Anti-Racism: Back to Affirmative Action

The situation of blacks in the workplace without AA [Affirmative Action] is not difficult to imagine. The racist impact of irrelevant job requirements will continue, perpetrating the victimizing effects of inferior ghetto education and the racial bias that has denied blacks training and work experience. Unless AA measures reduce the racist impact of seniority-based layoff, blacks will, as always, move down during recessions into unemployment. Should blacks wait until recessions are eliminated (until capitalism is fundamentally restructured) to achieve job security? Without AA, desirable jobs will be distributed through a white pipeline, as an ingrained practice in America’s two segregated societies.

...The aim of AA is to break that racist barrier. Without that pressure, even in an expanding economy, occupational segregation will continue. Blacks will remain second-class citizens. Gertrude Ezorsky, Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action, 1996.

The question of racial oppression in the US against peoples of African origin remains unsettled well over two hundred years after the country’s foundation.

Some would like to believe that the question was substantially solved after the Civil War with the liberation of African slaves from their bondage.

Still others would like to believe that the question was largely solved with the Civil Rights “revolution” of the 1960s when legal segregation was overturned and historical racially-based legal obstacles to voting were abolished.

And still others would like to believe that the final racial barrier was shattered when Barack Obama was elected, breaking the ultimate glass ceiling.

For many well-meaning liberals, only a mopping-up of the vestiges of racism remains: the abusive impact of language, attitudes, individual relations, micro-aggressions, etc. remain problematic. And, of course, these attitudes can fester into collective violence organized by the police or the so-called “alt-right.” From this perspective, the race question can neatly be absorbed into a vast rainbow of worthy causes, an intersection of dozens, if not hundreds, of group grievances for which liberal academics have concocted an umbrella word: “intersectionality.”

The wholly unique history of depredation and alienation experienced by a people forcibly “exported” to foreign lands for slave labor and subsequently scorned because of skin color is cast into a cauldron of -ism’s that range from the most benign to the most harsh, systemic, and unimaginably violent, elevating the slight and trivializing the brutal.

It is the relativizing of oppression that allows vast numbers of otherwise disinterested citizens to remonstrate against second-hand smoke while ignoring the slaughter of hundreds of thousands at the hands of the US military in its imperial campaigns throughout the world.

African Americans today fall behind their white counterparts in every objective, material standard of well-being, from life expectancy to accumulated wealth. Despite the relative successes of an upper stratum (petty bourgeoisie) of US Blacks who have parlayed education, social or political contacts, professional prowess, ethnocentric entrepreneurship, or fealty to power to its advantage, most African Americans occupy the lowest, most precarious rungs of the US working class.

Black citizens often live in bantustan-like neighborhoods, isolated from better housing, better schools, and better human services. Where Northern, urban African Americans have historically been confined to city ghettos, they are now being ethnically cleansed from inner cities by a process of gentrification motivated by young, white professionals enamored with the amenities of urban living. Today, Blacks are herded into declining suburban ghettos where they were formerly denied residence.

It is no exaggeration to say that the segregation of Blacks and whites is as great or even greater than ever, with a consequent disparity of advantage.

The Liberal Moment

The high point of progress against racism and its effects occurred in the 1960s coincident with the growth in breadth, militancy, and unity of many decades of anti-racist activism. New Deal liberals, prodded by a largely Communist left and CIO working-class radicalism laid the foundation for the direct action and broad-based movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Democratic Party, long an unholy alliance of Northern liberals and Southern racists, acutely felt the pressure from this movement. A unique conjuncture of sympathy for an assassinated President’s initiative, the rare audacity of a succeeding President, Lyndon Johnson, obsessed with leaving an historic legacy and repairing the international image of the US, widespread outrage over officially sanctioned violence in the South, and, most importantly, a disruptive mass movement for racial justice culminated in unparalleled legislation expanding civil, political, and human rights for US Blacks. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked the high-water point in the struggle against racism. The history since that juncture has been one of defending, enforcing or, most tragically, witnessing the erosion of those gains.

To a great extent, the gains of the 1960s reached the limits of bourgeois democratic, rights-based reform. Unlike a revolutionary change brought on by the US Civil War, a war that overturned an entire politico-socio-economic system (while leaving the deplorable material conditions of Blacks largely intact), liberal reformism promises opportunity but does not promise the delivery of outcomes. In other words, liberal reformism may open closed doors without providing the means to pass through those doors.

The legislation of the mid-1960s opened many doors for African Americans, but failed to offer most of them the material essentials-- the education, the jobs, the living conditions, etc.-- to successfully pass through those doors toward real equality.

Just as the promise of 40 acres and a mule never materialized to liberate former slaves, liberal reformism fails to offer Blacks the socio-economic foundation that would liberate the African American working class in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To grant that foundation would challenge the most sacred values of capitalism and open further doors to the emancipation of the entire working class.

The aftermath of the Civil Rights era brought two promising developments: a movement to desegregate public schools in both the South and the North and an emerging commitment to affirmative action.

Beyond the Limits of Reformism?

School Desegregation

Of all of the potential reforms targeting racism, desegregating public schools and forcing children to bear the burden of social change was the least likely to come at a cost to capitalism or disrupt existing power relations. Nonetheless, there was great promise in dramatically improving the education available to Black youth by putting them in the same classroom with white youth, where the quality of teaching, resources, facilities, and options are consistently higher.

While minimalist in economic sacrifice, public school integration met intense opposition from highly organized racists who rallied many under the bogus banners of “forced busing,” “school choice,” and “neighborhood schools.” It made no difference that elites had embraced publicly subsidized busing and travel out of neighborhoods for their children’s attendance at private and parochial schools. The hypocrisy was only underscored by the use of busing and the abandonment of neighborhoods to avoid attendance at integrated schools.

Nonetheless integration of city schools persisted. Of course the problem of better education for Blacks remained unsolved because of the even greater class disparity between urban and suburban schools. To achieve some parity for Blacks would necessarily involve consolidating school districts across this class line at some additional material cost and with social and political cost to the existing racial barriers.

This dramatic step for parity education for African Americans was quashed with the Burger Supreme Court decision of 1974, Milliken v. Bradley.

The Burger majority effectively removed any legal obligation of suburban school districts to participate in school desegregation unless they could be shown to be intentionally racist, placing an untenable onus upon reformers. The urban Detroit school district was 75% Black when it originally appealed for judicial relief. With the Supreme Court denying relief, it was 90% Black by 1987.

Dissenting Justice Douglas caustically noted: “...the task of equity is to provide a unitary system for the affected area where, as here, the State washes its hands of its own creations.” One should clarify: the capitalist state washes its hands of its own creation.

With a substantial legal obstacle placed before it, the reformist desegregation movement collapsed well before it achieved any real educational parity for African Americans. Liberal reformist leaders surrendered without a further fight. Since Milliken v Bradley, it has been a persistent battle to protect the limited gains made from opportunist politicians.

Beyond the Limits of Reformism?

Affirmative Action

The other promising reform stoked by the Civil Rights movement-- and potentially the most significant-- was the policy of affirmative action, a policy designed to move beyond allowing participation in the US economy to actually leveling the employment playing field for US Blacks. Marxist political economist, Victor Perlo, calls affirmative action “...the principal mechanism designed to reduce discrimination against African Americans.”

Among the most thoughtful, passionate advocates for affirmative action is the liberal philosopher Gertrude Ezorsky. Her brief, concise book, Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action, is the classic on the policy. From first reading her book many years ago, I remember well her central datum that jobs are acquired overwhelming through contacts or personal networks. It caused me to reflect on my own work history from digging a basement for a neighbor when I was thirteen through the rest of my employments. Without exception, every job was gotten through family, friend, or other acquaintance. Every thoughtful person, except for the mythical “self-made man/woman,” will concede this datum.

Of course this means that those limited to the worst jobs through racism will only produce and reproduce, through their limited networks, still others locked into bad jobs.

It is this cycle that affirmative action promises to break by guaranteeing Black representation in workplaces proportional to African American representation in the population.

While ‘60s liberals acknowledged both the necessity and promise of affirmative action (Title 7, Civil Rights Act 1964), they were slow to devise plans or seek implementation of the policy. Ezorsky notes that, ironically, two of the more effective plans were enacted during the Nixon Administration. The 1969 Labor Department Philadelphia Plan saw the representation of Blacks in the construction trades go from 1% to 12% in Philadelphia. And Nixon’s 1971 Executive order 11246 required “that dated numerical targets for hiring, training, and promoting minorities be set by firms that hold government contracts but have underutilized minorities…” (Ezorsky, p.37)

Affirmative action got as much attention in the 1976 Democratic Party platform as did fisheries. When mentioned, it was conflated with the Black unemployment rate. Even less attention was given by the Carter Administration, in practice.

Ezorsky concedes that “[t]he affirmative action programs begun in the 1960s have been diminished in the 1980s in response to a different political climate.”

The Democratic National Committee’s 1986 83-page statement of principles, New Choices in a Changing America, written and endorsed by the Party’s luminaries, contains not one endorsement (or mention) of affirmative action. In its place were vague policies directed at unemployment and job training.

Affirmative action was dead.

Racial Justice

Because Ezorsky grasps the historical specificity of US racial oppression, she recognizes a strong need for restorative justice, a justice that must go beyond merely establishing opportunity. The liberal conception of justice as fairness-- everyone playing by the same rules-- professes a distance, a willful blindness to outcomes. But blindness to outcomes fails to acknowledge that inequality of means determines outcomes even when equality of opportunity is assured.

Thus, an equal opportunity to apply for acceptance from Harvard means little to the gifted African American student saddled with a third-rate education; an “equal opportunity” job-training program in the suburbs means nothing to a motivated potential employee lacking the financial resources to travel to the suburbs; and the right to stay at the Greenbrier resort counts for little to the vacationer who would have to devote an entire paycheck for a visit.

Of course it is the class dimension that arises with these examples, an “intersection” with racism that academics and “middle class” liberals seldom recognize.

Consequently, restorative justice-- like affirmative action, but unlike merely establishing civil rights-- depends on a redistribution of society’s resources. For Blacks to finally enjoy justice, they must acquire a material foundation beyond newly minted rights in order to participate productively in society and enjoy its benefits.

Obviously capitalism opposes any redistribution of assets or any reordering of power relations, unless it comes at the expense of the working class. And that opposition explains the stillbirth of affirmative action. It has disappeared almost entirely from the mainstream conversation.

Could affirmative action succeed in bringing racial justice to African Americans under capitalism?

Probably not, but the struggle for affirmative action would bring Blacks closer, and would attack racism at its core.

Anti-racism for the Twenty-first Century

The shallow and patronizing anti-racism that occupies much of the left-- the language-scolding, the tokenism, the guilt-driven deference-- leaves the structure of racial oppression untouched.

Nor does the idea of “reparations” attack that structure. Reparations draw upon hollow legalisms: the notion that a retributive settlement can be negotiated with a guilty party and magically restore justice to a people kept back for centuries. It fundamentally looks to the past, promising to repair damages incurred, but with no promise of delivering future justice. Further, reparations fail to explain how any settlement would be distributed in a way that benefits those most aggrieved. Like other liberal answers to racism, it fails to recognize the fact of class.

Any attack on the structure of US racism must recognize that eliminating the racial ghettos of poverty, inferior education, poor housing, mass incarceration, poor health care etc. must attack the economic ghetto of centuries of super exploitation, unemployment, underemployment, and inadequate jobs.

In his classic reprise on the subject, Economics of Racism II, Victor Perlo writes:

A program to achieve economic equality [for Blacks] has two main requirements:

1. Affirmative action; that is, specific measures to improve the economic conditions of African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and sections of the Asian population;
2. Measures to advance the conditions of the entire working class. (Perlo, p. 281)

Any anti-racist reforms must, therefore, revisit affirmative action. An authentic People's anti-racist strategy must place restorative measures at the center of our efforts-- measures that afford African Americans the minimal means to march through the doors of opportunity won in the great Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Trumpism as Capitalism’s Default Option

Happily, many on the US left are beginning to see the intense, ongoing battle between Trump and his defenders and the self-described “Resistance” as reflective of a “split in the ruling class.”

This is a welcome development because it removes some of the confusions fostered by the Democratic Party leadership and the childish sensationalism and witless simplicity of the capitalist media. With little more than Russians-under-every-bed to rouse the electorate, the Democrats sell a narrative of Trump-as-Traitor, Trump-as-Defiler-in-Chief, and Trump-as-Fascist. Nancy Pelosi, the billionaire face of the Democratic Party parliamentary contingent, declared three priorities, should the Democrats win the interim election, three pieces of battered, rusty liberal boilerplate: lowering health costs and med prices (always promised, never delivered nor deliverable under a private system), higher wages and improved infrastructure (unrealized for nearly half a century and a teaser to the labor movement), and “cleaning up corruption” (which means continuing the bizarre Mueller witch hunt). No mention of overturning the Trump administration’s tax cuts for the rich.

It is a step out of the weeds of political posturing and shallow cable news analysis to now see a real, fierce battle between different groups of the wealthiest and most powerful, a conflict that gives some deeper meaning to the bizarre antics of the Trump era. Behind the lurid and illusory imagery of a corrupted vulgarian (Trump) resisted by the “heroic” protectors of freedom and security (the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc.) lies an actual contest over ideas, interests, and destiny. So it is a good thing that not everyone has been seduced by the cartoon-like political circus constructed by the capitalist media. It is a good thing that more are seeing a contest between the rich and powerful, contesting different visions of the future of capitalism: “a split in the ruling class.”

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks”

For much of the last two years, I have written often of the emergence of a ruling class alternative to the conventional wisdom of market fundamentalism-- so-called “neo-liberalism” and “globalization.” I have written of the growth of economic nationalism in the “advanced” economies as the expression of that alternative. I have postulated its increasing ruling class popularity as grounded in the damage to globalism-- deceleration of trade, slow growth, financial imbalances, popular discontent, etc.-- in the wake of the global crisis that began in 2007. The intensifying competition in the politics of energy are offered as materially symptomatic of economic nationalism, as is the disinterest in maintaining a relatively peaceful backdrop to securing and promoting trade. The US, for example is more interested in selling arms than in resolving its many wars (Secretary of State Pompeo is said to have convinced those in the Trump administration publicly shamed by the slaughter in Yemen not to cut off support for Saudi Arabia because of the possible loss of $2 billion in weapons sales).

Therefore, a recent commentary (The Dividends of Wrath, 9-3-18) by the influential senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, Joshua Green, counts as recognition of the shifting political terrain triggered by the crisis and its direct consequence in “Making America Great Again,” the slogan of Trump’s economic nationalism. The subtitle of Green’s think-piece clearly identifies that theme: How anger over the financial bailout gives us the Trump presidency.

Through reminiscences of an interview with former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Green takes us back to the aftermath of the financial collapse, where a resigned Geithner expressed a profound fear of the populace seeking “Old Testament justice” for Obama’s bailout of the banks and the coddling of the banksters.

Green reminds us of Obama’s infamous White House meeting with the CEOs of the major banks where he candidly told them, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Reflecting on Obama’s words, Green comments:

Ten years after the crisis, it’s clear Obama was foolish to think public sentiment could be negated or held at bay… Millions of people lost their job, their home, their retirement account-- or all three-- and fell out of the middle class. Many more live with a gnawing anxiety that they still could. Wages were stagnant when the crisis hit and have remained so throughout the recovery. Recently the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that US workers’ share of nonfarm income has fallen close to a post-World War II low.

This unusually harsh mainstream indictment of post-apocalyptic capitalism well captures the conditions that have stoked fear of dusted-off pitchforks. And make no mistake, those who rule the major capitalist centers pay attention to the anger, not to answer it, but to deflect it.

Green continues: “...the pitchfork-wielding masses will eventually make themselves heard. The story of American politics over the last decade is the story of how the forces Obama and Geithner failed to contain reshaped the world… unleashing partisan energies on the Left (Occupy Wall Street) and the right (the Tea Party)... The critical massing of conditions that led to Donald Trump had their genesis in the backlash...” [my emphasis]

While it may be emotionally satisfying to blame Obama and Geithner and go no further, it is more revealing to locate the cause of Trump in the failure of market fundamentalism and the unsettling consequences for capitalism if no alternative were found. Trump and “Make America Great Again” may be a crude response to dangers unleashed by market fundamentalism run amok, but response it is.

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off these proposals”

Insightfully, Green locates the first stirring of an alternative to the reigning politico-economic paradigm in Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to dissociate the Republicans from the Obama bailouts-- in his words to “...keep our fingerprints off these proposals [the TARP funding of the banks].”

But it wasn’t until Trump that anyone crafted a strategy that successfully harnessed the mass anger into political success. “By the time Trump declares his candidacy in 2015, Americans of every persuasion had soured on the ‘elites’ running both parties, something his Republican opponents didn’t understand until far too late,” Green notes.

Trump was able to cobble together a campaign based on responding to the anger with a measure of economic nationalism, patriotism, and, paradoxically, partisanship for the working class.

Green explains:

Today, his campaign is remembered as having been driven mostly by anti-immigrant animosity. But… Trump spent loads of time attacking Wall Street on behalf of the forgotten little guy and fanning the suspicion that a cabal of political and financial eminences was screwing ordinary people.

When I interviewed Trump just after he’d locked up the Republican nomination, he told me that he intended to transform the GOP into “a workers’ party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry.”

His closing message in the campaign consciously evoked the disgust so many people had come to feel toward Wall Street and Washington. His final ad on the eve of the election flashed images of Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and sought to implicate them, and Hillary Clinton, in what Trump called “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of large corporations and political entities”... It’s no surprise that this message struck a chord: What is Trump if not the embodiment of a balled fist and a vow to deliver Old Testament justice?

Of course the idea that Trump is building a workers’ party is ridiculous, and Green knows it. But that is not the point.

The point is that Trump is not merely the anomaly, the Elmer Gantry figure, bent on capitalizing solely on his cynicism, his vulgarity, his hypocrisy to cheat his way to the pinnacle of power. He is not simply the cartoon-like character of orange hue, small hands, and a Mussolini-like pout. Instead, he represents a section of the ruling class’s alternative to the now nearly thirty-year unopposed reign of market fundamentalism.

But it is most important to stress that he is a ruling class answer to the failings of a ruling class-dictated era of the universal worship of private property exclusively, of US policed globalism, and of lubricated trade. The latter ideology has not surrendered and the ideology of economic nationalism has yet to dominate. In no way does the struggle between the two roads promise to advance the interests of the working class-- both are dead ends for working people. And Green confidently reminds us that the damage wrought by the economic crash “...makes it all but certain that the next presidential election, and Trump’s possible successor, will be shaped by it, too.”

Green, with his earnest, liberal hopes, believes that there is a chance that the otherwise disinterested Democrats will take up the cause of those wielding the pitchforks. He sees that opportunity in Elizabeth Warren. Others see it in Bernie Sanders or the ripples of DSA progressivism on the surface of the Democratic Party.

With the Democrats delivering no qualitatively meaningful reforms for the US working class since the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, that likelihood has moved from hope to groundless faith.

Taking sides in this struggle over how best to serve capitalism will only further set back the cause of working people. And looking for a road away from serving capitalism within the Democratic Party is a futile repeat of old illusions.

Only a concerted effort to create or nurture a truly independent, anti-capitalist movement addressing the real and urgent needs of working people makes sense today, when the bourgeois parties willingly sacrifice the interests of workers to the Moloch of capitalism. Only a movement with revolutionary purpose can divert the working class from the false prophets of inward-looking demagogy, tribalism, and Spencerian Survival of the Fittest.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Remembering Chile

September 11 will mark 45 years since the military coup deposing the elected Popular Unity government of Chile. With the electoral victory on September 4, 1970 and under the leadership of presidential candidate, Salvador Allende, the Chilean left proclaimed the first steps on a peaceful transition to socialism. Millions of progressive and socialist-minded people worldwide followed the Chilean developments with intense interest only to witness their hopes dashed and tens of thousands of Chileans brutalized or murdered by the junta lead by Augusto Pinochet.

In the aftermath of the violent coup and the destruction of Chile’s constitutional system, hundreds of thousands worldwide marched and organized in solidarity with Chilean democrats, socialists, and Communists. At the same time, a rigorous examination of the three-year experiment took place, dissecting the objective and subjective factors leading to and allowing the coup. Articles, books, forums, and witnesses argued passionately the possibility of peaceful transition, of a parliamentary road, the role of intermediate strata, the absence or necessity of stages of struggle, the role of reformism, of compromise, of dependency, of foreign intervention, of the socialist countries, of economic priorities, and of many other aspects of the Chilean struggle.

Today, the questions raised in the 1970s-- a time of great promise for socialism-- remain relevant, urgent, and vigorously debated. With the passage of time, they stand out as essential to interpreting our world, theoretically and practically. Every process for change, from the Italian elections, the Portuguese revolution, and African liberation movements of the 1970s to the most recent events in Syria and Nicaragua, prompts most of the same questions that were raised by the Chilean counter-revolution.

The Role of the US

The one point of agreement shared by Communists, socialists, democrats and even the left wing of Christian Democracy was that US influence occupied an essential place in the undermining of the Popular Unity government and its programs and prospects. We know even better today of the active, intense interventions of the CIA and US corporations like Anaconda, Kennecott, and ITT in strangling the Chilean economy. From the first election, the US government at the highest levels devised a plan and began actions to derail the Chilean left.

Credits and loans were denied. The global price of copper (70-80% of Chilean exports) was manipulated downward to deny Chile’s government essential revenue for the country’s social programs (salaries rose between 35% and 66% in 1971) and industrial development.

Without hard currency outside loans or revenue from trade, hyperinflation eventually plagued Chile, reaching 163% in 1973.

“The US credit and trade squeeze was designed for a political purpose…: to promote the political demise of a democratic socialist government. Economic pressures led to economic dislocations (scarcities), which generated the social basis (discontent among the middle class) that created the political context for a military coup.” (The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government, James Petras and Morris Morley)

Funding middle class truck-owners’ “strikes” through the CIA and AIFLD further fueled middle class alienation (the middle strata in Chile was quite large-- one study claimed that the 45% of the population beneath the top 5% shared 53% of national income).

Of course the Chilean military maintained strong and dependent contact with its US counterpart, a fact that guaranteed that the US would be a partner in the coup.

The CIA paid bribes to Chilean legislators, funneled money to leading newspapers to influence popular opinion, and encouraged and financed acts of terror.

Writing in 1970 and anticipating the impact of economic warfare on three Latin American independent and progressive processes-- Peru, Chile, and Bolivia-- Italian Communist, Renato Sandri, astutely observed:

The strategy of the imperialist siege of the three countries seems to be a combination of an insidious pressure from the outside, primarily on the economic level, with internal resistance by the unseated oligarchies, [and] the reactionary sectors of the armed forces… The besiegement of these countries, in which the contradiction between the desperate needs of the largest masses and the possibilities of meeting them soon is so acute, has a clear objective: to force them into economic bankruptcy, to bring the governments to their knees in isolation from their own peoples… (Critica Marxista, 1970, number 6)

For those most sincerely in solidarity with the Chilean people, condemnation of both US intervention and the Pinochet regime became the immediate priority. For those dedicated to returning governance to the people of Chile, resisting the machinations of the US ruling class and its allies overshadowed settling the political differences following in the wake of the coup.

For a broad base of US leftists and democrats, Chile solidarity served as the template for internationalism, solidarity, and anti-imperialism. At its core was the idea that US activists must first and foremost resist the meddling of the more powerful country in the affairs of a weaker country; solidarity required a universal respect for another country’s absolute right to determine its own fate regardless of what we may think of its internal affairs.

A Lesson Learned?

For reasons that are not easily discerned, the US left has compromised the principles that united the many factions in the Chile Solidarity movement. Despite deep political divides, solidarity work in the past stood firmly on the foundation of respect for other countries’ right of self-determination. Another lesson learned-- though less widely accepted-- was to avoid the conceit of judging other people’s paths, especially by the conventional standards of affluent, privileged US citizens.

But that resolve was to erode after the Pinochet coup. By the end of the decade, most of the US left failed to respond to the US intervention in Afghanistan which fell on the side of the anti-secularist, millenarian, ultra-conservative counter-revolutionaries. No doubt, anti-Communism played a role, but it is worth noting that liberal values supposedly deeply embedded in the US left were quietly retired before the onslaught of the Jihadis.

Cold War politics surely account for the disinterest of the predominantly white left organizations in the US government’s substantial support for the wrong sides in the liberation of the last remaining colonies in Africa. “Specialized” organizations and a fairly broad section of the Black community were moved to condemn US engagement.

Anti-Reaganism and a determined core of Latin American solidarity activists restored some of the vigor of the Chile Solidarity era with an insistent defense of the Sandinistas against the onslaught of the US-sponsored Contras. It helped that the cause proved useful in the Democratic Party’s fight against Reagan and his cohorts.

The dismantling of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a non-event for most of the US left and a troubling turning point in US left solidarity. As the US and its NATO allies encouraged, financed, and actually interceded in the orgy of nationalism, with roots in World War II fascism and anti-fascism, there were no demonstrations, marches, or actions in the US. Few voices, notably excepting Diana Johnstone, Michael Parenti, and scant others, challenged the newly minted doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” concocted by the Democratic administration.

When the Jihadis bit the hand that fed them in the twenty-first century, the US struck hard at Afghanistan. Given the popular image of the US as an innocent “victim,” it was not surprising that little opposition arose to the invasion.

But then emboldened by that lack of opposition, the US brazenly invaded Iraq in 2003. For this naked aggression, the broad left mobilized, agitated, and demonstrated, particularly after the claimed justification collapsed. Once again, hatred for a Republican president fueled the mass expression, along with pacifistic anti-war convictions devoid of deeper solidarity sentiments (muted by vulgar charges of “islamo-fascism”).

Obama’s wars brought a further decline of left internationalism in the US. Partly because of the ascendance of a Democratic president unjustifiably deified by much of the left, murderous actions in the US’s longest war, in a once-stable Libya and Syria, and through remote drones, were shamefully ignored by much of the left. The deliberate destabilization of countries like Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, the meddling in Iran’s elections, and the coup in Honduras were largely met with left indifference.

The turn-of-century anti-imperialist renaissance in Latin America created excitement and support from a broad segment of the US left. Developments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, ranging from liberal nationalism to proclaimed socialist-orientation (and real socialism in Cuba!), inspired many to celebrate a crack in the US global hegemony.

But as hardships piled up and US economic warfare increased against these upstarts, many in the US abandoned them, surrendering to North American-media charges of corruption, incompetence, and human rights violations. The shallowness of US left solidarity is on full display.

After the charismatic Hugo Chavez died in Venezuela and after the US economic sanctions tightened (in a way only too much like Chile during Popular Unity), many on the US left fled the Venezuelan cause like rats from a sinking ship.

Still others turned on the leadership, voicing intense criticisms of the Venezuelan government’s chosen path at the moment of greatest duress. Nothing gives meaning to great-power chauvinism like the second-guessing of a privileged US leftist.

But the reaction of the US left to the recent events in Nicaragua exceeds the shabby sell-out of Venezuela. Despite the fact that the Sandinista government won an overwhelming victory in elections last year, we are to believe that they are now disowned by a majority of the citizens. We are to believe that confidence in the government is so fragile that it justifies burning cars and buildings, constructing homemade mortars, and organizing violent attacks, actions that would turn US liberals and some on the left running to demand police intervention should this happen in their own country.

The carping and criticizing of the Sandinista government-- a matter best left to Nicaraguans-- overshadows the well-documented intervention of US agencies in Nicaraguan affairs. The media’s overwhelmingly negative and one-sided campaign against the Sandinistas should be transparent to anyone who has faced the US media’s persistent negative characterization of anything remotely left wing. Yet many US leftists ponder the “complexity” of the conflict. Many hesitate to defend not only the government, but Nicaraguans’ right to determine their own future, their own fate, free of US influence. Maybe the bully has good intentions?

One would think that a left worthy of the name would gladly err on the side of any regime that found itself in the gun sights of the US government, its security agencies, and the corporate media. When, since World War II, has that formula NOT been a fairly reliable guide to taking an anti-imperialist stand?

The Chile Solidarity moment is a dim memory. In the past, solidarity movements-- the Spanish Republic, the Vietnamese Liberation Front-- were springboards for the US left. Unfortunately, the same is not true in the wake of Chile Solidarity.

Social Democrats or Democratic Socialists or Democratic Democrats seem only interested in democracy in the US; they show little regard for the global democracy of self-determination and national independence. When it comes to the fate of peoples in far-off lands victimized by an arrogant US foreign policy, they are too often diffident.

Those ignorant of the nobler episodes of US solidarity with the victims of US imperialism are not to blame. But those leaders on the left who are beholden to foundations, think tanks, non-profits, and other organs of dependency have tarnished that legacy. They cannot hide behind the fig leaf of class-defined “human rights” forever.

Thankfully, there are still some who remain dedicated to principled solidarity work, there are many diligent enemies of the bullies of the world, steadfast in accepting the heavy burden of fighting their own country’s bid for global dominance. Anti-imperialism does live!

We celebrate their work on the anniversary of the tragic end to the Chilean people’s reach for control over their lives.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Pumpkin and the Soccer Ball

We won the Hiss case in the papers. We did. I had to leak stuff all over the place. Because the Justice Department would not prosecute it. Hoover didn't even cooperate.... It was won in the papers. I leaked out the papers.... I leaked out the testimony. I had Hiss convicted before he ever got to the grand jury.... Go back and read the chapter on the Hiss case in Six Crises and you’ll see how it was done. It wasn't done waiting for the goddamn courts or the attorney general or the FBI. Richard Nixon tapes

Unless you are my age or spent time hanging around old Reds you probably don’t know about Richard Nixon’s Great Pumpkin ploy. Nixon ran for office in California in 1946 under a “Red under every bed” platform, successfully red-baiting a New Deal Democrat House incumbent. His understanding of the power of anti-Communism became the driving force in his career, a career further realized when he promptly joined the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) soon after his election.

Always on the lookout for scandalous new revelations about Communist “mischief,” Nixon soon found a source in Whittaker Chambers. Chambers-- a damaged personality-- had, in the 1920s and 1930s, been allowed to take on responsibilities in the Communist Party far greater than his stability or trustworthiness. After he broke with the Communists, he tried to peddle his ever-changing, exaggerated tales of clandestine activity and espionage to the Roosevelt administration.

They declined.

In the early war years, the FBI interviewed Chambers. They also walked away from his stories.

As the Cold War heated, Chambers made another attempt to sell his product, this time to HUAC. Many, including President Truman, discounted Chambers’ claims.

But they underestimated Richard Nixon. In a media-recorded drama, orchestrated by Nixon, Chambers visited his farm where he proudly showed the public a pumpkin in which he had hidden documents allegedly incriminating Alger Hiss, a former high-ranking State Department official, in Soviet espionage.

The Great Pumpkin Caper, infused with the ominous threat that Communists were out to assassinate Chambers for his treachery, proved to be just the right amount of theatrics and fear-mongering to put Chambers’ wild accusations into mainstream respectability. It should be added that many New Deal liberals quickly lost their spine and dutifully joined the anti-Communist crusade.

I was reminded of these Cold War hysterics when I read a Bloomberg News 45 pt headline, Putin’s Soccer Ball for Trump Had Transmitter Chip, Logo Indicates. Could the gift from Putin to Trump after the recent summit actually be a spy device?

Author Vernon Silver attempts to place an inch of distance between his suppositions and an actual allegation of Russian perfidy, but he takes it seriously enough to inquire with the ball’s maker, the President’s spokesperson, and a hacker group. Further, he reminds us of a Forbes article that described an engineer who used a chip similar to the chip affixed to the ball to invade a nearby cell phone. Could the soccer ball be a nefarious Russian attack?

Apparently another intrepid journalist thought so. Clare Foran, writing for CNN, revisited the story under a 42 pt headline Putin gave Trump a soccer ball that may have a transmitter chip. Like Silver, Foran checked in with Adidas, the President’s spokesperson, and the ubiquitous “cyber-security expert” hanging around newsrooms and TV studios. In addition, she checked with the US Secret Service. Its prepared statement, reassuring readers, suggests that many other amateur sleuths had inquired about the suspicious soccer ball.

Despite the cautions, Foran remained vigilant, citing Senator Lindsey Graham’s “warning”: “if it were me, I’d check the soccer ball for listening devices and never allow it in the White House.”

Not for lack of effort, these two elite-school graduates failed to generate enough interest to warrant a serious look from the master conspiracy theorist, Robert Mueller. Nixon would have gotten it done.

In another crackpot moment, Newsweek writer, Cristina Maza, sensed a trojan horse in the NATO camp. Her article, VLADIMIR PUTIN'S BIKER GANG SETS UP MILITARY CAMP IN NATO MEMBER STATE, PUBLIC FIGURES URGE GOVERNMENT TO TAKE ACTION, raises the specter of a military take-over by a group of Russian and Slovakian motorcyclists from the Night Wolves motorcycle club. The group recently occupied a building complex about the size of a large high school campus. Maza worried “that the group had access to tanks and armored vehicles.” Apparently, they had rented a few Soviet era tanks from a local military museum to add some color to their gathering. While the Night Wolves claim to have organized the event to inaugurate a new chapter, two hundred “public figures” signed a petition urging the Slovakian government to expel the invaders.

The US’s enduring regime change vehicle, Radio Free Europe, quotes the vigilant petitioners as characterizing the Night Wolves ominously as  “Putin’s paramilitary vanguard in a hybrid war against the EU, NATO, and Slovakia.”

Nixon would approve.

How do you “infiltrate” the National Rifle Association (NRA)? Like most membership organizations (AAA motor club, the local library, even the Democratic Party), you give your personal information and pay a fee to the NRA and you’re a member. If you want to join from Russia, Afghanistan, or Colombia, it’s an additional $10.

Yet an uncommon diversity of news and entertainment organizations (MSNBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Chicago Tribune, Vox, Democracy Now!, Rolling Stone, Jimmy Kimmel Live, etc. etc.) have charged Russian national, Maria Butina, with “infiltrating” the NRA. I suppose that my membership in the Green Party, coupled with my openly expressed desire to influence the organization towards advocating socialism, makes me an “infiltrator,” too.

Curiously, her Department of Justice affidavit does not describe as an “infiltration” Butina’s engagement with a more elite, politically charged organization, The Fellowship Foundation, and its annual National Prayer Breakfast.   

Wikipedia describes the National Prayer Breakfast as “designed to be a forum for the political, social, and business elite to assemble and build relationships,” seemingly an ideal event to “infiltrate.” Wikipedia also asserts that the guest list is limited to about 3,500 people including guests from 100 countries, presumably none of which, except Russia, were bent on influence peddling.

The Butina case reeks of the media’s hysterical “Russian under every bed” campaign. Nixon would be pleased with the use of the Cold War-tested, sinister-conjuring word, “infiltrate.”

It is no surprise that the Gallup poll reports that only 22% of its respondents have a “Great Deal” or “Quite A Lot” of confidence in the criminal justice system. The recently reluctantly released-- and heavily redacted-- FISA application that the FBI submitted to the secret FISA court in October of 2016 and the ensuing disputes give ample evidence for that lack of confidence.

The focus of the request for extra-legal surveillance was Carter Page, a business consultant and a campaign advisor to Donald Trump for six months or so. Despite the fact that the FBI released 414 pages, the meat of the case could be carved out in about thirty heavily redacted pages. The rest of the release was redundancies, boiler-plate and blackened copy to add gravitas to an otherwise slight document.

No doubt the FBI anticipated that the FISA courts are perceived as push-overs for government agencies; of 22,990 FISA requests from 1979 to 2006, only 5 have been rejected. So much for judicial vigilance.

Remarkably, much of the revealed substance of the suspicions about Carter Page are based, in one way or another, upon the infamous Christopher Steele dossier.

To an objective observer, the fact that no one wants to take ownership of the claims made in the dossier would cast suspicion on the real intent of the FBI and Justice Department officials who sought the surveillance approval. Even when the security agencies presented the dossier to Obama and Trump before the 2017 inauguration, they refused to attest to its veracity, they refused to take ownership of Steele’s “research.”

The FISA request does not, in those sections not redacted, explicitly reveal that the Steele information was gained at the paid behest of the Democratic Party (Steele was told, his immediate employers claim [Fusion GPS], that he was only instructed to answer the question: “Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?" -- a question akin to ‘when did he stop beating his wife?’).

Surely, no one would contend that the Democrats were paying for positive information on Trump. Nor could any rational person expect Steele to receive the instruction and not understand that his job was to dig up dirt. And just as assuredly, the failure to explicitly reveal the Democratic Party connection-- with no independent verification of the dossier-- casts a long shadow over the FISA request and its granting.

Either the FBI withheld relevant information or the FISA court is such a rubber stamp that its standards of evidence are nearly non-existent. Or, perhaps, the FBI used unverified claims for a fishing expedition and the FISA court is a sham.

If further proof of the corruption of the legal system is needed, it is provided by the vapid, amoral defense of the FBI’s FISA request by three former US Attorneys. Writing in the Daily Beast, they argue that, in fact, hearsay-- a sophisticated word for gossip-- is a sufficient condition for surveillance. The FBI would have been “derelict” if it had not sought a FISA request based on the Steele dossier or any other hearsay-- leaks, innuendo, anonymous calls, vendettas. They seem little concerned with establishing the limitations of hearsay.

They assure their readers that a FISA request only requires revelation of “potential for bias.” What an amazingly low standard for the credibility of evidence!

Nixon would have regretted not living to exploit such an abysmal decay of journalistic and legal standards.

Had he lived, he would have enjoyed the incredible expansion of the surveillance state, the demise of critical, combative, questioning journalism, the glorification and unchallenged legitimacy of the security services, and the punitive use and abuse of the grand jury and court system. He would have seen opportunity in narrowing the scope of permitted discourse and action-- all long strides toward a national security state. He would have hailed the promise this development offers for protecting the interests of the rich and powerful.

On the other hand, he would have been surprised at the complicity, even enthusiastic advocacy, of many liberals and “civil libertarians” in furthering this agenda.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com