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Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Arizona's anti-Immigrant Law is Inhumane & Illegitimate

Stop the System's Fascist Attacks on Immigrants

Imagine: You have a family you're supporting; you're on your way to the grocery store, or to work, or to pick up your children from school. You see a patrol car behind you. You realize if the cop stops you, he is going to demand you show your papers, and you know you can't. You'll be taken to immigration, locked in a detention center until you're deported, and getting back is nearly impossible. What will happen to your children when you're locked up? Who will take care of them? And if they're with you when you're stopped, will they be incarcerated as well? Will your family be separated, or given the "option" of everyone being deported, including children who are U.S. citizens.

What do you do?

This horror will be the reality for hundreds of thousands of people if Arizona's anti-immigration law, SB1070, goes into effect on July 29. This law is an ugly, radically reactionary leap beyond the already intolerable conditions immigrants without papers face in this country. This law demonizes and outlaws people who are from Mexico or Latin America, or look like they may be from Mexico or Latin America, or indeed from any other country from which immigrants come. The law requires that police demand proof of legal residency from anyone they "stop, detain or arrest" if police suspect that person is an undocumented immigrant. Many legal residents as well as citizens are going to be subjected to interrogation by the police because they "fit the description"—that is, if you are dark-skinned; have an accent; wear a certain style of clothes; or live in the "immigrant" part of town.

At least 11 million people in this country are already forced to live in the shadows, have no rights, work for extremely low wages and often get cheated, and face getting dragged off in the middle of the night. Medical care is out of reach; mothers whose children are sick can wait an entire day or more for them to be seen at a county hospital. The impact of the economic crisis means barely being able to survive.

In the U.S., the right against unreasonable searches and seizures is supposedly guaranteed to all people by the Constitution. It has already been shredded in recent decades in the name of waging a "war on drugs," the "war on terrorism," and apprehending "illegals."  Now in Arizona, it will no longer apply to immigrants. New norms are being established that solidify and radically deepen a system that already resembles the ugly, hated period of South African apartheid; the legal segregation, racism, and brutality of the Jim Crow period in this country; or the early stages of the Nazi treatment of the Jews in Germany.

A dozen or more states around the country are ready to join Arizona, effectively calling for this to become the "law of the land." An anti-immigrant atmosphere is being whipped up that is drawing all too many people into scapegoating immigrants, fueled with lurid tales of drug smuggling, violent criminals, connections to Mexican drug cartels, and more. Fox News is running supposed clandestine footage of border crossers wearing backpacks filled with drugs.

In Utah, where a similar bill is being debated now, high-tech vigilantes turned in the names and addresses of people they believe should be deported. Recently a printout of 1,300 Utah residents of Latino descent was sent by a group called "Concerned Citizens of the United States" to media outlets and law enforcement agencies demanding the immediate deportation of all 1,300. The confidential documents, taken from the Utah Department of Workforce Services, included addresses, phone numbers, workplaces, children's names, even due-dates of pregnant women. The Concerned Citizens' letter warned that "Some of the women on the list are pregnant," and called for immediate deportation before they give birth on U.S. soil. The smell of Nazi Germany, when "Good Germans" reported on the Jews in their midst, is all over this.

The government is passing cruel laws that hit these immigrants, as well as whole other sections of people who resemble them, while the growth of an angry, fascistic movement around all this continues with far too few people challenging it. Meanwhile, people die at the border, children are left alone and abandoned as their parents are deported, tens of thousands languish in immigration detention prisons, with many dying there because medical treatment is withheld.

It is crucial that everyone understand how unjust, unconstitutional, and immoral this new law is that could quickly spread all over the country; the tremendous danger that millions of human beings in this country now face; and why we must build resistance to it before it goes into effect. We cannot forget this warning: That which you do not resist, and organize to stop, you will learn, or be forced, to accept.

Each one of us now faces a choice: to resist or accept; to question the system that got us here, and begin to think about a whole different way, or shut your mind and listen to the authorities, and to the grotesque and racist demonizing and fear-mongering of their fascist spokespeople.

*****

How Did We Get Here? A Blood Soaked Foundation

How did we get to a situation where millions of people find themselves in a foreign land, forced here from Mexico, Latin America and beyond in order to survive and make a new life? And now to confront an angry, growing native population vilifying their presence and demanding vicious measures against them? To understand this, we need to briefly examine the historical process that has led us to this point.

When Obama began his July 1 speech saying "we are a nation of immigrants," he was leaving out essential parts of America's "rosy dawn." There was the "clearing" of the land of its native population through genocidal wars and the spreading of disease, destroying millions of Native Americans, and consigning most who survived to reservations. And that "rosy dawn" hinged on the capture and kidnap of millions of African people, who came here not as immigrants, but as chattel to be enslaved for hundreds of years in the most despicable conditions and who today still suffer discrimination and oppression wherever they turn.

This country's borders themselves are the product of the war with Mexico in 1846. The main purpose of this war was to extend slavery into Texas. The U.S. invasion swallowed almost half of Mexico and the people living there—becoming the southwestern U.S., including Arizona. In doing this, the U.S. replaced Spain as the force that would dominate and plunder Mexico down to today.

Fast forward to the mid-20th century, after the U.S. has established its dominance of Mexico and Latin America (see article on page 10). Beginning in the 1920s in the U.S., when there was an inability to meet the need for a growing workforce, combined with the growing demand for agricultural labor, millions of Mexican workers were brought here to harvest the crops for extremely low pay under back-breaking conditions. Mexican immigrants became a source of labor which could be hired and super-exploited in good times, and sent back to Mexico in bad times. In the '40s and '50s this was formalized through the "Bracero" program. When it ended, the U.S. expelled thousands of Mexican workers and exploited them one more time by denying their right to the retirement benefits that were taken from their earnings. But U.S. agriculture continued to rely on workers from Mexico and Latin America, and eventually other sectors of the American economy followed suit—the food industry, construction, and small scale production—by integrating immigrant labor, often undocumented, into their labor force.

Globalization: A Feeding Frenzy for Capitalist Sharks

Then, all this took a leap in the 1980s. Dramatic changes took place in the world economy and U.S. economy in the 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the U.S. as the world's sole superpower. There has been a wave of the intensive globalization of exploitation of people, the squeezing of ever greater profits out of millions, as capitalists (led by the U.S. imperialists) moved vast amounts of production to other countries. In this hemisphere, the implementation of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994 between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico enabled the U.S. to penetrate and dominate the Mexican economy in new ways. This treaty eliminated barriers to direct investment by U.S. companies (which had been instituted in the wake of the Mexican Revolution in 1910), and tariffs on agricultural imports from the U.S. Opening up Mexican agriculture to competition from the U.S. had devastating consequences for Mexico's small farmers or campesinos. Campesinos who had been able to work and live growing corn, beans and tomatoes and other products could not compete with the low-cost corn from the U.S., and in tremendous numbers they were forced to abandon farming and migrate to the cities, or to El Norte. Between 1994 and 2004, 6 million campesinos were forced out of the countryside in order to find a way to survive.

Globalization fueled an explosion of assembly plants, called maquiladoras, along the U.S.-Mexico border, where plants employed hundreds of thousands of women drawn there by the promise of work assembling auto parts, TVs and other electronic equipment, clothing, and more. This drive for profit greatly twisted and distorted the Mexican economy and bloated border cities like Tijuana and Juarez, whose infrastructure was overwhelmed. But then, even more profitable manufacturing sites were opened up in Asia and elsewhere. And, the maquiladoras, and the workers they had drawn there, were abandoned.

In the U.S., new needs for highly exploitable cheap labor were met by drawing immigrants from across the border to fill lower-skilled, low paying jobs. This has led to millions of people, especially from Mexico and Central America, to leave their homelands and their families behind, and risk apprehension and death trying to get across the border. And, the porous border between the U.S. and Mexico has benefited the ruling classes of both countries. For Mexico it has allowed workers to migrate north in search of work and relieve the pressure of too many workers chasing too few jobs in Mexico. For the U.S. capitalists, it has given them a fresh supply of needed workers for their factories and fields to be super-exploited.

Meanwhile these same pressures caused by the impact of globalization have meant the disappearance of millions of relatively high paying manufacturing jobs that provided "the American way of life" for significant sections of people in this country. The current economic crisis is further intensifying this. It contributes to a widespread feeling of instability and insecurity among large sections of mostly, but not solely, middle and lower middle class whites. Rather than directing their anger and frustration at the system of capitalism and its laws that have caused this whole situation, they are being rallied by powerful, reactionary forces with connections to a section of the ruling class. They are being programmed to blame their loss of position, and privilege, on immigrants, while dangerous nativist and racist sentiments are being whipped up against immigrants.

Threat to Reactionary U.S. Social "Glue"

The clash over Arizona's anti-immigrant law SB1070 reveals deep and volatile social divides—both in the halls of power and in society as a whole. The U.S. ruling class faces the necessity to "glue" the society together in a different way, and there is sharp struggle among them about how to do it. At this time the initiative is in the hands of a growing right wing fascist movement in this country that has the backing of powerful voices in the Republican Party and media.

There is a great American myth that has played a crucial role in maintaining the stability and coherence of this society from its beginnings: that this country has advanced through the ingenuity and hard work of its citizens (that is, its white male citizens), and that the superior position of white people in this society—and the privileges they have—are the rewards of hard work and supposedly superior "culture" and ethic. The cruel lie at the heart of this is that if others have not attained these things it is not because of deep-rooted discrimination and oppression but because "they are inferior, do not work as hard and their culture encourages them to be criminal, and immoral." Historically in this country, this lie has been used to justify the oppression of Black people—and today it is being used to justify these fascist attacks on immigrants.

That whole "social contract" grounded in white privilege and male privilege was fundamentally challenged through the upheaval and great struggle of the 1960s, most importantly the struggle for the liberation of Black people. Concessions like affirmative action were made, and racism and male supremacy were under assault while millions took up the challenge of fighting for new relations among people; blind patriotism was put on the defensive through the movement against the Vietnam war; and much more. All of these changes were, and still are, resented and hated by those behind this anti-immigrant movement today and others like it because they called into question that whole social contract. In the decades since, much of what was accomplished back then has been undone or overturned. But in the world view of this movement—only a thorough overturning and burying of all of what was brought forward through these struggles will suffice. The recent high profile conflict between the NAACP and the anti-immigrant Tea Party shows this.

The heart of the program of these fascists is to restore or return to that original social contract—with its male supremacy and white supremacy—which they associate with a time when the U.S. was "riding high." In fact, many even wax nostalgic about the Confederacy when the only reason for its existence was to defend slavery. In their view, if it takes establishing a fascist regime to do it, so be it. They are appealing to people who feel their whole way of life is threatened. They see the decadent culture and they want to get back to those earlier values. In their view, "if it weren't for people like Obama... If it weren't for these elites... and Wall Street barons, giving away our wealth...." They look out and see all this and think that without a solid center, the whole country is going to fall apart.

Virulent racism plays an important role in restoring this old social contract. It is the dangerous "others" who are taking over the country and supposedly collaborating to deprive hard working, white Americans of the privilege they have enjoyed, their prosperity and rights. These "elites," they are told, want to attack their values and undermine their whole way of life, and to give what is supposedly rightfully theirs to the "undeserving" masses in the inner cities. This extreme program is the strategy of a section of the ruling class associated with the Republicans.

The Choice That's No Choice

What is the program represented by the Democrats, and their leader in office, in response? The "difference" between the Republicans and the Democrats in this encounter is that the Republicans openly demonize immigrants, while Democrats like Obama pretend to sympathize with them, while leaving all the initiative in the hands of the Republicans.

While Obama did express some sympathy for immigrants in his July 1 speech, he did that while overall adopting the Republicans' terms, and even their proposals. He accused the undocumented of "making a mockery" of those applying to enter the country legally. He described the fascists behind SB1070 as understandably frustrated; and he did everything possible to narrow the space between his proposal for "immigration reform" and theirs.

Obama and the Democrats too want "order" above all else, but most of all they do not want to call the people who are horrified by what is happening into the streets to stand up to and oppose these fascists. The damage this repeated compromise and conciliation with fascism has caused, over several decades, is incalculable. It has for far too long encouraged and influenced progressive people to accommodate to a dynamic where, as Bob Avakian has pointed out, "[Y]esterday's outrage becomes today's 'compromise position' and tomorrow's limits of what can be imagined,"¹ and it has contributed to the disorientation among progressive people in the face of this growing, fascist movement. Remaining on that path, the future can only mean watching while things get worse and worse, while the masses of immigrants are put continually in a more locked down and super-exploited position, with no way out.

The Answer: A Movement for Revolution

As July 29 approaches, millions hold their breath: now what will happen?

One thing we know for sure: if we do nothing, the scene described at the beginning of this article will become reality for hundreds of thousands in Arizona, and very soon it will spread elsewhere. And new horrors, all depending on whatever "the system" needs to survive, will emerge and things will get still worse.

And yes, it is a system. What we've described and analyzed in this article and elsewhere in this issue—the whole history of domination and exploitation, one that has left lifetimes of terrible suffering and mountains of corpses in its wake... this didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of the system of capitalism, and that system has morphed and festered like a cancer as it has further developed. Today, the whole present-day reality of some people desperately attempting to survive, while others—some of whom are also being pushed to the edge—are misdirected and misled to fight against them... all this is results from the rules, the workings, and the history of this system—the system of capitalism-imperialism².

But there is another possible future. Yes, these imperialists are powerful. But keep in mind that their social order is under extreme pressure and very unstable, reflected even in conflicts among themselves (e.g., the Republicans vs. Obama) at the top. And yes, they have up to now been able to suppress the potential resistance of millions of immigrants. But those millions are not going away. And while their politicians have been able to whip up discontented people to turn their anger against those immigrants, these imperialists have no fundamental answer for those discontented people, and some can be won away by a determined movement. The widespread feeling that things are "coming apart" is based on reality—and in such times there is potential for people to look to whole different solutions, and to change their thinking very quickly. These are the "hidden contradictions" of the system—things that are not so evident, but are there, just below the surface.

This other possible future pivots on making revolution against this system. And there is a party—the Revolutionary Communist Party—that is not only dedicated to bring that other future into being, but which has a strategy to do so and is right now carrying on an important campaign to take a leap in carrying out that strategy and making that future real. As the Party's Message and Call³ for that campaign makes clear, "[N]ow is not yet the time, in this country, to go all-out to seize the power away from those who rule over us and to bring a new power, serving our interests, into being. But now IS the time to be WORKING FOR REVOLUTION—to be stepping up resistance while building a movement for revolution—to prepare for the time when it WILL be possible to go all out to seize the power."

Political battles like the one going on in Arizona right now have a lot to do with the strategy to get to revolution. Right now the polarization on this fight is not good—that is, the odds seem to be stacked against the people who are resisting oppression. But those odds can change, things can get re-polarized... for revolution. Through our actions, we can bring into reality the other side of those "hidden contradictions" we talked about above. How could that happen?

If people who understand the tremendous injustice coming down jump into action and rally others to resist, beginning now and especially in this next crucial period, and stand up against this illegitimate fascist law and the whole fascist offensive, giving heart to those who want to see resistance, and if through their bold actions they compel people "on the fence" or otherwise confused to think again...

If revolutionaries unite with that and rally that forward, on the foundation of sharply showing the source of the problem in the system and the solution to it in revolution, raising people's understanding and letting millions know that there IS a movement for revolution and a leadership for that movement, and winning a core among them to take up this revolutionary understanding and build this revolutionary movement...

If the connections are drawn between the repression in Arizona and the many other outrages, and struggles, in society, and their common source, especially through getting out Revolution newspaper and the works of Bob Avakian, the leader of the RCP and of the revolution, and if through getting to know that leadership and reading this paper people come to see that a radically different world is possible, and thus raise their sights as to what is possible...

If through all this spreading of revolution and growing resistance it comes to be seen by millions that what these rulers are doing is totally illegitimate, and indeed they don't in fact deserve to rule...

And if through all that the organized strength of this Party can grow...

Then the political equation can begin to change—radically. Then we can begin to make advances toward a whole different political situation, one where—through other changes in the world and the further development of this movement—people really could make revolution.

As part of doing that, this fascist law—this whole fascist offensive—MUST be challenged, resisted and ultimately stopped. The movement for revolution—the movement we ARE BUILDING—must be spread and strengthened. The challenge has been made; the people must answer it.

1. Bob Avakian, 7 Talks, "Question and Answer Session with Concluding Remarks," answer to question one. (bobavakian.net/talk8.html). [back]

2. We urge everyone to watch Bob Avakian's Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, available online at revolutiontalk.net. [back]

3. "The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have, A Message, and a Call, from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA," revcom.us/a/171/statement-en.html. [back]

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/Correction-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Correction to "Arizona's anti-Immigrant Law is Inhumane & Illegitimate"

The print version of "Arizona's anti-Immigrant Law is Inhumane & Illegitimate" contains an unclear paragraph. The corrected paragraph, which should be pasted as a sticker (available here: English | Spanish) over the previous paragraph on all print copies, reads:

The heart of the program of these fascists is to restore or return to that original social contract—with its male supremacy and white supremacy—which they associate with a time when the U.S. was "riding high." In fact, many even wax nostalgic about the Confederacy when the only reason for its existence was to defend slavery. In their view, if it takes establishing a fascist regime to do it, so be it. They are appealing to people who feel their whole way of life is threatened. They see the decadent culture and they want to get back to those earlier values. In their view, "if it weren't for people like Obama... If it weren't for these elites... and Wall Street barons, giving away our wealth."  They look out and see all this and think that without a solid center, the whole country is going to fall apart.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/arizona-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Reporter's notebook from Arizona Freedom Summer

Coming into Phoenix, you're hit with stark black billboards in every direction: "McCAIN, Fighting to Secure the Border."  On talk radio, the discussion is about how many Mexicans are actually "drug mules."  The newspaper has experts writing in to discuss in reasonable tones "scenarios" under SB 1070: for example, if you're driving for your job in a company-owned truck and your co-worker doesn't have documentation, will you go to jail under the new law for transporting someone illegal?

As the date of implementation for SB 1070 nears, more and more immigrants are fleeing the city or staying locked inside the house, only leaving for carefully-planned trips to the grocery store.  Whole apartment buildings are suddenly empty and parks usually filled with families are quiet and nearly desolate. 

This shit is intense and sickening and enraging.  People are telling us about the journey here from Mexico, what it feels like to be lost in the desert and then lucky not to die of dehydration, or preparing to cross and looking over to the U.S. side of the border at military fencing and a hillside filled with lights that you know are armed forces waiting to get you.  People are telling us about those who have died of dehydration, and the volunteers who go into the desert to leave gallons of water to try to prevent this kind of suffering and death, and the way these volunteers have been arrested and jailed, and the way the minutemen-type forces slash open and empty the gallons of water when they find them.  When I hear Obama talk about securing the border, or bragging about how there are "more boots on the ground" on the border than ever before in the history of the country, I hear these stories replaying in my mind. 

We've come into this situation with a vision of bringing forward a defiant resistance against the whole fascistic direction of things, not allowing the terrorizing of immigrants to continue and take leaps, changing the current dynamic in society, and bringing into question the legitimacy of the whole system.  Obviously, this has not been welcomed by some.  But for those who have been seeking a way to do something meaningful, finding this party, with a strategy for revolution and a real vision of how another world is possible, finding the leadership of Bob Avakian, has lifted their sights and hopes.  And the prospect of being able to forge a real resistance that doesn't allow the implementation of this fascistic program has drawn all kinds of people to start to find out more about this and take it up. 

One woman who has been fighting against the racism and anti-immigrant climate in Arizona for many years told us how completely drained and hopeless she's been, feeling like she was going up against a wall with no possibility of breaking through.  We read the Message and Call with her and she plied us with questions, especially about Bob Avakian and what kind of leader this is and why we trust him.  She bought the DVD of his Revolution talk and then came to a showing of the clip from that talk, "Why do people come here from all over the world?"  This is a person who has big disagreements with revolution and communism, but after watching that clip and discussing it with others, she came to the conclusion that if everyone could hear and see this, we could actually begin to change things—and since then has been promoting, popularizing and distributing that clip... 

These have to be days of non-compliance and not allowing raids and deportations.  Wherever you are now, come and join us. 

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/fundraising-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Raising Funds for Arizona Freedom Summer

Revolution received the following correspondence:

Since the introduction of the anti-immigrant law SB1070 in Arizona, a 16-year-old has been murdered by a U.S. border patrol, terror is being inflicted on the residents of Arizona, other states are trying to implement similar laws, while a list was "leaked" with detailed information of supposed illegal immigrants within Utah. We set out on a mission to return to communities that were part of the 200/10 saturation effort to call on them to take up and support the comrades who are currently in Arizona.

We went to an area of East L.A. to raise funds and mobilize broad sections, in support of Arizona Freedom Summer. Knowing well the implications of this in Arizona and also the outcome this would have around the country in legitimating new norms against immigrants, our orientation was to instill in people the need to resist these crimes in Arizona and put this to a halt—but also to bring to people a deeper understanding that things don't have to be this way and that another world is possible. We set out to do this by taking out the call in Revolution newspaper to join the Revolutionaries in Arizona along with the Party's message and call "The Revolution We Need...The Leadership We Have.." Our goal was to raise 150 dollars. We went into every shop, restaurant, hardware store and the dozen or so beauty and barber shops and the scattered taco trucks. What helped in fundraising and what we did that afternoon was shake the can every chance we got. While a few declined many gave what they could. We received a 20 dollar donation from a young woman at one of the beauty salons we entered. We had a pretty solid crew that day, while one comrade agitated two distributed the paper and raised funds and one would walk around the sometimes crowded launder marts with a poster that had images of ICE units and masses being detained awaiting deportation with the slogans "We are all illegal! We don't gotta show no stinkin papers!" in Spanish. Outside the shops we also had "Why do people come here from all over the world" amplified from a mega-speaker in Spanish. We boldly asked for donations and called on people to donate whatever they could because there are people in Arizona right now who are mobilizing broad sections of people to resist this law and they need their support. We called attention to the paper, and in particular the message and call on the back page, and the need to support this movement for revolution by calling attention to the section in the call, "The days when this system can keep on doing what it does to people, here and all over the world...when people are not inspired and organized to stand up against these outrages and to build up the strength to put an end to this madness...those days must be GONE and they CAN be." We laid out that Arizona is not all these fascists are after but this is where the battle is at this very moment and whether there will be a movement to bring something else into being would be up to what we do here.

Many people remembered us from before, waving hello and, at one barber shop, commenting on the Message and Call. All three barbers had read the call and had many questions arguing that human nature holds people back from making change. In one restaurant we met a young woman who asked us "is this the party of Bob Avakian? Is this Bob Avakian's party paper?" She had known of the party from years back but had many obligations that kept her from coming around. She commented that she loved how bold we were in going into the different stores spreading revolution. She wanted to maintain contact and got a sub to reconnect. By the end of the day we raised $130 sold 50 papers and one sub.

The following day, at a progressive Black church, we had a positive response. After and before the congregation, most engaged with us and said they are not in support of the law. The pastor spoke to this during the service at some point. We got several people to pledge donations and contacts serious about going to Arizona. A Black youth who was originally in the area to visit his friend stopped by the table and was outraged to learn the Oscar Grant verdict and went to his friend to tell him the news. He didn't have any money to take a paper but we encouraged him to fundraise for a copy of the paper, among passersby. He ended up hanging out with us for 30 minutes talking to everyone that came by reaching out and calling on the "sisters and brothers" to support. He would approach people and say "sister/brother have you heard about OG? Have you heard about Arizona? Do you have a minute so I can tell you why I'm so angry about what I just learned? Let me walk with you." He let people know that he just decided to do this because he felt passionate about this and if he could he would get in a car right now and join people up. Many people liked his energy and appreciated what he was doing, folks thought he was part of our core and later on asked if he was still around. This spirit of no holds barred is important and it makes a difference. The fact that he had no qualms about talking to people he never met before, going up to cars, stopping traffic, running across the street to talk with people and walking with folks. People got excited when they saw his reaction. But, in a predominantly Black community where we've done work around the Message and Call, we got a very different response. We're summing up that we need to be a lot bolder with the message "We don't have an immigration problem, we have a capitalist problem!" particularly in Black communities, because the sentiment exists that there is an immigration problem. And as one woman mentioned we have to get louder and struggle for unity because of what it would mean if there was no resistance, "who would be next?" We do need to resist to radically change the current climate of fear and resignation to one of defiance and resistance.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/history-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

The U.S. and Latin America

Tell Us, Now, Who Is the Great Respecter of Borders?

The U.S. went to war with Spain in 1898 to drive it out of the western hemisphere and parts of the Pacific and Southeast Asia and take over its colonies. The Spanish-American war was a turning point in the U.S. becoming a world imperialist power. As a result of this war, it gained control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and finally the Philippines—after drowning that country in the blood of hundreds of thousands who resisted. At this time the U.S. also seized Hawaii and Guam.

Where did this war come from? Why did the U.S. seize these areas, and why did they kill so many people to do so? And what does this have to do with today?

Capitalism first arose in the countries of Western Europe, and then in the U.S. and Japan. From its earliest days, the capitalist powers seized lands and established colonies in South and Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The capitalist powers plundered the raw materials of these colonies and forced them to buy the goods manufactured in the "mother country." They instituted slavery or near-slavery and chewed up tens of millions of people in their rise to domination. Capital truly did, as Karl Marx said, come into the world with blood dripping from every pore.

By the late 1800s, capital needed to extend and expand beyond its "home countries" and the capitalist powers began to penetrate the rest of the world in a new way. The capitalists now required places to export capital itself—that is, to invest in and set up capitalist enterprises in these parts of the world. Here they could force people to work for almost nothing and extract super-profits. The pressure to expand was tremendous—which capitalists would live or die, which capitalist powers would dominate and which would lose out—and this led to tremendous rivalry between capitalist powers and a fight to carve up the entire world. This struggle led to wars and conflicts, like the Spanish-American War, as well as the much more horrendous, bloodier world wars. Tens of millions have died in the past century alone in this conflict—a conflict over who would be the chief exploiter.

In this worldwide struggle for the advantage, the U.S. has always counted Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean as its special preserve. And they have shed oceans of blood to keep it that way.

The U.S. cleared the way for the spread of its economic and political tentacles over the entire western hemisphere, backed up whenever necessary through the use of brute force. Here are just some examples of this:

• 1903-1925: The U.S. Marines invade Honduras seven times. During the 1911 invasion, President Miguel Dávila is overthrown by former president Manuel Bonilla, aided by American banana tycoon Sam Zemurray and American mercenary Lee Christmas, who becomes commander-in-chief of the Honduran army.
• 1909: Troops were sent to Nicaragua and forced President José Santos Zelaya to resign after he attempts to impose taxes on American mining and banana companies, appropriate church lands, and legalize divorce.
• 1912: U.S. Marines invade Cuba to put down a rebellion of sugar workers at a U.S. owned sugar mill.
• 1914: U.S. warships were in the harbor in Tampico, Mexico protecting U.S. oil interests when Mexican soldiers intervened against American sailors. Two days later the U.S. warships invade and seize the city of Veracruz.
• 1915: U.S. troops occupy Port-au-Prince, Haiti and stay until 1934 to protect American interests.
• 1916: The U.S. invades and occupies the Dominican Republic for eight years when the Dominican president refuses to appoint American citizens, who work for New York banks and American sugar companies, to senior government posts.

Behind all the justifications that accompanied these crimes, was the reality, summed up bluntly by Smedley Butler, commandant of the U.S. Marines:

"...I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in....I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903... Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents." (Raymond Lotta and Frank Shannon, America in Decline, 1984, Banner Press, page 185)

In the second half of the 20th century, this continued and even got worse. Puppet dictators, such as Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the Duvaliers in Haiti, Noriega in Panama, Somoza in Nicaragua, and Pinochet in Chile to name a few, were installed by the U.S. in later decades through direct force or by coups orchestrated by the U.S. These dictators allowed U.S. financial and business interests to run rampant in their countries, ripping off the country's resources and  making super profits off the cheap labor that was plentiful—while they themselves slaughtered thousands to keep their grip on power. In the '70s and '80s, in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere in the region, the pro-U.S. puppets slaughtered tens of thousands of people to crush resistance and maintain American domination. In Peru, tens of thousands were slaughtered by the government, backed up by the CIA, in the repression of the Maoist-led revolution there in the 1980s and '90s. In Guatemala, approximately 200,000 were murdered by pro-U.S. butchers, advised by the CIA and actively assisted by the U.S. tool Israel. And in this very period the U.S. Army directly invaded the countries of Grenada and Panama.

Because of this system of U.S. imperialist economic and political domination, there is terrible poverty and massive unemployment in these countries. The U.S. will intentionally destroy local industry and agriculture in order to pave the way for its own capitalists. People from these areas of the world are desperate to find work. And here is the U.S., once again—this time "letting" people work in the U.S. itself, at the worst jobs and for the shittiest pay—if they even get paid. And then, when it no longer suits the rulers of the U.S., they try to drive the people out and back into their despoiled and plundered homelands.

Where in any of this history did the U.S. treat the borders of any country as "sacred" and "inviolate"?

And again—this happened because of this system. It happened because the rulers of the U.S. thought they needed to do this to keep their political and economic system functioning and to keep their position over other imperialists. When it suits them they will violate borders and murder people and talk about freedom; and when something else suits them, they will holler about borders and pose as the victims. Why should anybody take seriously, let alone support, their calls to defend their borders? Why should anybody, in fact, do anything—short of making revolution to get rid of such an inhumane and murderous system?

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/murder-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Anastasio Hernández Rojas—Murdered by Border Patrol

On the evening of Friday, May 28, three days after Obama's announcement that 1,200 troops would be sent to the U.S./Mexico border, dozens of people crossing the pedestrian bridge connecting San Ysidro, California, with Tijuana, Mexico, heard horrifying screams: "Ayúdame, por favor! Help me please! They're going to kill me!" In the cage-like enclosure where deportees are sent through the gate into Mexico, three Border Patrol agents were beating a handcuffed man. A crowd watched in horror as he was tortured to death in front of their eyes. Humberto Navarrete Mendoza, a medical student, videoed the encounter and this was posted on YouTube. Mendoza can be heard yelling out repeatedly to the Border Patrol, "He's not resisting! Why are you using excessive force on him?" He described how three migra were kneeling on top of the man who lay face down with his hands cuffed behind him and they were beating him in the ribs on both sides of his body.

Like wild animals attracted to the smell of blood, cops from different agencies arrived to get in on the killing frenzy. Wackenhut detention center bus drivers rushed over to join in the beating.  Then the Customs and Border Protection jumped in, until the unconscious, handcuffed man was being beaten by 20 cops. At a certain point, the beating stopped and the Tazing began. Finally an ambulance came, but it was too late: Anastasio Hernandez Rojas was brain dead.

Anastasio's heart stopped beating on its own on June 1. On June 2, the Border Patrol agents union sent out a tweet: "Lesson learned: Don't fight with the Border Patrol!"

On June 3, 500 people marched to the site of Anastasio's murder. When they stood at the top of the pedestrian bridge, the signs "Justice for Anastasio Hernandez Rojas" and "We are all Anastasio" were visible to thousands of cars waiting at the checkpoint on the Mexican side of the border. Drivers in ten lanes of cars began honking their horns in support for one mile into Mexico.

Imagine this: That everyone who sees the YouTube of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas' murder and is haunted by his screams and is sickened by the injustice and brutality of this crime, resolves not to let one more day go by without standing up and resisting and convincing others to do the same as part of a movement to make a revolution to end this system. Wouldn't that be a fitting response?

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/why_do_people-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Why DO People Come Here?^*

Why do people come to America? Because the capitalist-imperialist system of the United States has messed up the rest of the world even worse than what it has done in this country. One example—among many—is Mexico.

1. 150 years ago, after Mexico became independent from Spain, the United States waged war on Mexico and stole a large part of its territory. This stolen territory includes what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of California, Colorado, Nevada and Utah. One of the main reasons behind this was that slave owners in the southern U.S. needed more land.

The U.S. replaced Spain and other European colonial powers as the alien force dominating Mexico. Despite the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s, the masses and other sections of the people have continued to be exploited and down pressed, while their country is plundered by the United States.

2. Throughout the 20th century, U.S. capital expanded into and increasingly dominated the Mexican economy. Today, financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—which are dominated by the U.S.—pressure the Mexican government to promote farm crops that can be sold on the world market and industry that uses low-paid, super-exploited Mexican labor to produce low-cost goods for the world market. Land and resources have been shifted away from basic food production and the Mexican economy is distorted to serve the demands of international imperialist capital.

3. Since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, signed between the U.S., Mexico and Canada), U.S. imperialism has more fully penetrated the economy and other spheres of Mexican society. NAFTA ordered the Mexican government to drastically cut farm subsidies to small farmers. But meanwhile, in the U.S., agricultural exporters continue to receive the equivalent of $10 billion in subsidies per year. When the tariffs protecting Mexican corn and beans were lifted under NAFTA in early 2008, production of these crops further collapsed under the flood of imports. Farmers could no longer support themselves, and  over six million peasants were driven off the land. People have been forced by the workings of imperialism to seek a livelihood in the cities inside Mexico, the northern border region, and the United States.

NAFTA has also caused the worsening of the situation of the masses in the urban areas—with some 60% of the employment being in the informal sector (street vendors, for example). In 2004, 10 years into NAFTA, nearly 30 percent of Mexico's population was living on less than $1 a day. In Mexico, only one-third of new job seekers entering the employment market will find a job.

Though there are still great pressures on people to go to the U.S. to look for work, in recent years the economic crisis within the U.S. has further twisted the lives of the immigrants. There has been an important decrease in remesas, the money immigrants send to their families in Mexico. Some have returned to Mexico due to lack of work and increased official persecution. Still others must ask their families in Mexico to send them money to survive in the U.S., as they try to hang on for "better times"—since there is nothing back in Mexico for them.

People from Mexico's rural areas make up 44 percent of the migrants to the U.S. Other immigrants used to work in Mexico's domestic industries—but these closed down when the capitalists sought lower-paid workers elsewhere, or left for other reasons. Doctors, professors and others—finding no options for their studies or work in Mexico—come to the U.S. in search of a life.

4. Through all this, hundreds of thousands of peasants, manual laborers, professionals and others have been forced to leave their homes. They must look for work or a future, and search for ways to survive, in the United States. Here they face intense and brutal discrimination and exploitation—working in low-wage factory and field jobs or finding their college studies are only good enough here to drive a taxi or sweep floors. And all live in fear every day that they will be fired because they are immigrants or rounded up by the immigration police.

The complexity of a mass of 12 million Mexican immigrants in the U.S. pulls in many directions. U.S. imperialism needs the cheap labor power, but also wants to have control of this part of the population. The U.S. rulers also want to keep things "stable" within Mexico; but the attacks on immigrants, the disruption of the flow of remesas and the forced return back across the border are affecting the whole social fabric in Mexico.

But this mass of immigrants in the U.S. is a positive thing for the revolution. The stand of the movement we are building for revolution is clear: to welcome such immigrants as brothers and sisters... to insist on equality of nations, including equality in culture and language, and to learn from and take joy in cultural exchange... to stand with them as they oppose repression... to draw on their desire for revolution and their experience living in countries oppressed by imperialism, encouraging them to get into the movement for revolution and to take up, and spread the word on the leadership of Bob Avakian.

* The text and photos on this page were inspired by a chapter of a film of a talk by Bob Avakian, Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, where he talks about "Why Do People Come Here From All Over the World?" available at revolutiontalk.net. [back]

• Centerfold (PDF)

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/memoir-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

From Ike to Mao and Beyond
My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist
A Memoir by Bob Avakian

from Chapter 1: Mom and Dad

Armenia to Fresno to Berkeley

... My dad's parents emigrated from Armenia, before the big massacre of a million and a half Armenians by the Turkish authorities in World War 1. Even before the war, the Turkish government had carried out and encouraged brutal pogroms against Armenians for many years. My grandmother's and grandfather's families had both suffered from that, and they had left Armenia and come to the U.S. when my grandparents were young, where they met each other and married. So my father was born in the U.S., in Fresno, where his parents' families had settled as farmers because the climate and the kind of crops you could grow were similar to Armenia....

My grandparents were very good-hearted, generous people, and some of my other Armenian relatives were as well. But many of them were also petty property owners and proprietors, with the corresponding outlook. So it was a very contradictory kind of relationship. I was fond of them, because they were relatives and many of them were very kind on a personal level; but, at the same time, many were very narrow-minded and conservative, or even reactionary, on a lot of social and political issues. And from a very early age, because I was raised differently than that, there was a lot of tension, which sometimes broke out kind of sharply.

Fresno was an extremely segregated city, with a freeway through the center of town serving as a "great divide." On one side of the freeway lived all the white people—and essentially only white people lived there. Ironically, the Armenians, who were not actually European in origin, in the context of America were assimilated as white people, even though they faced some discrimination. By the time I was growing up, if you were Armenian you were accepted among the white people, by and large, somewhat the way other immigrants, like Italians, might have gone through some discrimination but finally got accepted as being white.

The Blacks and the Latinos and Asians lived on the other side of the freeway in Fresno, where the conditions were markedly and dramatically much worse. And none of my Fresno relatives ever ventured, at least if they could help it, across the freeway. So this was emblematic and representative of a lot of the conflict that came up. For these reasons, I have acutely contradictory feelings about Fresno and my Armenian relatives.

My dad was very aware of the discrimination against Armenians, and this had a big effect on how he looked at things more broadly. He ended up setting up his own practice, and practiced law with a couple of partners, partly because he couldn't get hired by these other firms, even though, as I said, many of them offered him jobs if he would change his name. I remember his telling a story about when he was on the college debating team. They were traveling to a debate in Oregon, I think, and they went to the house of one of the debating team members for dinner before the debate. So, as people do when they are being hospitable, the family was lavishing a lot of food on the team, and it got to a certain point where the debating team guys were saying, "No, we're full, thank you very much"; and the hosts were saying, "Come on, eat, eat, don't be a starving Armenian." Then all the members of the debating team got this look on their faces, and the parents realized they must have committed a faux pas, and then someone told them what the deal was with my dad. Those kinds of incidents stamped the question of discrimination very acutely into my father's consciousness. Besides learning about this directly from him, I've seen interviews that he's done, or speeches that he's given, where he has talked about the big impact this had on him and how it made him very acutely aware of the whole question of discrimination and the injustice of it. This would carry over importantly into his life, when the struggle around civil rights and the oppression of Black people broke open in American society in a big way in the 1950s and '60s. ...

Compassionate...and Determined

... While my parents were from different backgrounds, neither of their families resisted their marriage. Despite a lot of insularity among the Armenian relatives, my father's parents felt the important thing was what kind of person you marry, not whether they were an Armenian. My mother was pretty readily accepted both because of the attitude of my father's parents, but also because she was a very likeable person. And my mother learned how to cook some of the Armenian foods, and picked up some of the other cultural things. Beyond that, my father would not have put up with any crap! So the combination of all that meant that she got accepted pretty quickly. I'm not aware of friction from my mother's parents toward my dad. They were nice people generally, although they too were pretty conservative in a lot of ways, and also, to be honest, my father, having graduated from law school, was someone who had a certain amount of stature when my parents got married.

Despite the fairly conservative atmosphere in which she was raised, my mother was very far from being narrow and exclusive in how she related to people. If she came in contact with you, unless you did something to really turn her off or make her think that you were a bad person, she would welcome and embrace you. And that would last through a lifetime. Besides things like the Sunday "sacrifice night" meal, my parents, mostly on my mother's initiative, would do other "Christian charity" things, like in that Jack Nicholson movie, About Schmidt, where he "adopts" a kid from Africa and sends money. But they not only paid a certain amount of money, they took an active interest — they corresponded, they actually tried to go and visit some of the kids or even the people as grown-ups with whom they had had this kind of relationship. My mother had a very big heart and very big arms, if you want to put it that way. She embraced a lot of people in her lifetime. You really had to do something to get her not to like you. She was not the kind of person who would reject people out of hand or for superficial reasons.

I remember when I was about four or five years old and somehow from the kids that I was playing with, I'd picked up this racist variation on a nursery rhyme, so I was saying, "eeny, meeny, miny moe, catch a nigger by the toe." I didn't even know what "nigger" meant, I'd just heard other kids saying this. And she stopped me and said, "You know, that's not very nice, that's not a nice word." And she explained to me further, the way you could to a four- or five-year-old, why that wasn't a good thing to say. That's one of those things that stayed with me. I'm not sure exactly what the influences on my mom were in that way. But I do remember that very dramatically. It's one of those things that even as a kid makes you stop in your tracks. She didn't come down on me in a heavy way, she just calmly explained to me that this was not a nice thing to say, and why it wasn't a good thing to say. That was very typical of my mother and it obviously made a lasting impression on me.

One thing I learned from my mother is to look at people all-sidedly, to see their different qualities and not just dismiss them because of certain negative or superficial qualities. And I also learned from my mother what kind of person to be yourself — to try to be giving and outgoing and compassionate and generous, and not narrow and petty. I think that's one of the main influences my mother had on me.

 

Insight Press • Paperback $18.95 Hear Bob Avakian read sections from his memoir. Go online to bobavakian.net/audio3.html or revcom.us/avakian/ike2mao-realaudio/ike-to-mao-intro.html

 

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/spread_memoir-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Spread Bob Avakian's Memoir Far and Wide!

This week, Revolution begins a series of excerpts from Bob Avakian's memoir, From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist.

And we're running these excerpts to encourage everybody to take the memoir out broadly, as part of what they do all the time, and to introduce many more people to Bob Avakian. The memoir gives a real sense of why the Message and Call of the campaign "The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have" says of Avakian: "He is a great champion and a great resource for people here, and indeed people all over the world."

Some ways to get the memoir out:

• Get 5-6 copies and backpack copies of the memoir as you go out to the neighborhoods, concerts, campuses, or wherever. When people want to know who this leader is, what he stands for—sell them a copy of the memoir, and make plans to get back together to discuss it.
• Get professors and teachers to use the memoir as teaching material and to write comments about their experiences.
• Put the memoir on your coffee table or bring it to work to spark discussion with friends and family.
• Tell people that audio recordings of Bob Avakian reading excerpts from his memoir are online (revcom.us/avakian/ike2mao-realaudio/ike-to-mao-intro.html).
• Write us about your experiences in taking out the memoir.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/avakian/principles/index.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Revolutionary Strategy

Some Principles for Building A Movement for Revolution

By Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

At every point, we must be searching out the key concentrations of social contradictions and the methods and forms which can strengthen the political consciousness of the masses, as well as their fighting capacity and organization in carrying out political resistance against the crimes of this system; which can increasingly bring the necessity, and the possibility, of a radically different world to life for growing numbers of people; and which can strengthen the understanding and determination of the advanced, revolutionary-minded masses in particular to take up our strategic objectives not merely as far-off and essentially abstract goals (or ideals) but as things to be actively striven for and built toward.

The objective and orientation must be to carry out work which, together with the development of the objective situation, can transform the political terrain, so that the legitimacy of the established order, and the right and ability of the ruling class to rule, is called into question, in an acute and active sense, throughout society; so that resistance to this system becomes increasingly broad, deep and determined; so that the "pole" and the organized vanguard force of revolutionary communism is greatly strengthened; and so that, at the decisive time, this advanced force is able to lead the struggle of millions, and tens of millions, to make revolution.

 

 

Fight the power, and transform the people, for revolution.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/haiti-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Haiti: Six Months After the Earthquake...The Deadly Realities of Imperialist Aid

Six months ago, on January 12, 2010, a powerful earthquake struck Haiti, an island nation of about 9 million. The quake killed at least a quarter million people, and left over 1.5 million homeless. As Revolution brought out at the time, this devastation did not result solely from a natural disaster. It was made massively worse by a century of U.S. domination and especially by conscious U.S. policies of the last 30 years. These policies systematically destroyed much of Haiti's agricultural economy, forcing millions of former peasants to crowd into the small capital of Port-au-Prince in the hope of finding jobs or education. This flood of people was densely packed into poorly constructed housing, in conditions of extreme poverty, with little infrastructure—and all sitting on a known earthquake fault about which the people were never warned—and no basic housing codes were created and enforced, no emergency plans developed, etc. It was known that Port-Au-Prince would be a death trap in the event of a likely earthquake—but nothing was done about this. So the deaths of hundreds of thousands were not an "act of god" or "fate"—they were an imperialist crime against humanity. (See Revolution, #s 189-191 and #196.)

After the Earthquake the U.S. Rushes In... to Protect Its Interests

When the earthquake hit, the U.S. rushed to the scene of their crime—not to help the masses of suffering people, but to establish control. U.S. troops seized the only international airport, and U.S. soldiers began flooding in, even as Haitians and others who wanted to help, as well as aid supplies and medical help, were turned back. The airport, far from being a launch pad for a massive relief effort, became the main bottleneck in the aid effort, as huge amounts of food and supplies ended up being warehoused for days, weeks, months, while people suffered, starved and died of treatable injuries and disease.

In spite of this reality, the U.S tried to put on a big show of "compassion." TV cameras broadcast heart-wrenching scenes of high-tech U.S. and Israeli rescue teams pulling people from the rubble. But you had to read the fine print to learn that these teams rescued a total of less than 200 people. In fact, it was the Haitian masses, clawing through mountains of rubble with their bare hands, braving the imminent danger of being crushed, who were responsible in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake for rescuing countless numbers of people who would have died.

Initially, Obama announced a pledge of $100 million to Haiti—less than the cost of a half day of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, describing this paltry sum as the "start" of "one of the largest relief efforts in history." There was a lot of outrage, both in the U.S. and internationally, at the fact that the richest and most powerful country in the world was doing so little to help in the face of such a huge catastrophe. And this forced the U.S. to up its pledges several times, finally reaching $1.2 billion. But to date, six months later, as recently reported by Anderson Cooper on CNN—not one penny of this financial aid has actually been delivered!

Suffering Amidst the Rubble

It has been six months since a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti in January. The city of Port-au-Prince is still literally buried in rubble, making transportation difficult and rebuilding nearly impossible. There is little recovery and rebuilding. Why?

First of all, this reflects the fact that Haiti is an impoverished country that has been economically and politically stunted because it has been dominated by imperialism, especially  U.S. imperialism. Experts estimate that it would take 1,000 trucks three years to remove all the rubble. So far only 2% has been cleared. But the media reports that Haiti only has 300 trucks.

And then there are the rules of capitalism—in which nothing gets done unless there is a profit to be made. So millions of trucks and other heavy equipment in the U.S., including tens of thousands of pick-ups and SUVs sitting unsold on car lots because of the depressed economy, are not used to help hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti who are suffering.

There are the huge roadblocks thrown up by capitalist relations of ownership and production in Haiti itself. Listen to the following from the New York Times: "[D]ebris... also has a potential monetary value if it is to be reused. 'It's not just the rubble, it's the question of rubble ownership,' Mr. Scales [of the International Organization for Migration] said. Most [people on the land to be cleared] are renters, but the rubble technically belongs to the property owners. And sorting out who owns what land, and getting their permission to excavate has proved difficult."

Think about what is being said here: "It's not just the rubble, it's the question of rubble ownership." What is happening here speaks volumes to the utter insanity and brutality of the rules operating in the capitalist system—and the complete inability of this system to even address, much less meet, the basic needs of the people. 1.6 million people must live in the streets during hurricane season while the propertied classes determine who should gather profits from the ruins of their former homes!

But the most stunning failure has been housing. Only 28 thousand people have been placed in permanent or stable temporary shelter, while 1.6 million remain homeless. Most people have not even received tents. By official figures, only 97,000 tents have been put up since the earthquake—one for every 16 homeless people—and most of these are now falling apart. Tens of thousands of people do not even have tarps. Most of those who lost their homes still remain in the roughly 1,200 camps around the earthquake zone. Only one fourth of these camps are even being run by organized agencies—which are more likely to provide latrines, lights and perhaps clean water. The rest are pulled together by the masses of people, usually led by a committee of residents, fending for themselves to get food, water and sanitation. Said Menmen Vilase, a 9-months pregnant woman: "I'd love to live under a plastic sheet, but I can't afford it."

The New York Times (July 10, 2010) described one of these camps built single file along the median strip of a busy highway. Dozens have been injured when cars crashed into their shanties. Latrines were finally built in March by the French group, Islamic Aid, but they are across the road, so many people who are sick with diarrhea have to dart through traffic to get to bathrooms. A Revolution reporter visited this same shantytown in January—in all this time these latrines are the only substantial aid they have received.

Faced with all this, tens of thousands of people have moved back into homes badly damaged and unsafe, living daily with the terror of being buried alive if the unstable structures collapse, if another earthquake hits. Others have moved into cemeteries, a municipal dump, flooded sports fields. People live amidst rubble still containing human remains; one man said "it is better to be here with the smell of the dead bodies than to be down at that camp where it stinks of pee."

"Success," Imperialist-Style

The New York Times reported that UN officials "urge patience... They point to accomplishments in providing emergency food, water and shelter and averting starvation, exodus and violence."  Nigel Fisher, deputy special representative of the United Nations secretary general in Haiti told the Times that "What hasn't happened is worth noting. We haven't had a major outbreak of disease. We haven't had a major breakdown in security." (7/10/10, all emphasis added)

Now, when people like this talk about "violence" and "breakdowns in security," they are not talking about the security of the masses. They are not talking about the increasing levels of rape of women in the camps or the stealing and selling of children into the international sex trade, or attacks on "squatters" by machete-wielding thugs of large land-owners—all of which has been happening.

What they mean is that there has not, so far, been a major political uprising of the Haitian people against the U.S./UN occupation or against the failure of the imperialists and the subservient Haitian government to meet the most basic needs of the people. When they speak of "avoiding exodus," they are bragging that they have prevented large numbers of Haitians from escaping the desperate conditions there and coming to the United States. To the U.S. and other imperialists (including the UN) millions living on the edge of death is quite fine as long as people are kept from the point of either rising up or flooding into the U.S. where they might be a source of social instability.

The Promise and Reality of Aid

But what about all those billions of dollars of aid pledged to Haiti? Wasn't that a sign of genuine concern? And hasn't that helped people?

There are three realities to look at here. The first reality is that when you read the fine print, the aid pledged to Haiti came with "conditions," which were basically that Haiti officially give up its national sovereignty. The International Donors' Conference in March established a "Haitian Recovery Commission" to administer international aid, and insisted that this HRC stand above any oversight of the Haitian government or judiciary. The HRC has 24 members—half Haitians and half representatives of international donors and lenders, and is co-chaired by Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. Given that these "international donors" already hold the money and the guns in Haiti, this means in practice that the representatives of U.S. imperialism will call the shots on how Haitian society is reorganized in the wake of the earthquake—if it ever is rebuilt, which is a real question mark at this point.

In April, the Haitian Parliament acceded to these terms for receiving aid, in spite of some protests that this represented an unconstitutional loss of Haitian sovereignty. According to Reuters, President Rene Preval told them that "the operation of the commission would facilitate the release of massive reconstruction financing that will be administered through a Multi-Donor Trust Fund, to be supervised by the World Bank"—i.e., vote for this or we won't get any aid.

The "justification" for this outrageous imposition of foreign control is the history and present reality of widespread corruption and "incompetence" of the Haitian government. There is a racist and colonialist sub-text here—the imperialists imply that Haitian people are just too ignorant to handle their own affairs, so it is up to the great powers to "pick up the white man's burden" (as the pro-imperialist British writer Rudyard Kipling once called it) of running their society for them. This "native" corruption and incompetence is a prime justification for imperialist intervention of all kinds, and a prime way of covering up the enormous failures of their system.

Now it has to be said that in the wake of Katrina, the Wall Street debacle, the housing collapse, and the capitalist oil catastrophe in the Gulf, the U.S. should shut the fuck up about other nations' incompetence and corruption!

But more importantly, governmental corruption in Haiti (and elsewhere) is very real, but it is directly a product of U.S. domination! As Revolution noted right after the earthquake (see Revolution #188):

"The news reports talk about Haiti's poverty, but they don't tell you why Haiti is so poor. Very few people know that Haiti was the scene of the only successful slave revolution in history—when the heroic descendants of African slaves drove out the strongest army in the world at that time, the French. Very few people know that the world's powers—especially the U.S., which at that time feared the influence of Haiti on the slaves in this country, and France—embarked on a policy of isolating and impoverishing Haiti. Very few people know that for nearly 20 years in the early 1900's the U.S. marines occupied Haiti, suppressing a liberation struggle and implanting puppets. Very few people know that the U.S. backed the infamously cruel tyrant 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, and then his son 'Baby Doc,' in the middle of the century. And all too few know that it then conspired to overthrow the popular president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the 1990's and then again in 2004. All these criminal actions—this long criminal history of oppression—flowed from the economic and political needs of the U.S. ruling classes during the time when the U.S. was run, first, by a coalition of capitalist and slave-holding classes, and then more recently by the ruling capitalist-imperialist class. Throughout the last two centuries, the U.S. has backed up reactionary ruling classes within Haiti as part of this."

To put it bluntly, the U.S. has been the primary force shaping—often violently—the Haitian state and social and economic structure. And very specifically, the U.S. worked to overthrow any regime that was not thoroughly "corrupt." Why? Because the people the U.S. wants as local power structure in Haiti are those willing to sell out the interests of the people and nation of Haiti to the U.S., in return for prestigious titles, connections and a fat salary. How can it then complain that the same people are "corrupt" and "incompetent"?!?!

But with its Parliament having succumbed to U.S. blackmail, Haiti now confronts a second reality—that the vast majority of aid that was promised hasn't come through. According to Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, only about 2% of the pledged aid has been delivered to Haiti—and how much of that has actually gone to the Haitian people, rather than being siphoned off to various capitalists, power-brokers, etc., is anyone's guess.

And along with this, even to the extent that aid is available, the "normal workings" of capitalist relations are paralyzing reconstruction work. There have been frequent reports in the media that plans to build better camps are stymied by the failure to get permission from large landowners who control possible sites. In fact, there are many reports of people being evicted from encampments set up after the earthquake because landlords thought they could put even rubble strewn land to more profitable use. (One of the encampments that the Revolution reporter stayed at while in Haiti was subsequently evicted.)

Imperialist "Rebuilding"

The third reality here is that the U.S. plan for Haiti—should it ever actually materialize—is to rebuild it to better serve the needs of U.S. imperialism, and not to help the Haitian people.

According to Ansel Herz writing on HaitiAnalysis.com, "[Hilary] Clinton, along with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, are touting a plan devised by Oxford economist Paul Collier to expand tariff-free export zones around Haiti. Their plan calls for Haiti to lift urban slum-dwellers out of poverty through jobs in textile factories, like the Inter-American Garment Factory..."

The Corail-Cesselesse camp north of Port-au-Prince has been touted by the HRC as the "future" of Haiti. According to a report by Jonathan Katz in the Associated Press (July 13) there are plans to house 300,000 people in transitional then permanent shelters and provide them with jobs. According to Katz, the jobs being looked at right now are low-wage Korean garment companies. So far about 7,000 Haitians have been bused in to live in tents, followed by thousands more squatters desperate to find a piece of safe dirt on which to stretch some tarps.

But even this plan for organized misery has run up against powerful obstacles. Big landowners in the area claimed the land, and have tried to evict residents; they send thugs in the night to threaten people with machetes and guns. Finally in early-July they were able to officially open the camp with great fanfare, but on July 13, a summer squall hit the camp and destroyed 344 tents, leaving 1,700 people with no shelter at all. As Haiti stands at the beginning of hurricane season, this incident shows that the international and local authorities view even the residents of their future "model city" as disposable commodities whose lives and happiness count for nothing except an opportunity for capitalists and imperialists to profit from them.

In July demonstrations of thousands took to the streets in Port-au-Prince and other Haitian cities. While there were many diverse forces and demands, the unifying theme was to demand the resignation of the government of President Rene Preval. Annessy Vixama, a leader of Tet Kole, one of the major peasant organizations in Haiti, has raised the just demand that "the state has to change from attending to international businesses that are acting against the majority of the people and start attending to the peasants."

As pointed out above, the state, in Haiti or anywhere else, is never "neutral"; it does not represent "the people" or "the nation" in general—it arises on the basis of, reflects and serves the underlying economic and political system in a given country. In Haiti the basic system is exploitation and domination by the imperialists (mainly the U.S.) and by the imperialists' allies within Haiti amongst the large landowning and capitalist classes. This is the system, these are the class forces, that the state was built to serve and which it can only serve. And in fact, if the Haitian state is weak, that is mainly because the imperialists have repeatedly opted to rule directly, through coups, invasions and occupations; in fact, Haiti has been under U.S./UN occupation since President Aristide was kidnapped and taken out of the country in 2004, and most aid and investment bypasses the government and is funneled through NGOs (generally pro-imperialist "non-governmental organizations.")

The mounting struggle against this government and demands that it meet the needs of the people are completely just and should be supported by people everywhere. And such struggle has the potential to strengthen and push forward a movement for revolution that is aimed at the fundamental problem of U.S. imperialism and its stranglehold domination of Haiti.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/Perkinson_Interview-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Revolution Interview

A special feature of Revolution to acquaint our readers with the views of significant figures in art, theater, music and literature, science, sports, and politics. The views expressed by those we interview are, of course, their own; and they are not responsible for the views published elsewhere in our paper.

Robert Perkinson: Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire

Robert Perkinson is a professor of American Studies at University of Hawaii and the author of Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2008), a sweeping history of the U.S. prison system from slavery time to the present, with a particular focus on Texas. Revolution talked with Perkinson after a recent New York City book release event at Revolution Books.

***

Part 1: The Long Shadow of Slavery

Revolution: Your book goes deeply into the history and the current reality of the vengeful model of prisons in Texas. Can you give our readers some context and overview of what you lay out in your work?

Robert Perkinson: Texas is the most locked-down state in the most incarcerated country in the world. There has never been a nominally democratic country that has incarcerated such a great portion of its citizenry. And Texas has really been at the epicenter of that counterrevolutionary change that has swept American society over the last 40 years. We now have 2.4 million people in prison; 170,000 of them are in Texas, more than any other state. The promise, however fleeting, of rehabilitation has largely collapsed in our prisons and jails; they really are warehouses for the poor and the mentally ill and those addicted to drugs—those on the margins of society. My book looks at the whole sweep of American history, and the whole sweep of the prison and its entwinement both with politics and economy. It argues that the traditional history of the prison that typically tells a story rooted in the Northeast, a story of "good intentions gone awry," is really less important than the Southern story—which is not a story of good intentions gone awry but of bad intentions gone worse. Whereas in the North penitentiaries were built ostensibly to rehabilitate, in the South they were built to punish, to exploit labor, and to further solidify the racial divide. It is that model of imprisonment that has really come to the fore in our time.

Revolution: You write in the book that "in the realm of punishment, all roads lead to Texas." Your work is an in-depth examination of why that is, starting from the slave state days of Texas, and even before, and this is well worth studying. But can you draw out in broad strokes what you mean by "all roads lead to Texas"?

Robert Perkinson: There are two reasons why I think Texas provides the most illuminating case study of mass imprisonment. One is that it is the biggest, baddest system in the country. There are more people being executed, more people behind bars generally, more people in supermax isolation, more people in for-profit facilities than in any other state. It is also very much an embodiment of the Southern model of incarceration, so that most of its prison infrastructure is built on former slave plantations, precisely in the counties that had the greatest portion of slaves before emancipation. So the prison infrastructure very much grew out of the ruins of slavery, kind of phoenix-like.

But there is another reason too. You can find equal harshness and as prominent, if not more prominent, ties to the history of slavery in Louisiana or Mississippi, but the difference with Texas is that it has really had national political influence in a way that more backwater states, like Mississippi and Louisiana, never have had. By the latter half of the 20th century, Texas had perfected the plantation model of punishment, such that it became a conservative counterpart to the liberal, supposedly beneficent California regime. And as the country swung to the right politically, after the collapse of the Great Society, and after the war, and after the urban rebellions of the '60s, that Texas model became a template for the nation. So whereas policy makers and penologists had previously looked to Texas as kind of an anachronistic, throwback to the old South, it started to become not a backwater, but a beacon. And other states started following and copying Texas' focus on labor, cost-cutting, and exacting military-style discipline. All prisons are authoritarian, but really Texas was more totalitarian. So I argue that it really led the way in this punitive counterrevolution in American politics and penology.

Revolution: Can you get more into what you're raising about a link to slavery? In a section subtitled "The Long Shadow of Slavery," you note that while there are clear differences between literal enslavement and prisons, that "Texas prisons carried forth many of slavery's core practices and cultural traditions."

Robert Perkinson: Well, there are two ways that the ghosts of slavery live on in Texas politics and prisons. Most concretely you see it in the rhythms of daily life and the disciplinary practices of the institutions themselves. The form of labor organization under slavery was the gang-task system: there would be a white driver, sometimes even a slave driver, and then there would be a gang of workers that would go out to the fields to fill a certain quota over the course of the day. That style of labor fell apart and was replaced by sharecropping and tenancy in the South after the emancipation, and it survived only in Southern prisons—that's the only place that you still see that form of labor organization. (To a certain extent you still see gang-task labor management in some proletarianized, really harsh corporate farms in California, and some other places with disenfranchised immigrant field workers, but it has its purest forms in these prisons). So you still see long lines of, mostly African American, convicts being led out of the cotton fields by an armed white man on horseback, every morning before dawn; and they work essentially from dawn to dusk. The labor is less exhausting than it was before federal courts began intervening in the 1970s, but that is still very much a facet of the whole ethos of the prison. These prisons are all built on slavery blueprints.

We see traces of slavery in the rhythms of daily life and in prison culture as well: the time that meals are served (in accord with field conditions), the deferential and demeaning nomenclature, the insular rural white guard culture—passed down from father to son, and over the generations, from slave driver to corrections officer. So in a sense these prisons are cultural preserves, almost living museums in a perverse sense.

But the other way is in politics. First, it's important to dispel a common misperception: To a surprising extent there is very little correlation between how we deal with criminal punishment and prisons, and crime on the streets. There is very little correlation between rising crime rates and rising imprisonment rates. Sometimes they correlate, other times they don't at all. What really governs how we manage our prisons is politics, and in particular, racial politics (and to a somewhat lesser degree, class politics). What I found is that Texas' racialized prison politics took shape during slavery and has never escaped its shadow.

Finally, there's another way that history stretching back to slavery helps us understand the U.S. prison state. In the book, I argue that mass imprisonment represents an echo of what happened after Reconstruction. After emancipation, during the period of Reconstruction, there was this moment of flourishing Black freedom in American life—building churches, building schools, getting elected to office, integrating public facilities. And that was smashed by both a federal withdrawal of troops and protection and the formation of a terrorist militia, led by the Ku Klux Klan, that established Jim Crow segregation and lynching and convict leasing that endured for another century.

So there was this expansion and then a constriction of freedom, and what I argue is that we see the same thing happened after the Civil Rights movement. There is this flourishing of liberty with the Black Civil Rights freedom movement, so we see the whole infrastructure of Jim Crow segregation collapse, which was an astonishing accomplishment. But out of the rubble of that collapse, a new white conservatism emerged that turned not to segregation, but to the politics of law and order to govern this new integrated social order that conservatives had feared and fought against. And so you see the same jurisdictions that fought against integration most avidly have become our most avid jailers. In the same period that segregation statutes were swept from the books in Texas, for instance, you see drug penalties being ramped up, more resources being given to law enforcement, new prisons being constructed. It became the way the new conservative movement coped with integration, by this massive, police response. And we see obvious manifestations of that in the drug war, in the crack cocaine disparities, and the way politicians, like in the Willy Horton ads, were so effective against Mike Dukakis. But it's that politics of fear led by the right with the collusion of the Democrats, that has created a prison nation.

Revolution: In relation to the point about the prison boom as a response to the upsurges of the '60s, you cite a 1968 quote from H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon's top aide: "[the president said] that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to."

Robert Perkinson: I argue that the law-and-order response to desegregation really began with conservative Southern Democrats—the Strom Thurmonds of the world. They warned—if you go back and look at their quotes in the 1950s—that integration was going to unleash a terrifying crime wave, and they demanded a tough police response. So the reactionary Southern Democrats are the ones that really began this.

But then, pretty quickly the smartest strategists in the Republican Party realized that the Democratic Party was vulnerable. The Dems had this rock-solid hold on the South with an unwieldy coalition that included everyone from Black sharecroppers to white supremacists plantation owners. These folks were all voting in the same party (to the extent that Blacks were allowed to vote), and the GOP realized that as the Democrats were embracing the cause of civil rights, they could lose the support of angry anxious white voters, especially if Republicans made appeals in the idiom of law and order. Barry Goldwater was really the pioneer in that regard, copying the strategy first laid out by George Wallace.

Richard Nixon, then, was the first person that rode this "Southern Strategy" to power. He is the first person that really broke apart the Democratic coalition in the South, and began turning white southerners to the Republican Party, and that is now where they almost all reside. So that is in some ways what Nixon was talking about—he realized that a critical part of his electoral appeal was to harvest angry, often racist, conscious or unconscious, white voters; but in the post-Civil Rights era, you could no longer do that with crass racist demagoguery, you had to come up with a new way of appealing to that electorate.

Revolution: Aside from electoral strategies, there was a felt need at the top of the power structure to reverse what came out of the '60s.

Robert Perkinson: Yes, so it was real too. Crime rates were going up in the 1960s—even more than they were going up, the report of them were going up, because the government was keeping closer track. So it seemed that crime was going up even faster than it actually was. Like you say, the civil rights movement had achieved its immediate legal goals and...

Revolution: ...was growing into the Black liberation movement.

Robert Perkinson: Right, so there was a sort of radical wing of the Civil Rights movement, and people also started to talk about economic and social justice, not just civil rights. All of which was very threatening to those with economic and social power. So there was also this desire to ramp up law enforcement in response to the Black Panthers in particular, as a kind of domestic counterinsurgency. And this is really the era of global revolution too, so in their minds the Black Panthers, and the Viet Cong, and the Mau Mau, and all these radical organizations around the world, were swept into this—what they imagined to be this kind of communist boogie-man that they needed to repress by any means necessary.

Revolution: And this has had devastating consequences, especially in the oppressed communities and in particular Black and Latino youth.

Robert Perkinson: Well, the other thing that happens at the same time during this period is that as the right comes to power, the right slowly begins chipping away at the already anemic social welfare state, and that has had a particularly injurious effect on those at the bottom, and particularly Black Americans. We saw all of these tax policy changes during the Reagan administration that favored the wealthy and ultimately favored whites over Blacks, so at the same time that African Americans are being targeted by the drug war, intentionally or not, and being incarcerated in higher numbers, they are also being harmed as a general group by the whole gamut of economic policies. So we've gone from a helping hand style government to a closed fist—from carrots to sticks, from the Great Society to the Mean Society. There is a whole transformation, and that has had huge effects, even though by many measures the U.S. is so much less racist and much more tolerant now, than it was in say 1950. I mean, attitudes about interracial marriage and dating, and some of our superstars in sports and even our president have backgrounds that would have been unfathomable a century ago. Yet in some ways, especially by economic measures and most starkly of all by criminal justice measures, racism is alive and well. Racial division in some ways is as bad, almost, as it had ever been in the 20th century, certainly as bad as it has been anytime since the 1920s. There is a new study just out that the disparity in family wealth between Blacks and whites has quadrupled in the last 20 years. The racial disparities in criminal justice have almost doubled over the last 40 years. In some ways America is dispensing less equal rights now than before the civil rights movement, which is a pretty astonishing development.

Part 2: Warehousing of Prisoners and Dreams of Freedom

Revolution: What is the current situation with prison labor?

Robert Perkinson: If you go read prisoner memoirs from Northern prisons all through the 19th and 20th centuries, idleness is one of their central complaints. It's rarely a complaint that Texan or other Southern prisoners made, because they were worked to the bone, in very much the same style and with the same work quotas as had slaves. First, after the Civil War, they were worked for about half a century for private profit—almost all prisoners in the system, white and Black, were worked by private contractors, often to death, with African American prisoners being worked much harder and having higher work quotas than whites and sent to harsher work sites. And then when the states took over the system, around the turn of the century, that focus on labor exploitation as a way to cut costs and make the prison system almost—"self-sustaining" is the catch word that politicians used—continued all the way through the 20th century. And it only began to fall with the tremendous expansion of the system and federal court intervention in the late 20th century.

Now in the 21st century, they have had to build so many prisons—it went from like 20 prisons to 112 that they have in Texas now—a lot of them are just kind of concrete warehouses set up anywhere where the land is cheap. So the tradition of labor exploitation has finally begun to collapse into a warehousing regime, just within the last few years.

Revolution: While there is academic rigor in your research, you're also clearly passionate about this subject matter. How did you get into this area of study?

Robert Perkinson: I started working as an activist in college, working on all sorts of different causes in the '80s against the U.S. wars in Central America, against apartheid, against nuclear weapons. But I started noticing that every few weeks a new prison was opening, and the prison budget in some states was surpassing the higher education budget. More and more people were getting arrested for low-level drug possession, and more were going to prison for it. I started getting interested in that as a symptom of what was going wrong with the U.S. generally. So I started working as an activist—I did a conference on the drug war, and worked on the Mumia Abu-Jamal case for a while. And then in grad school I decided to take this on as a serious area of study.

I thought I would work on private prisons at first, but then finally when I started really reading, I decided what we really needed is to have a broad historical understanding of where this monster came from, in order hopefully to slay it. And so my hope is that, by illuminating the racial and fear-laden politics of prison politics, organizational strategies to try to change it will become more clear. My sense is that it is going to take not just tinkering around the edges, and technocratic fixes, or new studies showing we can save monies by this or that—rather, in the same way that this is a big change in American history, it is a big obstacle and it is going to take a lot to change it. In some ways I feel like it took a Civil War to end slavery, it took the Civil Rights movement to end Jim Crow segregation, and it will probably require another Civil Rights movement in order to transform the U.S. prison system.

Revolution: What is your view of the concept of the "prison-industrial complex," which is widely put forward?

Robert Perkinson: Yes, I used that term a lot as an activist. And it has been something that is kind of a very short phrase that encapsulates a critique of the criminal justice system. But the more that I started research and formulation of my own critique, I realized that it might encapsulate a critique in a slightly deceiving way. The suggestion with that term and its allusion to the military industrial complex—which itself was a term to try to explain the oversized influence of defense contractors on U.S. foreign policy and military spending—the presumption is that the profit motive and corporate greed, and for-profit prisons companies in particular, and to a lesser extent contractors and banks issuing prison bonds and so on, that they are really a driving force in the rise of mass imprisonment in the United States. I think all of that is a contributing force, but I don't find it credible that it is a driving force, because most of the economic forces in play are present in other countries of similar economies to the U.S., and there has been no comparable prison build-up elsewhere. We also see tremendous growth rates of imprisonment even in states where there is no private imprisonment, California notably.

So what I think we really have is more of a prison racist complex. And the suggestion in that term is that what we need to change is the poisonous racial politics in the United States. That is what needs to change for imprisonment politics to change. Whereas in the prison industrial complex, there is this supposition that if you could take the profit motive out of incarceration that somehow this system would teeter and collapse, and I don't think that is quite right.

Revolution: Increasingly in the prisons, as in society generally, fundamentalist Christianity is put forward as a so-called "alternative" to the dog-eat-dog mentality that's fostered by the prison system itself. What have you learned through your studies about this phenomenon in the prisons?

Robert Perkinson: Christianity has played a conflicted role in the history of prisons. On the one hand a lot of the prison reform movements, especially in the North but also in the South, have been led by Christian organizations preaching the ethic of mercy and forgiveness and helping those who are less fortunate. On the other hand, the Southern model of conservative Christianity that developed hand-in-hand with slave-owning emphasized deferring worldly pleasure for the afterlife, as well as submitting to god in the spiritual world and to your master or boss or husband in your daily life. It is that strain of Christianity based on submission and deferred rewards for those on the bottom, that is ultimately comforting to those in power and that has really started to gain a lot of official sanction in a number of prison systems. In fact there are all these evangelical right-leaning prisons that are being set up across the country, amazingly with tax dollars—in effect, they are forced Christian indoctrination camps for unfree people, where you will be rewarded if you adopt this strict fundamentalist theology. I visited one of these in Texas, and it is actually quite a nice prison compared to some other prisons, because there are more resources and there are free people coming in, women as well as men, and there are singing groups. But the theology that is imposed is very rigid, very Talibanesque (the Christian version). It is not quite big enough to have had a huge impact, so it is still early to know what the legacy of that will be.

Revolution: Your book is among books and other publications that have been banned from Texas prisons. Why did they ban it?

Robert Perkinson: It is quite sad because a lot of the book is based on extensive interviews that I did with prisoners who very generously shared their time with me. I worked with my publisher to set aside copies for these prisoners, and now they can't read it. The stated reason for the ban is quite twisted. There is a section towards the beginning of the book where I talk about the high rates of previous sexual victimization among female inmates. I tell this story of one prisoner who was raped as a child, and in a sentence in her words, she describes what happened to her. So the box that they checked in their censorship form is that the book depicts indecency with a child, so they lumped it into the same category as child pornography, even though this was a critique of abuse of children.

Revolution: You dedicate your book to "My friends in prison and their dreams of freedom." How have your interactions with prisoners affected you?

Robert Perkinson: It has probably changed my ideas so much that I can't even identify it all. I was very lucky; to their credit Texas prison authorities gave me quite generous access—so I was able to talk to hundreds of people, sometimes in snippets of conversations and other times really in depth. Some of the prisoners I interviewed for extended periods have really become intellectuals, and I shared with them some of my writing or at least my ideas, and they would present their critique. I would say "this is how I think the system works," and they would write back and say "no, I think it works this way." So there was a lot of back and forth in the same way that I have with other university professors and criminal justice professionals. So a lot of the prisoners became not just research subjects, but intellectual collaborators in the project.

I have gotten a chance to meet some in the free world after their release, and I hope to see many more.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/178/populism-racism-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

The Right Wing Populist Eruption:

Yes, It Actually IS Racism

On September 12, several tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Washington, D.C. ostensibly against the Democratic Party healthcare proposal in Congress. In fact, this march represented a major political statement by a fascist movement.

To give a flavor of this, one reporter noted that "a burly Pennsylvania correction officer named David McElwee held up a poster of Obama photoshopped as a half-naked African native in a hut with a grass skirt and a bone in his nose." Two days earlier, in Scranton, Pennsylvania: "All around were satanic representations of President Barack Obama in whiteface, as a Nazi, an African witch doctor; a Marxist; a Muslim...." Signs depicted Obama as Osama Bin Laden. A woman in the crowd told a reporter that Obama was putting himself at a godly level, and that she was praying "for his conversion." Was Obama a Muslim she was asked? "Only he knows." Adding to her fury: she heard that Michelle Obama had a six hundred dollar pair of shoes. (Descriptions from "Who Is Barack Obama? And why do people say such loopy, ugly things about him? The enduring rot in American politics," by Philip Weiss, New York Magazine, September 28, 2009)

Barack Obama is Not a Socialist or a Communist... But WE Are Reactionaries have attacked Obama as a socialist or a communist. He's not—Obama is chief executive of the capitalist-imperialist system. Neither side of the mainstream "debate" over healthcare has anything to do with REAL socialism. Socialism is a whole different system, brought into being by a REAL revolution, aimed at doing away with all exploitation and oppression, and as part of that, truly meeting the needs of the people. To learn more about communism and socialism: Read COMMUNISM: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW STAGE, A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (available at Revolution Books in your area or online at revcom.us). Bob Avakian is the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Find his work at bobavakian.net. Be there when Raymond Lotta's tour, Everything You've Been Told About Communism Is Wrong, Capitalism Is a Failure, Revolution Is the Solution, comes to your area (info at revolutionbooks.org).

The atmosphere at the healthcare town hall meetings over the summer included numerous incidents of people openly displaying guns. One man wore a loaded 9mm pistol as he stood outside a town hall meeting on healthcare held by Obama in Portsmouth, N.H. His sign read: "It's time to water the tree of liberty"—a reference to a quote by Thomas Jefferson—the full quote is: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

In another widely reported incident, a Hagerstown, Maryland man held up a piece of cardboard upon which he had scrawled: "Death to Obama, death to Michelle and her two stupid kids." The Arizona Republic reported that "A man, who decided not to give his name, was walking around the pro-healthcare reform rally at 3rd and Washington Streets, with a pistol on his hip, and an AR-15 (a semi-automatic assault rifle) on a strap over his shoulder."

While some (but not all) of these people showing up with guns and threats have been questioned or taken into custody by authorities, there is clearly an atmosphere where they feel they can get away with this. Compare that to incidents like one at a Bush campaign rally in West Virginia in 2004 when a couple was arrested for wearing T-shirts that said "Love America, Hate Bush."

These reactionary forces are being orchestrated and whipped up by powerful voices in the Republican Party and media. Glenn Beck rants that Obama (who in reality has avoided any criticism of racism throughout all this) "has a deep-seated hatred for white people." (See box below for more on Glenn Beck's particularly odious role.)

And it was not some anonymous good ol' boy blogger, but a prominent South Carolina Republican Party operative, Rusty DePass, who wrote on his Facebook page that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was "just one of Michelle [Obama]'s ancestors." DePass was co-chairman of Rudy Giuliani's 2008 campaign in the state's largest county, and a former state elections commission chairman. After DePass excused his posting as a "joke," he got a free pass from the state Republican Party. Eric Davis, another South Carolina Republican official, said, "Everyone says stupid things they regret later. I think the world should move on."

South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint, an up-and-coming force in this mix who is energetically being promoted, told the Washington crowd, sprinkled with swastikas and signs that said "Don't Tread On Me," that he was more comfortable with the protestors there than his fellow senators.

The "town hall meeting" atmosphere erupted in Congress itself, when South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, shouted, "You lie" when Obama told Congress his healthcare proposal would not cover undocumented immigrants. (For the record, all healthcare reform bills heartlessly exclude undocumented immigrants from receiving any healthcare benefits.) With straight faces, most of the mainstream media dismissed the idea that Wilson might be racist. Really? Wilson is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that celebrates those who fought for slavery in the Civil War, and as a state legislator voted against taking down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state capital. If that's not racist, what is?

It is not a great stretch or exaggeration to compare those at these meetings to a lynch mob in the making. One thing that must be said up front here: While Barack Obama—as the head of the U.S. capitalist-imperialist state—does not represent anything progressive, any kind of move against him along the lines of what is being promoted by these kinds of forces would be a reactionary outrage.

Populism or Racism? It's BOTH

Mainstream media analysts have argued this eruption is a rebirth of populism, and not about race. In a column entitled "No, It's Not About Race," conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that the furor erupting at the healthcare hearings was driven by populism, not racism. He insisted that the roots of this movement lay in the thinking of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and how could that be racist?

To which an insightful letter writer replied:

"...Ironically, by invoking the names of Jefferson and Jackson, [Brooks] calls attention to two of our nation's leaders most identified with racism — one who benefited directly from slavery and one whose purge of native people from their lands opened the doors to unchecked American expansionism in the West.

"Moreover, in his outline and glorification of populist movements throughout our country's history, Mr. Brooks doesn't mention the connection between racism and populism. The two do not stand in isolation.

"Historically, racism has served as the underlying thread that has sown our populist movements — and it continues to do so today." (Letter to the Editor from Angela West Blank, New York Times, September 21, 2009)

Exactly.

From its very beginnings, there has been a great American myth propagated: that this country has advanced through the ingenuity and hard work of its citizens (that is, its white male citizens), and that the superior position of white people in this society—and the privileges they have—are the rewards of hard work and supposedly superior "culture" and ethic. And that if Black people and other oppressed nationalities have not, as a group, attained these things it is not because of the hundreds of years of enslavement, not because of the century spent living in legal segregation and lynch mob terror, not because of systematic discrimination in every sphere of life that still goes on... but because "they are inferior, do not work as hard and their culture encourages them to be criminal, and immoral." A cruel lie, and an easily refuted one—but one that has justified oppression and inequality for those who've drawn benefits from it.

Jefferson promoted the vision of a society based on small landowning farmers, independent individuals who would participate equally as the most just, the best kind of society. But in reality, he presided over, acted in the interests of, and fought to spread a society founded upon the twin crimes of slavery and the brutal dispossession and near genocide of the Native peoples. The literal dehumanization of Black slaves (and free Black people) was enforced by white supremacist laws and racist thinking. And central to the social and ideological glue which has always cohered this nation was the shared identity of white people of all classes and strata.

From the beginning, white people were mobilized—as white people—to see their interests in opposition to, and threatened by, Black people and Native Americans. And the foundational divide between the classes that own and monopolize the means of production needed to produce the great wealth, and those who do not and were forced, either by the whip or by hunger, to produce that wealth—this basic division was obscured.

It is this appeal to the common (white) man that has been the basis of almost every populist movement in the U.S.—from Jefferson's time to Andrew Jackson, who not only led in the removal and near genocide of the Native peoples, but fought to expand slavery—right down through the Ku Klux Klan and now the movements of today. Racism is indeed "the underlying thread."

This whole historical development, which we have only been able to touch on here, has tremendous implications for communism, and revolution in this country. We strongly urge all our readers to get their hands on and dig into the work of Bob Avakian on all these questions including Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy.

The Roots of the Right Wing Populist Uprising

The last decades have been a period of great instability and uncertainty. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of the U.S. as the world's sole superpower, there were major geopolitical changes. These include the sharp challenge to U.S. domination from the rise and growing strength of the Islamic fundamentalists in the strategic Middle East. There have been great shifts in the world economy, with the globalization and further internationalization of production and of speculative and other parasitic activity by capital. Within the U.S., this has been reflected in radical changes in the economy. As capital chases around the world to exploit men, women, and children for pennies a day, many of the relatively high paying "blue-collar" jobs (which overwhelmingly employed men) are no more. Small businesses and independent farmers have come under extreme pressure and huge numbers of family farms have gone out of business. And there have been, accompanying these shifts and the impact that has had on millions, major changes in the broad mass—and especially youth—culture in this country. Some of these cultural changes were initially very positive, promoting a more critical and communal and anti-hypocrisy spirit, but in the last few decades especially these have more tended to fragmentation, commodification of sexuality, a certain nastiness of spirit, selfishness, and the perverse mirror-image capitalist mentality of gangsta-ism. In any case, all of them have had the effect of loosening the cohesion of "traditional small-town (and extremely suffocating and narrow minded) American values."

And now, the current economic crisis hits very hard. Over 70% of those who have lost their jobs are men. More and more families are dependent on women working—and all this seems to further "undermine the traditional family." Homes, which provided much of the wealth—and "security"—for non-ruling class white people in this country, are being lost in record numbers. The general stability and the privilege that people from these strata have enjoyed on the basis of being either white, male and/or living in a country which feeds off the rest of the world and have, on that basis, been given crumbs—all that is being threatened.

And the problem as these "common people" are being led to see it? Not the system of capitalism which has wrought all these dramatic changes in its search for ever greater profit (and, by the way, a system that has throughout its history brought much worse suffering to millions and millions in the inner cities of this country, and billions around the world). But the elites—of Wall Street and Hollywood—and the dangerous "others" who are taking over the country and supposedly collaborating to deprive hard working, white Americans of the privilege they have enjoyed, their prosperity and rights. These "elites," they are told, want to attack their values and undermine their whole way of life, and to give what is supposedly rightfully theirs to the "undeserving" masses in the inner cities.

It is true that "elites" manipulate huge blocs of finance capital and with the push of a button can cause misery for people all over the world. But those so-called elites are the inevitable product of, and stewards over, a system. That system is capitalism-imperialism. And it must be emphasized and understood that these decisions, including in this current crisis, affect the masses worldwide—and in the inner cities in this country—in the most bitter ways imaginable. In addition, those decisions are now wreaking havoc and suffering in the lives of many people who once thought they had finally made it. The problem is not that some people are cheating or refusing to play by the rules. The problem is the rules—that is, the basic functioning and dynamics of capitalism itself.

Most of all, these movements resent and hate the changes of the 1960s. The 1960s were a time in which the Black masses—joined by many others—waged a tremendous struggle and a time when concessions, like affirmative action, were made to this struggle. A time when a powerful movement was mounted against the unjust war the U.S. waged in Vietnam. It was a time in which laws were changed (or the Constitution interpreted) in ways that vitally affect women, including particularly around abortion. Gay people began to come out of the closet, and assert their rights. And these were times, as Bob Avakian has summed up when "...millions of people in the U.S. broke with the prevailing conventions and established authorities and took up the challenge of fighting for new relations among people and new cultural expressions that were not centered around careerism and battling for position in the cash nexus and the social pecking order and that consciously rejected 'America number one with god on our side.' A great many people came to understand that the common source of all the evils they were fighting against—and the obstacle to the things they were fighting for—was the capitalist-imperialist system.... And through the course of those tumultuous times, those who were rebelling against the established order and the dominating relations and traditions increasingly found common cause and powerful unity; they increasingly gained—and deserved—the moral as well as the political initiative, while the ruling class dug in and lashed out to defend its rule, but increasingly, and very deservedly, lost moral and political authority." (Preaching from a Pulpit of Bones: We Need Morality But Not Traditional Morality by Bob Avakian, pages 24-25)

In the decades since, much of what was accomplished back then has been undone or overturned. But in the world view of these populists—only a thorough overturning and burying of all of what was brought forward through these struggles will suffice. What these right wing fanatics aim for is to fully return and restore America to, its white, Christian roots... and its destiny... as divined by god.

The Current Ominous Polarization, and the Needed Repolarization

Meanwhile, how have the Democrats and Obama responded to all this?

By essentially denying that there is a problem and refusing to challenge this fascist movement.

When Jimmy Carter and a few others dared to say that this was a case of racism, Obama's spokespeople and Obama himself raced to say "no, no, these are just policy differences." Policy differences?! Look again at the first section of this article, or look at that YouTube of Glenn Beck described in the accompanying box—Glenn Beck who has become the new "rising star of the Right" and "man of the moment"—and tell us that this is a case of some disagreements over how health insurance is to be sold and delivered.

But this is nothing new. The Democrats for a good 20 years, and Obama himself, have over and over again allowed these fascists to run wild, unchallenged, and ceded the high moral ground to them. Take another example: how many Democratic office-holders, or other Party officials, attended the funeral of Dr. George Tiller, the courageous abortion doctor murdered last May by Christian fascists? Answer: none. The fact that Obama and the Democrats actively prevented any attempt to get abortion funded in this healthcare program underscores the point.

To understand why this is so, we want to turn to the very important—and still extremely relevant—work by Bob Avakian, the Chairman of the RCP, entitled "The Pyramid of Power and The Struggle to Turn This Whole Thing Upside Down." This work was taken from the question and answer section of Avakian's 2004 DVD, Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About. He describes the Republicans and Democrats as, roughly, representing two sections of the ruling class, sitting atop a metaphorical pyramid of society. He describes the kind of fascist movement and tactics that were going on at that point—including the links of that fascist movement into the military—and then goes on to say:

So, let's look at this whole picture and look at what they've been putting in place and then think about this: what do the Democrats—from their own position within the ruling class—what do they have to counter this with?

Here's the pyramid, and here are the Republicans over here (on the right) with their shit going down to this right-wing social base of religious maniacs and fundamentalist fools... [T]hese forces are quite willing to call into motion this fascistic kind of force that they've built up when they feel that they need it, and they're willing to bring it all the way into motion and turn this into a whole other kind of religious, fundamentalist, fascistic society if they feel that's where they need to go.

On the other hand, here are the Democrats at the top of this pyramid (on the so-called "left"). Who are the people that they try to appeal to—not that the Democrats represent their interests, but who are the people that the Democrats try to appeal to at the base, on the other side of this pyramid, so to speak? All the people who stand for progressive kinds of things, all the people who are oppressed in this society. For the Democrats, a big part of their role is to keep all those people confined within the bourgeois, the mainstream, electoral process...and to get them back into it when they have drifted away from—or broken out of—that framework. Because those people at the base are always alienated and angry at what happens with the elections, for the reason I was talking about earlier: they are always betrayed by the Democratic Party, which talks about "the little man" and poor people and the people who are discriminated against, and so on. And at times they'll even use the word oppression. But then they just sell out these people every time—because they don't represent their interests. They represent the interests of the system and of its ruling class. But they have a certain role of always trying to get people who are oppressed, alienated and angry back into the elections. You know: "Come on in, come on in—it's not as bad as you think, you can vote, it's OK." This is one of the main roles they play. But the thing about them is that they are very afraid of calling into the streets this base of people that they appeal to, to vote for them. The last thing in the world they want to do is to call these masses of people into the streets to protest or to battle against this right-wing force that's being built up.

Think for a minute what it would unleash if Obama were to say what is obvious to almost every liberal—that yes, there is a huge and driving element of racism involved in this "tea bagger" movement, that as a Black person in America he's known all along that this poison was going to surface, that this is part of and being folded into a whole fascist movement with support from the highest sections of the ruling class, and that anyone with a decent bone in their body should not only vociferously oppose this but put themselves on the line against it? And what would happen if some major figure in the Democratic Party were to then call people into the streets against these fascists? This is exactly the picture—the possibility of people actually getting into the streets to stand up to these reactionaries—that gives these Democratic politicians nightmares. Because once that genie is out of the bottle—once the oppressed people and the more enlightened people begin both to see and feel their potential strength and at the same time begin to investigate and debate why all this shit keeps happening and what can be done to really change it—then all kinds of possibilities for radical, and even revolutionary, change could open up and for every section of the ruling class this is a far worse nightmare than letting these fascists continue unimpeded.

One of the reasons, in fact, that such a large section of the ruling class rallied behind Obama is precisely to avoid and indeed prevent such a scenario. And now there is a certain irony—who "better" than a Black president to rule charges of "racism" out of order, even as he is himself targeted with a racism that grows increasingly more venomous with each passing day?

But there is a question as to whether and how long these contradictions can be contained. And there is the related question as to what revolutionaries, and people who want to see real change, do to transform the reality we face—to expose what is developing, to win people to see the deep roots in the system of both these ugly fascist movements and the capitulation to these movements promoted by the Democrats, to inspire people to resist this and the other crimes of this system—including the rampant police brutality and murder; the unceasing attacks on the right to abortion (and on women's rights more generally); denial of the rights of gay people, including to marry; the ongoing codification and use of torture by the government; the escalation of the war in Afghanistan (and continuing occupation of Iraq)... all of which are being presided over and furthered by Obama and the Democrats... and to do all this as part of repolarizing society, to make revolution.

Those are questions now being answered every day, by what we do—and do not do. 

JUST HOW SERIOUS ARE THESE RACIST, RIGHT WING POPULISTS—AND HOW FAR WILL THEY GO? In February, an episode of Beck's show on Fox "News" was called " War Room: 'Bubba Effect' – Martial Law, Looting, Hyperinflation, Depression, Chaos, America Implodes." It repeatedly posed a scenario that was essentially an armed fascist uprising against those responsible for "disenfranchisement and suffering" and to take back America, restoring its white, Christian roots...and its destiny...as divined by God. This would be an uprising that would replace the current U.S. government. And, Beck posed as the likely scenario, that this would have the support of the U.S. Army. Look at the YouTube of this—Beck's face shines with a sort of manic glee as he urges his listeners to prepare for this. (Search for "Glenn Beck" and "Bubba Effect" at YouTube.) This is only a very slightly cleaned up—updated—version of the infamous book, The Turner Diaries, which "envisioned" a race war in the U.S. with the righteous, fascist forces lynching Black people and whites who wanted integration. This book has been the inspiration for many reactionary survivalist militias for decades.

 

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/oil_catastrophe-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

The Capitalist Oil Catastrophe Is NOT Over
People Must Act to Stop It

by Larry Everest

The banner headline in the July 16 New Orleans Times-Picayune blared in big bold letters, "OIL FLOW HALTED." The day before, British Petroleum (BP) had, for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon well exploded on April 20, apparently stopped the flow of crude oil and methane gushing into—and poisoning—the Gulf of Mexico. 

BP and government officials are putting out the message that "the worst is over" and "the end is now in sight." But whether or not the gusher is really capped—and this is NOT yet totally clear—this oil disaster is far from over. The environment and the people, particularly along the Gulf coast, remain seriously threatened:

* Within days of the announcement of the capping, there were reports that there was "a detected seep a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head," and that the Coast Guard commander in charge had ordered BP "to draw up an emergency plan for the possible reopening of the cap." (Washington Post and Agence France-Presse, both July 19, 2010). So while the cap may be working, it is also possible that the capping process will drag on for weeks, perhaps longer.

* It is also possible, according to various engineers, that what has been done so far may have actually damaged the well and made completely capping it more difficult, perhaps even impossible. At each point in this disaster, BP and the government have systemically withheld information and outright lied about what is really going on. So it is possible that more is going on with this latest "fix" than is being revealed to the public, and people must remain vigilant.

* Enormous amounts of crude oil remain in the Gulf. According to official estimates (which may be too low), 35,000-60,000 barrels a day of crude oil have poured into the Gulf from the blown well everyday from April 20 until its capping. BP and the Coast Guard now claim that a major portion of the surface oil has been removed through skimming, burning, and weather effects and that the rest is breaking down "quickly." But there are now at least 100-200 million gallons of toxic crude still in the Gulf.

* As much as 80% of the oil may be under the surface—much of it in giant plumes, some stretching 10 miles. The existence of these plumes—which government officials in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) initially discounted, has now been proven by scientists.

* Oil has already washed into 630 miles of precious wetlands and ocean shores. But the bulk, a vast pool, remains offshore. There have been reports that it could get into the Gulf loop current and be carried to Florida and up into the Atlantic. Cuba and other Caribbean countries, even Europe, could be impacted.

* Hurricanes could sweep huge amounts of oil and toxic dispersants on shore—and the hurricane season has just started. The recent storm Bonnie turned out to be a "tropical depression," not a hurricane, but cleanup and drilling operations had to be stopped and there was talk of a possible 2-4 foot storm surge pushing oil into Louisiana marshes and beaches. Residents in low-lying areas were warned that oil-contaminated water could flood their homes and were told to avoid any contact with the water. Marine biologist Dr. Chris Pincetich of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project raised the question—what would happen if New Orleans is flooded again, but this time with water contaminated with oil and dispersants?

* No one knows the full extent of the devastation of marine life and other wildlife from this massive toxic nightmare, which has spread across huge regions of ocean filled with dolphins, fish, and turtles; into beautiful and amazing wetlands bursting with birds, crabs, oysters, alligators; into the barrier islands where brown pelicans and migratory birds have been nesting. Hundreds of birds, sea turtles, and dolphins have been found dead—the vast majority of animals killed by the oil disaster will never be found. Some scientists estimate that thousands of dolphins have already been killed. The next generation of hundreds of species of sea and coastal wildlife could well be devastated. Food webs in the Gulf will be laced with poison for no one knows how long and they could even face collapse.

* Scientist Samantha Joye, who has just been on the Gulf taking samples of the water, reported that the oil is now much more concentrated than when she first went out in May, and that 40% of what's gushed out of the well is methane gas—some concentrations at 100,000 times normal levels. Bacteria feed on this methane/oil mix and in the process use up oxygen, which may already be causing dead zones (water so depleted of oxygen that life can't even exist).

* There's been no systematic, publicly-available survey of the full extent of the threats to human health and lives posed by the catastrophe. Fumes and contact with this environment have poisoned people who are out on the waters or on the coastline. People's lives and livelihoods in many regions of the Gulf have been devastated and ruined.

* There are unknown and potentially catastrophic long-term impacts on ecosystems, marine life, wildlife, and human health. In 1989 the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled nearly nine million gallons of crude into the rich waters off the Alaska coast. It was four years later that much of the ecosystem collapsed, as new generations of marine creatures after the spill were born very vulnerable to the toxic mess and never survived or were damaged. The herring population, once rich in the area and a source of food for many other animals, was wiped out and has not reestablished itself 20 years after that spill.

All this points to the fact that this environmental and human catastrophe is far from over. An "all-hands-on-deck" people's response to stopping the disaster is as urgently needed as ever. We need to make sure that the gusher is actually stopped, that the toxic oil and chemicals now fouling the Gulf are cleaned up, that dispersant use which has been toxic, is halted immediately, and that the shores, wetlands, wildlife, marine life, and people are protected. And we need to dig into and expose the root causes of the oil blowout and the unconscionable response by BP and the government—and what that shows about this whole system and what it will take to prevent such catastrophes in the future and to really protect the planet and the people.

The Emergency Committee to Stop the Gulf Oil Disaster (stopgulfoildisaster.org) has called for protests globally on Friday, July 30: "100 Days of Outrage...Demand 100 Actions." Anyone who wants to stop the catastrophe and protect the Gulf, the people, and the planet should take part, wherever they are, in whatever way they can!

The System's Unconscionable Response to the Blowout

The Emergency Committee has called for building "a broad, determined, and powerful peoples' response." Why is this needed? Because "the government and British Petroleum have proven unable and unwilling to stop the disaster, protect the Gulf, or even tell the truth."

The response of BP, the Obama administration, and the whole power structure to the greatest environmental disaster yet in the history of the U.S. —and what may be the greatest oil disaster ever—has been shocking and outrageous:

• They've taken the very opposite of an "all-hands-on-deck" approach to stopping the gusher and dealing with the enormous effects on the environment and the people. Why weren't Exxon and Shell forced to send tankers, engineers and technology to help cap the gusher? Why have the thousands who volunteered to help been met with red tape and delays or never heard back from anyone after signing up?
• At each and every point, BP and the government have lied and covered up the full scope of the gusher and the reasoning for all the various fixes they have proposed and then abandoned up to now.
• They've used the toxic chemical dispersant Corexit on an unprecedented scale—nearly two million gallons—even though the manufacturer's (Nalco) own data state that Corexit mixed with oil makes the oil five times more deadly than oil alone, and about 10 times more deadly than the dispersant alone. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency's tests, which were used to justify their decision to okay BP's use of Corexit, did not test the toxicity of oil and Corexit together. So BP and the government made the environmental disaster worse in order to prevent oil from washing up onshore in massive amounts and push as much oil as possible out of sight. (See "Consensus Statement: Scientists oppose the use of dispersant chemicals in the Gulf of Mexico.")
• They have suppressed scientific research and public information on the size and impact of the gushing oil, the threats to human health, wildlife and marine life—which includes threatening, harassing and blocking journalists and the public—in order to prevent them from seeing and reporting on the full extent of the ecological horror BP and the government have created in the Gulf.
• They have attempted to enforce passivity among the people through stonewalling and bureaucratic delays for volunteers; threats against and gag orders on people hired for cleanup efforts; town hall meetings and massive advertising campaigns aimed at falsely assuring people that BP and the government really care and are doing all that is possible; and making many people in affected communities dependent on BP for any kind of livelihood.

All this has been unconscionable and has led to enormous costs in terms of ecological destruction and human suffering.

Why have BP and the U.S. government acted in the way they have? Because this has been a capitalist oil disaster—and a capitalist response to the disaster—at every level. The disaster itself was caused by the fact that under capitalism, everything is a commodity produced for profit. Under this system, the resources of the natural world are plundered without regard for ecological consequences. Production is privately owned and driven forward by cut-throat "expand-or-die" competition on a global scale. The time horizons of capitalism are short term. The system is driven by the need to maximize profits and to gain advantage in the market. (For more background, see previous coverage in Revolution and Raymond Lotta's talk, "A Capitalist Oil Spill...A System Not Fit to Be Caretakers of the Planet...And the Revolution We Need," available online at revolutionbooksnyc.org.)

And the U.S. government—representing the overall interests of the whole capitalist-imperialist system—allowed BP and others to recklessly drill 5,000 feet underwater, with NO IDEA of how to stop an oil spill at that depth. (Previous experiences with oil blowouts were in shallow waters, like at Ixtoc in Mexico in 1979, which took months and months to stop. To assume that the physics and mechanics are the same at much deeper levels is total irresponsibility and dishonesty in the service of profit.)

The question of oil and fossil fuels is bigger than BP as a major capitalist corporation. Through the 20th century and continuing today, oil has had everything to do with power and empire. Control over oil and other fossil fuels is not only a source of profits, but of leverage over other economies that depend on oil. Control over oil is a source of economic and geopolitical power in the world capitalist system. U.S. economic dominance in the world is inseparable from its military strength—from its bullying, wars of occupation and control, and global network of bases. And one of the dirty little secrets of empire is that the U.S. military is the single largest purchaser of oil in the world.

When disaster struck, the government continued to defend the interests of BP, the oil industry, and the capitalist system overall. They could not tell the truth about the catastrophe—because that would have further undermined the legitimacy of the government and the whole system. They could not mobilize the masses of people and make other corporations help in the response—because this would collide with private ownership and control (BP's). Think about it: BP's reckless pursuit of private profit has led to a monumental social disaster—that is affecting the economy, society, and environment far beyond BP's operations. And yet it has been left to BP to deal with this crisis.

Obama enacted a temporary and limited moratorium on deep-water drilling, while making clear that offshore drilling must continue to be part of the U.S. energy strategy. But already, before the BP well is even fully capped, before any investigation into the causes of the disaster is complete, and before any new technologies have been developed that could conceivably stop another blowout—there is a rising clamor from the oil giants and powerful forces in the ruling class to resume deep-water drilling immediately.

On July 12, the Obama-appointed commission on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill opened its hearings in New Orleans. This "independent" commission, which was supposedly looking into the causes of the disaster, became a platform for advocating the resumption of oil drilling. (The commission is a way to help the system deal with the deep fallout and exposure from this oil catastrophe.)

As the hearings began, a supporter of Revolution newspaper stood up, newspaper in hand, and disrupted the opening of the hearings in an action covered in the national media, including MSNBC and the Today show. He declared: "This commission is illegitimate, the people responsible for these crimes have no right to be investigating them. This is a capitalist oil spill and this system is not fit to be caretaker of the planet."

There was more truth in those few moments than in days of Commission hearings and months of official statements and bourgeois media coverage.

Turbulent, Oil-Fouled Political Waters...And the Urgent Need for a People's Response

The representatives of this system, at all levels, have been very active during this crisis—not to act on real solutions, but to limit the damage to their interests. State and national officials frequently come through Louisiana to hold press conferences and visit affected areas. Meetings take place nearly every week in various parishes (counties) involving BP, EPA, Coast Guard and other government officials, designed to reassure (often in the face of deep anger, distrust, and cynicism among the people) that the powers-that-be care, they're listening, they're doing all they can, they're sorry, blah, blah, blah.

All this is taking place amid deep contradictions and complex maneuvering among ruling class forces. Louisiana's Republican Governor Bobby Jindal is posturing as a front-line, "can-do," take-charge "general" in the battle against the oil spill. He has criticized the clean-up effort and blamed Washington and the Obama administration.

The fascist Tea Party has also been very active—going after Washington and "big government," and specifically blaming Obama, but in a way that covers up and enlists people behind the interests of the whole setup that produced this environmental and economic disaster. A July 21 "Rally for Economic Survival" organized by Republicans, business leaders, and Tea Party forces at the Cajundome in Lafayette, Louisiana, drew 11,000 people, plus 4,000 on live webcast. Speaking in the name of small businesses and the "common man," they claim that letting the big oil companies get back to "drill baby drill"—even more unregulated environmental rape and a more "hands-off" government approach to worker safety—is the only hope for those in desperate economic hardship. This when, in reality, both the enormous environmental devastation and the economic suffering and uncertainty are products of capitalism's relentless and brutal profit-seeking nature.

In this intense and rapidly changing mix, revolutionaries, radicals, progressives, environmentalists, and other political groups have also been active in various ways.

This has included the Emergency Committee to Stop the Gulf Oil Disaster. The Committee was formed following a June 19 Emergency Summit held in New Orleans in order to provide a vehicle for many, many people to act to stop the disaster in the face of BP and the government's refusal to do so. Its Mission Statement calls for mobilization of diverse forces—activists, impacted communities, environmentalists, scientists—on a nationwide, even global, basis to stop the catastrophe. It has issued seven demands that speak to all the dimensions of the crisis and provide concrete focuses for action.

In a little over a month, the Committee has actively protested the actions of both BP and the government including: holding the first demonstration at the Joint Unified Command headquarters (in charge of the response to the disaster); intervening in BP-government "town hall" meetings; protesting outside and speaking inside at the Obama Commission hearings; demonstrating when VP Joe Biden visited the area; joining the protests of other groups; and issuing many statements to the press, which have been widely covered. (See stopgulfoildisaster.org for the Mission Statement, demands, press coverage, and accounts of its actions, and other important information.)

Overall, the Committee's Mission Statement, its demands, and its actions represent an alternative pole to the authority claimed by BP and the government to continue pursuing their own interests in the crisis—rather than going all out to protect the environment and the people.

Much more needs to be done. There's an urgent need to uncover, and for people to understand, the full scope of this ongoing catastrophe. The Committee's Mission Statement, demands, and determined spirit need to reach many, many more people. The organized independent mass action and truth-telling is needed on a society-wide scale.

Taking action, marking the 100th day of the disaster on Friday, July 30 is an important juncture for pushing forward and making the voice of the people heard. As the Committee's call for the protest states, "We're not stopping until the well is sealed and the Gulf is healed."

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/hundred_actions-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

The following call is from the Emergency Committee to Stop the Gulf Oil Disaster:

GULF OIL DISASTER
100 Days of Outrage!

Demands 100 Actions!
Cities, Towns, Communities...Globally-the environment has no borders!
Friday, July 30th 2010

• Because the oil gusher may not be capped
• Because 100-200 million gallons of oil & 2 million of dispersants still foul the Gulf
• Because wetlands, shores, wild and marine life are still threatened
• Because people's health still isn't protected
• Because the truth is still not out
• Because oil companies and government still want to "drill, baby, drill"
• Because we're not stopping until the well is sealed and the Gulf is healed

On This Day - Stand up publicly....Organize a demonstration or speak out...Spread the word so others take action...Hold signs and banners on street corners...Organize an event with a scientist, person directly affected...Have children write letters to Gulf fisher-people...Dramatize the catastrophe with street theater...Host a prayer service or vigil for the Gulf...Write a letter to your local newspaper/take out an ad...Call talk radio shows to express your outrage...Host a bike ride carrying signs through town...Leaflet your work/neighborhood with our mission statement...Host a fundraiser for The Emergency Committee to Stop the Gulf Oil Disaster...Group viewing of video from the Emergency Summit...Call the press to get coverage. (Imagine if on this day all over the world the people's response is headline news)—One person with a sign is an action!

• Use your imagination and creativity to show the world this is not tolerable! Surprise us!


Send us your plan of action and we'll post info about your event on our "100 Days" webpage.
 Take pictures on that day and send them to us, with a brief report if possible.

DONATE URGENTLY NEEDED FUNDS ONLINE

stopgulfoildisaster@gmail.com | 504.644.7214 | www.stopgulfoildisaster.org

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/sherrod-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

The Attack on Shirley Sherrod.... And the Truth About Racism in America

Shirley Sherrod is a Black woman who used to be the Director of Rural Development in Georgia, under the U.S. Department of Agricultural (USDA). On Tuesday, July 20, she was forced to resign after Fox TV ran a video clip of a speech she had given and accused her of being a "racist."

A ton of lies have been spread about Shirley Sherrod. So right off the bat, let's get some actual facts straight:

Shirley Sherrod has long been involved in fighting for the rights of Black people and especially poor Black farmers in Georgia. The video clip came from a speech she gave in March 2010 at an NAACP fundraiser. Sherrod tells the story of how in 1986 a white farmer came to her seeking help. Sherrod, who at the time was with a non-profit rural aid organization and not yet working for the USDA, said:

"The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he—he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing. But he had come to me for help. What he didn't know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. I was struggling with the fact that so many Black people have lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So, I didn't give him the full force of what I could do."

There was plenty of reason to question the motives of rightwing blogger Andrew Breitbart, who sent this short clip to Fox as "proof" that Sherrod is a "racist." Any journalist or government officials responding to this "story" should have, at the very least, bothered to watch the entire speech or call Sherrod to get her response. But NONE of this was done—and instead, before the sun rose again, the USDA had forced Sherrod to resign and the NAACP had issued a statement saying that Sherrod's actions were "shameful."

But the chorus of slander against Sherrod—from both rightwing conservatives AND Democratic liberals—was forced to end the next day when the truth came out. In fact, Sherrod had actually ended up really helping the white farmer, Roger Spooner. 82-year-old Eloise Spooner, Roger's wife, spoke out in support of Sherrod, saying, "If we hadn't have found her, we would have lost everything, I'm afraid." And the whole point of this story in Sherrod's speech was the complete opposite of what she had been accused of. She had gone on to say that working with the white farmer, "made me see that it's really about those who have versus those who don't, you know. And they could be Black; they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people—those who don't have access the way others have."

USDA officials (and their bosses in the White House) found themselves with egg on their faces. On Wednesday, Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture, quickly issued a public apology to Sherrod. The NAACP said they had been "snookered" by Fox TV. On Thursday President Obama called Sherrod and said he was sorry.

Vilsack said there had been a "misunderstanding." He fell on his sword to protect the emperor (i.e. Obama)—reiterating several times that it had been his decision alone to force Sherrod to resign. Vilsack kept saying this was a "teachable moment"—he said "we have to make sure we think before we act." But the REAL lessons of this whole incident are not something you're going to hear from a government official.

Here are some real and important things to learn from what happened to Shirley Sherrod:

1. We encourage anyone who hasn't watched the FULL video of Sherrod's speech to do so. The most powerful part of Sherrod's speech is the stories she tells about what it was like growing up in the South. And remember—this is not some ancient history we're talking about here. This is the 1960s. Sherrod and her family, like many Black people living today, experienced the terror of KKK lynch mobs and the humiliation of Jim Crow laws that dictated separate bathrooms for "colored and white" and forced Black people to ride in the back of the bus.

Sherrod says: "It was 45 years ago today that my father's funeral was held. I was a young girl at the age of 17 when my father was murdered by a white man in Baker County. In Baker County, the murder of Black people occurred periodically, and in every case the white men who murdered them were never punished. It was no different in my father's case. There were three witnesses to his murder, but the grand jury refused to indict the white man who murdered him." Sherrod recalls how shortly after this, she was at school when she learned that a bunch of white men had burned a cross in front of the house with her mother, four sisters, and baby brother inside. Her mother went out on the porch with a gun. One of her sisters got on the phone and called other Black men in the county who came and surrounded the house, forcing the white racists to flee.

Sherrod says the intense racism in the South and the back-breaking work of farming had led her to want to leave her hometown for the North. But that after the death of her father she said, "I made the commitment on the night of my father's death, at the age of 17, that I would not leave the South, that I would stay in the South and devote my life to working for change. And I've been true to that commitment all of these 45 years."

Sherrod made good on this promise, joining the Civil Rights and the Black Liberation Movements of the 1960s. These tremendous struggles brought down some barriers to formal inequality. But they did not tear up the deep roots of white supremacy that have been a part of the foundation of the U.S. capitalist system from the very beginning—and that continue to be in effect, in different ways, today.

Sherrod's speech talks about how back in the 17th and 18th century, there were black indentured servants and white indentured servants who worked and lived together and "they didn't see any difference in each other—nobody worried about skin color. They married each other. You know, these were poor whites and poor Blacks in the same boat, except they were slaves, but they were both slaves and both had their opportunity to work out on the slavery." But, she goes on to say, the "people with money" decided that they needed to do something about this, "the elite, decided, hey, we need to do something here to divide them. So that's when they made Black people servants for life. That's when they put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That's when they created the racism that we know of today."

Sherrod points to the injustice of what she sees as a society of haves and have-nots. And at the same time, she exposes the deep and systemic racism of American society. And it must be said that it is NOT racism to expose and fight against this oppression of Black people.

The whole video of Sherrod's speech refutes the lie that the way she treated this white farmer was a case of "racism." But even more than this, Sherrod's speech, and the whole incident surrounding her firing—reveals and underscores an even more profound truth: The long-standing, crying injustice of the oppression of Black people—that has been part of the economic and social foundation of the United States since the very beginning AND continues today in different forms.

2. The White House, Democrats, the NAACP—were all completely on the defensive in the face of the right wing's attack on Sherrod. The USDA fell all over itself to prove it would not tolerate such "racist" behavior. They rushed to fire her, without even bothering to look into the actual truth of the matter one bit. All the media people started jumping on this story without even checking the facts of the case. You didn't hear any politicians coming to Sherrod's defense. The NAACP quickly denounced Sherrod and scolded those in the audience who had applauded Sherrod's speech.

Think about this: They all took the word of a hatchet job by a guy, Andrew Breitbart, who has a whole history of engaging in exactly this kind of fraud. (Remember the whole way the community organization ACORN was set up in September 2009 with a heavily edited video purporting to show ACORN activists advising a supposed prostitution ring on avoidance of tax laws? Yes... this was Breitbart's handiwork—right down to the cutaway shots implying the man visiting ACORN was dressed in full "pimp regalia" when in actuality he was wearing a conservative business suit. ACORN lost government and private funding because of the incident and ended up disbanding.) The rush to "get in on" the attack on Sherrod says something about the polarization in this country—where right-wing, conservative, Tea Party racists are on the offensive, setting the terms and aggressively pushing their agenda, while the Democrats, including Obama, are on the defensive.

The Tea Party can carry signs and guns threatening Obama, spouting the most racist shit. The governor of Virginia can proclaim April as the "Confederate History Month" and defend the fact that his proclamation said nothing about slavery. (He then issued an "apology" about the "omission" when people calling him out on it refused to back down.) The Republicans can talk about honoring "Southern values" which amounts to a defense of slavery. And this is seen as acceptable political dialogue and discourse. That if one Black person even dares to tell the truth and says there is discrimination... "whoa," they shout, "you're being a racist."

Why is it that some get thrown under the bus.... but others get a free ride on the bus?

An important—and still extremely relevant work by Bob Avakian, "The Pyramid of Power and The Struggle to Turn This Whole Thing Upside Down" sheds much light on this. This work was taken from the question and answer section of Avakian's 2004 DVD, Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About.

Avakian describes the Republicans and Democrats as, roughly, representing two sections of the ruling class, sitting atop a metaphorical pyramid of society. He describes the kind of fascist movement and tactics that were going on at that point—including the links of that fascist movement into the military—and then goes on to say:

"[T]hese forces are quite willing to call into motion this fascistic kind of force that they've built up when they feel that they need it, and they're willing to bring it all the way into motion and turn this into a whole other kind of religious, fundamentalist, fascistic society if they feel that's where they need to go.

"On the other hand, here are the Democrats at the top of this pyramid (on the so-called 'left'). Who are the people that they try to appeal to—not that the Democrats represent their interests, but who are the people that the Democrats try to appeal to at the base, on the other side of this pyramid, so to speak? All the people who stand for progressive kinds of things, all the people who are oppressed in this society. For the Democrats, a big part of their role is to keep all those people confined within the bourgeois, the mainstream, electoral process...and to get them back into it when they have drifted away from—or broken out of—that framework."

The "narrative"—i.e. the lie of rightwing conservatives, which Obama not only panders to but reinforces, is: This is a "post racial" society. There is no longer any racism and Black people should stop their complaining. If they end up in prison, can't get a job, can't get a good education, etc. then it's their own fault, their own "bad choices"—not the system. The problem, the right wing says, is not that there is ongoing discrimination against Black people and other people of color. The real problem is reverse discrimination—"racism against white people" who have to suffer because Black people are given so many privileges in the name of righting wrongs that no longer exist. And they say, when Black people speak out against oppression and discrimination that this is "Black racism."

BUT ALL THIS IS A BIG LIE. Look at the kind of rampant, systematic and institutional racism that continues to exist in hiring, education, and housing ("The Oppression of Black People, The Crimes of This System and the Revolution We Need," Revolution No. 144). Look at the way Black youth are so disproportionately stopped, frisked, arrested and murdered by the police.

In New York City, for example, an average of 20 people for every 100,000 residents in the Upper East Side (a wealthy area where Mayor Bloomberg lives) were arrested for misdemeanor marijuana charges in 2007-2009. In that same period, the arrest rate for the same offense was 3,109 people for every 100,000 residents in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that is 75% African-American. ("A Smell of Pot And Privilege In the City," Jim Dwyer, New York Times, July 21, 2010) And the Center for Constitutional Rights recently reported that the NYPD made a record number of "stop and frisks" in 2009—over 575,000—and that of those stopped, 87% were Blacks and Latinos, who comprise about 25% and 28% of the city's total population, respectively.

And what about the kind of discrimination against Black farmers that Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack himself mentioned in his public apology to Sherrod. He said there are tens of thousands of claims against the USDA—mostly from Black farmers but also from Latinos and women—charging discrimination in terms of things like being denied loans that are granted to white farmers, for buying seeds and equipment.

Yet the right wing is allowed to set the terms in mainstream political discourse with the lie that it is not racism, but Black people themselves, who should be blamed for their problems. And this is the lie that they tried to bolster with their attack on Shirley Sherrod.

As we pointed out in the article "The Right Wing Populist Eruption: Yes, It Actually IS Racism,"

"Think for a minute what it would unleash if Obama were to say what is obvious to almost every liberal—that yes, there is a huge and driving element of racism involved in this 'tea bagger' movement, that as a Black person in America he's known all along that this poison was going to surface, that this is part of and being folded into a whole fascist movement with support from the highest sections of the ruling class, and that anyone with a decent bone in their body should not only vociferously oppose this but put themselves on the line against it? And what would happen if some major figure in the Democratic Party were to then call people into the streets against these fascists? This is exactly the picture—the possibility of people actually getting into the streets to stand up to these reactionaries—that gives these Democratic politicians nightmares. Because once that genie is out of the bottle—once the oppressed people and the more enlightened people begin both to see and feel their potential strength and at the same time begin to investigate and debate why all this shit keeps happening and what can be done to really change it—then all kinds of possibilities for radical, and even revolutionary, change could open up and for every section of the ruling class this is a far worse nightmare than letting these fascists continue unimpeded."

3. The kind of virulent racism that FOX News puts out every single minute of every day is reinforced and being given strength—and it's put out as part of the legitimate discourse. It is not only seen as part of the debate—it is actually allowed to set the terms of the discussion as it did here over Sherrod.

But this has to STOP. People have to stand up and expose this for what it is. People have to call it out for what it represents in terms of this system and the whole history and present-day reality of the oppression of Black people. People have to take this on as part of standing up to things like the fascist anti-immigration laws in Arizona, the police murder of Oscar Grant, the mass incarceration of Black youth.

Sherrod has been very courageous, she stood her ground, she hasn't backed down. She recounted her response when she got the phone call telling her to resign: "I said, 'You know, the fight hadn't been in me before, but it's definitely here now, and you have not heard the last from me.' I really didn't know exactly what that meant when I said it. But I knew—I know I'm a fighter, and I knew at that point I would not take this lying down."

This is something to learn from in fighting against the oppression of Black people, as part of building a movement for revolution.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/AWTWNS_Azad-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

From A World to Win News Service

India: Leading Comrade Azad Murdered - CPI (Maoist) Statement

July 12, 2010. A World to Win News Service. It was with great sorrow and anger that we learned that the authorities in India captured and cold-bloodedly murdered Comrade Azad (Cherukuri Rajkumar), a leading member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) known throughout the world for his work as the party's spokesperson, and party comrade Hemchandra Pandey. Following is a slightly edited statement by the CPI (Maoist) Central Committee released by the party's North Regional Bureau Press July 3, 2010.

On July 1st, the Andhra Pradesh Special Intelligence Bureau police, a unit notorious for its abductions and cold-blooded murders, arrested comrade Azad (Cherukuri Rajkumar), CPI (Maoist) Political Bureau member and spokesperson, and comrade Hem Pandey (Jitender), a zonal committee-level comrade, in Nagpur city around 11 o'clock when they went to meet a comrade from Dandakarnaya zone who was supposed to receive them. Comrade Azad reached Nagpur around 10 am on the fateful day along with comrade Hem Pandey, after travelling a long distance. Acting with specific information, the lawless goons of the AP SIB abducted them, and took them, perhaps by helicopter, to the Adilabad jungle near the Maharashtra border and killed them, shooting them point blank and in cold blood.

We pay our red homage to our beloved comrades...

The Life of Comrade Azad

Comrade Azad was one of the senior-most party leaders of CPI (Maoist). He was born in Krishna district of AP [Andhra Pradesh, a state in southeast India], in a well-to-do family. He did his school education in Sainik School, at Korukonda of the present Vizianagaram District. Comrade Surapuneni Janardhan, a legendary comrade of the student movement, brought comrade Rajkumar into the Radical Students Union in 1974.

A brilliant student at the Regional Engineering College, which became famous as the Radical Engineering College in those days, he finished his degree in chemical engineering and moved to Vishakhapatnam as per the Party's direction. He was the second president of the AP RSU until 1984. He was the catalyst behind many Andhra-wide student agitations and people's movements in that period. He became a district committee member of the CPI (ML) (People's War).

He moved through the length and breadth of India to organize the Seminar on the Nationality Question held in Madras (now Chennai) in 1981. He was shifted to Karnataka in 1982, where comrade Azad was one of the founder members of the party there and worked as the secretary of the State Committee. He became a member of the Central Committee of the CPI (ML) (People's War) after the Central Plenum in 1990 and its Political Bureau at the All-India Conference in 1995. He continued in those posts after the formation of the CPI (Maoist) in 2004. He has been the spokesperson of the CC since then.

Known for his simple life and hard work, voracious reading and brilliant analyses of situations, crystal clear articulation and sharp logic, and fine organizational skills, he contributed widely to the revolutionary movement in many spheres.

He wrote profusely for People's March, People's War (the party theoretical organ) and the Maoist Information Bulletin. He wrote a fine critique of the intellectuals of AP who got disillusioned and lost faith in the revolutionary movement after the collapse of Soviet imperialism and its satellite regimes.

With his death, the Indian revolutionary movement lost an exemplary comrade and a shining star, who served the movement more than three and half decades.

Comrade Hem Pandey, 30, hailed from the nearby village of Pithoragarh in Uttarakhand State. He did his MA in history at Nainital University and got himself registered in PhD studies. While he was in college, he was active member of AISA. Slowly realizing the pseudo-revolutionary character of AISA politics, he moved to the radical groups. Later, in 2001, he joined the then-CPI (ML) (PW). He organized peasants in the mountainous villages in Almora district, taking up umpteen numbers of issues of the peasantry.

Soft-spoken, bespectacled, lean and energetic, comrade Hem won the love of the people of that region. He was moved into more important work in 2005. He did his new assignments with patience and endurance. His appetite for learning new things, reading more and more, and zeal for penning his ideas, are to be emulated by all revolutionaries. He wrote articles for news magazines under various pen names. We request the civil rights organizations to demand that the AP police send the body of comrade Hem Pandey to his bereaved mother in Haldwani, Uttarakhand state, who is his sole surviving parent.

AP SIB - the Indian Avatar of Mossad

The Andhra Pradesh Special Intelligence Bureau has been partly trained by the Mossad [Israeli intelligence]... It has been moving across state borders, and conducting abductions and cold-blooded murders with impunity. This is all happening with clear blessings of Manmohan [Prime Minister Manmohan Singh], Sonia [Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi] and [Home Minister] Chidambaram. This fascist gang has established its tentacles all over India, resorting to the killings of revolutionaries, scoffing at the recent AP high court judgement that all encounters [where the authorities kill captured or kidnapped revolutionaries and then falsely report that they died in an "encounter" – a gun battle] are to be first booked as murders... [and brought before a judge for an investigation into possible culpable homicide].

Will Chidambaram expect the CPI (Maoist) to sit for talks with the blood of comrades Azad and Hem Pandey on his hands?

CPI (Maoist) never contested or raised any hue and cry in the case of real encounters. The AP police are resorting to Goebbels-like lies, not believed even by the gullible. CPI (Maoist) stood for truth and accountability to the people, and always stated facts. Azad was not going to Sarkepally forest in Adilabad. When there is no movement and organization in Adilabad, why would he go there? Azad was going to discuss with our comrades, inter alia, the concrete proposals of well-meaning people like Swami Agnivesh [a figure who has been trying to arrange talks between the CPI(M) and the central government] about particular dates for a mutual ceasefire. He was carrying a confidential letter written to him from Swami Agnivesh dated June 26, 2010. Will Chidambaram expect CPI (Maoist) to sit for talks with the blood of comrades Azad and Hem Pandey on his hands? He repeatedly calls on us to abjure violence. Killing unarmed comrades by the AP police with your blessings – is this not like devils chanting scriptures?

AP Police Lies

That the police found an AK47 is again a lie. Comrade Azad alighted from a train around 10 am along with comrade Hem Pandey in Nagpur Station, and was caught by the AP SIB unarmed. Is the government following article 21 of its own constitution? Is the government following the kernel of the Geneva Convention, that "defenseless persons" should not be harmed? Is it not utter hypocrisy and a hoax that while the government is presenting the prevention of torture bill, the police are every minute resorting to the torture of the detained? These concocted encounter stories have been repeated ad nauseum by the AP police, churned out to the media umpteen times. The right to life, guaranteed under the constitution, is mocked, and the right to be brought before a judge within 24 hours of arrest has metamorphosed into being killed within 24 hours of arrest, so that there is no scope for any redress by their near and dear.

We appeal to the civil rights organizations, democrats and patriots to rise to the occasion and thoroughly investigate this fake encounter as an example of the extra-judicial killing that are happening in scores in this country and bring out the truth before the people.

- Ajay, spokesperson, CPI (Maoist)

A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine (aworldtowin.org), a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world's Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/burge-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

After 37 Years—Head of Chicago Police Torture Ring Convicted—of Lying

On June 28, a federal jury in Chicago returned a verdict of guilty on all counts against Jon Burge, a retired Chicago Police Commander who had tortured, and organized the torture, of Black men in Chicago for 20 years or more. Burge was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice—NOT torture. He was found guilty only of lying to cover up the torture in which he and men under his command engaged from at least 1972 to 1993—when he was forced into retirement with a generous pension. Burge will be sentenced on November 15, 2010 and faces a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison.

In discussing his feelings the day of the verdict, Ronald Kitchens, one of Burge's victims, said: "I will celebrate but I won't dance." In regard to whether justice was done, he said, "It's a beginning but there is still a long way to go. There are cops out there even on the force. There are still people sitting in jail."

Mark Clements, another victim of Burge, speaking after the verdict, said: "These people stole my life. I hate to tell you the truth. I sat in a prison cell and I prayed for this day. I was 16 years old. This is America. 16 years old. What are we going to do about other people who are sitting in those prison cells? ... My daughter is 29 years old. I missed all those years with my daughter sitting in a prison cell."

Confessions from Torture

What was done to force Mark Clements and more than 100 like him to sign off on false confessions? An article in the Revolutionary Worker (now Revolution), "The Chicago Inquisition," detailed some of the testimony taken in 2000 during court hearings on the torture that took place under Jon Burge. That article details five of the terrifying testimonies given at that time. Here is one example:

"It was 8 in the morning, on October 28, 1983, when a teenage David Bates was arrested, brought to a room in the police station and cuffed to a wall. Two officers, Grunhard and Byrne, were among those who interrogated Bates. The first round of 'questioning' entailed slaps to the face and a kick to the testicles. The second brought more slaps and punches. On the third visit, the cops used the plastic bag. When David was punched in the stomach, this forced him to gasp for air, sucking the bag into his mouth and nose. He came close to passing out. The bag came back off, the punches continued as the cops shouted questions at him. Then the bag went over his head a second time—stifling David's screams. 'I couldn't breathe at all,' remembered David, 'I was 17, 18 years of age, my first interaction of such like that. I was in stark terror, at the police station, at the police officers. I didn't think they could do that. It was straight trauma.'"

On their last visit, the police left David Bates with a threat. "We know how to deal with n*ggers like you," remarked one of the detectives, promising to return on the graveyard shift and "deal" with him then. David caved in. "I felt like I wasn't gonna make it overnight if they came back. They had the power to do what they like, they made that message clear."

Beating with fists, clubs, other objects. Electric shock with cattle prods and hand cranked generators applied to the body including the genitals. Suffocation with plastic bags. Mock executions. Russian roulette. Burning with a hot radiator.  Deprivation of sleep, food and facilities. This is the short list of methods of torture used by the Burge crew.

Thirteen of Burge and company's victims ended up on death row as a result of "confessions"—false confessions signed off on to stop the torture. Ronald Kitchens, finally released from prison in 2009, said, "What they did to me was premeditated murder. They knew I was innocent and they put me on death row. That is premeditated murder."

The scandal around the Burge torture ring played a role in Illinois Governor George Ryan's 2003 decision to clear Illinois's death row. Ryan outright pardoned four death row inmates who had confessed under torture and commuted the sentences of the remaining 167 inmates on death row. Ryan cited the fact that 13 Illinois death row inmates had been exonerated as evidence that the death penalty in Illinois was inherently flawed.

Burge: A Creature of the System

Jon Burge is a true creature of U.S. imperialism. A February 3, 2005 article from the Chicago Reader, "Tools of Torture" by John Conroy, lays this out in chilling detail. (Over the years, Conroy's work has played an important role in exposing the Burge torture ring.) First, Burge was weaned on racism. He grew up in an all-white southside Chicago neighborhood—the kind that initially fought against integration with bricks and burning crosses. But by the late 1960s, when the influx of Blacks could not be stopped, the Burge family—along with most other whites—quickly fled.  Second, Burge always wanted to be an armed enforcer for the system. In high school, his life revolved around ROTC—in which he was a top student. After dropping out of college he immediately joined the military and trained to be an MP. This took him to Vietnam where he guarded enemy prisoners and learned torture techniques from the U.S. military intelligence interrogators. And once he got home, he joined the Chicago Police Department where his gung-ho mentality quickly pushed him up the ranks to become a detective.

The systemic and systematic racism that informed Burge's activity for so many years is something that Jon Burge and his attorney counted on in their defense strategy. On his blog, Rob Wildeboer, a reporter for Chicago Public Radio, described the defense's closing argument as "a hail mary" with "a wink, wink" and went on to comment:

"Richard Beuke [Burge's attorney] made arguments about the evidence, enough to give jurors cover to acquit, but those arguments took a back seat to the repeated insults he threw at the alleged torture victims. Those victims are not the most sympathetic witnesses. They have multiple convictions and they're accused of heinous crimes. Beuke used a variety of words to describe the alleged victims: rat, piece of garbage, serial criminal, pathological liar, cough syrup junkie. Beuke shouted his message over and over that these people are the scum of the earth....

In contrast Burge is a decorated cop, the only thing standing between order and chaos in the city." This time these arguments didn't free Burge. The jury found him guilty on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.

It took 37 years for Burge to get convicted of anything. Thirty-seven years with more than 100 innocent people sitting in jail cells. Thirty-seven years with at least 13 innocent people sweating it out on death row. Thirty-seven years with thousands protesting and working to dig up the dirt, filing lawsuits, testifying at international tribunals. Thirty-seven years while Burge's crimes were widely known, but swept under the rug.

Burge: NOT a "Rogue" Cop but the Tip of the Iceberg

While Jon Burge and company may have set high standards for cruelty in forcing confessions, torture in police custody is not uncommon in the USA. In 1971 eight members of the Black Panther Party—the San Francisco 8—were tortured into confessing to a crime they didn't commit. In 1972—the year complaints detailing Burge's use of torture began to surface—the first "supermax" prison was opened in Marion, Illinois, where forms of incarceration that are internationally recognized as forms of torture, specifically solitary confinement, are the norm. We could do a "torture trek" through years of police history in the USA, but let's just jump ahead. On February 22, 2010, three New York City cops were let off scot free after being charged with sodomizing a man they stopped for smoking marijuana.

Jon Burge may have been caught using electrical shock to torture people in custody. But NOW, with the wide-spread dissemination of Tasers to police departments, people can go on YouTube and see prisoners in police custody in the USA being tortured by Tasers and electroshock "stun belts"—even in open court. Meanwhile, the plain, old-fashioned beating of Black, Latino, and other people by police and/or in custody is as common as ever. And NOW there are 35 prisons that are supermax or have supermax facilities.

Even in his day, Jon Burge and the cops organized and trained by him were not the only ones railroading people into prison. In fact, 16 innocent people railroaded onto Illinois death row during the years when Burge was torturing people have been freed who were NOT victims of Burge and his cohort (and that's just in Illinois, and just on death row)!

Down through the years, Burge's activity was not just accepted—it was rewarded. Time magazine noted that "Burge received commendations like snacks." And Burge was not alone in railroading people, he was training, and overseeing, whole squads of torturers—first in the Area 2 police headquarters, then in the Area 3 police headquarters.

For 20 years Jon Burge and the detectives under him were regularly using torture to force false confessions from their victims—and this open secret was confirmed by medical examination of the defendants. For at least 20 years, Illinois state prosecutors ignored this evidence year after year. In fact, they continued to prosecute using the false confessions forced under the use of torture. Among the States Attornies prosecuting during this period—while actively brushing past allegations of torture—was Richard M. Daley, Illinois States Attorney from 1980 to 1989 and mayor of Chicago from 1989 to the present.

In 1993 the Chicago Police Department's Office of Professional Standards issued a 98-page report, known as the Goldston and Sanders report, which confirmed that Burge had been organizing the torture of suspects. The investigation supported accusations that there was systematic abuse in Area 2 police headquarters for more than 10 years. Yet to this day the City of Chicago continues to pay for Jon Burge's defense at a cost that now exceeds $8 million.

Burge: A Man for the Times

When Burge began his reign of terror, the upheaval of the '60s had presented a powerful challenge to the ruling class—demanding the elimination of white supremacy and the full integration of Black people into society on an equal footing.  In the face of this, in 1969, U.S. President Nixon's top aide, H.R. Haldeman, noted in his diary: "President emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this, while not appearing to."

Along these lines, a counter-revolutionary assault was launched which included a "Law and Order" agenda, the "War on Drugs," and attacks on the radical political movements of the day. Meanwhile, jobs in the inner cities became scarcer with the further de-industrialization of the cities and deepening unemployment, especially among Black youth. In the 1980s, as part of unofficial government policy, cocaine was imported into inner city neighborhoods in a scheme to fund counter-revolutionary armies (Contras) in Central America. This massively expanded the underground economy in drugs. And, starting in the '80s and accelerating through the '90s and into the new millennium, a policy of official neglect, removing resources and programs from Black and Latino city neighborhoods, has been instituted by the federal government.

This, in large part, is what is behind the whole prison boom in the U.S. over the last several decades. Between 1925 (when official imprisonment statistics were first organized) and 1971, the imprisonment rate remained on the order of about one per 1,000. Then, in 1972, the imprisonment rate began to soar and is still soaring past the rate of seven in 1,000 people in 2008. And while Black people are 13% of the U.S. population, they are more than 50% of the population in prisons [For a full analysis of these developments see "The Oppression of Black People, the Crimes of this System, and the Revolution We Need." Revolution #144, October 5, 2008]. This is the backdrop for the torture, forced convictions, and long prison terms that Burge was responsible for.

Getting Out from Under the Burge "Cloud"

But today there are two problems with having a high-profile, ongoing public discussion of the fact that squads of torturers in Chicago have railroaded dozens of Black men into prison.

For one thing, it doesn't fit the ruling class narrative—amplified and popularized by the likes of Bill Cosby—that the reason so many Black people are in prison is because of "poor choices" they have made. This explanation is so pervasive that one of Jon Burge's victims, speaking to youth at a community center in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, told the young people gathered around him that the reason he was tortured into confessing to a crime he didn't commit was because of bad choices he had made in his life.

For another thing, the official position of the U.S. is that it opposes human rights abuses, including torture. So open torture in its third-largest city makes all of the honeyed words about the U.S. as "the land of freedom and democracy" look pretty empty. The scandal of the torture ring in the Chicago Police Department first went international when, in 1990, Amnesty International issued a report specifically on torture in Chicago.

The fact that the Chicago Police routinely forced false confessions under torture has become increasingly known internationally—at a time when U.S. torture practices in Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba have become an international scandal. In September 2005, community groups from Chicago went to the "Inter-American Commission on Human Rights" of the Organization of American States for a hearing on police torture.

In 2007 Chicago took a big step into the international arena with its bid for the 2016 Olympics. This was the U.S. Olympic bid and signaled an increasing international role for Chicago. Chicago activists went to Geneva to bring the question of police brutality in general, and police torture in particular, before the United Nations International Committee to Eliminate Racial Discrimination. The ruling class needed to settle the Burge case in some way seemed increasingly apparent.

It took 37 years to convict a brutal torturer—of lying.  And the system that produced this monster is still in full effect.

——

REFERENCES

Amnesty International Report, December 1990, (chicagojustice.org/foi/amnesty-international-report-on-torture-by-chicago-police/Amnesty_International_Report_re_Allegations_of_Tor.pdf)

Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, The continuing crime of Black imprisonment," March 27, 1995 (unix.oit.umass.edu/~kastor/ceml_articles/continuing.html)

Conroy, J., "House of Screams," The Chicago Reader, January 26, 1990 (john-conroy.com/house-of-screams)

Wildeboer, Rob, "Burge defense: A hail mary with a wink wink," WBEZ Blog, June 25, 2010 (blogs.vocalo.org/rwildeboer/2010/06/burge-defense-a-hail-mary-with-a-wink-wink/27700)

DGAP Human Rights, "Chicago and the Olympics— international city must abide by international standards." February 2008 (dgaphumanrights.blogspot.com/2008/02/press-release-chicago-and-olympics.html)

"Ex-Chicago cop arrested in '90s torture scandal," USA Today, updated October 21, 2008, (usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-10-21-chicago-cop_N.htm)

Ferkenhoff , E, "Chicago's toughest cop goes down," Time, July 19, 2006 (time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1216795,00.html)

"From Hellholes of Incarceration to a Future of Emancipation" Revolution #183, November 15, 2009 (revcom.us/a/183/editorial-en.html)

Goldston, M and Sanders, F., Goldston Sanders Report, September 1990 (gangresearch.net/GangResearch/Chicago/goldston.pdf)

"Haldeman diaries reveal Nixon fed up with blacks during his White House tenure," Jet, June 13. 1994 (findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1355/is_n6_v86/ai_15490486/)

Human Rights at Home, The Chicago Police Torture Archive: Timeline (humanrights.uchicago.edu/chicagotorture/timeline.shtml)

Rudoren, J., "Inquiry finds police abuse, but says law bars trials," New York Times , July 20, 2006 (nytimes.com/2006/07/20/us/20chicago.html)

Ryan, G., An Address on the Death Penalty, June 3, 2002, (pewforum.org/Death-Penalty/Governor-George-Ryan-An-Address-on-the-Death-Penalty.aspx)

Terry, D., "Tearful Burge Evokes Pity in His Former Investigator," Chicago News Coop, June 20, 2010 (chicagonewscoop.org/tearful-burge-evokes-pity-in-his-former-investigator/)

U.S. Incarceration Rate Chart (angelfire.com/rnb/y/rates.htm#years)

WorldLingo, "SuperMax" (worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Supermax#United_States)

X, Virus, "The Chicago Inquisition—Stories of Police Torture," Revolutionary Worker, August 27, 2000 (revcom.us/a/v22/1060-69/1068/chicago.htm)

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/arizona_funds-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Funds Urgently Needed for Arizona Freedom Summer

Arizona's fascist law against immigrants is set to go into effect on Thursday, July 29. People are coming to Arizona from all over to oppose this and to wage a political battle to stop this.

Revolution newspaper needs to be a major part of this mix.

Over $6,000 is urgently needed:

• to support getting out Revolution newspaper and the RCP's Message and Call, "The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have", in very large numbers in Arizona as one important way to build the resistance—as part of building the movement for revolution.
• to support writers for Revolution on the ground in Arizona, reporting on what's happening and how the political battle is taking shape.
• to pay for a billboard in Phoenix that has just gone up, which says, "We don't have an immigration problem. We have a capitalism problem." and promoting Bob Avakian's talk, Revolution: Why It's Necessary, How It's Possible, What It's All About, at revolutiontalk.net.

We all can't be in Arizona, but we can all play an important role. Donate now. It matters.

Donate on line here. Note "Arizona Freedom Summer" in the comment box.

Make check or money order payable to: "RCP Publications." Write "Arizona Freedom Summer" in the memo line.

Send to RCP Publications, P.O. Box 3486 Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 60654. Questions? Call 773-227-4066 or email rcppubs@hotmail.com.

If you want to come to Arizona and for more information, e-mail arizonafreedomsummer@yahoo.com.

• Arizona's anti-Immigrant Law is Inhumane & Illegitimate
  Stop the System's Fascist Attacks on Immigrants

Contributions or gifts to RCP Publications are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/immigration-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Arizona's anti-Immigrant Law is Inhumane & Illegitimate

Stop the System's Fascist Attacks on Immigrants

Imagine: You have a family you're supporting; you're on your way to the grocery store, or to work, or to pick up your children from school. You see a patrol car behind you. You realize if the cop stops you, he is going to demand you show your papers, and you know you can't. You'll be taken to immigration, locked in a detention center until you're deported, and getting back is nearly impossible. What will happen to your children when you're locked up? Who will take care of them? And if they're with you when you're stopped, will they be incarcerated as well? Will your family be separated, or given the "option" of everyone being deported, including children who are U.S. citizens.

What do you do?

This horror will be the reality for hundreds of thousands of people if Arizona's anti-immigration law, SB1070, goes into effect on July 29. This law is an ugly, radically reactionary leap beyond the already intolerable conditions immigrants without papers face in this country. This law demonizes and outlaws people who are from Mexico or Latin America, or look like they may be from Mexico or Latin America, or indeed from any other country from which immigrants come. The law requires that police demand proof of legal residency from anyone they "stop, detain or arrest" if police suspect that person is an undocumented immigrant. Many legal residents as well as citizens are going to be subjected to interrogation by the police because they "fit the description"—that is, if you are dark-skinned; have an accent; wear a certain style of clothes; or live in the "immigrant" part of town.

At least 11 million people in this country are already forced to live in the shadows, have no rights, work for extremely low wages and often get cheated, and face getting dragged off in the middle of the night. Medical care is out of reach; mothers whose children are sick can wait an entire day or more for them to be seen at a county hospital. The impact of the economic crisis means barely being able to survive.

In the U.S., the right against unreasonable searches and seizures is supposedly guaranteed to all people by the Constitution. It has already been shredded in recent decades in the name of waging a "war on drugs," the "war on terrorism," and apprehending "illegals."  Now in Arizona, it will no longer apply to immigrants. New norms are being established that solidify and radically deepen a system that already resembles the ugly, hated period of South African apartheid; the legal segregation, racism, and brutality of the Jim Crow period in this country; or the early stages of the Nazi treatment of the Jews in Germany.

A dozen or more states around the country are ready to join Arizona, effectively calling for this to become the "law of the land." An anti-immigrant atmosphere is being whipped up that is drawing all too many people into scapegoating immigrants, fueled with lurid tales of drug smuggling, violent criminals, connections to Mexican drug cartels, and more. Fox News is running supposed clandestine footage of border crossers wearing backpacks filled with drugs.

In Utah, where a similar bill is being debated now, high-tech vigilantes turned in the names and addresses of people they believe should be deported. Recently a printout of 1,300 Utah residents of Latino descent was sent by a group called "Concerned Citizens of the United States" to media outlets and law enforcement agencies demanding the immediate deportation of all 1,300. The confidential documents, taken from the Utah Department of Workforce Services, included addresses, phone numbers, workplaces, children's names, even due-dates of pregnant women. The Concerned Citizens' letter warned that "Some of the women on the list are pregnant," and called for immediate deportation before they give birth on U.S. soil. The smell of Nazi Germany, when "Good Germans" reported on the Jews in their midst, is all over this.

The government is passing cruel laws that hit these immigrants, as well as whole other sections of people who resemble them, while the growth of an angry, fascistic movement around all this continues with far too few people challenging it. Meanwhile, people die at the border, children are left alone and abandoned as their parents are deported, tens of thousands languish in immigration detention prisons, with many dying there because medical treatment is withheld.

It is crucial that everyone understand how unjust, unconstitutional, and immoral this new law is that could quickly spread all over the country; the tremendous danger that millions of human beings in this country now face; and why we must build resistance to it before it goes into effect. We cannot forget this warning: That which you do not resist, and organize to stop, you will learn, or be forced, to accept.

Each one of us now faces a choice: to resist or accept; to question the system that got us here, and begin to think about a whole different way, or shut your mind and listen to the authorities, and to the grotesque and racist demonizing and fear-mongering of their fascist spokespeople.

*****

How Did We Get Here? A Blood Soaked Foundation

How did we get to a situation where millions of people find themselves in a foreign land, forced here from Mexico, Latin America and beyond in order to survive and make a new life? And now to confront an angry, growing native population vilifying their presence and demanding vicious measures against them? To understand this, we need to briefly examine the historical process that has led us to this point.

When Obama began his July 1 speech saying "we are a nation of immigrants," he was leaving out essential parts of America's "rosy dawn." There was the "clearing" of the land of its native population through genocidal wars and the spreading of disease, destroying millions of Native Americans, and consigning most who survived to reservations. And that "rosy dawn" hinged on the capture and kidnap of millions of African people, who came here not as immigrants, but as chattel to be enslaved for hundreds of years in the most despicable conditions and who today still suffer discrimination and oppression wherever they turn.

This country's borders themselves are the product of the war with Mexico in 1846. The main purpose of this war was to extend slavery into Texas. The U.S. invasion swallowed almost half of Mexico and the people living there—becoming the southwestern U.S., including Arizona. In doing this, the U.S. replaced Spain as the force that would dominate and plunder Mexico down to today.

Fast forward to the mid-20th century, after the U.S. has established its dominance of Mexico and Latin America (see article on page 10). Beginning in the 1920s in the U.S., when there was an inability to meet the need for a growing workforce, combined with the growing demand for agricultural labor, millions of Mexican workers were brought here to harvest the crops for extremely low pay under back-breaking conditions. Mexican immigrants became a source of labor which could be hired and super-exploited in good times, and sent back to Mexico in bad times. In the '40s and '50s this was formalized through the "Bracero" program. When it ended, the U.S. expelled thousands of Mexican workers and exploited them one more time by denying their right to the retirement benefits that were taken from their earnings. But U.S. agriculture continued to rely on workers from Mexico and Latin America, and eventually other sectors of the American economy followed suit—the food industry, construction, and small scale production—by integrating immigrant labor, often undocumented, into their labor force.

Globalization: A Feeding Frenzy for Capitalist Sharks

Then, all this took a leap in the 1980s. Dramatic changes took place in the world economy and U.S. economy in the 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the U.S. as the world's sole superpower. There has been a wave of the intensive globalization of exploitation of people, the squeezing of ever greater profits out of millions, as capitalists (led by the U.S. imperialists) moved vast amounts of production to other countries. In this hemisphere, the implementation of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994 between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico enabled the U.S. to penetrate and dominate the Mexican economy in new ways. This treaty eliminated barriers to direct investment by U.S. companies (which had been instituted in the wake of the Mexican Revolution in 1910), and tariffs on agricultural imports from the U.S. Opening up Mexican agriculture to competition from the U.S. had devastating consequences for Mexico's small farmers or campesinos. Campesinos who had been able to work and live growing corn, beans and tomatoes and other products could not compete with the low-cost corn from the U.S., and in tremendous numbers they were forced to abandon farming and migrate to the cities, or to El Norte. Between 1994 and 2004, 6 million campesinos were forced out of the countryside in order to find a way to survive.

Globalization fueled an explosion of assembly plants, called maquiladoras, along the U.S.-Mexico border, where plants employed hundreds of thousands of women drawn there by the promise of work assembling auto parts, TVs and other electronic equipment, clothing, and more. This drive for profit greatly twisted and distorted the Mexican economy and bloated border cities like Tijuana and Juarez, whose infrastructure was overwhelmed. But then, even more profitable manufacturing sites were opened up in Asia and elsewhere. And, the maquiladoras, and the workers they had drawn there, were abandoned.

In the U.S., new needs for highly exploitable cheap labor were met by drawing immigrants from across the border to fill lower-skilled, low paying jobs. This has led to millions of people, especially from Mexico and Central America, to leave their homelands and their families behind, and risk apprehension and death trying to get across the border. And, the porous border between the U.S. and Mexico has benefited the ruling classes of both countries. For Mexico it has allowed workers to migrate north in search of work and relieve the pressure of too many workers chasing too few jobs in Mexico. For the U.S. capitalists, it has given them a fresh supply of needed workers for their factories and fields to be super-exploited.

Meanwhile these same pressures caused by the impact of globalization have meant the disappearance of millions of relatively high paying manufacturing jobs that provided "the American way of life" for significant sections of people in this country. The current economic crisis is further intensifying this. It contributes to a widespread feeling of instability and insecurity among large sections of mostly, but not solely, middle and lower middle class whites. Rather than directing their anger and frustration at the system of capitalism and its laws that have caused this whole situation, they are being rallied by powerful, reactionary forces with connections to a section of the ruling class. They are being programmed to blame their loss of position, and privilege, on immigrants, while dangerous nativist and racist sentiments are being whipped up against immigrants.

Threat to Reactionary U.S. Social "Glue"

The clash over Arizona's anti-immigrant law SB1070 reveals deep and volatile social divides—both in the halls of power and in society as a whole. The U.S. ruling class faces the necessity to "glue" the society together in a different way, and there is sharp struggle among them about how to do it. At this time the initiative is in the hands of a growing right wing fascist movement in this country that has the backing of powerful voices in the Republican Party and media.

There is a great American myth that has played a crucial role in maintaining the stability and coherence of this society from its beginnings: that this country has advanced through the ingenuity and hard work of its citizens (that is, its white male citizens), and that the superior position of white people in this society—and the privileges they have—are the rewards of hard work and supposedly superior "culture" and ethic. The cruel lie at the heart of this is that if others have not attained these things it is not because of deep-rooted discrimination and oppression but because "they are inferior, do not work as hard and their culture encourages them to be criminal, and immoral." Historically in this country, this lie has been used to justify the oppression of Black people—and today it is being used to justify these fascist attacks on immigrants.

That whole "social contract" grounded in white privilege and male privilege was fundamentally challenged through the upheaval and great struggle of the 1960s, most importantly the struggle for the liberation of Black people. Concessions like affirmative action were made, and racism and male supremacy were under assault while millions took up the challenge of fighting for new relations among people; blind patriotism was put on the defensive through the movement against the Vietnam war; and much more. All of these changes were, and still are, resented and hated by those behind this anti-immigrant movement today and others like it because they called into question that whole social contract. In the decades since, much of what was accomplished back then has been undone or overturned. But in the world view of this movement—only a thorough overturning and burying of all of what was brought forward through these struggles will suffice. The recent high profile conflict between the NAACP and the anti-immigrant Tea Party shows this.

The heart of the program of these fascists is to restore or return to that original social contract—with its male supremacy and white supremacy—which they associate with a time when the U.S. was "riding high." In fact, many even wax nostalgic about the Confederacy when the only reason for its existence was to defend slavery. In their view, if it takes establishing a fascist regime to do it, so be it. They are appealing to people who feel their whole way of life is threatened. They see the decadent culture and they want to get back to those earlier values. In their view, "if it weren't for people like Obama... If it weren't for these elites... and Wall Street barons, giving away our wealth...." They look out and see all this and think that without a solid center, the whole country is going to fall apart.

Virulent racism plays an important role in restoring this old social contract. It is the dangerous "others" who are taking over the country and supposedly collaborating to deprive hard working, white Americans of the privilege they have enjoyed, their prosperity and rights. These "elites," they are told, want to attack their values and undermine their whole way of life, and to give what is supposedly rightfully theirs to the "undeserving" masses in the inner cities. This extreme program is the strategy of a section of the ruling class associated with the Republicans.

The Choice That's No Choice

What is the program represented by the Democrats, and their leader in office, in response? The "difference" between the Republicans and the Democrats in this encounter is that the Republicans openly demonize immigrants, while Democrats like Obama pretend to sympathize with them, while leaving all the initiative in the hands of the Republicans.

While Obama did express some sympathy for immigrants in his July 1 speech, he did that while overall adopting the Republicans' terms, and even their proposals. He accused the undocumented of "making a mockery" of those applying to enter the country legally. He described the fascists behind SB1070 as understandably frustrated; and he did everything possible to narrow the space between his proposal for "immigration reform" and theirs.

Obama and the Democrats too want "order" above all else, but most of all they do not want to call the people who are horrified by what is happening into the streets to stand up to and oppose these fascists. The damage this repeated compromise and conciliation with fascism has caused, over several decades, is incalculable. It has for far too long encouraged and influenced progressive people to accommodate to a dynamic where, as Bob Avakian has pointed out, "[Y]esterday's outrage becomes today's 'compromise position' and tomorrow's limits of what can be imagined,"¹ and it has contributed to the disorientation among progressive people in the face of this growing, fascist movement. Remaining on that path, the future can only mean watching while things get worse and worse, while the masses of immigrants are put continually in a more locked down and super-exploited position, with no way out.

The Answer: A Movement for Revolution

As July 29 approaches, millions hold their breath: now what will happen?

One thing we know for sure: if we do nothing, the scene described at the beginning of this article will become reality for hundreds of thousands in Arizona, and very soon it will spread elsewhere. And new horrors, all depending on whatever "the system" needs to survive, will emerge and things will get still worse.

And yes, it is a system. What we've described and analyzed in this article and elsewhere in this issue—the whole history of domination and exploitation, one that has left lifetimes of terrible suffering and mountains of corpses in its wake... this didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of the system of capitalism, and that system has morphed and festered like a cancer as it has further developed. Today, the whole present-day reality of some people desperately attempting to survive, while others—some of whom are also being pushed to the edge—are misdirected and misled to fight against them... all this is results from the rules, the workings, and the history of this system—the system of capitalism-imperialism².

But there is another possible future. Yes, these imperialists are powerful. But keep in mind that their social order is under extreme pressure and very unstable, reflected even in conflicts among themselves (e.g., the Republicans vs. Obama) at the top. And yes, they have up to now been able to suppress the potential resistance of millions of immigrants. But those millions are not going away. And while their politicians have been able to whip up discontented people to turn their anger against those immigrants, these imperialists have no fundamental answer for those discontented people, and some can be won away by a determined movement. The widespread feeling that things are "coming apart" is based on reality—and in such times there is potential for people to look to whole different solutions, and to change their thinking very quickly. These are the "hidden contradictions" of the system—things that are not so evident, but are there, just below the surface.

This other possible future pivots on making revolution against this system. And there is a party—the Revolutionary Communist Party—that is not only dedicated to bring that other future into being, but which has a strategy to do so and is right now carrying on an important campaign to take a leap in carrying out that strategy and making that future real. As the Party's Message and Call³ for that campaign makes clear, "[N]ow is not yet the time, in this country, to go all-out to seize the power away from those who rule over us and to bring a new power, serving our interests, into being. But now IS the time to be WORKING FOR REVOLUTION—to be stepping up resistance while building a movement for revolution—to prepare for the time when it WILL be possible to go all out to seize the power."

Political battles like the one going on in Arizona right now have a lot to do with the strategy to get to revolution. Right now the polarization on this fight is not good—that is, the odds seem to be stacked against the people who are resisting oppression. But those odds can change, things can get re-polarized... for revolution. Through our actions, we can bring into reality the other side of those "hidden contradictions" we talked about above. How could that happen?

If people who understand the tremendous injustice coming down jump into action and rally others to resist, beginning now and especially in this next crucial period, and stand up against this illegitimate fascist law and the whole fascist offensive, giving heart to those who want to see resistance, and if through their bold actions they compel people "on the fence" or otherwise confused to think again...

If revolutionaries unite with that and rally that forward, on the foundation of sharply showing the source of the problem in the system and the solution to it in revolution, raising people's understanding and letting millions know that there IS a movement for revolution and a leadership for that movement, and winning a core among them to take up this revolutionary understanding and build this revolutionary movement...

If the connections are drawn between the repression in Arizona and the many other outrages, and struggles, in society, and their common source, especially through getting out Revolution newspaper and the works of Bob Avakian, the leader of the RCP and of the revolution, and if through getting to know that leadership and reading this paper people come to see that a radically different world is possible, and thus raise their sights as to what is possible...

If through all this spreading of revolution and growing resistance it comes to be seen by millions that what these rulers are doing is totally illegitimate, and indeed they don't in fact deserve to rule...

And if through all that the organized strength of this Party can grow...

Then the political equation can begin to change—radically. Then we can begin to make advances toward a whole different political situation, one where—through other changes in the world and the further development of this movement—people really could make revolution.

As part of doing that, this fascist law—this whole fascist offensive—MUST be challenged, resisted and ultimately stopped. The movement for revolution—the movement we ARE BUILDING—must be spread and strengthened. The challenge has been made; the people must answer it.

1. Bob Avakian, 7 Talks, "Question and Answer Session with Concluding Remarks," answer to question one. (bobavakian.net/talk8.html). [back]

2. We urge everyone to watch Bob Avakian's Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, available online at revolutiontalk.net. [back]

3. "The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have, A Message, and a Call, from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA," revcom.us/a/171/statement-en.html. [back]

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/revtalk-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Bob Avakian on "Why do people come here from all over the world?": 5,000 total views on Thursday, July 29!

As the fascist anti-immigrant law SB 1070 goes into effect in Arizona, introduce people to Bob Avakian and the real revolution. Check out this clip, "Why do people come here from all over the world?" from Bob Avakian's historic filmed talk, Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDsRQyhKPfA and in Spanish at www.youtube.com/watch?v=abg4QCw8tLc

On Thursday, July 29 be part of a campaign to reach 5000 views of this powerful clip. As part of a movement of resistance to stop SB 1070, we need to repolarize for revolution, introducing people to Bob Avakian, the leader of the RCP and of the revolution, and enabling them to see the source of the problem is the system and that through the solution—revolution—a radically different world is possible, and thus raise their sights as to what is possible...

Ways you can be part of this 24-hour campaign, spreading http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDsRQyhKPfA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abg4QCw8tLc STARTING NOW:

On Facebook: Post the clip to your profile and to your friends' pages. Post it as a Note and tag several friends. Post it on Facebook groups and fan pages. Check www.facebook.com/revolutiontalk for frequent updates.

Twitter: ReTweet the tweets from twitter.com/revolutiontalk throughout the day, write your own reasons for sharing this, and encourage all your friends and followers to do the same.

YouTube: Favorite and like the video clips. Write about it on your friends' walls, and send the link to the clip in messages.

Via email: Email the link to the clip to friends and email lists, and encourage people to forward it to their friends and lists!

Text: Send text messages: "Why DO people come here from all over the world?" Bob Avakian answers @ youtube.com/revolutiontalk. Watch this clip, FWD this text.

Blogs: If you've got a blog, post it there, and if you have any connections to widely read bloggers, encourage them to post it to their blogs as well.

On Internet discussion sites: Post the link in political discussion forums...and get the discussion going!

Please contact us at info@revolutiontalk.net with any other ideas you have for reaching this goal—5,000 views on Thursday, July 29, for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDsRQyhKPfA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abg4QCw8tLc  Watch the full Revolution talk at http://revolutiontalk.net

The REVOLUTION is real. Watch it. Spread it.

—the Revolution Talk web promotion team

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/campaign-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

The Campaign: Mid-Summer Report

The conferences held in late May to get into, and lay plans for, the campaign around "The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have" marked a turning point for this campaign. In just the past six weeks, there's a greatly heightened feel of a national campaign around... and important new advances, building on the plans off the conferences.

• Several hundred thousand copies of the Message and Call of the campaign have gotten out.  This happened through a concentrated effort in some major cities right after the conference (which got out nearly 200,000 in ten days), and then through teams of people fanning out into the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit in June, down to the Gulf Coast where the oil spill hit, on the Warped Tour (a tour of dozens of punk bands that gathers thousands of youth), and out into Arizona, where people are gearing up for a showdown over the new fascist immigration law. And the new image of Bob Avakian has begun to get out, intriguing people and stirring things up.
• The web-a-thon in late June marked an important new thing in raising money for the campaign (with nearly $10,000 in hand thus far), and popularizing what it's doing. 
• July 4 began to have a different ring this year: not only did the anti-4th of July picnics raise spirits (and money), but there was also an important step in breaking out Bob Avakian's Revolution talk to a different level, with 3,000 on-line hits (triple the goal) for the part of the talk that draws on Frederick Douglass' "What To A Slave Is Your Fourth of July?" speech, and coverage on the Newsweek website.

Very importantly: all of this was done in conjunction with important struggles against police brutality and murder, against repression directed against immigrants, and around the environment.

A lot of this flowed directly out of plans made at the conferences. The percolation at the conferences on other projects will also be brought to bear in the coming weeks. Some of this was featured in the article "Report from the Conferences: Making Bob Avakian a Household Name," and some will come out in other ways. During these next few months, we will be putting out plans for really making an impact on the campuses... for getting the content and reach of this paper, Revolution, which is the hub and pivot of the revolutionary movement, onto a different level... and for really giving people who are coming forward the opportunity to dig very deeply into the thinking and plans this Party has for actually making revolution in the USA. 

The plans for the next three weeks are laid out on this page.  So, jump in... and stay tuned.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/this_week-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

These Next Few Weeks:

Special Efforts with this Issue of the Paper... Followed by Five Days of Saturation with the Message and Call... And Another Web-A-Thon!

1) The next 10 days:

This issue of the paper has particular importance: it puts the vicious fascist offensive against immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and against Latino and other people of color generally, in the context of revolution, and it gives direction to that struggle. It needs to go out far and wide. We should, in doing this, get subscriptions, and find stores, community centers, etc. that would carry the paper and show the Revolution talk DVD (see special sub blank).

There are also plans to make a big deal of a clip from Bob Avakian's talk on Revolution—a section entitled "Why Do People Come Here From All Over The World?" We're going to project this voice into the whole debate around immigration and the struggle against this anti-immigrant offensive, especially on July 29, when the new fascist law in Arizona goes into effect. Check the Facebook site "Revolution: A Film of a Talk By Bob Avakian" (facebook.com/revolutiontalk) for plans.

2) July 31 through August 5:

In the wake of that effort, we then need another concentrated push, nationwide, of really getting out the Message and Call. Take time now to talk to everyone who participated in, or who you have met during or since, the last big effort, in early June. Figure out with them the best way to help the effort: some people like to really get these out on their own, some like to be part of a big team, other people may want to help in other ways. Listen to what people say, and learn from it. And raise funds as you go—make sure that there is someone agitating for funds, and shaking the bucket.

This should give impetus to ongoing local plans to get out the Message and Call, and reach our goal of one million through the summer. It should also be seen as part of ongoing efforts all over the country, including to get it out big-scale at important festivals, concerts, etc. (People should make sure to send the results of their efforts since the June push, and as we go forward, to the paper.)

At the same time, there should be a special effort to popularize the new image of Bob Avakian. Everyone should be wearing the T-shirts during this period (along with some people wearing Revolution T-shirts at the same time); everybody should be getting out palm cards and buttons, and there should be efforts to do light projections of the image on walls. Send in pictures!

Return to one area you went to last time; and choose a new area. Use the best saturation techniques you developed from last time.

Have the saturation captain report in figures every night during this period, as they did in early June.

3) If we are doing our work right, we should be provoking interest in Bob Avakian. People want to know what this leader stands for, and who he is. So everyone should purchase a couple of copies of Bob Avakian's memoir, From Ike to Mao...And Beyond, and backpack it, and leave a copy around on your coffee table, etc; when people express interest, sell it to them, as well as friends, relatives, and others.

4) August 8: Web-a-thon, to raise money for special projects to popularize Bob Avakian's leadership, especially the Revolution talk, and for the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund. Recruit people to help phone-bank for this.

5) At all times: seek out ways to give life to the slogan, "Fight The Power, And Transform The People, For Revolution."

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/BAsics-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

BAsics Open Mic Night in NYC

Saturday night, July 10 at Revolution Books in NYC was a BAsics "open mic" night to promote and raise money and encourage ideas and volunteers for the BAsics project—the publication later this year of a pocket sized book of about 100  Avakian quotations. 23 people read some 36 "favorite Bob Avakian quotes" from 20 different works by Avakian. Some people came without a particular quote to read, but were literally inspired to on-the-spot search out a quote they wanted to read. Several people who were there, and others who could not make it, have said, "we have to do this again." And the point was made that some version of this could be held in different places and venues around the city and country-bookstores, homes, a supportive coffee shop, and more.

The evening began with Peter Tosh's "Lessons of My Life" song, and a reading of the section in Bob Avakian's memoir, From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist, Chapter 27 "Perseverance and Inspiration", "Money Can Make Friendship End" where he writes to comrades about his sadness at the murder of Tosh, but of the lessons of that song and Tosh's life. People gave short introductions about why they selected their quote, and at one point another song and quote focused on the Oscar Grant murder and verdict, and the police killing of others with impunity.

A program like this, including the raising of funds, is both a strong, creative promotion of Bob Avakian and his leadership and of BAsics, and of "The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have" campaign.

Everyone is encouraged to send in their suggestions of Avakian quotes for BAsics by July 31. And all kinds of ideas and volunteers are needed for all aspects of the BAsics project: fundraising, layout and design, translation, proofreading, production, promotion and distribution. To get your quotes and ideas in, and to volunteer, email thebasics2010@yahoo.com.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/screening-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Revolution Talk Screening in Park

Thursday, July 15, 2010: As the sun went down Bob Avakian's voice boomed out from a large inflatable screen in a park in New York City. More than 100 people, all different ages, mostly Black but other nationalities as well, gathered in and around the park in the first in a series of showings of the film of the Revolution talk in parks. Some listened from benches around the park, hanging out on stoops, leaning out of windows, and sitting on the park steps where people from a university and a hospital came out onto the street. One couple heard the audio outside the park, couldn't tell where it was coming from, and wound their way down through the park to find the screening. Afterwards people talked about what they had heard—conversations ranged from how Avakian talked about how people from all over the world end up living in the U.S. and asking more about how the U.S. destroys the economies of countries like Mexico, to some people who expressed surprise to learn that Avakian was the leader of a movement that is building for revolution here and now.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/Oscar_Grant-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

The following was submitted to and published by the Berkeley Daily Planet:

There Are No "Outsiders" in the Struggle Against Oppression

By Reiko Redmonde

Tuesday July 13, 2010

To those who talk about "inoculating" people against the so-called "violence" of the masses. Who preach against protest. Who say "be cool." Who say they want to preserve a "peaceful and thriving Oakland" when the reality is that every day the police run rampant, brutalizing and killing our youth. Who cynically invoke the names of Malcolm X and Huey Newton in attempts to pre-emptively quell the outrage of the people. Who speak of "love" while they denigrate those who have taken a stand, calling them "outside agitators" and "extreme fringe groups." We say: 

WHERE IS YOUR OUTRAGE AT THE MURDER OF OSCAR GRANT? Oscar Grant, 22 years old, with his whole life ahead of him, was shot in the back at point blank range in front of his friends and hundreds of BART passengers. It was a horror. A violent, brutal, totally unjustified execution. 

WHERE IS YOUR OUTRAGE AT THE EPIDEMIC OF POLICE BRUTALITY? At least 100 people are killed by police each year in California. At least 1000 people are killed by law enforcement each year across the U.S. Sergio Hernandez, 15, shot by Border Patrol while committing no crime and while on the Mexican side of the border. Aiyana Stanley-Jones, only 7 years old, killed by Detroit police grenade and bullet. 

AND WHERE IS YOUR OUTRAGE AT THE PRE-EMPTIVE REPRESSIVE MEASURES, EDICTS, AND MILITARY EXERCISES BY THE POLICE? 

WHY ARE YOU SPEAKING OUT AGAINST THE PROTESTERS, INSTEAD OF STANDING WITH THEM AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY? 

To those officials who sound like southern sheriffs in 1964 when they talk of "outside agitators" we say: 

WHAT BLACK YOUTH IN THIS COUNTRY IS "OUTSIDE" OF AND NOT SUBJECT TO DEGRADATION AND POTENTIAL DEATH SENTENCE AT THE HANDS OF THE POLICE? 

WHAT PERSON IN THIS COUNTRY DOES NOT HAVE THE RESPONSIBILITY TO STAND UP TO THAT OUTRAGE? 

This system of capitalism-imperialism is poisoning the oceans, creating dead zones; is waging unjust wars; is criminalizing immigrants; is attacking women; and it enforces all of this oppression and injustice with brutality, repression and violence. 

We say it is right to rebel. If the people do not resist oppression, they will be demoralized and crushed—forced to swallow their anger until they eventually turn it against each other. 

WHO DO YOU "LOVE"? WHERE DO YOU STAND? WHERE IS YOUR OUTRAGE AGAINST THE SYSTEM? WHAT KIND OF WORLD ARE YOU FIGHTING FOR? 

The system delivered its verdict, a slap on the wrist to Johannes Mehserle. It mobilized its armies of cops, its liars in the media, its networks of politicians, ministers, non-profits and snitches to stifle and suppress the people. We take heart that in the face of all that people took to the streets with courage and determination, and gave voice to the bitter anger of many, many more, in Oakland and beyond. There are no outsiders in the struggle against oppression. 

The whole damn system IS guilty. We are stepping up the battle for justice for Oscar, the battle against the whole damn system, and we are building a movement for revolution.

Fight the Power, and transform the people, for revolution! 

Reiko Redmonde is part of Revolution Books in Berkeley.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/BART-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Another OPD – BART Police Killing in Oakland

A little more than a week after the "involuntary manslaughter" verdict of ex-BART cop Johannes Mehserle, police killed a man in a neighborhood near the same BART station where Oscar Grant was murdered a year and a half ago. People in the Fruitvale neighborhood were stunned, many awakening to a huge volley of shots.  At least 5 police, from Oakland PD and BART fired as many as 50 shots.  One man who saw the shooting said that a "gang" of over 15 police was there, and police were shooting from different angles. More than one witness says that the man, who appeared homeless, wearing heavy clothes and possibly two backpacks, was backing away, agitated and saying "Shoot me! Shoot me!" Then the police opened fire, killing him. Even if the police's story is true: what kind of society is it that considers it OK for its police to gun down people who are mentally ill and acting out?

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/tough_questions-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

The Toughest Questions You Face...

We want to know the toughest questions that you run up against. When you are getting out Revolution newspaper, or wearing the T-shirt with the image of Bob Avakian, or in some other way representing for revolution... what questions do you run up against that provoke you, or intrigue you, or bother you—and that you want help understanding and answering.

Especially if you are newer to the movement, or cut off from other revolutionaries—we want to hear from you. Send us the questions you run up against, and we'll do our best to answer them. Not only that, we'll ask everyone else who reads the paper for help.

If you can, tell us a little bit about who tends to ask you these questions, and how you understand and respond to them. You might also want to let us know a little bit about what you're doing—without going into specifics, in what kind of situation are you building the movement? For instance, whether you are selling the paper on a campus, or wearing the BA T-shirt in a neighborhood, or debating with people in prison, etc.

But that's optional. The main thing is this: we want to hear the questions you're running up against.

You can send your questions several ways:

• At the revcom.us, click on the "Send us your comments" link
• Email to rcppubs@hotmail.com
• Send by regular mail to RCP Publications, PO Box 3486, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 60654

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/read_spread-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Read and Spread Revolution Newspaper

We have a strategy—and our newspaper is, as "The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have" statement says, "the foundation, guideline, and organizational scaffolding for [the] whole process" of carrying out that strategy. This is the paper that cuts to the bone to tell you WHY things are happening... to show you HOW it doesn't have to be this way... and to give you the ways to ACT to change it. It is a call to action and a means of struggle. It is, and has to be much more, the scaffolding on which this movement is built, where those who are getting into it and following it can wrangle in its pages and on its website with how we can better build this movement. It is a guideline where today thousands, but soon tens of thousands and eventually millions, all over the place, stay connected and learn to act in a powerful and united way. It is the foundation where those who read it learn about the larger goals of revolution and communism and come to see the ways in which the struggles of today are connected to those larger goals... where they come to grasp the scientific communist outlook through its application to all the many particular events and outrages and developments in society... and where they get organizationally linked up to this revolution.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/sustain-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

SUSTAIN Revolution financially each month!

Revolution newspaper is the foundation, guideline, and organizational scaffolding for the movement we are building for revolution. Stop and think about it—how essential is that?! But the reality is that this newspaper will not fill this need without more people becoming regular monthly sustainers. Sign up yourself to contribute regularly. And then, wherever you are—at a protest, a concert, selling Revolution, at FaceBook... or just hanging out—struggle with people, including people you just met, to sustain Revolution regularly. Once a week, check yourself: How is this going? How many new sustainers did you sign up?

To sustain Revolution: click the "Sustain/Donate" link at revcom.us or send a regular amount at the beginning of each month to RCP Publications, P.O. Box 3486, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 60654.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/lynne_stewart-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Vicious Government Attack on Lynne Stewart

10 year sentence meant as warning to other lawyers

On July 15, a well-known people's lawyer, Lynne Stewart, was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Stewart, who is 70 years old and recovering from breast cancer treatments, has devoted her life to the legal defense of poor people and unpopular defendants.

This jailing of Stewart is an outrage. It sends an ominous message to other lawyers: "Take up the defense of opponents of our empire or people we label as 'terrorists,' and this might happen to you."

The story behind Stewart's prosecution reveals the political motives of the government in going after Stewart. In the 1990s Lynne Stewart worked as a defense attorney for fundamentalist Islamic cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted and sentenced to life in 1996 for seditious conspiracy related to alleged plots to attack New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center. The government's allegation against Stewart is that she and two co-defendants, a translator and a paralegal, helped to communicate a message from Rahman to his organization in Egypt, by passing on a press release to a Reuters reporter indicating his opposition to a ceasefire with the Egyptian regime.

One might think this was an exercise of free speech. But the government claims that this public communication violated the "Special Administrative Measures" (SAMs) that had been placed on Rahman. SAMs began during the Clinton era and permit the government to isolate and silence any prisoner considered a threat to the security of the empire.

Stewart's alleged offense occurred in 2000, yet the government took action against her in 2002, after the 9/11 attacks. At that point, Attorney General John Ashcroft rushed to New York to announce on television the sudden arrest of Stewart, calling her a "terrorist lawyer." This was at a moment when the government was conducting mass round-ups of young men from Muslim countries and did not want lawyers interfering.

Most of the government's case against Stewart was based on secret recordings of her meetings with her client and thousands of intercepted letters, faxes, e-mails, and phone calls to and from her office and her employees. This was made legal through the new fascist legal powers taken by the government in the wake of 9/11, all of which are maintained and zealously employed by the Obama administration.

Stewart's 10 year sentence is actually a re-sentencing, since a federal appeals court ruled that her original 28-month sentence was too lenient. The trial judge complied by giving her the maximum sentence for the main charge against her, providing "material support to a terrorist conspiracy," and tacked on two additional years of "supervised release." The message was sent to lawyers who dare to defend anyone the government brands "terrorists"

This new 10 year sentence is especially outrageous – given how they have already brutally treated Lynn Stewart in prison. The appeals court that ordered Lynne Stewart's resentencing last year revoked her bail, and ordered that she be taken into custody immediately. After her incarceration, a regularly scheduled breast cancer check revealed a spot on her liver. She requested that the needed biopsy be done by her own doctor and at her own hospital, which had her medical records. Instead it was performed at an inferior facility selected by prison authorities. Except during the actual examination and procedure, she was shackled and handcuffed for the hospital visit.

Stewart has been disbarred and now faces almost 8 more years in prison, even with time off for good behavior and credit for time served. Because she is a beloved figure among the people's movements, the packed courtroom burst into applause when Stewart entered the room. Many attorneys were present in her support, in addition to her defense counsel, Jill Shellow and Sarah Kunstler (daughter of the late William Kunstler). Almost 300 more people filled an overflow room in which the proceedings were viewed by video.

More information about the case and what you can do to support Lynne Stewart can be found at www.lynnestewart.org.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/208/bill_weber-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

In Memory of George "Bill" Webber

From a reader:

Bill Webber died July 10 at age 90. By title he was The Reverend Dr. George W. Webber, magna cum laude Harvard graduate, PhD from Columbia University, former professor and dean of students at Union Theological Seminary, professor of Urban Ministry and President Emeritus of New York Theological Seminary. But he had no use for titles and trappings and he and Helen, "Dibby," his life long partner of 67 years, lived in and with, and for the people of East Harlem for 50 years. There are many remarkable things to know about Bill, his life and work.

I first met Bill in the early '60s while doing field work as a student with the East Harlem Protestant Parish which he co-founded in 1948. But it was some twenty years later while working on the War Crimes Tribunal of U.S. Imperialism in New York City that my conversations with Bill really began, and continued, right up until the last couple years when he became ill. We talked and wrangled some about resistance, religion, revolution; Bob Avakian and the RCP; capitalism, imperialism, socialism and communism; nukes, history and experiences, family and friends, and more. Always Bill was forthright and sharp, unflinchingly honest, completely principled and trustworthy; humorous and warm; and so remarkably open-minded—in fact the door to his office at New York Theological Seminary, when he was there, was, literally, always open.

And Bill had a deep sensitivity to and outrage about how so many people in this city, this country, this world are treated by this system and those running things. But there was more. The New York Times obituary quotes Dibby saying Bill's motivation was "to make things better in the world, to make things right." Bill not only fought with the people against police brutality, rotten housing and schools, daily repression and oppression of East Harlem. Early on, he opposed the U.S. war on Vietnam and traveled to Hanoi during that war. He led Witness for Peace groups to Nicaragua when the U.S.-backed Contras were terrorizing and killing people. He went to Baghdad just weeks before the U.S. blasted Iraq in January 1991 in the first Gulf War, coming back to speak out against the U.S. war, including at a program at Revolution Books.

Bill could be quietly scathing in his rejection of the Christian right, but he also critiqued clergy and others in the religious ranks who he thought stayed too much within the institutional walls. He had no truck with anti-communism, and as the polarization in this country sharpened he referred to what happened in Germany and the famous Niemoller quote that begins, "First they came for the communists...."

Bill was an important signatory to the Engage! Statement to project and protect the voice of Bob Avakian.

Bill encountered Avakian's Revolution talk at a time when, as I recall, he was more than ever angry and upset about what was going on in this country and what the U.S. was doing in Iraq and around the world. And he asked how it is that Avakian and the RCP keeps going. So I think that what he wrote after viewing that talk is particularly significant and speaks to today, "Whatever your political orientation or religious background, this comes across as a challenge that must be heard and wrestled with. There is great depth and seriousness in Bob Avakian's analysis of a situation which  most of us have failed to fully recognize. But he is confident that we can create a viable future for the planet."

Bill wanted "to make things right." And he was fearless about seeing how unjust and not right things are. And he acted on those convictions. Bill fought for change all his life, repeatedly putting his career and physical safety on the line—including going to jail many times—to stand with oppressed people in this country and around the world.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/avakian/principles/index.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Revolutionary Strategy

Some Principles for Building A Movement for Revolution

By Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

At every point, we must be searching out the key concentrations of social contradictions and the methods and forms which can strengthen the political consciousness of the masses, as well as their fighting capacity and organization in carrying out political resistance against the crimes of this system; which can increasingly bring the necessity, and the possibility, of a radically different world to life for growing numbers of people; and which can strengthen the understanding and determination of the advanced, revolutionary-minded masses in particular to take up our strategic objectives not merely as far-off and essentially abstract goals (or ideals) but as things to be actively striven for and built toward.

The objective and orientation must be to carry out work which, together with the development of the objective situation, can transform the political terrain, so that the legitimacy of the established order, and the right and ability of the ruling class to rule, is called into question, in an acute and active sense, throughout society; so that resistance to this system becomes increasingly broad, deep and determined; so that the "pole" and the organized vanguard force of revolutionary communism is greatly strengthened; and so that, at the decisive time, this advanced force is able to lead the struggle of millions, and tens of millions, to make revolution.

 

 

Fight the power, and transform the people, for revolution.

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/196/communist_revolution-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

What Is Communist Revolution?

It is this system that has got us in the situation we're in today, and keeps us there. And it is through revolution to get rid of this system that we ourselves can bring a much better system into being. The ultimate goal of this revolution is communism: A world where people work and struggle together for the common good...Where everyone contributes whatever they can to society and gets back what they need to live a life worthy of human beings...Where there are no more divisions among people in which some rule over and oppress others, robbing them not only of the means to a decent life but also of knowledge and a means for really understanding, and acting to change, the world.
This revolution is both necessary and possible.

From: The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have
A Message, And A Call,
From The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

Permalink: http://www.revcom.us/a/196/bob_avakian-en.html

Revolution #208, July 25, 2010

Who Is Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party?

In Bob Avakian, the Chairman of our Party, we have the kind of rare and precious leader who does not come along very often. A leader who has given his heart, and all his knowledge, skills and abilities to serving the cause of revolution and the emancipation of humanity. Bob Avakian came alive as a revolutionary in the 1960s—taking part in the great movements of those days, and especially working and struggling closely with the most advanced revolutionary force in the U.S. at that time, the Black Panther Party. Since then, and while many others have given up, Bob Avakian has worked and struggled tirelessly to find the way to go forward, having learned crucial lessons and built lasting organization that could continue the struggle, and aim to take it higher, while uniting with the same struggle throughout the world. He has kept on developing the theory and strategy for making revolution. He played the key role in founding our Party in 1975, and since then he has continued the battle to keep the Party on the revolutionary road, to carry out work with a strong revolutionary orientation. He has deeply studied the experience of revolution—the shortcomings as well as the great achievements—and many different fields of human endeavor, through history and throughout the world—and he has brought the science and method of revolution to a whole new level, so that we can not only fight but really fight to win. Bob Avakian has developed the scientific theory and strategic orientation for how to actually make the kind of revolution we need, and he is leading our Party as an advanced force of this revolution. He is a great champion and a great resource for people here, and indeed people all over the world. The possibility for revolution, right here, and for the advance of the revolution everywhere, is greatly heightened because of Bob Avakian and the leadership he is providing. And it is up to us to get with this leadership...to find out more about Bob Avakian and the Party he heads...to learn from his scientific method and approach to changing the world...to build this revolutionary movement with our Party at the core...to defend this leadership as the precious thing it is...and, at the same time, to bring our own experience and understanding to help strengthen the process of revolution and enable the leadership we have to keep on learning more and leading even better.

From: The Revolution We Need... The Leadership We Have
A Message, And A Call,
From The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

• Works by Bob Avakian (Centerfold PDF)