@PMA_Union via Twitter “The art museum is Philadelphia,” curator Amanda Bock said. “There’s no art without art workers, so if you enjoy coming to the museum, seeing art, you need to support the people who make that possible.” Bock and 180 Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) curators, educators, archivists, and other art workers aren’t feeling that support from one of the nation’s largest, oldest, and most venerable institutions. So, workers struck the PMA on Sept. 26, demanding a voice at work, livable wages, affordable healthcare, and job security. “A lot of people say you can’t eat prestige,” said Adam Rizzo, president of AFSCME Local 397, representing PMA workers. “I think that’s true.” The PMA is known by its iconic front steps, made famous in the Rocky movie. The workers struck after two years of stalled negotiations and union busting by museum management, who refused to meet the worker’s contract demands even halfway. Management offered an 11% salary increase through 2024, unacceptable to workers who have already labored without a raise for three years, including during the pandemic and the current inflation spiral. PMA management has opted to keep the museum open and bring in scabs to install the upcoming exhibit featuring the works of French artist Henri Matisse. Striking art workers have appealed to art lovers not to cross the picket line to view the Matisse exhibit. “Scabby the rat” has a permanent presence in front of the museum. “It is not hyperbolic to say our union’s fight for a fair contract…is a fight to save one of the world’s great art museums,” the union tweeted in early August. The workers want a livable wage commensurate with their education and training. They also want to make the institution more responsive to the needs of the diverse Philadelphia community. The battle at PMA reflects a broader crisis of major cultural institutions nationwide and their prevailing model. Billionaires, corporate lawyers, and politically-connected individuals run the institutions. Their class and social bias prevent them from appreciating their employees’ struggles and the wider multi-racial working-class communities the institution serves. Museum management is also out of touch with the swirling debates about how to make modern institutions more responsive to the emerging diverse and democratic multicultural world, including the repatriation of looted artifacts, something art workers have been grappling with for years. Museum management has proven ill-equipped to respond effectively to growing challenges to dominant white supremacist, patriarchal and elitist culture traditionally shaping their operations. Under the direction of the corporate and wealthy patrons, museums are run like corporations, accumulating huge endowments, spending billions on massive expansions, and bloated administrative salaries while forcing the staff to work for poverty wages. The 2020 median annual wage for archivists, curators, and museum workers was $52,140, according to the Labor Statistics Bureau. PMA is no different. The museum has a $500 million endowment and a $60 million annual budget. Executives make $500,000 or more per year, and the PMA chose to build a $233 million expansion rather than invest in those who make the museum operate. Management refuses to raise the minimum hourly pay from $15 to $16.75. Management has resisted transparency in what it pays each employee. It took the Art and Museum Transparency spreadsheet that allowed workers in the industry to share their salaries discreetly. One PMA worker found out she makes less than the fellows and interns she supervises. As a result, PMA and other museums are seeing a surge of unionization of their workers, mainly with AFSCME and UAW. In 2020, 89% of PMA workers voted to join the AFSCME. Security guards and maintenance workers were already unionized.
The workers say PMA management takes advantage of art workers’ commitment and passion for their jobs and cultural institutions. The low wages are forcing a high turnover, which doesn’t seem to concern management. Often management promotes a worker, and their former position goes unfilled. Previously permanent positions are now temporary or “term” positions. The result has been severe understaffing. “We’re bleeding talented colleagues because of the museum’s low pay, poor benefits, and lack of professional development and advancement opportunities,” wrote PMA employee Emily Rice. “We no longer have enough staff to function properly. We have no archivist, no rights and duplication specialist, no database manager for collections; We only have one paper conservator, one taxidermist and one press officer. Each remaining employee covers the work of two or three people.” Artists and cultural workers across the country, including museum workers in new unions at the Museum of Modern Art, Chicago Art Institute, and Brooklyn Art Museum, are sending solidarity and supporting the PMA strike fund. After expressions of solidarity inundated the PMA’s social media, the museum announced it was shutting down the comments section. AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler joined the picket line on Oct. 8. Both AFSCME and the AFL-CIO held mass rallies with PMA workers during their conventions this past summer. “Solidarity with @PMA_Union on strike. Every @philamuseum employee deserves respect, fair pay, and affordable health care. What goes great with some of the very best art in the world? A Union! 100%,” tweeted John Fetterman, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Correction: This article originally attributed an article written by PMA staff member Emily Rice to the wrong person and included an incorrect hyperlink. People’s World apologizes for the error. AuthorJohn Bachtell is president of Long View Publishing Co., the publisher of People's World. He served as national chair of the Communist Party USA from 2014 to 2019. He is active in electoral, labor, environmental, and social justice struggles. He grew up in Ohio, Pittsburgh, and Albuquerque and attended Antioch College. He currently lives in Chicago where he is an avid swimmer, cyclist, runner, and dabbler in guitar and occasional singer in a community chorus. This article was republished from People's World. Archives October 2022
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10/17/2022 Amazon suspends 80 workers for refusing to work following dangerous fire By: Jacob BucknerRead NowThe Amazon Labor Union says that more than 600 workers initiated a work stoppage and occupied the break room, refusing to work after a cardboard compactor caught fire in the warehouse. | @IssaSmallsWorld via Twitter STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.—In the late afternoon of Oct. 3, a fire occurred at the sorting center at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse here. The blaze started when a cardboard-box compactor at a loading dock ignited just before the scheduled shift changeover. With fumes and the smell of chemicals still hanging in the air after the fire was doused, Amazon ordered workers arriving for their evening shift to get to work—even after the employees expressed concerns for their health. As a result, 650 workers entered the break room and another group went to the Human Resources department demanding they not be subject to unsafe working conditions. Amazon responded by suspending 80 workers in what labor leaders are calling a clear act of anti-union retaliation. The incident is the latest episode in a long history of the company refusing to uphold safety protocols, risking workers’ lives in order to secure maximum profit. Around 4:00 pm, workers first reported the fire at the loading dock compactor. Employees could be seen on video screaming “Evacuate!” while running away from the blaze. At the same time, Amazon ordered workers to exit through the much slower turnstiles instead of the emergency fire exits, raising the danger that workers could be trapped inside the building. The company also refused the request by night shift workers starting their day to go home instead. The evacuated employees were made to stand outside in cold, 50-degree rain in the parking lot for an hour while waiting for FDNY to arrive and battle the fire. Once the initial fire was extinguished, the day shift workers were allowed to leave an hour early with pay. But the company announced that all evening shift employees must report to work, saying the warehouse was deemed safe.
Workers on the ground, however, say that as many as 650 employees sat in the break room demanding they be sent home, stating that the working environment was dangerous for their health. After a few hours, Amazon demanded the workers go back to work and leave the breakroom, but many stayed behind to protest the unfair treatment. At around 9:00 pm, about 100 of those employees did a “march on the boss,” going to the HR office and demanding night shift be sent home with pay. The fire itself may have been an avoidable event. Amazon Labor Union lawyer Seth Goldstein says the compactor had been causing problems and smoking for weeks. What was Amazon’s solution to this clear hazard to workers’ safety? The multibillion-dollar company had been pouring water on the compactor to stop the smoke. They could have prevented this risk to employees’ health by evaluating the compactor, but this delay was apparently deemed impossible because it would cut into valuable profit. How did the company respond?After the work stoppage ended, 80 workers were suspended. The company placed them “under investigation” after they spoke up about safety hazards. These suspensions were done haphazardly, and seem to be targeted and malicious. One worker reported that while all the women in her department who participated were suspended, none of the men were. The company has also tried to obfuscate the safety concerns and downplay the necessity for union activity. When the employees walked into the break room as an act of protest, management misstated the number of employees were involved in the walk out. Chris Smalls, ALU president, said 650 refused to work in what they felt to be potentially dangerous conditions; the company claimed only 100 employees were involved—intentionally trying to downplay the scale of the action. The ALU said, “The ‘small group’ that refused to return to work made up 30% of the building by management’s own admission.” Additionally, Amazon spokesperson Paul Flaningan publicly stated, “All employees were safely evacuated,” but this did not acknowledge the many workers who reported tearing up from exposure to smoke or the worker that had to be sent to the hospital from smoke inhalation. Amazon’s report on the incident also did not account for the residual water, dust, debris, and potentially toxic chemicals being exhumed in the aftermath of the fire. All of this is in an attempt to not only camouflage to the public how often Amazon puts workers lives at risk, but also to erode support for the union. Amazon workers lives have been at risk before This is not the first time Amazon workers have had their lives put at risk for company profits. In 2021, as Tropical Depression Ida killed 14 people in the area surrounding JFK8, employees were still expected to go into work. Additionally, in the same year, a deadly tornado in Edwardsville, Ill., killed six Amazon workers because the company refused to close their warehouse in the middle of the storm. In fact, in recent days, there have been three fires at different Amazon warehouses throughout the country. Workers should not have to choose whether they will lose their job and maintain safety or keep their job and risk exposure to toxic chemicals, natural disasters, and death. But this is the sacrifice the company expects employees to make because without workers’ constantly exploited labor, Amazon’s entire basis for profit would be affected. JFK8 is one of the most productive warehouses in the county, and the company would rather sacrifice the safety of employees than halt production and distribution at this key facility. Recognize the ALU!
Additionally, the company announced it would invest $1 billion dollars into higher wages, however, it has so far moved ahead on a mere $0.25 raise, and that after a year -long review process. The ALU points out that, with inflation rising to 9.1%, it is actually a cut in real wages by $1.85. This union says the situation proves once more the necessity of collective bargaining representation. But the company is still trying to use its meager increase in wages as a tactic to devalue the union’s importance and convince workers that organizing is against their fundamental interests. The company continues to refuse negotiations with the Amazon Labor Union. It is still campaigning to invalidate the election at JFK8, calling on the NLRB not to accept the outcome and accusing the government body of unfairly favoring the union because it denied all 25 objections Amazon made to the vote count. For highly exploitative capitalist companies such as Amazon and Starbucks (which has seen 240 of its stores go union) a collective bargaining agreement threatens their total control over workers and their labor. But the ALU isn’t quitting, and the fire at JFK8 has pushed it to fight even harder to ensure workers’ lives are not put at risk and to make it clear that workers have the power when they are united. As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the opinions of its author. AuthorJacob Buckner writes from New York. Jacob Buckner escribe desde Nueva York. This article was republished from People's World. Archives October 2022 Despite the Affordable Care Act’s promises, publicly subsidized insurers are jacking up prices while Americans lose coverage. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Back in 2010, Democrats sold the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to Americans as a way to both preserve a privately financed health insurance system and provide more affordable and expanded coverage. Twelve years later, as health insurance companies report record profits, the opposite has happened: The nation’s major health insurance companies are receiving most of their money from the government, they just jacked up prices by double digits, and nearly half of the country is now underinsured or uninsured. A new analysis from former health insurance executive Wendell Potter shows that six of the seven largest health insurers — Centene, CVS, Elevance, UnitedHealth, Humana, and Molina — now receive the majority of their health plan revenues from the federal government, while the seventh, Cigna, gets 42 percent of its revenue from the government. These revenues are fueled in large part by the growth of Medicare Advantage plans, the expensive privatized Medicare plans operated by private health insurers that often wrongfully deny care. These figures do not even include the subsidies that insurers receive to help people buy individual insurance plans offered on state exchanges under the ACA. Under President Joe Biden, Democrats have twice expanded this ACA subsidy program, now until 2025. If Democrats move to authorize these subsidies yet again, the total ACA health insurance subsidy scheme would cost the public more than $800 million over the decade. Meanwhile, these plans deny nearly 20 percent of all in-network health claims. All that government money, however, is not buying more affordable prices. According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, health insurers raised their prices by 24 percent in a single year. Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced an 8.5 percent spike in revenues paid to Medicare Advantage insurers after implementing the highest-ever increase to Medicare premiums, a decision Biden has partially walked back for next year. The government largesse is inflating insurance industry profits, but it isn’t buying universal — or even very good — coverage: A new study from the Commonwealth Fund finds that 43 percent of Americans “are inadequately insured” — meaning they’ve had coverage gaps, they are insured but still cannot afford medical services, or they have no insurance at all. Biden campaigned on a promise to create a public health insurance option, whose “premiums could be substantially lower than those of private plans,” according to the Congressional Budget Office. However, Biden hasn’t once mentioned a public option since becoming president. Democrats have instead moved to expand health insurance coverage by providing more subsidies to insurance companies to put people on ACA plans. Meanwhile, the insurance sector has poured more than $18 million into Democratic coffers in the last two years. According to the New York Times, by next year, a majority of seniors will be enrolled in private Medicare Advantage plans instead of the traditional Medicare program. The Trump administration actively encouraged seniors to choose the private plans with advertisements touting their extra benefits, like gym memberships and dental coverage — without mentioning the plans’ threat of wrongful denials of care. Amid that trend, the Trump and Biden administrations have also operated programs that allow companies to move seniors from traditional Medicare into private health care plans without their informed consent. AuthorDavid Sirota Founder/editor in chief, The Lever; Oscar nominated for DON'T LOOK UP; Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign speechwriter in 2020. This article was republished from the Lever. Archives October 2022 10/13/2022 US Rejection Of Moscow’s Offer For Peace Talks Is Utterly Inexcusable By: Caitlin JohnstoneRead Now
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Moscow was open to talks with the the US or with Turkey on ending the war in Ukraine, claiming that US officials are lying when they say Russia has been refusing peace talks.
Reuters reports: Lavrov said officials, including White House national security spokesman John Kirby, had said the United States was open to talks but that Russia had refused.
Lavrov’s claim was given more weight when US State Department spokesman Ned Price dismissed the offer for peace talks shortly after it was extended, citing Russia’s recent missile strikes on Kyiv.
“We see this as posturing,” Price said at a Tuesday press briefing. “We do not see this as a constructive, legitimate offer to engage in the dialogue and diplomacy that is absolutely necessary to see an end to this brutal war of aggression against the people and the state, the Government of Ukraine.”
This is inexcusable. At a time when our world is at its most perilous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis according to many experts as well as the president of the United States, the US government has no business making the decision not to sit down with Russian officials and work toward de-escalation and peace. They have no business making that call on behalf of every terrestrial organism on this planet whose life is being risked in these games of nuclear brinkmanship. The fact that this war has escalated with missile strikes on the Ukrainian capital makes peace talks more necessary, not less.
This rejection is made all the more outrageous by new information from The Washington Post that the US government does not believe Ukraine can win this war and refuses to encourage it to negotiate with Moscow. “Privately, U.S. officials say neither Russia nor Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright, but they have ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table,” WaPo reports. “They say they do not know what the end of the war looks like, or how it might end or when, insisting that is up to Kyiv.” These two points taken together lend even more credibility an argument I’ve been making from the very beginning of this war: that the US does not want peace in Ukraine, but rather seeks to create a costly military quagmire for Moscow just as US officials have confessed to trying to do in Afghanistan and in Syria. Which would explain why US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the US goal in Ukraine is actually to “weaken” Russia, and also why the empire appears to have actively torpedoed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia in the early days of the conflict. This proxy war has no exit strategy. And that is entirely by design.
Many have been calling for the US to abandon its policy of actively sustaining this war while avoiding peace talks.
“President Biden’s language, we’re about at the top of the language scale, if you will,” former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen told ABC’s This Week on Sunday regarding the president’s recent remark that this conflict could lead to “Armageddon”. “I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing,” Mullen said, adding, “As is typical in any war, it has got to end and usually there are negotiations associated with that. The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.” “One thing the United States can do is… drop the position, the official position, that the war must go on to weaken Russia severely, meaning no negotiations,” Noam Chomsky argued in a recent appearance on Democracy Now. “Would that open the way to negotiations, diplomacy? Can’t be sure. There’s only one way to find out. That’s to try. If you don’t try, of course it won’t happen.” “It is time for the United States to supplement its military support for Ukraine with a diplomatic track to manage this crisis before it spirals out of control,” said the Quincy Institute’s George Beebe following the Monday missile strikes on Kyiv, calling it “a major escalation in the war” that was bound to “bring the world closer to a direct military collision between Russia and the United States.” “The Americans have to come to an agreement with the Russians. And then the war will be over,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said at an event on Tuesday, adding that “anyone who thinks that this war will be concluded through Russian-Ukrainian negotiations is not living in this world.”
It’s absolutely insane that the world’s two nuclear superpowers are accelerating toward direct military confrontation and they aren’t even talking to each other, and it’s even crazier that anyone who says they should be gets called a Kremlin agent and a Chamberlain-like appeaser. Responsible Statecraft’s Harry Kazianis discusses this freakish dynamic in a recent article titled “Talking is not appeasement — it’s avoiding a nuclear armageddon“:
I have fought more than thirty combat simulations in wargames under my own direction for a private defense contract over the last several months, looking at various aspects of the Russia-Ukraine war, and one thing is clear: the chances of a nuclear war increase significantly every day that passes.
I repeat again that it is absolutely pants-on-head gibbering insanity that these direct negotiations are not already presently underway. Let us petition any and all higher powers we have faith in that this changes very soon. Let us also petition the leaders of our individual nations around the world to exert whatever kind of pressure they can muster upon Washington for these talks to commence. This brinkmanship threatens us all, and the managers of the US empire have no business playing these games with our lives.
Author ArchivesOctober 2022
Ukrainian Sports Club in NYC with the UPA black-and-red flag
“Slava Ukraini” “Heroyam Slava” echoed and boomed through the corridors of New York City alleyways and streets, filling the whole of Times Square in the sea of blue and yellow flags. Hundreds gathered together in NYC for weeks following the February 24th Russian Special Operation in Ukraine, hoping that raising attention to their condemnation of Russia’s operation would support the Ukrainian war effort.
Back to back coverage of the invasion of Ukraine flooded Western mainstream media, showcasing heart wrenching images of Ukrainian refugees while valorizing the “heroes of Ukraine” who were forced by Ukrainian government issued mandates to fight against Russia. Through the years, Western people have heard the tropes of the “brutal, imperialistic” Russian government that led an attack in 2016 on so-called American democracy resulting in a Trump presidential victory. The masses in North America and Europe alike have been groomed by their state-funded media and politicians to anticipate a Russian invasion of Ukraine, of Russia seeking to expand their territory and dress their imperialist endeavors in WWII anti-fascist garbs. Immediately, Russia’s operation was swiftly met across the West with condemnations, sanctions, calls for boycotts, and mass civil unrest, particularly among the Ukrainian-American diaspora. Soon after, online there was a saturation of fundraising efforts for the Armed Forces of Ukraine garnering millions of dollars, initiated by organizations few had heard of. Lying dormant in the fabric of North American civil society, there has long been a foundation of pro-Ukrainian, pro-NATO organization, waiting for its moment of full glory as torch carriers of Ukraine’s first fascist movement of the 20th century. And it was there in the heart of Manhattan where years of organizing finally paved the way to capture the entirety of the American people and their tax dollars, fighting for an Independent Ukraine. The Fascistic Myth Surrounding the “Independent Ukraine"
Behind tales of valiant Cossack legions trudging through the Dnieper lies the mythical idea of the Independent Ukraine of which Ukrainian nationalists have been fighting a 100 year long crusade for, fighting for their own Valhalla.
The Independent Ukraine is mythologized in roots by historical revisionist chronicles of a Ukrainian Kievan Rus, citing that Kievan Rus was the birthplace of Ukrainian history while “Moscow was just a swamp then”, similar in fashion to German Nazis tropes of descending from Aryan nomads.
But if we look at history departing from fascist mythology, Kievan Rus was the kingdom of which Belarusian, Russians, and Ukrainians alike descend from, owing this to their Nordic-Eastern Slavic ancestors of whom they share. The southern principalities of Kievan Rus, including of course its capital city Kiev, are parts that are considered today Ukrainian land while northern principalities extended to modern day Russia and Belarus with cities such as Novgorod and Polatsk.
The term itself “Kievan Rus” was designated in the 19th century, well after the demise of the ruling Rurik dynasty, of which during their time the kingdom was known as Rus, land of the Ruthenian people. Put simply, Kievan Rus and its legacy belongs to Russians as much as it belongs to Ukrainians. Nonetheless, Ukrainian nationalists desperately strive to portray Ukrainian history as distinct from Russia’s. In numerous ways, it is, but it is simultaneously tied to Russian history at its roots. However historical revisionism will continue to be a key tool in fascist Ukrainian propaganda for centuries to come. But what is then the struggle for an Independent Ukraine, namely for a country that’s been independent for 30 years?
The ruse surrounding the Independent Ukraine is defined by the brutal reign of Symon Petliura and the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), a nationalist Ukrainian state that undertook the ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 Ukrainian Jews to create a “pure” racial society of Ukrainians.
Founded on ideals of social democracy, for ethnic Ukrainians only, the UNR declared itself a state following the October Revolution of 1917 and quickly became hostile to the rise of the Bolshevik Party in Ukraine. The antagonisms between competing ideologies in Ukraine led to a 5 year long civil war between the Ukrainian National Army and the Bolsheviks, among other groups, with particularly heated skirmishes between the Ukrainian Red Galician Army, led by Volodymyr Zatonsky, against their nationalist compatriots in West Ukraine. The UNR government later made a pact with the Polish government to aid them in pushing the Bolsheviks, or Soviets, eastward resulting in the Polish-Soviet War. As a consequence, Petliura had to recognize Galicia, a hub of Ukrainian nationalist sentiments, as Polish territory, and in turn, the UNR became a “government-in-exile” within Polish dominion, marking Soviet Ukrainian victory over nationalists. Though protected by the Polish government, the UNR had lost all capacity to function as a legitimate government as their lands were then under Soviet and Polish control. Nonetheless, Petliura wrote extensively on the national movement in Ukraine and became one of the first prominent Ukrainian nationalist activists in the West until his assassination in 1926. The exiled UNR government leaders would only make their re-emergence after the 1941 German invasion of Soviet Ukraine, allying itself with its ideological partners, German Nazis, once again in the struggle for a Ukrainian national-socialist state, the Independent Ukraine. The Birth of Ukrainian Fascism
According to Per Anders Rudling, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, influenced by nationalist Dymtro Dontsov, was formed in Vienna in 1929 by leaders such as Yevhen Konovalets by uniting the Ukrainian Military Organization and other extreme right-wing organizations, such as the Ukrainian National Association, the Union of Ukrainian Fascists, and the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. They operated first in Eastern Galicia infiltrating institutions to maintain positions of power and spread the ideals of their Ukrainian fascism.
The OUN then split on the question of collaborating with Nazi Germany into the OUN-B, headed by Stepan Bandera who wanted independence from the Soviets and Germans, and the OUN-M, headed by Andriy Melynk who vowed to work with Hitler’s army. While the OUN-B was later persecuted and had hostile relations with Nazi Germany, records show that they in fact at times did collaborate with German fascists, particularly in executing Ukrainian Jews and Poles as they were seen as settlers. Both the OUN-B and OUN-M were deeply anti-Semitic, citing ideas of Judeo-Bolshevism as justification for the ethnic cleansing of Jews, Poles, and Russians. Originally published in Surma, the OUN was led by 10 Decalogues of the Ukrainian Nationalist Revolutionary which go as follows:
The OUN’s principles were to create an Independent Ukrainian state with the ideology rooted in fascism. The OUN, seeing itself as the greatest representation and authority over the Ukrainian people, sought to build a “Ukraine for Ukrainians'' dominated by the capital of the wealthy kulak class and a nationalist dictatorship, cleansing out those who were deemed racially inferior or tainted, as stated in early OUN documents. The ideals of the Independent Ukraine, as it has been mythologized, was one ridden with nationalist fascism and deep discrimination against the “Judeo-Muscovite-Bolsheviks” which took full force after the 2014 Euromaidan coup that ousted the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych, while other far-right paramilitaries such as Right Sektor and the Azov Regiment continue the crusade started by Ukrainian nationalists started in 1905 for the Independent Ukraine. Anti-semitism, while a major role in the actions of Ukrainian nationalists, was fed by their anti-communism and Russophobia. In many instances, it was because of a perceived Jewish loyalty to Bolshevism and Russia that Jewish people could not be tolerated by the nationalists. The Ukrainian nationalists of today will now tolerate Jewish people, so long as they are Zionists, and they use this as a cover against all claims of Nazism, despite polling higher than Russia for anti-Semitic sentiments among the population. But national socialism as an ideology cannot be reduced to anti-Semitism. The ethno-nationalism of today in Ukraine sets its sights against ethnic Russians and Communists, for the latter poses an existential threat to fascists across the globe. There is much debate about the OUN-B and their role as German Nazi collaborators, some stating they resisted the Germans, others factually raising their work with the Nazis. Yet both of these arguments fail to reveal that the OUN-B and their allies were Nazis in their own right, regardless of their ever changing relationship to the German Nazi Party. They were members of the economic elite and the intelligentsia who sought out to create a state ruled by nationalism and ethnic purity, guided by perceived ethnic superiority over their neighbors and took no mercy on those deemed enemies. The Ukrainian nationalists were brought to their knees by the Bolsheviks and later the Soviet Red Army, later to flee with their families, refusing to face justice for their crimes, and then to spend years in Displaced Persons Camps in hopes of obtaining refugee status in the West. Between 1947 - 1955, 80,000 Ukrainians immigrated into the United Status, the majority with pro-nationalist sentiments. Today, New York City is the home of over 150,000 Ukrainians, the highest in the country. Despite being a marginal fraction of the U.S. population, their influence proves immense. In The Fascist Kernel of Ukrainian Genocidal Nationalism, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe writes “Ukrainians in Romania and Czechoslovakia, as well as the diaspora communities in countries such as Germany, Canada, and the United States of America, were important outposts of the Ukrainian revolutionary nationalism.” The West has served as the center for Ukrainian fascist organizing, continuing its legacy through indoctrinating Ukrainian-American youth, and serving as collaborators with the anti-Worker, imperialist governments of the West. From the xatas of Galicia to the shoebox apartments of Manhattan, the Ukrainian nationalists have held and passed on their ideology of national-socialism, they have brought Bandera to the streets of New York. AuthorKayla Popuchet is a Peruvian-American CUNY student studying Latin American and Eastern European History, analyzing these region's histories under a scientific socialist lens. She works as a NYC Housing Rights and Tenants Advocate, helping New York's most marginalized evade eviction. Kayla is also a member of the Party of Communists USA and the Progressive Center for a Pan-American Project. ArchivesOctober 2022 10/13/2022 Manufacturing consent for the containment and encirclement of China By: Carlos MartinezRead NowThe following detailed article by Carlos Martinez explores the escalating propaganda war being waged by the imperialist powers against China. Carlos notes that “propaganda wars can also be war propaganda”, and that the torrent of anti-China slander has a clear purpose of manufacturing broad public consent for the US-led New Cold War. Carlos shows how the propaganda model described in Herman and Chomsky’s classic work Manufacturing Consent has been updated and enhanced using modern communication techniques, and how it is being applied today against China, in particular in relation to the allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Carlos introduces the most frequently-hurled slanders on this topic and debunks them in detail. The author concludes that this propaganda campaign is serving to “break the bonds of solidarity within the global working class and all those opposed to imperialism”, and that all progressives must resolutely oppose and expose it. If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. (Malcolm X) The Western media is waging a systematic and ferocious propaganda war against China. In the court of Western public opinion, China stands accused of an array of terrifying crimes: conducting a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang; wiping out democracy in Hong Kong; militarising the South China Sea; attempting to impose colonial control over Taiwan; carrying out a land grab in Africa; preventing Tibetans and Inner Mongolians from speaking their languages; spying on the good peoples of the democratic world; and more. Australian scholar Roland Boer has characterised these accusations as “atrocity propaganda – an old anti-communist and indeed anti-anyone-who-does-not-toe-the-Western-line approach that tries to manufacture a certain image for popular consumption.” Boer observes that this propaganda serves to create an impression of China as a brutal authoritarian dystopia which “can only be a fiction for anyone who actually spends some time in China, let alone lives there.”[1] It’s not difficult to understand why China would be subjected to this sort of elaborate disinformation campaign. This media offensive is part of the imperialist world’s ongoing attempts to reverse the Chinese Revolution, to subvert Chinese socialism, to weaken China, to diminish its role in international affairs and, as a result, to undermine the global trajectory towards multipolarity and a future free from hegemonism. As journalist Chen Weihua has pointed out, “the reasons for the intensifying US propaganda war are obvious: Washington views a fast-rising China as a challenge to its primacy around the world.” Furthermore, “the success of a country with a different political system is unacceptable to politicians in Washington.”[2] Propaganda wars can also be war propaganda. In this case, the war in question is the escalating US-led New Cold War.[3] The various slanders against China – particularly the most lurid accusations, such as that of genocide in Xinjiang – have much in common with the 2003 allegations regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or the 2011 allegation that the Libyan state under Muammar Gaddafi was preparing a massacre in Benghazi. These narratives are constructed specifically in order to mobilise public opinion in favour of imperialist foreign policy: waging a genocidal war against the people of Iraq; bombing Libya into the Stone Age; and, today, conducting a wide-ranging campaign of economic coercion, political subversion and military threats against the People’s Republic of China. In his book Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah, Pan-Africanist and first President of Ghana, discusses how “ideological and cultural weapons in the form of intrigues, manoeuvres and slander campaigns” were employed by the Western powers during the Cold War in order to undermine the socialist countries and the newly-liberated territories of Africa, Asia and Latin America. “While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news’… A flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom.”[4] The mechanisms for such “intrigues, manoeuvres and slander campaigns” have changed little since Nkrumah’s day. British media analysts David Cromwell and David Edwards explore the concept of the propaganda blitz – “fast-moving attacks intended to inflict maximum damage in minimum time.” These media attacks are “communicated with high emotional intensity and moral outrage” and, crucially, give the appearance of enjoying consensus support among experts, academics, journalists and politicians.[5] This consensus “generates the impression that everyone knows that the claim is truthful.”[6] Such a consensus is most powerful when it includes not only right-wing ideologues but also prominent leftist commentators. “If even celebrity progressive journalists – people famous for their principled stands, and colourful socks and ties – join the denunciations, then there must be something to the claims. At this point, it becomes difficult to doubt it.” When it comes to China, many such commentators are only too happy to oblige: British columnist Owen Jones for example, writing for the Guardian, has asserted that “despite the denials of the Chinese regime, the brutal campaign against the Uighurs in the Xinjiang region is real.”[7] Jones backs his assertion up with links to two other Guardian articles, both of which rely on research provided by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) – a hawkish anti-China think tank funded by the Australian government, the US government and various multinational arms manufacturers (of which more below). That is, this self-described socialist relies on the same sources as the most extreme China hawks in Washington. Yet his public endorsement of anti-China slander, along with that of NATO-aligned commentators such as Paul Mason,[8] serves to create the impression that such slander is entirely credible, as opposed to being what it in fact is, namely yet another unhinged far-right conspiracy theory. Although the various anti-China slanders clearly lack evidentiary support, they are nonetheless powerful, persuasive and sophisticated. It requires no great skill to persuade hardened reactionaries and anti-communists to take a hard line against China, but the propaganda war is carefully crafted such that it actively taps in to progressive ideas and sentiments. The accusation of genocide is particularly potent: by accusing China of perpetrating a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, imperialist politicians and journalists are able to mobilise legitimate sympathies with Muslims and national minorities, as well as invoking righteous indignation in relation to genocide. An emotional-intellectual environment is created in which to defend China against accusations of genocide is equivalent to being a Holocaust denier. Solidarity with China thus incurs a hefty psychological, and perhaps material and physical, cost. Manufacturing ConsentEdward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 work Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media remains an authoritative and indispensable analysis of how the so-called free press works in the capitalist world. In particular, the book explores the connection between the economic interests of the ruling class and the ideas that are communicated via mass media. “The media serve, and propagandise on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.”[9] Herman and Chomsky develop a propaganda model, in which a set of informal but entrenched ‘filters’ determine what media consumers read, watch and hear. These filters include:
According to Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model, “the raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print.”[13] The resulting news output serves to “inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state.”[14] Western mainstream media coverage of China fits comfortably within this model. Almost without exception the major media operations – from Fox News to the Guardian, from the BBC to the Washington Post – present a narrative consistently hostile to China. For example, in relation to the 2019 protest movement in Hong Kong, the Western press was universal in its one-sided condemnation of the Hong Kong police and authorities, and in its effusive support for ‘pro-democracy’ protestors. Violence by the protestors – storming the parliament building, attacking buses, throwing petrol bombs, vandalising buildings and intimidating ordinary citizens – was either totally ignored or written off as the actions of a small minority, whereas the local Hong Kong government was subjected to an extraordinary level of scrutiny and condemnation. A Guardian editorial went so far as to state that “China is crushing any shred of resistance in Hong Kong, in breach of its promises to maintain the region’s freedoms”[15] – unironically citing Chris Patten, the last (unelected like all his predecessors) British governor of Hong Kong, in support of its claim. It apparently didn’t occur to the author to contrast the Hong Kong police’s incredibly restrained response to the protests with the US police’s shockingly violent repression of Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020, which saw several fatalities at the hands of the US police, compared to precisely zero at the hands of their Hong Kong counterparts.[16] No major Western news outlet seriously explored the violence of the protestors; nor did they mention the protest leaders’ extensive links with some of the most reactionary US politicians;[17] nor did they choose to investigate the role of the National Endowment for Democracy in providing financial support to the movement.[18] Meanwhile they shamelessly ignored the millions of Hong Kong residents who didn’t support the protests, who saw that “rioters and mobs were everywhere destroying public facilities, paralysing railway systems and so on but they were called ‘Freedom Fighters’ by Western countries.”[19] Conversely, what should be positive stories about China – for example in relation to poverty alleviation,[20] or its progress in the field of renewable energy,[21] or suppressing the Covid-19 pandemic[22] – are either ignored or magically transformed into anti-China stories. The announcement that China had succeeded in its goal of eliminating extreme poverty was “delivered with much bombast but few details”, and the whole program was written off as part of a cunning strategy by Xi Jinping “to cement his position as the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong”.[23] Literally millions of lives have been saved as a result of China’s dynamic Zero Covid strategy, and yet according to the New York Times, the CPC is simply trying to “use China’s success in containing the virus to prove that its top-down governance model is superior to that of liberal democracies”. While acknowledging that a policy of saving millions of lives unsurprisingly “still enjoys strong public support”, this is put down to a familiar trope that Chinese people have “limited access to information and no tools to hold the authority accountable”.[24] Veteran political scientist Michael Parenti wrote in Blackshirts and Reds about the absurdity of Western propaganda against the socialist world during the Cold War, and how refraction through the lens of anti-communism could “transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence.” He notes: “If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skilful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regimes atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.”[25] Parenti’s observation certainly resonates with the contemporary media consensus against China. For such a media consensus to be coincidental would be a statistical impossibility. It represents precisely the current political agenda of the “privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state” (that is, the imperialist ruling classes); it aims precisely to manufacture consent for the New Cold War on China. XinjiangNowhere is the propaganda model more visible than in relation to the mainstream media coverage of Xinjiang. The accusation that China is committing a genocide (or “cultural genocide”) in Xinjiang has been repeated so frequently as to become almost an accepted truth in large parts of the West. Although the accusation is backed up with precious little evidence, the story has become a global media sensation and has led to the introduction of an escalating program of sanctions, plus a “diplomatic boycott” by various imperialist countries of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022.[26] Furthermore, it has filtered into popular consciousness, fuelled by sophisticated social media campaigns. It has become the quintessential example of a propaganda blitz. As noted above, and consistent with Edwards and Cromwell’s description, this propaganda blitz is consistent across the corporate media’s conservative-liberal spectrum, from Fox News[27] to the New York Times,[28] from the Daily Mail[29] to the Guardian.[30] Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model explains how such a story picks up steam: “For stories that are useful, the process will get under way with a series of government leaks, press conferences, white papers, etc… If the other major media like the story, they will follow it up with their own versions, and the matter quickly becomes newsworthy by familiarity. If the articles are written in an assured and convincing style, are subject to no criticisms or alternative interpretations in the mass media, and command support by authority figures, the propaganda themes quickly become established as true even without real evidence. This tends to close out dissenting views even more comprehensively, as they would now conflict with an already established popular belief. This in turn opens up further opportunities for still more inflated claims, as these can be made without fear of serious repercussions.”[31] The mass media is supplemented by much of the radical left in the imperialist heartlands. Popular progressive news outlet Democracy Now has parroted every lurid accusation against China in relation to Xinjiang.[32] Jacobin in 2021 gave a sympathetic interview to Sean R Roberts, author of The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Campaign Against Xinjiang’s Muslims, in which he claims that “what we see right now in the Uyghur region is a lot like the process of cultural genocide elsewhere in the world from a century ago, but benefitting from high-tech forms of repression that are available now in the twenty-first century”.[33] Meanwhile Britain’s Socialist Worker claims that “up to one million Uyghurs are locked up in internment camps.”[34] Somewhat ironically, Noam Chomsky himself is not immune to the imperialist propaganda model, stating in a 2021 podcast episode that China’s actions in Xinjiang are “terrible” and “highly repressive”, and repeating the assertion (discussed at length below) that “there are a million people who have gone through reeducation camps.”[35] Meanwhile in the sphere of parliamentary politics, right and left have formed an unholy alliance in pursuit of the New Cold War on China. Besides right-wing fundamentalists such as Mike Pompeo, progressive Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been hawkish regarding Xinjiang, calling on US businesses to study an Australian Strategic Policy Initiative (ASPI) report condemning China and ensure that their companies are not connected to Uyghur forced labour. Omar said: “No American company should be profiting from the use of gulag labor, or from Uyghur prisoners who are transferred for work after their time in Xinjiang’s concentration camps.”[36] What is China accused of in Xinjiang?GenocideOf all the claims that are made in relation to China’s treatment of Uyghur people, the most serious is that it is perpetrating a genocide. One of the last acts of Trump’s State Department was, in January 2021, to declare that the Chinese government is “committing genocide and crimes against humanity through its wide-scale repression of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in its northwestern region of Xinjiang, including in its use of internment camps and forced sterilisation.”[37] The Biden administration doubled down on this slander, claiming in its 2021 annual human rights report that “genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang”, and that the components of this genocide included “the arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians; forced sterilisation, coerced abortions, and more restrictive application of China’s birth control policies; rape; torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained; forced labor; and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement.”[38] Canada’s House of Commons quickly followed suit,[39] as did the French National Assembly.[40] The European Parliament adopted a somewhat less adventurist resolution claiming that Muslims in Xinjiang were at “serious risk of genocide.”[41] Genocide has a detailed definition under international law, which can be summarised as the purposeful destruction in whole or in part of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.[42] It is rightly considered to be one of the gravest crimes against humanity. As such, it is not the sort of accusation that should be thrown around carelessly and without evidence. And yet imperialist ideologues routinely do exactly that. As Herman and Chomsky pointed out decades ago, “genocide is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimisation in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimisation by the United States itself or allied regimes.”[43] Prominent scholar and economist Jeffrey Sachs has written in relation to the Biden administration’s accusations of genocide that “it has offered no proof, and unless it can, the State Department should withdraw the charge.” Continuing, Sachs writes that the charge of genocide should never be made lightly. “Inappropriate use of the term may escalate geopolitical and military tensions and devalue the historical memory of genocides such as the Holocaust, thereby hindering the ability to prevent future genocides. It behoves the US government to make any charge of genocide responsibly, which it has failed to do here.”[44] What is the nature of the actual genocide charge? A 2021 report by a highly dubious Washington think-tank, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy,[45] claims that the Chinese government has implemented “comprehensive state policy and practice” with “the intent to destroy the Uyghurs as a group.” The report doesn’t claim that Uyghurs are directly being killed, but that coercive birth control measures are being selectively applied such that the Uyghur population slowly dies off. However, there is no credible data to support these claims. It is the case that the birth rate has been trending downwards in Xinjiang, but the same is true for every Chinese province. Meanwhile, the Uyghur population from 2010 to 2018 increased from 10.2 million to 12.7 million, an increase of 25 percent. During the same period, the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang increased by just 2 percent.[46] Reflecting on the reasons for the marginal downturn in Uyghur birthrate, Pakistani-Canadian peace activist Omar Latif noted that the causes are “the same as elsewhere; more women acquiring higher education and participating in the workforce; less necessity for parents to have more children to take care of them in old age; urbanisation; lessening of patriarchal controls over women; increased freedom for women to practice birth control.”[47] China’s one-child policy was first implemented in 1978, at a time when China was relatively insecure about its ability to feed a large population (China has 18 percent of the global population but only around 12 percent of the world’s arable land, along with chronic water scarcity).[48] The policy was in place until 2015, and largely serves to explain the long-term decline in the birth rate in China. However, national minorities – including Uyghurs – were exempt from the policy. Indeed the Uyghur population doubled during the period the one-child policy was in force. This pattern is replicated throughout China – according to the latest census data, the population of minority groups increased over the last decade by 10.26 percent (to 125 million), while that of Han Chinese grew at by 4.93 percent (to 1.3 billion) – less than half the rate. Another data point that tends to belie the claims of a genocide in Xinjiang is that average life expectancy in the region has increased from 30 years in 1949 to 75 years today.[49] One question that the various anti-China think tanks have not addressed is: if there were a genocide taking place in Xinjiang – including the ‘slow genocide’ of discriminatory coercive birth control – would this not lead to a refugee crisis? There is certainly no evidence of such a crisis; no camps along the border with Pakistan or Kazakhstan, and so on. Repression, war, poverty and climate change have combined to produce numerous current refugee crises in Africa, Asia and the Middle East; it is highly implausible that a full-blown genocide in Western China would not lead to any such issue. A Time article in 2021 confirmed that, in spite of both the Trump and Biden administrations’ outspoken criticisms of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the US had not admitted a single Uyghur refugee in the preceding 12 months.[50] Given that, in the same time period, Biden offered a refuge to people “fleeing Hong Kong crackdown”,[51] it’s unimaginable that the US would not offer refugee status to thousands of Xinjiang Uyghurs fleeing persecution – if they existed. Lamenting the fact that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ‘Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’, issued in August 2022, fails to even mention the charge of genocide, Yale Law School academic Nicholas Bequelin lets slip that there simply is not a credible evidentiary basis for such a charge. “For the crime of genocide, you need to have several elements. One of the elements is intent. You need to be able to demonstrate, and to demonstrate convincingly, before a court, that the state had the intent of committing genocide. That’s the first thing. The second is that you have a number of elements for the crime of genocide – which is that it has to be a systematic, widespread extermination, or attempted extermination, of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group. There are elements that are present in the Chinese case, but it’s not clear that the intent is to lead to the extermination of a particular ethnic group.”[52] The handful of reports on which the genocide charge is based do not provide anything like compelling evidence. What they put forward are some highly selective birth rate statistics, and the testimony of a small number of Uyghur exiles who claim to have been subjected to abuse. Working on the basis of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, China can by no means be considered as guilty of genocide. An aside: at the time of writing, the total number of deaths caused by Covid-19 in Xinjiang is three.[53] It is very difficult to believe that state forces conducting a genocide against a given ethnic group would fail to take advantage of a pandemic in support of their project; indeed that the regional health authorities would go to significant lengths to prevent the people of this group dying from Covid-19. Cultural genocideA somewhat more sophisticated accusation against the Chinese government is that is perpetrating a cultural genocide in Xinjiang – not wiping out the Uyghur population as such but the Uyghur identity, Uyghur traditions, Uyghur beliefs. Although cultural genocide is not defined under international law, it apparently refers to “the elimination of a group’s identity, through measures such as forcibly transferring children away from their families, restricting the use of a national language, banning cultural activities, or destroying schools, religious institutions, or memory sites.”[54] While the accusation seems less extreme than the accusation of physical genocide, the claims of cultural genocide are nonetheless similarly lacking in evidentiary basis. For example, all schools in Xinjiang teach both Standard Chinese and one minority language, most often Uyghur.[55] Chinese banknotes have five languages on them: Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and Zhuang.[56] Thousands of books, newspapers and magazines are printed in the Uyghur language. What’s more, there are over 25,000 mosques in Xinjiang – three times the number there were in 1980, and one of the highest number of mosques per capita in the world (almost ten times as many as in the United States).[57] Turkish scholar Adnan Akfirat observes that the Quran and numerous other key Islamic texts are readily available and have been translated into the Chinese, Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz languages. Further, “the Xinjiang Islamic Institute, headquartered in Urumqi, has eight branches in other cities such as Kashgar, Hotan and Ili, and there are ten theological schools in the region, including a Xinjiang Islamic School. These schools enrol 3,000 new students each year.”[58] Akfirat states that Muslims in Xinjiang freely engage in their religious rituals, including prayer, fasting, pilgrimages, and celebrating Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. These details have been confirmed by a steady stream of diplomats, officials and journalists that have visited Xinjiang in recent years. A diplomatic delegation in March 2021 included Pakistani Ambassador to China, Moin ul Haque, who explicitly rejected the accusations of religious persecution: “The notable and important thing is that there’s freedom of religion in China and it’s enshrined in the Constitution of China, which is a very important part… People in Xinjiang are enjoying their lives, their culture, their deep traditions, and most importantly, their religion.”[59] Fariz Mehdawi, Palestinian Ambassador to China, commented that there were a huge number of mosques and one could see there was respect for religious and ethnic traditions, saying: “You know, the number of mosques, if you have to calculate it all, it’s something like 2,000 inhabitants for one mosque. This ratio we don’t have it in our country. It’s not available anywhere.” It was put to Mehdawi that he could simply have been shown a Potemkin village. He replied: “Are we diplomats so naive that we could be manoeuvred to believe anything … Or are we part of a conspiracy, that we would justify something against what we had seen? I think this is not respectful… There is no conspiracy here, there is facts. And the fact of the matter is that China is rising and developing everywhere, including Xinjiang. Since some people are not happy about that, they would like to stop the rise of China by any means.”[60] Looking at different countries’ voting records at the UN in relation to human rights in China, it’s striking that the only Muslim-majority country that consistently votes in support of US-led slanders is NATO member Albania. During the 50th session of the Human Rights Council in 2022, members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation overwhelmingly co-sponsored the statement supporting China’s position (by 37 to 1). This pattern is mirrored in Africa (33 to 2) and Asia (20 to 2).[61] It is very difficult to believe that the vast majority of Muslim-majority countries, and countries of the Global South, would stay silent in the face of a cultural genocide committed against Uyghur Muslims in China. Given the lack of evidence for a cultural genocide; the data and reports concerning the protection of minority cultures in China; the large number of diplomatic missions to Xinjiang; and the near-consensus voice of Muslim-majority countries defending China against slander; the accusations of cultural genocide appear to be wholly insupportable. Concentration camps The specific charge most frequently levelled against the authorities in Xinjiang is that they operate prison camps where Uyghur Muslims are locked up in huge numbers – the most oft-mentioned figure is one million, out of a population of 13 million.[62] The alleged purpose of these prison camps is to eradicate Uyghur Muslim culture and to brainwash people into supporting the government – to “breed vengeful feelings and erase Uyghur identity”.[63] The “million Uyghurs in concentration camps” story is a quintessential propaganda blitz. Through sheer repetition across the Western media, along with support from the US State Department, this startling headline has acquired the force of a widely-accepted truth. And yet the sources for this “news” are so spurious as to be laughable. A 2018 China File article attempting to locate the source of this one million figure identifies four key pieces of research, by the German anthropologist Adrian Zenz; Washington DC-based non-profit Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD); the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI); and US-based media outlet Radio Free Asia (RFA). A new player entered the game in 2021: the Newlines Institute, a think tank based at the Fairfax University of America, which issued the “first independent report” to authoritatively determine that the Chinese government has violated the UN convention on genocide. It is worthwhile considering whether these individuals and organisations most responsible for these high-profile accusations against China have any vested interests or ulterior motives. Adrian Zenz was the first person to claim that a million Uyghurs were being held in concentration camps.[64] He is also something of a trailblazer in relation to allegations of forced labour and forced sterilisation. His relentless work slandering China has received an appreciative audience at CNN,[65] the Guardian,[66] Democracy Now,[67] and elsewhere. It is difficult to find a news report about China’s alleged use of concentration camps that does not reference Zenz’s work. A hagiographic report in the Wall Street Journal highlights the outsized role of this one individual in the construction of a global anti-China slander machine: “Research by a born-again Christian anthropologist working alone from a cramped desk … thrust China and the West into one of their biggest clashes over human rights in decades. Doggedly hunting down data in obscure corners of the Chinese internet, Adrian Zenz revealed a security buildup in China’s remote Xinjiang region and illuminated the mass detention and policing of Turkic Muslims that followed. His research showed how China spent billions of dollars building internment camps and high-tech surveillance networks in Xinjiang, and recruited police officers to run them.”[68] Casually hinting at Zenz’s ideological orientation, the article notes that “his faith pushes him forward” and that his previous intellectual activity includes co-authoring “a book re-examining biblical end-times.”[69] He “feels very clearly led by God” to issue anti-China slanders. In other words, Zenz is not simply a politically-neutral data scientist with a passion for human rights. Rather he’s a hardened anti-communist and Christian end-timer; he is employed as the Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation,[70] an arch-conservative organisation set up by the United States Congress in 1993 in order to memorialise “the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims in an unprecedented imperial holocaust” such that “so evil a tyranny” as state socialism would ever again be able to “terrorise the world.”[71] His book Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation, he urges the subjection of unruly children to “scriptural spanking” and describes homosexuality as “one of the four empires of the beast.”[72] Given Zenz’s ideological affiliations and intellectual record, it would not be unreasonable to demand that his research be subjected to serious scrutiny. In reality, however, his evaluations regarding Xinjiang have been uncritically accepted and widely amplified by the Western media and political machine. Another organisation lending its support to the accusation that “more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Turkic Muslim minorities have disappeared into a vast network of ‘re-education camps’” is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).[73] ASPI is a think-tank set up by the Australian government, and has become highly influential in terms of moulding the Australian public‘s attitude towards China. Its reports about Xinjiang are among the most-cited sources on the topic. ASPI describes itself as “an independent, non-partisan think tank”, but its core funding comes from the Australian government, with substantial contributions from the US Department of Defense and State Department (earmarked specifically for “Xinjiang human rights” work), as well as the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and others.[74] In summary, ASPI is knee-deep in the business of Cold War and the militarisation of the Pacific, and there is a clear conflict of interest when it comes to discussing human rights in China. The most recent “non-partisan think tank” to amplify anti-China propaganda in relation to Xinjiang is the Newlines Institute, described by Jeffrey Sachs as “a project of a tiny Virginia-based university with 153 students, eight full-time faculty, and an apparently conservative policy agenda.”[75] The Newlines report – “the first independent expert application of the 1948 Genocide Convention to the ongoing treatment of the Uyghurs in China”[76] – received extensive coverage in the Western media as the smoking gun proving China’s culpability in relation to concentration camps, forced labour and cultural genocide. The report was put together by the institute’s Uyghur Scholars Working Group, an illustrious group led by none other than Adrian Zenz. Canadian journalist Ajit Singh, in a detailed investigation for The Grayzone, points out that “the leadership of Newlines Institute includes former US State Department officials, US military advisors, intelligence professionals who previously worked for the ‘shadow CIA’ private spying firm, Stratfor, and a collection of interventionist ideologues.” Further, the institute’s founder and president is Ahmed Alwani, otherwise best known for having served on the advisory board for the US military’s Africa Command.[77] The BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post and others all treated the Newlines report as if it represented the very pinnacle of academic rigour, without mentioning even in passing its connection with the US military-industrial complex. It is abundantly clear that the popular narrative about Xinjiang prison camps rests on highly dubious sources. The evidence offered up by Zenz, ASPI and the like is a handful of individual testimonies along with a small selection of photographs and satellite pictures purporting to show prison camps. These pictures do appear to prove that some prisons exist, but this is not a terribly interesting or unusual phenomenon. China has some prisons, although its incarceration rate – 121 per 100,000 people – is less than 20 percent that of the US.[78] Several commentators have pointed out that it is not easy to hide a million prisoners – approximately the population of Dallas. As Omar Latif comments: “Imagine the number of buildings and the infrastructure required to house and service that number of prisoners! With satellite cameras able to read a vehicle license plate, one would think the US would be able to show those prisons and prisoners in great detail.”[79] Perhaps the most iconic image purporting to show a Xinjiang prison camp is that of a group of men in a prison yard wearing blue boiler suits. This turns out to be a picture of a talk given at Luopu County Reform and Correction Centre, in April 2017.[80] The Luopu Centre is an ordinary prison, with ordinary criminals, but it has been “fallaciously used to prove, show, or insinuate either concentration camps or slave labor of Xinjiang people”.[81] DeradicalisationThe Chinese authorities claim that what Western human rights groups are calling concentration camps are in fact vocational education centres designed to address the problem of religious extremism and violent separatism. They combine classes on sociology and ethics – focused on trying to undermine ideas of religious hatred – with classes providing marketable skills such that the attendees can find jobs and improve their standard of living. The basic idea is to improve people’s life prospects so that they are less likely to be radicalised by fundamentalist sectarian groups. The threat from such groups is real enough. The biggest among them is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which up until October 2020 was classified by the US State Department as a terrorist group.[82] It has sent thousands of its militia to fight alongside Daesh and assorted al-Qaeda groups in Syria and Afghanistan.[83] Between the mid 1990s and mid 2010s, there was a sequence of terrorist attacks in China carried out by Uyghur separatist outfits – in shopping centres, train stations and bus stations as well as Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds of civilians. This corresponds with an increase in terrorism across Middle East and Central Asia, in no small measure related to the West’s proxy wars against progressive or nationalist states in the region. Like any population, the Chinese people demand the right to safety and security; as such, terrorism is not a problem China’s government can simply ignore. The vocational centres were therefore set up as part of a holistic anti-terrorism campaign aimed at increasing educational attainment and economic prosperity, thereby addressing the disaffection that is known to breed radicalisation. Educational methods have been combined with a focus on improving living conditions: in the five years from 2014 to 2019, per capita disposable income increased by an average annual rate of 9.1 percent.[84] China’s approach to tackling terrorism is based on the measures advocated in United Nations’ Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, which “calls for a comprehensive approach encompassing not only essential security-based counter-terrorism measures but also systematic preventive steps to address the underlying conditions that drive individuals to radicalise and join violent extremist groups.”[85] Thus China is actively attempting to operate within the framework of international law and best practices. This approach compares rather favourably with, for example, the US’s operation of a torture camp for suspected terrorists, not to mention innocent victims snatched more or less at random, in Guantánamo Bay – itself an illegally-occupied area of Cuba.[86] Without conducting extensive investigations on the ground, it is obviously not possible to verify the Chinese authorities’ claims about how the vocational education centres run. What we can say with certainty is that the accusations about genocide, cultural genocide, religious oppression and concentration camps are not backed by anything approximating sufficient proof. Meanwhile the most prominent accusers all, without exception, have a known axe to grind against China. None of the foregoing is meant to deny that there are any problems in Xinjiang; that Uyghur people are never mistreated or ethnically profiled by the police; or that there has never been any coercion involved in the deradicalisation program. But these problems – which are well-understood in China and which the government is actively addressing – are in no way unique to China. Certainly any discrimination against Uyghurs pales in comparison with, for example, the treatment of African-Americans and indigenous peoples in the United States, or the treatment of Dalits, Adivasis and numerous other minorities in India. Why Xinjiang?The perverse propaganda campaign around Xinjiang serves multiple purposes. It is a component of the US-led New Cold War – a project of hybrid warfare designed to slow down China’s rise, to maintain US hegemony and prevent the emergence of a multipolar world.[87] It also connects to a century-old pattern of vicious anti-communism that aims to disrupt the natural solidarity the working classes in the capitalist countries, and oppressed people generally, might otherwise feel towards the socialist world. Lastly, Xinjiang’s geostrategic importance means that it has a special role in any overall strategy of weakening China. Bordering Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Xinjiang constitutes a key point along the major east-west land routes of the Belt and Road Initiative. It connects China to Central Asia and therefore also to the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and Europe. Xinjiang is China’s largest natural gas-producing region, is the centre of China’s solar and wind power generation, and is crucially important for China’s security. British political scientist Jude Woodward noted that Xinjiang’s location puts it at the heart of China’s blossoming trade relationship with Central Asia – “part of the world where the confrontation between China’s win-win geo-economics and the US’s old style geopolitics are playing themselves out with the starkest contrast… China has proposed that Central Asia should be at the crossroads of a reimagined Eurasia connected by oil and gas pipelines, high speed trains and continuous carriageways, with stability underpinned by growth and fuelled by trade. China offers a vision of a world turned on its axis, placing not the ‘middle kingdom’ but the entire Asian continent at the centre of the next phase of human development.”[88] In order to disrupt this progress, the US has resorted to destabilisation and demonisation. The maximum goal is to lay the ground for a pseudo-independent Xinjiang which would in reality be a US client state and a powerful foothold for further aggression against China and other states in the region. The minimum, and far more likely, goal is to disrupt the value chains connecting China to the Eurasian land mass, thereby slowing down the Belt and Road Initiative and damaging China’s trade relationships with Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. As an aside, the West’s stoking of instability in Xinjiang and its imposition of sanctions expose the shallowness of its commitment to the fight against climate breakdown. In 2021, Xinjiang generated 2.48 trillion kilowatts of electricity from renewable sources (primarily solar and wind) – nearly 30 percent of China’s total electricity consumption.[89] Around half of the world’s supply of polysilicon, an essential component in solar panels, comes from Xinjiang.[90] If the US and its allies were serious about pursuing carbon neutrality and preventing an ecological catastrophe, they would be working closely with China to develop supply chains and transmission capacity for renewable energy. China’s investment in solar and wind power technology has already led to a dramatic reduction of prices around the world.[91] Instead, they are imposing blanket sanctions on China and attempting to cut Xinjiang out of clean energy supply chains.[92] This indicates rather clearly that the imperialist ruling classes are prioritising their anti-China propaganda war over preventing climate breakdown. It seems the slogan “better dead than red” lives on in the 21st century. Refuse consentMalcolm X, the African-American civil rights leader and revolutionary, famously said that “if you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”[93] China is rising. Its life expectancy has now overtaken that of the US.[94] Extreme poverty is a thing of the past, and people increasingly live well. China has established itself as a leading force in the fight against climate breakdown; in the fight to save humanity from pandemics; and in the movement towards a more democratic, multipolar system of international relations. It is “now the standard-bearer of the global socialist movement,” in the words of Xi Jinping.[95] The US and its allies are pursuing a New Cold War with the aim of weakening China, limiting its rise, and ultimately overturning the Chinese Revolution and ending the rule of the Communist Party. The barrage of anti-China propaganda provides the marketing for this New Cold War. The Western ruling classes want Chinese socialism to be associated with discrimination, authoritarianism and prison camps; not with ending poverty and saving the planet. Readers in the imperialist countries should consider whether they want to have their consent manufactured in this way; whether they share the foreign policy objectives of their ruling classes. What would the likely repercussions be if the US and its allies were successful in their aims and the People’s Republic of China suffered the same fate as the Soviet Union? For one thing, the consequences in terms of the climate crisis would potentially be catastrophic. A capitalist government in China would have neither the will nor the resources to continue the projects of renewable energy, afforestation and conservation at the level they are currently being pursued. A pandemic on the scale of Covid-19 would be utterly devastating, resulting in several million – rather than a few thousand – Chinese deaths. Meanwhile malaria, cholera and other diseases could all be expected to make a comeback, given the perfect storm of poverty, overcrowding, rising temperatures and sea levels – ‘Goldilocks conditions’ for pathogens. Poverty alleviation and common prosperity would be relegated to history. Hundreds of millions would be pushed into destitution by a ruling class that had no reason to prioritise their interests. Homelessness, violent crime and drug addiction would once again become commonplace, as they did in Russia following the Soviet collapse. Furthermore a capitalist China, desperate to earn the friendship and protection of the US, would end its international role promoting multipolarity and opposing imperialism. We must resolutely oppose and expose anti-China slander, which aims to break the bonds of solidarity within the global working class and all those opposed to imperialism; which seeks to malign and undermine socialism; and which serves to perpetuate a moribund capitalist system that everyday generates more poverty, more misery, more oppression, more violence, more environmental destruction, and that increasingly threatens the very survival of humanity. References[1] Boer, Roland. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners. Singapore: Springer, 2021, p11 [2] Chen, W 2021, US should correct wrongs by ending propaganda war against China, China Daily, accessed 27 August 2022, <https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202110/15/WS6168b867a310cdd39bc6f0b4.html>. [3] Discussed in detail in Martinez, C 2021, The left must resolutely oppose the US-led New Cold War on China, Invent the Future, accessed 27 August 2022, <https://invent-the-future.org/2021/06/the-left-must-resolutely-oppose-the-us-led-new-cold-war-on-china/>. [4] Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Reprinted. London: Panaf, 2004. [5] Edwards, David, and David Cromwell. Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality. London: Pluto Press, 2018, p1 [6] ibid, p8 [7] Jones, O 2021, The right condemns China over its Uighur abuses. The left must do so too, The Guardian, accessed 27 August 2022, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/21/right-condemns-china-over-its-uighur-abuses-left-must-do>. 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[93] Malcolm X with Dick Gregory At the Audubon Ballroom (Dec. 13, 1964), Malcolm X Files, accessed 6 October 2022, <http://malcolmxfiles.blogspot.com/2013/07/at-audubon-ballroom-dec-13-1964.html>. [94] Hui, M 2022, China’s life expectancy is now higher than that of the US, Quartz, accessed 6 October 2022, <https://qz.com/china-life-expectancy-exceeds-us-1849483265>. [95] Zheng, W 2022, Xi Jinping article gives insight into China’s direction ahead of Communist Party congress, SCMP, accessed 6 October 2022, <https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3192677/xi-article-gives-insight-chinas-direction-ahead-party-congress>. AuthorCarlos Martinez is the author of The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse, co-founder of No Cold War and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China. He also runs the blog Invent the Future. Republished from Friends of Socialist China. Archives October 2022 10/13/2022 Thousands gather for human chain around parliament against extradition of Julian Assange By: Ceren SagirRead NowA section of the human chained around Parliament on Saturday Photo: Ceren Sagir THOUSANDS of campaigners joined MPs over the weekend to form a human chain around Parliament and protest against the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. A chain of protesters snaked along Westminster Bridge on Saturday, along South Bank and back around Lambeth bridge completely surrounding the Houses of Parliament. Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn linked arms with fellow MP Claudia Webbe and former Unite leader Len McCluskey in the chain. He said: “I would say to MPs — of any party — you’re there to represent democracy and rights. “That’s what you sign up for. If Julian Assange is extradited, it will set forth fear among other journalists of doing anything to expose truth. “It becomes a self-censorship of journalists all around the world.” Campaigner and event organiser John Rees told the Star: “What this event says to Parliament and the courts is that people just don’t believe the story here. “They don’t believe that a journalist should be enduring his fourth year in Belmarsh, they don’t think that there should be this kind of assault on the freedom of press, they want the extradition halted and they want Julian Assange freed.” Mr Rees called on MPs to “get on the case” of the new government and the Home Secretary. He said: “[Suella Braverman’s] not exactly stable in her job. In fact, the entire government is not stable in their jobs. “The people who are doing this to Julian Assange are quite politically weak, they are vulnerable to political pressure, and it’s up to the MPs to play their part in making that pressure effective. “We’ve done [our part]. Thousands and thousands turned out today — MPs should do the same.” Former shadow chancellor and NUJ parliamentary group founding member John McDonnell said: “What we have here is a journalist who has reported on some of the worst war crimes that we have seen in recent history. “And as a result of that, he has been imprisoned and is now with the threat of extradition.” Mr McDonnell, who has visited Mr Assange in prison, said he fears his life is at risk. He said: “We are standing up, not just for Julian Assange, but for journalists across the globe to have the right to report freely and to write the truth. “If we do not secure the freedom of Julian Assange, no journalist is safe from this type of political threat.” AuthorThis article was republished from Morning Star. Archives October 2022 Are the contradictions described by Marx in the capitalist mode of production only overcome by the establishment of socialism as a higher form of production? Many Marxists have always believed that the answer to this question is "yes." Does this mean, then, that socialism is inevitable? This, I think, is a different question entirely, and the answer to this question is " no." Many critics of Marxism have, however, confused these two questions and have maintained that Marxists hold that socialism is "inevitable." There are certainly quotes to be found in Marx, Engels and Lenin which could lead one to that conclusion. In the Communist Manifesto, for example, we are told "the victory of the proletariat" is "inevitable." Also, in the preface to the first German edition of Capital Marx says, regarding the laws of capitalist production, that they work "with iron necessity towards inevitable results." And Capitalism may inevitably break down-but the question is - is socialism the inevitable result of the capitalist breakdown? Engels, in his 1886 preface to the English edition of Capital, wrote, "at least in Europe, England is the only country where the inevitable social revolution might be affected entirely by peaceful and legal means." So we have here mention of inevitable victory, inevitable results, and an inevitable social revolution. Lenin also seems to subscribe to the notion of inevitability. In an article he wrote in 1914 on Karl Marx for The Granat Encyclopedia (Collected Works. vol. 21) he wrote that Marx deduces the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society into socialist society wholly and exclusively from the economic law of the development of contemporary society. And further. "The proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie... inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards the conquest of political power by the proletariat ('the dictatorship of the proletariat'). This same notion of "Inevitability" pops up six years later in 1920 (Left Wing' Communism an Infantile Disorder, Collected Works vol. 31) where Lenin writes apropos of the Russian Revolution; "At the present moment in history, however, it is the Russian model that reveals to all countries something - and something highly significant - of their near and inevitable future." Ninety-three years down the road, and in a new century, if not a new historical epoch, we may be permitted to have a different outlook on what the "near future" bodes and perhaps doubt the accuracy of Lenin's words. Ninety-three years is a long time considered from the point of view of an individual, but from an historical perspective we may, nevertheless, still be waiting for that "near future." But what we are interested in determining is if we are talking about an "inevitable" future. In an attempt to answer this question, I will rely on the speculations of Istvan Meszaros, an Anglo-Hungarian philosopher, who deals with this issue in his Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition. Within the system of capitalism there are inevitabilities it makes sense to talk about. For example, as capital expands globally it seeks out the cheapest possible labor market and attempts to reduce as much as possible the necessary labor time it takes to create its products. These actions result in a redundancy of workers - an increase in the numbers of the unemployed, because of unnecessary workers. Thus the growth of a surplus population Is an inevitable result (all things being equal) of the inner workings of the capitalist system. The system also leads to monopoly and imperial rivalries and war. This is just how the system works. It is not this type of inevitability we are seeking to determine. Capitalism may inevitably break down - but the question is - is socialism the inevitable result of the capitalist breakdown? It is one thing to say that socialism is the inevitable logical solution to the problems of capitalism, but quite another to hold that it is the historically inevitable solution - that is, that it will really come about. Meszaros quotes the late Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs who wrote “The objective economic evolution could do no more than create the position of the proletariat in the production process. It was this position that determined its point of view. But the objective evolution could only give the proletariat the opportunity and the necessity to change society. Any transformation can only come about as the product of the free-action of the proletariat itself." The workers have the opportunity to move towards socialism - but there is no guarantee they will take it. Meszaros also quotes Marx's remark from his famous preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. In this work Marx maintains that humanity only confronts the task it can solve (or must solve), "when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the process of formation." But to "confront" a task is not the same as "solving" it. According to Meszaros this means that Marx realized that socialism is not inevitable. He concludes that deducing from this preface, as some have, the "vulgar-fatalist view that Marx was maintaining that socialism was therefore inevitable "is nothing short of preposterous." Meszaros claims that the best Marxists can hope for is to analyze economic reality and state the case for the workers being the only agency or social force capable of "eradicating capital." But, "if that agency proves to be unequal to the task there can be no hope for the socialist project." Therefore, the use of the term "inevitability" with respect to the establishment of socialism by Marx, Engels and Lenin should, I conclude, be seen as hyperbole, or more as an optimistic assessment of the future than as an absolute claim of an historically necessary outcome. There is always the possibility put forth in the Communist Manifesto of "the common ruin of the contending classes." AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism. Archives October 2022 10/11/2022 The Most Dangerous Situation That Humanity Has Ever Faced: The Fortieth Newsletter (2022) By: Vijay PrashadRead NowLeón Ferrari (Argentina), Untitled (Sermon of the Blood), 1962. Dear friends, Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Since 1947, the Doomsday Clock has measured the likelihood of a human-made catastrophe, namely to warn the world against the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who attend to this clock, originally set the device at seven minutes to midnight, with midnight being, essentially, the end of the world. The farthest that the clock has been from midnight was in 1991, when it was set at 17 minutes from midnight. The closest to midnight that the clock has been is now. Since 2020, the clock has sat at ‘doom’s doorstep’ – 100 seconds from midnight. The motivation for this alarming setting was the unilateral withdrawal by the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019. This is the ‘most dangerous situation that humanity has faced’, said former President of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson. To contribute to the dialogue about this ‘most dangerous situation’, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has launched a new series of texts called Studies on Contemporary Dilemmas. These dilemmas include the pressing questions of the climate and environmental catastrophe, the wastefulness of military spending and the perils of warfare, and the deepening sensibility of despair and individualism. The solutions to these dilemmas are not beyond our capacity to resolve; our planet contains the resources needed to address them. We do not lack in ideas or resources; the problem is that we lack in political power. Elements of the policies needed in the world have been sitting in amber inside the United Nations Charter for decades, ignored by those who hoard power, privilege, and property. Our Studies on Contemporary Dilemmas are intended to stimulate debates around the broad issues of our times with the hope that these debates will galvanise social forces to prevent the impending doomsday. Takano Aya (Japan), Dun Huang’s Room, 2006. The first study in this series, produced in collaboration with Monthly Review and No Cold War, is called The United States Is Waging a New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective. The essays in this text provide a close assessment of the policy of the United States, which aims to maintain its control over the international system, including through its pursuit of nuclear primacy and willingness to launch even a ‘limited nuclear war’ to attain its ends. A simulation of nuclear war conducted by Princeton University in 2020 showed that if even one tactical strike is made by any nuclear power, it could result in the immediate death of 91.5 million people; ‘deaths from nuclear fallout and other long-term effects would significantly increase this estimate’, wrote the researchers. In our study, John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, writes: ‘just as the full destructive implications of climate change threatening the very existence of humanity are in large part denied by the powers that be, so are the full planetary effects of nuclear war, which scientific research about nuclear winter tells us will effectively annihilate the population of every continent on Earth’. Our calls for peace, therefore, must be as powerful as our calls to save the planet from the climate catastrophe. Dia Al-Azzawi (Iraq), Ijlal li Iraq (‘Homage to Iraq’), 1981. In the aftermath of the US nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the World Peace Council issued the Stockholm Appeal: We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples. We demand strict international control to enforce this measure. Within two weeks, 1.5 million people had signed the appeal. In 1947, the hibakusha (the survivors of the nuclear attack) and Hiroshima’s then mayor Shinzo Hamai initiated Hiroshima Day, which has since become an annual ceremony on 6 August. The Peace Bell at Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum and Park rings at 8:15 am, the exact moment when the bomb exploded, and paper cranes and paper lanterns float on the water near Genbaku Dome, the only building left standing from the carnage. The importance and vitality of Hiroshima Day has now withered. It is imperative to revive such a day as part of the process of rescuing the collective life. Our second study in this series began to take shape a month into the war in Ukraine, when Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research began a conversation with Jeremy Corbyn, a member of the UK Parliament and former leader of the UK Labour Party, and his team at the Peace and Justice Project. We felt that there was an urgent need to stimulate the peace movement with a discussion about the various catastrophes that had begun to ripple outward from Ukraine, including galloping inflation that is out of control. We invited a range of writers from Brazil to the United Kingdom, from South Africa to India, to reflect on the immediate crisis through the vital concept of nonalignment, which was born in the anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century and institutionalised in the Nonaligned Movement (1961). These essays – produced in collaboration with Morning Star, Globetrotter, and the Peace and Justice Project – have now been published as Looking Over the Horizon at Nonalignment and Peace, Studies on Contemporary Dilemmas no. 2. In his contribution to the booklet, Corbyn reflects on the idea of peace for our times: Some say to discuss peace at a time of war is a sign of some kind of weakness; the opposite is true. It is the bravery of peace protesters around the world that stopped some governments from being involved in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, or any of the dozens of other conflicts going on. Such a clear statement for a world of peace is the antidote we need to address what Mary Robinson has warned us is the ‘most dangerous situation that humanity has ever faced’. At the side lines of the United Nations General Assembly, 19 member states of the Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter of the United Nations met to discuss the need to strengthen multilateralism to ‘forge collective, inclusive, and effective solutions to the common challenges and threats of the 21st century’. Collective and common: these need to be our keywords. Less division, more collectivity; less building for war and more building for peace. The language of the Group of Friends is in the lineage of the Nonaligned Movement and the African-Asian Conference, held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. As the leaders of the new post-colonial states met in Bandung to talk about nonalignment and peace, the Malaysian socialist poet Usman Awang (1929–2001) wrote Bunga Popi (‘Poppies’), a poem about the ugliness of war: From blood, from pus that rots in the soil, Warmly, Vijay AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including "The Darker Nations" and "The Poorer Nations." His latest book is "Washington Bullets," with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. This article was republished from Tricontinental. Archives October 2022 If Lula wins reelection, he must not only rebuild the social investments that Bolsonaro destroyed, but also restore trust in a nation damaged by fascism’s sophisticated propaganda machine. Brazil’s first round of elections, held on October 2, yielded a major victory for the man who held the presidency from 2003 to 2010, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Winning 48 percent of the vote in a multicandidate race, Lula now heads to a runoff against incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, who won 43 percent. It’s the first chapter of a dramatic comeback for a leader who was once hailed as the epitome of Latin America’s resurgent left, who was then imprisoned on corruption charges by a politicized judiciary, eventually was released, and has now emerged onto the political scene in a very different nation than the one he once led. A founding member of Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT), Lula ran for president several times before winning in 2002. A year later I recall sitting in a huge stadium in Porto Alegre for the second annual World Social Forum (WSF), getting ready alongside tens of thousands of people to hear the new president speak. The WSF was an organized response to the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, where world leaders annually hobnob with corporate executives to explore capitalist solutions to the problems created by capitalism. In 2003, the crowds that had gathered in a Porto Alegre stadium to explore alternatives to capitalism greeted Lula with coordinated roars of “olè olè olè Lula!” It seemed at that moment that everything could change for the better, and that, in the words of Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who also addressed the WSF, “another world is not only possible, she is on her way.” Indeed, Lula’s rewriting of Brazil’s economic priorities emphasizing benefits for low-income communities was a welcome change in a world seduced by neoliberalism. He went on to win reelection in 2006. In subsequent years, Lula moved closer toward the political center. Maria Luisa Mendonça, director of Brazil’s Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, says, “I don’t think Lula is this radical left-wing person” today. In an interview she explains, “many social movements had criticisms of the Workers’ Party before because they thought [the party] could move to make structural changes in Brazil.” Still, she maintains that Lula’s changes to Brazil were profound. “The amount of investment that the Workers’ Party did, in education for example, [was] unprecedented.” She asserts that “they really made concrete improvements in the lives of people.” Fast-forward to 2018 and Bolsonaro swept into power, glorifying the ugliest aspects of bigoted conservatism and making them central to his rule, and decimating Lula’s legacy of economic investments in the poor. Business executives in the U.S. celebrated his win, excited at the prospect of a deregulated economy in which they could invest, and from which they could extract wealth. Today Latin America’s largest democracy has been shattered by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Bolsonaro’s fascist and conspiracy-fueled leadership elevated snake oil cures above commonsense scientific mitigation. The Amazon rainforest has suffered the ravages of unfettered deforestation, and its Indigenous inhabitants have been exploited beyond measure. Bizarrely, some corporate media pundits in the United States place equal blame on Bolsonaro and Lula for Brazil’s worrisome status quo. Arick Wierson writes on NBCNews.com, “these pressing problems are the result of the policies and actions of Brazilian leadership over the past two decades—inextricably linked to both the Lula and Bolsonaro administrations.” The Economist advises Lula to “move to the center” in order to win the election, implying that his social and economic agenda is too leftist. A PT spokesperson told the Financial Times that if Lula wins a third term in the October 30 runoff election, he plans to focus on the “popular economy,” meaning that “the Brazilian state will have to fulfill a strong agenda in inducing economic development,” which would be achieved with “jobs, social programs, and the presence of the state.” It speaks to the severe conservative skewing of the world political spectrum that a leader like Lula is still considered left of center. According to Mendonça, “I don’t think that investing in education and health care, in job creation, is a radical idea.” She views Lula as “a moderate politician,” and says that now, “after a very disastrous administration of Bolsonaro, Lula again is the most popular politician in the country.” Most Brazilians appear to have tired of Bolsonarismo. A Reuters poll found that Lula now enjoys 51 percent support to Bolsonaro’s 43 percent ahead of the October 30 runoff race. But, just as the 2016 U.S. presidential race yielded a win for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, the candidate who had been widely expected to win, there is no guarantee that Lula will prevail. And Bolsonaro, who has been dubbed the “Tropical Trump,” has worryingly taken a page out of the disgraced American leader’s 2020 election playbook in claiming ahead of the first round of elections that Lula loyalists plan to steal the election. “Bolsonaro has been threatening not to accept the result of the election,” says Mendonça. “His discourse is very similar to Trump’s discourse.” Just as Trump—in spite of damning and overwhelming evidence of his unfitness for office—remains disconcertingly popular among a significant minority of Americans, Bolsonaro enjoys a stubborn level of allegiance within Brazil. He has reshaped the political landscape so deeply that the lines between reality and propaganda remain blurred. “We had years and years of attacks against the Workers’ Party,” says Mendonça. She asks us to “imagine if all mainstream media [in Brazil] were like Fox News.” Additionally, Bolsonaro has built what she calls “a huge infrastructure to spread fake news on social media.” And, like Trump, Bolsonaro enjoys support from evangelical churches. “The challenge is how you resist that type of message,” worries Mendonça. She dismisses claims that Brazil is politically polarized as too simplistic, saying that it “doesn’t really explain that there was this orchestrated effort to attack democracy in Brazil.” Putting Brazil into an international context, she sees Bolsonaro as “part of this global far-right movement that uses those types of mechanisms to manipulate public opinion and to discredit democracy.” The nation and the world that a resurgent Lula faces are ones that require far more sophisticated opposition and organized resistance than when he last held office more than a decade ago. Ultimately, the challenges facing Lula, the PT, and Brazilians in general are the same ones that we all face: how do we prioritize people’s needs over corporate greed, and how do we elevate the rights of human beings, of women, people of color, Indigenous communities, LGBTQ individuals, and the earth’s environment, in the face of a rising fascism that deploys organized disinformation so effectively? AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives October 2022 10/11/2022 After All the Pomp and Pageantry for Queen Elizabeth II: The Apology That Never Came By: Prabir PurkayasthaRead NowLed by the royals, British colonialists committed every form of cruelty imaginable—those who suffered under the empire and fought it are angry over the homage paid to Elizabeth II. How should we remember Queen Elizabeth II and her 70 years on the British throne? It’s perhaps better to consider after the media parade about her funeral is in the rearview mirror. A number of people have reacted to the glorification of her rule, pointing out the British Royals’ direct connection to the slave trade, Britain’s colonial massacres, mass famines and its loot from the colonies. Britain’s wealth--$45 trillion at current prices from India alone—was built on the blood and sweat of people who lost their land and homes and are today poor countries. Lest we forget, the slave trade was a monopoly of the British throne: first, as the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa in 1660, later converted to the Royal African Company of England. The battle over “free trade” fought by British merchant capital was against this highly lucrative Royal monopoly so that they could participate in it as well: enslaving people in Africa and selling them to plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean. According to western legends of the European Age of Discovery, co-terminus with Enlightenment, was what started it all in the 16th century. Explorers such as Vasco de Gama, Columbus, and Magellan went across the world, discovering new lands. The Enlightenment led to the development of reason and science, the basis of the industrial revolution in England. The Industrial Revolution then reached Europe and the United States, creating the difference between the wealthy West and the poverty-stricken rest. Slavery, genocide, land expropriation from “natives” and colonial loot do not enter this sanitized picture of the development of capitalism. Or, if mentioned, only as marginal to the larger story of the rise of the west. Actual history is quite different. Chronologically, the Industrial Revolution takes place in the second half of the 18th century. The 16th-17th centuries is when a small handful of western countries reached the Americas, followed by the genocide of its indigenous population and enslaving of the rest. The 16th-17th centuries also see the rise of the slave trade from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas. It destroys African society and its economy, what Walter Rodney calls How Europe Undeveloped Africa. The plantation economy--based on slavery in the Caribbean and Continental America—created large-scale commodity production and global markets. While sugar, the product of the plantations, was the first global commodity, it was followed by tobacco, coffee and coca, and later cotton. While the plantation economy provided commodities for the world market, let us not forget that slaves were still the most important “commodity”. The slave trade was the major source of European—British, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese—capital. Gerald Horne writes, “The enslaved, a peculiar form of capital encased in labor, represented simultaneously the barbarism of the emerging capitalism, along with its productive force” (The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, Monthly Review, April 1, 2018). Marx characterized it as so-called Primitive Accumulation and as “expropriation,” not accumulation. Capital from the beginning was based on expropriation—robbery, plunder and enslaving of people by the use of force; there was no accumulation in this process. As Marx writes, capital was born “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” The British Royals played a key role in this history of slavery and the so-called primitive accumulation. Britain was a second-class power at the beginning of the 17th century. Britain’s transformation was initially based on the slave trade and, later, the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Its ships and traders emerged as the major power in the slave trade and, by the 1680s, held three-fourths of this “market” in human beings. Out of this, the Royal African Company, owned by the British Crown, held a 90% share: the charge for Britain’s domination of the slave trade was led by the British Royals. Interestingly, the slogan of “free trade,” under which slogan the World Trade Organization (WTO) was created, was the British merchant capital wanting the abolition of the Royal Monopoly over slave trade. It was, in other words, the freedom of capital to enslave human beings and trade in them, free of the royal monopoly. It is this capital, created out of slave trade and outright piracy and loot, that funded the industrial revolution. While slavery was finally abolished, in Britain it was not the slaves but the slave owners that were paid compensation for losing their “property.” The amount paid in 1833 was 40% of its national budget, and since it was paid by borrowings, the UK citizens paid off this “loan” only in 2015. For the people of India, there is another part to the story. As the ex-slaves refused to work on the plantations they had served as slaves, they were replaced by indentured labor from India. To go back to the British Royalty. The Crown’s property and portfolio investments are currently worth 28 billion pounds, making King Charles III one of the richest persons in the UK. Charles III personal property itself is more than a billion pounds. Even by today’s standards of obscene personal wealth, these are big numbers, particularly as its income is virtually tax-free. The royals are also exempt from death duties. In the three hundred years of the history of British colonialism, brutal wars, genocide, slavery, and expropriation were carried out in its name and under its leadership. After the industrial revolution, Britain wanted only raw materials from its colonies and not any industrial products: the slogan was “not even a nail from the colonies.” All trade from the colonies to other countries had to pass through Britain and pay taxes there before being re-exported. The complement of the industrial revolution in Britain was de-industrializing its colonies, confining them to be a producer of raw materials and agricultural products. Why are we talking about Britain’s colonial past on the occasion of the death of Queen Elizabeth II? After all, she only saw the last 70 years when the British colonial empire was liquidated. This is not simply about the past, but that neither the British Crown nor its rulers have ever expressed any guilt over the brutality of its empire, and its foundation based on slavery and genocide. No apology for the empire’s gory history: not even for the massacres and mass incarcerations that took place. In Jallianawala Bagh, which Elizabeth II visited in 1997, she called the massacre a “distressing episode” and a “difficult episode”; not even a simple “We are sorry.” Prince Phillip even questioned the number of martyrs. How do we reconcile the anger that people who suffered from Britain’s colonial empire feel about their leaders making a bee-line to pay homage to the Queen? Does it not shame the memory of those who laid down their lives in the freedom struggle against the British Crown that India lowered the national flag to half-mast to honor the Queen? One can argue that this happened long before Elizabeth II took over the Crown, and we cannot hold her personally responsible for Britain’s colonial history. We should: she as Queen represented the British state: it is not Elizabeth, the person that people want an apology from, but the titular head of the British state. That is why Mukoma Wa Ngugi, the son of Kenya’s world-renowned writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o said, “If the queen had apologized for slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism and urged the crown to offer reparations for the millions of lives taken in her/their names, then perhaps I would do the human thing and feel bad,” he wrote. “As a Kenyan, I feel nothing. This theater is absurd.” Mukoma Ngugi was referring to the Mau Mau revolt for land and freedom in which thousands of Kenyans were massacred, and 1.5 million were held in brutal concentration camps. This was 1952-1960; Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952, very much in her lifetime! AuthorPrabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement. This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter. Archives October 2022 10/10/2022 The Shadowy Network of Right-Wing Money and Influence Behind Moms for Liberty By: Maurice CunninghamRead NowThe group, which claims to be about “parent rights,” has ties to the January 6 insurrection and is expected to provide “foot soldiers” for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Moms for Liberty (M4L) claims the organization was started by moms. But it is hard to believe that three mothers in Florida could start up a grassroots group on January 1, 2021, and then, within a matter of weeks and months, wind up on Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson’s show, Glenn Beck, and Fox News. However, there is a shadowy network of money and influence in right-wing political circles that could arrange that easily. Among M4L’s financial supporters and profile boosters are some of the most influential organizations, media operations, and wealthy donors in the vast theater of the right-wing propaganda machine. And it would be a mistake to believe M4L’s agenda is exclusively about maternal concerns over what children learn in schools. Instead, most of the organization’s purported success seems to be in helping to advance a much broader right-wing political agenda through electoral politics. In its short history, M4L has already been credited with helping to engineer a “massive victory,” according to Salon, and ensuring a string of wins for a number of Republican candidates in school board elections across Florida. Looking ahead at the upcoming elections, M4L is expected to provide the “foot soldiers” for the reelection bid of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and many also expect to see the M4L soldiering for DeSantis in the 2024 presidential race. The Rise of Moms for Liberty Moms for Liberty was inaugurated on January 1, 2021, and filed as an Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation—a “social welfare” group structure that allows it substantial leeway to participate in politics, including taking unlimited sums of dark money and dispensing those dollars in support of favored candidates. M4L was born into a full-scale right-wing media rollout. As Olivia Little of Media Matters reported in July 2022, M4L debuted on The Rush Limbaugh Show in January 2021—right out of the cradle. M4L representatives have since appeared “on Fox News at least 16 times and Steve Bannon’s War Room at least 14 times,” according to Little. As her reporting and my own investigation in April 2021 indicated, M4L initially had practically no members or state infrastructure. But appearances on Fox and fawning treatment in right-wing outlets like Breitbart News and Glenn Beck propelled its growth. By June 11, 2021, M4L threw a fundraiser called “Fearless: An Evening with Megyn Kelly,” the former Fox News celebrity. The highest-priced ticket of $20,000 for the “presenting sponsor” included 20 tickets to a meet-and-greet along with a photo with Megyn Kelly and came with many other benefits. There were other offers that included lesser benefits for donors making contributions of $15,000 or $10,000 and the general admission was $50. On January 14 and 15, 2022, M4L co-hosted the “American Dream Conference” in Franklin, Tennessee, featuring musicians like Larry Gatlin and John Rich. Weekend tickets went for $100. The keynote speaker was former President Donald Trump’s Cabinet secretary Ben Carson. M4L’s grandest event thus far has been its national summit, which took place between July 14 and 17, 2022 in Tampa, Florida. The national summit featured speeches by DeSantis, Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis, Carson, former Florida Governor and current U.S. Senator Rick Scott, and Trump’s former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who advocated for the abolition of the department she had led, according to Florida Phoenix. The highest-priced sponsorship for the national summit was a presenting sponsor that had a $50,000 price tag. That sold out, but eager moms could purchase and become sponsors by paying anything between $2,500 and $30,000. M4L isn’t just in the conference business. It has an actively managed social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. M4L has registered three federal political action committees, one of them is a Super PAC, and also has a registered Florida political action committee. According to an IRS search, 79 501(c)(4) nonprofits have registered across the country as Moms for Liberty affiliates. ‘We Do Sell a Lot of T-Shirts'Operating such sophisticated undertakings takes a lot of money, contacts, organizational capacity, resources, and expertise. Yet when a reporter for the 74 asked who is funding M4L, co-founder of the organization Tina Descovich said, “We do sell a lot of T-shirts,” adding that money received from these sales was the “biggest funding source” for the organization. In a July 20, 2022 C-Span appearance, Descovich added that the organization received some additional funding for the national summit in the $2,500-$5,000 range from conservative organizations, but stuck with the narrative about most of the funding coming from T-shirt sales. During the interview, she also suggested that M4L was working on its Form 990; these charitable tax returns that eventually become public, are expected to help provide financial information about the organization. But the forms eventually submitted convey little information and provide almost no details about donors. In April 2022, Newsweek reported co-founders Descovich and Tiffany Justice admitting, “They recently got some bigger donations from more prominent sources, though they’re happy to keep them a secret for as long as they’re legally able to [do] so.” Nonetheless, some information about the funders has emerged. In June 2022, Moms for Liberty Florida’s political action committee took a $50,000 contribution from Publix heiress Julie Fancelli, Politico reported. Fancelli provided $300,000 in funding to the January 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally, according to Daily Mail, a contribution brokered by Infowars radio host Alex Jones. Moms for Liberty and the Council for National PolicyIn Descovich’s C-Span appearance, a caller asked her whether M4L was getting funding from the Council for National Policy (CNP) or from Charles Koch. Koch and CNP are two of the most prominent funding networks behind various right-wing causes. Descovich denied receiving any direct Koch money and professed to be unfamiliar with CNP. But there is substantial evidence that CNP has been vital to M4L’s rise. “The Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 by a group of televangelists, Western oligarchs, and Republican strategists to capitalize on Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory the previous year,” wrote journalist and author Anne Nelson, for the Washington Spectator. “Operating from the shadows, its members, who would number some 400, spent the next four decades courting, buying, and bullying fellow Republicans, gradually achieving what was in effect a leveraged buyout of the GOP.” In her 2019 book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, Nelson exposed the CNP as combining vast sums of conservative money, Christian nationalists and their communications networks, and activist groups like the National Rifle Association into a powerful organization. Among the CNP’s wish list of policy preferences, according to Nelson, is taking down public education and replacing it with privatized schools that practice religious-based indoctrination. M4L’s connections to the CNP and its many network nodes are numerous. Betsy DeVos, who spoke at the M4L’s national summit, and members of her family, have “supported” CNP, according to Rolling Stone. A 2014 CNP membership directory that the Southern Poverty Law Center obtained and posted online in 2016 does not list Betsy DeVos but does include her mother, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, as a member of the CNP board of governors and among its “Gold Circle Members.” The other co-host of the American Dream conference M4L helped throw, the Be the People Project, was founded by Carol Swain, a CNP member, according to a recent CNP membership directory Documented posted in 2022. Other connections between M4L and CNP run through the Leadership Institute (LI), an educational foundation. LI is an affiliate of CNP, and LI president Morton Blackwell is a member and founder of CNP, according to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). According to the institute website, LI “prepares conservatives for success in politics, government, and the news media,” and it “has trained more than 250,000 students.” LI was the largest donor for M4L’s 2022 national summit and the sole known $50,000 presenting sponsor, and attendees of the summit could join LI campaign trainings, WUSF Public Media reported. Other connections M4L has to CNP have come through the organization’s many associations with other organizations and individuals in the conservative movement. The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America were sponsors of M4L’s national summit. The Heritage Foundation was also a “meeting sponsor” of CNP’s 2022 annual conference, according to an agenda obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy. A description of a session led by the Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts stated that the foundation has been “a core partner of the Council for National Policy from the start, and Heritage president Kevin Roberts is on the CNP board of governors.” In 2022 the Heritage Foundation awarded its annual Henry Salvatori Prize for American Citizenship to M4L. M4L leaders presented at Heritage forums in 2021 and 2022. The organization also features materials from both Heritage and LI on its website in addition to recommending the book, The Making of America by the late W. Cleon Skousen, a former CNP member, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Another thread on the web linking M4L to CNP connects to Turning Point USA (TPUSA), according to the CMD’s Sourcewatch website. Turning Point USA, according to Sourcewatch, is a conservative youth and student group funded by right-wing donors that “has faced numerous allegations of racial discrimination.” It has operated the Professor Watchlist to expose what it considers to be radically left college and university professors and now operates a School Board Watchlist to do the same for local school boards. TPUSA was an M4L National Summit participant, NBC News reported, and its president Charlie Kirk is a CNP member, according to Wikipedia. M4L’s frequent ally Parents Defending Education, a $5,000 bronze sponsor of the national summit, is headed by veteran Koch operative Nicole Neily. Charles Koch, while not a CNP member, has had plenty of cross-influence with CNP and recently increased his clout within the group, according to Anne Nelson. It is not clear when the ties between M4L and CNP and LI started, but in July 2022, still early in M4L’s formation, Dylan Craig, digital marketing coordinator for LI, wrote on the institute’s website that “[M4L] got advice from my boss, Morton Blackwell, and used Leadership Institute trainings and sheer determination to quickly become a national force.” Craig also boasted about the role LI had in running the M4L national summit: “I’m proud to say Leadership Institute partnered with Moms for Liberty and supported the Summit as the top sponsor, official photographers/videographers, trainers, and all-around support. LI held training for attendees on Candidate Vetting, Grassroots Lobbying, Communications, Running for Office, Strategic Research, Vote Goals, and four hours of Media Training. Now, 150 more conservatives are trained to advance their principles in their local communities.” Marie Rogerson, who serves on the M4L executive board and is M4L’s director of program development, is a graduate of LI, according to an interview with her on the institute’s website. M4L’s Connections to January 6Perhaps unsurprisingly, M4L’s many connections in the right-wing cosmos lead to white nationalists, election denialists, and those who took part in the January 6 insurrection. First, there is the $50,000 gift M4L got from Julie Fancelli, who funded the rally that preceded the storming of the Capitol. But there are other ties. Alexis Spiegelman, who is, according to her LinkedIn page, M4L’s Florida legislative chair and Sarasota County chapter chair, entered into an arrangement with conservative political consultant Roger Stone, one of the organizers of the “Stop the Steal” event that preceded the riot at the Capitol, to pressure Senator Rick Scott to challenge Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, according to Florida Politics. CNP member Charlie Kirk bragged on Twitter about sending 80 buses to the January 6 rally, according to Daily Dot. He later deleted the tweet. “As early as February 2020, the CNP and its advisers were already anticipating various strategies to overturn the results of the election in the event of the loss of either the popular vote or the Electoral College, or both,” Anne Nelson reported for the Washington Spectator. A chief organizer of the “Stop the Steal” campaign that brought Trump proponents to the Capitol on January 6, Ali Alexander, was “sometimes known as ‘Ali Akbar,’ the name he was listed under as a member of the CNP [in] 2017 and 2018 rosters,” according to Nelson. After the election results confirmed a Biden win, CNP operatives gathered at a special meeting from November 12 to 14 to organize how to overturn the results in Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, according to Nelson. “On December 10, CNP’s Conservative Action Project published a letter stating, ‘There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election,’” Nelson reported, and “CNP affiliates took action on a local level,” to call on Trump supporters to descend on Washington, D.C. “The CNP’s affiliates were by no means acting alone in attempting to overturn the results of the election,” Nelson conceded, but, “What is irrefutable is that members of the CNP and their circle exerted their influence and manipulated their followers to support Trump’s lies about the stolen election and his effort to derail the electoral process.” Foot Soldiers for DeSantis An even closer connection between M4L and January 6 runs through Christian Ziegler, husband of M4L co-founder Bridget Ziegler and vice chair of the Florida Republican Party. Christian Ziegler was at the Capitol on January 6, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported, although he said he watched the scene from afar and, “didn’t see anyone breaking stuff.” The Zieglers also provide a primary conduit of influence linking to Florida Governor DeSantis and his strong-arming of the state’s education policies. Bridget Ziegler, who was the third co-founder of M4L, stepped down from her leadership position in the organization in February 2021, but spoke at the national summit and remains active. She also helped write, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Florida’s Parents’ Bills of Rights, aka the Don’t Say Gay law, that bans instruction of LGBTQ topics in grades K-3 in schools, gives parents more leeway in filing lawsuits against public school curriculum, and requires schools to divulge to parents when their children use mental health services, according to the Washington Post. Bridget Ziegler won reelection to the Sarasota County School Board in 2022. Vice News reported that she and another M4L-supported candidate were photographed at an election night celebration with two members of the extremist Proud Boys, “one of whom posed flashing the OK sign, a known white-power dog whistle.” Her political action committee received a $10,000 donation from Caroline Wetherington, who is a CNP member and co-founder of Women for Trump, according to CMD. Wetherington attended the January 6 rally in Washington, according to CBS Los Angeles, and heads a group called Defend Florida “which helped coordinate an April rally featuring Michael Flynn and Roger Stone that attracted white nationalists, [and] claims to have 5,571 affidavits alleging ‘voting irregularities’ across Florida,” according to Axios Tampa Bay. Shortly after her school board election victory, Bridget Ziegler was hired by the Leadership Institute to be the director of the organization’s school board programs, SRQ20 reported. She will retain her position on the Sarasota board, according to that source. Christian Ziegler gave away the politics of M4L to the Washington Post suggesting, as the Post put it, that he expected M4L to “become foot soldiers” for DeSantis’s reelection campaign. “I have been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party,” he said, “and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. … But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me.” Governor DeSantis has made “clear” that M4L—an operation that was not even in existence until he was halfway through his first term--“is a key part of [his] strategy” to replace nonpartisan local school board members with advocates of a decidedly right-wing political agenda, reported TCPalm. Making endorsements in local school board races is unusual for a traditionally nonpartisan office, but at M4L’s national summit, his wife Casey DeSantis told the audience that the governor’s endorsement could elevate the name recognition critical to an electoral success of M4L-backed candidates “and [open] up potential resources to help that candidate run a successful campaign,” according to Florida Politics. In turn, DeSantis has made a concerted effort to advance prominent members of M4L and promote the interests of the organization. He appointed to the Florida Board of Education Esther Byrd, a “Moms for Liberty member known for making social media posts supportive of the Capitol insurrection and being photographed on a boat flying the QAnon flag,” according to the 74. Politico reported, DeSantis “handpicked to amplify his criticism of critical race theory” M4L Miami chapter chair Eulalia Maria Jimenez who has “espoused views aligned with QAnon conspiracy theories and appears to support those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.” When PayPal suspended M4L from its services, Florida’s Voice reported that DeSantis came to the organization’s rescue, threatening to punish “‘woke’ banking.” PayPal unfroze M4L’s account. When M4L presented DeSantis with an award at its national summit, co-founder Justice remarked that she had spoken to mothers across the country who “cannot wait to vote for him for president,” Tallahassee Democrat reported. Given the M4L’s 501(c)(4) dark money operations have already been established across the nation, including in Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s reasonable to believe these operations will be part of DeSantis’s plan to run for president. One of CNP’s ‘Obedient Franchises'The Council for National Policy, and much of the conservative movement it has so successfully commandeered, has made it unmistakable that it wants to destroy public education and privatize schooling. CNP has designs to educate children outside of public schools in order to reorient education toward Christian nationalism and transform the culture of the nation. To do this, CNP knows it must break the teachers’ unions. Moms for Liberty may prove to be a useful agent for furthering that goal. Following an article by the conservative National Review blaming teachers for falling test scores during the COVID-19 crisis, M4L blasted an email, which Our Schools has a copy of, to media organizations amplifying the message, and M4L leaders Justice and Descovich have adopted right-wing bumper stickers for “parents to fire the unions,” according to the email, and have taken to calling teachers and their unions “the K-12 cartel,” a term straight out of the conservative lexicon authored by the movement’s most prominent advocacy organizations. The “moms” who founded and lead M4L have a mission, but they aren’t really founders of anything new. Instead, like many other right-wing conservative operations, they are agents of those at CNP with money, religious fervor, and political connections. To borrow a term from Anne Nelson’s book, Moms for Liberty appears to be one of CNP’s “obedient franchises.” AuthorMaurice Cunningham PhD, JD, retired in 2021 as an associate professor of political science at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and is the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization. This article was produced by Our Schools. Archives October 2022 10/10/2022 Why It’s Essential for Working People to Vote in the November 8 Election By: Tom ConwayRead Now Al Polk will bid his wife goodbye on October 11 and set out for New Hampshire with boots, gloves, heavy coat, windshield scraper, and shovel in the trunk of his Chevy Impala. As the weather grows colder over the next few weeks, the fight for America’s future will also reach a turning point. And there’s no way the 79-year-old will let brutal temperatures, ice, or snowstorms impede his efforts to turn out Granite State voters for the crucial November 8 election. Polk, a Massachusetts resident and member of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR), is among thousands of union activists across the country committed to knocking on doors, handing out leaflets, and organizing rallies to support the pro-worker candidates needed to continue moving America forward the next two years. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe in it,” declared Polk, who served as president of his United Steelworkers (USW) local at Cleveland Twist Drill in Mansfield, Massachusetts, for 20 years and then worked on the union staff before retiring in 2015. Polk has volunteered for election work in New Hampshire for decades. He’s lived in hotels for weeks at a stretch, just as he intends to do again this year. He’s endured drenching rain as well as early winter snowstorms forcing him to shovel out his car before long days of door-knocking. He’s talked with thousands of fellow union members, securing untold votes with his respectful doorstep advocacy, and handed out thousands of flyers at USW-represented workplaces like the Manchester Water Works, New Hampshire Ball Bearings in Laconia, and 3M in Tilton. And while every election has its pivotal issues—the Democrats’ tireless work on invigorating the economy and growing the middle class proved decisive factors in 2020, for example—Polk cannot remember another time when voters in New Hampshire and throughout the country faced so stark a choice as they do this year. “Keep the forward movement or stand still,” explained Polk, who expects to log many miles traveling around the state to highlight the string of accomplishments that pro-worker officials and their union allies racked up since President Joe Biden took office just 20 months ago. That list of accomplishments includes the American Rescue Plan, which provided the child care assistance and other support that families needed to survive the COVID-19 pandemic while also saving the retirements of 1.3 million Americans enrolled in faltering multiemployer pension plans. It includes the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, already contributing to record job growth by rebuilding roads, bridges, waterways, energy systems, and communications networks with union labor and products. And it includes the CHIPS and Science Act, intended to spur production of crucial supply chains, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which imposes a $35 cap on insulin costs for Medicare recipients, fuels development of the clean economy, and forces the wealthiest Americans to begin paying their fair share in taxes. These bills set the stage for a manufacturing renaissance after years of industrial decline, Polk said, adding he often “felt like a mortician” over the years while assisting families devastated by mill and plant closures. Electing more pro-worker officials would pave the way for still more prosperity. Passage of the Protecting the right to Organize (PRO) Act, for example, would eliminate barriers to union organizing and help more Americans secure family-sustaining wages, safe working conditions, and a voice on the job. As he knocks on doors, Polk will emphasize the support that Democratic officials like New Hampshire’s Sen. Maggie Hassan and U.S. Reps. Chris Pappas and Annie Kuster, all seeking reelection this year, provided for worker-friendly bills. But he’ll also point out the important role that more than a dozen Republicans in the New Hampshire legislature played in defeating anti-worker legislation in the state last year. These Republicans, several of them union members themselves, joined forces with Democrats to kill a falsely named right-to-work bill that would have undermined unions and weakened workers’ voices. “It’s very simple,” Polk said of the USW’s approach to candidates. “If they support our issues, we support them. If they don’t support our issues, we don’t support them.” “It’s bipartisan,” agreed John Gros, president of USW Local 13-447 in Westwego, Louisiana, citing his members’ close ties with city Councilman Johnny Nobles, a member of the GOP. “We endorse Republicans, just like we endorse Democrats. They just have to support working men and women.” If union-endorsed officials of either party fail to honor their promises to working people, he said, he’ll work to defeat them in the next election. Getting out the vote for pro-worker candidates is essential in countering the billions that corporations spend to influence elections, observed Gros, noting that big business courts officials who will let them cut corners on safety, violate labor rights, and suppress workers’ voices. During the last administration, pro-corporate appointees at the National Labor Relations Board turned the agency against the very workers it was created to serve. But Biden, elected largely with the support of USW members and other union workers, quickly put the agency back on course. “We can’t throw a lot of money at folks because we don’t have a lot of money,” said Gros, who also serves as vice president of the Louisiana AFL-CIO and the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO. “We have votes. We have boots on the ground.” “That’s why it’s so important that we get out there,” he said of union voters. “Every vote does make a difference.” AuthorTom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW). This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute. Archives October 2022 The Italian general election was a historic win for the far right. A coalition of the three major parties won 44 percent of the vote, enough in Italy’s byzantine electoral system to form a clear majority in both houses of parliament. Most importantly, it was driven by the meteoric rise of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party rooted in the post-Mussolini fascist tradition, which secured 26 percent of the vote, making it the single largest party in parliament. For many, the ascension to power of a fascist party in the centre of Europe seemed unthinkable. But decades of grinding economic crisis, state-sponsored racism and the discrediting of parties of the neoliberal centre have created a dangerous situation of far-right advance. With Europe on the brink of yet another recession, the prospect of further descent into authoritarianism and barbarism is alarming. If you listen to the capitalist press and politicians, however, you would think that there’s nothing to worry about. A headline in the Australian exhorts: “Relax, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers aren’t fascist”. The Australian Financial Review carried the line, “Victory to Italian right is no lurch into extremism”. This is despite Meloni’s pledge to institute a naval blockade to stop refugee ships, roll back abortion and LGBTI rights and dismantle social welfare. Speaking to an Italian journalist at the Venice Film Festival, US former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even praised Meloni: “The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing”. It’s remarkable to speak of “breaking with the past” as Mussolini-nostalgists return to power in the birthplace of fascism. A statement from Lorenzo Codogno, a former director-general of the Italian Treasury, reveals the real reason for establishment nonchalance in the face of fascism. “They want to be perceived as a party that you can do business with and can govern the country.” Business has taken a look at this coalition of far-right racists and fascists, and decided it’s a government they can deal with, potentially making a great deal of money. Aided by a wave of apologetics from the media, Meloni has attempted to sanitise her image to present a respectable face. During the election campaign, she reassured voters that her party had “handed fascism over to history for decades now”. But Meloni has maintained a commitment to fascist politics throughout her life. At the age of 15, she joined MSI (Italian Social Movement), the party founded by leading fascists who survived the fall of Mussolini’s regime in 1943 and wanted to work for its return. Along with a series of other former MSI leaders, Meloni founded Fratelli d’Italia in 2012 as the latest iteration of this project. In her autobiography, I am Giorgia, she espouses the “great replacement theory”, claiming that the left is attempting to destroy Western civilisation by flooding the continent with African and Middle Eastern migrants and undermining traditional family structures. In local government, Brothers politicians have passed legislation making it harder for migrants to access social housing, and proposed laws that would make it compulsory to bury aborted fetuses in cemeteries. Meloni will rule in coalition with the Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, who as interior minister in a previous government blocked the entry of NGO ships carrying rescued refugees to Italian shores, and Silvio Berlusconi, the infamously corrupt and venal media magnate whose Forza Italia was once the leading light of the populist right. While the far right has been advancing in Europe since the 2008 global financial crisis, Meloni’s victory is a significant milestone. It’s the first time a party with neo-fascist roots has led a government in a major European economy. This gives a boost to the rising tide of far-right politics internationally. Meloni’s victory comes in the immediate aftermath of the major win for the far-right Sweden Democrats. She has been a vocal supporter of the Spanish Vox Party and Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian government in Hungary. Both Meloni and Orbán were guests of honour at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the most important gathering of the American right. Meloni’s victory was assured by the craven support that every party of the political mainstream gives to unpopular and brutal neoliberal policies, which have created massive poverty and youth unemployment and savaged living standards. The 25 September election was triggered by the collapse of the Draghi government, an unelected technocratic cabinet headed by a former European Central Bank president to oversee further cuts to social spending. Every major party from the centrist Democratic Party to the Lega participated in this “national unity” government. Meloni’s group was the only significant force that remained outside of the coalition. As the government slowly but inevitably collapsed, the Brothers gained credibility. The high level of abstention in the election was another important factor in Meloni’s success. The rise of the right can be put down to widespread revulsion at the political mainstream, rather than a popular endorsement of Meloni’s program. Fewer than 64 percent of the eligible population voted, the lowest turnout in history and down from an average of 90 percent in the post-WWII period. Meloni increased her vote largely by winning voters from the other right-wing parties. Despite a history of shallow anti-establishment rhetoric, a hallmark of the far right, Meloni will likely continue Draghi’s economic agenda. Meloni has also reassured the capitalist class that her government will support NATO. Internal divisions could emerge within the coalition over the war in Ukraine—Salvini’s Lega has ties to Italian capitalists with heavy investments in Russia, and he has questioned the continuation of sanctions. Meloni will have to balance the fragile and conflicting interests of her coalition partners with her desire to remain a reliable ally of European capital at large. What is certain is that the new right-wing coalition will intensify attacks on workers and oppressed people. It can’t be ruled out that they will attempt to curb civil and democratic rights. The Brothers have already signalled their desire for legislation to ban what they term “totalitarian” or “extremist” ideologies, by which they mean communism and Islam. The far right’s victory is a harbinger of things to come. A recent opinion piece by Edward Luce in the Financial Times noted: “Western liberalism is still skating on thin ice”, with war and looming recession in Europe, a protracted energy crisis and far-right electoral advances making for destabilising factors in world politics. The capitalists realise that in a crisis-ridden and polarised world, far-right governments may increasingly be an option for defending their power and privilege. They think that they are playing a clever game by normalising the new government in Italy. They believe that they can keep the fascists under their thumb, use them to absorb discontent at unpopular austerity measures and advance their economic agenda. History tells us that fascists like Meloni, who are inspired by the monstrous dictatorships of the 1920s and ’30s, may harbour even darker aspirations for the future. AuthorThis article was republished from Red Flag. Archives October 2022 10/7/2022 Faulty Shotspotter gun crime surveillance system doesn’t meet needs of Detroit’s people By: Sammie LewisRead NowTop left: A Shotspotter detector installed on top of a streetlamp in Chicago sends signals to monitors at police headquarters, right. Detroit council is considering spending $7 million of COVID recovery funds to bring the faulty surveillance system to the Motor City. | AP photos I still remember the common occurrences of police brutality as a frontliner throughout the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. I can still feel the trauma sinking to the pit of my stomach and making my skin crawl with the tingling sensation of goosebumps when I think about it. I flashback to Aug. 22 and 23 of 2020. On this particular evening, our nonviolent group of protesters was met with the worst beatings we would encounter from the Detroit Police Department that summer. Prior to the violence, we had occupied an intersection, blowing bubbles, reading books, and dancing in moments of radical love and joy. For that, we received broken bones, wounds that required stitches, and chemical injuries that would burn in the sunlight the following day when some of us, sleep-deprived, offered jail support for those arrested and paraded in the Detroit Detention Center yard like zoo animals. I still remember my arm peeling like a sunburn, even after washing it four times. I recently reflected on videos from that night of excessive force and heard again the sounds of pepper spray, people being struck with batons, screams, and panting. We had run for our lives as DPD aimed tear gas canisters at our heads. In the footage, you can see the intersection fill with red and white clouds of tear gas, and the riot line attacking, throwing us to the ground, aggressively making arrests, and going after those who had their backs turned. All this while we chanted, “We don’t see no riot here, why are you in riot gear?” Most of all, in the videos you can feel the absolute terror.
Many Detroiters participating in the public comment demanded that councilmembers reject the proposal, arguing Shotspotter—which has a faulty record in other cities that have bought it—will not actually make the community safer. Grassroot organizers instead emphasized the need to divest from the police and reinvest in the communities by giving us the resources we have continuously asked for in previous City Council meetings. We have repeatedly expressed the need for affordable housing, better infrastructure, and many other basic rights as we battle high rates of inflation and a seemingly never-ending pandemic. Instead of hearing us and responding to our needs, however, the Council preys on our fear and grief, as many members in this city have lost a loved one to gun violence. The volatile, fear-based marketing strategy has been pushed from the very top—by President Joe Biden as he met with Duggan to discuss the crime in the city. The mayor’s job is not to defend the Biden administration; his job is to do right by the people of Detroit, which he often fails to do. In addition, City Council seems to more frequently represent Duggan and his violent police force than they do actual Detroiters. Public commenters pleaded for help as they shared stories, reliving their trauma, but our leaders continuously fail us. Many of us are in agreement that if our representatives were interested in lowering crime rates, they would give resources and money back to the people who need it, not create more opportunities for crime by failing to provide for the people they supposedly serve. Instead, City Council wants to fund Shotspotter, a resource many in the community view as a reactionary, racist, and classist hyper-surveillance tool that will not make anyone safer. What it will do is give the Detroit Police Department another opportunity to harass, brutalize, and terrorize marginalized communities. Those of us opposing Shotspotter still find empathy for people supporting it, as these are often small business owners or those mourning someone they lost to gun violence. We sympathize with the need to feel safe, but are we really protecting our communities by creating a stronger police presence, when the police have guns as well? If the police investigate a neighborhood where Shotspotter detected a loud sound, how can we trust them to respond with caution and care to the people of that community after witnessing how they aggressively responded to us, protesters blowing bubbles? As people who love our community, we want to see a decrease in violent crimes, which is why we must constantly reiterate the need to take care of one another by making sure we simply have the things we need, a responsibility that is meant for our leaders. As we are let down time after time, one thing should be clear: The community should have control over the budget and police, and perhaps then we would be able to provide better means of public safety. The Detroit Police budget is already more than $330 million annually; they do not need more hypermilitarized toys or money, especially when there is a strong likelihood of increased violence from an already brutal police force. One commenter in a public consultation session pointed out how the Detroit Police Department has increased racism, false arrests, and the brutalization of Black and Brown people. Another shared their experience growing up undocumented in the city and how they learned to fear law enforcement from a young age. Many Detroiters expressed their love and care for their community and argued that over-policing and hyper-surveilling will not improve public safety or prevent crime, but rather they would be detrimental to the public and a violation of privacy. Some cities have dropped Shotspotter after encountering issues with the overpriced system. Chicago’s Inspector General has reported on problems with the system’s effectiveness, methodology, the impact it has on marginalized communities, and the ways in which law enforcement responds to its detection alerts. Chicago saw an increase in stop-and-frisk incidents following the adoption of the system, mostly targeting people of color. Shotspotter detects other sounds beyond gunshots, such as car backfires and fireworks, which trigger the deployment of officers in response to plenty of false alarms. Shotspotter data has also been used as evidence against defendants facing criminal charges, despite these false alarms and lack of data proving the effectiveness of the device. The lack of conclusive data backs up the concerns many Detroiters have brought before City Council. As COVID-19 continues to take lives, the people of our community are struggling to survive not only the virus, but rent increases, grocery store price hikes, high gas prices, and the other consequences of rising inflation. The American Rescue Plan Act is intended to support people through funding public health and economic recovery from the pandemic; it seems abundantly clear that funding Shotspotter would be a waste of funds that belong to the people. We want to see less violent crimes, but again, providing people the things they need—like housing, jobs with good wages, and healthcare—would be the truest form of crime prevention. We need to tackle these issues at the root, which means spending money in ways we haven’t before. The police do not need more, especially when there is no improvement in their work, but we the people need proper resources, funding, and systemic change. Detroiters came to City Council with facts, questions, and concerns about the functionality and accuracy of the detection technology. We demand that City Council spends the ARPA funds in accordance with the purposes of the law, to benefit the people who have been suffering since 2020 and even well before that. We demand that City Council votes no on funding Shotspotter, not only with the $7 million ARPA contract but altogether with any other funds as well.
When I open up my radical imagination, I do not envision my city being neglected by the people in charge or destroyed by the same police who have referred to beating protesters as feeling like they were “at Disneyland.” Instead, I see affordable food, housing, and healthcare, including mental health resources, fixed-up homes, working streetlights, recreation centers, fair wages, and job opportunities, more funding for our public school system, better infrastructure, and that same radical love and joy we had back on Aug. 22, 2020, before the police instilled fear and terror in our movement for Black Lives and for liberation. Funding Shotspotter would be a step backwards when we have the opportunity to be proactive and truly move forward. A safer Detroit exists when our needs are met; hyper-surveilling tools do not come close to meeting the needs of the people. As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the opinions of its author. AuthorSammie Lewis: Detroit Communist, Black feminist, youthful revolutionary. This article was republished from People's World. Archives October 2022 |
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