Colin Kaepernick, the Black Panthers, and Fred Hampton

By Simon Wood

"When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie" - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

In the 2016 preseason American football games of the San Francisco 49ers, quarterback Colin Kaepernick began to sit rather than stand for the US national anthem. In an interview, he explained his stance:

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

He later chose to kneel instead of sit, explaining that this change was to express more respect for past and present US military service members.

A year on the controversy has exploded, dominating news agendas and social media feeds. There is a hashtag [#takeaknee] and numerous opinion pieces, expressing sympathy and condemnation in broad measure, have achieved broad circulation. US President Trump has joined the fray, expressing the standard view from the right that the actions of Kaepernick are disrespectful and unpatriotic. This has in turn served to trigger the 'liberal left' in a way that decades of inequality, police violence against black people and mass carnage abroad has never quite managed.

Indeed the coronation of Donald Trump has been a stroke of genius for the US and global ruling classes. His unparalleled boorishness and ineptitude has been the perfect distraction for a generation force-fed decades of identity politics, people who see war and class oppression as abstract concepts to be frowned on and soberly discussed while foaming at the mouth over, say, the various classifications of gender, in those moments when they are not victims of all the other distractions on offer.

The chances of any serious movement arising to topple the financial elites and their collaborators under these circumstances are zero. 'Trump out!' goes the slogan, with the sloganeers all too happy to see this particular puppet replaced with another Obama, the man who personally ordered numerous drone strikes in full knowledge of the fact that 90% of the victims were civilians, some toddlers and infants.

Whatever Kaepernick's and his followers' good intentions, they must be aware that any movement that gains popularity and has potentially revolutionary appeal will be either subverted and rendered harmless by the state apparatus, or - if or when that fails - mercilessly crushed. That second stage has not been reached here, and it will not, as all the signs are there of a major media operation to re-direct and dilute the mass of outrage away from the true target, namely class oppression and the system that enables it - capitalism. By giving support and condemnation, the media subverts the anger of the people and crafts the debate on its terms. Black versus white, the people versus Trump, freedom of speech - whatever. What it absolutely must not ever mention or encourage understanding of is the reality that this injustice stems directly from oppression by the ruling classes. Just keep the people arguing among themselves. Divide and rule.

This is a class issue, and to understand that requires class awareness, the very concept identity politics was deployed to destroy. The one single thing that petrifies the looting warmongers in control of the world's 'democratic' institutions is a mass awakening of class awareness, from which follows the ability to discern between truth and fraud, fact and misdirection, reality and illusion - in other words, the only means to tackle the disease. If you listen carefully, as the right bang on and on about respecting the flag and the left argue among themselves, demanding some kind of vague 'justice' for the victims of police violence, on a quiet night you can hear the ruling classes laughing over champagne in their ivory towers. You may also hear the sound of Fred Hampton rolling fitfully in his grave.

Fred Hampton was the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP. He understood that revolutionary change was the only answer to the long, deep injustice suffered by the oppressed. In a speech at Northern Illinois University in November 1969, he expressed this in his own inimitable manner:

You know a lot of people have hang-ups with the Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. And the people that have those hang-ups are opportunists, and cowards, and individualists and everything that's anything but revolutionary. And they use these things as an excuse to justify and to alibi and to bonify their lack of participation in the real revolutionary struggle. So they say, "Well, I can't dig the Panther Party because the Panthers they are engrossed with dealing with oppressor country radicals, or white people, or hunkies, or what have you. They said these are some of the excuses that I use to negate really why I am not in the struggle."

We got a lot of answers for those people. First of all, we say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx, and Lenin, and Che Guevara end Mao Tse-Tung and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that revolution is a class struggle. It was one class--the oppressed--those other class--the oppressor. And it's got to be a universal fact. Those that don't admit to that are those that don't want to get involved in a revolution, because they know that as long as they're dealing with a race thing, they'll never be involved in a revolution.

[...]

If we never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that when you, the by-product, what comes off of racism, that capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to take money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means that capitalism had to, through historical fact, racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a by-product of that.

Anybody that doesn't admit that is showing through their non-admittance and their non-participation in the struggle that all they are, are people who fail to make a commitment; and the only thing that they have going for them is the education that they receive in these institutions-education enough to teach them some alibis and teach them that you've gotta be black, and you've gotta change you name. And that's crazy.

[...]

And a lot of people think now that their hands are getting dirty. We call them ideological servants of United States fascism. And that's what they are, because they serve fascism by doing nothing about it until the law goes over and then they apologize for it, they get apologetic. But we say it's the same press that we'll look at and believe and think is bona fide; the same press that talked us into believing that we was somebody when in fact we were nobody.

I don't think there's anything more important. I think that what Malcolm says is important. Now think back. Those students were laughing at Malcolm. Can you dig it? They were laughing at Malcolm. Why? Regis Debray, he says the revolutionaries are in the future. That militants and pork chops and all these people, radical students, are in the present, and that most of the rest of the people try to remain in the past. That's why when somebody comes that's in the future of a lot of us can't understand him. And the same thing that you don't understand Huey P. Newton now, you didn't understand Malcolm when he was living. But we know that when Malcolm left, the well almost ran dry. You don't miss the water til the well runs dry, and it almost ran dry.

[Excerpts selected for relevance]

A month later, Hampton was murdered by the police on the orders of the FBI. A short examination of the circumstances leading to his death are relevant as they provide an object lesson of citizen actions the state is concerned about, as well as those that the state is not, and also the lengths to which the state will go to destroy potential threats to power.

While Hampton impressed many of the people with whom he came into contact as an effective leader and talented communicator, those very qualities marked him as a major threat in the eyes of the FBI. Hence, the bureau began keeping close tabs on his activities. Subsequent investigations have shown that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive Black movement in the United States. Hoover saw the Panthers, Young Patriots, Young Lords, and similar radical coalitions forged by Hampton in Chicago as a frightening steppingstone toward the creation of such a revolutionary body that could, in its strength, cause a radical change in the U.S. government.

The FBI opened a file on Hampton in 1967. Hampton's mother's phone was tapped in February 1968, and Hampton was placed on the Bureau's "Agitator Index" as a "key militant leader" by May. In late 1968, the Racial Matters squad of the FBI's Chicago field office recruited an individual named William O'Neal, who had recently been arrested twice, for interstate car theft and impersonating a federal officer. In exchange for having his felony charges dropped and a monthly stipend, O'Neal apparently agreed to infiltrate the BPP as a counterintelligence operative. He joined the Party and quickly rose in the organization, becoming Director of Chapter security and Hampton's bodyguard. In 1969, the FBI special agent in San Francisco wrote Hoover that the agent's investigation of the BPP revealed that in his city, at least, the Panthers were primarily feeding breakfast to children. Hoover fired back a memo implying that the career prospects of the agent were directly related to his supplying evidence to support Hoover's view that the BPP was "a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means".

By means of anonymous letters, the FBI sowed distrust and eventually instigated a split between the Panthers and the Rangers, with O'Neal himself instigating an armed clash between the two on April 2, 1969. The Panthers became effectively isolated from their power base in the ghetto, so the FBI went to work to undermine its ties with other radical organizations. O'Neal was instructed to "create a rift" between the Party and SDS, whose Chicago headquarters was only blocks from that of the Panthers. The Bureau released a batch of racist cartoons in the Panthers' name, aimed at alienating white activists, and launched a disinformation program to forestall the realization of the Rainbow Coalition but nevertheless it was formed with an alliance of the Young Patriots and Young Lords. In repeated directives, Hoover demanded that the COINTELPRO personnel investigate the Rainbow Coalition and "destroy what the [BPP] stands for" and "eradicate its 'serve the people' programs".

Documents secured by Senate investigators in the early 1970s revealed that the FBI actively encouraged violence between the Panthers and other radical groups, which provoked multiple murders in cities throughout the country. On May 26, 1969, Hampton was successfully prosecuted in a case related to a theft in 1967 of $71 worth of Good Humor Bars in Maywood. He was sentenced to two to five years but managed to obtain an appeal bond, and was released in August. On July 16, there was an armed confrontation between party members and the Chicago Police Department, which left one BPP member mortally wounded and six others arrested on serious charges. In early October, Hampton and his girlfriend, Deborah Johnson (now known as Akua Njeri), pregnant with their first child (Fred Hampton Jr.), rented a four-and-a-half room apartment on 2337 West Monroe Street to be closer to BPP headquarters. O'Neal reported to his superiors that much of the Panthers' "provocative" stockpile of arms was being stored there and drew them a map of the layout of the apartment. In early November, Hampton traveled to California on a speaking engagement to the UCLA Law Students Association. While there, he met with the remaining BPP national hierarchy, who appointed him to the Party's Central Committee. Shortly thereafter, he was to assume the position of Chief of Staff and major spokesman.

Here we observe several tactics of division and subversion such as infiltration, sowing distrust, publication of controversial materials under false pretenses, even the instigation of violence and so on.

Once Hoover - seeing Hampton and the Black Panthers as a major threat - had ordered an intensified FBI campaign to destroy them by any means necessary, a sequence of events eventually led to a raid on the apartment where Hampton often stayed in Chicago. On the evening of December 3rd, 1969, the FBI informant O'Neal slipped a sleeping agent into Hampton's drink to ensure he would sleep through a raid planned for that night. Unable to awaken when the raid occurred, Hampton was wounded in the shoulder as he lay next to his heavily pregnant fiancé. Black Panther Harold Bell reported that he heard the following exchange:

"That's Fred Hampton."

"Is he dead? Bring him out."

"He's barely alive."

"He'll make it."

Two shots were heard, later discovered to have been fired point blank into Hampton's head. According to Johnson, one officer then said: "He's good and dead now."

Demanding social justice is a fine thing, one that raises a person above the many who have been so deeply indoctrinated that they care only for the things they are programmed to be concerned about. The propaganda apparatus is well prepared for such outrage, however, and successfully plays billions of people for fools again and again, ensuring that any and all protest organisations never attain a revolutionary aspect and actually start taking direct strategic actions against their oppressors. A concerned citizen or activist must be smart, aware of all the tricks of misdirection that are employed to ensure essential harmlessness from all possible threats. Being impervious to these methods is a necessary, key step toward freedom and progress. And therefore justice.

The Kaepernick issue is one such case. Yes, it is about social injustice and freedom of speech, but all this stems from the overriding issue - as Hampton explained so clearly - of class. Make it about that, strive to organize and/or join marches and other direct actions on as large a scale as possible to bring down the mass-murdering war apparatus of the Pentagon and the CIA and the financial networks that simultaneously fuel and profit from them. Forget the personalities (like the pathetic Trump) and focus only on the system that permits such evil and incompetence, the system that threatens all our lives.

This was originally published on Simon's blog. Simon is available on Twitter @simonwood11

From Turmoil to Tribute: How the Trump Presidency Will Ultimately Fortify the Status Quo

Michael Orion Powell

If you grew up in the United States as a Millennial or in Generation X, many of the historical names seem like a natural part of our environment. A main street is named after Martin Luther King, Jr. in close to every major city in the country, while New York's busiest airport is named after John F. Kennedy, parks and streets in major cities like Washington D.C. are named after Malcolm X, an airport in Kansas is named after Dwight Eisenhower, and a major stadium in Washington D.C. is named after Robert F. Kennedy.

It's normal for monuments to be named after leaders, but the process where it becomes finalized often occurs after a tumultuous period. The 1960s and 1970s were just that. Deemed "a long national nightmare" by President Gerald Ford (who also has an airport named after him in Michigan), that period started off with promises of "a new frontier," only to go through an unpopular war, multiple assassinations, the resignation of a president, inflation, an oil crisis, and social, class, and racial tension and conflict throughout the country.

Currently, we are passing through a similar phase. The eulogy of John McCain last week signaled a bipartisan group of former American heads of state coming together to actively spurn the sitting president, Donald Trump, while simultaneously building up a legacy for the Arizona Senator they were mourning.

Several comments seemed directed at Trump. One was from George W. Bush, who said, "Perhaps above all, John detested the abuse of power. He could not abide bigots and swaggering despots. There was something deep inside him that made him stand up for the little guy - to speak for forgotten people in forgotten places ... We are better than this. America is better than this."

Barack Obama added on by saying that "so much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It's a politics that pretends to be brave and tough, but in fact is born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that."

Trump is going to go down. At least every few days is a strange new accusation, departure, or friction between him and someone else, including people within his own administration. A few weeks ago, it was the departure of political aide Omarosa Manigault. As of this writing, it is bizarre accusations from veteran political journalist Bob Woodward of Trump behavior in the White House, including calling Attorney General Jeff Sessions "mentally retarded" and "a dumb Southerner" while imitating his accent in a Foghorn Leghorn manner. Woodward also claimed that he was told by an inside source that Trump wanted to "fucking kill" Syrian leader Bashir Assad, a strange accusation for someone who "colluded" with Russia, given Russia's decades-long support for Assad and his father.

And now, in perhaps one of the most shocking moments in modern political history, an anonymous op-ed published by the NY Times titled, " I am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration ," whereas a reported "insider" goes on to talk about an organic resistance that has developed within Trump's own circle in an effort to "thwart Mr. Trump's more misguided impulses until he is out of office."

With the eventual exit of Trump will be a gift for his predecessors, who will be hoping to shore up their legacies as America's "legitimate" statesmen. Donald Trump, the Alt Right, Russia, and whatever other far-right elements are associated with him, will be pinned with the nadir of American society that the country now sits in, instead of the destructive policies that led America toward Trump in the first place.

The true legacy of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, no matter what role they are playing now, was war and decline.

Bush talked of a "humble foreign policy" while running for president, while one of Obama's first political appearances was at an anti-war speech in Chicago. The only change that Obama brought was changing how theatrical war appeared. Instead of relying on "troops on the ground," to coin a phrase from Secretary of State John Kerry, special forces and drones were used to maintain American supremacy in Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere.

Bush's policies promised the end of terrorism, only to create a breeding ground for Al Qaeda to transform into ISIS and then Boko Haram. The invasion of Iraq touted democracy and the rule of law, but created so much chaos that people whose ancestors had lived in the Lavant for generations fled for Europe by the millions.

Obama promised "post-racialism," a phrase used often upon his election, only to see a small (and mostly one-sided) war between police and the black community escalate, as the federal government distributed military equipment to the nation's police departments.

All of this will be forgotten as the erratic housing tycoon-turned-president Donald Trump eventually falls, however. In the mainstream imagination, Trump will represent the treasonous forces of darkness that usurped those who wanted progress. Just as Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and the like were venerated in the aftermath of Nixon's resignation, national holidays, monuments, and buildings will be memorialized after the establishment figures who stepped up against him - all with the purpose of whitewashing recent history and fortifying the status quo.

The reality of what all the last American presidents, Trump included, really is stands beyond what a theater of difference they stage. As Vladimir Putin put it in an interview with Oliver Stone, "It's very curious. Your presidents change but the policy never changes." The truly powerful people who run the United States only change the face of the United States every few years. If we go through difficulties, it's their doing and not the spokesperson they pick. This reality, while tested by the tumultuous Trump, will only be strengthened in his ousting.

Learning from our Elders: Kwame Somburu and Scientific Socialism

By Colin Jenkins

A dear friend of mine passed away in 2016. He was a lifelong revolutionary activist and quite possibly the most interesting man in the world (sorry, Dos Equis guy). His name was Kwame Somburu, formerly Paul Boutelle.

I came into Kwame's life through chance when, after a journey that resembled more than a dozen lifetimes, his eclectic path led him to Albany, NY. It was 2012, and Kwame was well into his 70s when he entered the capital district activist scene. He was a bit of an enigma, presenting a uniquely powerful blend of principled conviction and carefree humor. Unlike many activists, he was immediately lovable; not bitter, not rancorous, not pushy, and not self-inflated. He was grizzled, yes, but in an old-school way, where you could almost see the wisdom oozing from his pores. He had every reason in the world to possess a runaway ego, but nonetheless carried a calm humility that could not be mistaken. In an oft-aimless world, he was the personification of guidance.

Kwame undoubtedly carried the emotional scars of growing up Black in America, as well as the spiritual exhaustion of being on the front lines of struggle for five decades. Yet he was bulletproof, unfazed by the cruel confines of American society, which he had long broken from in his push to lead a fierce and principled revolution against the roots of this society: capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Kwame's list of achievements and experiences would require an entire book to do them justice. He had run for public office nine times throughout the 60s and 70s, once as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party. He spent these decades speaking on the street corners of Oakland and Harlem, giving lectures at Oxford and the London School of Economics, and appearing on numerous TV and radio shows, most notably partaking in a contentious debate with William F. Buckley in 1968 on Buckley's popular show, Firing Line.

Kwame was active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (early 60s), participated in the 1963 March on Washington, co-founded Afro-Americans Against the War in Vietnam (1965), spoke at numerous Black Power Conferences through the 60s, and assisted in organizing 400,000 people from the Native Sioux, Puerto Rican, and African-American communities to rally at the United Nations in 1967.

In 1970, Kwame served as the chairman of the Committee of Black Americans for Truth About the Middle East, an organization that spoke out against the U.S.-supported crimes of the Israeli government. Representing an early voice in support of the Palestinian struggle, Kwame toured Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria as a guest of the General Union of Palestine Students. In 1993, Kwame engaged in a speaking tour throughout Europe to discuss Malcolm X, the film about his life, and in defense of Black Nationalism and Socialism.

Despite all of this, Kwame's most endearing quality was his ability to inject his principles into humor. After living a few years in upstate New York, he regularly joked that there was "only one kind of white supremacy that cannot be denied…snow." He always made a point to immediately correct someone's usage of "history" by responding with, "it's herstory…because you can't have man without womb-man." He talked about his nationally televised appearance-turned-debate with William F. Buckley like a pugilist would talk about an old street fight in their prime: "Buckley had no idea how to respond to historically-informed analysis…he was a mental midget."

Kwame was proud of his performance on Buckley's show [ watch the entire episode here -Eds.], and rightfully so. He would encourage folks to watch it whenever he had the chance. He did this not in a boastful or braggadocios manner, but in a way that was meant to empower those of us in the trenches-as if to say, "here I was, a Black man in the belly of the beast and from modest beginnings, largely self-taught, staring down an Ivy League-educated white man and conservative icon who came from one of the most privileged paths imaginable." On national television. And not only staring down, but bodying on all levels-intellectually, ideologically, logically, historically, and morally, ala Malcolm X at the Oxford debates.

He masterfully defended the Cuban revolution to Buckley, justifying the harsh treatment of Cuban reactionaries by explaining that if a people's revolution occurred in the US, "I'm sure there will be a lot of Mississippi sheriffs who would be put on trial." To counter Buckley's misrepresentation of socialism, Kwame accurately described his party as "a party which represents social forces that desire change" due to a deadly and exploitative capitalist system and its embryonic Native genocide and "500-year slave trade" that resulted in the deaths of "100 million black people." When pressured further about his beliefs, Kwame brilliantly flipped the script, telling Buckley, "What are you representing? You're representing George Washington, you're representing Custer, you're representing an imperialist, oppressive, racist system. So, don't attack socialism on the assumption that the system you represent-which is full of lies, hypocrisy, and murder-has been so perfect. The only thing capitalism has done is to provide opportunists like yourself with the opportunity to be parasites on the backs of oppressed people." When Buckley tried to shut Kwame down by claiming, "American Negroes are free," and that he would "get more Negro votes" if he ran, Kwame nailed the coffin by snapping, "I'm sure of one thing… if you went down to Mississippi and told Black people they were free, you would be running and it wouldn't be for office."

During our time together, Kwame described his ideological development in his own words: "In 1960, after a few years of independent study (from a scientific perspective) in many and varied historical/contemporary areas, but mainly African and African American history, the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, and acquired knowledge from life experiences, I declared myself to be a Black Nationalist-class definition-and a Scientific Socialist." Within a multitude of wisdom and guidance, it dawned on me that this unassuming portion was perhaps his most important-scientific socialism.

Or maybe it wasn't so unassuming. When describing his political orientation, Kwame was intent on always including "scientific" before socialist. Whenever bluntly asked if he was a socialist, Kwame would quickly respond "scientific socialist," always with an emphasis on the scientific part. If engaged in a political or theoretical discussion, he would sometimes refer to socialism, only to quickly correct himself with a "that is, scientific socialism." He wanted folks to understand that socialism goes deeper than utopian idealism; that it is rooted in a scientific, materialist analysis. It's safe to say the commitment to this message was obsessive. So much so that it may have been easy for many to view it as a trivial quirk.

And while I always appreciated his relentless effort of being literal, I too underestimated the importance of the emphasis. That was until 2015, when Bernie Sanders emerged as a formidable candidate for president.

To those of us in radical circles, Bernie was always viewed as an interesting member of the entrenched political class-a man who spent his entire career as a U.S. Senator flopping back and forth between maintaining the imperialist state and serving as a thorn in the side of wealthy capitalists. Bernie was known for his Senate hearings, where he would routinely grill a CEO or financier, denounce economic inequality and poverty, and put on a valiant show in the name of morality. In a bit of a stretch and with some exaggeration, he could be given some credit for helping to spark the Occupy movement. However, not a whole lot beyond that. Despite his entertaining interludes, capitalism and its war machine always continued unabated, running roughshod over much of the world and many Americans.

Despite his predictable impotence while serving as a cog in a rotten machine, Bernie's emergence onto the national stage was beneficial in one way: It paved the way for the fateful return of the term "socialism." As a result, socialism has entered public discourse once again, millennials in droves are now referring to themselves as socialists, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have experienced historic swelling in their ranks, from 5,000 members in 2016 to 40,000 in 2018 , and it led The Guardian to ask the question, " Why are there suddenly millions of socialists in America ?" even several months before the 2016 election. This development also indirectly helped authentic socialist candidates, like the Socialist Party USA's (SP-USA) Mimi Soltysik, the Party for Socialism and Liberation's (PSL) Gloria La Riva, and the Workers World Party's (WWP) Monica Moorehead to gain more momentum in their abbreviated tours across the country.

However, along with this sudden resurgence has been a lot of backlash and confusion. The backlash has come in the form of sensationalist tactics that are undoubtedly the product of an intentionally dumbed-down society. Red-baiting is being deployed from both sides of mainstream politics-by conservatives through their typical anti-intellectual and ahistorical knee-jerk reactions, and by liberals through a bizarre and equally ahistorical conflation of Trump, Russia, and Communism, which has reached the absurd level of associating the hyper-capitalist boss, Trump, with the hammer and sickle, a symbol that stands for industrial and agricultural workers uniting in opposition to capitalist bosses. The latter development has led to the chronic overuse of the term "democratic socialism"-a redundancy born of red-scare and cold-war propaganda-by those who moonlight in liberal spaces.

The confusion has come in the form of hordes of young people embracing a term that they have not researched or read up on. If you ask a few dozen, newly-ordained "socialists" in the United States what socialism is, you may get a dozen different answers. Many will be sure to insist that "socialism is not communism!" out of a residual fear still emanating from corporate media. Many describe socialism as nothing more than New-Deal liberalism, a tame form of capitalism that includes stronger social safety nets - an explanation surely rooted in the Sanders candidacy and Bernie himself. Others may give half-baked answers, vaguely referring to Nordic countries, cooperative business models, and even Guaranteed Basic Incomes in an attempt to separate themselves from the confusion.

In coming full circle, the answer to this backlash and confusion is found in my late friend, Kwame Somburu, or more specifically in his unapologetic, principled, and informed embrace of scientific socialism: The use of scientific methods, rooted in the work of Karl Marx (a materialist conception of history and dialectical materialism), that adequately analyze both the structure and evolutionary functioning of the capitalist system to expose inherent contradictions, exploitative and alienating underpinnings, surplus value, and the laws of accumulation of capital.

In "plain, proletarian English," scientific socialism is genuine socialism-an accurate breakdown of capitalism and a realization that it must come to an end if we have any hopes of living in a just and sustainable world. It means a constant, deliberate focus on pinpointing and destroying all forms of oppression, or as Kwame succinctly put it, "analysis of capitalism/imperialism, fascism, racism, and colonialism" with the purpose of "worker's revolution, colonial revolution, self-determination for all peoples, and relevant contribution towards a working-class world revolution." This does not mean a tightly monitored form of capitalism; it means no more capitalism. It does not mean government control; it means worker control of the means of production. It does not mean guaranteed income for all; it means workers, families, and communities finally enjoying the fruits of our labor. It does not mean "bread lines"; it means reducing massive amounts of waste through community-run production and the de-commodification of basic human needs. It does not mean equality; it means justice.

Although he never waned, Kwame would be rejuvenated by recent developments. But he would also be praising the merits of scientific socialism like never before. In a time of confusion, let's follow Kwame.

This was originally published at Monthly Review .

Trump's Muslim Ban is a Declaration of Perpetual War

By Amir Khafagy

After months of anticipation, the Supreme Court has finally made their decision on Trump v. Hawaii, better known as the Muslim ban. In a close 5-4 ruling the court has ruled to uphold Trump's ban. The decision has outraged many, yet the decision was expected given the court's conservative majority. Plastered all over my Facebook feed I'm bombarded with invites to protests and rallies that will achieve nothing but satisfy the collective catharsis. Say No to Trump's Muslim Ban, the invites enthusiastically read. Thousands have already taken to the streets in nationwide days of action to show solidarity with Muslims and in defiance of the court's decision. During a rally in Foley Square in Manhattan, Democratic politicians and nonprofit leaders took to the stage to lambast Trump. New York City Council Member, Carlos Manchaca, addressed a crowd which seemed to be comprised of mostly white non-Muslims by stating to roaring applause that Trump "doesn't represent New York and American values."

As a Muslim and an Arab American, one would think I would be the first to jump on the bandwagon of resistance to such an abhorrent policy. You would also think that I would be grateful to see so many non-Muslim liberals pledging to stand up for me and other Muslims. However, I can't seem to stomach any of it. Maybe because those who are in opposition of the ban are opposed to it for the wrong reasons. Politicians like Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren pledge to defend Muslims in America, yet their support for military budgets that bomb, main, and kill Muslims abroad go unchallenged. Everyone is quick to react, but few are critically thinking. Trump's travel ban isn't a Muslim ban at all; it's a hit list. If it was truly a Muslim ban, meaning every majority-Muslim country was on the list, I would feel quite differently. But that doesn't seem to be the case. What is the case is the fact that every country on Trump's list is a country that the United States is currently at war with.

Let me first briefly explain what the travel ban is. On January 27, 2017, Trump signed the first travel ban, Executive Order 13769. In addition of blocking Syrian refugee's entry into the United States indefinitely and suspending U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, it also barred nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the country. Immediately after the executive order was announced, liberal activists around the country sprang into actions. Rallies were held at JFK airport to support the travelers who were being turned away at customs. Upwards of over 700 travelers were detained, and nearly 60,000 visas were revoked. After numerous legal challenges and the public outcry, the Trump admiration grudgingly revoked the order, replacing with a modified and rebranded Executive Order 13780. The new travel ban was a much more diversified list that restricts travel from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Trump called the new travel ban the "watered-down, politically-correct version." Again, activists protested the plan and again the administration modified the list, this time only removing Chad. Soon after the third version of the travel ban went into effect, the state of Hawaii sued the administration, arguing that the ban was racially and religiously discriminatory because it specifically targets Muslims.

Hawaii's argument isn't wrong, per se. As far as that's concerned, I do agree to an extent that the ban is a bigotry policy that is intended to pander to Trump's Islamophobic and racist base. What I don't agree with is the simplistic view of the travel ban that ignores the relationship between it and America's imperial foreign policy. For instance, none of America's middle eastern allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, made the list, even though all the 9/11 hijackers were nationals of those two countries. Those two oppressive and dictatorial regimes are firmly nestled in America's pocket by being the recipients of massive amounts of military aid. It's not just happenstance that the travel ban aligns with American overt or covert regime-change operations abroad. Are we quick to forget that America has been conducting drone strikes in Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen? Or the fact that American boots are on the ground in those countries? Additionally, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran are subjected to crippling economic sanctions and their governments are being constantly undermined by American intelligence services. If anything, those countries should have a travel ban in place against us.

What really makes the so-called "Muslim ban" dangerous is that it taps into the fear of Muslims, an irrational fear that is so pervasive in our culture, to further legitimize American imperialism. It's worth noting that retired four-star general, Wesley Clark, has remarked that the State Department and Pentagon have planned since 2001 to "take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." With the exception of Lebanon and the removal of Sudan and Iraq, Trump's travel ban list is identical to the Pentagon's "kill list." So, it should be safe to assume that the travel ban has more to do with justifying war than it does with banning Muslims. Thus, the ban serves as a de facto declaration of perpetual war, sanctioned by the highest court of the land. After all, if we aren't afraid of Muslims, how can we be persuaded to fight them indefinitely?

Most of the criticism of the ban from Democrats is mute when it comes to attacking America's foreign policy. It focuses on the politics of identity rather than the politics of the reality. The Democrats want us to focus our outrage on Trump and the racist Republicans instead of understanding that the Democrats are just as complicit in their bipartisan support for the military industrial complex. Just last year, Trump signed into law a whopping $700-billion military budget with overwhelming, bipartisan support. Interestingly enough, the budget stipulated increased military spending for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The Democrats have no problem bombing Muslims, they only take issue with banning them.

Which reminds me, this whole paternal obsession with refugees is also misguided. During one of the protests I attended, I noticed a woman holding up a sign that read, "We Love Refugees." During the rally, another politician stood at the podium and declared, "We welcome the refugees fleeing their war-torn countries." Maybe it's just me, but I found this whole love affair with refugees to be quite morbid. I couldn't help but think if we weren't busy bombing and destabilizing their countries, there wouldn't be a refugee crisis in the first place. But, of course, no one made mention of that. As always, liberals in attendance were quick to diagnose the symptom but failed to acknowledge the disease. In this case, the disease is, as Martin Luther King, Hr. put it so eloquently so many years ago, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government."

The 2001 Terrorist Attack on American Soil Wasn't the Only "9/11"

By Matthew Dolezal

On the morning of September 11, 2001 , four commercial airliners were hijacked by 19 members of the militant Islamist organization al-Qaeda. One plane was deliberately flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center complex in Manhattan, closely followed by another crashing into the south tower. About 30 minutes later, a third plane collided into the western wall of The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. The forth and final aircraft crashed in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board.

The unprecedented coordinated attack resulted in a loss of nearly 3,000 lives, making it the deadliest act of terrorism in American history.

This surreal assault was monstrous and tragic beyond words, but unfortunately it wasn't the first "9/11". On September 11, 1973, a CIA-backed military coup ousted Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, paving the way for two decades of brutal dictatorship under the rule of General Augusto Pinochet. More than 3,000 people were murdered by Pinochet's regime, and approximately 32,000 were tortured . During this tyranny, Chile was part of a broad network of Latin American despots and death squads known as Operation Condor , which was assisted by a CIA base in Panama. This episode is but one example of violent American hegemony that has contributed to global resentment and even blowback, such as the aforementioned terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

In a series of interviews (published as a small book entitled, "9-11"), famous linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky discussed terrorism as a global phenomenon, including the Western double-standard regarding the term. By detailing an array of examples, such as Kosovo, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, and Sudan, Chomsky observed that, based on the conventional definition of the word, the U.S. is a top global purveyor of terror. The immediate death, destruction, trauma, and misery caused by this vicious tactic is abhorrent, but this violence can also perpetuate itself, often continuing for generations. Regarding the 9/11 attacks and the origins of al-Qaeda specifically, Chomsky explained:

"The CIA did have a role, a major one in fact, but that was in the 1980s, when it joined Pakistani intelligence and others (Saudi Arabia, Britain, etc.) in recruiting, training, and arming the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists it could find to fight a 'Holy War' against the Russian invaders of Afghanistan."

The term "blowback" was coined by the CIA to describe the unintended consequences of covert actions undertaken by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. The word was first used in this context during internal speculation after the agency helped overthrow the Iranian government in 1953 (which I summarized in a previous article ).

In his groundbreaking exposé of said phenomenon, the late Chalmers Johnson vividly chronicled the far-reaching tentacles of the post-war American empire. He explained how this multi-faceted hegemony causes profound resentment and hatred throughout the world, sometimes even leading to cases of blowback. Such incidents have included terrorist bombings against Americans abroad, with targets like U.S. embassies in Africa, a Pan Am flight above Lockerbie, Scotland, and an apartment building in Saudi Arabia that housed American soldiers. Blowback also includes organizations and foreign leaders whom were once armed and/or supported by the U.S. later becoming enemies of the U.S., as was the case with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. And the presence of roughly 700 American military bases in 130 different countries only seems to fan these flames.

A post-9/11 manifestation of blowback was the formation of the gruesome terrorist organization known as ISIS , which was only possible thanks to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Though ISIS committed shocking acts of violence, this outcome wasn't shocking at all; it was entirely predictable, based on the U.S. military's own research . In 2004, then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld requested a report from the Defense Science Board Task Force regarding the efficacy of American policy in the Middle East. The task force's response included the following:

"American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the U.S. to single-digits in some Arab societies.[…] In the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering.[…] Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies."

This unsavory, yet sober analysis of our problematic role in foreign conflicts is often omitted from mainstream discourse because it is profoundly embarrassing to many of our prominent institutions and public officials. Acknowledging our own role in perpetuating mass violence calls into question the popular notions of American exceptionalism and American moral benevolence. President George W. Bush's explanation of the events of September 11, 2001 (which occurred early in his first term) revolved around the phrase "they hate our freedoms." Bush's evaluation was vastly different from the words of the actual perpetrator, Osama bin Laden, who outlined his motives in a detailed "letter to America". Though the missive is laced with Wahhabi rhetoric, it also elucidates bin Laden's political grievances, including verification that 9/11 should be categorized as "blowback."

Bin Laden's objections to U.S. policy included its support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine (including the killing of civilians and destruction of homes), its sanctions against Iraq (resulting in at least half a million civilian deaths), its military bases throughout the Middle East (including in Saudi Arabia), its military actions in Somalia, and its support for regimes that have killed and oppressed Muslims throughout the world. This al-Qaeda kingpin may have been an extremist and a mass-murderer, but his explanation certainly holds more water than Bush's glib retort.

The devastation caused by the 9/11 attacks inspired a beautiful outpouring of support and solidarity among people from all backgrounds coming together to assist and comfort one another. However, the aftermath of this atrocity also unleashed pervasive nationalism, ethnic and religious profiling, violations of constitutional rights, and imperialistic mass murder in the Middle East.

The 9/11 slogan became "Never Forget." As a nation, we certainly won't forget such a large-scale catastrophe, but in a sense, we also "Never Remember." Instead of starting the timeline only when an event affects us directly, we should analyze the historical context of such events, and have the courage to look in the mirror and see our decades of relentless global violence, both covert and overt. We should also - as participants in a democracy - evaluate our role in the profound suffering, sorrow, resentment, and blowback these policies have generated.

The Korean War may help put this in perspective: American military aggression in North Korea between 1950 and 1953 resulted in the equivalent of hundreds of 9/11s, based on the respective death tolls. The same is true of American aggression in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and '70s. In recent decades, the so-called "War on Terror" has taken the lives of approximately 1.3 million people . The scope of these blood-drenched foreign conquests, combined with consistent historic U.S. support for dictatorships and death squads , makes it easy to see why America is widely perceived as the greatest threat to world peace .

On this dark anniversary, let's honor the victims of September 11, 2001 by overcoming our tribalistic tendencies and remembering the victims of our own terrorism as well. If we change our ways, we can address the root causes of these conflicts, and prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future. Let's acknowledge our history, confront our current complicity in mass murder (in Gaza and Yemen , for instance), and work to end this cycle of violence.

Women's Reproductive Rights in Cuba vs the United States: A Comparative Analysis

By Valerie Reynoso

Cuba is an island in the Caribbean governed by a socialist state that has made strides in numerous aspects, including but not limited to socioeconomic equality, redistribution of wealth to the masses, advocacy for the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the end of the colonial rule in Angola during the 1960s. Cuba has served as an inspiration for the overthrow of fascist dictators in other Latin American nations such as Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the neighboring Dominican Republic, along with an outstanding healthcare system that has even drawn attention from organizations such as the UN and UNICEF.

The United States, on the other hand, is a hegemonic Western nation with a capitalist-imperialist government that is rendered as the most superior in the world. The US is defined by the existence and persistence of systemic inequities, deepening class stratification, high rates of mass incarceration, homelessness, and poverty; as well as unique socioeconomic consequences faced by women, largely due to reproductive healthcare services not being universalized and not always covered by health insurance.

In comparison, Cuba outperforms the US in areas of women's reproductive rights and abortion access, given its complete legalization of abortion and other healthcare services to women for free. The US is unable and seemingly unwilling to meet the standards of Cuba, given primarily the Hyde Amendment and overall privatization ("profitization") of medical industries.

Cuba and Women's Health

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 brought radical change to the island in the form of new socialist socioeconomic and political structures, as well as a shift in the role of women in society and women's reproductive rights, distinct to pre-1959 Cuba. Cuban leader Fidel Castro believed that the liberation of women was vital to the socialist revolution. This idea stood in stark contrast to pre-revolutionary Cuba, which more closely resembled that of the United States, with regressive policies in terms of women's rights and reproductive care under General Fulgencio Batista. Prior to the rise of the Castro, abortion laws in Cuba were based on the 1870 Penal Code of Spain and had many restrictions, some of which were loosened in 1936 with the entry of the new Social Defense Code. This new penal code legalized abortion in the cases of endangerment of the life of the mother due to pregnancy, any form of rape, or serious medical complication of the fetus that would require the termination of pregnancy. During this time, Cubans who sought abortions due to health risks caused by pregnancy had to be granted permission from two physicians to get the procedure done.

Following the birth of the Cuban Revolution, Cuba became one of the first countries in the world to legalize abortion with full access in 1965, up to the tenth week of gestation, through their national health system. The Social Defense Code was replaced once again in 1979 with the adoption of a new penal code, which explicated what constituted as illegal abortion as well as punishments for those who conducted them. Illegal abortions were defined as those done under conditions that neglect health laws regarding abortion. Likewise, those caught in violation of said legal abortion regulations would potentially face three months to a year in prison. Abortions performed for profit, outside of accredited institutions, or by anyone other than a legitimate physician would result in culprits being subject to two to five years in prison. Abortions are also considered illegal in Cuba if executed without the consent of the pregnant patient and would result in two to five years of prison time for the executer of the procedure. If the non-consensual abortion is performed with force or violence, then the prison sentence is increased to up to eight years.

Likewise, menstrual regulation is implemented in the case that gestation is five weeks or less; women do not need to confirm their pregnancy, nor do minors need parental consent to receive menstrual regulation. Gestations of ten to twelve weeks would require confirmation of pregnancy to obtain an abortion and, along with that, the pregnant woman must be examined by a gynecologist as well as be given counseling from a social worker. For those who seek abortions services, parental consent is needed for women under eighteen, and permission from a medical committee is required for women under 16. A committee of obstetricians, psychologists, and social workers would have to approve a second trimester abortion in addition to the patient satisfying the regulations for a first trimester abortion. Moreover, in 1960, the Castro administration formed the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which was led by Vilma Espin, a revolutionary who resisted against the Batista regime and was also the partner of Raul Castro, Fidel Castro's brother. FMC has played a vital role in the advancement of gender equality and the enhancement of women's healthcare in Cuba.

The FMC has a membership that includes 85.2 percent of all eligible Cuban women and girls over 14 years of age. It is recognized as an NGO and as a national system for women, due to the overwhelming majority of Cuban women being participants, because the organization is not socioeconomically funded by the Cuban government, and because the federation has a hierarchy consisting of local, municipal, provincial, and national levels of representation and leadership. Along with endorsing the mass education of women, inclusion of women in the work force, and advocacy for legislative and social reform for gender equality, the FMC has also had a significant impact on the Cuban healthcare system and its regulations. One instance of the influence of the FMC on the Cuban healthcare regulations is their assistance in passing maternity leave laws in 1974, under which pregnant women are granted three months of paid leave. The FMC also played a role in the foundation of maternity homes for women to deliver their infants under the maintenance of primarily FMC volunteers who serve as trained attendants.

The FMC has proven to be successful in the mobilization and formation of solidarity amongst Cuban women, united under a common motivation to fight for women's rights to higher education, paid maternity leave, childcare provision, and free abortions and birth control.

The United States and Women's Health

In the US, the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v Wade was a victory for women's reproductive rights. However, the battle against women's rights are ongoing, with various conservative and right-wing interests, typically headed by men, continuing to mount a powerful opposition. Measures taken to diminish the impact of Roe v. Wade and strengthen anti-woman legislation like the Hyde Amendment have significantly changed abortion accessibility and affordability for women in the US.

Abortions were legal and frequently performed from the 18th century until approximately 1880 in the US. The idea that the fetus at conception and the early stages of pregnancy was a human life was not a conventional one held in US societies, nor the Catholic Church, for some time. The typical stance on this subject at the time was that it was centered on women's experiences and relations with their own bodies, rather than societal stances on what is considered immoral for women to do regarding abortion. The Catholic Church accepted early abortions before ensoulment; however, around 1869, began to denounce abortion, simultaneously when abortion became politicized in the US. In 1895, the church opposed therapeutic abortions, which were meant to save a woman's life. Abortions were outlawed in the US by 1880 due to pressure from medical groups, with the exception of cases involving medical complications that could endanger the woman's life.

Women in the US continued to seek abortions despite these newfound laws and those who could afford options often received services from practitioners in private homes. Those who could not afford private services were left with no other choice but to resort to near-lethal means out of desperation. Rates of women who obtained illegal abortions naturally increased with restrictions barring access to legal procedures. Between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal abortions were conducted per year in the US in the 1950s and 1960s. Underground organizations that provided safe, illegal abortions were formed in the 1960s by individuals concerned about the well-being of the high number of women who dangerously sought to terminate their pregnancies. These organizations included the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion and The Abortion Counseling Center of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, also known as Jane. The Rubella outbreak in the US, which lasted from 1964 to 1965, endangered fetuses and hence was a major factor in a rehashing of the abortion debate in the country. This outbreak and the ongoing debate led to the passage of Roe v Wade in 1973.

Roe v Wade was decided on January 22nd, 1973 and ruled that state-sanctioned restrictions of abortion are unconstitutional. It was concluded that the criminalization of abortion under Texas statutes (for the most part) infringes upon the constitutional right to privacy women have under the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. Numerous abortion rights activists wanted the case to be passed under the ninth amendment, so that it could be written in the constitution rather than malleable and subject to change. Although this case made legal abortion more available and safe for women in the US, barriers were still placed on them, including measures that were taken to restrict the effectiveness of Roe v Wade and socioeconomic disparities that made it more difficult for underclass women to receive services. Following Roe v Wade, several US states have enacted over 1,074 laws with the purpose of limiting access to abortion, with over a quarter of these legislations having been legalized between 2010 and 2015.

Part of the anti-woman crusade that was sparked by Roe v. Wade was the Hyde Amendment, which was passed in 1977 to prohibit the use of Medicaid to pay for abortions, excluding cases of rape, incest, or endangerment of the life of the mother. According to a study done in 1984 at the Guttmacher Institute, 44 percent of female Medicaid recipients who had abortions that year paid for them by using money they had initially saved for necessities, such as rent and food. Due to said women not being able to afford the costly prices of abortions, many were forced to save for a longer period of time for the procedure, which resulted in later, riskier, and more expensive abortions, or women being forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term due to an inability to afford an abortion. This statistic increased to 57 percent of abortion patients paying out of pocket by 2010. The Hyde Amendment resulted in Medicaid-funded abortions decreasing from 300,000 per year to only a few thousand per year. As of 2010, seventeen states finance abortion care for citizens with Medicaid coverage, and 20% of abortions conducted in the US were funded with Medicaid in 2008. Additional barriers are posed to women in need of abortions per individual state. For instance, as of 2008, fifteen of the seventeen states that fund abortion care for its people have also established obstacles such as low reimbursement rates and delays in enrollment, which make it more difficult for women and providers to use Medicaid for abortion services.

Comparing Cuba and the United States

The changes Cuba experienced in its transition from the Batista regime to the Castro administration, as well as the changes in abortion legislation the US experienced from the 18th and 19th centuries to the late 20th century, demonstrates that Cuba was making drastic improvements in the conditions of Cuban women. While the Cuban government made tremendous strides in forging women's rights, the accessibility of abortion declined for women in the US during the same period.

The radicalization of the Cuban government implemented by Fidel Castro set the foundation for the drastic modification of women's rights that would occur in the island throughout the latter half of the 20th century and 21st century. The FMC led by Vilma Espin was crucial to the development of universalized healthcare and inclusions of free abortions and other reproductive health services that overwhelmingly affect Cuban women. Contrarily, the Hyde Amendment, malleability of the Roe v Wade case, and constant pressure from a male-driven, conservative crusade have proven that the profits of US medical industries and artificial morals of fundamental Christianity are paramount to the reproductive rights of women in the US, especially given how expensive abortions are and that Medicaid cannot be used to pay for it in a majority of cases.

The capitalism system which dominates American life is a system driven by infinite profit extracted from the finite resources of the planet and exploitation of the labor of the working class. This exploitation is deepened when members of this working class are part of other marginalized groups as well, such as women, non-white people, and disabled people; all of which make up the overwhelming number of patients struggling to obtain legal abortions in the US. Many of these women have the misfortune of resorting to dangerous alternatives out of need. In comparison, the socialist system Cuba operates under has clearly succeeded in ensuring that Cubans of any racial or socioeconomic background have access to high quality, universalized healthcare and abortions without barriers of any kind.

Statistics prove that in terms of abortion access and reproductive healthcare, Cuba has a model that is more superior than that of the US. Chapter IV of the Cuban constitution contains articles that explicitly enforce the socioeconomic and political equality of all genders, as well as state-funding of financial support for pregnant women. Article 44 states that all genders enjoy equal rights in all aspects of society; women are guaranteed equal opportunities to men and will have an equal impact on the advancement of the island; and the state also manages institutions like child centers, boarding schools, and homes for the elderly with the purpose of helping working families. Article 40 dictates that the Cuban state provide working women with paid maternity leave before and after childbirth, as well as job options that would be suitable for pregnant people and mothers.

As of 2014, Cuba has a total expenditure on health per capita of $2,475 ; and a total expenditure on health as percent of GDP of 11.1 percent for a population of 11,147,407 as of July 2017. The Cuban government has no intervention concerning fertility level, allows abortions on request for any reason, and provides direct support on contraceptives for its citizens. As of 1987, 70 percent of married Cuban women between the ages 15 and 49 use modern contraception, which is available in all government health institutions and through one agency called the Sociedad Cientifica Cubana para el Desarrollo de la Familia (SOCUDEF) that receives full support from the government. Under these measures taken by the Cuban government, in accordance with the country's constitution, the amount of legal abortions quadrupled from 1968 to 1974 with a percent increase from 16.7 to 69.5 legal abortions per 1,000 fertile women. 85,445 abortions were conducted among women between the ages 12 and 49 in 2016, which totals to 41.9 abortions per 100 pregnant women, which is half of the figures from 12 years prior to that. Even more so, contraceptive use has caused a decline in abortion rates in Cuba over the past 15 years.

In contrast, despite the increase in healthcare spending and decline in legal abortion rates in the US, the spike in illegal abortions and barriers posed by the Hyde Amendment indicate that US women still do not have full access to reproductive healthcare. The total expenditure of health in the US rose by 4.3 percent in 2016, at a ratio of $10,348 per person, and made up 17.9 percent of the national GDP. In addition to this, the national abortion rate decreased by 2 percent between 2013 and 2014, where there was a rate of 12.1 abortions for every 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, or 186 abortions per 1,000 live births. Frequent Google searches for self-induced abortions in US regions with low access to health institutions imply a spike in the obtainment of illegal abortions, although an exact statistic for this is difficult to determine given that illegal procedures are not easy to keep track of. In 2015, the Guttmacher Institute found that there were 119,000 searches on how to have a miscarriage as well as other phrases of a similar nature, such as how to self-abort, etc. In total, there were over 700,000 Google searches that year on how to conduct a "self-induced abortion." There were also 3.4 million searches for abortion clinics, 160,000 for how to find abortion pills through unverified sources, tens of thousands on herbal remedies for abortions, 4,000 on instructions for coat hanger abortions and a few hundred on abortion methods through bleaching the uterus. It was found that a disproportionately large number of these Google searches were in the state of Mississippi, which only had one abortion clinic in 2016. For perspective, the Guttmacher Institute reported that there are approximately one million legal abortions per year in the US. Based on this research, a correlation between economic insecurity and abortion seems clear. Online searches related to "self-conducted abortions" surged towards the end of 2008, during the financial crisis and great recession at the time. Legislative barriers also seem clear, as these searches increased by 40 percent in 2011, the year when 92 laws that restrict abortions were passed in the US.

Conclusion

Cuban women have free reproductive care and are provided abortions at their request for free as well, under one of the statistically best healthcare systems in the world. In the US, a significant number of pregnant women cannot afford nor have access to legal abortions; therefore, being forced to endanger their lives through illegal procedures. The Cuban state operates under a socialist system that places the lives of its women citizens before corporate or private profit, to the point where it is illegal for abortions to be conducted for profit in the nation and prison terms are possible for violators of this policy. The fact that access to abortion clinics in the US has dwindled, causing legal abortions to decline while searches for illegal abortions have drastically spiked, is yet another failure of the capitalist healthcare system in the country. Specifically, the US for-profit system has failed the women it is meant to serve and will only continue to fail them as these dangerous statistics further grow.

In addition to operating for profit, US healthcare and medical industries remain beholden to patriarchal (and downright misogynistic) values that are tied to its economic system. Capitalism is a system founded on imperial conquests of Global South nations and the enforcement of patriarchy and class stratification on these matriarchal, communal societies by European Crowns. These structures have disproportionately affected women, and especially women who are oppressed in other aspects of their being. This has resulted in the devaluation of feminized labor, usage of women as domestic tools for the social reproduction of working men, and now high costs of abortions as well as barriers that prevent women from getting them. All of this leads to already underpaid and underprivileged women risking their lives to get their necessities out of despair because the system that governs them does not value them.

As maternal mortality rates are skyrocketing in the US, Cuba boasts one of the lowest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world. As of 2015, Cuba has a maternal mortality rate of 39 deaths for every 100,000 live births and an infant mortality rate of 4.2 deaths for every thousand births. The probability of children under the age of five dying in Cuba is 0 per 1,000 live births based on data from 2015. In addition to this, in June 2015, Cuba became the first nation in the world to be praised by the World Health Organization (WHO) for their achievement in eradicating mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis through medical innovation. The corollary benefit to this is enjoyed by pregnant women who may otherwise seek abortions due to them having HIV and not wanting to infect their baby. With this ability, and the expectation of a healthy baby, those mothers may now choose to carry full term. Since 2010, the WHO has been teaming up with Cuba and other nations in the Americas to execute a regional plan to get rid of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. As part of this program, Cuba has guaranteed early access to prenatal care, HIV and syphilis testing for pregnant women and their partners, treatment for women who test positive for the infections and their babies, caesarean deliveries and substitution of breastfeeding-all of which is provided under the universalized healthcare system of the island. These statistics make Cuba the country with the lowest infant mortality rate in the Americas, in the Global South as a whole, and one of the lowest in the world.

On the other hand, as of 2015, the US has a maternal mortality rate of 26.4 deaths per 100,000 live births, up from around 17 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1999. Other Western nations rank much lower in comparison to the US regarding maternal mortality, such as 9.2 for the UK and 7.8 for France per 100,000 live births respectively. According to a six-month long examination conducted by NPR and ProPublica on maternal mortality in the US, more women in the US are dying from complications due to pregnancy than any other Western nation, and the US is the only country where this rate is actually increasing. While the neglect of women's health is certainly predetermined by the for-profit system, it is also systematically neglected by the US government and its health agencies. Only 6 percent of block grants designated for maternal and child health end up being used for the health of the mothers, as revealed by federal and state funding. This is despite the increase in spending in overall healthcare in the US. The fact that only a minimum percent of block grants that are meant to be used for maternal and child health is utilized to help them further illustrates how the well-being of pregnant women and abortion patients is not paramount in the capitalist healthcare system of the US. Additionally, US hospitals that must worry about "bottom lines" (like any for-profit company) can be extremely unprepared for maternal emergencies such as self-induced abortions having gone wrong, even if the hospital has an intensive care unit for newborns and their mothers. Medical training in the US is also suspect. Some US doctors may specialize in maternal-fetal medicine without ever having to spend time in a labor-delivery unit that would further develop their specialties.

Cuba's healthcare system is world-renowned for many reasons: It was among the first of nations to fully legalize abortion; it has successfully eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis through medical innovation; it has implemented universalized healthcare such that all reproductive services are free for all citizens; it has scored low maternal and infant mortality rates; and it is a significant factor in creating one of the highest standards of living for women in the world. All of this is due to taking profit and personal interest out of healthcare by making it a social imperative and human right. In comparison, the US has systematically restricted women's reproductive rights, increased barriers for women who seek abortions, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the West, is forcing women who seek illegal abortions due to lack of access to legal services, and has implemented high costs for legal abortions and other basic services, therefore diminishing the quality of living for millions of marginalized women. All of this is due to putting profit above people while pushing patriarchal values that do not recognize women as human beings who should have full agency over their bodies.

Bibliography

"Central America and the Caribbean: Cuba." The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, 11 Apr. 2018.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Roe v Wade. 26 Apr. 1999.

Falk, Pam, et al. Cuba's Constitution of 1976 with Amendments through 2002. Oxford University Press Inc.

Ginsburg, Faye D. Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community. University of California Press, 1998.

Jatlaoui, Tara C., et al. "Abortion Surveillance - United States, 2014." Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 24 Nov. 2017.

Jones, Rachel K., et al. "At What Cost? Payment for Abortion Care by US Women." Women's Health Issues Journal, no. 23-3, 4 Mar. 2013. Elsevier.

Kassebaum, Nicholas J. "Global, Regional, and National Levels of Maternal Mortality, 1990-2015: a Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015." The Lancet, vol. 388, 8 Oct. 2016.

Last Five Years Account for More Than One-Quarter of All Abortion Restrictions Enacted Since Roe. Guttmacher Institute, 13 Jan. 2016.

Montagne, Renee, and Nina Martin. "U.S. Has The Worst Rate Of Maternal Deaths In The Developed World." Lost Mothers: Maternal Mortality in the U.s., NPR, 12 May 2017.

National Health Expenditure Data. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, 8 Jan. 2018.

Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat. Cuba: Abortion Policy. The Population Policy Data Bank.

Reagan, Leslie J. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 . University of California Press, 1998.

Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth. Abortions at Clinics, or Somewhere Else. Guttmacher Institute, 5 Mar. 2016.

"The Federation of Cuban Women." The Federation of Cuban Women, Stanford University.

World Health Organization. Facts on Cuba.

WHO Validates Elimination of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV and Syphilis in Cuba. World Health Organization, 30 June 2015.

Exposing the American Okie-Doke: Russiagate, Corporate Propaganda, and the Historical Obstruction of Class Consciousness

By Colin Jenkins

The "founding fathers" deliberately arranged a system of governance that would protect the wealthy minority from the majority. Over time, as it fused with capitalism, this arrangement transformed the US government into a market. Railroad tycoons and robber barons forced their way into this market during the Gilded Age. Big business controlled the "public agenda" throughout the 20th century, with multinational firms taking root in the 1980s and 90s. Ronald Reagan ushered in the neoliberal era, which amounted to an all-out corporate coup of American politics. And, in 2010, the Supreme Court placed its stamp of approval on this system with its Citizens United decision, allowing anonymous donors unlimited access to politics through Political Action Committees (PACs).

In other words, the US government has been a traded commodity for a long time, in many ways since the beginning of the country's founding. Wealth determines elections (over 90% of the time the campaign with the most money wins). Politicians are commodities that are bought by capitalists. Legislation is a commodity that is bought by lobbyists (employed by capitalists). This is the case for both parties and all politicians (because it is built into the system).

The point : If you still believe your 5th-grade textbook and think you have a say in determining public policy in the US, you are furious right now. Because you believe democracy exists and that it was hijacked by a foreign government. However, if you realize democracy (or a republic) does not exist, the Russia/Trump revelations mean only one thing: the traded commodity known as the US government has gone global, following all of the other capitalist markets that have been globalized over the past 40 years.

The bottom line : We, the working-class majority, have never had a say in our political system. Whether it's the Koch brothers, George Soros, Goldman Sachs, the Israel Lobby, the Saudi royal family, some anonymous hedge fund manager on Wall St, or a dozen Russian oligarchs, "foreign" entities have always controlled our government. Our problems are wholly internal, created by our founders, intensified by capitalism and both capitalist parties, and solidified by Congress and the Supreme Court. Our everyday ills - poverty, debt, unemployment, underemployment, eroding safety nets, homelessness, inadequate housing, inadequate healthcare, inadequate education, debt-to-live scenarios, war, police brutality, campaign financing, corporate lobbying, corporate subsidies, etc.. - are homegrown. The systems that smother us in our everyday lives - capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy - are purely homemade.

The solution : The cries of Russia "interfering with our democracy" are both a distraction and a product of a system that intentionally obstructs critical thought. As working-class Americans, our enemies are the capitalist system, the dictatorship of capital, and the wealthy interests that dominate and control our lives, regardless of their supposed citizenship. This truth can only be realized through an embrace of class consciousness, something that has been stripped from us for the good part of the last century. Corporate "news" plays a crucial role in this process.

Today, when republican/conservative ignorance is met with informed, structural analysis, it is quickly deemed "fake news." When democrat/liberal ignorance is met with informed, structural analysis, it is immediately met with screams of "Russian trolls." Despite the cognitive dissonance that is sparked, ignorance usually prevails in both cases because Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC are incredibly skilled at packaging entertainment as information and analysis. The production value is top notch, and the range of "experts" who are trotted out every night gives the illusion that they are presenting "all sides" of the matter, leaving nothing to be questioned beyond agreeing or disagreeing with each side. In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky broke it down like this:

"The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda."

Our time, or lack thereof, is used against us. Capitalism smothers us from all angles by placing us on that proverbial hamster wheel, forcing us to run ourselves ragged in the pursuit of a paycheck. We live our lives one or two weeks at a time, spending half of our waking hours in a place we do not want to be, doing something we do not want to be doing, struggling to keep our lives and those of our families afloat, scraping by as best we can for that next piece of paper that allows us to eat. In this smothering environment, regurgitating corporate-propagandized talking points becomes the default mode because it takes much less time and effort than actually learning (reading a variety of sources, building historical context, discussing, engaging in the reciprocal process of praxis and theory, and deploying structural and systemic analysis).

Nuance is important, but class analysis is vital. With it, we understand that our problems are systemic, our immediate enemies are domestic, and our struggle against power cannot be sidetracked by a feud between global elites. In the end, our allegiance must lie with the oppressed of the world. And when our own oppressors begin to stir up a patriotic fervor, calling on us to pledge our loyalties to them, consider this advice from human rights activist Ajamu Baraka: "What does the working class have to do with a struggle between capitalists in the US and capitalists in Russia? That is not our fight. Our interests are not the same as their interests… Black, Brown, and white working-class and poor folks have nothing to do with the US capitalist elite."

For all intents and purposes, Donald Trump is an enemy of the people. As is Vladimir Putin. As are the Clintons, the Bushs, Barack Obama, and any individual that fills the power structure which has smothered us since the country's founding. Their allegiance is not to us; it is to global capital. It is to the system that was deliberately arranged by our founders with the purpose of protecting wealth and power from "the mob" (us). As such, our allegiance should be to the poor, oppressed, and working people of the world. Through its media channels, US/capitalist propaganda tells us otherwise, packaging its elite interests into some vague form of "national interest," while tugging on our emotional strings with primetime spectacles. The power structure relies on these propagandized, emotional triggers to override any potential shift toward rational and critical thinking. This is why organic/working-class intellectualism is so desperately needed. It is the key to revolutionary change. And we all have it. But, for many, it is obstructed by layers of conditioning. It is the duty of radicals to chip away at these layers without accidentally fortifying them. A delicate task, indeed.

Trump In Helsinki: A Trip Back to the 1970s

By Michael Orion Powell

The climate in the United States in 2018 is portrayed as inexplicable and unprecedentedly bad. And, despite a sense of uniqueness, it is full of precedent.

During the early 1970s, the United States was shedding away from the world. The Vietnam War, a protracted invasion by the U.S. war machine, left with the Vietcong victorious. It was one of the United States' most obvious defeats - despite a bombardment with superior technology, 58,220 Americans died in Vietnam and, to this day, Saigon remains Ho Chi Minh City, in honor of the Vietnamese revolutionary.

Military withdrawal was not the only mark of defeat. Then President Richard Nixon, in the midst of the 1972 election that led to the Watergate scandal that brought down his presidency, convened with the Soviet Union in the Moscow Summit of 1972, meeting with General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. The meeting came after meeting in China with Chairman Mao Zedong earlier that year; much like how Trump's meeting with Putin was preceded by a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Paralleling Nixon's series of agreements that seemed like capitulation to many Americans caught up in a Cold-War frenzy, Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, where he expressed an agreement with the Russian president's claims that he had no involvement in interfering in the 2016 election, has the appearance of capitulation. During his own tour, Nixon signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, and the U.S.-Soviet Incidents at Sea Agreement, in effect enabling the policy of detente that enabled the Soviet Union the space to invade Afghanistan in 1979.

There is much speculation about what motivation Trump had to be so passive and deferential in Helsinki, with the New Yorker arguing that he is somewhat compromised. There is a culture of corruption in many "Eastern Bloc" countries (an outdated term that suddenly seems back in vogue) that may be hard to shed oneself of once they become embroiled in it. As Eric Trump said, the only color that his father sees is green. Therefore, most likely some sort of investment, business move, or debt is imploring Trump to give Russia a benefit of the doubt that he is unwilling to provide many others.

Beyond Trump as an individual is a world that has been led to a very similar situation as the early 1970s. The place the United States (and the world, largely) is in is so similar to four decades ago that it makes one wonder if we are in some sort of self-repeating simulation; long wars in the Middle East, disenchanting liberal political figures, and economic stagnation have led the United States to American retreat, racial tension, and many of the other problems that made the 1970s a hard decade for most.

As mentioned earlier, the Soviet Union took the space of American retreat to invade Afghanistan, a poor move that resulted in the dissolution itself of that country ten years later. Vladimir Putin's Russia most likely has its sights on the Muslim world once again, with Russia providing support for Khalifa Haftar, a Libyan general who would act as a "regional strongman" that would preside over a country left largely leaderless since Muammar Gaddafi was taken out of power by a US-backed coup in 2011. Gaddafi's own son Saif is poised to run in an upcoming election in Libya, as well.

Russia's attitudes toward Africa are strange. Despite racist incidents occurring regularly in the country (especially at soccer events), Moscow has long sought open relationships with many African countries. The murder of Gaddafi has been reported to have upset Putin deeply, with him developing a fear that NATO would attempt that same fate on him. Russia has provided visa free travel to Moroccans, provided arms to Cameroon to fight Boko Haram, and has made economic investments in Ethiopia. Russian intervention in Libya would provide access to the surprisingly large reserves of groundwater that the country provides in its interior.

The repeat of the 1970s would only complete in analogy if it reached a similar conclusion, as well. The Soviet Union overstayed its hand in Afghanistan and was vulnerable to its own compromise when political winds shifted. Putin may be a very deft and intelligent leader, but he is a mortal man who will not be around forever. His country has a history of instability when regimes provide vacancy. Something very unpredictable could happen if he ever resigns from or dies in power.

Likewise, with the development of an "enemy list" and bizarre relationships with celebrities (Nixon gained the friendship of Elvis Presley and James Brown), Donald Trump is really shaping into a Nixonian figure. If he were to meet a similar fate as Nixon, which is increasingly likely if a planned second summit with Putin has a similar reception to the first, a much more seasoned and mainstream American leader could find their place on the American stage, making countering Russia in the world his or her chief sales pitch.

Michael Orion Powell-Deschamps is a writer living in the Bay Area. He also has a music project called Tilhas, which can be seen at Tilhas.org.

A Humanist Capitalism?: Dissecting Andrew Yang's 2020 Presidential Platform

By Charles Wofford

One of the most delightful experiences I've had as a leftist is when I hear someone who has no apparent class consciousness express, seemingly from nowhere, a remarkably perceptive comment on class society. I recall a coworker once mentioning aloud how strange it was that we were all so frightened of the boss and what they might do to us. Entrepreneur and 2020 democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang of Venture for America has given us another example with his essay, " Humanity is more important than money - it's time for capitalism to get an upgrade ." Throughout the article, Yang advocates for a new capitalism, based on three principles: that humanity is more important than money, that the individual person ought to be the unit of the economy rather than the dollar, and that markets exist to serve "common goals and values." In the end, Yang explicitly calls for federal government intervention to "reorganize the economy."

There is little to disagree with in Yang's moral analysis and his point that capitalism does not serve the interests of the great mass of people. To be clear, I also think the government ought to reorganize the society along more egalitarian lines. But Yang also appeals to certain widely accepted economic beliefs about the "invisible hand," and self-interest and competition being the main drivers of economic prosperity. As a result, Yang's case is subject to the same critique that Marx made of the classical political economists in his 1844 economic manuscripts :

"Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws - i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property...Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild..."

Translation: Like the classical political economists, Yang looks at the capitalist world in which we live and simply takes it as a natural order, whose economic tendencies are unchanging laws. Because he does not understand the historical origins of the divisions of labor that make up capitalism, Yang can posit such oxymorons as "human-centered capitalism." Because he sees capitalism in the misleading and pedantic terms of supply-and-demand ("capitalism prioritizes what the world does more of") he thinks we need to merely demand a more just world and capitalism will provide it. Yang is clearly not involved in activist spaces, otherwise he would know that people have been making radically humanist and egalitarian political demands for longer than capitalism has been around, and at no time has capitalism worked toward those goals. If Yang read up on the founding of the United States (particularly Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10), he would know that the founding fathers intended this anti-egalitarianism. If Yang read up on Hamilton, he would know that many founding fathers thought the wealthy were the natural representatives of all people - a complete fabrication and a lie.

Yang argues for a conception of markets that meet human needs rather than compelling humans to meet the needs of markets. But then he talks about how we can change our behavior as economic subjects in order for the market to provide what we want. The contradiction seems lost on him: if markets are to be geared toward human need, then the question is not an economic one, but a political one. The question is not "how do we read the market?" The real question is "how do we get the power to create a human-centric society?" And this is the conceptual problem behind Universal Basic Income (UBI). Yang justifies it in terms of the productivity it may increase. But that's not a humanist concern; it is a capitalist-economic concern.

A brief history of how capitalist relations came to be is in order. Yang never defines exactly what he means by capitalism, but he suggests that it goes back over 5,000 years, conflating it with the invention of money. In reality, the notion of capitalism - private, for-profit ownership of industry with wage labor and commodity production - has its origins in 17th-century England. Over the centuries the city dwellers of the country - who were mostly merchants and exchangers by profession - had acquired so much money, and thereby power, that they were able to appropriate common-owned land in England. Up until the late 18th century, most of the land in England was commons: the people who lived there had rights to the land irrespective of whatever the "owner" may wish to do with it. Modern concepts of ownership did not exist at the time. As the merchants in the cities grew more wealthy, they bought out or often outright stole commons land in order to expand their holdings, and thereby their businesses. By the late 18th century, the merchant class (who Marx called the bourgeoisie, which literally just means "city-dweller") had bought parliament itself, and started passing parliamentary laws of enclosure to finish up the long consolidation process the bourgeoisie had begun over 100 years prior. At the end of this process, a tiny number of people concentrated in the cities owned some 98% of the land and industry in the UK. 99% of the population, formerly peasants, had to go work for them in a condition called "employment" in order to live. They were now wage laborers: the proletariat. This is the origins of what we now call capitalism. It did not come about through some peaceful transition, but through a violent process of robbery by a small class of an entire country. One of the relevant points to take from this history is that the peasants of England did not voluntarily employ themselves to the nascent bourgeoisie. They were compelled to go to work in the factories because they had been robbed of their own access to the means of existence. None of this has anything to do with freedom; it is all coercion.

The standard economic view of money is that it is a neutral means of exchange. However, if any one individual or clique acquires enough money then they may purchase and bribe politicians, control entire fields of media coverage giving them huge influence on political opinion, and they may commit horrible crimes with impunity because no one will take them to court, etc. In short, having enough money allows one to shape society to one's whims at the expense of others. The conclusion is that money is not merely a neutral means of exchange; it is a form of social power. A society focused around human need, and not markets and money, would therefore have, at the very least, strict limits on the amount of money any individual may possess. Ideally, it would abolish money altogether. But this is against the capitalist premise, which is about free exchange.

With this in mind, where does Yang propose that the government get the power to do these things that he suggests? Short of forcibly expropriating the wealth of the 1%, I do not see a way. Money is a form of social power, and the government is a prime target for that power. Yang has perhaps watched one too many episodes of the television show The West Wing, which shows some fairy-tale vision of politics as an honest journey of visionaries. Yang does not seem to understand that it's all about accumulation of wealth, exploitation of resources, the maintenance of power systems, and that capitalist society is unavoidably inhuman.

David Harvey gives a beautiful example that may help to illustrate the point. In almost every major city in the world today one can find thousands of high-rise condominiums existing in the same city as thousands of homeless people. The condos are empty except for a few weeks of the year. They were not purchased to be lived in; they were purchased to be speculated on in a housing market. This housing market grew to such proportions and has been given such reign that it caused a housing crisis which foreclosed some 4 million people of their homes. Those who lost their homes are not the same people who speculated on the housing market; those people are doing just fine. What does this show? Precisely that the market itself, if allowed to grow unchecked, may wreak havoc upon a society; a truism that seems obvious to everyone except business people and economists.

Ok, so we control the market via government regulation. But those market owners do not like that, and they lobby against regulation laws, they bribe politicians, they control the media discourse etc. Those without the money do not have any real recourse within the system to stop them, for the system has been hijacked via its own methods. So it's not as simple as "well, the government can just do this." The government has long ago been bought out by the capitalists, and politics is treated like another market now. Since the 1980s laws have been made such that it is all but impossible to reregulate the markets. The solution is that we need a completely new system, because "capitalist democracy" (so-called) has fallen past the event horizon into unworkability. This means the end of capitalism, and it means a newer, more direct, less representational form of government. It means public banking rather than private banking. It means the redistribution of wealth from those at the top who have robbed from all of humanity through a coercive system. Interestingly, this would also entail smaller government in many ways, as institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the military industrial complex, and others which exist to protect the status quo would be abolished. Just to drive the nail home, it would also mean the abolition of the Constitution and its replacing with something more progressive and centered around human values rather than defending the "minority of the opulent." (Madison)

Harvey rightly blasts the UBI idea as simply a front for Silicon Valley to get more effective demand for their products. The UBI is really a subsidy to Silicon Valley, not a method of providing for the people. That Yang is an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley is no coincidence.

In other ways, Yang's entrepreneurial training implicates him in the very values he attempts to refute. His "human-centered capitalism" is not a society that is in fact based on human need, but simply around the old fallacy of "meritocracy." A moment's reflection would tell us that a truly humane society would not be meritocratic, as the notion of "merit" is inherently politically implicated. Who defines what counts as merit? A truly humanist society would allow all people the means to develop to their fullest potential on their own terms.

Yang proposes a "parallel economy around social good." The capitalist economy would simply allow this parallel economy to get plump before taking it over. That is exactly what the capitalists are currently doing with the internet. If Yang's "parallel economy" were possible, it wouldn't be needed.

Yang writes, "Most entrepreneurs, technologists and young people I know are chomping at the bit to work on our problems." Our problems are known and have been known for at least 100 years. The problem is capitalism: private control over the means of production. The solution is socialism: worker control over the means of production. The means are popular revolution, which is above and beyond electoral politics. Unless and until you are speaking that language, your "human-centric" ideology is just a sham. Technology will not save us on its own; otherwise it would already have done so.

Lastly is Yang's line about how a humanist capitalism could "spur unprecedented levels of social activity without spending that much." This sounds like the opposite of a humanistic anything, and very capitalist. Why? Because Yang is thinking of more ways to get people to work more, produce more, engage in more activity. But we are already working ourselves to death; American worker productivity is higher than it's ever been. We don't need new ways to do more; we need new ways to do less. We need a new concept of what it means to "contribute" to society. A humanist society would not be obsessed with getting people to work, producing, exchanging, etc. but would rather leave them in relative peace while providing at least for their basic needs. But this is what the entrepreneur is trained to do: produce more, take more risks, and be more daring in the market. In this mindset, people are inherently viewed as commodities, tools to be used by the entrepreneur. We need to move beyond capitalist thinking if we are to move beyond the problems of capitalism.

In conclusion, Mr. Yang's proposed solutions are impressive to those armchair theorists and liberals who lack a deeper understanding of capitalism. They will not solve our problems. They may, in fact, empower capitalism to appropriate even more of our lives. I cannot help but suspect that Mr. Yang is just the liberal version of Donald Trump: the "successful" businessman who is "outside the system." Yang is noticing that there is a political market for progressive values and he is attempting to cash in on it.

He is, after all, an entrepreneur. But treating politics like a business is part of our problem. We've seen how capitalism can posture around the idea of "freedom." Do we not think it could do the same with ideas like "humanism?"

Charles Wofford is an activist and PhD student in historical musicology.

Melting the Ambiguity and Power of ICE

By Canyon Ryan

In less than a week, the people of the world have forced the President of the United States of America to no longer allow detained immigrants to intentionally be separated from their family members. Such an inhumane practice has been permitted at more than 400 detention facilities supervised by ICE agents in the United States.

What this piece aims to do is delineate ICE as an organization and provide a critical analysis of U.S. foreign-policy initiatives, the proposed solution to the ICE facility attention, and an honest call to action.

ICE: Its History and Functions

When discussing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there is an ambiguity in consideration to its foundation. We know that ICE is the problem, but what is ICE?

ICE was born in 2003, in accordance with the Homeland Security Act of 2002 following the events of September 11, 2001. Since, ICE has become the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, the second largest body of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the second largest "criminal investigative agency" in the U.S. (trailing the FBI). There are more than 20,000 ICE employees in over 400 offices in the U.S. and in 46 countries abroad.

ICE has two primary arms: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Each are equally important.

There are approximately 6,500 HSI agents. HSI agents have the authority to enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act ( Title 8 ), U.S. Customs Laws ( Title 19 ), general federal crimes ( Title 18 ), Controlled Substances Act ( Title 21 ), as well as Titles 5, 6, 12, 22, 26, 28, 31, 46, 49, and 50 of the U.S. Code .

The HSI agents are to investigate national-security threats such as human rights violations, human trafficking, drug trafficking, document and benefit fraud, transnational gang activity, cash smuggling, money laundering, and the like.

Their international offices are used to combat transnational criminal activities and work with governments abroad to prevent such activities from entering the U.S. This policy framework can be considered something similar to the "National Security States" used in Central America to repress what was then considered a communist infiltration, known as the supposed "Real Terror Network". Today, we must keep in mind that we've passed the "end of history". Communism is out, terrorism is in. With terrorism at the frontline is bred the dehumanization of the migrants, no longer the Reds. The war on communism has morphed into the war on terror; and ICE, with its HSI agents, are spearheading this new war.

There are other functions of the HSI, but this synopsis should do. Next, we will investigate the ERO.

The ERO are the ones primarily responsible for the current national spotlight. Their function is to capture illegal immigrants and assure their removal from the U.S. In the time between this removal, the families being expedited are held in government and "charity-sponsored" detention camps, or in the case of the Brownsville Detention facility in Texas, a shelled-out Walmart.

The ERO has been strengthened by the Immigration and Nationality Act Section 287(g) , which allows ICE to cooperate with state and local law enforcement agencies. In doing such, it authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to also work with state and local law enforcement agencies, permitting officers to perform immigration law enforcement functions. As such, ICE provides these law enforcement officers with the training to identify, process, and detain immigrants.

In detainment, the so-called aliens are placed in the detention centers (similar to jails) mentioned above. Something very important to note here is that, as of 2009, the U.S. Congress has mandated that ICE detention centers must have at least 34,000 people confined each night. Thus, by law and similar to prisons again, there is a requirement (quota) for detention.

Between 2003 and 2007, 107 people died in ICE custody. The New York Times reported that in some cases officials used their supervisory roles to cover up evidence of mistreatment and avoid media coverage of "substandard care or abuse". Between 2010 and 2017, The Intercept reported that 1,224 sexual assault complaints had been made in ICE detention facilities, with only 3% being investigated.

U.S. Foreign Policy: Fighting "Terrorism" with Terrorism

Considering the youth of ICE as an agency, as well the timing of its inception, ICE is undoubtedly a component of the "war on terror." Created by the Bush administration, emphasized and vastly expanded by the Obama administration, and now mushrooming under the Trump administration, we must recognize that ICE is part of a much larger conglomerate. While it is ICE that is attracting much attention, it is not just ICE that we should call into question. Its purpose is to refuse all "aliens" who are "infesting" the U.S., but it is simply a bullet in the gun.

We must see this segment of the government as piece of their new war against the people of the world. The wars that the U.S. have escalated abroad, causing mass refugee migration crises in Central America, the Middle East, and Africa, are primarily responsible for such successions. With the rise of climate change as well, we will soon have a world unstable to support current and expected living standards.

Clearly then, ICE's purpose is to fend off migrants and refugees developed from the wars promoted by the US's other militaristic forces. Last year, people were worried about Syrian refugees flooding the states. Today, the focus is back on the Mexican border. In the future, expect further crises in Africa. HSI operates abroad, they are the international eyes for the ERO. Working with both foreign and domestic law agencies, ICE has created in less than two decades a global force of supervision and detention.

This analysis goes along with the U.S. Commission on National Security which stated , "In the new era, sharp distinctions between `foreign' and `domestic' no longer apply." Accordingly, former President Barack Obama noted , "there is no distinction between homeland and national security". The importance here lies in the conundrum considering that U.S. foreign policy initiatives have been disastrous, for the soldiers sent abroad, for the world in general, and for democracy as a whole. The same values the U.S. government claims to represent in every war it initiates are those which it refuses to allow develop without its supervision, and what ICE and the quotes above illustrate is that the leaders of our country are very aware of their dwindling control over the masses, and specifically who the masses are that they must control. But this conundrum posed appears common knowledge, thus we begin to ponder why we keep making the same mistakes?

Simply put: the U.S. is the producer of terror. It is the producer of terror abroad and thus the engineer of the very terrorism it aims to fight. This is not the result of stupidity. This is its purpose. Such social stratification is ideal for the ruling class. If they can decimate countries abroad, they can go in and offer their assistance. This assistance of course comes with loans. Those loans of course come with interest. Yes, the U.S. is the most indebted nation, but it also makes its money by indebting other nations! These are not mistakes, they're markets.

The terrorism that the U.S. has promoted in the overthrow of governments in Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Haití, Greece, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and so on, is on a scale never seen in history. This is what the U.S., as the main facilitator of the global capitalist system, strives for. The U.S. just passed a $716 billion defense budget. The U.S. allowed the Pentagon to misplace $21 trillion in 17 years. Across the world, the U.S. has promoted right-wing, ultra-conservative, authoritarian regimes, reaping the benefits while the workers of these countries are murdered and forced to live at starvation wages. Even today, the U.S. operates with approximately 75% of the world's dictatorships. Our policy is not democracy, it is detention. Thus, the same military that caused many to flee their homelands is now being asked to detain them at home.

A quick historical contextualization of the "Mexican immigrant crisis" is needed. The U.S. under President James K. Polk went to war with Mexico over territory and conquered 525,000 acres of land in 1848. Afterwards, the Native Mexicans, now Americans, were exterminated by a California state-sponsored genocide that massacred over 80% of their population. Come 1914, the U.S. intervened after the Mexican Revolution, toppling the government in order to protect its imperial interests in Mexico's oil, mines, and railroads, which were predominantly owned by USAmericans. In 1938, after discussions of reparations which were not paid to Mexico after the U.S. invasion, Mexico decided it would nationalize its oil reserves. Consequently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided not to imperialistically intervene, though during the great depression the U.S. did expel between 400,000-2,000,000 Mexicans from the U.S. (60% of who were birthright citizens). In 1982, during the world oil crisis, the nearly 150% drop in oil's worth meant that Mexico's foreign debt more than doubled . This foreign debt was owed to the U.S.-sponsored World Bank. And after NAFTA passed in 1994, Mexico's government became so reliant on the U.S. that now over 88% of its exports go directly to its neighbor, the U.S.

NAFTA has made it more difficult for Mexican workers to organize, thus wages have plummeted and corruption has run wild in the country. This is perfect for the neocolonial empire as it creates an austere society, with money coming from the top to colonialists, who then protect those giving them money if threatened. By destabilizing Mexico, they allow the society to fight itself at the bottom, while the corrupted officials remain floating above the general public.

What CIA-trained forces did during Operation Condor in Central America has passed. The Japanese internment camps during World War II were temporary. But what they have being built now, these ICE detention facilities, they are here to stay. They are here to stay unless we stand up and fight back against such terror. We cannot become desensitized to these detention facilities, as we have with the creation of a military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the slaying of innocent young black men. We must fight.

Trump's Solution: A Crumb to the Beggars

President Trump recently signed an Executive Order that will no longer allow families to be separated unless criminal laws say otherwise. For this, I have seen liberal praise. We must reject such gains as "wins". Such an order goes along with another liberal argument I've seen that separating families in the detention facilities is morally wrong. Yes, indeed it is. But so is the blanket detention of non-violent immigrants. So is the containment, isolation, entrapment, and debilitation of so-called aliens. The liberal "resistance" seemingly wants us to settle for allowing them to be in cages so long as they are together in these cages.

What this Executive Order does not do is mend the separation that has already taken place. Moreover, it seeks to indefinitely detain these families-- calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to file a request in court to change the settlement in Flores v Reno. What's more, it calls for families to be detained at military facilities, as well. The same military that has brutalized the world, trained torturers, tortured others themselves, and killed on mass scale, is now being called upon to "care for" detained immigrants. This is a scary revelation. The average citizen cannot just walk on to military facility grounds. We cannot walk into jails for inspection, let alone military facilities. What they hid before, they will hide again.

Such detainment facilities are beyond just immoral, they are abhorrent. They are heinously inhumane and such institutions should not exist anywhere. There are borders today, yes. There are laws and rules, and there are important procedures in place to protect our citizens from potential terrorists. This, however, does not require the detention and deportation of all "illegal" families. In fact, prior to 2012, such a notion was not only unheard of, it was structurally impractical.

Our Solution: A Call to Action

The protest-blockade against the ICE facility in Portland, Oregon is unprecedented. Here, protesters have effectively shut down and ICE detention facility by sheer will of the human body. They blockaded the garages so that ICE vehicles could not exit. For a while, ICE employees even could not exit the facility. Eventually police were called in to escort them out of the building.

Such direct action should set as a reminder that we the people have the power. In numbers, when organized, we have the potential to shut down each facility in the U.S. Approximately 1,000 citizens surrounded the building, the garage, and even ICE employee's cars (provoking the police to arrest one demonstrator) in Portland. These protestors were so effective that the ICE center was actually shut down indefinitely, due to security concerns!

These protests were against Trump's separating of families. What is important is not allowing this Executive Order to calm the fire. We must fight ICE at every step, we must melt ICE. Starting with preventative care, we can help our immigrant communities know their rights by circulating literature on how to defend from ICE raids. It is also important that we verify when ICE is in the neighborhood and document it. We owe gratitude to Sam Lavigne, who doxxed the Linkedin profiles of the majority of people working as ICE agents. We now we know who our enemy is. We have the locations of ICE detention facilities (via ICE's own website), we know where they are stationed. What happened in Portland can just as easily happen in any US city!

We must take a stand. Times are ripe, people are awakened to the monstrosities of this administration because it is Trump, and because it is Trump it is profitable for the media to "uncover." The capitalists only think of money, not the substance. And this substance is accidentally revolutionizing our country. Come an economic collapse, which we are due for as it's been 10 years since the 2008 recession, the honest Left should and will be ready. We must begin organizing and fighting now, and it starts against ICE.