpretation of the story. "Jesus says, 'You guys must think I just got off the boat. Don't show me what you've got for them, show me what you have for yourself,' because travelers at that time used to carry food and drink inside their clothes, but it was for themselves. He says, 'Because if you are willing to risk and model risk taking behavior, they'll emulate you. So, bring the people together in small groups and if you show them what you've got, what little you've got, they'll be willing to show you what they've got.'" Now, there's two ways of looking at the miracle; one is Jesus said, "Shazam," and everybody had a Big Mac and a Coke. Or the other way to look at it is that there were people there who hated each other. Nabateans, Samaritans, Galileeans, Greeks, Romans, all kinds of different groups of people who hated each other and mistrusted each other. The miracle was that by modeling risk-taking behavior, by modeling calculated vulnerability, by showing what they had, everybody there had a little bit of time, talent and energy, and they began to put it together. There was a more than enough for all of them. I will argue with you that the people in our communities have time, talent, energy. They need to be shown, they need to be modeled risk taking behavior, reciprocal behavior, and that's the role of local political organizations, which understand The Iron Rule. Thank you very much, and I'm sorry I went so long.

By Nathanial Catchpole

State and corporate funding of the arts is well known as a way of supporting culture which reinforces the status of the political and corporate elite. In the US and UK, opera, symphony orchestras, the ballet, museums, art galleries, plus the infrastructure that supports them, all get significant funding from both sources. Usually targeted towards an upper or upper-middle class audience and serving both their taste and social interests.


What is less well-known is the systematic state subsidy of corporate sponsorship and philanthropy, which has been going on in some form or another since the 1950s. Direct state subsidy is quite easy to trace and quantify, but in the US, and to a lesser (though increasing) extent in the UK, the State has supported many forms of cultural activity either covertly via intelligence services, or indirectly via the tax system. This has made public art institutions dependent on corporate sponsorship for their existence, and allows companies to get a significant kick-back from the state for what is already a very targeted and cost-effective form of advertising.


During the Cold War in 1950, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)set up an organisation called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which existed until 1967 as the main body of their cultural wing. Run by Michael Josselson, at its peak the Congress had “offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances”[1]. It was originally set up with the primary purpose of funding cultural activity in Western Europe, one of its earliest major activities being the Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century festival in Paris, 1952. This month long festival included the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, the West Berlin RIAS Orchestra, and works and appearances by as many composers as possible who's works had been banned or denounced by, or had physically fled, Nazi Germany and the USSR, including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg, Debussy, and Copeland.


The Congress for Cultural Freedom wasn't set up to directly promote US foreign policy – to do so would have had no greater effect than US State Department sponsorship, which continued throughout the period, although with far less funding - and it would have been counter-productive if any of the people working for it or supported by it had realised it was a CIA initiative. Instead, its purpose was to build up the reputation of artists in the West who's work could in some way be viewed as supportive or at least uncritical of American foreign policy and free trade, and to show Western Europe as somewhere where the arts were both supported and allowed to flourish uninhibited by the ruling elite. Due to its secrecy (any detection of state intervention in the Arts on this scale would have made a mockery of the idea that the West allowed more cultural freedom than the Soviets), it managed to fund artistic activity which would never have received US State Department funding – the abstract impressionists, serialist composers, and many other “progressive” artists loosely aligned to the Non-Communist Left (NCL). “The CIA estimated the NCL as a reliably anti-Communist force which in action would be, if not pro-Western and pro-American, at any rate not anti-Western and anti-American.”[2]


In order for all this to remain covert, CIA money had to be funnelled through private cultural foundations – notably that of Nelson Rockefeller who was for many years the president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA). Money was deposited into the accounts of a number of real and front foundations, and eventually into institutions like MoMA to fund specific projects and exhibitions. One of the main focuses of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was Abstract Impressionism (described as “free enterprise art” by Nelson Rockefeller), which it supported with exhibitions and purchases for a number of years:


“We recognised that this was the kind of art that didn't have anything to do with socialist realism, and made socialist realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. So one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy handedly was worth support one way or the other”.[3]


The Congress for Cultural Freedom was therefore characterised by two main approaches: channelling state money through private sponsorship in order to prevent any artists involved noticing the CIA's involvement, and funding “progressive” art, loosely aligned with the Non-Communist Left. Both to show how culturally progressive the West was, and to try to increase the status of artists aligned with the NCL over those who supported the Soviets. It also artificially inflated the power and prestige of “private” cultural institutions such as MoMA and the Guggenheim foundation, supplying them with ample support towards their already considerable resources.


The Congress was shut down quite quickly in 1967, after revelations came out about agents in its employ and its source of funding, mainly concerning the flagship Encounter magazine. Ironically it's major opponent following the revelations was the then president, Lyndon Baines Johnson - “[I] won't have anything more to do with [the CIA intellectuals]. They all just follow the Communist line – liberals, intellectuals, Communists. They're all the same.”[4]


However, since then, individual and corporate philanthropy and sponsorship have still been receiving significant state subsidy through the process of tax expenditure. Most large arts organisations, no matter how elitist, are registered charities, and donations to them are tax-deductible. In short, if a donor (private or corporate) pays a tax rate of 40%, £1 donated to a charity will give them a tax break of 40p, with only 60p of the donation coming out of pocket; the state therefore contributes an additional 2/3rds over and above their out of pocket donation. If someone pays a tax rate of 20%, the state contributes 20p against their 80p, an addition of 25% to their out of pocket donation. Due to the graduated tax system in both countries which has been in place to a greater or lesser extent over the past 20-30 years, those on lower incomes get considerably less subsidy for their donations to arts organisations and charities in general. Corporate donations are similarly tax deductible.[5]


This allows corporations and wealthy individuals to have considerable influence over the finances of cultural institutions, and more indirectly over what's represented in them, all with a considerable discount provided by the State. Direct state funding is slowly withdrawn (although the money is in reality still be spent), and either taken out of the Arts altogether, or channelled into new initiatives.


The common liberal or anti-corporate reaction to this sort of activity is that tax-loopholes should be closed up and the money spent directly by the state to make it accountable. All that would do would be to restore the bureaucratic elite to a central position of resource control for cultural activity instead of the corporate one. In fact, the same people with the same interests; many politicians, ex-politicians and high-level civil servants serve on the boards of charities and non-profit Arts organisations in the same way they are often also company directors. Quangos and other government agencies are by no means accountable, and an attack on corporate sponsorship can very easily end up supporting them as an alternative.


Creative Industries Development Agencies, are one of the most recent ways that the State and Capital are co-opting art towards their interests. People have been well aware for some time that artists are often the first to move into deprived areas and start the process of gentrification – opening small galleries or craft shops, giving deprived areas a veneer of cultural and artistic activity, and taking over and renovating disused industrial spaces for workshops and studios. Usually this is an organic process, many artists are simply unable to afford to live or work anywhere else and are attracted by cheap rents and empty space. With the advent of Creative Industries Development Agencies, the State is now targeting areas (East London, Brixton, Yorkshire/Humber region for example) to actively support this process. The agencies use money from regeneration budgets (notably from Ken Livingstone's London Development Agency with support from the CBI), to provide business advice, accommodation, marketing, and other services to people involved in “creative industries” - already a loaded term for cultural activity of any kind, placing it firmly within enterprise culture and commodity exchange.


Rent and property value, at least in areas of East London, has overtaken the capacity of artists and even those in the new media industries (regarded as responsible for most of the gentrification) to afford accommodation easily. Many redevelopments, including those with “live/work” planning permission (often a thinly disguised excuse for massive luxury studio apartments instead of either affordable housing or viable work space) are aimed at City workers in the financial sector, with corresponding prices. This leads to a polarisation where local residents can clearly see the priorities of developers, and begin to mobilise against it - the State is therefore having to artificially inject artists into these areas in order to give some kind of cultural authenticity and public service veneer to the development process.


Projects include housing Arts projects in derelict spaces for short periods to prevent them being used for squatting before redevelopment, and generally trying to reduce the negative effects of gentrification for cultural workers in order to prevent them being pushed out along with the wider working class (the same can be said for key worker housing). Although this kind of activity temporarily ameliorates the difficulty of finding appropriate space for a small number of approved artists, and those artists are rarely in a position not to take advantage of them, it doesn't deal with the issues of private land ownership that cause those problems in the first place. It also serves as a means to divide the interests of the working class – local residents (quite rightly) point to the money being spent on “creative industries” development, which isn't being spent on repairs to council accommodation, building cheap general-use housing, or infrastructure, often ignoring the fact that many artists are also on low-incomes with low-paid casual day jobs in order to pay these higher private rents. This becomes a smokescreen for the true nature of gentrification, which will eventually push out both artists and local residents in favour of luxury residential and retail developments.

The only way that artists and musicians can gain control of their activity without reliance on the State or corporate sponsorship, is to develop self-managing structures to work towards a society which will not leave their livelihood dependent on the State, Capital, or patronage by the rich. This involves recognising that their interests lie with the wider working class, and building solidarity between themselves and their communities in order to further their interests outside bureaucratic and sponsorship mechanisms. It is in all our interests to work towards a society where we are not required to take low-paid work or rely on benefits and patronage in order to meet basic needs, and where all individuals are able to reach their full potential through the liberation of work and cultural activity from Capital and commodity production.

Nathanial Catchpole

James Petras


Introduction

The CIA uses philanthropic foundations as the most effective conduit to channel large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to their source. From the early 1950s to the present the CIA's intrusion into the foundation field was/and is huge. A U.S. Congressional investigation in 1976 revealed that nearly 50% of the 700 grants in the field of international activities by the principal foundations were funded by the CIA (Saunders, pp. 134-135). The CIA considers foundations such as Ford "The best and most plausible kind of funding cover" (Saunders 135). The collaboration of respectable and prestigious foundations, according to one former CIA operative, allowed the Agency to fund "a seemingly limitless range of covert action programs affecting youth groups, labor unions, universities, publishing houses and other private institutions" (p. 135). The latter included "human rights" groups beginning in the 1950s to the present. One of the most important "private foundations" collaborating with the CIA over a significant span of time in major projects in the cultural Cold War is the Ford Foundation.

This essay will demonstrate that the Ford Foundation-CIA connection was a deliberate, conscious joint effort to strengthen U.S. imperial cultural hegemony and to undermine left-wing political and cultural influence. We will proceed by examining the historical links between the Ford Foundation and the CIA during the Cold War, by examining the Presidents of the Foundation, their joint projects and goals as well as their common efforts in various cultural areas.

Background: Ford Foundation and the CIA

By the late 1950s the Ford Foundation possessed over $3 billion in assets. The leaders of the Foundation were in total agreement with Washington's post-WWII projection of world power. A noted scholar of the period writes: "At times it seemed as if the Ford Foundation was simply an extension of government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA officials on specific projects" (Saunders, p.139). This is graphically illustrated by the naming of Richard Bissell as President of the Foundation in 1952. In his two years in office Bissell met often with the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, and other CIA officials in a "mutual search" for new ideas. In 1954 Bissell left Ford to become a special assistant to Allen Dulles in January 1954 (Saunders p. 139). Under Bissell, Ford Foundation (FF) was the "vanguard of Cold War thinking". One of the FF first Cold War project was the establishment of a publishing house, Inter-cultural Publications, and the publication of a magazine Perspectives in Europe in four languages. The FF purpose according to Bissell was not "so much to defeat the leftist intellectuals in dialectical combat (sic) as to lure them away from their positions" (Saunders p. 140). The board of directors of the publishing house was completely dominated by cultural Cold Warriors. Given the strong leftist culture in Europe in the post-war period, Perspectives failed to attract readers and went bankrupt. Another journal Der Monat funded by the Confidential Fund of the U.S. military and run by Melvin Lasky was taken over by the FF, to provide it with the appearance of independence (Saunders p. 140). In 1954 the new president of the FF was John McCloy. He epitomized imperial power. Prior to becoming president of the FF he had been Assistant Secretary of War, president of the World Bank, High Commissioner of occupied Germany, chairman of Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank, Wall Street attorney for the big seven oil companies and director of numerous corporations. As High Commissioner in Germany, McCloy had provided cover for scores of CIA agents (Saunders p. 141). McCloy integrated the FF with CIA operations. He created an administrative unit within the FF specifically to deal with the CIA. McCloy headed a three person consultation committee with the CIA to facilitate the use of the FF for a cover and conduit of funds. With these structural linkages the FF was one of those organizations the CIA was able to mobilize for political warfare against the anti-imperialist and pro-communist left. Numerous CIA "fronts" received major FF grants. Numerous supposedly "independent" CIA sponsored cultural organizations, human rights groups, artists and intellectuals received CIA/FF grants. One of the biggest donations of the FF was to the CIA organized Congress for Cultural Freedom which received $7 million by the early 1960s. Numerous CIA operatives secured employment in the FF and continued close collaboration with the Agency (Saunders p 143).

From its very origins there was a close structural relation and inter-change of personnel at the highest levels between the CIA and the FF. This structural tie was based on the common imperial interests which they shared. The result of their collatoration was the proliferation of a number of journals and access to the mass media which pro-U.S. intellectuals used to launch vituperative polemics against Marxists and other anti-imperialists. The FF funding of these anti- Marxists organizations and intellectuals provided a legal cover for their claims of being "independent" of government funding (CIA).

The FF funding of CIA cultural fronts was important in recruiting non-communist intellectuals who were encouraged to attack the Marxist and communist left. Many of these non-communist leftist later claimed that they were "duped", that had they known that the FF was fronting for the CIA, they would not have lent their name and prestige. This disillusionment of the anti-communist left however took place after revelations of the FF-CIA collaboration were published in the press. Were these anti-communist social democrats really so naive as to believe that all the Congresses at luxury villas and five star hotels in Lake Como, Paris and Rome, all the expensive art exhibits and glossy magazines were simple acts of voluntary philanthropy? Perhaps. But even the most naive must have been aware that in all the Congresses and journals the target of criticism was "Soviet imperialism" and Communist tyranny" and "leftist apologists of dictatorship": - despite the fact that it was an open secret that the U.S. intervened to overthrow the democratic Arbenz government in Guatemala and the Mossadegh regime in Iran and human rights were massively violated by U.S. backed dictators in Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and elsewhere. The "indignation" and claims of "innocence" by many anti-communist left intellectuals after their membership in CIA cultural fronts was revealed must be taken with a large amount of cynical skepticism. One prominent journalist, Andrew Kopkind, wrote of a deep sense of moral disillusionment with the private foundation funded CIA cultural fronts. He wrote "The distance between the rhetoric of the open society and the reality of control was greater than anyone thought. Everyone who went abroad for an American organization was, in one way or another, a witness to the theory that the world was torn between communism and democracy and anything in between was treason. The illusion of dissent was maintained: the CIA supported socialist cold warriors, fascist cold warriors, black and white cold warriors. The catholicity and flexibility of the CIA operations were major advantages. But it was a sham pluralism and it was utterly corrupting" (Saunders, pp. 408-409). When a U.S. journalist Dwight Macdonald who was an editor of Encounter (a FF-CIA funded influential cultural journal) sent an article critical of U.S. culture and politics it was rejected by the editors, working closely with the CIA (Saunders, pp. 314-321). In the field of painting and theater the CIA worked with the FF to promote abstract expressionism against any artistic expression with a social content, providing funds and contacts for highly publicized exhibits in Europe and favorable reviews by "sponsored" journalists. The interlocking directorate between the CIA, the Ford Foundation and the New York Museum of Modern Art lead to a lavish promotion of "individualistic" art remote from the people - and a vicious attack on European painters, writers and playwrights writing from a critical realist perspective. "Abstract Expressionism" whatever its artist's intention became a weapon in the Cold War (Saunders, p. 263).

The Ford Foundation's history of collaboration and interlock with the CIA in pursuit of U.S. world hegemony is now a well documented fact. The remaining issue is whether that relationship continues into the new Millenium after the exposures of the 1960s? The FF made some superficial changes. They are more flexible in providing small grants to human rights groups and academic researchers who occasionally dissent from U.S. policy. They are not as likely to recruit CIA operatives to head the organization. More significantly they are likely to collaborate more openly with the U.S. government in its cultural and educational projects, particularly with the Agency of International Development. The FF has in some ways refined their style of collaboration with Washington's attempt to produce world cultural domination, but retained the substance of that policy. For example the FF is very selective in the funding of educational institutions. Like the IMF, the FF imposes conditions such as the "professionalization" of academic personnel and "raising standards." In effect this translates into the promotion of social scientific work based on the assumptions , values and orientations of the U.S. empire; to have professionals de-linked from the class struggle and connected with pro-imperial U.S. academics and foundation functionaries supporting the neo- liberal model.

As in the 1950s and 60s the Ford Foundation today selectively funds anti-leftist human rights groups which focus on attacking human rights violations of U.S. adversaries, and distancing themselves from anti-imperialist human rights organizations and leaders. The FF has developed a sophisticated strategy of funding human rights groups (HRG) that appeal to Washington to change its policy while denouncing U.S. adversaries their "systematic" violations. The FF supports HRG which equate massive state terror by the U.S. with individual excesses of anti-imperialist adversaries. The FF finances HRG which do not participate in anti-globalization and anti-neoliberal mass actions and which defend the Ford Foundation as a legitimate and generous "non-governmental organization".

History and contemporary experience tells us a different story. At a time when over government funding of cultural activities by Washington is suspect, the FF fulfills a very important role in projecting U.S. cultural policies as an apparently "private" non-political philanthropic organization. The ties between the top officials of the FF and the U.S. government are explicit and continuing. A review of recently funded projects reveals that the FF has never funded any major project that contravenes U.S. policy.

In the current period of a major U.S. military-political offensive, Washington has posed the issue as "terrorism or democracy," just as during the Cold War it posed the question as "Communism or Democracy." In both instances the Empire recruited and funded "front organizations, intellectuals and journalists to attack its anti-imperialist adversaries and neutralize its democratic critics. The Ford Foundation is well situated to replay its role as collaborate a cover for the New Cultural Cold War

We focus on the shakeup at the Village Voice, where one of the paper's top investigative reporters was fired and two of its prize-winning writers resigned following a merger with the New Times Media - a chain of weekly newspapers based in Phoenix. In this week's issues, about 20 staffers wrote an open letter protesting the dismissal of James Ridgeway - the paper's Washington correspondent and one of its chief investigative reporters covering national news. Ridgeway had written for the paper for over 30 years. We speak with Ridgeway as well as Village Voice reporters Nat Hentoff, Tom Robbins, Sydney Schanberg - who recently resigned from the paper - and two reporters who have been following the story closely, Mark Jacobson and Tim Redmond. [includes rush transcript]



Tom Robbins, reading letter signed by 20 Village Voice reporters calling on management to "reverse discharge" of James Ridgeway.

Nat Hentoff, longtime Village Voice columnist, who has been writing for the Village Voice since 1957. We asked him about his thoughts on the firing of Ridgeway and about the new management.

Nat Hentoff, longtime Village Voice columnist.

For more on the Village Voice, we are joined by three guests:

James Ridgeway, in addition to being the paper's former Washington correspondent he is the author of several books. His latest is titled: "The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11." He also runs a website on video journalism at Ridgewayng.com

Sydney Schanberg, former press critic at the Village Voice. He resigned in February following the sale of the paper. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Cambodia during the 1970s and his story inspired the film "The Killing Fields."

Mark Jacobson, a reporter with New York Magazine. In November he wrote a major piece on the Voice-New Times merger titled, "The Voice From Beyond the Grave." He is a former writer at the Village Voice.
Tim Redmond, executive editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, we reached longtime Voice reporter, Tom Robbins, who is leading the effort to get management to rehire Ridgeway.

TOM ROBBINS: This is a letter that we sent to Village Voice management that was printed in this week's Voice.

“For 30 years, James Ridgeway has, in his person, his politics and his writings, defined what makes the Voice a special publication.

“From Three Mile Island to 9/11, Ridgeway has provided some of the nation's most incisive and insightful coverage of government misfeasance and malfeasance. He was one of the first journalists in America to spotlight the threat posed by a resurgent racist and neo-Nazi movement, an issue he hammered away at in the pages of the Voice years before anyone ever heard of Ruby Ridge or Timothy McVeigh. His reports on escalating environmental abuses exposed corporate law-breakers and bureaucratic indifference.

“Ridgeway’s writings on conflicts from Bosnia to Baghdad to Haiti have always provided the otherwise unreported flipside of the world according to the mainstream media, in short reporting that jibes precisely with the exact mission of the Voice. Over the past few years, Ridgeway expanded onto the web, filing regular nuggets of breaking news and even posting video reports on the 2004 elections.

“In light of this distinguished track record, the decision last week by the Voice’s new ownership to terminate Ridgeway is shameful. It also sends a terrible message as to the sort of coverage that the new ownership portends. We call on Voice Media Executive Editor Michael Lacey and Chairman and CEO Jim Larkin to reverse his discharge.” And it's signed by 20 staff members of the Village Voice.

AMY GOODMAN: Tom Robbins, a union steward at the Village Voice, reading the letter that appears in this week's Village Voice. We also yesterday reached Nat Hentoff, who has been writing for the Village Voice since 1957. He would join us today, but he’s on a train to Yale. This is what he had to say.

NAT HENTOFF: You know, it's very hard for me to understand what management anywhere does in most instances, but this to me is inconceivable. I don't know another reporter we've had at the Voice who is so widely knowledgeable about so many areas of government and all kinds of important areas and who does such consistent, comprehensive research. And for him to get fired is inexplicable. It makes no sense at all.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is happening? And do you see this as a part of media consolidation in the country, crackdown on criticism of the Bush administration?

NAT HENTOFF: One thing I have learned over the years, I don't make generalizations. I try to be an empiricist. So I’m waiting to see what else is going to happen at the paper. Meanwhile, I keep doing what I do, and nobody has told me otherwise. And, for example, I’m doing a series now on the surprising, it seems, change in the Supreme Court maybe with John Roberts joining a concurring opinion that indicates, although they didn't take the Padilla case, that the next time the government tries to put him back as an enemy combatant, it's not going to work and it may be the end of that classification of people as enemy combatants. So I’m proceeding, as I always do, and I’ve been through all kinds of changes of management. But I do believe that whatever the future holds, to lose Jim Ridgeway is an enormous loss for the paper.

AMY GOODMAN: Nat Hentoff is still writing for the Village Voice, at this moment, at least. Jim Ridgeway now joins us in the studio in Washington, D.C. In addition to being the paper's former Washington correspondent, he is the author of many books. His latest is called The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jim Ridgeway.

JAMES RIDGEWAY: Hi, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Can you talk about why you're no longer at the Village Voice? How long had you written for them?

JAMES RIDGEWAY: Well, first, before I start that, I mean, I want to thank my colleagues at the Voice. I didn't expect this kind of support. It's very moving. And I don't know. I have written there, I guess, off and on -- I started writing there, I guess, in the middle ‘70s, and then, of course, I wrote with Alex Cockburn for many years and then carried on by myself. But the only thing that's saving me is the union. If I didn't have union protection, I would be nowhere. So, what happened there, you want to know what happened at the Village Voice?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

JAMES RIDGEWAY: Does that mean is that what you want to know?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

JAMES RIDGEWAY: Well, I'll tell you what happened to me. I don't want to get into speculation, and my lawyer has advised me, as they say, to be circumspect. But I can say that there was an editorial meeting in the very beginning, in which Mr. Lacey appeared, and he said that – either there or he told Mark Jacobson that the Voice was a basket case and I think specifically referred to the front end of the Voice. And I asked for a meeting with him to tell him that I would, you know, support him in any way I could, support the new management. I was a team player, blah, blah, blah.

He killed my column, and he asked me to submit ideas for articles to him one by one, which I did, and which he either ignored or turned down, except in one case involving the coal mine situation in West Virginia. So, I mean, I just concluded he didn't like what I do. I don’t know what else to say, except that, you know, they won't say that I’m fired. I’m supposedly laid off. So, I don't know what that means. I’m in some technical situation, I guess.

But Lacey has talked, I think, not to me, but to everybody else, about how he wants to do investigative reporting, more local reporting. I think he doesn't want to do, you know, like -- he doesn't want to retrace things that have been done by the other papers, the bigger papers. I proposed stories on abortion. He ignored that. I proposed stories on the Minutemen on Long Island, who want to protect the Canadian border. And he said that was old story. Everybody’s done that. So, I mean, I don't know. I mean, it seems to me that the paper, at least from my experience, is kind of shutting down all its national coverage, but maybe not. Maybe this is my bizarre take on it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Jim Ridgeway, could you talk to us about what it has meant for you over the years to be able to cover these national stories in the Village Voice in a way perhaps that other mainstream or corporate media have not been able to do?

JAMES RIDGEWAY: Well, yeah. I mean, I started writing about, you know, the Ku Klux Klan and the far right racist sort of resistance, both the over-ground and the underground, in the early 1980s. Wayne King of New York Times did a lot of work on that, but then he left, and there really hadn't been much of anybody on the East Coast that writes about this stuff in any great detail. There are people in the West in the L.A. Times, Dallas Morning News, Rocky Mountain and the Kansas City Star, Trudy Thomas. But, no, I don't think other people have written much about that.

I wrote about Haiti from the early moments here when Aristide was coming back. And one of the things I really, really tried to do was to write about the conservative movement in Washington, I mean the new right in the early 1980s. And I didn't do it by attacking people and claiming they were all kooks and screwballs and stuff, but by trying to understand it and write articles that basically explain where this conservative movement was coming from and what it stood for.

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Village Voice, or I should say former Village Voice reporter, Jim Ridgeway. We're going to break. When we come back, he will be joined by our guest in the New York studio, Mark Jacobson, who has written a piece about what has happened to the Village Voice, and Sydney Schanberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to former Village Voice reporter Jim Ridgeway in our Washington studio. And here in New York we’re joined by Sydney Schanberg, the former press critic at the Village Voice, Pulitzer Prize winner. He resigned in February, following the sale of the paper. He won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in Cambodia during the 1970s. His story inspired the film The Killing Fields. We’re also joined by Mark Jacobson. He’s a reporter with New York Magazine. In November, he wrote a major piece on the Voice-New Times merger, entitled "The Voice from Beyond the Grave." He’s a former writer at the Village Voice.

And I also want to say, we did try to reach Michael Lacey, who is the new Executive Editor of the Village Voice and co-founder of New Times Media, as well as Christine Brennan, the Executive Managing Editor of the Village Voice, but they did not return our calls. And New Times Media is now called Village Voice Media.

Sydney Schanberg, you attended a meeting in early February with Michael Lacey and the whole Village Voice staff. What happened?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: What happened was very sad. Mr. Lacey came in and very quickly told the staff that he was disappointed and appalled by the fact that the front of the book was all commentary and that he wanted hard news. He said if he wanted to read a daily or regular critiques of the Bush administration, he would read the New York Times, and that's not what he wanted in the Village Voice. He was insulting to the staff. He figuratively or in effect called them stenographers. He said they had to stop being stenographers. When I objected to that, because that was so insulting, and I said that you can criticize any news staff in some ways, but the one thing that you couldn't call the Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers, taking notes from public figures and just passing them on.

And I said it was unfair, and he said, “So, I’m unfair.” And then he added, he said, “Look, I don't care what rouses you, even if it's getting pissed off at me.” And I said, “I’m not pissed off at you. I don't even know you.” And he really had this huge one-ton or two-ton chip on his shoulder. And I think he walked into the room thinking that the people in the room didn't welcome him and didn't like him and, you know, and hated him. And he was totally insecure. And he gave the impression that he didn't understand the Voice and he didn't understand New York, and he didn't want to. He didn't like it, even though he was born here, I understand. I mean, he was born in Brooklyn.

And he said a lot of other things. He told the staff that they better prepare themselves to say goodbye to some of their friends. He picked a fight with Nat Hentoff, which was disgusting.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the mentioning of other media in the Village Voice?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Oh, he said, when he picked that fight with Nat, he was referring specifically to a story in which Nat had led off one of his pieces praising an ABC television investigative report. And Lacey said that was unforgivable and that wasn't good journalism, and that he in the future never wanted to see ever again a story in the Voice that referred to work done by another publication or media organization, which is kind of astounding. I don't know how you can do it, if you don't recognition the media as a power center in America.

My assumption was he didn't want to cover the press. His other papers, other New Times paper, don't have a press column. He’s not interested in that. And he really made me think that he really didn't want to have the Voice talking about national issues and have a national focus. He didn't understand that people in New York pay attention to those things, huge percentage of people in New York. And he didn't want a press column.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Sydney, in terms -- this whole idea of a weekly concentrating on covering news, when we’re basically dealing now with cable news, 24-hour cable news, channels in addition to the daily newspapers, there's no way that the Village Voice or any weekly could compete in terms of news coverage. In fact, the Village Voice's trademark has always been the interpretive commentary behind-the-news kinds of stories that require more of an involvement or the identity of the writer coming out in the writing, so it seems to be totally contradictory to the entire history of the Voice.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: It's contradictory to my religion, which I think is journalism. And the mainstream press and television, certainly, do a very soft job of covering the press, either as corporate entities or as news organizations. Absolutely soft coverage. And that includes the New York Times. They have always -- and they’ve admitted it privately to me and others that they don't want to do this, and not making a clear explanation why. And so, the Voice has always, as an alternative paper, has always understood that that was part of their role, and I think it should be of any alternative paper.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Jacobson, we were not able to reach Michael Lacey, but you did. You interviewed him in your piece. Can you talk first about why the Village Voice and what happens to it is a national story?

MARK JACOBSON: Well, the Village Voice is for people, especially in New York, sort of a religion of sorts. In other words, if you grew up in New York City, you were reading the Village Voice, if you were of a certain kind of liberal mentality. If you grew up in sort of a place like Queens, like I did, the Village Voice was a little bit of a life raft for you that could be extended in the sea of the New York Times and all of this kind of stuff like that, which was like your parents’, and you didn't want that. So, therefore, you had the Village Voice and you’d read people like Jack Newfield and Lucian Truscott, all of these kind of hallowed names, and they would give you this other view of things. And that's what the Village Voice was.

Now, I would say the most functional word here is “was,” because, you know, when I talked to Lacey, who was going to be obviously -- I don't want to appear here to be the apologist for Michael Lacey, who is like, you know, I personally enjoyed hanging around with him, because he’s a good-time guy of a sort. He enjoys drinking and carousing, which is kind of a change of pace from the former management. But the paper, as itself, the Village Voice, has been on fallow times for many years. It's not just since this guy arrived two months ago. This paper has been in eclipse now for 20 years or something like that.

So I don't want -- and I’m sure Mr. Ridgeway, who is a very good friend of mine, and the idea that I wrote a -- like not uncomplimentary piece about Mr. Lacey, the idea that he comes and fires my good buddy Ridgeway is like appalling to me, because Ridgeway is not the kind of guy you would want to fire. The Village Voice doesn't need deletion. It needs addition, because there's nothing in there really. You need more stuff, not less stuff. And so the idea that this is a kind of glorious, kind of like fantastic journalistic enterprise, which is now being wrecked by these barbarians from Phoenix is just not the case.

AMY GOODMAN: We are also joined on the telephone by Tim Redmond. He is the executive editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Tim, why is this a story that you feel is a national story? We’re talking to you from New York.

TIM REDMOND: I’ll tell you why it’s a national story. It's a national story, because the alternative press has always been kind of feisty, independent, challenging the status quo, and the alternative press has always been about independent media, has been about independent voices. And, you know, it sounds kind of hokey, but I got into this business 25 years ago, because, you know, I thought I could help change the world. And I’m not saying the alternative press has changed the world, but I think the Village Voice has made a huge difference in New York, and the Bay Guardian, where I work, has made a huge difference in San Francisco, and that's something.

And what the folks from New Times, now known as Village Voice Media, want to do, they want to buy up alternative papers all around the country and make them all the same. You know, I don't think anyone should own 17 alternative papers. And I particularly don't think a company run by people who despise activism, who are not activists and don't think of themselves journalistically as activists, who don't endorse candidates, who don't take stands on issues, who haven't even come out against the war, should be taking over the Village Voice. It's really sad. I mean, the Voice was always part of the activist tradition of the alternative press. And, you know, in the same way that a few big chains like Gannett have bought up and control most of the daily newspapers in the United States and a few big corporations like Clear Channel control an awful lot of the radio, a few big corporations control most of the TV, if we go that way in the alternative press, it's going to be very sad, particularly, as I say, when it is an operation that doesn't believe in activist politics. That's not what the alternative press has been about.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Tim, a question. New Times has a reputation, supposedly, for hard-hitting local investigative stories in many of their other chains. How do you reconcile that "reputation" with their current moves, in terms of the Village Voice?

TIM REDMOND: New Times has some good journalists, and they have done some good stories. I’ve never doubted that. But they don't believe in providing progressive community leadership on issues. They'll do some investigative reporting, and there's nothing wrong with that. But when it comes to the role the alternative press has always taken, which is to provide activist leadership, they don't believe in it.

Besides, you know, I don't care if Mike Lacey wants to run a kind of neo-libertarian paper down in Phoenix and say whatever he wants to say and do whatever he wants to do. But once he tries to take papers all over the country and make them all the same, you know, it's kind of like the Borg. They sweep into town, they take over a paper, and they remold it in their own image so it's exactly like all of the other New Times papers. If you go from city to city to city, you know, Denver, Phoenix, you go around, Houston and Miami, they all look the same. They all have the same voice. They all have the same tone. And that's not good for the alternative press, and I would say that's not good for the United States. It's not good for progressive politics. This is not what the alternative press is about.

AMY GOODMAN: Sydney Schanberg, what did Michael Lacey -- and again, we wanted to have him on, were not able to reach him or Christine Brennan, another executive, management in the Village Voice -- what did they say about covering President Bush?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Well, as I said before, he said, “If I want to read regular criticism or bashing of the Bush administration, I'll read the New York Times. I don't want it in this paper.” And I agree with Redmond about them doing a cookie-cutter job. This was a wrecking crew. And I just don't believe that you have to come in when you want to change things and tell people -- insult them. I just don't -- I mean, if you believe in journalism, you don't come in and insult good journalists. And there's something inside Lacey that led him to think this was an adversary group, this was a group that was adversarial to him, before he actually ever had a serious conversation with members of the staff.

And I asked him afterward. I said I had one question, and how could you have -- how could we have a press column if we can't write about other work done in the press? And he said, “Did you hear what I said in there?” And I said, “Yeah, you were quite clear. But that doesn't answer my question.” “Just listen. Just remember what I said.” And I shook his hand, and I walked away and I walked out of the place.

The fact is that there is something wrong with people who come into a newspaper and insult journalism. And I'll disagree with Mark Jacobson. It's very easy to say that something is a shadow of itself, and it may be true in some senses. There may be people who once were there that, you know, critics and others, but most of the people he’s talking about were writing commentary, as well as news. And the fact of the matter is the Voice still provides the majority of investigative coverage of New York City and New York state. And if Mr. Jacobson can tell me anybody else who is doing a serious job on this, I'd be glad to listen.

I should mention, by the way, so that people can say I was motivated, he called it the once lively press column. But I don't judge myself by what someone says in another piece.

MARK JACOBSON: That’s okay. I did notice in your response to my column you did manage to spell my name wrong the entire time.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Right. That's very important.

MARK JACOBSON: Well, it was important to me.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Yes, okay.

MARK JACOBSON: You wouldn’t like it if I misspelled your name, even though it was right in front of you how to spell it.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Right.

MARK JACOBSON: So, you know, regardless.

AMY GOODMAN: Actually, what --

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: This isn't -- you know, you want to be in a little debate society. That's high school stuff.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you something.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Let's talk about substance.

MARK JACOBSON: Well, let’s talk about substance.

AMY GOODMAN: What about fact checkers at the Village Voice, speaking of which?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: As I understand it, Lacey has dismissed all of the fact checkers.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Ridgeway is still with us in Washington, D.C. Jim Ridgeway, former Washington correspondent for the Village Voice. There are a lot of issues you think are worth covering. Your latest book is The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11: What the 9/11 Commission Report Failed to Tell Us. What do you think needs to be covered, if you were still writing in the Village Voice?

JIM RIDGEWAY: Well, I suggested to Lacey that, you know -- he said he was very into this, what he calls, magazine writing, which means you find some guy and trace his life, I guess, until something happens to him. But I suggested investigation of like the New York ports and the security in the New York port system by a team of reporters and, you know, in terms of terrorism. And I have suggested over and over again ways -- and written about ways of looking at this hurricane situation, in terms of the way the government has responded to the hurricane stuff. And I was told by the acting editor at time, under Lacey, he called me up, and I wrote an article in which I attributed something to a document that the Washington Post printed. And he called me up and he said, that article you wrote, that is exactly what he doesn't want.

You know, I mean, and Izzy Stone said, “There’s good journalism and bad journalism.” It has nothing to do with some formulaic crap about, you know, some prototype about magazine writing or whatever, you know? So there's that.

There's the whole 9/11 thing about the responsibility of the airlines in 9/11. I mean, yesterday, there was a great deal of -- you know, everyone is terribly upset about this 93, Flight 93. But, I mean, why did Flight 93 ever get off the ground? I mean, you know, it got off the ground after two other planes hit. Why didn't somebody call all these pilots and tell them to stop or close their doors? Why didn't these things happen? What is the responsibility of the airline industry? So, I mean, there are issues like that that seem to me that people in New York City would like to know about. I mean, maybe the reporting will be wrong, but, I mean, they would like to know about it. I can't imagine anybody doing journalism in New York City and not talking about politics. What, are they crazy or something?

AMY GOODMAN: What about Zacarias Moussaoui and the latest news?

JIM RIDGEWAY: Well, I mean, to me, Zacarias Moussaoui is, you know, a horrible guy, and he’s a nut probably. But, I mean, he serves a very interesting political purpose here, because he covers up stuff that -- the activities of the F.B.I., and the F.B.I., you know, ran this absolutely incredible, ridiculous operation before 9/11, in which they, you know, overlooked hijackers living in California -- living openly in California, renting apartments from their own, you know, informant. I mean, all this stuff is fortuitously thrown down the hole, because everybody concentrates on what a bastard Moussaoui is. I mean, I don't doubt he’s a bastard, but I just think that the business of having an inquiry into 9/11 is a really big deal, having an open, decent inquiry that will answer questions that all Americans have. I don't think it's some conspiracy theory deal or anything like that. But I don't understand why the Village Voice wouldn't be in the forefront of doing something like that. I mean, what's going to happen? Is there going to be another 9/11 type thing in New York, some suicide bomber or something, and the Village Voice editorial is going to turn around and say, ‘Oh, let the New York Times do it. They do a better job’? I can't believe that.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Sydney Schanberg, the Voice, of course, has been through many owners since Norman Mailer and his fellow co-conspirators started it. Even under Murdoch, it maintained some degree of political independence. And your sense, especially when I hear that, for instance, a young reporter like Jennifer Gonnerman who has done fantastic coverage of the prison-industrial complex has left, as well, your sense of its future?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Well, Jennifer Gonnerman is a very good example of Lacey saying one thing and meaning another. He said he wanted narrative journalism. And in that meeting, he praised her. He said you seem you know what you're doing. She wanted to know exactly what kind of pieces. And he said, “I don't think I have to tell you, because you're already doing it.” And yet, he refused to put her on the staff. She obviously -- I’m guessing now from what she said when she left. She said she hoped that they would use the staff to better advantage. And my guess is she wanted to be a full-time staffer, and they said no. They wanted to keep her on this, you know, penurious freelance basis.

So, I don't necessarily believe Lacey. I think when he talks about investigative journalism, he talks about isolated cases without connecting the dots. I believe in connecting-the-dots journalism. That's how we’re finding out about what's happening in Iraq and how this war was conceived. And people like Jim Ridgeway and Nat Hentoff and others, and I'd like to think myself, did that kind of thing and have enough experience and have seen enough of things happening in the world that we can connect those things for any audience, especially the New York audience that has an interest in national affairs.

I just think it's a sin to do certain things in journalism. I think, for example, that firing Jim Ridgeway is a journalistic sin, just as when the New York Times let Russell Baker go. You don't do things like that, just because somebody is older or whatever, you personally don't like their stuff, because the idea of a newspaper is to let all voices ring, let them all be heard. And that's not what he's saying. So I don't have any -- you know, I don't have any -- I don't know this man, Mike Lacey. But I don't have any respect for how he's behaved or how he's conducted himself at the Voice.

AMY GOODMAN: Sydney Schanberg, I wanted to go back to Tim Redmond, executive editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The Bay Guardian filed suit against the San Francisco Weekly, the East Bay Express and the New Times newspapers, charging that the nation's largest alternative news weekly chain had illegally sold advertising below cost in an effort to put the family-owned Bay Guardian out of business. Can you talk about this suit and how it relates to the discussion we're having now?

TIM REDMOND: Sure, it relates to the discussion, because it demonstrates that Mike Lacey and the folks from Phoenix don't believe in a diversity of voices. They don't believe in newspaper competition. They don't believe in independent press. What they did in San Francisco is they came into our market, they bought a locally owned competitor, the S.F. Weekly, which at that time was owned by a local guy. They bought it, and they immediately started selling ads at less than the cost of producing them, basically losing money, and they have been losing money every year in San Francisco, a lot of money, but it doesn't matter because they’re a big chain and they can draw on their profits from other markets. Their goal is to put us out of business, because they want the market to themselves. That's how these guys operate. These are monopolist anti-competitive people, the same way all of the big national news chains and the mainstream press that we’re also critical of operate. They came into San Francisco. As I say, their goal is to have the market to themselves.

Now, San Francisco, like New York, is a very political market, and we have always been a newspaper that is a part of that. We’re a part of the San Francisco community. We try to make the city a better place. They're not interested in that. Their politics are very cynical. Nothing is ever good enough for New Times, which is now Village Voice Media, sad to say. And their modus operandi is to dominate and control markets. That, again, goes against the whole grain of what the alternative press has been about. If these guys have their way, they would like to buy up every alternative newspaper in the country and make them all exactly the same. And that's a problem in San Francisco. It's a problem in New York. It's a problem nationwide, where there are alternative newspapers serving their community. And that's what these guys are about.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to end with Jim Ridgeway in Washington, D.C. We're talking about the print paper, the Village Voice, but it also has a web component that you have been very successfully writing in. Can you describe that, as we wrap up?

JAMES RIDGEWAY: Yeah, I mean, I think the web is the future of the alternative press, to tell you the truth. And I spent a lot of time and really worked as hard as I could -- I’m not very technologically gifted, but, I mean, I worked as hard as I could to put stuff on the Voice web, from spot news to investigative, whatever. And I wanted to introduce videos, you know, verite video, which I was able to do for a certain period of time. And then, you know, the support wasn't there.

But Lacey said he didn't care about the web. I said, “Look, I’m filing maybe three or four stories a week on the web, on a daily basis almost.” He said, well, you know, he didn't care about that. He said cut it back. You know, and I just don't know what to say about this, except that the future of this alternative -- there's no point in saying that alternative journalism is dead or anything like that, because it's going to survive and it's going to survive very, very well on the web. That's the future of this thing. And if guys like Lacey and Larkin and others, I’m sure, want to turn these things into like, you know, like shoppers, they want to turn these newspapers into shoppers that don't have anything in them and just use them to sell advertising, I mean, you know, they can do it, because the journalism will just plain move on. That's all.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Ridgeway, I want to thank you for very much for being with us, Washington correspondent -- former Washington correspondent for the Village Voice. His latest book is called The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11: What the 9/11 Commission Report Failed to Tell Us. We have also been joined by Sydney Schanberg, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, resigned from the Village Voice after Jim was forced out. Mark Jacobson, who writes for New York Magazine and wrote a piece on what's happening to the Village Voice called "The Voice from Beyond the Grave." And in California, thanks to Tim Redmond, who has joined us, executive editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. We will continue to follow this and hope that Village Voice Media, which is the new name for New Times Media, will also agree to join us at a future point.

By Paul Craig Roberts

As coincidence would have it, Mark Crispin Miller’s new book, Fooled Again(Basic Books), documenting the Republican theft of the 2004 presidential election, arrived in the same mail delivery with the January 12 edition of the Defuniak Springs Herald, the locally owned weekly newspaper in a Florida panhandle county seat.

The Florida panhandle is thorough-going Republican. Even Democrats run as Republicans. Nevertheless, the newspaper’s editor, Ron Kelley, believes that American political life is measured by something larger than party affiliation. In his editorial, "The shepherds and the sheep," Kelley reports that two Florida counties have banned any further use of Diebold voting machines after witnessing a professional demonstration that the machines, contrary to Diebold’s claim, are easily hacked to record votes differently from the way in which they are cast by voters.

The pre-election statement by Diebold’s CEO that he would work to deliver the election to Bush was apparently no idle boast. In five states where the new "foolproof" electronic voting machines were used, the vote tallies differed substantially from the exit polls. Such a disparity is unusual. The chances of exit polls in five states being wrong are no more than one in one million.

Miller describes considerably more election fraud than voting machines programmed to count a proportion of Kerry votes as Bush votes. Voters were disenfranchised in a number of ways. Miller reports incidences of intimidation of, and reduced voting opportunities for, poorer voters who tend to vote Democrat.

Some of Miller’s evidence is circumstantial. However, he documents widespread Republican dirty tricks and foul play. The media’s indifference to a stolen election burns Miller as much as the stolen election itself.

Miller is not alone in his concerns. The non-partisan US Government Accountability Office (GAO) in response to congressional request investigated a number of complaints regarding the electronic voting machines.

Here are some of the problems noted in the GAO’s September 2005 report:

Some voting machines did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.
It was possible to alter the machines so that a ballot cast for one candidate would be recorded for another.
Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.
Access was easily compromised and did not require a widespread conspiracy. A small handful of people is sufficient to steal an election.
Curiously, the media has shown no interest in the GAO report. In my opinion, a free press has proven to be inconsistent with the recently permitted highly concentrated corporate ownership of the US media.

The electronic voting machines leave virtually no paper trail and their use involves private potentially partisan corporations tabulating the votes with proprietary software that is not transparent.

A number of counties in various states have decided to return to paper ballots that can be verified and recounted. But now that Republicans have learned that they can use the electronic machines to control election outcomes, the disenfranchisement of Democrats is likely to be a permanent feature of American "democracy."

Other reports claim that the under-sampling by pollsters of Democratic voters creates a percentage bias that exaggerates the number of Republican voters by as much as 5 percent, thus providing cover for vote fraud. If hard-to-reach Democratic voters, such as the working poor, are less likely to answer telephones, polls can create the illusion that there are more Republican voters than in fact exist. If the electronic voting machines are then rigged to shift 5 or 6 percent of the vote to the Republican candidate, the result is not at odds with the expected result and can be used as "evidence" to counter the divergence between exit polls and vote tally.

The outcome of the 2004 presidential election has always struck me as strange. Although Kerry was a poor candidate and evaded the issue most on the public’s mind, by November of 2004 a majority of Americans were aware that Bush had led the country into a gratuitous war on the basis either of incompetence or deception. By November 2004 it was completely clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and that Bush had rushed to war. People were concerned by the changing rationales that Bush was offering for going to war. Moreover, the needless war was going badly and the results bore no relationship to the rosy scenario painted at the time of the invasion. It seems contrary to American common sense for voters to have reelected a president who had failed in such a dramatic way.

Miller directs our attention to Bush’s high-handed treatment of dissenters. If electronic voting machines programmed by private Republican firms remain in our future, dissent will become pointless unless it boils over into revolution. Power-mad Republicans need to consider the result when democracy loses its legitimacy and only the rich have anything to lose.

By Howard Zinn

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans—members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen—rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq.
A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell’s presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his “evidence”: satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled “Irrefutable” and declared that after Powell’s talk “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil,” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson—so often characterized in our history books as an “idealist”—lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”

Everyone lied about Vietnam—Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991—hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq’s taking of
Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil?

A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was “we the people” who established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.

Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn’t talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that—not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor—is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there—the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be “checks and balances”—do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

The deeply ingrained belief—no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general—that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to “pledge allegiance” (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.”

And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” announcing that we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” There is also the unofficial national anthem “God Bless America,” and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation—just 5 percent of the world’s population—for his or her blessing.
If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values—democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise—to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.
It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this “the American century,” saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was “the calling of our time.” Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: “The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities.”

What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison—more than two million.

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice.

Book Reviewed by Amin Sharif

Ever since Harry Belafonte returned from Venezuela declaring President Bush a terrorist and announcing his support for President Hugo Chavez, there has been much interest within the radical community and among people in general about what is really going on in Venezuela . The Venezuelan Revolution answers 100 of the most fundamental questions about the revolution. It is an excellent, concise, and unvarnished account of how the Bolivarian Republic—as it is known among the masses in Venezuela—came to power and to the lofty social, economic, and political goals to which it is dedicated. Almost every question that could be anticipated by the reader about Venezuela—from the nature of its constitution, the status of the indigenous peoples, Venezuela’s conflict with the United States, why Chavez was briefly overthrown, and what the future of the revolution maybe—is addressed in this small book.

But more than anything else, Boudin, Gonzalez, and Rumbos have exposed as baseless slander the prevailing idea that the Venezuelan revolution is a dictatorship set against the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people. Indeed with its revolutionary ideology of “participatory” rather than “representative” democracy, Venezuela may be even more democratic than many of the states in the West, including the United States of America.

Let us begin our review by examining the Bolivarian Republic and confronting the most pervasive question about any revolutionary change that emanates from Latin America or the Caribbean. Is it communist? The authors of the Venezuelan Revolution quickly dismiss this notion and show conclusively that, "Although the Venezuelan Communist Party (PVC) supports the Chavez government and was the first party (besides his MRV party) to endorse his presidential candidacy in 1998, its members do not currently have any significant positions in the central government. None of the ministers, members of the National Assembly, state governors, or any other high-ranking public officials are communists."

Indeed, the authors of the Venezuelan Revolution attest that the “Marxist-Leninist party, Bandera Roja, and the labor party, La Causa Radical, stand in opposition” to the Chavez government.

What makes this book so valuable is that each question raised and answered not only sheds light on an individual aspect of the revolution. But, all 100 questions and answers form an organic composite of the revolution. One sees and understands clearly the strength and weakness inherent in the revolutionary process undertaken by Chavez and the Venezuelan masses.

But before we proceed any further, it may be instructive for the reader to have some sense of the, albeit abbreviated, history of Venezuela, a country which provides the United States with 12 percent of its daily oil imports. As the authors inform us, "Beginning with the Spanish colonization in the1550’s, a series of dictatorial regimes ruled Venezuela until 1958, when a power-sharing agreement between the leading political parties led to the creation of what became essentially a two party democracy."

Politicians from the Accion Democratica (AD) and Comite de Organizacion Politica Electoral Independiente (COPEI) would share power for the next forty years, even as their policies led the country into a protracted national crisis.

The protracted national crisis began in 1980 when oil prices dropped. The result was that many oil producing countries throughout the world, including Venezuela, found they were unable to make payments on their foreign debt. Then, ". . . in 1983, a massive bank failure combined with widespread embezzlement and capital flight wiped out the savings of much of the middle class. In the midst of this recession, marked by spiraling national debt, international financial institutions promoted neo-liberal economic policies that became a central part of the Venezuelan government program for over a decade."

It was under these neo-liberal policies administered by both the AD and COPEI that the standard of living for all but the wealthiest Venezuelans continued to erode. In February 1989, in the wake of the imposition of yet another round of neo-liberal policies, people took to the streets by the hundred of thousands to protest what became known as the “Caracazo.” The military was called in, and the protests were put down in a hail of bullets. Some 5,000 protests followed over the next three years.

By 1997, a staggering 85 percent of the Venezuelan people were living in poverty and an astounding “67 percent were living in extreme poverty, earning less than $2 a day.” Under these stark conditions, it is no wonder that the “majority gave up on institutional reform, demanding revolutionary change instead.” The man who led the Venezuelan masses in initiating this revolutionary change was Hugo Chavez.

But who is Hugo Chavez? We are given the following biographic sketch of the controversial President of Venezuela by our authors. "Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias was born in 1954 in a rural town called Sabaneta in Barinas State. Both his mother and father were schoolteachers . . . Chavez turned seventeen with the dream of becoming a professional baseball player, and he enrolled in the military academy hoping it would launch his career as a big-league pitcher. The baseball career never worked out, but Chavez did graduate as an officer in the Venezuelan military."

It was as a military officer that Chavez witnessed how ruthlessly President Perez put down the Caracazo demonstrations. Some three years later in February of 1992, Lieutenant Colonel Chavez led an unsuccessful military coup which made him a national hero but also sent him to jail. A second unsuccessful coup was attempted against Perez in November of 1992. But it would not be until 1993 that Perez would be successfully impeached and removed from office. Hugo Chavez was pardoned one year later and eventually elected President of Venezuela in 1998 with an amazing 62 percent of the vote.

Chavez is often portrayed in the Western media as a communist dictator principally because of his friendship with Fidel Castro. But Chavez characterized himself as a Christian, a socialist, a nationalist, and an internationalist. And unlike Castro, Chavez has run for and won nine electoral contests. Yet what is even more telling about how Chavez feels about the democratic process is that, "In August 2004, in the wake of a massive opposition signature drive and under international pressure, Chavez submitted himself to a presidential recall referendum and was ratified by 59 percent of the vote."

Clearly, this is not the kind of political act one expects from your garden variety Latin American dictator. In addition to submitting himself to the democratic will of his people, Chavez has held referendums on many of his major policies. Even in constructing a new constitution for his country, we can see how he sought to avoid political elitism, "The process of writing the text of the new constitution, based on the template that President Chavez presented to the assembly, was not limited to the elected members of the assembly, but was rather open to public participation."

Public participation took many forms, including forums, Internet pages, popular assemblies, study groups, and public debates. The privately owned media, universities, political parties, and NGO’s all brought their suggestions to the attention of the members of the assembly elected from their regions, who were then charged with delivering the ideas to the relevant subcommittee.

The authors of Venezuelan Revolution do a superb job in fleshing out not only the process of how the new constitution was drafted but its actually impact (or lack of impact) on the Venezuelan masses.

Still, a constitution no matter how well written amounts to very little unless it empowers the masses to solve their most fundamental problems. What lies behind the constitution and the Venezuelan revolution is the notion unique of participatory and protagonistic democracy. Unlike American representative democracy which stresses voting for candidates, participatory and protagonistic democracy, "is a model that attempts to stimulate and guarantee the people’s active participation in the process of governing the country."

Participatory democracy demands that citizens play a role in developing government policy, prioritizing budgets so as to benefit the entire government. It is a form of government that facilitates monitoring the government’s progress and its level of corruption and inefficiency, and that call for change where necessary. It is participatory because people have a role that goes beyond simply casting ballots; it is protagonistic because the people play a role in managing the government.

The case is made in the Venezuelan Revolution that it is precisely because Chavez has vested the poor and working masses with the power to shape governmental policies that he has drawn so much criticism at home and abroad. In December of 2002, opposition forces mounted a national strike against Chavez that lasted nearly 62 days “causing billions of dollars of damage to the oil wells and refineries.” It was only when oil workers loyal to Chavez took back the wells and refineries that the strike was stopped.

Some two years later, Chavez was briefly ousted from power in a failed coup attempt. But whether the opposition arises from reactionary domestic conspirators or the machinations of outside forces such as the United States, the Venezuelan masses have always rallied to defend Chavez and their revolution against any and all enemies.

Still, even with the evident support of the Venezuelan masses, the Bolivarian Republic faces some serious roadblocks to its development. Poverty and corruption, in all its manifest forms, may eventually evaporate the support of the masses for the revolution if not addressed quickly.

Our authors have informed us that the spirit of the Venezuelan revolution is contained in its drive to make participatory democracy a reality. The muscle of the Venezuelan revolution to attack its myriad social ills is embodied in Chavez’s concept of social missions. What are the missions? They are described by the authors in the following passage: "The missions are extraordinary social campaigns through which the Venezuelan government is attempting to address its citizens most pressing needs. The government developed the missions in an attempt to enact participatory democracy on the ground in order to accomplish campaign promises in areas such as health, education, food, housing, and employment."

On its face, the missions sound like just another socialist program. One would be right in assessing them as such if it not for the unique form of the socialism which gives them structure. For, as we are informed, "The idea of the missions, as the name implies, derives loosely from Christian theology, President Chavez is a practicing Christian and invites government leaders, members of the church, health care workers, business leaders, and people from around the country to participate in helping Venezuela’ most downtrodden in the tradition of Christian missionaries-following the example of Christ . . . Chavez views Jesus Christ as the first socialist."

It is this nexus of participatory democracy, Christian inspired socialism, and unique governmental organization that makes the Venezuelan revolution unlike any revolutionary effort that has been attempted before in history. Yet, even with all its strength, there are problems that seem to be beyond the reach of the spirit and muscle of the revolution. Racism and sexism are admittedly two of the most pressing social problems that have yet to be solved by the Venezuelan revolution.

Some eight percent of Venezuela’s population is of African descent. Yet our authors’ honestly state that this population “has not benefited as a group” from the fruits of the revolution. When one contrasts the monumental efforts undertaken by the government to address the historical inequities suffered by the indigenous people of Venezuela, the lack of attention to the problem of racism is indeed troubling.

Venezuelan women constitute 49.6 percent of the population. The women’s movement has, according to our authors, “been one of the strongest progressive movements in Venezuelan history.” It is clear from the information provided to us in the Venezuelan Revolution that there has been progress in providing women and their children with much needed legal and social protection. The Venezuelan Ministry of Education has even been obliged “to incorporate new teaching methods from preschool onward, oriented to modify sociocultural norms of the behavior of boys and girls.” Undoubtedly, this progressive and far reaching policy will address the inequities between Venezuelan men and women in the future.

Yet, "Despite these legal gains, only 18 of 165 National Assembly deputies (11 percent) are women. Only 2 out of 22 governors are women (9 percent) and only 20 out of total of 335 mayors are women (6 percent)."

It is clear that if the Venezuelan revolution is to survive it must seek a way to address not only the inequities of poverty but also of race and gender.

One would conclude from all the information provided by our authors in the Venezuelan Revolution that the United States would seek to support a democratically elected and committed Christian leader such as Chavez. But this is far from the case. In the Venezuelan Revolution, we are given the reason why there is so much enmity between the United States and the Bolivarian Republic. The main reason why the United States has problems with Chavez is centered on the question of regional hegemony. That is, who should play the leading role in developing Latin America?

Since the advent of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States has used a series of dubious pretexts to keep Latin America and Caribbean countries under its thumb. In regard to Venezuela, our authors assert that, historically, "Venezuela governments have put a lot of energy into maintaining a strong relationship with the United States without paying much attention to other bilateral relationships . . . The Chavez government actively seeks to break this historic dependency."

The principle way in which Chavez has sought to break with the United States is by pursuing an entirely independent foreign policy. Not only has Chavez befriended Castro but he has also hosted President Khatami of Iran, visited Saddam Hussein in Iraq (before the war) and Mu’ammar Gadhafi in Libya. Chavez has also worked to strengthen OPEC which resulted in “driving up oil prices.” But what is not more generally known is how much aid Chavez has given to other Third World countries and even to poor communities within the United States.

More recently Chavez has worked to oppose the United States Free Trade Zone of America (FTAA). Like NAFTA which established a free trade zone between Mexico, Canada, and the United States, FTAA would, “make all of the Western Hemisphere (thirty-four countries) with the exception of Cuba, a free trade zone.” In essence, FTAA would give the entire Southwestern Hemisphere over to exploitation of multinational corporations at the expense of the national sovereignty of individual Latin American countries. It is because Chavez has followed an independent foreign policy and acted to thwart the plans to economically integrate all the Latin America countries under the flag of multinational corporate interests that he has become the enemy of the United States.

The principle question for radical and progressive forces concerning Venezuela is whether both its domestic and foreign policies constitutes real revolutionary change in the region? There has been much written by especially the socialist forces on this matter. But this is what our author tell us, "The Bolivarian Revolution began by overhauling the political-judicial structures that served to maintain the previous system of the government and the rampant inequalities that it produced. The revolution is now focusing on economic and social changes in the interest of the majority of Venezuelans living in poverty . . . These changes do not yet fundamentally impact capitalist development, the rule of law, or private property. Still, in the context of this country’s recent history, most, Venezuelans, whether they support them or oppose them, recognize that the profound changes that are currently in progress are indeed revolutionary. "

Recently, The International Socialist Review (Issue 46 March-April 2006) dedicated its spring issue to the examining the political developments in Venezuela and Bolivia. The venerable socialist theorist, Noam Chomsky, in an essay called, "Latin America at the Tipping point, states that, "From Venezuela to Argentina, the hemisphere is getting completely out of control, with left-central governments all the way through. Even in Central America, still suffering the aftereffects of President Reagan’s 'war on terror', the lid is barely on."

Chomsky seems to see Venezuela as at least as part and parcel of a general progressive tide that is sweeping Latin America. Chomsky’s view seems to arise from the role that Chavez has in placing Venezuela within Mercosur (a South American trading zone) which he rightly states “represents an alterative to the so-called Free Trade Area of America.”

In "An Unconscious Socialist Revolution" (The International Socialist Review (Issue 46 March-April 2006), Américo Tabata, Venezuelan member of the national committee of the Party of Revolution and Socialism (PRS), believes that "an unconscious socialist revolution . . . is unfolding" in Venezuela. For example, Tabata admits that Chavez’s missions are, “democratic achievements wrested from the bourgeoisie and imperialism by popular struggle.” But still, he wonders about whether such democratic achievements will necessarily lead to a socialist state. Both articles by Chomsky and Tabata make great companion pieces for The Venezuelan Revolution and should be read by all those who have interest in the revolution.

But despite criticism raised about the revolution, there can be little doubt that Venezuela is indeed a progressive country and that its anti-imperialist stand should be enough for it to enjoy the support of radical and progressive forces everywhere in the world. Whether Venezuela veers further left, remains the same, or recaptured by the right it is in the final analysis a matter to be decided by the poor and working masses. What Boudin, Gonzalez and Rumbos reveal in their book is how complex, even fluid, the revolutionary situation is in Venezuela.

It is not simply the answers given by our authors to the larger issues such as whether the achievements of the Bolivarian Republic is revolutionary that make this book so compelling. The answers to questions about urban crime, the prison system, the media, state run corporations, the changing role of the military and the transformation of political parties, all enhance our understanding of what the Venezuelan people are trying to accomplish. The Venezuelan Revolution 100 Questions-100 Answers is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the essential thrust of revolutionary activity in Venezuela and throughout Latin America. I commend Boudin, Gonzalez, and Rumbos on compiling a highly effective work and highly recommend that it be included in the library of all progressive and radical forces.

By Ishmael Reed

I TiVo Don Imus as much as I can because his putrid racist offerings are said to represent the secret thinking of the Cognoscenti. Maybe that's why journalists like Jeff Greenfield and others admire him so much. He says what they think in private.

On any day, you might find Bernard McGuirk, the man, who, according to "60 Minutes," Imus hired to do "nigger jokes," doing a lame imitation of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, using a plantation type dialect. The blacks who are satirized by McGuirk and others are usually displayed as committing malaprops, but, though white writers appear daily on the show, I've rarely seen a black author.

In the last twenty years, black authors have received every prize available to authors. His idea of a black author must be the same as the producers of the movie, "The Tenants:" Snoop Dogg.

Recently, McGuirk referred to Rev. Joesph Lowery as a "shameless skunk," and a joke was made about the manner in which Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's window, was murdered. Black athletes are referred to as "knuckle draggers," which, the Irish and and Scotts Irish members of Imus's crew--they discussed their ethnic heritage on C-Span--might be surprised to learn, was the way that the British referred to their groups.

When an exhibition of great apes was presented in London, the British commentators said that the exhibition showed the Irish to be the link between ape and man. But their being Irish and Scots-Irish makes sense because it was members of these groups who used to entertain the Anglos by blackening up. Maybe that's why Imus has listeners in Kennebunkport. Bush I is a fan.

Another fan is Congressman Harold Ford (D-TN), whom Imus endorses so as to deflect attention from the show's lowbrow racism. I'm sure that Ford understands what Imus is all about, but he needs the country and western vote in rural Tennessee in order to gain a senate seat. Imus has a big following among this constituency. So did James Earl Ray.

But why pick on Imus? His approach to the treatment of black issues and personalities has become mainstream, the only difference being that instead of using the Irish and Scot-Irish, the traditional white-trash mercenaries, who stand between the Other and the Anglos, when, given their social and economic position, they should strike common cause with blacks, the network and newspaper executives use people who resemble blacks to chastise blacks. This colored auxiliary function as their mind doubles and iPod people.

I'll bet the executives got the idea from the cynical packagers of President Bush's political strategies. The administration's advocates of torture for example are Vietnamese, Chinese and Mexican Americans. The former domestic policy advisor who was recently arrested for scamming a department store is black, and the secretary of state is black. When they come before congressional committees, the idea is that congressmen would be reluctant to submit them to harsh questioning for fear of being called racist. That way, they can promote the administration's megalomaniac foreign policy with very little criticism. I'm sure that's Karl Rove's thinking.

Unlike Ms. Rice, who I, in a heated public exchange with her, dubbed "the Manchurian Candidate" about a year before she joined the Bush campaign, journalist Barbara Reynolds is a progressive. She said that she was fired from USA Today because she didn't appeal to the demographic group from which the paper gets its sales: Angry White Men. Those black syndicated columnists who have remained must fit the bill. They have become the go-fers for backlash journalism, all of them competing with each other to blame the country's social problems on black behavior.

Clarence Page and others are regularly blaming the victim. Harvard's Orlando Patterson is also brought in by the Neo Con op-ed editors at the Times to characterize the problems of African-Americans as self-inflicted, using the kind of argument that would be ripped to shreds in a freshman class room.

Even Bob Herbert, a liberal and the token black on the New York Times' Neo Con editorial page, has to take the brothers and sisters to the woodshed from time to time in order to maintain credibility with his employers. He too says that Gangsta Rap is the cause of society's woes. (David Brooks, who promotes some of the same ideas as David Duke, but has a more opaque writing style, even blamed the riots in France on Gangsta Rap).

For these writers, black peoples' style is the irritant. If we could only get Rep. Cynthia McKinney to a new hair stylist.

Michelle Martin, who was assigned to beat up on Ms. McKinney by the producers of "Nightline," spent half the interview on Ms. McKinney's hair even though Ms. McKinney has been outspoken on a number of serious issues. Can you imagine Ms. Martin conducting an interview with Trent Lott, the last person on the planet to use Wild Root Cream Oil, or Joe Biden, and spending half the time on his hair?

If "Nightline's" Martin had subjected a white male congressman to this kind of hostile sarcastic interview, sarcastic not only in words but in body language, to which she subjected Cynthia McKinney, Martin would have gotten the same treatment from her bosses that Connie Chung received when she interviewed Newt Gingrich's mom, who denounced Hillary Clinton as "a bitch." (Ms. Martin knows whom to aggress upon. When she appeared on a program with "white militant" Joe Klein and Klein, who lied about his authorship of Primary Colors, talked about "the poverty of values within the inner city," she just sat there and took it.)

Before Chung's interview with Newt's mom, the network executives, according to a media publication issued by the Freedom Forum, wanted someone like Connie Chung for their shows. She still hasn't recovered and has been assigned to a Saturday morning show on MSNBC. Oblivion.

Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Constitution was also solicited by "Nightline" to join in on the ambush of Ms. McKinney. Ms. Tucker, who blames the Hudlin brothers, producers at Black Entertainment Network, for the problems confronting some black kids, is the syndicated columnist who relied on the usual inflammatory and racist reporting to describe those who sought refuge in the New Orleans Superdome as "bestial." The New York Times, the New Orleans Time-Picayune and the LA Times all discounted these rumors and the LA Times even apologized, saying that such reporting would never have occurred had there been white middle class inhabitants of the Superdome.

Ms. Tucker never retracted her false accusation, nor did Jeff Koinange, the reporter whom CNN has assigned to cover all of Africa. He replaced the African-American reporter who was covering the Superdome because this reporter presumably wasn't sensational enough. While one can see African leaders, intellectuals, and scientists, sessions of parliaments, cultural events on the B.B.C., CNN's view of Africa is on par with that found in the Tarzan movies.

When CNN bade Koinange farewell on the occasion of his new assignment, they presented the highlights of his Africa coverage. One picture showed him staring at a crocodile. Another showed him grinning at a monkey. No wonder the American public's knowledge of the world is on par with that of their president's.

You'll also notice that the moderator of the "Nightline" show where Congressperson McKinney was grilled was of South Asian origin. According to a memo I have from a Cuban reporter, who was fired from CNN, the executives there, led by Jonathan Klein (the new head of CNN who is trying to boost his ratings by running mug shots of black males all day, while dropping the story about the middle class white kids, who were caught on video beating up homeless people, killing one of them; they were sent to psychiatric counseling) prefer South Asians as anchors, especially the women, and particularly on CNN International.

CNN Atlanta features a South Asian anchorwoman who giggles while the male correspondents exchange remarks with her that are loaded with sexual innuendo, certainly an issue that feminists should take up.

Even C-Span, the only network where you can obtain a variety of viewpoints from African Americans, though they give disproportionate time to think-tank blacks like Shelby Steele, has gone Imus. Last week, Jadish Bhaghati, a South Asian professor at Columbia who supports Bush's plan to bring Mexican slave labor into the United States to serve his big agri-businesses contributors, shared laughs with host Pedro Echevarria and a caller, a white employer, who was voicing the kind of jokes about black work habits that one reads at the Klan's "Nigger Watch" website. Both Bhaghati and host Echevarria are black, but that didn't prevent them from enjoying the kind of barbs against African-Americans one hears on the Imus show.

Of course, one should avoid generalizing about South Asians, but obviously the British, who, referred to them as "niggers," trained some of them very well and they're not the only "people of color" who serve as stooges for the corporate media. Michelle Malkin, instead of a hard-hitting anti-establishment writer like Emil Gulliermo of Asia Week, represents Filipino Americans. For Muslim Americans they give us Irshad Manji, who refuses to debate the young playwright Wajahat Ali.

For Mexican Americans we are awarded the syndicated Ruben Navarrette, Jr., who believes that black people are too dumb to compete with the cheap Mexican labor that has been brought into New Orleans. People who work off the books, for less than the minimum wages, and who are subject to blackmail by their employers. People who threaten to wipe out all of the gains that American workers have fought for over the last one hundred years. Apparently, there is no room for the views of Patricia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriquez, who are to the left of Navarrette, Jr.

African-Americans have a number of individuals who are willing to serve as mind doubles. Some are supported by right wing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter, black front man for the Eugenics movement. The Manhattan Institute boasts that they can provide enormous publicity for their fellows—the kind of clout that enables them to impose their viewpoints upon discussions about black issues—by using proxies who are unknown to black Americans. When McWhorter attacks me in Commentary, a magazine that praised Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve," or in his books, where do I go to get equal time? He once challenged me to a debate, threatening "to wipe up the floor with me," but when I accepted, he backed out.

Another proxy person-of-color intellectual for right wing interests is Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institute. He just got three hours on C-Span to explain his one-note theory that blacks complain too much about their "victimization." He accused blacks of expressing "victimization" when they complained about being robbed of their votes in Florida during the Presidential election of 2000, even though there is abundant evidence that they were victimized.

But even Shelby Steele isn't as popular with the right as Ward Connerly who is so firmly associated with proposition 209, the measure that ended Affirmative Action in California, that lazy journalists claim he started the drive that led to its being passed. He didn't. He was brought on when the real sponsors suffered a lapse in their notion of a color-blind society long enough to realize that a black face on their proposition would aide in its adoption.

Before Connerly came on, the proposition was failing. (One of the two white founders of the proposition said that he did so because a woman got the job that he was qualified for (Lydia Chavez, the author of "The Color Bind: The Campaign to End Affirmative Action" Paperback, April 1998) an excellent book about the sinister maneuvering that led to proposition 209 says the woman has never been found.)

Connerly, viewed as by the media as martyr who braved the scorn of his black accusers to follow his conscience, only agreed to support the proposition if its supporters raised $500,000. Newt Gingrich helped to raise the money. He was also supported financially by President Clinton's nemesis Richard Mellon Scaife. Rupert Murdoch contributed 200,000 dollars and the Pioneer fund contributed thirty five thousand dollars to the campaign to end Affirmative Action in California, so that now Duke University and "Old Miss" have a higher black enrollment than the University of California and California State University.

In his book, The Nazi Connection, Stefan Kuhl says that "Today, the Pioneer Fund is the most important financial supporter of research concerning the connection between race and heredity in the United States." Its largest contributor, until the 1960s, was textile magnate Wickliffe Draper, who worked with the United States House Un-American Activities Committee to demonstrate that blacks were genetically inferior and ought to be 'repatriated' to Africa."

The Pioneer Fund also supported Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve," the book beloved by publications that hate Minster Louis Farrakhan so much. In this book, Charles Murray floats some of the same stereotypes about blacks that were once aimed at his Scots-Irish ancestors.

Another supporter was Andrew Sullivan, who came to the attention of the mainstream electronic media after he did such a good job bashing blacks at the New York Times Magazine section, which describes blacks as cannibals and crack addicts.

Obviously Ward Connerly, who has made millions from being associated with proposition 209, is supported by such ultra right individuals and groups that he has been reluctant to list his contributors.

Such is the power of their right wing backers that Steele, Connerly, and McWhorter get more media attention than black elected officials. When Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Connerly appeared on C-Span, on the same day, it was Connerly who was featured.

I remember the press conference held by David Duke when he announced that he was abandoning his quest for the presidency.

Only a few news people attended. Duke complained that he had to quit because the mainstream candidates had co opted his program all about a growing black underclass threatening civilization. (His Nazi colleague, Tom Metzger disagreed with him. He said on Larry King's show that the average woman on welfare is a white woman whose husband has abandoned her.)

The same might happen to Don Imus, whose "nigger Jokes" are sponsored by American Express and other famous brand names. Who needs a white man when there are plenty of people of color willing to take up the slack.

By Vince Rogers

Hard to create in this state, as the Joy Stealers and Soul Snatchers patrol the high road.The Necromancers of Negritude have laid a path of sucked skulls and confused souls.The keys to freedom lay buried in the Ancient Books, but the Alchemists have turned gold to lead

The PoliTricksters negotiate another unapologetic unconditional surrender to bondage.
While young men die along the Euphrates paying the price for old men’s greed. This side of Babylon, Dope Boys and No Limit Soldiers get caught up like flies in the trap.

Tonight there’ll be no burning or looting, maybe some shooting and some illusions will die.Salon styled Dreadlocks worn for fashion without passion in this I-ration without elevation. An old man with a drawer full of worn out Afro Picks remembers young people shouting Uhuru Sasa!!!!! Closets full of button down shirts and Dashikis hanging alongside one another like a double Niggative

Niggertude

For decades, Niggers, Negroes, Black People and African-Americans, have been struggling with what to call themselves, ourselves, yourselves and my self. Negro which probably makes the most sense, was rejected in order for us to name and define ourselves, rather than be named by Europeans. The word Negro best describes our peculiar reality as Africans whose most unique cultural trait is that we were displaced from our homeland by Europeans and resettled around the globe by them not by ourselves.

In reality most of us here in this part of the Diaspora, at this point in time, have been shaped more by negative American cultural forces than by positive African cultural forces. Despite being essentially American, we continue to seek to identify ourselves in a culturally distinct way such as African-American, as if it’s the least we can do to keep our ancestors and the rest of the Diaspora from being ashamed of us.

In reality though, although uncomfortable with the word Black or Negro most of us have very little in common with Africa, if not an outright disdain for her. Nevertheless, African-American currently holds the distinction of being displayed in front of the most check boxes on Federal forms and job applications today.

Throughout history, our attempts to name ourselves have been problematic at best. I prefer Black because it makes the strongest statement. To be honest though, identifying people by color who range from canary yellow to raven black is kind of silly. If the use of the term Black has accomplished anything, it proved that Caucasian people are silly enough to call themselves White, despite there not being a white one in the bunch. I recall when “African American” was introduced; there was rejoicing that we had settled the name problem once and for all. Then came along those that didn’t want to be identified with the African part and those who wanted nothing to do with the American part. What was wrong with these Niggers, I mean Negroes? By the way does anybody know where the committee meets that decides this shit?

Nevertheless as Chris Rock has alluded to, based on a myriad of cultural, political and economic influences, some of us are more or less Niggers, including the wealthy hip-hop impresarios who have muddied the etymological waters even further, by making the word something that’s okay for a fourteen year old White girl to shout at the top of her lungs while rockin' with the hype man at a rap concert.

To try to justify this cultural contradiction (because God knows the last thing we should want to do in this era of the Cash Money Rights Movement is to criticize wealthy Black people) the separate and distinctly spelled terms “Nigga or Niggah” have been introduced to justify the use of the word as a term of endearment. This has been done in much the same way the titles “Be’yach and Ho” were marketed to make misogyny palatable so women would buy more records in the 90s.

Sadly enough though, one of the reasons we find ourselves in such a pickle is that even our most respected scholars have been complicit throughout the years in the process of embracing Nigger Culture or Niggertude and explaining it as part of some false African cultural continuum. This has been done either because they did not understand the anthropological phenomena that truly explained certain Black cultural behavior or because they couldn’t find solutions to certain problems, so they sought to embrace or excuse the behavior. Maybe they just didn’t want to give up their own hog maws and chittlins, Friday night jump offs at the strip club and Saturday night sparring sessions with their woman, before going to praise the Lord on Sunday morning.

The entire industry of “Soul Food,” black hair care products and the majority of consumption of jewelry, car accessories and pork products by Black people is a direct inheritance of the culture of slavery. What are we really or as my homies in the hood would say “What’s really happenin’”? Are we products of our own design or the product of second class citizenship and an inferior self concept forged through adaptation to adverse conditions. Are we simply a people who’ve had to make cultural sacrifices and bargains to survive or are we just Jigaboos whose real legacy is now and always has been tellin’ jokes, sangin and gettin’ crunk?

The truest advice given by every guidance counselor and self help author to their audience is to do what you love or what you’re good at. It is often argued that the Black man can do anything that all of the other races excel at and for that matter it is a known fact that we invented the majority of the arts and the sciences. Why is it then that now even the most successful among us from Oprah Winfrey to Robert Johnson have made their marks as entertainers and entertainment promoters, not physicists and mathematicians? The real question though is rather than try to prove we can be just as good at geophysics and aeronautics would we be better off taking total control of areas like sports, entertainment and the arts? We have spent centuries apologizing for our affinities for athletics and entertaining, when if we controlled those industries it would provide enough resources to employ, house and feed us all.

Our scholars and academics, motivated mostly by shame and faced with the contradictions to their tales of Kings and Queens, have devised a canon of bad science to attempt to explain the existence of Rudy Ray Moore and African griots in the same time space continuum. They have done so for lack of the ability to find answers to our problems that provide valid explanations for our unique anthropological case study. We are displaced Africans scattered throughout the Diaspora by Europeans. This has created distinct cultural-social-economic problems, which cannot be solved easily, painlessly or without a multifarious regimen of diagnosis and rigorous curative measures.

As a matter of fact, it is even theorized now that our inability to adapt to this climate and the American diet is the real culprit that predisposes us to higher levels of hypertension and other health maladies. Even after we have had centuries to adapt, just living here is a physiological threat to us. I am often reminded that even the wealthiest amongst us, such as Reginald Lewis and Johnnie Cochran, who could afford the best of medical care and had almost unlimited resources, met their natural demise at inordinately young ages. So if living here is killing us, we can’t go “back home” and White people have proven to have a history of unleashing genocide on various populations when the going gets rough, what is the answer? Is it hopeless?

Examining the benefit of embracing authentic Negritude and rejecting that which is Niggertude is one of the greatest challenges to us finding our place as a people on this planet. I always find it funny when scholars with no real anthropological basis or research just assume certain shit must have some roots in African culture and try to make up some bogus connective story to explain certain Nigger shit we should be trying to run away from - like shooting up in the air at nothing on New Years Eve. They give explanations like “Oh that goes back to the tribesmen throwing their spears in the air to celebrate the harvest.”

On the other hand even the bougiest Niggas still feel something when they hear the drums and have a certain reverence for a sister with her head wrapped – that has an anthropological basis to it, that's Negritude. Is the Greek step show really the ancestor of the South African boot dance? Would the Egyptians really want the credit for hair weaves? Why haven’t the Ashanti chiefs sued Lil Jon for royalties on the Pimp Cup? Is Egypt really the place we should be trying to connect to, or is it just easier to embrace than Chad?

Identifying, embracing and furthering those aspects of our culture which are edifying is the key to ensuring our continued existence as a people and empowering the entire African Diaspora.

Niggertude is the shit we can't seem to shake no matter how many Brooks Brothers suits we wear. Niggertude is borne out of the conditions we are yet to recover from after centuries of wallowing in this cesspool of racism, oppression and inequality. It is imperative that we eschew the evils of Niggertude and cease to identify these phenomena as part of our culture.

These are the real issues that nobody could seem to get to the heart of, during Bill Cosby’s recent campaign of self hatred. Although Michael Eric Dyson sought to reveal Mr. Cosby’s motivations, he offered very few solutions of his own. Cosby was mad at the Niggers ‘cus they weren’t doing their part to become African-Americans. Dyson was mad at Cosby because he realized Cosby was just saying what he was saying because he was ashamed of Niggers. However, even though Cosby hates Niggers, he pointed out many issues that needed to be examined.

Despite his good intentions, Dyson had no plans to empower Black people or Niggers because he was at the core cut from the same elitist academic cloth as Cosby. Niggers were like “Why are y’all Niggas all in my business. You’n know me?” The situation did serve to shed light on the fact that educated rich Niggas can be as far from true Blackness and incapable of Black Love as the Boyz n da Hood. Neither group is building community, empowering the Diaspora or fostering healthy Black love and unity.

The dialogue that ensued (if it can be truly called a dialogue, since few people stood up to challenge the Venerable Cos) did reveal another issue that has been brewing under the surface for some time though. Black people in the “Ivory Towers” and African-Americans in the corridors of power seem to feel as besieged as Negroes on the second shift and Niggers in the trap. In this day and age everybody says that the only struggle we now face is economic - so why do people who have "made it" feel as lost as people in the ghetto? I think it's because the soul can tell when it is lost even when physical conditions are fine.

I often ask myself why homeless cats on the streets can seem happy as hell sometimes. I think maybe it's because a certain comforting freedom comes from not kissing ass, selling out and punking out everyday. On the other hand, some people with the most stuff seem to feel the most lost because they have to give the man an emotional rim job everyday just to eat. If the issue were only economics, so many of us wouldn't feel hopeless, powerless and insecure. Deep inside we desire unity and cultural connectedness but most of us can’t decide which group to unify with – the Niggers, the Negroes, the Blacks or the African-Americans.

Because we tend to unify around superficial vestiges of class rather than cultural imperatives, many of us have had the experience of being unable to find common ground with anybody or have been betrayed by our own various adopted tribesmen. Once the middle class Black man or African-American gets his money stolen by his business partner or comes home and finds his golfing buddies dick in his wife’s mouth, he realizes he was dealing with a Nigger too. Niggertude doesn’t just affect the Black bourgeoisie however. Niggers are stealing old ladies checks in the ghetto. Niggers are fucking each other over for promotions at the job. Niggers have been lured into a state of paralysis reading endless lists of books about the Illuminati, and Masons and Coentelpro, while devising no stratagems to combat the effects.

Lastly but not least well educated, well heeled, well connected Niggers are holding meetings somewhere deciding what else about our culture we should be ashamed of, what else we are willing to sacrifice for economic gain, and what else should be important to the rest of us Negroes.

By Greg Grandin

Even as the United States wages a war in the Persian Gulf that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice describes as a central front in an epic "generational struggle" in defense of Western values and freedoms, another geopolitical threat has been massing on its southern flank. Over the course of the past seven years, Latin America has seen the rebirth of nationalist and socialist political movements, movements that were long thought to have been dispatched by cold war death squads. Following Hugo Chávez's 1998 landslide victory in Venezuela, one country after another has turned left. Today, roughly 300 million of Latin America's 520 million citizens live under governments that either want to reform the Washington Consensus--a euphemism for the mix of punishing fiscal austerity, privatization and market liberalization that has produced staggering levels of poverty and inequality over the past three decades--or abolish it altogether and create a new, more equitable global economy.

This year, that number is likely to grow. Latin America is in the middle of an election cycle that has already seen Evo Morales win in Bolivia and Michelle Bachelet, a single mother and socialist, win a third term for Chile's center-left Concertación Coalition. On April 9 in Peru, Ollanta Humala, a nationalist former military officer backed by Chávez and Morales, came from behind to force a runoff. In the months ahead, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela will hold presidential elections. And with center-leftist Manuel López Obrador ahead in Mexico, the Sandinistas poised to make a comeback in Nicaragua and Chávez's re-election all but certain, the Bush Administration is nervous. It has responded by trying to drive a wedge between what Rice describes as the "false populism" that is spreading throughout the Andes and the pragmatic reformism of Chile, Uruguay and Brazil--in other words, between the "statesmen" and the "madmen," as Chávez recently put it.

There are, in fact, important differences among Latin American leftists--between, say, Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has opted to pursue reform through market-led growth, and Chávez, who is more willing to mobilize the left's social base, allow the state a greater role in the economy and pick fights with international capital. But they are also highly dependent on one another, especially in their dealings with the United States. For Chávez, besieged during the first three years of his administration, the election of sympathetic regional allies, starting with Lula in 2002, came just in time to help him shore up his position and push back his domestic and foreign opponents. In return, the confrontational Chávez provides cover to his more circumspect counterparts, drawing Washington's anger. If it were not for its quarrel with Venezuela, the United States would certainly be less tolerant of what Rice calls its "differences with friends," which include Brazil's opposition to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) and Chile's refusal to support the invasion of Iraq.

But more than just giving one another room to maneuver, Latin America's new leftists have produced over the last couple of years their own consensus, a common project to use the centrifugal forces of globalization to loosen Washington's unipolar grip. Brazil's Lula has been central to this project, especially insofar as he has helped to awaken international financial institutions to the downsides of free-market orthodoxy. When he was elected, he was hailed as Latin America's great hope, not just by the poor but, once he promised to maintain a high budget surplus, by the officials of institutions like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. His campaign took place in the shadow of Argentina's financial meltdown, the latest in a series of international financial crises that led globalization's managers to emphasize the importance not only of freeing markets but of strengthening institutions that could stabilize those markets. If a man of the left such as Lula could achieve "growth with equity"--which by Brazil's 2002 vote had become the World Bank's new mantra--in Latin America's largest economy, it would go a long way toward defining the post-Washington Consensus consensus. Lula, said former World Bank president James Wolfensohn in an interview last year, is leading the "most important experiment in Latin America today."

As Lula approaches the end of his first, and possibly only, term, the results of this experiment have been disappointing. Extreme poverty has decreased somewhat, but this has less to do with his showpiece "zero hunger" program than with steady economic growth driven by high commodity prices. Still, after emerging as a spokesperson for developing countries on trade issues and leading the opposition to the FTAA over subsidies and concerns about intellectual property rights, he did begin to represent an alternative, if not to free trade then to Washington's stranglehold over the way free trade was proceeding in the Americas.

Under Lula, Brazil has played a key role in fostering the economic links that have begun to wean the region from its dependence on the United States. Buoyed by Argentina's and Uruguay's turn left, and anchored by Brazil's enormous market and advanced agricultural, pharmaceutical, heavy equipment, steel and aeronautical sectors, the countries of South America have taken a number of steps to diversify the hemisphere's economy. They courted non-US trade and investment, particularly from Asia. Fueled by a consuming thirst for Latin America's raw materials--its oil, ore and soybeans--the Chinese government has negotiated more than 400 investment and trade deals with Latin America over the past few years, investing more than $50 billion in the region. China is both Brazil's and Argentina's fourth-largest trading partner, providing $7 billion for port and railroad modernization and signing $20 billion worth of commercial agreements. South American leaders have also sought to deepen regional economic integration, primarily by expanding the Mercosur--South America's most important commercial alliance--and embarking on an ambitious road-building project. These efforts appear to be working. In December Lula claimed that Brazil's trade with the rest of Latin America grew by nearly 90 percent since the previous year, compared with a 20 percent increase with the United States.

One sign that economic diversification is gaining force was the success last year of Argentine President Néstor Kirchner's take-it-or-leave-it offer of 30 cents on every dollar owed on its $100 billion external debt, to be paid in long-term, low-interest bonds. In the past, financial markets would have severely punished such insolence, but with Asian investment pouring in and the economy rebounding at a steady clip, a majority of lenders had no choice but to make the deal. For its part, the IMF, fearing either a complete default or a successful agreement made without its imprimatur, was forced grudgingly to sanction the bid. It was, according to Knight Ridder Business News, the "biggest sovereign debt restructuring in history, with international creditors accepting unprecedented losses." "For the first time in history," a triumphal Kirchner said in a speech to Congress reporting on the transaction, "a restructuring process has culminated in a drastic reduction of the indebtedness of the country."

Asian investment, road building and common markets are not what Fidel Castro had in mind when in the 1960s he rallied third-world youth to take up arms against Yankee imperialism. Yet the rise and maintenance of the United States as a world power has long been predicated on claiming Latin America as its own. On the eve of the cold war, for instance, even as Harry Truman was promoting the United Nations and pushing for open markets elsewhere, his envoys in Latin America were negotiating an alliance that gave preferential treatment to US corporations and allowed Washington to mobilize the region as a bloc in its struggle against the Soviet Union.

In the past few years, however, the region's most consequential nations have refused to be conscripted into Bush's "war on terror." And unlike the way they lined up to quarantine Cuba during the cold war, they have rebuffed Washington's calls to pursue an "inoculation strategy" against Chávez, as Secretary of State Rice put it to Congress in February. Last year, Bush even saw his nominee to head the Organization of American States bested by a candidate backed by Venezuela. If Latin America's new left achieves nothing else, it has at least broken the political bonds of this proprietary relationship.

The FTAA is the US government's gambit to turn things around. It is meant to do for Latin America what the North American Free Trade Agreement did for Mexico: ratify its status as a US province within an increasingly globalized economy. Under NAFTA the United States has come to dominate Mexican trade, muscling out other Latin American countries. The same is expected to occur when the Chilean and Central American free-trade pacts are fully implemented. Call it "market polygamy," whereby the United States can have multiple partners but each of those partners must remain faithful to it alone.

Hopes that Brazil could counter the gravitational pull of the United States have been diminished by the corruption scandals that in the past ten months have rocked Lula's Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and shattered its Congressional coalition. While Lula has not yet announced whether he will stand for re-election in October, recent polls indicate that if he does, he will most likely face a tough fight. There is still time for him to pull through. He has recently raised the minimum wage, increased social spending and cut interest rates, all in the hopes of boosting the economy in the run-up to the election. But even if he does win a second term, he will govern from a greatly weakened position.

As Lula recedes, Chávez proceeds. Until his victory in the August 2004 recall, it was easy to dismiss the Venezuelan president as the latest in a long line of Latin American Bonapartists, a strongman who emerged to restore order after Venezuela's two-party system collapsed under the weight of its own venal incompetence. During Chávez's first six years in office, his fiery rhetoric did little to diminish economic inequality or challenge the generous contracts his predecessors gave to petroleum multinationals. But whereas Lula started with high expectations only to disappoint, Chávez has moved in the opposite direction. He has rebounded from the recall fight to quicken the pace of reform. With the economy booming, unemployment falling, the opposition in disarray and his Fifth Republic Movement in control of Congress and regional posts, he has accelerated the distribution of expropriated land, nationalizing industries and diverting Central Bank reserves to diversify the economy.

For Washington, the most immediate threat posed by Venezuela is not the spread of "false populism" in Latin America but Chávez's emergence as the motor behind the left's attempt to advance economic and political multilateralism. He has turned out to be a skilled rope-a-dope artist, making at times preposterous political pronouncements--in March Chávez requested that the legislature have the white horse on Venezuela's flag face left instead of right, so that it would no longer be an "imperialist horse"--while playing a nimble Great Game of geopolitics. He has capitalized on the rise of China and India as alternative sources of investment and trade--Venezuelan exports to India tripled over the past year, while oil sales to China are expected to double this year and increase fivefold by 2010--and parlayed the 2004 election of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero into a strategic victory. Under Zapatero's predecessor, José Aznar, Madrid not only backed Bush's "war on terror" but helped enforce neoliberalism in Latin America through Spain's powerful banking sector. That has changed as Zapatero and Chávez have joined their respective countries into a corridor linking South America and the European Union. Although Washington may yet scuttle the deal, Spain recently agreed to sell Venezuela $2 billion worth of transport planes and patrol boats, while Caracas has offered a long-term agreement to supply Spain with gas and oil.

Chávez has cultivated alliances across the ideological spectrum, buying arms from Russia and negotiating a deal with Colombia's conservative President Alvaro Uribe to build a natural gas pipeline connecting the two countries--the first step in what observers believe will give Venezuela access to the Pacific and lower export costs to China. Venezuela has also managed to secure the tacit endorsement of Chile's just inaugurated Bachelet for its bid to become a nonpermanent member of the UN Security Council, which surely will contribute to John Bolton's anger issues.

Last December Venezuela scored another diplomatic coup, joining Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay as a full member in Mercosur. When Mercosur was founded in 1991, it was to be little more than a tool to groom individual countries for eventual absorption into the US market. But reformers in recent years have worked to transform it into a real alternative to Washington's FTAA. The entrance of Venezuela, South America's third-largest economy, comes just at the moment when Lula's troubles are threatening to derail this project. Serious obstacles to trade and tariff standardization remain, yet at the same meeting where it approved Venezuela's petition for admission, Mercosur established a Parliament modeled on the European Union, agreeing to cooperate on a range of issues, including multilateral trade agreements with countries like China. Caracas has promised billions of dollars to develop northern South America's transportation and commercial infrastructure and has even floated the idea of a "Bank of the South," along with a common Latin American currency, which would provide an alternative to US-controlled financial institutions like the IMF and dollar-denominated financial and commodity transactions. Venezuela has already become an important regional creditor, purchasing more than $1 billion of Argentine debt last year, which allowed Buenos Aires to pay off its IMF tab in full.

Venezuela is making cheap oil available to a majority of its neighbors, including a quid pro quo with Paraguay for support of its bid to join Mercosur. But oil does more than grease Chávez's diplomatic wheels: Energy integration, he insists, will lay the foundation of Latin American unity. Kirchner, Chávez and Lula have announced plans to build a 5,000-mile pipeline that will transport Venezuelan natural gas through Brazil to Argentina; Buenos Aires and Brasilia just signed a deal whereby Argentina will ship 1.5 million cubic meters of gas to Brazil in the summer and Brazil will provide Argentina with 700 megawatts of electricity in the winter. In March the government-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) announced that it would spend $3 billion to buy thirty-six oil tankers from a Brazilian shipbuilder. The deal, which is the largest foreign order of Brazilian vessels to date, is expected not only to create 10,000 new jobs but, as a prime example of Chávez's realpolitik, to help Lula's re-election prospects. In addition, over the last year Venezuela and Brazil have signed a number of energy deals and have begun the construction of a joint oil refinery in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. And while US pundits have dismissed Chávez's provision of cheap oil to poor urban neighborhoods in New England and Chicago as a public relations stunt, this innovative form of diplomacy lets him bypass unsympathetic national governments and build alliances directly with local political movements. In March he reached an agreement with a group of FMLN mayors in El Salvador, including the mayor of San Salvador, to supply them with petroleum under preferential terms, allowing Chávez to strike into a region firmly under US control and giving the leftist mayors access to an important resource independent of the national government, which is headed by the FMLN's main rival, the ultraconservative ARENA Party.

Much of this activity is taking place under the umbrella of three Chávez-brokered oil alliances--PetroAndina, PetroCaribe and PetroSur--through which Venezuela is not only offering a reliable stream of petroleum at a set price but cheap credit, processing capabilities and financing to expand gas and oil production in the respective regions. Caracas has allowed fifteen Caribbean countries to pay part of their oil bills up front, spreading the balance out over twenty-five years at low interest rates, and has even let some nations pay their debt in kind, with bananas, sugar or, in the case of Cuba, doctors. This past September, twelve Latin American energy ministers met in Venezuela and voted to pursue the unification of the three oil alliances into one PetroAmerica, which if it comes into being would allow petroleum exporting countries to negotiate collectively with the United States, generate price competition through the creation of new regional markets, and help buffer economies from energy price spikes.

Chávez's oil diplomacy extends beyond Latin America. Perhaps his most consequential initiative upon taking office in early 1999 was to end Venezuela's role as a rate-busting OPEC member and to work with Iran and other petroleum-exporting countries to enforce production quotas, which, well before Bush's invasion of Iraq and the current troubles in the Middle East, began a steady rise in world oil prices. Last year, taking advantage of increased global demand, Chávez forced seventeen foreign companies to increase royalty payments and convert their operating contracts into joint ventures with PDVSA, which not only means that the state now owns at least 51 percent of all oil production but that the multinationals will be picking up the bill for modernizing the country's drilling and refining capacities. When ExxonMobil balked at Chávez's New Year's deadline to become PDVSA's junior partner, Spain's Repsol-YPF stepped in and bought out its holdings under Venezuela's terms. A similar diversification of demand may help Morales renegotiate Bolivia's existing contracts with foreign natural gas companies, if not to nationalize production then perhaps to set up something similar to Venezuela's joint ventures. With Malaysian, Indian and Chinese gas companies eager to get in, firms already operating in Bolivia, including Repsol, will have to consider seriously whatever offer Morales puts on the table. Just recently, Russia's Gazprom struck a preliminary deal with the Morales government to invest in joint exploration, production and refining operations--which would give one of the world's largest energy companies its first significant toehold in Latin America--while Brazil's state-owned Petrobras has signaled its willingness to renegotiate existing contracts, backed up by an announcement that it would help jumpstart Bolivia's moribund state energy company.

the Bush Administration may well face the following scenario by the end of the year, starting closest to home and working downward: A likely López Obrador win in Mexico in July, possibly supplemented by a Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, would bring Latin America's left renaissance to the United States's doorstep. Since signing NAFTA, Mexico has been one of Washington's few sure regional allies, countering Chávez's oil diplomacy by spearheading its own effort to integrate Mesoamerican and Colombian energy production and consumption. Markets are betting that López Obrador will speak like Chávez but govern like Lula. Yet Lula has demonstrated that being "fiscally responsible" in the eyes of the global financial community no longer means complete submission to Washington's will. López Obrador has not yet taken a stand on PetroAmerica, but he has invoked Mexico's long tradition of petro-nationalism, pledging not to privatize the state-owned industry and to reduce foreign influence in its operations. He has also promised to renegotiate NAFTA--particularly a provision scheduled to go into effect in 2008 that completely opens the Mexican market to US corn--and allying with Venezuela could strengthen his hand at the bargaining table. And while few welcome the possible return of the now corrupt Daniel Ortega, there are still worthy grassroots social movements within the Sandinista coalition, and a victory might begin to thaw Washington's icy grip on Central America.

Further south, with Morales in Bolivia and Chávez-style candidates on the march in Peru and Ecuador, the United States could confront a mobilized Andean rim, which could put access to cheap natural resources in danger and leave Colombia, its one trusted lieutenant in the region, isolated. Chávez's re-election, which seems assured, would give him at least another six years to consolidate Venezuela's position as a strategic hub, connecting the Andes, the Caribbean and southern South America to Spain and the EU, Russia, the Middle East, India and China. And PT militants in Brazil may look to the success of Chávez's Fifth Republic Movement to renovate their party. But Latin American solidarity historically has been honored more in the breach than in the observance. Entrenched political and economic rivalries will probably slow, if not stall, Mercosur and PetroAmerica integration. If the dollar declines and shrinks demand for imports, if global interest rates go up and swell Latin American debt, or if China slumps, leading to a fall in commodity prices and Asian investment, the economic growth that has underwritten regional cooperation over the past few years could end abruptly. Yet even if a pro-FTAA candidate wins in Brazil in October, and Peru and Ecuador remain firmly in Washington's camp, the United States would still confront opposition from Argentina, open defiance from Venezuela and, most likely, skepticism from Mexico--three of Latin America's four largest economies and critical to any successful free-trade deal.

As its political and economic influence in the region wanes, Washington has given up trying to convince Latin America to join the "war on terror," while its trade envoys are now reduced to signing bilateral deals with negligible economies like Paraguay and Ecuador to dilute opposition to the FTAA. The White House, under the sway of neocon ultras, has further backed itself into a corner by encouraging Chávez's adversaries to go for broke. Rather than patiently broadening a base of opposition and accumulating grievances, they have pursued an increasingly desperate series of actions--a coup attempt, an oil strike, the recall and, most recently, a boycott of legislative elections--that have left their nemesis strengthened and themselves discredited. Washington may be laying the groundwork for the same all-or-nothing strategy against Morales, having just announced that it is cutting off 96 percent of its military aid to Bolivia, a move that seems calculated to provoke the armed forces to act. The Bush Administration now promises to wage a battle for the "future of Latin America," but with few options left--except, of course, the military one--it is unclear if it will have any more success in what used to be the United States's backyard than it is having now in the Middle East.

By Christian Parenti

A young former US Army sniper wearing a desert camo uniform, an Iraqi kaffiyeh and mirrored sunglasses scans a ruined urban landscape of smashed homes, empty streets and garbage heaps. His sand-colored hat bears a small regulation-style military patch, or tab, that instead of reading "Airborne" or "Ranger" or "Special Forces" says "Shitbag"--common military parlance for bad soldier.

This isn't Baghdad or Kabul. It's the Gulf Coast, and the column of young men and women in desert uniforms carrying American flags are with Iraq Veterans Against the War. They are part of a larger peace march that is making its way from Mobile to New Orleans. This is just one of IVAW's ongoing series of actions.

In all, about thirty-five Iraq vets cycled through this weeklong procession of 250. For the young, often very broke, very busy veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, this represents a fairly strong showing. But many casual observers, influenced by memories of Vietnam-era protesting, when veterans mobilized in the thousands, expected that US soldiers in Iraq would turn against the war faster and in greater numbers than they have. An estimated 1 million Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, but so far IVAW has only about 250 members.

For many of the more activist IVAW vets, their political evolution did not follow the simple trajectory one might expect, from idealism at enlistment to postcombat disillusionment. In fact, many of them shipped off to war despite serious political misgivings. "I went to Iraq opposing the war," says Garrett Reppenhagen, the former sniper with the irreverent potty-mouthed patch on his hat. Reppenhagen served a year with the Army's First Infantry Division in and around the very violent city of Baquba. "I was reading Zinn's People's History and John Perkins's Economic Hit Man before I went."

What's that? Someone went off to be killed or maimed or possibly to kill "hajjis" despite being an antiwar leftist? And Reppenhagen is not alone. A recent Zogby poll found that 29 percent of soldiers in Iraq favored immediate withdrawal, which some see as a sign of an imminent crisis in military discipline. But the poll could be read in exactly the opposite fashion. If the Army and Marines can keep the disgruntled soldiers fighting and fighting, even 70 percent of troops could favor immediate withdrawal and it would mean nothing.

The question for peace activists thus becomes: How is it that antiwar soldiers continue to fight? And what does it really take for an antiwar soldier to resist? The answers lie largely in the sociology of "unit cohesion" and the ways the military uses solidarity among soldiers as a form of social control. Similarly, the peace activism of IVAW requires the spread of an oppositional form of loyalty and camaraderie.

Since 1973, when Congress ended the draft, the armed forces have been restructured using unit cohesion as a form of deep discipline. In other words, social control in today's military operates through a system that could be straight from a text by French philosopher Michel Foucault: Soldiers are managed not with coercion but with freedom. Because they join of their own free will, they find it almost impossible to rebel. Volunteering implicates them, effectively stripping them of the victim status that conscription allowed. Soldiers who would resist are guilt-tripped and emotionally blackmailed into serving causes they hate. During my time embedded in Iraq, I met several antiwar soldiers, but none of them considered abandoning their comrades. They said things like "you signed that paper" or "they got that contract"--as if contracts are never broken or annulled.

If veterans are supposed to be at the heart of the peace movement, then it would serve progressives to understand this new military culture. Understanding the world of the military is also important because it is a major force in the socialization of young working-class Americans. If you're 20 or 22 and you're not doing what many rich kids do (like a career-boosting summer internship in New York) or doing what some truly poor kids do (like going to state prison on drug charges), chances are you're learning about responsibility and adulthood, and escaping small-town or inner-city America, courtesy of the US armed forces. One of the key lessons you'll learn there is: Look out for your comrades, because they're looking out for you.

Since World War II military psychologists, sociologists and historians--most notably the army historian S.L.A. Marshall, who interviewed hundreds of combat veterans in the Pacific theater--have agreed that soldiers fight not for justice, democracy or other grand ideas but for the guy next to them. Unit cohesion is the real glue holding the US military together.

"I remember they had this formation to tell us we were going to Iraq," recalls Fernando Braga, a skinny, unassuming 23-year-old Iraq vet who is still enlisted in the New York National Guard. Braga, now a poet and student at CUNY's Hunter College, says he became politicized well before the war, when he helped his immigrant mother clean rich people's homes. "My company is really anti-authoritarian. Guys would regularly skip formations and insult the NCOs. So I thought nobody would go. But, like, everybody went!"

And since everybody went, so did Braga. "I had to go. I wasn't going to leave these guys."

It's worth recalling how badly military discipline broke down during the later stages of the Vietnam War, because those traumas shaped the thinking of today's military leadership and guided a wide array of important military reforms.

At the heart of the matter was the draft, which provoked a massive counterreaction that swelled the ranks of the peace movement but also salted the military with disgruntled troops whose increasingly disobedient ethos spread to many volunteers as well. By 1970 whole companies refused to go into combat, and enlisted men started "fragging"--that is, killing--their officers. Drug use and bad attitudes were rampant (Fort Hood, Texas, became known as Fort Head).

The group Vietnam Veterans Against the War staged dozens of protests. One action was a threatening and theatrical "search and destroy mission" that ran from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. When Nixon invaded Cambodia, the VVAW invaded DC in what the radical vets mockingly called "a limited incursion into the country of Congress." The culmination of it all was the Winter Soldier hearings, in which vets documented US war crimes.

Ending the draft excised much of the disgruntled element from the ranks, and by professionalizing the services, it has helped create a deepening military-civilian divide. Within today's all-volunteer military there is much more intense solidarity than during the Vietnam era. After Vietnam the military also improved its housing, wages, benefits, food and training; it reached out to the families of soldiers and modernized its disciplinary systems and promotions methods, all of which improved morale.

Another key difference between this war and Vietnam is the use of whole-unit rotations as opposed to individual rotations. In Vietnam a soldier was dropped into a unit for 365 days and then, if he survived, plucked out. In Iraq and Afghanistan, battalions (500 to 800 soldiers) train together, deploy together and come home together. During Vietnam the constant flow of men in and out of line companies fighting the war seriously undermined unit cohesion and camaraderie.

"When I showed up in Vietnam we were just parceled out to different platoons as they needed us. I was called the FNG when I showed up--the fucking new guy," remembers David Cline, a legendary activist and driving force within Veterans for Peace. "These kids today face a very different set of pressures."

Is a Vietnam-style collapse of military discipline imminent? Some peace activists think so, pointing to the estimated 400 US military deserters who have made their way to Canada, twenty of whom have applied for asylum, and the roughly 9,000 military personnel who have failed to report for duty since the war began (not all of them have been classified as deserters). Recruiting numbers, meanwhile, have flatlined.

Yet while today's military certainly faces a crisis of quantity, it does not have the Vietnam-era problem with quality.

During the Vietnam War the military had a sufficient number of troops--500,000 in country for much of the war. The problem was qualitative: low morale, rebellion, combat refusal, drug abuse, a crisis of conscience. Today's military is not falling apart Nam-style. Rather, it faces a crisis of size: Though expensive and hardware-heavy, the military is simply too small for the jobs at hand, and it is incapable of growing because too few recruits are joining up and too many veteran soldiers are leaving.

Despite growing cynicism about the Iraq War, indications are that morale, never super-high during prolonged combat, is not particularly low. Likewise, US training and equipment is among the best in the world. But 150,000 soldiers in Iraq, and 16,000 in Afghanistan--many on their second or even third deployment--is simply not enough. When one looks at special categories like translators, civil affairs and intelligence specialists, the staffing shortage becomes even more acute. Thus the small professional army remains disciplined and functional, while the "battle spaces" around it--Anbar province in Iraq or Kunar province in Afghanistan--spin out of control.

We hear often about the "economic draft"--the financial pressures that force young people to join the military. But there is also what could be called an "alienation draft" or, conversely, a "solidarity draft." The military offers not only jobs but also a type of belonging. "The military is like family, for a lot of people," says one vet. In many ways, the US military is a uniquely straightforward institution. Unlike society as a whole, it doesn't pretend to be a democracy--it's a hierarchy and makes no bones about that, but as such, it contains checks and balances, an appeals process and clear paths forward for promotion.

"The US military has one of the best affirmative action programs in the country," says Stan Goff, a twenty-six-year veteran of the US Special Forces, including the ultra-secret Delta Force. On the march to New Orleans, the rugged and compact Goff is playing the role of sergeant major, rallying the sleepyhead vets for the morning briefings, setting the tempo, always moving. "The other thing about the Army is that it's fair. If you know the regs you can work the system." Goff also points out that the highest-paid military general makes only about fourteen times what the lowest-paid grunt earns--compare that with private-sector pay discrepancies that reach ratios of 700 to 1.

Of course, other vets have stories of racism and broken promises. Demond Mullins is a New York National Guardsman, dance teacher and City University of New York college student who returned from Iraq only six months ago and is now active with IVAW. Mullins is embittered not only about losing a close friend in Iraq and seeing twenty-five others from his battalion wounded and almost getting killed himself when his Humvee hit a homemade bomb; he's also angry at being skipped over for promotion because he is black and about being lied to by his recruiter. "They still haven't given me any money for college."

Such stories aside, there are many ways the military avoids the intense racial and class segregation that marks much of American life. And the armed forces mix people of many different backgrounds.

"The military is one of the only places in America where black people routinely boss around white people," says Braga with a mischievous grin. Another white middle-class vet from the rural South once described to me how his "battle buddy," or assigned partner, in basic training was an ex-hoodlum who had been a homeless street kid in Mexico. "The dude was covered with scars from knife fights. I mean, where else would I have spent every waking minute with that guy, or he with me?"

This egalitarian mingling and the intense camaraderie, plus decent pay, housing for family and constant training opportunities, can make military life look a lot better than the atomized, segregated, economically stagnant world outside. And all of this creates a deep-seated sense of loyalty to the military, even among those who oppose its wars.

On the other hand, Cline, Braga and other activist vets all point out that unit cohesion can cut two ways: It works like Kryptonite to stop rebellion, but after a tipping point unit cohesion can serve to make rebellion even more intense.

To illustrate the point, Braga recalls the story of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, from Rock Hill, South Carolina. In October 2004 this Army Reserve unit (Braga worked alongside them at times) refused what they called a "suicide mission" to deliver fuel in a convoy of old, unarmored trucks. Eighteen drivers from the 343rd were arrested, but the media storm that followed--a whole company had openly refused orders!--helped pressure the military into delivering armor and retrofitting its trucks and Humvees. Similarly, when Reppenhagen the sniper joined IVAW, his spotter, the guy he'd spent a year with in Iraq, also joined--they remained a team.

The rebellion of the 343rd also pointed out the pragmatism of resistance. "Hey, protesting could save your life," says Braga. "I've seen it happen. The 343rd and that soldier who asked Rumsfeld that question about the body armor, those two things got the military to pay attention and buy decent armor."

If 1960s activism was fueled by disillusioned outrage, then today's activism is fettered by a type of world-weary cynicism. Braga says most of the guys in his unit assume the war is based on lies and that it's all about oil, but they won't get involved in peace activism because "They say, 'You can't change anything.' But if you read history you see that usually people already have changed things," he says. "Movements have made lots of things happen."

As an MC more concerned with government conspiracy and institutionalized racism than making sure his lady brings her Wet Wipes, Immortal Technique seems to have little in common with fellow Harlem natives the Diplomats. He might not have quite the same swagger, but in 2006 he’s hoping to prove that he has the hustle that Harlem has become synonymous with.


After his two albums, Revolutionary, Vol. 1 and Revolutionary Vol. 2, established him as a forceful artist committed to showing the bigger picture behind ghetto realities, he became president of his own independent label, Viper Records, where he just executive produced his new artist Akir’s album, Legacy. With his upcoming third album, The Middle Passage, through Babygrande/Koch, a DVD documentary called Urban Warfare and a “mixtape/album” with Green Lantern on the way, Tech’s rep is only getting bigger. Just before he left for the West Coast to kick off his 2006 Invasion tour, Tech took time out to enlighten us on what he has in common with the Dips, why the South is winning and what lies ahead for the future of New York hip-hop.


First of all, thanks for the shout-out on “Impeach the President.” How tight are Interscope and XXL exactly?

I’m sure that’s a question that the people at accounting over there could answer a lot better than I could. Not to imply that y’all take money for covers or articles or for reviews, but when you do that much business with someone, you must come to form some sort of bond. It was just a rhyme, it wasn’t a shot out of disrespect. Come on now, you’ve heard my music, fam, that’s nowhere near being disrespectful for a nigga like me. I think I just pointed something out that wasn’t news to anyone in the game, or someone looking at it from the outside. I’ve always appreciated XXL’s support of the shit that I do. Shout to the Chairman, Bonsu, Leah and all the staff that works hard.

What do you think about hip-hop’s current love of all things “Stop Snitching”?

I hear a lot of criticism about it; [that] it destroys the community, that is creates distrust and prevents crimes from being solved. People lead by example, though. If the police want people to start speaking to authorities, maybe they should start speaking to authorities. They want people to take the stand? Maybe they should walk around the blue wall of silence and take the stand themselves. They want Latinos and Blacks to snitch on each other? They want the ’hood to snitch on itself? I’ve never seen an officer take the stand against another one and be like, Yeah, your honor, I saw my partner bash that kid’s head in ’cause he was Black and had an attitude. I’ve never heard one of them say, No, we had no reason to stop them. We just do that all the time on the highway in Jersey and hope we get lucky. And what about the government? You [ever] heard the FEDs snitch on each other with it resulting in shit? What about the CIA? They kill snitches. Who ever heard Col. Oliver North—who was funneling drug money and weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua—snitch on Reagan? Fuck outta here, nigga. You never heard of anything like that. You want us to snitch? You snitch, muthafucka. You want crimes solved? So do we. You want truth? Guess what? We do too. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King Jr. Tupac. Biggie. Agent 800. Gulf War Syndrome. Cancer clusters in the ’hood. JFK. 9/11. Anthrax. The circumstances behind the War in Iraq. The funding of the Taliban by America up to five months before Sept. 11, 2001. Start there. We as a people need to start policing ourselves. We need to confront child molesters and rapists, as well as the Church that—without any disrespect to Jesus Christ—could easily fall under that category too. We should start a “Start Snitching” campaign for the government to come to terms with what they’ve done to us before we point the finger at another brother. I spent an extra six months locked up and a month in the hole over saying nothing to the police, even after my co-defendant sang like a fuckin’ canary. I didn’t do that for street cred or ’cause I thought it was cool. I am a man of commitment and principle. I lost everything, in terms of money and my family, but I walked out of that cage and came home to NYC a man in every sense. I take that snitching shit personally because they didn’t break me or make me talk. I wasn’t for sale. And I don’t think that our loyalty as a people should be either.

Is signing with a major label something you’ve considered?

They keep trying to sign me as an artist and throw money at me without realizing that this isn’t about just paper for me. It’s about principle and about my success rate as the president of my own label. As the VP and then the president of Viper, I sold 80,000 copies of Vol.2 and I sold about 35,000 of Vol.1. SoundScan might give you some numbers that are lower, but the first 30,000 of Vol.2 I moved on my own and through a series of smaller distributors. I mean, before I even had distribution I moved about 10,000 on my own for $8 to $10. I don’t need to pretend to be paid for anyone. Even though I’m from Harlem, I’m not really flashy. I got a Third World country work ethic, like the Haitians, Jamaicans, Cubans, Colombians. I’m mostly Peruvian, so I put my money into investments. I own three apartments and a house I bought for my grandmother in South America. I own over 50 acres of farmland in Peru. I’m putting my sister through school and now medical school. I get as much as many major label artists for shows. I mean, my agent won’t call me unless we’re talking $5,000 to $15,000. I’m not starving and broke and willing to sell my soul to them along with the rights to my masters and publishing. I’m not looking for the big advance. I’m looking for what a record deal—or rather, a P&D deal—should be. A deal, not some piece of paper written in legalese that makes me a slave.

50 Cent seems to be signing everybody these days. What would he have to come at you with to get you to sign a major label deal with G-Unit?

You’re trying to be funny, but I’ll humor you. As a Latino with an overwhelmingly strong fan base of Latino people and someone who has plenty of White fans as well as Muslims and Blacks, I have a diversity wherever I move. I tour the world. But in terms of a deal, I would need something similar to what Roc-A-Fella got from Def Jam; they give 25% and have a large distribution outlet with support from a major. But I need to hold on to those masters since I mix it down and have it mastered myself out my own pocket. I have no A&R. I do it all myself. It’s no one’s vision but mine. I always put up the dough for production and pressing my own records. I don’t think that fits with just about anyone’s formula. People aren’t getting signed nowadays by someone who doesn’t wanna own them 100%, and labels don’t really break artists anymore. They want someone self-made but don’t pay them like they’re self-made.

Do you think being labeled a “political rapper” helps you or hurts you?

I’ve heard “Revolutionary Rapper,” “Street Politician,” “Political Rapper,” “Activist MC,” all that shit. I pay it no mind. They used to call me a “Battle MC” because I won all the major battles in New York. I know what I’m capable of. I know what it is to be pigeonholed in the game, so I don’t worry about what people say. The hardest albums, even the birth of gangsta rap, was all revolutionary: Amerikkkaz Most Wanted, The Chronic, Ice-T’s O.G. How can someone listen to these albums and not hear a revolutionary message encoded in them? I represent the streets here in America and I represent the people from other countries that come here as a result of what has been done to their homeland. Every aspect of this rap game is political, any veteran will tell you that. If you don’t like politics, stay the fuck outta the music business. Politics is the most gangsta shit in the world. Third World countries are rich in resources—Africa, South and Central America, all of Asia. The reason they’re sources for cheap labor, the reason they’re so poor and wretched and starving is that all their resources are owned by countries like America and Europe, countries that used to own them as colonies and keep the people as slaves. That’s politics, nigga. That’s more gangsta than you, your block, your set or anyone you know will ever be. I just tell it like it is, like it was and how it could be, [instead of] like it’s not, like wasn’t and how it should be.

You’ve been working with Green Lantern a lot lately. How did you guys link up?

I met Green while he was still with Shady at this High Times hip-hop [event] with a whole lot of other muthafuckas that were talking about the way the government was set up. I was on that “fuck the industry” shit back then. I didn’t need them. I was only up to 15,000 back then. Matter fact, you guys gave me the Show & Prove, along with my nigga Saigon, right around that time. But me and Green Lantern were on the same page back then. We have a similar vision. I always come to the table with something outlandish and he thinks about it and is like, “Yeah, fuck it, let’s do it.” With the original “Bin Laden” joint, I spit the first verse for him and he was unsure if they were ready for it. But after I spat the second [verse] he was like, “They better be ready.” And that was that.

Why do you think Southern rap is so much more prominent than New York rap these days?

Well, East Coast and West Coast artists go diamond, which I haven’t really seen Southern hip-hop do [Editor’s note: OutKast’s Speakerboxx/The Love Below has been certified diamond by the RIAA]. Isn’t the highest-selling artist in the game 50 Cent, and isn’t he reppin’ NYC? The [only] problem is, in an attempt to market ourselves better, we started putting the hottest, most lyrical and most creative songs on mixtapes, rather than albums. But maybe [Southern rap] seems more out there because it sells better per project, so [there’s] consistency. It makes the industry push it more. That makes other people see it as a formula for success, and there are a lot of dudes—not just in NY, but especially here—who follow trends [and] have the same subject matter.

What subject matter do you think people would rather hear from New York?

With all that’s going on in the world, I guess people take that to heart. They looked towards NYC, which traditionally breeds lyricists to speak on it. When they didn’t see that, they lost faith. People are tired of only hearing the tough talk with no meaning, of hearing that you’re a drug dealer unless you explain some other dimension of it. So what you got guns? A lot of people got guns too, nigga. You sold drugs, who hasn’t? You did time? Me and few million other people have too. That shit ain’t a right of passage for Black and Brown men, it’s slavery. You’re willing to kill someone. Aight, so? Make it creative or get a therapist, nigga. It’s not that rappers are too “street” or “too raw” for the audience, they just aren’t talented—weak metaphors, similes that a four-year-old could come up with. I always hear “he got a hot flow.” That doesn’t excuse son’s lyrics from being trash.

What do you think Down South MCs are bringing to the table?

I mean, no one expects miraculous lyrics from a Down South artist, but them niggas ain’t stupid. They experience more racism, more government abuse and more poverty than any part of the country, except maybe Michigan and some [Native American] reservations. So regardless of lyrics, they sound hungry to express their pain. Sure, we hear the commercial tracks on radio from them, but the others songs have content. We, as the East Coast, are held to another standard though, by people like you, by the hip-hop community.

Why does New York have that standard?

Being an average or above average lyricist in New York? That’s just disrespectful to the very culture of hip-hop. Maybe there’s another factor too, though. The audience in hip-hop has another generation gap. There are kids out there who see Biggie and Tupac as old school. People who were five or six years old when they died. If you make things more simplistic with lyrics, then it will appeal to a younger audience. Not to disrespect the intelligence of the youth at all—I know lots of smart teenagers—that’s just truth. But the realest thing I’m gonna tell you about hip-hop’s Southern power surge: niggas ain’t making money like that. I don’t care what you wore in your video, what you showed up to the Howard homecoming in, what you floss in the streets, or how many independent units niggas sold out they trunk in Alabama or Atlanta. Let’s not sit here and pretend that the big companies aren’t the ones making all the real money. The Southern push doesn’t reflect the growing living standard of Southern people as much as it represents a desperate effort from record labels to salvage their sales, which are in the toilet. They found a loyal market and they will now exploit it to the fullest. Your imprint means nothing, nigga. You own no masters, you split publishing. The dollar amount that the majors get from the distributor is the bottom line. You don’t even see that as an artist. We’re all still slaves, we’re just on different boats.

You’re from Harlem, where the dominant artists right now are the Diplomats. Are you a fan?

[Laughs.] People sometimes forget I’m from Harlem and I live here and in the Heights. I guess that comes from being on tour 200 days out the year. I always liked the most fucked up raw shit that artists do, so for me, even though I like some music Cam and them put out now, the realest shit he ever wrote was these two songs on Confessions of Fire called “D Rugs” and “Confessions.” Shit sounded like it hurt him to write that, and that’s what I appreciate—from anyone.

They’re obviously very different from you lyrically, but is there something about Dipset you can say you relate to, being that you’re all from Harlem?

Regardless of if you like the content of their rhymes or manner of dress, something I think people overlook is the independent success that they’ve had at Koch. They’re independent with their main artists on major labels. Koch is $5 to $6.50 a record. Multiply that, and it shows you the reality of a successful hustle. Harlem is the Apollo. Harlem is Marcus Garvey. Harlem is jazz. Harlem is a musical Mecca. Harlem is the legacy of Malcolm X, that shuts down all the stores on his birthday until 3 p.m.—except disrespectful Burger King, [which] niggas had to personally shut down in 2005. Harlem is the hustle. I think if anything they just exemplify that hustle for anyone that takes a serious look at their businesses. That’s me too. I’m Harlem. I hustle, just for a different reason than most muthafuckas out there.

It seems like the average Joe just doesn’t want to think about serious social or political issues when listening to pop music. Why should people listen to you?

I think you’re wrong. The average Joe wants to know what’s going on, but it has to be presented to him in the right fashion. Even the biggest, most ignorant muthafucka isn’t gonna look at his six-month-old child with pneumonia and say, “Man up, nigga.” People act like they don’t care, but they do care about the world they live in. My music doesn’t just deal with complex political ideology. You don’t need a college degree to understand what I say in every song. The joint that made me famous in the underground—“Dance with the Devil”—is real gruesome. I’m not a positive rapper. I rhyme about rape, murder, torture, about the ’hood and drugs. I just make it relevant to what’s going on in the world. I relate it to the Third World. I mean, I’m Peruvian and part Black, but I was born out there [in Peru] and I never forget the people who are suffering the full effects of anything we scratch the surface [of] in the ghetto here.

By Steve Maich

On March 16, Iraqi insurgents fired a mortar shell into the U.S. army base in Tikrit, landing near two members of the 101st Airborne Division, reportedly as they stood waiting for a bus. The explosion killed Sgt. Amanda Pinson of St. Louis, Mo., making her the 2,315th U.S. soldier killed in Iraq since the war began three years ago. She was 21.

A few hours later in Washington, the U.S. Senate voted 52-48 to increase the ceiling on the national debt, by $781 billion, to $9 trillion (all figures US$) -- or roughly $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the country -- thus avoiding the first-ever default on U.S. debt. The House of Representatives then approved another $92 billion in federal spending to support the war effort in the Middle East.

That night, Gallup wrapped up its latest opinion poll on Americans' attitudes toward the White House, showing just 37 per cent approve of the President's performance, versus 59 per cent who disapprove -- a drop of five percentage points in a month -- one of the worst scores of any president in the modern era.

Just another day in the life of the world's last superpower under the leadership of President George W. Bush.

With deficits and debt swelling to epic levels, an economy showing massive cracks, and support for America crumbling abroad, the Bush administration finds itself increasingly isolated. With mid-term elections looming in November, the President is now widely seen as a political liability. Republicans are actively distancing themselves from Bush, and joining Democrats in strident critiques of the White House. And things may be getting worse. Last week, court documents emerged showing Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, testified that Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence to shore up support and discredit critics of the Iraq war, raising, for the first time, the possibility that the President may be personally implicated in a scandal.

These are more than just the normal travails of a second-term president fending off the slings and arrows of partisan attack. Bush's constant battles at home and abroad are taking on historic proportions, hardening perceptions that his administration is defined by failure on multiple fronts. Just over 16 months have passed since George W. Bush was elected for the second term that eluded his father, but already historians and pundits are beginning to debate whether he just might be the worst U.S. president in a century.

In 2004, George Mason University polled 415 presidential historians and found 80 per cent considered Bush's first term a failure. More than half considered it the worst presidency since the Great Depression. More than a third called it the worst in 100 years. Eleven per cent said it was the worst ever. Robert McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsaps College in Mississippi, says scores would likely be worse if the poll were repeated today. "When I filled out that survey I said Bush was the worst since Buchanan [1857-61], but things have gotten worse and now I'd have to consider him the worst ever," McElvaine says. "If you look at the situation he inherited, and the situation following 9/11, he had great opportunities and he basically squandered them. He has put the future of the country in a much more precarious position than it was when he became president."

That Bush is unpopular, especially among academics, is not surprising in itself. He has always been a polarizing figure, and most presidents have been deeply unpopular at some point in office, especially those who dedicated themselves to ambitious projects beyond America's borders. Even Abraham Lincoln, now generally considered the greatest of all U.S. presidents, was widely detested in his day for triggering the bloodbath of the Civil War for no good reason.

In the final analysis, presidents are judged on a relatively narrow set of criteria -- fiscal management, economic stewardship, handling change or crisis at home, and the promotion of America's interests abroad. It all boils down to two questions: how did he deal with the challenges of his day? And were the American people better off at the end of his tenure than they were at the start? No president can claim an unambiguously positive record, but few have come up so short, on so many counts, as Bush has.

Ronald Reagan was attacked for mismanaging the nation's finances, but he won the Cold War and his aggressive tax cuts eventually ignited the economy. Richard Nixon resigned under the cloud of Watergate, and remains one of the nation's most reviled presidents, but historians now credit him with huge foreign policy successes, including the opening of relations with China. Bush's supporters say history will be kind to him, just as it has been to Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson. They, like Bush, guided the nation through wars -- Korea and Vietnam respectively -- widely seen as unnecessary and ill-conceived. But Johnson was a champion of the civil rights movement and an ally of Martin Luther King. Truman was the driving force behind the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War.

With just a few years left in his mandate, historians say George W. Bush has no such achievements to offset the grievous cost of Iraq in blood and treasure. Despite the biggest federal spending spree in more than a generation, the Bush White House has produced no transformational vision for domestic policy. His massive tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 have neither sparked the economy nor bolstered his popularity. They have, however, exacerbated a fiscal crisis that threatens to undermine the very basis of the American state. "It used to be a part of the American character to believe in delaying gratification, and saving for the future," McElvaine says. "But it seems the future is being ignored in spectacular fashion by this administration."

Even a couple of years ago this would have sounded like a partisan indictment. But today it is sounding more like the general consensus. The latest backlash against Bush has nothing to do with his folksy demeanour, his frequent malapropisms, or even the allegations that the Iraq invasion was launched under false pretenses. Nor is it rooted solely among the Democrats and urban intellectual elites that have always despised him. Over the course of the past two years, a growing list of Bush allies has broken faith with his leadership -- conservatives and libertarians like Bruce Bartlett, Peggy Noonan and Newt Gingrich, and neo-con intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama. Their complaints are based on numbers -- huge, frightening numbers, that cast serious doubt on the notion that Bush will ever be vindicated.

David Walker is an accountant by trade and a political firebrand by disposition. For the past four years, he has been preaching the gospel of fiscal restraint to little effect. As comptroller general of the United States, he is the independent auditor of government, and last November he issued a clarion call to the nation's lawmakers, comparing America's burgeoning deficits and debt to the forces that ultimately toppled the Roman Empire. "There is no question both U.S. government spending and tax cuts are spiralling out of control," Walker wrote. "It's time to get serious about our nation's fiscal future." The numbers he cites are nothing short of staggering.

When George W. Bush took office at the beginning of 2001, he inherited from the Clinton administration a budget surplus of US$86.4 billion. He had campaigned on a promise to use that money for an ambitious program of tax cuts, which he put into action immediately upon arrival in the Oval Office. But Bush's conservative allies had expected those tax cuts to be followed by an equally sweeping review of federal spending. That austerity never came. On the contrary, he's gone on a mammoth spending spree.

Stephen Slivinski, director of budget studies at the Cato Institute, is working on a book about the decline of fiscal conservatism under Bush, and says discontent among conservatives has been building for several years. "People thought over the long term he'd try to do some good and Republicans could finally make good on their promises of getting spending under control, but here we are in the second term and that has not materialized," he says. "The dam has just broken."

The Bush administration has a standard answer for this critique. In a time of war, they say, budget overruns are the inevitable cost of defending freedom and democracy at home and abroad. But that no longer holds water with Washington's budget hawks. They point out that federal spending has risen by $683 billion a year under Bush, less than a third of which has gone to national defence and homeland security.

As a result, the U.S. national debt has surged from $5.7 trillion in the last fiscal year before Bush took office, to over $8.3 trillion and counting. Brian Riedl, a budget analyst with the right-wing Heritage Foundation, says the Bush administration has played the benevolent uncle to every special interest that comes calling, using its spending power to win support in potentially vulnerable constituencies. The No Child Left Behind education bill, for example, was aimed at suburban families; the farm bill at Midwest rural voters; and the prescription drug benefit at the most active voting bloc of all, seniors. "No president since FDR has accelerated spending as fast as Bush has," he groans. "I'm shocked about it, but the numbers show what the numbers show."

In reality, the $8.3-trillion figure doesn't even begin to describe the true size of America's fiscal crisis because it doesn't include the so-called entitlement liabilities. In Medicare and Social Security, the U.S. government is committed to providing retirement benefits and medical care for senior citizens. But thanks to an aging population (the first of about 78 million American baby boomers turn 60 this year) and rising medical costs, those programs are desperately underfunded. At the end of 2004, government actuaries calculated that the two programs had unfunded liabilities of $43 trillion, up from $20 trillion in 2000. In other words, Washington would need an immediate cash infusion of $43 trillion in order to meet all its future obligations under Medicare and Social Security. That was before the President pushed through the prescription drug benefit, which added an estimated $18 trillion to the Medicare shortfall. And when Republicans tried to add spending caps to the bill, to prevent uncontrolled cost inflation in the future, Bush threatened to veto them.

The Economic Policy Institute recently projected that under the current tax regime, by 2014 all government revenue would be consumed by four budget items: Medicare, Social Security, national defence and interest on the debt. Walker's department forecasts that, at the current rate of growth, the cost of servicing the national debt will consume half of all tax revenues within 25 years.

Bush does have his fiscal defenders, and they generally point out that the national debt rose higher as a percentage of the economy under Reagan. But as Cato's Slivinski points out, there are key differences between the two. For one thing, Reagan's deficits got smaller and more manageable as his presidency went on. The Bush administration is projecting deficits north of $400 billion a year for the foreseeable future. More importantly, as Reagan increased defence spending, he cut other budget items. Bush has allowed spending to rise across the board. "The greatest costs of Bush's legacy are Medicare and Social Security, and those haven't even been seen yet," Slivinski says. "We're going to look back and wonder what the hell Republicans were thinking expanding all these programs at a time when we should've been looking at how to reform them, and pay for them."

America's looming financial crunch would be less daunting if it seemed like the economy was poised to take flight. But among economists there is little hope for such a windfall. With 12.6 per cent growth in GDP and the creation of 2.3 million jobs since 2001, President Bush frequently crows about the world's "pre-eminent" economy. Beneath the surface, critics see a situation far less healthy than it first appears.

Two million new jobs sounds like a lot, but it's the most anemic job creation performance by any president in the postwar era. The gains have also failed to keep pace with the growth of the workforce, and as a result the overall employment rate under Bush has declined from 64.4 per cent to 62.9 per cent. The manufacturing sector has been particularly hard hit, losing 2.9 million jobs since Bush took office, a decline of roughly 17 per cent -- worse than the postwar hangover under Truman, worse than the early '70s stagnation under Nixon, and far worse than the darkest days of Reagan's Rust Belt plant closures. Little wonder that a Gallup poll earlier this year showed more than half of Americans consider the economy only "fair" or "poor," and 52 per cent think it's getting worse.

This would be less of a concern, the experts say, if the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 had formed the basis of a broad economic resurgence at home. But while corporate profits hit a record $1.35 trillion last year, companies have been stubbornly reluctant to reinvest those earnings. With profits up 65 per cent since 2001, capital investments have declined by 4.5 per cent. And though that has fuelled a surge in the stock market, broader financial measures like wage growth have stalled.

So while CEOs and politicians can point selectively to indicators of a robust economy, the story on Main Street doesn't look so rosy. Consumers know much of their lifestyle has been financed on credit. Household indebtedness has skyrocketed by 60 per cent to $4.5 trillion in the past five years, and U.S. consumers now owe close to five times as much as they did 20 years ago when adjusted for inflation. Economists have been ringing alarm bells about this for years, and last week Treasury Secretary John Snow issued the government's starkest warning yet. "While credit and credit cards are a boon to life in America today, they also present some potential problems if credit and credit cards aren't used wisely," Snow said. "People can get into trouble. They can cause themselves financial wrecks." To financial analysts, Snow's comments seemed like common sense, but they have fuelled speculation that he and Bush have parted ways with regard to the economy, and that he'll soon resign from cabinet.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the election over Jimmy Carter by repeatedly asking voters, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" In 2004, Bush wouldn't have dared ask such a question, and since then things have deteriorated substantially. While not all of this can be blamed on the President, the perception is now taking hold that America's vaunted standard of living is under assault. A decade of improvements in alleviating poverty have reversed in recent years. While the economy has grown, the poverty rate has risen to 12.7 per cent of the population, the highest level since 1998, representing five million people who have fallen into poverty in five years.

Even economists who supported Bush's tax cuts see little hope that they will form the bedrock of a future boom -- not with U.S. consumers so deeply indebted, and with future administrations saddled with massive funding liabilities that will, in all likelihood, force taxes back up again in the near future. But those are long-term concerns, and America has more immediate problems to face.

Jack Trout is a legend in the marketing business. He's written several classic books on branding, and his firm, Trout and Partners, is adviser to dozens of huge clients, from Apple Computer to Xerox. In late 2002, he was hired by the U.S. State Department to develop a strategy for diplomats to polish the image of America around the world, casting the U.S. as a partner in peace. "I presented this idea and they loved it, but they said, 'There's just one problem,'" he recalls. "They told me, 'I think we're going to invade Iraq.' And I said, 'Forget it then. All this stuff goes out the window.' "

Trout sensed a global PR disaster on the horizon, and his fears were soon realized. Last June, the Pew Global Attitude Project released its latest international survey on America's image, carrying the remarkably optimistic title "American Character Gets Mixed Reviews." This was technically true, though the "mix" ranged from hostile to scathing. The report found that world attitudes toward the U.S. had deteriorated sharply between 2000 and 2005. In Canada, those with a favourable opinion of the U.S. had slipped from 71 per cent to 59 per cent. In Germany, approval ratings fell from 78 to 41 per cent. The story was even worse in the Muslim world: in Turkey and Pakistan just 23 per cent saw the U.S. in a favourable light. "This is the mother of all branding problems," Trout says now. "What do you do to rebuild America's brand and image? When a business has had a bad run and turned off a lot of its customers, they hang out a big sign that says 'under new management.' And we will get nowhere until we have that sign hanging out there."

According to Pew's research, George W. Bush appears to be at the core of international disfavour. This, says Bruce Buchanan, an expert on presidential politics at the University of Texas, has the potential to be an enduring roadblock to U.S. objectives around the world. "I think it's extremely bad for the United States and for the world," he says. "The chances of us continuing to be seen as an honest broker is seriously compromised, and I think that hurts our interests in the long run. Where else can you put the blame? The buck stops on the President's desk. He's the man in charge."

Robert Dallek, a presidential historian and professor emeritus at Dartmouth University, agrees. He has written books on John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, is now working on a biography of Richard Nixon, and says no other president has been so universally reviled around the world as Bush, with the possible exception of Johnson. "There is an old weakness in our foreign policy," Dallek says. "We make the mistake of believing that inside every foreigner there is an American just waiting to emerge. It's just not true. Woodrow Wilson made that mistake, and George Bush is making it again. The whole notion that you can export democracy at the point of a bayonet simply does not work."

To be sure, Bush's record in the Middle East is not entirely negative. Last year, Iraq held elections that far exceeded the expectations of the skeptics, and Afghanistan is slowly rising from failed state status, thanks primarily to the U.S. determination to root out the murderous and regressive Taliban regime. And even though his policies are deeply unpopular through most of the world, Bush has managed to rally support in several areas. For example, Europe and the United Nations have been broadly supportive of U.S. efforts to dissuade nuclear development in Iran and North Korea. And given that there have been no major terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11, the White House can justifiably claim success in homeland security.

Still, critics point to many other aspects of national security that seem to have deteriorated as attention has focused on Iraq and al-Qaeda. Russia, for example, seems to be sliding gradually backward into authoritarianism, with scant notice from Washington. In South America, one nation after another -- Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile -- has embraced left-leaning politicians hostile to America's traditional interests in the region, and threatening trade links vital to its financial security. In the Middle East, Iran is growing more belligerent by the day while pursuing nuclear capability in defiance of Western pressure. And the push for democratic reform in the Palestinian Authority yielded a resounding election win for Hamas, the terrorist organization dedicated to the annihilation of Israel. Overall, it's difficult to mount a convincing argument that the world is a safer, more stable place today than when Bush took office five years ago.

Foreign policy is often a nightmare for U.S. presidents, since Americans have a long history of preferring isolationism to foreign intervention. John F. Kennedy suffered the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs fiasco; Carter was embarrassed by the Iranian hostage crisis; and every president from Truman to Reagan operated under the shadow of the Soviet menace. Bush doesn't yet face a threat on the scale of the Cold War, but no president has attracted such hostility on so many fronts, in so short a time.

More worrying are the signs that Bush's tendency toward unilateralism has weakened ties to America's traditional allies, including Canada. Perhaps the most dramatic example came in 2004, with Spain's election of a new left-leaning government, which immediately bowed to public opinion and pulled the country's 1,300 troops out of Iraq. Hungary, Poland, Ukraine and the Netherlands began their own gradual withdrawals last year. And last September, Italy -- which had the fourth-largest contingent of troops on the ground in Iraq -- began a phased pullout after an Italian agent was accidentally killed by U.S. troops and the public turned strongly against the war. The NATO deployment in Afghanistan has been more stable, but not without controversy. It recently took six months of wrangling in the Dutch parliament before the Netherlands finally authorized deployment of 1,400 troops to the region to relieve a withdrawing U.S. force.

Observers say these foreign controversies would be easily manageable, if not for a steady stream of domestic missteps eroding confidence in the administration. The bungled relief effort following hurricane Katrina, Bush's aborted attempt to appoint his close friend, the woefully underqualified Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court, and Scooter Libby's revelations about the ongoing CIA leak affair, have all contributed to the President's slide. Last month, Pew released its latest study of American attitudes, finding that just one in three support Bush's leadership. Even among those who say they voted for Bush in 2004, his support has fallen from 92 per cent at the beginning of 2005 to 68 per cent. Asked for a one-word description of the President, the most common response was "incompetent," followed closely by "idiot" and "liar." A year ago, the top response was "honest."

Two weeks before Christmas 2003, U.S. troops found Saddam Hussein cowering in a tiny hidden cellar, just south of Tikrit, and pollsters noted an immediate surge in support for Bush. "We've come to this moment through patience and resolve and focused action," Bush said that night. "That is our strategy moving forward. The war on terror is a different kind of war, waged capture by capture, cell by cell, and victory by victory. Our security is assured by our perseverance and by our sure belief in the success of liberty." That night, it seemed, America was ready to believe. But it would prove to be the high point of a presidency that is fundamentally defined by the decision to invade Iraq. The President's approval ratings have never returned to the levels of that December, when images of a haggard and unkempt Saddam Hussein flashed across the nightly newscasts.

Decades from now, academics will debate fiscal policy, jobs, the UN and the Supreme Court, but only as footnotes to another stark question: when that mortar shell killed Amanda Pinson on March 16, less than three years after she graduated from high school and immediately enlisted, was her sacrifice and that of more than 2,300 others in vain, or in the service of a noble, world-changing cause?

Bruce Buchanan, for one, isn't willing to write Bush's name among the worst presidents of all time just yet. "Short-term perspectives have a short shelf life," he says. "It is possible he's set in motion forces that might turn out in his favour years down the line. Perhaps breaking those eggs over there in Iraq will result in the eventual rooting of democracy in the Middle East. But that's the citizen's dilemma: we must judge in the here and now."

It's the here and now that really concerns Dallek. He has spent years studying presidents like Johnson and Nixon, who were reviled in office and revered in retrospect, but when he looks at the trajectory of Bush's agenda, he sees little hope that the 43rd President of the United States will ever be redeemed. "We are now deep into the wadi, and the majority of his term has been put in place, and what great achievements can he point to?" he asks. "He's alienated so many peoples around the world. The war in Iraq is turning out to be something of a nightmare, perhaps the biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam. Historians will point to imperial overreach in terms of domestic spying. They will complain about him being anti-intellectual and far too evangelical. But ultimately it all comes back to Iraq. And if it continues to go as badly as it's going, he's in serious trouble."

For his part, the President is pressing ahead with his audacious Middle East gamble, appealing for faith, and chiding those who dare to bet against him. "We must never give in to the belief that America is in decline, or that our culture is doomed to unravel," he said in his State of the Union address last January. "The American people know better than that. We have proven the pessimists wrong before, and we will do it again."

For now, the pessimists outnumber the believers. And with every one of Bush's former allies that turns away from his leadership, the margin grows and the odds get longer.

By Michael Blanding

The ballroom at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware, is the picture of opulence. Paintings of Greek gods and goddesses peer down from the walls, lit by two crystal chandeliers the size of Mini Coopers. It's here in April that the Coca-Cola Company will hold its stockholders' meeting, an annual exercise designed to boost the confidence of investors. If the meeting is anything like last year's, however, it may do the opposite.

As stockholders filed into the room in April 2005, news hadn't been good for Coke, which has steadily lost market share to rivals. Investors were eager for reassurance from CEO Neville Isdell, a patrician Irishman who had recently assumed the top job. Few in the room, however, were prepared for what happened next. As Isdell stood at the podium, two long lines formed at the microphones. When he opened the floor, the first to speak was Ray Rogers, a veteran union organizer and head of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke. "I want to know what [Coke is] going to do to regain the trust and credibility in order to stop the growing movement worldwide...banning Coke products," boomed the 62-year-old.

That was just the beginning of a ninety-minute slugfest that the Financial Times later said "felt more like a student protest rally" than a stockholders' meeting. One after another, students, labor activists and environmentalists blasted Coke's international human rights record. Many focused on Colombia, where Coke has been accused of conspiring with paramilitary death squads to torture and kill union activists. Others highlighted India, where Coke has allegedly polluted and depleted water supplies. Still others called the company to task for causing obesity through aggressive marketing to children.

In the past two years the Coke campaign has grown into the largest anticorporate movement since the campaign against Nike for sweatshop abuses. Around the world, dozens of unions and more than twenty universities have banned Coke from their facilities, while activists have dogged the company from World Cup events in London to the Winter Olympics in Torino. More than just the re-emergence of the corporate boycott, however, the fight against Coke is a leap forward in international cooperation. Coke, with its red-and-white swoosh recognizable everywhere from Beijing to Baghdad, is perhaps the quintessential symbol of the US-dominated global economy. The fight to hold it accountable has, in turn, broadly connected issues across continents to become a truly globalized grassroots movement.

Coke shrugs off the protests as coming from a "small segment of the student population," says Ed Potter, the company's director of global labor relations. "What I see are largely well-meaning attempts to put a spotlight on some reprehensible things--but which are unrelated to our workplaces." Nevertheless, Coke has fought back with ads on TV and in student newspapers, part of a mammoth advertising budget that has increased 30 percent in the past two years, to a staggering $2.4 billion. However, as evidence against the company mounts ahead of this year's annual stockholders' meeting, so does the pressure for Coke to address its growing international image of exploitation and brutality.

On the morning of December 5, 1996, union leader Isidro Segundo Gil was standing at the gate of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia, when two paramilitaries drove up on a motorcycle and shot him dead. A week later, unionists say, paramilitaries lined up all the workers inside the plant and forced them to sign a letter resigning from the beverage union SINALTRAINAL, spelling the end of the union at the plant.

Violence against union members is a fact of life in Colombia, where nearly 4,000 have been killed by paramilitaries in the past two decades. But Gil's murder was different, say his union brothers; two months earlier, they observed the plant manager meeting with a paramilitary commander in the company cafeteria. And just a week before he was killed Gil had been negotiating with the company over a new contract. Workers see these events as an example of the collusion of bottling executives with the paramilitaries. "From the beginning, Coca-Cola took a stand to not only eliminate the union but to destroy its workers," said SINALTRAINAL president Javier Correa in a recent speaking appearance in the United States.

Nor was Gil's murder a unique occurrence, says Correa. In all, eight union members and a friendly plant manager were killed between 1989 and 2002. Even today, union leaders routinely receive death threats and attempts on their lives. In 2003 paramilitaries kidnapped and tortured the 15-year-old son of one union leader and killed the brother-in-law of SINALTRAINAL's vice president. This past January, says Correa, managers at the Coca-Cola plant in Bogota attempted to get workers to sign a statement saying Coke did not violate human rights; a week later the leader of the union received a death threat against himself and his family.

"Coke has a long history of being a virulently antiunion company," says Lesley Gill, an anthropology professor at American University who has twice been to Colombia to document the violence. "It has been calculated and targeted, and it usually takes place during periods of contract negotiations." A 2004 investigation directed by New York City Councilman Hiram Monserrate documented 179 "major human rights violations" against Coke workers, along with numerous allegations that "paramilitary violence against workers was done with the knowledge of and likely under the direction of company managers." The violence has taken a toll on the union. In the past decade, SINALTRAINAL's Coke membership has fallen from about 1,400 to less than 400.

Coca-Cola representatives deny involvement of the company or its bottling partners, contending that the murders are a byproduct of the country's civil war. In response, the company touts the security measures it offers union leaders, including loans for home security systems and reassignment for those in danger. Furthermore, Coke points out that it has been exonerated in several cases in Colombian courts. However, charging those courts as ineffective--only five paramilitaries have been found guilty of murder, despite 4,000 killings--SINALTRAINAL reached out in 2001 to the International Labor Rights Fund, a Washington-based solidarity organization. Using a US law called the Alien Tort Claims Act, the ILRF and the United Steelworkers filed suit against Coke and its bottlers in Miami later that year. In 2003 a judge ruled that Coca-Cola couldn't be held responsible for the actions of its bottlers and dropped it from the case, even while allowing the case against the bottlers to go forward. ILRF lawyer Terry Collingsworth finds that decision preposterous, noting that Coke has ownership shares in its Colombian bottlers and highly detailed bottling agreements. "I'm 100 percent sure that if Coca-Cola in Atlanta ordered them to change their uniform color from red to blue, they would do it," says Collingsworth. "They could stop these activities in a minute."

While the ILRF has appealed the decision, procedural rules require it to wait until the case against the bottlers is over before the case against Coke can be taken up again--a process that could take years. "We needed to figure out a way that Coke sees delay as bad," says Collingsworth. In 2003 SINALTRAINAL put out a call for an international boycott of Coke products. At the same time, the ILRF contacted Ray Rogers, head of Corporate Campaign, Inc., an organization that consults with unions to win contracts through unorthodox methods. Over the past three decades, Rogers has forced concessions from a dozen companies--including American Airlines, Campbell's Soup and New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority--not through strikes or negotiations but through an aggressive strategy of publicly embarrassing anyone associated with his targets.

Rogers immediately saw Coke's weakness: its brand. "They are right at the top of the worst companies in the world, and yet they've created an image like they are American pie," he says. "When people think of Coca-Cola, they should think about great hardship and despair for people and communities around the world." From the beginning, Rogers appropriated Coke's trademark red script to make the Killer Coke logo, and tweaked its advertising campaign with slogans like "The Drink That Represses" and "Murder--It's the Real Thing." He made a dramatic first appearance at a Coke annual meeting two years ago, when police wrestled Rogers away from the mike and forcibly dragged him out of the hall.

Early on, Rogers rejected SINALTRAINAL's call for a consumer boycott of Coke products, fearing it would be ineffective and might alienate unions working with Coke. He focused on "cutting out markets" by going after larger institutional ties. He convinced several unions, including the American Postal Workers, several large locals of the Service Employees International, and UNISON, the largest union in Britain, to ban Coke from their facilities and functions, and he induced pension-fund managers, including the City of New York, to pass resolutions threatening to withdraw hundreds of millions in Coke stock investments unless Coke investigated the Colombia abuses. He persuaded not only the SEIU but the largest US union of Coke's own employees, the Teamsters, to pass a resolution in support of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke and to speak out at last year's annual meeting (the Teamsters stopped short of banning Coke from their own facilities). "It's horrendous what we're hearing," says David Laughton, secretary-treasurer of the union's beverage division. "The company's lack of action is having a ripple effect all over the country in school and college, and that means reductions in jobs for us. It's time for them to wake up and admit their errors."

The campaign's greatest success has come at colleges and universities. Rogers set up a website with a step-by-step guide for students looking to convince their institutions to cut multimillion-dollar Coke contracts, and he's traveled to schools to hold rallies and advise students. One by one, more than a dozen schools in the United States, as well as a handful more in Ireland, Italy and Canada, have decided to cut lucrative beverage contracts or otherwise ban Coke from campuses. The effort accelerated after it was joined by United Students Against Sweatshops--one of the main groups behind the Nike boycott of the 1990s--which helped organize its own chapters. Anti-Coke campaigns are now active at some 130 campuses worldwide. "This campaign against Coke has politicized a new generation of students," says Camilo Romero, a national organizer with USAS. "It's something that students feel personally connected to, because it's something they can hold in their hand," says Aviva Chomsky, a professor at Salem State College in Massachusetts, which severed ties two years ago. "It's too easy to say, 'There are so many bad things in the world, I'm just going to concentrate on my own life.' It's the concreteness of this that's appealing."

While student campaigns have mostly focused on the abuses in Colombia, some have included demands from other countries as well. Few companies have the kind of global reach of Coca-Cola, which has set up a network of bottling partners around the world that allows it to maximize profits by keeping distribution costs down and exploiting lax environmental and labor laws abroad. The first rumblings came from India, where villagers near several Coke bottling plants reported that their wells were dropping, sometimes more than fifty feet; meanwhile, the water they were able to get was tainted by foul-smelling chemicals. Starting in 2002 villagers near Plachimada, in the southern state of Kerala, began a permanent vigil outside the local plant. They finally won an indefinite closure in March 2004, although the case remains an issue in the Kerala High Court.

Villagers started another vigil, at Mehdiganj in central India, this past March. Escalating protests there and at a third plant, in the desert state of Rajasthan, have ended in police attacks on villagers employing Gandhian tactics of nonviolence, which Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center (IRC) lays at Coke's feet. "We know the company has the power to stop the police from resorting to violence," he says, "but it has let this go on without saying a word."

The IRC has been joined in its mission by Corporate Accountability International (CAI), which has attacked Coke on its aggressive push to sell bottled water. "If water becomes a branded product, it's clearly going to undermine the demand and support for publicly managed water systems," says CAI executive director Kathryn Mulvey. "The people who lose out are those who don't have the means to pay top dollar for their water." As a veteran anticorporate campaigner, Mulvey sees the Coke campaign as a new model. "People are taking these abuses that are happening all over the world and bringing them to Coke's headquarters," she says. "Transnational corporations are really surpassing the nation-state as the dominant economic and political institutions. Social change movements need to find ways to come together across borders and strategize."

The broad attack against the company has been a strength for the campaign, allowing diverse groups to share information and recruit greater numbers at protests, as well as making a more difficult target for counterattacks. "The company can't control it," says Rogers. "They realize they can't get rid of one person or group and hope the thing will die." At the same time, the sheer number of charges against Coke raises the question of how and when the campaign can declare victory. On that score, the different groups are clear about their specific goals. The Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, for example, has adopted seven demands by SINALTRAINAL, which include a human rights policy for bottling companies and compensation for families of slain workers. The campaign in India calls for closure of certain plants, cleanup of others and compensation for affected villagers.

Many student campaigns have made their top demand an independent investigation into the Colombia abuses. At last year's annual meeting, Coke tried to mollify critics by releasing the results of a company-funded study, which was rejected by students as woefully biased. Still facing the prospect of boycotts at several universities--among them Rutgers, NYU and Michigan--Coke put together a commission of students, school administrators and labor leaders to come up with a protocol for an independent inquiry. "I was honestly hopeful, perhaps naively," says USAS's Romero. "It seemed like they were putting this new investment into making things work." From the beginning, however, the company insisted it had a right to be on the commission; even after Coke was booted by the students, it kept putting strictures on the investigation, such as a moratorium on investigating past abuses. The final straw was Coke's insistence that anything uncovered be inadmissible in the court case in Miami, which Collingsworth says is against legal ethics. "We cannot prejudice our clients by agreeing to bury evidence that would support their claims," he wrote in an angry letter to Coke's Ed Potter.

At around the same time, new evidence of Coke's antilabor tactics emerged in Indonesia, where, according to USAS, workers were intimidated when they attempted to unionize; and in Turkey, where more than 100 union members were fired and then clubbed and tear-gassed by police during a protest. This past November the ILRF filed another lawsuit against Coca-Cola, based on the claims of the Turkish workers. By that point, students had had enough; all but one left the commission.

With the failure of the investigation commission, administrators at some schools ran out of excuses to keep the Coke contracts. Both NYU and Michigan suspended contracts in December. NYU's status as the country's largest private university earned the campaign national and international press. "We knew if we were to ban Coca-Cola, our statement would resound around the world," says Crystal Yakacki, a recent NYU graduate who helped lead the campaign while she was a student.

As this year's annual meeting nears, Coke has gone on the offensive, announcing a plan to draft a new set of workplace standards. At the same time, the company has asked the UN's International Labor Organization to perform a workplace evaluation of the Colombia bottling plants. Rogers and Collingsworth have already cried foul, pointing out that Potter has been the US employer representative to the ILO for the past fifteen years. "Either they know something we don't know," says Collingsworth, "or they believe the ILO moves so slowly and bureaucratically that they can delay." In response, Potter claims the organization is so large that no one person can influence it. Regardless, the gambit is having some effect: In April Michigan, citing "the reputation and track record of ILO," rescinded its ban.

At the Hotel du Pont on April 19, organizers hope to stage a repeat of last year's grilling, with an even larger contingent of activists in attendance. Schools debating Coke contracts this spring include Michigan State, UCLA, the University of Illinois, DePaul and several campuses of the City University of New York. In Britain, the campaign lost a close vote in April to convince the National Union of Students--which represents 750 campuses--to cut a multimillion-pound contract. Many British universities, however, are continuing individual boycotts, as are campuses in Italy, Ireland, Germany and Canada. "This is a moment in history that is very rare, where students have the power to change one of the largest corporations in the world," says Romero. After recent campus victories, momentum seems to be on the side of the campaign. "Coke has a contracting market; we have an expanding market," says Rogers. "I want Coke to come to the realization that there is a lot more for them to lose by continuing to do what they do. They have to be made to do the right thing for the wrong reason."

Until they do, say activists, the violence against Coke's workers will continue. "It's very difficult for me to convince my family that they have to live with the worries, and that they will one day maybe have to receive bad news," says SINALTRAINAL's Correa. "My kids say that walking with Dad is like walking with a time bomb. But I can't leave this struggle seeing these violations happening all around me. The reality of the situation is that it's better being with a union than without one."

By Robert Jensen
Department of Journalism
University of Texas



Here's what white privilege sounds like: I am sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support.

The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that in the United States being white has advantages. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege. So, if we live in a world of white privilege—unearned white privilege--how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I ask. He paused for a moment and said, "That really doesn't matter."

That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: the privilege to acknowledge and you have unearned privilege but ignore what it means. That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race and racism with students. It drove home to me the importance of confronting the dirty secret that we white people carry around with us everyday: In a world of white privilege, some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk openly and honestly about white supremacy and white privilege.

White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of one's identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has affected me.

I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn't live near a reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the state's only numerically significant non-white population, American Indians. I have struggled to resist that racist training and the ongoing racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I "fix" myself, one thing never changes--I walk through the world with white privilege.

What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don't look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me for those things look like me--they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves, and in a racist world that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I'm white.

My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are mediocre, though I don't know very many.

As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next hundred years, it's possible that at the end of that time the university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as an insult to anyone, but is a simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.

Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a bitterly racist society and that the racism has real effects on real people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I know, because I am one of them. I am not a genius--as I like to say, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching full-time for six years, and I've published a reasonable amount of scholarship.

Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one churns out to get tenure, and some of it, I would argue, actually is worth reading. I work hard, and I like to think that I'm a fairly decent teacher. Every once in awhile, I leave my office at the end of the day feeling like I really accomplished something. When I cash my paycheck, I don't feel guilty.

But, all that said, I know I did not get where I am by merit alone. I benefited from, among other things, white privilege. That doesn't mean that I don't deserve my job, or that if I weren't white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white. I grew up in fertile farm country taken by force from non-white indigenous people. I was educated in a well-funded, virtually all-white public school system in which I learned that white people like me made this country great. There I also was taught a variety of skills, including how to take standardized tests written by and for white people.

All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a teaching position at the predominantly white University of Texas, which had a white president, in a college headed by a white dean and in a department with a white chairman that at the time had one non-white tenured professor. There certainly is individual variation in experience.

Some white people have had it easier than me, probably because they came from wealthy families that gave them even more privilege. Some white people have had it tougher than me because they came from poorer families. White women face discrimination I will never know. But, in the end, white people all have drawn on white privilege somewhere in their lives. Like anyone, I have overcome certain hardships in my life. I have worked hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay there.

But to feel good about myself and my work, I do not have to believe that "merit," as defined by white people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from white privilege, which continues to protect me every day of my life from certain hardships.

At one time in my life, I would not have been able to say that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was due solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the heroic American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the culture's mythology that I couldn't see the fear that was binding me to those myths. Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I didn't really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn't heroic or rugged, that I wasn't special.

I let go of some of that fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn't special, but that I was still me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know that the rules under which I work in are stacked in my benefit. I believe that until we let go of the fiction that people have complete control over their fate--that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose--then we will live with that fear. Yes, we should all dream big and pursue our dreams and not let anyone or anything stop us. But we all are the product both of what we will ourselves to be and what the society in which we live lets us be.

White privilege is not something I get to decide whether or not I want to keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this society.

Frankly, I don't think I will live to see that day; I am realistic about the scope of the task. However, I continue to have hope, to believe in the creative power of human beings to engage the world honestly and act morally. A first step for white people, I think, is to not be afraid to admit that we have benefited from white privilege. It doesn't mean we are frauds who have no claim to our success. It means we face a choice about what we do with our success.

By Susan Sontag

The following is the keynote address given at the Rothko Chapel in Houston on March 30 on the occasion of the presentation of the Oscar Romero Award to Ishai Menuchin, chairman of Yesh Gvul ("There Is a Limit"), the Israeli soldiers' movement for selective refusal to serve in the occupied territories. --The Editors

Allow me to invoke not one but two, only two, who were heroes--among millions of heroes. Who were victims--among tens of millions of victims.

The first: Oscar Arnulfo Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, murdered in his vestments, while saying mass in the cathedral on March 24, 1980--twenty-three years ago--because he had become "a vocal advocate of a just peace, and had openly opposed the forces of violence and oppression." (I am quoting from the description of the Oscar Romero Award, being given today to Ishai Menuchin.)

The second: Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old college student from Olympia, Washington, murdered in the bright neon-orange jacket with Day-Glo striping that "human shields" wear to make themselves quite visible, and possibly safer, while trying to stop one of the almost daily house demolitions by Israeli forces in Rafah, a town in the southern Gaza Strip (where Gaza abuts the Egyptian border), on March 16, 2003. Standing in front of a Palestinian physician's house that had been targeted for demolition, Corrie, one of eight young American and British human-shield volunteers in Rafah, had been waving and shouting at the driver of an oncoming armored D-9 bulldozer through her megaphone, then dropped to her knees in the path of the supersized bulldozer...which did not slow down.

Two emblematic figures of sacrifice, killed by the forces of violence and oppression to which they were offering nonviolent, principled, dangerous opposition.

Let's start with risk. The risk of being punished. The risk of being isolated. The risk of being injured or killed. The risk of being scorned. We are all conscripts in one sense or another. For all of us, it is hard to break ranks; to incur the disapproval, the censure, the violence of an offended majority with a different idea of loyalty. We shelter under banner words like justice, peace and reconciliation that enroll us in new, if much smaller and relatively powerless, communities of the like-minded. That mobilize us for the demonstration, the protest and the public performance of acts of civil disobedience--not for the parade ground and the battlefield.

To fall out of step with one's tribe; to step beyond one's tribe into a world that is larger mentally but smaller numerically-- if alienation or dissidence is not your habitual or gratifying posture, this is a complex, difficult process. It is hard to defy the wisdom of the tribe, the wisdom that values the lives of members of the tribe above all others. It will always be unpopular-- it will always be deemed unpatriotic--to say that the lives of the members of the other tribe are as valuable as one's own. It is easier to give one's allegiance to those we know, to those we see, to those with whom we are embedded, to those with whom we share--as we may--a community of fear.

Let's not underestimate the force of what we oppose. Let's not underestimate the retaliation that may be visited on those who dare to dissent from the brutalities and repressions thought justified by the fears of the majority. We are flesh. We can be punctured by a bayonet, torn apart by a suicide bomber. We can be crushed by a bulldozer, gunned down in a cathedral. Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example--for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.

The perennial destiny of principles: While everyone professes to have them, they are likely to be sacrificed when they become inconveniencing. Generally a moral principle is something that puts one at variance with accepted practice. And that variance has consequences, sometimes unpleasant consequences, as the community takes its revenge on those who challenge its contradictions--who want a society actually to uphold the principles it professes to defend.

The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles contradict the way things really are--and always will be. How things really are--and always will be--is neither all evil nor all good but deficient, inconsistent, inferior. Principles invite us to do something about the morass of contradictions in which we function morally. Principles invite us to clean up our act, to become intolerant of moral laxity and compromise and cowardice and the turning away from what is upsetting: that secret gnawing of the heart that tells us that what we are doing is not right, and so counsels us that we'd be better off just not thinking about it.

The cry of the anti-principled: "I'm doing the best I can." The best given the circumstances, of course.

Let's say, the principle is: It's wrong to oppress and humiliate a whole people.To deprive them systematically of lodging and proper nutrition; to destroy their habitations, means of livelihood, access to education and medical care, and ability to consort with one another. That these practices are wrong, whatever the provocation. And there is provocation. That, too, should not be denied.

At the center of our moral life and our moral imagination are the great models of resistance: the great stories of those who have said no. No, I will not serve. What models, what stories? A Mormon may resist the outlawing of polygamy. An antiabortion militant may resist the law that has made abortion legal. They, too, will invoke the claims of religion (or faith) and morality against the edicts of civil society. Appeal to the existence of a higher law that authorizes us to defy the laws of the state can be used to justify criminal transgression as well as the noblest struggle for justice.

Courage has no moral value in itself, for courage is not, in itself, a moral virtue. Vicious scoundrels, murderers, terrorists, may be brave. To describe courage as a virtue, we need an adjective: We speak of "moral courage"--because there is such a thing as amoral courage, too. And resistance has no value in itself. It is the content of the resistance that determines its merit, its moral necessity. Let's say: resistance to a criminal war. Let's say: resistance to the occupation and annexation of another people's land.

Again: There is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.

Here is what I believe to be a truthful description of a state of affairs that has taken me many years of uncertainty, ignorance and anguish to acknowledge: A wounded and fearful country, Israel, is going through the greatest crisis of its turbulent history, brought about by the policy of steadily increasing and reinforcing settlements on the territories won after its victory in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. The decision of successive Israeli governments to retain control over the West Bank and Gaza, thereby denying their Palestinian neighbors a state of their own, is a catastrophe--moral, human and political--for both peoples. The Palestinians need a sovereign state. Israel needs a sovereign Palestinian state. Those of us abroad who wish for Israel to survive cannot, should not, wish it to survive no matter what, no matter how. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to courageous Israeli Jewish witnesses, journalists, architects, poets, novelists, professors--among others--who have described and documented and protested and militated against the sufferings of the Palestinians living under the increasingly cruel terms of Israeli military subjugation and settler annexation.

Our greatest admiration must go to the brave Israeli soldiers, represented here by Ishai Menuchin, who refuse to serve beyond the 1967 borders. These soldiers know that all settlements are bound to be evacuated in the end. These soldiers, who are Jews, take seriously the principle put forward at the Nuremberg trials in 1945-46: namely, that a soldier is not obliged to obey unjust orders, orders that contravene the laws of war--indeed, one has an obligation to disobey them.

The Israeli soldiers who are resisting service in the occupied territories are not refusing a particular order. They are refusing to enter the space where illegitimate orders are bound to be given--that is, where it is more than probable that they will be ordered to perform actions that continue the oppression and humiliation of Palestinian civilians. Houses are demolished, groves are uprooted, the stalls of a village market are bulldozed, a cultural center is looted; and now, nearly every day, civilians of all ages are fired on and killed. There can be no disputing the mounting cruelty of the Israeli occupation of the 22 percent of the former territory of British Palestine on which a Palestinian state will be erected. These soldiers believe, as I do, that there should be an unconditional withdrawal from the occupied territories. They have declared collectively that they will not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders "in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people."

What the refuseniks have done--there are now more than 1,000 of them, more than 250 of whom have gone to prison--does not contribute to telling us how the Israelis and Palestinians can make peace, beyond the irrevocable demand that the settlements be disbanded. The actions of this heroic minority cannot contribute to the much-needed reform and democratization of the Palestinian Authority. Their stand will not lessen the grip of religious bigotry and racism in Israeli society or reduce the dissemination of virulent anti-Semitic propaganda in the aggrieved Arab world. It will not stop the suicide bombers.

It simply declares: enough. Or: there is a limit. Yesh gvul. It provides a model of resistance. Of disobedience. For which there will always be penalties.

None of us have yet to endure anything like what these brave conscripts are enduring, many of whom have gone to jail. To speak for peace at this moment in this country is merely to be jeered (as in the recent Academy Awards ceremony), harassed, blacklisted (the banning by one powerful chain of radio stations of the Dixie Chicks); in short, to be reviled as unpatriotic.

Our "United We Stand" or "Winner Takes All" ethos: The United States is a country that has made patriotism equivalent to consensus. Tocqueville, still the greatest observer of the United States, remarked on an unprecedented degree of conformity in the then-new country, and 168 more years have only confirmed his observation.

Sometimes, given the new, radical turn in American foreign policy, it seems as if it was inevitable that the national consensus on the greatness of America, which may be activated to an extraordinary pitch of triumphalist national self-regard, was bound eventually to find expression in wars like the present one, which are assented to by a majority of the population, who have been persuaded that America has the right--even the duty--to dominate the world.

The usual way of heralding people who act on principle is to say that they are the vanguard of an eventually triumphant revolt against injustice. But what if they're not? What if the evil is really unstoppable? At least in the short run. And that short run may be--is going to be--very long indeed.

My admiration for the soldiers who are resisting service in the occupied territories is as fierce as my belief that it will be a long time before their view prevails. But what haunts me at this moment--for obvious reasons--is acting on principle when it isn't going to alter the obvious distribution of force, the rank injustice and murderousness of a government policy that claims to be acting in the name not of peace but of security.

The force of arms has its own logic. If you commit an aggression and others resist, it is easy to convince the home front that the fighting must continue. Once the troops are there, they must be supported. It becomes irrelevant to question why the troops are there in the first place.

The soldiers are there because "we" are being attacked or menaced. Never mind that we may have attacked them first. They are now attacking back, causing casualties. Behaving in ways that defy the "proper" conduct of war. Behaving like "savages," as people in our part of the world like to call people in that part of the world. And their "savage" or "unlawful" actions give new justification to new aggressions. And new impetus to repress or censor or persecute citizens who oppose the aggression the government has undertaken.

Let's not underestimate the force of what we are opposing. The world is, for almost everyone, that over which we have virtually no control. Common sense and the sense of self-protectiveness tell us to accommodate to what we cannot change.

It's not hard to see how some of us might be persuaded of the justice, the necessity of a war. Especially of a war that is formulated as a small, limited military action that will actually contribute to peace or improve security; of an aggression that announces itself as a campaign of disarmament--admittedly, disarmament of the enemy; and, regrettably, requiring the application of overpowering force. An invasion that calls itself, officially, a liberation.

Every violence in war has been justified as a retaliation. We are threatened. We are defending ourselves. The others, they want to kill us. We must stop them. And from there: We must stop them before they have a chance to carry out their plans. And since those who would attack us are sheltering behind noncombatants, no aspect of civil life can be immune to our depredations.

Never mind the disparity of forces, of wealth, of firepower--or simply of population. How many Americans know that the population of Iraq is 24 million, half of whom are children? (The population of the United States, as you will remember, is 290 million.) Not to support those who are coming under fire from the enemy seems like treason.

It may be that, in some cases, the threat is real. In such circumstances, the bearer of the moral principle seems like someone running alongside a moving train, yelling "Stop! Stop!" Can the train be stopped? No, it can't. At least, not now. Will other people on the train be moved to jump off and join those on the ground? Maybe some will, but most won't. (At least, not until they have a whole new panoply of fears.)

The dramaturgy of "acting on principle" tells us that we don't have to think about whether acting on principle is expedient, or whether we can count on the eventual success of the actions we have undertaken. Acting on principle is, we're told, a good in itself. But it is still a political act, in the sense that you're not doing it for yourself. You don't do it just to be in the right, or to appease your own conscience; much less because you are confident your action will achieve its aim. You resist as an act of solidarity. With communities of the principled and the disobedient: here, elsewhere. In the present. In the future.

Thoreau's going to prison in 1846 for refusing to pay the poll tax in protest against the American war on Mexico hardly stopped the war. But the resonance of that most unpunishing and briefest spell of imprisonment (famously, a single night in jail) has not ceased to inspire principled resistance to injustice through the second half of the twentieth century and into our new era. The movement in the late 1980s to shut down the Nevada Test Site, a key location for the nuclear arms race, failed in its goal; the operations of the test site were unaffected by the protests. But it led directly to the formation of a movement of protesters in faraway Alma Ata, who eventually succeeded in shutting down the main Soviet test site in Kazakhstan, citing the Nevada antinuclear activists as their inspiration and expressing solidarity with the Native Americans on whose land the Nevada Test Site had been located.

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

Thus: It is not in the best interests of Israel to be an oppressor.

Thus: It is not in the best interests of the United States to be a hyperpower, capable of imposing its will on any country in the world, as it chooses.

What is in the true interests of a modern community is justice.

It cannot be right to systematically oppress and confine a neighboring people. It is surely false to think that murder, expulsion, annexations, the building of walls--all that has contributed to reducing a whole people to dependence, penury and despair--will bring security and peace to the oppressors. It cannot be right that a President of the United States seems to believe that he has a mandate to be President of the planet--and announces that those who are not with America are with "the terrorists."

Those brave Israeli Jews who, in fervent and active opposition to the policies of the present government of their country, have spoken up on behalf of the plight and the rights of Palestinians are defending the true interests of Israel. Those of us who are opposed to the plans of the present government of the United States for global hegemony are patriots speaking for the best interests of the United States.

Beyond these struggles, which are worthy of our passionate adherence, it is important to remember that in programs of political resistance the relation of cause and effect is convoluted, and often indirect. All struggle, all resistance is--must be--concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance.

If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.

To Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.

To Rachel Corrie.

And to Ishai Menuchin and his comrades.

By James A. Warren

As I brace myself for yet another routine Black history month, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be a part of a serious democratic discussion and debate about the state of Black America today in its correct historical context. It’s all well and good to celebrate history, but the point is to understand it and build a better world by standing on the shoulders of those that came before us. After several decades of participating in Black history month celebrations I have concluded that I should share my view on how to study our glorious history of struggle to realize our humanity as a part of world humanity.

What can we expect from official and semi-official circles for this month? First and foremost the historians will try to prove that we had people in our history who were “equal to whites” – the “first Black this”, the “first Black that” – which proves only one thing; the historians believe these individuals were the exception when in fact they were the rule. We have had millions more in our past that could and did excel. The historians miss the point: there never was a question in the minds of our ancestors about their equality. Even the racist exploiters and oppressors in their vast majority didn’t believe we were inferior. That is why they fought so violently to beat us down and keep us down. We should refuse to try and prove our equality to anyone least of all ourselves.

These historians will present us as long-suffering victims. They will walk us through the slave ships, chains, death and destruction visited on millions of our people for centuries. We will be bombarded with images of church bombings, white racist riots, police brutality and frame-ups. Once again the point is lost on them. Our history is not that of victims but of fighters. We have always resisted attempts to be turned into victims. We fought back with whatever tools and weapons we had available to us, as Malcolm X said, “by any means necessary”. We fought against racist violence here at home and we laid down our lives in this country’s wars in the mistaken believe it would bring democracy and justice at home. We fought with dignity and valor, we distinguished ourselves as heroic figures by the thousands, only to have great white American heroes betray us. Teddy “big stick” Roosevelt stood up before the entire country and lied about our contributions after Black soldiers saved his butt in Cuba and the Philippines. Our ancestors didn’t conduct themselves as suffering victims. They correctly acted to resist and stand up to their tormentors in this country.

Above all, the historians will advance the pied-piper view of the history of the Civil Rights Movement. We are told that 400 years of brutal exploitation and oppression came tumbling down when Martin Luther King had a dream and marched throughout the South. With all due respect to MLK, who inspired me to become political, he didn’t create the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Movement created him. In fact, the one individual who could be mentioned in this vein is ignored by the historians: a man name E. D. Nixon, the president of the Montgomery NAACP and the president of a sleeping car porters local union. Rosa Parks, his part time secretary, learned her Black pride from this old veteran of the labor and Civil Rights Movement. He convinced her to fight, he organized preachers to meet at Dr. King’s church, and proposed the bus boycott.

Above all Nixon formulated a plan of action that drew in thousands and led to the total destruction of the Jim Crow system.

The bus boycott was a fundamental departure from the tactics of the fight for Black rights utilized from the defeat of Radical Reconstruction up until the boycott. The shift was away from trying to convince white society that we were worthy of first class citizenship. We simply asserted our humanity; we took our equality and refused to surrender it for 381 days. And we won. This victory was not the result of the genius of Dr. King or Mr. Nixon. It exploded from the bottom up. It was the result of the accumulation of 80 years of experiences from the Civil War to World War II. The formula was classic, the accumulation of quantitative experiences exploding into qualitative change in expectations and actions. We took matters into our own hands and we stopped appealing to our oppressors sense of humanity – we finally realized they had none.

The image of the thousands of Black maids, laborers, farmers and farm workers should be burned into our memory. They stood up, fought and won. This invisible mass of humanity woke up, flexed their muscles and made history. They are the heroes we should be celebrating during Black history month. The fact is, that same potential power exists today. It’s a simple matter of tapping into it and utilizing it to change the deplorable conditions the majority of our people face in life today.

The historians will present the massive influx of former civil rights leaders into the electoral arena, primarily the Democratic Party, as a logical outcome of the victory of the movement. Nothing is further from the truth. Obviously winning the right to vote and running for office was a key component of the victory. The central lesson of the victory was the fact that we had organized, mobilized and overthrown Jim Crow without the right to vote or even the pretense of equality under the law. At that point in our history we stood at the threshold of making the greatest advances since our kidnapping and enslavement in this country.

The Civil Rights Movement had a beginning, middle and an end. It was over by 1968 the day after Dr. King’s assassination when the entire country burned. The challenge facing the victorious leaders of the Civil Rights Movement was to stand on the shoulders of the Civil Rights Movement and build a social movement using the same methods of struggle that got us that far. Such a movement would have advanced a social program beginning with a plan similar to the Marshal plan that rebuilt Europe and Japan after World War II. We should have demanded a publics works program to build schools, housing, and hospitals, which would have amounted to a reconstruction of the Black community. I call it reparations with teeth.

As Malcolm X was so fond of pointing out, the goal of segregation was not to deny us rights, the denial of rights was a tool that allowed the market system to exploit us more, pay us less, condemn us to inferior housing and education, higher unemployment, sub-standard medical care, if we had any at all. These are social-economic problems that demand social and economic solutions.

Many historians are incapable of explaining why the conditions of life for the vast majority of people who are Black in this country have deteriorated since the victory of the Civil Rights Movement. The challenge we face today is the same challenge we have faced since 1968. Objective conditions cry out for a social movement. Serious fighters for Black rights today have a responsibility and obligation to stand up and tell the truth no matter how painful it may be. By doing so we will find the young fighters of today who are more than capable of bridging the gap between the past and the present with an eye toward a future of struggle and progress. It is this that we should celebrate during and after this Black history month.

By Beth Shulman

As the Presidential campaigns seek definition, one pivotal issue remains hidden from view. It is potentially huge, especially for Democrats, because it involves their natural constituents, and it addresses core issues of the economy, social justice and fairness. The issue is low-wage work.

Fully 30 million Americans -- one in four U.S. workers -- earn $8.70 an hour or less, a rate that works out to $18,100 a year, which is the current official poverty level in the United States for a family of four. These low-wage jobs usually lack health care, child care, pensions and vacation benefits. Their working conditions are often grueling, dangerous, even humiliating.

At the same time, more and more middle-class jobs are taking on many of these same characteristics, losing the security and benefits once taken for granted.

The shameful reality of low-wage work in America should be on every Democrat's cue card as a potential weapon to be used against the Republicans' rosy economic scenario. But so far it isn't. Why not? One reason may be four long-standing myths that have for years drowned out a rational discussion of what should be a national call to conscience:

Myth 1: Low-wage work is merely a temporary step on the ladder to a better job. According to the American dream, if you work hard, apply yourself and play by the rules, you will be able to earn a decent living for yourself and your family. If you fail to move up, you must be lazy or incompetent.

The truth: Low-wage job mobility is minimal. Low-wage workers have few career ladders. Those of us lucky enough to have better-paying employment depend on them every day. They are nursing home and home health care workers who care for our parents; they are poultry processors who bone and package our chicken; they are retail clerks in department stores, grocery stores and convenience stores; they are housekeepers and janitors who keep our hotel rooms and offices clean; they are billing and telephone call center workers who take our complaints and answer our questions; and they are teaching assistants in our schools and child care workers who free us so that we can work ourselves.

In a recent study following U.S. adults through their working careers, economics professors Peter Gottschalk of Boston College and Sheldon Danziger of the University of Michigan found that about half of those whose earnings ranked in the bottom 20 percent in 1968 were still in the same group in 1991. Of those who had moved up, nearly two-thirds remained below the median income. The U.S. economy provides less mobility for low-wage earners, according to an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study, than the economies of France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Finland or Sweden.

Today's economy is even more rigid. In many industries, such as insurance, retail and financial services, wealthier clients are served by different employees than lower-status customers. This makes it harder for the lowest wage earners to move up. Some do, but this happens primarily in the manufacturing sector, where the number of jobs continues to decline.

Myth 2: Training and new skills solve the problem. Low- wage workers are said to lack the necessary skills for better-paying work in our changing economy. What's needed is retraining and better education for everyone.

The truth: The problem is that there are fewer better jobs to move into. The percentage of low-wage jobs is growing, not shrinking. The growing sectors of our economy are the labor-intensive industries. The two lowest-paid work categories, retail and service, increased their share of the job market from 30 percent to 48 percent between 1965 and 1998. By the end of the decade, the low end of the job market will account for more than 30 percent of the American work force. There will be about 1.8 million software engineers and computer support specialists, but more than 3.8 million cashiers.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, half of all new jobs by 2010 will require relatively brief on-the-job training. Only three of every 10 positions currently require more than a high school diploma. Certainly, raising skills and education levels will lead some workers to higher wages and better jobs. But that approach will do little to improve the lives of most of the hardworking women and men in the jobs that will continue to grow as a proportion of our economy.

Just as important, those who denigrate low-wage work as "low-skilled" ignore the reality of these jobs. A nursing-home worker must be compassionate, must pay attention to detail and must possess psychological and emotional strength; a call-center worker must have patience and must be able to command enough information to handle questions and complaints; a security guard must be dedicated, alert and conscientious. To say these workers need retraining to earn more lets their employers off the hook for failing to compensate them appropriately for their existing skills and duties.

Myth 3: Globalization stops us from doing anything about this problem. Between 1979 and 1999, 3 million manufacturing jobs vanished as global trade brought in textiles, shoes, cars and steel produced by overseas labor. In June 2003 alone, 56,000 manufacturing jobs were lost. American employers must keep wages and benefits low if they are to compete in the global marketplace.

The truth: Very few low-wage jobs are now in globally competitive industries. It is true that global trade has had a profound impact on our economy and on American workers. But companies in Beijing are not competing with child care providers, nursing homes, restaurants, security guard firms and janitorial services in the United States. Checking out groceries, waiting on tables, servicing office equipment and tending the sick cannot be done from overseas.

Employers and politicians use globalization as an excuse to do nothing for low-wage workers, scaring them into accepting lower pay, fewer benefits and less job security. It is invoked to justify reduced social spending and less workplace regulation, and workers believe they are powerless to object. Yet not only does globalization fail to apply to most of America's low- wage jobs, other industrialized countries facing the same global competition have chosen differently: They provide social safety nets, notably including guaranteed health care. As a result, according to a 1997 study by Timothy Smeeding of Syracuse University, Americans in the lowest income brackets have living standards that are 13 percent below those of low-income Germans and 24 percent below the bottom 20 percent of Swedes.

Myth 4: Low-wage jobs are merely the result of an efficient market. The economy is a force of nature, and we as a society have little control over whatever difficulties it creates.

The truth: The economic world we live in is the result of our creation, not natural law. America's low-wage workers have little power to change their conditions because of a series of political, economic and corporate decisions over the past quarter-century that undercut the bargaining power of workers, especially those in lower pay grades.

Those decisions included the push to increase global trade and open global markets, changes in immigration law, the deregulation of industries that had been highly unionized, Federal Reserve policies focused on reducing inflation threats, and a corporate ideological shift that eliminated America's postwar social contract with workers and emphasized maximizing shareholder value.

Those decisions worsened conditions in low-wage jobs and exaggerated disparities in income and wealth.

AMERICA'S most vulnerable workers have also lost many institutions, laws and political allies that could have helped counterbalance these forces. In the 1950s, the number of American workers who were fired, harassed or threatened for trying to organize a union was in the hundreds a year. According to Human Rights Watch, by 1990 that number exceeded 20,000. In 1979, one-fourth of private-sector workers were unionized; only 11 percent are today.

At the same time, the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage fell 30 percent during the 1980s. Despite minimal increases in the 1990s, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the value of the current minimum wage of $5.15 per hour is still 21 percent less than it was in 1979.

The richest country in the world should not tolerate such treatment of More than a fourth of its workers. The myths of upward mobility and inevitable Market forces blind too many people to the grim reality of low-wage work. A presidential campaign is the right time to begin a conversation on how to change it.

By Unknown

Georges Sorel was born in Normandy in 1847 and, after receiving a private education there, attended the Ecole Polytechnique, where he distinguished himself in mathematics. He entered the civil service as an engineer and retired after the requisite twenty-five years, then promptly took up writing, and through innumerable books, established his place as a major social critic. The most famous and most extreme advocate of syndicalism, Georges Sorel's passion for revolutionary activity in place of rational discourse made him most influential in shaping the direction of fascism, especially in Mussolini's Italy.

Georges Sorel stated his theory of "social myths" most clearly in a letter to Daniel Halevy in 1907.

.....Men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph. These constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians, I propose to call myths; the syndicalist "general strike" and Marx's catastrophic revolution are such myths. As remarkable examples of such myths, I have given those which were constructed by primitive Christianity, by the Reformation, by the Revolution and by the followers of Mazzini. I now wish to show that we should not attempt to analyze such groups of images in the way that we analyze a thing into its elements, but that they must be taken as a whole, as historical forces, and that we should be especially careful not to make any comparison between accomplished fact and the picture people had formed for themselves before action.

I could have given one more example which is perhaps still more striking: Catholics have never been discouraged even in the hardest trials, because they have always pictured the history of the Church as a series of battles between Satan and the hierarchy supported by Christ; every new difficulty which arises is only an episode in a war which must finally end in the victory of Catholicism.

In employing the term myth I believed that I had made a happy choice, because I thus put myself in a position to refuse any discussion whatever with the people who wish to submit the idea of a general strike to a detailed criticism, and who accumulate objections against its practical possibility. It appears, on the contrary, that I had made a most unfortunate choice, for while some told me that myths were only suitable to a primitive state of society, others imagined that I thought the modern world might be moved by illusions analogous in nature to those which Renan thought might usefully replace religion. But there has been a worse misunderstanding than this even, for it has been asserted that my theory of myths was only a kind of lawyer's plea, a falsification of the real opinions of the revolutionaries, the sophistry of an intellectual.

If this were true, I should not have been exactly fortunate, for I have always tried to escape the influence of that intellectual philosophy, which seems to me a great hindrance to the historian who allows himself to be dominated by it.

In can understand the fear that this myth of the general strike inspires in many worthy progressives, on account of its character of infinity, the world of today is very much inclined to return to the opinions of the ancients and to subordinate ethics to the smooth working of public affairs, which results in a definition of virtue as the golden mean; as long as socialism remains a doctrine expressed only in words, it is very easy to deflect it towards this doctrine of the golden mean; but this transformation is manifestly impossible when the myth of the "general strike" is introduced, as this implies an absolute revolution. You know as well as I do that all that is best in the modern mind is derived from this "torment of the infinite"; you are not one of those people who look upon the tricks by means of which readers can be deceived by words, as happy discoveries. That is why you will not condemn me for having attached great worth to a myth which gives to socialism such high moral value and such great sincerity. It is because the theory of myths tends to produce such fine results that so many seek to refute it....

As long as there are no myths accepted by the masses, one may go on talking of revolts indefinitely, without ever provoking any revolutionary movement; this is what gives such importance to the general strike and renders it so odious to socialists who are afraid of a revolution....

The revolutionary myths which exist at the present time are almost free from any such mixture; by means of them it is possible to understand the activity, the feelings and the ideas of the masses preparing themselves to enter on a decisive struggle: the myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act. A Utopia is...and intellectual product; it is the work of theorists who, after observing and discussing the known facts, seek to establish a model to which they can compare existing society in order to estimate the amount of good and evil it contains. It is a combination of imaginary institutions having sufficient analogies to real institutions for the jurist to be able to reason about them; it is a construction which can be taken to pieces, and certain parts of it have been shaped in such a way that they can...be fitted into approaching legislation. While contemporary myths lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things, the effect of Utopias has always been to direct men's minds towards reforms which can be brought about by patching up the existing system; it is not surprising, then, that so many makers of Utopias were able to develop into able statesmen when they had acquired a greater experience of political life.

A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the conviction of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalyzable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions. A Utopia, on the other hand, can be discussed like any other social constitution; the spontaneous movements it presupposes can be compared with the movements actually observed in the course of history, and we can in this way evaluate its verisimilitude; it is possible to refute Utopias by showing that the economic system on which they have been made to rest is incompatible with the necessary conditions of modern production.

For a long time Socialism was scarcely anything but a Utopia; the Marxists were right in claiming for their master the honor of bringing about a change in this state of things; Socialism has now become the preparation of the masses employed in great industries for the suppression of the State and property; and it is no longer necessary, therefore, to discuss how men must organize themselves in order to enjoy future happiness; everything is reduced to the revolutionary apprenticeship of the proletariat. Unfortunately Marx was not acquainted with facts which have now become familiar to us; we know better than he did what strikes are, because we have been able to observe economic conflict of considerable extent and duration; the myth of the "general strike" has become popular, and is now firmly established in the minds of the workers; we possess ideas about violence that it would have been difficult for him to have formed; we can then complete his doctrine, instead of making commentaries on his text, as his unfortunate disciples have done for so long.

In this way Utopias tend to disappear completely from Socialism; Socialism has no longer any need to concern itself with the organization of industry since capitalism does that....

People who are living in this world of "myths," are secure from all refutation; this has led many to assert that Socialism is a kind of religion. For a long time people have been struck by the fact that religious convictions are unaffected by criticism, and from that they have concluded that everything which claims to be beyond science must be a religion. It has been observed also that Christianity tends at the present day to be less a system of dogmas than a Christian life, i.e., moral reform penetrating to the roots of one's being; consequently, new analogy has been discovered between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even reconstruction of the individual -- a gigantic task....

...by the side of Utopias there have always been myths capable of urging on the workers to revolt. For a long time these myths were founded on the legends of the Revolution, and they preserved all their value as long as these legends remained unshaken. Today the confidence of the Socialists is greater than ever since the myth of the general strike dominates all the truly working-class movement. No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that the apprenticeship has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before; their experience of labor has taught workmen that it is by means of patient apprenticeship that a man may become a true comrade, and it is also the only way of becoming a true revolutionary. (July 15, 1907)

JANUARY, 1997

From: videotaped interview conducted and shot by Kerry Appel
Translation by: Jason Gilmore and Kerry Appel

Note: The sentence structure and use of language of Subcomandante Marcos was translated as directly as possible into English. It was suggested to me by some people that I change the sentence structure and idiomatic expressions into that which may be used by a US citizen who spoke English as their native language in order to make it seem more natural and more easily understood for the US audience. I decided not to guess how Marcos might speak if he spoke English as a first language or to guess what expressions he might use. Besides, I don't believe it is in the best interests of the audience to try to make everything easy. I feel that there is a valid need for readers of this interview or for viewers of the video version to step out of the parameters of their own experiences slightly in order to hear and to understand what it is that Marcos is saying. -Kerry Appel

I went to Chiapas in January of 1997 in order to buy coffee and weavings from the indigenous communities there. That's what I do these days. I went to Chiapas three years ago, in June of 1994, as an artist who was curious about what an indigenous uprising had to do with a "free trade agreement". I produced a documentary on what I had found and then I produced a second documentary and a third. I was eventually told by the United States and Mexican governments that I should "stay out of it" and "leave it to them". I was told that, as a private citizen, I had no business discussing economic, social or political subjects with the indigenous peoples of Mexico or, apparently, discussing anything I had seen or heard in Mexico with US citizens. I could only legally engage in cultural, recreational, health or sports activities as a "tourist". Excuse me! I thought my activities were "cultural". In my mind I was doing "re-creational activities. I was told by the Mexican government that, if I wanted to see Indians, I could see them in the markets or the museums. Then they kicked me out of Mexico. It wasn't legal for them to kick me out of Mexico so I have been returning in order to do business under the "free trade agreement". My business is to be partners with indigenous people in Chiapas and to develop direct markets in the United States for the coffee and weavings that they produce in their communal villages. If they are going to annihilate the indigenous people of Mexico under the "free" trade agreements of the United States then they can annihilate myself as well. I guess the free trade agreements have, in their own unintended way, united the fates of myself and, in various manners, countless other people around the world.

While in La Realidad, Chiapas, Mexico, on international trade business, I received a visit from Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army. I don't know, perhaps I shouldn't have talked to him. Perhaps I should have said "I'm sorry. I don't know if this falls within cultural, recreational, health or sports activities".

Question #1, Kerry Appel: Where are we, what is the date, if you want to say, and what is going on right now with the peace process?

Marcos: We are in La Realidad in the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas, Mexico in the first days of January, 1997. Approximately 15 -20 days ago we received a proposal from the government to modify the general law of the nation, which is the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States (CPEUM), to incorporate the demands of the indigenous peoples (pueblos) of Mexico, principally for autonomy in respect to their customs and their right to be citizens, like any other, because now, in Mexico, the indigenous people are second or third class citizens or not even citizens at all. The actual situation of that law is still to be defined. There are some accords that the government signed a year ago in February of 1996 that are still unfulfilled. In the fulfillment of those accords depends the future of the process of dialogue and negotiation. If the government cannot keep their word and their signature, because they did sign the accords, then it will be difficult to continue the process of peace in the long run.

Question #2, Kerry: What will the Zapatistas do if the Initiative for Indigenous Culture and Rights is not accepted by President Zedillo and incorporated into the Mexican Constitution?

Marcos: As I explained before, the initiative to respect the rights and culture of indigenous peoples is an initiative that was signed by the representation of the Federal Government. In this case it is not a matter of whether or not Mr. Zedillo accepts or not a proposition, but whether his decision is to keep his word or not in regard to what he signed. This is not about a new initiative or a new demand of the EZLN (Spanish acronym for Zapatista Army of National Liberation). This is about what he already negotiated in 1995 and what was signed by representatives of the Federal Power of Mr. Zedillo in the Dialogue of San Andres on February 16, 1996. If Mr. Zedillo does not accept to fulfill these accords signed by his representation then it means that he does not intend to fulfill his pact and that he has used the dialogue of negotiation as a pretext to gain time to seek the military solution to the conflict and to try to provoke the erosion of public opinion of the EZLN nationally and internationally. This strategy to look for a favorable moment to get rid of the EZLN the fast way, as they call the military solution, is what they have intended for the last three years since 1994, with Mr. Salinas de Gortari, and later in 1995 and 1996 with Mr. Zedillo. Evidently, if they don't fulfill their word, it will put in definite crisis the dialogue of San Andres and the negotiation for peace between our rebel forces and the federal government.

Question #3, Kerry: Why is this initiative so important...to indigenous peoples...to the general population?

Marcos: Since Mexico got it's independence from Spain it has had a series of conflicts, wars, and social movements that tried to rescue the Mexican nation and the rights of social groups; in the case of 1910, the peasants, when they demanded land, and later the workers movements that also gained great labor victories. But during this course of historical events that has been in practice since the independence of 1810 and until our time there has been a sector of the population of Mexico that is more than 10% of the population, that is 10-12 million indigenous people, that have never been recognized within the nation as citizens. It is pretended that the indigenous are equal to any other citizen of the town or the countryside and it is forgotten that they have their own culture and history and that they arrived here, or have been here, a long time before the conquest and the colonies and before Mexico's independence and Mexico's revolution. They have never had the opportunity to incorporate their rights. The fact of their demands being recognized in the highest law of the nation would signify the redefinition of the historical pact of the relationship that there is between the Mexican nation and one of it's parts, in this case with the most historical and original part that was first in the formation of the Mexican Nation. For the indigenous it would signify the culmination of a period, that carries with it many centuries, to try to incorporate itself with the modern world, whatever signifies modernization over history, without renouncing being indigenous, without transformation, converting or rendering, without leaving behind being Indians. And with their demand, the resistance of all these years, and now the armed demand, the other, in this case the government and the Mexican society, would have to recognize them as being different and having a place in the national order. In respect to other social groups, not only in Mexico but in the rest of the world, we think that the demands of the EZLN in particular and the Indian peoples of Mexico in general put in first place the problem that's appearing in this time of globalization. It's neoliberalism. At the same time that it tries to erase borders and globalize economies it begins to exclude social groups that aren't economically productive. And paradoxically, those social groups are the oldest and have the most historical tradition. I'm not referring only to the Latin American Indians but also to those of North America and to the ethnic groups and social groups that are in the rest of the world, the ones called minorities. I'm referring to indigenous people, migrants, homosexuals, lesbians,... the youth, the women. Although difficult to categorize as minorities, they are treated as minorities that need to be done away with in different forms, sometimes by police persecution, sometimes by war, sometimes by forgetting them which is what they are trying to do here and now in Mexico. In another way the demand of the indigenous people of Mexico agrees with universal demands of other social groups that demand respect for the life and way of being of every social group. It is not possible that in the modern world the only way to value a person is by their purchasing power or credit capacity. It is necessary to refer to history as to what makes a human being, or their dignity as we say in the EZLN, without converting them into nothing more than a consumer or producer or another number in profit indexes or the statistics of the multinational corporations. I think that is why many social groups in the world are interested in or attentive to what can happen here but, above all, to the word of the indigenous people of the EZLN in regard to what they have to say to the powers and to neoliberalism.

Question #4, Kerry: People often talk about the struggle in Chiapas as if it were just a local struggle between indigenous peoples and the Mexican government in regard to poverty. What is this struggle really about and are there other protagonists involved besides the Mexican Government?

Marcos: Well, lately the protaganism is global. It's not about a national problem. The effect of the neoliberalism and the process of globalization is that it erases the borders for money and erases the borders for the problems. With this I mean to say that the fundamental problem that is in the Zapatista rebellion is not just an indigenous problem but also the problem of the excluded in this gigantic genocide that the big money and great financial powers of this world are doing that decides to exclude a part of the population at any cost, even at the cost of human lives. And this is repeated in Europe, in the United States, in Canada, in all the countries of Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, in Oceania; in all five continents there is this process of annihilation to shut out social groups and to concentrate on nothing more than the criteria of economic devaluation or productive devaluation, in this case, the power of purchase. The body of the Zapatista rebellious movement is a body fundamentally indigenous. We are speaking of a civil population that is 100% indigenous with four principal ethnic groups of Mexico; the ethnic Chol, the ethnic Tzeltal, the ethnic Tzotzil, and the ethnic Tojolabal, Mayan peoples of the Southeast of Mexico. And 99% of the regular combatant forces, the insurgents that we are, are indigenous and a small part of us are Mestizos. That is the body of the Zapatista rebellion but the heart has to do with the problem of human dignity on the international level. It has to do with the problem of putting value back into one's word and giving feeling to the question of humanity. We insist that whatever defense of humanity now is a struggle against neoliberalism as it was before against fascism in the middle of this, the 20th century that is about to end. We can say it that way, that the body of the Zapatista rebellion is indigenous and the heart of it's rebellion is the dignity of all the "excluded" in the world that encounter power.

Question #5, Kerry: Does Mr. Zedillo have the power to now implement the accords on indigenous rights that resulted from the dialogue?

Marcos: He has various problems, no? Mr. Zedillo has the problem of a state party system, in this case it is concentrated in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), that is in a process of decomposition that is very acute. More than a political organization, it's more like a criminal organization that takes care of it's differences and battles with crime and murder. The State Party System is corrupt, it is involved in drug trafficking, it has a wake of deceit, of lies, and of loss of legitimacy with the Mexican nation. So Mr. Zedillo has to try to govern with a state party system that hasn't any credibility and he has to try to convince them that he can govern and, if he can't convince them with reason, he has to convince them with blows. So the possibility for Mr. Zedillo to fulfill the accords that came from the negotiations depends a lot on the power of the state political system to transform and to change without dragging the rest of the nation into the process of internal annihilation that it is suffering from. We are very skeptical that this is possible in the sense that there are so many interests in the government power that don't seem willing to do anything in order to transform things.

Question #6, Kerry: Against the combined forces of the Mexican and North American governments what chances do the Zapatista have of achieving their goals?

Marcos: Well, the opportunity that we have to triumph depends on other social groups in the world understanding the demands of the Zapatistas and understanding in what way they can benefit living in a world that the Zapatistas attempt to live in. The Zapatistas have said clearly that they don't aspire to take charge of the government or to take power, but they aspire to recuperate the place that they deserve in the world that the modern history wants to exclude; not just the indigenous but other social groups that have been marginated, excluded, and persecuted like, for example, before, the population of color, the black population of the USA with that same process of discrimination, of persecution, of racism that indigenous people suffered, not just in Mexico, but in the rest of the American continent. It is difficult to say that the indigenous people of the US and Canada have the same rights and prerogatives of other citizens or that they are treated in the same manner. In another manner, they are only accepted if they renounce their cultural values and if they incorporate..."as you say, "the American way of life", you know what I mean?" They aren't accepted as indigenous or with their historical process under the culture that they have. "They have to live like..."WASP", white anglo saxon peoples." They have... in that form they can't live like their ancestors. They can't have the same beliefs. They can't be themselves ultimately. The modern system demands that they renounce their way of being and convert into another that wants to buy and sell, that is, what the modern system and global system produce. If we accomplish that these social groups in all the world, but above all in the countries that sustain the Mexican government which are the countries of the European Common Economy, the American Union (USA) and Canada, ...if we could convince these peoples above all, but also those governments, they would demand that the Mexican government adopt, reform, and actualize the relation of the institutions and the Mexican society with the Indian people. In regard to our failure. If we were to fail and if we weren't able to triumph in our demands it would mean a defeat not only for us but for others that are excluded and for other social groups that demand their place in history and a defeat for humanity and a triumph of the global crime of this Fourth World War that we are now living.

Question #7, Kerry: Press and government officials in the US tell me, sometimes in subtle terms and sometimes not so subtly, that the indigenous peoples in Mexico aren't ready for democracy as we are in the "first world" but need to establish "market economies" and "prosperity" first and democracy and liberty will someday follow. What's your opinion?

Marcos: Well, our opinion is history's opinion that economic profits have never been a requisite for democratic rights. The governments and forms of governments and the conduct of politics in indigenous nations in all of the American continent can be a lesson to any modern political system. All the systems of government, the Mexican political system and the rest of the continent, didn't have to base their development through war, for example, in the annihilation of others, in the market...in the buying and selling of human beings. But, in the case of the indigenous people, the decisions are taken in majority accord or collectively in a discussion or communal assembly. Within the social groups of Mexico, the group that has the most economic problems, that are the most miserable, is the indigenous people and they are the ones that have developed most their forms of government in what is referred to as democracy. The consensus and the search for accord and dialogue are things that are barely being discovered in modern political systems of neoliberalization but are things that are many centuries old within the indigenous peoples. We think the process runs parallel or, in any case, the opposite cannot have economic profits or social development if there are not political liberties that are what make possible the distribution of wealth. The access of social groups to health services, education, and nutrition are only possible in a democratic system that allows to be heard the majority of the population and social groups but also allows to be heard the minorities, as they are now called, or other groups that are not representative of a social system or a nation but have a place in history. We say that in Mexico it will only be possible...this economic development in regard to treaties like NAFTA... will only be possible as a democratic system that permits participation of humans without losing their dignity and their history.

Question #8, Kerry: Recently Mr. Zedillo had a meeting in New York with people from Wall St., CNN, Chase Manhattan bank, J.P. Morgan, Henry Kissinger, New York Times, etc. What did they speak of?

Marcos: Evidently it's about the Mexican country being up for sale to the "modern world" and Mr. Zedillo has become a sales agent, someone who is visiting other countries and other possible buyers to show a product that includes not just oil, in this case, the case of Mexico, but also the people and the history. What they did in that meeting was to bargain about the conditions of the merchandise that is now offered that includes almost 100 million Mexicans and many centuries of history and many years of being independent, almost 200 years of independence. This is what was discussed. The big money of North America wants to buy the whole country and wants to know the condition of the merchandise. Mr. Zedillo is committed to lie to them like any sales agent that knows he doesn't have good merchandise, that knows he has merchandise in crisis that can breakdown at any moment, and to dress up the product that he wants to offer to be able to put it on the market. It is simply an encounter between buyer and seller that happened in New York with Mr. Zedillo that was very well received by the North American press, the ones who didn't get distracted by Lady Diana's visit, so they could pay attention to Mr. Zedillo's visit as a visit by a salesman that comes to offer a product that it seems the big money of North America is interested in buying.

Question #9, Kerry: I'd like to get your opinion here in regard to if the Mexican government is directed to some degree by the government of the United States in regard to the initiative on rights and culture of the indigenous. For example, if Zedillo wanted to give a just response, would the United States allow it?

Marcos: Well, more than depending on the United States, it depends on the great financial centers that also control that same United States government. The North American government has been converted into the police of a transnational government, the government of financial capital that is dedicated to obligate the countries and people of the world to comply with the production, payment and financial quotas that are established in the financial centers. Evidently the global financial powers don't have any interest in a sector that is not productive for them, such as the indigenous sector in respect to their land and their rights and their form of life because they are not interested in human beings but in what these lands can produce. And that explains their interest in oil and uranium that are in the forests of Chiapas and the wood and the electricity, in all the natural resources that can be exploited at a low price and surrendered to them. If by that the indigenous are converted into an obstacle the large financial capital will try to eliminate them. All that they lack is for the rest of the world to permit it.

Question #10, Kerry: This struggle is sometimes hard for the average US citizen to relate to personally. Some of the changes proposed by the Zapatistas would lead to profound changes in Mexican society and might also have some impact on US society. Why should the average US citizen support the goals of the Zapatistas?

Marcos: Well, I'm going to give you an example, the example of migrants in the American Union (USA). A good percentage of inhabitants of other countries who migrate to the USA to look for work are from Mexico. A good percentage of those Mexicans that cross the border are indigenous. It's like that because, in their land, their communities don't have any rights or any possibility of life and they find themselves without options, they die in their lands, or migrate to other places to look for better economic positions. The ones who can't migrate or the ones taken prisoner by the SIN (Spanish acronym), the US Immigration Service or the border patrol have to stay in their communities and begin to convert into an unstable political factor. In no way can it be convenient for the North American people and government to have a country like Mexico that has converted into a time bomb with a possibility of a social explosion. Evidently, to recognize the indigenous rights and to comply with these rights would signify a reduction of the flow of immigrants into the USA and would politically stabilize the country and would be more productive or would have more possibilities for any economic projects or commercial interchange between our countries. What is occurring with the EZLN would repeat itself in other social groups and other Indian peoples and would be in the in the south of their nation, to the south of North America, a process of social decomposition, of civil war very similar to the Yugoslavia of today and to Lebanon of the last decade where there are so many groups that they don't know who to shoot at, or where, or who to negotiate with or to dialogue with. It starts to be a "scrambled malotov cocktail" that isn't 1000s of kilometers away such as in the case of Europe of the Middle East but is located on the other side of the border. The possibility or a civil war in Mexico or a process of decomposition close to a civil war would signify an increase in immigration to the United States as a consequence, an increase to their police and military to control this immigration, a reduction of welfare, social costs to the American government and a series of consequences in instability of the markets and inflation; public insecurity that would necessarily touch the American people, especially the middle class. All this could be avoided if Mexico would open the channels of political participation in a way that the differences or the discords that exist in social sectors could have causeways of political participation and wouldn't have to bring about violence or wouldn't have to become criminals or delinquents. That's all.

Kerry, "That's all?"

Marcos, "I don't know...the last question?"

Kerry, "There are three more questions if you have more patience with me."

Marcos, "I have the patience but the light, I don't know if I have light."

Kerry, "Light? Luz?"

Marcos, "Si."

Kerry, "Oh yeah, we have plenty of light."

Marcos. "OK"

Question #11, Kerry: How can people outside of Mexico who want to support the struggle of the Zapatistas do so?

Marcos: Well, we think there are many ways. The first and most important is to understand what is going on here. Its not about a political group that has a series of demands and aspirations. We are not a political party. We're an organized people. We represent hundreds of thousands of indigenous, almost a million in the Southeast of Mexico and we also have the message that repeats the restlessness of the other millions of indigenous people of the rest of the country. To understand this is to be able to resist the media campaigns that try to reduce our movement into a movement of political interest or a political group that tries to obtain their own advantages. Another way would be to send economic aid or humanitarian aid to the indigenous communities, not to the EZLN but to indigenous communities that are men women and children that can be seen in your documentary (El Viaje del Relampago Rojo) that are resisting simply because they don't want the problems to continue the same or to be immediately resolved. They want a profound solution and this is why they decided to refuse the governmental aid and to live only with what they have, with what they can work with, and with help that they can get from other villages. And the third way that we say to help is to know or learn that the struggle of Zapatismo is only a symptom of a worldwide struggle that exists of the excluded groups to recuperate their place in history and that all these people, men and women, that are in other parts of the world that struggle within their nations and within their social groups, demand also to take back the place that they deserve in the modern world.

Question #12, Kerry: There are those who should know that they say the CEO's (chief executive officers) of Multinational corporations don't give a damn about human rights but only care about maximizing profits, what could you say to convince them to incorporate more human values into their bottom line?

Marcos: They aren't going to be able to capitalize these profits if they don't respect human dignity. If they are going to encounter that logic of profit in a completely broken or annihilated world they are going to have great riches and no way to circulate them because there will not be any consumers. There will not be any producers. The world will be divided between the dead and the criminals. It would be the worst nightmare that could be imagined in any movie of science fiction. When the big money of multinational corporations bets the annihilation of the people, the rape of human rights, thinking that it will bring profits, it trades the future for a present that will be very apt to fly away like a gust of wind. The moment that all those people revolt or are finally annihilated, no market, commercial or financial, will be able to sustain itself in that way. In reality what they are doing in the long run, the multinational corporations, is sacrificing their success, their prestige, and their economic well being.

Question #13, Kerry: This question is more personal. Has living here in Chiapas with the Indigenous peoples changed you and, if so, how?

Marcos: Well, first it was a process of colliding. We came from an urban culture and the urban culture, above all, teaches you speak, "you must speak, speak, speak and nothing to listen to". You don't learn to listen, only to speak and to impose your point of view. At the time, we came upon a culture that was different and as much as you spoke and argued no one understood you. You had to detain yourself and learn to hear, to understand, to learn to listen to a language and learn what it had to say. It wasn't just that but to learn the world, how it was organized, and how they explain to themselves their world and their history. The principle result of this encounter was recognizing that we had much to learn, almost nothing to teach, and the possibility of whether the modern world would be able to remember that part of history or that part of their world, of the modern world, that was becoming forgotten but of which it had much to learn. That, finally, the world was sacrificing and was losing a lot at the time it forgot these people and would gain more remembering and recognizing that all those people have a lot to teach and from whom they have much to learn. If I could summarize generally what it signifies for Marcos, the encounter with the Indian people, they converted him from teacher to student and that they taught him how to listen and to try to understand what is behind words and not only the sounds.

Kerry: Is there any message you'd like to give to the audience?

Marcos: I don't know. Who is the audience?

Kerry: Well, this could be on TV, it could be transcribed, it could...

Marcos' message to audience: What we would like to tell them in the name of the people is to not forget the struggle even though when in the media the Indian is only news when they are dead, armed or when they commit a crime. This daily struggle of all these indigenous men and women is a struggle that also has a mirror and dignity in other parts of the world. We are not the only ones. There are other social groups and other people that are struggling. It would also be good if they would pay attention to those social groups, no? Finally, that our struggle is a struggle for dignity, for human dignity, and that it is also the duty of any human being wherever they are. It is not important the color of their skin, their culture or their language. What is important is to struggle to be better.

Stephen Hartnett is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California-Berkeley. He is also a volunteer instructor in California's San Quentin Prison.

Shaka is an intellectually hungry young man who, due to a first-time arrest on a nonviolent drug charge, has spent the past twelve years struggling to maintain his sanity in a medium-security prison in Indiana. One of Shaka's chief dilemmas -- among the daily prospects of rape, gang violence, harassment by guards, and the deafening anomie of boredom -- is that the prison he is in has instituted a policy offering prisoners a Faustian choice: fester in your cell with few opportunities for life-improving activities, or, as a means of escaping the drudgery of confinement, work in a prison-administered factory. Despite the welcome opportunities for physical activity and conversation with fellow prisoners offered by the prison's work program, Shaka is adamant that he will not labor for the prison. He explains his reasoning as follows:

During slavery, work was understood to be a punishment, and became despised as any punishment is despised. Work became hated as does any activity which accomplishes no reward for the doer. Work became identified with slavery, and slavery with punishing work, thus work came to be a most hated activity ... This is why I adamantly refuse to work within the prison system: I unequivocally refuse to be a slave.

Shaka's comparison of contemporary prison labor and antebellum slavery may seem hyperbolic or even melodramatic, but in fact Shaka is historically accurate and politically astute in linking prison, labor, and slavery. This is perhaps the most productive means of thinking about the role of what I call "the correctional-industrial complex."

Historical Perspectives on Prisons, Slavery, and Imperialism

It is important to recall that many of the first settlers of the "New World" were actually British, Scottish, Irish, French, German, and Dutch convicts sold into indentured servitude. Selling "criminals" to the companies exploring the Americas lowered the cost of maintaining European prisons (since they could remain relatively small), enabled the traditional elite to rid themselves of potential political radicals, and provided the cheap labor necessary for the first wave of colonization. Indeed, as detailed in both Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged and A. R. Ekirch's Bound for America, there is a strong historical relationship between the need for policing the unruly working classes, fueling the military and economic needs of the capitalist class, and greasing the wheels of imperialism with both indentured servants and outright slavery.

An early US example of this three-pronged relationship occurred in Frankfurt, Kentucky in 1825. Joel Scott paid $1,000 for control of Kentucky's prison labor to build roads and canals facilitating settler traffic westward into Indian lands. After winning this contract, Scott built his own private 250-cell prison to house his new "workers." In a similar deal in 1844, Louisiana began leasing the labor of the prisoners in its Baton Rouge State Penitentiary to private contractors for $50,000 a year. California's San Quentin prison illustrates this same historical link between prison labor and capitalism. In 1852, J.M. Estill and M.G. Vallejo swapped land that was to become the site of the state capital for the management of California's prison laborers. These three antebellum examples are not typical of pre-Civil War labor arrangements, however. The institution of slavery in the South and the unprecedented migration of poor Europeans to America in the North provided the capitalist elite with ample labor at rock bottom prices. This left prison labor as a risky resource exploited by only the most adventurous capitalists.

Prison labor became a more significant part of modern capitalism during Reconstruction because the Civil War made immigration to America dangerous, left the U.S. economically devastated, and deprived capitalism of its lucrative slave labor. One of the responses to these crises was to build more prisons and then to lease the labor of prisoners, many of whom were ex-slaves, to labor-hungry capitalists.
Burdened with heavy taxes to meet the expenses of rebuilding the shattered economy, and committed to the traditional notion that convicts should, by their labor, reimburse the government for their maintenance and even create additional revenue, the master class, drawing on its past experience with penitentiary leases, reintroduced a system of penal servitude which would make public slaves of blacks and poor and friendless whites.
-- J.T. Sellin
Slavery and the Penal System

The conditions of such leased prison labor -- much like the conditions of both plantation slave labor and Northern factory work before the War -- were atrocious. For example, D.A. Novak reveals in The Wheel of' Servitude: Black Forced Labor After Slavery that the death rate of prisoners leased to railroad companies between 1877 and 1879 was 45% in South Carolina, 25% in Arkansas, and 16% in Mississippi. Conditions in the labor camps of the Texas State Penitentiary in Galveston were so bad that 62 prisoners died in 1871 alone. Thus, prisons have been linked historically to forced labor, inhumane working conditions, reproduction of slavery-like conditions, and the imperial needs of a rising capitalist elite. Given this perspective, the trend of privatizing both prisons and prison labor may be seen not so much as a recent reaction of the "lock `em up" generation, but rather -- as suggested earlier by Shaka -- as one of the fundamental historical links between prison, slavery, and capitalism.

The Correctional-Industrial Complex

While the correctional-industrial complex has become one of the most heavily capitalized sectors of the US economy, a number of failings are evident. For example, it has:
not proven effective at rehabilitating prisoners
not lowered crime rates and in fact bears no relationship to crime rates
coincided with the most profound escalation of violence among young men in our national history and
pursued imprisonment patterns that indicate deeply racist practices

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency estimates that over the next ten years state and federal expenditures on prisons will amount to $351 billion. Some critics charge that the correctional-industrial complex (along with its corresponding "war on drugs") is but a form of state-sponsored subsidy, a post-Cold War form of corporate welfare enabling the circulation of federal capital into friendly pockets while simultaneously appealing to popular racist sentiments.

Indeed, much as the military-industrial complex fueled the economic juggernaut of the Reagan/Bush era's redistribution of wealth and resources, so now we are witnessing the production of a correctional-industrial complex in which society's already limited resources and funds are redistributed away from social justice-based forms of spending in favor of imprisonment. For example, while states are cutting spending on education, housing, health care, and other long-term infrastructural necessities, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that state spending on prison construction increased 612% between 1979 and 1990. The American Friends Service Committee characterizes this redistribution of wealth, resources, and possibilities as part of an oncoming "fortress economy" in which an America ever more stratified by racial and class divisions retreats into armed enclaves where the promises and obligations of justice and democracy are increasingly replaced by a high-tech correctional-industrial police state.

California is a particularly cogent example of how the "needs" of the correctional-industrial complex lead toward a "fortress economy." Its budget for fiscal year 1996/97, for the first time ever, appropriated more money for prisons (9.9% of the budget, up from 2% in 1980) than for the University of California and California State University systems combined (9.5% of the budget, down from 12.6% in 1980). Put more simply, since 1980 California has slashed educational spending by roughly 25%, while raising prison spending by roughly 500%. The effects of this budgetary redistribution are already evident. Mike Davis reports that the decade from 1984 to 1994 saw California universities and colleges lose 8,000 employees, while the California Department of Corrections "hired 26,000 new employees to guard 112,000 new inmates." This redistribution of educational monies into the machinery of the correctional-industrial complex is also, whether intentionally or not, reproducing the fundamentally white-supremacist culture of antebellum slavery. The San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice reports that in California, the number of black men in prison (41,434) outnumbers black men in college (10,474) by a ratio of almost four-to-one.

The correctional-industrial complex is therefore a crucial element in reproducing racism. An equally insidious result of the correctional-industrial complex is that capitalists now have an economic stake in escalating imprisonment rates. For example, consider the case of Prince George County, Maryland, where Jon Greenberg reports that in addition to construction and maintenance costs, "The county spends about $4 million a year to buy everything from shoes to toothpaste." This massive outlay of county money may well contribute to the survival of some local businesses, but in most cases the recipients of such correctional largesse are major corporations. Their ability to profit from increased imprisonment in turn creates a correctional-industrial environment in which, as one of Greenberg's corrections industry interviewees states, "The talk is `three strikes and you're out' ... well, naturally that's going to translate into more sales. The more crooks you have the better business is for us."

Indeed, the correctional-industrial complex has been in such an accelerated boom cycle that J. Robert Lilly and Paul Knepper report that in 1986 Adtech Incorporated spun-off two subsidiary operations, the Correctional Development Corporation and American Detention Services Incorporated, and then in 1988 acquired Steel Door Industries, with the end result that profits rose from $10.3 million in 1987 to a remarkable $21.6 million in 1989. This doubling of profits is dwarfed by the 500% profit-growth over a five year period shown by Space Master Enterprises Incorporated (builders of pre-fabricated prison cells), which leapt from $12 million in 1982 to $60 million in 1987. The rapid emergence of the correctional-industrial complex has fueled the development of new forms of disciplinary technology. Much like the endless stream of hardware produced by the military-industrial complex, these have not enhanced the daily lives of Americans yet have made their manufacturers millions of dollars via lucrative deals with federal, state and county governments.

While it has been estimated that up to 25% of all American children live under the poverty line, and hence struggle to meet their daily nutritional needs, the correctional-industrial complex has spawned a parallel subsidized food economy. Indeed, feeding prisoners has become a major growth industry totaling over $1 billion a year. A Campbell Soup Company representative thus recently celebrated the fact that "the nation's prison system is the fastest growing food service market." Prince George County, for example, contracts its Prison food services with Szabo Correctional Services. According to its President Bill Barrett, Szabo has grown "within the last five years from a $20 million company to an $85 million company."

As the correctional-industrial complex provides capitalists with imprisoned consumers, it also provides them with cheap labor. For example, the Oregon Department of Corrections has been using prison laborers to produce a "Prison Blues" line of clothing (for public sale both in America and primarily in Asia) with projected yearly sales of over $1.2 million. Despite these profits, prisoners are reportedly earning real wages (their $8 an hour wage minus state-imposed restitution fees, and room and board charges) of $1.80 an hour. The largest network of prison labor is run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons' manufacturing consortium, UNICOR. While paying inmate laborers entry-level wages of 23 cents an hour, UNICOR boasts of gross annual sales (primarily to the Department of Defense) of $250 million.

The correctional-industrial complex therefore relies on a sobering "joint venture" directly relating profits to increased incarceration rates for four kinds of "partners," only the first of whom are those seeking opportunities in prison construction. A second kind of partner stocks these prisons with stun guns, pepper spray, surveillance equipment, and other "disciplinary technology," corporations such as Adtech, American Detention Services, the Correctional Corporation of America and Space Master Enterprises. A third partner finds a state-guaranteed mass of consumers for food and other services in the prisoners themselves, such as Campbell's Soup and Szabo Correctional Services. The fourth partner can be any private industry or state-sponsored program that stands to gain from paying wages that only nominally distinguish captive forced labor from slavery. In this last category, an example of the former is Prison Blues and of the latter is UNICOR which uses prisoners to produce advanced military weaponary.

Capitalism, slavery, and prison labor thus appear as firmly wedded today as in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the evidence presented above suggests that the short-term benefits the correctional-industrial complex offers to capitalists contrasts sharply with the long-term needs of a democratic society struggling with the questions of how to reduce violence, how to redistribute social wealth, how to address its troubled racial history and how to enable more citizens -- regardless of race or class -- to play productive and creative roles in their communities.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Sol, one of Shaka's cell-mates, observes that his experiences with the mind-numbing corruption of both prison and prison-based labor as having amounted to little more than "training in the discipline of graft":

A chow hall assignment without standards: "just do it." A Job in the Department of Recreation where the standards are measured in terms of improvement of your basketball and handball games. An educational curriculum with General Educational Development Certificates for sale. A vocational school that grants Associates Degrees with honors to students who rebuild cars, lawnmowers, air-conditioners, boats, and motorcycles, anything that's requested, for corrupt prison officials and their private enterprises. So much for the work ethic...in fact, jobs in prison can be described, at best, as training in the discipline of graft.

On Capitol Hill, heated debate continues over immigration reform. We speak with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D - TX) who has submitted an immigration bill in Congress that would allow for legal permanent residency for undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for the past five years, would double the cap for family visas and would increase the number of work visas. [includes rush transcript]



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On Capitol Hill, heated debate is continuing over a bill passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that would allow the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in this country a chance to work here legally and eventually become U.S. citizens - a process that would take 11 years and include paying fines and back taxes.
But support for the legislation in the Senate is uncertain and there is already talk of a possible filibuster by Republican senators opposed to what they call amnesty for illegal immigrants.

On Monday night, a group of Republican senators reached for a compromise that they hoped would bolster votes for the bill. The talks were led by Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Mel Martinez of Florida. Under the compromise proposal, undocumented workers who could produce pay stubs, billing records or other proof showing they have lived and worked in the United States for five years would qualify for a work visa and an opportunity to apply for citizenship. They could stay in the country as they apply for a green card. Those not meeting the requirements would have to return to their native countries.

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter said after leaving the meeting "People who have roots who ought to be treated differently."

Any bill that passes the Senate would have to reconciled with a House bill passed last year that has been described as the most repressive immigration bill in 70 years. HR 4437 would, among other things, turn every undocumented immigrant into a felon and make it a crime to offer help to undocumented immigrants. The bill sparked widespread demonstrations and student walkouts of historic proportions across the country.

For more on immigration reform we are joined by Democratic Congressmember Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas. She has called the immigration issue the civil rights issue of our time. She joins us from a studio in Houston.


Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D - TX), she has submitted an immigration bill in Congress that would allow for legal permanent residency for undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for the past five years, would double the cap for family visas and would increase the number of work visas. Her bill has been stalled in the Immigration Subcommittee since mid-2005.

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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Jackson Lee, you've submitted an immigration bill to Congress that would allow for legal permanent residency for undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States, for how long?

REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE: If they've been living consistently in the United States between five and six years.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about -- just give us the layout of your bill and where it stands now.

REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE: To give you some framework, I want to at least mention the tone of the debate that is occurring now in the United States Senate and what occurred in the House. The great disappointment of this issue is that the members of Congress who were so opposed, outrageously opposed to any fair consideration of documentation of the undocumented individuals in this country really sort of debated this as if they had no sense of humanity, no sense of family and no sense of what this country was built on. And that is, of course, immigrants coming from all over the world during periods of our history and making this country great. In fact, many of us know that African Americans came to this country not as documented citizens and did not obtain citizenship until very, very late, so I'm disappointed at the level of debate.

My bill attempted to craft this as a civil rights issue, and that is, to give a sense of fairness to individuals who had been in this country and had worked and paid taxes and wanted to come from under the shadows. And it provided the earned access to legalization with English conversance, the idea of working, investment in the community, family and community service and no felon record. We also provided for family unification. We provided for the DREAM Act, so the children could go to school. We eliminated or provided penalties for the utilization of fraudulent documents, for the abuse of women, for the abuse of workplace, which would take advantage of those who are undocumented. We insisted that employees provided a safe workplace and a workplace with dignity and equal rights . We also provided for the anti-smuggling provisions, that would stop the coyotes from bringing individuals across the border and causing danger to their lives.

We looked at this in a holistic viewpoint that, in fact, if you identify the undocumented individuals, they become investors in this society. They become part of the economic engine. They invest their dollars in banks. They don't send most of their money back overseas. They're allowed to have bank accounts in our country, which is a part of an economic engine.

The disappointment in this debate that is now being politicized in the Senate is that we're being overtaken by minority voices within the Republican Party, because if you explain to the American people, one, I'm prepared to protect your jobs -- and by the way, I have a provision in my bill that takes the fees that immigrants would pay to become documented and utilize them for job creation amongst American workers and protection of American workers and job training. I try to bring two district groups together in the legislation that I’ve offered, Save America Comprehensive Immigration bill, which has the support of many members of Congress. The disappointment was that in the debate, we didn't allow all members’ bills to be fully debated. The McCain-Kennedy bill on the House side, which was a Kolbe-Gutierrez bill, my bill and a number of others never had an opportunity either to be debated and/or to be voted on, because of the singular, unilateral, exclusive approach that the Republicans took and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee took. None of us were allowed to submit our legislation.

AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, Congressmember Jackson Lee, we were speaking with Professor Ron Walters, who is raising the issue of the concerns of African Americans that immigrants take jobs in this country. Your response?

REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE: You're absolutely right. Professor Walters is absolutely right. This is what is permeating throughout the nation. And that's why I've said that we have operated in this debate with the wrong facts, with the idea of creating divisiveness, rather than finding a common ground that would educate Americans, no matter whether they're African Americans or whether they are white Americans or Asian Americans or others. Let me share with you what I think is really the framework of difficulty in the African American community. With our communities having the highest unemployment rate, with administrations or the administration and this congress being very unconcerned about the plight of African American males, the plight of poor quality schools, yes, I can sympathize and empathize with the African American community about what they perceive to be a population group that takes jobs.

But frankly, that is not the case. If you look at the large percentage of the undocumented who are working here, unfortunately, they are working in jobs that possibly are available to African Americans, and they have chosen not to take, or as the normal progression of immigration occurs, each group comes in and the group preceding them moves up. The heavy hand of discrimination in this nation has kept many in the African American community from achieving their dreams, from gaining jobs and gaining education opportunities. And, of course, we've not responded to it. It appears then that any group that is working may be taking their job. But what we need to do to address this question is invest in job training, invest in the protection of American jobs, stop the outsourcing that is impacting Americans of all races, and begin to look at the 11 million undocumented as an economic engine that would churn the economy, helping to create more jobs. I am sympathetic. And I think that's an important response.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you have the support of the Congressional Black Caucus on your bill?

REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE: I think we have the support of many members of the United States Congress, which include members of the Democratic Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus and, yes, the Black Caucus and the Asian Pacific Congress. We have received support from across the Congress. And it would have been -- the House, that is, would have been an appropriate part of the debate, if we had been allowed to have that debate, including the House version of the McCain-Kennedy bill, which was not allowed on the floor. Neither was mine, was not allowed on the floor.

I hope to participate as a member of the conference committee, which is a place where maybe reasoned minds can generate a debate. Unfortunately, I don't know if that will be the case, inasmuch as I understand the chairman of that conference may be the author of the House bill. I hope that we will have a conference that will be open, that will be inclusive and will allow us to produce a product that is, if you will, deserving of the reputation that America has of respecting the rights of all human beings.

And might I just say this? I talked to a young Hispanic male yesterday in a high school. It was one of the most emotionally charged meetings or conversations with a youngster, a person under the age of 18. We had just had a whole class talking about this question, because, as you would know, many high school students around the country have been walking out. And they're still doing so. We've been going to high schools to discuss this. He asked the question: Does America want him any more? Is he wanted? He felt so hurt and so disenfranchised. And he was not documented. But he wanted to join the United States military. And he had always wanted to do it. It was his dream, along with a number of his classmates. But he asked me the question, and it was so difficult to answer. Am I wanted? What is this debate about making me a felon? And I think America can do better, and I think we need to have a better debate and a better response to individuals who simply come here for an economic opportunity.

AMY GOODMAN: You have called this the civil rights issue of our time.

REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE: I believe it is. And that's one of the reasons why I truly believe that there is an opportunity for the African American community to be great leaders in this movement. We understand discrimination. We understand isolation and separation. We also understand striving and fighting for just a chance, an economic chance or a chance of dignity. I believe this is a great opportunity for the civil rights organizations of both communities, Hispanics and African Americans, Muslims and others, who have been discriminated against, to come together. That is why the NAACP and LULAC have worked together and are struggling to understand this issue of immigration, because if you have a large body of individuals who you isolate and discriminate against, what is the question? It is civil rights. Many people believe these are illegal persons, they have broken the law and this word of amnesty has become an ugly word. I don't even call it amnesty. I call it the right to earn the access to legalization. I call it the right to earn dignity. And I believe it is a civil rights question.

By Lerone Bennett Jr.

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song . . . in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness . . . and lay the foundations of the vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. — W.E.B. Du Bois


They came out of the sun; bringing with them the gift of the sun.

Founders without heralds, benefactors without banners, they transformed the new land, creating the foundations of the wealth and giving it a new music and a new spirit.

The forgotten founding fathers and mothers, the ancestors of contemporary Blacks, did all this in the face of obstacles and proscriptions that would have destroyed a lesser people. By all odds, they should have been destroyed physically and spiritually, on the slave ships and plantations. But they were so tough that nothing—neither slavery, nor segregation, nor discrimination—could destroy them. They came up from slavery, up from segregation, up from fire, blood, pestilence and pain. And by some mystery no historian can truly fathom, they not only endured but prevailed, leaving behind imperishable testimony on the indomitable tenacity of human spirit.

The story of their transplantation and transformation and survival is the story of one of the greatest flights of the human spirit in recorded history. But that story has been distorted and pushed into strange shapes by a massive propaganda campaign based on power myths that hide Black people from themselves and their greatness. These myths—defined here as stories, belief, and notion commonly held to be true but without factual basis—inform almost all popular discussions on Black history. Propagated day in and day out by almost all media and passed on from generation to generation in the cultural bloodstream, the myths affect the dreaming, desiring and acting of both Black and White Americans. And although the myths were fostered originally as a means of control to discredit Blacks and to assuage the conscience of racists, they are reported by some Blacks who have been negatively conditioned by the popular history taught in nurseries, movies, bars and too many classrooms. As a consequence, millions of Black and White Americas act on images and myths which are grossly exaggerated or have no basis in fact. The myths are many and varied, but they are generally organized around ten dominant notions.

1 The Myth of Tarzan and the Black Void

The image of Tarzan, whether accompanied by Maureen O’Sullivan or Bo Derek, is the organizing focus of a recurring fantasy based on the myths of “the primitive African” and “the Dark Continent.” The myths persist despite overwhelming evidence—from archeologists, historians, and contemporary writers and travelers—which places the African-Americans at the center of the human drama. According to this evidence, which has forced a scholarly reappraisal of African and world history, the human race was born in Africa where Black people, or people who would be considered Black today, were among the first humans to use tools, paint pictures, plant seeds, and worship gods.

The popular myth depicts conquering Europeans carrying the blessings of civilization to naked “savages” who sat under trees, filed their teeth and waited for fruit to drop into their hands. This is a gross perversion of European and African history, for Europe’s eminence came after the fall of Africa and as a direct result of one of history’s greatest crimes, the 400-year horror called the slave trade. When this event started, life in some African states compared favorably with life in some European states. In fact, in some areas of Africans were a step or two ahead. Thus, on the West Coast of Africa, from whence came most of the ancestors of American Blacks, there were complex institutions ranging from extended family groupings to village states and territorial empires. Most of these polities had all the characteristics of modern states—armies, courts, internal revenue departments. Indeed, more than one scholar has paid tribute to the “legal genius of the African.”

Bearing these things in mind, we can readily see that African-Americans, contrary to the common belief, came not from the void but from traditions that were, in Stanley Elkins’s words, “essentially heroic in nature.”

2 The Myth of Original Slavery

Nothing is more common than to hear people—Black and White—say that the crucial difference between Black and White history is that “we didn’t come here in the same way.” By this they mean that Black people came to English America in slavery and White people came in freedom. But the first Black immigrants, the 20 Africans who landed at Jamestown, Virginia, in August 1619, a year before the arrival of the Mayflower, were not slaves. Nor, for the most part, were the first Whites free. This is a point of capital importance in the history of Black America. They came, these first Blacks, the same way that many, perhaps most, of the first Whites came—under duress and pressure. They found a system—indentured servitude—which made it possible for poor Whites to pay for their passage by selling their services to planters for a stipulated number of years. Under this system, which TV and textbooks generally overlook, tens of thousands of Whites were shipped to the colonies and sold to the highest bidder. In Virginia, then, as in other colonies, the first Black settlers fell into a well-established socioeconomic groove that carried with it no implications of racial inferiority. After working for a number of years as indentured servants, some were freed according to law and custom. Before the introduction of slavery, they accumulated land, voted, testified in courts and mingled with the masses of Whites on a basis of relative equality. And it should be borne in mind, in considering the myth of original slavery (read: sin), that freedom preceded slavery, and integration preceded racism.

3 The Myth of Immaculate White Creation

Words whispered in nurseries and images stamped on impressionable minds and repeated day in and day out, year after year, foster the erroneous idea that America was the exclusive creation of Europeans and the sons and daughters of Europeans. This propaganda onslaught, which is more overwhelming than convincing, glosses over the extraordinary complexity in the peopling of America, which was founded not by Europeans alone but Europeans, Africans and Indians working together and in opposition in a complicated and counterpoint of interests, dreams and passions. The relative importance of the African factor varied from time to time and place to place, but it was never negligible and it extended over the entire period of settlement. As a matter of fact, Black explorers—servants, slaves and free men—were among the first non-Indian settlers of the land, and there is some evidence that African sailors explored the New World before Columbus. Blacks were with Pizarro in Peru, Cortes in Mexico, Menendez in Florida. They “accompanied DeSoto,” W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “and one of them stayed among the Indians in Alabama and became the first settler from the Old World.” Perhaps the best known of the early Black explorers was Estevanico, who opened up New Mexico and Arizona for the Spaniards.

Later, as we have noted, Black pilgrims preceded the official (White) Pilgrims in the settlement of English America. There were skilled artisans and farmers among the first group of Black immigrants, and there are indications in the record that they were responsible for some innovations later credited to English immigrants. An early example of this was reported in Virginia, where, in 1648, the governor ordered rice planted on the advice of “our Negroes,” who said conditions in Virginia were as favorable to the crop as “in their Country.”

After the introduction of slavery, Blacks played key roles in creating the economic foundations of the country. The strain of slavery was too much for ten of thousands who died of old and new diseases and the shock of psychic mutilation. But millions, testifying to physical and spiritual strength that transcended the heroic, survived. And, surviving, they ensured the survival—and prosperity—of America, which fashioned out of their misery the take-off capital that financed the growth of America in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Not only in slavery but also in freedom, not only in the South but also in the North and West, Black pioneers contributed to the common cause, building schools, constructing roads and blazing new paths into the interior. William Alexander Leidesdorff, for example, played a key role in the founding of San Francisco, and at least 26 of the 44 founders of Los Angeles were descendants of Africans. Nor can we forget Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, who founded the city of Chicago, an event the Indians immortalized in the saying: “The first White man to settle in Checagou was a Black man.”

This happened in more communities than historians care to remember. And it entitles us to say that America, myths notwithstanding, “is an African as well as European invention.”

4 The Myth of Absence

In American history, as in American life, Black Americans are invisible presences. They are not seen, not because of their absence but because of the presence of a myth that prepares and requires their absence. The myth of absence, which expresses this idea and intention, operates not by misinterpretation and slander but by silence and exclusion. By simply not mentioning certain realities and by removing Black actors from scenes in which they played supporting and sometimes starring roles, the manipulators of the myth change the color of the past and control perceptions and acts in the present. It is not accident, therefore, that the dominant images of popular history, the images of Minutemen, Pilgrims, Cowboys and Soldiers in Blue, are white images. But these images, which are the staples of mass media, are selections from a multicolored whole which included both Black and White Actors. And to grasp the American experience in its fullness, we have to remember that Blacks were present and acting at almost every major event in American history. They were the bridge in Concord and on Bunker Hill in Boston. They were at Valley Forge with Washington and at Appomattox with Grant. And they are the keys to an understanding of Thomas Jefferson and Monticello and Abraham Lincoln and Gettysburg. Neither the Civil War nor Reconstruction can be understood without reference to the missing images. For it is the Black presence or, to be more precise, the presence of Black actors which explains the Old South and the New South and the urban North. One can go further and say that a precise understanding of the Old West would necessarily include Black images. For although TV and the movies have managed somehow to overlook them, Black cowboys rode and wrangled in the West. They were at Abilene and Dodge City and Cheyenne. They fought with and against Billy the Kid. And if the Black cowboys and soldiers and Minutemen are invisible today, it is not because they were absent in the past; it is because men and women have manipulated the images of the past in order to make their descendants invisible in the present.

5 The Myth of Sambo

The image of Sambo, the image of the carefree, shiftless, irresponsible Black who shuffles and grins and scratches where he doesn’t itch, dominates the popular (and scholarly) dialogue on American slavery. To more Whites than I think would admit, there is always at the back of the mind this image, this myth of Gone With The Wind, with Clark Gable and Scarlett O’Hara in the Big House and Blacks—happy, irresponsible, faithful and grateful—in their appointed places in the kitchens and the fields. And to understand this national passion, one has to investigate its origin in the traditional picture of slavery. In almost all popular (and too many scholarly) discussions of this period, we are asked to accept a portrait of fat, happy, docile slaves who were almost members of the family, slaves who loved old “marsa” and “missus” with a passion and cried bitter tears when Lincoln “freed” them. Practically all of this is sheer fantasy. For although some Blacks (then and now) exploited the White fantasy for personal gain, most slaves maintained a sense of expectancy and resistance that is, to borrow Kenneth M. Stampp’s phrase, “one of the richest gifts the slaves have left to posterity.” Confronted with perhaps the most coercive social systems the world has ever known, these slaves resisted with every weapon they could lay hands on. They slew masters and mistresses in hand-to-hand combat. They poisoned whole families. They staged more than two hundred revolts and conspiracies. And they ran away in droves. So many slaves ran away that Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a specialist at the University of Louisiana, discovered a new disease, “Draptomania, or the Disease Causing Negroes to Run Away.” In a now visible, now invisible struggle which continued until the end of slavery, the slaves “quietly and subtly and deliberately sabotaged the system from within. By resisting, maintaining, enduring and abiding, by holding on and holding fast and holding out, they provided one of the greatest examples in human history of the strength of the human spirit in adversity.”*

6 The Myth of the Broken Circuit

Everyone—or almost everyone—“knows” that the Black family is weak because the current of Black love was short-circuit in slavery. The only problem is that the story almost everyone knows is almost totally false. For a series of pathfinding studies have established that most slaves lived in families headed by fathers and mothers and that Black fathers were strong and respected members of the family circle. These studies, based on plantation records, census reports, and Freedmen’s Bureau documents, have also established that slave marriages were buttressed by extended family groupings that covered a wide range of relationships.

There is equally no case, one may emphasize, for believing that the Black family disintegrated in the Jim Crow era. For we know now—thanks to the research of Herbert G. Gutman (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom) and other scholars, Black and White—that the Black family was a strong institution until at least the third decade of the 20th century. According to Gutman, Black families were as stable as Southern White households and Northern White ethnic households until the 1930s.

Since that time, the situation has changed, primarily because of racism, urbanization and a 50-year run (except for World War II and the Korean War) of Depression-level unemployment. What is astonishing, under these circumstances, is certainly not that some Blacks have fallen but that so many still stand and hope and love.

7 The Myth of the Wayward Workers

Oppression has no shame. It makes its victims work and derides them for working. It gets rich on the sweat of its victims’ brows and taunts them for being poor and dependent. The myth of the wayward workers is the primary instrument of this strategy which maintains, in the face of the whole of American history, that Blacks are lazy and shiftless vagabonds who won’t work. So persuasive is this myth, so intimidating is its constantly repeated phrases, that Blacks who know better, Blacks who were raised in communities where Blackness was a synonym for hard work, are apologetic and defensive about the Black work record. Is there a more astonishing example in human history of the power of myth to change reality and make people think that night is day? In fact, as everybody over 40 knows, the truth is the precise opposite of the myth. The wealth of this country was founded on what Abraham Lincoln called “the 250 years of unrequited toil” of Black men and women. It was the work of Black workers, it was the work of unpaid and underpaid slaves and sharecroppers, that changed the flora and fauna of America and created the capital that made possible the economic growth from which they were excluded by fraud and violence. And one can say, with only slight exaggeration, that before Blacks were forced out of the work force, they were the only people in America who did any real work. This fact is embedded in the language, where the phrase, “to work like a Negro,” acknowledges in an underhanded and often derogatory manner the falsity of the myth and America’s debt to Black workers.

8 The Myth of the Missing Economic Gene

One is always being told, as unarguable proof of the fairness of the game, that the economic position of Blacks can be explained by “the absence” of Black business tradition. But this argument overlooks a lot of history and a lot of facts. Perhaps the most important of these facts is the one most frequently overlooked: Blacks came to America with a business tradition. They came from a culture of great traders and merchants, and within a few years after their arrival they were hard at work accumulating capital and plantations. By 1651 Anthony Johnson, one of the original Jamestown immigrants, had accumulated enough capital to import five indentured servants on whose headrights he received 250 acres of Virginia land. Nor was Johnson unique. There are records of land accumulation and business activity by Black planters and businessmen (and businesswomen) in New York, Massachusetts and other colonies. By the American Revolution, there were scores of prominent Black business leaders, including Samuel Fraunces, owner of New York’s Fraunces’s Tavern, the favorite watering hole of George Washington, and James Forten, who employed 40 workers, Black and White, in his Philadelphia sail factory.

What perhaps is most astonishing is that these pioneer Blacks operated in the mainstream of money and dominated certain fields. In the antebellum period, according to census reports and the testimony of travelers, Blacks were prominent in the fashion and clothing fields, the coal and lumber industry, and the wholesale and retail trade. They operated foundries, tanneries, and factories. They made rope, shoes, cigars, furniture and machinery. They operated major inns and hotels in Southern and Northern cities. And they held virtual monopolies in the catering, barbering, and hairdressing fields. This activity was not confined to the upper levels of the free Black class. For much of the trading in open-air-markets near railroad stations and boat terminals was controlled by Black hucksters, male and female.

For several years after emancipation, Blacks held their own in the open market, serving both Black and White customers. Then, as Jim Crow expanded, Black barbers, caterers and artisans were displaced and the myth of the missing economic gene was created to explain their absence. But the history of pioneer African and African-American business leaders and the achievements of modern entrepreneurs, who have created business empires despite great odds, tells us that there is nothing wrong with the business genes of Black folk that fair play and an open market would not cure.

9 The Myth of the Defiling Dole

A common impression to the contrary notwithstanding, Blacks survived in America not because of White doles but because of Black generosity.

It was internal giving, it was communal sharing and caring, that enabled Blacks to survive the vilest punishment inflicted on a people in the Western world. From the very beginning—read the slave narratives and the new studies by Black and White scholars—the slaves assumed responsibility for one another, and the slave tradition was deepened and extended in free Black communities, which organized their own United Ways. By 1831 there were more than 43 Black benevolent or mutual aid societies in Philadelphia alone. By that time, the free Blacks of Philadelphia and other cities were handling their own welfare cases. A White commentator said the free Blacks of New England were “seldom seen in the almshouses, for they have many benevolent societies . . . and in case of need are ready to help each other.”

After the Civil War, the first Black schools and welfare institutions were founded not by White missionaries, as we have been told, but by Black men and women who pooled their pennies, organized fish fries and church suppers and took care of themselves. Many, perhaps most, of the large numbers of Black orphans were taken in by Black families, and Black churches and lodges raised thousands of dollars for indigents. John DeForest, a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in South Carolina, said that “however selfish, and even dishonest, [Blacks] might be, they were extravagant in giving.” He added, gratuitously, “The industrious were too much given to supporting the thriftless”

The effort continued in the 1880s and 1890s. There was no home for delinquent Black girls in Virginia, and the state wouldn’t build one, so the Black women of Virginia organized their own home. There was no institution for Black boys in Alabama, so the Black women of that state organized and funded their own institution.

This tradition of self-help and communal support spilled over into the 20th century with the work of Black club women and Black ministers and fraternal organizations. There are men and women living today who remember the old communities of the South where it was traditional to go from house to house collecting pennies and dimes to bury indigents and care for the sick.

No, however we turn the problem, whether we investigate the mutual aid societies of the 1780s or the club women of the 1880s or the rent parties of the 1930s, we come back always to the main point: the history of Black America has been a history of generosity, not dependency. And if the story of the past was better known, it would perhaps inspire a greater generosity in the present and future.

10 The Myth of the Crab Barrel

Here, once again, we are presented with a generalization based on the behavior of people act like captured crustaceans who, according to the myth, pull down lucky crabs who reach the top of the barrel. And the important thing to notice about the false—and slanderous—generalization is that it is designed to create the captured crab phenomenon and to check the natural tendency of oppressed people to band together against their oppressors. Perhaps the best evidence against the myth is the endlessly repeated litany, from the days of George Washington to the days of Ronald Reagan, that Black people huddle together and refuse to betray one another. To counter this tendency, mythmakers use every medium to persuade Blacks, especially successful Blacks, to stand apart and stop identifying with other Blacks. Integration has intensified these efforts. If we can credit the evidence in Black Life in Corporate America, and other books to unusual lengths to keep integrated students and executives from talking to one another and supporting one another.

In the light of these facts, it is nothing short of amazing that the myth of the crab barrel persists. For despite centrifugal forces, inevitable in a situation of oppression, the history of Black America has been a history of “many thousands gone,” helped and applauded by their brothers and sisters. And old Black proverbs says, “If you knock the nose, the eye cry.” Which means that an injury to one member of the family is an injury to all. This idea, the idea of Black familyhood and the peculiar Black American stress on brotherness and sisterness, runs like a black thread through the whole of Black history. It was a living reality on the slave ships where, according to Orlando Patterson and other scholars, “it was customary for children to call their parents’ shipmates ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt,’” and for men and women “to look upon each other’s children mutually as their own.” The same dynamic operated on the slave plantations and was noted by Black and White witnesses who said that a Black who betrayed another Black was held “in greater detestation than the most notorious thief.” We learn from the same source that adult slaves generally called each other “brother” and “sister.” The “brother-sister” principle informed the struggles of Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods and was perhaps the only reason Blacks survived in America. There were betrayers, then and later, but the people survived, then and later, because the spirit than the force that tried to pull them apart. So, to cite a single spectacular example from the Reconstruction period, 66,418 Blacks voted in South Carolina in November 1867, and every Black, 66,418, voted for a constitutional convention and the Black future.

It will perhaps be said in objection that this happened 116 years ago and that segregation and integration have destroyed the old-time spirit.

But how can it be denied that the 99 per cent plebiscites of Montgomery and the recent Chicago election were reflections of enduring roots that extend to unfathomable depths in the ground beneath us?

It is clear from this myth and the other myths cited here that Black Americans have been sold a false bill of goods and that we are not who we think we are or what White media say we are.

These media tell us that we are historical orphans, impoverished by an impoverished past. But the past tells us that we are inheritors and guarantors of what Ralph Ellison called “one of the great human experiences and one of the great triumphs of the human spirit in modern times, in fact, in the history of the world.”

By Naomi Jaffe

First , I want to acknowledge that these are strange, abnormal and frightening times

We didn't set out to make a movie, we set out to make a revolution. Some of us are still trying to make a revolution. The horrors that the Weather Underground movie shows, that impelled us to go underground, brutal war against other countries, and ruthless repression at home, are worse today than they were then.

An old bumper sticker says if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. Today, if you're not grief-stricken, you're not paying attention. If you're not terrified, you're not paying attention. But I also think if we're not hopeful, we're not paying close enough attention.

To me, the interesting and important question is, what is useful to building a movement today from the experience of the Weather Underground and other radical movements of the 60's and 70's?

There are two main things from my experience in the WUO that I'd find interesting to discuss in the context of building a multi-racial, multi-issue resistance to war, racism, fascism and repression. The first is the optimism that comes from seeing the strength and the potential for victory of people's resistance movements for justice. We were really lucky to live through a time of the tremendous upsurge of people's power. I think it helped at least some of us be able to see what the forces in power are trying to cover up ñ that people's resistance never stopped for 500 years, and it continues to exist today. It is and has always been a real threat to the existing structures of power. A couple of inspiring examples from our own time: 1. The people of Puerto Rico threw the Navy out of Vieques! 2. The Free Mumia movement, in which I'm active, while it hasn't yet succeeded in freeing Mumia from prison or from Death Row, has prevented Pennsylvania from killing him as they obviously would have done. And 3. The global outpouring of tens of millions of people all over the world in outrage against the Iraq War. Although we didn't stop the war on Iraq, I remember that we didn't know until years later how much impact our Viet Nam anti-war protests had on the warmakers. I think that's more true of all our protests than we realize.

One thing that's happened around this movie is it's been an occasion for the elites and the corporate media to try to rewrite the history, to trivialize, ridicule, and demonize not only those movements back then, but even more, the movements of today. The energy they put into doing that is one strong piece of evidence that people's resistance was and is a force to be reckoned with.

The second thing I hope will be discussed is that the foundation of the strength of people's movements is opposition to every kind of oppression. Racism and white supremacy are central. The 60's and 70's were a time when a lot of people's eyes were opened to see white supremacy as the way oppression and exploitation are organized globally and that people of color were leading the struggle against injustice . I think our Weather Underground line was a strong statement of this awareness. Our practice was something else altogether. We had an all-white organization with vanguard aspirations and no accountability to people of color. That's not the way to do it.

Some of the questions asked us by young activists in the wake of the move: How do you do accountability to people of color in practice? Is Marxism-Leninism still relevant to building a global justice movement? What's the role of violence and nonviolence in building a resistance movement? And most of all, what should we do to build a strong and just movement that can successfully challenge the global power of capitalism/imperialism/racism?

The answer to the last question is, when I find out, I'll let you know, and you do the same for me. If we knew how to overthrow the system, we'd all be in a very different place today. But some lessons, positive and negative, might be helpful.

The simplest answer to the question of accountability is, if you are a white person, talk with people of color and hear what they say. There is no substitute for actual human contact. Desegregate one's life; don't tokenize; put oneself in situations of mutual respect; don't intervene; find places to be in the minority. Support the separate organizing of people of color when that is happening; this is not in contradiction to being in other places, organizations, and personal scenes where white people are not dominant.

Marxism-Leninism was useful in some ways and an obstacle in other ways. The most important way it was an obstacle was lack of democracy in our organizations. In this respect, today's movements are way ahead. I think it was useful in three ways: it led us to serious study; it helped us be disciplined and focused revolutionaries; and it strengthened our understanding of the leading role the oppressed nations and people of the world. This may sound like a contradiction because Marx and Lenin were both European men. But Lenin wrote powerfully about the progressive role of oppressed nation nationalism; and my generation was profoundly influenced by Marxist-Leninist writers of color -Cabral, Mao, C.L.R. James, DuBois, Ho Chi Minh, Che, and others. Yes, women are missing from the list - a key weakness of Marxism-Leninism and of our movement.

Let's look at the question of violence and non-violence from two perspectives, moral and tactical. On a moral level, the violence of the U.S. government, military, and economy, and in particular its targeting of people of color in the U.S. and globally, are the defining and overwhelming violence in the world. Activists of color often point out that the luxury to decide between violence and nonviolence is not present in their communities - only the choice between resisting genocidal violence and being buried by it. In the face of that, I refuse to wring my hands over damage to some empty imperialist buildings. Human lives are another matter, which I would approach with MUCH greater caution and humility, from a moral point of view, than I personally did in the past. Nevertheless, I still feel challenged, as a white person in a world in which white people are inflicting daily death and violence on people of color, to consider a full range of responses in trying to stem the genocide.

From a practical and tactical point of view, I feel strongly obligated to say to today's younger activists that the conditions under which our movements operate today are very different than they were in the 1960's and '70's. Many of the militant tactics used in that period are impossible today. No one is asking you to go out and commit suicide by trying to bring a bomb into the Pentagon in 2003. New, imaginative, and creative tactics are called for, and are in fact being devised all the time, including courageous nonviolent ones. On the one hand, it's not helpful to pretend that the level of repression and surveillance isn't frightening. On the other, it's important to know that resistance movements have survived and been effective under the most ghastly repression, including slavery, extermination camps, prisons, and military conquest. We still have a lot of room to move, and we are called upon to take some risks and sacrifice some privilege.

The connection between the potential power of people's struggles, and how badly racism and other oppressions can mess them up, is that the only way to figure it out and get it right is in the day to day practice of organizing, movement building, protesting, and resisting. I am deeply sorry that my generation didn't leave more of a path for yours. We all now have to make the path as we go. There is no other way except to make mistakes. The enemy is ruthless, we will pay a high price for them. Those who don't want change will use this to tell you it's futile, it's a waste of your life, it's a ridiculous joke to think you can overthrow the most powerful forces in the world. But some of the people who have made the greatest sacrifices are there to say that the chance to play a part in building a better world is worth everything. When you hear the political prisoners, including two in the movie, Laura Whitehorn who did 15 years and David Gilbert, who is doing a life bid at Attica, say this, you get a sense of how much courage, strength, and inspiration are possible when you are part of a people's movement for justice. Another world is possible, we were lucky enough to come close to it, it is STILL possible, and I believe that living your life for it is still the only game in town.

by Kevin Mattson

Emboldened by political victory, the right has gone hunting in the last refuge of the liberal elite--our universities--to smoke out radicals. Everyone knows about Ward Churchill, whose talk at Hamilton College was canceled once a student Googled an essay of his that mentioned "little Eichmanns" in the World Trade Center. Bill O'Reilly attacked, and Governor Bill Owens demanded that the University of Colorado fire him. Also consider Oneida Meranto, a political science professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Conservative students complained about her liberal bias in class and got support from reactionary ex-radical David Horowitz, who is promoting an "academic bill of rights" in state legislatures. There's also Elyse Crystall, an English professor at the University of North Carolina, who objected to the comments of a "white, heterosexual, Christian male" in her class. She got bad press, hate e-mails and the attention of Representative Walter Jones, who persuaded the Office for Civil Rights of the US Education Department to investigate. She was found guilty of harassment.

The ivory tower is now face to face with politics. If there's any doubt, just consider Larry Mumper, state senator from Marion, Ohio. Well-liked among colleagues, he's served since 1997 without much controversial legislation to his name. Now he's known for Senate Bill (SB) 24, an academic bill of rights that would require "curricula and reading lists" at all Ohio colleges (public and private) to "provide students with dissenting sources and viewpoints" (calling all publishers of Holocaust deniers and flat-earthers!). The bill argues that faculty should "not infringe the academic freedom and quality of education of their students by persistently introducing controversial matter into the classroom or coursework that has no relation to their subject of study and that serves no legitimate pedagogical purpose." One fellow state senator told me that SB 24 came "out of the blue." He was used to talking about soybeans and crop labeling with Mumper, not this.

Mumper's comments to the press illustrate how unprepared he was for attention. He explained to the Columbus Dispatch that "80 percent or so" of professors "are Democrats, liberals or socialists or card-carrying Communists," as if for a moment he forgot what decade he lived in. When a journalist asked him if he had ever met a communist, Mumper explained the term was a euphemism for "people who try to over-regulate and try to bring in a lot of issues we don't agree with." At the same time, he admitted that "we're going to put in some ways to monitor classrooms" to enforce the academic bill of rights. The irony of this was noted by numerous commentators.

Mumper told another reporter that funding cuts were "always in the back" of his mind. He elaborated, "Why should we, as fairly moderate to conservative legislators, continue to support universities that turn out students who rail against the very policies that their parents voted us in for?" One of Mumper's co-sponsors explained that parents were tired of paying taxes for education "and then finding out their kids are being taught things that do not reflect their family values." It's as if Sinclair Lewis came back to rewrite Babbitt with its central character winning public office.

The state senators opposing SB 24 speak of a "coordinated national campaign." They're right. A right-wing infrastructure has been hard at work on this issue. Most important are David Horowitz and his organization Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), which has been documenting cases of alleged liberal bias in the classroom on its website. Now they're pushing the academic bill of rights, which they argue is necessary to protect students who would otherwise fall prey to the liberal professoriate. In my own university newspaper, conservative students likened their cause to the civil rights movement.

The campaign is making headway. In addition to Ohio, so-called academic bills of rights have now been introduced in Florida, Indiana, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Maryland and New York. After protests emerged from some savvy faculty in Colorado, the legislature yanked its version of the bill and accepted a less binding agreement. Something similar happened in Georgia. And in California the bill has been reintroduced after being killed earlier.

The impact has even reached the national level. In late 2003 Congress introduced legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act (HEA). Georgia Representative Jack Kingston--a congressman who wants the Ten Commandments posted in the House and Senate chambers--tried to attach an academic bill of rights to the reauthorization. This resolution would have prevented professors "from using their courses or their positions for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or antireligious indoctrination." The resolution died in committee, but its language has since appeared in the College Opportunity and Access Act of 2004, another legislative attempt to reauthorize the HEA.

It's not clear how many actual laws will emerge from this maneuvering. But in the realm of symbolic politics, passing legislation might not matter so much as influencing public opinion. Horowitz himself explained, "The only reason for these laws is to stimulate an attack of conscience." This fits his overall strategy. As he wrote in his manifesto The Art of Political War, "In political warfare, the weapons are words and symbols because there is no time to reach the electorate with lengthy arguments--or even short ones." So get ready for a war over the popular perception of academia. It's fueled by a long legacy of anti-intellectualism and right-wing populism that focuses anger on liberal eggheads.

Unfortunately, America's professoriate is in a weakened state, and is ill prepared to fight back--notwithstanding the false stereotypes Horowitz promulgates in doing battle. For instance, during an exchange, Horowitz labeled Graham Larkin, an art professor at Stanford University, a "reactionary" defending "an entrenched class of privileged academics with lifetime tenure." When Horowitz spoke at the University of Colorado, a newspaper reported his characterization of professors as "a privileged elite that work between six to nine hours a week, eight months a year for an annual salary of about $150,000." Obviously, Horowitz should visit a few more universities--especially the growing number of for-profit and on-line institutions, community colleges and state schools in urban settings. Here most of the teaching is off the tenure track, performed by underpaid adjuncts with as much job security as employees at McDonald's. As future state cuts are made by the very same GOP legislatures considering passage of academic bills of rights, this trend only promises to become worse.

The battle against the academic bill of rights--and the even more important struggle to insure more funding for education in the future--will be an uphill one. The right is hungry for war; it might not have "lengthy arguments," but it has a well-honed arsenal of ideas and infrastructure ready for action. It has zeal and couldn't care less about the fragility of higher-education institutions it attacks. That's why it's important for liberals to wage a counterbattle. If they don't, we might find politicians visiting college classrooms, sniffing out card-carrying communists, euphemistic or otherwise. Nothing could be worse for higher education or democracy.

Much ink has been spilled in recent years about the failings of our corporate media system. And about the real, life-and-death consequences of these failings—the war in Iraq being only the most obvious example. What is just now becoming clear, however, is how profoundly this situation has affected the public’s trust of the media, as well as how it’s beginning to pull together existing strains of media activism into a movement that parallels other great social movements of our time, like environmentalism, feminism and civil rights.


The mainstream media is no longer providing us with the information we need when it matters most.

Increasingly, there's a feeling out there of genuine anxiety, that maybe we don't really know the world around us anymore. So widespread is the condition, it's earned itself a name: information insecurity. It’s what people are feeling in the wake of phantom WMDs and fictive links between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. In the wake of regular, scripted, time-managed military heroics. In the wake of fake news and fake journalists paid for by governments and corporations. The media fiascos have gotten so frequent, it's become impossible for anyone to trust any of the versions of the world that are on offer.

And so the information insecurity deepens. People sense that they lack the diversity of information needed to make good decisions about the issues they face everyday. What food to eat. What drug is avoid. What political line to believe. Everyone is being forced to ask one profoundly simple question: do we really know what's going on?

There's a widespread realization that media is the issue of issues.

Our whole relationship with information has been distorted, and along with this distortion comes a desire for radical change. In conference after conference, commentary after commentary, the sentiment among media reformers is clear: rather than just irrevocably crushing our ability to trust, all of the bad news about our global media system is building up to a watershed moment in awareness. Information insecurity has brought us to the realization that mass media has a profound effect on nearly every other social and political issue.

When scientists funded by Big Oil are given equal airtime to well-respected, publicly funded researchers, how can we ever hope to make informed choices about climate change? When the local news is hysterical with stories of random violence and immanent terrorism, how can we be expected to address neighborhood crime with a cool head? Whether the problem is poverty, health care, climate change or war, the solution will ultimately involve access to more reliable information and more rigorous public debate. In short, it will involve a complete rethink of how meaning is produced in our society.

Media activism, in all its disparate strains, is slowly but surely becoming a bona fide global movement.

There are plenty of people who have been working hard for years to reform aspects of the mass media. But media activism has remained fragmented across dozens of different agendas. Policy mavericks are fighting ownership concentration in the courts. Independent journalists are speaking out on the internet and airwaves. Educators are helping the next generation by teaching media literacy in their classrooms. Pirate broadcasters fighting for a slice of the public airwaves. Up until now, there has been little to bring these interests together, to argue in some compelling way that they are all struggling toward a similar goal.

Enter Media Democracy, Media Justice and Mental Environmentalism. These are the larger narratives emerging from the grassroots to help describe and explain our common cause. They are the storylines that promise to gel our currently disparate threads of activism into an effectual, truly global media movement.

Mental Environmentalism in particular is a powerfully simple idea: like our air and oceans, our shared mindscapes are littered with pollutants—distorted news, manipulative ads, top-down culture. Either we act now to preserve information diversity and the mental commons, or we risk slipping further into a psychological wasteland in which we literally cannot survive and stay sane. This is the narrative that we feel has the greatest potential to play a major role in helping the movement to reach the next level of organization, and so Adbusters has chosen it as the focus for the Media Carta campaign. Over the coming months, we hope you’ll join us to refine and expand this Big Idea, to build it into a narrative that is capable of inciting people to make global media reform a reality.

by Suzi Weisman

Suzi Weissman: Why is criminal justice so central to American politics? Why do we beat the European competition when it comes to incarceration, the war on drugs, paramilitary policing, punitive sentencing and even the death penalty? Is the War on Drugs a euphemism for repression of the rebellious and poor?
Christian Parenti, author of Lockdown America, Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, suggests something more than a draconian response to surging crime; he situates the repressive mania for law and order in the social, political and economic crisis that faced the US as the post-war boom went into decline. His provocative analysis is the subject of today's "Beneath The Surface."
Christian Parenti teaches at the New College of California in San Francisco. He has written for In These Times, The Progressive, The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, and co-hosted "Flashpoints" on KPFA, our sister station. He is speaking to us from northern California. Let's start with your argument, Christian. Your talk about prison and policing as a repressive strategy, as deliberate?


Christian Parenti: I chart the rise of the emerging anti-crime police state in the United States from the 1960s to the present. The first wave of this current buildup that we're experiencing, a wave that starts in the 1960s, can be seen in many ways as counterinsurgency by other means.there's no better example of this than [Nixon's aide] h.r. haldeman's quote in his diary when discussing Nixon's war on drugs: he tells that the president says the real issue is the blacks, and the solution is to devise a system of control that acknowledges this while not seeming to.that is their description of the war on drugs: a way of controlling insurgent populations and insurgent neighborhoods. by the 1980s the politics shift to some extent because there isn't the same level of insurgency in America that there was in the '60s and '70s.It's still very much about class and racial control, but not so much about counterinsurgency, not so much about putting down insurgent populations as it is managing the contradiction of having this huge population of newly immiserated people--who can't be dealt into the system, and have to be contained some how--and that's the second part of the buildup.keep in mind that the 1960s were marked by massive social upheaval. you often look back at that time and think: well, the police won. they cracked down on the panthers, they liquidated the leadership of certain radical movements, they killed fred hampton--they won.that's true to a certain extent, but if you look back at 1967, it didn't really look like that. there was a moment there in the mid-to-late '60s when the police were actually failing in the eyes of policy elites, those who control the large foundations, who sit in government, who control the large universities, the police forces.It was clear to them that the cops were messing things up through either too much repression (in 1968 when the Chicago cops' actions provoked a crisis on the floor of the democratic convention), or too little (the beginning of the watts rebellion in 1965, when the police forces didn't have the equipment necessary to communicate with each other).This crisis in American policing is finally dealt with at a national level starting in 1967. And the other thing to remember is that there are hundreds of riots every summer from 1965 on. In response, President Johnson initiates legislation in 1967 which in 1968 finally becomes law as the Omnibus Crime and Safe Streets Act of 1968, passing the House of Representatives literally as D.C. is burning.Martin Luther King has just been killed, D.C. goes up in flames and Congress has just passed this big federal crime bill. And what that federal crime bill does is create the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration--this massive bureaucracy which for the next ten years redistributes about a billion dollars a year to local law enforcement to give the cops all of the things that we associate with the infrastructure of modern policing.That's when they first get computers, helicopters, swat teams, body armor, shoulder radios. that's when cops for the first time have to learn how to read--many of them before that weren't required to know how to read--and when American law enforcement takes its great leap forwards, is really rationalized and retooled into the form we know it.


SW: You suggest that the police responded to 1965 with a technical rationale: in other words there was too little repression, and later in 1968 there was too much. But what about 1992, when there is a similar rebellion in Los Angeles?


CP: Actually you do have, to a certain extent, a similar police response (to the first phases of the Watts rebellion), a with-drawal, which is what provokes the trigger of the LA riots at Florence and Normandy.But again you have a similar federal response. Where does Clinton's 100,000 new cops initiative come from? that's a response to 1992. And the crime bill of '94, one of the most dramatic crime bills of the last thirty years, is very much informed by the specter of la in '92.


SW: Going back to the late '60s and the counterinsurgency methods used, which were to use a lot of hardware, a lot of police and paramilitary paraphernalia--including SWAT teams--did it provide its own rationale and create its own bureaucracy that then had to justify and perpetuate itself?


CP: Yes, definitely. The roots of that self-perpetuating police bureaucracy and police `officialdom' connected to and addicted to the gear, takes root in the '60s and '70s. but it's embryonic when compared to that kind of politics today.You really see that interest group beginning to help push policy in earnest in the '80s, when every single police force of any size in this country has a swat team, and you have this infrastructure of training and conferences to help facilitate a culture among this police officialdom, who then push harder and harder for more and more gear.the two crises from which i see our current anti-crime police state emerging are, first, the crisis of policing and of political obedience and rebellion in the '60s; and second, connected but somewhat separate, the beginnings of an economic crisis, more specifically a profit crisis.The postwar boom era was the rebuilding of Europe and Japan, when U.S. business is in a position to really reap the lion's share of those benefits, high profits allow business to pay high taxes and pay high wages, and thus you get the golden era of american capitalism as sociologists and economists often call it.but that starts to play out by the mid '60s and stall by the late '60s. and in the early '70s you see profit rates declining because there's finally just too much stuff in international markets, too much competition; in other words the recovery from world war ii is done.in 1968 general electric, which was then the fourth largest employer in the country, notoriously anti-labor, faces a massive strike by twelve unions, and the unions win. afterwards ge does an analysis and finds that the unions, that the strikers, had not only been getting their strike dues but had been collecting welfare--in fact they had collected twenty-five million dollars in welfare, so from the point of view of general electric's Board of Directors this was state-subsidized class warfare.That had to be broken. So that's the solution that emerges ideologically in the '70s. But it doesn't really actualize in policy until the reagan era. the opening act of the 1980s, which is really the solution to the 1970s, is that paul volcker was appointed chairman of the federal reserve by carter. then reagan comes in, and together reagan and volcker basically engineer the second worst recession since the great depression.the idea of this was to discipline and scare working people. I've got quotes to that effect in the book... At the same time Reagan goes on a policy offensive against the institutional strength of the working class, gutting the rights of labor, regulation of corporations, federal spending on education, and all of the infrastructures of the social welfare system, like AFDC, CETA (Comprehensive Employment Training Act), etc. The best way to measure the effect is in 1980 not a single union contract--as had been the case since the early 1960s--involved a wage freeze or a wage give-back, but in 1982 after two years of bitter recession and a policy offensive, 44% of all union contracts involved an outright wage giveback or a wage freeze.This redisciplining of American labor helps to rejuvenate profit rates, but creates this other problem: the expansion of a new class of poor people, the return of mass homelessness.With deindustrialization and the withdrawal of municipal services in cities you get this hyper-ghettoization, you have this whole problem population which ten years earlier had been in rebellion and might rebel again. And even if they don't rebel they cause an aesthetic and ideological problem to the system: they can show up in the wrong place at the wrong time. capitalism needs the poor, yet is always threatened by them.so how does this system manage that problem? basically as machiavelli says there are two choices: men will either be treated well or crushed. and governing a class society is basically about toggling between those two poles. and so what happens is a shift back, away from cooptive, ameliorative forms of governance towards good old-fashioned repression.you see beginning in the early eighties a re-engagement of the crack-down of the early and mid '70s. You get the Reagan era war on drugs.


SW: Which is still with us...


CP: Yes, and it begins in earnest in '84, and we basically have had massive federal crime bills every two years since then. so the argument is that the second wave in the current criminal justice buildup is about preventative counter insurgency to some extent, but also about managing and containing the surplus populations created by capitalist economic restructuring. that's where you get the whole incarceration and policing binge taking off.


SW: Do you think that the 1.8 million--soon to be two million--people incarcerated represents the layer of people that would threaten the status quo? And how does this relate to hidden structural unemployment?


CP: I think yes, it does represent a layer of people who threaten the status quo, but the main way the United States hides its unemployment is just by not counting it. The Europeans have a different method of counting. We count only people who are registered as looking for work, so discouraged workers, the millions and million of discouraged workers just lost in the inner cities, the class and caste that are hounded by the cops daily, are just not counted.As for those almost two million people in prison, people have done the math on that, and it would raise the unemployment rate by 2%. That is, one of the functions to mask unemployment--but that's not why people are in prison. ultimately, the argument made in the book is a political argument about class and racial rule, and maintaining stability in an inherently unequal and therefore inherently unstable social situation.that's what makes Lockdown America different from other books. I'm not arguing that prisons are a profit center. i'm not arguing that prisons are a profit center. I'm not arguing the same thing as manning marable, that prison is hyper-profitable and that's why it's being pushed forward. actually, I don't think that's the case, I don't think that most prisons are profitable.There are 72,000 prisoners working. It's a lower percentage of the overall prison population than was working in 1980. the vast majority of prisoners work for state-owned prison industries. the vast majority of those state-owned prison industries do not create a surplus for the state or for the prison system. in other words they have to be subsidized by taxpayer dollars.the main point of prison labor is not extracting wealth; it's about making prison look efficient. There are only 2500 prisoners that work for private corporations. And it's not for lack of effort. there's been enormous effort to try and draw capital into prison, but the thing is private corporations don't want to exploit prison labor for a number of reasons.one, which we on the left should keep in mind there is still a moral stigma attached to using convict labor. two, there's so much cheap labor everywhere in the world, including the United States, and much of it militarily disciplined, why would you ever need prison labor? Third, prison is not just for prisoners, but for everyone else there a bureaucratic nightmare. So you can't operate a sweatshop with total flexibility inside prison because you're going to have prison guards strip-searching your workers, shutting down your operations, doing economically irrational stuff like not letting people walk across a yard when it's foggy.All of these things are keeping private capital out of prison labor. What happens too much on the left is that people look for corporate smoking guns, as opposed to looking at the class system in general.

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[This is the initial essay in Barthes' Mythologies, originally published in 1957. The book is a series of small structural investigations of (mass) cultural phenomena; as Barthes explains in his preface to the 1970 French second edition, "This book has a double theoretical framework: on the one hand, an ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture; on the other, a first attempt to analyze semiologically the mechanics of this language. I had just read Saussure and as a result acquired the conviction that by treating 'collective representations' as sign-systems, one might hope to go further than the pious show of unmasking them and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature."

You might think about why the analysis of wrestling would lead off such a project. Also, keep in mind that professional wrestling (in Europe called 'amateur wrestling') in the 1950s had not reached the pinnacle of promotional and popular success that it has today (for one thing, TV was in its infancy); it was more of an 'outlaw' sport lacking the legitimization of gigantic revenues and spectatorships - not to mention wrestlers-turned-Governors. Does Barthes' semiology of wrestling applies to the current version of the sport/entertainment? By the way, I've numbered the paragraphs for ease of in-class reference; cuts in the text are indicated in square brackets.]


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The grandiloquent truth of gestures on life's great occasions.

--Baudelaire

The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres. And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque [Barthes here refers to characters in neo-classic French plays by Molière and Racine]. Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrong called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.

This public knows very well the distinction between wrestling and boxing; it knows that boxing is a Jansenist sport, based on a demonstration of excellence. One can bet on the outcome of a boxing-match: with wrestling, it wold make no sense. A boxing-match is a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator; in wrestling, on the contrary, it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time. The spectator is not interested in the rise and fall of fortunes; he expects the transient image of certain passions. Wrestling therefore demands an immediate reading of the juxtaposed meanings, so that there is no need to connect them. The logical conclusion of the contest does not interest the wrestling-fan, while on the contrary a boxing-match always implies a science of the future. In other words, wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result.

Thus the function of the wrestler is not to win: it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him. It is said that judo contains a hidden symbolic aspect; even in the midst of efficiency, its gestures are measured, precise but restricted, drawn accurately but by a stroke without volume. Wrestling, on the contrary, offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning. In judo, a man who is down is hardly down at all, he rolls over, he draws back, he eludes defeat, or, if the latter is obvious, he immediately disappears; in wrestling, a man who is down is exaggeratedly so, and completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of his powerlessness.

This function of grandiloquence is indeed the same as that of the ancient theatre, whose principle, language and props (masks and buskins) concurred in the exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity. The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disgusting, he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle. In wrestling, as on the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one's suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears.

Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot. As soon as the adversaries are in the ring, the public is overwhelmed with the obviousness of the roles. As in the theatre, each physical type expresses to excess the part which has been assigned to the contestant. Thauvin, a fifty-year-old with an obese and sagging body, whose type of asexual hideousness always inspires feminine nicknames, displays in his flesh the characters of baseness, for his part is to represent what, in the classical concept of the salaud, the 'bastard' (the key-concept of any wrestling-match), appears as organically repugnant. The nausea voluntarily provoked by Thauvin shows therefore a very extended use of signs: not only is ugliness used here in order to signify baseness, but in addition ugliness is wholly gathered into a particularly repulsive quality of matter: the pallid collapse of dead flesh (the public calls Thauvin la barbaque, 'stinking meat'), so that the passionate condemnation of the crowd no longer stems from its judgment, but instead from the very depth of its humours. It will thereafter let itself be frenetically embroiled in an idea of Thauvin which will conform entirely with this physical origin: his actions will perfectly correspond to the essential viscosity of his personage.

It is therefore in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest. I know from the start that all of Thauvin's actions, his treacheries, cruelties, and acts of cowardice, will not fail to measure up to the first image of ignobility he gave me; I can trust him to carry out intelligently and to the last detail all the gestures of a kind of amorphous baseness, and thus fill to the brim the image of the most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus. [Barthes goes on to describe other 'character roles' in wrestling, comparing them to stock characters in the Italian tradition of Commedia dell'Arte.] Wrestling is like a diacritic writing: above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestling arranges comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make the intention utterly obvious. Sometimes the wrestler triumphs with a repulsive sneer while kneeling on the good sportsman; sometimes he gives the crowd a conceited smile which forebodes an early revenge; sometimes, pinned to the ground, he hits the floor ostentatiously to make evident to all the intolerable nature of his situation [. . .]

[. . .]It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. [Barthes elaborates on this point, and again compares French wrestlers from the 1950s to characters in classical theater.]

What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man's suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks. The wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm-lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pietà, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by an intolerable affliction. It is obvious, of course, that in wrestling reserve would be out of place, since it is opposed to the voluntary ostentation of the spectacle, to this Exhibition of Suffering which is the very aim of the fight. This is why all the actions which produce suffering are particularly spectacular, like the gesture of a conjuror who holds out his cards clearly to the public. Suffering which appeared without intelligible cause would not be understood; a concealed action that was actually cruel would transgress the unwritten rules of wrestling [. . . .] What wrestlers call a hold, that is, any figure which allows one to immobilize the adversary indefinitely and to have him at one's mercy, has precisely the function of preparing in a conventional, therefore intelligible, fashion the spectacle of suffering, of methodically establishing the conditions of suffering. The inertia of the vanquished allows the (temporary) victor to settle in his cruelty and to convey to the public this terrifying slowness of the torturer: [. . .] wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture. But here again, only the image is involved in the game, and the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle.
[Barthes discusses the forearm smash as a gesture signifying tragic catastrophe, then moves to the next major spectacle of wrestling: Defeat.] Deprived of all resilience, the wrestler's flesh is no longer anything but an unspeakable heap out on the floor, where it solicits relentless reviling and jubilation. [. . .] At other times, there is another ancient posture which appears in the coupling of the wrestlers, that of the suppliant who, at the mercy of his opponent, on bended knees, his arms raised above his head, is slowly brought down by the vertical pressure of the victor. In wrestling, unlike judo, Defeat is not a conventional sign, abandoned as soon as it is understood; it is not an outcome, but quite the contrary, it is a duration, a display, it takes up the ancient myths of public Suffering and Humiliation: the cross and the pillory. It is as if the wrestler is crucified in broad daylight and in the sight of all. I have heard it said of a wrestler stretched on the ground: 'He is dead, little Jesus, there, on the cross,' and these ironic words revealed the hidden roots of a spectacle which enacts the exact gestures of the most ancient purifications.


But what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice. The idea of 'paying' is essential to wrestling, and the crowd's 'Give it to him' means above all else 'Make him pay.' This is therefore, needless to say, an immanent justice. The baser the action of the 'bastard,' the more delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives in return. If the villain - who is of course a coward - takes refuge behind the ropes, claiming unfairly to have a right to do so by a brazen mimicry, he is inexorably pursued there and caught, and the crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the sake of a deserved punishment. [. . .] Naturally, it is the pattern of Justice which matters here, much more than its content: wrestling is above all a quantitative sequence of compensations (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth). This explains why sudden changes of circumstances have in the eyes of wrestling habitueés a sort of moral beauty; they enjoy them as they would enjoy an inspired episode in a novel [. . . .]

It is therefore easy to understand why out of five wrestling-matches, only about one is fair. One must realize, let it be repeated, that 'fairness' here is a role or a genre, as in the theatre: the rules do not at all constitute a real constraint; they are the conventional appearance of fairness. So that in actual fact a fair fight is nothing but an exaggeratedly polite one; the contestants confront each other with zeal, not rage [they don't keep pounding after the referee intervenes, etc.] One must of course understand here that all these polite actions are brought to the notice of the public by the most conventional gestures of fairness: shaking hands, raising the arms, ostensibly avoiding a fruitless hold which would detract from the perfection of the contest.

Conversely, foul play exists only in its excessive signs: administering a big kick to one's beaten opponent, [. . .] taking advantage of the end of the round to rush treacherously at the adversary from behind, fouling him while the referee is not looking (a move which obviously only has any value or function because in fact half the audience can see it and get indignant about it). Since Evil is the natural climate of wrestling, a fair fight has chiefly the value of being an exception. It surprises the aficionado, who greets it when he sees it as an anachronism and a rather sentimental throwback to the sporting tradition ('Aren't they playing fair, those two'); he feels suddenly moved at the sight of the general kindness of the world, but would probably die of boredom and indifference if wrestlers did not quickly return to the orgy of evil which alone makes good wrestling.

It has already been noted that in America wrestling represents a sort of mythological fight between Good and Evil (of a quasi-political nature, the 'bad' wrestler always being supposed to be a Red [Communist]). The process of creating heroes in French wrestling is very different, being based on ethics and not on politics. What the public is looking for here is the gradual construction of a highly moral image: that of the perfect 'bastard.' [Barthes goes into detail about the French 'model bastard.']

[. . .] Wrestlers, who are very experienced, know perfectly how to direct the spontaneous episodes of the fight so as to make them conform to the image which the public has of the great legendary themes of its mythology. A wrestler can irritate or disgust, he never disappoints, for he always accomplishes completely, by a progressive solidification of signs, what the public expects of him. In wrestling, nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively. Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification, rounded like Nature. This grandiloquence is nothing but the popular and age-old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a universal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.

When the hero or the villain of the drama, the man who was seen a few minutes earlier possessed by moral rage, magnified into a sort of metaphysical sign, leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds the power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship. In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.