Hampshire is first to divest

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

Also published at Dissident Voice.

Gary Lapon reports on a milestone in the movement in solidarity with Palestine--the first U.S. college to divest.

February 13, 2009

THE HAMPSHIRE College board of trustees voted to transfer assets from a fund that invests in corporations that contribute to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, making Hampshire the first institution of higher education in the U.S. to divest.

This historic decision came as a result of from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group formed at Hampshire in 2006. According to a statement from Sigmund Roos, chair of the board of trustees, the board reviewed the college's investments to address a petition from SJP.

Among the corporations that Hampshire will divest from are United Technologies, which produces Blackhawk helicopters and engines for F-15 and F-16 fighter jets that Israel uses to kill Palestinians, and Caterpillar, which supplies Israel with bulldozers that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) uses to destroy Palestinian homes, orchards and olive groves in clearing land for illegal settlements and the "Separation Barrier" apartheid wall.

The petition in support of divestment was signed by over 800 Hampshire students, faculty and alumni (on a campus with under 1,500 students). It was the product of a two-year campaign that included educational events such as film screenings and lectures, "mock walls" simulating life in the occupied West Bank, and interactive forums.

SJP explained the reasons for its actions in a statement:

Traditionally, Hampshire College has advocated for the oppressed. In 1977, Hampshire College was the first college in the U.S. to divest from apartheid South Africa. In 2001, Hampshire was the first college to object to the war in Afghanistan.

In this spirit and in light of the fact that the Israeli occupation is the longest ongoing occupation since World War II, we state our objection to the oppression of the Palestinian people. The Hampshire community hereby declares its commitment to work toward the end of this occupation. Furthermore, we call upon Israel to end its policies of discrimination and to respect international law and Palestinian rights, including the right to self-determination. We support the Palestinian right to resist the occupation in accordance with international law.

In recent weeks, the SJP at Hampshire joined with students from area colleges and the community in the recently formed Pioneer Valley Coalition for Palestine, which organized protests against the Israeli bombing and ground assault in Gaza that killed over 1,300 people, including hundreds of children. The protests, on January 10 and February 7, drew hundreds of people each time.

The banner at the front of the February 7 march proclaimed "From Amherst to Gaza: Abolish Racism." That was a reference to the "Justice for Jason" movement against the prosecution of University of Massachusetts Amherst student Jason Vassell for defending himself from racist attackers. It was also meant to express the links between racism against African Americans and the Islamophobia used to justify the occupation of Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The rallies were the largest antiwar actions in Amherst in recent years and were heavily attended by Arabs and Muslims. Student activists from SJP, Palestine solidarity organizations on other local campuses, the Campus Antiwar Network, the UMass Muslim Students Association and the International Socialist Organization added their voices to the call for divestment from Israel.

SJP hopes their success will be an inspiration and a call to action for others who support justice for the people of Palestine. With students occupying buildings and winning concessions in support of Palestine across Britain--and now in the U.S. at the University of Rochester, divestment at Hampshire College is an important victory for a growing movement.

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BUILDING A movement that calls on U.S. institutions to divest from Israel is a key component of the struggle for justice for the people of Palestine.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 to make possible to foundation of the state of Israel and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that began in 1967 have created a horrific reality for Palestinians, which anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu described after a 2003 visit as "much like what happened to us Black people in South Africa."

Israel's illegal occupation and slaughter of innocents would not be possible without the vast funding and political support it receives from the U.S. government. Israel has been the top recipient of U.S. foreign aid for years--a total of more than $100 billion since 1948, over half of which is military aid.

Hampshire College's divestment of funds from Israel has set a precedent for a movement that could play an important role in ending apartheid in Israel.

Hampshire played a similar leading role in the struggle against apartheid South Africa. In 1977, students in the Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa occupied the college's administrative offices. They won their demands, and Hampshire became the first U.S. college to divest from apartheid South Africa.

By 1982, similar struggles won divestment at other colleges and universities, including the nearby UMass Amherst, the University of Wisconsin, Ohio State University and the entire University of California system (which withdrew $3 billion in investments). By 1988, over 150 institutions had divested from South Africa.

By the end of the 1980s, as well, dozens of cities, states and towns across the U.S. had put in place some form of economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Inspired by the resistance of Black South Africans, the U.S. movement pressured Congress to pass (over a veto by President Ronald Reagan) sanctions against the racist regime. The solidarity movements around the world provided important support to the struggle of Black South Africans that defeated apartheid.

Hampshire College's role in the campus anti-apartheid movement was an inspiration and a tool for SJP's movement for divestment from corporations that support Israeli apartheid, according to SJP member Brian Van Slyke. "That Hampshire was the first college to divest from apartheid South Africa was really a rallying cry for us on this campus," he said.

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HAMPSHIRE SJP is hosting a rally outside the campus library at Noon on February 13 to celebrate this historic victory and have an open discussion about the next steps for the movement for justice in Palestine.

According to Van Slyke, these include defending this gain by "getting the word out to other activists and community organizers" to "make sure that people like [rabid pro-Israel supporter] Alan Dershowitz don't succeed in smearing us or shutting us down." SJP members plan to continue organizing to push for Hampshire to provide resources for an exchange with Palestinian students.

SJP has received numerous invitations from activists on other campuses and is considering sending members on a tour to share the story of their victory and the lessons they've learned to inform and inspire other students to push for and win divestment from Israel.

"SJP has proven that student groups can organize, rally and pressure their schools to divest from the illegal occupation," SJP said in a press release. "The group hopes that this decision will pave the way for other institutions of higher learning in the U.S. to take similar stands."

Recycling free market myths

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

January 21, 2009

IT SEEMS that conservative New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof missed the memo that the economic crisis has exposed his neoliberal "the free market will solve everything" ideology as bankrupt.

His January 15 column on the lives of the poorest of Cambodia, "Where Sweatshops are a Dream," while a good source of toilet paper, also provides an opportunity to confront neoliberalism for what it is and how it reveals the bankruptcy of capitalism in general.

Kristof's argument can be summed up in a two-sentence quote:

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don't exploit enough.

He argues that while those of us who oppose sweatshop labor are well-meaning (and naïve) idealists, to really improve the lives of the world's poorest people, those who survive by scavenging in landfills, we should advocate the expansion of sweatshops.

This argument is supported with such gems as: "Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children," and "one of the best hopes for the poorest countries would be to build their manufacturing industries...but global campaigns against sweatshops make that less likely."

By calling a job in a sweatshop a "cherished dream," Kristof reveals how privileged and out of touch he is. By simply recycling the old neoliberal argument, trumpeted by such organizations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that free trade and "development" will end poverty, and that labor unions and standards, social services like public education, health care, and food subsidies for the poor are what is holding this project back, Kristof uses his podium to attack working people.

This argument states that poor countries can eventually develop into advanced economies free of poverty, which is implied in the term "developing countries." This theory has been proven false after decades of "development" that has done little (or worse) for the masses of people in the global South.

Removing barriers to trade and slashing social services has not alleviated poverty, but has deepened and spread it, and has worsened living standards for the working class as a whole in industrialized nations, as well as in developing countries like Cambodia.

Wages and benefits for workers in most industrialized countries, including the U.S., have stagnated or declined in recent decades, and as Eric Toussaint lays out in his book Your Money or Your Life, following a gradual increase in quality of life in the developing countries from 1945-80, "after 1982, eruption of the debt crisis and generalization of structural adjustment policies brought on the degradation of living conditions."

The capitalist class and its cronies in governments around the world, not anti-sweatshop movements or the broader labor movement, are to blame for the lack of jobs in the poorest nations.

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TODAY, PRODUCTION is slowing on a global level because of the contradictions of capitalism itself. The credit crunch that is a major cause of the deepening economic crisis has made it impossible for many businesses to secure the loans required to keep factories running.

On the demand side, workers whose living standards have been cut again and again during the three-decade-plus reign of neoliberalism, have watched their sources of credit evaporate and are no longer able to afford to buy the goods those factories would have produced.

Capitalists, in competition for a limited market defined not by human need but by those with the money to buy, continually seek to cut wages and increase productivity, so that fewer workers produce greater amounts of goods for less wages. This undercuts demand and leads to crises of overproduction like the one we're in today. Factories close, leading to even weaker demand, and the cycle repeats itself. This is not the work of omnipotent anti-sweatshop activists; it is a tendency built in to capitalism as an economic system.

The growing gap between rich and poor under late 20th and early 21st century world capitalism, both internationally and within the borders of individual nation-states, has led to the tragic absurdity of unemployment due to a lack of capital in some countries alongside unemployment due to an excess of capital in others.

And internationally, the means and potential exist to meet the human needs of everyone on the planet several times over.

This state of affairs underlines the relevance of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky's century-old theory of combined and uneven development, which provides a much better analysis for understanding and changing the world today than the pipe-dreams offered by apologists for capitalism. This theory argues that under capitalism national economies do not develop in an even or straightforward manner.

On the contrary, as capitalism proceeds, national markets become more and more integrated into the world economy while development proceeds unevenly. Some countries become highly developed while others stagnate and can go backwards, and within nations advanced production can exist side by side with some of worst conditions imaginable for human beings, with peasants living under near-feudal conditions and masses of the unemployed living off of refuse.

This is a chaotic process driven by competition and the drive for greater profits, for the benefit of a few at the expense of the many.

The only solution, according to Trotsky, was Permanent Revolution, an international revolutionary movement of the working class to expropriate the exploiters who benefit from our misery and take control over production and distribution to meet the needs of all.

The recent film Slumdog Millionaire, set in India and featuring images of modern skyscrapers towering above sprawling slums, strikingly illustrates the applicability of Trotsky's theory to today's world. Millions of Indians live in dire poverty, their ranks growing as farmers continue to be displaced by "special economic zones" where international corporations have free reign, while a few have become fabulously wealthy as a result of advanced development.

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CAMBODIA IS an interesting example for Kristof to have chosen. As an American conservative pundit, Kristof is a member of a group that manages to discuss (scapegoat) African American poverty while minimizing or ignoring slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and institutional racism perpetrated and upheld by the U.S. ruling class, injustices that are at the root of the high rates of poverty faced by African Americans to this day. So it's no surprise that he manages to discuss poverty in Cambodia as if it, too, can be torn from its historical context and dealt with without holding to account those responsible for the current state of affairs.

In 1969-70, in the middle of its criminal war on the Vietnamese people, the U.S. military dropped over 100,000 tons of bombs on "neutral" Cambodia as part of "Operation Menu." The bombing killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodian civilians and paved the way for the rise of the brutal dictator Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime, which killed 1.5 million more.

Instead of sweatshops to allow U.S. and other capitalists to exploit the survivors of this brutality and their descendants, the rich who benefit from the U.S.'s wars should be taxed and the money used for reparations so that no Cambodian has to pick through garbage to find food to eat.

More generally, a look at the history of imperialism and colonialism that continues to this day shows that the ruling classes of the U.S., Europe and Japan (the "Triad"), by far the richest in the world, built their fortunes by exploiting their own working classes while plundering, slaughtering and exploiting those of the Global South.

Pathetically, remittances from immigrants working low-wage jobs are responsible for a greater flow of money from the richest nations to the Global South than official aid, and the net flow of wealth is from the Global South to the industrialized Triad, as payments on debt and capital outflows greatly exceed any aid from the Triad.

To claim that employment in sweatshops should be viewed as a "step up" for the world's poorest is to ignore this history of injustice and accept that a just and sane world is impossible, so we should settle for what little we have because "it could be worse." Instead of praying for jobs in sweatshops, we must demand the reparations we are owed by our exploiters.

Kristof, in a time when the rich are richer than ever and the U.S. government can find trillions of dollars to bail out the big banks, wants us to believe that the best the world's poor can expect is a chance for a sweatshop to open up in the neighborhood. In his sick version of reality, the labor movement, those who seek better wages, benefits and working conditions for the people who produce this wealth, is portrayed not as a champion of the poor but as an obstacle in their way.

In this time of crisis, we must reject this and every other cynical ploy to weaken the only force capable of fighting back against the ruling class's attempt to make us pay for their crisis: the international working class.

It is international solidarity, not sweatshops, that will improve the lives of those currently going without from Cambodia, to Cairo, to California. We need more of the solidarity shown by the hundreds of thousands around the world protesting the slaughter in Gaza; although they are not Gazans, they see an injury to the Palestinians is an injury to all. We need more of the solidarity exhibited by members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) who shut down the west coast ports in the U.S. this past May 1 to protest the wars against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and immigrants in the U.S., and were joined by Iraqi dockworkers striking in their country.

We need to reach back into our own history, to proud struggles like the Seattle general strike of 1919, when workers took control of the city in a strike that halted shipments of arms being sent to crush the workers government in Russia, so that we might learn the lessons that will enable us to move forward to a better future.

Gary Lapon, Northampton, Mass.

Representing Obama at the G20

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

November 25, 2008

I NEARLY fell out of my chair when I read that Barack Obama had chosen Madeleine Albright and Jim Leach to represent him at the recent Group of 20 (G20) economic summit in Washington, D.C.

According to a statement by Obama senior foreign policy advisor Denis McDonough, Leach and Albright would "be available [to] meet with and listen to our friends and allies on [Obama's] behalf."

I grew up and became politically aware during the Clinton years, so the return of Albright and Leach is like having a flashback to a recurring childhood nightmare.

Madeleine Albright was Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) during Bill Clinton's first term and secretary of state during his second term. As UN ambassador, she worked hard to deny calling the massacres in Rwanda "genocide." As secretary of state, she helped orchestrate the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999, which killed hundreds of civilians and displaced tens of thousands.

Infamously, she was asked in 1996 by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes about the impact of U.S. sanctions on Iraq during the Clinton era. "We have heard that a half million children have died," Stahl said. "I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Then-Secretary of State Albright responded: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it."

Jim Leach, meanwhile, is the same "Leach" of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which partially repealed the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act.

In a nutshell, Gramm-Leach-Bliley removed the regulatory wall separating commercial and investment banks, allowing for the expansion of the "shadow banking sector," replete with the mortgage-backed securities based on bad debt hidden in off-the-books "structured investment vehicles," which greatly amplified that impact of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

In other words, Jim Leach helped write the legislation that is a major cause of the current world financial crisis.

Officially, the point of the G20 Summit was to assemble leaders of 19 developed and developing countries and the European Union, which together account for about 85 percent of the world economy, in order to figure out how to coordinate efforts to deal with the financial crisis, pull the economy out of recession, and increase regulation to prevent something like this from happening again.

By sending Albright and Leach as his representatives, Obama sent the message that his views on the crisis can be expressed by someone who would justify the mass slaughter of children, as well as by an architect of the financial crisis--and that he trusts these scumbags to "play telephone" and relay their version of events at the summit back to him.

Whatever our varied opinions of the true intentions of Barack Obama, those who seek progressive change cannot but be deeply troubled by the return of the likes of Albright and Leach to the center of U.S. power.

Our response must be to build an alternative--to build a left that demands that the desire of the U.S. ruling class to dominate the Middle East is wrong, and not worth the life of a single Iraqi child, let alone 500,000, and that the solution to the economic crisis is to reorganize our economy to meet the needs of working-class people around the world, not the billionaires on Wall Street or their counterparts in the rest of the G20.

Gary Lapon, Northampton, Mass.

The undemocratic Electoral College

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

October 28, 2008

ELIZABETH SCHULTE'S article "The world's greatest democracy?" does a great job of skewering the myth that the U.S. electoral process is anything close to truly fair or democratic, and calling out John McCain's absurd claims about ACORN trying to "fix" the election for Barack Obama.

A closer look at the Electoral College, particularly with regards to the 2000 election, illustrates how it functions to limit democracy.

The Electoral College, which decides who is president of the United States, consists of 538 winnable votes: one for each of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, one for each of the 100 senators, as well as three for the District of Columbia.

Except for Nebraska and Maine, each state awards its votes by "winner take all," so that a candidate who wins a state 48 percent to 47 percent, for example, would get all of that state's electoral votes. The 47 percent who voted for the other candidate are effectively disenfranchised, as their votes will not impact the final outcome.

As Schulte points out, the Electoral College ensures that popular votes from smaller (more rural, more white) states are overrepresented, since each state gets at least three electors regardless of population. Even more troubling about the Electoral College system is that relatively arbitrary factors can decisively impact the outcome of a presidential election.

Consider the 2000 election. In their 2003 article, "Outcomes of Presidential Elections and the House Size," Cal State Northridge mathematicians Michael G. Neubauer and Joel Zeitlin show how, in a race that is close in terms of the popular vote, the outcome can depend on the number of seats in the House of Representatives.

Proponents of "lesser-evilism" who would like to lay at the feet of Ralph Nader responsibility for George W. Bush's "win" in 2000 have overlooked the true culprits: the members of Congress who, in 1911, picked 435 for the new number of House seats.

In general, the larger the size of the House of Representatives, the closer the Electoral College outcome gets to an accurate reflection of the popular vote, since additional House seats would be awarded to the states with the greatest ratio of population to number of House seats, which offsets somewhat the advantage that small states get from the awarding of votes based on Senate seats.

In the 2000 presidential election, despite the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans and various other fraud, Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore. However, because of the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College (and with a little help from both the Supreme Court and Gore's spineless complicity), Bush won a majority in the Electoral College and became president.

Analysis by Neubauer and Zeitlin shows that Bush would have won for any House with 490 seats or less. However, the 491st and 492nd seat would have been apportioned to New York and Pennsylvania, respectively, both of which Gore won, putting Gore in the lead in the EC.

So if the size of the House had been set at 492 instead of 435 in 1911, or if it had been increased to 492 at some point over the last 89 odd years to reflect population gains, Gore would have been president.

Even more absurdly, based on current apportionment methods for House seats, "for House sizes between 492 and 596, the winner goes back and forth many times without much rhyme or reason. For those 105 different House sizes, the election ends in a tie 23 times, Gore wins 29 times, and Bush wins 53 times." Since Gore won the popular vote, for House sizes of 598 and above, Gore wins every time.

All else remaining the same, the outcome of the 2000 election hinged upon an arbitrary decision made in 1911 by people who were all dead at the time of the 2000 election.

It appears that the fabric of even the most formal mechanism of democracy in the United States was shoddy long before ACORN even came into being.

Gary Lapon, Northampton, Mass.

Blaming the victims of the crisis

Protesters and family gathered to stop the eviction of Melonie Griffiths-Evans in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston (Jonathan McIntosh)

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

Also published in Dissident Voice.

Analysis: Gary Lapon

Gary Lapon exposes the right-wing myth that "irresponsible" African American and immigrant borrowers triggered the housing crisis.



October 21, 2008

THE U.S. economy is in the midst of the worst crisis since the Great Depression. In response, segments of the ruling class have sought to deflect working class anger using a despicable and well-worn strategy: blatant racism.

They seek to shift the blame for the current crisis away from those who are actually responsible and onto the victims--the disproportionately African American and Latino low-income borrowers who were scammed into the sub-prime mortgages that are the chief cause of the crisis in that housing market that sparked the broader crisis.

In a recent Washington Post column, Charles Krauthammer, who repeatedly referred to the majority of people as "the mob," stated that "only a fool or a demagogue" would see predatory lending as a major cause of the financial crisis. Instead, he blamed an imaginary "bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination."

Fox News chimed in with the same argument. As reported on the Media Matters Web site, Fox News' Neil Cavuto conflated giving home mortgages to minorities with risky lending practices, saying there should have been "a clarion call that said, 'Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.'"

Minorities also were targeted by Mark Krikorian, head of the anti-immigration group FAIR. In his blog on the Web site of the right-wing magazine National Review, Krikorian posted Washington Mutual's final press release before its collapse--titled "WaMu Recognized as Top Diverse Employer--Again." Krikorian called his post "Cause and Effect?," implying that the bank's hiring of minorities is behind its failure. "I really thought this was a joke, but it's not," he wrote.

In a National Review article titled "Illegal Loans: A Criminal Business," Michelle Malkin claimed to show "how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis," which she refers to as the "illegal-alien home-loan racket."

In the article, Malkin jumps from complaining about loans made to undocumented immigrants to pointing out that foreclosure rates are disproportionately high in Latino neighborhoods, which she calls "illegal-alien sanctuaries."

Republican politicians also got into the act. On September 25, at a House hearing, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) placed blame for the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Bill Clinton's supposedly overzealous enforcement of Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) "quotas" that "forced" banks to encourage diversity by lending "on the basis of race."

This is absurd on its face, since about half of all sub-prime loans were made by mortgage companies that aren't regulated by the CRA at all.

To his credit, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) debunked Bachman's racist nonsense and placed the blame for the crisis where it belongs: on deregulation, falling wages and predatory lending. He wrote that "research clearly shows that the majority of the predatory loans that have led us to this financial mess were originated by non-bank financial institutions and other entities that did not have a CRA obligation and lacked strong federal regulatory oversight. Shifting the blame for the current economic crisis to laws that allow equal access and opportunity to communities of color is ridiculous."

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THESE ATTACKS--particularly the absurd idea that "misplaced generosity" on the part of banks supposedly forced to lend to minorities and the poor is to blame for the current crisis--are without foundation. It is an effort to shift the blame from the real culprits: the criminals on Wall Street and their bipartisan cronies in Washington.

African Americans have faced hundreds of years of slavery, Jim Crow racism and institutional racism that persist to this day. And housing was--and remains--a major aspect of this continued racial oppression.

One key element of housing discrimination is redlining, the practice of denying loans in Black neighborhoods. In 1935, the government's Home Owners' Loan Corporation, at the behest of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, labeled African American neighborhoods as "risky." The result: Blacks were denied loans and forced to pay more for substandard housing.

As Petrino DiLeo points out in the International Socialist Review, legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 has had a limited impact. Although the CRA prohibited discrimination based on race or national origin in terms of access to credit, "during the past 30 years, the form of financial racism has shifted from being a question of the denial of credit to one where credit is offered on predatory terms."

In recent years, African Americans were given sub-prime mortgages at over twice the rate of low-income whites. These loans typically have adjustable interest rates that are now on the rise. As a result, foreclosures are increasing and erasing the savings of Black families, who on average have 63 percent of their net worth in home equity.

African Americans are today disproportionately represented among the one in six homeowners who owe more than their house is worth--and many face skyrocketing mortgage payments to boot.

The banks, not minority or low-income borrowers, are to blame for the sub-prime fiasco. They paid mortgage brokers more for sub-prime loans, encouraging them to hand them out like candy, even to people who qualified for standard mortgages. That's because the riskier loans yielded returns at higher interest rates, which translated into higher rates of return for investors and fatter commissions for the investment banks.

Thus, while the banks are being bailed out with over $700 billion taken from the pockets of the working class, the victims of predatory sub-prime lenders--disproportionately low-income, African and Latino workers--are being thrown out of their homes and onto the street.

Two worlds in one city

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

Also published at Dissident Voice.

Comment: Gary Lapon
Gary Lapon reports on the tough realities for working people in a city that Joe Biden just visited.

September 16, 2008

DEMOCRATIC VICE presidential candidate Joe Biden held a fundraiser at the Log Cabin in Holyoke, Mass., September 10, raising $300,000 with a $500-per-seat reception, followed by a $2,300-per-plate dinner.
Meanwhile, across this small city of about 40,000 people, 300 new families sought food assistance this summer from Margaret's Pantry, emptying its shelves.Biden's visit with the well-to-do served to highlight the scale of the social crisis in Holyoke, one of the poorest cities in Massachusetts.

According to the Boston Globe, "one in five public school students [in Holoyoke] is homeless, living in a shelter or foster care, doubled up with another family, or in transitional housing...the U.S. Census Bureau reported last month that the proportion of school-age children living in poverty in Holyoke increased from 33 percent in 2000 to nearly 40 percent in 2005."

Gender and race play a major role in poverty, and the impact is stark in Holyoke. According to the Census Bureau, in 2000, 22.6 percent of families in Holyoke lived below the poverty line. The percentage rose to 48 percent for families with a female head of household and 71 percent of families with a female head of household and a child under five.

Holyoke is over 40 percent Latino, and per capita income for Latinos in Holyoke in 2000 was $7,757, just 40 percent of the per capita income for white residents. Around 60 percent of residents qualify for food stamps, which average about $1 per person, per meal.

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"ONCE KNOWN as 'The Paper Making Capital of the World,' Holyoke has a rich industrial history," reads a report profiling Holyoke from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "But the city has suffered from what many small cities in New England have experienced: a decline in manufacturing, population loss, and a shift toward a new economy based on services."

A Wistariahurst Museum essay called "Holyoke's Industries" sheds some light on what is meant by a "rich industrial history."

It's a history rich in suffering. Irish immigrants died digging canals in the city in the mid-19th century. Immigrant workers, including children, arrived in Holyoke starting in the mid- to late-19th century to work 90-hour weeks in the paper mills and textile factories for low wages. Today, rates of poverty, injection drug use and HIV are among the highest in the state.

It's a history rich in struggle. From the unemployed immigrants who marched on City Hall in 1876 demanding work and crying out that "We didn't come to this country to starve"; to Anna Sullivan, who led an organizing drive for the Amalgamated Textile Workers Union during the 1930s, winning the first 40-hour week at the Skinner Silk Mill, Holyoke workers have a strong working-class tradition.

It's also literally a history of the rich. Just minutes from the old industrial downtown are the old mansions of families like the Skinners, which amassed their fortunes on the backs of workers.

Like so many cities and towns where exploited workers created the wealth that made the U.S. ruling class into the wealthiest in the history of humanity, Holyoke workers have been tossed aside like pieces of trash, left to fight for the occasional scrap as the once-bustling city crumbles around them.

Enter Joe Biden, champion of the credit card companies that prey on the poor in cities like Holyoke to tap the local elite and add to the nearly $400 million that Barack Obama has raised so far in his bid for the White House.

Biden dined with wealthy supporters to the tune of $2,300 per plate, raising a total of $300,000 in an evening in Holyoke. $2,500: that's over two years of food stamps for the average recipient. $300,000: that's almost $2,350 per family with children in a homeless shelter in Holyoke, more than enough for first and last months' rent and a security deposit in an apartment around here.

With heating oil prices in Massachusetts expected to increase by at least 50 percent this winter, combined with skyrocketing prices for essentials like food, health care and education, Holyoke residents and others in New England and across the country will face tough choices this winter on questions like eating enough or staying warm.

Biden wasn't available to answer questions about what he and Obama plan to do to prevent what is shaping up to be a disastrous winter for the poor of Holyoke, whose lives are already hanging by a thread.

As reported by a local ABC station, Biden spent eight seconds walking from his car to the Log Cabin banquet hall in Holyoke, past a crowd of supporters who couldn't afford to attend. Biden made a beeline for the big money, neglecting to even wave to the crowd assembled outside as he fixed his hair to look good for the local elite.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden seek to appeal to the bitterness and anger among working-class people while assuring wealthy donors that they will be responsible managers that answer to the ruling class--a feat that requires them to talk out of both sides of their mouths.

So Obama brags about being against the war in Iraq before it started, but voted for war funding, won't commit to a full withdrawal and intends to escalate the war in Afghanistan.

Biden talks about understanding the plight of workers, but legislates to make it more difficult for them to get out of crushing debt. And he walks past his low-income supporters without a word, in one of the economically hardest-hit cities in the country.

Thanks Joe, we got the message loud and clear: If we want our voices to be heard, we have to join together so they are loud and united enough that they can't be ignored.

Expensive gas won't stop pollution

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

September 4, 2008

I AGREE with David J. Barboza ("Don't fight for cheaper oil") that fossil fuels should be replaced with clean energy, that food subsidies should go towards feeding the hungry rather than lining the pockets of agribusiness giants, and that agricultural self-sufficiency should be restored.

I disagree that we should base our strategy around the argument that higher oil prices "create all the right incentives to conserve that are a necessary prerequisite to a clean-energy revolution we should all embrace."

A fundamental problem with capitalism is that corporations like ExxonMobil and the other few major oil and related companies have the power to shape the market for their products, to actually create demand. And they are driven solely by the profit motive.

During the second quarter of the 20th century, General Motors, Standard Oil of California (now Chevron), Firestone Tire and Phillips Petroleum (now ConocoPhillips) formed National City Lines, a holding company that bought up electric streetcar lines in over 100 cities across the U.S. in order to force people to rely on buses and automobiles.

Although this was more expensive (electric streetcars are much cheaper to maintain and more durable than buses, and cars are horribly inefficient) and worse for the environment and public safety, it conveniently created huge markets for their products.

The Interstate Highway System was created by the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, the result of lobbying by the automobile industry and arguments by President Eisenhower that the system would facilitate the quick transport of military vehicles and personnel. The largest public works project to date at that time, the billions spent on highways could have gone to faster, safer, cleaner public transportation.

To this day, in large part because of the massive political influence of corporations that profit from the use of automobiles (who are buying off Democrats in Denver as I write this), public transportation in most places is underfunded and insufficient to get people to work on time, let alone to allow them to drop off their kids in the morning and run all of the errands they need to run.

So there is still a demand for automobile transportation, even though it's more dangerous and causes more pollution than any other form of transportation.

The point is, incentives on the consumer end are not what shapes what is produced or how it's produced. This is decided by capitalists who have the power to make fundamental decisions like what type of transportation infrastructure we have, and don't care how many people get asthma, lung cancer, die in car accidents, or go broke trying to keep up with rising gas prices.

A struggle for lower prices at the pump, at the expense of ExxonMobil's outrageous profits, can be a step towards building the type of movement necessary to win the fundamental changes we both want to see. Such a struggle could be linked to environmental demands already being made by truckers and residents in Oakland ("Fighting for union rights and clean air") and could grow into broader, related demands for things like affordable, clean and expansive public transportation.

A demand for a cap on gas prices should be raised not in isolation but as part of the larger struggle that is needed to combat the devastating impact of the current economic crisis on a working class already bruised and battered by 30 years of attacks.

Millions of workers are being pushed to the edge and/or over it by the high price of gasoline that they need to buy to get to work today, so they can feed themselves and their families tomorrow.

If we celebrate high gas prices and say, "Well, now you'll be forced to conserve," we will only alienate the very people we need to organize with in order to win a sane, clean world.

Gary Lapon, Northampton, Mass.