Forget the Faustian Cliff Deal: Fight for a Living Wage

The last-minute deal to end the “fiscal cliff” settles very little. Congressional Republicans agreed to a small increase in taxes on individuals making more than $400k, while Democrats were able to extend the protections of the social safety net, like unemployment benefits, for two more months. Come February, the American electorate will have to go through another round of this perverse game of chicken with the “debt ceiling” debate.

According to Talking Points Memo, “a key provision of the fiscal cliff deal only buys down the sequester for two months, meaning deep cuts to domestic and defense spending will take effect at the end of February, right when the debt limit will have to be increased.”

It’s easy to see that the deal doesn’t defuse the Republican strategy of preventing the normal functioning of government in order to exert leverage on state policy. Another battle is looming in which Republicans will have a stronger hand politically. Paul Krugman’s take is that Obama’s “evident desire to have a deal before hitting the essentially innocuous fiscal cliff bodes very badly for the confrontation looming in a few weeks over the debt ceiling.”

Had we gone over the cliff, taxes would have been restored to Clinton-era levels. But why should there be any popular objection to restoring taxes to the level everybody was paying in the 1990s? The reason is that legislators have masked the real decline in wages over the last 10 years by cutting taxes, and rising prices have squeezed the middle class to the point that a small tax increase would have a major effect on their ability to make ends meet.

Michael Hudson points out the deception behind the political rhetoric over taxes: “The emerging financial oligarchy seeks to shift taxes off banks and their major customers (real estate, natural resources and monopolies) onto labor. Given the need to win voter acquiescence, this aim is best achieved by rolling back everyone’s taxes. The easiest way to do this is to shrink government spending, headed by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Yet these are the programs that enjoy the strongest voter support. This fact has inspired what may be called the Big Lie of our epoch: the pretense that governments can only create money to pay the financial sector, and that the beneficiaries of social programs should be entirely responsible for paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not the wealthy. … The raison d’être for taxing the 99% for Social Security and Medicare is simply to avoid taxing wealth, by falling on low wage income at a much higher rate than that of the wealthy.”

Wages have fallen as capital has creamed off a greater proportion of the national income at labor’s expense.  The key to employers’ ability to hold down wages is the decline of unions. They were able to organize effectively when the mass of Americans worked in factory jobs while the economy was expanding after World War 2. But unions have faced a war of attrition over the last 30 years as structural changes in the economy were accompanied by corporate-friendly legislative restrictions on their bargaining strength. These were political decisions that were aimed at destroying the gains of the New Deal.

Harold Meyerson notes in the Washington Post “how central the collapse of collective bargaining is to American workers’ inability to win themselves a raise. Yes, globalizing and mechanizing jobs has cut into the livelihoods of millions of U.S. workers, but that is far from the whole story. Roughly 100 million of the nation’s 143 million employed workers have jobs that can’t be shipped abroad, that aren’t in competition with steel workers in Sao Paolo or iPod assemblers in Shenzhen. Sales clerks, waiters, librarians and carpenters all utilize technology in their jobs, but not to the point that they’ve become dispensable. Yet while they can’t be dispensed with, neither can they bargain for a raise.”

Outsourcing undermined the unions’ base and this, while facilitated by new technology, resulted from decisions of the US government to open up the domestic economy to world trade. The consequence was a withdrawal of capital from direct manufacturing in the US in favor of the higher-profit areas of marketing and distribution. As manufacturing declined, corporations became increasingly financialized, facilitating the growth of monopolies.

Steve Fraser spells it out in TomDispatch: “Rates of U.S. investment in new plants, technology, and research and development began declining during the 1970s, a fall-off that only accelerated in the gilded 1980s.  Manufacturing, which accounted for nearly 30% of the economy after the Second World War, had dropped to just over 10% by 2011. … The ascendancy of high finance didn’t just replace an industrial heartland in the process of being gutted; it initiated that gutting and then lived off it, particularly during its formative decades.  The FIRE sector, that is, not only supplanted industry, but grew at its expense – and at the expense of the high wages it used to pay and the capital that used to flow into it.”

As well as being weakened by structural changes in the economy, unions have faced an ideological assault. As more and more workers found themselves on temporary assignment, without contracts or benefits, their resentment was leveraged electorally against organized labor by billionaire-funded campaigns aimed at dividing unionized employees from other workers.

Walmart is a model for this turn to absolute exploitation of workers. The company, according to In These Times writer David Moberg, “heavily influences standards for vast swaths of the American economy, from retail to logistics to manufacturing. Over the past few decades, Walmart’s competitive power—a combination of size, technology and cut-throat personnel policies—has played a role in dramatically reducing American retail workers’ average income and unionization level (from 8.6 percent in 1983 to 4.9 percent in 2011).” Walmart now pays less than what a worker needs to reproduce his or her labor-power, offloading the costs of healthcare, housing etc. onto the rest of society. It is a strategy that results in destroying a generation of workers – a form of destruction of capital – devaluing labor.

Low wages and opposition to unions are more than just a means of gaining market share. They are also a way of establishing power over the workforce. Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein explains: “Wal-Mart’s hostility to a better-paid and healthier workforce is as much an issue of power as it is a question of prices and profits. High wages reduce turnover and awaken employee expectations, transforming the internal culture of the workplace. Decent wages lead to real career and the expectation of fair treatment over a lifetime of employment. That in turn might well lead to demands for a steady work shift, an equitable chance at promotion, retirement pay, and even the opportunity to make one’s voice heard in a collective fashion.” [Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution, New York 2009:250]

In 2012, union struggles for a living wage challenged not only the business strategy of companies like Walmart, but also the political strategy of the plutocracy to weaken and destroy unions and dump responsibility for social welfare onto the individual. Moberg notes: “OUR Walmart joins a host of smaller campaigns by workers in other precarious and penurious industries, like logistics, fast food and domestic work. With enough density of membership, service-sector unions can raise standards in local, and ultimately national, markets. For example, in San Francisco and New York, where 90 percent of hotel housekeepers are unionized, average hotel housekeeper wages are $19 to $26 an hour, compared to a national average of $10.10.”

Across the country, low-waged workers in various industries are empowering themselves by fighting back. The Occupy movement’s achievement to raise consciousness of inequality, new approaches to union organizing, and outpourings of solidarity such as the support for victims of Hurricane Sandy, point the way forward for 2013.

Black Friday Protests Demand Walmart Stop Enriching Itself on Worker Impoverishment

Walmart workers picket at Paducah, Kentucky, on Black Friday

Widespread protest actions against Walmart’s low wages and intimidation of workers took place in all major cities across the U.S. on “Black Friday” – the sales day after Thanksgiving on which retailers rely to put their profit margins in the black.

According to the Guardian, “The biggest protest seemed to be in Paramount, California, where more than 1,500 people gathered in the streets to chant protest songs in opposition to what they say are low wages that keep Walmart workers in poverty.” Nine people were arrested for sitting in the street and blocking traffic, including three striking Walmart workers from area stores.

The protests succeeded in drawing national attention to Walmart’s poverty-level wages. According to the consulting group IBIS World, they average $8.81 an hour – which would mean working 42 hours every week of the year to earn the federal poverty level for a family of three. Walmart takes care to keep most workers working less hours than the minimum that would entitle them to company benefits.

Most customers continued with their shopping despite the pickets, but in Worcester, Massachusetts, one shopper left her cart in the aisle when she heard protesters chanting and left the store in solidarity. As a demonstrator tried to hand a flier to an employee at a cash register in that store, a reporter noticed a man who appeared to be her manager telling her not to take it or she would be fired.

A number of vociferous and courageous Walmart employees took part in the actions across the country, although the majority of protesters came from a broad coalition of community and labor activists. Those who did take a stand clearly express a new mood among Walmart’s workers, the majority of whom fear retaliation if they publicly show their support.

At the Paramount store, three Walmart employees who did not participate in the strike told The Huffington Post that they share the strikers’ concerns about low wages, lost benefits and retaliation for speaking up, but they did not strike for fear of losing their jobs. “Workers striking in Paramount who had been scheduled to work Friday said they may face retaliation but that the chance to take action was worth it. ‘People say I could just get a job elsewhere. But why?’ said Victoria Martinez, who was scheduled to work Friday at the Pico Rivera, Calif., store. ‘It will just be the same, and Walmart will get away with this. We can’t run away’.”

Josh Eidelson writes in The Nation: “one noteworthy trend is the number of places where a worker struck despite being the only one in their store to do so, often in stores with little or no prior OUR Walmart activism. One of those workers was Christopher Bentley Owen, whom I interviewed Tuesday about his experience in a mandatory ‘captive audience’ meeting he said was designed to make workers fear they could lose their jobs if they joined the strike. Owen said today that the sense that Walmart ‘wanted the managers to intimidate me’ helped spur him to join OUR Walmart, and join the strike. …

“Owen signed up with OUR Walmart on Wednesday online. Yesterday, two hours before his scheduled 5 pm shift, he called in and told a manager he was going on strike. Owen had considered also staging a one-person picket outside his store, but decided against it. ‘I was a little spooked,’ he said, ‘because thirty-one off-duty police officers had been hired’ along with ‘eight on-duty police’ for Black Friday.”

Roger Bybee reports in Socialist Worker: “A pre-dawn gathering in Milwaukee attracted more than 100 Walmart workers and supporters from labor, community organizations, and the faith community, despite bone-chilling winds outside Walmart’s northside store, which was subsidized by $4.5 million in taxpayer dollars. The store’s entrance was fenced off by temporary metal barriers and surrounded by six Milwaukee police vehicles as a half-dozen Walmart managers watched vigilantly … A Kenosha worker named Jerry, an eight-year Walmart veteran, noted that he has never enjoyed a holiday with his family during his entire time at Walmart, having to work each and every one.”

Walmart management were clearly concerned about any expression of dissent, mobilizing police at all targeted stores in an attempt to intimidate protesters and in effect their own employees. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, according to OUR Walmart, managers threw shoppers out of the store under the assumption they were there to protest.

The Nation reports: “Security at stores was excessive, even taking into consideration the sometimes chaotic scenes associated with Black Friday sales. After the morning crowd surge had come and gone, a weird mix of local police, state police and officers from the Sheriff’s department still patrolled the aisles of a Walmart in Kearny, New Jersey, occasionally communicating with store management about the presence of pesky protesters.”

The protests were largest on the east and west coasts, traditionally more union-friendly regions, and there were fewer in the mid-South. However, there were pickets at stores in Baker, Louisiana; Dallas, Texas; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Phoenix, Arizona; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Mobile, Alabama; and most Midwestern states.

Walmart’s business model recreates the impoverishment that forces workers to shop for the lowest possible prices. Profits come from the sheer volume of commodities moving through their stores – their employees are there merely to facilitate this movement and are totally disposable. The company is aggressively anti-union and anti-minimum wage and uses brutal legal and legislative muscle to grind down attempts to organize.

Jordan Weissman at The Atlantic explains: “Wal-Mart is an expert at using the weeks before union votes to stoke fear among employees about what might happen to their jobs if they choose to support the union. And in cases where those efforts proved insufficient, the company has been willing to take extreme steps. When a group of Texas butchers voted to unionize in 2000, the company responded to the only successful U.S. union drive in its history by switching to selling pre-packaged meat company wide.

“But the problem isn’t simply what’s legal – the NLRB has found many instances where Wal-Mart’s union busting behavior violated labor law. But the penalties are negligible. From 2000 to 2009, U.S. companies paid total of $36 million in fines for punishing workers over union activity. Wal-Mart alone could fork that over and write it off as the low, low price of doing business. … Wal-Mart’s labor savings helped it put unionized retail competition, such as Caldor, out of business.”

However, Walmart’s expansion throughout the U.S. and internationally is having the effect of generalizing the resistance to low pay in the retail industry. The fact that wage rates and working conditions have become the focus of a broad protest is not a one-off event but the beginning of a mass movement to reverse the erosion of the social contract in America.

Occupy Sandy: Lessons in American Solidarity

Three weeks after Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern seaboard of the United States, government has been unable to restore normal living conditions to the worst-hit areas, all located a few miles from the financial center of Manhattan. It is incredible that a country which is spending untold billions to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan does not have the resources to get relief to people living in the nation’s symbolic center. Those who are suffering most are, as always, the poor and underprivileged.

Hurricane Sandy was just one of a series of extreme weather events this year, the kind of events which are likely to become much more frequent as a result of global warming. It hit the headlines primarily because it affected a highly populated area of the U.S., but its aftermath highlighted the fact that the municipal infrastructure in parts of New York City has for years been allowed to disintegrate. As a result, three weeks after the storm thousands living in the housing projects of Red Hook in Brooklyn, as well as the Rockaways in Queens and Staten Island (where many first responders also live) are still without electricity, heat, hot water, and medical support.

Photographer Matt Richter has been documenting relief efforts in the area’s public housing. He told Gothamist last week: “The sick and elderly are trapped on the top floors of high-rise buildings in cold, pitch-black apartments without anyone to check on them or anyone to talk to. Mothers cannot feed their children because all of the local storefronts have been destroyed by flooding and looted. Diabetics and asthmatics have run out of medicine. Residents are heating their homes using gas stovetops and poisoning themselves.”

Many have observed that FEMA and the Red Cross were slow and ineffective in getting relief to these communities, while members of the Occupy movement were able to mobilize and coordinate volunteers almost immediately. Individuals who had been active in the Zuccotti Park occupation acted the day after the storm to find out what people needed, then set up distribution centers at church premises in Brooklyn, from where volunteers have been taking supplies to Red Hook and the Rockaways. Occupy’s horizontal structure appears to have facilitated an inclusive and flexible response to the disaster.

In the Rockaways, according to Gothamist, “volunteer manpower—a precious resource in the Hurricane Sandy recovery—continues to be misdirected or squandered by those in charge of official relief efforts. ‘The city hasn’t reached out to us at all,’ said Matt Calender, a Rockaway resident who helps direct a bustling relief effort from a house on Beach 96th Street. ‘The Red Cross gave us 500 blankets the other day. FEMA talked to us. But that’s it. We station volunteers here, but we also send people downtown, where there is immense need’.”

Slate reported: “Unlike other shelters that had stopped collecting donations or were looking for volunteers with special skills such as medical training, Occupy Sandy was ready to take anyone willing to help. … Ethan Murphy, who was helping organize the food at St. Jacobi’s and had been cooking for the occupy movement over the past year, explained there wasn’t any kind of official decision or declaration that occupiers would now try to help with the hurricane aftermath.  ‘This is what we do already,’ he explained: Build community, help neighbors, and create a world without the help of finance.”

John Knefel writes in Truthout: “One of Occupy’s defining features is horizontalism, or non-hierarchical organization, which replaces traditional methods of control with, in theory, mutual affinity and respect. The media often refers to this as “leaderlessness” and calls it a weakness, and when trying to interpret Occupy through the narrow lens of corporate-captured electoral politics that may be a fair criticism. But the premise is completely incorrect. … The fact that volunteers can be trained and assigned to tasks quickly – tasks they aren’t compelled by any strict authority to do and so therefore take ownership of almost immediately – is a virtue rather than a fatal flaw.”

The Red Cross and FEMA are hamstrung by bureaucracy and turf issues. FEMA field official Katherine Ordway told Time magazine: “It’s dark in those apartments and people are cold …They’re coming here wanting us to fix the problem in their homes, but we can’t. Restoring power and heat is not a FEMA issue. And that’s very frustrating.”

Occupy Wall Street framed their actions as the community self-adjusting to the crisis. What it also shows is that when communities are faced with rebuilding after a disaster, the philosophy of Occupy coincides with their modes of recreating social order. People who are protesting the control of banks and corrupt politicians over their lives can relate to those who have lost it all. One of the organizers of the relief effort, PhD student Pamela Brown, told Democracy Now: “organically, Occupy was able to organize very quickly on the ground and provide real relief to people, provide food and clothing. People were donating all of these things. And the Red Cross wasn’t really able to reach out to people in the way that was necessary to distribute those goods. … One of the things that Occupy has been amazing at with Sandy has been actually going to people, talking to them and saying, ‘What is it that you actually need?’ and providing that.”

While Occupy could not move large quantities of equipment and materiel to large areas, it can mobilize volunteers and concerned citizens in a way that the government cannot. A Time article considered: “Being among the first to move made Occupy a vital part of the city’s hurricane relief infrastructure. As a result, this radical nonstate movement finds itself in the unlikely position of coordinating with government institutions it might otherwise be in conflict with. … Ultimately, Occupy Sandy is an ethos, a grassroots, on-the-fly approach to disaster relief that, in certain areas of the city, has filled a void left by overwhelmed bureaucracies. It’s an approach adopted by numerous local groups and individuals throughout the city, and Occupy is in large part an attempt to link volunteers and donations to those efforts.”

The New York Times ran a story that contrasted the middle-class values of the volunteers with those of the working poor who are the recipients of aid. Naturally, any social interactions will not be free of class antagonisms. However, the fact that these interactions are taking place at all is a step to finding solutions to the daily struggles that project-dwellers face. What is needed is the inclusive and pluralistic ideology of the Occupy movement to facilitate equality and mutual respect.

As in New Orleans after Katrina, relations of power get rebuilt after disasters. But with Occupy Sandy, there is an opening for them to be challenged. The Occupiers are right to prepare for resistance against the opportunist interventions of financiers who seek to capitalize on crises by encouraging debt dependency, like the 2-year disaster loans small businesses are being advised to take or people’s borrowing against their retirement savings. Against the faceless world of finance capital and a government that serves it, Occupy Sandy is mobilizing the power of human and American solidarity—the recognition that, as Lincoln put it, united we stand.

Strikes at Walmart: War Against Mass Sweatshop Labor and a New Era in the Fight for Jobs and Respect

Walmart workers confront management at their Bentonville, Ark., headquarters

A threat by Walmart employee activists to stage strikes on “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, is a hugely significant event which has had little attention in the mainstream media. To stop the company retaliating against workers trying to organize, the activists are taking on the foundation of the Walmart retail empire, a behemoth with annual sales totaling more than the entire GDP of Norway, and employing more than 2 million Americans.

According to In These Times, “Retail strikes broke out in at least eight new cities on Tuesday [October 9], and workers staged a major protest at the corporation’s Bentonville, Ark., headquarters on Wednesday. … Following last Thursday’s strike by 63 Walmart workers in the Los Angeles metropolitan area – the first significant retail strike at the world’s largest merchandiser – workers walked off the job Tuesday morning at Walmart stores in Dallas, Texas; the Bay Area and Sacramento, California; Seattle; Miami; Washington, D.C. and Chicago.”

Warehouse workers employed by a subcontractor who struck against retaliation and wage theft at a Walmart-owned warehouse near Chicago won all their demands. Striker Phil Bailey told In These Times: “the workers marched back in together wearing T-shirts emblazoned with ‘Warehouse Workers for Justice’.”

Matt Stoller writes in Naked Capitalism that the threatened strike “is potentially one of the biggest stories of the year, a genuine challenge to the current economic order. Walmart has set the tone for the global economy, becoming a massive trading empire on the order of the British East Indies Trading company. … The key to Walmart’s dominance is the way that it electronically tracks all of its merchandise through an enormously efficient supply chain … Beyond that, the size of Walmart – eight cents of every dollar spent on retail in the US goes through the company – means that selling at scale in the US means selling through Walmart. In order to sell there, though, Walmart walks into your company and dictates how you are to manufacture, price, and package your product.”

Walmart’s control of its supply chain has enabled it to eliminate non-essential capital from every step of the process, and to increase the absolute surplus value squeezed out of it. In his article, Stoller quotes New America scholar Barry Lynn: “Once set in motion, the shift of power and initiative from manufacturer to retailer tended only to accelerate. The more Wal-Mart learned about the operations of its suppliers, the more it was able … to zero in on profit centers inside its suppliers. As time went on, Wal-Mart was able to dictate not only how its suppliers packaged and distributed their products, but what they manufactured, how they manufactured, how much money they made on their businesses, and indeed whether they would remain in business at all.”

In addition to its control over manufacturing, a just-in-time distribution system allows less capital to be tied up in inventory, and variable capital is kept to a minimum by not only keeping wages low, but also utilizing labor only when warehouses and stores need it. Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein described the distribution network like this: “There are layers of subcontractors, but it’s all one system. It’s a mass sweatshop, where pressure is put through subcontractors to squeeze labor. The industry is the supply chain, regardless of who is the technical employer. One of the competitive advantages of Walmart is their ability to deploy labor in ways that they refer to as ‘flexible.’ Come in tonight, work three hours tomorrow, etc. For the workers, this is chaos.”

Walmart is big enough not to face major challenges from competing capitals; however, it needs to continually realize a high rate of profit on the sale of commodities in order to offset the fixed capital tied up in its stores. But the system depends on workers accepting their exploitation. Everything is finely balanced: there is no redundancy, a huge enterprise depends on each link in the chain working perfectly. A minor disruption has the potential to jeopardize the entire network.

Josh Eidelman, who has been following the activists’ campaigns for Salon and In These Times, told Democracy Now that Wednesday’s strike “signifies that we’re in a new wave in this multi-decade struggle between U.S. labor and the world’s largest private employer. And it’s a wave that started, in many ways, this summer in June, when we saw eight workers go out on strike at a Wal-Mart supplier, CJ’s Seafood.” He explained that despite the threat of unemployment, workers were forced to take dramatic action to defend basic rights that may be necessary for a basic standard of living. “And when they do it, they face retaliation. And while much of this retaliation is illegal, much of these alleged acts are illegal, workers have found, not just at Wal-Mart but around the country, that the law itself is not good enough, is not strong enough, to rein the companies in.”

Walmart has used corporate-friendly labor law to suppress attempts at unionization, but breaks the same laws by retaliating against organizing activities. Lichtenstein explains the background to the current action: “At the turn of the new century, the union [the United Food & Commercial Workers] had conducted a vigorous, but traditional, organizing drive seeking National Labor Relations Board certification at dozens of U.S. stores. All failed because the anti-union experts deployed by Wal-Mart top management knew how to intimidate workers and propagandize the workforce in the weeks leading up to a formal union vote. In the case of one Canadian town, they just closed the store when forced to actually bargain with the union under the relatively pro-union laws then governing labor relations in Quebec.”

So the UFCW sought another way to organize Walmart workers. Over the last year the union recruited several thousand employees into an organization called OUR Walmart, standing for Organization United for Respect at Walmart. Lichtenstein considers it to be “a kind of return to labor formations of the 1930s. It’s an association – they aren’t looking for legal certification, they don’t claim to represent everyone. They’re a minority that is willing to stick their necks out. It’s a demonstration strike. For every one worker who actually goes outside and holds a picket sign, you can be sure that 25 workers inside the store or in other stores feel the same way but are afraid to be publicly identified.”

He adds: “The organization does not claim to be a union; it does not seek formal recognition from either the NLRB or even from Wal-Mart. But it does seek to give effective voice to the fears and aspirations of those Wal-Mart associates willing to join. I met four of them last March when they came to a writing workshop at UC Santa Barbara. They were working-class folks with all the insecurities, bills, family problems, and job issues faced by millions of retail and service workers. And they were incredibly brave, because they were determined to tell their story, to explain why their work life at Wal-Mart was so often punctuated by a series of humiliations, petty and grand, that they found intolerable. Joining OUR Walmart was a gamble they were willing to take.”

Explaining why they were willing to take that gamble, Charlene told AOL Jobs: “I joined because I understood what it meant to be intimidated by our management, and unfairly written up for something so bogus.” Two other workers, Greg and William, said they both joined after they were retaliated against. “They were working on the loading dock, and they say the load just kept increasing. Greg and William both complained, but the management didn’t let up. William’s knee – which had been operated on when he was 13 – suffered severe aggravation, and Greg tore some of the connecting issue in his spine. In response, they claim management tried to cut their hours and dock their pay – in Greg’s case down to 10 hours a week, $8 an hour. William and Greg challenged that and won.”

“When OUR Walmart organizers showed up, they were ready to join. ‘This is exactly what we’ve been looking for,’ William thought. ‘This is exactly what we need.’ Says Charlene: ‘It’s going to be a long, long fight. But it’s one we’re willing to go through’.”

We Are Not the Same People Any More: After One Year of Occupy Wall Street, Chicago Teachers Give Lessons in Justice and Unions are Born in New York

The Chicago teachers have returned to work with renewed confidence in their fight against Rahm Emanuel’s attempt to force restructuring on the Chicago Public Schools. They have achieved significant concessions from management, and have done so against the full weight of ideological marginalization by the media, who blamed teachers for the stand-off that left 350,000 students out of school.

The struggle is by no means over. The big elephant in the room, as teachers’ leader Karen Lewis said, is the school board’s strategy of closing 200 public schools while planning to open 60 new charter schools in the next few years.

The decision to strike was an expression of teachers’ anger at the board’s arrogant top-down management tactics, and the delay in returning to work after the agreement was negotiated indicates teachers’ fear of school closures and their distrust of the board.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported: “At Bond Elementary, which is on academic probation, teachers on the picket line Monday wanted more time to think about what they should recommend to delegate Jacqueline Ward. … Teachers wanted to know more about what job protections union leaders had secured for laid-off teachers, and how the new teacher evaluation system would work … ‘If evaluations determine your livelihood, that’s important,’ Ward said. ‘Just treat it fairly. How are we going to ensure this is the way it’s going to be? [Teachers] have zero trust in [Mayor] Rahm Emanuel and the Board of Education’.”

Significantly, the threat of unemployment, which has been used by neoliberals to discipline and intimidate the workforce, is now contributing to a determination to safeguard jobs against layoffs and to a spirit of solidarity in teachers’ fight for  better classroom conditions.

The course of the strike is very instructive. First of all, it was a grassroots struggle against school closures that elected its own leadership as head of the union. Teachers felt themselves to be and were an integral part of the communities they taught in, so they began by building support from the general public. They tapped into communities already engaged in struggles on evictions and labor abuses, so the strike is part of that same struggle.

Low-paid warehouse workers at Wal-Mart’s largest distribution center in Chicago went on strike at the same time as the teachers to protest illegal retaliation and other labor abuses, just days after workers at the California warehouse that supplies Wal-Mart stores walked off the job to protest illegal retaliation and poor working conditions.

In a discussion about the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, journalist Laura Gottesdiener told Democracy Now: “We’re seeing that [direct action] especially in Chicago and especially because of the teachers’ strike in Chicago. I think that’s one of these hotbeds of direct action. We’re seeing incredible work by the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and other sorts of homeless communities saying, We don’t recognize the bank’s ownership of these abandoned—or these vacant houses. … So they’re actually going in, rehabbing these houses that are destroying their neighborhoods and taking them over.”

In the same discussion, Amy Goodman outlined a case study of how the Occupy movement has spread into communities and taken root. “For the past two years, residents of the heavily immigrant neighborhood of Sunset Park in Brooklyn have refused to pay rent on their apartments in three buildings where the same landlord has refused to ensure safe living conditions. …This summer, members of Occupy Sunset Park got word of the rent strike when they saw banners that residents hung on the outside of their buildings. They contacted the residents, have since tried to assist them as they resolve many of the concerns themselves. Now there’s even talk of the tenants taking ownership of their buildings by forming a tenants’ associations or an affordable housing corporation.”

Dennis Flores, an activist with Occupy Sunset Park, explained how after the start of Occupy Wall Street a small group got together and decided that this movement had to be brought into their community. “Our issues that we’ve been dealing with, whether it’s gentrification, low-income housing, police brutality, stop and frisk, we needed that to be part of this conversation of the Occupy movement.” They met up with tenant association organizer Sara Lopez, who said: “When Occupy Sunset Park knocked on our building, because we knocked on so many elected people to help us, and we didn’t get the help, what we expect from them—when they knocked on our door to answer what we need, they really helped us. … I feel more stronger, because I know I have them to push us, to help us to do a lot of things. So this Occupy, I’m glad they’re still around.”

Those who have written off the movement have confused the political form of the movement with the social basis of its support in opposition to debt, low wages and homelessness. That form, the tactic of occupation, was systematically destroyed by the Obama administration to prevent a catalyst for protest from growing. There is still much sympathy with the movement – whose members are mostly young and educated – among the general population.

But there is also a clear groundswell of resistance to exploitation among low-paid workers in America – the neoliberal project of reducing wages and living standards is now encountering a limit to how far it can squeeze labor-power out of workers before they rebel.

For example, in New York City, for the first time ever, workers at a car wash have voted to join a union. There are nearly 200 car washes in the city employing at least 1,600 workers to clean up thousands of cars and taxis by hand. According to the New York Times, “many of the workers are illegal immigrants hesitant or unwilling to join a public campaign, for fear that it might cost them their jobs or somehow expose them to a greater possibility of deportation.” But they were no longer willing to being paid less than minimum wage with no overtime payments.

Their victory was achieved with the help of advocacy groups Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change. In a similar way, deli workers at the Hot & Crusty bagel café on Manhattan’s Upper East Side won official recognition for a brand-new, independent union. In These Times reported: “This virtually unprecedented victory in a hard-to-organize sector was accomplished in just a few months, on a shoestring budget. Along with leadership training from the innovative non-profit Laundry Workers’ Center, the campaign received crucial support from the Immigrant Worker Justice working group (IWJ) of Occupy Wall Street.”

After a series of actions targeting owner Mark Samson’s private equity firm, he has since sold the store to investors prepared to recognize the union. Jacobin magazine tells more of the role Occupy was able to play: “A campaign to organize immigrant restaurant workers – some of whom are undocumented – might have had a profoundly different outcome without the Occupy movement. … Fed up with long hours, abuse and sub-minimum wages, some of the workers eventually ended up at Zucotti Park after starting a free eight week organizing crash course at the Laundry Workers Center (another grassroots institution about to celebrate its first birthday). Some of the employees then joined the Immigrant Worker Justice Working Group, an OWS committee formed to address the lack of immigrant voices in Occupy. Through that milieu, the workers complemented their grassroots campaign by plugging in to New York’s mushrooming activist network.”

The arrests of protesters and photojournalists on Occupy Wall Street’s first anniversary on September 17 signify only the state’s sensitivity to the symbolic power of its actions targeting the banks. Despite the dismantling of the highly-visible occupations, the movement has become a catalyst for alliances between labor, political and community organizations around concrete, local issues.

For workers like Mahoma López , a Hot & Crusty deli worker, Occupy Wall Street has become a social network that has helped transform his political consciousness. “We’re not the same people we used to be,” he says of himself and his co-workers. “Our eyes aren’t closed anymore.”

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.

The Prize for Building It is Slashing Down the Safety Net: Like Saturn, Republicans Will Devour Their Own Base

The Republican National Convention this week had the challenge of marketing a political party whose election would benefit only the super-rich and would devastate the living standards and health of all other Americans. Romney’s and Ryan’s acceptance speeches, scripted by Karl Rove and rapturously welcomed by the delegates, made grandiose promises they had no intention of keeping, while carefully omitting any substantive details of their policies.

Ryan’s speech in particular was so full of lies that even Fox News had to point them out. As Juan Cole put it: “He has to get people on his side who would be hurt by his policies. And that requires that he simply lie to them.” Both Ryan and Romney sought to persuade them to have faith in a superior Republican “leadership” which could reverse the recession, restore prosperity and protect the social safety net. Ryan promised to recreate “the America that was given to us, with opportunity for the young and security for the old.” Romney promised to “restore that America.” This nostalgic vision of the “Mad Men” era was calculated to appeal to the old, the white, and the disgruntled: “If you’re feeling left out or passed by, you have not failed; your leaders have failed you,” said Ryan.

Romney tried to humanize his image with stories about the importance he gives to family and family values – at a moment when his election would kill Medicare and remove government support for education and retirement. Ryan portrayed himself as a small-town, middle-class individual, raised from poverty through his own hard work, creating a picture designed to identify with the very people targeted by Republicans. “Trust us, because we are just like you” was his message: “My Dad, a small-town lawyer… Mom, who rode the bus to Madison …” and had to rely on Medicare after the death of his father. But this, like the rest of his speech, was a lie.

The LA Times observed: “Ryan, 42, was born into one of the most prominent families in Janesville, Wis., the son of a successful attorney and the grandson of the top federal prosecutor for the western region of the state. … Ryan’s rise to political power and financial stability was boosted by family connections and wealth. The larger Ryan family has repeatedly helped the candidate along in his career, giving him a job when he needed one and piling up tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. Court records indicate Ryan’s father left a probate estate of $428,000 …. The will leaves the bulk of the estate to Ryan’s mother, who now lives in an oceanfront condo in Florida.”

Ruth Conniff, a journalist with the Progressive magazine, noted the reaction of the delegates. “They loved him. They love his confidence, his poise and, most of all, his ability to make this incredibly Orwellian argument, to emote, to connect with working-class people like his constituents in his incredibly hard-hit industrial district, and then to take that and sell policies that are absolutely devastating to these same people. … he is the smiling face of this incredibly brutal Darwinian set of policies that the Republicans are presenting to us. And the fact that … he can flip through graphs saying that cutting taxes on the rich is going to bring back jobs and make America great again, and just his delivery, his relaxed demeanor and his humor, it’s what people love about him. And it’s really dangerous.”

The Republicans are lying through their teeth out of desperation. Their demographic base is shrinking; it’s 98% white, while other ethnic groups are rapidly becoming a majority. They want to gain power at all costs to transfer the remainder of society’s wealth to their plutocratic backers, and legislate to delay the inevitable reckoning with the expropriated. Harold Meyerson wrote a pungent article in the Washington Post charging the Romney campaign with attempting to rouse the demographically declining population of white voters – using attack ads falsely claiming Obama to be gutting welfare reform – with resentment of African Americans and Latinos. Ryan’s budget “would bring the nation down to the developmental level of the anti-tax, anti-public-investment Southern states of yore,” he said.

“To the extent that Republicans can depict government as the servant of this rising non-white America (precisely the purpose of Romney’s ads), the South’s antipathy toward government can find a receptive audience in other regions,” Meyerson continues. “This transformation of the GOP has also been spurred by the Southernization of the economy. The U.S. economy’s dominant sector is no longer the unionized manufacturing of the Northeast and Midwest, whose leaders included such Republican moderates as George Romney, and whose white working-class employees were persuaded by their unions to back Democratic candidates. Instead, the economy is dominated by a mix of the low-wage, nonunion retail and service sectors, and by high finance, which has shown itself fiercely opposed to regulation and taxation, happy to reap and shield its profits abroad at the expense of U.S. workers, and willing to invest plenty in a party that does its bidding.”

Resentment of government has other roots. Cap Times writer Paul Fanlund summarizes the work of political scientist Katherine Walsh, who found support in rural Wisconsin for cuts in government because residents believed it failed to represent their interests. “[T]hey would argue that it instead was operating to benefit other people: sometimes the wealthy, but also people who were undeserving largely because they did not work hard enough for the government benefits they enjoyed.” “Deservingness” was often defined by whether program recipients were perceived to be hard-working people like themselves, she writes, adding: “If one wishes to mobilize opposition to a government program, one powerful way of doing so is to suggest that the recipients of that program are predominantly people of color.”

She concludes: “Some of the conversations I observed strongly suggest that racial attitudes were playing a part in opposition to government programs.” Race came up just as often in urban and suburban conversations, she emphasizes. “It’s so easy for us urbanites to write off their attitudes as simply racism. That is only part of it. The rural consciousness I describe is about a broader ‘us versus them’ perspective that is effective for mobilizing opposition to government programs.”

Republican rhetoric about self-help and individual effort resonates with this ideology of the undeserving poor. However, many Republican voters are unaware of the extent of government support for their communities. Political scientist Dean Lacy found that the more a county receives in federal government payments, the more likely it is to vote Republican. Salon editor Joan Walsh comments: “As Lacy elaborated to a WNYC reporter: ‘The counties that are getting more in crop subsidies, housing assistance, and Medicaid payments are a lot more Republican. So it really is about that catch-all category that you might call welfare.’ Yet because their local congressmen and women tend to defend that type of ‘welfare,’ Lacy says, ‘they have the luxury of voting on social issues knowing that these federal spending programs will be kept in place’. Except those programs won’t be kept in place by the new GOP, which is committed to trashing even the economic supports it used to (however hypocritically) defend.”

Whoever wins the election, there will be a major struggle over government social programs which are immensely popular with all sections of society. Whatever the Republicans’ intentions, this is their last chance to win an election with an appeal to angry white men. The party will not survive in its present form – times they are a’changin’. Communities that are plunged into this fight will be able to make alliances across the ethnic and class lines that the Republicans historically have used to divide them, asserting the values of solidarity in a common cause.

Already, grassroots groups have formed to promote community action on basic needs, like housing and food. They will grow rapidly as social conditions worsen. There’s no need to run for the Canadian border: the future Americans can look forward to is one of struggle, but there is a world to win.

Their Line on the Pavement: The Republicans Preview their Wild West Vision of America in Tampa, but the Little People Still Complain

State troopers and protesters face off in Tampa, Florida, on Monday. Photo: yfrog

When the Republican party convenes in Florida on Tuesday, it will be walled off from Tampa citizens and the concerns of the general public by phalanxes of state troopers. But inside the convention center itself, the Republicans’ agenda is so extreme it is stratospherically removed from the needs of ordinary Americans. Tea party supporters, backed by funds from maverick billionaires, have commandeered the delegates and are making it difficult for the Republican establishment to control their message – a throwback, extremist platform designed to slash and burn the middle class standard of living and devastate the poor by ending Medicare while giving a free pass on taxes to the new plutocratic super-rich.

Dana Milbank reports that the conference will consider “a study of whether to return to the gold standard, a call for auditing the Federal Reserve, positions denying statehood to the District [of Columbia] but seeking to introduce more guns onto its streets, a provision denying women a role in combat, and others calling for a constitutional amendment that makes tax increases a thing of the past and for a spiffy new border fence — with two layers!”

The furor over the comments by Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri – who claimed that the female body had ways to shut down pregnancy in cases of “legitimate” rape – conceals the fact that his views are identical to the party’s program. Frank Rich points out: “The truth is that Akin is typical of today’s GOP, not some outlier; only a handful of the House’s 241 Republican members differ at all from his hard-line stand on abortion. … Akin’s sin in the eyes of GOP grandees has nothing to do with his standard-issue hard-right views — it’s that he gave away the game by so candidly and vividly exposing how extreme those views are in an election year.” Akin was able to garner enough support from the Republican base to successfully defy the party leadership and stay in the Senate race.

While the Republican coalition is united in opposition to Obama, insiders believe the party will split apart after the election when it faces real issues. Juan Cole published a piece by Paul Guzzo detailing the fears of the local party in Tampa, where the convention is taking place. One Republican insider explained that Tea Party supporters realized they had to support other issues than just that of government spending, but “rather than supporting ‘real issues,’ they latched on to crazed theories such as the Agenda 21 conspiracy (the Teabagger belief that the U.N. is trying to deprive people of property rights by forcing them to live in cities). The Pinellas County, Florida Tea Party Movement’s succeeded in getting fluoride removed from its drinking water on the belief that fluoride is ‘toxic’ and that scientists cannot be trusted because they work for ‘Big Brother’.”

Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate reflects the fact that even after winning the party primaries, he still hasn’t been able to gain the support of his party’s base, many of whom voted for anyone but him. Romney needs to divert attention away from his own dubious wealth to issues of personality and small-town values. Political scientist Tom Ferguson explains that Ryan embodies the appearance of radical change to people who are desperate. “You now have an enormous unemployment crisis. People want, effectively, a kind of round square. They are really scared about the budget. They think that is the way, cutting that might get them back to a reasonably full employment. They don’t know what to think. The Obama administration does not help them on that by walking around and talking about how all it wants to do is cut the budget, and over the long run.”

Yet it is not a foregone conclusion that Romney will lose his presidential bid. At present the U.S. is divided down the middle politically. Economically, voters’ wealth has plummeted since 2009. The New York Times reports: “The typical household income for people age 55 to 64 years old is almost 10 percent less in today’s dollars than it was when the recovery officially began three years ago, according to a new report … Across the country, in almost every demographic, Americans earn less today than they did in June 2009, when the recovery technically started.”

Americans’ ideological presuppositions color who they blame for this – an older, whiter, and more conservative layer wants to return to the kind of prosperity they knew in the 60s. They have been convinced that this can be achieved by reducing the government deficit, cutting entitlements, expelling immigrants, and asserting patriarchal values by limiting or altogether eliminating the choices women have about their reproductive health and halting gay marriage.

Writing in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait comments: “Piles of recent studies have found that voters often conflate ‘social’ and ‘economic’ issues. What social scientists delicately call ‘ethnocentrism’ and ‘racial resentment’ and ‘ingroup solidarity’ are defining attributes of conservative voting behavior, and help organize a familiar if not necessarily rational coalition of ideological interests. … Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociologist, conducted a detailed study of tea-party activists and discovered that they saw themselves beset by parasitic Democrats. ‘Along with illegal immigrants,’ she wrote, ‘low-income Americans and young people loom large as illegitimate consumers of public benefits and services’.”

Demographic changes mean that Republicans cannot guarantee an election win by appealing to the resentment of angry and alienated white men. The electorate is becoming younger, more educated, and less white. Where Republicans control the electoral process, they have set up legal hurdles targeted to suppress likely Democratic voter turnout. However, the reason the race is still close is because Obama has disillusioned the social movement that elected him by accepting Republican budget-cutting rhetoric and refusing to prosecute bankers. “Too big to fail” banks are continuing to act lawlessly in eviction actions and to destabilize the economy. We may be going from Big Brother to Big Daddy, but rest assured: Big Daddy is much worse.

Outside the RNC, class solidarity has replaced the narrative of racial division that has served the Republican party for so long. If there is hope for the renewal of American society and its beleaguered and corrupted political system (thanks to Citizens United), it is in the spread of this spirit and new understanding of solidarity throughout the country.

Resistance to the growth of impoverishment in America is taking the form of loosely-organized, decentralized groups who have a base in community activism and come together in various protests. In Florida, Nathan Pim explained how his group “Food Not Bombs,” which shares food with the homeless, is working with the Occupy movement to support protests at the Republican conference. He told Naked Capitalism: “We’re doing all of our events out of Occupy Tampa’s park, which is called Voice of Freedom Park. We’re planning on trying to get, if people want shelter or food or water or something – we’re going to be helping to bring some food to protests, but we’re also letting people know if they need other services and we’re not doing a sharing at that time, that we’re going to be trying to provide it back at Occupy Tampa’s location.”

The neighborhood around Occupy Tampa’s park is pretty supportive, he said.  “You see like the same people every single day. They come by and talk. There’s people that come byto show support. … There’s always people just coming through and like talking to us. Sometimes I think there’s been people starting rumors about it being like not so great, but – and it is weird, you know, honestly, obviously, mostly younger white Occupiers in like an almost totally black neighborhood, but I think it’s actually been, in the month I’ve been here I’ve had pretty much nothing but good experiences with all the people of West Tampa.”

Although they are unlikely to get near any of the Republican delegates, the Coalition to March on the RNC intends to rally anyway, defying the weather and demanding good jobs, healthcare, affordable education, equality, and peace. Nonviolent direct action marches will take place every day at 10 am as an alternative to the official “event zone” declared by the city and police. Occupiers have been able to set up a “Romneyville” encampment legally on the edge of downtown for protesters to stay. These witnesses of conscience are determined to make public the realities of American private lives in the bank-created recession so that we are reminded that in this election our fight for the common good is at stake.

Anaheim Protests: Build a Powerful Alliance Against the One Percent

Police patrol the streets of Anaheim in camouflage uniforms and carrying weaponry

Now that protests over the shooting of two young Americans in Anaheim have died down, the community is taking stock of the situation. An open meeting of the Anaheim City Council on Thursday (August 2) did not resolve any tensions, but it gave about 75 local residents the opportunity to make statements before the council went into closed session.

The LA Times reported that speakers made “numerous calls for calm discourse to move past the violence and address long-simmering complaints in the racially segregated city.” Corie Cline spoke to the council about how her brother was killed by Anaheim police in 2007, and how she was taunted by the officer who shot him at a recent protest. Speakers also called for the hiring of a Latino police chief who would be more responsive to the long-standing complaints of the community about police harassment.

A public meeting scheduled for next Wednesday at the local high school is expected to draw up to a thousand people, but some pro-business elements on the council are pressing to cancel it on the grounds that it will attract outside protesters and get more adverse publicity for the city.

Local community leaders consider that changing council elections from an “at-large” system, where the whole city votes on all candidates, to district representation will make the council and the police more responsive to the needs of the Latino community. This is a view shared by the mayor, Tom Tait, who visited the scene of the fatal shooting on Tuesday.

Four out of five councilors live in affluent Anaheim Hills on the east side of the city. Martin Lopez, an organizer with Unite Here Local 11, which represents hotel, restaurant and airport workers throughout Southern California, told California Public Radio: “If these guys are not representing the Latino community, they’re not going to push the police to represent the Latino community. So when these guys go to our communities, they see them as the enemy, and that’s someone that they are there to protect.”

But there is a structural basis for the police crackdowns: Corporate Disney wants low-waged workers to cut the grass and change the bedsheets in its resorts, but it also requires “security” to stop visitors being scared away by riots. And the Anaheim Hills residents want the problems of poverty and violence kept well away from them.

Disney, the largest local taxpayer and employer, has wielded its considerable political strength to prevent affordable housing being built close to tourist areas. According to the New York Times, “In 2007, when a developer proposed a high-rise building with affordable housing, Disney spent more than $2 million to back a group called Save Our Anaheim Resort Area, which opposed the plan and successfully persuaded the city to abandon the idea. Since then, the group changed the verb in its name from ‘save’ to ‘support’ and has created a political action committee that funneled thousands of dollars to candidates, largely money collected from Disney and businesses near the resort, while Disney has continued to donate millions directly to candidates.”

Long-time councilor Harry Sidhu, a founder of the pro-Disney group, inadvertently expressed the basis of the opposition of white suburbanites to redistricting: “If they don’t elect their own people, you can’t say we are at fault,” he said. Sidhu’s othering of the Latino community is one of the major reasons local activists focus on achieving council representation.

The council recently voted to make major tax concessions to a developer building luxury hotels near to Disneyland. Instead of collecting a 15 percent tourist tax for every hotel stay, the city will allow the developers to keep the money for the next 15 years, a deal estimated to be worth $158 million.

Eric Altman, a spokesman for a coalition of community organizations, told the New York Times: “Throughout the city people are facing real problems with working poverty and struggling to get the resources and attention that others parts of town get routinely. There is the basic question of why is it in a city with those kind of resources can we have such extreme poverty?” Mr. Altman said the most recent tax deal is “essentially the city printing money” for investors in the resort area.

Gabriel San Roman commented in the OC Weekly: “… if district elections come to Anaheim and literally change the political landscape of the city, there will be challenges still. A platform of economic democracy and racial justice are key components in moving forward from its descent into becoming the Tragic Kingdom. After all, if hotels in the resort area are no longer massively subsidized in controversial so-called ‘public-private partnerships’ and the general fund is consolidated against such giveaways, will the Anaheim Police Department still consume a substantial proportion of it? That depends on a leadership class emerging with a new kind of politics.”

Occupy supporters coming from out of town had an awkward reception from the local community leadership. When occupiers arrived to show support for a prayer vigil for victim of police shooting Manuel Diaz on Sunday evening, they were stopped by Anna Street residents acting as stewards. According to the OC Weekly, “Wanting to keep the event peaceful, they asked Occupiers to put their signs down before joining the vigil. Most were eager to oblige. But a young girl in a Hello Kitty backpack was none-to-pleased. ‘Thank you for coming from different parts of the world and almost getting shot,’ she fumed sarcastically.”

The local leadership were not enamoured with this patronizing attitude nor with the Occupy supporters’ tendency to jeer provocatively at the police.

Earlier in the day, the Somos Anaheim coalition had organized a silent march to protest not only the officer-involved shootings but also the violent riots of the previous week. Occupy supporters held a separate march which aimed to reach Disneyland but was headed off by police horses and a militarized SWAT team, weapons drawn.

The OC Weekly gives this eyewitness report: “Unlike at previous protests, there were no projectiles thrown at the cops. Instead, many demonstrators looked visibly scared. ‘Are they going to shoot us?’ one person asked. Police issued no orders to disperse, instead repeating their demand that protesters stick to the sidewalk. But more than 100 of them sprinted down a side street; they were followed by officers, who quickly surrounded them.

“Atef Nadal, an Anaheim resident who ran with the group, said that Latino residents started to come out of their homes, offering water and support, even hosing down some of the sweat-drenched protesters. ‘They were throwing their fists in the air and showing they were sympathetic with what we were protesting against, which is police brutality and harassment in Anaheim neighborhoods,’ he said.

“As police moved in on the demonstrators, prepared to make arrests, residents screamed at the police, ‘Leave them alone!’ and, ‘Go home!’ Within moments, officers put away their batons, apparently acting in response to an order from superiors to back up and mount up.”

Building these kinds of alliances across ethnic divides is not easy, but if successful can be extremely powerful.  For example, Gabriel Thompson gives an account in Alternet about a recent union organizing drive at an Alabama poultry factory employing many immigrants. A previous attempt had failed because of the union’s failure to build bridges between Spanish and English-speaking workers.

Thompson writes: “… my neighbor was a Guatemalan named Dagoberto who had organized, in one day, a 500-person march through town in support of immigrant rights. This was the kind of leader—unafraid and widely respected—that an organizer would kill for. But Dagoberto had voted against the union in 2006. ‘To be honest, I didn’t really know what a union was,’ he told me. ‘I never even saw anyone from the union.’ I would speak with dozens of immigrants who expressed similar sentiments. …

“This time, [Randy] Handley [a union organizer] and his organizing team, which included Jose Aguilar, an immigrant from Honduras, were quick to build bridges within the diverse workforce. Organizers took care to hold bilingual meetings and translate all documents, and set up shop at intersections around the plant. … ‘This time, we made sure that the Latinos understood what a union is all about,’ says Aguilar. ‘I told them, the union is you. You’ll fight and negotiate for a contract that will protect you’.”

As the Latino community in Anaheim becomes more experienced in political struggle, the inclusive and pluralist message of the Occupy movement will resonate with it. Likewise, Occupy supporters must learn the history of struggles in Anaheim and join with the community in a movement of alliances. This will take a big step towards creating a new kind of politics that unites Americans against the one percent.

Chicago Arrests: Government Entrapment Threatens Right to Dissent

A dangerous legal development which threatens the right of protest has materialized in the course of demonstrations against the Chicago NATO summit over the weekend. Five protesters allegedly connected with the black bloc were arrested and charged with “conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing material support for terrorism and possession of an explosive or incendiary device.” The arrested protesters’ lawyers claim entrapment by undercover police.

According to the Chicago Tribune, police informants recorded three of the defendants in conversations about making Molotov cocktails and using them to attack police stations, mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house, and Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago. They were arrested on Friday after they allegedly bought gasoline and started making the devices. Two other men were arrested on similar charges on Sunday, on information supplied by the same undercover police.

The Guardian report noted: “The men’s defence attorney, Michael Deutsch, has said the three were victims of a ‘a Chicago police set-up, entrapment to the highest degree.’ … Deutsch said the undercover police officers – reportedly nicknamed ‘Nadia,’ ‘Mo’ and ‘Gloves’ – had ‘egged on’ the protesters.” He told Democracy Now that “from our information, these so-called incendiary devices and the plans to attack police stations, attack the mayor’s office, is all coming from the mind of the police informants and are not coming from our clients, who are nonviolent protesters. They are not anarchists. They don’t belong to a Black Bloc organization. They’re involved with nonviolent protest.”

AJC News commented: “Longtime observers of police tactics said the operation seemed similar to those conducted by authorities in other cities before similarly high-profile events. For instance, prior to the Republican National Convention in 2008 in St. Paul, Minn., prosecutors charged eight activists who were organizing mass protests with terrorism-related crimes after investigators said they recovered equipment for Molotov cocktails, slingshots with marbles and other items. … Molotov cocktails are dangerous weapons, but it ‘kind of stretches the bounds to define that as terrorism,’ said Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.”

The boundaries of definition are being stretched as part of a broader strategy to make an ideological connection between Occupy protests and terrorism. What is new is the systematic use of police entrapment, similar to the methods used to obtain convictions of alleged sympathizers of al-Quaeda. Even without a conviction, these charges now carry the possibility of indefinite detention and even assassination by presidential order.

Occupy Wall Street pointed out on their website: “This is now the second time authorities have timed high-profile arrests of alleged ‘domestic terrorists’ to coincide with major days of action for the Occupy movement – the other was earlier this month when five Occupiers in Cleveland were arrested on charges of conspiring to blow up a bridge on May Day. In both cases, authorities surveilled and infiltrated activist circles to instigate and supply support for alleged conspiracies to commit domestic terrorism.”

An analysis of the Cleveland charges by RT reveals that “although the suspects are believed to have expressed anti-government sentiments and disdain for major financial corporations, the impetus in the would-be bombing was the urging of undercover agents that had infiltrated a group of friends and encouraged them to consider acts of terrorism.” The FBI despatched an informant to infiltrate an Occupy protest in Cleveland in October, who then forged a relationship with a number of men who “acted differently” from the others, made them financially and emotionally dependent on him, and browbeat them into planning criminal acts.

Richard Schulte, a veteran activist, told Jake Olzen that two of the men had been part of the full-time occupation over the winter in Cleveland’s Public Square. “After having grown frustrated with what they perceived as the Occupiers’ timidity — Schulte called it ‘passive gradualism’ — the Five were encouraged by [the informant] Azir to break off from Occupy Cleveland and form their own, much smaller group, ‘The People’s Liberation Army.’ … Azir would give them a case of beer in the morning, according to Schulte, have them work outside on houses all day, and then give them a case of beer at night. He gave them marijuana and would wear them down by keeping them up late into the night with drinking and conversation — all the while urging them to break away from other groups, keep their arrangement secret and not to trust other activists. Looking back, Schulte said Azir and the FBI used ‘security culture against activists’ and ‘developed patterns of trust to seem legit.’ The Cleveland Five, he explains, ‘were coached by the federal government’.”

There is no way these operations could have been organized without the complicity of the Obama administration. The highly-disciplined character of police behavior during the demonstrations, refusing to respond to open provocations – which frustrated some protesters – was due to extensive training from the Department of Homeland Security. Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy told Chicago Tonight: “Only about a third of the department is going to be used for this event. Those officers are being trained to levels that have been called exceeding the national standards by the people who do this across the country.”

Demonstrators were allowed to roam the streets, but McCarthy said ”police would be ready with quick but targeted arrests of any demonstrators who turn violent Sunday. ‘If anything else happens, the plan is to go in and get the people who create the violent acts, take them out of the crowd and arrest them,’ warned McCarthy, at the scene of protests after dark. ‘We’re not going to charge the crowd wholesale – that’s the bottom line’.”

These “snatch squad” counter-insurgency techniques were employed at the end of Sunday’s mass demonstration: “At the end of the march, police appeared to be using precisely the tactics Superintendent Garry McCarthy said they would — extracting individuals from the crowd and quickly getting them away from the rest of the demonstrators. Several times they could be seen pulling protesters into a line of officers, which parted briefly before quickly closing ranks again,” reported SeattlePi.

Although some praised the restraint of the police during the weekend, the iron fist within was revealed when demonstrators overstepped, even by a little, the bounds imposed by the authorities. According to In These Times writer Rebecca Burns, “Though [Sunday’s] march proceeded from Grant Park without incident, police began to move in as soon as the permit expired at 5 P.M. This followed similar police behavior at Friday’s National Nurses United-organized rally, where police gave a dispersal order immediately following the permitted rally’s end. … as the veterans and other demonstrators began exiting, one group of protesters advanced towards the line of police … Within ten minutes, at least two demonstrators emerged from the cluster bleeding from the head as a result of blows from police batons.”

Independent journalists and live streamers were targeted by police in an attempt to intimidate and suppress press coverage. According to the Guardian: “Late Saturday night Tim Pool, Luke Rudkowski, Geoff Shively and two friends were driving to an apartment where they had been staying in Chicago. The group had spent the day live streaming and documenting anti-Nato protests. As they approached a stop sign, roughly a dozen police vehicles – marked and unmarked – reportedly surrounded their car with lights flashing. … Police bent Shively over the vehicle and handcuffed the remaining four. Officers rifled through the vehicle and reportedly smashed batteries and external hard drives belonging to the journalists. Rudkowksi’s phone was taken from him and much of his footage from the incident was deleted. …

“Pool and Rudkowski are among the most well-known live stream journalists covering the Occupy movement. Pool’s work has been profiled in Time magazine and number of other publications. Shivley recently returned from a live streaming trip to Syria. Rudkowski – who was granted NATO press credentials – has a history of confronting political figures and executives with his camera. A day before his detention, Rudkowski questioned Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy and asked if the department intended to use agent provocateurs in responding to the NATO demonstrations. Hours before the live streamers were detained, Mike Paczesny, who works with Rudkowski’s media outlet, We Are Change, claims he was held for over seven hours at a Chicago police precinct in connection with a separate incident and was questioned about Rudkowski.”

There seems little doubt that the government is mounting a two-pronged attack on the right to dissent. Protests are being contained using politically-sophisticated crowd control techniques, avoiding mass arrests which have been shown to increase support for the protesters, and public opinion is being manipulated by connecting demonstrations with the threat of violence and domestic terrorism. To maintain this narrative, independent press coverage of confrontations is being suppressed. More ominously, this strategy lays the legal foundation for detention without trial.

NOTE: This post was updated to make it clear that only the prosecution was claiming any connection of the arrested protesters with the black bloc.