Raising our voices for Trayvon

Published at Socialist Worker. Co-written with Julian Guerrero.

THOUSANDS of people gathered in Union Square in New York City March 21 for a "Million Hoodie March" to demand justice for Trayvon Martin, as outrage at his racist murder continues to spread across the country and the world.

Trayvon was gunned down in the central Florida town of Sanford in late February as he walked to the home of his father's fiancé. His killer was George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who was patrolling a gated community when he spotted Trayvon. To judge from chilling 911 recordings, Zimmerman decided that the African American 17-year-old was "suspicious," began stalking him and then shot him at point-blank range.

Police questioned Zimmerman, and then released him because he claimed he killed Trayvon in "self-defense"--though Zimmerman outweighed Trayvon by nearly 100 pounds and was armed with a handgun, while Trayvon possessed only a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Nearly a month after the crime, Zimmerman has still not been arrested.

Trayvon's parents led the protest in New York City. Demonstrators wore hoodies as a show of solidarity--Trayvon was wearing one when he was murdered--and to dramatize the statement from the organizers' Facebook page that "a Black person in a hoodie isn't automatically 'suspicious.'"
New York's was the largest, but not the only demonstration to express the growing anger at Trayvon's killing--and more actions are planned in cities around the country in the coming days.

In Orlando, only a few miles from Sanford, hundreds rallied at a protest organized by the Florida Civil Rights Association to demand that the state to revoke the concealed weapons permit issued to George Zimmerman. Later that night, in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood, more than 200 supporters gathered, carrying bags of Skittles and cans of ice tea. "I wanted to come 'armed and dangerous,'" said teacher Suneeta Williams.

The night before, in Sanford itself, some 1,000 people packed a town meeting led by NAACP President Ben Jealous, along with leaders of the ACLU and Nation of Islam. As Jealous told the crowd, "I stand here as a son, father, uncle who is tired of being scared for our boys. I'm tired of telling our young men how they can't dress, where they can't go and how they can't behave."

There were plans for another protest in Sanford on Thursday, this one led by Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network. In Atlanta, activists booked several buses to make the nearly eight-hour drive to Sanford--and sold every seat in advance.
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AT UNION Square, thousands of people turned out for the quickly organized protest. The multiracial crowd wore hoodies, scores of people defiantly held up bags of Skittles. One Black youth of elementary school age held a sign asking, "Am I next?" A man held a sign that read, "Racism is not a fringe issue," and listed, "George Zimmerman, NYPD, Newt Gingrich, Jan Brewer, and on and on and on..."

As one protester, Aisha Mays, said:

Things like this happen all the time because Black men are targets. You see the worst of this here, but you also see it everywhere--in the schools, the workplaces. I'm glad that people are here. We have to continue these speakouts and rallies, we have to continue to talk about these issues and bring them out in the open, we have to break down these racist barriers. We have to take action.

Alia, a white woman who attended the rally with her 7-year-old son Sam, said "I've got kids, too, and I know that Trayvon was somebody's baby. We have to be here for them because of that. This is the only way to have a better world."

Sam added: "I'm here because I'm really angry at the man who killed Trayvon. He must be crazy, out of his mind to do what he did. We should protest the government until it gives up and stops racism!"

Speakers at the protest highlighted the racist double standard of police doing a background check and drug/alcohol test on Trayvon, but not on Zimmerman, the shooter. A lawyer for Trayvon's family pointed out that without the support from activists and the hundreds of thousands who signed petitions demanding justice for Trayvon, the case would never have gained the prominence it has.
After he finished speaking, the crowd parted and began chanting "Justice for Trayvon," as Trayvon's parents made their way to the front to speak.

Trayvon's father, Tracy Martin, said, "If Trayvon was alive, he'd be on these steps with you rallying for justice. Trayvon Martin did matter. We're aren't going to stop until we get justice for Trayvon!"
His mother Sybrina Fulton thanked the crowd for their support. Choking back tears, she said, "Our son did not commit any crimes...Our son is your son. Justice for Trayvon!"
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CHANTING "WE are Trayvon Martin!" the crowd in its thousands poured into the streets to march for justice.

This echoed the chant of "We are Troy Davis!" that rang out in Union Square six months before as about 1,000 people marched in the "Day of Outrage" protest on September 22, the day after the state of Georgia executed Troy Anthony Davis, an innocent African American man. A number of people at the rally for Trayvon had marched for Troy.

Initially, the march made its way west down 14th Street, taking over two full lanes of traffic. Demonstrators chanted, "They don't care if Black kids die, protect and serve, that's a lie!" Police attempted to corral marchers back onto the sidewalk. They succeeded for a brief time, but were overwhelmed as the crowd took the streets again. Eventually, marchers made their way back to Union Square.

New York has also seen growing anger and action against police abuse and violence at home. There is a growing movement against the racist "stop and frisk" policy of the NYPD, whose 2,000 or so victims each day are overwhelmingly Black or Latino. Plus, activists in the Bronx have organized a number of demonstrations this winter against the police murder of Ramarley Graham, an unarmed Black teenager killed in his own home, and the beating of another Black teen, Jateik Reed.

The spirited demonstration for Trayvon is a further sign that a new movement for racial justice is emerging in New York, as it is in other cities. As protester Lupe Rodriguez said, "People are fed up about hearing these stories of people of color being beat down and shot down by cops. There have been too many of them brought to light in the last couple of months, and Trayvon is the tipping point for these communities."

One influence on the new movement is Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow, which argues that mass incarceration of people of color is a system of racist social control akin to Jim Crow segregation and slavery. The many signs and chants that drew connections between the murder of Trayvon and instances of police brutality and racism made it clear that people don't view this as an isolated incident but as a broader system of racism and injustice.

As another marcher, Armani Williams, said:

It makes me really angry to be a young Black male who knows that in 2012, I can be shot and killed, and the police don't do anything...Black people are sick of how police terrorize us...This country was built on racism, and honestly, I feel that if the roles were reversed, if it was a white boy named Travis Martin who was killed by a Black man called George Jenkins, without a doubt, the killer in this instance would be in jail right now.

Nicole Colson contributed to this article.

Graduating into never-ending debt

Published at Socialist Worker and the Indypendent.

OVERWHELMING STUDENT debt has become a source of worry and financial distress for many millions of people--and even worse for the one in five people with student loan debt who are classified as delinquent.

And the problem will only get worse as a new generation of students and recent graduates, carrying a bigger loan burden than ever before, struggles to find work in an economy that, despite statistics showing job growth, still seems like the Great Recession, especially for young workers.

The scale of the student crisis has even caused mainstream financial commentators to suggest that a supposed "student loan bubble" will cause as much trouble as the "mortgage bubble" did a few years ago. But the real pain won't be suffered by bankers and rich investors, but by ordinary working people dealing with the effects of a higher education system where the burden of the costs of education has fallen increasingly onto students and their families.

Early this month, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report titled "Grading Student Loans," which analyzed the student debt crisis in the U.S.

The report revealed that student loan debt stands at a whopping $870 billion, with 27 percent of borrowers who are in repayment past due and 21 percent classified as delinquent. Total debt on student loans easily surpassed total debt on credit cards ($693 billion) and total debt on auto loans ($730 billion), according to the study.

Some 37 million people in the U.S. carry student debt, with an average of $23,500 per borrower. However, the median amount owed--which means half of all borrowers owe more than this amount and half less--is $12,800.

The median is so much lower than the average because a relatively small number of borrowers carry extreme amounts of debt, skewing the average. According to the New York Fed's report: "About one-quarter of borrowers owe more than $28,000; about 10 percent of borrowers owe more than $54,000. The proportion of borrowers who owe more than $100,000 is 3.1 percent, and 0.45 percent of borrowers, or 167,000 people, owe more than $200,000."

In other words, about a million people have student loan debts for an amount equivalent to the cost of a house in many parts of the country.
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AND THE crisis is worse than even these numbers suggest. The figure of 27 percent who have missed payments likely understates the severity of the crisis, given that nearly half (47 percent) of borrowers have student loans that are deferred or in forbearance--which means that they don't yet have to make payments on their debt.

These are disproportionately young, current students or recent graduates, a group facing record levels of debt--the class of 2011 was the most indebted on record--and high rates of unemployment.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the middle of last summer, less than half of the aged 16-24 had paying jobs--the 48.8 percent figure was the lowest level of youth employment since statistics started being kept in 1948. And nearly half of youth who do have jobs are employed in the "hospitality" (including food service) and retail industries--generally low-paying jobs with few benefits or little job security.

As in the broader employment statistics, Black youth--who also carry higher average student loan debt and are less likely to graduate--suffered a worse situation, with the official (and highly understated) unemployment at 31 percent last summer, nearly twice the overall official youth jobless rate of 18.1 percent.

Given this situation, it's a sure thing that when payments on the loans of current students and recent graduates begin to come due, rates of past due and delinquent borrowers will shoot up. Hedge fund investors who profit by betting on student loans expect default rates for current graduates to be as high as 40 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The student debt crisis is a result of decades of tuition hikes, which have outpaced the rate of inflation by four times, alongside cuts to grant-based financial aid and funding for public higher education. Degree programs that students could pay for with a part-time minimum wage job two generations ago now require students to go into massive debt.

This in turn reflects broader trends of the privatization of public higher education and a long-term shift of the costs of education further onto students and their families. The rise in student loan debt is part and parcel of the last three decades of neoliberalism, as working families facing stagnant incomes and rising costs for necessities like housing, health care and education, went into debt to maintain their standard of living.

But unlike credit card or mortgage debt, it is nearly impossible to get out from under most student loan debt without paying it off.

In the case of federally guaranteed loans, which make up the bulk of student loans, lenders can even garnish borrowers' Social Security checks, and loans can balloon to multiple times the original amount if borrowers fall behind on payments and accrue penalties.

Sara from New York City, an adjunct professor who barely earns enough to make ends meet, has $200 taken from her paycheck by a collection agency who bought her loan from Sallie Mae. As Sara put it:

I often feel like my entire life is spent trying to figure out ways to make money rather than focusing on finishing my degree...a single medical expense wiped out the small amount of money that I usually have saved...Going to a great university, getting into one of the best programs in my field at the time--all of this seems to be worthless, because I still spend all of my time worrying about getting by.

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STUDENT LOAN debt is a crisis in the sense that it represents a human disaster for a generation of students that entered the labor market at a time when unemployment was at the highest rate it's been in decades. These graduates, labeled a "lost generation" by many commentators, face a future of working low-paying jobs they are overqualified for in order to pay back loans for degrees that mean little at a time when the fastest-growing industries don't require workers with a college education.

But it is also a potential crisis for the financial system. Some media sources, including the Washington Post, have even asked whether student loans represent the next "debt bomb" on the verge of bursting, a threat akin to the housing bubble of a few years ago.

The "student loan bubble" is not insignificant. But student loans don't pose anything like the threat to the economy that the housing bubble did. As economist Dean Baker explained:

At the peak of the housing bubble in 2006, the residential housing market in the United States was worth more than $22 trillion. It has since lost close to $8 trillion in real wealth, which is the basis of the current downturn...

[The] student loan market is now valued at $867 billion, less than 1/25th the size of the housing market at its bubble peak. Furthermore, all of it will not default, and the defaults that do occur will be spread over many years. And the government will cover most of the losses since it is guaranteed.

In addition to student loans being a fraction of the size of the mortgage bubble, banks and other private investors hold a proportionally much-smaller stake in student loans than they do in mortgage debt.

For example, in 2006, major financial institutions held nearly $5 trillion in mortgage debt, and over $6.6 trillion was in mortgage pools or trusts, collateral for the mortgage-backed securities at the center of the housing crisis. This represented over 80 percent of outstanding mortgage debt, which exceeded U.S.'s gross domestic product--the value of all goods and services produced in the country in a year. When a chunk of this massive amount of debt went bad, it threatened to bring down the world financial system.

By comparison, the market for securities backed by student loans is less than $250 billion, a significant sum, but a small fraction of the trillions in mortgage-backed securities.
So student loans don't pose the systemic threat to the financial system that the mortgage bubble did. But that fact certainly doesn't ease the human suffering caused by the student debt burden, which is akin to a modern-day form of indentured servitude.

Young people are going into debt at 6.8 percent interest--the current rate for federal student loans--just to receive an education that is now a basic requirement for the vast majority of jobs with decent pay and benefits. But when the banks were in trouble, they each got to borrow tens of billions from the Federal Reserve at effective interest of 0 percent, or close to it--and many made a profit by lending it right back to the U.S. government to finance the deficit.

But it does not have to be this way. While the student loan crisis is very real, it is also manufactured. As left-wing economist Doug Henwood points out:

It would not be hard at all to make higher education completely free in the USA. It accounts for not quite 2 percent of GDP. The personal share, about 1 percent of GDP, is a third of the income of the richest 10,000 households in the U.S., or three months of Pentagon spending. It's less than four months of what we waste on administrative costs by not having a single-payer health care finance system."

The money is there; what is lacking is the political will, and that will only change if people fight back.

The rise of the Occupy struggle last fall showed the potential of movements built from the ground up to capture the imagination of millions of people who want change. Grassroots action alone represents the only hope for those enduring the heavy burden of student debt. We need to put this crucial issue at the heart of building a new student movement.

Protesting the NYPD Spies

Published in Socialist Worker.

NEW YORK--Approximately 100 protesters confronted NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly outside an event for alumni of the Fordham Law School on March 3 to protest the NYPD's assault on Muslims, communities of color and peaceful protesters.

The demonstration, organized by the Fordham Muslim Law Students Association, called for the resignation of Kelly after revelations by Associated Press journalists of extensive NYPD surveillance of Muslim communities and student groups across the Northeast, as well as recent attacks on communities of color and Occupy Wall Street.
According to a statement by the group:

[W]e demand the resignation of NYPD Commissioner Kelly who unabashedly violates the civil liberties of Muslim New Yorkers and students, through the illegal practice of "Stop & Frisk" largely on minority communities, and by the violent suppression of "Occupy Wall Street."

Specifically, protesters denounced Fordham Law School's invitation to Kelly to speak to alumni at an event at the posh Cipriani Wall Street, just blocks from where New York police brutalized activists and forcibly evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment just a few months ago. The demonstrators also demanded Fordham release a statement "which affirms its commitment to the equality of all of its students and opposes the NYPD's racist policies."

Two days before the protest was scheduled to take place, Fordham issued a mealy-mouthed statement that paid lip service to supporting civil liberties and opposing discrimination, but did not clearly condemn NYPD spying or rescind the invitation to Kelly.

While Fordham officials claimed they are "deeply concerned about, the chilling effect such surveillance could have on academic freedom, and on freedom of speech and association," they also accepted the logic that spying on Muslims is an attempt to keep people safe, rather than an example of religious and racial profiling, harassment and intimidation.

Fordham stated that the university "acknowledges the enormous responsibility placed in the hands of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to safeguard the city and all of its citizens, while at the same time preserving civil liberties. We trust that the mayor and commissioner understand the importance of preserving those liberties, especially in times of heightened danger."

This "trust" comes despite revelations that the NYPD played the Islamophobic film The Third Jihad, which Kelly himself appears in, for 1,500 officers, and then lied to the press when questioned about it.
While Fordham went on to claim that its decision to invite Kelly "should not be construed as a university endorsement of his policies," Kelly used the forum provided by Fordham to defend the very policies of profiling and surveillance of Muslims for which he was denounced by protesters in front of an audience of lawyers, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
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UNDETERRED BY Fordham's statement, members of the Fordham Muslim Law Students Association went ahead with their protest outside the venue at 55 Wall Street. They were joined by activists from Independent Viewpoints, Occupy Wall Street, the International Socialist Organization and opponents of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policies, among others.

Protesters initially gathered on the sidewalk in front of the venue, but they were threatened with arrest by officers, who claimed the sidewalk was "frozen," unless they moved across the street.
According to Mohammad Ali Naquvi of Independent Viewpoints:

Legally, and I'm a lawyer, we're allowed to stand on a sidewalk as long as we don't block passageway or an entrance...We don't have to stand in a pen...but they were making up rules, saying the sidewalk is "frozen." "Frozen" is not a legal term. I tried to push him on it...I said, you know, "frozen" means that water solidifies at 0 degrees...I don't know the legal term "frozen" in any way. He didn't have a response, [and] he threatened us with arrest.

Chants included "Kelly spies, Bloomberg lies," and protesters held signs with slogans such as "NYPD is racist" and "NYPD, CIA, hands off our people," while well-dressed Fordham alumni arrived for the event.

Sara Bokhari of Brooklyn, a Muslim woman active in Occupy Wall Street, drew attention to the need for unity among those targeted by the NYPD:

I'm out here protesting these racist policies that the NYPD has been using for generations...It didn't just start with Muslims; it didn't start after 9/11. They've been profiling and infiltrating our brothers and sisters in Harlem and the Bronx, all over...It doesn't make our city safer, and we need to stand up and fight back against it."

Asked about the potential to unite struggles against police brutality and profiling of Blacks and Latinos with the fight against anti-Muslim spying, Bokhari said, "I think there is a ton of potential...We're all people who are being oppressed by these same policies, and we need to stand together in solidarity."

Protesters used the "peoples' mic," where one person speaks and the crowd repeats and amplifies their words, to address Kelly and those who came to hear him speak. One woman used the mic to say:

In the last several months, the Associated Press has blown the cover of the NYPD. The AP has confirmed what Muslim communities have known for years: the NYPD has been spying on our communities, just because we're Muslim. They have been spying on our mosques...on the businesses we go to and own...and the NYPD has been spying on our students.

Ray Kelly: we are a growing chorus of people...we are students and professors, we are workers, we are Muslims, and we are here together to say "No more"!