never forget

We should never forget the reason for music, politics, and faith...
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Obama, Even So

from Le Monde diplomatique (Paris)

Obama's first steps
by Serge Halimi

To deal with the legacy he inherited from his predecessors, Barack Obama has rejected several of their ideas. True, the new US president has been in no hurry to withdraw US forces from Iraq and he has committed more troops to the murderous, hopeless deadlock in Afghanistan. On the home front, his policy vis-à-vis the automobile industry, the banks and the pay-packets of top executives shows no sign of breaking with the diehard neo-liberalism which allows the public to share company losses but not their profits.

Even so, Obama is no doubt the most progressive the US system can produce in the current climate – so much so that decisions taken by the powers that be in Washington are sometimes more acceptable than those coming from Paris, Brussels, Moscow, Beijing – or Tehran. If the White House holds its ground and powerful lobbies in Congress are kept under tight control, the United States may shortly have legislation in place to protect trade union rights and deal with the cost of health care for the 46 million Americans who have no insurance cover. That would be no mean achievement.

It can be argued that Obama is, after all, a Democrat. But that is to ignore 40 years of history. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, took office in 1969, and both the Democratic presidents who succeeded him waged most of their battles against the progressive ideas of their own party. So both effectively paved the way for the conservative Republicans who succeeded them (Ronald Reagan and George W Bush). Carter set the deregulation ball rolling, pursued an ultra-monetarist policy and revived the cold war on the pretext of defending human rights. Things were even worse under Clinton: tougher penal sanctions were introduced, the death penalty extended country-wide, federal aid for the poor abolished and military operations undertaken – without any UN mandate – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and Kosovo. Obama’s first steps must also be measured against these precedents.

True, there were no real surprises in the content of his Cairo speech on 4 June: Bush had already accepted the idea of a Palestinian state and all the incumbents of the White House since Carter had called for a stop to Israeli settlements – with the results we see now. But Obama’s tone was new. Speaking of US relations with the peoples of the Middle East, he said “the cycle of suspicion and discord must end” and he was careful to avoid the word “terrorist”, which his predecessor had used so freely. Obama even acknowledged that: “Hamas does have support among some Palestinians”. Finally, by suggesting the Palestinians should follow the example of the (non-violent) struggles of the Afro-Americans, he implicitly identified Israeli colonialism with the “humiliation of segregation” once suffered by black people in America.

But, he added, “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone”. This wise principle was immediately applied to Iran. In his Cairo speech, Obama had expressed regret over the coup engineered by the US secret services which brought down Mohammed Mossadeq’s government in 1953: “In the middle of the cold war, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” This was another way of saying the US was not in an ideal position to raise the issue of election rigging – especially when those in power in Iran counted on just that in order to accuse their unfortunate competitors, once themselves pillars of the regime, of being in the pay of the Great Satan. Meanwhile, the worse things get in Iran, the more any inclination by Obama to negotiate with Tehran will expose him to accusations of naïvety from the neo-conservative right.

Any US president, whether he likes it or not, has an empire to run and is therefore subject to the tight constraints of US strategic interests. Nevertheless, Obama’s first steps suggest that he has not yet altogether forgotten his progressive past in the streets of Chicago.

Serge Halimi is editor of Le Monde diplomatique, a widely-read progressive monthly in France. Read the English edition here.

July 2009

Translated by Barbara Wilson

Labor Rights vs. Rightist Wrongs

Battle over Labor Law Reform Shows True Power of the Right
By Abby Scher

from Public Eye

Some people may enjoy watching the Right thrash around trying to find its way in the Obama Age, but I take the election results and their aftermath as a sign of a country dangerously divided. There really was a stark difference in the major party candidates, and 46 percent voted for the guy who lost. 59,946,378 is a lot of people. This political force isn’t going away.

During the McCarthy Era of the early 1950s, the anticommunist movement fed off of disgruntled Republicans who could not accept that huge influential chunks of their party accepted the New Deal and the role of the government in regulating capitalism. They saw America’s new regulations and modest aid for people tossed by harsh business cycles as outright property theft and communism. That the New Deal asserted federal power over the states could mean only a loss of political sovereignty and American liberty. Feeling disenfranchised not just by Washington but parts of their own party, the Republican Right created an alternative universe of betrayal, suspicion, and conspiracy.

This spring’s tea party protestors reveled in the language of the Old Right, the same language warning of incipient socialism that Republican operatives rolled out in their attempt to defeat Obama in 2008 and that television and radio pundit Sean Hannity channels from some strange archaic source. The news stories and photos told the story:

The audience, which was quite large despite a heavy rain, was told that Obama was leading the country toward “dictatorship.” The government, we were told, was creating a crisis “100 times as grim as 9/11,” the people were being “brainwashed” into complacency by the media and soon “the face of big brother will be exposed and the slogans of a classless one party system are revealed to us.” [1]

In a desperate search for relevance to its shrinking electoral base. the Republican Party embraced the language of suspicion, conspiracy, and betrayal. Far from pushing the conspiracy-minded away in hopes of finding a vital center, Newt Gingrich and other GOP beltway heavies threw their weight behind the anti-Obama, anti-tax “tea parties,” and Republican congressmen, mayoral candidates and the like lined up to speak even though many protestors despised them as much as the Democrats.

In their scramble, neither the Republican Party nor Christian Right organizations like Focus on the Family have a pretty face to put on their politics. No Ronald Reagan, not even a George W. Bush with folksy mannerisms disarming the nation. But the question is not who will be the next Republican savior or the new Ralph Reed deploying marketing intelligence and beltway connections for his Christian Coalition. The question is whether the Right’s institutions are strong enough even in the wake of electoral defeat for them to win key victories in such areas as health and workers’ rights that ensure reactionary dominance of the sectors progressives need to move the country closer to justice. The answer to that question is clearly yes. Don’t be distracted by the tea parties and think that only Fox News zealots are left to fight on core issues.

To see the huge economic and ideological resources at the Right’s disposal, you need only look at the wavering chances of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would make it easier to organize a union and actually get a contract. The bill would let workers form a union if a majority sign cards saying they want one, taking away the power of employers to ignore the cards and demand secret ballot elections instead. It also pushes the contract negotiations into binding arbitration after 90 days if talks are fruitless, since companies that don’t beat unions at the ballot box often do by stalling at the negotiating table. Now they would have incentive to close the bargain.

But one by one, the business lobby has peeled back crucial support from Democrats so that the heart of the bill, “card check,” is in jeopardy. To counter both union donations to Congress and the overwhelming support of Americans for unions, they pump ready money at southern Democrats like Senator Blanche Lincoln of WalMart’s home state of Arkansas and insinuate with $20 million worth of propaganda that union thugs will become Americans’ new slavemasters and take away their freedoms. [2]

The corporations opposing EFCA had no trouble getting Republicans to vote against it since the White men who tend to vote Democratic also tend to be union members. White men in unions went for Obama by 18 points, when White men in general went for his opponent by 16 points. [3] You don’t need donations from WalMart or Home Depot to convince you to get on board, if you are a Republican counting votes.

Nor do you want to give unions the ideological advantage in a downturn when people wonder, maybe for the first time, whether companies really have their best interests at heart and whether they as individuals really have the economic power to control their own lives.

So here, at least, the bickering Republicans are in lockstep. They are backed by the smears and power politics of venerable union busters like WalMart and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—not as warm and fuzzy as you might think from your local Chamber dinners—and outright front groups like lobbyist Richard Berman’s propaganda mills with names like Center for Union Facts and Employee Freedom Action Committee. [4]

“We need to make sure every worker has the freedom to choose what’s best for themselves and their families,” is a typical line. EFCA will “take away free and fair democratic elections,” charge Berman and the Chamber of Commerce. [5] You would think they were labor’s champions from all the patriotic red blooded language they use.

But the faux populist language works its charm, even though corporate funded PR men created it in the first place. When Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter announced he would no longer back the labor legislation, he used language lifted right out of their press releases, saying giving workers not their employers the right to decide whether to have secret ballot elections or card check violates “the cornerstone of our democracy.”

Did the news that almost a third of companies being organized fire workers trying to unionize—an undemocratic violation of the secret balloting process—reach him? Specter did notice that it is undemocratic for companies to drag out the election process so long that 40 percent of elections never take place. He is now negotiating a compromise that drops “card check” but also would require the election within three weeks of the union filing. [6]

Tying together the tea parties and the anti-EFCA battle are not just the Republicans and their donors but the new group Americans for Prosperity, a rabid free market outfit launched in 2003 with the help of Kansas billionaire David Koch. His family’s Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation joins with corporate and other longtime funders of right-wing institutions like the Bradley Foundation to support 24 national staff in Washington, and 41 regional staff working in 19 states. [7] Together they managed to summon 400,000 signatures on a petition opposing Obama’s stimulus package, so the group has some heft.

Along with sponsoring local tea parties, Americans for Prosperity created a “Save My Secret Ballot” tour of the states that will probably feed into a ballot campaign to bar card check through changes in state constitutions. Its “Hot Air” tour opposes “climate alarmists” and regulation trying to limit harmful emissions, including cap and trade legislation backed by Obama. “Families in South Bend were happy to bring their children out to see the seventy-foot tall hot air balloon emblazoned with the message ‘Cap and Trade Means: Higher Taxes. Lost Jobs. Less Freedom.’” [8]

Between the petition drive and the tea parties, it seems they are a group to watch, and may become home to a reliable right-wing voting base while being utterly silent on the “family” issues energizing conservative churchgoers. That certainly seems to be the goal given all the people in the field. They can give organization to the exurban and suburban base of the Right—the more privatized areas of the country, where you socialize in private clubs or churches, support school vouchers, drive in your own cars, and ignore the home foreclosures that give lie to an easy belief in personal responsibility and individual freedom that undergird your identity in the marketplace.

But if the tea parties are earthy, deriding Obama’s policies as “white slavery,” for instance, the group’s official leadership still seems to lack the right-wing populist touch in formulating their rhetoric. While they glibly target union taskmasters and greedy government bureaucrats, so far their official materials ignore other familiar scapegoats that could give their politics more zing – like undocumented immigrants, certainly a popular foil for those with economic grievance. The 1300 immigrant-related bills submitted by local and state legislators last year testify to that.

In the 1950s, William F. Buckley, Jr., tried to groom the language of the Old Right, removing ugly anti-Semitism and name calling while retaining its glorification of a free market and anti-democratic sentiments. It seems outlandish that Americans for Prosperity and the rest of today’s Right will be able to groom their vision of a nation that derides the idea of climate change, keeps the free market a humming (though the notion is rank mythology), and dissolves the separation of church and state so your favorite religious group could discriminate in the delivery of government services. But the EFCA struggle shows we should not underestimate the enduring conservative combination of front groups generating lies for the media and corporate lobbyists. Let us hope their old magic does not keep unions weak when we need them most. Indeed, the battle is nothing less than a test of democracy.

Endnotes here

The Politics of Mourning Michael Jackson

The Politics of Mourning Michael Jackson
John Delloro 6.26.09 To be posted on Asian American Action Fund and LA Progressive blog

With the passing of Michael Jackson, I am 12 years old again and rediscovering the subversiveness of living authentically.

Now, Michael Jackson is not a “John Lennon.” He never used his celebrity status to aid controversial causes like ending a war or freeing political prisoners. He never had a corrupt US president attempt to deport him for his politics. He never wrote a revolutionary song like “Imagine.” Instead, he spent more time bleaching his skin and under the surgical knife, rather than on the picketline. He has been accused of sexually molesting children and careless with his own child, rather than taking time off to be a stay-at-home father. His altruism has usually stayed within the safe boundaries of charity (although, I am little unsure how to categorize his desire to buy the deceased body of the “Elephant Man”).

Yet, I gave up a night’s sleep to turn up the volume along with the masses in listening to the endless musical tributes to the “King of Pop.”

Throughout Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and the other vast populated regions in cyberspace, its citizens detail childhood memories of failed attempts to moonwalk, popping and dancing to his tunes, or feeling the joy, innocence, and inspiration of his beats and sounds. Everybody is back to being a child again. For me, it is about returning to a time of living in the moment. At age 12, we moved from a small largely white New Jersey town to initially live in a predominantly Latino/a urban area in Los Angeles. My younger brother and I would walk to the nearby record store “Discolandia.” I knew little Spanish so I would only understand Michael Jackson’s “Bille Jean,” which they religiously played. When that familiar one-two keyboard sound filled the air, our heads would nod in rhythm with the other young heads in the store. Eventually, some kids broke out in dances imitating Jackson’s moves and we would hold one hand out in the air in honor of the one-gloved wonder. However, the song was also very bittersweet for me because it was one of the last music videos I watched before leaving Jersey. At night, whenever the video would come on, I would miss my old friends and quietly cry with the bedroom door closed.

For me and many others, Michael Jackson and his music were very much part of our cultural landscape growing up, regardless of our musical tastes. It is tied to a time when we were able to fully experience both suffering and joy without intrusion and to live authentically.

This is especially relevant for today. The most devastating result of the current economic crisis is not job loss or declining workplace conditions but the atomization and destruction of community and theft of dignity. Dignity finds substance when we are able to adhere to our values of hard work and individual initiative. When those values lose meaning in a changing economy, the despair is much more profound and community crumbles. We yearn for a better way to relate to our world beyond left and right partisanship.

Many of us chose to remember Michael Jackson, not solely for his talent as a performer but out of a desire to remember what it feels like to be a human again. To feel part of a community again. Even when we acknowledge his flaws, we are recognizing that the painful process of growth always involves some loss. If anything, for those who are politically engaged, his passing instructs us that his music is not some “opiate for the masses” but that we have yet to learn how to touch the hearts of the everyday person on a global scale.

I am not an ardent fan of the music of Michael Jackson, but I appreciate shared smiles and tears and the power of simulating walking on a moon across the Apollo stage.

Populist Hate and the GOP

Populist Hate and the GOP
John Delloro 6.10.09 To be published on Asian American Action Fund and LA Progressive

Some progressives and liberals may cheer at a rudderless and shrinking GOP but as a nation we should be concerned. Recent events illustrate why: The killing of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion extremist. The recent shooting of the Holocaust Museum by a white supremacist. President Obama receiving more death threats than any US president in history. Even some newscasters from the conservative media network Fox News have begun to backpeddle on their critiques of the Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism (Fox News’ Shepard Smith recently admitted that the emails he has been receiving in the last few months have been getting “more and more frightening”). Are the Morlocks on the march?

In HG Well’s “The Time Machine,” a time traveler goes to the future to find that the wealthy elite have evolved into the carefree, childlike and ineffectual “Eloise” and the working class has become monstrous angry beasts called “Morlocks” who live below in dark caverns and feed on their above-ground neighbors. HG Wells intended to warn of the dangers of turn of the century industrialization but it may as well be a cautionary tale of a leaderless Republican Party with moderates being cannibalized or jumping ship.

Today, as many have observed, the GOP has become the Party of Rush Limbaugh. Former Secretary of State and Republican Colin Powell asked, “Can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh? Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kind of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts?” The very essence of political conservatism is a yearning for a more idyllic past. The likes of Sarah Palin and the chorus of shock radio talk show hosts hark back to a “Leave it to Beaver” 1950’s small town but people of color and immigrants have never been welcome in those places at that time. The problem for the GOP is that yesteryear offers little for a country in which people of color will outnumber whites nationally in the future. Consequently, the Republican Party can only pull out and dust off their arsenal held in a Cold War-era vault and take aim with their warnings of “socialism” or reach into the 1980s and 1990s and play their “reverse racism” card.

However, if you turn the dial to any right-wing radio talk show host and listen carefully, a much older and apocalyptic narrative emerges which marries economic populism and social conservatism into a single coherent world view. They describe an America weakened by political corruption, moral decay, corporate greed, and mass immigration—“This is not the America we grew up in.” They equally deride overly-compensated CEOs, “latte-drinking” effeminate electeds and impoverished “illegal aliens” alike. At closer inspection, we are transported further back in time and find white working people of the 1800s, displaced or dehumanized by the factory, persecuting Chinese immigrants and fighting the corporate elite. They associated Chinese immigrants, who were recruited by the employer as a cheap unskilled workforce, with “unfree labor” that threatened the “American dream” of pulling yourselves up by your own bootstraps. Eventually, it led to the first laws restricting people entering the US based on race (e.g. 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, 1917 “Asiatic Barred Zone,” etc) and subsequent outbreaks of local violence towards Asian immigrants. When you establish Judeo-Christian European-influenced cultural practices as the superior standard for a civil society and then conflate it with the “American Dream,” the further any group stood from the “Eurocentric” standard, the more they would be seen as a threat to posterity.

A simple internet search through the most highly visited conservative blogs uncovers racism at the core of the most violent rhetoric (I don’t mean “prejudice” which is a specific individual’s subjective feelings. I’m talking about structural inequalities based in history). Senior analyst Chip Berlet concluded, “How the Republicans reconstitute themselves will affect how racism plays out. A core group of Southern white Christian voters could emerge in control, and then struggle over race as an issue. Also, when Democrats are in power, and Republicans seem weak, it may kindle acts of terrorism and assault by the most zealous racists who want to mobilize potential recruits to step outside the electoral process.”

Ironically, a more progressive future may depend on the type of leadership that emerges on the right.

Remembering "Multiculturalism"

Above: Al Robles

Remembering “Multiculturalism”
6.08.09 John Delloro (To be posted on "Asian American Action Fund" and " LA Progressive")

The passing of leading thinkers in the ethnic studies canon, Ron Takaki, Mark Him Lai, Richard Aoki and the poet Al Robles, in the last few months challenges us to complete unfinished tasks.

During the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, whenever anyone would ask what am I, I always responded “human.” I didn’t identify as “Pilipino” or even as a “person of color.” Such terms struck me as separatist and seemed to deny any sense of individuality. Asian American and Pacific Islander campus activists would become infuriated with me and then dismiss me as a “banana” —”yellow” on the outside and “white” on the inside. Until, one day, I found myself swept into the struggles for ethnic studies.

At the time, I met Bong Vergara, one of the student leaders who led the drive for Pilipino Studies and Tagalog language classes at UCLA. Unlike many of the student activists I encountered, he didn’t lecture me but shared his personal stories. When I became more open-minded, I listened to him sing acapello the Pilipino song “Sampaguita” at an evening event. Afterwards, I hummed its melody to myself as I drove home. When I got to my bedroom, I cried without a sound the entire night.

It took me over twenty years to finally confront many memories I had hid away. I remembered being seven years old and the other kids (all white) saying I look Chinese and singing “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these” as they pushed the outside corners of their eyes up. At the same time, I remembered wanting to look like them. I remembered at age twelve, looking at the mirror pinching my nose and sliding my glasses down in order to narrow it, hoping it would be less flat and more straight like the many whites in class I knew. I remembered being embarrassed by the way my parents ate their food with their fingers and always served rice with every meal. I remembered avoiding being around the few other Asians in class so that people wouldn’t make comments that we look good together or ask if we are related. I remembered wanting to date mostly white women in order to prove my personal worth and that I am not ugly. I remembered denying me in the name of “individualism” when I was only cutting myself away from a larger family that I didn’t want to see... because they looked like me.

Like the rhythm in the song Bong sang, his embrace of his ethnic identity allowed melody to leap forward and dance. For the longest time, I avoided the dance floor.

Scholars and artists like Ron Takaki, Mark Him Lai, Richard Aoki, and Al Robles created the tools to help me understand my marginalized experiences. Takaki named the beast which ate away at those memories—the “Master Narrative,” which narrowed US history to the efforts of one racial group. He introduced us to the other and forgotten makers of history who looked like me—the Manong Generation who co-founded the United Farm Workers union, the Chinese immigrant workers who helped build the transcontinental railroads, the Japanese American internees who challenged the violation of their constitutional rights, and many others. To paraphrase Takaki, we must tell our stories and in our re-telling we create a shared community of memory.

More importantly, individuals like Takaki, Lai, Aoki, and Robles, not only uncovered the dignity and contributions of people of color in this country but they redefined the mission of education as a vehicle for social change, not a simple mechanism to mainstream us into the economy. We had to both read their scholarship and act on it. Eventually, I went from carrying picket signs protesting the exploitation of Asian immigrant garment workers to joining a civil disobedience with mistreated Latino/a janitors in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles.

With the election of Obama as president, Sonia Sontemayor becoming a serious contender for the US Supreme Court and even the identification by mainstream news of Laura Ling and Euna Lee as “American” journalists, Multiculturalism, which has been heavily associated with these intellectuals, seems to have reached its zeitgeist. But at its core, it was never just about race but power and our right to determine our own lives. Ron Takaki often quoted Langston Hugh’s line “Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.” Their passing has left the torch in our hands to take the race to the next level until we can all breathe deeply and long.

“You are Now the Owner of a Brand New Car (Company)!”

“You are Now the Owner of a Brand New Car (Company)!”

John Delloro June 4, 2009

LAProgressive.com

Asian American Action Fund

We now own a major stake in the largest auto company in the world.

With the General Motors Corporation filing the second-largest industrial bankruptcy in world history, the US government has stepped in to take a 60% stake in the company and the autoworkers’ healthcare fund taking ownership of 17.5%. In a reversal of Aesop’s tale “The Lion’s Share,” where the lion steps in to consume an entire stag that the other animals have captured and painstakenly prepared for eating, those who have purchased and built GM cars (consumers and workers) now own a lionshare of the company. Is US democracy up to the task?

In the early years of GM in 1946, the late labor leader Walter Reuther threw one of the most boldest demands across the table to the General Motors chief Harry Coen—“higher wages for workers without an increase in car prices for consumers.” When Coen declared GM did not have the money, Reuther told him to prove it and “open the books.” Reuther distrusted GM and large monopolies who he believed had the power to endanger the safety and stability of the nation. Reuther stated,

“The grim fact is that if free enterprise in America is to survive, it has got to work…it must demonstrate more than an ability to create earnings for providing full employment at a high standard of living, rising year by year to keep pace with the annual increase in technological efficiency…The fight of the General Motors workers is a fight to save truly free enterprise from death at the hands of its self-appointed champions.”

He believed “increased production must be supported by increased consumption, and increased consumption will be possible only through increased wages.”

GM refused Reuther’s demand to “open the books” and told Reuther to stop “fighting the fight of the whole world” and “let the labor statesmanship go to hell for a while.” For GM, meeting Reuther’s request would have opened the company to more public scrutiny and potentially would have held them more accountable to the people of the US. The autoworkers succeeded in getting higher wages with the first “cost-of-living” allowances in US history but lost the bigger fight for corporate responsibility. With this loss, the fight to “open the books” was forever abandoned and became a historical footnote.

This same company who turned away from Reuther and his demands would continue displaying their backside when various local autoworker leaders, over the decades, would repeatedly warn GM that their greed would lead to disaster for this country—“people want small economically efficient cars, not big rich luxury cars,” “ if you move our jobs overseas, you won’t have the middle-class families to buy your cars,” “we have to stop this policy of making cars that fall apart after a few years so that people would have to buy a new one” and “you have a responsibility to the local communities you have used for their labor and tossed away.”

At one point in our history, GM, like the young soldier inspired to serve his or her country, halted car production to build the weapons needed to win World War II while providing some of the first jobs for African Americans and women in the nation. Over half a century later, GM, once the largest company in the world and leader in the global economy, has fallen into the arms of the US people. For the longest time, we have measured the success of our democracy by how much we can consume. Now, the viability of US democracy will be measured by how much we can lead. Will we carry GM along the path of service or will we repeat history and return it prepared for the lion to consume as whole?