Orlando: Deeper Than Terrorism

By Devon Bowers

The recent mass-shooting in Orlando is, without a doubt, a terrorist attack. However, it is not the terrorism that so much of the mainstream media is playing into, with their focus being on shooter Omar Mateen's alleged pledge of allegiance to ISIS. Rather, it is terrorism against the LGBT community, especially Latinx LGBT people, and, due to the backlash from the far right and politicians who want to focus on Mateen's religion, Muslim LGBT people. We need to understand and realize that this shooting goes much deeper than just terrorism and touches on a number of aspects of American culture itself.

Despite the victory of same-sex marriage, there is still a large amount of bigotry against the LGBT community. One only need to look at the large number of states which have passed laws that protect "state officials, faith leaders, and religious organizations who act on their beliefs that marriage is between a man and a woman, that sex is only acceptable between husband and wife, and that gender is established at birth." [1] This is done under the guise of 'religious liberty,' in which it is argued that someone is merely practicing their faith when discriminating against LGBT people, yet actually inverts the entire situation by promoting the idea that "Christians who object to homosexuality on biblical grounds [are] victims of religious persecution."[2] Add to this the recent and ongoing hysteria involving transgender people using the bathrooms of their gender identity.

The situation, which hadn't been a problem before, suddenly exploded into the mainstream when the North Carolina legislature passed a bill which "[struck] down all existing LGBT nondiscrimination statutes across the state, on top of banning transgender people from using some public restrooms." [3] The arguments became so controversial that the White House stepped in and made clear that, with regards to public schools, transgender children can use the bathroom of the gender they identify with.[4] In response, states have sued the Obama administration[5] and/or have voted to ignore the directive. [6] Unfortunately, these bathroom laws have had a very real and detrimental effect on transgender people, with calls to the transgender suicide hotline, Trans Lifeline, doubling after the passing of the North Carolina bill. [7] Thus, we see that there is a general atmosphere across that nation that is hostile to people in the LGBT community - people who have been in the trenches of a long-term struggle for basic human dignities.

It should be noted that Mateen attacked Pulse during its Latin Night[8] and it has been reported that "a co-worker recalled him as a virulent racist."[9] It is quite obvious that there is an atmosphere against Latina/os in the US. With everything from presidential candidate Donald Trump saying that he was going to build a wall to keep Mexicans out [10], and that Mexicans were all rapists and criminals[11], to the old and tired argument that immigrants (specifically Mexicans) were stealing jobs from people, the anti-Latino sentiment in the US is alive and intensifying, and has been for quite some time. Mateen's racism isn't random, but rather a possible byproduct of the anti-Latina/o bigotry that has been being expressed more and more openly over the years.

It has also been noted that he was abusive toward his wife.[12] This is rather important to note as there is a connection between gun violence and domestic abuse[13]; in addition to the undercurrent of misogyny that is common in many shooting incidents - from George Zimmerman, who was arrested for domestic violence[14], to Ismaaiyl Abdulah Brinsley, who shot his ex-girlfriend before going on to kill two NYPD officers [15], to the UCLA shooter, who killed his estranged wife in Minnesota before driving to UCLA to shoot a professor.[16] Violence against women and gun violence are often linked together.

On a personal level, Mateen may have lived in a homophobic household, evident by a video released by his father the day after the shooting, where he said that "God will punish those involved in homosexuality."[17] There is also the possibility that Mateen himself was gay or at least attracted to men. According to the Palm Beach Post, "One former classmate of Omar Mateen's 2006 police academy class believed Mateen was gay, saying Mateen once tried to pick him up at a bar."[18] Mateen frequented Pulse as well,[19] yet due to both the homophobia at home and in society more generally, he may have not wanted to come out and may have internalized the shame, finally acting on it in the shooting.

The point of this isn't to play armchair psychologist, but rather to acknowledge Omar Mateen's views didn't develop in a vacuum; they were caused by deeper cultural problems involving bigotry against the LGBT community, women, Latina/os, and immigrants, all of which are reflective of the larger American society.

In terms of the response to the shooting, there has been focus on terrorism and ISIS, gun control, and some arguing that the tragedy affected everyone, not just LGBT people.

Not soon after the tragedy, both presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, responded. Trump "[lambasted] the president and Clinton for not using the words 'radical Islamic terrorism,'" seemed to advocate for loosening concealed-carry laws, and repeated his call for a 'temporary' policy to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S.," whereas Clinton said that she "supports the U.S. efforts to contain ISIS" and wants "tighter gun safety laws." [20]

Where both Trump and Clinton agreed was that the U.S. needed to bomb ISIS more, which The Intercept writer Zaid Jilani noted was a bit of a problem as "no operational links between ISIS and the alleged Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, have been discovered" and "neither explained how escalating bombardments in Iraq and Syria would do anything to stop self-radicalized and/or unhinged attackers in the United States." [21] Yet, the pro-military argument plays into the terrorism narrative that has been ongoing since 9/11, and possibly plays into the larger regional game the U.S. has, as it could be argued that ISIS needs to be stopped permanently and the only way to do that would be to send in ground forces, something that would let the U.S. stay directly involved in both Iraq and Syria for quite some time.

There has also been much talk about gun control and how citizens shouldn't be able to access assault weapons, with President Obama saying, "Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families and explain why that makes sense."[22] Even Republicans, it seems, may be open to changing the nation's gun laws. [23]

Recently, on the show, Sky News Press Preview, host Mark Longhurst debated journalist Owen Jones (who is gay) on the causes of the attack, saying that "it was an attack on the 'freedom of people trying to enjoy themselves' on a night out." Co-guest Julia Hartley-Brewer then told Jones, "I don't think you have ownership of the horror (sic), of this crime, because you're gay."[24] On the other side of the pond, former Senator Scott Brown stated that "It's so tragic that you have people, and a lot of them were gay and lesbian and transgender, and that's deeply unfortunate, but I think it's more than that. They were Americans first."[25] There was even an article in The Advocate entitled, "There Were Straight Victims in Orlando Too."[26] While it is important to acknowledge that there were straight victims, shifting attention to these victims ignores the fact that Mateen targeted Pulse specifically because it had LGBT people there. His thoughts weren't about the straight people that, to him, just happened to be there; they were on harming and killing LGBT folk. Saying "there were straight people too" only serves to erase the nature of the hate-crime and relegate LGBT people to the back rows.

What both the discussion of ISIS/terrorism as well as gun control laws does is shift the narrative of the shooting, turning it away from homophobia. This should be fought as rather than focusing on the tragedy of what happened and how to combat bigotry, the situation risks becoming another game of political football for politicians to use, using the dead bodies of LGBT people as their platform.

The purposeful ignoring of the shooting as a hate crime, either explicitly or implicitly, and acting as if was a crime against all people only serves to ignore the fact that Mateen targeted Pulse specifically because it had LGBT people there. His thoughts weren't about the straight people that, to him, just happened to be there, they were on harming and killing LGBT folk. Saying "there were straight people too" or that "they were Americans first" only serves to erase the nature of the crime and relegate LGBT people to the back rows, despite their blatant and deadly victimization.

When confronting tragedy, contrived talking points designed to support ongoing narratives do nothing to address the matter. There needs to be an examination of what exactly caused the situation, not only from a criminal perspective, but also a social and cultural perspective. These mass shootings occur in a modern context where race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other factors intersect. To refuse to examine these intersections is a refusal to attempt to attain a fuller understanding of what occurred and why. It is a shame that people are obfuscating or ignoring the larger picture, as it is extremely important.

It may save us from the next massacre.

Notes

[1] Molly Jackson, "How Southern States Are Now Challenging Gay Marriage," Christian Science Monitor, February 20, 2016 ( http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2016/0220/How-Southern-states-are-now-challenging-gay-marriage )

[2] Southern Poverty Law Center, 'Religious Liberty' and the Anti-LGBT Right, https://www.splcenter.org/20160211/religious-liberty-and-anti-lgbt-right (February 11, 2016)

[3] Hannah Levintova, "North Carolina's GOP Just Fast-Tracked The Broadest Anti-LGBT Bill In The Country," Mother Jones, March 23, 2016 ( http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/north-carolina-bill-lgbt-discrimination-law )

[4] Emanuella Grinberg, "Feds Issue Guidance On Transgender Access To School Bathrooms," CNN, May 14, 2016 ( http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/12/politics/transgender-bathrooms-obama-administration/ )

[5] Theodore Schleifer, "Officials In 12 States To Sue Obama Administration Over Transgender Bathroom Directive," CNN, May 27, 2016 ( http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/25/politics/texas-lawsuit-barack-obama-transgender/ )

[6] Emma Brown, "Kansas State Board of Education Votes to Ignore Obama's Transgender Bathroom Directive," Stars and Stripes, June 16, 2016 ( http://www.stripes.com/news/us/kansas-state-board-of-education-votes-to-ignore-obama-s-transgender-bathroom-directive-1.414884 )

[7] Samantha Allen, "After North Carolina's Law, Trans Suicide Hotline Calls Double," The Daily Beast, April 20, 2016 ( http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/20/after-north-carolina-s-law-trans-suicide-hotline-calls-double.html )

[8] Yara Simón, "Worst Mass Shooting In Modern US History Takes Place at Orlando Gay Club on Latin-Themed Night," Remezcla, June 12, 2016 (http://remezcla.com/culture/pulse-mass-shooting-latin-night/)

[9] Jenny Jarvie, Harriet Ryan, Del Quentin Wilber, "Orlando Nightclub Gunman Remembered as Abusive, Homophobic, and Racist," Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2016 ( http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-orlando-nightclub-shooter-20160612-snap-story.html )

[10] Anna Brand, "Donald Trump: I Would Force Mexico to Build Border Wall," MSNBC, June 28, 2015 ( http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/donald-trump-i-would-force-mexico-build-border-wall )

[11] USA Today, Donald Trump: Mexico is Bringing Drugs, Crime, and Rapists to the US, http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/2015/06/25/29292957/ (June 25, 2015)

[12] Claire Z. Cardona, "Orlando Shooter was 'Mentally Unstable,' Abusive, Ex-wife Says," The Dallas Morning News, June 12, 2016 ( http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/2016/06/orlando-shooter-was-mentally-unstable-abusive-ex-wife-says.html/ )

[13] Emily Crockett, "Why We Can't Ignore the Connection between Gun Violence and Domestic Violence," Vox, June 14, 2016 ( http://www.vox.com/2016/6/14/11922576/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen-gun-domestic-violence )

[14] Ren Stutzman, "Girlfriend to Deputies: George Zimmerman Pointed A Shotgun at Me," Orlando Sentinel, November 18, 2013 ( http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2013-11-18/news/os-george-zimmerman-arrested-20131118_1_george-zimmerman-murdering-17-year-old-trayvon-martin-deputies )

[15] Justin Fenton, "Police Say Killer of 2 NYPD Officers First Shot Ex-Girlfriend in Owings Mills," The Baltimore Sun, December 20, 2014 ( http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-co-owings-mills-shooting-20141220-story.html )

[16] Julia Jacobo, "UCLA Shooter Killed Estranged Wife Before Campus Incident: Police," ABC News, June 3, 2016 ( http://abcnews.go.com/US/ucla-shooter-climbed-window-kill-estranged-wife-police/story?id=39597309 )

[17] James Barrett, "5 Things You Need to Know About The Father of Orlando Jihadist Omar Mateen," Daily Wire, June 13, 2016 ( http://www.dailywire.com/news/6532/orlando-jihadists-father-god-will-punish-those-james-barrett )

[18] Lawrence Mower, "Orlando Shooter Omar Mateen was gay, Former Classmate Says," Palm Beach Post, June 14, 2016 ( http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/orlando-shooter-omar-mateen-was-gay-former-classma/nrfwW/ )

[19] Paul Brinkmann, Gal Tziperman Lotan, Rene Stutzman, "Witness: Omar Mateen Had Been at Orlando nightclub Many Times," Orlando Sentinel, June 13, 2016 ( http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/pulse-orlando-nightclub-shooting/os-orlando-nightclub-omar-mateen-profile-20160613-story.html )

[20] Rebecca Shabad, "Orlando Attack Reactions from Clinton, Trump Are Starkly Different," CBS News, June 14, 2016 ( http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-offer-starkly-different-reactions-to-orlando-attack/ )

[21] Zaid Jilani, "Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Call for Bombing ISIS After Orlando Shooting That ISIS Didn't Direct," The Intercept, June 13, 2016 ( https://theintercept.com/2016/06/13/hillary-clinton-and-donald-trump-call-for-more-airstrikes-on-isis-after-orlando-massacre-that-isis-didnt-direct/ )

[22] Robin Gradison, Alexander Mallin, "President Obama Rips Gun Control Opponents After Meeting with Orlando Victims' Families," ABC News, June 16, 2016 ( http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-obama-visiting-families-victims-orlando/story?id=39885188 )

[23] Ed O'Keefe, Karoun Demirjian, "In wake of Orlando shooting, gun control getting fresh look from GOP," Washington Post, June 15, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-wake-of-orlando-shootings-gun-control-plans-getting-a-fresh-look-from-gop/2016/06/15/e25e3b2a-3311-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html )

[24] Danny Boyle, "Owen Jones storms off Sky News paper review after presenter refuses to describe Orlando massacre as attack on gay people," The Telegraph, June 13, 2016 ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/13/orlando-shooting-owen-jones-storms-off-sky-news-paper-review-aft/ )

[25] Emily Atkin, "Scott Brown Says Orlando Shooting Did Not Primarily Target Gay People," Think Progress, June 14, 2016 ( http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/06/14/3788372/scott-brown-orlando-shooting/0

[26] Jacob Ogles, "There Were Straight Victims in Orlando Too," The Advocate, June 13, 2016 ( http://www.advocate.com/crime/2016/6/13/there-were-straight-victims-orlando-too )

Gordon Gekko's America

By Sean Posey

On October 19, 1987, a worldwide stock market crash-dubbed Black Monday in the States-interrupted the go-go 1980s. Only weeks after that panic-filled day, Oliver Stone's meditation on the decade of greed, Wall Street, hit the theaters. The story of Bud Fox, a wannabe master of the universe, and his Machiavellian mentor Gordon Gekko, served as a morality tale that America did not want to hear at the time. (The film proved to be far more popular in later years than it was in 1987.) And many who did see the film deeply misunderstood its central lessons.

A generation of future brokers and investment bankers cited the movie as a central influence in their decision to go to work on Wall Street; however, Gordon Gekko, the flashy, glib, and dangerous corporate raider, became a lasting symbol for the economic and moral transition America has undergone over the past few decades. [1] The character's ruthless worldview is now the norm, and not just for Wall Street where the "21st century children of Gordon Gekko," as Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd referred to them in 2007, rule, but for society as a whole.[2] Gekko and Gekkoisms have penetrated the political, economic, and cultural fabric of America. The age of Gekko is a terrifying world where the winners "make the rules" and the losers "get slaughtered."[3]

The late 1980s represented an intoxicating time in American life. Larger than life millionaires and billionaires penetrated the popular imagination like never before. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Ivan Boesky (the crooked Wall Street insider), Michael Milken (who partially inspired the Gekko character), Donald Trump (who is bringing the spirit of the 1980s back to the presidential stage), and even John Gotti, who brought a flashy 1980s sensibility to the New York Mafia, all represented the fabulous wealth that accumulated to a lucky few. But the machinations of Wall Street's elite in particular, captured the spirit of the era.

Wall Street emerged as a cautionary tale during a time when caution went right out the window. New economic experiments in the realm of government and finance (supply side economics, the deregulation of thrifts, etc.) led to great crises: rapidly increasing inequality and the savings and loan scandal. Stone's film targeted the exotic world of high finance, complete with well-dressed corporate raiders and fortunes accumulated through the destruction of companies.

In the film, Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen) comes from blue-collar roots and is looking to leapfrog from the world of a junior broker to the esteemed realm of investment banking. His prospective mentor is Gordon Gekko (portrayed by Michael Douglas), a flashy executive who symbolizes the worst aspects of both Wall Street and American capitalism. Although Gekko is framed as the villain, many audiences responded positively to the charming greenmailer. Both Stone and Douglas later remarked that they met numerous individuals who readily admitted that Gekko inspired them to pursue a career on Wall Street. [4]

Gekko did not just symbolize an era, however; he proved to be a prescient philosopher, introducing America to what would soon be its future. Late in the film, Bud Fox, in a crisis of conscience, begins to turn away from his amoral idol. Gekko, sensing his hesitation, explains to Fox how the world of the 1980s really works:

"It's all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation… It's not a question of enough. It's a zero-sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or gained-it's simply transferred from one perception to another."

"The richest 1 percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars… You got 90 percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal: the news, war, famine, upheaval, the price of a paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it."

"Now your not naïve enough to think we are living in a democracy, are you, Buddy? It's the free market." [5]

Gekko's speech was far ahead of its time. The share in national income going to the top decile in the U.S., after dropping sharply following the Great Depression, returned to a rate of 50 percent by the turn of the century.[6] In 2005-2006, a leaked series of reports by analysts at Citigroup described an emerging "plutonomy," that is an economy driven by the spending of a small plutocratic class. [7] In many ways, America has returned to the Gilded Age, and it is once again a zero-sum game where those in the oligarchic plutocracy make the rules.

Government played a central role in the transition to a Gekko-esque economy. While Gekko pined for "the days of the free market" in Wall Street, President Reagan proclaimed, "Government is the problem."[8] This approach led to widespread efforts to deregulate the economy at almost every level, which coincided with reducing top tax rates on the wealthy.

Remarkably enough, the Clinton administration in the 1990s echoed Reagan and Gekko's sentiments: "The era of big government is over," Clinton declared. [9] The deregulation of the financial system proceeded apace with the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which repealed part of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which largely freed OTC derivatives from significant regulation. Economic bubbles began to emerge, and the sordid culture of Wall Street continued to thrive.

The days of the corporate raiders waned after the decade of greed, but with the Stock Market reaching new highs in the 1990s, a new generation of Wall Streeters looked to Gekko as a figure to emulate. Boiler Room, released in 2000, tells the story of a misguided young broker (Giovanni Ribisi) who goes to work for a shady chop shop firm during the height of the market. These young wannabes lack any of the charm of Gekko, but they emulate him all the same. When Ribisi's character goes to the home of the firm's head recruiter (Ben Affleck), he encounters a group watching Wall Street, which several characters recite from heart as it plays. And like down-market versions of Gekko, the employees of J.T. Marlin rip-off their clients with aplomb on their way to obscene riches. "There's no honor in taking that after school job at Mickey Dee's, honor's in the dollar, kid," Ribisi's character intones. "So I went the white boy way of slinging crack-rock: I became a stockbroker."[10]

Wall Street began to be used in ethics classes in business school, but judging by the behavior of the financial industry in the first decade of the 21st century, the moral lessons of the film apparently fell on deaf ears. Journalist Philip Delves Broughton describes how he remembers students at Harvard responding to Gekko's speeches: "At my old business school, Harvard, Gekko's speech electrified a snoozy morning class on leadership. By the time Gekko was done berating the board of Teldar Paper, the entire class was grinning and alert. For most MBA students that speech is less a parody than a guiding philosophy."[11]

"Gekko was merciless, but if he were on the Street today, the hedge fund guys would eat him alive," Fortune joked in a cover story on the old character in 2005.[12] The ruthlessness of the new Wall Street was confirmed by the events of 2007-2008. The children of Gordon Gekko brought the financial industry and indeed the country itself to its knees. Just as newly elected President Obama began bringing Wall Street scions like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner into his new administration during the darkest days of the Great Recession, Oliver Stone readied Gordon Gekko for another appearance on the big screen.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps introduces audiences to an aged Gekko, recently released from prison after a laughable eight years. (Michael Milken only served two years in prison, and no major figures served prison time as a result of the financial meltdown of 2007-2008.) A free man, Gekko goes on a speaking tour in support of his memoirs. Addressing an auditorium of college students, he exclaims that, "Someone reminded me I once said 'Greed is good'. Now it seems it's legal." [13]

Indeed, the extreme views of Gordon Gekko circ. 1987 had been firmly baked into the culture by 2010. The titans of the financial industry knowingly drove their own companies into the ground in the name of short-term (personal) gain. And far from being punished, they were allowed to collect enormous bonuses while millions lost their homes and their livelihoods in a recession that continues to be a haunting reality for much of the country. Once again, a seemingly contrite Gekko plays the prescient sage in the sequel: "The system is insolvent. No one knows what to do next except repeat the insanity until the next bubble blows. That'll be the one, the big one."

Six years after Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, little has changed. According to economist Emmanuel Saez, the top 1 percent of earners received 95 percent of the income gains between 2009-2012.[14] Conspicuous consumption is back on the rise, and Donald Trump, one of the most well known figures from the era of the original Wall Street, is the Republican candidate for president. In a fitting twist, Trump actually appears in a barbershop scene alongside Gekko in deleted scenes from Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

In 2013, Martin Scorsese released The Wolf of Wall Street, another well-timed tale of "greed is good" for post-Great Recession America. The center of the story is Jordan Belfort, one of the most notorious figures in the financial industry during the 1980s and 1990s. Leonardo DiCaprio's portrayal of Belfort represents a 21st century Gordon Gekko reborn as a "financial bro." Belfort, who made a large fortune on the backs of poorly informed blue-collar investors, comes across in an almost glamorous light-one of the chief criticisms of the film. During an advanced screening at the Regal Battery Park Theater in New York City, audiences cheered Belfort's on-screen exploits, including efforts to procure cocaine and prevent the feds from ensnaring criminal members of his own firm.[15]

The blame does not rest solely with Scorsese or the cast of the film, however. Lionizing the lifestyles of the rich and ruthless has become an American pastime. Even though movements like Occupy Wall Street have emerged to challenge the narrative of 'Greed is Good,' the Gekkos of the world continue to remain appealing characters to an American public inculcated into a mantra of success at any cost. Reality television shows are but one of the myriads of ways that a zero-sum society of Hobbesian dimensions is impressed upon us. Considering this, it is no surprise that America appears to be lurching toward accepting a modern day Leviathan, Donald Trump, as president. For a world where the ethics of Gordon Gekko dominate is a world where fear is bred by insecurity, and insecurity followed perhaps by authoritarianism.

Notes

[2] Kevin Rudd, Edited extract of the speech, "The Children of Gordon Gekko," October 6, 2008, The Australian. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/archive/news/the-children-of-gordon-gekko/story-e6frg7b6-1111117670209 (accessed May 24, 2016).

[3] Wall Street , directed by Oliver Stone, 20th Century Fox, 1987.

[4] Philip Delves Broughton, "Gordon's Back," London Evening Standard, September 14, 2009.

[5] Ibid.,

[6] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Bellknap Press, 2014), 334.

[7] Ajay Apur, Niall Macleod, Narendra Singh, 'The Plutonomy Symposium - Rising Tides Lifting Yachts," Citigroup, Equity Strategy, The Global Investigator, September 29, 2006.

[8] "Inaugural Address," Ronald Reagan, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1981.

[9] "State of the Union Address," Bill Clinton, Washington D.C., January 23, 1996.

[10] Boiler Room , directed by Ben Younger, New Line Cinema, 2000.

[11] Broughton, "Gordon's Back."

[12] Andy Serwer, Fortune, "Is Greed Still Good?" June 2005.

[13] Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps , directed by Oliver Stone, 20th Century Fox, 2010.

[14] Emanuel Saez, "Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States, " UC Berkeley, September 3, 2013.

[15] Steve Perlberg, Business Insider, "We Saw 'Wolf of Wall Street' with a Bunch of Wall Street Dudes and it was Disturbing," December 19, 2013.

Pain and Expression: An Interview with Panic Volkuskha

By Devon Bowers

Below is the transcript of an email interview with artist Panic Volkuskha, where we discuss art and how it can relate to reality, specifically focusing on a rather recent piece entitled Couples Therapy.

What made you interested in art? Why are you so passionate about art?

I enjoyed drawing from a very early age. Comic books, specifically Japanese manga, are actually what got me into art in the first place.

I'm a transgender man, I spent the first 24 years of my life being viewed and treated as a woman. So being raised as a little girl in the 90s, I didn't find many American comics and tv shows that interested me. The stuff aimed at girls didn't click for me -- I didn't like the art style, I didn't like the plot lines. Japanese comics and cartoons, like "Sailor Moon," "Cardcaptor Sakura," and "Revolutionary Girl Utena," did click for me. Many of those were created by women, and the main characters were young girls, who got to have magical powers and fight villains. And they got to wear super cool costumes while doing it!

My dad often says that he knew I was serious about art when I was seven. I had gotten in trouble for drawing during class, so I started setting my alarm clock early to draw before I went to school. My dad said nothing would have gotten him out of bed early at that age.

I have my parents to thank, too. Both of them work in the arts, so I grew up going to plays and art museums on a regular basis. For a long time, I didn't realize that was not the norm for most kids. My parents may not always like the content of my art, some of my paintings and comics deal with disturbing subjects, but they have always been supportive.

By middle school, I was really using art as an escape and as a form of therapy. I was bullied at school before there was much public discourse about how damaging bullying is -- it's emotional abuse -- so the school didn't really know how to handle it. The teachers and administrators didn't seem to understand how horrible it was for me. I felt dismissed and unheard. My art was where I could make myself heard.

You said in a recent Tumblr post that you live with "depression, anxiety, obsessive skin-picking, and some lingering trauma." Do you use art as a way of dealing with that?

Oh, absolutely. Since I started studying art therapy, I've begun to see that a lot of the art I was making/continue to make has been an instinctive method of therapy for myself, particularly comics. There's a form of therapy called "narrative therapy," which is based around the idea that everyone tells stories, to themselves and about themselves. These stories influence self-perception, emotions, and behaviors. Narrative therapy also holds that the "true" story doesn't really matter because all stories are subjectively true; you experience it, therefore it is real. This is particularly helpful with PTSD, because trauma can distort and conceal "true" memory.

Before I ever heard of narrative therapy, I was making comics about the stories that I told about myself and the stories others told about me -- what it was like to be seen as an intelligent, high-achieving student when inside I was incredibly anxious and self-loathing. I was sexually abused at a fairly young age, by a kid my own age, and those memories are pretty fragmented. For awhile, I was plagued by the fact that I couldn't fully remember what happened. So I made a comic about what I did remember, how it made me feel, and how I accepted it as a part of myself, but not as what defined me. It really helped to lessen some of the anxiety and intense emotion surrounding the event; even if I didn't have the full "real" memory, I had my true experience of it.

Why is it that you chose drawing/painting as your particular art style? What other artists do you admire or have influenced you?

Drawing is usually the easiest thing to do! There's almost always something to draw with, no matter where you are. I draw when I want to complete something relatively quickly, as my paintings take a longer time and tend to be more detailed.

I like acrylic and oil paints the best. I've worked with them the most, so I have a sense of mastery, I know how to do what I want with them.

My favorite art movement is the German Neue Sachlichkeit or "New Objectivity" movement. It developed after WWI, before WWII, and focused on the social and economic desperation of the times. The general style involves realistic depictions that are distorted and bizarre, a reflection of the climate in Germany at the time. A lot of the Neue Sachlichkeit artists were outspoken about the rise of the Nazi regime and had to flee Germany.

One of my favorite comic book artists is Lynda Barry. She has an incredible ability to tell funny and serious stories through the view point of children; she really captures how it felt to be a kid, to know more than the adults around you think you know, but to still not fully know what's going on.

Another big influence for me is Dave McKean. His work, particularly "Cages," expanded my idea of what can be done with comics. He uses photography, digital manipulation, painting, collage, and he blends it all together so well -- it never feels chaotic, like too much, it's all considered and composed.

To just list some influences -- Otto Dix, Jenny Saville, Odd Nerdrum, Dino Valls, Henry Darger, David B's "Epileptic," Charles Burns' "Black Hole," "7 Miles a Second" by David Wojnarowicz and David Romberger, "Dorohedoro" by Q. Hayashida, Kate Beaton's comics make me laugh myself sick, "Vampire Loves" by Joann Sfar and all of my friends who are artists.

Regarding the "Couples Therapy" piece that has gained a lot of attention as of late. I wanted to know, what inspired you to make that piece? What made you chose those specific characters and television shows?

I was taking a class on systems therapy, which refers to a number of theories of therapy that believe, even when working with one person, you have to consider the entire system, the family system the person grew up in, systems of economics, race, gender, and sexuality, and the broader sociocultural system that we all live within. All of these tie into the individual and how they experience the world. For instance, the anxiety and/or depression experienced by a transgender Latina woman is informed by different factors than the anxiety and/or depression experienced by a cisgender white man.

Our class used different families as examples in our class discussions, as case examples, fictional or nonfictional families that were relatively well-known so that everyone had some base knowledge for the discussion. I started thinking about families in pop culture, the ones that I had grown up with, and was suddenly struck by the fact that Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin are both abusive fathers. I mean, I kind of knew that, but I had never thought about it very seriously before. Hank Hill sometimes borders on emotionally abusive, but he's the most understanding and adaptive of all three characters.

I started wondering, if I considered the behavior of Homer, Peter, and Hank seriously -- then what would Bart, Chris, and Bobby be like as adults? Looking at the behavior of their fathers, the behavior of the entire family, and how the family is viewed in the context of the show, how would these kids turn out? The idea snowballed from there and I began sketching out the comic.

What do you think are some of the long-term effects that shows like Family Guy and The Simpsons have on normalizing violence and abuse, while masking it under comedy?

I don't think the shows themselves are responsible for child abuse, which is what some people seem to think this sort of criticism -- my criticism -- is claiming. I think the shows normalize abuse. All three shows are semi-realistic family sitcoms, with "King of the Hill" being the most grounded in reality. The Simpsons, the Griffins, and the Hills are pretty much all put forward as the "average American family." And the Simpsons and the Griffins are abusive families.

If the shows were consistently cartooinshly violent, like "Coyote and Roadrunner," I wouldn't have so much of a problem. But the shows are relatively grounded in reality and present these families as "average sitcom families."

If the abusive behavior is meant to be satire of actual abusive families, then it is not good satire. It falls into the trap of simply repeating/displaying the thing that it's trying to satirize, with no criticism or deeper message.

Part of this is a cultural shift, I think. The creator of The Simpsons is my parents' age; they grew up in a time when physical punishment of children was the norm. Sure, there was some sort of line that you weren't supposed to cross, or else it would be abuse, but getting hit with a belt or chased around the house with a switch was a part of their childhood. And my parents joke about it with their siblings because it's part of their shared experience, and part of why they chose to never ever physically punish me.

There are so many studies coming out now that show how extreme and long-lasting the effect of physical punishment can be; not just extreme physical punishment, any physical punishment, even spanking. Maybe physical punishment was normal enough when my parents were kids, and even when I was a kid, so that it could be a joke, but not anymore.

Lastly, I've been getting a lot of messages from people about the comic that really drives home that these depictions are a problem. People writing me and saying "It took me a long time to realize my family was abusive because shows like this made it look normal," or "This is the kind of thing that happened to me and it was horrible and I don't understand why I'm expected to laugh at it." Those messages made me want to cry and I think they're very telling.

What every day things inspire you?

People! I love portraits and figure drawing. I honestly believe that everyone is beautiful; there is at least one facet of any person that would make a beautiful painting, the unique pattern of crooked teeth, the folds of flesh on a person's stomach, the hollows made by the eye socket.

My classes are really inspiring. As much work as grad school is, it's very exciting to be studying a subject that is so important to me.

How can people support your work?

The big one that I urge everyone to do with art online is to properly credit the artist. Always try to find the original source and link to it.

I do have a Society6 (https://society6.com/panicvolkushka) and an Etsy ( https://www.etsy.com/shop/panicvolkushka). There isn't as much on there as I would like, what with being a full time student and employed, but whenever I have a break from school, I try to add new stuff.

Drawing Class Lines Through Critical Education: History, Education, and the Global Class War

By Derek R. Ford

The following is the foreword to Curry S. Malott's new book, History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War , just published through Peter Lang.

There is a common belief out there that capitalism is so totalizing, so all-subsuming, that even the most radical scholarship can be accommodated with its circuits of production and consumption. Curry Malott, in his newest book, History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War, seems to be out to disprove that belief. He succeeds, and in his success, he demonstrates that this belief reveals nothing about contemporary capitalism, and everything about what passes as radical scholarship today. At the base of this book, then, is a critique of-and corrective to-the deep-seated anti-communism that permeates much of the western and academic Left, especially within the U.S. Thus, it isn't just the global bourgeoisie and its representatives who will despise the contents of this book; it's likely to upset quite a few self-proclaimed and celebrated "critical scholars" inside and outside of education. One thing is for sure: after reading this book it's hard to look at the field of critical education-especially critical pedagogy-the same way. With biting critique and careful historical and theoretical analysis, Malott lays bare what he, following Sam Marcy, calls the "crossing of class lines" that characterizes so much critical scholarship. The crossing of class lines is, simply, when one finds oneself shoulder to shoulder with imperialism, shouting the same slogans ("down with authoritarianism!") and attacking the same enemy (communism).

Bringing communist theoreticians and revolutionaries into the educational conversation, Malott begins to develop a "communist pedagogy" in this book, and this pedagogy offers the field needed clarifications, historical contexts, conceptual frameworks, organizational imperatives, and future possibilities. Malott begins by tackling a question that is, for any organizer, presently absent in academia writ large today: the state. He clarifies for us what the state is and what role it plays in the revolutionary process, reminding us along the way that revolutions are, by definition "one of the most authoritarian human actions possible." Revolutions take place when one segment of society imposes its will absolutely on another segment; there is no revolution without repression. As Marx (1867/1967) put it in Capital, "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one" (p. 703). It is only through utilizing the state and its repressive and productive powers that a new society can arise, for the bourgeoisie, as history has shown, doesn't go without a fight.

Once deposed they count their losses, regroup, find new allies, and launch campaigns of terror. The history of the communist movement has proved this without exception. Thus, to forfeit or bypass the state "is to surrender before the final battle has even begun." Just months after the exploited masses of Russia took power in 1917 they were under attack from 14 imperialist armies, each of which was in coordination with the White Army that served Russia's former capitalists and landlords. When Cuban guerrillas overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in their country, it wasn't long before the U.S. invaded the island. The CIA's forces were repelled by the armed Cuban masses, but the campaign against Cuba continued with assassinations and terrorist attacks. There were plans for another U.S. military intervention, and these plans were changed only when the Soviet Union sent medium-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads to the country. There is a reason that imperialist politicians constantly denounce any attempt by an independent government to acquire a nuclear weapon-and it isn't because they hate bombs. They don't care that Israel has a nuclear weapons arsenal and that it has never allowed international inspection of its nuclear capabilities, and they aren't dismantling their own nuclear weapons. Instead, they are attacking the DPRK for its nuclear capability, and they are denouncing Iran's alleged attempts at a nuclear weapons program (which isn't documented). They bully countries into dismantling nuclear weapons programs, imposing deathly sanctions and threatening more war. It is interesting to note that the two governments who have complied with U.S. dictates to abandon nuclear weapons development were Iraq and Libya. Both governments were overthrown after they complied. What is the lesson here?

The establishment of the Soviet Union in 1917 and the Communist International in 1919 provided a new hope for the world's oppressed. This hope wasn't merely ideological, but was also material. As Malott shows, the Soviet Union was the center of gravity in the proletarian struggle for much of the 20th century. It was the armory from which the world's oppressed drew their weapons to overthrow their oppressors and it fertilized a counter-hegemonic bloc to imperialism, allowing the class war against the bourgeoisie to take on a truly global character for the first time in history. On the one side of the war stood the imperialist states and their puppet governments, and on the other side stood the socialist states and the anti-colonial states.

This was a beautiful period of struggle for humanity, although it wasn't without its setbacks and its errors. Yet Malott argues that there is a crucial difference between critiquing the leadership or policy of a socialist state and critiquing that state's social system. And here is where his criticism of critical pedagogy is most severe: critical pedagogy turned its weapons of critique against the social systems of the proletarian class camp, thereby crossing class lines. Malott provides several historical and contemporary examples of pedagogues such as Henry Giroux who not only denounce the proletarian camp, but even go so far as to equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany-its literal opposite. Democracy is opposed to totalitarianism in critical pedagogy, which is exactly how Winston Churchill framed the world struggle in his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Missouri on March 5, 1946. Talk about crossing class lines!

There is a material basis for such class collaboration, and a history of it that stretches back over 100 years with the betrayal of the Socialist International, which was the grouping of mass socialist parties. In 1912, the Socialist International met in Basel, Switzerland for an emergency meeting. The outbreak of an inter-imperialist war was imminent, and the socialist movement needed an orientation. The outcome of the meeting was clear: in the outbreak of inter-imperialist war all socialists should oppose the war and refuse to fire on workers of other countries. For those parties with representatives in parliament this meant that they had to vote against any war credits. When push came to shove, however, the overwhelming majority of the socialist parties capitulated to imperialism, and united with their national ruling classes. The Socialist International collapsed.

Why did this happen? How was it that the parties of working class revolution united with their class enemies? Lenin answered these questions in his work on imperialism. Monopoly profits extracted by imperialist powers, those profits "obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their 'own' country" made it "possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy" (p. 9). These monopoly profits provided the material basis for national chauvinism and reformism, the latter of which can be defined as sacrificing the gains of the entire working class for the short-term gains of a particular section of the working class. The socialist parties that betrayed the working class, like the German Social Democratic Party, were able to keep their offices, their newspapers, their positions in parliament, and so on. The Bolsheviks, who stayed loyal to the proletarian revolution, were driven underground and their parliamentary representatives were arrested.

It's not too hard to see, then, why what Malott calls "anti-socialist socialism" is so prevalent in the academy. We are back at the limits of what counts as radical today. There are limits. You can be a socialist in the academy, but only after you denounce every socialist country and the history of the communist movement. All you need to do is add a few quick lines dismissing the Soviet Union as "totalitarian" and you will be all set, no need to worry about your tenure and promotion. It will help, too, if you stick to teaching and writing about this critical stuff, and refrain from organizing and agitating.

We should hope that these critical scholars will engage with Malott's ideas and arguments, and do the only logical thing: repudiate their previous writings and actions. This is what Malott has done in and with this book, which is an honest political self-critique. He writes of his "long journey of self-reflection and de-indoctrination." Malott's work has been heavily influenced by the revolutionary critical pedagogy of Peter McLaren. More than anyone else, McLaren has been instrumental in bringing Marx into the field of education, and this book is certainly situated within the opening at McLaren's work has created. McLaren turned to Marx at the height of the post-al era, and it was an uphill battle all the way. But, as Malott notes, the "fog and bigotry of anti-communism in the U.S. slowly dissipating." Indeed, the crises of capitalism and imperialism have aroused new mass movements in the U.S., from Occupy in 2011 to Black Lives Matter today. The campaign of Bernie Sanders has both capitalized on and furthered the acceptance of the word "socialism." It's now safe(r) for communists to come out of the shadows and boldly organize, and that is precisely what this manuscript represents.

Malott doesn't just formulate his program through critique, however, for he also points to several examples of organizations in the U.S. that have refused to cross class lines. Chief among these is the Black Panther Party, which clearly located itself within the context of the global class war. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was explicitly a Marxist-Leninist Party that saw itself as part of an international communist movement. Panthers distributed Mao's little red book at rallies, travelled to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and aligned themselves with all foreign anti-imperialist governments. They developed their own application of Marxism-Leninism particular to the contours of U.S. capitalism, and they did not follow orders from any foreign communist Party, but they militantly defended all socialist formations and all people's governments. A modern day example that he gives is the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has unflinchingly stood against imperialism.

While it is common to hear dismissals of the Soviet Union as "authoritarian" or "totalitarian," there are also the quite puzzling designations, "state socialist," or "state capitalist," or "deformed workers' state" that pop up. They are labels that intellectuals in capitalist countries put on socialist governments, because they know better. The way that one arrives at these designations is by drawing up what an ideal socialist society would look like and then comparing that to actually-existing socialism. As Malott carefully shows us, however, this is idealism pure and simple. A materialist analysis acknowledges that "the tension within the co-existence of the past, present, and future represents an unavoidable, dialectical reality that carries with it the contested curriculum of struggle." The Soviet Union, for example, erected socialism not out of advanced capitalism but out of feudalism. But socialism was constructed. It wasn't perfect, there were ebbs and flows, but capitalism was never restored. There were income differentials, sure, but there was no bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union, labor-power wasn't a commodity to be bought and sold, and the relations of production were not relations of exploitation (see Szymanski, 1979 for empirical proof of this).

When the wave of counterrevolutions in 1989-1991 overthrew socialist governments throughout Europe it was celebrated as an advance for democracy and freedom. And for the world's bourgeoisie, it was: they moved in and gobbled up the countries, making private all that was held publicly before. Isn't odd that, whenever privatization happens in the U.S. critical intellectuals decry it as "neoliberalism," but when it happens in formerly socialist states it is seen as "democratization?" Malott's analysis here cuts through this mystification, helping us see that these are just two sides of the same coin, two of global capital's strategies for accumulation. We have to resolutely oppose both.

The global proletariat today is more fragmented and dispersed as a result of this freedom and democracy. With the framework of the global class war that Malott provides we can more deeply appreciate the transformations that have taken place since 1991. There are two primary phases here. The first is an all-out imperialist offensive against all socialist and independent states and peoples. Without an effective counterweight against imperialism many independent and socialist states found themselves under the immediate threat of military and economic attack. The economic blockades on Cuba and the DPRK were immediately expanded and intensified. A new war was started against Iraq-first by military means, then by economic means, and then again by military means. Thousands of bombs were dropped on Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Kosovo to break up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, sending the different nations within the federation into turmoil and chaos. Panama was invaded and its President was kidnapped and taken hostage in a U.S. prison. This is the context in which the recent wars on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen must be seen (in fact, the war on Afghanistan was the first step in a new war against independent states in the Middle East). It is similar with the U.S.'s policies toward states such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Iran, Sudan, China, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, and Russia.

But we are in a new historical moment, and it is a vulnerable and exciting one. The U.S.-led imperialist offensive has waned; the era of uni-polar imperialism seems to be over and new counter-hegemonic blocs are forming. While the war on Iraq did overthrow the nationalist Ba'athist government, it wasn't as easy as the imperialists had imagined it. The Iraqi people waged a heroic insurgency against occupation forces, and the project of installing a new puppet government ultimately failed. In 2007-2008 the capitalist economic crisis shook the world. With the U.S. bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, a socialist tide gathered in Latin America, bringing socialist and anti-imperialist governments into power, most notably with the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. At the same time, independent powers like China and Brazil have emerged as real economic forces. True, these states are characterized by capitalist relations of production (although that's not 100 percent true in China's case), but they are not imperialist. China, in particular, has opened up an avenue for anti-imperialist and independent governments to emerge. Chinese economic relations with the Bolivarian revolution, for example, have been critical in Venezuela's independence from U.S. imperialism.

The emergence of a counter-hegemonic bloc has thrown imperialism into crisis. The strategy of installing puppet governments is no longer feasible, for these governments can easily abandon the U.S., as happened in Iraq. In the face of this reality, Dan Glazebrook (2013) argues that the strategy of imperialism today is to generate failed and weakened states. This is a compelling way in which to understand imperialist strategy in Syria since 2011. When protests against the Syrian government began that year, imperialism seized the opportunity to initiate regime change. The West had been funding opposition groups in Syria for some time, and these groups as well as radical Islamists quickly emerged as the opposition leadership (all progressive opposition groups quickly sided with the government, as they were satisfied with the reforms instituted-including a new constitution-and aware of the threat of imperialist intervention). But Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to wage war on the country. So for five years now the West has been waging a proxy war against Syria, and in the process has created the material basis for the emergence of Daesh-or the Islamic State in the Levant-and has facilitated weapons and money transfers to them and the al-Nusra Front, which is affiliated with al-Qaeda. Russian military intervention in Syria, which began on Sept. 30, 2015, has been essential in turning the tide of the war, allowing the Syrian Arab Army to liberate key cities from the terrorist forces. Of course, the U.S. doesn't want Daesh to get too powerful, and it can't have Daesh threatening U.S. geopolitical interests. The U.S. is flailing around trying to stay balanced on a tightrope it strung across the Middle East. If the U.S. were really interested in ending terrorism, it would immediately fall back and join in an alliance with Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah, the three groups that have actually been fighting Daesh and the terrorist groups for five years.

This is the state in which we find ourselves: imperialism is in crisis, a new counter-hegemonic bloc has formed, and social movements in the United States are gaining ground and becoming more and more militant. The veil of anti-communism is lifting. What are we to do? The question, as Malott puts it, is: "will education support the basic structures of capitalist hegemony and its domination over the Earth, or will it strive to uproot them?" This book provides us with an essential framework for understanding our history our present and, thus, for formulating the tasks ahead for critical educators. By drawing a clear class line through critical pedagogy he has offered up a new space in which to theorize and enact the possibilities of critical education.

References

Glazebrook, D. (2013). Divide and ruin: The West's imperial strategy in an age of crisis. San Francisco: Liberation Media.

Lenin, V.I. (1920/1965). Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: A popular outline. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.

Malott, C.S. (2016). History and education: Engaging the global class war. New York: Peter Lang.

Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital: A critical analysis of capitalist production (vol. 1). New York: International Publishers.

Syzmanski, A. (1979). Is the red flag flying? The political economy of the Soviet Union today. London: Zed Press.

Prisons are for Burning: On Abolition and Dystopia

By Neal Shirley

A century and a half ago, a huge social struggle was waged over the question of slavery on this continent. Slave uprisings and mass escapes were increasingly common, and conflicts internal to the ruling class over what kinds of colonial and industrial expansion should take place added to the tension. The American Civil War was a product of the state intervening in this struggle, and it resulted in new regimes of bondage and control.

The loophole in the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted," made this abundantly clear, and the politics of Reconstruction even more so. While occupying the former Confederacy, the Union Army itself enforced labor contracts by which Black people were often made to work for their former masters. Former slaves were evicted from lands they had taken over, industrial projects increased in number and scope, and the wage labor and convict lease systems favored by northern capitalists solved the labor problem created by the absence of slavery. Bondage was not destroyed by slavery's abolition - it was democratized.

Today, we witness an unprecedented renewal of the discourse of "abolition," now with the idealistic gaze firmly set upon the massive prison-industrial complex that has come to define our lives, in particular those of young men of color. This rhetorical framework, by which "radical" reforms, activism, and technological development will replace prisons and even policing, has emerged not just in the usual mish-mash of liberal and leftist scenes, but in the very heart of the capitalist State. Fueled by the financial collapse of 2008 and subsequent budget crises, everyone from Democratic hopefuls to right-wing judges can be heard sounding the call: We need to shrink prisons, move away from "mass incarceration," and develop "alternatives" to prison. All of a sudden, the president and his opposition all sound an awful lot like Angela Davis.

The vanguard of this political development is also a technological one: emergent technologies in population analytics, biometrics, genetic mapping, and computing systems suddenly make prison abolition a real possibility for 21st century state and capitalism. Take the booming technology of ankle bracelets, for example.

North Carolina has tripled the use of electronic monitors since 2011. California has placed 7,500 people on GPS ankle bracelets as part of a realignment program aimed to reduce prison populations. SuperCom, an Israeli-based Smart ID and electronic monitor producer, announced in early July 2014 that they were jumping full force into the US market, predicting this will be a $6 billion-a-year global industry by 2018. The praise singers of electronic monitoring are also re-surfacing. In late June 2014, high-profile blogger Dylan Matthews posted a story on Vox Media, headlined "Prisons are terrible and there's finally a way to get rid of them." He enthusiastically argued that the most "promising" alternative "fits on an ankle."

The techno-utopian vision here is boundless. One pair of enthusiasts even drafted a document, "Beyond the Bars," that envisions a world where "advanced risk modeling, geospatial analytics, smartphone technology, and principles from the study of human behavior" allow for a smartwatch to control the movement of entire populations.

Maybe this sounds like conspiracy theorist nonsense - like a scene from Hollywood's renewed obsession with dystopian settings - but think about all the developments we've already accepted into daily life that could make this totalizing reality possible: metal detectors at public schools, drug tests at public housing, breathalyzer machines in our cars, police body cameras, mass data collection via cell phones, GPS, halfway houses, community policing substations and permanent police checkpoints at the entrances to certain neighborhoods, city planning courses at universities, DNA mapping...The list is pretty endless, and it doesn't take a paranoid wingnut to start to understand how prisons might actually be abolished. Instead of prison being a discrete, physical place, a "state of exception" from normal life that houses only a small minority of the population, prison would become a nameless normality, something a plurality if not majority of people are interacting with, in some version, every day. Like slavery, imprisonment would not be destroyed - it would be democratized.

None of this goes to say that we shouldn't destroy prisons. Prison and police are the absolute enemy of all liberatory efforts in the 21 st century, by desire and necessity. But we would do well not to fall into the same limitations as did slavery's critics in the antebellum United States. However broad its proponents may declare their concerns to be, prison abolitionism, in its name, scope, and vision, is primarily limited to reforming one aspect of domination and oppression in this society, not destroying that form of control. And it offers the state a crucial escape route through already existent strategies and technologies of profit, punishment, and control.

We would do better to reject every reform and technological solution offered by the economy, confront rather than accept the gradualism of activist policy makers, and participate uncompromisingly in active revolt wherever it occurs. Developing our own communities of care and solidarity as we rebel against the world around us, offers the only real "alternative to prison." As a discourse, "abolition" has immediate appeal, but the fruit it will most likely bear can already be seen in the reflection of a body camera or heard in the quiet beeping of an ankle bracelet.

This was originally published at Mask Magazine.

Lying Down On the Job: The Ableist, Racist, Classist Underpinnings of 'Laziness'

By Lindsey Weedston

Hello, I'm a lazy Millennial.

In other words, I'm from a generation that has worked more hours for less money than any generation before me, but occasionally I eat a granola bar for breakfast instead of pouring myself a bowl of cereal. According to some, including many writers of online thinkpieces, that's enough to make me "lazy."

But the problem isn't me, or young people in general, or any group that's historically been decried for its idleness. Like Millennials, groups that are called "lazy" are often the hardest-working people around. They're just subject to ableism, racism, classism, and other bigotry that codes exploitation or exhaustion as "unwillingness to work."

I myself have had a very confusing relationship with "laziness" from a young age, often being called "lazy" for enjoying reading and video games by the same parents who praised me for always getting my homework done on time.

Needless to say, I became rather confused about the quality of my work ethic. Was I lazy or not? In my teens, I developed an anxiety disorder and a perfectionism that made academic shirking impossible, but the constant state of worry disrupted my sleep and left me so exhausted that I would often come home from school and go straight to bed for a nap. Sometimes, all I could do was lay in bed, awake, ruminating on everything I could possibly worry about.

But because I was in bed, this was called "laziness."

In adulthood, I encountered yet more inconsistencies about what it meant to be "lazy." Like many young adults, I started out working in the food and customer service industries, before I eventually got a job as a content writer for a digital marketing company.

I worked so little at that office job, I couldn't believe it. I could spend multiple hours each day scrolling through Tumblr or playing on social media. My "work" time involved reading articles vaguely related to my work-mostly because there wasn't much work for me to do. Compared to being on my feet all day, being expected to work every moment on the clock, it was nothing.

I worked three times as hard at my food and customer service jobs as I did at any of my digital marketing positions. And yet contemptuous thinkpiecers keep on describing people who work in those industries as "lazy." Why don't you get a REAL job? Like reading Tumblr while sitting at a desk, instead of busting your ass at McDonald's.

According to Dr. Alison Munoff, a licensed clinical psychologist, "laziness" is nothing more than a value judgement.

"'Laziness' is not a personality trait, it is simply a matter of a lack of proper motivation and reinforcement, as it is a behavioral pattern rather than a part of who we are," says Dr. Munoff. "The ability to actively approach a task in a time-effective manner changes depending on the task and its value in our lives. For example, in a situation of obtaining limited resources, people find themselves quite motivated and resourceful, meaning that this task is simply a priority based on its value and necessity, and has little to do with someone's personality. Unfortunately I find that when asked about the first time people were told they were being 'lazy,' it was from a parent or caregiver who was unsuccessfully attempting to motivate the child without a good understanding of the way this idea would be carried forward."

In nature, animals spend a lot of their time being idle. Most of the footage shot of big cats like lions are of them lazing around. Part of this is because many of them are nocturnal, but it's also because animals will hunt, forage, and eat until they're full, and then most of the rest of their time is spent conserving energy. Laying around doing pretty much nothing is completely natural. It's adaptive. Yet laziness has this negative connotation in many human societies. And that negative connotation is often deployed in ableist, racist, and classist ways.

Basically every race of color has been called "lazy" by white people in the U.S. at one time or another. This is completely absurd considering the fact that people of color built this nation with their bare hands. From the Chinese immigrants building our railroads to our entire economy being built on the backs of black slaves, the United States owes everything to exploited, underpaid, and incredibly hard-working people of color.

Today, we can all enjoy reasonably priced produce thanks to the many exploited Latin undocumented immigrant workers picking our fruit and vegetables-labor that is so intensive that we "non-lazy" white people simply can't handle it. And let's not forget that all of this land was stolen from the Indigenous tribes that were here before we floated over and laid claim to it all. Isn't stealing other people's hard work supposed to be lazy?

Or is it just that it's easier to call people lazy than admit that you exploited them?

Even if you're not racist, you've probably used the idea of laziness in a way that hurts a lot of people. I still struggle with an anxiety disorder and go through bouts of depression, and a lot of what's involved in these mental illnesses looks like what people call "laziness." Depression saps your energy and makes everything seem pointless. Anxiety is paralyzing, making even some of the simplest tasks (like calling people on the phone) seem daunting, so I avoid them.

Combine the two and you've got me huddled into a ball on the bed, unable to do anything but listen to Netflix playing in the background. It looks like laziness, but I'm actually engaged in an exhausting war in my own head. Anxiety is like pushing a giant boulder in front of you wherever you go, and depression is like dragging a giant boulder attached to your legs by chains.

People with physical illness and disability are also prone to being accused of laziness, especially if that illness or disability is not visible to others. There are people who are nearly constantly in pain or constantly fatigued, but you would never know by looking at them. These individuals work much harder than able-bodied and "healthy" people. Not only do they often have to work to survive because disability payments (if they can get them) are not nearly enough, they have to navigate a world that caters to able-bodied people, and they have to navigate that world while their bodies work against them. But article after article decries the "laziness" of people who use motorized carts or take elevators up one floor instead of using the stairs, not for a second thinking that there are people who wouldn't be able to shop or go up floors at all without these "conveniences."

It's not just articles, either. Politicians demonize people who are too sick or disabled to work, calling them "lazy" as justification for taking away the meager allowance our government gives them-which is not enough to live on, let alone cover medical bills. That ableism intersects with classism, with people assuming that those living in poverty or on welfare must be too lazy to go to school or get a better job. Racism shows its face here, as well, particularly in the myth of the "welfare queen." And the hatred leveled at fat individuals under the guise of thinking them "lazy" can be very intense.

It's easier to think of someone as "lazy" than to face the fact that school costs too much, that better jobs are inaccessible, that childcare is unaffordable, that people are forced to work so hard for so little that there's no way they could have enough energy to attempt schooling or finding better work, and that what we give to people who can't work is insufficient to the point of being shameful. I could say that calling people lazy is, in itself, lazy, but it's not just an intellectual shortcut. It's a defense mechanism.

Everyone has a finite amount of energy. Some of us have greater drains on our pool of energy than others, whether it comes from the stress of racial microaggressions, the stress of poverty, or mental or physical illness. Needing more time to recover isn't laziness. Having less time or energy to make breakfast than the previous generation isn't laziness. When you take a second to look into the reasons behind the behavior, you'll never end up finding laziness. Because laziness isn't real.

This was originally published at The Establishment.

Activism or Revolution?: Deciphering Modern Forms of Resistance

By Kevin Bailey

Here in the United States, and the global North in general, there is a lack of clarity regarding activism and revolutionary activity, in fact one is often confused for the other. This is part and parcel of our post-modern condition in which every action, no matter how small, has the intrinsic property of being in and of itself a revolutionary act simply by rejecting dominant cultural narratives or withdrawing from participation in politics, for example. Lifestyle choices like veganism, ethical consumerism, buying fair-trade, or a simple rejection of politics in general, have become substitutes for a political line in many circles on the Left. A negation is thus inverted into a positive affirmation in which the mere act of verbal rejection, or non-participation, or withdrawal/retreat is treated as a substantive revolutionary act. Furthermore, what matters is one's membership to a micro-community, one's inward beliefs and values, and one's outward appearance and individual actions. There is no emphasis on a political and individual transformation in connection to a larger collectivity struggling for general emancipation. That is not to neglect the importance of smaller communities that often do serve the important function of providing personal assistance, empowerment, and support networks to marginalized communities, but rather, that these variants of lifestylism or micro-communities, if self-isoloated and not linked up to a broad emancipatory struggle, are not revolutionary but separatist. And not only that, but as de-politicized and isolated phenomena they can never be revolutionary, only expressions of petty-bourgeois individualism thoroughly tinged with accommodationist leanings towards bourgeois society, or a general apathy or cynicism towards mass struggle and politics.

Of course this notion of a withdrawal, or separation, from political life and struggle, to a retreat into the confines of a self-isolated community mirrors the transformation of bourgeois democracy in the global North from traditional social democratic models of supposedly inclusivist participation to the "low intensity" democracy of neoliberalism. With the prevalence of micro-struggles and a general receding of participatory channels for democratic expression as the State is literally, and quite physically, deconstructed, the notion of activism itself has been transformed. Previously what it meant to be an activist was someone who had been transformed politically, either through a long struggle or through a "revelatory" event (think of the young people who were radicalized by seeing the mass killings in Vietnam on television), and then submerged themselves in the stream of the mass movements and participated in the class struggle for definite political ends. Now activism has become a rejection of political transformation, because it is a rejection of the politicization of things themselves, it is the anti-politics.

Anyone who has witnessed a picket, protest, or rally in recent decades has probably witnessed the following: people standing around holding signs with vague slogans devoid of political content, a few chants lazily cast skyward, and a few raised fists as people march, or even worse, attendees standing silently while listening to some half-dead academic speak on the issue of the day. Of course after all of this is said and done we can wash our hands of guilt, since we did something, we acted, (after all, doing something is better than nothing, right?), and that makes us better than those who did nothing or are ignorant of our cause. But that's the problem, activists have become so satisfied with doing something that they have forgotten to stop and ask the "whys" and the "whats" of that something. Asking that question, which was asked by the activists that came before us, leads straight towards a universalization of struggle, away from separatism and towards political transformation. It leads to class struggle. And why does it lead there? Because a collective conceptualization of your struggle necessitates you grappling with your struggle's relation to all other struggles. Its recognition is anathema to separatism, apathy, cynicism, and identity politics, it leads to a general theorization of a linking up of seemingly disparate micro-struggles, to the recognition of their role in the mass struggle, which in our capitalist world is the class struggle.

Counter to activism, revolutionary activity requires politicization, it requires the revolutionizing of an individual. To most students, thoroughly ingrained with petty-bourgeois ideology, the notion of the necessity of transformation and of incorporating one's own personal or community struggles into a larger struggle screams of an oppressive totalization and marginalization. However, disregarding the rejection in toto of all totalities as being a totalization itself, the notion that one's own struggles have to take a subordinate role, or backseat, to some other issue is missing the point, as well as implicitly privileging one's own struggle over other's. A revolutionary struggle, unlike an activist struggle, is totalizing in that it is the sum total of all oppressed people's struggles for liberation linked and forged through direct experience. This is not a negative as the post-modernist dread of totalization would have us believe, it is a positive. And it is a positive because mass revolutionary, not activist, struggles have led to the liberation of hundreds of millions of people historically (the revolutions in Russia and China freed over 600 million people, across both countries, from the yoke of capitalism, semi-feudalism, and imperialism). Yet, what has the activist line produced? Micro-struggles that lead to gradual reform measures to better the lot of a particular oppressed group while another oppressed group is ignored, until of course their own micro-struggle emerges to lessen their oppression (because it would be "oppressive" or "totalizing" if these two struggles were linked since one is not a direct member of the other's oppressed community or group).

In my own organization, as well as countless others, there is a contradiction between an activist line and a revolutionary line. Or, more specifically, between the line expressing a desire for a depoliticized and loose grouping that wishes to do nothing more than protest this or that, and the line of those who wish to politicize themselves and the masses and march forward towards organizing and building for collective liberation. This activist line must be struggled against, and those who uphold it must be won over to the revolutionary line and be convinced of the necessity of its application. While activism bills itself as the most revolutionary trend, in that it rejects politicization and mass struggle in favor of micro-struggles, inward looking personal development, and depoliticized spaces, it is thoroughly anti-revolutionary. Not only because it opposes the revolutionary line elaborated on here, but because it cannot lead towards a liberation from the oppression that it seeks to end by the methods it employs. While the activist Left in Western Europe and North America continues to naval gaze and search for anti-political solutions to political problems, revolutionaries in India, Turkey, Afghanistan, and the Philippines are seeking to storm heaven, to capture State power and free millions from the chains of capitalism, imperialism, patriarchal oppression, and semi-feudal conditions. They are revolutionaries, not activists.

We must grapple with the fact that our own approach has produced nothing more than a few isolated apparent victories that have done nothing more than ameliorate our existing conditions. We have rejected politics in favor of being cynical or apathetic, we have discarded parties and organization in favor of disunity and a deified decentralization, we have unspokenly privileged our own struggle over those of others, and we have done all of this as the State and capitalism continue their assault on us. We have voluntarily dismantled our own power, our own defense, in the face of the neoliberal offensive and called it liberation. We were wrong, activism was wrong, and it has proven to be a dead end. It may not be easy for many of today's activists to admit this, but it is a political necessity to self-criticize and transform oneself politically in the service of the masses. It's time to come out of the ivory towers, come out of the hermetically sealed safe spaces, come out of our own self-imposed ideological and political exile and step into the class struggle and serve the people. It's time to integrate ourselves with the masses and cast aside petty-bourgeois illusions of separatism, apathy, and cynicism and say that we won't settle for anything less than total emancipation and a destruction of the old society through our collective power. Most importantly, it's time to become a revolutionary in the service of the oppressed peoples, to become more than just the chanter or sign holder that is the activist, to transform oneself politically to fight for liberation. To this I say down with activism, and up with revolution.

This piece was originally published at Necessity and Freedom.

The 50th Anniversary of the Meredith March Against Fear

By L. Eljeer Hawkins

"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he is not fit to live."

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As the sun sets upon the presidency of the first black President, Barack Hussein Obama, and the emergence of a powerful life-affirming banner, Black Lives Matter (BLM). It was June 5, 1966 that the last great march of the civil rights era took place, the Meredith March Against Fear, which highlighted the deep fissures in the movement politically, generationally, and organizationally. Let's examine the anatomy of the march and its lasting and troubled legacy.

Blood on Highway 51

On October 1, 1962, James Howard Meredith became the first black student to attend the previously segregated University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), marking another great victory for the civil rights movement. James Meredith a former enlisted man in the air force, a defiant race man who walked to his beat politically and morally. Meredith had a contentious and combative relationship with the traditional civil rights leadership and organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). For years, Meredith hinted at a march from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to provide a new type of leadership and counter balance the doctrine of non-violence and subservience to white supremacy.

Following the legalistic victories and encouraging developments under President Lyndon B. Johnson - the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the march from Selma to Montgomery - the Civil Rights movement was facing a defining moment as the United States was escalating its military operations in Vietnam while, at the same time, Johnson introduced the Civil Rights Bill to Congress in 1966. The great society and anti-poverty programs couldn't quell the civil unrest in some urban centers like Harlem and Watts, and a growing militant segment of black youth. This political and cultural radicalization was epitomized by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) under the leadership of newly elected chairperson and Howard University student, Stokely Carmichael, and Floyd McKissick of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

On June 5, 1966, Meredith set out to begin his lone sojourn; a no-no within the highly organized and choreographed civil rights movement. Meredith would be accompanied by 4 or 5 others in the scorching sun and into the deep south to restore black manhood and respect. The state of Mississippi has a bloody, violent history rooted in slavery and its 1861 Southern secession from the Union. After the end of the radical Reconstruction Era, it was the site of some of the most horrific events faced by the black working class and poor under Jim and Jane Crow: the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955; the assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in 1963; and the murder of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney in 1964.

On June 6, Meredith faced impending danger from the white racists standing alongside the highway jeering and cursing as black people stood proudly in Meredith's March against Fear. Like a thunderbolt, several shots pierced the air and hit Meredith directly. Once again blood was spilled in the Magnolia state of notorious hate.

The Big Six in Mississippi

As news of Meredith's shooting and possible death spread like wildfire across the country, the new national director of CORE, Floyd McKissick, asserted the importance of continuing the march as Meredith lay in a hospital bed. Leading civil rights leaders like Dr. King and organizations like SNCC agreed to resume the journey despite differences from NAACP and the National Urban League. Historically, the Civil Rights movement's campaigns of desegregation and voting rights had a clear and direct mission that would force the national government to intervene and pass groundbreaking legislation to end Jim and Jane Crow. The March against Fear didn't have a stated goal or mission, and this made the march a defining moment for the movement and its organizations.

The only civil rights organization that had any organizing roots in Mississippi was SNCC. SNCC played a very crucial role in the battles to desegregate the Mississippi Democratic Party, and they helped to co-found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) that challenged the the selected Mississippi Democratic Party delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. At this convention, President Johnson and Democratic Party leadership refused to recognize Fannie Lou Hamer and the other MFDP delegates. As Cleveland Seller, program director for SNCC, would explain, "We left Atlantic City with the knowledge that the movement had turned into something else. After Atlantic City, our struggle was not for civil rights, but for liberation." (Hassan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt, p.56)

The work of SNCC and local activists in Lowndes County combined black power politics, grassroots organizing, political education, and the construction of an independent black working-class organization, the LCFO - the original "Black Panther Party." The LCFO and the Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP) put forward an alternative - organizationally, programmatically, and ideologically - to the traditional civil rights organizations' reformist approach, while challenging the Democratic Party in the county.

The March Against Fear had the ingredients of a great debate about the direction of the movement, with the rise of black nationalist ideas, rejection of white liberal involvement, the relevance of non-violent civil disobedience tactics, and reformist politics in the face of an enormous crisis facing the Johnson administration. The debate would be recorded and filmed as Dr. King and Stokely Carmichael marching along the highway engaged in a friendly, but tense, back and forth about the tactic of non-violence and the beloved community in the face of white racist terrorism.

What awaited the marchers in Mississippi was a concrete wall of hate, callous indifference, and terror punctuated by the white political and economic establishment in the Democratic party, the Citizens' Council, which was founded after the 1954 Brown vs. Education decision and boasted over 100,000 members throughout Mississippi and the South. Terror organizations like the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR) and the dastardly Ku Klux Klan rounded out the reality facing marchers. The hatred and social control of black workers and poor under Jim and Jane Crow weren't confined to race, but ideas and organizing as well. The system of Jim and Jane Crow violently opposed labor union organizing, communists, and black and white solidarity campaigns.

The reality of black life in Mississippi stamped the urgency and symbolic nature of the March Against Fear as many were living through deep levels of poverty, displacement, and structural racism. In many ways, it fit in perfectly with Dr. King's Chicago project, which highlighted poverty and housing discrimination in the urban north. Dr. King was tying the threads of racism, poverty, and capitalism.

A new political paradigm emerged for SNCC as Stokely Carmichael and young people were inspired by figures like Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, Deacons for Defense, anticolonialism struggles in the so-called third world, and a diasporic racial consciousness. The dashed dreams and hopes of post-world War II economic prosperity and democracy for black youth and workers were too much to bear. The long hot summers of law enforcement terrorism, endemic poverty, and betrayal of reformism and liberalism went up in flames as multiple cities burned to decry the consistent criminal governmental neglect at both the federal and city levels. The time bomb that shined a light on the dubious political motives of the liberal establishment was Assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action," a report that placed the blame for poverty and ineptitude on the disintegration of the black family and absence of the black father in the household.

The banner and rallying cry of Black Power was articulated in every urban center before it was detonated in Mississippi during the March Against Fear. Black Power caused a significate debate and split within the movement as well as the presence of the Deacons for Defense, a black clandestine armed self- defense organization comprising of black veterans of the military and union activists founded in Louisiana.

The March on its Final Leg

The March against Fear would conclude on June 26, 1966, with a healed James Meredith. A march that set in motion the next stage of the black freedom movement as the coalition politics which defined the civil rights movement would collapse under the weight of political, ideological, and organizational differences, and historical events like the War in Vietnam. The marchers would face the brutal reality of state violence unleashed by the Mississippi Highway Patrol and indifference by President Johnson to the March as the 1966 Civil Rights bill failed in Congress.

The march did achieve significant gains particularly in the context of Mississippi politics. As author Aram Goudsouzian states, "Black people defied Jim Crow's culture of intimidation by marching. Moreover, 4,077 African Americans registered to vote in the counties along the route. Federal examiners registered 1,422, and county clerks performed the rest. Approximately 1,200 registered in Grenada County, where a large crowd had already attended the first meeting of the Grenada County Movement." (Aram Goudsouzian, Down To The Crossroads Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear, p.246)

The rise and prominence of the black power era would usher in a significant phase in the movement and a violent response by American capitalism under the Counter Intelligence Progam (Cointelpro), which sought to prevent the development of a unified radical movement and leadership. Cointelpro developed under the guidance of FBI chief, J.Edgar Hoover, and was a continuation of the Palmer raids of the early 1900s and the McCarthy witch-hunts of the late 40s and early 50s to neutralize the movements of resistance against U.S. capital at home and abroad.

The Lessons For Today

The March Against Fear reminds us of the stark reality of the ever present need to challenge racism, white supremacy, and capitalism. In the 50 years since the March, we have witnessed the evisceration of the traditional organizations of the black freedom movement; our leaders co-opted, publicly assassinated or imprisoned as the system of profit and destruction continues. The Black Lives Matter banner is going through a critical phase of development and debate as the forces of corporate America and the liberal establishment attempt to co-opt and corral this nascent movement by criminalizing grassroots BLM activists daily. The BLM banner is soaked in identity politics, which I firmly believe is the first phase of one's political awakening under a system of degradation and alienation. But, as black power became a response to the failings of American capitalism and democracy by rejecting reformism and white liberalism, a political and organizational mistake was made refusing and alienating good and dedicated activists who were 'white casted' out to organize in their "communities." In the face of a disjointed working class struggle and consciousness today against capitalism and racism, those within the BLM banner would be politically inclined to follow suit as black power activists did many years ago with a view engaging in this struggle by organizing black folks exclusively. We must challenge all forms of co-optation, sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia in our movement. Only through honest and forthright political discussion and debate on those points can our movement move forward and develop coherent ideas, program, demands, and strategy to challenge capitalism and racism.

The final years of Dr.King's political work - the Chicago project, Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam, Poor People's Campaign, and Memphis sanitation workers strike - provide a historical framework on how to take our struggle forward within 21st century political, economic, and social conditions. Dr. King at the end of his life influenced by events began to challenge the contours of the empire at home and abroad.

The Meredith March Against Fear stands as a powerful lesson for activists today as we aim to dismantle the edifice of capitalism and racism.

Eljeer Hawkins is a community and anti-war activist who was born and raised in Harlem, New York. He has been a member of Socialist Alternative/CWI for 21 years. Eljeer is a former shop steward with Teamsters local 851 and former member of SEIU 1199, and is currently a non-union healthcare worker in New York City. He regularly contributes to Socialist Alternative Newspaper and socialistworld.net on race, criminal justice, and the historic black freedom movement. Eljeer has lectured at Harvard University, Hunter College, Oberlin College, and the University of Toronto. Eljeer can be reached at eljeer123@gmail.com or at http://www.greatblackspeakers.com/author/eljeerhawkins/.

Revolutionary Shop Stewards and Workers Councils in the German Revolution

By Kevin Van Meter

The following is a review essay of Ralf Hoffrogge's Historical Materialism Series book Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement .

If Ralf Hoffrogge were writing within an American context rather than a German one, he would be situated between two important developments in the United States. A new cohort of social movement historians is addressing the gaps in anarchist, anti-authoritarian, and left-communist historiography. Neighboring this is a resurgence of interest in workers' councils historically and in the contemporary period. With the recent translation and subsequent publication of Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard M üller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement in two editions, Hoffrogge enters this discourse with a extremely detailed political biography of a nearly unknown militant whose finest years coincided with the German Revolution and workers' council movement of 1918. Communists of various stripes have laid claim to Rosa Luxemburg and anarchists to Gustav Landauer, both murdered as the revolution was suppressed with the latter yelling "to think you are human" as he was stomped to death. Council communists and autonomists have been gifted Richard Müller, who was forgotten in part because he survived.

Revolutions often begin in desertion: sailors, not shop stewards, led the German uprisings of 1918. The end of the Great War steered into the Russian Revolution with soldiers, worn through their boots, joining upheavals rather than returning to their old lives; resulting in the Bolshevik government of October 1917. A year later on October 29th, in a port city 250 miles northwest from Berlin, seamen rebelled, forming sailors councils that later joined with those of workers. Rebellions led by sailors quickly spread across the coast. By November 9th, workers in Berlin left the factories, though daily meetings and shop floor deliberations had begun amongst various revolutionary factions as early as the 2nd. German sailors and workers joined Russians, Greeks, Irish, Mexicans, Egyptians, and Poles as revolutions, often incorporating councils modeled on Russian soviets, emerged across the planet. The Red Scare in the United States prevented circulation of struggles to the American context. Elsewhere in Germany, the Bavarian Council Republic arose November 7th, though it would be defeated electorally in January 1919 with the left parties and radicals pushed out of the government.

There was a constellation of left parties and organizations in Germany leading up to the revolution. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) had sought a parliamentary avenue to repair the country following economic crises and war; winning the war was viewed as a step toward parliamentary democracy. Karl Liebknecht, like Luxemburg (whom he was eventually killed alongside), was expelled from the SPD due to his antiwar agenda, resulting in the formation of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). The Spartacus League, led by Liebknecht and Luxemburg, initially functioned as the left wing of of the SPD before merging with the USPD as they increasingly sought revolution through parliamentary means using the vehicle of the workers' councils. Then the Spartacists founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in December 1918. After the revolution of November they attempted to consolidate the left wing of the workers movement and bring the workers' councils and shop stewards under their auspices. Launching their own ill-fated insurrection on January 4th, in what is now referred to as the Spartacist uprising, the KPD was suppressed on the 19th; the arrest and execution of its leadership quickly followed. Meanwhile, outside of these shifting allegiances and political wrangling, the sailors and workers' councils persisted as the democratic, organizational expression of working-class abilities and needs.

As with Antonio Gramsci, Liebknecht and Luxemburg enter into the historical record. What is less recognized is how these party formations sought to capture the democratic and revolutionary impulses of the councils in order to form a workers' state. Müller and the shop stewards stood in opposition to these attempts, even as they participated in governing bodies. There is a fundamental political disagreement here. With regard to the shop stewards, Hoffrogge writes, "Their forum was the factory and their form of political action was the general strike" (p. 62). As a young unionist Müller struck out against the imposition of Taylorism. He was to go from a lathe operator to become the temporary head of state for the revolutionary republic. Meanwhile, as a delegate he was the workers' representative in the daily operations of the revolution. Reflecting on Müller's views, Hoffogge offers,

The councils were the original representation of the working class. In the eyes of his opponents, the mass mobilization, which turned every street and factory into a parliament, was 'pure anarchy,' the opposite of politics. The councils' potential for a different structure of representation was opposed and suppressed by the coalition of traditional elites purporting to represent the 'people' (p. 91).

Müller served as workers' council delegate to the Executive Council of the Council of People's Deputies, the governing body of the councils and hence post-revolutionary Berlin. His position as chair meant he was in charge of the Council and in turn the government. The experiment of the Executive Council was to be short-lived since on December 16th the machinery of state was subsumed under the Central Council; the Executive Council, with its direct relationships to sailors and workers' councils, was jettisoned. These maneuvers from above would mark the decline of the November Revolution. Before a year had past, in August 1919, the constitution that would become the guiding document of the Weimer Republic was instituted. Nevertheless workers in central Germany launched rebellions during March 1921 and again in Hamburg throughout October 1923. With the end of the Hamburg uprising the romance of the Germany Revolution was extinguished.

Hoffrogge details the process of revolutionary upheaval, followed by the innumerable ways it disintegrated. Hoffrogge observes that workers' councils, drawing on Müller's own writing of 1913, "had to work out collective practices, like refusal of overtime or slow-downs, gradually and painstakingly" (p. 18). These machinations do not translate into parliamentary politics. Two key political lessons result. First, as delegates and members of councils, ordinary workers are ill-equipped to jostle with party bureaucrats and professional politicians in government bodies. In fact, it is not only the structural incorporation of workers' councils into the government that lead to their defeat. The very day-to-day mechanisms of government dominated by the party and politicians erode the democratic impulses of delegates while replacing their spontaneous enthusiasm with proceduralism. As a result, and secondly, preparing for governing post-revolutionary conditions is an important area for future theorization and organizing. However, Hoffrogge has produced an intellectual history not a genealogy or strategic manual for potential workers' councils. The book suffers for lack of a proper introduction and overview for those unfamiliar with the German Revolution. The first such summary appears in chapter five. Many readers will have trouble acclimating to the context Müller was operating within.

There are two ways to read Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: as a social movement history or as a biography. Readers looking for the former will stop at chapter nine and forgo the final three chapters, which address Müller's developments after leaving politics. But for those looking for the arc that is a political life will discover Hoffrogge's excruciatingly detailed account of the lathe operator who was to become temporary head of the German Republic before "returning to obscurity" (p. 230).

Read as a social movement history, Hoffrogge joins the resurgence of interest in workers' councils following the 2008 planetary economic crisis. Edited collections, including, Ours to Master and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present (where Hoffrogge's writing on Müller first appeared in English), New Forms of Worker Organizing: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism, and An Alternative Labor History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy have reintroduced the concept of the workers' council to contemporary labor organizers, although, a new edition of labor historian Peter Rachleff's out-of-print Marxism and Council Communism would provide a historical overview of these ideas and practices. As social movement scholars, Hoffroge and others will have to contend with the short twentieth century where workers' councils appeared as part of revolutionary upheavals. When considered chronologically, these include: Russia, Poland, Germany, Italy, Ireland, China, Spain, Hungary, France, Chile, and Iran. Did what began in 1905 conclude in 1978?

While Hoffrogge addresses missing historiography, I am afraid that the specificity of the subject matter - Müller, shop stewards, Berlin in 1918 - will draw readers away from the considerable details of day-to-day organizing and operations of workers' councils. Admittedly this is a criticism of the reader rather than the author. The Brill edition is a pricy hardback suitable for academic libraries. Historical Materialism has corrected this initial error by providing a softcover version at just over the cost of buying a round of bier for Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Landauer, and Müller.

Hoffrogge, Ralf. Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard M üller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement. Joseph Keady, trans. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2015. 253 pp. $28.00 softcover. ISBN 978-16-08-46550-7; and, Leiden & Boston: Brill. 2015. 253 pp. $141.00 hardback. ISBN 978-90-04-21921-2.

Bamboozled: On African Americans and Feminists Casting Their Votes for Hillary Clinton

By Cherise Charleswell

Though the decision should have been an easy one to make, a "no brainer", one that could be made while walking and chewing gum at the same time, African Americans seem to be grappling with the decision of whom they should be casting their vote for during the 2016 Democratic primaries. And, in Southern states such as North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, and Florida, which have large African American populations , they have voted in favor of Hillary Clinton . Clinton's campaign relies heavily on this support from African Americans, and she was able to obtain this support because she carries a name that has a great deal of recognition from voters who jokingly called her husband "the First Black President" during the 1990s, before Hillary ironically ran against the man who would go on to actually become the first elected Black president of the United States.

Name recognition and a variety of other factors, including the following, helped to garner Clinton the Black vote:

• The fact that Clinton's campaign had more money and thus more resources to influence voters.

• Bernie Sanders, although having a long and illustrious career in Washington DC, was an independent Senator from Vermont, a state that does not have a sizable, or notable African American population; and thus he seemed to be an unknown to the community.

• The explicit media bias, that seems to provide Clinton's campaign with far more coverage than Sanders. More about thathere and here.

• Clinton secured the endorsement of visible and prominent African Americans including: Congresswoman Maxine Waters - a super delegate, Kerry Washington, and even Shondra Rhimes.

• Americans, including Black Americans simply have a short-term memory when it comes to historical events and their contemporary consequences; and this includes Clinton's stance (including flip-flopping) and previously advocacy on issues such as the XL pipeline, fracking, the Trans Pacific Trade Agreement (TPP), the Iraq War; as well as the Defense of Marriage Act, Don't Ask Don't Tell, as well as welfare reform, which has contributed to many Americans plummeting into extreme poverty. More on thathere and here .

What makes this extremely disheartening is the fact that Clinton is running against a democratic socialist who speaks about bringing about a political revolution that includes universal healthcare, a living wage, environmental protections, ending rampant Wall Street greed, removing moneyed interest from the political process, and dismantling the prison-industrial complex; some of the very issues that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. championed at the end of his life when he professed to Harry Belafonte during their last conversation that he had come upon something that disturbed him deeply:

"We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I've come to believe we're integrating into a burning house."

He continued, "I'm afraid that America may be losing what moral vision she may have had," he answered. ….And I'm afraid that even as we integrate, we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Until we commit ourselves to ensuring that the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears at the soul of this nation."

So, why should have the decision been easy to make?

The first response would be the images of Bernie Sanders marching alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1965 march in Selma, Alabama. The other would be the image of Sanders handcuffed alongside a Black woman, as they were both taking part in protests for civil and human rights. Despite this history, civil rights activist and longtime Congressman, John Lewis, was quick to comment that he didn't know Bernie Sanders and had never met him, initially diminishing Sanders' credibility. However, Lewis would have to later recant his statement due to that photo at the 1965 March, where a young Bernie Sanders is seen standing just a few feet behind John Lewis.

The contrast between Sanders' activism and Clinton's conservative background as a Young Republican and Goldwater Girl is worth noting. When doing so, we realize that Sanders is the candidate who has a long history of protesting, calling out, and actively fighting against social-racial-injustice and economic inequality. And his political record, including his condemnation of the aggressive actions of Israel against the Palestinian in Gaza, despite himself being Jewish, demonstrates a moral compass that is often missing among mainstream political candidates. Speaking out against issues is not new to him, so it's reasonable to assume that such statements are much more than a form of pandering. There is actually numerous videos and footage of Sanders speaking about these exact same issues and points that he has been raising in the current presidential race many years prior. His principles have not changed over the past 30 years.

Contrast this to Hillary's various changing positions and claims that she has "evolved on a number of social issues," and is indeed a Progressive. In response to this, political pundits have argued that the campaign direction and message of the Sanders campaign simply has forced Clinton to shift her politics to the left, and that she is essentially "parroting" many of Sanders' arguments to gain support from the progressive Left. Saturday Night Live actually aired a skit that depicted actress Kate McKinnon, as Hillary Clinton, showing her morph into Bernie Sanders. Of course the transformation would only be temporary, because the elected candidate Clinton would readily regress back into a Moderate-Conservative politician. One who would expect us to continue to wait for urgently needed social-economic reforms, such as the introduction of Universal HealthCare. While she refers to Sanders' support of single-payer universal healthcare as being "too ambitious," he and other Progressives, activists, public health leaders, and organizations such as Physician for a National Health Program remind us of the following realities:

• Those living in the United States of America pay vastly more in health care expenditures than other countries, particularly post-industrial nations, and receive the poorest or most limited care; or return on their investment. Essentially, Americans are paying more in premiums, copays, direct fees, etc. and getting less.

• This high cost of access to health care services continues to causes Americans to go into bankruptcy, something that is unheard of in other post-industrial nations.

• The barriers to quality health care (as well as nutritious food and other factors) also play a factor in the United States having unusually high infant mortality rates, particularly among African American women.

• Although a step in the right direction, the Affordable Care Act, which Hillary always alludes to, in its current state simply has not gone far enough to ameliorate health care access and quality of care problems in the United States.

When considering all of this, and the fact that marginalized populations (especially African Americans) disproportionately suffer the highest rates of infant mortality and chronic diseases, the position that the country needs to continue to wait, postpone, or not even consider a more economically-sound universal healthcare system should have seemed preposterous to African American voters, as well as feminists who claim to be concerned about reproductive justice, women's health, and so on. Those advocating for social change should not be supporting the candidate who simply says WAIT; and when it comes to that $15 hour national minimum wage, do not forget that Hillary also would like us to WAIT. Consider that and then ponder Malcolm X's statements made during his 1964 "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech:

"So it's the ballot or the bullet. Today our people can see that we're faced with a government conspiracy. This government has failed us. The senators who are filibustering concerning your and my rights, that's the government. Don't say it's Southern senators. This is the government; this is a government filibuster. It's not a segregationist filibuster. It's a government filibuster. Any kind of activity that takes place on the floor of the Congress or the Senate, it's the government. Any kind of dilly-dallying, that's the government. Any kind of pussy-footing, that's the government. Any kind of act that's designed to delay or deprive you and me right now of getting full rights, that's the government that's responsible. And any time you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress."

Thus, those who casted their votes for Clinton during the 2016 Primaries were again bamboozled by these performances and antics, including pandering comments abouthot sauce and trying out Boba ice tea, or "bubble tea." The truth of the matter is that Hillary has had an extensive career in politics, and during this time her record has been consistent with that of a Conservative or Moderate-Conservative. Ultimately, her voting record provides the "receipts" needed to determine whether one should support her candidacy.

While looking up a candidate's voting record, or even given it some thought, does require a small commitment of time, it truly is a responsibility that voters have to bare. Relying on investigative journalists to do this is no longer viable or credible, as they no longer exist to provide information. While candidates like to speak about transparency, most do not provide a complete timeline of their voting record on their official candidacy pages. This is the equivalent of going to a job interview and refusing to provide a resume. Clinton takes this lack of transparency a step further with her unwillingness to release any video or transcripts of the speeches that various corporations paid her millions of dollars to deliver. (More on that here). She claims that these large sums of payment did not influence her vote, advocacy, and decisions in any way. If that is the case, there should be no hesitation in making them public.

Where Hillary Clinton Stands On Pressing Social Issues

During the 1990s, the Clintons made a concerted effort to prove that they were just as tough on crime as Republicans, and in doing so, supported policy changes that drastically increased the rates of incarceration for people of color and the poor. Such attitudes and policies also contributed to the militarization of the police. These issues have been the focus of protest groups such as Black Lives Matters, which was started by three Black, queer feminists. And although mainstream (white, middle class) feminists like to make the claim that Hillary Clinton champions women's rights and feminist's issues, history shows that has actually not been the case. At best, her record has been a mixed bag. For instance, while she advocated for the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, she was unwilling to openly discuss and address the state-sanctioned violence that disproportionately affects women of color and their children. In fact, when Black Lives Matter activists showed up at a Clinton campaign event, they were ignored by the candidate and heckled by a mostly White crowd. Clinton handled their presence notably different than Sanders. Where Sanders stepped back and allowed the activists to speak and openly share their grievances, Clinton waited for the protestors to be removed and then stated that it was time to "get back to the important issues" - because, apparently, the lives of Black people and other people of color are not that important.

Environmental degradation is certainly an important social and public health issue, and those who face the most dire consequences of this degradation are the poor, people of color, and children - all of whom are more likely to live in areas having high toxicity, pollution, and in close proximity to highways. What occurred in Flint, Michigan with the water supply is an example of this, and the polluting of the water supply is tied to unchecked industrial practices including fracking. Although trying to move away from her initial position on fracking, Clinton was previously unwilling to condemn the practice, even as early as last year. (Seehere and here). Furthermore, it was revealed that the Clinton Global Initiative actually has ties to a top executive of the agency facing multiple lawsuits for its role in poisoning the children of Flint - children who, again, were mostly African American.

Hillary Clinton's Positions and their Impact on Marginalized People

Mass Incarceration

Currently, the United States has the highest incarcerated population in the world, and the vast majority of those held in prisons in this country are people of color, low-income people, and people with other marginalized identities. Despite this, many African Americans have chosen to overlook Clinton's role in setting up this system that is now incarcerating women (of color)at an ever-increasing rate. In her article, Why Hillary Clinton Doesn't Deserve the Black Vote, Michelle Alexander goes on to explain the Clintons' role:

"We should have seen it coming. Back then, Clinton was the standard-bearer for the New Democrats, a group that firmly believed the only way to win back the millions of white voters in the South who had defected to the Republican Party was to adopt the right-wing narrative that black communities ought to be disciplined with harsh punishment rather than coddled with welfare. Reagan had won the presidency by dog-whistling to poor and working-class whites with coded racial appeals: railing against 'welfare queens' and criminal 'predators' and condemning 'big government.' Clinton aimed to win them back, vowing that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime than he.

Clinton championed the idea of a federal 'three strikes' law in his 1994 State of the Union address and, months later, signed a $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces. The legislation was hailed by mainstream-media outlets as a victory for the Democrats, who 'were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.'"

Clinton actually surpassed Reagan's use of dog-whistle politics and choose to use blatant, racially-charged rhetoric, the most notable of which was said during a speech in support of the 1994 Crime Bill: "They are not just gangs of kids anymore," she said. "They are often the kinds of kids that are called 'super-predators.' No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel." This statment was widely understood to be in reference to Black children. This is precisely the same rhetoric that former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson used in his description to justify murdering Mike Brown, an unarmed African American teenager. In his statements, Wilson called on his inner Hillary to make Mike Brown not only sound like a super predator, but a super human…"

Brown approached again and hit Wilson, who fired another bullet. At that point, Brown ran away, with Wilson following on foot. He fired more shots - striking Brown at least once - and stopped. But Brown wasn't down. Instead - like a villain, or perhaps an evil mutant - he appeared stronger than before. Wilson fired again. "At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I'm shooting at him," Wilson said. "And that face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn't even there, I wasn't even anything in his way."

Wilson describes an almost animalistic Brown, who - like the comic book character, Wolverine - had gone into a kind of berserker rage. He made "a grunting, like aggravated sound," Wilson said. "I've never seen anybody look that, for lack of a better word, crazy," he explained. "I've never seen that. I mean, it was very aggravated … aggressive, hostile … You could tell he was looking through you. There was nothing he was seeing."

In response to this criticism, Clinton likes to point out that Sanders also voted for the Crime Bill. But what she fails to disclose is his multiple attempts to weaken it, including eliminating the death penalty provisions and trying to have a separate vote about creating new mandatory minimums. His vote was one made in reluctance, in order to pass the ban on semi-automatic assault weapons and the Violence Against Women Act provisions.

Welfare Reform

In 1996, Bill Clinton, former president and husband of current candidate Hillary Clinton, uttered the words, "The era of big government is over". What he was referring to was his signing of The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which dismantled the federal welfare system known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). This is a bill that Hillary Clinton ardently supported, and later in 2008 continued to laud as a great success. Was it successful in reducing the number of people on welfare? Yes. Did it end the need for social safety nets? No. In fact, the legislation resulted in doubling extreme poverty in the decade and a half after it passed.

Corporate Interests and Global Imperialism

Clinton's decades of service on corporate boards and in major policy roles as first lady, senator, and secretary of state give a clear indication of where she stands. She has reaffirmed through her actions, statements, and support of use of military force that the protection of US economic interests (not its citizens, of course) justifies military interventions in other countries. A 2013 Bloomberg Businessweek article entitled "Hillary Clinton's Business Legacy at the State Department: How Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into a machine for promoting U.S. business" underlines this position, noting that she sought "to install herself as the government's highest-ranking business lobbyist," directly negotiating lucrative overseas contracts for US corporations like Boeing, Lockheed, and General Electric. Not surprisingly, "Clinton's corporate cheerleading has won praise from business groups." In 2011, she actually penned an essay on America's Pacific Century for Foreign Policy, where she went on to speak at length about objectives that involved "opening new markets for American business," and with this attitude, she of course initially supported the Trans Pacific Trade Agreement (TPP). Her support of the controversial and damaging TPP again exemplifies that she aligns herself with corporate interests, not the needs and concerns of women, the working class, and other marginalized groups. (More on that here, here, and here).

Clinton actually served on the board of Walmart, an organization that has US taxpayers spending billions to subsidize their low-wage workers , who for the most part go without benefits. While Clinton now wants to cast herself as a champion of the American worker, she served on the Board of this corporation which waged major campaigns against labor unions. And, to make matters worse, she has not cut her ties with the corporation and its executives. In fact, in 2013, Alice Walton donated the maximum amount ($25,000) to her "Ready for Hillary" Super PAC.

Clinton's policies and supported actions have been just as detrimental to marginalized people globally - from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America and the Caribbean. In Haiti, Clinton led the State Department in its collaboration with subcontractors for Hanes, Levi's, and Fruit of the Loom who aggressively moved to block mandated minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest paid in the hemisphere. Essentially, the factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or $5 per day, despite a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian Parliament in June 2009.

The recent and brutal murder of Honduran indigenous environmental activist, Berta Cáceres, provides another example of Clinton's commitment to imperialism and corporate interest over the rights of women, working class people, and disenfranchised groups. In fact, prior to her murder, Berta singled out Clinton for her role in supporting a 2009 coup and illegal ouster of Honduran left-of-center President Manuel Zelaya. Under this new government indigenous leaders have been murdered and tortured, and Honduras is noted for being the most violent country in theworld. Further, indigenous and Garifuna people are being increasingly marginalized and displaced - being pushed away from fishing off the coasts to make way for tourism, and losing access to their farmland and rainforests for the sake of transnational corporate resource-extraction projects.

In the Middle East and Central Asia, Clinton continued to defend the US's right to violate international law and human rights. One needs to look no further than her AIPAC speech to learn more about her promotion of war and violence against women and their communities in the Middle East. In the article " Why these two feminists aren't voting for Hillary", Juliana Britto Schwartz elaborates on this:

"She pledged to 'provide Israel with the most sophisticated defense technology' and invited Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] to visit the White House - tying herself in ways even Obama didn't to an Israeli government committed to race-mongering, apartheid policies, and continuing the Occupation of Palestine. She pledged to fight the bedrock of progressive community organizing: boycotts. She expressed pride in 'imposing crippling sanctions' against civilians in Iran - sanctions which have denied access to women's health services and life-saving treatment for hundreds of thousands of Iranians."

To continue on the topic of war, particularly drone warfare, Britto Schwartz's article provides additional insight:

"Her repeating typically pro-war talking points about 'Iranian aggression' being the biggest threat to Middle Eastern stability were also especially rich given that she herself, as US senator and as Secretary of State, advocated for aggression and the invasion of other countries illegally. She fought for the Iraq War when many others, including Bernie Sanders and even current President Obama, opposed it. Clinton's State Department devised the legal reasoning that justified the expansion of American drone attacks which have killed hundreds of civilians, and she pushed to maintain US ties with dictators in Egypt , Tunisia and, and Bahrain. As others have written, Clinton's famous call for women's rights as human rights, or some donation for the Malala Fund, holds little credibility when it is a US-manufactured and Clinton-supported ordinance that is blowing up women in Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

LGBTQ Rights

Clinton comes from the era of Second Wave feminism - a time when feminists excluded and at times participated in discriminating against people who identified as LGBTQ. Essentially, if something didn't relate to or impact the lives of heterosexual, middle class, white women, it was not truly a matter of concern. Thus, Hillary Clinton sat in silent agreement (like she did during her time on the Walmart board) as policies such as 'Don't ask, Don't tell' (DADT) and legislation like The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) were signed into law by her husband. DADT was the official US policy regarding the service of gays and lesbians in the military, which remained in effect until September 20, 2011. DOMA defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman, allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages, and allowed for other forms of discrimination.

Ironically, Clinton receives praise, and is deemed as being a highly capable candidate, due to her political record and years of experience. This is in spite of the fact that, as a policymaker, she has consistently favored policies devastating to women, people of color, LGBT persons, and working class people. The very record and experience that she flaunts proves that she is not a progressive, doesn't uphold feminist values, and certainly does not deserve the African American vote.

On Hillary, "the Feminist"

Those who are most adamant that Hillary Clinton is indeed a feminist are mostly women who have a few things in common with Clinton - white, older, baby boomers, heterosexual, upper-middle class. They are perhaps correct, in that Clinton is a Second Wave feminists, and this is reflected in the focus on what has been seen as traditional women's rights issues - access to abortion and contraception, and eliminating the gender pay gap (all while ignoring the fact that there is a gender-racial gap as well). With her pant suits and muted femininity, Clinton represents the group of White women who began to work outside the home, and entered male-dominated fields, while largely excluding issues prevelant to women of color who have always had to work outside the home. In short, her form of feminism is not inclusive. The feminists that she identifies with are those who have never experienced forms of oppression, such as war, police profiling and brutality, and thus find it easy to ignore their impact, and do not deem them important enough to prioritize as a voting issue. Instead, they have social justice activists dragged away while declaring that it is "time to get back to the important issues."

As pointed out by Juliana Britto Schwartz in her article "Why these two feminists aren't voting for Hillary", it's been confusing for us to hear feminists insist that Clinton cares deeply about women's rights when her policies have had such a devastating effect on Black and Brown women abroad and in the US.

Ultimately, Hillary is a moderate-conservative centrist who, along with her husband, has managed to become a multimillionaire while working strictly as a "public servant." Her political views, positions, and actions are not that of an intersectional feminist, and ultimately have negatively impacted marginalized people in the United States and globally. Her candidacy and platform do not incorporate needed reforms and radical changes to the status quo. Despite this, she has been able to bamboozle these people into voting for her during the 2016 Primaries. Through speeches where she adopted "progressive" talking points, media bias in her favor that led to "blacking out" her opponent, and opportunities to appeal to those who still get their news solely from American corporate-sponsored media, she was able to convince these voters that she is not a member of the oligarchy, that she does not represent corporate interests, and that she was the only Democratic candidate that could actually beat Donald Trump, and I suppose save America. Polls have shown that this is not the case. Instead, they show that a general election between the two former friends and colleagues (with Trump being a former donor to Clinton's campaigns) would be a close one. Further, Clinton's political career and campaign, and disregard for intersectional issues of race, class, sexuality, and foreigners exemplify the problem with mainstream feminism - in that it continues to be focused on advocating for access for wealthy white women to "lean in" and share in the spoils of capitalism and US imperial power.