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Kirstin Roberts tells the story of an uprising that toppled three centuries of Tsarist rule.

THE POLISH revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg wrote that humanity faces a choice--either the continued barbarism of capitalism or the revolutionary transformation of society to create a world fit to live in.

This choice appeared starkly in the years between 1914 and 1917--in the form of the carnage of the First World War. The outbreak of world war in 1914 was a turning point. The mask of "progress" that the industrial revolution had worn was ripped away to reveal the imperialist conflict and savagery beneath.

The First World War was the terrible product of capitalism. The rapid industrialization of the late 19th and early 20th century spread capitalism around the globe, and the richest states became locked into competition for the world's resources and markets.

One of the most horrific aspects of the war was the mismatch between generals' use of 19th century battle tactics and 20th century weaponry, like machine guns and chemical weapons. This contributed to the enormous human cost. Ten million people were killed or died as a result of the war. Russia alone lost close to 2 million.

The First World War involved extensive use of trench warfare: the hideous spectacle of men digging themselves into the ground--often, their own graves--separated from the enemy by a "no man's land."

At Verdun, the war's longest battle, an average of 100 shells a minute were fired for five months--23 million in total. Two million men fought at Verdun, and by the end, half were dead. Yet at the end of the encounter, the battle lines were almost exactly where they had been at the beginning.

Russia was pitted against the economically and technologically superior German war machine, so Russian commanders responded by throwing at it a mountain of human bodies--poor peasants whose lives were seen as "expendable" in the eyes of the state.

The first major battle on the Eastern front occurred when German forces surrounded and destroyed the Russian army at the Battle of Tannenberg. Because of the total incompetence of the Tsar's generals, nearly a quarter of a million Russians lost their lives in this one battle alone.

To add to the tragedy, the vast majority of working-class political parties across Europe had abandoned their previous opposition to war. This left the once-powerful European workers' movement confused and demoralized. The Bolshevik Party in Russia, led by Lenin, was among the few to maintain an internationalist position of opposition to war.

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THE SENSELESS barbarism of the war left the Tsarist system in Russia in a state of general collapse and crisis by 1917. One-fourth of the Russian Empire's richest lands had been lost to Germany--despite 6 million Russian soldiers killed, wounded or captured.

The destructiveness of the war was matched by a breakdown in Russia's economy. Prices rose far above wages, and food and fuel were in short supply. By early 1917, the average working woman of Petrograd was spending 40 hours a week in bread lines.

Scandalous corruption and ineptitude at the highest levels of Russian society provoked even previously loyal subjects of Tsar Nicholas into a movement against his system. Strikes and demonstrations for better wages, against war profiteering, and for price controls grew in number and militancy throughout 1915 and 1916.

A police report in early 1917 stated that Russia's working class was

on the edge of despair...the slightest explosion, however trivial its pretext, will lead to uncontrollable riots...The inability to buy goods, the frustrations of queuing, the rising death rate owing to poor living conditions, and the cold and damp produced by lack of coal...have all created a situation where most of the workers are ready to embark on the savage excesses of a food riot.

On February 23, 1917 (March 8 on the Western calendar--Russia's ran 13 days behind), this despair turned into open revolt.

February 23 was International Women's Day, a socialist, working-class holiday in celebration of the struggles of working women to emancipate themselves and their class. As Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, later wrote:

The social-democratic circles had intended...meetings, speeches, leaflets. It had not occurred to anyone that it might become the first day of the revolution. Not a single organization called for strikes that day.

But the women textile workers of Petrograd came out on strike, and they dragged behind them the Bolshevik Party-led metal workers of the Vyborg district.

The Bolshevik Party--the most consistently revolutionary worker's party in Russia--initially urged its membership not to participate in the strikes, fearing that the workers' movement was not yet ready to defend itself against an inevitable crackdown by the government.

But the Bolshevik rank and file threw itself into the developing rebellion, with more experienced party activists on the ground often providing the lead as masses of people took more and more decisive action.

By the end of International Women's Day, 90,000 workers were on strike. The next day, the 24th, about half of Petrograd's workers were on strike, and large numbers were demonstrating in the streets. "The slogan "Bread!" wrote Trotsky, "is crowded out or obscured by louder slogans: 'Down with the autocracy,' 'Down with the war!'"

By the third day, large numbers of soldiers who had been mobilized to squash the demonstrations had instead joined the revolt, and could be seen using their weapons to shoot at police stations and liberate political prisoners.

Since the infantry could not be relied on to fire on the people, the government brought out its most reliable and elite troops, the Cossack Calvary. But the Cossacks, too, refused to fire on the workers.

Instead, according to witnesses at one demonstration, the Cossacks winked at the demonstrators and fraternized with them. With their commanders watching helplessly, they allowed the protest to proceed--these feared warriors pretended not to notice as the workers crawled under their horses and into the streets.

By February 27, barracks of peasant soldiers in the cities, training to eventually take their turn in trenches at the front, began to rebel openly and come over to the side of revolution. Large numbers of these soldiers were mobilized by the most militant workers to seize the police stations, arrest government officials and army officers loyal to the Tsar, and drive troops loyal to the government out of the cities.

The Tsar's ministers fled or were arrested. Finally, on March 2, three centuries of Romanov rule came to an end, when the Tsar abdicated.

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MANY OF the most decisive acts of the revolution that brought down the Tsar were spontaneous and unplanned. But it would be wrong to ignore the crucial role of experienced and organized revolutionaries in the workplaces and army during the February uprising.

In particular, members of the Bolshevik Party played key roles in the strikes, street battles and demonstrations.

While no left party had predicted the date or the exact path that the revolution would follow, it was clear to all--except, perhaps, the clueless Tsar--that Russian society faced an extreme crisis that held revolutionary implications.

The Bolsheviks stood out not for their ability to predict how the revolution would unfold, but for their preparation and dedication to the power of workers to transform society since the first Russian Revolution in 1905. The influence of these ideas--voiced by a layer of experienced party activists in workplaces across Russia--were of decisive importance in steering the revolution to victory.

Again, Trotsky explained the dynamic:

The mystic doctrine of spontaneousness explains nothing...In the working masses, there was taking place an independent and deep process of growth, not only hatred for their rulers, but of critical understanding of their impotence, and accumulation of experience and creative consciousness, which the revolutionary insurrection and its victory only completed.

To the question, "Who led the February revolution?" we then answer definitively enough: conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin.

The February Revolution was a beacon of inspiration to workers and the oppressed the world over. The horror of the First World War had an alternative: the overthrow of those who led their countries to fight.

Morgan Price Phillips, an English journalist in Russia at the time, wrote of the spirit of these heady days,:

I knew this was coming sooner or later, but did not think it would come so quickly. Whole country is wild with joy, waving red flags and singing Marseillaise (the French revolutionary anthem). It has surpassed my wildest dreams, and I can hardly believe it's true...

Long live Great Russia, who has shown the world the road to freedom. May Germany and England follow in her steps.

The Russian working class and peasantry had taken the first steps toward securing their own emancipation. Immediately following the abdication of the Tsar, workers' and soldiers' councils began to form across Russia, as they had in 1905.

But while the working class proved in February that it could topple a hated and rotten regime, it also proved it was, as yet, unable to take and hold power for itself. Instead, power remained, for the time being, in the hands of Russia's capitalist class. This paradox, as later articles will show, could not last long.

This article first appeared in the March 2, 2007, edition of Socialist Worker.

This interview with Karl Marx first appeared on January 5, 1879, in the Chicago Tribune--one of the most conservative newspapers of the time, which regularly attacked socialism and trade unions. This text is republished from the Marxists Internet Archive.

LONDON, DECEMBER 18 [1878]--In a little villa at Haverstock Hill, the northwest portion of London, lives Karl Marx, the cornerstone of modern socialism. He was exiled from his native country--Germany--in 1844, for propagating revolutionary theories. In 1848, he returned, but in a few months was again exiled. He then took up his abode in Paris, but his political theories procured his expulsion from that city in 1849, and since that year his headquarters have been in London. His convictions have caused him trouble from the beginning. Judging from the appearance of his home, they certainly have not brought him affluence. Persistently during all these years he has advocated his views with an earnestness which undoubtedly springs from a firm belief in them, and, however much we may deprecate their propagation, we cannot but respect to a certain extent the self-denial of the now venerable exile.

Our correspondent has called upon him twice or thrice, and each time the Doctor was found in his library, with a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He must be over seventy years of age. His physique is well knit, massive, erect. He has the head of a man of intellect, and the features of a cultivated Jew. His hair and beard are long, and iron-gray in color. His eyes are glittering black, shaded by a pair of bushy eyebrows. To a stranger he shows extreme caution. A foreigner can generally gain admission; but the ancient-looking German woman [Helene Demuth] who waits upon visitors has instructions to admit none who hail from the Fatherland, unless they bring letters of introduction. Once into his library, however, and having fixed his one eyeglass in the corner of his eye, in order to take your intellectual breadth and depth, so to speak, he loses that self-restraint, and unfolds to you a knowledge of men and things throughout the world apt to interest one. And his conversation does not run in one groove, but is as varied as are the volumes upon his library shelves. A man can generally be judged by the books he reads, and you can form your own conclusions when I tell you a casual glance revealed Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Moliere, Racine, Montaigne, Bacon, Goethe, Voltaire, Paine; English, American, French blue books; works political and philosophical in Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, etc., etc.

During my conversation I was struck with his intimacy with American questions which have been uppermost during the past twenty years. His knowledge of them, and the surprising accuracy with which he criticized our national and state legislation, impressed upon my mind the fact that he must have derived his information from inside sources. But, indeed, this knowledge is not confined to America, but is spread over the face of Europe. When speaking of his hobby--socialism--he does not indulge in those melodramatic flights generally attributed to him, but dwells upon his utopian plans for "the emancipation of the human race" with a gravity and an earnestness indicating a firm conviction in the realization of his theories, if not in this century, at least in the next.

Perhaps Dr. Karl Marx is better known in America as the author of Capital, and the founder of the International Society, or at least its most prominent pillar. In the interview which follows, you will see what he says of this Society as it at present exists. However, in the meantime I will give you a few extracts from the printed general rules of The International Society published in 1871, by order of the General Council, from which you can form an impartial judgment of its aims and ends. The Preamble sets forth "that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves; that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule; that the economical subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor--that is, the sources of life--lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence; that all efforts aiming at" the universal emancipation of the working classes "have hitherto failed from want of solidarity between the manifold divisions of labor in each country," and the Preamble calls for "the immediate combination of the still-disconnected movements." It goes on to say that the International Association acknowledges "no rights without duties, no duties without rights"--thus making every member a worker. The Association was formed at London "to afford a central medium of communication and cooperation between the workingmen's societies in the different countries," aiming at the same end, namely: "the protection, advancement, and complete emancipation of the working classes." "Each member," the document further says, "of the International Association, on removing his domicile from one country to another, will receive the fraternal support of the associated workingmen."

The Society consists of a general Congress, which meets annually, a general Council, which forms "an international agency between the different national and local groups of the Association, so that the workingmen in one country can be constantly informed of the movements of their class in every other country." This Council receives and acts upon the applications of new branches or sections to join the International, decides differences arising between the sections, and, in fact, to use an American phrase, "runs the machine." The expenses of the General Council are defrayed by an annual contribution of an English penny per member. Then come the federal councils or committees, and local sections, in the various countries. The federal councils are bound to send one report at least every month to the General Council, and every three months a report on the administration and financial state of their respective branches. whenever attacks against the International are published, the nearest branch or committee is bound to send at once a copy of such publication to the General Council. The formation of female branches among the working classes is recommended.

The General Council comprises the following: R. Applegarth, M.T. Boon, Frederick Bradnick, G.H. Buttery, E. Delahaye, Eugene Dupont (on mission), William Hales, G. Harris, Hurliman, Jules Johannard, Harriet Law, Frederick Lessner, Lochner, Charles Longuet, C. Martin, Zevy Maurice, Henry Mayo, George Milner, Charles Murray, Pfander, John Pach, Ruhl Sadler, Cowell Stepney, Alfred Taylor, W. Townshend, E. Vaillant, John Weston. The corresponding secretaries for the various countries are: Leo Frankel, for Austria and Hungary; A. Herman, Belgium; T. Mottershead, Denmark; A. Serrailler, France; Karl Marx, Germany and Russia; Charles Rochat, Holland; J.P. McDonell, Ireland; Frederick Engels, Italy and Spain; Walery Wroblewski, Poland; Hermann Jung, Switzerland; J.G. Eccarius, United States; Le Moussu, for French branches of United States.

During my visit to Dr. Marx, I alluded to the platform given by J.C. Bancroft Davis in his official report of 1877 as the clearest and most concise exposition of socialism that I had seen. He said it was taken from the report of the socialist reunion at Gotha, Germany, in May, 1875. The translation was incorrect, he said, and he volunteered corrections which I append as he dictated:

First: Universal, direct, and secret suffrage for all males over twenty years, for all elections, municipal and state.

Second: Direct legislation by the people. War and peace to be made by direct popular vote.

Third: Universal obligation to militia duty. No standing army.

Fourth: Abolition of all special legislation regarding press laws and public meetings.

Fifth: Legal remedies free of expense. Legal proceedings to be conducted by the people.

Sixth: Education to be by the state--general, obligatory, and free. Freedom of science and religion.

Seventh: All indirect taxes to be abolished. Money to be raised for state and municipal purposes by direct progressive income tax.

Eighth: Freedom of combination among the working classes.

Ninth: The legal day of labor for men to be defined. The work of women to be limited, and that of children to be abolished.

Tenth: Sanitary laws for the protection of life and health of laborers, and regulation of their dwelling and places of labor, to be enforced by persons selected by them.

Eleventh: Suitable provision respecting prison labor. In Mr. Bancroft Davis' report there is

A Twelfth Clause, the most important of all, which reads: "State aid and credit for industrial societies, under democratic direction." I asked the Doctor why he omitted this, and he replied:

"When the reunion took place at Gotha, in 1875, there existed a division among the Social Democrats. The one wing were partisans of Lassalle, the others those who had accepted in general the program of the International organization, and were called the Eisenach party. The twelfth point was not placed on the platform, but placed in the general introduction by way of concession to the Lassallians. Afterwards it was never spoken of. Mr. Davis does not say that is was placed in the program as a compromise having no particular significance, but gravely puts it in as one of the cardinal principles of the program."

"But," I said, "socialists generally look upon the transformation of the means of labor into the common property of society as the grand climax of the movement."

"Yes; we say that this will be the outcome of the movement, but it will be a question of time, of education, and the institution of higher social status."

"This platform," I remarked, "applies only to Germany and one or two other countries."

"Ah!" he returned, "if you draw your conclusions from nothing but this, you know nothing of the activity of the party. Many of its points have no significance outside of Germany. Spain, Russia, England, and America have platforms suited to their peculiar difficulties. The only similarity in them is the end to be attained."

"And that is the supremacy of labor?"

"That is the Emancipation of Labor"

"Do European socialists look upon the movement in America as a serious one?"

"Yes: it is the natural outcome of the country's development. It has been said that the movement has been imported by foreigners. When labor movements became disagreeable in England, fifty years ago, the same thing was said; and that was long before socialism was spoken of. In American, since 1857, only has the labor movement become conspicuous. Then trade unions began to flourish; then trades assemblies were formed, in which the workers in different industries united; and after that came national labor unions. If you consider this chronological progress, you will see that socialism has sprung up in that country without the aid of foreigners, and was merely caused by the concentration of capital and the changed relations between the workmen and employers."

"Now," asked our correspondent, "what has socialism done so far?"

"Two things," he returned. "Socialists have shown the general universal struggle between capital and labor--the Cosmopolitan Chapter in one word--and consequently tried to bring about an understanding between the workmen in the different countries, which became more necessary as the capitalists became more cosmopolitan in hiring labor, pitting foreign against native labor not only in America, but in England, France, and Germany. International relations sprang up at once between workingmen in the three different countries, showing that socialism was not merely a local, but an international problem, to be solved by the international action of workmen. The working classes move spontaneously, without knowing what the ends of the movement will be. The socialists invent no movement, but merely tell the workmen what its character and its ends will be."

"Which means the overthrowing of the present social system," I interrupted.

"This system of land and capital in the hands of employers, on the one hand," he continued, "and the mere working power in the hands of the laborers to sell a commodity, we claim is merely a historical phase, which will pass away and give place to A Higher Social Condition.

We see everywhere a division of society. The antagonism of the two classes goes hand in hand with the development of the industrial resources of modern countries. From a socialistic standpoint the means already exist to revolutionize the present historical phase. Upon trade unions, in many countries, have been built political organizations. In America the need of an independent workingmen's party has been made manifest. They can no longer trust politicians. Rings and cliques have seized upon the legislatures, and politics has been made a trade. But America is not alone in this, only its people are more decisive than Europeans. Things come to the surface quicker. There is less cant and hypocrisy that there is on this side of the ocean."

I asked him to give me a reason for the rapid growth of the socialistic party in Germany, when he replied:

"The present socialistic party came last. Theirs was not the utopian scheme which made headway in France and England. The German mind is given to theorizing, more than that of other peoples. From previous experience the Germans evolved something practical. This modern capitalistic system, you must recollect, is quite new in Germany in comparison to other states. Questions were raised which had become almost antiquated in France and England, and political influences to which these states had yielded sprang into life when the working classes of Germany had become imbued with socialistic theories. therefore, from the beginning almost of modern industrial development, they have formed an Independent Political Party.

They had their own representatives in the German parliament. There was no party to oppose the policy of the government, and this devolved upon them. To trace the course of the party would take a long time; but I may say this: that, if the middle classes of Germany were not the greatest cowards, distinct from the middle classes of America and England, all the political work against the government should have been done by them."

I asked him a question regarding the numerical strength of the Lassallians in the ranks of the Internationalists.

"The party of Lassalle," he replied, "does not exist. Of course there are some believers in our ranks, but the number is small. Lassalle anticipated our general principles. When he commenced to move after the reaction of 1848, he fancied that he could more successfully revive the movement by advocating cooperation of the workingmen in industrial enterprises. It was to stir them into activity. He looked upon this merely as a means to the real end of the movement. I have letters from him to this effect."

"You would call it his nostrum?"

"Exactly. He called upon Bismarck, told him what he designed, and Bismarck encouraged Lassalle's course at that time in every possible way."

"What was his object?"

"He wished to use the working classes as a set-off against the middle classes who instigated the troubles of 1848."

"It is said that you are the head and front of socialism, Doctor, and from your villa here pull the wires of all the associations, revolutions, etc., now going on. What do you say about it?"

The old gentleman smiled: "I know it."

"It is very absurd yet it has a comic side. For two months previous to the attempt of Hoedel, Bismarck complained in his North German Gazette that I was in league with Father Beck, the leader of the Jesuit movement, and that we were keeping the socialist movement in such a condition that he could do nothing with it."

"But your International Society in London directs the movement?"

"The International Society has outlived its usefulness and exists no longer. It did exist and direct the movement; but the growth of socialism of late years has been so great that its existence has become unnecessary. Newspapers have been started in the various countries. These are interchanged. That is about the only connection the parties in the different countries have with one another. The International Society, in the first instance, was created to bring the workmen together, and show the advisability of effecting organization among their various nationalities. The interests of each party in the different countries have no similarity. This specter of the Internationalist leaders sitting at London is a mere invention. It is true that we dictated to foreign societies when the Internationalist organization was first accomplished. We were forced to exclude some sections in New York, among them one in which Madam Woodhull was conspicuous. That was in 1871. there are several American politicians--I will not name them--who wish to trade in the movement. They are well known to American socialists."

"You and your followers, Dr. Marx, have been credited with all sorts of incendiary speeches against religion. Of course you would like to see the whole system destroyed, root and branch."

"We know," he replied after a moment's hesitation, "that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinion: as socialism grows, religion will disappear.

Its disappearance must be done by social development, in which education must play a part."

"The Reverend Joseph Cook, of Boston – you know him –"

"We have heard of him, a very badly informed man upon the subject of socialism."

"In a lecture lately upon the subject, he said, 'Karl Marx is credited now with saying that, in the United States, and in Great Britain, and perhaps in France, a reform of labor will occur without bloody revolution, but that blood must be shed in Germany, and in Russia, and in Italy, and in Austria.'"

"No socialist," remarked the Doctor, smiling, "need predict that there will be a bloody revolution in Russia, Germany, Austria, and possibly Italy if the Italians keep on in the policy they are now pursuing. The deeds of the French Revolution may be enacted again in those countries. That is apparent to any political student. But those revolutions will be made by the majority. No revolution can be made by a party, but by a nation".

"The reverend gentleman alluded to," I remarked, "gave an extract from a letter which he said you addressed to the Communists of Paris in 1871. Here it is:

'We are as yet but 3,000,000 at most. In twenty years we shall be 50,000,000 – 100,000,000 perhaps. Then the world will belong to us, for it will be not only Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, which will rise against odious capital, but Berlin, Munich, Dresden, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Brussels, St. Petersburg, New York – in short, the whole world. And before this new insurrection, such as history has not yet known, the past will disappear like a hideous nightmare; for the popular conflagration, kindled at a hundred points at once, will destroy even its memory!'

Now, Doctor, I suppose you admit the authorship of that extract?"

"I never wrote a word of it. I never write such melodramatic nonsense. I am very careful what I do write. That was put in Le Figaro, over my signature, about that time. There were hundreds of the same kind of letters flying about them. I wrote to the London Times and declared they were forgeries; but if I denied everything that has been said and written of me, I would require a score of secretaries."

"But you have written in sympathy with the Paris Communists?"

"Certainly I have, in consideration of what was written of them in leading articles; but the correspondence from Paris in English papers is quite sufficient to refute the blunders propagated in editorials. The Commune killed only about sixty people; Marshal MacMahon and his slaughtering army killed over 60,000. There has never been a movement so slandered as that of the Commune."

"Well, then, to carry out the principles of socialism do its believers advocate assassination and bloodshed?"

"No great movement," Karl answered, "has ever been inaugurated without bloodshed.

"The independence of America was won by bloodshed, Napoleon captured France through a bloody process, and he was overthrown by the same means. Italy, England, Germany, and every other country gives proof of this, and as for assassination," he went on to say, "it is not a new thing, I need scarcely say. Orsini tried to kill Napoleon; kings have killed more than anybody else; the Jesuits have killed; the Puritans killed at the time of Cromwell. These deeds were all done or attempted before socialism was born. Every attempt, however, now made upon a royal or state individual is attributed to socialism. The socialists would regret very much the death of the German Emperor at the present time. He is very useful where he is; and Bismarck has done more for the cause than any other statesman, by driving things to extremes."

I asked Dr. Marx what he thought of Bismarck.

He replied that "Napoleon was considered a genius until he fell; then he was called a fool. Bismarck will follow in his wake. He began by building up a despotism under the plea of unification. his course has been plain to all. The last move is but an attempted imitation of a coup d'etat; but it will fail. The socialists of Germany, as of France, protested against the war of 1870 as merely dynastic. They issued manifestoes foretelling the German people, if they allowed the pretended war of defense to be turned into a war of conquest, they would be punished by the establishment of military despotism and the ruthless oppression of the productive masses. The Social-Democratic party in Germany, thereupon holding meetings and publishing manifestoes for an honorable peace with France, were at once prosecuted by the Prussian Government, and many of the leaders imprisoned. Still their deputies alone dared to protest, and very vigorously too, in the German Reichstag, against the forcible annexation of French provinces. However, Bismarck carried his policy by force, and people spoke of the genius of a Bismarck. The war was fought, and when he could make no conquests, he was called upon for original ideas, and he has signally failed. The people began to lose faith in him. His popularity was on the wane. He needs money, and the state needs it. Under a sham constitution he has taxed the people for his military and unification plans until he can tax them no longer, and now he seeks to do it with no constitution at all. For the purpose of levying as he chooses, he has raised the ghost of socialism, and has done everything in his power to create an emeute."

"You have continual advice from Berlin?"

"Yes," he said; "my friends keep me well advised. It is in a perfectly quiet state, and Bismarck is disappointed. He has expelled forty-eight prominent men – among them Deputies Hasselman and Fritsche and Rackow, Bauman, and Adler, of the Freie Presse. These men kept the workmen of Berlin quiet. Bismarck knew this. He also knew that there were 75,000 workmen in that city upon the verge of starvation. Once those leaders were gone, he was confident that the mob would rise, and that would be the cue for a carnival of slaughter. The screws would then be put upon the whole German Empire; his petty theory of blood and iron would then have full sway, and taxation could be levied to any extent. So far no emeute has occurred, and he stands today confounded at the situation and the ridicule of all statesmen."

H.

Ragina Johnson documents Corporate America's new drive to exploit natural resources, no matter what the impact on the environment or the rights of Native peoples.

THOUGH YOU wouldn't know it from the mainstream media, the U.S. economy continues to suffer the aftershocks of the Great Recession of 2008. California is special case in point, where the unemployment rate hovers at 10 percent.

To resolve this crisis, money-grubbing corporations and the politicians that serve them are working together to restructure the economy and restore stronger growth by turning to resource extraction. This form of growth and development is already having a drastic impact on the environment, people's health--and also the sovereignty and rights of Native American tribes and nations.

The consequences for working people are stark. In California, child poverty is on the rise at 23 percent, rental prices have skyrocketed, migration to the Golden State has slowed, and in a sure sign of an unfolding social crisis, some adults are deciding that having children is no longer an affordable option. The reports of a rise in suicide rates among adults shows how far the social crisis can deepen if people don't have access to economic stability and good jobs.

In the fall of last year, Native tribes declared a state of emergency. Reports revealed Native American teens and young adults are killing themselves at more than triple the rate of other young Americans. Coming after decades of racism, continued land theft and inequality, Native Americans, as a segment at the bottom of the ladder, are being hit the hardest.

The 1 Percent, on the other hand, has managed to hoard unprecedented amounts of cash--almost $2 trillion in 2011, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. The super-rich are looking for ways to invest their money, and they can count on the U.S. government to help them with its policies.

This explains why President Obama could flip to the other direction from his pre-election speeches and take up the "Drill, baby, drill!" mantra of the right wing. The 1 Percent in this country aims to finish first in the rat race to pump out what remains of the world's oil reserves.

Not without resistance, though. The push to complete the Keystone XL pipeline regardless of environmental damage has sparked a movement made up of environmental activists and indigenous tribes and nations, including the inspiring Idle No More movement in Canada, which rose up against Bill C-45.

C-45 aims to expand tar sands mining as well as the pipeline carrying tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Pacific coast. The end goal is selling this oil to overseas markets. C-45 is part of a long line of legislation attacking the rights of indigenous people in North America.

As an editorial at the online NetNewsLedger.com points out:

With domestic and foreign investors seeking resource wealth from the lands of Canada, First Nation sovereignty presents a massive hurdle for Canada to exploit such resources. This is precisely why the motivation exists to dismantle First Nation legal connection to treaties, sovereignty, and protected reserve lands, as it opens up lands and resources to investors.

The struggle of First Nations organizing in the Idle No More movement has parallel connections with tribes and nations in the U.S. In late March, the Oglala Sioux Tribe renewed its vow to stop XL Pipeline "from crossing the Mni Wiconi Water Line, any part of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and any and all 1851 and 1868 treaty lands," it stated in a resolution.

The resolution affirmed: "The Great Sioux Nation hereby directs President Barack Obama and the United States Congress to honor the promises of the United States made through the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie treaties by prohibiting the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline and any future projects from entering and destroying our land without our consent."

On the day of the vote, Oglala Sioux tribal member Debra White Plume made a call for members to engage in direct-action united with other environmental activists to stop the pipeline.

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THE MOVEMENT against the Keystone XL pipeline has been at the forefront of resistance against the absurdity of putting profits above the sustainability of the environment and our ability to live in good health and drink clean water. But we have to understand that oil isn't the only natural resource that corporations aim to extract and exploit until there isn't a drop or an ounce left.

New permits for mining have been enacted all over the country, including in Wisconsin, where corporations hope to mine sand to support the fracking extraction process used to obtain natural gas and oil.

Last month, Gov. Scott Walker signed a law that directly violates treaties with Native American tribes and environmental protections, which surrounds the largest freshwater lake in the world.

As reported at the LGBT news site Let's Get Real:

While we were busy watching unconstitutional abortion laws and the run up to [the U.S. Supreme Court] taking on Prop 8 and DOMA, the state of Wisconsin quietly declared war on the Bad River Chippewa. In violation of provisions in the 1837 and 1842 treaties with the Lake Superior Chippewa that ceded vast tracts of territory to what is now Wisconsin, the state enacted a new iron mining law that effectively guts the environmental protections on the ceded territories. According to those treaties, the Chippewa retained the rights to hunt, fish and gather in the ceded territories in perpetuity.

This caused Gordon Thayer, chairman of the Lac Courte Oreilles of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, in a state tribal address,
to call on Wisconsin lawmakers to not "cash in our natural resources for corporate profit."

Thayer also said state officials were spreading inflammatory and downright racist "political propaganda" to support opening the mine by stating the tribe was most concerned with spear fishing. Apparently, one Republican leader was so offended by Thayer's accusation of discriminatory language against the Chippewa that he walked out during the address.

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IN CALIFORNIA, a lucrative focus on revitalizing mining has been dubbed the "New Gold Rush."

At least that's what investors thought until last month, when gold dropped dramatically in price to around $1,360 an ounce, down from around $1,700 a few months before. Since then, to the sighs of relief of mining corporations, gold prices rebounded, although not to previous levels. A couple of months ago, gold hovered around at $1,700 per ounce.

Even so, gold has not been such a sought-after commodity since the early 1970s, when the U.S. went off the gold standard.

With this revival in the drive for gold, business and financial news sources have been conjuring up the fairy tale and downright revisionist history of the Wild West during the first Gold Rush. As Market Wire boasted:

Gold mining is in California's DNA. During The Gold Rush (1848-1855), 300,000 people moved to the Golden State. When the boom ended, many of the prospectors stayed and formed the base of a diverse economy, which blossomed for 150 years--but is now failing.

Desperate for jobs and tax revenue, the government of California can look to the mining industry as a cash cow whose operations and labor pool cannot be outsourced. Modern extraction and processing technologies are also making it easier for California gold producers to meet the state's stringent environmental standards. California has granted 30 of the last 30 mining permits.

Not much is said about how the boom in mining and migration westward during the mid-1800s affected the Native population or the environment. After the U.S. took control of California in 1848 in a war with Mexico, the ideology of "Manifest Destiny" pushed the conquest of North America toward the setting sun, along with violence against an indigenous population with a history dating back 10,000 years or more.

Historians have estimated that prior to the Gold Rush, over 300,000 people lived in California--some researchers now think the number was actually over 700,000. The population represented up to 100 tribes who spoke 300 dialects of 100 distinct languages. California today has the largest Native population of any state.

Yet rarely, as you travel over California roads and pass through cities and small towns, is there a mention of the people who existed prior to the miners, traders--the so-called pioneers--even as people visit deserts and towns named after tribes. And rarely in schools or local museums is there discussion of the Native population residing in California now. Instead, people are taught the history of the Mission system or the legacy of the Gold Rush, which was actually genocidal in character.

The racism that continues today against Native Americans is because of the legacy of the United States. The theft of land and resources of indigenous peoples' was a central component part of the formation of the U.S. state and its laws.

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THE RIGHTS and sovereignty of Native peoples has once again been in the crosshairs as the high price of gold has pushed efforts to reopen large-scale mining in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, home to what is known as the Mother Lode.

The Briggs Mine, now owned by Atna Resources Ltd. of Golden, Colo., reopened because of the rising price of gold. The mine is located in the Panamint Valley and Mountain Range, which borders and crosses into Death Valley. According to its website, the company is looking to extract 213,000 ounces of gold by 2017.

The Briggs Mine is an open-pit, cyanide leach operation--a severely dangerous and ecologically unsound method of extraction. According to the Environmental Working Group, Death Valley National Park Superintendent James T. Reynolds opposed the reopening of Briggs because:

[c]yanide heap leaching is a method in which companies place the huge quantities of rock and earth on a plastic-lined heap leach pad and then spray or drip cyanide over the pile. As the cyanide trickles through the heap, it binds to the precious metal. The mining company then collects the metal from the cyanide solution in liquid-filled pits at the base of the rock pile. Canyon Resources has a history of pollution in Montana. Its Kendall Mine was permitted in 1989 and has exceeded water quality standards according to the EPA.

But despite the Environmental Protection Agency saying certain mines met regulation standards, it is a known fact among environmental groups that these types of mines often have cyanide spills, which cause surface and groundwater contamination from acid mine drainage.

The Panamint Range mountains are sacred ground for the Timbisha Shoshone, whose ancestry traces back to the Uto-Aztecans. The Timbisha organized against the original opening of the Briggs Mine and still to this day are trying to make sure the mine conforms to regulations.

The Timbisha's struggle against mining goes back 130 years to the famous Twenty Mule Teams. These teams, made up of 18 mules and two horses, plus a driver, transported borax out of Death Valley to trains in the Mojave Desert almost 200 miles away.

This was the tribe's first contact with white prospectors and miners, who flooded into the valley that the Timbisha called home. The discovery of borax, a mineral and chemical compound used in almost everything from detergent and cosmetics, to insecticides and fiberglass, ended up being as profitable as finding gold.

The Timbisha's way of life was completely altered by borax mining. The Pacific Borax Company obtained local water rights, which robbed vital resources and land from the indigenous population.

In 1933, Death Valley, whose name is a actually an insult to the Timbisha, became a national monument, further severing the Timbisha's sovereignty in the area, through the establishment of the national park.

The Timbisha never left the valley, though, nor gave up on their historical rights to the surrounding resources and the mountains they called home. Finally, with the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act of 2000, after almost 70 years of organizing, they were finally returned some of their ancestral lands.

Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Barbara Durham of the Timbisha Shoshone Indian Tribe described the process of this bittersweet achievement in an interview:

Our tribe was finally recognized in the 1980s, but we were not given any lands, and we were thought of as trespassers. In the 1990s, there was the California protection act, and we thought we should do something now. This started the ball moving to get Rep. Jerry Lewis to add language to the bill for reservation lands inside and outside of the park, and this began the process. Even today, we are the only tribe to have lands in a national park in the United States.

Before this victory, we were considered trespassers on our own land. We had to shame the park to get to them to the negotiating table. We have over 7,000 aces of land. But it was like coming at the end of everything. All of the good land was gone.

Amid this success for the Timbisha came the plans to reopen the Briggs Mine. The tribe challenged further expansion of the Briggs mining operation and exploration in the Panamint area. The tribe knew the mine could pollute ancestral lands and water sources in the Panamint, creating an irreversible environmental disaster.

The Timbisha was never directly consulted about the opening of the Briggs gold mine in the first place, nor the reopening, as required by laws and regulations of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of Inyo County.

Durham described the tribe's opposition to the mining operation:

The water use of the mine was of interest. We tried to fight this, but it didn't go too far. We keep going to CR Briggs, even today, once a year, but the BLM worked closely with the mine owners, and they still do. Whatever CR Briggs wanted, the BLM did. CR Briggs approached the Timbisha a couple times and wanted to throw money at us. But we don't want it. Why would we take their money? Some tribes choose to work with mining money. We couldn't.

The Timbisha Shoshone Native Tribe was part of the movement to appose the Yucca Mountain disposal project that Congress designated in Nevada as a nuclear waste dump in 1987. The Yucca Mountain project never came to fruition because of resistance of Nevada residents, environmental activists and indigenous people.

Even today, Yucca Mountain comes up among politicians and corporations as a viable option for nuclear disposal. The Yucca Mountains are sacred to the Western Shoshone. This means that tribes alongside environmental activists will continue to resist the project of using the mountain for any nuclear disposal.

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WE SHOULDN'T allow this discussion to focus on job creation.

Environmentalists have rightfully pointed out the devastating impacts of mining, drilling and fracking. Supposedly, California has tough regulations, which are the result of the mining industry's legacy of ecological damage.

Miners during the Gold Rush used mercury to process gold. As a consequence, millions of pounds of poisonous waste found its way into watersheds, streams and rivers. Now, throughout California, some fish are still unsafe to eat.

But the environmental consequences of mining aren't an issue that happened 150 years ago. When San Juan Ridge miners hit groundwater in the 1990s in California, a member of the Nevada City school board noted how the neighborhood wells started to go dry, and currently, the water is still unsafe to drink.

The mine shut down after only a few years, but now it's looking to reopen. Tim Callaway, CEO of San Juan Mining Corp. said, "I don't expect the community to take any significant risks for the benefit of my operation."

He went on to say that he "hopes the idea of job creation will erase people's memory of the mine's environmental pollution. What this project offers is really high-paying jobs. There are very, very few industries or jobs in rural communities."

Similar to the Keystone pipeline debate, mining companies have tried to sell the idea of job creation as a way to ignore the threat of pollution and environmental damage. This is especially true in the mining country of California, when unemployment is staying so high, especially in rural areas.

Instead of taking the bate, workers and environmental activists should demand well-paying jobs that aren't part of mining industries that harm workers and communities' health, alongside destroying vital resources like land and water--and that oftentimes represent a new phase of attacks on indigenous people's sovereignty.

Native tribes and nations are our natural allies in the fight for a sustainable environmental and a just world. In fact, Native Americans have been at the forefront of this struggle for environmental justice alongside their fight for sovereignty. Today, this struggle has been most visibly represented by Idle No More, but smaller and lesser-known struggles have been happening by tribes and nations in the U.S. for over a hundred years.

If we look around us and get past the government's policies of trying to erase Native American history and culture, which can have the effect of separating our struggles, we will build a more powerful movement--one that will can produce victories.

Does anyone believe the NYPD hasn't long realized that there's no connection between the stop-and-frisk racial profiling program and preventing crime and violence?

IF YOU want to mess with the New York Police Department's "stop-and-frisk" policy, you're going to have to go through Michael Bloomberg.

Columnist: Danny Katch

Danny Katch is a New York City based writer, activist and wiseass. He is the author of America's Got Democracy! The Making of the World's Longest Running Reality Show and has contributed to other long-titled books such as Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America and 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed U.S. History.

The mayor likes to imply that stop-and-frisk is a heroic anti-racist cause and that its critics, many of whom are longtime civil rights activists, just don't care about the safety of people of color.

Last month, Bloomberg called out the New York Times, which has belatedly begun pointing out that a policy of mass interrogation of youth of color without probable cause just might be unconstitutional, for running more articles about stop-and-frisk than murder victims:

"All the news that's fit to print" did not include the murder of 17-year-old Alphonza Bryant. Do you think that if a white 17-year-old prep student from Manhattan had been murdered, the Times would have ignored it?...I loathe that 17-year-old minority children can be senselessly murdered in the Bronx and some of the media doesn't even consider it news.

So it's pretty shocking to learn that over the past year, the NYPD actually reduced the number of recorded stop-and-frisks by 50 percent.

What happened, Mayor Mike? You say that you're down with the struggle and your cops care so much about Latinos and Blacks that they're willing to throw thousands of them across car hoods every single day. Now we feel betrayed.

Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly appear to be decreasing stop-and-frisks because years of grassroots activism have shifted public opinion and laid the groundwork for a class-action lawsuit Floyd v. City of New York. Many people expect the outcome will go against the city.

Not that they'll admit it, of course. When asked about the major drop in stop-and-frisks, NYPD spokesperson Paul Browne claimed that it doesn't reflect a change in policy, but merely "what the police officers on duty during that quarter observed."

But we know that's not true, and not just because Paul Browne is such a notorious liar that I highly recommend googling "Paul Browne lies." Thanks to the testimony and secret police precinct recordings in Floyd v. City of New York, we now have proof that the stop-and-frisks are driven not by what cops see in the streets, but to fulfill quotas given to them by their supervisors.

Even before the Floyd case, however, it was obvious that most stop-and-frisks aren't based on police observation. Do you want to know why? Because they never find anything! Of the 685,000 stop-and-frisks in 2011, illegal contraband was found only 2 percent of the time. If those were based on police observation, then Bloomberg could become a hero in many neighborhoods just by ordering department-wide eye exams.

Let's be real: the only thing being observed is skin color--84 percent of those stopped were Black or Latino.

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BUT NONE of this explains why Bloomberg has been relentlessly promoting a policy that he seems to be phasing out. This is a guy who last summer went to a Black church in Brooklyn where stop-and-frisks are unpopular and confidently declared, "we are not going to walk away from a strategy that we know saves lives."

You might think that the mayor would trumpet the lower stop-and-frisk numbers to show that he is responding to community concerns. But that's not how people in power generally think. Bloomberg doesn't want the activists who have been exposing stop-and-frisk through years of protests and meetings to think they have made an impact. Even more importantly, he doesn't want the greater numbers of people who might become activists in the future to think it's made a difference.

But there's an even more important reason why Bloomberg has kept up the bluster about stop-and-frisk, even while toning it down in practice. It turns out that when the police walked away from a strategy that supposedly saves lives, it saved lives.

That's right, the murder rate in New York City is down an astounding 30 percent from last year. Bloomberg wants to highlight that number, of course, but if he wants to take credit for it, he can't have it be known that the decrease coincides with a similar decrease in the policy he's been saying we need to reduce murders.

The only relationship between violent crime and stop-and-frisk seems to be that the same people are victims of both in many cases. That's the tragic lesson of the very young man who Bloomberg tried to use against the New York Times. Alphonza Bryant's mother Jenai Van Doten wrote a powerful account in the New York Daily News about how a few months before his murder, her son was stopped and frisked by cops who cursed at him for being on the phone with his mother asking what he should do.

Like many who live in crime-ridden neighborhoods, Van Doten is on the fence about stop-and-frisk:

I support stop-and-frisks. I'm open to anything that gets guns off our streets. The policy works sometimes, but not all the time. I'm not a lawmaker, but the stops need to be better targeted at real criminals...

Stop-and-frisks are random. Does it apply to every child that wears a hoodie? It should be modified--it's not working the way they intended. Out of so many stop-and-frisks, how many people stopped have handguns?

Some people are saying stop-and-frisks are terrorizing our kids. Some kids need to be terrorized. Maybe my son wouldn't have been shot if the right kids were terrorized.

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IT'S AN understandable sentiment, even for someone who hasn't just lost a child: Most people would like to have a police force that stopped crime without randomly targeting people based on clothing or skin color. It really shouldn't be that complicated.

But that's based on the false assumption that the main reason the police are in our neighborhoods is to stop crime. The Bloomberg administration is famous for its reliance on data--does anyone believe that the NYPD didn't already know there's no correlation between crime rates and stop-and-frisk? Of course they do. But stopping crime isn't the main reason they patrol the streets.

Here is how David Whitehouse, speaking at Socialism 2012, explained the primary role of the police from their origin:

The police were invented in England and the United States in just the space of a few decades, roughly from 1825 to 1855. The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn't lead to any new methods in dealing with crime. The most important way for authorities to solve crime, then and now, is for someone to tell them who did it. It's the old way. Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to collective action.

To put it in a nutshell, the police were created in response to large defiant crowds. That was strikes in England, riots in the Northern U.S., and the threat of slave insurrection in the South. The police are a response to crowds, not crime.

Okay, well, that was almost 200 years ago. Surely cops don't sit around the station house talking about how their true purpose is to suppress the rebellious underclass. But apparently, they do. Here's how one Brooklyn supervisor puts it on one of the secretly recorded tapes played at the Floyd trial:

If you get too big of a crowd there, you know, they're going to get out of control, and they're going to think that they own the block. We own the block. They don't own the block, alright? They might live there, but we own the block, alright? We own the streets here.

The phrase "we own the streets" is almost identical to the motto of the NYPD's old Street Crimes Unit: "We own the night." That unit was disbanded after the outrage and protest that followed officers from the unit firing 41 bullets at unarmed Amadou Diallo in 1999. Then there was the notoriously brutal and corrupt CRASH unit of the Los Angeles police, whose slogan was "we intimidate those who intimidate others."

Notice the slogans, especially. None of are like: "Let's stop crime so the people in this neighborhood can be safe and happy!"

If you still think the idea that the police are more designed to suppress the population than to help it is far-fetched, think back to a time that you went to them to report a crime. Chances are you experienced the distinct sensation that the police couldn't care less.

I'm not just talking about poor customer service; we all have bad days at work. But no matter what kind of attitude I might get from behind the counter when I order a bagel, I'm going to end up with a bagel. I'm not going to be told, "Well, I can enter a bagel request in the system, but I can tell you right now nothing's going to happen."

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BECAUSE POWER and authority is the heart of what the police do, we should consider the possibility that the cops aren't actually doing any fewer stop-and-frisks, but are just recording fewer of them.

The fact that they recorded all of them so meticulously in the first place might turn out to be a historical anomaly--the odd result of combining traditional police thuggery with the Bloomberg administration's nerdy bean-counting culture. You can picture Bloomberg convening a meeting of precinct commanders--"So tell me, captain, what's the latest metrics on how many arms we've broken in the 70th?"

But even if that turns out to be the case, activists shouldn't be discouraged, because it's clear that years of organizing against police violence are having an effect. And I'm not just talking about the drop in stop-and-frisks. The normally smooth and confident billionaire mayor is being reduced to rambling paranoia when he tries to defend the department. Consider this comment:

Stop playing politics with public safety. Look at what's happened in Boston. Remember what happened here on 9/11. Remember all of those who've been killed by gun violence--and the families they left behind.

Wow, 9/11 and everything. Perhaps the next time cops shoot an unarmed victim, they'll claim they thought he was reaching into his pocket for a Boeing 767.

As Leonard Levitt notes at NYPD Confidential, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani would certainly approve of his successor's approach. But for the rest of the city, Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk stories are getting pretty far-fetched.

Sharon Smith argues that Angelina Jolie deserves better than derisive and sexist "humor" for making public a health decision that all women dread being faced with.

Angelina Jolie

BREAST CANCER is no laughing matter--certainly not for the roughly 232,340 U.S. women who will be diagnosed with it this year, or the 39,620 women expected to die from it.

Yet the editors over at the CounterPunch website were apparently guffawing over Angelina Jolie's recent decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy. Their e-mail promo for an article posted on the site on May 14 reads: "Ruth Fowler unsnaps Angelina Jolie's bra and exposes privilege, health care and tits." Presto! A double mastectomy morphs into locker room fodder.

Fowler's article never actually mentions the word "tits." But like smirking adolescents, the editors insert it yet again in their contemptuous title: "Angelina Jolie Under the Knife: Of Privilege, Health Care and Tits." One can almost hear them howling with laughter at their own perceived cleverness. Presumably they also laughed their way through Seth McFarlane's sophomoric "We saw your boobs" spoof at the Academy Awards, while millions of women cringed.

But using boob jokes to introduce an article about undergoing a double mastectomy to prevent a potentially deadly disease constitutes a descent from sexism to misogyny.

Like so many Hollywood actresses, the sexual objectification of Jolie's own face and body has been a key component of her fame. Jolie should certainly be commended for her courage in choosing to make her double mastectomy public--in order to help reassure other women confronting the possibility or reality of mastectomy to understand that losing one or both of their breasts does not mean losing their sexuality. In her May 14 op-ed piece in the New York Times, she wrote, "On a personal note, I do not feel any less of a woman. I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity."

In a society as sexist as ours, in which women are so often judged in relation to the perceived desirability of their individual body parts--as if in suspended animation from the rest of their personhood--this message could not be more timely.

The essence of this message is entirely lost on the CounterPunch gang. They seem blissfully unconcerned that their own use of the degrading term "tits" is yet more evidence of the damaging impact of the sexual objectification of women. The fact that they do so under the guise of left-wing commentary only compounds this damage.

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FOWLER'S ARTICLE is devoid of boob jokes, but is also teeming with contempt toward Jolie.

Fowler ridicules Jolie for "your elaborately reconstructed chest and your incredible bravery in submitting to top-end, essential preventive treatments in order to avoid a painful and abhorrent death," as if Jolie endured multiple surgeries over a period of months as a colossal act of narcissism.

But Angelina Jolie made the decision to undergo a double mastectomy because she heard the news that every woman dreads: She tested positive for a faulty BRCA1 gene, which gave her an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer. The fact that her mother died of ovarian cancer after a nearly 10-year struggle at the age of 56 is a further indication of what the future would likely hold.

One might reasonably ask why Jolie has been singled out for such scorn. Fowler's article uses reverse (some might even say reactionary) logic: She disparages those who do have access to quality medical care instead of demanding that all women gain access to the same standard of care. Thus, Fowler dismisses the option of genetic testing in asking: "[W]hat good is knowing that there's a test out there only privileged rich people can get?" This is bad advice for women facing the possibility that they carry a defective gene.

Jolie is far from silent on the issue of access. As she argued in her op-ed piece:

Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.

Fowler dismisses Jolie's comments above as offering merely "a trifling nod" to class inequality, asking, "Why don't you raise our awareness of your own overpriced, privileged medical treatment a little more, and continue to NOT raise awareness of any actual fact?" Yet since Jolie's op-ed was published, the Internet has been abuzz with debate and discussion about this important subject, demonstrating that Jolie has indeed opened a much-needed conversation.

Fowler's resentment is misplaced. Hollywood actors neither created nor can resolve the health care crisis. That responsibility lies squarely with the medical-industrial complex, including its government lackeys, who sustain the class disparities of the for-profit health care system. The conditions are ripe for a movement that demands health care for all, but it must take aim at the appropriate targets to be effective.

It should not be difficult to understand why millions of women who, facing an epidemic of breast cancer, breathed a sigh of relief on May 14 upon reading Jolie's honest and eloquent account of removing her breasts to save her life.

And I strongly suggest that those who find her struggle amusing lift their snouts out of the trough long enough to discover why so many women are not laughing. An ounce of empathy for women's health and dignity would go a long way.

Patrick O. Strickland reports from the West Bank and Israel on protests to mark 65 years since Israel was established through dispossession of Palestinian people.

Palestinians in Gaza march to mark Nakba Day (Joe Catron)

EVERY YEAR, Palestinians in Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories and the diaspora mark the Nakba (which means "catastrophe" in Arabic), referring to the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel that led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land and homes.

This year, protests and commemorations for the 65th Nakba anniversary brought out thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank as well as a significant number of Israelis and international solidarity activists.

Hundreds gathered on May 15 in Ramallah to hear politicians deliver speeches, though representatives of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, having long since abandoned its democratic mandate in favor of American funds, lack little legitimacy in the eyes of a growing number of Palestinians.

In Bethlehem's Manger Square, thousands came out and held a candlelight vigil. "Nakba has always been the deepest wound in our modern history as 70 percent of our people are still identified as refugees, either in camps or in the diaspora," Najwa Darwish, director of Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, told the crowd.

Elsewhere, clashes erupted across the occupied West Bank. Unarmed Palestinians chucked stones in Qalandia, Beituna, Jerusalem and elsewhere, and Israeli forces used tear gas and "riot dispersal means." In one case, four Israeli soldiers were injured in Hebron when their jeep was struck by a Molotov cocktail.

Earlier in the day, "17 Israelis tried to enter [Al-Aqsa mosque] before local Palestinians obstructed them," witnesses told Ma'an News Agency. Clashes broke out, and "Israeli forces intervened to protect the Israelis."

Palestinian citizens of Israel, often overshadowed in mainstream coverage, also mobilized. In defiance of a loud right-wing counter-protest accompanied by a handful of supportive Israeli parliamentarians, hundreds of Jewish and Palestinian students assembled May 13 at Tel Aviv University (TAU). Activists read off the names of demolished villages, students told their families stories, and others recited poetry about the collective tragedy of exile and dispossession.

"The Nakba commemoration at TAU is...held in Hebrew and Arabic [in order] to spread Palestinian history to anyone who doesn't know it...Jewish Israelis in particular," said Ruba Salem, student organizer from the left-wing Israeli political party Hadash, in an interview.

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ONE DAY before the British Mandate expired, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of a Jewish state, presumably on all 10,430 square miles of the Palestinian map: "We appeal...to the Arab inhabitants of the state of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions."

This appeal must have rung hollow to Palestinians as Zionist militias proceeded to destroy more than 500 Palestinian villages and scatter more than 750,000 refugees across the Middle East. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé notes, thousands more became "present absentees," a Kafkaesque term that refers to "Palestinian refugees wandering within the state of Israel, homeless and stateless."

What Ben-Gurion referred to as "the age-old dream--the redemption of Israel"--has translated into the erasure of Palestine, a process that has continued unabated since 1948.

Israeli settlers continue to chop up the West Bank at a breakneck pace; the saturation bombing of Gaza has become so routine that it's hardly news; the population of refugees exiled in neighboring countries is swelling; and Palestinian citizens of Israel face at least 67 discriminatory laws that impede political rights and reduce access to state resources, particularly land.

In an environment of legal impunity for Israel and its colonial settler front, Nakba has come to refer to an ongoing process that assumes the forms of present injustices: evictions, home demolitions, administrative detention, land theft, imprisonments, extrajudicial killings and other violations of human rights and international law.

"Nakba today means being confined to a little refugee camp that is overlooked in the political process," Ehab El-Shafie, a 21-year-old resident of Al-Amari camp, said in an interview. "It means that, even though it's our right to decide, the president [Mahmoud Abbas] has dropped our [right of] return in order to be 'pragmatic.'"

"Every day is Nakba for me because I'm doubly exiled, demanding to return to my home in Lod, but forced to live in this Ramallah camp under the rule of the PA, which privileges and gives advantages to a tiny minority," concluded El-Shafie.

Six-and-a-half decades after the original catastrophe, there are almost 5 million registered refugees living in camps, 4,900 prisoners in Israeli lockup, and a growing population of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that already tops 500,000.

Is it any wonder that Palestinians don't understand the Nakba as a single historical event so much as a daily reality?

Keegan O'Brien says that Bradley Manning should be at the head of Pride this year.

Bradley Manning in 2009 (Daniel Joseph Barnhart Clark)

AT THE end of April, the San Francisco LGBT Pride Committee announced that Bradley Manning, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated LGBT veteran and whistleblower currently languishing inside a military prison for releasing classified military documents to WikiLeaks, would be a grand marshal at this year's Pride parade.

But mere hours after the news broke, San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee President Lisa Williams released a statement rescinding the honor and calling the decision "a mistake that never should have been allowed to happen."

The controversy has divided the LGBT military community and drawn significant attention to what some critics have seen as Pride's backing away from contentious issues and embracing corporate sponsors. As a long time queer youth and antiwar activist, I couldn't keep silent.

Let's start with Williams' own words. Williams says: "[T]he hint of support for actions that placed in harm's way the lives of our men and women in uniform...will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride. It...would be an insult."

But contrary to Williams' intentional misrepresentation of the facts, investigations have demonstrated that no military personal have been harmed as a result of Manning's actions. Rather, Manning's bravery has revealed to Americans the gruesome reality behind U.S. wars and occupations abroad.

The only people endangered by Manning's actions are the politicians and military officials accountable for engineering, covering up and justifying the U.S. war efforts.

Most glaring in Williams' statement is her blatant disregard for the lives of LGBTQ people beyond the borders of American soil. What about the violence carried out by U.S. military forces against the LGBTQ people of Iraq and Afghanistan? The death and destruction inflicted by military drones against the people of Pakistan and Yemen, plenty of them queer? Or the countless LGBTQ Palestinians forced to endure the trauma of living under Israeli apartheid and occupation in Gaza and the West Bank?

Do the lives of Arab, Muslim and brown queer people, and what Bradley Manning's actions have done to highlight the injustices carried out against them by our government, not matter to the San Francisco Pride Committee?

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WHILE THE board feels it necessary to bar Manning from the post of grand marshal, they are more then willing to embrace a slew of corporate sponsors that commit enormous levels of economic violence on working-class and poor communities and violate countless laws and regulations in their pursuit for profit.

Writing in the Guardian, a publication that picked Manning as its "Person of the Year" in 2012, columnist Glenn Greenwald highlighted how corporations like AT&T, Bank of America and Wells Fargo underwrite San Francisco Pride for their own marketing purposes.

It would be nice to be able to say that the committee's decision is surprising. Unfortunately, Pride parades across the country have become increasingly corporatized and visibly less connected to political activism and social justice. Half-naked glittered men, dykes on bikes and spectacular drag queens still parade through major city streets in June, but they do so "sponsored by" massive Budweiser floats, Bank of America tents and opportunistic politicians eager to court queer money and voting power.

So it's ironic to see Williams charge those who pushed for Manning to be chosen as grand marshal as symbolizing "a system whereby a less-than-handful of people may decide who represents the LGBTQ community's highest aspiration" when it's her and the forces she represents who have steered Pride away from its original radical and defiant sprit.

The Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 and the first Gay Freedom Day parades organized in its aftermath began as demonstrations for sexual and gender freedom and opposition to injustices everywhere. Solidarity and resistance to all forms of oppression, not obedience to corporate America and the military-industrial complex, were the spirit of the Gay Liberation Movement.

Bradley Manning's bravery to stand in solidarity with occupied people everywhere by speaking truth to power makes him a hero who stands in the best tradition of LGBTQ history. He deserves to be honored as grand marshal.

The San Francisco Pride Committee doesn't speak for the vast majority of LGBTQ people, most of whom still believe in a basic commitment to social justice, human rights and solidarity. I'll be at Pride this year, holding the biggest "Free Bradley Manning" sign I can find, and I hope you will be, too. It's time to take Pride back.

First published at TheNation.com.

Michelle Farber reports on a protest of a speech by an anti-abortion doctor in Seattle.

Dr. John Bruchalski

ON MAY 9, Seattle Clinic Defense (SCD), a grassroots abortion rights group, picketed the University of Washington's (UW) Students for Human Life event titled "What's Science Got to Do With It? Abortion from an OB/GYN's Perspective."

The talk was advertised as a "scientifically grounded" lecture by a "pro-life" OB/GYN named Dr. John Bruchalski of Tepeyak Family Center, which, according to their website, offers "a full range of obstetrical and gynecological services, including well woman care and cancer screenings, natural fertility consultation, obstetrics care, gynecologic surgery, a perinatal hospice, holistic medicine and level I and II ultrasounds while respecting the dignity and the intrinsic worth of each patient."

However, under their "mission and values" section, they state, "Tepeyac's mission is to convey the healing presence of Christ through excellent medical care that respects the consciences of patients and providers."

Although Bruchalski is a legitimate doctor, it is clear, even from his website, that his services do not fall under the realm of "full scope" care--which would include contraception and, at a minimum, unbiased, medically accurate counseling on abortion.

SCD partnered with two groups affiliated with the University of Washington for the picket--Third Wave Feminists and the International Socialist Organization. SCD held a picket of a similar speaker, also sponsored by UW Students for Human Life last May. Instead of choosing an anti-choice talking head, the group decided to attempt a meeting in which they tried to use a scientific argument against abortion.

The picket started with a circular protest outside the building in which the lecture was held. Protesters passed out fact sheets with reliable scientific studies about the safety and necessity of abortion to passers-by. The picket then moved inside and participants lined the doorway to the event so that those attending had to either walk through or even be escorted by one of the organizers.

Many of the protesters noted loudly how ironic it was that anti-choicers had to be escorted into the event, as the gauntlet was meant to be a recreation of what pro-life picketers do to women attempting to access reproductive health services.

The group then moved inside before the event started and stood at the back. After Dr. Bruchalski was introduced the picketers unfurled banners that read, "Trust Women" and "Seattle Clinic Defense" and marched down the isles of the auditorium while chanting "Pro-life men have got to go, when you get pregnant let us know."

After leaving the event, the group continued cheering and chanting in the foyer outside the lecture hall. Police eventually closed and locked the doors, having to unlock them in order for attendees to get back in.

Following the end of a question-and-answer session several students approached the protesters and noted that they had thought the event was going to be an unbiased examination of abortion from a scientific perspective. Instead, they reported that Dr. Bruchalski quoted Soviet-era studies on abortion causing breast cancer and being harmful to future fertility.

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SEATTLE CLINIC Defense not only defends clinics, but it is essential that our scope of organizing encompasses events such as these, and especially events in which those purporting to be compassionate medical providers are engaging in activities that deny women services and deny women access to medically accurate, shame-free care for any reproductive decision they may make.

Our current political culture is one in which women's reproductive decisions are colored by political rhetoric at best and outright restricted around the country, either by law or by anti-choice picketers who harass and intimidate women. Furthermore, in an era where Catholic hospitals are merging with secular institutions at an alarming rate, 44 percent of hospitals in the Northwest are Catholic-affiliated.

We must demand that our health care providers are safely and adequately prepared to give women the reproductive health care they need and deserve. Most importantly, we must call them out and demand that they live up to their oath to do no harm.

Instead of mitigating harm, the right is creating dangerous situations for women by denying access to legal, safe health care. Kermit Gosnell, a man who performed late-term abortions in West Philadelphia far outside the realm of safety and who was recently convicted of murder, was able to operate in part because of doctors like Bruchalski, who have contributed to a climate of restrictions and shame around women's right to obtain an abortion.

The fewer doctors that are trained in providing accurate abortion and contraceptive counseling the more harm will come to women who will seek care from those who are not qualified to perform safe abortion.

Many anti-choice physicians claim that they violate the Hippocratic oath by performing abortions, but what is unacceptable is to bring religion and politics in the exam room. When anti-choice events like Bruchalski's speech occur, pro-choice activists and health care providers must echo George Tiller and say, "You do not speak for me. Real providers trust women."

Lee Sustar compares the record of the Chicago Teachers Union leadership, running for re-election in a May 17 vote, with its counterparts in other cities around the U.S.

The CORE slate for top offices in the CTU (left to right): Michael Brunson, Kristine Mayle, Karen Lewis and Jesse Sharkey

THE CHALLENGERS in the Chicago Teachers Union's (CTU) May 17 elections accuse union President Karen Lewis and the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) leadership of "squandering" last September's strike and giving ground on pay, health care, pensions and seniority.

Lewis and other CTU officials never shied away from addressing the problems in the agreement that ended the nine-day strike. As Lewis often puts it, "It was the contract we could get."

But the truth is the Chicago teachers' strike successfully resisted the corporate education reform juggernaut on all the key issues--and strengthened the contract in other areas.

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HERE'S A look at the key issues:

Pay
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel declared war on the CTU in 2011 when he cancelled a previously negotiated 4 percent annual raise, citing a provision in the contract negotiated by the previous union leadership that allowed the school board to revoke raises in the event of a financial crisis. (The new contract eliminates that loophole.)

In the contract talks that followed, Emmanuel was determined to eliminate raises based on experience (steps) and education (lanes), and replace them with merit pay, which teachers' unions have traditionally opposed because it undermine collaboration among educators. But in recent years, teachers' union locals in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, New Haven, Conn., Baltimore and other cities have surrendered on this issue--all with the support of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the CTU's national affiliate.

But the CTU stopped Emanuel cold on merit pay, preserved step and lane salary increases and won a modest raise in base pay, despite the claimed $1 billion school budget deficit. While the base pay raises don't keep up with the longer school day imposed by the city, instructional time for individual teachers hasn't increased.

For another perspective, compare that outcome to the deals negotiated by other Chicago public employee unions.

Just weeks after the CTU strike, Chicago Transit Authority construction workers took pay cuts in a new contract through elimination of overtime and paid holidays and a reduction in health care. This was followed by new contracts for train and bus workers that also cut overtime pay, increased health care costs for workers and cut pay for trainee workers to 50 percent of top pay for as much as a year, further entrenching a two-tier workforce.

Job security
The CTU opposition group for this election, calling itself the Coalition to Save Our Union, claims that the CTU leadership folded when it agreed that laid-off teachers would receive full pay and benefits for five months instead of 10, as in the past.

What the opposition doesn't say is that Chicago Public Schools (CPS), citing a budget shortfall, had demanded the right to end all pay and benefits, immediately upon layoffs. Despite the pressure, the CTU was able to salvage a compromise on that provision, though a disappointing one to CTU leaders.

The opposition also attacks the CTU leadership for negotiating an agreement in which performance evaluations also play a role in determining which teachers can be laid off.

This, too, is a compromise, but one that stems from a state law, the Performance Evaluation Reform Act, that passed in early 2010, when the main force in the opposition, the United Progressive Caucus (UPC), held the union's top offices--and did nothing to oppose the law.

In the 2012 contract talks, the new CTU leadership was, in fact, able to limit the role of teacher evaluations in layoffs. As the Wall Street Journal noted at the time, this was a clear CTU victory: "Mayor Rahm Emanuel had to agree to conditions that make it hard to fire some teachers who receive weak evaluations, and to limit some of the power of school principals to choose their staff."

By contrast, in Baltimore, members of the teachers' union--under direct pressure from the AFT leadership--agreed in 2010 to an evaluation deal that eliminated pay raises for 60 percent of teachers and put them at risk of immediate termination on the grounds that they were "unsatisfactory."

It isn't hard to imagine the opposition agreeing to a Baltimore-style deal in Chicago. In 2008, former CTU President Marilyn Stewart launched a "Fresh Start" program that offered to collaborate with the school board to fire "failing" teachers in "failing" schools in exchange for keeping schools open. Joining Stewart at the press conference to announce her plan was the former president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers, Dal Lawrence, who told the media that he'd helped fire more teachers than any school superintendent in Ohio.

Pensions
The opposition slams the CTU leadership and CORE for failing to match the pension supplements negotiated in the two previous contracts. Those deals, though, were make-up payments for the state's long-term failure to make adequate contributions to public-sector pensions. This time, the CTU managed to come out ahead of other public-sector workers--like bus and train workers, who will have to make higher contributions to their pensions out of their own paychecks.

The opposition also bashes CTU negotiators for giving up the ability to bank up to 325 unused sick days for pension service and payout after 20 years. But the real news here is that, despite Illinois' $100 billion pension shortfall, the CTU managed to hold on to 40 unused sick days as the basis for pension credits.

Health care
CTU negotiators agreed to a "wellness" program that costs union members money if they don't sign up for monitoring by health insurance providers for compliance with preventative measures.

The opposition is playing to CTU members' understandable discontent with this change. But CTU negotiators succeeded in their demand that members' contribution to health care insurance will be unchanged. That's a better deal than the transit workers got: They have both higher health care costs and the wellness program.

Union power in the schools
CPS wanted a "thin" contract to empower principals and administrators, based on the agreement in New Haven, Conn., that AFT President Randi Weingarten hailed as a "model or a template" for future teachers' union contract.

Rather than capitulate, the CTU dug in. Not only did union negotiators get the contract language won over decades restored, but they added important new provisions. Under the new contract, members can file grievances against principals for bullying. With principals under increasing pressure to drive out high-salaried teachers, that's a critical tool for union members--and according to CTU field representatives, this contract provision is already being widely used.

What's more, the contract gives the CTU new leverage in the school-based Professional Problems Committees. In monthly committee meetings, union delegates can negotiate with principals over issues to try to resolve them before grievances get filed.

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BUT IF you really want to get a sense of what the Chicago teachers achieved in last year's strike, take a look at the new proposed contract negotiated by a different CTU.

That CTU, the Cleveland Teachers Union, recently announced a tentative agreement that guts tenure by abolishing job security based on seniority, imposes a merit pay system that will undermine union solidarity, implements an evaluation system that will expose large numbers of teachers to termination, and imposes higher health care costs.

A summary of the deal lists the breathtaking concessions that Cleveland union leaders made: a seven-year track to a weakened tenure status; a 40-minute addition to the school day that includes 100 additional minutes of student contact time per week; elimination of voluntary professional development days; elimination of standard schedules for high schools; layoffs, in a system modeled on the disastrous Baltimore contract, according to evaluation and skills, rather than seniority; and higher health care contributions from members.

The centerpiece of the proposed Cleveland agreement is the merit-pay system--known as differentiated compensation, in which teachers will earn "achievement credits" based on skill development. This is a recipe for favoritism and divide-and-conquer tactics by principals, and fractured union solidarity.

The Cleveland contract debacle isn't simply the result of corporate education reformers getting their way. The Cleveland Teachers Union and the AFT both hail the agreement as a product of labor-management partnership. Thus, AFT President Weingarten stated:

This agreement recognizes and values the voice and experience of educators in strengthening Cleveland's public schools and guaranteeing every child the education she needs and deserves. It is good for students, fair to teachers and was forged through a deep commitment to collaboration and shared respect, rather than conflict. This tentative agreement is yet another example of what is possible when both sides remain dedicated to the collective bargaining process to do what is best for children and teachers.

The proposed contract, which will be voted upon by Cleveland teachers in coming days, was written to conform to state legislation passed last year in cooperation with Republican Gov. John Kasich. The governor is notorious in the Ohio labor movement for his legislation that would have ended collective bargaining for public-sector workers in the state until it was overturned by a voter referendum.

The Cleveland teachers' collaboration with Kasich came at a high cost, not just for teachers, but public education. Under the Cleveland Plan for Transforming Schools, tax money will be funneled directly to charter schools, thereby entrenching unaccountable and often substandard private operators.

Five officials at the Cleveland Academy of Scholarship Technology and Leadership Enterprise were among the 10 people recently indicted for allegedly stealing $2 million from that charter school. Not surprisingly, these people ran a lousy school: it's currently in "Academic emergency," the bottom ranking of the Ohio Department of Education.

The Cleveland plan will only increase the risk of such scandals. According the Cleveland plan's authors, by 2011, some 11,400 students in the district were enrolled in charter schools out of total enrollment that year of 43,202. In other words, in a city where one of every four children already attends a charter school, the Cleveland teachers' deal with Kasich will only accelerate the shift away from traditional public schools.

Cleveland, of course, is hardly alone. In New Orleans, Detroit and Philadelphia, rapid-fire school privatization through school closures and the proliferation of charters is ending public education as we know it.

Rahm Emanuel is determined to advance that agenda in Chicago, too--hence the announced closure of 54 neighborhood elementary schools, even as the number of charter schools expands.

But Emanuel ran into unexpected resistance from the CTU, which not only put tens of thousands of striking teachers into the streets for nine days, but also won widespread public support for the strike. Against all odds--and breaking with the strategy of its national leadership in the AFT--the CTU fought a defensive battle and won.

Any Chicago teacher who wants to see their union continue that fight should vote for Karen Lewis and the CORE slate on May 17.

Barack Obama is giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "adding insult to injury."

NATIONAL TEACHERS Appreciation Week, traditionally the first full week of May, passed this year without even a token statement from Barack Obama. Instead, the White House issued a presidential proclamation honoring the same weeklong period as...National Charter Schools Week.

Yep, you read that right. Barack Obama--who got the votes of millions of teachers last November and whose party depends on hundreds of millions of dollars in political spending by teachers' unions and the rest of organized labor--not only couldn't be bothered to utter a symbolic good word about teachers. He went out of his way to celebrate an initiative of the Republican Bush administration that spotlights a centerpiece of the anti-teacher school deform agenda.

If you're a regular reader of SocialistWorker.org, you'll know that there's a long history of the Democrats talking populist when they're asking for the votes of their working-class and liberal base of support--but acting quite differently when "the party of the people" is in office.

But Obama and Co. seem almost eager to rub their supporters' faces in it.

Teachers aren't the only example. At election time, one of the most reliable appeals for voting Democratic is to raise the specter of Republicans taking away a woman's right to choose. The urgent pleas of pro-choice supporters in 2008 and 2012 to vote for Obama were a stark contrast to his administration's neglect of the issue.

This week, though, the Obama administration took action on abortion rights, appealing in court for...continued restrictions. In April, a federal judge struck down an Obama-era rule barring women younger than 17 from obtaining the Plan B "morning-after" abortion pill without a prescription. This Monday, the Justice Department of a pro-choice Democratic president asked a higher court to overturn that decision.

Its reasoning for stopping the judge's order from going into effect--that women would become "confused" if they gained unrestricted access to Plan B, only to have it taken away later if the Obama administration succeeded in its appeal--was a glaring and infuriating display of contempt for women and their rights.

There are plenty more examples. The willingness of Obama and the Democrats to give ground to Republicans on issue after issue while kicking their own base in the teeth has come into particularly sharp focus this spring. It's worth pointing out that these are also the opening months of Obama's second term, during which the president was, according to some liberal commentators writing before the election last year, supposed to prove he was a true progressive after all.

This isn't a new insight into the nature of the Democratic Party, by any means. But the importance of the lesson that flows from it--anyone who wants to see change must rely not on allies in high places, but the collective strength of our struggles and our movements--is all the more crucial to remember as activists mobilize around the urgent issues we face today, from immigrant rights to climate justice and more.

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THE REPUBLICAN Party and the Democratic Party aren't identical. If they were, there wouldn't be any reason to have two of them.

Most of the time, most Democrats stand to the left of most Republicans. That's a big part of why Democrats are effective in carrying out an agenda that serves the political and social status quo. They can win the votes and political support of masses of ordinary people well to their left who fear even worse from the other guys.

But some of the time, there's not even the proverbial dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans. Charter schools and the corporate school deform agenda are a prime example.

The standardized testing mania, scapegoating of teachers and encroachment of private interests into public education began in earnest under George W. Bush with his No Child Left Behind law. But Obama took over the Bush program for public schools and kicked it into high gear. His administration's Race to the Top program dangled billions of dollars in front of state governments, in return for passing "reform" laws that tied teacher evaluation to test scores and opened the way for more charter schools, among other measures.

Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan were speaking glowingly about charters long before National Charter Schools Week. The language of Obama's proclamation is typical: "These learning laboratories give educators the chance to try new models and methods that can encourage excellence in the classroom and prepare more of our children for college and careers."

Every part of that statement flies in the face of the facts. Charter schools prepare fewer of our children for anything at all, because the private operators who run schools with public funds get to exclude the students they don't want.

For example, a 2011 study of 14 Florida school districts found that more than 86 percent of charter schools didn't have a single student with a severe disability, compared to more than half of district public schools that did. The pattern is similar with homeless students. As education expert Diane Ravitch reported at a 2010 hearing, "New York City has 50,000 homeless students, but only about 100 are enrolled in a charter school. If a proportionate number were in charters, there would be 1,500, not 100.

In other words, charter schools on the whole take the students they want from public schools--preferably, those without special needs that cost more money--and leave the rest behind in a system that's even more starved for financial resources, thanks to the subsidies for charters.

And even so, charter schools can't demonstrate that they do any better at educating the students they do take. On the contrary, a 2009 study by the respected RAND Corporation, for example, analyzed charter schools in five major cities and three states, and found that in every location, students in the charter schools performed no better at best, and demonstrably poorer at worst.

So why the zealous cheerleading for charter schools? The answer: Follow the money.

Follow the money in a direct sense--more than one-third of charter schools were run by for-profit companies as of 2010, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Public school privatization is proving to be an even bigger bonanza in other areas--companies like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are scrambling to get their hands on the billions to be made off the standardized testing bonanza.

But you can also follow the money in an indirect sense. The charter school crusade is aimed squarely at the power of the teachers' unions--according to Diane Ravitch, 90 percent of charters are non-union. Charterization has become a dependable way to get rid of well-paid, veteran, union teachers--and replace them with educators who labor under the conditions described by one Ohio teacher in a comment at Ravitch's website:

I've been an educator in Columbus, Ohio, since university. In my eighth year, I currently earn $34,000 before taxes at a 9-12 charter school. I can be fired at any time. I have no tenure, no union and scarce resources to teach...My family needs the money I earn, so I must teach, but I just pray a public school gives me a chance.

Teachers and education workers are one of the last remaining strongholds of the union movement--around three in every 10 union cards in the U.S. are held by members of the American Federation of Teachers or National Education Association. An injury to those unions through charterization is an injury inflicted on the whole working class, to the benefit of the bosses.

Plus, there's the ideological angle. Charter schools are promoted by free marketeers, liberal and conservative alike, who claim that the private sector always does a better job than wasteful, corrupt, bloated big government.

Actually, it's abundantly clear that the private sector is a cesspool of waste, corruption, bloat and worse--which is why the charters need a vigorous, pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain public relations campaign, with the president of the United States serving as cheerleader-in-chief.

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REPUBLICANS AND their media mouthpieces like Fox News still like to portray the Democrats as tools of organized labor, but it's hard to believe anyone buys that any more.

Labor's political power has been shrinking with its membership numbers for decades, while business' spending advantage in elections expands with each cycle. But more to the point, the leadership of the Democratic Party has molded itself so completely into the role of servants to Corporate America that it doesn't even bother with the old symbolic gestures any more.

As historian Van Gosse wrote after last year's election, "The mass party of the center, birthed 20 years ago by Bill Clinton triangulating his way into a 'socially liberal' version of neoliberalism (or what used to be 'liberal Republicanism' in the days of Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney), has been brought to fruition by Barack Obama's savvy Chicago apparatchiks."

So it shouldn't be any surprise that the Obama administration's policies are bent and twisted in whatever ways are necessary to serve the interests of Corporate America, at the expense of the people who make up the main base of support for the Democrats.

But even as Obama and the Democrats thank their most devoted supporters with betrayals and insults, they won't tolerate the least criticism from their base.

On this score, the Obama White House is every bit as belligerent as Democratic administrations that came before it--maybe more so. Thus, Joe Biden told anyone dissatisfied with the multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street to "stop whining"; Obama himself mocked liberal critics of his health care law for "seeing the glass as half empty"; and White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs sounded off against the "professional left" that would only "be satisfied when we have Canadian health care, and we've eliminated the Pentagon."

In stark contrast to their timid attitude in confrontations with Republicans, the Democrats save their real venom for anyone to their left who dares to hold them accountable for the policies and principles they claim, usually at election time, to stand for.

You don't have to go far on the Internet to find a liberal commentator who fumes about this two-faced behavior. But all too often, even critical voices accept that the only "realistic" course in a two-party system is to seek to influence their Democratic "allies."

But is it realistic to expect working people to get a hearing from a party that is so intent on listening only to the demands and dictates of Corporate America?

Or is it more realistic to rely--as the most important struggles for change in history always have--on the power of mass mobilization and action at the grassroots to build a political alternative that breaks out of the confines of the two-party political system?

Todd Chretien examines a new book's insights into the revolutionary process.

Hugo Chávez (in blue and white) joins in a mass rally in Caracas

HUGO CHÁVEZ'S death on March 5 has placed a question mark over the future of the Venezuelan revolution.

If you want to understand the terms of the inevitable political battles to come, then read George Ciccariello-Maher's We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution. He produces a crisply written social and political history of the critical decades leading up to Chávez's election in 1998, concentrating on the period after the overthrow of the dictatorship in 1958 and the consolidation of the corrupt two-party system known as "puntofijismo."

Relying on a wide range of interviews from many of the leftist militants who confronted the pro-American plutocracy in a decades-long battle, Ciccariello-Maher convincingly argues:

[M]y objective is to reassert the long-term, to insist that what is going on today in Venezuela is nothing new, and to demonstrate above all the continuity of struggle generated after 1958... [R]ecent Venezuelan history has been punctuated by momentary ruptures and breakthroughs that represent qualitative leaps in popular struggle, crystallizing and revealing long-term developments.

This passage typifies Ciccariello-Maher's elegant style and the power of historical materialism in his hands. In fact, he builds into the very structure of the book this appreciation for how slow quantitative change can "suddenly" erupt into qualitative confrontation. Interrupting the narrative of chapters chronicling the revolutionary left and chapters that probe specific social groups are two short interludes focusing on precisely these "qualitative leaps."

Ciccariello-Maher uses these breaks to assert that any Chávez-centric narrative that privileges the failed coup attempt he led in 1992 and then his subsequent 1998 election as president obscures the revolutionary dynamic. Instead, he insists that the 1989 uprising against neoliberal austerity known as the Caracazo and the mass rebellion of the urban poor against the 2002 right-wing anti-Chávez coup deserve historical primacy.

Review: Books

George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution. Duke University Press, 2013, 352 pages, $25.95.

It was these confrontations that, as it were, "created" Chávez--by creating a layer of leftist leaders and local cadre who built and maintained the radical mass movements, making Chávez's election and his survival as president possible. But if Chávez rode this bull to power, it refused to stop bucking when he pinned the presidential sash across his chest.

This brings Ciccariello-Maher to his central thesis:

[W]e must attempt to grapple with the fact that the vast majority of such militants--those who deeply despise corruption, bureaucracy and even the state itself and are more likely to associate that state with torture, murder and "disappearance"--are still Chavistas, at least for the time being. (p. 5)

Approaching the question from this angle leads Ciccariello-Maher to ask the question which gets to the heart of the revolutionary process in Venezuela: How are we to understand the apparent synthesis of revolution from above and revolution from below? We Created Chávez helps us get closer to unlocking this riddle.

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TO BEGIN with the revolution from below, Ciccariello-Maher uncovers, as the subtitle promises, the real people's history of Venezuela. He traces a long arc from Cuban-inspired guerrilla movements in the 1960s to the growing concentrations of self-organized collectives among the millions of impoverished barrio dwellers ringing Caracas by the 1990s as well as the even longer arcs of indigenous and Afro Venezuelan resistance.

Along the way, Ciccariello-Maher keeps up a merciless barrage against French political theorist Régis Debray, who famously (mis)interpreted the Cuban revolution, reducing it ad absurdum to the so-called "foco strategy" of guerrilla warfare. Insofar as a section of the Venezuelan left adopted this top-down, militarist approach, many wasted years--and sometimes their lives--in the same blind alley that led to Che Guevara's murder by the CIA in Bolivia.

Ciccariello-Maher tells the story of how these lessons were painfully won and the rural guerrilla units transformed themselves into urban mass organizers. I find this history extremely informative, and I wholly concur with his savaging of Debray.

At the other extreme, Ciccariello-Maher warns of the "dangers that come with fetishizing horizontalism" (p. 16) à la Marxist writer John Holloway. For example, speaking about the uprising that broke the anti-Chávez coup in 2002, a former guerrilla punctures the myth of purely spontaneous mass action, explaining, "The vanguard came first and then the masses followed with confidence." (p. 175)

Yet if organized elements led the way, their disproportionate political weight also raised potential problems in that they could subsequently restrain the struggle, as a layer of them did after the coup when Chávez adopted a policy of reconciliation towards some of the would-be Pinochets.

Here, I want to raise my first question. While Ciccariello-Maher demolishes the theoretical basis of the foco and investigates the historical transformation of the guerrilla fighters into urban organizers, he tends to describe a sort of lingering top-down approach among leftist groups as "vanguardism." He is both sympathetic to some of the practical consequences of this and critical of its potential problems, but he never defines exactly what he means by the term (see p. 57-66). Instead, it remains a sort of negative adjective.

Given Ciccariello-Maher's insistence that we take the "from below" and "from above" dialectic seriously, and given his truly exhaustive knowledge of the component parts of the Venezuelan left and their attitudes towards the "party question," this seems like an opportunity for greater clarity.

This leads me to my second question. One of We Created Chávez's great strengths is the detailed attention Ciccariello-Maher pays to the struggles of oppressed groups: peasants, women, indigenous peoples and Afro Venezuelans. Rather than relegating these sectors to the proverbial "and lest we forget" of the revolutionary process, Ciccariello-Maher devotes special attention to their struggles and integrates that discussion into the overall class struggle.

Ultimately, he asks if Venezualan workers in the formal economy are an "aristocracy or revolutionary class," and if there might be a "new proletariat" consisting of informal labor. This is a long discussion, so I will cut to the quick. Ciccariello-Maher argues that:

[T]he vanguard position played thus far by the buhoneros [street vendors] and the lumpen more generally is no accident, but is instead precisely the result of this strategic position this massive class currently holds in Venezuelan society. Their overwhelming numbers, their high degree of mobility, their necessarily political demands and their location in the bustling streets make this a class that, if pushed toward revolution, is capable of providing more than merely the "spearhead" foreseen by Fanon. (p. 231)

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CICCARIELLO-MAHER castigates "Marxists" for their supposed dismissal of all these people as "lumpen." I want to take issue with this.

First, although Ciccariello-Maher is right to note that some Marxists certainly have done so, there is also a long tradition of others being the first to recognize new economic and social development--for example, Lenin on the national question, Antonio Gramsci on revolutionary class alliances, José Carlos Mariátegui on Latin American class formation and the question of indigenous liberation, etc.

Second, I would dispute Ciccariello-Maher's claim that the massive urban class he refers to can be called "lumpen." When Marx used the category, he was referring to a relatively thin layer of demoralized poor and criminals. He never saw a city in which the majority of the people labor under the conditions prevalent in Caracas, Mexico City, Calcutta, Lagos, etc.

Whatever we imagine he might say, today, we need to take account of the problem and the potential of this new social class. In fact, I think Ciccariello-Maher does an excellent job on this front, especially his analysis of barrio culture and the hostility of the neighborhood collectives to the state.

Yet he sharply counterposes this (let's call it) lumpen class to workers employed in the formal sector. He invokes Frantz Fanon, who, in the context of the Algerian revolution, dismissed workers of the formal sector as "pampered by the colonial regime." To be fair, Ciccariello-Maher doesn't really think this fits in the Venezuelan context (so why use the quote?); instead, he invokes Mariátegui, who, Ciccariello-Maher suggests, also disagreed with Marx about the revolutionary potential of the working class (p. 183-184). I don't read Mariátegui that way, but we can leave that aside.

Based on these comments, you might think that Ciccariello-Maher writes off the regularly employed working class completely, but you'd be very wrong. In fact, he explores workers' militant history (especially oil workers) and presents a picture of a union movement that is, yes, saddled with an often corrupt bureaucracy, but one that boasts an enormous array of revolutionary socialist leaders and rank-and-file members (we should be so lucky in the U.S.).

Ciccariello-Maher quotes many of the leading revolutionaries in the trade union movement and is clearly sympathetic to their struggles. However, he ends on a pessimistic note, emphasizing ideological barriers which stand in the way of the working class becoming, as Marx argued, the "universal revolutionary subject" (p. 183). Moreover, he seems to dismiss the potential economic power of this class, writing that the "manual formal working class" is barely 25 percent of the population.

If we add teachers, nurses, at least some sections of transportation, service and public sector workers, than just less than half of the population--conservatively--works in the formal sector. If that is the case, it seems impossible to imagine a revolution in which they do not play a leading role, not to the exclusion of the buhoneros and barrios (where many of them live), but in alliance with them.

Ciccariello-Maher does articulate a general category which includes the working class under the heading of "el pueblo." This term literally means "the people." But it is slippery in the Latin American context and carries the distinct connotation that we might translate into English as the real people: non-elite students, workers, the urban poor, poor peasants, oppressed nations and ethnic or racial groups, women, etc.

I believe Ciccariello-Maher is absolutely right to point to the revolutionary potential of this concept as long as it can be clearly distinguished from populism (of which there is a long, sad history in the region) and the relationship of the different class forces can be worked out in practice. If, in my opinion, he errs in over-generalizing the obstacles to the working class relating to other elements of el pueblo, and in downgrading its importance, then the disagreement will have to be settled in practice, but in no way closes off strategic discussions among revolutionaries who place different emphases on this dynamic.

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MY THIRD question has to do with Ciccariello-Maher's invocation of Lenin's concept of dual power in what I believe to be an extremely productive manner. This is a long quote, but well worth it:

Lenin saw himself as fighting a war on two fronts against those "opportunists" who sought to simply take control of the state and the "anarchists" who sought to avoid it at all costs, and his response to each was clear: against the former, he insisted that the "ready-made state machinery" must be "smashed" and replaced, and against the latter, he added the proviso that the old state machine will be replaced for time by a proletarian "semi-state" that must then "wither away." The dual power embodies this intermediary form: still an instrument of class power (state), but one oriented towards its own abolition.

In today's Venezuela, the opponents are largely the same: the "opportunists" are those conservative sectors of Chavismo that would like nothing more than to become a new ruling class, whereas the "anarchists" are those who--mostly from a distance--reject any dealings with the state as tainted a priori.

In other words, I speak of "dual power" because it points us in the right direction, towards the simultaneous preservation and radicalization of the revolutionary process in Venezuela and the transformation of that core of coercive apparatus generally bearing the name "state." Moreover, whereas some Chavez supporters simply hope for a radicalization from above, my history attests instead to the consolidation of a dual power as a fulcrum to force that radicalization from below. (p. 240)

I want to say a few things about this formulation. First, a small point with the simple goal of terminological clarification: When Ciccariello-Maher writes "the dual power embodies this intermediary form," I think it would be better to say that "the revolutionary side of this dual power embodies this intermediary form." After all, what Ciccariello-Maher is driving at is the need to strengthen one side, and not the other, of this dual power.

Second, if I understand him correctly, Ciccariello-Maher is arguing here for what we might call a "long dual power." Marxists have traditionally understood situations of dual power as being extremely unstable. The Paris Commune lasted 71 days; the struggle between the Soviets and the Provisional Government in Russia lasted less than eight months; the Hungarian Soviet Republic was smashed after three months. Furthermore, we have tended to think of dual power in its purest crystallized form: here is the revolutionary government with so many regiments, and there is the capitalist government with so many regiments.

Ciccariello-Maher suggests we consider a "dialectical twist internal to Lenin's concept of direct seizure of power from below" (p. 242). Instead of leading immediately to the knife-edge of revolution or counterrevolution, he argues that the failure of the anti-Chávez coup in 2002 significantly weakened the bourgeoisie's control over the state apparatus. Chávez purged the officer corps and built concrete links between the mass movements and sections of the state. Meanwhile, since Chávez himself owed his very survival to mass mobilization, he represents not only an oppositional politician, but a sort of infiltration of the bourgeois state by an agent of the oppressed classes.

Thus, although the constellation of barrio collectives, local armed groups, cooperative communes, radical unions and other mass organizations has not crystallized into a single identifiable revolutionary institution that constitutes one side of dual power, the totality of mass organization from below and the penetration of the bourgeois state by revolutionary (even if they are unreliable) elements should be understood as a unique form of dual power.

I find this approach intriguing from a theoretical point of view and informative in the Venezuelan context. Over the last 50 years, myriad potential dual power situations have developed: workers' shoras in Iran in 1979 against both the Shah and the clerical state, cordones in Chile in 1973 alongside Allende's government, the liberated zones in Nicaragua in open revolt against Somoza's National Guard in 1979, etc. None of these took the "classic" 1917 form, and we should not be surprised if an even greater variety of dual power situations confront us in the future.

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THIS LEADS me to two final points.

The first is about timing. Certainly there is no theoretical reason why a situation of dual power cannot continue longer than a few months. However, capital cannot survive indefinitely in a situation where it cannot set the terms of exploitation, and if, for some reason, it happens to lose control of the state in the sense that the state becomes genuinely anti-capitalist, it will either die out or find a way to organize a new coercive force to resolve the dual power situation in its favor by counterrevolution.

This is why dual power situations have tended to go one way or the other in relatively short order. 2002 certainly bought the Venezuelan revolution some time, but how much time remains an open question.

The second question is about the danger of extending the concept of dual power so broadly that it loses its specific content. Whether or not Ciccariello-Maher is right in his estimation of the balance of forces in Venezuela today is a question that can be disputed. He offers strong evidence for his case, but others may disagree with his assessments. My own sense is that he doesn't quite prove that dual power has actually emerged from what he definitely does prove is a revolutionary period, where two sides are potentially in the process of crystallizing into opposing state forms.

More generally, if we do accept Ciccariello-Maher's analysis, then we can ask a counter-factual question: how would we know when dual power in Venezuela disappears? Obviously, dual power will disappear if the revolution deepens, popular power emerges from below and disperses the aspects of the state which support capital, and the oppressed develop their own state over which they exert democratic control in order for it to begin withering away. This will require some sort of break, or revolution, unless we imagine the Venezuelan bourgeoisie will allow itself to be pushed off the stage quietly, and the U.S. will forego intervention.

But would dual power have dissolved in the other direction if the opposition candidate Henrique Carpriles Radonski had won a few more votes and taken office? Or what if the balance in the state tilts in favor of more conservative officials and officers under Nicolás Maduro? Or what if some percentage of the communes dissolve or some number of unions is smashed?

My main concern with Ciccariello-Maher's more expansive definition of dual power is that it can bleed over into meaning nothing more than a mushy sense of "El pueblo, unido, jamas será vencido." (The people, united, will never be defeated). In other words, it is almost always the case that there are some elements of working-class organization or popular mobilization in society, but these don't constitute dual power.

I am not suggesting that Ciccariello-Maher takes this view, but by emphasizing, quite correctly, the continuity of struggle over the course of the last 50 years as the context in which Chávez came to office, he also has to take care to perhaps more precisely define the dangers ahead.

I am sympathetic to his method here, but I think there is a tension that must be explored as well. In Adolfo Gilly's classic book on the Mexican Revolution, La Revolucíon Interrumpida, he also stresses the continuity of the revolution process (it did not end, it was simply "interrupted") from the Morelos Commune to the land reform under Lázaro Cárdenas through the 1960s. I think there is a great deal to speak for that point of view, but it also carries the danger of ascribing "revolutionary" continuity to movements that are better understood as fights for reforms, which have not yet grown powerful enough to genuinely challenge the state and capital. My personal opinion is that the truth is somewhere in between and depends on the specifics of the mass struggles in question.

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BUT CICCARIELLO-MAHER is careful not to get lost in an abstract discussion of terms and grounds his analytical concepts tightly in the realities of this Venezuelan revolution. He concludes:

Here, there are no guarantees, and despite the fact that the collective "we" of the Venezuelan revolutionary movements documented in this book indeed "created him," this does not mean the creation will not betray the creators. However, given the institutionalization of popular power and Chávez's clear reliance on the movements for support against a host of other enemies, to do so would certainly require a fight.

So we must move beyond the naïve dichotomy of pro-Chávez or anti-Chávez to say, alongside the most revolutionary segments of Venezuelan society, that we support Chávez as long as he supports the revolution; or, to paraphrase this most complex of all figures in contemporary Venezuela, turning his own words into a threat and a promise: Chávez, we're with you, pero sólo por ahora--only for now. (p. 254-255)

To what degree Chávez's absence will affect this dialectic will have to be settled by people in Venezuela. For those who want to see the revolution continue, Ciccariello-Maher has made a critical contribution to our understanding, which is in and of itself enough to recommend this book without reservation.

But more than that, We Created Chávez brilliantly demonstrates how social history scholarship can mine the lived experiences of rank-and-file activists and radical leaders for precious stones, and then set those gems in a visible and rigorous theoretical frame that allows us to see history in motion.

On a final note, I was lucky enough to get to know and work closely with the Venezuelan revolutionary--as he always considered himself--Peter Miguel Camejo before he died in 2008. I can think of no better recommendation for this book than to say that Peter would have loved it and insisted that you go out and buy a copy for yourself, several for your friends, and then sit down to study it together so that you are better prepared to stand up and fight.

A Portland teacher reports on Portland Public Schools' attack on the teachers' union.

JUST MONTHS after angry parents, students, and teachers forced Portland Public Schools (PPS) officials to back down from closing several neighborhood schools, PPS has found a new target: teachers.

Negotiations between the school district and Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) began this month with such enormous differences between their two proposals that the local media is already raising the possibility of a strike next year. Representing nearly 2,800 teachers, the PAT is the largest teacher local in Oregon, and its fate will determine the tide of education reform in the region.

Given the widespread attacks on teachers nationwide, the decimation of the public school system in cities like Philadelphia and Detroit, and the relative success of union-bashing in states like Wisconsin and Michigan, PPS evidently believes now is the time to seize as much control as it can.

District officials recently appropriated the language of the Chicago teachers' strike in an Orwellian letter to the community claiming their proposal was "updating" the teachers' contract to give "our students the education they deserve." In particular, they point out that their proposal removes work rules that "have prevented many high school students from taking eight classes."

This letter reveals that until parents pressured the district in recent weeks to add teaching positions in order to provide a full eight classes to students, the district originally hoped to simply force high school teachers to teach another class. Their contract offer would allow this because it eliminates all restrictions on teacher workload in the contract--including the limit of 180 students per high school teacher negotiated last year.

But how is eliminating a cap on the number of students in a teacher's classes supposed to benefit kids? If a history teacher assigns an essay to all of her 180 students and devotes just five minutes to reading and commenting on each--an impossible task, in itself--this would take 15 hours of outside-of-class time. Or say a science teacher wants to spend 10 minutes talking to each student's parent about how to best serve a child's needs. At the 180-student limit the district hopes to eliminate, this would add an extra 30-hour workweek for that teacher.

While the district hopes to erase parts of the contract that put any restraints on the amount of unpaid labor teachers do outside of the school day, they also want to increase the "official" teacher workday and reduce the time teachers have to get non-instructional work accomplished during that day.

With language that could have been written in the 19th century, the district's proposal increases the official teacher workday from 7.5 hours to "generally" 8 hours. At the same time, its offer cuts high school teacher planning and preparation time from 90 minutes to 60 minutes per day, a reduction of 2.5 hours per week.

Does the district really believe that "the education Portland students deserve" is one where their teachers have little time to plan engaging curriculum, give students meaningful feedback and develop individual relationships with them?

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THE PORTLAND Association of Teachers' (PAT) proposal, on the other hand, recognizes that teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions. PAT's contract proposal asks the district to reduce class size and caseload over the next few years setting goals for 2018 that are based on national research. The proposal also calls on the district to "work with the Association, parent groups, student groups, business groups, city, county, metro, and state elected officials to secure adequate funding to achieve these goals."

Another part of the district's offer the community should be concerned about is the removal of language that prevents teacher evaluations from being based on students' standardized test scores. How can the school district claim to be fighting for the "education our students deserve," while increasing the emphasis on flawed high-stakes tests?

In fact, Portland students have recently launched a campaign to protest high-stakes standardized tests. Does the district think these students don't understand what kind of education they deserve?

In contrast, PAT's proposal asserts that "standardized tests shall only be used in a manner supported by the test methodology and testing frequency" and that "standardized tests should only be one tool used for assessing student learning and growth."

The school district will also likely try to paint the union as self-interested because PAT is asking for cost-of-living raises that keep up with inflation. In its offer, the district wants a four-year wage freeze and a cap on district contributions to health insurance so all future costs pass directly on to educators. But is the education Portland students deserve one where their teachers find it hard to focus on teaching because they are worried about paying their bills?

The truth is that PPS's initial contract offer is more about union busting than it is about providing students a quality education. This is why their proposal excludes temporary employees from the union, eradicates the role seniority plays in determining layoffs, gets rid of union members' ability to grieve evaluations while removing restrictions on when principals must complete those evaluations, and eliminates the ability of the union to grieve discriminatory practices based on race, national origin, sex, sexual orientation and political activity. In fact, the district's initial offer deletes more than 30 pages from the teachers' contract. According to the PAT, PPS's proposal includes over 70 take-backs.

At a recent bargaining session, district spokesperson Brock Logan was clear about their intention to use the erasure of PAT contract language to vastly expand management's rights while stomping on teachers'. According to Logan, "If the contract doesn't specify it, management can do whatever they want."

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FORTUNATELY, PAT is standing strong and genuinely attempting to advocate on behalf of students and parents in addition to teachers. As Susan Nielsen, writes in the Oregonian:

Their proposal reads less like a standard contract than an education manifesto written by your favorite teacher. We want smaller class sizes, the union says in a six-page preamble. We want more electives for kids! We want every child to have access to a full curriculum that includes music, art, PE, world languages and staffed libraries. We want less time spent on endless standardized testing and more time spent developing the whole child.

The PAT preamble titled "The schools Portland students deserve," is an intentional effort to incorporate the inspiring example of the recent Chicago Teachers' Union fight into the union's bargaining proposal. The preamble attempts to codify the spirit of the recent school closure fight into the teachers' contract demanding "priority shall be placed on maintaining enrollment in neighborhood schools instead of school closure" and that "a school closure due to under-enrollment is a last resort and shall only be done in the most extreme circumstances."

In one of the boldest sections of the preamble PAT flips the script on "accountability" in education by demanding that administrators, not just teachers, be held accountable. They ask for "creating a mentoring/feedback program for administrators" that includes "feedback surveys from students, parents, professional educators and mentor administrators."

The preamble also calls for a coalition of parents, students and other supporters of public education to push back against reforms that limit curriculum and wrap-around services and to work to find new sources of revenue that restore electives and services and lower class sizes.

Such a coalition will be needed now if there is any hope that the union's vision of the schools Portland students deserve wins out over the district's. Just last year, three Oregon Education Association locals--two just east of Portland, were forced to strike by districts that used the economic crisis as an excuse to decimate teacher contracts.

If those struggles are any indication of the battle ahead, the PAT will need all the support it can get.

First published at Oregon Save Our Schools.

Michelle Farber, a University of Connecticut alumna and Seattle Clinic Defense organizer, looks at the controversy over a UConn student who challenged sexism.

University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst

UNIVERSITY OF Connecticut senior Carolyn Luby wrote an open letter that appeared at the Feminist Wire on April 24 to the university's first female president, Susan Herbst, to address the university's recent logo change.

The letter came days after UConn announced its mascot was to be changed from a smiling husky dog to a logo, designed with Nike's influence, featuring an aggressive, almost wolf-like dog. Luby quoted women's basketball coach Geno Auriemma's comments on the design change: "It is looking right through you and saying, 'Do not mess with me.' This is a streamlined, fighting dog, and I cannot wait for it to be on our uniforms and court."

Why does the University of Connecticut, Luby asks, need a more frightening logo, when women are intimidated, attacked and harassed by UConn athletes with alarming regularity? She cites some, though certainly not all, of the attacks and violent behavior displayed by UConn athletes:

On October 6, 2012, Lyle McCombs is arrested on charges of second-degree breach of peace for a domestic violence dispute in which he was, "yelling, pushing and spitting at his girlfriend" during an argument outside a residence hall.

On February 11, 2013, Enosch Wolf is arrested on charges of third-degree burglary, first-degree criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct when he "refused to leave" a female student's apartment, "grabbed the hair of the victim and pushed her head" and "knocked the glasses off the victim's face with his hand."

On March 21, 2013, Tyler Olander is arrested for trespassing in a structure or conveyance while on spring break in Panama City, Florida."

Luby implored Herbst to start addressing the violence against women occurring on campus, rather than concentrating on the university's corporate partnership with Nike:

Instead of communicating a zero-tolerance atmosphere for this kind of behavior, increasing or vocalizing support to violence against women prevention efforts on campus in the face of such events, or increasing support to student-run programs that seek to work with athletes on issues of violence as well as academic issues, it would appear that your administration is more interested in fostering consumerism and corporatization than education and community.

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FOR SIMPLY asking the question, "Does UConn really need a more aggressive mascot and sports culture when violence against women is happening on a startling basis here already?" Luby was harassed and threatened--both with rape and death. The threats came from fellow students on campus all the way to Rush Limbaugh, who is perpetually looking for another Sandra Fluke to target.

Barstool Sports, an online sports blog, printed a reader e-mail mocking Luby, calling her a bitch, and claiming that she is arguing that the new mascot is the cause of rape.

Luby reported her on-campus harassment to the UConn police, whose response, according to the student newspaper, was that Luby wear a hat and keep a low profile.

The response from the university and President Herbst? Absolute silence. According to an article in the Hartford Courant, Herbst has released a statement citing campus policy on the right of students to express their opinions without being degraded, but didn't mention Luby.

In an era of Sheryl Sandberg-esque feminism, in which we're taught to believe that the problem is there aren't enough women in the corner office or at the head of a boardroom table, this incident is a case in point. The current head of the University of Connecticut is indeed a woman, and Luby appealed to her to further the interests of women on campus, as many current students and alumnae hoped she would.

However, under Herbst's administration, students have only seen further tuition hikes and the prioritization of the athletic programs over student needs. The example at UConn speaks to the need for confronting the idea that we simply need to equalize the gender balance of the ruling class in order to effect equality for women.

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AS A former student activist on the University of Connecticut campus, I spoke with a current student about the incident and the misogynist backlash. Confronting institutions in which women's reports of rape and harassment aren't taken seriously or are swept under the rug has been at the center of recent feminist organizing, following the rape of a teenage girl by Steubenville High School athletes, and Title IX cases that have been brought against Yale, Occidental, Amherst College, the University of North Carolina and a devastatingly high number of other universities charged with not adequately protecting female students from their attackers.

Kylie Angell, a student activist in UConn's Violence Against Women Prevention Program, said:

I feel that this backlash is the symptom of a greater problem, and cannot be summed up by looking at this incident in a vacuum. Rather, our students and faculty must look at the overarching issues which permeates throughout campus, including the searing sexism and misogyny stemming from those in opposition of the feminist-inspired letter."

The "overarching" issues that Angell brings to light are those of a hyper-masculine sports culture that encourages and even rewards the denigration and assault of women--a culture in which universities encourage sexual assault survivors to seek recourse through non-legal means and rarely expel or punish the assailants.

Just like Steubenville, this scenario--in which a young woman demanded accountability from the administration for encouraging aggression in an already overly violent college sports program and then faced death and rape threats, horrific misogyny from media, and complete silence from the university--could have happened on any college campus in the country.

What's happening at UConn isn't isolated. It can be demoralizing to look at the list of sexual assaults on campus, violations of Title IX and university presidents more concerned with corporate sponsorship than the safety of their student body, but as more and more students, alumni and activists come forward and demand change, it's imperative to tie all of these incidents together.

According to the New York Times, women at Occidental College sought advice and inspiration from students who have brought Title IX suits against their colleges. There's also discussion about creating a national organization for survivors of campus sexual violence to connect and share strategies in how to fight for justice in their university's administrative system.

In response to the recent campus events, UConn students organized an event on May 7: a "Silent Protest Against Violence, Sexual Assault and Hate Speech." In their press release, they stated:

The letter [written by Carolyn Luby] and, more importantly, the backlash from the letter allowed for her argument to be further proven; there is indeed violence and rape on college campuses. Most importantly, this is not an individual issue; this is an issue that affects all of us.

Although Carolyn Luby's story may seem like an isolated incident to some, it unearths issues that affect all of us: first, that universities are failing to provide safe environments for their female students, plain and simple.

Peeling back the layers on rape culture on college campuses is multi-factorial and complex, but a college's first steps must be addressing their aggressive, overfunded athletic programs and, for once, prioritizing the voices of women like Luby, instead of Nike's corporate sponsorship of a public university's athletic programs.

The story of how Wounded Knee became private property--which is now for sale--is the story of Native dispossession across the U.S., explains Brian Ward.

The burial ground at the site of the Wounded Knee massacre

THE SITE of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890--land that is considered sacred by the Lakota tribe--is up for sale. A white man named James Czywczynski, who privately owns the land, listed it for sale a couple weeks ago with a price tag of $4.9 million.

Czywczynski has made it clear that he will not gift the piece of land to the Oglala Lakota and will entertain offers from non-Natives--though he says that he would like the Oglala Lakota to purchase it.

What? Czywczynski wants Native residents of one of the poorest areas in the country to purchase sacred land that they are entitled to? In 2010, Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation had the lowest per capita income in the country, with unemployment estimated at 70 percent.

There is no doubt that this land is considered sacred not only by the Lakota, but also by American Indians around the country. Then why is it for sale? Aren't American Indian reservations sovereign? How could it be that reservation land is privately owned?

These are very valid questions. The simple answer is that this piece of land is not actually owned by the tribe, and the more complicated answer is based on history and on the passage of the Dawes Act (General Allotment Act) of 1887.

In an interview with Indian Country Today, Czywczynski explained in his own words how he acquired the land in the first place:

The land was put up for sale in the 1930s as an allotment so the Native people could sell their land. The Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation was sold off, and there are many non-Indian ranchers, farmers, businessmen, cowboys and casinos that are owned and within the confines of that reservation.

Our property was bought in the 1930s by Woodrow Wilson, who signed the deed. Clive Gildersleeve's father bought the land and store in 1935, which included 40 acres of the national historical site of Wounded Knee. In 1968, I bought the property from the Gildersleeves, which included the Trading Post Museum, a home, four cabins and museum artifacts. The 40 acres we bought included the ravine and the area where the massacre took place in 1890.

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THE WOUNDED Knee Massacre happened when the 7th Cavalry killed more than 300 Lakota men, women and children. It is often viewed at the last massacre of the Indian wars. It is also the site where the Lakota and the American Indian Movement set up an occupation in 1973, calling for Congress to reexamine treaties and remove Oglala Sioux tribal council President Dick Wilson.

Czywczynski used to live in Wounded Knee and owned the trading post. During the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, his house and trading post were occupied, and his house was later burned down. Czywczynski clearly has no sympathy with the American Indian Movement or any militants of that era, referring to those who took part in the occupation as "militant Indian thugs."

So what made it possible for Czywczynski to buy this land? Three key events serve as the essential backdrop for passage of the Dawes Act of 1887--first, the Industrial Revolution, which was kicking into high gear; second, the stock market crash of 1873, which marked the beginning of an economic depression that lasted until 1879; third, the defeat of General Custer and his Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. These three factors were leading to more and more pressure to "assimilate" the Western Indians and take their land for the continued expansion of American business.

The Dawes Act systematically reduced the land held by Natives in the West and attempted to integrate them into the system of American capitalism by undoing any notion of collective ownership and "giving" 160 acres to each head of household. This land, now owned and operated by individual families, was to be held in trust with the federal government for 25 years. The bill, however, exempted many tribes and seemed to be focused on those western tribes "causing trouble," such as the Lakota and the Cheyenne.

Natives who took possession of their parcel of land and adopted the habits of "civilized" life, such as farming and living in family rather than tribal units, they were granted U.S. citizenship. One of the most important provisions was that the surplus land was made available for settlers, railroads, corporations and national parks.

All these players started to flood the area. Some were immigrants searching for a better life, though most were corporations looking for quick ways, such as gold mining, to cash in. In the East, signs were plastered everywhere announcing "Indian land for sale." The Dawes Act provided a legislative lever to confront Indian resistance to westward expansion, thus clearing the way for the capitalist pursuit of new markets and easy profits.

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WHEN THE Dawes Act was passed in 1887, Indians held 138 million acres of land; by 1934, they held only 48 million acres, and nearly half of this land was arid or semiarid desert. In the process, 900,000 Natives were made landless.

Colorado Sen. Henry Teller, one of the most outspoken critics of the bill, said:

The real aim [of allotment] was to get at the Indian lands and open them up to settlement. The provisions for the apparent benefit of the Indians are but the pretext to get at his lands and occupy them...If this were done in the name of Greed, it would be bad enough; but to do it in the name of Humanity...is infinitely worse.

After the 25-year ownership in trust by the government was over, many Natives sold off their land to non-Natives at bargain prices in order to afford the basic necessities of life. Though the bill tried to force many to become farmers, the bill did basically nothing to help create this.

The act was terminated under the terms of the Indian Reorganization Act, which was passed in 1934. Today, it requires an act of Congress to give any of this privately owned land back to tribes. Even if a private owner wants to give the land back, it often comes under the jurisdiction of the local, county or state government rather than the reservation. The land was thus incredibly easy to sell, but seemingly impossible for Native tribes to get back.

Some have even argued that the Dawes Act did more damage to natives than any battle or massacre because of its systemic drive to assimilate native peoples.

The planned sale of Wounded Knee illustrates the continuing impact of the Dawes Act, and though this type of sale happens all the time, the historical importance of Wounded Knee has brought new attention to the issue. Today, many reservation maps look like checkerboards, with some having more than half of their land privately owned.

The Oglala Lakota shouldn't have to pay a dime for Wounded Knee, and Czywczynski shouldn't be able to hold them hostage to make money off stolen land. It's time to demand that Congress reexamine the effects of the Dawes Act on the American Indian community and give that land back with full sovereignty.

A number of social pressures have converged to take the fun out of sports for youth.

IN EARLY May, I had the great joy of being a judge at the 2013 D.C., Maryland and Virginia Louder than a Bomb teen poetry slam competition.

Columnist: Dave Zirin

Dave Zirin is the coauthor, with John Carlos, of The John Carlos Story, and author of Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love and A People's History of Sports in the United States, as well as two collections of his sports writings, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports and What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States. He is a columnist for TheNation.com; his writings are also featured at his Edge of Sports Web site.

For those who don't know how Louder than a Bomb works, area high schools organize teams who perform in front of an audience of family, friends, fans and, of course, the other competing poets. It's raucous, intense, and when the emotional weight of a poem connects with a crowd, the adrenaline can suck the air out of a room.

As I was watching these young people unfurl their intense emotional discourses, the sportswriter in me began to ponder what was truly radical about the proceedings. It wasn't the content of the poems as much as the content of the event itself. Like any great athletic contest, I was seeing the feel of competition push participants to new heights. I saw teams bonding, playing off one another, and working together like one of those Wade-to-LeBron-to-Wade-to-LeBron fast breaks.

But I also witnessed an atmosphere that was genuinely supportive and cooperative, and spoke to the best angels of that oft-abused trope known as "sportsmanship." As I watched this unfold, I asked myself, "Why can't youth sports be like this?"

Yes, it's true that some teams are fun, some children have terrific experiences, and access to youth sports should be universal. But overall, youth sports, to quote my neighbor's 11-year-old kid, "straight sucks." Why do 70 percent of kids quit youth sports by age 13? Why do parents get so unbelievably nasty? Why, and this is the most serious point, can it turn suddenly violent?

The day I was judging poets, a soccer referee in Utah, Ricardo Portillo, died a week after being punched in the face by a 17-year-old player because he didn't like a call that Portillo made on a corner kick. Ricardo's daughter Johana Portillo told the Associated Press, "Five years ago, a player upset with a call broke his ribs. A few years before that, a player broke his leg. Other referees have been hurt, too."

What in the blue hell is going on here? I spoke with Joe Ehrmann, former NFL player, pastor and founder of Coach for America. Ehrmann has devoted his life to fighting this societal tide and making youth sports and coaching a positive experience for children. He said to me:

My belief is that while youth sports originated to train, nurture and guide children into adulthood, many programs/coaches are using them to meet the needs of adults at the expense of kids. Sports should be a tool to help children become whole and healthy adults who can build relationships and contribute as citizens, but the social contract between adults protecting and providing for the needs of children [instead of their own needs] is broken. [My emphasis.]

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THIS IDEA that youth sports has become something that fulfills the needs of adults as opposed to children was backed up by a statistic sent to me by Mark Hyman, author of the highly recommended book Until It Hurts: America's Obsession with Youth Sports. He wrote me, "Approximately half of all reported youth sports injuries are the result of overuse"--caused by kids starting too young in sports, specializing in one sport too early, and training too intensely. Before the adult-supervised era of kids' sports, there were no overuse injuries." (My emphasis.)

Mark wrote another book, also highly recommended, called The Most Expensive Game in Town: The Rising Cost of Youth Sports and the Toll on Today's Families. This book, for me, is a Rosetta stone for understanding why youth sports have become so unbearable for so many.

Organized sports in this country are now a trillion-dollar business--as one marketer says, "from the womb to the tomb." This is not an exaggeration. There are companies that make videos with names like Athletic Baby and Baby Goes Pro. There are gymnasiums for newborns with an eye on getting them to the pros. There are personal trainers for babies as young as six months.

Poor and working-class families of every ethnicity have long seen sports as a ticket out of poverty. But now the financial crunch is on middle-class families as well. Their goal is less the pros than, in an era of $50,000 tuitions and crushing student loans, a college scholarship. Parents see their children as competing against other boys and girls, from the time their kids are big enough to pick up a ball.

But to even get in the scholarship pipeline, unlike in decades past, playing for your school is not enough. You need to be a part of a traveling team. You need to have the right equipment. As the overwhelming majority of families are now headed by two working adults, you need to have parents willing to sacrifice scarce leisure time or work hours to attend games. As Mark Hyman describes, these families are not wealthy. Instead, they're making an investment that needs to pay off, which creates a powder keg of pressure on very young kids.

I asked John Carlos, the great 1968 Olympian who has also worked as a guidance counselor in public schools for over two decades, why youth sports are so toxic for so many. He said:

The problem is the system. It's a system where everyone wants to get over on kids. Yes, the parents make these bad choices, but when you're in that kind of cesspool, all you can really see is...you know what you see in a cesspool. It's like a kid can't just be a kid anymore.

That last line is the key. Profiteering and childhood, whether we are talking about youth sports or charter schools, are a toxic mix. It's creepy enough that the representatives of big business are oozing around the playground and judging youth sports as an underdeveloped "opportunity." It's time to get their priorities off the playing field and fight for space so kids can be kids. If we can link this to a movement of fighting for price controls on college tuitions, that will be music to many a parent's ears.

First published at TheNation.com.

Every woman should have access to the morning-after pill as a matter of reproductive choice. So why is the Justice Department blocking it? asks Elizabeth Schulte.

Abortion rights activists rally against restrictions on reproductive rights

JUST AS Plan B, or the "morning-after pill," looked like it would finally became available to women over the counter, the Obama Justice Department put the brakes on this victory for women's reproductive rights.

The morning-after pill averts an unwanted pregnancy by preventing ovulation or fertilization of an egg. After a review of the pill's safety--and a decade of stalling under both the Bush and Obama administrations--the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) determined in 2011 that Plan B should be made available to all women, without a prescription, on the shelves with other contraception, and without any age restriction.

But the Obama administration, in the person of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, intervened to reimpose an age limit of 17 and older for obtaining Plan B without a prescription.

In early April of this year, a federal judge in New York issued a court order overturning that rule and making the pill (including its less expensive generic counterpart) available over the counter to women of any age. District Court Judge Edward Korman called the 17-and-older rule "arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable," giving the adminstration until Monday to appeal.

At the end of April, the FDA announced that the age restriction should be dropped to 15 years old and above. This move was likely to soften the blow of what they did next--on Monday, the Obama Justice Department appealed Korman's decision, going to court to argue in favor of an age restriction.

On top of that, the Justice Department demanded an immediate suspension of the judge's court order, arguing that if the pills went on the shelves while the decision was being appealed, it would cause "substantial market confusion."

They're right about the confusion part. Women might exercise their right to obtain Plan B without any obstacles--and then be confused when the Obama administration takes away that right. If the Obama White House wants to avoid this "confusion," why won't it allow affordable Plan B on store shelves, where any woman can have access to it?

What's most confusing of all is that the Democratic Obama administration is restricting access for some women to this important contraceptive--when Obama is supposed to be committed to women's reproductive rights.

In issuing his order in early April, Korman had some choice words for the administration. "It turns out that the same policies that President Bush followed were followed by President Obama," said Korman, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan. Even worse, Korman pointed out, the Obama White House waited until after the FDA ruling at the end of the month, which it applauded, to come down against his order.

"You're disadvantaging young people, African Americans, the poor--that's the policy of the Obama administration?" Korman asked.

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NON-PRESCRIPTION sales of Plan B became available to women in 2006, but only for women 18 and older. In 2009, the minimum age was lowered to 17. In 2011, the FDA decided to lift the age restriction, but HHS Secretary Sebelius overruled the decision.

At the time, Obama claimed he didn't get involved in Sebelius' decision. He told reporters:

I will say this, as the father of two daughters. I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine. And as I understand it, the reason Kathleen made this decision was she could not be confident that a 10 year old or an 11 year old going to a drugstore should be able--alongside bubble gum or batteries--be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect."

Let's set aside the fact that 10-year-olds rarely need Plan B--and if they did, what kind of cruel individual would deny it to them?

There are plenty of medications far more harmful than Plan B available on store shelves today. As Susan Wood, who resigned from the FDA in 2005 over the Bush administration's intransigence on this very issue, wrote in 2011:

Apparently there is no problem in allowing younger teens to purchase products such as acetaminophen, and others with known and serious risks, over the counter. There are no age restrictions for condoms, spermicides or treatments for yeast infections, either. Indeed, for no other over-the-counter medication has the FDA ever required extra data for a particular age group...

But somehow, the prescription requirement for Plan B--which is very safe and impossible to overdose on--remains in place for those younger teens who are in the unfortunate situation of being at risk of pregnancy and who need emergency contraception immediately.

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THE JUSTICE Department's decision to try to block Korman's order isn't about "protecting young women"--it's about continuing the attack on young women's right to control their own bodies. If the appeal succeeds, it would make it impossible for most young women to acquire the medication they need.

Even the FDA's less stringent 15-years-and-older cutoff is problematic, since 15-year-olds rarely have the kind of government-issued proof of age that would be required, like a passport or a birth certificate.

If a woman can get pregnant, she should be to obtain contraception, which is what Plan B is. It should be no one else's decision but her own--not her parents, not a pharmacist, no one but her.

This attack affects all women. No woman should have to rely on a request to a pharmacist before they can acquire the morning-after pill.

A woman has to begin Plan B within 72 hours of unprotected sex for it to work. So if a woman lives too far from a pharmacy, or needs Plan B during the hours a pharmacy is closed, she could be unable to prevent what should be a completely preventable pregnancy.

And if women are going to have access to Plan B, they're going to need to be able to afford it. Currently, Teva Pharmaceuticals is the only company with FDA permission to provide a single-dose morning-after pill over the counter. The cost is about $50, no small sum for many women. Korman's order also called for making other versions, including generics, available.

Despite all these facts, the Obama administration continues to drag its feet on this important issue of women's reproductive rights--a pill that has the ability to improve the lives of tens of thousands of young women who face an unintended pregnancy.

On the legal front, the Center for Reproductive Rights plans to answer Monday's filing within 10 days. Then, the appeals court will issue a ruling on whether to delay enforcement of Korman's ruling.

Reproductive rights activists around the country are organizing to call on the Justice Department to drop its appeal--and to demand that all women have access to Plan B--over the counter, without restriction and at a cost that is affordable to all women.

New York City activists, who have organized speak-outs inside drugstores to demand that Plan B be put on the shelves where it belongs, are calling for a week of actions around the country. Activists are also planning civil disobedience in Washington, D.C., in the coming weeks.

The Obama administration is making it clear that they aren't serious about making Plan B readily available to all women. We have to show them that we are serious about it.

Michael Karadjis analyzes the conflicts and connections between the Assad regime, the Syrian uprising, Israel and the U.S., in an article published at the Links website.

Bashar al-Assad

IN THE wake of two Israeli air strikes on targets in Syria on the May 4-5 weekend, the second causing massive explosions close to Damascus and killing at least several dozen Syrian troops, discussion rages about the aims of this aggression and the relationship it has to the ongoing mass uprising and civil war in Syria.

Israel claimed both attacks were aimed at Iranian long-range rockets--or the military depots where they were housed--in transit via Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon. As the Zionist regime has continually indicated that its "red line" was the transfer of any significant "game-changing" weaponry to either Hezbollah in Lebanon (which is currently aligned to Syria's besieged Assad regime) or to the Sunni Islamist rebels fighting to overthrow that regime, this explanation seems plausible.

In fact, Israel also bombed a convoy of rockets in Western Syria destined for Hezbollah at the end of January, and according to some reports, also a biological weapons research center near Damascus, which "was reportedly flattened out of concern that it might fall into the hands of Islamist extremists fighting to topple the government of Syrian president Bashar Assad," according to Aaron Klein and Karl Vick, writing in Time magazine.

Indeed, after the latest bombings, Israel's leaders went on to stress that these attacks were not aimed at the Assad regime, still less to support the armed opposition, as will be discussed further below.

But of course, such aggression must also be seen in a wider context. Clearly the situation in Syria is falling apart, and the war daily is getting more vicious and criminal (on both sides, but above all on the side of the regime), without any end in sight. Clearly at some point, there may well be some form of more direct imperialist intervention than at present, even if only to try to stamp its mark, in whatever way possible, on an almost impossible situation.

The myths about "recent gains by the Syrian regime" is just bravado to talk up the latest rounds of horrific massacres in the North coastal region, which promise no more stability than the last two years of brutal massacres.

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Mass Terror

Therefore, in such a context, with Israel every day lamenting the "lost peace" on the Northern border of occupied Golan (i.e., the peace it has enjoyed for 40 years as the Assad regime never challenged the Zionist occupation and annexation of its Golan territory), Israel is also announcing loud and clear to all sides in Syria and to the Syrian masses that "Israel is here, and this is what we can do." The overall aim, in other words, is mass terror.

Yet while the situation may inexorably drive towards some kind of imperialist intervention, the outstanding fact to date has been the reluctance of imperialist states--and above all Israel--to lend any concrete support (or in Israel's case, even verbal support) to the opposition trying to overthrow Assad's tyrannical capitalist dictatorship.

And while a simple comparison with the extremely rapid intervention in Libya (within a few weeks of the beginning of the uprising in early 2011) might ignore practical differences for intervention in the two cases, any analysis of statements and actions of the U.S. and especially Israel over these two years make clear that both have fundamental political objections to the nature of the opposition. These even extend to prospect of the overthrow of the regime itself, unless it can occur under a very strong degree of imperialist control, which is a very unlikely prospect.

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No Secular Fighters?

It's worth looking at a recent article in the New York Times, which, like a great many articles, overemphasizes the significance of the radical Islamist element in the armed uprising. In this case, the Times made the case more absolute: "Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of."

Curiously, for a number of those on the left convinced that the U.S. is hell-bent on backing the Syrian rebellion against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, or who even claim the U.S. is explicitly backing these "Islamist" forces within it, or even that the whole Syrian rebellion is a "U.S. war on Syria," this statement was greeted as a sign that "even the U.S." is coming to understand how bad the rebels "that it supports" are.

This is a very odd argument for a number of reasons. But before analyzing the reasons for the Times' statement, it is worth looking at the evidence.

It is certainly true that there is a strong "Islamist" element within the armed opposition, and that as Assad's brutality grows, so does the "radical" nature of the ideology of many of the rebel groups, and also the reverse brutality of some of the armed rebels (whether secular or Islamist). It is also true that part of the Islamist opposition is backed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar as part of a reactionary-sectarian regional game (see below). And it is further true that some Islamist groups, such as al-Nusra, are allegedly linked to al-Qaeda.

However, there are also a vast number of articles, interviews, documents, photos, videos and other evidence of opposition, both armed and unarmed, as well as opposition-controlled towns, that remain secular, or at least religious only in a formal sense, without any "sharia law," or that are opposed to the Islamization of the movement. While this article is not aimed at proving this, here are some useful links that demonstrate the point:

-- "The Syrian revolution has changed me as a writer"
-- "Welcome to Free Syria: Meeting the rebel government of an embattled country"
-- "How should Idlib's Islamists be handled?"
-- "Syrian rebels tackle local government"
-- "Syria: The 'no secular fighters' myth"
-- "Jihadists and secular activists clash in Syria"
-- "Some rebels worry about extremists, but Assad comes first"
-- "Syria rebels see future fight with foreign radicals"
-- "First Christian unit of FSA forms"

A similar list could of course be made of all kinds of brutal, reactionary and religious-sectarian actions by parts of the anti-Assad revolt. But that is not what is in question in such a variegated, bottom-up, mass uprising. The evidence above makes clear that the sectarian element can by no means be declared in complete control.

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"U.S. war on Syria"...means what exactly?

So, given the evidence, why did the Times make this ridiculous, sweeping, clearly false statement? An obvious explanation might be precisely that the Times, which tends to closely reflect U.S. ruling-class thinking, is simply pushing this line precisely in order to justify U.S. policy, consistently over the last two years, of not supporting the Syrian uprising.

Overwhelmingly, the reason continually being stressed by the U.S. government for its lack of support to the rebels is its hostility to the growing "Islamist" part of the rebellion, especially, but not only, the al-Nusra organization, which the U.S. has officially listed as a "terrorist organization." The Islamist forces are generally hostile to U.S. imperialism, and very hostile to Israel, which has even in stronger terms expressed its opposition to these forces coming anywhere near power in Syria (see below). The CIA has even made contingency plans for drone strikes on the radical Islamist rebels.

The idea that the U.S. wants to support these Islamists, and is just pretending not to, is a fantasy indulged in by parts of the left who have decided to throw their lot in with the reactionary dictatorship of Assad. Since the Islamists are doing a significant amount of the fighting, and the extreme fringe of Islamists (e.g., al-Nusra) have taken responsibility for the actions that can most correctly be called "war-like" (e.g., terrorist bombings in Damascus, etc.), the best way to claim the uprising is a "U.S. war on Syria" is to make the inherently unlikely claim that the U.S. is supporting and arming these Islamists, despite the U.S. and other imperialist governments stressing nearly every day that these Islamists are the primary reason they are not supporting and arming the uprising.

Just to clarify: This claim by the U.S. and Israel that they are hostile to the Islamist element in the uprising, especially the more radical elements, is not simply rhetoric; it is clearly true. However, both the U.S. and Israel are relentlessly hostile to the democratic element of the Syrian uprising as well.

A genuine people's revolution would challenge the reactionary U.S.-backed dictatorships in the region, and would be much more likely than Assad's pliant dictatorship to challenge Israel's 46-year occupation of its Golan territory. But it is not smart politics to say the latter very loudly. So by pretending the entire anti-Assad movement is Islamic fundamentalist, the U.S. has sought to justify not giving concrete support to any element of the uprising.

Oh, but the U.S. is sending arms to the Syrian rebellion, isn't it? But simply making that statement for years does not prove that it's true. A CBS report on May 1 noted, "The first shipment of U.S. aid to the armed Syrian rebels was being delivered Tuesday to the opposition Supreme Military Council (SMC). It includes $8 million in medical supplies and ready-to-eat military food rations."

You read it right. After nearly two-and-a-half years of the Syrian uprising, about two-thirds of that time in the form of armed rebellion, the first U.S. shipment of aid to the rebels occurred in May 2013 in the form of "medical equipment and food rations."

In reality, what we see most of the time is the U.S. expressing extreme reservations about any kind of intervention in the Syrian civil war, not just about the outlandish suggestions by Republican Party hawks like John McCain for air strikes, but even for arming the armed opposition. In February, the U.S. did authorize a $60 million package for "non-lethal aid" for the SMC, once it had decided that the SMC leadership could be controlled and could control the flow of whatever equipment it got. Of that $60 million, it is only this $8 million in food and medicines that has yet seen the light of day.

More recently, hints were made that the package could include things like body armor and night-vision goggles. On May 1, the Washington Post reported anonymous U.S. officials saying "they are moving toward the shipment of arms" beginning at some unspecified time in the next few months, "but emphasized that they are still pursuing political negotiation," with President Barack Obama pursuing further talks with Russia to try to find agreement.

These talks with Russia have now begun, with U.S. state secretary John Kerry visiting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to try to hold an international conference, attended by both members of the Assad regime and the opposition, aiming to set up a "transition" government in Syria which would include both some Assad regime ministers and opposition figures, thus keeping the core of the regime intact. The role of Assad himself appears to be a key sticking point.

Indeed, with all the hoo-ha about the Syrian military allegedly using chemical weapons, and leftist claims that this was the parallel of the "WMD" excuse to invade Iraq, one might have expected the U.S. to take advantage of this to order some kind of aggressive action. In reality, Obama's reaction was to re-define his "red line" he had made of any use of chemical weapons to mean any "systematic use," which no one claims to have occurred.

In sharp contrast to the emphatic lies about Iraqi WMD peddled in order to justify an invasion, in this case Obama has reacted to allegations of use of chemical weapons by stressing the evidence "was still preliminary," and thus he was in no rush to intervene, stressing he needs to "make sure I've got the facts...If we end up rushing to judgment without hard, effective evidence, we can find ourselves in a position where we can't mobilize the international community to support."

Therefore, most analysis suggests the U.S. is very unlikely to sharply change course. U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel stressed that "no international or regional consensus on supporting armed intervention now exists," while "NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen has ruled out Western military intervention and U.S. Admiral James Stavridis, NATO's supreme allied commander, cautioned last month that the alliance would need agreement in the region and among NATO members as well as a U.N. Security Council resolution."

Likewise, the until-now more hawkish British government is now "exercising more caution in its attempts to arm the rebels fighting the Bashar Assad regime in Syria, following intelligence reports and warnings by other governments that the major part of the rebel movement has been taken over by Jihadist groups with links to al-Qaeda," and the recently hawkish French government has in the last week swung strongly toward advocating a political solution. Germany for its part has remained steadfastly opposed to recent Anglo-French attempts to end the European Union arms embargo on the Syrian rebels.

There are, of course, the much more hawkish calls from Republicans such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham for U.S. air strikes on Syria's chemical weapons sites. Notably, McCain was not concerned about whether Assad's forces had used chemical weapons or not--even if they hadn't, he said, the U.S. should still "use Patriot [missile] batteries and cruise missiles" and ready an "international force" to enter Syria to secure stocks of chemical weapons.

Clearly enough, these are more aggressive imperialists even than Obama. Yet still not that useful for Assad fans as an argument--McCain's reason for this is that "these chemical weapons...cannot fall into the hands of the jihadists."

Others also pushing hard to arm a vetted section of the rebel leadership also do so mainly to counter the growing strength of the radical Islamist forces. For example, on May 7, Bob Corker, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, claimed the U.S. will "shortly" start arming some "moderate" rebels to boost them over the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Nusra front. He said the "moderate opposition groups that we support are not as good at fighting, they're not as good as delivering humanitarian aid, and we need to change the balance" because "a nightmare would be al-Nusra, if you will, gaining control of Syria. That's worse than Assad being there."

Notably, legislation introduced the previous day by Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Bob Menendez to "green-light the flow of arms" from the U.S. to rebel groups "that have gone through a thorough vetting process" would not include the transfer of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles--i.e., the arms that rebels would need to even come close to dealing with Assad's massive air power. In other words, the bill mainly deals with small weapons that the U.S. can use for leverage over the rebels and with Assad, rather than being of any effective concrete assistance.

Thus, while two years of fighting the Assad regime did not qualify the Free Syrian Army to receive U.S. or EU arms, now that radical Islamist forces appear to be getting an upper hand in the anti-Assad rebellion, they may qualify in order to fight the Islamists. The imperialist dilemma is that by the U.S. refusing to send arms, and the EU imposing an arms embargo (which favors the massively armed Assad regime, which in any case gets loads of arms from Russia and Iran), more and more anti-Assad rebels will turn to the Islamists, as they receive arms from Saudi Arabia and Qatar and regional Islamist networks. The argument is that arms need to be sent to non-Islamist fighters to balance those received by the Islamists; the counter-arguments is that many of the arms may end up with the Islamists anyway.

In any case, the U.S. is only dealing with exile rebel leaderships in Jordan and Turkey, such as the unrepresentative Syrian National Council (SNC) and the Supreme Military Command, the high command of the Free Syrian Army (SFA), which liaises with the SNC. They have minimal control over what the locally organized FSA and the Local Coordinating Committees do all over Syria, and it is precisely this lack of control over the largely self-organized revolutionary ranks--not only for Islamists--that makes the imperialist powers so hesitant to arm anyone.

While much was made of 200 U.S. troops being sent to Jordan to help coordinate aid to the rebel leadership, it was astounding that the leadership was unable to get any arms to the FSA in southern Syria, near the Jordanian border, when it just lost the strategic town of Khirbet Ghazaleh. A very strange "U.S. war on Syria."

Aside from arming the rebels, according to Reuters, other "possible military choices range from limited one-off missile strikes from ships...to bolder operations like carving out no-fly safe zones," or the creation of "humanitarian safe areas that would also be no-fly zones off limits to the Syrian air force."

However, U.S. officials have warned that "once you set up a military no-fly
zone or safe zone, you're on a slippery slope, mission creep, and before you
know it, you have boots on the ground," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution.

Of course, despite all this there may well come a time when the U.S. decides that the level of ongoing instability is simply too great to be allowed to continue, or that its so-called "credibility" is at stake if it doesn't do something, or that if it is all going to fall apart anyway, so the U.S. needs to choose those who it wants to take over, despite the difficulties of enforcing such a choice. Imperialism cannot be trusted to act "rationally," even from its own point of view, at all times, and a catastrophic--for all involved--U.S. intervention cannot be ruled out.

Nevertheless, if the kind of action that people like McCain are urging came to pass, that would be a marked shift--to claim it gave credence to the idea that the last two years of uprising and rebellion was all a "U.S. war on Syria" would be too illogical to warrant comment.

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Saudi-Qatari Intervention: Promoting Sectarian Counter-Revolution

Many of the assertions about U.S. aid to the Syrian uprising, when examined for evidence, are nothing but reiterations of the well-known fact that the reactionary Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have been providing a moderate stream of arms for specific rebel groups. The fact that these two states are pro-U.S. is twisted in discussion to mean they are mere puppets of the U.S., as if they cannot have their own policies.

In fact, these two relatively powerful states are engaged in an aggressive regional "sub-imperialist" project, with the dual aims of countering Iranian influence in the region, and turning the democratic impulse of the Arab Spring, including its Syrian chapter, into a Sunni-Shia sectarian war. The democratic impulse was and is a mortal danger to the absolute monarchies just as much as to regimes like that of Assad, as Saudi Arabia's suppression of the uprising in Bahrain shows. Saudi and Qatari intervention is thus a counterrevolution trying to hijack a revolution.

However, while the U.S. may also see some benefit in diverting a democratic movement in a sectarian direction up to a point, it is very wary of this strategy, principally because the only available "shock troops" for this Saudi strategy are hard-line Sunni Islamists and "jihadists" who are more anti-U.S. and especially anti-Israel than Iran itself, and much more so than the Assad regime, which does not have an "anti-imperialist" history at all.

Just to make things clear: just because these Saudi-backed forces are "anti-imperialist" and imperialism and Israel are hostile to them, does not make them "good." To suggest that would be falling into the same trap as those who wrongly think Assad is "anti-imperialist" and that this makes his regime "good." The Saudi-backed forces are the most reactionary in the Syrian context, especially given the sectarian dimension, and the reactionary strategy of the U.S. (see below) would even be slightly better than an outright jihadist victory--except that such an outright jihadist victory is almost impossible, as there remains a real democratic anti-Assad movement on the ground that is hostile to the jihadists.

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Israel: "Terrorists" Are the Main Enemy

The strangeness of the argument that the U.S. "must" be behind the anti-Assad rebellion if some of its Arab allies are behind parts of it, is that the key U.S. ally in the region, Israel, remains steadfastly opposed to this Saudi-led project, viewing a victory of a Syrian uprising with a strong Islamist component as a nightmare.

While Israel wants to weaken the Assad regime in order to disrupt the passage of arms between Iran and Hezbollah via Syria, it is also aware that the Assad regime has both kept the border with the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan completely quiet for 40 years, and that the same regime has continually waged war on the Palestinians (for more detail, see my article "Syria and the Palestinians").

Therefore, Israel's stand has been the polar opposite of the Saudi-Qatari stand.

That is not to say Israel won't launch aggression--as it has clearly just done--but that such aggression, for its own reasons, is not aimed at helping the Syrian opposition overthrow Assad.

Straight after the bombing of military facilities near Damascus on May 5, Israel sought to persuade Assad that the air strikes "did not aim to weaken him in the face of a more than two-year-old rebellion...Officials say Israel is reluctant to take sides in Syria's civil war for fear its actions would boost Islamists who are even more hostile to Israel than the Assad family, which has maintained a stable stand off with the Jewish state for decades." According to veteran Israeli politician Tzachi Hanegbi, a confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the government "aimed to avoid an increase in tension with Syria by making clear that if there is activity, it is only against Hezbollah, not against the Syrian regime."

In a similar vein, Israeli Defense Ministry strategist Amos Gilad stressed that while "Israel has long made clear it is prepared to resort to force to prevent advanced Syrian weapons reaching Hezbollah or jihadi rebels," Israel was not interested in attacking Syria's chemical weapons because "the good news is that this is under full control (of the Syrian government)."

Israel's overall stance was explained recently by Yuval Steinitz, Israel's minister of intelligence and strategic affairs, who stressed the "only scenario" for Israeli military action in Syria would be to "prevent the delivering of arms, chemical weapons and other kinds of weapons into the hands of terrorists." He noted that Netanyahu had made clear that "if there will be no threat to Israel, we won't interfere." Steinitz emphasized that Israel was not urging the U.S. to take any military action "whatsoever" in Syria at this stage."

In an interview with BBC TV, Netanyahu called the Syrian rebel groups among "the worst Islamist radicals in the world...So obviously we are concerned that weapons that are ground-breaking, that can change the balance of power in the Middle East, would fall into the hands of these terrorists," he said.

In a recent meeting with British Prime Minster David Cameron, Netanyahu, who was visiting London for Margaret Thatcher's funeral, again warned of the danger of Western arms reaching jihadist rebels that could be used later against Israel and Western targets.

In particular, reports the Times of Israel, Israel "worries that whoever comes out on top in the civil war will be a much more dangerous adversary" than Assad has ever been, specifically in relation to the Golan Heights. "The military predicts all that (the 40-year peaceful border) will soon change as it prepares for the worst."

According to Israel's Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz in March, "we see terror organizations that are increasingly gaining footholds in the territory and they are fighting against Assad. Guess what? We'll be next in line," while Major Gen. Aviv Kochavi, warning that "radical Islam" was gaining ground in Syria, compared the region near the Golan with "the situation in Sinai, as a result of growing jihad movement in Syria."

Clarifying that it is the fall of Assad that worries Israel, Aluf Benn wrote in Haaretz that "the worrisome scenario in the North is that after Assad is gone, Israel will be attacked, and the Syrian Golan will turn into a new version of the Gaza Strip, with southern Lebanon serving as a base for launching rockets and missiles. This is what is concerning the IDF's top brass. Assad's control of the Golan is disintegrating as his forces are being drawn into the decisive battles around Damascus and the fight for the city's international airport."

Thus, while Hezbollah is seen as a mortal enemy, the anti-Assad Islamist fighters are seen as in some ways even less predictable. According to Aaron Klein and Karl Vick writing in Time in February, "Hezbollah is not Israel's only concern--or perhaps even the most worrying. Details of the Israeli strikes make clear the risk posed by fundamentalist militants sprinkled among the variegated rebel forces fighting to depose Assad...jihadist groups are less vulnerable to the same levers that have proved effective against Syria and other states--such as threats to its territory--or even the frank interests of an organization like Hezbollah, which as a political party plays a major role in Lebanon's government."

Of course, outside the actual contest between Assad and opposition, Israel's bigger project is to build up for an attack on Iran. In this sense, the bombings can also be seen as a warning to Iran, and even a test run. As Assad has been both asset and thorn for Israel, it prefers his regime to remain, if weakened, and to try to either attack Iran, or decimate Hezbollah, as its way of breaking the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah Shia nexus.

In contrast, the governments doing the most to intervene against Assad's regime--Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey--are all horrified at the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran, as it would tend to swing their own populations into "Islamic solidarity" with Iran (for some evidence of this, see "The geopolitics of the Syrian uprising/insurgency"). They prefer to try to break the nexus via destroying Assad and bringing to power a Sunni Islamist regime in Damascus--Israel's nightmare.

The only reason Syria is in the "nexus" in the first place is due to Israel's illegal annexation of the Golan. Syria uses Hezbollah as a form of indirect pressure via Lebanon, while keeping its own Israeli Golan border quiet. With its bombing and Israel's frank words afterwards, Israel is also sending a message to Assad that if he wants Israel's help, he has to break the nexus with Hezbollah. Naturally, Assad has no reason to trust the Zionist regime, and still less as Israel is not offering the return of the Golan in exchange. With Syria weakened, Israel has the bargaining power.

A final thought on Israel's intentions is that, given the fears expressed about Southern Syria becoming a "new Gaza" if Assad falls, some Israeli strategists may even be considering invading to set up a new "buffer zone" between its occupied Golan and victorious Islamists and/or Hezbollah infiltration into the region. Thus, current aggression may be a prelude to a larger operation, if the Zionist regime sees it as necessary and feasible, but this would be a very high-risk move.

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Let "Terrorists" Kill Each Other?

One interesting angle to all this, however, is that since both the U.S. and Israel view both Hezbollah and the anti-Assad Sunni jihadis as enemies, would it not be in their interests for them to kill each other in Syria? While Israel opposes weapons getting to Hezbollah in Lebanon, it may look differently at Hezbollah foolishly wasting its resources, energies and cadres in Syria fighting other Islamists, and focused away from Israel.

This strategy was advocated by neo-con extremist Daniel Pipes, who asserted that "continued fighting does less damage to Western interests than their taking power. There are worse prospects than Sunni and Shiite Islamists mixing it up, than Hamas jihadis killing Hezbollah jihadis, and vice versa...This keeps them focused locally, and it prevents either one from emerging victorious and thereby posing a greater danger. Western powers should guide enemies to a stalemate by helping whichever side is losing, so as to prolong their conflict." As he believes Assad is currently losing, the U.S. should support Assad.

The snag in that would be, of course, if Assad falls, Hezbollah would be in a similar position inside Syria to the Sunni Islamists in being able to grab access to Assad's weaponry. All the more reason, from Israel's point of view, for the regime to survive as the "least worst scenario." They also cannot necessarily be relied on to keep fighting once Assad is gone; jointly turning their attention to liberating Golan is not out of the question. And the strategy also means the continuation of massive instability in Syria for the foreseeable future, precisely what most imperialist interests see as the problem.

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Heading Where?

The Assad regime, in its current form at least, is finished, if not now, then soon; it has at least a majority of its population fighting it, and even if it can hang on, it can never defeat the opposition. As long as the regime hangs on, the region will be in a state of permanent instability, wracked by massive war and terrible bloodshed. The figure of 70,000 killed to date may end up being dwarfed.

Those interpreting the U.S. verbal support for the regime's replacement as some fundamental hostility are simply refusing to see that the U.S. now wants Assad out because he cannot win and his presence guarantees continued instability, as well as the further rise of the radical Islamist element. But what does it want to replace the regime with?

The U.S. interest is to balance between the mutually hostile Israeli and Saudi projects for the region, while at all cost trying to preserve some sense of "order" in the (inevitable) Syrian transition. The U.S. therefore prefers a deal that would include significant parts of Assad's regime, to preserve a "stable" core, joined with some defector generals from the regime, "liberal" oppositionists in the foreign-based Syrian National Council (which is unrepresentative of the Syrian movement on the ground) and more moderate members of the Muslim Brotherhood. This strategy is at variance with the Saudi strategy, and aimed at both stemming the reactionary Islamist tide, but also ensuring no genuine "people's power" can arise from below.

The current U.S. attempt to find a "negotiated solution" together with Moscow fits this strategy; Kerry was not wrong when he said that the U.S. and Russia have similar interests in Syria.

While the Syrian opposition has not rejected this course, it has reacted coolly. Moaz al-Khatib, the recently resigned head of the opposition umbrella National Opposition Coalition (NOC), warned Syrians to "be careful of squandering your revolution in international conference halls." Its "red line" would be any role for Assad himself in any "transitional government," which would inevitably involve some members of his regime.

This is an understandable and valid reaction to any attempt by powerful outside states to derail the people's will.

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Cease-fire

However, the growing role of a reactionary Sunni sectarian element among the armed opposition, backed by the tyrannies of the Gulf, and the fact that this sectarianism frightens the bulk of the minority populations, at least Alawis and Christians and probably some Druze and even secular Sunni into grudgingly backing the regime or remaining neutral, and the fact that endless war with no victory of either side in sight is simply catastrophic to all, means that a "military victory" over Assad is highly unlikely. Also, any "military solution" in the current sectarian circumstances may be anything but the most democratic outcome.

Military struggle is by no means synonymous with Islamist or sectarian politics as is often thought; at the outset, the masses picked up arms to defend themselves from Assad's slaughter, and a good part of the Free Syrian Army is still simply the armed people. But armed struggle, due to the very nature of bloodshed, in particular without a left wing and consciously anti-sectarian leadership, can help bolster an existing sectarian potential. A ceasefire would arguably create the best conditions for the democratic element of the mass movement to gain some breathing space and revive the mass struggle.

Whether or not the current U.S.-Russia talks can bring a ceasefire about is uncertain, but even if they can, whether or not such a cease-fire and transitional government can really give any breathing space to the masses also depends a great deal on whether such an unbroken "Assad state without Assad" allows such a breathing space, or simply continues its repression and terror with a new face.

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Arms

In the meantime, it is important to stress that it is the regime that is imposing a "military solution" on a massive scale; in such circumstances, the FSA has the right to get arms for self-defense from whoever it wants. Blaming whatever tiny trickle of arms the FSA gets for the continuing military conflict is simply stating that the FSA should commit suicide in order to achieve the peace of the graveyard. To begin to ever-so-slightly equalize the firepower of the two sides--with the regime still absolutely dominant[1]--does not mean advocating a military solution. It just means people have the right to protect themselves against getting blasted to bits. It may even strengthen the possibilities for a negotiated solution, which at present Assad has no reason to consider.

If, on the other hand, the current talks break down, and the U.S. and other imperialist powers, or even Israel, decide to desperately throw themselves in, and the McCain strategy comes to pass, the current situation would become even more catastrophic. While it is clearly not the Israeli strategy--yet another case where extremely pro-Zionist U.S. neo-conservatives are not aligned with Israel's strategy--Israel would likely move to take advantage of such a conflagration to carry out its own aggression against Iran, or even to forcibly expel a new wave of Palestinians.

Opposing imperialism should obviously not mean being apologists for Assad's butchery. But it is important to remember that opposing this butchery should in no circumstances mean losing our critical faculties and forgetting the kind of Armageddon a real imperialist war would entail.

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Notes

1. To discuss this would require another article, however, a good look at Syria's massive military equipment is at "Syria's Military Capability." It is beyond ridiculous to talk about a few small arms getting to the FSA coming anywhere near this massive array of tanks, APCs, attack helicopters, combat planes, scud and other missiles, etc.

First published at the Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Challenging anti-immigrant sentiment in local communities goes hand in hand with a more humane approach to immigration, explains Marty Kirchner, a member of the Independent Workers' Movement in New York City, in an article written for New York City's Indypendent.

Day laborers wait for work

RAYNALDO GETS up every morning at 6 a.m. to catch a bus going 12 miles from West New York, N.J., to an alleyway behind a police station on the edge of Bergenfield, N.J. By 7:30 a.m., he finds himself alongside other recent immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico, hoping a construction contractor, homeowner or small business owner will drive up and offer a job for the day.

Work has been hard to find since the collapse of the housing market in 2007. But the United Patriots of America (UPA) have not.

Every Saturday morning for the past seven years, the UPA--which models itself after the Arizona-based Minuteman Project--has been holding rallies in Dumont, a neighboring borough just across the street from the hiring site where Raynaldo and others gather.

As many as 15 UPA members regularly assemble at these rallies. They wave U.S. and Arizona flags, carry signs that scapegoat immigrants for the country's economic crisis and record video of immigrants seeking work and the employers who hire them. Local police regularly drive through the area and issue tickets to any day laborers found standing outside the city-designated hiring site.

"I don't like the protesters because they always see us as not producing value, but we produce a lot of value for this country economically," says Raynaldo. "If there were no day laborers or no immigrants, then the county's economy would go down."

"The image I have is of what America looked like in the 1960s in the South," added Jean Gratien, an immigrant from Rwanda who volunteers with a group that provides English lessons, coffee and sandwiches to the day laborers.

Bergenfield is a suburb of 26,000 people located 10 miles outside New York City. Whites are a slim majority of the borough's residents. Rapidly growing Asian and Hispanic populations have helped reverse decades of population decline in Bergenfield and the surrounding area while stoking the concerns of some locals about Bergen County's changing complexion.

"You have a lot of the population that is really aging," explains Bonnie Strain, a resident in Dumont. "A lot of these workers--the ones I spoke to the other day--are busy doing additions, updating in people's houses."

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THE TENSE stand-off that has been unfolding on the edge of Bergenfield for much of the past decade is emblematic of national trends that have made smaller communities like this one central to the struggle over the future of the United States' 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Since the 1990s, new immigrants, often following jobs in construction and the food industry, have been settling in growing numbers in suburban cities and rural towns, as well as across the South and Southwest. The effect was jarring for many whites who were accustomed to living alongside people who looked and spoke like they did.

When longtime anti-immigrant groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) used the post-9/11 backlash against foreigners to launch attacks on immigrants, their nativist rhetoric fell on fertile ground. In late 2005, House Republicans pushed legislation, known as the Sensenbrenner Bill, that would have made it a felony--as opposed to a civil violation--to reside in the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant or to hire or assist one.

The draconian measure sparked a massive response from immigrant communities across the nation. In the spring of 2006, a rolling series of protests that culminated on May Day saw an estimated 3 to 5 million people take to the streets in over 160 cities and towns in the largest series of mass demonstrations in U.S. history.

The Sensenbrenner Bill was dropped, but the mass mobilizations of 2006 soon turned out to be a high water mark for the immigrant rights movement. A surge in military-style workplace and predawn home raids conducted under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security drove many undocumented immigrants back into the shadows.

As author Juan González writes in Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, it was "the most extensive government campaign of roundups and deportations since the days of Operation Wetback [in the 1950s]. Nearly 900,000 people were deported by ICE from 2006 to 2008--nearly three times the number removed from 2001 to 2003."

Following the defeat of the Sensenbrenner Bill in 2006 and with the onset of the Great Recession, conservative towns and cities throughout the country--with the support of the Bush administration--began to activate federal-local partnerships under section 287(g) of the Immigration and National Act. The program trains and deputizes local police officers to act as immigration agents and create an immigration dragnet under the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Later, the Obama administration would implement a 50-state roll out of Secure Communities, a program that relies on biometric identification technology that allows local police to check the fingerprints of arrested persons against FBI and Homeland Security databases.

Other localities pushed further. Just weeks after the 2006 May Day protests, anti-immigrant activists in San Bernardino, Calif., a suburb outside of Los Angeles, began a petition drive calling for a city ordinance to restrict the employment and housing options of undocumented immigrants. With help from FAIR, similarly worded ordinances began appearing in places like Hazelton, Penn.; Valley Park, Mo.; Farmers Branch, Texas and Riverside, N.J.--obscure towns and suburban cities with conservative local governments that had experienced sharp increases of new immigrants over the previous two decades.

In the same way that angry whites initiated local battles against mandatory school busing in the 1970s that provided fodder for a larger post-civil rights era backlash, this wave of local anti-immigrant initiatives had an outsized impact as Washington-based politicians raced to stay ahead of public support for stricter, more punitive policies.

Meanwhile, in Bogota, N.J., five miles south of Bergenfield, conservative mayor Steve Lonegan hosted a town hall meeting at the height of the 2006 marches that featured speakers from UPA, New Jersey Citizens for Immigration Control and a national official from FAIR. A petition drive in Bergenfield calling for a citywide vote on 287(g) subsequently failed to gain enough signatures. But in 2007, the New Jersey Attorney General issued a directive saying that local law enforcement should inquire about a person's immigration status upon arrest for a serious crime.

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THE UPA's weekly effort to intimidate day laborers in Bergenfield that began shortly after the 2006 mass protests continues to this day. But it is something of an outlier now compared to 2010, when the extreme nativist movement saw its peak with 319 similar groups active around the country.

Since then, says Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, "most of the energy that once animated the anti-immigrant movement...moved into the political mainstream, where Republicans and Tea Partiers have competed with one another to craft ever-harsher nativist laws." These state and local laws and federal enforcement programs have defined immigration policy for the country. They shape the terms of the current debate over immigration reform in Congress.

"I think it is important to recognize that protests and attacks on day laborers and the attempts, both legislative and grassroots, to limit their access to paying jobs is part of a larger effort to limit the ability for all immigrants, both documented and undocumented, to seek work," says Aaron Flanagan of the Center for New Community. "It is a material manifestation of the doctrine of self-deportation, or attrition through enforcement."

In 2007, a coalition of anti-racist, pro-immigrant and socialist groups from New Jersey and New York began to hold counter-protests against the UPA. At the time, spirited rallies of as many as 100 people took place.

"When there are organizations that want to defend the rights of immigrants, it gives me a great feeling that we are not alone, that there are people who are not racist, who are on our side," said Raynaldo. "It is a great motivation to continue and persevere."

Unfortunately, the momentum to support the day laborers has waned over the years while the UPA has continued its weekly protests. On March 2, nine members of the Independent Workers' Movement (IWM), a New York City-based network of day laborers, domestic workers and street vendors, joined more than 30 day laborers in Bergenfield in a lively protest against the continued presence of UPA.

Such events bolster the morale of embattled day laborers. They also send a message to area residents that immigrant bashing is misguided and not worthy of their support, which is why these kinds of visible solidarity actions need to become much more common. Day laborers in Bergenfield have also begun meeting with IWM and are organizing to finally end the harassment they face from UPA.

The counter-mobilization against immigrant rights feeds off fear and ignorance and is centered in state and local areas outside of urban strongholds like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. This often-unfamiliar terrain, the home turf of anti-immigrant forces, is where immigrant rights supporters need to be going on the offensive and contesting right-wing narratives. Only by changing hearts and minds at the grassroots level and isolating far-right nativists can we begin to shift the political establishment's fixation away from punishment and toward a more humane approach to immigration reform.

First published at the Indypendent.

Paul Dean, a worker at Bethesda Lutheran Communities, reports on a step forward for a union organizing drive at his workplace.

Workers celebrate after turning in hundreds of union cards (Better Bethesda Oregon)

A GROUP of direct support professionals (DSPs) at Bethesda Lutheran Communities (BLC) in Portland, Ore., have successfully filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

DSPs assist people who have developmental disabilities with cooking, hygiene, medication and other basic needs, yet they generally receive close to minimum wage. Starting pay is about $10 an hour, and wages barely go up from there. People who have been working with BLC for 13 years get $11.40 an hour, and workers are required to work on holidays.

BLC's CEO doesn't have to worry about his salary, however, because he made $363,698 in 2010.

The DSPs have been organizing with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 503 in Portland. The management of BLC--a Christian non-profit corporation that receives money from the government as well as individual donations--has spent a lot trying to derail the efforts of workers from their struggle for a living wage and better benefits and working conditions.

DSPs who work in group homes have been bombarded with anti-union e-mails, notices posted all over their work sites and compulsory "information" meetings with management (which union activists have been excluded from). All of this did not deter people from signing union cards.

Workers now have the right to hold a union election, which will likely be conducted by the NLRB near the end of the month. BLC is worried that a successful union election in Portland could lead to similar action in the other states it operates in--which is why BLC management are putting so much effort and money into stopping this union drive.

BLC has increased its anti-union campaign, creating a website in which it claims to "expose" the union. They have plenty to say about the union--but nothing about the issues of low pay, pathetic benefits and disrespect for the people who are on the front lines of providing support to people with developmental disabilities.

Since the filing for the union election, management has held meetings with small groups of workers with the company's anti-union lawyer, brought in from Illinois, in an attempt to intimidate and frighten workers. BLC tells us how hard up they are and that times are tight--yet management spares no expense fly in well-paid lawyers, instead of spending the money on support services.

But management is failing in its campaign. Workers can see through the overbearing attitude. In fact, after the union had submitted the authorization cards to the NLRB, even more people signed cards.

The union campaign is now reaching out to the wider community. A facebook page, "Better Bethesda Oregon," has been set up and a petition has been launched asking people to support BLC workers in their effort to form a union. Workers are asking the public to call on Bethesda management to stop spending public money that's meant to support people on an effort to stop workers from forming a union.

Benjamin Dangl, author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia and Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America, writes on the 1952 revolution in Bolivia and its lessons for today, in an article posted at UpsideDownWorld.org, where he is the founding editor.

Bolivian revolutionaries during the 1952 revolution

Author's note: At a May Day speech this month, Bolivian President Evo Morales announced that his government would be expelling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from the country for seeking to undermine the leftist policies and agenda of the Morales government. As I wrote in an investigative article on this topic in 2008 for the Progressive magazine, the U.S. government has for years been attempting to oppose the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), the political party of Morales, and weaken Bolivia's leftist social movements.

Washington is no stranger to interfering in leftist and nationalist politics in the Andean nation. As the following paper, originally published in the University of Vermont History Review in 2012, outlines, the Harry Truman administration worked against the progressive policies, self-determination and grassroots base of Bolivia's transformative National Revolution in 1952. This history's legacy lives on; Washington's power is woven into the fabric of Bolivian politics, from the dreams and nightmares of the National Revolution, into the MAS era of today.

AT THE beginning of the Cold War, Bolivian miners and peasants took to the streets in what would become one of the most transformative and symbolically rich political events of the 20th century for the Andean nation. Bolivia's National Revolution in 1952 initiated shock waves that are still felt among the country's impoverished and indigenous majority. From land reform and the nationalization of the tin mines, to expanding access to voting, education and health care, the changes and promises wrought by the National Revolution were historically unprecedented for Bolivia.

Public support for the National Revolution was fed by many Bolivians' dissatisfaction with working conditions in the fields and mines of the nation and the country's widespread social and economic inequalities. A testimony from Bolivian miner Domitila Barrios de Chungara conveys the perception of injustice that was common among Bolivian workers at the time of the revolution: "Why should we allow a few to benefit from all of Bolivia's resources while we go on forever working like animals, without having higher aspirations, without being able to provide a better future for our children? Why shouldn't we aspire to better things when our country is rich thanks to our sacrifice?"[1] Barrios de Chungara's complaints illustrate the rage felt by many poor Bolivians, a rage which gave expression to the demands of the revolution. Yet in the months and years following the uprising, many of the National Revolution's promises remained unrealized. A string of military dictatorships, corrupt presidents, racism and vast inequality in the country contributed to these challenges. But a look at Washington's response to the revolution in 1952 points to some other roadblocks to development and social change.

This essay explores the ways in which President Harry Truman's administration undermined the historic nationalist changes that took place during the National Revolution in Bolivia. In the U.S. fight against communism in the Cold War, the decisions of leading Truman administration foreign policy officials working on Latin America were consistently informed by U.S. commercial interests. Such U.S. policy fought against nations who challenged those commercial interests in their own countries by way of the state-led expropriation of private businesses, industry and land. Diplomatic cable exchanges between government officials and diplomats in Washington and La Paz detail how the Truman administration worked against the self-determination of Bolivia's National Revolution. Of specific interest here is the extent to which the Truman administration, following Bolivia's nationalization of tin mines, pressured Bolivian officials into reimbursing the private businessmen who were the former owners of the government-expropriated mines, a move that was against the popular sentiment of the grassroots base of the Bolivian revolutionary government.

Considering the roots of the Truman administration's foreign policy in the wake of the Second World War and the development of the Truman Doctrine, the administration's response to the National Revolution took place at an important juncture in U.S.-Latin American relations. In the years following Bolivia's revolution, Washington notoriously helped orchestrate bloody coups against leaders with nationalist leanings elsewhere in the region. The way in which Washington dealt with this earlier threat to U.S. hegemony in the Andes sheds important light on the machinations of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America in the early Cold War.

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Good Neighbors and Tin

Coming out of the commercial, economic and political disruption of the Great Depression and the Second World War, Washington sought to mend crises and prevent further decay in relations with Latin America through the Good Neighbor Policy, which essentially served as an "international counterpart of the New Deal."[2] The Good Neighbor Policy was aimed at developing a more reciprocal trade relationship with Latin America, a departure, at least rhetorically, from the more interventionist policies of many previous U.S. administrations. While directed toward developing more equal economic and political partnerships between Washington and the governments and people of Latin America, the Good Neighbor Policy was also aimed at expanding U.S. influence, commercial presence and political power in the region. U.S. President Herbert Hoover, elected in 1928, was considered one of the fathers of the Good Neighbor Policy in his plan to not view Latin America simply as a little brother. President Franklin Roosevelt expanded these neighborly policies toward Latin America, focusing on pro-trade approaches and a non-interventionist stance, which also involved cutting back on military spending due to the financial constraints imposed by the Great Depression.[3]

The Good Neighbor Policy was a shift away from the more explicitly interventionist Roosevelt Corollary, which was established in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt and served as an expansion of the Monroe Doctrine. The Roosevelt Corollary basically claimed that the U.S. had the right to intervene militarily in Latin America in order to protect U.S. commercial interests in the region, and to stabilize economies and penalize nations if they did not pay back debt to the U.S. The Corollary was based on the belief that if the U.S. did not establish a strong presence in the region through intervention, then European powers would encroach on Latin America.[4]

When the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place on December 7, 1941, Latin American countries rallied to resist Axis incursions into the region and supported the U.S. in the Second World War, in part by breaking relations with Axis nations. The solidarity with the U.S. on the part of many Latin American nations was due in part to a fear and disdain for the Axis Powers as well as an expectation that by supporting the U.S., they would receive helpful financial aid from Washington.

Latin America was a war-free zone in the Second World War, providing much in the realm of natural resources to the U.S.[5] Each year, from the 1920s and into the 1940s, the U.S. used 160 billion tin cans and 75,000 tons of tin metal. This was roughly 45 percent of the entire global use per year. During World War II, Bolivia provided most of the tin for the U.S.; from 1940 to the early 1950s, the U.S. purchased nearly half of all of Bolivia's tin ore.[6] This tin trade was the most important aspect of U.S.-Bolivian relations throughout the war, and would continue to be a key concern during the National Revolution in Bolivia.

Truman entered office in 1945, with Dean Acheson acting as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953. This dynamic partnership created a foreign policy legacy that continued to influence U.S. politics for the rest of the century. During the Truman years, the U.S. established itself as a dominant ally in Europe with the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union posed a threat to U.S. economic and political interests, and Truman responded to this in March 1947 by developing the Truman Doctrine, which established Washington's objective in the post-Second World War era of using political and financial support to contain the Soviet Union to prevent its further expansion. Bolivia's National Revolution in 1952 provides an interesting case study for measuring the impact of the Truman Doctrine in its early days.

The timing of the revolution was also significant in that it took place following the signing of the Rio Military Pact in September of 1947 between the U.S. and Latin American nations. The pact involved collaborations in defense of the region, establishing that any nation would come to the defense of another in the case of a foreign intervention. Following the precedent set by the Truman Doctrine, Washington's initial goal with its participation in this agreement was to curb the influence of communism and the Soviet Union in the region. Later, in April 1948, the Organization of American States was also established initially to protect the region from communism.

The Cold War and U.S. containment policy quickly pushed aside the more "neighborly" language and approaches of the Good Neighbor Policy as fears of Soviet Russia and communist expansion in the region took center stage. Yet perhaps more notable than the Truman administration's concern for the spread of communism in Latin America was its general ignorance and lack of concern toward Latin America. A brief look at leading political and diplomatic officials connected to the administration illustrates this view.

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The View from Washington

On February 18, 1950, George Kennan, a senior Foreign Service officer and State Department counselor, boarded a train in Washington, D.C., that was bound for Mexico City. Kennan was a Cold War expert on Russia whose reports from the Soviet Union helped form the U.S. containment policy toward communism. Yet he knew next to nothing about Latin America. The U.S. State Department sent him on this trip to assess the threat of communism in the region and how to deal with it.[7]

The trip took Kennan to major cities in Panama, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Peru. "I found the journey anything but pleasant," he later wrote. Indeed, the 10,000-word memorandum to Dean Acheson painted a grim picture of the region. In his report, he essentially said that Latin American nations had to be pressured into following U.S. wishes, either through coercion or intervention, because they were too weak on their own to resist communism. While these views were more typical of the stance of Washington within the framework of the Roosevelt Corollary, rather than the Good Neighbor Policy, they offered some insight into the views of the region from the perspective of the Truman administration at the time, in part because of Kennan's influential role in shaping U.S. policy toward Latin America in the Truman years. Kennan's racist 1950 report following his travels in Latin America incredibly pointed to "nature and human behavior" as key obstacles to progress in the region. Kennan said that "extensive intermarriage" between people of Spanish, indigenous and African ethnicity was an impediment to development that was written in "human blood."[8]

How this played out on the ground was a clear clash between what the Truman administration and others said the Cold War was all about. As historian Gaddis Smith explains, "The public rhetoric of American foreign policy, enshrined in the Truman Doctrine and innumerable other declarations, proclaimed that democracy, freedom, the rights of the individual were the answer to Communism. But in Latin America, Kennan saw a political culture too weak and selfish to support a democracy strong enough to resist the superior determination and skill of the Communist enemy."[9]

Kennan's views were reflective of general perceptions and ignorance toward Latin America in Washington at the time. Truman, for his part, said Latin Americans were simply "very emotional" and hard to work with.[10] And in Acheson's own almost 800 page memoir the only opinion he shares about Latin America was that the region's challenges were caused by a lack of "population control," "primitive politics, massive ignorance" and "archaic" societies.[11] Acheson himself admitted in 1950 that he was "rather vague" regarding Latin America, and unclear about whether Latin Americans were "richer or poorer, going Communist, Fascist or what."[12]

Condescension was typical of the Truman White House toward Latin America during the early Cold War. Leaders in Washington could afford that condescension because they were extremely powerful in the region, expected obedience from most Latin American governments, and were generally unafraid of actual Soviet interference. "They were far more concerned about nationalism, especially its economic variety, and the threat this posed to private U.S. investments," writes U.S. foreign relations historian Robert Beisner.[13]

The Truman administration's work in Latin America represented an important juncture in U.S.-Latin American relations. Not only did Truman's time in office coincide with the years immediately following the Second World War, but it also represented a shift away from the Good Neighbor Policy and to the Cold War interventionism that came to define the approach of subsequent administrations toward Latin America. For example, in 1954 the socialist president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup largely organized by the CIA under President Dwight Eisenhower. This was in response to a direct threat against U.S. business interests in that Arbenz had expropriated land used by the United Fruit Company, a U.S.-based company. The case of the Bolivian National Revolution, therefore, is unique in that Bolivia nationalized its tin mines, affecting U.S. investors, but the U.S. continued working with the country, pressuring it diplomatically and commercially rather than seeking to overthrow the revolutionary government. How Truman worked with Bolivia in the National Revolution says much about U.S. policy in the early Cold War.[14]

The events in Bolivia were dramatic and unparalleled in the country's history. For Washington, it posed a challenge and opportunity to test the Truman Doctrine and continue the purchase of tin from the impoverished country. Though the revolution later transformed into a dictatorship, it began hopefully with a broad participation of society overthrowing a military ruler, and establishing long sought after rights for the impoverished indigenous majority.

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"There Will Be a Lot of Bread"

The National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) party grew out of the camaraderie that was established between soldiers in the trenches of the 1930s Chaco War, a bloody fight with Paraguay over land and access to oil. In its early days, the MNR was led by a multi-class coalition of veterans of the war who allied with radical students. In the months leading up the 1952 National Revolution, the MNR also drew from the vital support of miners, workers and farmers, many of whom joined the party out of impatience with Bolivia's traditional political parties; they saw in the MNR a more inclusive and progressive set of platforms and political beliefs.

In 1951, the party ran Victor Paz Estenssoro as a presidential candidate. He won a resounding victory at the ballot box, but the military would not allow him to take power; they put military General Hugo Ballivian in Estenssoro's rightful place. After the legitimate victors were barred from entering office, the MNR decided that their only option would be armed revolution against Ballivian and his faithful supporters in the government and army.[15] Washington at the time was keeping a watchful eye on Bolivia, monitoring developments from afar. In the lead-up to the revolution, they simply waited to see how things would turn out before taking a stance on either Ballivian or the MNR's claims to power.

On April 10, 1952, Ballivian called for the lights to be put out in La Paz in order to impede the advance of the MNR rebels as they descended into La Paz from the neighboring city of El Alto. Yet a full moon lit the way, providing the rebels with guidance in their march down the steep hills from El Alto into the capital city. Many of the MNR rebels were members of the working class neighborhoods in El Alto, and so knew the terrain very well. They effectively cut off Ballivian's forces by blocking key routes on the outskirts of the city. Conflicts flared up in the night, leaving wounded and dead on both sides. But news of the MNR rebels' victory spread throughout countryside, inspiring similar uprisings across the nation. Three days later, with over 600 dead from the battles, the MNR was victorious over the Ballivian regime and took power.[16]

Estenssoro flew into the El Alto airport from exile in Argentina on April 15, 1952. When he entered La Paz he was met by a crowd of 7,000 people waving signs that read "Nationalization of the mines," "Agrarian Reform," and "Welcome, father of the poor." The crowd was so massive that it took Estenssoro a full thirty minutes to arrive at the presidential palace half a block away. He greeted the crowd in Aymara, the indigenous language most members of the crowd spoke: "Jacca t'anta uthjani," he said--"There will be a lot of bread."[17]

Just three days after Estenssoro took office, the Bolivian Workers' Center (COB) pressured the new president to nationalize the country's tin mines, expropriating the industry and natural wealth without paying the private owners of the mines. The COB also demanded that the MNR government redistribute land to poor farmers, grant citizens universal suffrage and formalize the armed worker and campesino militias as a replacement for the military. Such demands coming from the COB and other worker and farmer movements pushed the MNR to turn the radical changes they promised on the campaign trail into a reality.[18]

On July 21, 1952, the government granted the right to vote to all Bolivians over the age of 21, bringing 80 percent of the formerly marginalized indigenous population into the electorate. Further rights were gained through grassroots pressure on powerful institutions. Campesinos and rural workers' unions, using their weapons from the revolution, applied their own systems of justice through militias, took over land, reorganized systems of production and often superseded the power of local political authorities.

As a result of the pressure from labor organizations and miners, the MNR signed a decree that nationalized the country's tin mines on October 31, 1952. An enormous crowd of miners gathered to celebrate the signing with cheers, dynamite explosions and gunshots into the air. The festivities went on for days. The worker-run Bolivian Mining Corporation took over the operation of 163 mines and 29,000 workers formerly controlled by the three Bolivian "tin baron" families: the Patiños, Hochschilds and Aramayos. In spite of the COB's demands not to pay the owners a cent, the Bolivian government ended up paying these families a total of $27 million to buy back Bolivia's underground wealth.[19]

Poor, armed campesinos in various parts of the country also occupied land and pressured the government to break up large land holdings and expropriate and redistribute the land. In August of 1953, the MNR passed the Agrarian Reform Law to appease protesting grassroots organizations, but a difference remained between the rhetoric of the MNR's policies and the actual change on the ground; on a national level, the land reform only affected 28.5 percent of large landowners.[20] In the U.S., there was alarm regarding the revolution in Bolivia, but the State Department was mostly concerned about the nationalization of the tin mines as it affected U.S. businesses.

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Moderating the Revolution

From the very beginning of the revolution in April 1952, the Truman administration was opposed to the MNR government's plan to nationalize the tin mines. In a memorandum from Secretary of State Acheson to President Truman on May 22, Acheson argued for the U.S. to recognize the MNR government. Acheson believed this recognition would help the moderates in power of the MNR maintain their legitimacy against more radical sectors of the government, particularly the Minister of Mines and Petroleum, Juan Lechín, a popular union organizer who was advocating vociferously for the nationalization of the tin mines. The U.S. ended up recognizing Bolivia, but only as part of a power play to draw moderates in the government closer to U.S. interests, leading them away from more radical voices such as that of Lechín.[21]

In subsequent correspondences, both Acheson and Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs Edward Miller were primarily concerned about nationalization, how that would affect U.S. investors in the country, and how it would be a dangerous example of nationalist policies to others in the region. On September 8, Acheson wrote to the U.S. Ambassador in La Paz to tell the Bolivian government that the U.S. would not purchase tin from Bolivia if the country nationalized its tin industry.[22] This case of blackmail from the U.S. State Department against the sovereignty of the Bolivian people demonstrates that the Truman administration was more interested in protecting U.S. commercial and security interests than respecting the rights of Bolivia to develop its own economy in a nationalist direction.

Finally, when Bolivia did nationalize its tin industry on October 31, 1952, the U.S. State Department responded with strong recommendations that Bolivia pay back the major tin companies, including U.S. investors. This went entirely against the will and demands of much of the organized labor in Bolivia and the indigenous and peasant population that formed that backbone of the popular support for the MNR. In the view of this significant sector, the three main mining companies had been enriching themselves through the enslavement of Bolivian people in the tin mines for decades, and that therefore the tin barons should not be compensated for their cruelty. Nonetheless, the U.S. demanded that the Bolivian government compensate the tin barons of the mining industry a total of $27 million, a huge sum for the impoverished government.[23]

The National Revolution in Bolivia was met with pressure from Washington, and the "reluctant revolutionaries" of the MNR responded by compensating owners of the nationalized tin mines, an approach that was unpopular among tin miners and the grassroots base of the MNR, but pleased Washington. Shortly following the compensation plan, "U.S. officials announced that the United States was doubling its purchases of Bolivian tin and that Bolivia would begin receiving food exports." Over the next decade, into the 1960s, the Bolivian government received a third of its funding from U.S. aid, totaling $100 billion, a higher amount than any other country in the region received at the time. In exchange, the Bolivian government had to follow Washington's commands.[24]

The U.S. government used its clout as a major purchaser of tin and provider of financial aid to the poor nation to pressure the MNR government into a more moderate approach in its policies toward the tin industry. In this way, Washington was able to maintain its supply of cheap tin as well as its hegemony over the country's politics. The Truman administration thus paved the way toward a form of intervention that was not based on covert operations or a military coup--as was the case with President Arbenz in Guatemala just two years later. Instead, Washington was able to achieve U.S. objectives in the country through diplomatic pressure to uphold U.S. commercial interests.

In the U.S.-dominated Latin America in the early Cold War, the odds were against nationalism in Bolivia from the beginning. As historian Stephen Zunes writes, "The decision to expropriate, rather than confiscate, the mines--despite immense pressure from the miners and other Bolivians for the latter option--was directly related to concerns by the MNR that they had to acknowledge that at least some form of compensation was necessary, otherwise they feared that the United States would label them communist and deny them foreign aid."[25]

As tin was the main export for Bolivia, and the U.S. was the biggest buyer of the tin, Bolivia was beholden to the U.S., and Washington used this dependency adeptly. Willard Thorp, the Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, told Acheson early on in the tin negotiations with Bolivia, that the U.S. would get what it wanted in the end: "We will almost certainly get the Bolivian tin eventually. They have no other place to sell it."[26]

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Conclusion

When Domitila Barrios de Chungara was a young girl in a family of tin miners, her father, a union organizer in Bolivia's National Revolution, told her a story about the millions of dollars the MNR government paid to the tin mine owners. In telling the story, he used the metaphor of a doll. "Suppose that I bought you a beautiful doll or one of those puppets that can walk and talk," he said. Then the doll is stolen by a man who exploits it in backbreaking labor. "But one day, after so much fighting, you grab [the man] and hit him hard and take the doll away from him." After so much work, the doll is dirty, broken and weak. "[S]hould you pay him for the way the doll has aged? Don't you see you shouldn't? It's the same with the 'tin barons' who've gotten rich with our mine."[27]

The National Revolution had the momentum to place power in the hands of Bolivia's poor majority. However, according to Barrios de Chungara, the "new bourgeoisie" in power started "undoing the revolution" in spite of the fact that the revolution was made by the working poor. "Everything's been betrayed because we left the power in the hands of greedy people," she said, explaining that in the end, most of the MNR's policies just enriched a new group of elites.[28]

She saw the MNR leaders as playing a key role in the ultimate failure of the revolution, and believed the solution would involve electing a working class president who understood the plight of the people. Barrios de Chungara explained, "Because only those who know what it's like to dig into a rock, only those who know what it's like to work every day and earn your bread with the sweat of your brow, are going to be able to make laws that control and watch out for the happiness of the great majority, the exploited people."[29]

The MNR leadership's distance from the rank and file of their party contributed to the unfulfilled promises of the National Revolution. Yet Washington limited the revolution's transformative capacity as well. The Truman administration's role in pushing the MNR away from full expropriation of the mines demonstrated a Cold War tactic of putting U.S. commercial interests above the rights to national sovereignty in Latin America. Certainly, the Cold War did involve economic and political battles against the Soviet Union and its allies across the globe. Yet in Latin America, the Cold War was often used by Washington as simply an excuse to squash nationalism, movements against U.S. imperialism, and governments that were seeking a more independent and defensive route within the arena of a global market increasingly dominated by the U.S.

The case of Washington's pressure on the National Revolution in Bolivia is illustrative of this dynamic. Just two years later, the Eisenhower administration overthrew the Arbenz government. In 1973, the U.S. backed a military coup against democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile, leading to a bloodbath orchestrated by the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. propped up repressive dictators in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. When the socialist Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua in 1979, the U.S. began a covert military operation against this government that lasted throughout the 1980s. These are the tragedies that came to define the Cold War in Latin America. This conflict that was ostensibly against the Soviet Union and communism was fought out in part in the streets and government palaces of Latin America. The U.S. pressure against Bolivia in 1952 was but an early sign of this development.

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Notes

1. Domitila Barrios de Chungara, Let Me Speak!: Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 51.
2. Mark T. Gilderhus, The Second Century: U.S.-Latin American Relations Since 1889 (Lanham: SR Books, 1999), 71.
3. For more information see Graham Stuart, "The Results of the Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America," World Affairs vol. 102, no. 3 (1939): 166–70.
4. For more information, see John M. Mathews, "Roosevelt's Latin-American Policy," The American Political Science Review vol. 29, no. 5 (1935): 805–20.
5. Gilderhus, Second Century, 91, 98. Also see G. J. Dorn, "Pushing Tin: U.S.-Bolivian Relations and the Coming of the National Revolution," Diplomatic History vol. 35, no. 2 (2011): 203–28.
6. Kenneth D. Lehman, Bolivia and the United States: A Limited Partnership (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 62, 75.
7. R. R. Trask, "George F. Kennan's Report on Latin America," Diplomatic History vol. 2, no. 3 (1978): 307–12.
8. "The American Republics: Views Within the Department of State Regarding United States Policy Toward The American Republics as a Group," 4 January 1950, Miller Files, Lot 53 D 26, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950: The United Nations; The Western Hemisphere, vol. II (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 589–690.
9. Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 70.
10. Ibid., 67.
11. Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 569.
12. Gilderhus, Second Century, 134.
13. Beisner, Dean Acheson, 570.
14. For more on U.S. relations with Latin America during the Cold War, see Arne Odd Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143–52.
15. Herbert S. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 206–08.
16. James Dunkerley, Rebelión en las Venas: La Lucha Política en Bolivia, 1952–1982 (La Paz: Plural, 2003), 67–69.
17. Ibid., 67–69, 70–71.
18. Pablo Solón, La Otra Cara de la Historia (La Paz: Fundación Solón, 1999), 27–29, 30–31.
19. Benjamin Kohl and Linda C. Farthing, Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance (London: Zed Books, 2006), 64.
20. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Oprimidos Pero no Vencidos: luchas del campesinado aymara y quechua 1900–1980 (La Paz: HISBOL--CSUTCB, 1984), 122–23; Dunkerley, Rebelión en las Venas, 104–6.
21. Memorandum by the Secretary of the State to the President, 22 May 1952, 611.24/5–2752, in Foreign Relations of the United States: The American Republics, 1952–1954, vol. IV (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), (hereafter cited as FRU.S.), 490.
22. The Secretary of State to the Embassy in Bolivia, 8 September 1952, 824.2544/9–852:Telegram, in FRU.S., 502.
23. The Secretary of State to the Embassy in Bolivia, 23 December 1952, 824.2544/12–2352:Telegram, in FRU.S., 516–22.
24. Lester Langley, America and the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 182–83.
25. Stephen Zunes, "The United States and Bolivia: The Taming of a Revolution, 1952–1957," Latin American Perspectives vol. 28, no. 5 (2001): 33–49.
26. Ibid.
27. Barrios de Chungara, Let Me Speak!, 51–52.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 51.

First published at UpsideDownWorld.org.