Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis
As previously reported, a historic conference at Temple University intended to guide and radicalize activists in #BlackLivesMatter was held from January 8-10, 2016 in Philadelphia. We are going to post videos from the panels that have just become available online. Tune in next week for further coverage of this historic conference.
This video features Hakim Pitts, Mani Martinez, Che Gossett, Pamela Whitney Williams, Tyrone Reed, and Meejin Richart, and was moderated by Gabe Gonzalez.
When Gina Raimondo told voters that the public pension fund was in trouble, she promised to save taxpayers $4 billion over the next 25 years. But after reviewing the more recent audit by Ted Ted Siedle, it is apparent that promise has not come true and instead up to half of that promised savings has gone into the pocket of Wall Street.
Describing Raimondo’s investment strategy as “flawed”, he writes:
In other words, during the former Treasurer’s tenure, gambling in [high-risk and hedge fund-based] alternative investments cost [Employee Retirement System of Rhode Island] ERSRI stakeholders almost $1 million a day. Total preventable underperformance losses identified in this report amount to nearly $2 billion. Ironically, thanks to Raimondo’s “pension reform” the sustainability of ERSRI is more precarious than ever. [Emphasis in original]
What’s more, all the warnings were presented in the mainstream press and other venues well in advance. But rather than acknowledge these problems and save what remains in the pension, current Treasurer Seth Magaziner has soldiered on, refusing to cooperate with Siedle’s investigations and doing serious harm to public disclosure laws in the process. Make no mistake, the history books are going to mark Raimondo and Magaziner alongside the Patriot Act as the most damaging things to happen to the public’s right to know in the past century.
The fact we have yet to hear from the local level of checks and balances that are supposed to be created in offices like the Attorney General or the General Assembly only suggests either a lack of willingness or knowledge that they might be implicated also when the axe falls. How one can say nothing knowing that we are in the midst of the greatest financial crisis in Rhode Island history?
Of course, who in the non-government sector is in on the scam? According to Siedle, the real estate portfolio of the pension, which he is going to be auditing next, is performing abysmally. Could that portfolio be linked to certain local property magnates who are known to be political power players also?
Until Siedle and the feds come forward with further information we will not know.
Several days ago, the New York Times ran a story titled Plan to Expand Pipeline at Indian Point Raises Concern. It highlights the growing worry that the proposed Spectra natural gas transport route might one day pose a threat to a nuclear power plant beside the Hudson River.
This story of course brings into discussion an important side-note worthy of dissection. My editor at CounterPunch, Jeff St. Clair, has been adamant in his work as an environmental activist that the nuclear energy industry might at some point try to parlay the approaching depletion of fossil fuels and the global warming trends into an excuse for using nuclear fission as a “bridge fuel” away from carbon-producing ones.
Besides the obvious problems of meltdowns and accidents akin to the disaster at Fukushima, there is also the fact that nuclear waste produced by such plants is poisonous and dangerous. Uranium and other materials that cease to be powerful enough to generate electricity still are potent enough to pose a risk to humans. The disposal of the stuff is quite problematic.
Right now, the University of Rhode Island is host to a small reactor dating back to 1960. While providing some research material for students, it also costs a good deal of money for the state. In 2011, an intern was “accidentally” exposed to radiation in the facility. It is located quite close to the water and, should something ever occur, it would prove to be quite dangerous for the entire Narragansett Bay. The air within a twelve mile radius would be filled with radioactive iodine were there to be a core breach.
The proliferation of the fracking industry poses a viable threat for future tectonic activity that could severely damage the reactor. Climate change will create more powerful storms that could also cause problems. With all these factors in mind, it is important to be on guard for the sneakiness of the nuclear industrial complex.
This year Rhode Island’s Future is going to host a fortnightly column called Another World Is Possible. Using the popular socialist slogan as our guide, we are going to create twelve articles that deliver an in-depth description of what a socialist world would look like. There are plenty of writings on the internet that explain all sorts of theoretical positions on any variety of socialism, but we want to go to the next level and suggest the laws and social practices that can and should be enacted to bring the Ocean State to that point within our lifetimes.
This year has seen an upsurge of angst in the public sphere surrounding the police. Whether discussing overt police violence (the militarization of the force, the prison-industrial complex, ethnic profiling) or covert violence (the revelations about domestic spying by the NSA via the internet), we are seeing a fantastic debate that has not existed in the mainstream for a generation.
I want to begin this essay with first a rebuttal to the classical liberal/libertarian-capitalist critique of the police, a discussion which I find to be logically deficient in a key aspect. Then I want to offer a discussion of what an alternative would be in a socialist world. I chose to deal with this topic as my opening discussion so to both identify a key point in our society in need of radical reformation while also negating any accusations of Utopian fantasia at the outset.
The typical liberal/libertarian-capitalist critique of the police has always been one based around notions of autonomy and liberty. There are certain Libertarian Party members today who are fantastic in civil rights issues and have great stances on rejection of racism, sexism, and homophobia. They link the rejection of the police to these struggles and will say police target minorities as the state will target women seeking abortion care or queer people engaged in consenting activity, ergo we need less government, beginning with the police.
But what this argument fails to grapple with is the fact police do not exist to protect and serve the people, just as the state in the capitalist world fails to stand of, for, and by the people. Instead, the state and the police that protect its existence are created to protect property. In this sense, the taxpayer always is secondary.
It is also important here to articulate the fact that the greatest trick played on the American worker was the notion of class mobility and that somehow they were members of the middle class. In the post-World War II period, when the Baby Boom and the Keynesian economic heyday was in full force, returning white GIs had the various veterans benefits to depend on to help them pay for a house and hold down a good job (I say white because veterans of color were barred from these benefits in many cases, causing a huge level of structural racism to continue). These vets were made to think that, because they could afford a piece of property to shelter their 2.5 children and go on holiday in the summertime, they were now on the same economic footing as the European middle class.
That is the most brilliant delusions in human history. It is why America has never had a successful socialist movement and why Western Europe’s Communist parties were never successful in parliamentary politics.
Prior to the World Wars, when this delusion began, the middle class was a social group composed of the small business owners who depended on inherited wealth to maintain their social standing. Class mobility was impossible and one did not move out of the working class unless you met Prince Charming and married up, as it was called.
The Marxist Internet Archive defines the middle class in these terms:
[The] Petit-bourgeoisie, the “little people”, who like the proletariat, do real work (private labour), but possibly also employ wage-workers, thereby sharing social interests with the bourgeoisie, but being “little people” are constantly being “done over” by the big firms, and frequently find themselves thrown into the ranks of the proletariat… Bourgeois sociology determines class differently: when people are asked which class they are, the majority always reply “middle class”, just as people used to think the Earth was the centre of the Universe and “the truth lies in the middle”, etc., etc. Despite the fact that identity is often middle-class, class-consciousness among the middle-class is almost a contradiction in terms, as people finding themselves located in the middle, usually identify themselves with one side or the other when it comes to politics.
In the epoch of neoliberalism, we have seen the myth of the middle class break down and the advent of neoclassical economics has recreated the class bifurcation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. As a result, we have also seen the growth of the prison-industrial complex which is the vanguard of property rights.
As such, we need to radically redefine our ideas about what the police are for and what is to be done with prisons.
In terms of the police, we must redefine their role in our community, a move which requires a radical reformulation of the curriculum of the police academies. Instead of being protectors and servants of property, they must become facilitators and provide assistance to the people. This sort of logic would see communities controlling their own well-being in a democratic fashion while putting our police forces through a massive demilitarization. There are some instances when police can have some benefit for a community, as in the case when a police officer acts as a crossing guard near a school or directs traffic at a busy intersection. But the dynamic of having a militarized police force has no place in our civil society, it only invites strife.
In terms of what is to be done with prisons, in the black radical tradition, the finest strand of socialist thought in American history, the guidance is to be taken from the prison abolition movement. Here is Ruth Gilmore Wilson explaining the basic logic of the prison abolition movement.
The first step to enact this in Rhode Island is to eliminate the profit motive with the Adult Correctional Institute. According to Human Rights Watch, the inmates at the ACI produce the following:
The industry program in Rhode Island manufactures or performs services related to auto body repair, quick copy, residential/household/dormitory furniture, seating, signage, flags, metal and wood furniture refinishing, janitorial supplies, paint, panel systems, license plates and printing. Work crews are also available to perform the following services: moving; grounds maintenance; exterior and interior painting; rug shampooing; building cleaning; litter cleanup and floor stripping. [Emphasis added]
By replacing the unionized work force that would perform these tasks with cheap laborers provided by the prison, the judicial corrections system ceases to function as a correctional mechanism at all and instead destroys any potential for the recreation of an economic base in Rhode Island. It also adds a motivation to the arrest of individuals that, when combined with the racialized nature of American culture, recreates that chattel slave caste system that our nation had a Civil War because of.
At this point in time, it is clear that the prison must be abolished and that it is worthwhile to support these efforts so to one day reach another world. To achieve this, the Providence Industrial Workers of the World have recently begun efforts that readers are encouraged to engage with. They can be contacted at Providence@IWW.org with an e-mail subject line of Incarcerated Worker Organizing Committee, or IWOC. For more information about these efforts, visit the IWOC webpage at https://iwoc.noblogs.org.
For several months now, we have been reporting on the efforts of sex workers who are trying to assert their rights despite the efforts of self-described “abolitionists” who describe all consenting sexual activity in exchange for money as a form of human trafficking. At times, we have found value in the work of writers at Reason magazine useful despite the fact that, as a libertarian-capitalist publication, the organization has political goals that might prove to be problematic.
The conclusion that a writer at Reason cannot reach but which I can is a Marxist one. It requires an understanding that first liberalism and now neoliberalism has always functioned as a sort of cultural pressure release mechanism. Throughout history, it has asserted the language and ideological coordinates of coincidental radical politics and domesticated these ideas, making them more palatable for the mainstream.
John Maynard Keynes is such an example, he famously created the political economy of the modern welfare state while maintaining the structures of capitalism that would have otherwise been expropriated by the victorious anti-Fascist Communist partisan governments in the post-World War II period. As a result, the early elements of the European Union were created, the British got a national healthcare plan, and the Soviet Union was besieged for the next four and a half decades despite the fact they were the first country on earth that had tried to create both those systems in 1917.
This sort of pattern is repeated consistently over history. Lenin, himself no friend of sex workers, said of liberalism: As for the development of the independent political thought of the…masses, the development of their initiative as a class, this is something the liberal does not want; more, it constitutes an outright danger to him. The liberals need voters, they need a crowd that would trust and follow them…but they fear the political independence of the crowd. This remains true, liberalism has always created an illusion that it is supportive of the working class while simultaneously protecting capital. This contradiction can be best illustrated by the struggle of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with the Democratic Party, he gave up on electoral politics in disgust and dismay after he saw that, even if Lyndon Johnson would sign the Voting Rights Act, the vital and still-necessary radical emancipatory politics of wealth redistribution would never come from the capitalist system.
And so we see such a dynamic in action with sex work. In 2003, Angela Davis, the radical scholar, published Are Prisons Obsolete?, an argument for the abolition of prisons that was just one of many plateaus that has included this type of work throughout her career. Dr. Davis and others like Dr. Michelle Alexander have argued that the racialized nature of the criminal justice system and America as a whole has made the prison system function as a new form of chattel slavery. Liberalism is now just catching up on this trend, just recently NPR featured a story titled Written Behind Bars, This 1850s Memoir Links Prisons To Plantations that is basically saying what Dr. Davis said five decades ago.
Another element of this trend is refocusing public energies elsewhere, hence the occurrence of the rescue industry. This anti-prostitution movement uses the verbiage of the prison abolition movement and refocuses it in a way that would increase the prison population. It is deceptive and wholly advantageous in how it re-writes sexual molestation and trafficking laws so now giving a sex worker a place to sleep one night legally makes one a sex trafficker, among other such legal over-reaches, while failing to stop actual sex trafficking. A 2015 paper by Mechthild Nagel, Trafficking With Abolitionism: An Examination Of Anti-Slavery Discourses, says the following:
I have argued that the term “abolition of prostitution” is a misnomer. What such advocates simply demand is the prohibition of a particular type of work. It has nothing to do with the symbolic claim to the abolition of (chattel) slavery and thus the framework of abolitionism is woefully misplaced and has well disguised its sexist, racist, as well as imperialist framing. Furthermore, it might be helpful to look at dualisms; what are the opposite couples or opposing forces within each discourse? Regarding prostitution, when we look at the opposite spectrum, proponents of sex workers, including feminist advocates, are talking about legalized sex work or decriminalized sex work. By contrast, nobody demands the legalization of slavery—a universal discourse prevails proscribing the mis-recognition of humans as mere objects-bereft of bodily integrity and the like. By contrast, the opponents of penal abolitionists do not have to talk about legalizing prisons. The popular “harsh justice” sentiment is that prisons have been around for some thousands of years and their existence is sacrosanct – just as it was a matter of course to think that some people are destined to be natural slaves. Aristotle gave a defense of that view, which later was mounted as a defense of the great chain of being, where, magically, white men are at the top of the human hierarchy of beings, enslaving those who are closer to non-human status and thus can be treated as chattel, property. Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, had a clear conception of medical penology: Punishment was meant as medicine and effectively cures the offender from wayward practices. So, in the context of penal policies, the defenders of harsh justice are holding up the scepter of moral panic: they marshal an even fiercer defense of the status quo, of instrumentalizing punishment for the putative public good, which often amounts to what is good for big business that profits from locking up poor people, and poor women of color become a likely target the world over. Penal abolitionists are also mindful of the social construction of crime, as it is apparent in the arbitrary criminalization of privatized commercial sex (prostitution); rarely do anti-sex industry advocates (prohibitionists) critique the imprisonment of poor girls and women of color who are street workers (Kempadoo et al., 2005; Dewey, 2008).
It bears mentioning in these contexts that the last time the United States allowed itself to become beholden to a moral panic causing legislative Prohibition, the mafia had a field day while speak-easy gin joints dotted the streets. In simpler terms, Prohibition did not abolish alcohol, it only reduced the amount of safe, consumable alcohol. As a response to demand, home distilleries oftentimes produced concoctions that ended up being poisonous. And so it would be with the reduction of safety for sex workers. The organized crime family loves this prostitution abolition concept because it would enable them to return to the realm of facilitation and allow them to exploit sex workers in a variety of ways.
One example of this type of moral paranoia and rabble rousing can be seen in recent writings by one Melissa Farley. Out of respect for our sources and to hinder police entrapment, I will not direct readers to her newest load of accusations. Nonetheless, in this newest missive she identifies by name several sex workers active in the advocacy efforts taking place across the country and dresses up her Prohibitionist ideology with a lot of faux-Marxist vocabulary to mask her anti-liberation attitudes. This is in violation of the basic tenets of the Hippocratic Oath she took as a clinical psychologist (“first, do no harm”) as well as the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Professional Ethics (“Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness”). What we might equate this behavior with is when newspapers used to list the names of those arrested on the previous night during a raid on a gay bar by homophobic police, the publication of which insured loss of job and community respect. What Farley and other like her is involved with is nothing less than the public shaming described in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It bears mentioning that Farley’s writings, not published in peer-reviewed academic journals, have previously been critiqued by other scholars on this topic.
Even a rudimentary interrogation of such slogans as “End The Demand” is laced with galling logical fallacies. Since the service sex workers provide is readily self-evident, the logical conclusion is that we would have to abolish the hypothalamus and pituitary glands to completely end the sex drive that creates demand, a feat I am unaware of being possible yet in science. And because of the aforementioned racial element of the criminal justice system, these folks who borrow the verbiage of the black radical tradition are in fact contributing to the very problem that tradition is now confronting! Nagel says elsewhere in her paper “sex work prohibitionists ignore the racist effects of their carceral ideology. Paradoxically, “freedom from prostitution” condemns sex workers to penal captivity or deportation. Apparently, this is the price to be paid, in the interim, to deal with the scourge of the global prostitution industry. (It also means to pay the price of uneasy alliances with “family values” oriented Conservatives and religious extremists.)” Hence why Donna Hughes can write for a magazine like National Review.
I would personally advise those who feel they have devoted their energies toward the abolition of prostitution for nothing to redirect their efforts toward prison abolition. Radically assert control of the social media elements like #EndTheDemand and recreate these sorts of slogans in a way to end the demand for prisoners to serve the prison-industrial complex. This country was founded on the backs of poor single mothers of color. Making them targets of the vice squad, as the rescue industry does, prevents them from asserting their place at the vanguard of the black radical tradition and building a better society. But by re-purposing this matrix towards a liberation project, we can perhaps see genuine progress towards what Dr. Davis calls “abolition democracy”.
In part two of our interview with Eric Draitser, geopolitical analyst and commentator, he explains the role of China in the African continent and Syria. These two locations demonstrate the meaning of the multi-polar world theory and repudiate a good deal of the propaganda generated by the mainstream media.
It is worth noting here that these geo-political concerns are not perfect but they do stand as tenable strategies. There are essentially two choices in this case. Either one accedes to the destructive imperial behavior of the American-led NATO bloc, which has produced nothing but war since the end of the Cold War that every America supports daily with their taxes, or one shows solidarity with the geopolitical effort working to counter this. Is it perfect? Of course not. But the history of solidarity movements which have been successful always included an alternative and viable power structure, be it supporting the North Vietnamese or the Sandinistas or the Second Spanish Republic. And the instance in recent memory where a power vacuum did in fact exist, as was the case in Cambodia, terrible things can and do happen. Geopolitics is not morality, it is power relationships and being forced to choose between the least awful of choices. And in understanding the way that the Western imperial project and its weaponized debt programs under the auspices of foreign aide have pillaged country after country, one quickly grasps the dynamics of this question.
As previously reported, a historic conference at Temple University intended to guide and radicalize activists in #BlackLivesMatter was held from January 8-10, 2016 in Philadelphia. We are going to post videos from the panels that have just become available online. Tune in next week for further coverage of this historic conference.
This panel features Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report, Larry Hamm of the People’s Organization for Progress in Newark, NJ, Prof. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Prof. Donald Tibbs, Associate Professor of Law at Drexel University, and is moderated by Eugene Puryear.
The annual Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) is one of the most vital elements of living on a fixed income. If things are moving smoothly, the recipient of benefits, be it their retirement plan or Social Security disability insurance, is given a COLA that compensates for inflation or the rise of costs for things like heating fuel and food.
But imagine if, after putting in years of hard work at an honest job, the administrators of your retirement plan told you to go blow, that you were a selfish leech who should have known better than take a public sector job, and that there would be no more COLAs for you?
Welcome to the plight of the retired public sector worker in Rhode Island!
The Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, a law loaded with more hyperbole than honesty, forbade any future COLAs from being given to retired teachers, janitors, and thousands more people who had done an honest day’s work for decades only to be screwed over by a legislature full of ne’er do well legislators and a Treasurer, now Governor, who used confusing polysyllabic verbiage to occlude the building of a pipeline from the Rhode Island pension fund into the coffers of former Enron traders and a host of other dubious figures on Wall Street who have never done a day’s honest work.
It is time to talk seriously not just about the case of the missing COLAs but what is going to happen when people cannot dip into their savings anymore to make up the difference in their monthly budgets.
Are we supposed to be mum when droves of retired public employees are lining up at the Food Stamps office? Should we be impressed when the Baby Boomers are spending their final years in destitution? Is part of Raimondo’s plan having these seniors taking out loans from her friends on Wall Street that they might not be able to pay back?
The systemic ripple effect caused by this 2011 law is going to impact this state in a negative fashion for years to come and we will all be paying for it.
Perhaps one of the doors to begin asking questions at would be that of Rep. Joe McNamara, the Chair of the Democratic Party. McNamara spent his career in the Pawtucket school system and yet we hear nothing yet from him about restoring the COLAs that would be going to his mailbox. Why is beyond me, but I do know that Mao Zedong would call that a contradiction.
Regardless of one’s political orientation, repealing this law should be made an election year issue. If you are a self-described fiscal conservative, it makes perfect sense to want to reduce the need for social safety net public benefits. If you are a liberal, it is about restoring the social contract and upholding the state’s side of a bargain it made with honest working class people. If you are someone who is opposed to corruption, it would clean the clocks of several dirty politicians that might be benefiting from the pension heist. The only person who might not benefit is myself, who would have less muck to rake, and Gina Raimondo, who might see her dubious blind trust stop sending her fat checks every month.
Rhode Island’s Future is dedicated to providing both quality news and analysis while also giving showcase to amazing arts and entertainment programming. As part of this, we will host a new Sunday Night Movie column that goes out of the way to find the quirky, kooky, and weird material we know our readers will enjoy. This week we present the documentary AMERICAN RADICAL.
AMERICAN RADICAL is an engaging, at times infuriating story of the son of two Holocaust survivors who gave his career and life to the cause of Palestinians and said loudly “not in my name”. Well worth your time.
Recently I was talking with a colleague who said he wished that, when there is anti-war protest in Providence, the protesters would be able to offer something a bit more substantial that just slogans and pacific ideals. I agree with this sentiment
To that extent, I recently had the opportunity to speak with Eric Draitser. He is a geopolitical analyst and commentator whose work can be read in CounterPunch, RT television’s website, and a variety of other forums. He currently can be heard weekly delivering the podcast CounterPunch Radio.
Over the next several articles, Draitser will introduce through our conversation a series of concepts and strategies that are now gaining currency within the international geopolitical arena. The theory of a multi-polar world, for our purposes, envisions the end of a world order where the United States is the dominant power in the international political arena. In its place, various regional powers emerge and develop a set of consensus points that are used to dictate a level of peace and stability in the world. In this world-view, the Russian, Chinese, Indian, and Iranian leadership in their spheres of influence help balance out and reduce the occurrence of conflicts.
This is not a new concept and it is one that is quite familiar to figures such as Sen. Jack Reed, the Rhode Island congressional delegate who is considered a liberal despite sitting on a military appropriations committee where he has shoveled billions of dollars into the maw of the military-industrial complex while Rhode Island has above-average unemployment and astounding rates of childhood hunger, homelessness, and poverty. Sen. Reed knows that a multi-polar world would reduce the spending on the Pentagon budget and make some of the social safety net programs proposed by the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign not just tenable but conservative when one considers that over half of our total annual budget goes to fund war. Yet in the name of an antiquated and paranoid Cold War mindset wherein we must fear the Moscow-Peking alliance, America is a shambling, barely-conscious impersonation of the late Roman empire, over-extended and dependent on a semi-privatized contractor military the has wrought chaos, destruction, and death across much of the world while alienating those who would have us as allies.
I do not deny that some of these concepts are jarring at first. The power structure has engineered a clever campaign to make the efforts of our potential allies seem like “imperialism” and “aggression”. It is also vital to understand that these are not apologias for singular individuals or governments, states are always violent systems. It is also not a direct path to the Big Rock Candy Mountain of some wonderful socialist tomorrow. Yet in a world where America is a pariah and loathed by its neighbors due to imperial arrogance and where Jack Reed, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Hillary Clinton are not sending themselves or their loved ones to die in war, consider these ideas with maturity.
Last month, Bill Fletcher, host of THE GLOBAL AFRICAN on TeleSur, held a stimulating and intriguing interview with Prof. Lester Spence of Johns Hopkins University. Spence just recently published Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, an expansion on a previous paper he published in the academic journal Souls. Later, Fletcher discussed the recent COP 21 climate change summit that took place in Paris.
Both issues share a similar trajectory. The black liberation and environmental movements were radical emancipatory political projects that challenged the basic coordinates of capital from the outset and contained within them the kernel of class warfare. Neoliberalism’s ability to co-opt these efforts and create a pro-capitalist version of these movements is not a new phenomenon, we can see it at work in the domestication of LGBTQQI or women’s or any other number of radical ventures that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s.
MANUFACTURING CONSENT is a fantastic primer on the great anarchist and activist Noam Chomsky. This film is truly one of my all-time favorites and is highly recommended.
As Black History Month comes upon us again, one of the things left out of this discourse, despite its importance, is the role of Joseph Stalin as a national liberation thinker. This is perhaps jarring for the uninitiated reader and might strike some as racist to put a white Georgian known for his human rights violations within the same spectrum of as Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr., but bear with me.
The recent fracas involving Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writings about Bernie Sanders and reparations is instructive and has not been discussed in this fashion. What I found so intriguing about the exchange between Coates and his critics, including rapper Killer Mike, a Sanders supporter, was that they were trafficking in verbiage that is oddly reminiscent of the slogans used last century by the Communist Party USA in regards to what was then called “the negro question”. It strikes me that the Clinton machine press, such as The Atlantic magazine and other venues, have been using an ultra-Left position to criticize Sanders while failing to articulate that same critique for Hillary Clinton. Another example of this is in regards to Palestine, Max Blumenthal, son of Clinton bag man Sidney, has repeatedly hammered Sanders in his writing while noticeably failing to mention that the current state of affairs lies on the shoulders of his father’s paymasters. I would be remiss to articulate that this discussion should not be taken as me singing hosannas for Sanders yet I also think the Democratic machine that feels so threatened by him needs to be properly dissected herein.
To begin with, one must understand what Stalin said about what was called the national question. In his classic book On Marxism and the National Question, a text I have been told is still valuable by mainstream anthropologists, Stalin articulated a position that Lenin and the Bolsheviks adopted wholeheartedly and which later Communist leaders like Mao also held true to. In essence, Stalin says that the fight for liberation of an oppressed minority, even if it is not socialist in nature, short-circuits capitalism and imperialism, thereby taking on a wholly-revolutionary character. In the later Foundations of Leninism, he wrote:
The same must be said of the revolutionary character of national movements in general. The unquestionably revolutionary character of the vast majority of national movements is as relative and peculiar as is the possible revolutionary character of certain particular national movements. The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement. The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism…
In application to America and black nationalism, it created an impressvie anti-racist movement that informed later efforts by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Arguably the most important period of this struggle was during the Great Depression and the so-called Third Period.
The Third Period in the history of the Communist movement is an interesting and problematic discussion point. On the one hand, by calling the German Social Democrats “social fascists”, the German Communists prevented the creation of a political united front to stop the election of Adolf Hitler, a move which led to a whole generation being sacrificed on the altar of what scholars like Enzo Traverso are beginning to call the European Civil War between Communism and Fascism. But at the same time, there was an air of truth to the “social fascism” label, European Social Democrats in the seats of various imperial powers were overly deferential to colonialism and its institutional violence.
The Communist Party was actively agitating against the Jim Crow apartheid system in a variety of fashions. They spearheaded agitation campaigns against segregation and lynching while organizing labor unions across the South. The vindication of the Scottsboro Boys was brought about almost entirely by the Communist front organization International Labor Defense, who made the case a cause célèbre in the international arena, saying they were innocent, while the NAACP was merely calling for a fair trial to discern the truth, a position which almost certainly would have caused their execution. And the crowning element was the Communist Party call for a so-called “Black Belt Nation”, a vision of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow derived entirely from Stalin’s position on the national question. It bears mentioning here that the Popular Front period during the war, while able to grow membership, did involve a tampering down on the anti-racist militancy within the ranks as well as a no-strike pledge from CP members.
Harry Haywood, the African American Communist who remained for his entire life a devoted proponent of Marxism-Leninism and who titled his memoirs Black Bolshevik, had this to say in 1933:
…[The] concrete application of the Marxist-Leninist conception of the national question to the conditions of the Negroes and was predicated upon the following premises: first, the concentration of large masses of Negroes in the agricultural regions of the Black Belt, where they constitute a majority of the population; secondly, the existence of powerful relics of the former chattel slave system in the exploitation of the Negro toilers — the plantation system based on sharecropping, landlord supervision of crops, debt slavery, etc.; thirdly, the development, on the basis of these slave remnants, of a political superstructure of inequality expressed in all forms of social proscription and segregation; denial of civil rights, right to franchise, to hold public offices, to sit on juries, as well as in the laws and customs of the South. This vicious system is supported by all forms of arbitrary violence, the most vicious being the peculiar American institution of lynching. All of this finds its theoretical justification in the imperialist ruling class theory of the “natural” inferiority of the Negro people.
It is important before moving forward in this discussion to make clear that the Communist position on the idea of a separate republic based in the Black Belt was not occurring in a vacuum, multiple black nationalists (and even a few white supremacists) were arguing in favor of such an idea. The CPUSA position on this issue was one of many positions that all had as their conclusion a secession of the Black Belt from the United States.
Opportunistic anti-Communist historians, such as the late Irving Howe, leave this important context out of the discussion and present the CP policy as deluded. It was not, it was considered normal in its time. What was so impressive about this vision was that the CP said the Black Belt should not form a separate republic with the same states that would insure hegemony of the white minority. Instead, they suggested that the Black Belt states unite as a single entity, thereby giving electoral majority to Africans. This was a tenable effort at practical reparations for slavery that went well beyond monetary gain and entailed actual liberation.
The Scottsboro Boys, an incident not unlike the recent public acts of violence against people of color but with with a happy ending, was made into an international news story because of the effective agitating of the Communist presses. Haywood tells us the following:
[T]he Party was able to seize effectively upon the issue of the frame-up of these boys to develop a tremendous campaign of mass action and the exposure of the whole system of national oppression of the Negroes. The Scottsboro campaign marked the first real nation-wide mobilization of masses by the Party of concrete struggle against one of the cornerstones of capitalist Negro oppression — the institution of lynching. Through the struggle on this issue the Party was able to bring its program before the widest masses of Negro and white toilers, arousing among them the greatest sympathy and confidence. Scottsboro, as the first big battle conducted by the Party on the front of Negro national liberation, did much to break down the traditional barriers of chauvinism and national distrust separating the Negro and white toilers. This struggle, which was coupled with a real political exposure of the treacherous role of the Negro bourgeois reformists of the N.A.A.C.P., hastened the process of class differentiation among the Negroes — the separation of the interests of the Negro proletarian and semi-proletarian masses from the general interests of “race-solidarity” as propagated by the Negro bourgeois nationalists. The Negro toilers began to understand class divisions. They began to find out who were their friends and who their enemies. Only through the vigorous application of our correct Leninist program on the Negro question could the Party carry through and lead such a struggle as the Scottsboro campaign. This campaign gave rise to the sudden movement of mass participation of Negro workers on an unprecedented scale in the general struggles of the working class throughout the country. The great strike of the Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia coal miners which broke out in 1931, during the first part of the Scottsboro campaign, witnessed greater participation of Negro workers than any other economic action led by revolutionary trade unions. Large masses of Negro workers rallied to the unemployed movement, displaying matchless militancy in the actions of the unemployed. Notable examples of this were the heroic demonstrations against evictions in the Negro neighborhoods of Chicago and Cleveland.
Most historians agree that the case ended in a victory for the defendants only because of the militancy of the CP and its Fellow Travelers. This coincided with a union drive across the South that led to the region becoming a stronghold of CIO membership. There were flaws in Southern unions, most notably the instance in some cases where blacks were segregated into a dual-tier payment system, but the CIO to its credit was a major engine of desegregation, thanks in no small part to the CP membership of their most successful organizers, whereas the AFL was segregated.
Another element of this that is not as easily preserved in the meeting minutes or resolutions passed by the CPUSA is the integrated norms of their meetings. The Daily Worker began to run jazz album reviews and co-sponsor integrated concerts featuring famous performers. Communist Party dances were known sites of inter-ethnic dating, a place of interesting fights between white woman who danced with black men and the black women who sometimes felt slighted. This is the source of the claim that there was once a Jewish-Black alliance that informed an essential element of the civil rights struggle. What this phrase really refers to is that moment when African Americans found a powerful ally in the CPUSA, an organization that had a large number of Jewish members. Of course, mentioning that political orientation would be extremely inconvenient, therefore the mainstream narrative is focused around ethnic as opposed to class solidarity, perhaps one of the earliest instances of liberal identity politics.
One element of the anti-Communist historiography that recurs often is the idea that the CP had a “revolving door membership” wherein people would exit the Party consistently after a few weeks because they found the political program difficult. There is an element of truth there, not everyone is cut out to be a politician, but what is left out is the fact that many were instead members of various “front organizations”, groups that catered to specific demographics in a wholly-integrated fashion, be it a babysitting group, a literary gathering like the John Reed Club, or any other number of groups.
The late Abe Osheroff once described for the documentary HEIR TO AN EXECUTION, directed by Ivy Meeropol, granddaughter of the Rosenbergs, how the Young Communist League had a weight lifting club where the kids would do bench presses. As the Depression worsened, they became a cadre that would bring the furniture of evicted tenants back into the apartments after the landlords had ousted them! The Party’s history in Harlem, chronicled with great maturity by Mark Naison, was an amazing moment of political ferment that helped Adam Clayton Powell get elected and build a mass-organization that demonstrated against racism and poverty.
Of course one of the shining moments of CPUSA history was the creation of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought in the Spanish Civil War. This was the first fully-integrated military unit in American history where African Americans not only served alongside whites but were in commanding positions. Many of the black Lincoln volunteers went to Spain to fight Franco because they viewed it as avenging the Africans massacred by Fascism in Ethiopia, just as the Jews who went to Spain saw their fight as one against the Nuremberg race laws. Whatever the shortcomings of the Spanish Communist Party, one cannot in good conscience hold the Lincoln Brigade culpable for these failures.
In an essay for the anthology New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, edited by Brown, Martin, Rosengarten, and Snedeker, Dr. Gerald Horne explains and defines the Party policy regarding racism and how their electoral successes with Benjamin Davis in New York City Council demonstrated an augury of the CP nearly becoming a mainstream third party with potential electoral weight had the postwar Red Scare and McCarthyism not occurred. Davis’ experiences, especially the charges of anti-Semitism made against him by the Israel lobby, demonstrates a certain racist edge to the anti-Communist moment that is never properly addressed in the mainstream.
When we understand how central to the CPUSA program this question of African liberation was, we properly understand the true meaning of the Khrushchev Secret Speech of 1956, sixty years ago now, the event that shook the Party to the core and finally defenestrated it. W.E.B. Du Bois, who made a late-in-life decision to join the Party, had written of Stalin at his death in March 1953:
Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous… As one of the despised minorities of man, he first set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one nation out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality. His judgment of men was profound. He early saw through the flamboyance and exhibitionism of Trotsky, who fooled the world, and especially America. The whole ill-bred and insulting attitude of Liberals in the U.S. today began with our naive acceptance of Trotsky’s magnificent lying propaganda, which he carried around the world. Against it, Stalin stood like a rock and moved neither right nor left, as he continued to advance toward a real socialism instead of the sham Trotsky offered.
The pain of the Secret Speech was not learning that Trotsky had been correct, it was that the man whose theories had defined the most militant anti-racist current in American discourse on the issue had behaved like a madman. Not until the coming of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers did African Americans have such a militant vocabulary. From the period of 1929, when the stock market crashed, until 1956, when the Secret Speech broke in the headlines, the CPUSA had been a vanguard against racism with few rivals, perhaps only challenged by the Garvey movement. It bears mentioning here that, while Trotsky was still alive, the Trotskyist position was totally ahistorical, tone-deaf, and opposed to the CP position on a basis that looked at things from a European colonial view as opposed to taking into account the strange nuances of American racism.
Haywood was particularly shaken by the Speech. In his later years he became a part of the Maoist movement and declared all anti-Stalinism as “revisionism”, writing in Black Bolshevik:
Rather than finding a source of support in the Soviet Union, we on the left were thrown completely off balance by the two “revelations.” At first we couldn’t believe Khruschov [sic] made such a speech, thinking it must be some imperialist propaganda stunt. When this initial reaction passed we tended to give the new Soviet leadership the benefit of the doubt and failed to grasp the full implications of this attack on Stalin. The liquidationist right quickly took up the anti-Stalin banner and proclaimed the time for sweeping reevaluations of our line was at hand. They bitterly denounced our past history as one of slavish clinging to imported doctrines, the bankruptcy of which were now being proven. Under the guise of fighting dogmatism inherited from the era of “the cult of personality,” the Gates crowd concluded that Leninism was nothing more than Marxism applied to the peculiar, backward conditions of Russia – a purely “Russian social phenomenon” – and therefore not applicable in the U.S. They found Lenin’s theories of the bourgeois state as an instrument of class rule particularly outmoded and cringed at the thought of fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
From thereon, he and many like him would refuse to accept the reality of the Secret Speech, saying that they were calumnies. But what they never were able to articulate clearly was that the Speech, in the hands of the liberal press, was used to delegitimize not just the CPUSA but black liberation as a current. This is where the failure of Stalin truly lies, not in his brutality towards Soviet populations but in how the validity of liberation of the oppressed hinged so much on his cult of personality. The lasting acclamation of Stalinists like Antonio Gramsci or Frantz Fanon demonstrates that even the power structure is unable to deny the validity of that current’s greatest minds.
Along with these general reflections, the issue of strategy becomes one of extreme importance. There are some in the world, like Lars Lih, who wish to see the word ‘vanguard‘ retranslated as something wholly different than what it meant in the last century. Others would like to see the concept totally rejected.
I have reflected on this much in my research. It seems to me that, in instances held up as glorious moments by anarchists, be it Nestor Makhno’s Ukraine, the Industrial Workers of the World, or Spanish Catalonia, the anarchists have time and time again rejected the extreme anti-political views of Bakunin, as laid out in the Introduction to Marx’s The First International and After: Political Writings Volume 3 by David Fernbach, and instead taken on the role of the vanguard party. If one reads the 1932 Towards a Soviet America by William Z. Foster, particularly the final chapter, it is a prescription for a program that is strongly reminiscent of the final goal of the Wobblies or the Socialist Labor Party of America. In the Ukraine, the anarchist Nestor Makhno had created a social order wherein he had a more democratic Soviet model than the Bolsheviks. In Spain, the anarchists abandoned their scorn for parliamentary politics so to run in elections and hold seats in government. Indeed, it was the Italian anarchist Camilo Berneri who argued that the Republic should offer to end the colonial domination of Morocco by Spain, which would have in turn cut off a key source of troops to Franco’s forces. Berneri was killed in 1937 by the Communists, at the time operating under a Popular Front line that tampered down on the Left-leaning politics in the name of a hoped-for alliance Stalin wished to build with France and Britain against the Fascists.
It would seem to me, in the era of mass-communication, radicalization of the masses into the vanguard would be a matter of hours rather than months and that a variety of websites exist to help accomplish this. And it would also seem, based in part on the behavior of the CPUSA, that we should be looking to African Americans and other people of color to be at the forefront. Whereas white Leftists are consistently beneficiaries of capital and must work hard to disown their white privilege, people of color are consistently facing the brutality of capitalism. They know, from slavery unto the death of Trayvon Martin and beyond, that capitalism informs the American psycho-sexual racism fetish. Ergo, to echo the words of Dr. Tony Monteiro, they are almost by default an anti-capitalist people. This is why Dr. Du Bois, in his study of Reconstruction in America, included in the subtitle the word “democracy” and made clear that it was a revolutionary epoch smothered by capital. It is why Malcolm X focused the early days of his Organization of Afro-American Unity on consolidating the black nationalist movement, rebuilding bridges with Dr. King, and even spoke to Socialist Workers Party meetings. And it is why Dr. King, in his final years, embraced a democratic socialist vision that was culminating in a united front against poverty and racism when he was murdered.
In reading how Stalin viewed national liberation, one can find a unique prism through which to view a variety of liberation movements, from the successors of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam to the LGBTQQI movements that reject neoliberal identity politics to the progressive elements in Iran and Libya. It is a fascinating way to think about various elements in our society and can help build up the critical alliances necessary for a vibrant Left to reach the status that the CPUSA once had.
As previously reported, a historic conference at Temple University intended to guide and radicalize activists in #BlackLivesMatter was held from January 8-10, 2016 in Philadelphia. We are going to post videos from the panels that have just become available online. Tune in next week for further coverage of this historic conference.
This video, Police Prisons and the Neoliberal State, features as speakers Charlene Carruthers, Angela Y. Davis and Mumia Abu Jamal.
Richard Wolff is a Marxist economist of great talent who lays out in this brief discussion why neoliberalism had to happen as a system and why capitalism itself is simply unable to keep itself away from the danger zone. As we have gone again and again through crisis after crisis, it has become abundantly clear that an alternative is necessary, something he explains with a certain deadpan irony and zeal indicative of a mind worth giving attention to.
I watched NBC 10’s sportscaster Joe Kayata interview Pawtucket Red Sox owner Larry Lucchino not once but twice on February 17. It was hard to tell if this was a late Valentine’s Day for the sports franchise owner or if Kayata was just trying to give the Tolman High School softball team a run for their money, but either way it was a wasted opportunity that failed the fans, the taxpayers, and the viewers that was strangely reminiscent of some business involving bears and hand stands.
ONLY ON 10: @NBC10_Joe talks with PawSox owner Larry Lucchino about rebuilding fan trust. Watch NBC 10 News at 5:30. pic.twitter.com/lfRneFHMMN
— NBC 10 WJAR (@NBC10) February 17, 2016
What the discerning viewer could grasp at from the interview, and which Kayata would not vocalize, is the true nature of Lucchino’s plan. Here are the highlights, picked apart for all their meaning.
“This franchise was a jewel franchise for a long time. It has fallen on harder times in recent years.”
Uh, excuse me Mr. Lucchino, that is kind of a stretch. After Ben Mondor died, the team did struggle because his widow was not tuned to business acumen. But as soon as you and the late James Skeffington showed up with haughty expectations of not just moving the team but expecting Rhode Islanders to finance the move to Providence (something Kayata left out conveniently), the fans left in droves. Could it possibly be that you chased them away?
“We just want to recapture that glory, reignite that fan base, (and) galvanize the business community because that’s what was special.”
As reported earlier, this is asking for a subsidy from the state and the business community so to gentrify the poor community out of their homes near the ballpark. Lucchino smudged history in regards to his discussion of the attempt to move the Red Sox out of Fenway when he got involved with the Boston franchise years ago, trying to make it sound like that was all his decision, saying “It took us a couple of years to answer that [relocation] question in respect to Fenway Park.” It was not, a large contingent of Bostonians got up in arms and raised a huge SAVE FENWAY campaign that made it impossible for him to do as he had in Baltimore and San Diego and flip the team at profit a few years afterwards, leaving the taxpayers on the hook for projects that benefited only his bank account.
“We sat down with Mayor (Donald) Grebien here in Pawtucket and are working on a study of McCoy to see what kind of facility we have and what it needs to play an important role in the years ahead and we are focused on getting the fan base back to the ballpark”.
So does that mean that tax monies are being paid to fund this study? Why do you need another study when, this time last year, James Skeffington was telling people that a study had shown repairing McCoy was too costly? What could it possibly need considering the fact that McCoy and the PawSox are cited by many as an exemplary franchise?
Will the team remain in Rhode Island after the end of the current McCoy lease in 2020?
“I don’t know. That’s an impossible question to answer right now.”
In a word, no, unless of course they are given plenty of free money at the expense of the taxpayers and disenfranchise a slew of people who pay a higher percent of their income to taxes than Lucchino and company do.
It seems like Gina Raimondo is not the only vulture capitalist here for the long term. When William Carlos Williams wrote an Introduction to Allen Ginsberg’s classic poem Howl, he said in closing a brilliant line that fits these circumstances perfectly:
“Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.”
When Elizabeth Warren took Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate, America got an old fashioned New Deal/Great Society liberal in one of the major seats of power. She has been a thorn in the side of her neoliberal colleagues for years and needs to stay there.
Yet Sen. Alan Grayson, for reasons that should be held up to skepticism, has begun to circulate a petition asking “The President should appoint Warren right now, before the end of this week. That would make it a “recess appointment,” and Justice Warren could take office immediately. The obstructionists in the GOP couldn’t do anything about it.”
Whatever the motivation of Grayson, I think this is a terrible idea. Why?
In the first place, it would potentially limit whatever actions Warren might be taking to reign in the financial sector. She may have flaws in a variety of areas, but she has done some great things also that I think need to continue. Taking her away from that Senate seat would take away a great advocate for banking reform.
Second, it would effectively nullify the potential for a Sanders-Warren ticket in 2016. At this point it is almost impossible for Sanders to overcome the super-delegate fiasco, but there is the highly unlikely chance in Hades and Hyannis that things might change. But by taking away his most likely running mate, that would become more of an outside chance. And as Nate Silver has pointed out previously, a major element of the original base in the Sanders campaign came from when the Run Warren Run PAC dissolved this summer and sent its members to, as it were, Feel the Bern.
Third, does Grayson remember that raving psychopath Scott Brown, the Tea Party darling who made everyone miserable with his faux-rugged tough guy attitude and boneheaded behavior? What is to say that either
This of course is assuming that the Democrats would act in good faith and actually want to hold the seat. But I do not think that is a sure thing. If one thing is abundantly clear from this election season, it is obvious that Bernie Sanders, whatever his flaws (and they are many), has absolutely horrified the banking and medical industries that are known Democratic Party donors. The whole charade of the debates and controversy involving the behavior of Debbie Wasserman Schultz is demonstrative of a party in the midst of a massive identity crisis.
On the one hand, the Democrats are the party of Wall Street, the tech/drug/education deform advocates that make no bones about busting public sector unions and raiding pensions to help out their buddies in the banks. On the other hand, their major voting demographics are sick to death of this status quo paradigm and want to return to New Deal/Great Society Keynesian economics under the auspices of Sanders and Warren, something Hillary Clinton and her donors would rather drink hemlock than allow.
I would go as far right now to predict that, if through some absurd miracle Sanders does win the nomination, the Clinton machine and their slimy weasel operatives like David ‘The Real Anita Hill‘ Brock and Sidney ‘Birther Numero Uno‘ Blumenthal, along with the godforsaken mainstream press (MS DNC/Clinton News Network/New York Time/Time Magazine/whatever other birdcage liner you can name) would go into overdrive and actually work against a Democratic Party victory to protect Wall Street. Why think something so radically insane?
Because the Clintons did it before!
Arguably one of the finest moments in American Left history in the past two decades was the “Battle of Seattle”, the 1999 protests of the World Trade Organization conference that saw everyone from green anarchists to the Teamsters take to the street to protest a job-killing policy initiative that could have furthered neoliberal hegemony for decades to come. Bill Clinton knew he was in hot water when Jimmy Hoffa Jr. could not be silenced. And yet, in an electoral year that in hindsight we know was so vital for so many reasons, Bubba nobly soldiered forth. In fact, it was only because delegates from the Global South looked outside and knew they would be crazy to sell their countries down the river on a platter that more damage was not done.
A year later, my editor at CounterPunch, Jeffrey St. Clair, and his writing partner, the late Alexander Cockburn, promoting their account Five Days That Shook The World: Seattle and Beyond, told a packed crowd that one could make a decent case that what killed Gore’s votes in key states was the events in Seattle. Activists and socially-conscious liberals who were disgusted by the police brutality and refusal of the Democrats to cede to the whims of democracy were finally fed up and went to vote for Ralph Nader. This is not to say that Florida and the actions of the Bush political machine were not real, it is to say that Florida would have just been a side-show story with no impact on the election had Clinton and Gore listened to what people thought about their wretched World Trade Organization. But back then, the corporations were more important than the voters.
What’s to say they would not do this again? It’s why I have been keeping my vote for Jill Stein squeaky-clean all year while everyone else goes nuts for Chairman Bernie.
With shocking regularity and little sanity, our grand spectator sport-cum-soap opera akin to professional wrestling that is the Rhode Island legislature has continued to pump out hilarious moments that should be making us weep if it were not for the fact this is oh-so-typical. Not since Gibbon profiled the latter days of Rome has a corrupt, bloated, under-financed and over-romanced city-state with delusions of grandeur produced this much copy.
First there was the news that Sen. James Sheehan, in a letter he wrote to Senate President Theresa Paiva Weed that he said was not meant to become public (gee I wonder who leaked it then?), expressed dismay that Speaker Nicholas Mattiello had called any effort to enact ethics reform “an act of war”. Within a few days of that, Mattiello allegedly reshuffled those reps who voted against the controversial RhodeWorks bill out of key committee appointments. Et tu Brute?
Then came the news that Republican Sen. Nicholas Kettle had submitted a bill to require photo identification with purchases using EBT Food Stamps cards. Obviously Kettle, who at age 26 probably feels like everyone else should be carded as he is when he goes to purchase a drink, may be a little wet behind the ears and has no grasp of how being poor works. But the reality is that this bill would be quite problematic not for “the illeegullz” he thinks are committing Food Stamp fraud but the thousands of Rhode Island-based homeless and impoverished who cannot afford to get such a picture ID easily. Getting to the DMV by bus is itself an act of gymnastics, thanks in no small part to the measly budget Kettle’s colleagues gave RIPTA this year, and then obtaining the ID can be time consuming and costly. It bears mentioning that the state merely administers the Food Stamps program that is funded by the federal government, which itself is one of the paltry few elements of a social safety net that is demonstrably the most miserly in the northern hemisphere.
It is likely that most of the Democrats on the Hill will find this bill tasteless even with their standards being what they are and our young Republican will find little to no support for this. As a result, he will have created what amounts to a glamour bill that gives him fifteen minutes of fame on talk radio and actually costs the taxpayers more for us to give this bill a hearing than is actually lost in this alleged Food Stamp fraud. It is worth nothing here that we tried to reach out to Kettle for comment several times by telephone and got no reply but that he was able to be heard the morning of February 16 on WPRO. In other words, the Kettle is calling the pot black.
Finally, the February 16 editorial page of the Providence Journal featured a letter from Jeremiah T. O’Grady where he explained the inner mechanics of the RhodeWorks bill. There are already some grumblings to be heard over the tolls bill due to the recent hirings of middle managers who materialized as quickly as the funding did. What struck me as so interesting, however, was how he framed the piece, using the pension heist that we have been covering here over the last few weeks as a frame of reference.
As I walked into the House chamber last Wednesday to vote on the revised RhodeWorks infrastructure funding bill, I was struck by a sense of déjà vu and transported back to November 2011 when I walked into that same chamber to vote on then-General Treasurer Gina Raimondo’s pension reform proposal. The similarities between the two issues, and the solutions proposed to address them, are striking.
This speaks further to my own theory, that there may be a few more politicians than Gina Raimondo who take a fall when the feds come knocking regarding the letter Ted Siedle sent them last month regarding the various criminal elements involved in the scheme. Would this perhaps be the thing an ethics bill would address, thereby terrifying Speaker Mattiello?
Knowing how the fireworks continue to be launched, all we can say is “stay tuned, sports fans!”
As the final entry into our macro-historical overview of neoliberalism, I wanted to share with readers a very special interview. Michael Hudson’s new book Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy is a brilliant dissection of how neoliberal hegemony has come to dominate the economics discipline and what it has meant to our society.
But do not be scared off by this, here is a lucid, concise writer who explains economics in a fashion that any high school student could understand. Paul Craig Roberts recently wrote in a review I recommend you read:
Michael Hudson is the best economist in the world. Indeed, I could almost say that he is the only economist in the world. Almost all of the rest are neoliberals, who are not economists but shills for financial interests. If you have not heard of Michael Hudson it merely shows the power of the Matrix. Hudson should have won several Nobel prizes in economics, but he will never get one.
Hudson recently sat down with an interview with Eric Draitser of CounterPunch Radio (one of my personal favorite weekly podcasts) and gave a wide-ranging interview I found extremely illuminating. And if you really like what you hear, consider buying a copy of this excellent book.
On May 16, 1997, Robert Cadorette went to the law offices of Paul, Frank, and Collins, Inc. in Burlington, Vermont to talk about when he met then-sitting Bishop Robert Gelineau of the Diocese of Providence. He described on the record in detail, under penalty of perjury if he lied, how, when Gelineau was a young Brother in the Green Mountain State, he had tried to molest and then drown a young Cadorette at the Catholic orphanage on the shores of Lake Champlain. Less than one month after the deposition was taken, Gelineau retired and was replaced by Bishop Robert Mulvee, who went on in later years to settle lawsuits and make monetary restitution to victims of Catholic clerical abuse.
Gelineau’s behavior was the infamous gutter-talk of Providence for years. Buddy Cianci allegedly used to joke with people about bailing the Bishop out after he was caught in compromising positions with young men in the Jewelry District, just adjacent to gay men’s clubs and bath houses in Providence. There is the story of how he was once caught in a similar set of circumstances at a rest stop over the line in Massachusetts, an instant where he called in a political favor to Ted Kennedy late in the night which would explain why Bishop Tobin only actively sanctioned his son Patrick for pro-choice votes after the old Lion of the Senate had died.
Yet despite these obvious and well-known cases of what would be called human trafficking, there is very little effort to make any sort of real public reparation by the power structure for the behavior of Bishop Emeritus Gelineau. In fact, a surgical pavilion at Fatima Hospital in North Providence bears his name!
This is important to keep in mind when discussing anti-trafficking efforts in the news. Unless you are dealing with a group that wants to arrest Gelineau and those clergy in the Diocese who covered up for him, these efforts could in fact be deceptively-marketed anti-sex worker efforts.
We have been carrying stories for the last few months about sex workers that are trying to fight back against legal harassment. One element of this harassment is the so-called ‘rescue industry’ that utilizes the problem of human trafficking to justify this harassment, claiming that all sex workers are victims and are incapable of free association and choice in the sex industry, which they offensively equate with antebellum slavery.
One story worth reading comes from our friend Tara Burns, the activist and sex worker who sat for an interview with us several months ago. In a recent story she published called 602 Imaginary Prostitutes Were Arrested in Alaska Three Years Ago she explains how the dubious nature of the rescue industry starts with problems in the statistics issued by law enforcement agencies like the FBI and includes an interview with Maxine Doogan, who analyzes and critiques these statistics.
The other one comes from the Libertarian website Reason.com, who are quite good on issues of drug and sex industry issues even if I disagree with their economic views. In their story The War on Sex Trafficking Is the New War on Drugs, they write:
The tactics employed to “get tough” on drugs ended up entangling millions in the criminal justice system, sanctioning increasingly intrusive and violent policing practices, worsening tensions between law enforcement and marginalized communities, and degrading the constitutional rights of all Americans. Yet even as the drug war’s failures and costs become more apparent, the Land of the Free is enthusiastically repeating the same mistakes when it comes to sex trafficking. This new “epidemic” inspires the same panicked rhetoric and punitive policies the war on drugs did—often for activity that’s every bit as victimless. Forcing others into sex or any sort of labor is abhorrent, and it deserves to be treated like the serious violation it is. But the activity now targeted under anti-trafficking efforts includes everything from offering or soliciting paid sex, to living with a sex worker, to running a classified advertising website.
The issue is not a strict and near-Manichean bifurcation between arguments that say “trafficking is real” versus “trafficking is not real”, it is the slimy and altogether pro-pedophile use of the legal apparatus to prevent sex crimes for purposes that go after consenting adults. If the police are running around Rhode Island going after people who sell sex in a business transaction with full consent, you miss the sociopaths like Bishop Gelineau who are considered community leaders while inflicting harm on minors.
Consider the actions of Day One, an NGO that is not going after Gelineau. They are soon going to be giving “trainings” around the state that help people “spot human trafficking”, as if some of the most difficult to detect type of sex crimes were a giant game of Where’s Waldo? Bella Robinson, our friend and contributor, is skeptical of this effort and wonders if this is actually about harassing she and her co-workers.
