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.

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.