Vigilantism Reborn in the Manhunt for Christopher Dorner

The hellish climax of the manhunt for Christopher Dorner, the former police officer who waged a one-man vendetta against the LAPD, has generated a significant backlash from sections of the American public that object to his apparent execution without trial when the cabin where he was hiding was burnt to the ground.

On Saturday, February 16, dozens of protesters gathered outside police headquarters in Los Angeles with signs calling for the clearing of his name. According to the LA Times, they believed Dorner’s claims of racism and unfair treatment, and were protesting police corruption and the conduct of the manhunt.

Michael Nam, a former Marine, held a sign showing a tombstone and the words “RIP Habeas Corpus.” He told the LA Times he was disturbed that Dorner was given no chance to surrender after he had barricaded himself in the cabin and that it was “pretty obvious” police wanted him dead.

A Facebook page “We Stand with Christopher Dorner” has gathered over 27,000 likes to date and has over 77,000 talking about it. Other Facebook and Twitter posts, while not condoning his revenge killings, express support for Dorner’s stated aim to expose racism and corruption in the LAPD.

The manhunt for Dorner involved more than 1,000 police from more than a dozen local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. The Guardian reported: “Twitchy police shot up two vehicles thinking Dorner was inside, hitting a 71-year-old woman in the back and slightly injuring two other innocents. Hundreds of other police guarded 50 colleagues and their families believed to be on the fugitive’s hitlist.”

Due vigilance became vigilantism by the LAPD, shown in the fusillade of shots they unleashed on the senior woman’s truck. The LA Times reported that that at least seven officers fired their weapons, striking the truck at least a dozen times as well as nearby cars, trees and garage doors.

An Instagram of an African-American man wearing a T-shirt that said “Not Chris Dorner. Please Do Not Shoot,” went viral while the search was underway. BAGNews commented: “You wouldn’t have a picture like this go viral … unless American citizens were worried about ‘the man’ and the militarization of our ‘civil defenders.’ In that regard, I look at a photo like this (speaking truth to power through public signs and statements) as a continuation of what drove the Occupy/ ‘We are the 99%’ movement.”

Although police denied intentionally burning down the cabin, deputies fired at least seven incendiary teargas grenades through its windows. One deputy was overheard on a police scanner shouting “Burn that fucking house down!” Another voice exclaimed “Fucking burn this motherfucker!” The deputies were apparently concerned that Dorner could be hiding in the basement, and decided to let the fire burn completely so that there would be no chance he survived.

When photos of the burnt-out cabin were released, BAGNews noted: “If there is anything to be gleaned from the photos from Big Bear, with the smoldered foundation and the military vehicles, it’s that the scene could as well be a photo of a drone strike. And the authorities are surprised by the sympathy for Dorner as extra-judicial killing comes home.” An MSNBC reporter asked a witness: “Were you worried when you learned that Christopher Dorner was so close to your house?” The witness replied: “Actually, I was just afraid of the cops.”

Dorner’s claim that he was fired for reporting incidents of police brutality and the rampant racism that permeates the LAPD, which he said had gotten worse since the police beating of Rodney King in 1991, has resonated with the public. In his online manifesto Dorner describes how he reported a fellow officer for kicking a suspect in the head after he was handcuffed. But the department then retaliated by claiming that Dorner lied about the incident. Although the panel that heard his case was compromised by the inclusion of officers who were personal friends of the reported individual, it refused to recuse them and terminated his employment.

His account of how his complaints about racist comments isolated him is compelling: “While traveling back to the station in a 12 passenger van I heard Magana refer to another individual as a nigger…. I told Magana not to use that word again. I explained that it was a well-known offensive word that should not be used by anyone. He replied, ‘I’ll say it when I want’.

“Officer Burdios, a friend of his, also stated that he would say nigger when he wanted. At that point I jumped over my front passenger seat and two other officers where I placed my hands around Burdios’ neck and squeezed. I stated to Burdios, ‘Don’t fucking say that’. At that point there was pushing and shoving and we were separated by several other officers. … The sad thing about this incident was that when Detective Ty from internal affairs investigated this incident only (1) officer (unknown) in the van other than myself had statements consistent with what actually happened. The other six officers all stated they heard nothing and saw nothing.”

Other former LAPD officers have published statements confirming Dorner’s allegation that the department’s disciplinary system retaliates against those who try to expose misconduct. One former officer, Joe Jones, said he experienced the same kind of racist harassment by the department. Another, Brian Bentley, was fired after publishing a book detailing misconduct and racism in the department and told EUR web that he not only believed Dorner’s claims, he had lived through the same experiences. “When the department terminated you, they intentionally tried to ruin your life,” he said.

Dorner joined the US Navy and then the LAPD out of idealism, wanting to make a difference in his community. It was because he actually believed in the American Dream that the shattering of his career when he refused to participate in racist discrimination and cover-ups led to his turning to a vengeance crusade. As Dorner points out in his manifesto, minorities are only integrated within state forces if they internalize and participate in racist violence themselves.

Dormer’s case is a watershed moment: extra-judicial killings have now been imported back into the U.S. from the so-called War on Terror. It remains to be seen how the segment of American society that re-elected Obama will attempt to contain the militarized police departments across the country that mirror the vigilantism of the Wild West, terrorizing and not protecting those within the community that they theoretically serve.

Voting for the Dream of America: We Choose Fairness, Shared Opportunity, and Unity in Plurality

After Obama’s re-election, pundits of all persuasions are attributing his victory to Latino-American, African-American, women, and young voters responding to his differences from Romney on specific issues like immigration, reproductive rights, and health care. Conservative Bill O’Reilly claimed: “Obama wins because it’s not a traditional America anymore. The white establishment is the minority. People want things.” Political blogger Josh Marshall described it as a powerful victory for “the country’s first broad and real multiracial political party.”

It’s true that important demographic and social changes were reflected in the Democrats’ electoral victories in swing states and in the senate elections. However, this is only part of the story. In choosing Barack Obama, the majority of Americans asserted government’s role in re-establishing a system of taxation to fund the social contract that is the basis of the American dream: shared opportunity through education, a safety net for those who need a leg up when disaster strikes, and a recognition that our strength as a country comes from embracing its plurality.

E.J. Dionne outlines a similar perspective in the Washington Post:  ”By emphasizing Obama’s victory as a demographic and organizational triumph, conservatives have been laying the groundwork for renewing their sotto voce campaign suggesting that Obama is somehow ‘illegitimate’ or not ‘one of us.’ Yet the exit poll found that those who rallied to Obama represent a broad coalition of all of us.”

As Joel Benenson argues in a New York Times op-ed, the demographic changes were less important than voters’ perception of Obama as embodying the values that most Americans share. Obama, he writes, projected a vision of a stronger and more secure future “for average working-class and middle-class Americans who have believed for nearly a decade that the economic system in America had fallen out of balance for people like them, the president’s personal story and policies engendered trust because they connected with voters’ lives, aspirations, and beliefs about what it would take to create the future they wanted.”

What Benenson is describing is the imaginary that channeled people’s recognition of class divisions. UMass politics professor Thomas Ferguson noted that “the partisan split along income lines is huge. Obama’s vote percentage declines in straight line fashion as income rises. He got 63 percent of the votes of Americans making less than $30,000 and 57 percent of those making between $30,000 and $50,000. Above $50,000, the Other America kicks in. Romney won 53 percent of the votes of Americans making between $50 and a $100 thousand and 54 percent of the votes of Americans making above $100,000.”

These partisan class differences were not nearly so marked in 2008, but the change is testimony to the success of the Occupy movement in framing the political discourse of 2012.  Juan Cole sums it up like this: “What has changed is not that minorities are now half the electorate or that minorities plan to loot the government. What has changed is that the rest of the country is asserting itself against a small, patriarchal and oligarchic class that had unfairly dominated politics and business and received the lion’s share of government largesse. What has happened is that America is democratizing …”

Those who waited as long as seven hours to cast their vote expressed a purposeful determination to overcome machinations by Republican state officials to disenfranchise them and suppress their voices. This is not a cowed or apathetic electorate. The Miami Herald reported that some Florida voters remained in line at polling places until 1 a.m., hours after the polls were scheduled to close, defying the intervention of Republican governor Rick Scott to reduce the number of early voting days and early voting hours.

The Republican spin on this is that it was a close election, a return to the status quo, which doesn’t give Obama a mandate. This is simply a device to minimize the fact that the country as a whole wants a state that will support the elderly and the sick. Many Republican voters believed the propaganda that it was actually Obama who would undermine state support programs. However, Obamacare is now an established fact and a first step towards universal health care.

Commentator John Nichols said on Democracy Now:  “When all the votes are counted, President Obama will have won a popular vote margin of more than three million, probably quite a bit more than three million. And when Florida is finished—it’s a mess down there, but when it’s finally counted, probably to his column he will have roughly 332 electoral—it looks like 332 electoral votes. Those victories—more than three million popular vote, 332 electoral votes—are bigger than what John Kennedy came in with, bigger than what Richard Nixon came in with, bigger than what Jimmy Carter came in with, and bigger than what George Bush had in 2000 or what George Bush had in 2004. …

“What I want to emphasize here is, this president went before the American people, and the election was framed very much as a referendum on austerity, as a referendum on cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, to a real radical reshaping of the country, as pressured by, as emphasis by, as outlined by Paul Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. The important thing to understand is, American people understood that choice, and they voted for Barack Obama.”

It’s premature to assume (as Glenn Greenwald does) that Obama will be able to pursue a “Grand Bargain” with the GOP and with them target entitlements without energizing mass resistance. While politicians may believe the rhetoric surrounding budget deficits, hitherto marginalized groups such as low-waged workers are showing an unprecedented determination to assert their rights to live a better life. As Democracy Corps found in their post-poll surveys, “While elites assume the fiscal cliff is about deficit reduction and avoiding a contraction in the economy, voters want progress to create jobs over the next five years.  Voters want growth, not austerity, and above all, do not see ‘entitlements’ as on the table.”

There remains a huge gulf between the demands of the banking elite for austerity and Americans’ commitment to defending the social contract. The coming together of new constituencies in the course of rejecting the plutocrats’ election agenda evokes the pluralism of the Occupy movement. The resistance to predatory debt, the Black Friday strike against Walmart – this is the real American spring.

Waking Up and Smelling the Coffee: Americans Organize Collectively to Defend Themselves against the Plutocratic 1%

While pundits may debate Obama’s lackluster performance and Romney’s zingers, when it comes down to it, the presidential debate will not change people’s minds. What will decide the election will be demographics:  Latino voters have increased their support for Obama to 70%. Women perceive Romney as dismissive of their issues. And a Reuters poll finds Obama to be better representative of America by 48 to 39 percent – despite the billions spent by Republicans trying to portray him as alien.

Focus groups found that blue-collar voters lowered their opinion of Romney in response to quotes from his campaign, but were more forgiving of quotes from Obama; many suggested that Obama needed more time to fix the economy given the extent of the 2008 collapse.  “And while Obama didn’t seem to get too much credit from any group for his individual jobs policies or for his health care law, voters were bullish on the auto bailout — not only in auto-heavy Ohio, but northern Virginia as well. … In another disturbing trend for Romney, women’s health issues cut against him hard among the Virginia groups, especially college educated women, for whom they generated as much attention as the economy.”

Romney’s clandestinely videoed remarks describing half the population as parasitic have had a discernible effect on the electorate, strengthening the perception of him as the candidate for the plutocracy. This attests to the persistence of the Occupy theme of the 99 percent, a form of populist class awareness. A further social change is the turn to unionization among the low-waged. The threat of unemployment has become a two-edged sword: while employers have used the fear of joblessness to drive down wages and conditions, a point has been reached where workers’ backs are against the wall and they have nothing to lose by fighting back.

In the Midwest, two important strikes are currently taking place that bear this out. Warehouse workers at a giant Walmart warehouse outside of Chicago are on strike over illegal retaliation against workers who filed a lawsuit over wage theft, supported by Warehouse Workers For Justice, an organization launched by the United Electrical Workers union to raise standards for the industry. Although Walmart owns the warehouse, which handles 70% of all the goods it imports into the U.S., it has a pyramid organization of companies that contracts and subcontracts out its labor supply, in order to avoid responsibility for workers’ welfare.

In These Times reports that the dispute began after a small group of workers walked out of the facility when management first fired, then backtracked and suspended, some key workers’ leaders, including one of the four named plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Following this, another group of workers took a petition to management complaining about unsafe equipment, extreme heat, and a reduction in breaks during long shifts. Managers again fired the petitioners, then changed their minds and suspended them. The number of workers now on strike over unfair labor practices has reached 38.

Despite the high turnover rate in the warehouse, which makes it difficult to organize, a group of workers who had managed to endure the conditions for a number of months began the protest action. “What we have in common is we’re pretty marginalized and desperate,” plaintiff Philip Bailey told David Moberg of In These Times. “The prospect of working these low-paying jobs for long hours became scarier than risking losing the job to improve it. People realized we won’t get anything until we stand together.”

On Monday, several hundred supporters converged on the warehouse, effectively shutting it down. Riot police equipped with a Humvee-mounted sonic weapon were on hand to arrest 15 protesters who had nonviolently sat down outside the main gate. Support came from groups like Chicago Jobs With Justice and Chicago teachers, who have a common enemy in the privatization-crazed Walton family. Also joining the picket were workers from Sensata Technologies Inc., a company owned by Bain Capital and now in the final stages of moving its production to China.

The strike movement has now spread to Walmart stores in Los Angeles, whose “associates” staged a one-day protest on Thursday. Like the warehouse workers, the retail store employees are responding to escalating cases of retaliation by managers against workers who speak out against low pay, inadequate health insurance, short or unpredictable work weeks, understaffing, and lack of appreciation and respect.

In Detroit, as in the Chicago teachers strike, union members are striking against privatization, which they know will result in the loss of jobs and the rapid erosion of their control over conditions of work. Detroit’s wastewater treatment plant workers came out against a plan to cut 81% of their jobs under a $46 million no-bid contract signed with the EMA Group.  The suburban-dominated Detroit Water Board approved the contract in early September with the aim of replacing most of the unionized workforce. According to the union, the EMA Group was responsible for massive flooding in Toronto after revamping the city’s sewage system and laying off the majority of the workers.

Declaring they were fighting for the future of Detroit, 34 workers walked out in a wildcat action early Sunday, in order to preempt an order barring a strike. They were joined by the rest of the 450-strong workforce the following day, when, as anticipated, U.S. District Judge Sean Cox issued a no-strike order on the union. Defying the order, the strike continued, and on Tuesday water department officials suspended the original 34 strikers. At the picket line, Tanya Glover told the Detroit Free Press she was concerned about wage cuts and outsourcing: “I’m out here because I need to feed my family,” she said. “They’re telling me I don’t have a job in five years anyway. It’s either fight, or let them give my job away.”

Workers from other unions came out to support the water workers as word of the walk-out spread. “This strike is happening in the wake of the victory of the Chicago Teachers Union,” said Martha Grevatt, of UAW Local 869. “It’s another example of workers standing up, not only for their jobs, but against the banks and corporations. Whether you work for a private company or in the public sector, your bosses are part of the 1 percent.”

The union district-level Michigan AFSCME Council told union members on Tuesday to return to work and comply with the judicial order. The confusion this created meant that many of Wednesday’s afternoon shift followed this directive, after being informed that the department had promised not to discipline them. However, the leaders of the water workers’ Local 207 rejected the order, voting late on Wednesday to continue the strike until all suspended workers were given amnesty. It issued a statement that said: “The power of our strike is based on the support of Detroit’s Black community and the surrounding communities of Michigan, including unions and churches, and is being expressed more and more each day. … Unless our members are all returned to work, there is no deal, and the strike is still on.”

The strike ended Thursday in victory. Management agreed to reinstate all the fired workers and to continue discussions on union rights and job security. Michael Mulholland, Local 207 Secretary Treasurer, said, “This victory is a measure of the strength of Detroit as a whole. If Judge Cox had not feared what the public response would have been if he had taken action against our union, this victory would never have been possible.” Union attorney Shanta Driver added: “If the people of Detroit draw the correct conclusion that we have the power to control the destiny of our City and its resources even when just a few of us stand up and fight to win, this struggle will have achieved a great deal. … we are building a new movement that can change the balance of power in this city forever.”

The power of the community was also realized in the Chicago teachers’ strike, and the Occupy movement. As different groups of workers’ struggles begin to converge, this movement poses a challenge to bureaucracy within the unions. A new form of leadership is being created, close to the grassroots, which is turning outwards to unorganized low-waged workers and is building alliances within the community across ethnic and class divides – to paraphrase the leaders of Local 207, launching a new civil rights movement and era of mass struggle.

Chicago Teachers Bring Hope and Empowerment to the Fight Against Plutocratic Power

Now that Chicago’s teachers have returned to work, their strike is being fought out again on an ideological level, with both sides claiming victory. But the rhetoric obscures the true nature of the outcome: the teachers and their community support have been strengthened, while limits have been set on the education administration’s privatization goals.

On the national stage, Michelle Rhee, the former head of the school system in Washington and now a school reform advocate, hailed the stand of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. She said that “it ‘signaled a new day’ that Mr. Emanuel, a Democrat, had taken on issues — like tougher teacher evaluations and longer school days — so thorny with labor groups, and had pushed them forward even in the crucial few months before President Obama, his former boss and ally, seeks re-election.”

To give an idea of the forces behind the drive for privatization, Rhee’s lobbying organization is funded by predatory billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who views the education system as a “500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.” He has pledged to spend more than $1 billion to push for-profit schools. According to PRWatch, “She [Michelle Rhee] was credited with greatly improving test scores in Washington, D.C. schools, but this accomplishment was cast into doubt by a USA Today investigation that suggested that test score gains during her term may have been the result of cheating on the part of school officials.”

In Chicago itself, a Democratic party PAC funded by Wall Street hedge fund managers to promote non-union charter schools launched a political-style TV and radio ad blitz featuring Emanuel claiming he achieved “the right deal for our kids” by negotiating a longer school day and the right to evaluate teachers using pupils’ test scores. All 350,000 students were given a two-page letter with the same message.

However, as In These Times points out, “In the public-relations battle over who was helping ‘the kids,’ the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) held its own by emphasizing how it successfully bargained for a commitment to hire 600 new teachers in art, music and other ‘enrichment’ courses. CTU also extracted promises from CPS to hire more counselors, supply textbooks by the first day of school and include a parent representative on a class-size review committee.”

The union also has its critics from the left.  Pedro Noguera, a professor of sociology at NYU, writes in The Nation that “shutting down a school system where the overwhelming majority of students are poor, black and Latino without offering a vision for comprehensive change is not sufficient.” Since the teachers do not control the resources available to the school system, it is absurd to accuse them of lacking a vision for comprehensive change. They certainly have a vision for improvements in the classrooms, as the promises they extracted from the school board prove.

Another critic, New York attorney Elliot Sperber, accuses the union of not being militant enough.  “Rather than striking to secure better working conditions and better pay, per se, the Chicago teachers’ strike is a defensive, conservative strike [to defend jobs]… [they] found themselves facing Rahm Emanuel’s threat of a court-ordered injunction. Cowed by this, the teachers’ union agreed to a compromise.” But in fact Emanuel’s injunction threat came after the union had finished its negotiations, while teachers’ delegates were carefully examining the agreement. Their decision was unaffected by the mayor’s bullying threats, which smacked of desperation in face of the solidarity of the teachers.

The Chicago education board had begun to concede on issues like class size after 90 percent of the teachers had voted to authorize a strike. They had abandoned the idea of merit pay before the strike began, according to the Chicago Tribune, but the key victories on evaluation and recall policies were gained because of the walkout. Teachers’ union attorney Robert Bloch said: “To the union, that completely changed the whole tenor of how evaluations really worked. To take out student scores, a volatile indicator, as a way to lead to firing teachers was a really big accomplishment.” Most of the final contract was negotiated during the strike, he said, including the concession most popular among the teachers – the ability to write their own lesson plans.

Sperber casts Emanuel as Machiavelli using the legal argument of public health and safety to mobilize state sanctions against the teachers’ union. But this only credits Emanuel with greater power than he actually possesses. He has lost public support, while the union has retained and increased its approval in the community. Harold Meyerson draws attention to the class nature of their support: “the Illinois political newsletter Capitol Fax commissioned a poll of Chicago voters that showed that fully 66 percent of parents with children in the city’s public schools supported the strike, as did 56 percent of voters citywide. The only groups that disapproved of the strike (narrowly) were parents of children in private schools and whites. (Blacks and Latinos supported it.)”

CTS leader Karen Lewis and her union officials are not bureaucratic functionaries, but working teachers who are focused on improving the schools. After winning the leadership of the union, they changed its structure to include all sectors of the profession and make its workings transparent. In a long and informative interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Karen Lewis described how on the negotiating committee “we had members from all over the city in different areas—high school, grammar school, our paraprofessionals, our clinicians—all on our big bargaining team, so that they could actually see the process of negotiations.”

She explained: “we purposely tried to change the culture of union so that the union is about education, is about empowering teachers and paraprofessionals and clinicians. And as a result, the union officers took pay cuts, significant pay cuts, so that we can have an organizing department, so that we can have a research department, so that we didn’t do the union the way the old union was done, because those days are over.”

Lewis is a founding member of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), the group that reformed the union, which began when a small group of teachers formed a book group to read Naomi Kline’s Shock Doctrine in order to understand what was behind the school closings in the city. According to Lewis: “we started just trying to take off small bites of the apple by going to the school closing hearings, demanding that the Board of Education come to these hearings. … in the first year we started this, we got six schools taken off the hit list. That had never happened before. We changed the way the Board of Ed did things. The board members actually came to the schools. And we said, ‘You should at least come to the schools you’re going to close and look these people in the eye and explain to them why.’ And that had never happened.”

Their intervention restored the empowerment of parents and community members, who had felt that there was nothing that could be done to resist school closings. The teachers fought for parental involvement and school councils, and succeeded because they acted independently of the political parties and of the union bureaucracy, closely reflecting the grassroots membership. The union built bridges and support that strengthened during the course of the strike struggle.

As Lewis argues: “… the idea of the market approach for public education, as far as we’re concerned, tramples on democracy. You know, public schools are the place where you get to learn about democracy, and it’s been trampled out. And Chicago has the potential for that. We have local school councils of elected parents and community members and staff who are supposed to choose principals, evaluate principals, look at how the discretionary funds are spent. And the local school councils in schools that are very high-functioning, the local school councils are also high-functioning. But in the schools that aren’t so much, you find those aren’t functioning as well …”

In a measured, determined way, the Chicago teachers have successfully brought an organizing force and a pluralistic vision into the lives of working-class communities. This is the same spirit that motivated the Occupy movement, challenging the apparently overwhelming power of the plutocracy.

Standing Up for Public Education: Chicago Teachers Channel Jefferson

It looks as though the Chicago teachers’ strike has resulted in an agreement that pushes back attempts of mayor Rahm Emanuel and his personally-selected school board – stacked with hedge fund billionaires and former charter school administrators – to apply a corporate model of school reform to the Chicago Public Schools. Teachers’ delegates will vote on the contract tomorrow (Sunday September 16).

Originally, Obama’s former chief of staff had gone to the state legislature to impose an increase in the length of the school day, with no extra compensation for teachers. Although the two sides are now not far apart on pay issues, “at its heart, the strike is over the union’s deep opposition to what it calls a ‘corporate reform agenda’ that pursues a competitive or punitive relationship with teachers, rather than a collaborative one.”

The teachers had agreed to teacher evaluations required by the Illinois state legislature where 25 percent was based on student test achievement, but refused a demand to increase the weighting to 40 percent. According to Reuters, “Emanuel has retreated on his teacher evaluation demands, agreeing to phase in the new standards and lowering the percentage weighting of standardized tests. The union has taken advantage of the pressure on Emanuel to press for more job security from expected layoffs as more schools close.”

The president of the Chicago Teachers’ Union is Karen Lewis, who led an internal reform movement that won the union leadership in 2010.  She followed a strategy of building alliances with the community to defend public education against top-down restructuring. When Emanuel’s board refused to budge on teacher evaluations and school closings, 90 percent of teachers voted to authorize strike action.

Democracy Now correspondent Jaisal Noor explained the significance of the leadership’s strategy: “Karen Lewis and CORE, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, they’re a group of teachers that came together to fight school closings, to organize communities to oppose school turnarounds. That is a policy that was started in Chicago with Renaissance 2010 and No Child Left Behind, and it’s devastated communities. It’s led to the layoffs of hundreds of teachers. And the previous union leadership was not fighting, was not organizing the community to oppose these policies.”

In These Times gives an eyewitness report from the second day of the strike at Cooper Academy elementary school in southwest Chicago, where teachers, parents and community members were out in force. “They marched in front of the school, decorated with tile mosaics of Latino resistance fighters from the Aztec days to the Mexican Revolution to modern-day labor leaders like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. They chanted in English and Spanish and carried homemade bilingual picket signs. … The turnout at Cooper—like those at other schools around the city Monday and Tuesday—suggests heavy local support for striking teachers. Many parents joined the picket line, often with children in tow in strollers or cavorting on bikes.”

Amy Goodman points out the parallel with the Occupy movement: “Thanks to the grass-roots organizing that preceded the strike (in the same Chicago streets where Obama was once a community organizer), the striking teachers enjoy extensive parent and student support. One parent, Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, has two children in elementary school in Chicago. She is a member of the group Parents 4 Teachers and is marching with the teachers. She told me, ‘When we fight for the rights of teachers for a fair contract, fair compensation, lower class size, well-resourced schools, having psychologists, enough social workers, enough support staff, enough aides in the classroom, nurses … when teachers have these resources in their schools, we know that our children can do incredible things.’ This struggle reflects the essence of Occupy Wall Street—community members across class, race and other traditional divides uniting in disciplined opposition to corporate power.”

The teachers’ action has divided the Democratic establishment between corporatists like Emanuel and those who still support union rights. As the Washington Post commented: “At stake in the conflict is not only the future of education reform but also the role of unions within the party and, by extension, the nation. Emanuel’s clear desire to reduce the teachers union’s role in the city’s schools is hardly his alone. … What’s brewing is a battle between Democratic Party management (chiefly mayors, backed by a significant portion of the public) and Democratic Party labor, also backed by a significant portion of the public.”

The Obama administration has ostensibly not taken sides in the dispute. But under Obama’s Race to the Top program, states are rewarded with extra funding for legislation that spends heavily on charter schools – publicly funded but privately run and non-union – and eliminates job security provisions from teacher union contracts. This has not gone unnoticed by Chicago’s teachers. In These Times reported: “In a sign of its lukewarm feeling toward the Democratic administration, CTU President Karen Lewis refused to greet Vice President Joe Biden during the AFT’s July convention in Detroit. The CTU delegation also refused to wear Obama-Biden T-shirts handed out for Biden’s speech, instead opting for the red CTU shirts.”

There is another dimension to the struggle: a move to replace tenured teachers, many of whom are African-American, with younger and much lower-paid teachers, most of whom are white. Teachers are the core of the African-American middle class in Chicago.

They are up against some powerful and politically-connected enemies who are pushing charter schools. Pauline Lipman, professor of Educational Policy Studies and Director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, told Democracy Now that “Chicago is the birthplace of this neo-liberal corporate reform agenda of high-stakes testing, paying teachers based on test scores, disinvesting in neighborhood schools and closing them, and turning them over to charter schools… It was a model which was picked up by cities around the country, and then made a national agenda when Arne Duncan… became Obama’s Secretary of Education.”

One of the main promoters of this agenda is Stand for Children’s Jonah Edelman, son of civil rights leader Marian Wright Edelman, who was caught on video boasting of his organization’s anti-union tactics: “Armed with millions of dollars supplied by wealthy financiers, he hired the top lobbyists in Illinois and won favor with the top politicians. He shaped legislation to use test scores for evaluating teachers, to strip due process rights from teachers, and to assure that teachers lost whatever job protections they had. In his clever and quiet campaign behind the scenes, he even managed to split the state teachers’ unions. His biggest victory consisted of isolating the Chicago Teachers Union and imposing a requirement that it could not strike without the approval of 75% of its members.”

The effect of this legislative attack was the opposite of his intentions – Chicago teachers united behind their new leadership. They continue to fight for a proper chance for children, many living in desperate poverty and navigating gang areas daily to get to school. Learning is a social process, and the progress of individual children is markedly affected by the social baggage they bring with them, for which teachers cannot compensate. For example, more than 80% of Chicago public school students qualify for free lunches because they come from low-income households.

Some schools, like Gresham Elementary on the South Side, are in neighborhoods hit hard by gang-related crime. Gunfire can sometimes be heard from the school, say teachers, and pupils have understandably performed poorly on state-mandated tests. Unless their results improve, the school could have its principal removed, or be closed, by education officials. The closing of schools and what happens to the teachers working in them has been a major issue in the dispute.

Like the struggle in Wisconsin to defend collective bargaining, and the efforts of the Occupy movement to assert the right to free assembly, the Chicago teachers are fighting to defend a fundamental American principle of education for all children, no matter how advantaged or disadvantaged their background.  As Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Jarvis: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their controul with a wholsome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

Labor must follow the Chicago teachers’ example and build alliances across class and ethnic divides, but above all must assert its independence from corporate Democrats like Emanuel and Obama.

Vote for Obama with Eyes Wide Open: He Won’t Stop the Plutocrats, but Buys us Time to Organize Against the Wage Enslavement of America

The Democratic National Convention, like the Republican Convention before it, was a choreographed spectacle insulated from any kind of dissension and aimed squarely at motivating the party’s base.

Since the U.S. is so ideologically polarized, and voters are unlikely to change their position in the short term, the electoral calculations of party strategists dominated the proceedings. Compared to the Republicans, the delegates were noticeably diverse and their emotional response was palpable – “I want him to get us fired up again,” Colorado delegate Elizabeth McCann told the Guardian – and they rapturously applauded the performances.

There were a few vague references to the actual record of the last four years of the Democratic administration, but discussion of it was suppressed with the argument that Obama needed more time to fix the mess inherited from Bush.

The only crack in the appearance of party unity came over an amendment to the party’s platform to state that Jerusalem was the undivided capital of Israel. A sizeable group of delegates objected to their policy being determined by Republican criticisms, but their voices were steamrollered by convention chairman Antonio Villaraigosa, who held the vote three times. The elephant in the room – the ability of billionaires to buy electoral influence – was projected onto Republicans. The leverage of corporate funders was airbrushed out of the proceedings, if not from the logos on the conference credentials.

Michelle Obama’s speech had the goal of rekindling the social movement that elected Obama in 2008, and she did it by presenting the story of their life together from humble beginnings. E.J. Dionne pointed out the political messaging: “What she said directly is that Barack Obama understands people who are struggling. What she didn’t have to say is Mitt Romney doesn’t.” As the Guardian’s Gary Younge commented: “while Republicans expressed sympathy for those who struggled in the past, Democrats expressed affinity with those who still struggle in the present. Hard times they couldn’t claim for themselves they appropriated as their cause.”

Clinton, who was the most responsible historically for moving the party to the right, gave a polished performance raising the ghost of bipartisan cooperation and explaining that the country’s economic situation was so dire that Obama’s administration would need another four years to make any difference for the middle class. Like other speakers, he claimed that the country was better off than four years ago, even though people might not yet feel the recovery. Clinton and Biden both appealed to Reagan Democrats by competing with the Republicans for super-patriotism – with the execution of bin Laden a central motif in the rhetoric.

Obama’s speech itself fabricated an ideological web with shared responsibility at its core. Although ostensibly criticizing the super-rich who avoid paying taxes, it also carried the implication that we all have to sacrifice to dig the country out of its mess.

His masterful delivery distracted from the absence of a concrete basis for the promises he made. Obama claimed there was a “clear choice” between him and Romney, “a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future.”  “Over the next few years, big decisions will be made in Washington, on jobs and the economy; taxes and deficits; energy and education; war and peace – decisions that will have a huge impact on our lives and our children’s lives for decades to come.” But he made no commitment that the decisions he would make would reverse the wholesale transfer of wealth from the middle class to the banks and plutocrats.

In fact, his record is the opposite. Naked Capitalism’s Matt Stoller points out: “Obama, through various programs centering on the Wall Street bailout, basically reinflated financial assets owned by the wealthy while foreclosing on everyone else. The data shows the result – inequality has gotten worse, faster, under Obama, than it did under Bush. There are new jobs, but they are sparse, and low-paying.”

“If you turn away now,” Obama said, “change will not happen.” With this turn of phrase he subordinated independent grassroots struggles for change to his re-election. He called for shared responsibility as citizens, “the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another.” Although the idea implies equality of obligations in relation to society, Obama denied citizens any agency in resolving social problems except to vote for him and allow him to take decisions on their behalf.

He appropriated the rhetoric of the Civil Rights movement to support inclusivity and renewed trust in his presidency. “Yes, our path is harder, but it leads to a better place. … we keep our eyes fixed on that distant horizon, knowing that providence is with us and that we are surely blessed to be citizens of the greatest nation on earth.” But noticeable was his omission of any reference to more recent struggles like the defense of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin or the Occupy movement.

As In These Times writer Theo Anderson commented, the institution that concretely embodies the party theme of “we’re in this together” got short shrift. “Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, got a speaking spot in the early-evening wasteland on Wednesday. We heard from a few union members who work in the auto industry, and the president of the UAW, Bob King, was given a spot in the 9 p.m. slot on Wednesday. … The Democrats’ best and brightest politicians, meanwhile, mentioned unions only in passing.”

Trumka had led the AFL-CIO’s endorsement of Obama despite his attacks on public sector workers. Mike Elk described organized labor’s objections: “In a famous speech at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 2009, the president called for the getting rid of ‘bad teachers’; the next year, he endorsed the mass firing of unionized teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island. … Most recently, the president signed a bill in February making it more difficult for airline workers to unionize, which resulted in an unprecedented anti-union ruling by a federal district court that blocked 10,000 American Airlines customer service agents from holding an election.” But Verizon worker Norwood Orrick said he saw no other choice for union members: “Our decision to go with President Obama is more about who else are we going to go with?”

The labor movement was marginalized by the corporate Democrats who orchestrated the convention. It needs to assert its independence of the Democratic leadership and break free from the union leaders’ ideological prostration in the face of Obama’s perceived electability.

Whatever the result of the presidential election – and it looks like Obama stands a good chance – cuts in social programs will be implemented to get the super-rich out of the mess they themselves created. In practice, the difference is one of timing and degree: Republicans would legislate draconian cuts right away, while Democrats would enact them over a longer time period. This is not a negligible consideration, because resistance needs time to grow.

Moreover, the reforms Obama has achieved – like Obamacare – are real, if modest, gains. Voters in November should therefore vote Democrat, but with their eyes wide open, and be ready to continue the struggle at the grassroots.

Trayvon Martin and racial profiling as an undercurrent in Republican rhetoric

The second-degree murder charge against George Zimmerman undoubtedly signals a victory for the movement initiated by Trayvon Martin’s parents. Trayvon’s killing and the lack of an arrest captured the public imaginary throughout America and created a demand for justice to be seen to be done. While a charge is not a conviction, the trial will be played out in the public eye, so attention will be drawn to laws that have been promoted by the rightwing organizations ALEC and the National Rifle Association – concealed carry of weapons, easy access to guns, and “Stand Your Ground” – which will likely form Zimmerman’s defense.

The special prosecutor, Angela Corey, a Republican reputed to be tough on crime, denied that Zimmerman’s arrest was a response to pressure and maintained the state was following its due process. Corey’s statement announcing the charge attempted to overcome the perception of a conflict between her investigation and the Sanford authorities by linking the decision to prosecute to the constitutional rights of citizens: “Let me emphasize that we do not prosecute by pressure or petition,” she said. “We prosecute cases based on the relevant facts of each case and on the laws of the state of Florida. … By strictly adhering to this standard we vigorously pursue justice for all victims of crimes while maintaining the rights of every defendant. … Every single day, prosecutors throughout this country handle difficult cases, always keeping at the forefront their mandate to seek justice.”

However, the probable cause affidavit released by her office on Thursday made clear that Corey rejects Zimmerman’s claim – accepted at face value by police at the time – that Martin attacked him. Her investigators determined that Zimmerman “profiled” Martin and then pursued and confronted him.

The state had to respond to the demands for justice, to have a trial at least, to maintain its legitimacy. The ideal of equality under the law is important to the ideological justification of state rule. But this also intersects with other social currents in America. The NRA, which advocated and wrote the Stand Your Ground law, is an important conservative constituency for Republicans: Mitt Romney went out of his way to cultivate ties with the group and adopt their inflammatory anti-Obama rhetoric at their annual convention in St. Louis, Missouri, last week.

Speaking at the same convention, the NRA’s vice-president Wayne LaPierre tried to deflect criticism of Stand Your Ground by attacking the media for publicizing Martin’s killing and ignoring other violent crime. “By the time I finish this speech, two Americans will be slain, six women will be raped, 27 of us will be robbed, and 50 more will be beaten. That’s the harsh reality we face, all of us, every single day,” he said. What the NRA wants is to use the fear of crime to enable armed white citizens to enforce vigilante justice against a perceived criminal threat – exactly what Zimmerman did – without fear of legal consequences.

Supporter of right-wing causes and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz chimed in to pillory Angela Corey, saying he thinks she doesn’t have a case for second-degree murder. “What you have here is an elected public official who made a campaign speech last night for reelection when she gave her presentation and over-charged.”  He described the affidavit of probable cause as “thin,” “irresponsible,” and “unethical.”

While there is a clear division in public opinion over the case, it is not purely on race lines. Gary Younge overstates his argument in the Guardian when he says: “What follows from here has the potential to be every bit as divisive as the OJ Simpson trial and every bit as inflammatory as the Rodney King case – only this time there’s a black president in an election year.” According to the Washington Post: “Eight in 10 blacks say they think Martin’s killing was not justified, compared with 38 percent of whites. Most whites say they do not know enough about the shooting to say whether it was justified.” Almost 40% of whites agree with the overwhelming majority of African-Americans, and the rest are uncertain: that’s more nuanced than opinion was on OJ Simpson’s guilt. The divisions in the country over this case are more ideological than racial – racism is expressed through attitudes on gun control and stoking fears of criminality.

A Washington Post writer, Colbert King, points out: “The murder charge doesn’t settle the question raised by Martin’s shooting. As Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander, the author of ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,’ told the Christian Science Monitor, Martin’s killing is ‘not an exceptional case except for the fact that the one who did the accosting while armed was a private citizen’ rather than a police officer. … High rates of arrest, incarceration and unexplained stops by police, Alexander said, send ‘the message to young black men that no matter who you are, what you do, whether you play by the rules or not, you’re going to be viewed and treated like a criminal and you’re likely to wind up in jail one way or another’.”

Interviewed on DemocracyNow, NAACP president Benjamin Jealous raised the same issue: “We have not had an honest conversation about racial profiling in this country in a decade. And the reality is that [the Trayvon Martin] case, for a whole generation of young people, is the first time they’re seeing their country really talk about this problem. … You know, in 2003, what, there were about 160,000-170,000 stop-and-frisks in New York; 87 percent of those resulted in no summons, no one being locked up or taken to the station. Last year, 285—excuse me, 685,000 stop-and-frisks, 685, and 88 percent of them found nothing. You know, less than 10 percent of those were of white people; you know, more than 90 percent were black and Latino people. And the reality is that we’ve seen a massive upsurge in racial profiling over the last decade …”

Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison told the Guardian: “They keep saying, we have to have a conversation about race in this country. Well, this is the conversation. We’ll see if it plays out, if it makes a difference in terms of not just the hate crime thing, but the law.” She drew attention to the coded racial language of the conservative right, and how Santorum described Obama as a “government nig – uh.” “He said he didn’t say that! They used to say ‘government nigger’ when black people got jobs in the post office, stuff like that. And that’s what he was saying.”

The national discussion of race coincides with an election campaign in which the subverting of state law by the Republican right is being pulled into the public eye. Zimmerman’s trial will highlight racial profiling as an undercurrent in American political rhetoric – and will build opposition to it.

Challenging Racial Profiling: Trayvon Martin, Occupy Wall Street, and Social Justice

The Trayvon Martin case is currently being tried in the media, with op-eds galore which begin by decrying a rush to judgment, then express their own judgment through their presentation of the facts. The police department is trying to justify its failure to charge George Zimmerman with any crime by releasing selective information about the killer and his victim, while Zimmerman’s family and attorney are alleging that Martin attacked the shooter – a story that is not borne out by witness and video evidence which show Zimmerman unharmed.

The polarization of public opinion and the family’s demands for justice has laid bare the role of endemic racial profiling in the case. Zimmerman had channeled the gated-community imaginary connecting neighborhood burglaries with groups of youth in hoodies and so automatically found Martin suspicious. After the shooting, narcotics and not homicide officers were sent to the scene; the officers initially accepted Zimmerman’s story at face value since the victim was a black youth in a hoodie, and routine homicide evidence was not collected.

The lead detective on the case, Chris Serino, did not believe Zimmerman’s story, but was overruled by the police chief and state district attorney because of their interpretation of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. Jonathan Capehart pointed out in the Washington Post that: “Serino didn’t believe Zimmerman’s version of events and recommended a manslaughter charge. But he was overruled. And according to a report from Joy-Ann Reid of the Grio yesterday, the decision came from atop the law enforcement food chain: the state attorney. A source with knowledge of the investigation into the shooting of Trayvon Martin tells the Grio that it was then Sanford police chief Bill Lee, along with Capt. Robert O’Connor, the investigations supervisor, who made the decision to release George Zimmerman on the night of February 26th, after consulting with State Attorney Norman Wolfinger – in person.”

The Sanford police have a history of systemic racial discrimination, which led to Lee’s appointment six months ago to clean up the force. Lee himself was forced to step down in the aftermath of public reaction to his refusal to charge Zimmerman. Interviewing NAACP president Ben Jealous about Lee’s ouster, Amy Goodwin of “Democracy Now” asked: “what happened after Trayvon was killed, when he’s laying on the ground, and the police come, and George Zimmerman is standing over him, as witnesses describe, the police didn’t drug or alcohol test George Zimmerman. They drug and alcohol tested the corpse of Trayvon. … Then his body was taken to the morgue, where it sat unidentified for—it laid unidentified for two days, when the police had his cell phone, could easily have identified who he was. He was talking to his girlfriend as this was all taking place.”

Jealous replied: “This is why this chief has to go, because the reality is that if you’re a chief, and your officers come – are called to a scene where a man has killed a boy, and no arrest is made, no evidence is gathered – no attempt to, you know, check the hands of the shooter for powder burns or anything else, powder residue, to gather the clothing of the killer for DNA evidence or anything else, or to otherwise gather evidence from that scene – and then no one attempts to contact this boy’s parents, to track them down, to pick up the cell phone and call the last number and say, ‘Who does this belong to?’ and then no one arrests the shooter and begins an investigation, and weeks go by, and a sense of safety that was already tenuous in this community – you were called here to rebuild – erodes more and more and more, there’s a certain point when there’s nothing that you as that chief can do to fix it, and you’ve just got to go.”

The rapid spread of protests in support of Martin’s family throughout the U.S. highlights the widespread use of racial profiling in major cities. “Stop and frisk” tactics have led to stepped-up police harassment and criminalization of black and Latino youth in New York, in particular. In an echo of the protests around Trayvon Martin’s killing, The LA Times reports, “marchers in New York City held a demonstration to demand the arrest of a New York police officer for fatally shooting an unarmed teenager after chasing him into his family’s apartment. The march Thursday night in the Bronx, where 18-year-old Ramarley Graham lived, was the latest rally in what protesters say will be a relentless campaign on behalf of the teenager. ‘We will get justice, because I’m not going to stop. A mother never lays down,’ Graham’s mother, Constance Malcolm, told the crowd.”

Ryan Devereaux in The Guardian notes that the NYPD is now facing a federal class action over the expansion of its stop-and-frisk program into public housing. “The plaintiffs include several mothers and their teenage children. They claim the program regularly leads to unwarranted stops, harassment and trespassing arrests in their own buildings and the buildings of their friends and family. … NYPD data indicates that between 2006 and 2010, the department made 329,446 stops based on suspicion of trespassing, representing 12% of all stops. Out the total number of stops 7.5% have led to arrests. In 2010 the 10 precincts with the most arrests [predominantly African American and Latino communities] accounted for nearly as many stops as the remaining 66 precincts combined.”

The Guardian was the only major newspaper to report Wednesday’s successful Occupy protest against fare increases on the New York Metro, which the movement has connected with police criminalization of youth. “An Occupy Wall Street-affiliated group has claimed responsibility for chaining open more than 20 subway gates in New York City, in an action intended to highlight issues surrounding the public transit system. … Chains and padlocks were used to hold emergency gates open on the F, L, R, Q, 3, and 6 lines. Signs resembling Metro Transit Authority notices were posted on the subway walls that read ‘Free Entry, No Fare. Please Enter Through The Service Gate’, while activists above ground urged passengers to ride for free. … [Occupy supporter José] Martín said one of the motivations for Wednesday’s action was to highlight the number of minorities arrested for fare evasion. ‘One of the driving motivations was the criminalization of black and brown youth through the NYPD quota system,’ he explained. ‘A lot of Occupiers have been going to jail for the last six months and finding themselves in jail cells with black and Latino youth who are often there for nothing more than fare evasion, thrown in cages for such a tiny violation and then often forced to lose their job or get in trouble in school’.”

Police racial profiling of black and Latino citizens is a political strategy aimed at containing the consequences of increasing social polarization, but an accumulation of abuses has eroded the ties between police and communities. It’s what underlies many unlawful police killings of individuals, young and old. Another aspect of this strategy is to suppress expressions of political protest outside the official two-party system, such as the Occupy movement. The growing public anger at the police in the Trayvon Martin case signifies that communities across the nation no longer accept them as protectors of public safety and are demanding justice.

OWS and Trayvon Martin: America Will Not Be Satisfied Until Justice Rolls Down Like Waters

The coincidence of the Occupy protests with the growing national movement of outrage against the failure of Sanford, Florida police to arrest the killer of Trayvon Martin has called into question police authority and undermined the NYPD push to criminalize dissent. Despite violent nightly skirmishes from Monday onwards, the NYPD was not able to oust the occupiers from Union Square, and on Wednesday evening “hundreds poured into the square at 6 p.m. for a rally for Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager hunted down and killed for being black. Trayvon’s aggrieved parents, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, spoke at the rally, dubbed The Million Hoodie March, which drew 1,000 hoodie-wearing supporters who sported the same apparel that Trayvon’s killer, George Zimmerman, found ‘suspicious’ as he stalked the 17-year-old through a gated Sanford, Florida, community. … Around 7:30 p.m., the rally became a march, commanding 6th Avenue and easily overwhelming the considerable police presence.”

While police massed at the square in the aftermath of the demonstration, they remained on the defensive: “500 cops, accompanied by dozens of paddy wagons and arrest vehicles, surrounded the park – there was so much manpower that they stood shoulder-to-shoulder as they ringed the square – and pushed the protesters back onto the public sidewalk area in what was the largest show of police force since the November 15 raid on Liberty Square. But the show of force was thankfully just that, and though white shirts patrolled the crowd and provoked the occupiers, the paddy wagons and NYPD arrest bus remained empty. “

Last Saturday, March 25, hundreds more occupiers marched to protest the violent arrests the previous week and to demand the resignation of the NYC police commissioner, Ray Kelly. According to the Guardian: “Organisers framed Saturday’s action as a critique of an array of NYPD tactics that tend to disproportionately target low-income communities and people of colour. Protesters repeatedly pointed to the department’s widespread use of street-level stop and frisks and the surveillance of Muslim communities as examples of failed NYPD policy.” An example of this practice was the violent arrest of Mesiah Burciaga-Hameed, a 16-year-old activist from Oakland, who briefly blocked the path of a police scooter. According to The Occupied Wall Street Journal: “Despite her change of heart, she was quickly snatched from the sidewalk by officers who dragged her, hysterically crying, from her friends. … Burciaga-Hameed’s arrest was consistent with the random yet systematic targeting of women, teenagers and men of color for arrest, a pattern noted by many who were following the four-hour march on Twitter.”

The continued assertions of popular sovereignty in Occupy’s rhetoric and direct actions have been revitalized by the demands for justice in the Trayvon Martin case. The ouster of the Sanford police chief, following a motion of no confidence by the city council, showed a potent demonstration of the public’s power to push back for accountability from law enforcement, a movement that continues unabated.  The protests against arbitrary police actions have spread through the country like the Occupy movement in its initial days. In Chicago, hundreds of people rallied in the Loop and Daley Plaza to show support for Trayvon Martin’s family. “It’s not just about this protest,” Jazmin Barnett-Birdsong told the Morris Daily Herald. “It’s about all the protests nationwide. It’s about unity and solidarity. We as a country, we think justice should prevail.”

The mass nature of the movement means that hundreds of incidents where police have racially profiled African-Americans and Latinos have accumulated to the point where communities no longer believe the police are serving justice. Rallies were planned for Pittsburgh; San Francisco; Houston; Atlanta; Indianapolis; Baltimore; Philadelphia; Detroit; Memphis, Tennessee; Iowa City, Denver, and Sanford itself on Monday where 500 people crowded into the Sanford City Commission. Outside the meeting, several thousand people carried signs, rallied and marched in Martin’s support. “We’re not asking for an eye for an eye, we’re asking for justice, justice, justice,” said Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father. More than 2.2 million people have added their signatures to an online petition demanding an arrest in the case. Several Miami Heat players took the basketball floor on Saturday with messages such as “RIP Trayvon Martin” and “We want justice” scrawled on their sneakers, after posting photos of themselves wearing black hoodies on Twitter.

When Martin Luther King famously said, “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he was speaking about civil rights in the 60s. But the words encompass our 2012 reality.

Occupy the Dream: a Hopeful Beauty is Born

Despite a defeatist and rightwing narrative that minority workers have no interest in the OWS/ We are the 99 percent,” the interracial and pluralist alliance that we called for on this blog has begun to come together, signaling a truly transformational era for America.

Occupy Wall Street and Black clergy have started “Occupy the Dream,” joining forces to protest the hold financial institutions have on the economy. They have initiated a new series of actions they consider a continuation of Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy. “Dr. King did not die for a monument,” said the Rev. Jamal Bryant. “He died for a movement and that movement must move forward.” According to Afro.com, Rev. Bryant described OWS as having “taken the methodology of the black church in the civil rights movement and brought it to the 21st Century.” Occupy the Dream will hold major demonstrations every month in 10 to 15 select cities across the U.S., beginning on Martin Luther King Day, Jan. 16, 2012.

Behind this is the fact that economic privileges expected by the middle class have disappeared, so that all Americans face the same fate of poverty without a safety net. The political divide between the professional middle class and the working class, which has been fostered by Republicans since the time of Nixon, has now no basis in social reality.

Barbara and John Ehrenreich, following E.P. Thompson’s analysis of the formation of the English working class, describe how the 99 percent began to articulate their interests as a group despite race and class differences. “For decades, the most stridently promoted division within the 99% was the one between what the right calls the ‘liberal elite’ — composed of academics, journalists, media figures, etc. — and pretty much everyone else. … [but] the idea of the ‘liberal elite’ could not survive the depredations of the 1% in the late 2000s. For one thing, it was summarily eclipsed by the discovery of the actual Wall Street-based elite and their crimes. Compared to them, professionals and managers, no matter how annoying, were pikers. The doctor or school principal might be overbearing, the professor and the social worker might be condescending, but only the 1% took your house away.”

Even though they have lost their encampments, the OWS are continuing to build alliances with groups protesting home foreclosures and evictions, and as in New York City working in solidarity with labor unions. The first union to come out in support of OWS was Public Transit Union (TWU) Local 100, and the occupiers returned the favor on Thursday by joining the TWU’s rally outside MTA headquarters in Manhattan to demand a fair contract and then marching to a rally at Liberty Plaza. Bus and subway workers are rejecting a 3-year wage freeze and givebacks on working conditions.

The pluralist orientation of the 99 percent has helped diverse groups to articulate their perception of the accumulation of vast wealth by the one percent at the expense of everyone else. Nurses on East and West coasts, who are on the front line of changes in Medicare provisions, have been made militant by reductions in staffing ratios and attacks on wages while the CEOs at the top of the medical industry earn huge salaries and bonuses.

In New York City, “nurses, who voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, say they are being treated with disrespect by a corporate hospital culture that demands sacrifices from patients and those who provide their care, but pays executives millions of dollars.” They are being made to pay hundreds of dollars a year more for health care and medication, while the nurse to patient ratio is being reduced to an extent that threatens the quality of patient care.

The New York Times reported that the nurses’ sense of disrespect “crystallized when a management negotiator told them: ‘We have the money. We just don’t have the will to give it to you’.” The story quoted the president of the nurses’ bargaining unit, Jacklynn Price, who said: “‘They go home with bags of money, what I call these nonprofit oligarchs.’ … She cited a $1.2 million bonus paid last year to the [Mount Sinai] hospital’s chief executive, Kenneth L.  Davis, which brought his compensation to $2.6 million. ‘None of that could they do without nurses’.”

No wonder, then, that as the gap between the 1% and everyone else grows, Americans are uniting across racial, ethnic, and class lines. The tremendous solidarity of that union, which in the 1960s dreamed a better vision of what America could be and fueled the fight for it, has been revitalized.

As Barbara and John Ehrenreich write: “The Occupation encampments that enlivened approximately 1,400 cities this fall provided a vivid template for the 99%’s growing sense of unity. Here were thousands of people — we may never know the exact numbers — from all walks of life, living outdoors in the streets and parks, very much as the poorest of the poor have always lived: without electricity, heat, water, or toilets. In the process, they managed to create self-governing communities. General assembly meetings brought together an unprecedented mix of recent college graduates, young professionals, elderly people, laid-off blue-collar workers, and plenty of the chronically homeless for what were, for the most part, constructive and civil exchanges. What started as a diffuse protest against economic injustice became a vast experiment in class building. The 99%, which might have seemed to be a purely aspirational category just a few months ago, began to will itself into existence.”

A hopeful beauty is reborn in America.