Category Archives: Democracy

The real reason Rock the Vote is falling apart

This is from the May issue of Rock & Rap Confidential. Feel free to forward or re-post.

PULLING THE LEVER OR PULLING OUR LEG?… Rock the Vote is in shambles. According to a February 7 LA Times article by Charles Duhigg, the organization is $700,000 in debt and has cut its staff from twenty people in 2004 to two today. Rock the Vote hasn’t had a chief operating officer since the last Presidential election.

Duhigg attributes the crisis to overspending in non-election years and to the opportunism of the music industry executives who dominate the group’s board and use Rock the Vote primarily to promote their own artists.

Rock the Vote has a more fundamental problem: It has hitched its star to politicians who are completely hostile to the needs and desires of the American people. For example, check out the political hacks it has chosen to bestow its Rock the Nation Award upon.

There’s Bill Clinton, who presided over the 1996 Democratic Party convention which removed universal health care from the party platform even though more than 70 per cent of Americans are in favor of it.

There’s Hilary B. Rosen, who was head of the RIAA at the time she was honored. Rosen rocked the nation by launching the war against file-sharing. Sharing music on-line is, to say the least, wildly popular.

There’s Hillary Clinton, who, despite the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, has called for sending 80,000 more of our sons and daughters to the slaughter.

In June 2005, the Rock the Nation Award went to John McCain, one month after the Arizona Senator was part of the 100-0 Senate vote to approve Bush’s war funding bill. In his acceptance speech, McCain introduced himself as “Funk Master McCain.” Since then, Funk Master McCain has kept busy campaigning for California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose November ballot initiatives to cripple unions and give himself unsupervised power to gut social programs were soundly defeated by California voters.

In 2004, Rock the Vote, under the leadership of Jehmu Greene (who came to the organization directly from serving as Southern Political Director of the Democratic National Committee), registered 1.4 million voters in an effort to elect John Kerry. On March 2 of this year Kerry was one of 89 Senators who voted to make the Patriot Act permanent, even though more than 250 U.S. cities have passed resolutions calling for it to be abolished.

One of Rock the Vote’s few high points came in the early 1990s when the organization aired over 175 public service announcements in which artists gave their frank views on democracy. Our favorite was Ice-T’s. “I’m as anti ‘the system’ as you could possibly be,” he said. “We’ve got two options–the vote or hostile takeover. I’m down with either one.”

In other words, voter registration as a tactic can be useful when it’s part of an effort to transform the system. When voter registration is used as a strategy, what you get is Rock the Vote. It won’t be missed.

www.rockrap.com

Helen Thomas: “Why did we go to war?”

George Bush finally let Helen Thomas ask him a question after four years of ducking her. She asked him a simple question: “Why did we go to war?” Three years after the start of the war, he still has no answer that makes sense.

Here’s the video from the Bush’s March 21 press conference

American Sociological Association names “essential protest songs”

In the latest issue of the ASA sponsored journal Contexts, the editors compile a list of “essential protest songs.”

There are 14 songs on the list including standards as “We Shall Overcome,” Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” and the 1930s union anthem “Which Side Are You On?”

You can listen to a selection of essential protest song clips here

Here’s the full list of songs with commentary by the editors of Contexts:

“Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Lyrics by James Weldon Johnson; music by J. Rosamand Johnson. Key lyric: “We have come over a way that with tears has been watered / We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.” Known as the “Black National Anthem”—the antidote
to “America, the Beautiful.”

“Which Side Are You On?”
By Florence Reece. “Don’t scab for the bosses, don’t listen to their lies / Us poor folks haven’t
got a chance unless we organize.” Written during the labor struggles in Harlan County, Kentucky, in the 1930s, it was later adopted by the civil rights movement.

“Strange Fruit.”
Performed by Billie Holiday. By Abel Meeropol (who later adopted the children of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg). “Pastoral scene of the gallant south / The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth.” A chilling protest against lynching. Maybe the greatest protest song of all time.

“Pastures of Plenty.”
By Woody Guthrie. “Every state in this union us migrants has been /‘Long the edge of your cities you’ll
see us, and then / We’ve come with the dust and we’re gone in the wind.” Guthrie’s ode to America’s migrant workers.

“The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
By Bob Dylan. “There’s a battle outside and it’s raging / It’ll soon shake your windows
and rattle your walls.” Tough call between this and Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Masters of War,” “With God on Our Side,” etc., etc.

“We Shall Overcome.”
Adapted from a gospel song, the anthem of the civil rights movement. “Deep in my heart, I do
believe / We shall overcome some day.” Infinitely adaptable.

“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round.”
Also adapted from a Negro spiritual. “I’m gonna keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’ / Fightin’ for my equal rights.” Another powerful civil rights anthem.

“I Ain’t Marching Anymore.”
By Phil Ochs. “It’s always the old to lead us to the war / It’s always the young to fall / Now
look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun / Tell me is it worth it all?” An antiwar classic, complete with a revisionist history of American militarism.

“For What It’s Worth.”
Performed by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. By Stephen Stills. “There’s something happening here /
What it is ain’t exactly clear / There’s a man with a gun over there / Telling me I’ve got to beware.” Eerily foreboding.

“Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).”
By James Brown. “Now we demand a chance to do things for ourself / We’re tired of beatin’ our head against the wall and workin’ for someone else.” A Black Power anthem by the Godfather of
Soul.

“Respect.”
Performed by Aretha Franklin. By Otis Redding. “I ain’t gonna do you wrong while you’re gone / Ain’t gonna do you wrong ‘cause I don’t wanna / All I’m askin’ is for a little respect when you come home.” The personal is political.

“Redemption Song.”
By Bob Marley. “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our
minds.” Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” is also a contender.

“Imagine.”
By John Lennon. “Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger / A brotherhood of man.” Lennon as utopian socialist.

“Fight the Power.”
By Public Enemy. “Got to give us what we want / Gotta give us what we need / Our freedom of
speech is freedom or death / We got to fight the powers that be.” An exuberant hip-hop call to arms.

UNFORGIVABLE LIAR… If Woody Guthrie lived today he might write, “Some men rob you with a six gun, others with a microphone.”

from the March issue of Rock & Rap Confidential….

UNFORGIVABLE LIAR… If Woody Guthrie lived today he might write, “Some men rob you with a six gun, others with a microphone.”

In January, Bono announced his latest campaign to save the poor through capitalism–or rather, the other way around. This is Red, a marketing scam which finds the increasingly deranged U2 frontman in business with Nike, Converse, The Gap, Giorgio Armani and American Express. Red products include Converse sneakers made from “African mudcloth,” “vintage” Gap t-shirts, Armani wraparound sunglasses, and a red American Express card. The companies will donate “a portion” of their profits to fighting AIDS in Africa, the continent for whose poor Bono claims to be the spokesman. This portion is for the most part unspecified (American Express promises 1% of spending). Nor is it specified whether Bono takes a cut–presumably he would be crowing if he weren’t, as he did when U2 pimped iPods for free.

“It’s just a couple of degrees from becoming a Saturday Night Live skit,” says Noel Beasley of the UNITE/HERE textile workers union. “”It’s like if you took Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changing,’ used it to pitch Rolex watches and tried to convince people that if they bought enough luxury goods they could make a revolution. It’s ludicrous on its face.”

Financial Times termed Red “the latest in a series of marketing experiments by companies worried that television advertising is losing its punch. Many of these efforts are based on the idea of using good works or services as a way to get consumer attention.” The term for this, in respectable marketing circles, is “corporate social opportunity.”

As Beasley said on Kick Out the Jams, Dave Marsh’s Sirius radio show, “This is obviously the economic wet dream of every retailer and credit card loan shark in the world, if you can pitch consumerism and credit card debt as the salvation of the planet, while garment workers and shoe workers are starving to death and literally burning to death in horrific conditions in places like Burma and Thailand.” As a member of the executive committee of the International Textile, Leather and Garment Workers Foundation, Beasley regularly monitors sweatshop and slave labor conditions around the globe, up close and in person.

Bono announced his scheme at Davos, Switzerland, where he attended the World
Economic Forum, a meeting of leaders of the world’s richest countries. According to Financial Times, he got the Red idea from Robert Rubin, one of the architects of Clintonomics.

Bono explicitly believes that only such powerful insiders can effect meaningful change. Capitalism controls everything, and therefore, only capitalist solutions can be “effective.”

In Caracas, Venezuela, the World Social Forum took place at the same time as the Davos conference. The WSF is a meeting of leaders and activists from around the globe, from poor nations as well as rich ones. It is dedicated to the proposition that social justice occurs only when people govern themselves. The World Social Forum is the sound of some of the world’s have-nots speaking for themselves, which Bono sees as counter-productive. But today, five South American nations are run by governments that believe otherwise, while the countries where schemes like Red operate, particularly Britain and the U.S., allow their populations to grow poorer and more powerless by the day.

Bono claims to be a disciple of Martin Luther King. Dr. King spoke of the “triple evils”–racism, war and poverty–as inextricably connected. He eventually concluded that opposing one of them without opposing all of them didn’t make any sense. So Dr. King risked his relationship with the LBJ administration by first attacking the war in Vietnam, then starting the Poor Peoples Campaign, which raised exactly the same issues as the World Social Forum.

Bono and his ilk want to convince good-hearted folks that there is no need for the lowly to move. As long as Bono cuddles with the mighty, poverty and AIDS in Africa are being powerfully addressed. So Bono, “spokesman for the poor,” meets with Bush and never mentions Iraq or New Orleans.

For the past several years, Bono has argued that African nations need to be relieved of their multibillion dollar debt to rich countries. Much of that debt has been erased. This has produced no tangible reduction in poverty. Bono has issued pronouncements about increased U.S. aid to Africa after every one of his meetings with George Bush and his senior officials. That increase never comes and, as detailed by an article last summer in the U2 fanzine Rolling Stone, the way what little aid there is gets dispensed makes conditions worse.

The 2007 World Social Forum will be held, fittingly enough, in Africa. An offshoot, the U.S. Social Forum, will be held next year in Atlanta, a symbolic return to the South which gave birth to Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. Both of these massive gatherings (20,000 people are expected in Atlanta, 300,000 in Africa) will be suffused with culture, as artists from around the world speak directly with poor people, not about them from afar. The sound of a certain Irish pop star, off shilling for sweatshop syndicates and their middlemen, will be heard only faintly, if at all.

To subscribe to Rock & Rap Confidential, send $15 for one year (12 issues) to RRC, Box 341305, Los Angeles CA 90034.

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Vancouver part of global anti-war rally

On the third anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, over 5,000 people marched through Vancouver today in solidarity with thousands around the globe in massive protests against the US imperialism.

Vancouver protestors began their march at the south side of the Burrard Street Bridge then down Robson and Georgia Streets before arriving at the Vancouver Art Gallery downtown. The crowd at the Art Gallery has been made up of families, students, and seniors, and advocacy groups including the members of StopWar.ca, Mobilization Against War and Occupation, Communist Party of Canada, B.C. Teachers Federation, Vancouver Raging Grannies, The Rouge Forum, and many more.

A number of speakers took to the podium including an American war deserter Klye Snyder, who spoke of his disillusionment about the US military involvement in Iraq and a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams who has just returned from the region.

Check out Howard Zinn’s latest ZNet Commentary: “Lessons of Iraq War Start With US History”

ZNet Commentary
Lessons of Iraq War Start With US History March 18, 2006
By Howard Zinn

On the third anniversary of President Bush’s Iraq debacle, it’s important to consider why the administration so easily fooled so many people into supporting the war.

I believe there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture.

One is an absence of historical perspective. The other is an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism.

If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. But if we know some history, if we know how many times presidents have lied to us, we will not be fooled again.

President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that he really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Wilson lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the rising American power.

President Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”

And everyone lied about Vietnam — President Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, President Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin and President Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia. They all claimed the war was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanted to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

President Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country. And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 — hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait, rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

There is an even bigger lie: the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If our starting point for evaluating the world around us is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then we are not likely to question the president when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values — democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise — to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.

But we must face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S.
government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.

We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.

And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted the belief in the minds of many people that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties have embraced this notion.

But what is the idea of our moral superiority based on?

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world.

It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join people around the world in the common cause of peace and justice.

Howard Zinn, who served as a bombardier in the Air Force in World War II, is the author of A People’s History of the United States [ http://tinyurl.com/gqjvs ] (HarperCollins, 1995). He is also the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of Voices of a People’s History of the United States [
http://tinyurl.com/gja83 ] (Seven Stories Press, 2004).

Quote of the year

By way of the Wall of Separation:

On Wednesday, March 1st, 2006, in Annapolis at a hearing on the proposed amendment to the Maryland state constitution that would prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at AU, was requested to testify.

At the end of his testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said: “As I read Biblical principles, marriage was intended, ordained and started by God – that is my belief,” she said. “For me, this is an issue solely based on religious principals.”

Raskin shot back that the Bible was also used to uphold now-outlawed statutes banning interracial marriage, and that the constitution should instead be lawmakers’ guiding principle. “People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible,” he said.

The room erupted into applause.

Raskin is the author of a great book for high school students titled We the Students: Supreme Court Decisions for and About Students, as well as Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court Versus the American People in which he describes the transgressions of the Supreme Court against the Constitution and the people—and the faulty reasoning behind them—and lays out the plan for the best way to back a more democratic system.

He’s also running in the Democratic primary got Maryland State Senate in September against 20 year incumbent Ida Ruben.

Video of UBC Roundtable on the British Columbia Teachers’ Strike

Following last fall’s BC teachers’ strike a number of departments and programs at UBC, along with the New Proposals Publishing Society and <a href=”http://www.cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/”Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor sponsored a public roundtable discussion on the significance of the strike and the struggle for education in the public interest in British Columbia.

Streaming video of the presentations at the roundtable are now available via Charles Menzie’s In Support of Public Education blog or you can click on any of the presenters names below to access the video:

Stephen Petrina (Department of Curriculum Studies, UBC)
Jinny Sims (President British Columbia Teachers’ Federation)
Catherine Evans (BC Society for Public Education)
Paul Orlowski (Teacher, Kitsilano Secondary School, Vancouver)
Charles Menzies (Department of Anthropology & Sociology, UBC)
Kevin Millsip (former Vancouver School Board Trustee)
E. Wayne Ross (Department of Curriculum Studies, UBC)

Unions, democracy and the US in Haiti

The following is an edited version of a post to the Working Class Studies listserv by Kim Scipes:

January 29, 2006–

…In today’s [New York Times], there is a quite interesting article on the US operations in Haiti. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT PIECE–PLEASE READ. …

The article is titled “Democracy Undone: Mixed US Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos” and is written by Walt Bogdanitch and Jenny Nordberg. (As I mention below, I don’t think the “US signals” were “mixed,” but this is a case where the two different “wings” of US foreign policy came into conflict, and now has been exposed, with some very interesting information included.)

Despite straight journalism’s approaches to something, what you get here in an incredibly detailed look at US policy in Haiti. But, crucially, what these journalists show is not only official policy, but also the activities of the International Republican Institute (IRI). I cannot remember such a detailed accounting in the straight press about IRI operations. (And while minor, there are references to Venezuela included.) US Senator John McCain, the darling of many for being a “maverick,” is the head of the IRI, and refused to comment on this article.

The important thing about the IRI is that it is one of the four core “institutes” of the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy. The others are the International Democratic Institute, the International Wing of the US Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center. (Go to www.ned.org for information.)This article ties in the IRI, NED and the Bush Administration, including those like Otto Reich, who I believe, and Elliot Abrams who I know, were involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Reich has played a key role re US policy in Venezuela.

Now, there is no mention of the Solidarity Center or the AFL-CIO in this article. (FYI, the formal name of the Solidarity Center is the American Center on International Labor Solidarity or ACILS.)

However, Jeb Sprague has been doing research on the Solidarity Center’s activities in Haiti, and just reported that the Solidarity Center had channeled $100,000 from the NED to the Batay Ouvriye Labor Federation. And I just included that information in a piece that I wrote that ran on January 25, 2006 on MRZine, the Web Zine of Monthly Review, titlted “Worker Rights ARE Human Rights–Not Just in USA, but around World” (http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/scipes250106.html –links to Sprague’s work as well as many other things is included in this article. (And I also reported the amounts to the Solidarity Center from the NED in FY 2005 for the Solidarity Center’s work across Latin America, information that was provided by Anthony Fenton, who has also done some fine writing on Haiti.)

Further, at the end of my article, there are links to three recent articles that I have written on the AFL-CIO foreign policy program. The most important, in connection with this, is “An Unholy Alliance: The AFL-CIO and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Venezuela” that ran on ZNet on July 10, 2005 at www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?sectionID=19&itemID=8268. What I did in this piece is detail the connection of the AFL-CIO and the NED. If you don’t know this material, I suggest you read this piece.

What I’m trying to bring together is this excellent report on IRI and the NED, and draw attention to those of you interested in Labor that at least some of the work of the Solidarity Center is very similar to what the IRI has been doing in Haiti, although in the local labor movements. And, apparently, even in the labor movement in Haiti.

This is just another example why we in the labor movement must break the link between the Solidarity Center and the NED–it is a toxic relationship.

This information needs the widest dissemination, so please spread widely in your networks in North America and around the world. If we do this, and build on this information, we can have an even greater impact on breaking the link between the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center and the NED. And have a major impact on US foreign policy.

In international solidarity–

Kim Scipes

“Capitalism no longer needs democracy” and democracy doesn’t need capitalism

Writing for The American Prospect, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, makes an important distinction between capitalism and democracy.

In “The China Path”, Reich argues that:

China shows that when it comes to economics, the dividing line among the world’s nations is no longer between communism and capitalism. Capitalism has won hands down. The real dividing line is no longer economic. It’s political. And that divide is between democracy and authoritarianism. China is a capitalist economy with an authoritarian government.

But he certainly errs by clinging to a the one-sided idea that democracy needs capitalism. Reich says that “for democracy to function there must be centers of power outside of government.” Certainly this is true, but despite the evidence he points to in China (as well as the huge wealth gap in the USA), Reich continues to hold on to the fiction that “capitalism decentralizes economic power, and thereby provides the private ground in which democracy can take root.”

How exactly is that working in the USA right now?

Take for example a study released last week by Stalling the Dream—People of color less likely to own cars, less able to escape hurricanes & poverty

The report finds that people of color are considerably more likely to be left behind in a natural disaster, since fewer of them own cars compared to whites. In addition, lower rates of car ownership put them at an economic disadvantage.

The report finds that:

Only 7% of white households, but 24% of black households and 17% of Latino (Hispanic) households owned no vehicle in 2000.
In all 11 major cities that have had five or more hurricanes in the last 100 years (Houston, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Jacksonville, St. Petersburg, Tampa, New York City, Providence, Boston, and New Orleans), people without cars are disproportionately people of color.
In the case of a mandatory evacuation order during a disaster, of those who say they would not evacuate immediately, 33% of Latinos, 27% of African Americans, and 23% of whites say that lack of transportation would be an obstacle preventing them from evacuating.
Evacuation planning tends to focus on traffic management for those with cars and on institutionalized people, not on non-institutionalized people without vehicles. New Orleans had only one-quarter the number of buses that would have been needed to evacuate all carless residents.
In the counties affected by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, only 7% of white households have no car, compared with 24% of black, 12% of Native American and 14% of Latino households.
The stereotype that black people own expensive cars is inaccurate. In fact, their median car value is half (or less) of whites, according to the Federal Reserve.
Eleven percent of African-American families and 21 percent of Latino families have missed out on medical care because of transportation issues, compared to only 2 percent of white families, according to the Children’s Health Fund.
The median net worth of white families increased about 6% after inflation from 2001 to 2004, to $136,000, while the black median stayed unchanged at $20,000, according to the Federal Reserve.
Transportation is the second biggest expense for American households, after housing, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project.

Overall, there is a correlation between vehicle ownership and economic prosperity. Cars give access to wider choices of jobs, entrepreneurial opportunities and healthcare. Many small businesses require a vehicle, such as gardening and catering.

The report concludes that car ownership is a vital part of the American Dream. However, the solution is not simply to provide all residents with their own cars. The report suggests improvements in public transportation and disaster planning, as well as narrowing the racial wealth divide to enable more car purchases.

One of the report’s co-authors, Emma Dixon, went without electricity in her Louisiana home for a week after Hurricane Katrina. The others, Meizhu Lui and Betsy Leondar-Wright, are also co-authors of the forthcoming book The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the US Racial Wealth Divide (New Press, 2006). All work for United for a Fair Economy.

Stalling the Dream is the third annual Martin Luther King Day report from United for a Fair Economy, following State of the Dream 2004 and 2005.

United for a Fair Economy is a national non-partisan, non-profit organization that raises awareness of the dangers of growing economic inequality.