The vultures that prey on disaster

Published in Socialist Worker.

FREE-MARKET fundamentalists went to work on some of New York City's most vulnerable communities even before the last winds from Superstorm Sandy had died down.

Privatization and deregulation are the tools these vultures use to exploit disaster, but the irony is that Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath have shown the need for more government assistance and regulation of corporate excess, not less.

One week after Hurricane Sandy hit, Naomi Klein wrote a piece titled "Hurricane Sandy: Beware of America's disaster capitalists" to warn of attempts to apply the "shock doctrine"--the phrase she coined for how a crisis is used to further entrench corporate interests and neoliberal policy--in New York City in the wake of the storm.

Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and a leading participant in 350.org's "Do The Math" tour to combat global warming, explained the goals of those seeking to exploit this crisis:

[T]he fact that this storm has demonstrated that poor and working-class people are far more vulnerable to the climate crisis shows that this is clearly the right moment to strip those people of what few labor protections they have left, as well as to privatize the meager public services available to them. Most of all, when faced with an extraordinarily costly crisis born of corporate greed, hand out tax holidays to corporations.

She catalogued a series of arguments from right-wingers--including those who "blamed New Yorkers' resistance to Big Box stores for the misery they were about to endure" or who warned that reconstruction would be slowed by the Davis-Bacon Act that "requires workers on public works projects to be paid not the minimum wage, but the [higher] prevailing wage in the region."

Klein also had words of caution about efforts to use the hurricane to push "public-private partnerships"--infrastructure-rebuilding projects that involve private companies that "could install tolls and keep the profits."

Some advocates of such neoliberal measures have been particularly bald-faced, according to Klein:

The prize for shameless disaster capitalism, however, surely goes to right-wing economist Russell S. Sobel, writing in a New York Times online forum. Sobel suggested that, in hard-hit areas, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) should create "free-trade zones--in which all normal regulations, licensing and taxes [are] suspended." This corporate free-for-all would, apparently, "better provide the goods and services victims need."

Even some "liberals" got in on the act. Writing in Slate, Matt Yglesias argued against laws banning price-gouging during disasters, asserting that such safeguards against profiteering cause shortages and overconsumption. He does not address what happens to poor people who cannot afford inflated prices.

At a time when more regulation is needed to stop climate change and the for-profit polluters responsible for it, these arguments are especially insidious. And less than a month after the hurricane hit, the failings of the private sector to provide relief for the victims of the storm are clear. A key lesson is that more--not less--government planning and intervention is needed.

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THE MARKET fails to meet human needs even in normal times. There are tens of millions of people in the U.S.--and billions more around the world--who cannot afford what they need and therefore must go without, even when there is enough to go around.

Without money, their demand is not "effective," as economists say. During crises, the market makes this worse, not better: gaps between rich and poor sharpen, and the consequences of these disparities become more grave, even deadly.

In times of crisis, as in the "normal" periods between them, the production of goods and services under capitalism is driven by the pursuit of profit, not human need. Decades of neoliberal reforms--privatization of the public sector, attacks on unions and workers' rights, the elimination of subsidies to the poor, deregulation--have only worsened inequality and insecurity across the globe.

The most obvious immediate failing of the private sector in the wake of Sandy was widespread power outages, which hit more than 8 million households and still darkened more than 100,000 homes in New York and New Jersey nearly two weeks after the storm. The scale and the duration of the outages were almost certainly made worse by energy corporations prioritizing profits over service.

As Chris Williams pointed out at Socialistworker.org, Con Edison, a for-profit corporation that provides electricity to New York City, did not "spend the $250 million in investment the company deemed necessary to install submersible switches and move high-voltage transformers above ground level, things that may have prevented the explosion that wiped out electricity in lower Manhattan--even though the company made $1 billion in profit last year."

Without the profit motive, making these investments would have been a no-brainer, but since they would have cut into Con Ed's bottom line, the company took the chance and delayed upgrades. In addition to poor infrastructure, power companies lacked sufficient staff to deal with the emergency and were forced to call in tens of thousands of workers from across the country--workers unfamiliar with the particulars of the local power grid.

The Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) faced the most severe criticism and even a lawsuit as residents went weeks without power, leading to the resignation of its chief operating officer and an executive order from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to investigate the authority.

While LIPA is under the authority of New York state, it is an example of a "public-private partnership"--LIPA contracts with National Grid to provide "the operation, maintenance and construction of LIPA's transmission and distribution facilities, customer service, financial services and back-office support services." National Grid is a for-profit corporation, with the profit motive creating an incentive to cut costs as much as possible.

On the other hand, the publicly owned Metropolitan Transit Authority received the most praise for getting New York City's subway system up and running quickly--despite years of mismanagement and chronic lack of sufficient funding. Buses were back online almost immediately, running free of charge. Limited subway service was restored two days after the storm hit, and most of the lines were running when power was restored the weekend following the storm.

Despite their efforts, many MTA employees were docked for missing work on the Monday and Tuesday of the storm, when the city's transportation system was shut down.

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THE AFTERMATH of the storm also brought price gouging--namely, companies charging vastly higher prices because of the sudden shift in the balance between supply and demand.

Price gouging on essential goods during a crisis is illegal in many states, including New York and New Jersey, but that didn't stop businesses from looking to make a quick buck. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation into price gouging after receiving hundreds of complaints, such as businesses jacking up prices for necessities such as food, water and gasoline.

If special "free trade zones" were set up in disaster areas, as Sobel suggested, price gouging would have been legal, and thus even more widespread, as desperate people would have no choice--due to the conspicuous absence of government aid and relief--but to pay sky-high prices for basic goods. Those without extra disposable cash would have been even less able to procure the goods and services they needed to survive.

During Hurricane Sandy, residents in areas without power had to rely on cash on hand because ATM machines and credit/debit cards didn't work in stores without power. And since many businesses were shuttered for a number of days, money was especially short for workers making hourly wages or dependent on tips from service-industry jobs.

When power went out, some households lost hundreds of dollars of perishable food. Tens of thousands of those without power in New York City were public-housing residents, nearly half of whom live below the poverty line.

According to the New York Daily News, food service workers, most of whom "are employed by catering companies in corporate dining rooms," were docked sick or vacation days during the time when their offices were closed.

At a time when needs were especially great and money exceptionally scarce, the removal of laws preventing price gouging would have made the crisis more acute for those with the least means. Even more poor and working-class people would have gone without, while businesses would have made even greater profits at their expense. The rich, as always, would have been able to afford everything they needed and then some.

Nor would allowing Wal-Mart to build in New York City have solved the problem. First of all, it's unclear how people trapped without public transportation or cars would have gotten to and from Wal-Mart in the first place. And while Wal-Mart brings lower prices, this comes at a cost.

As Wal-Mart workers standing up to the corporate giant have made clear, Wal-Mart does not pay a decent wage and is willing to do whatever it takes to bust unionization efforts. Wal-Mart is leading the race to the bottom, and its expansion into New York City--which has union density double that of the nation as a whole--would serve to further undermine living standards and thus workers' ability to ride out crises like Hurricane Sandy.

The recent fire that killed at least 112 people at a Bangladesh factory which produces goods for Wal-Mart is a tragic reminder of the steep costs that Wal-Mart imposes on workers around the world in order to keep prices low and profits high.

Similarly, the removal of protections for workers employed in various aspects of Sandy cleanup and recovery is not only unfair, but it would also set a precedent that would plunge more workers into poverty, turning every day into a manmade crisis for those getting the city back on its feet.

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AT THE core of arguments in favor of privatization and deregulation is the idea that the best way to coordinate economic life is through unleashing private gain as a motivating factor--in other words, the profit motive. In this view, government will only get in the way.

One major problem with this argument is that in an unequal society, where large sections of the population don't have the money to buy what they need, the market won't provide for the needs of everybody. That's especially true in New York City, the most unequal city in the most unequal country in the advanced industrialized world.

Those who face social and economic oppression and marginalization--poor and working-class people, people of color, undocumented immigrants and others--will be least able to afford to buy what they need on the market, especially during crises, when high demand and scarce supply drive up prices.

This dynamic was evident in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Thousands of poor and working-class residents--overwhelmingly African American--were left to fend for themselves and then demonized by the media and hunted by police.

During Hurricane Sandy, disproportionately Black and Latino public-housing residents, nearly half of whom live in poverty and many of whom are elderly or disabled, were less likely to have the means to evacuate and were far more likely to be left stranded without power and heat. And poor and working-class neighborhoods were some of the hardest-hit areas, but among the last to receive attention from the government.

Preyed upon by payday lenders and corner-store price gougers in normal times, the private sector abandoned the poorest people in the wake of the hurricane because they lacked the ability to pay for what they desperately needed: food, water, warm clothes and other essentials.

Instead, tens of thousands of volunteers sprung into action, answering the call put out by Occupy Sandy and other community organizations to meet the urgent needs of residents abandoned by city, state and federal agencies. In any case, these agencies have been gutted over they years by budget cuts and layoffs--cuts that were justified by tall tales about the "invisible hand of the market" meeting the needs of those stuck in disaster scenarios, instead of government agencies.

Driven by a sense of solidarity and an ethos that anyone in need is deserving, some 50,000 volunteers have already donated their time, and countless thousands more donated their money and supplies. As in so many disasters, ordinary people--driven not by the promise of personal gain but by a desire to serve the common good--sought to fill the vacuum left by the private sector, the hollow neoliberal state and the shredded social safety net.

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A KEY lesson of Hurricane Sandy is that, after decades of neoliberal privatization, the free-market fundamentalists have gotten much of what they want. Seemingly unlimited resources are available for record profits, wars abroad and repression here at home--to secure markets for Corporate America and to expand the wealth of the elite--while these same elites claim there is not enough for social spending and basic public services.

There is a need for more, not less, government intervention in disaster relief, prevention and reconstruction. Many more relief workers--including hundreds of thousands of un- and underemployed New Yorkers who need the work--could have been mobilized had government funds been made available to pay them for their efforts.

And the impact of what efforts did take place could have been exponentially increased had the government provided trucks and buses, rather than leaving volunteers to rely on private cars, U-Hauls and other donated private vehicles.

The shortages of goods that worried Yglesias could be easily addressed by the government providing necessities free of charge. The state distributed free gasoline during the storm--there is no reason why this should not have been expanded to include food, water, diapers, cleaning supplies and other basics that Occupy Sandy and various community groups continue to scramble to get to those in need.

If the U.S. government is able to maintain military bases in three-quarters of the world's countries, including equipping an occupying force of nearly 70,000 troops in Afghanistan, certainly it has the resources and technical know-how to supply the people of the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area with basic goods in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Beyond the nearly $1 trillion spent each year on war, the richest 400 Americans alone are worth $1.7 trillion. The money is there. It is simply a question of priorities.

Finally, the workers who do the difficult and dangerous work of reconstruction in the months and years following the storm should receive a living wage and full benefits to support a family. The reconstruction effort provides the opportunity to implement a public jobs program at a time when workers continue to face high rates of unemployment.

A system of affirmative action in hiring could make a dent in the Black unemployment rate, which is more than double that of whites. And an effort to employ those with felony convictions would be a blow against the New Jim Crow and the exclusion of Blacks and Latinos from the economy.

This is not without precedent. The mass struggles of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s and 60s, including the ghetto uprisings that involved hundreds of thousands, forced the government at all levels to expand social services. Public-sector union organizing won decent pay and benefits. These struggles won bans against racial discrimination, the result of which is that public-sector jobs became a key means of advancement for African Americans.

Weeks after the storm, residents of impacted areas, union and nonunion workers, activists and others have begun to build movements to demand that the city, state and federal government address needs for decent housing, health care and a "peoples' recovery." While these efforts remain modest, they are a step towards the mass struggles needed to shift the balance of class forces and begin to turn the demands outlined above into a reality.

Disabled and left to fend for themselves

Published in Socialist Worker.

FOR PEOPLE with disabilities, Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath poses unique dangers.

The storm has also exposed how--as in so many other ways that affected poor and working class New Yorkers most of all--the government was disgracefully unprepared to protect the disabled from life-threatening danger, nor provide them with the services they needed in the days and weeks following. Once again, tasks that should be the responsibility of the state have fallen on volunteers.

Take Nick Dupree and his partner Alejandra Ospina, disability rights activists living in lower Manhattan, who lost power during the storm. On her blog, Crystal Evans-Pradhan recounted how she and a group of activists and others coordinated an effort via social media to save Nick's life.

Both Nick and Alejandra rely on wheelchairs, and Nick depends on a ventilator to breathe. When the power went out as a result of the hurricane, the two were stuck 12 flights of stairs above ground level--without electricity to charge batteries for the vent that Nick needs to stay alive, and with no landline and bad cell phone reception.

Luckily, Crystal, who lives near Boston, saw Alejandra's plea for help on Facebook and was able to mobilize a network of people to raise hundreds of dollars and secure the help of volunteers to supply Nick with batteries and distilled water. This was no small feat. During the several days that power was out in lower Manhattan, Nick required a new car battery every twelve hours, and each of these heavy, expensive batteries had to be carried up 12 flights of stairs.

Reading Crystal's account, it becomes increasingly clear that Nick may have died had he been forced to rely on the government for relief. Crystal had talked back and forth with FEMA's Office of Disability Integration and Coordination for hours without any luck, and after she travelled from Boston to New York with batteries and supplies, the Fire Department refused to help carry the items up the stairs to Nick and Alejandra's apartment.

Because Crystal also relies on a wheelchair, her friend Sandi Yu had to carry the supplies up by herself. Eventually, Crystal emailed FEMA to let them know that the potential crisis had been averted--no thanks to them.

In a second post, Crystal quotes Nick, who explains why he chose not to evacuate prior to the storm. Any hospital he went to would have had to switch to a hospital ventilator, which nearly killed him four years ago:

I wish there was a hospital I could trust to "first, do no harm," but right now, I just trust them to: a) put me on a ventilator that will maim or kill me; b) not have enough staff to feed or medicate me, because they have genuine emergencies on their hands. I am from Mobile, Alabama and was there until 2008; I tried to go to USA Children's hospital when Hurricanes Georges and Opal hit the Gulf Coast, and no beds or medicine were forthcoming (plus, the hospital lost their electricity, stranding us in our wheelchairs staring at dead elevator doors for hours during Opal), which forced us to un-evacuate, go back home.

And as Crystal points out:"[M]any of the 'evacuation centers' in the area were not wheelchair accessible, if we got him to one of those as the Red Cross had suggested." This included centers with makeshift ramps too steep for many wheelchairs, as well as one with "a sign telling people to ask security for access assistance, except that security is inside at the top of the stairs."

It is inspiring that individuals came together and went to great lengths to make sure Nick's ventilator didn't run out of batteries during the several days he was without power. But it is a case of criminal neglect that the city did not have disaster plans in place for Nick and others like him who depend on electricity to run lifesaving medical devices.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg waited nearly two weeks to announce that he was sending medical personnel door to door to check on people like Nick and Alejandra. Without the ad hoc efforts of volunteers, this would likely have been too little--and far too late.

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THE CASE of Nick Dupree is just one example of New York City's negligence when it comes to meeting the needs of disabled residents. Nor should it come as a surprise.

Just recently, a judge granted class action status to a lawsuit filed by advocates for the disabled that, according to DNAinfo.com, alleges that "the city does not have adequate plans in place to help the disabled population evacuate, find proper shelter or find electricity for medically necessary devices in the event of power failures." The lawsuit was filed last year, in the wake of Hurricane Irene.

For the 900,000 New Yorkers with disabilities, marginalization is not just an issue they face during emergencies like Hurricane Sandy. It's a fact of everyday life.

One of the biggest issues facing the disabled, particularly those in wheelchairs and others with impaired mobility, is the lack of accessible transportation. In New York, just 2 percent of taxis--less than 250--are wheelchair accessible, in a city with some 60,000 people who use wheelchairs.

By comparison, London requires all of its taxis to be wheelchair accessible, according to Jesse Lemisch of the Nation. Most of the subway system is inaccessible to those in wheelchairs, according to Lemisch:

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the United Spinal Association has brought suit against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for inaccessible subway stations: "It is an absolute disgrace that twenty years after the ADA was passed, more than 80 percent of the subway stations in New York are inaccessible," says attorney Julia Pinover.

Buses are the most widely accessible form of transportation for New Yorkers in wheelchairs--but as a result, cuts to bus lines have disproportionately impacted the disabled.

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THE FULL impact of the storm on the disabled is not yet fully known, but DNAinfo reports that some families have lost thousands of dollars in equipment, including electric wheelchairs and devices that allow people with conditions such as cerebral palsy to communicate. Replacing them will involve navigating the bureaucracy of FEMA and Medicaid.

Compounding this, organizations that serve the disabled are stretched thin, according to DNAinfo:

Amy Bittinger, director of Family Support Services for United Cerebral Palsy, said they have dozens of families in tough situations. One client is a disabled man trapped on the fifth floor of a building, where his family moved to avoid flooding. Unlike Schevon, who weighs just 90 pounds, no one is able to carry him down the stairs until the elevator is repaired.

Some adults without electric wheelchairs have been unable to return to classes. The agency may also have to dig in to its own charitable funds to help clients who don't receive federal assistance. The agency had to move 41 clients to temporary shelters from its locations in lower Manhattan during the storm and is still waiting for full power at its offices on Maiden Lane.

For the mentally disabled, the disruption to their daily routines and the lack of a prompt, coordinated comprehensive response from city, state and federal officials, has caused them significant distress.

Maria Vultaggio wrote in the International Business Times about the storm's impact on Felicia, her 21-year-old sister with Autism: "For those who know people with the learning disability, many of them don't like change. In fact, not only do they not like change, they find it virtually impossible to deal with change."

After days without power, Internet or cable, which Felicia relies on as part of her routine: "[S]he seemed to have reached her wits' end, and nothing we said could make her feel better. Her constant cries were starting to wear the family down."

CBS News interviewed Kirsten Nataro, who works on Long Island at a group home for the mentally disabled that went without power for several days after Sandy hit. She said that the disruption to the daily routine "just rocks their world to a different extent than I think a lot of people understand...regiment and schedule makes it a lot easier for them to function on a daily basis." She also worried about the chance of accidents in the darkened home.

According to the Associated Press, when medical personnel went door to door in the Rockaways on the second weekend after the storm hit, they found several residents in just the first three hours who had to be evacuated to a hospital. As AP reported:

Joseph Williams said that the home care aide who normally helps look after his 27-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy and needs a wheelchair, hasn't been able to visit since the storm. After days of trying to take care of him himself, in a flooded high-rise with no utilities, Williams gave up and carried him down seven flights, so he could be evacuated to Brooklyn.

With thousands still without power--and many of those likely to remain in the dark for several weeks to come--the potential remains for new crises and hardships facing the disabled in the disaster area to emerge.

There is also the potential for the storm itself--and the government neglect felt by some of the poorest, hardest-hit areas--to saddle a new generation with mental disabilities and impairments such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression. According to the New York Daily News, children living in areas still without power face trauma that could have a lasting impact.

It is an outrage that the city, state and federal governments did not take steps to prevent the storm and its aftermath from having a disproportionate impact on residents with disabilities. Like poor and working class New Yorkers, in the richest city in the world, those with disabilities have been left largely to fend for themselves.

The storm is still taking a toll

Published at Socialist Worker.

TENS OF thousands of people in New York and New Jersey remain displaced or stuck in their homes without power, heat or water fully two weeks after Hurricane Sandy ripped through the Eastern Seaboard.

Even as Manhattan gears up for the holiday tourism rush that begins in the coming weeks, the government relief effort continues to fall woefully short of what's needed in some of the city's poorest, hardest-hit areas.

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Two weeks later, and still without power
Thousands of residents of New York City public housing are still without power, heat or hot water. Public-housing inhabitants make up half of those in New York City without these basic services, according to the New York Daily News. Residents have been catching colds and falling ill due to the lack of heat, and anger is mounting at the lack of response from the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).

Much of the city's public housing consists of high rises, and some exceed 20 stories. This has left residents on upper floors, including the elderly and/or disabled, stuck without any assistance or even information from city, state or federal relief agencies. While Occupy Sandy and other community organizations have worked to fill the gap by bringing food, water, blankets and even medical care to public-housing residents, these efforts have not been enough to meet the overwhelming need.

After some long overdue media coverage and a petition demanding NYCHA address the power outages, NYCHA announced November 11 that it would provide rent credits to tenants in January 2013, although residents will still be required to pay full rent until then.

Some residents worry that the city will use the storm as a pretext to eliminate public housing, continuing the pattern of gentrification and displacement of the city's poorest residents. In many neighborhoods, public-housing units are islands of low-cost housing surrounded by apartments only the wealthy can afford, and developers would no doubt jump at the chance to replace these projects with luxury complexes.

The city has left water to fester for days in the basements of public housing units, according to the Daily News. "[Red Hook residents] worried that as more days pass, the damage caused by Sandy will become irreparable," reports New York 1. "They're going to knock down those tall projects over there because their foundation is bad," said one area resident.

This fear is well founded. In New Orleans, the Hurricane Katrina disaster was used as an excuse to destroy large amounts of public housing, replacing it with "mixed-income" housing rather than new public units. Years later, many public-housing residents remained displaced.

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More than enough vacant housing
In addition to makeshift camps, FEMA has put thousands of people in hotels, and New York City is currently working with real-estate moguls in an attempt to work out a system to temporarily house displaced residents in vacant apartments.

It is still unclear what will be done with the tens of thousands of displaced residents in New York and New Jersey. While the city has made noises about a "shortage" of vacant apartments to house the displaced, the scarcity has nothing to do with a lack of space.

A recent survey by Picture the Homeless found that New York City currently has more than 3,500 vacant buildings, enough to house nearly 72,000 people as well as enough vacant lots that if developed could house another 128,000.

In some cases, apartments are left vacant in wealthy neighborhoods in order to restrict supply and drive up prices in a city where the priciest condos go for almost $100 million.

Cost is another barrier: FEMA's $1,800 per month allotment for housing assistance to the displaced is not nearly enough to cover rent in Manhattan, where the average rent is $3,418 per month.

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Atrocious conditions in a FEMA shelter
An investigative report by Bill Bowman and Stephen Edelson for the Asbury Park Press revealed horrific conditions inside a FEMA shelter in Oceanport, N.J. According to reports, evacuees spent the night in sparse tents that did not provide protection from freezing temperatures during the November 7 winter storm that followed in Sandy's footsteps.

"At [Pine Belt], the Red Cross made an announcement that they were sending us to permanent structures up here that had just been redone, that had washing machines and hot showers and steady electric, and they sent us to this tent city," said Brian Sotelo, a resident of the shelter ironically called Camp Freedom. "We got [expletive]."

FEMA has barred the media from the camp, and when evacuees attempted to complain about conditions, wireless Internet access was turned off, and residents were prohibited from charging cell phones. Sotelo continued:

My 6-year-old daughter Angie was a premie and has a problem regulating her body temperature. Until 11 p.m. Wednesday, they had no medical personnel at all here, not even a nurse. After everyone started complaining, and they found out we were contacting the press, they brought people in. Every time we plugged in an iPhone or something, the cops would come and unplug them. Yet when they moved us in, they laid out cable on the table, and the electricians told us they were setting up charging stations. But suddenly there wasn't enough power.

Evacuee Ashley Sabol told Reuters that when she arrived at the FEMA camp last on the night of the winter storm, she was given only one blanket. "There was no heat that night, and as temperatures dropped to freezing, people could start to see their breath," she said. Reuters reported that "the gusts of wind blew snow and slush onto Sabol's face as her cot was near the open tent flaps. She shivered. Her hands turned purple."

Men outnumbered women--and according to Reuters, "the women said it was impossible not to notice the leering of some men."

While Sotelo likened conditions in the shelter to "being [in] prison," New York state is considering housing some of the 40,000 made homeless by Hurricane Sandy in an actual prison--Staten Island's Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, which was recently closed.

"I lost everything, but I still have my pride," said 44-year-old Wally Martinez. "We don't have to stay in a prison. My brother was once in that very prison, and my mother used to visit him regularly. She used to tell me how miserable he looked and how filthy and disgusting that prison was."

The system of mass incarceration is one of the few public institutions to receive funding increases in recent decades while funding for public housing and social services has been cut, so this outrage should come as little surprise.

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The loss of community resources
Hurricane Sandy destroyed some of the few resources available for two of New York's most vulnerable and marginalized groups: homeless LGBT youth and immigrant day laborers.
The hurricane destroyed the Ali Forney Center's drop-in center, which provides housing assistance, HIV testing, medical and mental health care and other basic services to homeless LGBT youth. They have moved into a temporary space at the LGBT Center. According to Executive Director Carl Siciliano:

Everything was destroyed and the space is uninhabitable...This is a terrible tragedy for the homeless LGBT youth we serve there. This space was dedicated to our most vulnerable kids, the thousands stranded on the streets without shelter, and was a place where they received food, showers, clothing, medical care, HIV testing and treatment, and mental health and substance abuse services. Basically a lifeline for LGBT kids whose lives are in danger.

The hurricane accomplished some of what Mayor Bloomberg had attempted last spring before being stopped by opposition from activists and the City Council. In his budget proposal last year, Bloomberg proposed $7 million in cuts to funding for homeless LGBT youth, including the elimination of 160 of the 250 beds in youth shelters.

Personally, that cut would've been chump change for the billionaire mayor--less than 0.03 percent of his fortune of $25 billion.

Immigrant day laborers also lost a vital resource to Sandy. The storm uprooted the "Bay Parkway Community Job Center, New York City's only center for day laborers, and moved it a couple hundred feet inland from the Bensonhurst shore, cracking one of its walls in the process," according to In These Times. Police have denied day laborers access to the center.

The center provided job protection for day laborers, such as requiring contractors to guarantee an eight-hour day with lunch and minimum pay of $120. According to In These Times:

Since the NYPD's decision to deny entry to the area, workers have been forced to go back to street corners, where they are sometimes given up to 12 hours of work for as little as $90 and forced to buy their own lunches. Wage theft is also a common practice with the workers when they are not being hired under the stewardship of the center, which additionally provides safety and legal trainings.

Despite this loss, workers from the center have organized to participate in relief efforts, putting their skills to use in assisting those impacted by the hurricane.

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Warped priorities revealed
One story from earlier this month highlighted the warped priorities of governments that put profits and the needs of the wealthy before those of the working-class and poor majority. According to Bloomberg Businessweek:

As superstorm Sandy flooded Atlantic City, N.J., one area was shielded from damage by dunes constructed at taxpayer expense: casinos and other beachfront businesses and homes. Nearby, another set of residents didn't get government-paid storm defense. In one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, water from Absecon Inlet filled the streets, knocking down doors, sloshing into bedrooms, destroying furniture and leaving residents wondering if they would drown.

While Atlantic City casinos rake in billions in revenue each year, about one in four city residents live in poverty, two-and-a-half times the statewide rate. City, state and federal spending to build up sand dunes and reconstruct beaches in order to protect the casinos and other "valuable" oceanfront property amounts to some $40 million in recent years.

In 1996, "the [Army Corps of Engineers] called...for building about 1,600 feet of bulkhead in two sections along the inlet," where many of the city's poor, disproportionately Black and Latino residents live. Sixteen years later, the city's poor were left to face Sandy's wrath--unprotected.

Revealing the two New Yorks

Published in Socialist Worker and the Indypendent.

HURRICANE SANDY, the most devastating storm to hit New York City in decades, has left the city divided between areas facing ongoing devastation and those where life is returning to normal.
But the hurricane has also revealed divisions in the city that existed long before Sandy touched ground: between rich and poor, and between the workers who make the city run and the wealthy who reap the benefits.

Some sections of the city, such as Manhattan north of 39th Street, and inland parts of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, are practically back to normal. Residents have power, water and Internet, restaurants and stores are open, and for the most part, the bustle of the city has returned.

In the other New York, however, a humanitarian crisis is looming. As this article was being written on Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of people were still without power--and will be for several days more--after a transformer explosion that affected Manhattan below 39th Street.

Dozens of homes were destroyed in a massive six-alarm fire that hit Breezy Point in Queens on Monday night, leaving hundreds of residents homeless. NYU Langone Medical Center evacuated when its backup generators failed, and Bellevue Hospital, which suffered damage during the storm and was running on generators due to a loss of outside power, evacuated some 500 patients on Wednesday.

Laura Durkay, a resident of the East Village and a SocialistWorker.org contributor, walked over 30 blocks on Wednesday to charge her cell phone in a deli in Midtown. "People are helping each other and sharing information," she said. "A man parked his truck on 12th Street with his radio on, and people gathered around to listen to the news. Electricity is the biggest issue. Starbucks and other places are jammed with lines of people waiting to charge their phones." In addition, cell phone service for many is spotty or down in areas without power.

SW contributor Sherry Wolf, who lives in Park Slope in Brooklyn, described the scene at a makeshift shelter in her neighborhood:

The Park Slope Armory that usually serves as a colossal YMCA--built by the 19th century robber barons as a fortress against the poor--is currently packed with more than 600 climate refugees, mostly seniors and others in desperate need. They appear like any of us would who haven't worn dry socks in days--happy for the donated hot meals and a dry place to sleep, but uncomfortable, frustrated and frightened about what happens next. Even teens off school this week are helping out, though, so many of us have displaced friends staying with us. In fact, I've got two camped out at my small place.

Although the Red Cross said that food relief was on the way, on Wednesday, residents stuck in lower Manhattan were relying on the few restaurants, such as pizza parlors with gas ovens, that were serving food to long lines of those who could afford it. Other restaurants, such as Northern Spy Food Co., "served [free] lunch to everyone who lined up outside their restaurant at Avenue A and 12th Street," according to the Gothamist.

Another obstacle for the poor stuck in the blacked-out area of Manhattan: They can't use the assistance they receive for food purchases from the state's food stamp program because the subsidy is delivered electronically, via Electronic Benefit Cards. Wherever the power is out, the cards are useless.

Durkay described the contrast between her neighborhood and Midtown as "surreal. Midtown is basically functional, while my neighborhood is a disaster zone--no power or cell phone service, maybe one business of out of every 10 or 20 open, no water or heat for many people, a few restaurants and bodegas open, but no grocery stores. Two guys called it the 'dead zone.'"

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RESIDENTS OF public housing were especially hard hit, with nearly 60 complexes without power as of Wednesday. Durkay reported seeing residents on the Lower East Side, many of whom were without water or power, filling up buckets of water from fire hydrants outside their buildings.

Several of the public housing complexes in New York City are in Zone A, which is at greatest risk for flooding. Inside the high-rises of 14 stories high or more, thousands of residents, including the elderly, disabled and those with limited mobility, are stuck without water or power, with humanitarian consequences.

Hector lives in the Jacob Riis housing project, which is located in Zone A on the Lower East Side. "They shut down the elevators and hot water just a few hours after I found out about the mandatory evacuation on Sunday," he said. The pre-emptive shutdown, presumably intended to force people to evacuate, actually made it more difficult for those trying to get out.

According to Hector, most residents of his complex decided to stay. Some thought that Sandy, like last year's Hurricane Irene, which mostly missed New York City, would end up being mostly hype. Others, especially immigrants, had nowhere to go because they were without family in the area--or no way to get there because of a lack access of transportation.

The subway and bus system shut down at 7 p.m. on Sunday, and a cab ride from Manhattan to the outer borough, with extra fees for bridges and tolls, can run $40 or more.

While most of New York City's homeless population rode out the storm in one of the city's 46,631 shelter beds, according to Russia Today: "Lacking enough beds to house all those in need, many shelters made exceptions, allowing their buildings to go over capacity for the night. But although the efforts helped many in need, there still wasn't room for everyone."

As the hurricane approached on Monday, several homeless remained on the streets to face the storm unprotected. But billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg had little sympathy. "There are some people that are just very difficult," he told the New York Observer. "They want to avoid interacting with others, and how you get to those has always been a challenge and as far as I know, we're doing a good job with that."

One homeless man, 43-year-old James, told freelance journalist Julia Reinhart: "I can't go back to the shelter system for another two months...Only once you've been out for a year, can you be classified as long-term homeless, and therefore get access to additional assistance." When Reinhart asked about the emergency shelters, James said, "No, they don't want us there. These shelters are for the good folks, the families that get evacuated. There is no room in there for me."

Also left twisting in the wind during the storm were the thousands of prisoners jailed at Rikers Island. Most are awaiting trial, but can't afford or were denied bail, or are awaiting transfer to serve minor sentences. Amy in Queens reported that the buses to Rikers Island, which had begun running again by Wednesday, were full of people anxious to visit their loved ones to make sure they were okay.

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THE STORM also raises questions about the state of New York City's basic infrastructure--and the priorities of the city's elites.

ProPublica, reporting on the failure of backup generators at NYU Langone Medical Center, explained that part of the system was in the basement, which flooded. New hospitals build generators above the level floodwaters are likely to reach, but according to hospital trustee Gary Cohn, "The infrastructure at NYU is somewhat old."

Tragically, lives were put at risk, including infants in neonatal intensive care, who had to be transported while nurses helped them breathe manually. Years of medical research were also lost when the generator failed.

Cohn, the NYU trustee, is president of banking giant Goldman Sachs, which is helping fund the construction of a nonunion Harlem Children's Zone charter school on public housing green space, in spite of community opposition. There is plenty of money for union-busting and school privatization, but updating hospital infrastructure is apparently lower down on the list.

Nor is there a centralized plan for dealing with hospital evacuations. According to a nurse at a downtown hospital, because of the continuing power outage, every hospital below 34th Street in Manhattan has been ordered to evacuate its patients by the weekend. But there is no plan for where to put the patients--nurses and other staff are working around the clock to find hospital beds for all the people who are soon to be displaced.

Meanwhile, the demand for hospital beds may be increasing as the supply dries up--as a result of injuries from the storm, the potential for the spread of disease resulting from the breakdown of sanitation systems and the possible worsening of New York's rat problem.

Power is out below 39th Street because of an explosion at a Con Edison substation at 13th Street, next to the water on the eastern edge of Manhattan. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, a senior Con Ed executive said the explosion might have been prevented had they moved some of the equipment to a higher level to avoid flooding, but that is "going to take some time." It's unclear why Con Ed, which knew about the risk of flooding after Hurricane Irene hit last year, did not take this precaution sooner.

A Con Edison employee, speaking anonymously, said that while company executives and Mayor Bloomberg declare that most New Yorkers will have power restored in four days, the real timeframe could be weeks--because of the unprecedented scale of the damage and the challenges it poses.

Con Ed workers are putting in 12 to 16 hour shifts in dangerous conditions to restore power as soon as possible.

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WHILE THE contrast between Hurricane Sandy's impact on different sections of New York City is stark, the truth is that New York has been sharply divided for a long, long time.

It is both a playground for some of the wealthiest people in the world--home of the $175 hamburger, $3 million parking spot and the $95 million condominium--and the home of some of the poorest people in the U.S..

The scale of inequality is staggering. New York City trails only Moscow for the most billionaires with 57, yet it is also home to the poorest congressional district in the nation. The city's inequality surpasses that of Brazil, as Doug Henwood pointed out in a blog post last year: "The bottom half of the city's income distribution has 9 percent of total income; the bottom 80 percent, 29 percent...[the top 1 percent] has 34 percent of total income, compared with 19 percent for the U.S. as a whole."
David Rohde, a Reuters columnist, pointed out that Hurricane Sandy exposed how unequal New York City has become:

Divides between the rich and the poor are nothing new in New York, but the storm brought them vividly to the surface. There were residents like me who could invest all of their time and energy into protecting their families. And there were New Yorkers who could not.

Those with a car could flee. Those with wealth could move into a hotel. Those with steady jobs could decline to come into work. But the city's cooks, doormen, maintenance men, taxi drivers and maids left their loved ones at home.

Rohde praised "the tens of thousands of policemen, firefighters, utility workers and paramedics who labored all night for $40,000 to $90,000 a year," as well as "local politicians who focused on performance, not partisanship, such as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie [and] New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg."

But it is politicians like Christie, Bloomberg and others--along with the corporate elites they serve--who are responsible for rising inequality in the first place.

In the years before Hurricane Sandy devastated his state, Christie took the axe to the benefits of the very workers who are taking the lead in helping residents during this crisis. Christie, with the help of several Democrats in the state legislature, attacked public workers with legislation to "remove health insurance from collective bargaining, more than triple employee health care contributions and raise workers' pension contributions." And Christie has led attacks on teachers' unions in his state, using his platform at the Republican National Convention to demonize teachers' unions further.
Bloomberg, with a net worth of more than $20 billion, is the tenth richest person in the U.S.

Unsurprisingly, he opposed the extension of the so-called "millionaires' tax" that would have raised billions by taxing the very wealthy--money that could go towards repairing the city's outdated infrastructure.

During his term as mayor, Bloomberg's net worth has more than quintupled, while he slashed budgets impacting the neediest; cut funding to education, health care, child care, homeless shelters including for LGBT youth and libraries; and attacked the very public-sector workers whose response to Hurricane Sandy Bloomberg has hypocritically praised in front of television cameras.

According to an article from U.S. News and World Report, the city could have protected New York City from the flooding with sea barriers of the kind used in major European cities--at a cost of just over $6 billion. That's less than one-quarter of Bloomberg's current fortune--and less than one-third the amount that Bloomberg's net worth has increased since he became mayor.

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THE EFFORTS of those workers have done an enormous amount to reduce suffering during this crisis. Limited bus service was active by Tuesday, and full bus service as well as limited subway and train service was restored by Wednesday. The MTA workers who made this possible--and who run the largest public transportation system in the country, the backbone of New York City--are more than two-thirds Black and Latino workers, who have been working without a contract since January due to the MTA's unwillingness to give them a fair deal.

Meanwhile, the MTA has announced further fare increases that will push the cost of public transportation even more onto working class New Yorkers.

Con Edison, despite making over $1 billion in profits each year, locked out employees just a few months ago in order to impose a two-tiered pension system and increased health care costs that cancel out pay increases. These same employees are working around the clock in dangerous conditions in order to restore power.

Then there are Verizon workers, who went on strike in August 2011 after the telecommunication giant, also incredibly profitable, demanded cuts in their pension, health care and retirement benefits. They are currently working 12-hour days repairing the damage done to phone and Internet lines in New York City.

Just as Hurricane Sandy revealed the importance of dealing with climate change, it has also revealed the vital importance of public-sector and utility workers. Sandy has showed that these workers, so often demonized and attacked, are so central to making this city, and our society, run.
Not only that, but the closure of grocery stores and restaurants across much of the city highlighted the vital work performed by a largely immigrant workforce for low wages in New York City's service industry.

While a general strike actively demonstrates the collective power of the working class to shut down production, Hurricane Sandy illustrates--by disrupting the everyday labor of millions of workers--the essential role performed by New York City's under-compensated and under-appreciated working class.

The nightmare of all nightmares

Published in Socialist Worker.

HURRICANE SANDY, which hit land in New Jersey on Monday evening, may be the worst storm to strike the East Coast in recorded history. It has already claimed more than 50 lives in the Caribbean, and it is certain to cause billions of dollars--maybe tens of billions of dollars--in damage in states across the Northeastern U.S.

But the threat of an even greater catastrophe remains--a nuclear nightmare. The effects of the storm could combine to produce the kind of disaster that took place at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan in March 2011--itself the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl 25 years before.

According to a Time magazine report, Sandy--whose impact has been magnified because it collided, as it hit land, with a cold front crossing the Northeast--will cause deadly flooding:

The real danger comes from the potentially huge storm surges the hurricane could cause along coastal areas. [The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] put the storm surge threat from Sandy at 5.7 on [a 6-point scale]--greater than any hurricane observed between 1969 and 2005, including Category 5 storms like Katrina and Andrew. NOAA's National Hurricane Center says that "life-threatening storm surge flooding" is expected along the mid-Atlantic coast.

And to top it off, the storm is hitting at the full moon, when ocean tides are at their highest point--which will make the flooding even worse.

Some 60 million people will feel the impact of the storm before it's over. Already, half a million people have been evacuated from coastal areas where the storm surge could hit 10 feet or more. Preparations for disaster relief by local, state and federal authorities are unprecedented.

But there's no preparing for the nightmare of all nightmares--if the so-called "Frankenstorm" causes a crisis at one of about two dozen nuclear power plants that are vulnerable to damage.

The fact that this scenario looms above the other tragedies caused by Sandy is further evidence--if more was needed--that nuclear power is too dangerous to be tolerated, and has to go.

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THE NUCLEAR plants are built to withstand a hurricane, but the greatest danger, according to former nuclear industry executive Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, comes from the possibility of a loss of outside power, which is likely to occur up and down the East Coast during the storm.

Gundersen has worked in nuclear energy for 40 years, including as a licensed reactor operator, and has overseen projects at 70 nuclear power plants across the U.S. On the Fairewinds podcast on Sunday, Gundersen pointed out that this is "what happened at Fukushima Daiichi; the offsite power was eliminated."

Even if the plants shut down, according to Gunderson, "what Fukushima taught us is that doesn't stop the decay heat. There is still as much as 5 percent of the power from the power plant that doesn't go away...For that, you need the [backup diesel generators] to keep the plant cool."

Gundersen said that many plants have two or three backup diesel generators, but he says he has encountered situations where one generator failed, meaning that one other generator was all that was available against the possibility of a disastrous meltdown.

Speaking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on Monday, Gundersen warned:

A bunch of these plants are in refueling right now. And when you're in a refueling outage, you are not required to have all your diesels running. You can be tearing apart one and only have one diesel available. So the concern is that, should they lose offsite power, all of this heat needs to be removed, and you're relying on just one diesel to keep the nuclear reactor cool.

He continued:

The biggest problem, as I see it right now, is the Oyster Creek plant, which is on Barnegat Bay in New Jersey. That appears to be right about the center of [where the storm will hit].

Oyster Creek is the same design, but even older than Fukushima Daiichi unit one. It's in a refueling outage. That means that all the nuclear fuel is not in the nuclear reactor, but it's over in the spent-fuel pool. And in that condition, there's no backup power for the spent-fuel pools. So if Oyster Creek were to lose its offsite power--and, frankly, that's really likely--there would be no way cool that nuclear fuel that's in the fuel pool until they get the power re-established.

Gundersen explained that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not require nuclear power plants to be able to cool fuel pools with their backup generators. On the Fairewinds podcast, he explained that this would require much larger generators, which the nuclear plants' for-profit operators don't want to purchase.

In other words--once again--profits come before safety.

If the fuel pools get too hot, Gundersen explained, it's possible for the steel lining of the pool to "unzip"--and for the humidity released by the boiling water to damage the structure of the building housing it, which can lead to the release of radiation. Such releases have lasting impacts. New reports indicate that the Fukushima plant may still be leaking radiation into the ocean, contaminating fish--some 17 months after the disaster.

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OYSTER CREEK is the oldest operating nuclear power plant in the U.S. It was built to operate for just 40 years after going online in 1969, but its operating license was recently renewed in spite of protest from area residents and environmentalists.

As longtime anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman wrote about the decaying Oyster Creek plant several years ago:

Perched 50 miles east of Philadelphia and 75 miles south of New York City, Oyster Creek could not be licensed at all by today's standards. Its reactor containment was never required to withstand a jet crash and is far flimsier than the lid that blew off Chernobyl Unit Four in the Ukraine in 1986, releasing massive quantities of radiation into the surrounding countryside. Because Oyster Creek's old core is laden with far more residual radiation, a breach could blanket the densely populated American northeast with an apocalyptic cloud of death and destruction.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sent inspectors to Oyster Creek and eight other nuclear power plants for "enhanced oversight" during the storm, including Indian Point just north of New York City, and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the site of an accidental partial meltdown in 1979.

On Monday night, the NRC declared an alert at Oyster Creek "due to water exceeding certain high water level criteria in the plant’s water intake structure.” Although NRC officials emphasized that the alert status was the second-lowest of the NRC's four action levels, it admitted that "Water level is rising in the intake structure due to a combination of a rising tide, wind direction and storm surge."

More than 20 million people live within a 50-mile radius of Indian Point, which sits on the Hudson River just 25 miles north of New York City. The Hudson is expected to feel the effects of the storm surge from Sandy.

Entergy, the Fortune 500 company that operates Indian Point for a profit, claims the plant will be safe despite the dangers posed by the hurricane. But these claims should be taken with a grain of salt--especially after an un-redacted version of an NRC report, leaked to the press, showed evidence that the NRC and power plant operators have "misled the public for years about the severity of the threat" of flooding to U.S. nuclear power plants located near dams.

Indian Point hardly has trustworthy record on safety. Studies have found that "thyroid cancer rates in those four counties around Indian Point are also among the highest in the U.S., with a rate of thyroid cancer that is 66% above the U.S. average, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

As of this writing on Monday afternoon, none of the plants in the path of the storm have shut down. Again, this is a case of corporations putting profits before people. As Gundersen pointed out on the Fairewinds podcast, "It would be better if the operators, instead of waiting for the power to fail, shut the power plant down ahead of time." A planned, gradual shutdown places much less stress on the plants' emergency systems than a sudden shutdown.

If the worst did occur at Oyster Creek or another plant, the storm will make evacuation efforts especially difficult. As of Sunday at 7 p.m., New York City subways and buses were shut down, along with Amtrak, Metronorth and New Jersey transit. Major bridges and highways in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut were closed, and U.S. Highway 6/202, a main artery in the case of an evacuation related to Indian Point, has been shut down through Wednesday at noon.

And it goes without saying that a nuclear disaster would take place while emergency and disaster response services are already stretched to the maximum dealing with the devastation caused by the hurricane.

The odds are that Hurricane Sandy will pass without causing a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. But the fact that this is even a possibility highlights the insanity of continuing to operate these plants, let alone in close proximity to several of the largest cities in the country.

That all this is happening in the days leading up to an election where both President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney support using public funds to build new nuclear power plants reveals the need for a mass movement for a nuclear-free society.

Chris Williams contributed to this article.

Operation Get Rid of the Vote

Published in Socialist Worker.

IT'S ELECTION time, so we'll be hearing plenty of pious tributes to the wonders of the U.S. political system. From members of both parties, as well as the media that cover them, it's a constant refrain that America is the "world's greatest democracy"--where citizens from every corner of society determine how their country is governed with their votes.

Only when you examine these claims, you find a completely different picture. The system is supposedly based on "one person, one vote"--only millions and millions of people are excluded from voting at all, while a tiny minority of people who run businesses and political institutions have considerably more influence over Washington politics than one vote gives them.

The myth of "one person, one vote" in the U.S. has been thrown into particularly sharp relief during Election 2012 by legislation, pushed in various states by Republicans, that seeks to limit who will cast a ballot. These so-called "voter ID" laws are justified as a measure to stop vote fraud--but in reality, they are explicitly aimed at disenfranchising likely supporters of Democratic candidates.

And after Barack Obama's lead in opinion polls slipped following the first presidential debate, the push for "voter ID" laws suddenly seemed like it had the potential to tip the presidential election.

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IN OCTOBER, federal courts blocked enforcement of voter ID laws in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, at least for the 2012 election. Weeks earlier, a federal court blocked a similar law in Texas, with judges ruling that the legislation "imposes strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor, and racial minorities in Texas," according to the Houston Chronicle.

Still, these are only a few of the voter ID laws now in place. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, nearly 1,000 voter ID proposals have been introduced since 2001, and a dozen states passed or strengthened such legislation in the last two years.

Voter ID laws fall into multiple categories. "Strict photo ID" laws--which will apply in four states for the 2012 election and are pending, due to legal challenges, in five others--require people to show a photo ID in order to cast a ballot. In six other states, and one more pending a legal challenge, a photo ID is required, but voters without one may cast a provisional ballot that will be counted if it meets various other requirements. Three more states require some form of ID, but not necessarily a photo ID, in order to vote. In 13 others, voters are asked for identification, but it isn't required in order to cast a ballot.

In all but one of the states that tightened their ID restrictions in the past two years, the proposals were introduced by Republicans. Over half of the bills were sponsored by lawmakers affiliated with the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), according to an analysis by News21.

ALEC, which created model voter ID legislation in 2009, is the same conservative organization behind the "Stand Your Ground" and "Castle Doctrine" laws that have been used to claim self-defense in the shootings of unarmed Black people like Trayvon Martin in Florida and Bo Morrison in Wisconsin.

The voter ID legislation has a clear aim: Depress the votes of people of color and other groups--young, poor, and working class voters--who are more likely to support Democrats.

Sponsors of voter ID legislation claim the proposals are intended to prevent vote fraud. But actual cases of vote fraud are so rare that this explanation rings hollow. Studies of 2004 elections in Ohio and Washington state found that vote fraud occurred in 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent of cases, respectively. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, "National Weather Service data shows that Americans are struck and killed by lightning about as often."

Ironically, it is the Republicans who face the most high-profile allegations of vote fraud in this election. The Republican National Committee recently had to cut ties with Strategic Allied Consultants, whose founder was accused of "dumping registration forms filled out by Democrats," according to a local Fox News report. The allegations are based on video in which an employee admits on tape that she was seeking to register only Romney voters. The RNC had paid the company $3.1 million.

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THE REASON for Republican enthusiasm for voter ID laws becomes clearer when you see who is disenfranchised by such laws and other attempts to discourage voting. Voter ID laws, like poll taxes and literacy tests in the Jim Crow South, disproportionately affect people of color.

A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that "25 percent of African-American voting-age citizens have no current government-issued photo ID, compared to 8 percent of white voting-age citizens." Those earning less than $35,000 a year are twice as likely to lack a photo ID--the same percentage applies to people aged 18 to 24.

Some Republicans don't even hide their intentions. As Ari Berman reported in the Nation, the chair of the GOP in Franklin County said he opposed expanding hours for early voting because "we shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban--read African American--voter-turnout machine."
Over the summer, former Florida Republican Party Chair Jim Greer said GOP officials in his state had talked about suppressing the Black vote, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

For the racists of the Republican Party, voter ID laws are a win-win. They will place new obstacles in the way of people who are unlikely to vote Republican. And by raising the specter of vote fraud, the laws provide another means to rile up and mobilize the GOP base to come out on Election Day.

While the rulings in South Carolina and Pennsylvania will prevent implementation of those voter ID laws before the 2012 elections, they haven't stopped them for good or even prevented them from having an impact on the election.

For example, according to the Columbia Free Times, the federal court decision ruled that the South Carolina law didn't discriminate against minorities. It postponed enforcement because "there wouldn't be enough time to practically implement any changes here before the November 6 elections," according to the Free Times.

Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Judge Robert Simpson ordered a temporary injunction to prevent enforcement of the voter ID law in 2012--but this could be reversed and the law put in place for the next election. In addition, Simpson's ruling doesn't prevent election officials from asking for ID--only that they can't prevent people from voting if they don't have it. In other words, election officials could still find ways to discourage those without ID from voting.

The U.S. Supreme Court has only ruled once on voter ID laws--in 2008, the justices upheld a strict photo ID law in Indiana. This does not bode well for those seeking to overturn the South Carolina law through the courts alone.

The recent rulings against voter ID laws are at least in part the result of efforts of groups like the NAACP and ACLU to mobilize protests against the laws. But it will take a longer and more determined struggle--one that looks beyond the 2012 election--to turn the tide.

Such a struggle, in order to win a real victory over those who would deny the vote to people of color, will have to go beyond voter ID laws to take on the policy of felony disenfranchisement. As Elizabeth Schulte wrote in Socialistworker.org: "Some 5.3 million Americans with felony convictions--and in several states, with misdemeanor convictions--are barred from voting...[m]ore than 1.4 million of the disenfranchised are African American."

Winning that kind of struggle will require challenging politicians of both parties who, in their eagerness to appear "tough on crime," have been willing to strip voting rights from those caught in the web of the New Jim Crow.

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EXPANDING THE right to vote in the U.S. has been a struggle since the founding of the country, when only white male property owners had the franchise. Some of the most important struggles in American history--the women's suffrage movement and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South, for example--revolved around this very question.

What the current situation tells us is that this struggle is far from over. Even if voting ID laws are turned back and felony disenfranchisement abolished, about 20 million immigrants--documented and undocumented--are denied a vote in the country where they live, work and raise their families.

However, making "one person, one vote" a reality in the U.S. will be just one change among many needed to achieve real democracy in America.

Under the two-party system that prevails in the "world's greatest democracy," voters--even if they can cast a ballot unhindered--are effectively restricted in who they can vote for. Their vote is generally limited to candidates of the Democratic or Republican Parties, both of which are heavily funded by the 1 percent and serve their interests.

As a result, voters often encounter elections where neither main candidate represents overwhelmingly popular positions, such as ending the war in Afghanistan or curbing the power of the health care industry. Voters never had a chance to cast a ballot on whether the Bush tax cuts for the rich should expire. Nor does the electorate have any way of affecting what happens in workplaces or the broader economy.

Likewise, there isn't any effective way to use the ballot box to hold politicians accountable for the promises they do make. For example, union members who want to punish Barack Obama for breaking his promise to campaign for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act can hardly do so by voting for Romney, who would only do more to destroy workers' living standards.

Of course, voters are technically free to cast their ballots for a third-party candidate, but election laws make it very difficult for third parties to even run candidates for office. Those who do qualify for the ballot are certain to be ignored as an irrelevance by the mainstream media.

The collusion between the media and the major parties to exclude dissenting voices from the election campaign was illustrated this month with the leaking of an agreement between the two parties to ensure the presidential debates went as planned, with no surprises or difficult questions. When Green Party candidates Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala tried to enter the second debate at Hofstra University, they were arrested and handcuffed to chairs for eight hours.

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WHEN IT comes to undemocratic institutions, the clearest example of all is the Electoral College system that actually selects the president, rather than a democratic vote. The Electoral College was specifically designed by the "Founding Fathers" who wrote the Constitution to be a safeguard against voters electing a president opposed by the elite.

Actually, the story of the formation of the U.S. political system shows that the Founding Fathers--who were mainly Southern slave owners or Northern merchants--were deeply suspicious of democracy, and they constructed the Constitution to limit its scope.

Their other chief concern in writing the Constitution was to safeguard the right to "property"--including owning men and women as slaves. Thus, James Madison, known at the time as the "Father of the Constitution," worried in the Federalist Papers that without strict protections for the privileges of property owners, "the most numerous party" would be able to "sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens."

Some of the "Founding Fathers" went even further. For example, Alexander Hamilton proposed that both senators and the president be elected, but serve for life, like Supreme Court justices.

As the late people's historian Howard Zinn said in an interview:

The Constitutional Convention was animated by the rebellions in Massachusetts and other places, [which] caused the Founding Fathers to decide to get together in Philadelphia and draw up a document that would create a national government strong enough to deal with rebellions like this. And you have General Knox writing to [George Washington] before the Constitutional Convention, saying, "These soldiers of the revolution come back, and they think because they fought in the revolution, they deserve an equal share of the wealth of this country."

A genuine democracy must be able to achieve justice and equality for the oppressed and the exploited. But extending democracy to every part of our society where injustice, inequality and exploitation are found will require a determined struggle.

Testifying against Israel's apartheid

Published in Socialist Worker. Written with Daphna Thier.

NEARLY 1,000 people gathered in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in lower Manhattan on October 6 and 7 to hear two days of testimony on the complicity of the U.S. government and the United Nations in Israel's past and present crimes against the Palestinian people.

The testimony took place before the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. Modeled on a tribunal to investigate U.S. war crimes in Vietnam organized by British philosopher Bertrand Russell, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine is an effort, embraced by renowned writers and thinkers, to expose the barbarism and oppression against Palestinians carried out by the Israeli government and its allies.

A statement from the Tribunal said that this session in New York City was the last of four that "[aimed] to bring attention to the complicity and responsibility of various national, international and corporate actors in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the perpetuation of Israel's impunity under international law."

The New York session focused particularly on the role of the UN and the U.S. in supporting or failing to prevent or punish Israel's crimes.

Since it has no legal authority, the tribunal relies on its "members' prestige, professionalism and commitment to human rights." The jury for the New York session included activists, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, legal professionals and scholars, and prominent intellectuals, ranging from Native Americans to African Americans born in the Jim Crow South, to people from South Africa and Northern Ireland.

The week before the New York session, it was announced that musician Roger Waters, best known as a member of Pink Floyd, had joined the jury. Waters said in an interview that he had joined the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel a few years ago after he was contacted about canceling a concert planned for Tel Aviv. "It's an absolute tragedy that Palestinians have been thrown off land their families have been living on for thousands of years," Waters said.

This tribunal session was held in the U.S. to call attention to the American government's role as key funder and enabler of Israel's crimes, but also to connect the struggle of the Palestinians with that of African Americans and Native Americans.

Harry Belafonte, who attended the Saturday session, said the connection between civil rights for African Americans and justice for Palestinians is "a link that I've always recognized...In the midst of our struggles from the civil rights movement to the liberation of South Africa, we have found great synergy in our interests as oppressed people of color. Both benefitted from the presence of each other and we continue to experience the need for one another."

Organizers of the tribunal aimed not only to shed further light on Israel's crimes, but to build connections between struggles against oppression across the globe and inspire others to act in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

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THE FIRST day of testimony began with Israeli historian Ilan Pappé discussing the impact of early Zionism on Palestine, leading up to the ethnic cleansing that preceded the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Pappé testified there was a thriving Arab society in Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel. He said early Zionist colonizers viewed the native Palestinians as "usurpers" and "foreign agents," assigning them the Orwellian category of "alien native." These racist ideas remain "at the heart of Israeli Zionist policies towards the Palestinians," Pappé said.

The Zionist movement decided "to ethnically cleanse Palestine...a crime against humanity [such] that only genocide is above it," he said.

Immigration lawyer Susan Akram detailed the Palestinian refugee crisis and the unwillingness or inability of the United Nations to resolve it. There are now 6.8 million Palestinian refugees--half of the world's refugee population--most of them people who were expelled in 1948 and their descendants.

Akram explained that while the UN believes all refugees have the right to return to the homes from which they were expelled, it has not acted to force Israel to respect this right.

Pappé testified that while many falsely trace the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the 1967 war and Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, in reality, 1967 represented a continuation of the colonial project to establish "Greater Israel." In fact, the desire to take Gaza and the West Bank was a core Zionist aim that went unfulfilled in 1948, according to Pappé.

As law professor John Quigley testified, the U.S. "covered up what it knew about the run-up" to the 1967 war, which began with Israel's surprise bombing raids on Egypt. According to Quigley, neither U.S. nor Israeli intelligence believed that Egypt was going to attack Israel. Thus, the 1967 war wasn't defensive, as Israel and the U.S. have always claimed, but a war of aggression, in violation to the UN Charter that Israel is a signatory to.

Journalist and activist Ben White testified that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is an ongoing process. He said the view that Palestinians within Israel represent a "demographic threat" is "commonplace among Israeli academics, think tanks, politicians, laypersons." White testified to the high rates of poverty among Palestinians, and that due to Israeli policy, "there is no practical means for the Palestinians to develop and independent economy."

Vera Gowlland-Debbas, of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, took up the question of the legal responsibility of the UN to enforce international and human rights law, including the issue of UN complicity in upholding a double standard for Israel.

She pointed out that when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the UN Security Council authorized the use of force, but the body has failed to act in response to Israeli crimes such as the construction of the separation wall in the West Bank or Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09, the barbaric assault on Gaza.

Suzanne Adely, a lawyer in attendance at the tribunal and member of the National Lawyers Guild and Defend the Egyptian Revolution Committee in New York, said in an interview, "We can't just say it's a double standard. Actually, structures such as the UN have been intentionally created by capitalist and imperialist entities to perpetuate and control this system, not make it more just."

Raji Sourani, a leading Palestinian human rights attorney from Gaza, was supposed to testify about conditions under occupation. However, the U.S. State Department refused him permission to enter the country. Instead, Jeanne Mirer, president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, spoke about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza that has resulted from the Israeli siege.

She described Gaza as an "open air prison for 1.6 million people...Closures imposed [by Israel] are illegal collective punishment." Mirer denounced Operation Cast Lead, during which Israel killed as many as 1,400 Palestinians, as an "illegal war of aggression." Some 95 percent of factories in Gaza are closed because Israel won't allow in necessary raw materials, unemployment is around 50 percent, 1.1 million Gazans rely on food assistance, and two-thirds live in deep poverty.

Mirer spoke ominously about Gaza's water supply, which is under threat because of a lack of sanitation equipment and supplies banned by the Israeli blockade. "If massive investments in water treatment and desalinization plants are not taken immediately, the whole population of Gaza will be subject to a water crisis of genocidal proportions in a very few years," Mirer said.

The end of Ilan Pappé's presentation stood out during the first day of testimony, as he made a passionate appeal for a one-state solution as the only just solution:

The idea of two states is a Zionist idea...do not shrink Palestine into 20 percent of its geography and do not shrink the Palestinian people into 50 percent of who they are. If we are going to seek a just and peaceful solution...we should include everyone who is affected and who was affected so that we can build together a stable future.

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THE SECOND day began with Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer residing in Ramallah, who explained how the U.S.-brokered "peace process" has helped to legitimize Israel's crimes.
She explained how the Oslo Accords of 1993 aided the annexation of large parts of the West Bank to Israel and legitimized this in the eyes of the international community. According to Buttu, "34 separate countries established relations with Israel...so rather than Israel feeling disdain that it was still an occupier and a dispossessor, it was now suddenly being rewarded."

Katherine Gallagher a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, spoke about how the U.S. uses its veto power as a permanent member of the UN Security Council to protect Israel from accountability for its war crimes and other violations of international law. Of the 82 times the U.S has vetoed UN resolutions, over half were to protect Israel.

Noam Chomsky testified via Skype on the history of the relationship between U.S. interests in the region and its policies regarding the Israel/Palestine question. He began by acknowledging the 30-year anniversary of the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Lebanon that left roughly 20,000 Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians dead, including the massacre of as many as 3,500 people at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Phyllis Bennis, co-founder of the U.S Campaign to End Israeli Occupation, testified that public opinion continues to shift in favor of those working for justice for Palestinians--but also that public opinion has limited influence on U.S. policy. "When we look at the history of the United States, we see the legacy of genocide, of slavery, of disempowerment," Bennis said. "But parallel to that we see another history...a history of resistance, right from the beginning."

Craig and Cindy Corrie, the parents of Rachel Corrie, the 23 year-old U.S. activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, made a surprise visit to address the tribunal.

Cindy Corrie spoke about the need to focus on civilian deaths, speaking of several dozen Palestinians who have been killed by Israel for nonviolently protesting the separation wall in the West Bank. "They all must be remembered," she said. "We must have accountability."

Craig Corrie said, "If you back over my car, I know you can replace my car. But you run over my daughter, I don't know what justice means. You have to prevent it from happening. So we have to keep preventing and preempting in our justice."

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AT A press conference held the day after the tribunal wrapped up, the jury's findings were announced. As in the previous sessions, the jury found Israel guilty of numerous violations of international law, including violation of the Palestinians' right to self-determination and refugees' right to return, as well as the "acquisition of territory through war."

The jury charged Israel with violating international humanitarian law prohibiting mistreatment, torture and prolonged administrative detention of Palestinians, and it confirmed the judgment of international activists that Israel is an apartheid state. "Because of their systematic, numerous, flagrant and sometimes, criminal character, these violations are of a particularly high gravity," the jury found.

The U.S. government has been guilty of complicity with Israel's crimes, according to the Russell Tribunal jury: "Since the Six Day War in 1967, the U.S. has provided unequivocal economic, military and diplomatic support to Israel in order to establish a qualitative military superiority over its Arab neighbors in violation of its own domestic law."

The U.S was found guilty of "obstructing accountability for violations of the Geneva Conventions" and "abusing its veto power within the Security Council," and it was charged with "continuing to provide economic support for the settlement expansion" and "failing to condition military aid to Israel...based on its compliance with human rights norms."

The United Nations was convicted for its failure to prevent Israel's violation of international law, which the UN is legally mandated to uphold.

The jury called for civil and criminal litigation against the perpetrators of the many crimes about which it passed judgment--and for the reform of the UN, including abolition of the veto power for permanent members of the Security Council.

Finally, the Russell Tribunal jury called for the mobilization of activists and trade unions for justice in Palestine, and for worldwide involvement in the BDS movement against Israel until the country complies with international law.

Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, addressed the tribunal at the end of the second day. He called on unions in the U.S. to take a stand in support of the Palestinian people as they had against South African apartheid.

Vavi said in an interview that international solidarity on the part of unions and others is "absolutely critical. Any form of denial of human rights anywhere constitutes a reason for us to extend our hands of solidarity across borders."