Look what made it on the table

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

Analysis: Gary Lapon

Gary Lapon analyzes some of the disappointing proposals that have crept onto the health care reform table.

SINGLE-PAYER health reform may be "off the table" for the Obama administration's pending overhaul of the U.S. health care system, but apparently taxing workers' employer-provided health insurance benefits is not.

According to a June 2 WashingtonPost.com video report, after meeting with Obama and other Democrats, Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus said that taxing health benefits is "something [Obama] might consider" and is "on the table."

This, the Post points out, is in sharp contrast with Obama's campaign rhetoric that criticized John McCain for the same proposal. "For the first time in American history, he wants to tax your health benefits," Obama said in September. "Apparently, Senator McCain doesn't think it's enough that your health premiums have doubled. He thinks you should have to pay taxes on them, too."

Since then, the Obama administration released a statement that while "the president made it clear during the campaign that he has serious concerns about taxing health care benefits," nevertheless, "all options should be considered." Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel suggested that Obama "may well be attracted to the dollars of a benefit tax, but he's waiting to see if he can blame Congress for dragging him into it."

Currently, workers pay no income tax on compensation they receive in the form of health care benefits. Removing this exclusion is equivalent to raising taxes for a majority of the working class during an economic crisis where many are failing or barely able to make ends meet. It would come on top of skyrocketing out-of-pocket health care costs--for workers who get insurance through an employer, these costs increased by 34 percent from 2004 to 2007, according to a recent study in Health Affairs.

The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that taxing benefits would raise up to $246 billion a year toward coverage for the uninsured, as part of Obama's health reform plan, which supposedly aims at providing health insurance for all.

However, according to the Congressional Quarterly's HealthBeat Web site, Baucus, whose committee is leading efforts to come up with a reform plan, said last month that "we're not going to get 100 percent coverage" and that a more likely figure would be 94-96 percent. Baucus added, "We're not going to cover undocumented workers. That's too politically explosive."

In other words, a possible "solution" to the failure of the for-profit U.S. health insurance system could raise taxes on the working class toward helping people purchase health insurance (and fill the already-bulging pockets of the insurance companies)--and would leave millions uninsured, including undocumented immigrants, one of the most oppressed and exploited sections of the working class.

There is plenty of money in the federal budget to pay for Obama's proposed health care reform, not to mention a much more effective single-payer system.

Estimates of the cost of Obama's proposals range from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years. The total U.S. military budget (including the Pentagon budget, spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for nuclear weapons, and payments to service military debt) is nearly $1 trillion per year, more than the rest of the world combined.

Obama could easily cover the costs of health care reform by ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing troops home from the over 700 U.S. military bases scattered across the globe and ceasing the development of nuclear weapons (after all, the U.S. already has enough nukes to destroy the world many times over). But such steps would be "too politically explosive" given the near absolute consensus among Democrats and Republicans on the rehabilitation and promotion of U.S. empire.

Baucus' comment about not providing health care to undocumented workers--predominately Latino immigrants, but also including people from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, among other places--because it's "too politically explosive" is revealing as well.

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FORTUNATELY, WHAT is seen by politicians as possible and what is seen as "too explosive" changes, depending on who is or isn't taking to the streets or exerting power in the workplace.

It would have been "too politically explosive" for Baucus to suggest today that health care reform not cover African Americans. However, that would have been an acceptable view for a mainstream politician before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s overturned Jim Crow and shifted the political spectrum and mainstream consciousness in the direction of equality for African Americans.

History, unfortunately, does not move steadily forward in terms of issues of social and economic justice and equality. Just a few decades ago, the idea of a Democratic (or Republican) President overseeing the dismantling of health and retirement benefits for United Autoworkers (UAW) would have "too politically explosive." But not today, after decades of attacks on unions and workers' living standards.

What reforms fall within the range of acceptability depends on the relative strength of the capitalist class on the one hand and the working class and social movements on the other. Our task today is to make it "too politically explosive" to pay for reforms by increasing taxes on the working class, to deny undocumented immigrants basic human needs like health care, or to suggest as an option any health care reform that does not ensure universal access to care.

Struggles like the victorious sit-in at Republic Windows & Doors, which saw a largely Latino and immigrant work force occupying their factory for demands that included health care benefits for themselves and their families, are an example of how different demands can be combined.

As the saying goes, "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu." The labor movement and the left are weak today and have been for some time, which is why our wages and benefits are being consumed by a ruling class hungry for profit. We need to organize and rebuild--and demand that the only options "on the table" are human needs, justice, dignity and equality.

Why women need single payer

Originally published in Socialist Worker. Also published in Counterpunch and Dissident Voice.

"Women At Risk: Why Many Women Are Forgoing Needed Health Care," an issue brief released this month by the Commonwealth Fund, reveals the gender inequality of the U.S. health care system and illustrates the gross inability of the current private health insurance system to meet the needs of working class women and men.

Although the study doesn't call for it, it provides further evidence for the compelling case for "everybody in, nobody out" single payer health reform as necessary both to provide universal access to health care and as a blow against sexism.

Report authors Sheila D. Rustgi, Michelle M. Doty, and Sara R. Collings begin by placing their findings in the context of an economic crisis where millions of workers are losing their jobs (and with it their employer-provided health insurance) while "health care costs are rising at a rate of more than 6 percent per year...increasingly, health insurance and access to care are falling further out of reach for many working families."

Women are disproportionately affected because on average they "require more health care services [than men] during their reproductive years" and "have higher out-of-pocket medical costs." Considering that women are paid about 76 cents for every dollar a man makes, they face the triple burden of requiring more care, paying more each time they access care,and relying on less income to cover these costs.

Disturbingly, "in 2007, more than three of five adult women under age 65 reported a problem paying medical bills, a cost-related problem getting health care, or both." And this data, from before the onset of the current economic crisis, is likely much worse today.

While U.S. Census Bureau data shows that some 47 million (nearly 16 percent) of U.S. residents are uninsured, the inclusion of the underinsured--those who have insurance but "incur out-of-pocket health care costs" such as co-pays and premiums "that are high relative to their income"--reveals that health care woes are spread across a much broader section of the population.

According to the "Women at Risk" report, 75 percent of adults with yearly household income under $20,000 and 60 percent of those with household income between $20,000 and $39,999 "had gaps in their insurance coverage or were underinsured...in 2007, 45 percent of women and 39 percent of men were underinsured or uninsured for a time in the past year."

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THE FINANCIAL burden of health care costs for the underinsured can be crushing, especially for those living paycheck to paycheck, and it's growing at a rapid rate. In 2007, 55 percent of women with household income under $20,000 spent at least 10 percent of their income on health care, up from 29 percent of those women in 2001, an increase of nearly 90 percent in just six years. The underinsured have coverage, but financial barriers mean they must at times go without needed care or choose between paying for care and other necessities such as food, rent, or debt payments.

According to the "Women at Risk" study, 67 percent of low-income women and 65 percent of moderate-income women responded "yes" when asked if, during 2007, because of cost they'd "not filled a prescription; skipped a medical test, treatment, or follow-up visit recommended by a doctor; not visited a doctor or clinic when they had a medical problem; or did not get needed specialist care." Working-class men fare better, but still face a crisis situation: for men in the same income brackets the percentages forgoing needed care are 57 percent and 52 percent, respectively.

Frequently, the un- and underinsured skip preventive care, such as cancer-screening: according to the Commonwealth report, "only 67 percent of underinsured women over the age of 50 received a mammogram in the past two years, compared with 85 percent of adequately insured women." Going without preventive care has tragic consequences: patients with treatable but dangerous diseases such as cancer and diabetes may go years without a diagnosis, only finding out about their condition when it's too late to prevent serious complications or even premature death.

According to Urban Institute findings based on Institute of Medicine methodology, 137,000 people died in the U.S. from 2000 to 2006 from a lack of health insurance. To put this in perspective, that is over 28 times the number of U.S. soldiers who've died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 23,702 more than the number of U.S. residents murdered during those same six years.

The United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world, yet is the only advanced industrialized nation that does not provide universal access to care and thousands of poor and working class residents die each year as a result.

They die because health insurance giants maximize profits, which increased 170 percent from 2003-2007 to $12.6 billion for the industry leaders, by providing less care and passing more costs on to those who are insured, providing insufficient coverage to those who are underinsured, and refusing to cover those who cannot afford to pay enough in premiums for the insurance companies to make a profit.

Until the profit motive is removed and the insurance companies excluded by the introduction of a single-payer reform or system of socialized medicine, millions will continue to suffer from forgoing needed health care.

Proposed reforms that maintain a role for private insurance, such as the "health insurance mandate" reform (the Massachusetts model), under which everyone is required to purchase health insurance, even if they contain enough subsidies to insure everyone (and even in Massachusetts over 2 percent aren't covered) will amount to a massive public subsidy to the health insurance industry and fall short of providing universal health care.

As illustrated above, millions of the underinsured, those who have insurance but pay a prohibitively high percentage of their income in premiums and out-of-pocket costs, do not have access to the care they need. Having access to insurance is not the same as having access to care, and it is not enough to fill in the gaping cracks in the system.

Those who are oppressed and marginalized, such as low-income women, are more likely to fall through these cracks, or be "swept into them" (as described in Michael Moore's Sicko).

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REPRODUCTION IS one of the main reasons women as a whole require a greater amount of health care than men. Women must pay for birth control, abortion services, prenatal, maternity, and post-partum care (before during, and immediately after the time of birth), and other services associated with choosing whether or not to have children or ensuring the health of mother and child.

According to a 2007 Thomson report for the March of Dimes entitled "The Healthcare Costs of Having a Baby," for the insured, the average vaginal birth in 2004 cost $7,737 (inclusive of prenatal and other care) while the average Cesarean section cost $10,958, the overwhelming majority paid for by the insurance company.

However, for the uninsured and underinsured, disproportionately low-income women, these costs are prohibitive and can have a devastating impact on the health of the woman and child. According to Dr. Jennifer L. Howse, president of the March of Dimes, "it is well documented that a lack of prenatal care is associated with poor birth outcomes, including prematurity and low birth-weight, and high out-of-pocket expenditures may discourage women from obtaining the care they need."

Control over reproduction is essential to winning equality for women. Working-class women who cannot afford birth control or an abortion when they so desire, do not have full control over their bodies and therefore cannot enjoy equality with men.

Similarly, this control is denied women who would like to have children but are discouraged or go without proper care because they lack adequate health insurance and cannot afford the costs associated with the care necessary to minimize health risks to mother and child.

For working-class women especially and for the working class as a whole, health-care costs associated with reproduction are one of the ways the capitalist class passes the cost burden of raising the next generation of workers onto the working class. The capitalist class wants workers to have more babies for the former to exploit for profits when the latter grow up, but would much rather the working class pay the costs and perform the unpaid labor to raise them.

The enactment of a system of universal health care, one that includes full funding for abortion (and a repeal of the Hyde Amendment restricting federal funding for abortion), would be a major victory for the women's rights movement, the labor movement (health care benefits are often used as a lever for employers to gain concessions from labor) and for the working class as a whole.

Today, according to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, 59 percent of Americans support government-provided national health insurance as opposed to 32 percent who think it should be left to the private sector. And numerous polls have shown that significant majorities of doctors support a single-payer system that eliminates the role of private health insurance.

Earlier this month, when nurses, doctors, and other "single-payer" advocates disrupted a Senate finance committee meeting on health care reform to ask why supporters of single-payer were not included and why committee chair Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana) refused to consider it, they were removed by police and arrested.

A government that would provide a seat at the table for health insurance executives who preside over a system that kills dozens every day by denying care, while arresting those who actually provide health care and speak for a majority of the population, is not going to pass single-payer unless pressured by a movement from below.

As Frederick Douglass wrote, "Without struggle, there is no progress." Supporters of women's and worker's rights should join the movement for single-payer health care, health care for all. Everybody in, nobody out!

Hip hop is alive in Palestine

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

I WANT to thank Ann Coleman for a great review of Slingshot Hip Hop ("The beats of resistance").

A few weeks ago, I saw DAM perform at Hampshire College, where they expressed solidarity with Hampshire Students for Justice in Palestine for pushing their college to divest from the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

The show was amazing, as DAM brought an energy and achieved a synthesis between MC and audience that gave weight to their statement: "Hip Hop is not dead. It is alive in Palestine."
I picked up a copy of Slingshot Hip Hop at the show, and have since watched it several times. It is a complex film that holds important lessons and inspiration for those who are the targets and opponents of oppression and repression.

At one point early in the film Tamer Nafar of DAM discusses the decisive influence of Tupac Shakur's video "Holla If Ya Hear Me," a stark look at issues such as police brutality, gun violence, racism and poverty. Nafar, although at that time unable to understand the lyrics, felt as though the video was filmed in Lyd, his home.

Later in the film, Nafar explains that the worse the conditions facing an MC, the more powerful their art, and that Hip Hop is a defiant response to oppression and a tool for channeling one's anger. Holding a copy of Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet, Nafar says, "Here there is a fear of an Arab...nation."

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DIGGING DEEPER in the crates (I'd recommend Jeff Chang's Can't Stop, Won't Stop as a great place to start), the similarities between the South Bronx, the birthplace of hip hop in the late 1970s, and Palestine, the home of its exciting resurgence in a form that is anything but co-opted, are striking.

Slingshot Hip Hop shows the home demolitions by Israeli bulldozers in Arab areas of Palestine to terrorize Palestinians and make room for Israeli settlers.

In the early 1960s, New York City bulldozers cleared whole neighborhoods and displaced thousands in the predominately Black and Puerto Rican South Bronx to build the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Several artists in the film cite the Second Intifada as a defining moment in their lives that gave birth to or at least shaped and inspired their work today. The Intifada, an uprising that began in 2000 in response to Ariel Sharon's visit to the al-Aqsa mosque but really marked a popular rejection of the failed Oslo strategy of negotiation and collaboration with Israel, was a mass struggle that utilized a diversity of tactics to resist the Israeli occupation.

In 1977, in the midst of a crippling recession, a blackout in New York City set off rioting and "looting" that was especially intense in poor Black and Latino sections of the city, including the South Bronx. Although not nearly as conscious or defined in purpose as the Second Intifada, the riots were political: they were an expression of the just rage of a people impoverished, brutalized by police, oppressed and displaced.

Just as the Second Intifada was an expression of frustration with Arafat's failed strategy to win liberation through negotiation, the 1977 riots were an expression of frustration with the failure of the movements of the 1960s and '70s to provide a solution to the injustice faced by Blacks and Latinos in the inner-cities of the North.

The Second Intifada provided DAM with the political material to compose their breakout 2001 single "Meen Erhabe?" ("Who's the Terrorist?"), which laid the foundation for political Palestinian hip hop and was downloaded over 1 million times.

The "looting" of 1977 provided many Hip Hop artists with the physical material, sound equipment and turntables, to develop and take the culture "all city" and beyond.

If these connections are surprising, consider that the same government whose police occupy the South Bronx funds Israel's occupation of Palestine. Martin Luther King Jr. said during Vietnam that bombs dropped overseas explode at home. They still do.

The fact that DAM is playing to packed crowds in the U.S. and Slingshot Hip Hop is opening the eyes of young people to the injustice faced by Palestinians is a reason to be hopeful, as is the outbreak of protest here and around the world in response to Israel's recent slaughter in Gaza, and the growth of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement in its wake.

Just as hip hop is a means to channel anger, we must channel that hope back into the struggle, because if we're ever going to get freedom here in the U.S., Palestinians need to win freedom in their country.

Our oppressors understand this, hence the "special relationship" between the U.S. and Israel. It's time for the oppressed and exploited in Palestine, the U.S., and everywhere else form our own "special relationship."

Gary Lapon, Northampton, Mass.

UMass speaks out against hate

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

Gary Lapon reports on the publication of a right-wing newspaper at UMass-Amherst--and the opposition it has galvanized.

February 27, 2009

AMHERST, Mass.--An ad-hoc coalition of students at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) came together and, on a few days' notice, organized a "Speak-Out Against Hate" February 25 to protest a racist right-wing newspaper.

The Minuteman began appearing on campus earlier in the month. Published by a registered student organization calling itself "The Silent Majority," the paper has outraged members of oppressed groups on campus and their allies with its blatant racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia and targeting of individuals involved in social justice organizing on campus.
"The Silent Majority," and many of the students involved in publishing the paper, are also members of the UMass Republican Club.

The front cover of The Minuteman (which is also the UMass mascot) features a picture of Jason Vassell, a former UMass student currently awaiting trial and facing a potential maximum of 30 years in prison for defending himself in his dorm from racist attackers.

The article, titled "Who's Paying Jason's Lawyers?...You are," alleges that Vassell and the Committee for Justice For Jason Vassell received assistance in the form of T-shirts from the UMass Student Government Association (SGA). On the back cover, there is a photograph of Malcolm X with the caption, "Is This YOUR SGA?"--a reference to a poster of Malcolm X that hangs in the office of the SGA, where a number of the representatives are progressive students and outspoken supporters of the Justice for Jason campaign.

The real outrage is that Vassell is being charged at all, and it makes sense that SGA would support a student assaulted and called a "nigger" by non-students while sitting in his dorm room.

If The Minuteman staff were truly concerned about "wasteful spending," they might have saved the cover for a feature on the hundreds of billions being handed to the banks and spent to kill Iraqis and Afghanis while UMass tuition is scheduled to increase by $1,500 next year.

However, the allegations of wrongdoing are simply a cover for racism and other forms of hate.

Inside the paper, an article by Ed Cutting entitled "Jason: Be A Man," begins with "Jason, if you were a real man, none of this would have happened." He goes on to blame Vassell for causing his attackers relatively minor injuries with a small knife--which Cutting believes was an unreasonable reaction from an African American man who was being attacked by two white men screaming racial slurs. Cutting ends his piece by giving his respect to all "the young men with enough courage to not 'go ghetto.'"

The paper is filled with hatred and has been aptly described by once local activist as tantamount to a "Klan rag." The Minuteman refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people as the "LBGTQWRSYZ community," and claims that "the only thing more queer than [openly-gay Congressman Barney] Frank's thinking on economics is his behavior in the bedroom."

The paper features an article presenting the supposed downside of a transgender civil rights bill (they put "civil rights" in quotes), illustrated by a stereotypical photograph of a "drag queen" performer. It begins with the sentence "What a drag!" and raises the specter of transgender people using bathrooms appropriate to their chosen gender.

The UMass Republican Club advertised their next event in the paper, which reveals their true agenda. It's called "Exposing the Malicious Myth of Liberalism: Hate Crimes." This is particularly outrageous given the recent history of hate crimes on campus.

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ALL OF this is enough to make African Americans, LGBT people, women, immigrants and other oppressed people on campus feel attacked and unsafe.

That sentiment was expressed by the students at the speak-out, who represented a cross section of the student body, including members of those groups attacked by The Minutemen--people of color, LGBT people, women and their allies.

On top of attacking these communities, the paper singles out Dan Keefe, an organizer in the Justice for Jason campaign. The paper refers to him as "Danny the Tranny" and "Dan 'Prom Queen' Keefe," and features a photograph of him dressed in makeup and a skirt.

Keefe spoke at the Speak-Out Against Hate, which he co-chaired, and placed the attack in the context of a history of harassment from members of the Republican Club.

Last year, when Keefe was sitting in the campus office of the Radical Student Union (RSU), members of the Republican Club on numerous occasions gave him the finger and call him a "faggot" as they walked by the office. Keefe pointed out that putting his picture in paper was "like putting a target on me, saying 'Gay bash me.'"

After calling out the UMass administration for failing to stand up for him and others who have been the victims of hate on campus, Keefe ended with a message of hope. "This struggle is all of our struggles," he said. "We're on the same side."

Others echoed this sentiment--acknowledging both the fear of attack and the desire to stand up and fight back.

One woman stated that she felt unsafe walking alone at night. Another expressed her fear of police, saying, "Police don't necessarily mean safety...we are our own safety."

William Syldor, a member of the RSU and organizer with the Justice for Jason campaign, gave a moving speech that illustrated the role oppression plays in "keeping people divided and conquered":

If we ever chose to destroy our socially constructed selves, and join our being with other human beings, if we were ever to truly unite, then the glass that the system lays on will begin to crack. United rebellion is all the system truly fears, it is the Achilles heel...The only true end of oppression lies in the end of us, so we remain divided and small and weak.

Another speaker pointed out that these groups are often pitted against one another by the mainstream media and politicians, whether it's the 2008 election that raised the absurd question of whether Blacks or women are more oppressed, or the way some sought to blame Blacks for the passage of the antigay Proposition 8.

But by attacking so many oppressed people, The Minuteman has brought us together and created an opportunity for us to join hands and stand against all oppression no matter who it targets.

Organizers stressed that the speak-out was only a first step. Dozens of attendees signed up for an e-mail list, and there will be a follow-up meeting on March 2, at 7:30 p.m. in the Pride Alliance office in the UMass Student Union to talk about next steps. In addition, they pointed out the importance of electing progressive students in the upcoming Student Government Association election.

As UMass student and member of the International Socialist Organization Charles Peterson said, "We're the majority, so we need to not be silent, and talk to people and bring even more to our next event."

Hampshire students defend their victory

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

Gary Lapon reports that pro-Israel apologists are putting pressure on Hampshire College to back away from its historic divestment decision.

UNDER PRESSURE from pro-Israel apologists led by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, administrators at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., issued a "statement of clarification" about the recent decision to divest from six corporations that profited from and supported Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine.

But student activists aren't going to quietly accept Hampshire's shameful attempt to wriggle out of a decision the college should be proud of.

Members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Hampshire announced in a February 12 press release that they had succeeded in pressuring Hampshire's board of trustees to divest from companies involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Palestinians and their supporters around the world, including Noam Chomsky, Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire, Howard Zinn and former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, greeted the news with joy.

"This is a monumental and historic step in the struggle for Palestinian equality, self-determination and peace in the Holy Land by nonviolent means," wrote Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a leader in the struggle against South African apartheid, in a message of support sent to members of Hampshire SJP.

"I see what these students have accomplished as a replica of the support of their college of our struggle against apartheid in South Africa," he continued, in reference to Hampshire's place of prestige as the first institution of higher education to divest from South Africa. "Hampshire College's decision to divest should be a guiding example to all institutions of higher learning."

But within hours of SJP's announcement, the pro-Israel counteroffensive began. Dershowitz, a virulent supporter of Israel, called Matan Cohen and Brian Van Slyke, two members of SJP, to threaten an international campaign to divest from Hampshire College--a threat that carries some sting for Hampshire, which is a small institution with a history of financial difficulties.

Dershowitz is notorious for his relentless personal and professional attacks on those who speak out against Israel's crimes. In 2007, for example, Norman Finkelstein, a renowned scholar and an outspoken critic of Israel's policies, was denied tenure at DePaul University after Dershowitz put pressure on faculty and the administration.

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FACED WITH Dershowitz's threats, three Hampshire administrators--Board of Trustees Chair Sigmund Roos, President Ralph Hexter, and Vice President and Dean of Faculty Aaron Berman--issued a joint "statement of clarification," presumably to appease their pro-Israel critics and downplay this important milestone in the struggle for justice for Palestinians.

The statement admits that while the investment review that led to the decision to divest "was undertaken...to address a petition from a student group, Students for Justice in Palestine...the decision [to divest from the State Street fund] expressly did not pertain to a political movement or single out businesses active in a specific region or country."

In trying to dissociate Hampshire's divestment decision from the Palestinian cause, the statement asserts that in addition to corporations like Caterpillar and United Technologies--which were among the six targeted by SJP for their support of the Israeli occupation--"the State Street fund included 200-plus companies engaged in multiple violations of the college's investment policy."

But the minutes of the university's own Committee at Hampshire on Investment Responsibility (CHOIR), a subcommittee of the Board of Trustees' investment committee, proves this to be a deception at best.

After two SJP presentations in 2008, CHOIR's own minutes recorded a vote "to recommend to the investment committee that Hampshire College divest of the following six companies--Caterpillar, Terex, Motorola, ITT, General Electric, United Technologies--based on full consideration of the presentation by SJP."

In its own statement, SJP points out:

SJP was explicitly asked by the administration what companies to avoid in the future in terms of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This fact illustrates that the Israeli occupation and SJP's work were undoubtedly the primary reasons for the decision to divest.

Furthermore, the violations of the other 200 companies...were only researched days before the investment committee's decision to divest...For eight and a half months, the only specific companies in the State Street fund that were discussed were the six companies SJP targeted.

These facts prove that the decision was made on the grounds of the six companies' involvement in the occupation of Palestine. We can only assume the reason the Board and administration chose to depoliticize this decision is because of the volatile nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This victory has inspired activists on campuses across the country and has the potential to help spur the movement for divestment from Israel's occupation and oppression of Palestinians.

As Omar Barghouti of the Palestinian Committee for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel said in a statement of solidarity to Hampshire SJP:

What worries Dershowitz et al. in the Zionist establishment in the U.S. to the extreme is the fact that this is a successful precedent attained through a persistent, committed, well thought out and intelligent student campaign...

There is no reason why Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley or Columbia students cannot emulate this success on their own respective campuses, Dershowitz must be thinking. And that would effectively announce the beginning of the end of Israel's impunity in the U.S. with all the repercussion such a transformation would lead to on the ground in Palestine.

Those who seek justice for Palestinians and support the right to speak truth to power should stand with Hampshire SJP to defend their victory so that, in the words of Hampshire SJP, "this decision will pave the way for other institutions of higher learning in the U.S. to take similar stands."

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.