The Nurses' Union That Made Medicine Sick: How the Oligarchs Hypnotized Labor Leaders to Betray Working-Class Communities of Color

By Jon Jeter

Opened in 1889, O'Connor Hospital was the first in the city of San Jose, and the second in California to be chartered and managed by the Daughters of Charity, a 400-year-old Catholic mission founded by St. Vincent de Paul. Its benefactor, Judge Myles P. O'Connor, made his fortune in mining and he and his wife, Amanda, were two of Silicon Valley's first philanthropists. They had originally planned to open an old-age home and an orphanage, but the local Archbishop convinced the couple that the needs of what would grow to become the state's third most populous city were far too prolific to address only that which vexed the very young, and the very old.

For the next 125 years, the Daughters of Charity faithfully served San Jose's sick, pregnant, and poor, the hospital's fortunes rising and falling in tandem with that of Santa Clara County's laboring classes. With paychecks buoyed by postwar productivity and assertive trade unions, the order built a new, state-of-the art campus on the city's east side in 1953, just as Americans were bursting at the seams with hope, and babies.

Similar to the protagonist in Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, however, O'Connor went broke, gradually at first, and then suddenly, as good-paying jobs dried up, culminating in the ruinous 2008 recession that left millions of Californians unable to pay their hospital tab. Forced to borrow heavily just to stay afloat, the Daughters of Charity Health System announced in 2014 what would've once been unthinkable: a sale of its network of six hospitals.

More jarring still was the colorful streetscape that greeted morning commuters on Forest Avenue as they approached O'Connor's main gate in the first days of 2015. As the low-watt January sun doused the Santa Cruz mountains in a champagne-colored dew, motorists were visibly puzzled, some even scratching their heads as they passed by.

On the campus' north lawn, nearly 100 protesters clad in robin's-breast red, chanted, cheered and hoisted placards that read: "Nurses and nuns agree: Approve the Sale."

To the south, maybe 20 yards away, stood another 100 or so demonstrators clad entirely in blue, brandishing signs that read: "Save our Hospital; Reject the Sale."

The dueling rallies prefaced a public hearing by California's State Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is legally required to approve the sale of nonprofit hospitals, and pitted one powerful labor union - the California Nurses Association in red - against another - the Service Employees' International Union, in blue.

Dubbed by the Nation Magazine as the country's most progressive trade union, the CNA and its umbrella organization, National Nurses United, endorsed a proposal by Daughters of Charity executives to sell the chain to Prime, a southern California-based healthcare provider with a reputation for ripping off Medicaid, its patients, and its workforce. A 2014 federal audit of Prime hospitals, for instance, found 217 cases of improperly diagnosed kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition that is seldom seen in the US, and typically found only in the global South. Unsurprisingly, Medicaid reimbursement rate for the the disease is quite high when compared with other maladies.

The SEIU, on the other hand, favored a sale to a Wall Street hedge fund named Blue Wolf with no management experience in the healthcare industry, but a demonstrated proficiency for dismantling businesses and auctioning its parts off to the highest bidders.

But here's the thing: San Jose's working-class communities - a Benetton- blend of Latinos, south Asians, Blacks and Whites - wanted neither, Prime least of all.

Had they bothered to show up for any of the dozen or so community stakeholder meetings held in 2014, the CNA's leadership might have known this. But Bob Brownstein, the executive director of the civic organization, Working Partners USA, could only remember seeing a CNA labor representative at a single meeting, and if he chimed in on the discussion, Brownstein couldn't recall.

Labor representatives for the SEIU, on the other hand, and Blue Wolf executives were fixtures at the stakeholders' meetings.

"I don't think either union did much of anything," Brownstein recalled more than a year later, "but SEIU was clearly more comfortable in dealing with the community. As I recall, there was someone from Blue Wolf and the SEIU at every meeting and they answered every question that everyone put to them. They were clearly trying to generate answers and they even made some changes to the original proposal" to win the community's approval.

"Their offer was more opaque but they did a much better job than Prime did in acknowledging community concerns. We never trusted Blue Mountain but the community was much more worried about Prime."

So much so that a coalition of 15 civic groups wrote a joint letter to Harris urging her to veto the sale to Prime. The stakeholders' clear preference was Santa Clara County which had bid on O'Connor, and whose health care network had a regional reputation for providing quality care to the uninsured that was second only to O'Connor's.

But Daughters of Charity executives did not want to break up the set, so-to-speak, and preferred selling all six hospitals to a single bidder.

"I don't know why the California Nurses Association didn't help us push the county's bid," said Grace-Sonia E. Melanio, Communications Director for Community Health Partnership, which was one of the authors of the letter to the attorney general's office.

"I assume it was because they don't represent county nurses but I don't know that for a fact."

By January of 2015, Brownstein, Melanio and others knew that shifting the conversation from the two labor-backed bidders to the county's bid was a longshot, at best.

Still, Melanio recalls her astonishment at seeing the the tsunami of red and blue as she pulled into the O'Connor parking lot ahead of that January public hearing.

"I was shocked," she said, "to see that the unions had the community outnumbered by roughly 100 to 1."

"You Got to Dance with Them That Brung You"

The question of who killed organized labor in the US has always been something of a whodunit for me, until I went to work as a communications specialist for the California Nurses Association in January of 2015.

The action at O'Connor was my first week on the job and the hospital's ultimate sale to a Wall Street hedge fund was tantamount to an exhumation. After examining the cadaver close up, I can report that all evidence identifies the killer beyond a shadow of a doubt:

It was a suicide.

What proved the undoing of the labor movement was not the bloodlessness of conservatives, but the faithlessness of liberals; not the 1 percent's dearth of compassion, but the 99 percent's failure of imagination; not the corruption of the managerial class but trade union leaders' desertion of the very communities that made the American labor movement a force to be reckoned with in the first place.

"You got to dance," the immortal Molly Ivins once wrote, " with them what brung you." After collaborating with workers of all races to create a middle-class that stands as the singular achievement of the Industrial era, unions switched dance partners mid-song.

In championing Prime Health Care, the nurses' union, and its Executive Director, RoseAnn DeMoro, carried water for a venal corporate class in much the same fashion that the Democratic Party, and its titular leader, Hillary Clinton, runs interference for Wall Street, leaving the people of San Jose to choose from the lesser of two evils, just as voters in next week's presidential ballot have no good options.

This is no coincidence. Beginning in earnest with Wall Street's 1975 takeover of New York City's budget, corporate executives have wooed both Democrats and labor union leaders with increasing assertiveness, in a concerted effort to thwart the interracial labor movement that is the only fighting force to ever battle the plutocrats' to a draw.

To put only slightly too fine a point on it, financiers' courtship of labor in the postwar era mirrors Napoleon's recruitment of Haiti's mulattoes to help put down the island's slave mutiny. Both counter- revolutions drove a wedge through the opposition with a psych-ops campaign that can be reduced to a question of identity:

Are you a worker, or are you white?

No More Beautiful Sight

The Bay area can make a credible claim to being the birthplace of the modern labor movement. When West Coast longshoremen went on strike at the height of the Great Depression, Blacks who had consistently been rebuffed in their efforts to integrate the docks, jumped at the chance to work, albeit for smaller paychecks than their white peers.

Confronted with a failing strike, the head of the longshoremen's union, an Australian émigré named Harry Bridges, toured African American churches on both sides of the Bay bridge, according to the late journalist Thomas Fleming.

From the pulpit, Bridges acknowledged the union's historical mistreatment of Blacks, but promised skeptical parishioners that if they respected the pickets, they would work the ports up and down the West Coast, earning the same wage as white dockworkers.

They did, and the strike's subsequent success triggered a wave of labor militancy that not only imbued the economy with buying power, but connected workers' discontent with broader political struggles for affordable housing, free public education, infrastructure improvements, and civil rights.

"Negro-white unity has proved to be the most effective weapon against the shipowners," the historian Philip S. Foner quoted a dockworker saying in his book, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, "against the raiders and all our enemies."

When Oakland's two chic department stores, Kahns and Hastings, denied pay raises to their mostly women employees in 1946, nearly 100,000 union members - mostly men - walked off the job in solidarity.

But they didn't stop there, shutting down the whole of Alameda County for the better part of two days, ordering businesses to close, and turning back deliveries of everything other than essential medical supplies and beer, which they commandeered to hold a bi-racial bacchanal in the streets of Oakland, dancing, singing, and exulting in the power of the many.

It was the last general strike in US history; within months, Congress overrode President Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act which, among other things, outlawed so-called sympathy strikes, and mandated trade unions to expel Communists from their ranks.

Still, the working class maintained its swagger for another generation.

Invoking eminent domain, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency razed thousands of structures in the city's "blighted" Fillmore neighborhood, forcing nearly 10,000, mostly Black households to relocate, and transforming Geary Street into an eight-lane monstrosity which sealed off the Fillmore from the whiter and wealthier Pacific Heights.

In a 1963 interview with the Boston television station WGBH, about his iconic documentary, Take This Hammer, James Baldwin said this:

"A boy last week - he was 16, in San Francisco - told me on television….He said, "I've got no country. I've got no flag." Now, he's only 16 years old, and I couldn't say, "You do." I don't have any evidence to prove that he does. They were tearing down his house because San Francisco is engaging - as most Northern cities now are engaged - in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out."

Among those who took notice of the Fillmore's gentrification was Lou Goldblatt, who was, at the time, the second-in-command of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the very same union that had integrated the West Coast's docks.

"There was no reason why the pension funds should just be laying around being invested in high-grade securities, Goldblatt later recalled. I thought there was no reason why that money shouldn't be used to build some low-cost housing."

The ILWU created the Longshore Redevelopment Corporation to pounce on the three city blocks-out of a total of 60- that the city had set aside for affordable housing.

In her 1964 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, Josephine Solomon described her new digs: "I've just moved into my new home in St. Francis Square…and living here is quite clearly going to be exhilarating and, more important, the best possible place in which I can raise my children. About 100 families have already moved in…and we have representatives of all races and colors living together as neighbors. There is no more beautiful sight in this town than our marvelous, mixed-up collection of white, brown, and yellow children playing together in the sunny community square every afternoon."

Who's The Boss?

"C'mon people, what are some more nurses values?"

I was nearly four months into my stint at the CNA when I found myself in a half-lit, mildewed, second-floor conference room in the union's downtown Oakland office, seated among a clutch of maybe 7 or 8 other communications staffers, all but two of us-an Asian woman and myself-who are non-white.

The task this late April afternoon was to identify "nurses values," which I had assumed meant that I would help pore over the results of a nurses' questionnaire to produce a coherent ad campaign.

Instead, the communications manager, Sarah Cecile, stood astride an easel that leaned like a sprinter at the finish line, her magic marker poised to add to the wan list of nouns that glared accusingly at me, reducing Hegelian dialectical inquiry to a game of fucking charades.

"Wait," I said, "we're telling the nurses what their values should be? Shouldn't we be asking the nurses what their values are, you know, like in a survey, or a poll?"

"That's a bad word for us," said a graphic artist who'd worked for the CNA for several years. "Polling is frowned upon here."

"Maybe they know something I don't," I said sarcastically, "but if we're telling the rank and file what to do, doesn't that make the union just another boss that the nurses have to answer to?

Should communications organize a coup of sorts?" I asked provocatively.

When I returned to my office 30 minutes later, I had an email from De Moro's secretary, summoning me to a meeting with the executive director the following morning.

This was extraordinary for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was that despite sharing the same floor as the executive staff, it was an unwritten rule that communications was to have no contact with top management. This directive went so far as to prohibit communications from either emailing executives directly, or from entering or exiting through the executives' north wing.

Moreover, I was told that both the executive staff, and the board, were almost all lily-white, save for one Latino and one African-American on each.

What I remember most about the next day's meeting is the mirthless half-smile that DeMoro wore like a mask for nearly the entire 45-minutes, reminding me of Sir Richard Burton's description of Lucille Ball as "a monster of staggering charmlessness."

She began by asking me if I had any ideas for trying to improve the union's communications effort, which was odd, since she'd blown off an email with my suggestions for doing exactly that only weeks earlier.

"Anything we could do to make this more of a bottom-up effort would be to the union's benefit," I recall saying. "It seems we spend an awful lot of time trying to talk to people who really aren't interested in what we have to say, and not enough rallying and organizing the community to put pressure on decision makers."

By this time, California's Secretary-of-State, Harris had already, effectively vetoed the sale to Prime by attaching such stringent conditions to the transaction that she knew no corporation would accept the terms. I had publicly predicted as much months earlier; knowing that Harris would rely heavily on Wall Street to finance her US Senate campaign, I'd proposed, unsuccessfully, writing articles interrogating the investment firm's mishandling of other businesses it had acquired.

But DeMoro's communications' director, a walking mediocrity named Chuck Idelson, had all of the imagination of a lamp post, and only half the personality. His idea of media relations was sending out at least one anemic press release per day, then marshaling the entire communication staff for two days to badger journalists we had no relationship with to cover news conferences that were wholly absent any news. A North Carolina rally for the Robin Hood tax on Wall Street transactions was attended by two people, the parents of Cecile, the communications manager.

As presidential hopefuls began campaigning in Iowa ahead of that state's all important caucus, the nurses' union planned to launch an ad campaign against Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker.

"Why in the world would you do that?" I asked Idelson one day in early 2015 just as the primary season was beginning to take shape.

"Well, Walker is really bad on labor," Idelson said.

"All the Republicans are bad on labor," I said. "All the Democrats too. You're gonna tell the rank-and-file that you spent a quarter-of-a-million dollars to help send union-busting Hillary Clinton to the White House? Why don't they spend that money on organizing, or on an ad campaign to support Black Lives Matter. Police violence against people of color is a public health crisis," I said. "Who is more credible on that issue than nurses?"

Moreover, I said, a California-based trade union buying ads in Iowa with union dues will surely be used as a cudgel with which to beat organized labor upside the head.

I repeated my concerns to DeMoro, but with that awkward smile on her face, she made it clear that she shared neither my faith in the rank-and-file, or the community.

"The nurses have some issues," she said at our meeting. "We need for more of them to support the Democrats and to work the phone banks and things like that," she said. "And frankly," she said, abandoning all pretense now, her smile dissolving into a contemptuous frown, "they need to be more progressive, more radical and to take more chances."

DeMoro's annual salary at the time was $359,000, more than triple the average nurse's yearly pay.

You Ain't White

Portraying Leftists as subversives, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act required trade unions to weed out suspected communists, according to the historian Foner, by asking Black workers questions like:

"Have you ever had dinner with a mixed group?"

And this: Have you ever danced with a white girl?"

Whites were asked if they had ever entertained Blacks in their homes, and witnesses, Foner wrote, were asked "Have you ever had any conversations that would lead you to believe (the accused) is rather advanced in his thinking on racial matters?"

Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, would later acknowledge that this purge of communists from trade unions was akin to severing the umbilical cord while the baby was still in the womb, starving the most democratizing social movements of a vital fuel-source.

Much of the labor movement's bandwidth however, could not be measured in muscle, or union-dues, but in imagination, as demonstrated by the ILWU's Goldblatt's vision of a Beloved Community, fashioned from the stevedores' pension fund.

"So let's all be careful," United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther once said, "that we don't play the bosses game by falling for the Red Scare."

And then Reuther went on to play the bosses game, expertly, chasing Marxists from the union, isolating Black workers, and reverting to the anodyne reforms that characterized the ineffective, segregated unions before the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. So disillusioned were Black autoworkers with Reuther's tripartite alliance with Detroit's industrialists and the Democrats that by the late 1960s, many had begun to joke that the acronym UAW stood for "U Ain't White."

The tipping point, however, occurred in the midst of the 1975 fiscal crisis, when New York bankers hatched a scheme to recoup their losses on bad real estate investments from the wages, pensions, and subsidies shelled out to city employees and the working class. The facts were not on their side, and so the financiers played the only hand they knew to play: race.

Doubling down on the Birth-of-a-Nation narrative, the city's oligarchs, and their friends in the media, portrayed Blacks as a menace to the civic project, exploiting racial resentment of a Black polity that had found its voice mostly through labor unions.

In a 1976 episode of the NBC television series, McCloud, titled "The Day New York Turned Blue," the stetson-wearing New Mexico sheriff- an avatar for white, male supremacy- almost single-handedly rescues Gotham from ruin, largely by convincing an Italian cop named Rizzo to cross a picket line, and help repel an attack by the mafia, who ambush police headquarters to kill a mob attorney-turned state's witness.

Aside from the mafia, the villains in this urban morality tale are the police union-led by the Bad Nigger that 1970s America loved to hate, Carl Weathers-which refuses to call off a labor walkout in the city's time-of-need, and a prostitute who is drugging her clients-one an accountant visiting New York to audit federal bailout money-with a fatal, suffocating blue paint.

Playing the role of Rizzo in real-life was the head of the city's largest municipal union, Victor Gotbaum. In his book, Working Class New York, the historian Joshua B. Freeman wrote of Gotbaum and his partner, Joe Bigel:

"Having seen the power of the financial community,the hostility of the federal government, and the divisions within the union movement, they shied away from a militant, independent labor strategy which might have led to them being blamed for a city bankruptcy. Instead, they preferred to make concessions and invest their members' pension money in city debt in return for a place at or near the table, where discussions about the city's future were being made by financiers, businessmen, and state and federal officials. Gotbaum became so entranced by the power elite . . .that within a few years he and (investment banker Felix) Rohatyin were calling each other best friends, even holding a joint birthday party in Southampton."

DeMoro is an heir to Gotbaum, not Goldblatt. If she or any of her lieutenants had an ounce of imagination I never saw it. Consider that at no time during the Daughter's of Charity sale, did I ever once hear anyone mention the possibility of pushing for legislation to convert O'Connor to a worker, or community-managed health co-op, similar to the ILWU's response to the Fillmore's housing crisis.

Shortly after Harris nixed the Prime deal, DeMoro called an emergency all-staff meeting in March of 2015, in which she bluntly asked the 65 or so staff members for their suggestions.

"If we don't do something different now, we're going to die," she said.

A young Latina labor organizer raised her hand, and said: "Why don't we start to build partnerships with the immigrant rights community that's politically active and organizing across California," I recall her saying. "We could really strengthen our own organizing capacity and deepen our roots in a community that is looking to join forces with institutional allies."

You could've heard a gnat piss on cotton in Georgia.

Later, the young organizer would tell me privately me that had she been a white, male labor organizer, and replaced immigrant rights community with some off-brand faction of Silicon Valley white liberals, say Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, DeMoro would've been over the moon.

"Everybody knows that RoseAnn loves her white boys," she said.

As for me, I was fired a week after proposing a coup because "you don't seem happy here."

It was May 1, or May Day.

This was originally posted on Jon's personal blog.

Jon Jeter is the author of 'Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People,' and the co-author of 'A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama's Postracial America.' He is a former Washington Post Bureau Chief in southern Africa and South America, a former producer for This American Life, and twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

The Power of Candy: Celebrating Robert Hillary King's Freeline

By Holly Genovese

Freelines, a delicious candy make from large amounts of butter, sugar, evaporated milk, and of course, pecans, doesn't seem all that different from your standard New Orleans Praline. Much softer, and a bit sweeter, but if you didn't know any better you might think they were simply the homemade version of the mass produced French Quarter treat. But candy connoisseur and business owner Robert Hillary King has given these sweet, southern treats a life, and political purpose, of their own.

King was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Angola 3, a group of Black Panther members incarcerated in the Louisiana Stat e Penitentiary and falsely accused of the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. (They were given this moniker in the early 1970s when their mothers were organizing for their freedom). King, alongside Albert Woodfox and the late Herman Wallace, were Black Panther Party members sentenced to life in solitary confinement for this murder, which they ascribe to their association with the Panthers.

Can a piece of candy be an act of protest? Can it be intellectual work? Robert Hillary King believes so. And he manages, through one candy, to contest the legacy of the Black Panther Party, help to humanize the experience of the incarcerated, and to supplement his income.

King can talk for hours about the years he spent in the state penitentiary, his favorite books (Native Son by Richard Wright and the Bible rank high among them), and his most beloved intellectual influences (other incarcerated writers and activists). His home at the time I met him, a small Austin residence, was decorated with Angola 3-inspired art and ephemera.

Posters from events about the Angola 3 were alongside more singular art projects like an Angola 3 wall clock. His bookshelves were filled with books and articles about the Angola 3 and the New Orleans Black Panther Party. He gave me a few freelines (pronounced free-leans-like pralines) to take home, a candy he learned to make while incarcerated and began selling after his release because it was impossible for him to find employment. [1]

Freelines are a play on pralines, the French-inspired Louisiana candy common in New Orleans. [2] King shared how he learned to make his pralines with me. On his website, King describes his freelines and the process in which he developed them. King explained, "I had plenty of time to perfect the recipe from my cell in Angola Penitentiary. I created a make shift kitchen from a stove made out of coke cans and burnt toilet paper rolls to get heat. My friend 'Cap Pistol,' who was working in the prison kitchen, taught me how to make sugar candy and I gave them away, especially to the guys on death row."

King's freelines are packaged with a label that describes the process for making them and his education in prison, alongside "the story of the Angola 3." Next to the brief story is a Black Panther, symbolizing King's continued allegiance to the Black Panther Party, although it was officially disbanded many years ago.

Both the Black Panther Party and the story of the Angola 3 are central to the production and packaging of King's freelines - without them, they would seem like any other New Orleans candy. Even decades after the Black Panther Party officially disbanded, King engages with the party politically and intellectually. His activism is still informed by their ten-point platform, which emphasized the need for an end to the incarceration of African American men, education, an end to police violence, and an emphasis on ending economic suffering for low-income African Americans. King explicitly links the Black Panthers with the Angola 3 on his candy, and had done this while the other members of the Angola 3, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, were still incarcerated (Herman Wallace was released in 2013, 3 days before his death from cancer and Woodfox was released in January 2016). King saw the freelines as a way to garner support for their freedom. Black Panthers and the incarcerated are both stereotyped and remembered as violent militants. By protesting unjust incarceration and false perceptions of the original Party with candy, something both non-violent and associated with sweetness, King helps to subvert these dangerous stereotypes.

The case of King's freelines as an act of Black Power is particularly interesting because of his connection to the South as a native New Orleanian. While influenced by the French, the American praline originated in New Orleans, whereas black power is often popularly constructed as a northern and urban phenomenon (although the origins of both Black Power and the Black Panther Party are in the South). [3] By combining the pralines with the imagery of the Black Panther Party, King uses his candy to assert the connection between the Party, black liberation movements in America, and southern history. By doing so, he helps to reframe ideas about the Party and Black Power through this edible treat, while also creating awareness to the proud history of Black struggle in America.

King's freelines serve as a source of empowerment and protest for those who remain incarcerated. By altering this food in a way that made it possible to make in prison, King implicitly makes an argument for the innovation and creativity found within the Louisiana State Penitentiary. While King started selling them after he left prison, his adjustments to the standard New Orleans praline came about because of the limited tools and supplies he had available to him while incarcerated. This resourcefulness and creativity, which amounted to forging a stove out of coke cans and toilet paper roles, gives the Freeline a defining quality that cannot be matched.

But more than an act of protest, King's freelines are an act of survival. While many states and cities have taken action to "ban the box," (the checkbox referring to incarceration on job applications), it is still incredibly difficult for the formerly incarcerated to gain employment. [4] This amplifies tremendously in the case of someone like King, who spent 29 years incarcerated, much of which was in solitary confinement. Beyond prejudices towards the formerly incarcerated and African American men on the job market, King had missed almost 30 years of experience and skill building, time he couldn't make up. Because of this, King's freelines are an act of radical protest, as well as an act of economic independence. By starting a business out of his activism, while also writing his autobiography From the Bottom of the Heap and going on speaking tours, King defied the constraints placed on him as a Black man in America. This defiance should be celebrated.

Notes

[1] see Orissa Arend Showdown in Desire

[2] Pralines Are More Than Just New Orleans' Signature Candy, http://www.eater.com/2016/10/27/13422426/praline-new-orleans-pecan-candy

[3] Black Power was coined in 1966 Mississippi by Stokely Carmichael, then a leader in SNCC. While the Black Panther Party was founded in October 1966 in Oakland California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, students at Merritt College, they were both originally from the South. New Orleans in particular had an active Black Panther Party chapter, to which King and the other members of the Angola 3 were connected with.

[4] Ban the Box Campaign, http://bantheboxcampaign.org/ .

Progress and Making the Native Disappear in South Africa

By Richard Raber

In the name of modernity and capital expansion, indigenous peoples across the globe have been slaughtered, dispossessed and made to be invisible. Through the writing out of history or blotting out of popular culture, indigenous people are often relegated to a state of pre-modernity or tradition; this continues to underpin policy.

We have seen this narrative countless times as manifest destiny, the empty-land myth and the like; gross human rights violations justified as the price of Progress. In this way, Progress is considered through the lens of the inevitability of capital. Some proponents of this notion of Progress may claim to lament the cultural, familial and economic attack on local communities. If taken at face value, such sentiments speak less to personal immorality but rather point to a crisis of imagination. Progress is bestowed with inevitability, simply pitted against Tradition, leaving little room for intellectual alternatives. Lacking options, proponents remedy Progress by painting it as ethical advancement while distancing it from its colonial origins. Extraction industry apologetics demonstrate this trend through buzzwords such as energy independence or exaggerated claims of job creation.

In an act of colonial continuity, the government of South Africa is incessantly trying to put forward the Traditional Khoi-San Leadership Bill. Amongst other issues, the Bill would increase the authority of Traditional Leadership in the nation's former Bantustans including the ability to unilaterally enter their communities into agreements with third parties. This would sanction an existing reality in many communities wherein Traditional Leadership personally benefits from extorting or at least preventing community resistance against the arrival of extraction or tourism industries. As I have covered before, Traditional Leadership has sold land that is not theirs to sell, while others have acquiesced to the intimidation of their community members. In this way, the Bill would further institutionalize Traditional Leadership and rural patronage as a fulcrum for capitalist exploitation.

The proposed legislation is the next descendent in a long line of rural patronage used to manage and exploit the nation's black majority. The Bill would directly affect roughly 18 million people . While it would be unfair to paint every Traditional Leader with the same brush, we must question their histories and relationship to the title. Many contemporary Traditional Leaders do not fit into the great lineage of anti-colonial resistance embodied by Chief Albert Luthuli or King Langalibelele but rather fall into a line of collaboration. For instance, Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini legitimized Mangosuthu Buthelezi and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), armed by the regime, the IFP engaged in a ravenous civil war with the African National Congress across today's KwaZulu-Natal and the townships of Gauteng. It should be noted that Zwelithini also faces accusations of stoking the xenophobic violence plaguing the nation.

During the transition process, the IFP harnessed its ability to withhold peace by threatening to boycott the 1994 election. In exchange for their participation, the IFP was awarded a major concession and pre-cursor to the TKLB, the Ingonyama Trust Act. Passed days before the historic election, the Act stipulates that much of the land belonging to the former KwaZulu homeland is to be administered by the Zulu King. As I have argued before, the nature of the relationship between the national state and citizens on this land has remained largely unchanged since the colonial era. The Traditional Khoi-San Leadership Bill would further reify these borders and this relationship.

Considering the magnitude in terms of those directly affected by the Bill, there has been relatively little coverage of it. This falls into a long pattern of externalizing the experiences as well as plight of rural communities. Further, as I have noted before, much of the popular discourse surrounding rural people taking place outside of rural areas often frames these folks and by extension their communities within two stereotypes. The first label is stupid or lazy while the second is rural people as the proverbial gate-keepers of tradition, seemingly left-behind by modernity. A consultation process mired in inadequacies speaks to the first perception as rural people are to be spoken to, never heard, to be led rather than to lead. The relative silence in major English language media speaks to the perceived irrelevance of rural matters.

Much like its colonial forbearers, the Traditional Khoisan Leadership Bill is a tool to overlook the experiences, ambitions, opinions and indeed, dignity, of rural black South Africans. If enacted, this Bill will further empower corrupted Traditional Leadership while capital freely exploits the local soil. Progress is often understood as innovation, the easing of life. For capital this Bill effectively solves the problem or removes the barrier of rural people and their ability to politically participate, resist exploitation and direct their own destiny.

Raised in Canada, Richard Raber is a writer and researcher presently based in Luxembourg. His current research centres around social memory in contemporary South Africa. His writing has previously been featured by Open Democracy, Daily Maverick, New Politics and Thought Leader as well as other platforms. He can be found on Twitter at @RaberRichard.

A Resistance in Name Only: On the Trickery and Complicity of the Democratic Party

By Brenan Daniels

"We're soon going to have a one party system."

- Donald J. Trump

The 'Resistance', as opponents to President Trump call themselves, have been busy fighting back against the President's policies, having recently kicked off a ' Resistance Summer ' in order to "[counter] the agenda of President Trump and the GOP-led Congress." However, while they are fighting back, they are having some serious problems information-wise, such as propagating false stories like the House Republicans celebrating the passing of a bill to repeal Obamacare with beer or that rape would be a pre-existing condition under this new healthcare bill. There are larger problems, though, primarily with the party they are supporting (the Democrats), and it very well may come back to haunt them in the near future.

Young people who would generally vote Democrat overwhelmingly favored Bernie Sanders , coalescing around his promises to break up the big banks, Medicare for all, and free public college. Despite this, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said of her party : "I have to say we're capitalist and that's just the way it is." This is a major problem when the majority of young Democrats see themselves as socialists .

There is also the problem of the Dems having shown themselves to be a group of liars and cheaters. Currently, the Democratic National Committee is under a class action lawsuit alleging that they stole the Democratic Presidential nomination from Bernie Sanders. Some rather telling information came out, such as the fact that the DNC's legal representation said that the case should be thrown out on the grounds that "the Party has the freedom to determine its nominees by 'internal rule,' not voter interests, and thus the party could have favored a candidate" without breaking any laws. This was later stated more explicitly :

"We could have voluntarily decided that, ' Look, we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way ,'" Bruce Spiva, lawyer for the DNC, said during a court hearing in Carol Wilding, et al. v. DNC Services Corp. (emphasis added)

This is undeniable evidence that there are deep-seated problems in the DNC, but there are further problems for the Democratic party itself: Russia.

Democrats seem to be obsessed with accusations of Russia-Trump collusion. This obsession has been reflected by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who spent the majority of her time earlier this year focusing on Russia, as well as a recent protest that took place in which people demanded that Trump's ties to Russia be investigated. This line of thinking continues despite the fact that a number of high level individuals on their own team have flatly denied any such claim. One of these individuals, former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell stated that "On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all;" and "There's no little campfire, there's no little candle, there's no spark." Meanwhile, another of these individuals, Dianne Feinstein, had the following exchange with CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

WOLF BLITZER, CNN: The last time we spoke, Senator, I asked you if you had actually seen evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and you said to me -- and I am quoting you now -- you said, 'not at this time.' Has anything changed since we spoke last?

SEN. FEINSTEIN: Well, no -- no, it hasn't...

BLITZER: But, I just want to be precise, Senator. In all of the -- you have had access from the Intelligence Committee, from the Judiciary Committee, all of the access you have had to very sensitive information, so far you have not seen any evidence of collusion, is that right?

SEN. FEINSTEIN: Well, evidence that would establish that there's collusion. There are all kinds of rumors around, there are newspaper stories, but that's not necessarily evidence. (emphasis added)

There is such a dearth of evidence that mainstream organizations such as Bloomberg and even MSNBC's Chris Hayes are questioning the entire narrative in an attempt to move on.

While the Democratic Party is obsessed with thoughts of Russians, the Republicans are doing actual damage. Case in point: while everyone was obsessing over the recent Comey hearing, the Republicans went and gutted the Dodd Frank Act which "was designed to protect taxpayers by ending wholesale government bailouts of banks and non-bank financial institutions that encouraged indiscriminate lending." Furthermore, the Democrats have also been on the side of Trump, with many Dems praising him for his airstrike on a Syrian government air base over a questionable chemical weapons attack. (This shouldn't be surprising given the fact that Hillary Clinton argued for a no fly zone over Syria, which had she been elected could very well have caused a major military engagement with Russia .)

So, why does any of this matter? It is important because it shows that the Democrats are completely fine with, and work to uphold, the status quo. The same status quo that has led us to war and put us on the brink of war numerous times; and the same status quo that seems to have no qualms with engaging in activities that could very well lead to a world war scenario. The ground supporters of the 'Resistance' for the Democrats have yet to notice this glaring problem: they are supporting a party that isn't going to actually do much of anything to combat the major problems that are facing us, and in many cases have pushed to exacerbate them.

On a structural level, both parties are loyal to their corporate owners and push a foreign policy that seeks to confront any nation it sees as a threat to US global hegemony. Both parties also adhere to pro-capitalist neoliberal economic policy that continues to harm the working-class majority, gut the middle class, and enrich the 1%.

If "The Resistance" were real, it would be pushing the Democrats to actually propose policies designed to help working-class people in our daily struggle for living-wage jobs, adequate education, basic necessities, and accessible healthcare. Instead, it has chosen to obsess over Russia and support war, which is why they will likely find themselves "resisting" for another four years.

Against Zombie Intellectualism: On the Chronic Impotency of Public Intellectuals

By Derek R. Ford

I've just read yet another think piece decrying the sad state of affairs in the U.S. and ascribing it to a depoliticized, docile, stupid populous that is "easily seduced." It came out on June 24, and I read it on June 25, as people took to the streets across the country for Pride (to celebrate it and to push back against pinkwashing). This is just a few days after people across the country took to the streets to protest the acquittal of the cop who murdered Philando Castile. What to explain this disconnect?

The piece I'm referring to is " Manufactured illiteracy and miseducation: A long process of decline led to President Donald Trump ," by cultural critic and public intellectual Henry Giroux. It's one of many articles of its kind, and is exemplary in its general representation of a certain brand of politics. In it, the distinguished professor Giroux mourns for a long-lost "civic culture," "public life," for the "foundations of democracy," and a time before "the corruption of both the truth and politics." The Trump administration, he admonishes, has "turned its back on education as a public good." Even more so than formal institutions of school however, we have a wider cultural pedagogy that manufactures ignorance and illiteracy-our inability to see or read the truth:

"Cultural apparatuses that extend from the mainstream media and the diverse platforms of screen culture now function as neoliberal modes of public pedagogy parading as entertainment or truthful news reporting."

This isn't just a bias against intellectuals and academics. It's more: "It is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives."

What we - progressives and the left - need to do is to understand that education can empower people, it can give the people tools to critically understand their lives so that they can overcome their ignorance and complicity, hold power accountable, and transform the world. With the election of Trump, we can't wait. We need to foster the "ideological and subjective conditions that make individual and collective agency possible." Once, apparently, this was just "an option," but now it is "a necessity."

The people, not intellectuals, make history

What this piece ultimately does is whitewash the long history that has led to this climate. It rests on a triumphalist account of American democracy that is only now under attack. It denies any historical and existing agency that the people have. And it offers no real solutions. I call it "zombie intellectualism" because it feeds off of existing political struggles but serves only to demotivate and demoralize them. We're all guilty of it from time to time, but the fact that it has become a niche in its own right should be alarming to those of us on the left.

Giroux is right that Trump has been a long time coming. But the decline didn't begin with Fox News or Facebook. It began in 1492. It began with the genocide of the Indigenous peoples. It accelerated with the Slave trade and the formal institutionalization of white supremacy and slavery. It intensified during each war of colonial and imperial conquest-from the war against the Philippines in the late 19th century to the ongoing war against Syria. The conditions that allowed for the rise of Trump didn't originate with the neoliberal attack on the public sector in the early 1980s. They are inscribed in the foundations of American democracy .

And yet this history of oppression has equally been a history of resistance. The legacies and fruits of this resistance are what we should be remembering, celebrating, and fighting to strengthen. And resistance is what we have seen since the election of Trump.

I don't exactly know why radical academics often fail to bring this into the narrative. It may be because of their general disconnection from political struggles and protest movements. But it may also be because academics have had little to do with this narrative. Distinguished professors have never made history strictly through their work as public intellectuals. History has been made by the masses: by organizers, by activists, by everyday people. Sometimes, these people have held professorships, but that has always been incidental.

This is not to brush off the ways that academics with radical politics have been attacked by the right wing, as some bloggers have done . They must be defended. (But it is interesting to note that the ones who are attacked are not propagating liberal myths of American democracy).

This is also not to say that spontaneous resistance is enough, or that there is no role for theory. On the contrary, theory is absolutely crucial. But theory doesn't come from the universities; it comes from the social movements themselves. Anyone who has helped organize in any way even the smallest of protests or political actions knows that there is no lack of theoretical debate that take place in our movements.

There has never been a time when the truth or politics have been uncorrupted, or pure. And truth has never corresponded with politics in any straightforward manner. If anything, politics is the struggle to produce new truths, new realities, and this is ultimately a struggle over and for power. That's what we need to focus on building right now: power.

Giroux comes close to admitting this, writing that truth and politics are now corrupted because "much of the American public has become habituated to overstimulation and lives in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images." Jodi Dean has dubbed our current era that of "communicative capitalism ," a merging of capitalism, networked technologies, and democracy that traps us in a reflexive circuit of information and critique. The answer, then, is not more information and more critique. The answer is to organize, to build, to multiply, and to intensify.

Don't mourn or just write, organize!

I share Giroux's wish that there was more resistance. But I can't erase the incredibly hard work of the grassroots organizers and resisters in the U.S. I know the discipline they have and the incredible sacrifices they make. Their labor should be honored, supported, and highlighted.

One current example of this is an initiative called " The People's Congress of Resistance ." It's a campaign uniting radical activists and organizers from a range of struggles, and it will convene at Howard University in Washington, D.C. on September 16-17. The initial conveners are from organizations like the American Indian Movement, the Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition, the Muslim American Alliance, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. There are people organizing for all 50 states.

Exposing the U.S. congress as the congress of millionaires and billionaires, it is building an alternative congress of the people, a true form of counter-power. If radical academics want to see the organic intellectuals they have read about in theory books, then they should be there. And if anyone wants to not just witness the beauty of the people in motion, but be a part of it, then you should be there.

It will be yet another manifestation of the collective agency of the people.

The Utopian Dream of Portland Is Lit by Flames of Racist Hatred: Educating the Next Generation Is Our Only Hope for Change

By Susan Anglada Bartley

When I moved to Portland 17 years ago, freshly graduated from New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a degree in History and Literature of Marginalized Communities that I studied to earn with people so brilliant, people who worked so hard, researched so deeply that I should probably not say that I am associated with them--people like the great Dr. Tricia Rose, professor, warrior, TV commentator, and author of Black Noise and several other texts, people like Dr. Robin Kelley, highly regarded professor of History, author ofRace Rebels and Thelonius Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original and numerous other books and articles--toting Albert Gallatin Scholar and Founder's Scholar awards for my academic work, I was totally unaware of the depth of racism I would encounter in Oregon.

I left New York City with a dream of the West handed down to me by the beat poetry movement, namely Allen Ginsberg, who I deeply admired and had the chance to meet personally before he passed away in 1997, and from my Uncle Kearney, a member of the 60s counterculture who left his Detroit home to wander across the country and up and down the West Coast of the United States, staying at communes in Traverse City, Michigan, Hood River, Oregon, the Russian River, California, and finally in San Blas, Mexico, where he lived for 15 years. My journey West, then, did not initially arise from a desire to fight racism; it came from a desire to follow the footsteps of a dream that is in fact very racist--the escapist dream of the White American hippie. I was born a hippie. I was spoon fed the hippie dream when my uncles would wander into town from the road to visit, full of the shine of San Francisco (and full of marijuana), full of guitar, full of long hair, full of sex, full of Love. They basically told me three things -- Fuck the Man, Everyone is Your Brother or Sister, and Go West! These boys were raised in Detroit--they felt a brotherhood with Blues Music, felt close to Black Urban Poor folks, thought Black and Brown women were BEAUTIFUL, and felt no responsibility to serve anyone or change shit--other than guitar strings. It was through this lens of reality that Oregon always glimmered in the distance, like a mountain range to equality, peace, and brotherhood! New York was nothing like that. New York was halls, and elevators, and stairways. New York was smelly subways. New York was rich people who I served in restaurants or cocktail bars. Or New York was going back to Buffalo...and after what I felt I achieved at NYU, in honor of my Mother who never went to college, I couldn't give up on having a different life. To clarify--this dream wasn't consciously racist; but the unconscious privilege in the concept that one can just leave, escape the system and establish oneself in the magic of the West is the epitome of White blindness-- only a young White college grad would ever believe in the existence of such a Utopia (and let's not forget that it is all related to the constantly reproduced dream of settler colonialism).

Seventeen years later, I write in an area of Portland once called Felony Flats, where impoverished Whites were known to congregate and participate in the underground economy through collecting and selling metals and trading in mind-altering substances (and still do). While it once was a neighborhood populated by more White people, the neighborhood is now one of the most diverse in the city, with large Vietnamese, Chinese, Mexican, Somalian and Ethiopian communities coexisting with working class or unemployed Whites. The heartbeat of the neighborhood is either the parking lot of 7-11 at 82nd Avenue and Flavel, a methamphetamine and heroin and oxy sales station which is very close to a public park that holds much-debated homeless encampments, or the Vietnamese Buddhist Monastery at the end of my block, where monks meditate in silence for long periods of the day while people of all of these communities, including white-supremacist Nazis, walk by outside, or perhaps it is Franklin High School, a school with a lot of pride and a lot of poverty where I dedicated my life energy as a teacher and program leader for 13 years.

I write in an historical moment where a frightening murderous racist hatred has splashed blood on our streets. This hatred is not a new hatred; it is a hatred that has incubated since the inception of the State of Oregon, which, as an article for The Atlantic by Alana Samuels notes, was founded as a racist Utopia in 1859. It is a racist hatred that often wears a "progressive" disguise; it is a hatred that occupies every facet of public life, from public education to the mayor's office. And if we are going to hold onto our humanity, educators, parents, and citizens who care about the future of the State must use our collective power to rip racism from its roots and reforest. But to do so we must first see the way it operates, understand our role in it, and educate children in solidarity against it.

In 2013, I won an H. Councill Trenholm National Education Association Human and Civil Rights Award for my work to dramatically increase the number of students of color in Advanced Placement courses at Franklin High School. It seems appropriate, now, to point out that one can only win a Human and Civil Rights Award for opening doors that are already legally supposed to be open to everyone in a very racist environment. What doesvery racist mean? Doesn't racist sum it up? Very racist means that the culture inside schools in Oregon, minus a few islands, caters directly to White privilege and actively polices, rejects, intimidates, and totally fails students of color. Very racist means Black, Latino, Native, and Asian students being marginalized, in mass numbers, to remedial and lower-level courses while White students are ushered into higher level opportunities. Very racist means that the experience of children of color in Oregon schools are significantly different, based on their race, as are the results they get from their education. In the mid-2000s, I saw this going on at the high school I taught in, and worked with two tremendous Black Principals--Dr. Charles Hopson followed by soon-to-be Dr. Shay James, to end gatekeeping at one school. Through building solidarity between a group of teachers and counselors through the program I co-founded (called The Advanced Scholar Program) we opened the gates and provided needed supports and mentoring for students of color and students living in poverty. Through this work, we also became the school with the number one graduation rate for African American students in the State of Oregon. But soon after the fanfare of the awards (I also won the OnPoint Community Credit Union Award in 2014, which paid my mortgage for a year) wore off, I began to look beyond the myopic focus that was required to do the work I did at Franklin to examine what was going on at other schools.

The problem was, and is, everywhere. Students of color are relegated to lower level courses and locked out of AP programming, especially in Science and Mathematics, all over the State of Oregon. Noting this, I set out with a group of former students of color who are currently in college to author the Bill of Rights for Students of Color in AP & IB Courses. The document gives specific direction to the Portland School Board regarding exactly how to eradicate barriers for students of color. It contains budgetary suggestions, as well as immediate actions that can be taken by Principals to remove barriers like we successfully did at Franklin in the past. After creating the document, we built a coalition of local leaders including prominent leaders of the Black, Latino, and Native American Communities like Portland Black Parent Initiative Executive Director Charles McGee, I AM Academy Executive Director and Real Estate Investor Ellis "Ray Ray" Leary, Don't Shoot Portland Founder Teressa Raiford, Andrea Morgan of CAUSA Oregon, and now State Representative Tawna Sanchez. Each time a new leader signed on, we updated the school board, totaling more than eighty emails back and forth. Soon, the Bill gained national attention. Multi-platinum rapper Scarface signed on, as did Olympic Gold Medalist Steve Meslar. My college roommate, MacArthur Genius Michelle Dorrance, also reached out to sign on to the Bill of Rights, as did the League of Women Voters, and many other local and national leaders. With tremendous social pressure behind it, the Bill was passed unanimously by our school board. An article was published on the NEA Ed-Votes Website, encouraging other school districts to pass similar legislation. And then the school board and district totally failed to act on any of the initiatives in the Bill. Perhaps their failure to act can be blamed on lead contamination that was found, at exactly the same moment, in most of the Portland schools, making not also poisoning the children the clear priority for the district, trumping and overshadowing educational equity.

Very racist also means that throughout my experience of fighting for racial justice in Portland Public Schools, I have faced significant backlash from white administrators and even fellow teachers (though, interestingly, no African American administrator has ever admonished me or punished me in any way). After winning the awards, I was moved into an office and given no desk, while my male office mate had a desk. When I requested a desk, I was given a children's school desk, where, as an award-winning educator with clear, well-documented and published results, I was supposed to do my work adjacent to my male counterpart with an adult desk. While working on the Bill of Rights, which I completed entirely outside of the school day (documenting my hours so as to avoid the assumption that I was working for justice on company time), I was regularly berated by several administrators, and again placed into an office with no door to the main hallway so that students could not come in to see me. I was also told that in order to continue to operate my extremely successful program, I had to do it with less time, little real support, and constant threats of funding cuts. From 2003 to present, when I called out gatekeeping, I have been bullied by small groups of fellow teachers who do not agree with or understand civil rights law, or suggest that I am making trouble by suggesting we focus on examining the significant inequities in the system that relate to the way we do our work--and actually focus on serving children of color. When I say bullied, I mean ostracized and gossiped about; I mean that my work has been degraded multiple times. Though I have had eight Gates Scholars come through my classroom, some white teachers who are themselves incapable of conceiving of Black, Latino, and Native American academic excellence put down my work by claiming that I am making things easier for my students, or that my grading systems do not equate to their rigorous standards. Really, they are afraid to face their own complicity and responsibility in the system they have devised, with support from administrations, to uphold White supremacy in Portland Public Schools without ever even stopping to care. Of course, there are many educators who supported and collaborated in the work of eradicating racism, but these educators have never been asked to lead, and have never been in the majority -- we are always pushing against a racist status quo that governs public education in Portland, Oregon.

They'll say they cared. They'll say they devised systems, helped students write special essays about African American history. They'll say this and they'll say that--but some will know what I mean when I say no one ever really stopped to care. I mean it was never the sole focus for a significant number of years in many schools others than one or two. I mean that there was never a time when every single teacher was asked to take five years to really work on their relationships with students of color. There was never a time when every administrator was asked to look at who they privilege in the school, and how they make staff of color feel in the school environment. There was never a time when administrators were required, with appropriate accountability, including penalties for not doing the work, to examine the inequities in their advanced coursework, discipline data, grade data, and graduation rates for students of color. This district has never stopped to really listen to the amazing voices of the former students of the I AM Academy who will tell you one by one that the reason that they stayed in school, and often the reason they are alive is in part because of the wisdom of African-American educator Ray Leary--a man who himself has faced continued hatred, discrimination, and threats to his excellent program simply for doing great work with Black boys. This district never put its foot down around obscene parental funding at Lincoln High School, a school known to serve privileged White students on the West side of town, turning a blind eye regarding additional funding that parents put in to set their own kids up to win when they face less privileged schools in academic and athletic competitions.

And, it's not that the school teachers never stopped to care. Of everyone who is culpable for the racist system, teachers cared the most, but we are still complicit in the fabric of racism; we are still accountable. The truth is so hard to hear! To teach in Portland means to be complicit in a racist system. And there is racism in the roots of the system. In a 2016 article for KATU News, investigative report Joe Douglass writes, "African American K-12 students in Oregon are 2.3 times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students...black children in Portland Public Schools are four times more likely to be suspended or expelled". But the racism doesn't end there--the racism thrives in the way history is often taught--as evidenced by the rape culture denial letter that went viral earlier in the year from a Social Studies teacher in Portland Public Schools. The presence of a prominent, if not LOVED, history teacher denying the existence of rape culture is an abomination of the field of history itself, for one cannot teach the history of Western Civilization and also deny the omnipresence of rape culture. To do so is a total denial of the reality of the history of the world. To do so is to deny the existence of women in history at all. To specifically deny the existence of Native and Black women is misogynoir, is absolute fiction, is simply the rhetoric of supremacy. Racism also shows up in Forensic Science courses, where some teachers still use terms like Mongoloid to describe people of Asian origin, Negroid to describe people of African origin, and Caucasoid to describe White Europeans. These terms, which were invented by racist Scientist Blumenbach in the 1780s were strictly forbidden, even by my history teacher, Mr. John Toy, in the early 90s, who was educated by Catholic Jesuits in New York City. It is an abomination that these terms are still in use in this state, but I've heard about their usage in a science class as recently as this year. Portland educators never stopped to truly investigate their curriculum for racist and sexist attitudes and make appropriate changes to rectify inappropriate attitudes found therein.

A diversity training program called Courageous Conversations, offered through the always-under-attack Office of Equity aimed to gently ask White educators to examine our biases--and many did, but some tried to refuse the training or chose not to absorb the benefits and made a joke of it as time went by. That eradicating racism is not the topic of discussion for every educator in the state every day of the year has troubled me since I arrived seventeen years ago; that systemic and overt racism is not the topic of discussion in every school now that we cannot deny the existence of a thriving, deadly white power movement in our city and state makes me wonder what the fuck I am doing here. One time, when faced with the reality that a student of Mexican heritage who was in fact a genius could not go to college because of his immigration status, I prayed on my knees, asking God to simply make me a woman of great faith. I prayed it sincerely. Sincerely, I prayed it. I prayed it with depth, with all of my heart. I can only say that if you ask God to make you a person of great faith, she is likely to give you some challenges.

The City of Portland, too, never stopped to care. Portland never stopped to care when Kendra James was murdered in her car by police while trying to unfasten her seatbelt. They never stopped to care for Quanice Hayes. They never stopped to care--it got so bad in schools that they sometimes just painted over swastikas and didn't report it to the parents. It got so bad that I once heard about a kid being sent back to class by an administrator when a teacher sent them out because they had swastikas drawn on their jean jacket---but the administrator didn't confiscate the jacket or send the kid home. He just told him to roll up his sleeves and go back to class. Isn't that just the way it is, Portland, Oregon?

I now realize that a large part of the problem that white Portland has with racism is that for many, they have been raised in such an isolated white supremacy that they really haven't had much contact with Black or Brown people, other than in this dynamic where they have total power. Black and Brown children are the only contact many white educators have, and Black and Brown children are under them. If they have contact with other Black or Brown people, it is often in a condition of subservience. There are, for example, many fancy restaurants, with almost all White waiters, and all Central American and Mexican workers inside the kitchen. The color caste system is so prominent and visible in Portland that many white Portlanders don't see any reason why that should change, nor do the teachers who come from this same society. Thus, the sharp and humiliating tongue of the White teacher is like a double lash on the backs of Black and Brown children who must bear the brunt of that pain twice as painfully as a White child who does not have to assume that some of the hatred is not just for their youth, but also for who they are as a person--at a soul level--their identity. For many students of color, the humiliation from racist encounters in Portland Public Schools causes feelings of dejection so powerful that students feel more comfortable outside of school and far away from certain classrooms, which ultimately impacts their ability to navigate the system, and reflects as low grades and lower graduation rates for students of color.

It's not that every teacher in Portland Public Schools is actively racist, except me. There is, in fact, a legacy of anti-racist work that started before my arrival, like the work of former teachers, who took students from Portland to Alabama to walk in the footsteps of Dr. King (a trip that continues through the dedication of several current educators). Currently, there are cells of anti-racist educators at many schools throughout the city; few of them will tell you that their work is fully supported. Many have faced significant challenges in order to stay focused on supporting students of color. All will speak of the greater financial support they would need to provide greater resources for students of color. Many anti-racist educators in Portland know the great faith required to continue to fight for achievement for students of color in a district that prioritizes equity in messaging, but not in reality.

What if every teacher in Portland felt part of the movement to transform Portland Public Schools? What if every teacher had the skills and humility to actually relate to and support students of color? What if every teacher was willing to look inside our attitudes, and inside our curriculum, to eradicate racism with the goal of creating social change in the city of Portland? What if?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the foundations of anti-racist education...and how they were laid in me. As I previously mentioned, my hippie Uncles were obsessed with Howlin' Wolf, and all of the Blues greats -- I had Blues songs for lullabies and still do. I get it that they were appropriating a dream -- but in that particular dream, there was a solidarity between White and Black working class dudes that I really have not seen since. For me, anti-racist education began in a bizarre if not obtuse, but totally child and heart-centered school, founded by complete hippies, called CAUSE School. This school was founded on the principle that through community-based education, community action, and education totally focused on unity between students of different races, anti-racist and non-violent social revolution could be activated. Throughout my early childhood, I was constantly surrounded by intelligent, counter-culture black adults who were speaking the language of Black Power. Whether they were struggling to get by or pursuing a doctorate, I felt a great sense of love and respect for the many Black adults in my life -- and I readily and eagerly gave that love and respect, and learned how to receive that love and respect, which was the greatest gift I ever received in terms of becoming an educator -- for I did not ever have to say, "I have a Black friend." I was part of a community that included many Black people who loved me and who I loved; in fact, my very definition of love came from the feelings I had from people in that community. Black love was my definition of love -- and though I am fully white and have lived a life of incredible privilege -- I also had the privilege of understanding some of the language of Black love. Part of that language is that you can't come out here as some dumbass White woman and define Black love. That would be some bullshit. You have to feel it. And I do.

If I really had to explain anti-racist education, I would say it through this anecdote: when I was a little older, attending another extremely radical hippie diverse Montessori school in the early 1980s, I noticed a Black boy who was very unclean. This school was also in the middle of the most impoverished Black neighborhood in the city of Buffalo, NY -- a community totally devastated by crack cocaine. Many other children said that his Mother was on crack. This made me so sad when I went home that I snuck into the cabinet and brought this boy a bar of soap. When we were in the hall alone, I walked up to him and quietly offered him the bar of soap.

SMACK!!!!

"I don't need no soap, White Bitch!" he said, slapping me hard across the face.

That was perhaps the best anti-racist education a White person can have. I was slapped out of savior at age eight. And it was a righteous slap. It was not a slap where you go tell the teacher. It was a you-better-fucking-not-go-tell-the-teacher-or-I'll-fucking-kill-you-next-time-slap. It was a slap into total submission and full realization that you do not pity Black people or in any way make assumptions about their level of resourcefulness or resources because you will have another thing coming. In my earliest years, I was surrounded by the children of Black nationalists who regularly spoke about African power. In my 7-9 year old Montessori class, we studied South Africa in great depth. The teachers focused on helping us to understand the meaning of racism, and working hard to connect us, through helping us to look at racism in our own society and in ourselves.

In my recollection, there was some very specific language they used that was effective for my young mind. When I say these words, I know that the intellectuals who read this will get their guns and start shooting me down with great acuity for how little deconstruction I am going to do here; however, in defense of these radical educators of the 1980s, they did something really amazing through focusing their entire methodology on anti-racist language. While they focused the curriculum on showing us the history of oppression and revolution throughout the world in depth, they also used slogans that a child could easily remember to help us to understand anti-racist philosophy in the way that worked for the mind of a 5 to 9 year old. The words they wove into us as we sat on the floor looking up at their mythic storytelling were, It's what's on the inside that counts.

It's what's on the inside that counts will not heal the deaths of all of the Black and indigenous people who have died, to date, from the largest genocide in the history of the planet. It's what's on the inside that counts will not bring back Trayvon, or Emmett, or any of the millions who died in the chokehold of White power, but for God's sake, Portland, we cannot go on like this.

Portland teachers need a new language and an entirely new focus on anti-racist education. Dr. Rosenberg's work on non-violent communication is a great place to start; and we must also be willing to take direction from our local educators and leaders of color who can convene and, if supported appropriately with pay, can help White Portlanders to understand what they don't see. Every teacher must be willing to investigate our own curriculum each year, each week, each day, to work toward bettering our relationships with students. We can do this by requiring that every teacher change from a teacher-centered model to a student-centered model that utilizes non-violent communication, as well as a variety of other techniques that I will discuss in a future article. Above all, we need more Black, Latinx, and Native American teachers in our schools. We know that the state tests filter out candidates of color because of various forms of bias. We also know that our schools are often currently not comfortable places for Black and Brown staff members. We must call for changes in how teachers are hired while also requiring administrators to work on school climate with a specific focus on racism, sexism, and White male supremacy, and how they manifest in staff culture.

We must turn the schools upside down, shake them, and put them back down with new walls, higher ceilings, open doors, and more light. In creating a new infrastructure that supports students of color, we can look to the legislation that is already provided for us by Dr. King, Reverend Shuttlesworth, Fanie Lou Hamer, and other heroes of the early NAACP and civil rights movement who fought to write their suggestions into law. Until this transformation takes place, the Portland School Board, current district leaders, high school principals, and even teachers must accept full responsibility for evident civil right violations and a culture of racism that operates in the public system. The Utopian dream of Portland is lit by flames of racist hatred. Focusing on eradicating civil rights violations in every school, supporting the Office of Equity in a large scale collaborative project to examine all questionable curriculum to remove racist attitudes, and gathering together as anti-racist educators to teach the next generation both anti-racist philosophy and inclusive student-centered curriculum is our only hope for change.

Susan Anglada Bartley is an activist, writer,​and teacher in Portland, Oregon. She earned her B.A. from NYU, and her M.Ed from Portland State University. She was awarded a National Education Association H. Councill Trenholm Human and Civil Rights Award in 2013 for her work to end racism in public education. She presented her work on Systemic Barriers to AP and IB Courses for Black, Native American, and Latino Students, and co-presented with Pedro Anglada Cordero, MSW on Invisible Fences: Removing Obstacles for Latino Students at the Teaching for Social Justice North West Conference and at the Evergreen Education Association Diversity and Social Justice Conference. She has published articles with Artvoice Buffalo, Literary Arts Portland, The National Education Association Magazine, NEA-Ed Votes, Latino Rebels, and The Hampton Institute: A Working Class Think Tank.

Race, Solidarity, and the American Working Class

By Edward Carson

The search for solidarity has escaped white, black, and brown working class people, in part, due to white people's historical reluctance to embrace shared experiences that cross racial boundaries. Because of recent political news, mass rallies by Black Lives Matter, and the growing concerns about the economic gap, I aim to resurrect past and present conversations about the "working class." As we know, it is not monolithic. In order to confront working class issues, society must mend the color line through class, which is complex, as the American race question is the real problem.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, expresses the unchanged dimensions of the American color line and class-consciousness among the working class:

"Solidarity is standing in unity with people even when you have not personally experienced their particular oppression. The reality is that as long as capitalism exists, material and ideological pressures push white workers to be racist and all workers to hold each other in general suspicion. But there are moments of struggle when the mutual interests of workers are laid bare, and when the suspicion is finally turned in the other direction - at the plutocrats who live well while the rest of us suffer." [1]

Black lives do matter, but many accept arguments that society operates under the guise of color blindness, a falsity that permits modern day atrocities to black and brown Americans. This argument stands in the way of interracial workers forging unity. Black Lives Matter further elicits a reaction to the present-day injustices that were not wholly resolved via 1960's de jure legislation. Thus, the movement has sought to bring all people together in solidarity against systematic racism and brutality.

Working class people should be unified across racial lines; however, the lack of solidarity and the division capitalism promotes regarding class and race continues to divide them, as noted by the rise of Donald Trump, the 2016 Republican Presidential winner. If the white, black, and brown working class were fully unified - they might grasp their intersectional identities and achieve an understanding of themselves as a wholly marginalized people, often comprised of multiple identities: LGBTQ, people of color, women, etc.

The past and present reflect white people's belief in their own understanding of racism, not the real experiences faced by people of color. Often, they have defined racism in a "neoliberal" sense of saving black people from their own community problems. Rudy Giuliani, following the killings of five police officers in Dallas, referenced how he has saved more lives than Black Lives Matter. He, as well as others, such as Republican National Convention speaker David Clarke, a Milwaukee Sheriff, who too spoke against Black Lives Matter, failed to note the waves of cyclical oppression in cities like Baltimore, a conclusion of America's past Jim Crow policies. White people fail to understand the ubiquitous degree of privilege they hold, a precursor to being an ally to black and brown people. The rejection of "white privilege" is an acceptance of interracial solidarity.

Black Identity and Solidarity

Without privilege and facing racial oppression, American Negroes have long sought solidarity, but without it, focused on their own struggle and revolution. As Malcolm X wrote in Message to the Grassroots,

"The Negroes were out there in the streets. They were talking about how they were going to march on Washington… That they were going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed. They even said they were going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land….That was the black revolution."

This revolution was absent of racial solidarity, in part, due to white resistance and disinterest, growing Black Nationalism, and societal failure to grasp the extent of white racism within the working class.

Before the second civil rights period, 1954 - 1965, black Marxist, who pondered their approach to fighting capitalism and Jim Crow in the early 20 th century, witnessed the pervasiveness of racial injustice and the pronouncement of white supremacy as ubiquitous forces in post-bellum America. Thanks to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), black folk sought to address their oppression in a country shaped by de facto racism and Jim Crow. Through such challenges, Negro solidarity continued, though Carol Anderson's book, Bourgeois Radicals, discusses the NAACP's attempt to distance itself from radical Du Bois, whose writings offered a Marxist analysis in the United States and an international call for colonial independence.

Du Bois witnessed the rise of Marcus Garvey and his paradigm, which sought to use capitalism in promoting Black Nationalism in the 1920s. Du Bois, who joined the Communist Party USA in 1961, adopted a Marxist perspective early in his training to challenge racism, while Garvey's use of capitalism was his means of addressing the race problem. And though there was solidarity in addressing the advancement of blacks, Garvey's capitalism offered a contentious anti-Marxist narrative to Du Bois's integrationist approach. After all, it was Du Bois who opposed Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise, even though he shared a desire with them in eradicating Negro oppression.

By the 1950s, the United States government saw a need for change regarding its race problem, due to the Soviet Union and voices from organized movements, such as the International Labor Defense. Black American communists, such as William Patterson, Claudia Jones and Esther Jackson, propagated the left's message questioning American democracy. The United States championed the 1954 court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which chipped away at Jim Crow, but did not fully resolve legal segregation; it was a clear response to the accusations made by the Soviet Union and American radicals regarding America's race problem. [2]

Marxism and Racial Unity

According to Marxism, the first focus is on class; hence, a desire to unify the oppressed proletariat. Karl Marx assumed class struggle would address the race question. However, both are contentious forces in the United States. This, unfortunately, has historically created troubled interest for white and colored workers in unifying, often because capitalism and white supremacy have maintained a symbiotic relationship. Blacks have long suspected that white working class people were exploited and fed lies about the Negro, in an attempt to prevent solidarity. As Du Bois wrote in The place of Negroes in the crisis of capitalism in the United States,

"This newest South, turning back to its slave past, believes its present and future prosperity can best be built on the poverty and ignorance of its disfranchised lowest masses-and these low-paid workers now include not only Negroes, but Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the unskilled, unorganized whites. Progress by means of this poverty is the creed of the present South… The Northern white worker long went his way oblivious to what was happening in the South. He awoke when the black Southern laborer fled North after World War I, and he welcomed him by riots… They excluded Negroes. It is taking a long time to prove to them that their attitude toward Negroes was dangerous. If Negro wages were low in the South, what business was that of New England white labor?"

Angela Davis, who ran for the vice presidency of the United States on the Communist Party ticket in the 1980s, and recently authored, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, reminds us of the universal struggle shared by black and brown folk, as she echoed Du Bois's observation that the "problem of the twentieth century is that of the color line." Davis contends "Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work".

Du Bois and Davis touched on the unique struggles of being black and American. They remind blacks that white bourgeois power and racism are instruments to suppress their blackness and social condition. This promulgated Negro distrust of whites, driving later concerns about the Communist Party USA (CP), as reflected in the writings of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, who critiqued their struggles with the left, due to the reluctance of white communists and the CP to fully address race. Wright showcased his frustration in his essay I Tried to be a Communist.

Those fears should have been allayed by the historical solidarity and support the CP expressed in fighting the racial injustices toward the falsely accused Scottsboro Boys of rape. Not even the NAACP supported them, withdrawing from the case in 1932. Later, in 1955, it was the CP who sought justice for the slaying of Emmett Till, who was murdered in Mississippi by white supremacists.

The Struggle for Unity in Labor

With such efforts at building solidarity by black, brown, and white communists, challenges persisted. A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, pointed to the complexity of America's racial binary relationship, as he noted, "Salvation for a race, nation or class must come from within. Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted."

Randolph, like Du Bois, Washington, and Garvey, sought first to take care of the Negro race - then use that to advance the race within white America. The commonality of race consciousness and black identity usurped class. Negro awareness of white working class differences was a grave barrier to achieving unity over capitalism. Randolph's approach moved closer to solidarity with whites, as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) granted the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters a charter, but the color line was not mended in a fashion that promoted class-consciousness. Manning Marable's book, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945 - 1990, noted that "The purge of communists and radicals from organized labor from 1947 through 1950 was the principal reason for the decline in AFL-CIO's commitment to the struggle against racial segregation." [3]

Blacks observed white union members still struggling with racial solidarity in the trade union movement decades later. In the 2008 election, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka spent weeks encouraging white workers to support Barack Obama, saying, "While there are many reasons to vote for Obama, there's only one really, really bad reason to vote against Barack Obama. And that's because he's not white."

Racism has long divided the working class, and today is no different. Many white working class people voted for Donald Trump. And much like 2008, race was a reason. While some will salute a strong economy, in truth, wages have flattened for the working class. Because of this, and because white workers have grown suspicious of the burgeoning black power call by Black Lives Matter, the search for solidarity continues to escape a racially divided country, as noted by the current political climate.

Edward Carson is an independent historian who teaches courses on race, religion, United States history, and African American Studies in the history department at the Brooks School, a residential school in North Andover, Massachusetts. He is the current chair of the Communist Party USA Boston. The title of his working manuscript is " W.E.B. Du Bois's Editorial Influence on Western Negro Migration ."

Notes

[1] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016), 215.

[2] Daniel Rubin, "James and Esther Jackson: Shapers of History," People's World, December 16, 2006, http://www.peoplesworld.org/james-and-esther-jackson-shapers-of-history/ .

[3] Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945 - 1990 (University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 28.

Explaining the Dollar: How it Became the Global Currency and What it Means For You

By Megan Cornish

Most working people think of the buck as the way they pay their bills. But its use goes far beyond the USA's borders. The greenback is the major world currency for trade and finance. This international role bestows vast power on the U.S. government and the rich. But its status doesn't help ordinary people much.

Fundamentally, the exchange of commodities and investments under global capitalism requires generally accepted forms of money to buy and sell them with. And the notes issued by the largest and richest economies tend to be employed the most. Today, the dollar is the most widely used, followed by the euro, the British pound, the Japanese yen, and since 2015, the Chinese yuan.

These world currencies have many uses. Besides international trade in commodities, there is foreign exchange, which is the buying and selling of the legal tender of different countries. Governments must hold foreign currency reserves to back up their money in case of economic crises, especially massive speculation in their own notes that can cause their value to collapse. In weaker and smaller economies, many everyday transactions take place in dollars or other international bills rather than the official local money. Some countries, like Panama, don't have their own currency, and instead use the dollar.

How the greenback became king.

Dollars backed by the government began (except for a brief unsuccessful run during the Civil War) with the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. Government-backed notes allowed the USA to compete with Britain and its pound for economic dominance. In World War I, and later World War II, U.S. businesses profited mightily from supplying the combatants, and the country became the center of global finance. In 1944, representatives from over 40 countries met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and signed an agreement that the dollar would be the world currency, convertible to gold by central banks at fixed exchange rates.

That arrangement lasted until 1971, when massive deficit spending on the war in Vietnam inflated the greenback and caused other countries to demand its exchange for gold. President Nixon ended this international convertibility, effectively devaluing the dollar.

The other result was that all currencies floated in value relative to each other, and there was no longer one official world paper money. The chaotic capitalist market prevailed, and a whole new arena of finance flourished - currency speculation.

But since the U.S. economy still dominated world finance and trade, the buck retained much of its international financial role. For instance, at the end of 2016, almost 64 percent of known foreign exchange reserves were held in dollars. They still predominate - so far - because of the size and relative strength of the economy of the USA and the dominance of its financial markets.

Who does a strong buck benefit?

To listen to the financial press,workers and business have the same interests. When governments, institutions and rich individuals are buying U.S. securities, stocks and real estate, interest rates tend to stay low and Wall Street booms. But that mainly benefits the rich who live off investments.

A rising greenback is a danger to workers and the overall economy. In this time of economic stagnation, when wealth is flowing almost exclusively to those at the top, the demand to buy dollars as an investment has soared, and so has its value. Between mid-2014 and 2016, the dollar appreciated 20 percent in relation to other main currencies.

This in turn has made the U.S. trade deficit explode. That is because as the buck rises, imports become cheaper to buy (in dollars) and exports to other countries become more expensive. Not only do exports fall, but production for the home market does too, as it becomes cheaper for consumers to buy foreign products.

This results in job cuts. Domestic production shrinks and national businesses try to reduce their costs by increasing automation. The high value of the greenback becomes a drag on the whole economy.

Calls for protectionism tend to increase, often along with xenophobic and racist movements. Witness the Trump phenomenon, and fascist-based movements in Europe. But neither protectionism nor "free" trade is good for workers anywhere. Capitalism is all about pitting working people against each other.

Feeding the war machine

One of the major ways governments and institutions hold dollars is in the form of U.S. Treasury securities. The buyer is lending their money to the government. The buck's high value helps Uncle Sam to sell ever more bonds. Unfortunately, much of the proceeds are plowed into military spending. This process has been funding the war industry since WWII. It has pushed the explosion of military actions that are devastating the Middle East and destabilizing many countries. It has cemented U.S. imperialism and world dominance at the cost of mayhem and misery.

Military spending plays a significant role in the economy of the USA, making large parts of the country's production not for human use, but for destruction. However, it props up the economy only so long as the greenback is an attractive investment. The United States can't maintain this house of cards forever, and it behooves workers here to remember that their interests remain with all the world's workers, not with "our" ruling class.

This was originally published in Freedom Socialist newspaper, Vol. 38, No. 3, June-July 2017 ( www.socialism.com)

Send feedback to author Megan Cornish at fsnews@mindspring.com.

Give us Liberty, or Give us Death: A Review of Phillip Nelson's "Remember the Liberty!"

By Greg Maybury

With the anniversary of the enormously consequential 1967 Six-Day War (SDW) between Israel and the Arab states (Egypt, Syria, Jordan) upon us, Phil Nelson's book is a timely and welcome addition to the literature of that event and the key people involved, and indeed, the era. Although on its face about the deliberate attack by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) during that conflict on the U.S. naval 'sig-int' ship the USS Liberty, with the loss of 34 lives and over 170 casualties, it's much more than that.

Along with showcasing one of the most disgraceful episodes in U.S. military history -- to say little of the self-serving, hypocritical and callous manner in which the political and military establishment treats its service personnel -- "Remember the Liberty!" presents us an opportunity to place into broader, more urgent relief, the history of America's increasingly dangerous -- some might say existentially so -- relationship with Israel, in addition to probing the role of both nations in past events and those unfolding as we speak in and across the Greater Middle East.

His just released tome moreover, crucially invites us to reexamine the virtually unexplored, indeed, wilfully neglected role played in these events by arguably America's most psychologically unhinged and criminally 'sectionable' of Oval Officeholders, one whose political ascendancy and White House tenure may have been the most consequential of all. We're talking here the then president of the U.S., Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), he of the Gulf of Tonkin fame. As the author reveals, had things gone the way as LBJ had planned, it almost certainly would've triggered the most cataclysmic consequences of all for humanity. Suffice to say that to the extent there might have been anyone around to write about it after, by way of comparison, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis would've ended up a mere footnote in history.

On all counts then, Nelson's book provides us ample context and perspective within which to contemplate all of this and more. The truly astonishing story in this new book then is about one of the most explosive and hidden secrets in U.S. history - one that has never been previously told in such a transformative way. It is made all the more explosive because it involves Israel. Based on all available evidence, this is the most authentic, complete, up to date -- and it has to be said, disturbing -- account of the Liberty tragedy and its subsequent cover-up; the war in which it took place and that war's own hidden backstory; and the real perpetrators behind both of these, along with revelations about their motivations and intrigues. No matter what you read elsewhere, I can pretty much guarantee you're not getting the 'full monty' . And for those looking to write about the Liberty going forward, don't put pen to paper without it. Whether you're in the mainstream or alternative media camps, you'll just look like you've not done your homework!

"Remember the Liberty!" explores how a sitting U.S. president collaborated with Israeli leaders in the fomentation of what became known as the Six-Day War between them and their Arab neighbors. The so-called "spontaneous war" had been planned for months -- possibly even as early as two years before -- to be a war that would ensure a victory for Israel; the weakening of her enemies in neighboring Arab nations; and the acquisition of additional territories for Israel. These were all incentives to create 'buy-in' from Israeli leaders to this diabolical quid pro quo between them and LBJ, which might not otherwise have been forthcoming.

But the man known as "Landslide Lyndon" had his own ulterior motives in facilitating the Six-Day War: For the estimable LBJ, his highest priority was always about the ruthless accumulation of power, and in this case, it was about holding onto said power by ensuring his re-election the following year. Upset by his loss of popularity generally and with Jewish voters in particular, he wanted to give Israel as much covert - and ultimately, had the plan succeeded, overt - support as possible in the plan to engage their neighbors in that war, including the creation of a pretext to join them in attacking Egypt.

After the botched plan was implemented, the ship refused to sink even after being hit by a torpedo (more on this shortly), leading the attack to be abandoned and a massive cover-up set in motion, which included serious threats to the crewmembers to "keep their lips sealed." As ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern put it in the book's Foreword (see Consortium News "Not Remembering the Liberty") , those orders "put steroids to the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffered by many of the survivors." That cover-up is still in place (barely), but now completely exposed. Indeed, we can now say with certainty it is the worst best-kept secret in the history of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Written in conjunction with three of the remaining survivors, Ernie Gallo, Ron Kukal and Phil Tourney, the book includes harrowing first-hand accounts from them. It's perhaps apposite to cite just one account of the numerous disturbing, poignant of those written for the book, this one by Tourney. With his shipmate Rick Aimetti helping him, they,

'….found some fire hoses and began hosing off the deck with a "suicide nozzle" on it that sprayed water in a very concentrated, high-pressure stream. It took both of us to handle this hose, because it was like a giant python and one man could not do it alone. It was the most gruesome, heartbreaking task we've ever done because every piece of flesh was the remains of one of our fellow sailors, many of whom were friends. As [we] went about this ungodly task, tears streamed down our faces and I prayed to God for forgiveness in how we were forced to treat the remains of these men so sacrilegiously. In the gun-tubs we found a shoe with a foot still in it, which we put aside for collection. Many of the bloodstains would not come off, even with that special hose, because of the previous day's heat - not just baking under the sun's heat, but from the rockets and napalm that had be dropped on the ship by the attacking [planes]. We found out the hard way how hot our government's most brutal weapon can burn: It can get as hot as 2,200°F, which explains why that blood could not be completely cleansed from the steel decks.'

"Remember the Liberty!" places much more focus on the brutality and ruthlessness with which the Johnson administration and the U.S. Navy brass treated the sailors themselves, not only then, but, significantly, continuing even now. It began immediately after the attack but - because of the threats of prison "or worse" if they ever uttered a word about it, even to their wives or parents - it festered for decades, while they and their families had to live with the trauma they experienced. This meant keeping their horrific memories to themselves for 15-20 years before they felt safe enough to even discuss it with anyone. Their stories recount how they've continued to be marginalized, dismissed - even ridiculed -- by the MSM and accused of anti-Semitism by Israel's defenders in knee-jerk fashion. In fact, the book contains an entire chapter dedicated to this point.

Another brutally shocking revelation -- one hitherto virtually ignored or neglected, even apparently by some of the survivors, and one likely to induce cognitive dissonance even in those folks who might imagine themselves immune to the discomforts of this most curious of psychological conditions -- is the following: After the IDF motor torpedo boats (MTB) had fired four torpedoes and all had missed the target (this may or may not have been deliberate upon the part of the MTB commanders; we can only surmise), the fifth torpedo which did hit the ship was fired, according to one sailor's account, by the Liberty's escort submarine the USSAmberjack, the result of a direct order from President Johnson. (My emphasis)

The grievously wounded sailor - Richard Larry Weaver - who only relatively recently revealed publicly this part of the story (and further claimed the Amberjack filmed the assault through its periscope), was nearly killed, only saved by one of his shipmates who came to his rescue and helped him to the medics, the then 21 year old literally holding his intestines inside his abdomen until his fellow sailor delivered what was left of him to the ship's only doctor. The most severely wounded of all of the remaining survivors, even for those who aren't especially God-fearing would have to concede some kind of miracle occurred that day to save Weaver. But well might we say, that day June 8, 1967, was remarkable for its many "miracles", and Nelson's narrative is littered with them.

A Few Dead Sailors (And the Some)

When he was finally released from hospital and returned Stateside, Weaver then discovered that his Navy records had been doctored to hide the fact he was even assigned to the Liberty. He was then forced to hire a private investigator to prove it just to get his disability service pension acknowledged. His investigator reportedly had "high-level Pentagon contacts" who revealed many of the secrets to him, and that's how Weaver found out about that "fifth torpedo" and who had fired it. I'm given to understand that this investigator has since denied he made this revelation, but to this day Weaver - a man who has undergone more than 35 major operations since that day -- is adamant his account is true. The YouTube video in the link above is a must watch, but folks should prep themselves for a singularly distressing account of his experience. Those who do watch it can then make up their own minds as to whether the man's account is credible.

But for those folks who've read Nelson's earlier books on LBJ (see here and here ), they'll know such a monumental act of treachery and treason was not beyond this president. By Nelson's reckoning (and numerous others it needs be said), [LBJ] "wanted that ship sunk!" Johnson - interestingly, a former, albeit less than distinguished , Navy man himself -- was not prepped to allow a "few dead sailors" to cause "embarrassment" to an important ally like Israel. We might readily assume the president had in mind avoiding same (and more) for himself. The very fact that Johnson - via Robert McNamara , his then Defense Secretary, a man who was as complicit as his boss in this unmitigated act of treason and the travesty of the cover-up and who later denied being able to recall anything significant about the Liberty attack -- stopped in their tracks not one but two separate attempts by Sixth Fleet Commanders to come to the ship's rescue is sufficient to underscore this.

There has been of course no shortage of books written about the attack on the Liberty. Some of those present the case put forth by the U.S. and Israeli governments' "official story" (e.g. Judge AJ Cristol , or self-styled Six-Day War "expert" Michael Oren ), concocted to perpetuate the cover-up narrative (not unlike the contrived narrative Israel has clung to about why it went to war in the first instance), hiding the incriminating facts and essentially writing it off as a freak "accident." You know, the "Fog of War" thing!

But that was never the reaction of the State Department officials of the time, or certain members the Navy brass who weren't under orders to conduct a phony investigation designed to cover it up. One of the latter, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff no less Admiral Thomas Moorer , observed that the president's handling of the Liberty attack was "…the most disgraceful act I witnessed in my entire military career." By the same token, one of the Admirals who did his best to keep a lid on the real facts of the attack was none other than Admiral John ("Mr. Seapower") McCain Jr., which if the name doesn't ring any bells for folks, was the father of the estimable Arizona Senator John McCain III , not coincidentally one of the most ardent of the Beltway's apologists for Israel.

Tellingly, the man who wrote the original fabricated Navy "Court of Inquiry" report on the incident - the report used by those same authors as the basis for their books - eventually retracted all of it: Former Navy Captain Ward Boston Jr., JAGC, in 2004 penned a scathing denunciation of the book by Judge Cristol, admitting that the original Navy report was designed to cover up the truths and replace them with bald-faced lies. And interestingly, one of Australia's former Prime Ministers Malcolm Fraser in 2014 declared unequivocally the attack on the Liberty by Israel was deliberate. As a senior cabinet minister at the time -- and later Defence Minister -- few could argue Fraser didn't know what he was talking about, even if he barely knew the half of it.

These earlier books which have attempted to lay out the real facts behind the attack all come to the conclusion that the brutal two hour attack was an intentional, well co-ordinated assault, designed not to just put the ship out of commission and prevent it from sending or receiving real-time 'intel' about unfolding events, but to ensure that it sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean. These books (e.g. by James Ennes , Peter Hounam, and James Scott ) do not mention the key factor that actually caused the attack in the first place, and which then necessitated the massive cover-up. One book ( Hounam's Operation Cyanide ) did suggest something strange was going on at the White House, and posited that Johnson's political travails -- of which there were plenty -- might have something to do with the chain of events.

"Remember the Liberty!" though is the first book to factor LBJ's psychopathological issues - again of which like his "political travails", there were many -- into the calculus. Only by understanding his obsession with winning back the political support of Jewish people who'd abandoned him because of his shambolic Vietnam policies -- along with the monomaniacal nature of Number 36 -- can one understand what really happened. Like his previous "false flag" 'op' mentioned earlier - the phantom 'attack' at the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnamese gunboats on two U.S. Navy destroyers, conveniently occurring just three months before the 1964 elections, which helped him win his landslide election - he calculated this attack would secure his re-election the following year.

Yet the opposite happened: when the Liberty didn't sink -- and his devious "false flag" plan to use it as a pretext for blaming the attack on Egypt and join Israel in their victorious "Six-Day War" collapsed - it was his re-election chances that were deep-sixed. Nine months laterhe reluctantly pulled the pin on seeking reelection to the very office he'd lusted for his entire life. And as they say, the rest is history. Except that with these things, it never is of course! By this time, LBJ was a broken man. But by then so was pretty much everything else in the Home of the Brave.

Of the two principals involved, the conflicted -- in both cases ulterior -- goals of the Six-Day War are the root cause of the turbulence in the Middle East which the world has both witnessed and endured for the past five decades. Numerous ironies abound, such as the fact that over half of the U.S. foreign aid budget goes to Israel, a well-developed, prosperous economic power set amidst some of the most poverty-ridden nations in the world. And Israel has for fifty years been dining out on the myths associated with the Six-Day War.

Moreover, it was through the paradox of Johnson's most sordid, devious manipulations that the U.S.-Israel relationship became so entwined in the aftermath of the Liberty attack: Virtually overnight, U.S. policy was transformed from being "neutral" towards all countries in the area - as earlier administrations had tried to remain, to avoid being seen as partial to either side - to that of openly and aggressively backing Israel in all possible ways, including its acquisition of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, an ambition which LBJ's predecessor JFK had adamantly opposed.

My Country, Right or Wrong

Doubtless this book will cop plenty of flak for its controversial assertions, even from some prominent, purportedly progressive/liberal/left-wing quarters, with many therein resisting any embrace of the real truth about Johnson the man, the consequential nature and character of both his presidential tenure and his political career overall, and his overarching position in the historical firmament. Bizarrely, Number 36 still seems to be regarded as some kind of "liberal" icon (check everyone from Jimmy Carter to Bill Moyers), largely due one supposes to the so-called "Great Society", a busted flush by any measure when one considers the individual state today of most of the key areas where the program was supposed to improve the socio-economic lives of Americans. These 'improvements' included ambitious reforms in everything from immigration, health, civil rights, consumer protection, housing and urban development, education, along with addressing major issues of economic inequality and racial injustice, to name the key areas.

And although Johnson can't be blamed for all of the failures of these reform measures, still well might we ask, what does America have to show for the much-touted Great Society today, 50 years on? Or well might we ask, how much more successful might they have been had LBJ not blown the budget in -- and equally as important, not allowed himself and his administration to so distracted by -- the Vietnam debacle, one for which he was totally responsible, and for which he can and should rightly be blamed?

For their part, the formidable Israel Lobby -- which ironically went on to become even more powerful and influential in Washington after the Liberty attack, and is as entrenched today as it ever was -- and the uber-partisan "Friends of Israel" will attack this book and its author with a vengeance likely to metaphorically match the attack on the Liberty itself, with the same 'terminate with extreme prejudice' mindset.

But any criticisms of it being biased against Israel will be misplaced. If anything, "Remember the Liberty!" finally places the principal blame for the attack right where it has always belonged: upon the man also known as "Lyin' Lyndon". By Nelson's reckoning, Israeli leaders at the time were only taking such actions because Johnson had insisted on them doing so as a pre-condition for his assistance in their plans for extending Israeli borders into Palestine, thus acquiring the extra territory theyd coveted ever since 1948. The Israelis simply would've had no real motive for attacking the ship, if only because by that time, the war was over and they'd already achieved their objectives.

None of this of course absolves Israel of culpability in this war crime -- not by a long shot from the Texas Schoolbook Depository Building -- nor does it let the country off the hook for taking full and unconditional responsibility for it now, this especially given its abject refusal to admit to this day it was indeed a deliberate, unprovoked and unjustified attack on its most important ally. Their propensity to attack those who might suggest otherwise only adds insult to 50-year-old injuries.

But for those folks with a more (ahem), nuanced view of the 36th POTUS there may or may not be any surprises herein. He was as some folks were wont to say, a man to see with the bark off! The fact that LBJ's diabolical plan failed, and the Liberty did not sink thanks to the heroic efforts of the survivors, undoubtedly saved the world from the nuclear conflagration which might have otherwise occurred, with Jerusalem - the "city of peace" - at ground zero. They say Americans don't do irony. This writer once again begs to differ.

"Remember the Liberty!" is then both a tale of abandonment, betrayal, and justice denied, and truth ruthlessly suppressed. It is also one of great courage and determination, and what we might term here Down Under, 'mateship forged under fire'. Moreover, it is one of authentic patriotism, not the dodgy variety that passes for such in and around the rarefied environs of the Beltway and which might be defined as such by feckless mainstream media pundits. For their efforts in saving the ship, they helped avert the unthinkable, an achievement for which we all must be forever truly grateful. But the price they have paid must have left many of those remaining wishing they had not survived the attack, with presumably quite a few also calling into question the whole "Truth, Justice and the American Way/My Country Right or Wrong" Thing!

I trust readers are all able to see their way clear of keeping this story alive by buying a copy of the book and alerting interested friends, family and acquaintances to this very important -- if shameful -- piece of hidden American history. This will be the 'last shot in the locker' as it were these veterans and their families have to obtain some critical mass public recognition, accompanied by some measure of justice and redress for what they've been put through, and continue to go through. To say nothing of the all-important, much sought after closure.

After all, we'd all want that for ourselves and our own families, wouldn't we? And if America can't do that after all this time, we'd have to say it truly has lost its way!

Greg Maybury is a Perth, Australia-based writer and blogger. Separate to this review, he has published an in-depth, lengthy analysis and commentary of the people and events covered by Nelson's book. This analysis is in two parts, and can be found on his blog .

Russophobia and the Logic of Imperialism

By Ava Lipatti

As it stands today, the U.S./NATO imperialist bloc has its eyes set primarily on two countries: Russia and China. While NATO imperial terror, including economic sanctions and military action, in countries such as Ukraine, Syria, Iran, and North Korea constitute exploitative projects in their own right, they also function to encircle Russia and China. Given the importance of Russia as an object of imperial desire, clarity on the character of Russia is imperative in order to understand the current economic and political crisis of imperialism.

There are several important aspects to the question of Russia as it stands today.

The narrative of the Democratic Party is that "Russian hackers" rigged the "democratic" "elections" and that Trump is a puppet of the Kremlin and of Vladimir Putin in particular. There virtually no substantial evidence for this claim. But what is the significance of this narrative? What are its historical roots?

There is also the common claim by elements of the left that Russia is in fact an imperialist power in its own right, primarily for its actions in Crimea, Syria, and Chechnya. However, Russia's relatively weak economy is characterized primarily by the export of raw materials, rather than the export of finance capital as in imperialist countries. The claim that Russia is an imperialist country has been convincingly argued against both by Sam Williams and by Renfrey Clarke and Roger Annis . But does this claim come from nowhere? What is its intellectual heritage?

The purpose of this article is not to prove that Russia is not imperialist or that Trump is not a Kremlin puppet. Others have already grappled with these questions in a much more thorough way than I am equipped to do. The purpose of this article, rather, is to place these phenomena in the context of a long history of Orientalism directed at Slavic people in general, and Russia in particular.

Before proceeding, a brief definition from Edward Said's Orientalism (1978):

"Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident.' Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, 'mind,' destiny, and so on... the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient... despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a 'real' Orient." (5)

Whiteness, Nazism, and Bolshevism

On the border between "Europe" and "Asia", Russians have historically maintained at best a vacillating, conditional relationship with whiteness and "European civilization". The most historically openly terroristic, revanchist manifestation of European supremacist ideology was undoubtedly Nazism. What was the relationship between Nazism, Bolshevism, and the Slavic peoples?

In War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (2015), Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo seeks to reclaim the revolutionary tradition and reevaluate the character of Nazism, which he argues has been whitewashed by revisionist historians. Losurdo emphasizes several key points in relation to Nazism and Bolshevism.

Perhaps most importantly, Losurdo argues that in rejecting the revolutionary tradition (from the Jacobins through the Bolsheviks), the revisionist historians have also concealed the colonial character of the Nazi project. Even a cursory reading of Nazi ideology and its goals and practices indicates an essentially colonial dynamic with respect to Jews, Romani, Slavs, and other oppressed peoples. However, U.S. and European historians prefer to whitewash this history, ripping the Holocaust from its historical context and presenting it as an anomaly in human history, rather than an integral manifestation of colonial conquest and imperial terror.

A central aspect of the Nazi project, outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was the plan to colonize Eastern Europe, specifically through exterminating Eastern Europeans and settling throughout the Soviet Union. What historians have traditionally suppressed is that this plan did not come from nowhere: it was inspired in large part by the U.S. settler-colonization of "North America" and the genocide carried out against both the Indigenous people and the people of Africa. Nazi concentration camps were influenced by U.S. concentration camps (i.e. "Indian reservations"); Nazi eugenics was largely inspired by reactionary U.S."scientists" .

Anti-Semitism, anti-Ziganism, and anti-Slavic racism fused to produce the fascist Nazi ideology of turning Eastern Europe into an Aryan settler-colony. In this process of counter-revolution, Nazi ideology racialized its most ferocious enemy: Bolshevism. Bolshevism, a revolutionary working class movement, was the primary existential threat to Nazism, the counter-revolution of big capital. The Bolsheviks, who supported the rebellion of the toiling colonized masses, were the antithesis of imperialism in general and especially its Nazi iteration. Losurdo writes:

"[Revisionist historiography] forgets that, in addition to calling for the transformation of the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war, the Bolsheviks also appealed to the slaves of the colonies to break their chains and wage wars of national liberation against the imperial domination of the great powers. Such repression makes it impossible adequately to understand Nazism and Fascism, which also presented themselves as a movement in reaction - extreme reaction - against this second appeal." (103)

Nazi demagogues painted the Russian Revolution as a "Judeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy, bankrolled by the supposedly economy-controlling Jewish capitalists. As Bolshevism, a movement born out of Russia, took on an anti-colonial character, Russian workers were increasingly racialized for "betraying" Europe and placing their lot with the oppressed rather than with imperialism and colonialism. In a way this process was the opposite that took place among ethnic minorities in the United States, particularly Italians, Poles, and Irish. While the latter groups assimilated into whiteness fully from their conditional status through embracing cross-class white supremacy (and especially anti-Black racism), the Bolsheviks embraced the toiling masses and national liberation; thus, their "whiteness" was "revoked." Hitler himself stated directly in Mein Kampf that the Tsarist Empire was a product of "the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race," whereas the "inferior" Slavic elements took power in October 1917.

The racialization of Bolshevism was a direct manifestation of historical Orientalism. Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler told a group of Waffen SS fascists three weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union:

"When you, my men, fight over there in the East, you are carrying on the same struggle, against the same subhumanity, the same inferior races, that at one time appeared under the name of Huns, another time- 1000 years ago at the time of King Henry and Otto I- under the name of Magyars, another time under the name of Tartars, and still another time under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they appear as Russians under the political banner of Bolshevism."

However, this was not the first time that the Soviet Union faced an invasion of reactionary terror. After October 1917, the Bolsheviks fought a "Civil" War against the pro-Tsar White Army, the latter enjoying military support from 14 countries. As Losurdo notes, the anti-Semitic pogroms and lynchings carried out by the anti-Bolshevik White Army against Russian Jews and other ethnicities was "a chapter of history that seems to be a direct prelude to Nazi genocide." Anti-Bolshevism, anti-Slavic racism, and colonialism thus became intermeshed in the anti-Semitic Nazi program of extermination. Losurdo explains:

"Denunciation of October [1917] as a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy now reached its most tragic conclusion. General Blum communicated the orders received: 'Eastern Jewry constitutes the intellectual reserve of Bolshevism and hence, in the Führer's opinion, must be destroyed.' As well as building the new colonial empire, the crusade in the East now aimed to detect and destroy the bacillus of dissolution wherever it was to be found. The 'poison of dissolution' that acted via Bolshevik cadres was to be neutralized once and for all, but without forgetting that 'the chief "carriers of the Bolshevik infection"' were the Jews. In Goebbels' words, 'Jewish terror' was the core of 'eastern Bolshevism', that mortal enemy of civilization. The Jews were doubly Oriental and doubly barbarous. They were an 'Asiatic people' alien to Europe and the West, as had been stressed by Houston Chamberlain and the anti-Semitic tradition that fed into Nazism; they therefore formed part of the 'native' populations. Furthermore, they were the inspirers of 'eastern Bolshevism' - were, in fact, the ethnic basis of the virus eroding civilization that was to be eliminated for good." (190)

This racist ideology of anti-Semitism provided the ideological narrative for the Nazi colonial project, which killed millions of Jews, Slavs, Romani, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and other oppressed groups. According to Nazism, Russia, far from being a bastion of "Aryan civilization", was a "host body" of the "Judeo-Bolshevik virus" that "infected" Europe.

The relationship that Russians and other Slavic peoples have with whiteness today cannot be evaluated in isolation from the history of Nazism and the racialization of Slavs and Bolshevism that went hand-in-hand with anti-Semitism and the entire Nazi project, a project deeply rooted in settler-colonialism, directly inspired by the United States and Canada.

Hannah Arendt and "Totalitarianism"

Most bourgeois historians have suppressed the colonial character of Nazi Germany and its conquest of Eastern Europe. Instead, they have gone as far as to conflate the USSR under Stalin and the Third Reich under Hitler as equally oppressive dictatorships. They conceptualize World War II and surrounding geopolitics as the struggle between "democracy" (imperialist U.S., Britain, etc.) and "dictatorship" ("Stalinism", Nazism).

One of the most popular ideologues of this argument was the Heideggerian philosopher Hannah Arendt for the theory of "totalitarianism", which equates Nazism with Communism (or "Stalinism"). Other proponents of this theory included George Kennan, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell. In effect, this framework asserts that despotism "infected" the "civilized world" (Europe) through the "uncivilized" and "barbaric" peoples of Africa and Asia.

In The Post-Colonialism of "Cold War" Discourses (1988), William Pietz asserts that Cold War discourse displaced colonial discourse in the aftermath of World War II. Note that George Kennan located "totalitarianism" in the "Oriental mind" of Russians:

"[Russian] fanaticism, unmodified by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise, was too fierce and too jealous to envisage any permanent sharing of power. From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they had carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent or peaceful coexistence of rival forces. Here caution, circumspection, flexibility, and deception are the valuable qualities; and their value finds natural appreciation in the Russian or the oriental mind."

Hannah Arendt followed suit, asserting that "totalitarianism" was something "learned" from African tribes:

"When the Boers, in their fright and misery, decided to use these savages as though they were just another form of animal life they embarked upon a process which could only end with their own degeneration into a white race living beside and together with black races from whom in the end they would differ only in the color of their skin. They had transformed themselves into a tribe and had lost the European's feeling for a territory, a patria of his own. They behaved exactly like the black tribes who had roamed the Dark Continent for centuries.

"My point is not the awful, Conradian diction or even the stark conceptual separation between the European and the African. It is the effect upon the Boers and thence - so the retrograde diffusionist argument goes - upon Europe. We "degenerate" into a race-based, primitive and nomadic, rootless 'tribe' (or 'race organization') no better than them. Thanks to this contact with the primitive, not only do we come to think in terms of race (i.e. in a racist way), but this mode of thinking later morphs into a tribal nationalism that, in turn, becomes modern anti-Semitism and totalitarianism ('a whole outlook on life and the world'). This last phenomenon 'lies in the nature of tribalism rather than in political facts and circumstances.'"

Instead of locating the origins of fascism in the colonial violence of capitalism, it is located in the mind of the Oriental despot who, like a virus, has spread from the East into Aryan civilization. Pietz elaborates:

"It was Arendt's signal achievement to frame a set of historically grounded political concepts capable of locating the origin of 'totalitarianism' in general and modern European anti-Semitism in particular - and by implication, the responsibility for the Nazi holocaust - outside Europe, in the savage 'tribalism' of 'the Dark Continent.'"

The colonized are blamed for an outgrowth of colonialism itself; the socialist tradition is condemned as the catalyst for the very system most antagonistic towards it, fascism. Pietz states:

"American cold war discourse about totalitarianism served a double function: in regard to the Soviets, it justified a policy of global anti-communism by reinterpreting all struggles for national self-determination in terms of the geopolitical contest for zones of power against totalitarian Russia; in regard to Nazi Germany, it saved the traditional pre-war faith concerning 'the values of Western civilization' held by post-war foreign-policy 'wise men' by displacing the human essence of fascism into the non-Western world... The necessary conscience-soothing exorcism was achieved by affirming the equation of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, combined with an historical interpretation of the essential Orientalness of the Russian mentality. The basic argument is that 'totalitarianism' is nothing other than traditional Oriental despotism plus modern police technology. The appearance of the first truly totalitarian state in the heart of Europe was thus an accident, explainable by the fact that the technology permitting totalitarianism was invented by Western science and was thus first accessible in the West. Moreover, Germany's totalitarian moment is characterized by Kennan as a 'relapse' into barbarism; far from showing a flaw in Western culture, it proved the need for constant alertness in preserving our distinctly Western values."

A supposedly anti-racist theory reveals its racism in its implied upholding of "Western values", a distinctly fascistic, colonial ideal. As "European civilization" faces an existential threat of "barbarism", it tightens its ranks and purges itself of all but the purest elements. According to the Orientalist worldview, Russians have only been able to masquerade as white due to their frequent contact with Europe. However, once the veil is lifted, an essentially Oriental mind is revealed. Pietz again writes:

"History - specifically the pre-modern geopolitics of the Eurasian 'ecumene' which produced the 'Russian-Asiatic world' - explains the Oriental essence of the Russian mind. This mentality is distinguished by its ability, after centuries of direct contact with Europe, to appear civilized and to use this facade of civility for its own barbaric ends."

Not only was Cold War discourse anti-communist; it, in effect was also deeply racist, Orientalist, and provided cover for Nazi terror and its colonial origins. While Russians may have enjoyed conditional whiteness under Tsarism via participation in European imperialism, this privilege was quickly revoked upon the world-historic Bolshevik revolution for its anti-colonial character. The facade of whiteness evaporated, and all that was left was Oriental despotism, or so the racists argue.

On the one side there is Bolshevism, national liberation, and revolution; on the other, Nazism, colonialism, and imperial conquest. To reject the former is to provide tacit support for the later.

Russian "Exceptionalism" and Eurocentrism

A Eurocentric view of history asserts that, while Europe exists as a dynamic, linearly progressing bastion of "civilization", the "uncivilized" world (Africa, Latin America, Asia, and other places) is static and dormant. The "uncivilized" people have no history, existing as a feature of nature itself rather than as an active agent within it.

This teleological worldview attempts to measure all social formations by the standard of the development of industrial capitalism that took place in Europe. Of course, it sidelines the fact that western Europe developed the way it did precisely because of colonialism and genocide enacted on the rest of the world.

Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in their earlier works, fell into this trap with the concept of an "Asiatic mode of production" separate from the slave, feudal, and capitalist modes of production as they developed in Europe. This idea is based on an understanding of Georg Hegel's concept of The Oriental Realm .

Marx outlines several basic features of this supposed mode of production in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (1857-58):

"...as is the case in most Asiatic fundamental forms, it is quite compatible with the fact that the all-embracing unity which stands above all these small common bodies may appear as the higher or sole proprietor, the real communities only as hereditary possessors...

"Oriental despotism therefore appears to lead to a legal absence of property, in most cases created through a combination of manufacture and agriculture within the small community which thus becomes entirely self-sustaining and contains within itself all conditions of production and surplus production."

This unfortunately aligns with the common racist myth that the "Orient" has a tendency towards despotism and dictatorship, which has intellectual roots dating all the way back to Aristotle .

Not only was this concept for the most part dropped by Marx and Engels, but Samir Amin (a Marxist) has theorized a "tributary mode of production" that encapsulates both European feudalism and economic systems based on land ownership in east Asia. However, the "left" has latched onto this "exceptionalism" for the East, continuing to characterize Russia as a timeless, supernatural social formation of Oriental despotism.

The Soviet Union, formed on the basis of the Russian Revolution of 1917, was quickly denounced by left communists as non-socialist, especially under Stalin. However, these theorists were unable to argue that the USSR was a capitalist formation in the traditional sense, because it clearly functioned like no capitalist society to ever have existed. Thus, "left" detractors of the Soviet Union resorted to creating ad hoc economic categories much like the way "Asiatic mode of production" was used to characterized the "exceptional" nature of the "Orient".

Raya Dunayevskaya characterized Soviet Russia's economy as "state capitalism":

"Since under the specific Russian state capitalism legal title to the means of production as well as the competitive market for such means have been abolished, how is appropriation achieved?

"Inasmuch as private property in the means of production has been abolished in Russia, it is a deviation from the juridical concept to permit accumulation within any enterprise since the state aims to increase only 'national capital'. Nevertheless, with the establishment of 'ruble control', enterprises were permitted to accumulate internally...

"The Stalinist Constitution of 1936 recognized the intelligentsia as a special 'group', distinct from workers and peasants. With this juridical acknowledgement of the existence of a new ruling class went the guarantee of the protection of state property from 'thieves and misappropriatiors.'"

Compare this with Marx's statement above that "Oriental despotism therefore appears to lead to a legal absence of property"; compare "national capital" and "new ruling class" with "the higher or sole proprietor". The Asiatic mode of production makes a reappearance, in so many words. Again, the despots of the Orient have achieved the impossible: capitalism without capital, and a ruling class with no legal property rights. Stalinist totalitarianism thus became the latest iteration of Oriental despotism.

Hillel Ticktin called the Soviet Union's economy a "non-mode of production"; yet again, Asiatic production exists outside of history, time, and space. It is a static, non-society without a mode of production and subsequently a political and cultural life. Italian "socialist" Bruno Rizzi and later a faction of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP) characterized the Soviet Union's economy not as socialist but rather as "bureaucratic collectivist":

"In the USSR the 'nationalisation' of property came in one swoop following the October revolution, but, since the concept of nationalisation has no scientific validity in Russia, in effect this was the generalisation in one swoop of state capitalism and its foster brother statism.

"What has happened to the economy? Has it become socialist? No, says Trotsky. Is it still capitalist? No, we say, precisely because of the law of the transformation of quantity into quality; it is Bureaucratic Collectivism."

Dunayevskaya, Ticktin, and Rizzi thus all latched onto the idea of an Asiatic mode of production. An Oriental despot (Stalin) has appropriated the (collective) means of production through totalitarian rule, absent legal property ownership. This application of the so-called Asiatic mode of production to the Soviet Union was put forth even more explicitly by Karl August Wittfogel in Oriental Despotism (1957), in which he "observed a transition from the old despotic governments to a new form of despotism represented by communist Russia, which could be considered as a new version of industrial-bureaucratic despotism."

The ghost of Oriental despotism and the Asiatic mode of production made an appearance yet again with the theory of Soviet "social-imperialism," which Albert Szymanski argued against . This charge that the Soviet Union was "socialist in words, imperialist in deeds" was first asserted by the Communist Party of China, and subsequently taken up by the Party of Labour of Albania and numerous U.S. Maoist groups in the New Communist Movement. Yet again, the Slavic despots have achieved the impossible: an imperialist version of socialism, and yet another (imperialist) ruling class with no legal property rights.

As left communists and U.S. Maoists alike have noted, legal property relations are secondary to productive relations, which underlie the economic life of a given society. Of course this is true; but to assert that the two can be wholly incongruent is an exercise in metaphysics. In this model, the Superstructure has a life wholly independent from the Base; form has transcended content.

In The 'State Capitalist' and "Bureaucratic Exploitative' Interpretations of the Soviet Social Formation: A Critique (1978), David Laibman produces an incisive critique of all of these trends:

"The power of capital, then is exercised through a heterogeneity of institutional structures no one of which, taken in isolation, manifests that function… Adequate comprehension of capitalism requires this complex structuring of concepts in which the capitalist function is determinant at the level of production relations but is simultaneously constituted by the proximate forms in which it is manifested. This approach must be contrasted with rationalist methodology of ideal types which focuses on 'essences' or 'deep structures' as uniquely 'real' and the proximate forms as mere illustrations 'at a lower level of abstraction' No more than the Hegelian Absolute Idea can the capital concept exist in disembodied form. Capital is not reducible to its form of existence; but neither is it separable from these forms…

"Capitalist production relations, and in particular the existence of a capitalist class or bourgeoisie, are not like a disembodied spirit that can inhabit one or another juridical form - i.e., state vs. private property - at will. As an important application of the dialectic of the production relations as a complex structure, one can neither merge the property form and the 'social process of appropriation' and mistake the form for the real relation itself; nor separate them, and speak of the underlying class relation as one of real 'appropriation' etc., without explaining the source and reproduction of the power appropriate."

In other words, Marxist dialectics allow us to understand the underlying relations of production in a given society through the really existing institutions and mechanisms that facilitate and reproduce them. Capitalism cannot persist without means by which to maintain and reproduce the accumulation of Capital. Capitalism is not some "inner essence" that invisibly persists in the DNA of a given society; it is a real process involving real actors and real mechanisms and institutions. Legal institutions are not identical with capitalist exploitation as such but they cannot be an isolated phenomenon wholly separate from the economic system of a given society.

Laibman aptly locates these critiques not in Marxism, but in Hegelianism, a philosophy of teleology, rationalism, and Eurocentrism. The Asiatic mode of production and the ruling class without legal property rights are wholly alien to Marxism. While those who call themselves Marxists have continuously put forth the arguments of Dunayevskaya and Rizzi as it applies to Russia, their arguments are both anti-Marxist and Orientalist in essence.

"Russian Imperialism"?

It is within this intellectual tradition that the new thesis emerges: since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has developed into a modern imperialist power, some claim even in the Leninist sense. While the form (Stalinist totalitarianism) is long gone, the content (Russian despotism) has lingered on. Tsarism, Stalinism, and Putinism are each manifestations of Oriental despotism, an inherent feature of the ahistorical Slav.

It would be quite difficult to argue that Russian Federation can be characterized as an imperialist power in the Leninist sense. Economic arguments aside, the "Russian imperialism" thesis cannot be separated from the theses above: state capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism, and the Asiatic mode of production. If the Russian Federation, boasting an economy based on the export of raw materials, constitutes an imperialist power, it would be the strangest one to ever exist.

Yet again, the Slavs have transcended reality: a ruling class without legal property ownership, capitalism without capital, socialism with imperialism; and now, imperialism without finance capital. Clearly, at least among the liberal left, arguments about "Russian imperialism" are based much more on racist fears and imperial chauvinism than a sober appraisal of Russia's economic situation.

The liberal media projects constant fear about Russian encroachment onto NATO territories, and has blasted Russia's air assistance to the Syrian government. They have also condemned Russian "interference" in Crimea and the Donbass, despite the high concentration of ethnic Russians in these territories and Crimea's landslide vote to join Russia . The spectre of "Oriental Despotism" has returned to Europe, the United States, and the rest of the "free world", hellbent on undermining Aryan civilization.

All of this is very ironic, given that NATO has been quietly deploying thousands of troops to the Russian border in Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Estonia for months now; and given that a far-right, NATO-backed military junta rules over Ukraine, persecuting ethnic minorities such as Jews, Romani, and Russians. This continuous uptick in anti-Russian hysteria has most recently manifested in the charges by the Democratic Party and its supporters that in fact Donald Trump is a puppet of the Kremlin in its plot to expand its Empire's influences across the globe.

The Democratic Party and Imperial Decay

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx famously noted:

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

If Cold War conspiracies were a tragedy, the contemporary anti-Russian conspiracies of the Democratic Party are a farce. It is obvious, and thus has been widely noted, that the smear campaign against Russia reeks of McCarthyism and Cold War hysteria. This hysteria is in no way limited to the Democratic Party elite. Rachel Maddow spent over half of March talking about Russia. Newt Gingrich has even called for the establishment of a new House Un-American Activities Committee. The bourgeois T.V. news has gone as far as to "accidentally" refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union. While the Soviet Union has been gone for over 25 years, the spectre of "Asiatic despotism" continues to haunt the paranoid Western powers.

Yet again, Arendt-esque Cold War discourse comes into play, this time perhaps through an even more openly Orientalist form. U.S. society cannot come to terms with the fact that President Donald Trump is a direct product of centuries of settler-colonialism and white supremacy. So, it blames Russia for "infecting" "American culture" with Asiatic despotism, this time in the form of Putinism. The racist logic of this argument is no different than Arendt's and the original Cold War fear-mongering. Therein lies the basis for re-asserting "American values", which in itself constitutes an ideology of white supremacist terror.

The red scare is being replayed through a broken projector; while the original McCarthyist witch hunts were an ascendant imperialist power's expression of fear of socialism, today's Russophobia is the desperate sigh of U.S. imperialism in utter decay. Russia is threatening to U.S. imperial interests because the U.S. is failing. Recent U.S. imperial conquests, especially in Syria, have been largely unsuccessful, and all the oppressed of the world continue to fight as the economic and political crisis of imperialism only deepens.

Ava Lipatti is a Marxist, anti-imperialist, feminist activist and writer. Her blog can be found at lonelyhourreflections.wordpress.com .