"WHAT DO WE HAVE TO LOSE? EVERYTHING"

Harry Belafonte sums things up better than any "closing speech" could (NY Times, 11/7/2016):

 “O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath —

America will be!”

— Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”

What old men know is that everything can change. Langston Hughes wrote these lines when I was 8 years old, in the very different America of 1935.

It was an America where the life of a black person didn’t count for much. Where women were still second-class citizens, where Jews and other ethnic whites were looked on with suspicion, and immigrants were kept out almost completely unless they came from certain approved countries in Northern Europe. Where gay people dared not speak the name of their love, and where “passing” — as white, as a WASP, as heterosexual, as something, anything else that fit in with what America was supposed to be was a commonplace, with all of the self-abasement and the shame that entailed.

It was an America still ruled, at its base, by violence. Where lynchings, and especially the threat of lynchings, were used to keep minorities away from the ballot box and in their place. Where companies amassed arsenals of weapons for goons to use against their own employees and recruited the police and National Guardsmen to help them if these private corporate armies proved insufficient. Where destitute veterans of World War I were driven from the streets of Washington with tear gas and bayonets, after they went to our nation’s capital to ask for the money they were owed.

Much of that was how America had always been. We changed it, many of us, through some of the proudest struggles of our history. It wasn’t easy, and sometimes it wasn’t pretty, but we did it, together. We won voting rights for all. We ended Jim Crow, and we pushed open the Golden Door again to welcome immigrants. We achieved full rights for women, and fought to let people of all genders and sexual orientations stand in the light. And if we have not yet created the America that Langston Hughes swore will be — “The land that never has been yet” — if there is still much to be done, at least we have advanced our standards of humanity, hope and decency to places where many people never thought we could reach.

What old men know, too, is that all that is gained can be lost. Lost just as the liberation that the Civil War and Emancipation brought was squandered in Reconstruction, by a white America grown morally weary, or bent on revenge. Lost as the gains of our labor unions have been for decades now, pushed back until so many of us stand alone in the workplace, before unfettered corporate power. Lost as the vote is being lost by legislative chicanery. Lost as so many powerful interests would have us lose the benefits of the social welfare state, privatize Social Security, and annihilate Obamacare altogether.

If he wins this Tuesday, Donald J. Trump would be, at 70, the oldest president ever elected. But there is much about Mr. Trump that is always young, and not in a good way. There is something permanently feckless and immature in the man. It can be seen in how he mangles virtually the same words that Langston Hughes used.

When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, “Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,” he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, “America never was America to me,” and through the rest of this remarkable poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished.

Mr. Trump, who is not a poet, either in his late-night tweets or on the speaker’s stump, sees American greatness as some heavy, dead thing that we must reacquire. Like a bar of gold, perhaps, or a bank vault, or one of the lifeless, anonymous buildings he loves to put up. It is a simplistic notion, reducing all the complexity of the American experience to a vague greatness, and his prescription for the future is just as undefined, a promise that we will return to “winning” without ever spelling out what we will win — save for the exclusion of “others,” the reduction of women to sexual tally points, the re-closeting of so many of us.

With his simple, mean, boy’s heart, Mr. Trump wants us to follow him blind into a restoration that is not possible and could not be endured if it were. Many of his followers acknowledge that (“He may get us all killed”) but want to have someone in the White House who will really “blow things up.”

What old men know is that things blown up — customs, folkways, social compacts, human bodies — cannot so easily be put right. What Langston Hughes so yearned for when he asked that America be America again was the realization of an age-old people’s struggle, not the murky fantasies of a petty tyrant. Mr. Trump asks us what we have to lose, and we must answer, only the dream, only everything.

-->

Harry Belafonte is an artist and activist.

COMEY'S ACT

I don’t know (who does?) why FBI Director Comey raised havoc with the almost completed Presidential elections. He admits he acted without significant information, but he must have known he was throwing a lifeline to the Trump campaign.

It does make me think about “context”, and some questions that call for serious investigative journalism.  

This election, as no other in the past, has raised the possibility that it can happen here. 

Well before Trump took center stage, ultra (“alt”) right or incipient fascist tendencies penetrated Congress and the GOP,  as well as state governments and the general political landscape. Now Trump has turned the prospect of a “law-and-order” dictatorship into a clear and present danger. 

Assessing that danger, one should keep in mind that only part of government and institutional political power is visible to the public. There is another largely hidden governing power not really accountable to the public and largely insulated from elections and the democratic process.  These are the institutions empowered to employ the various forms of enormous force that define the “security state”: the Pentagon, the FBI, the police, the whole network of enforcement agencies. Has Trumpism and the alt-right found support within these institutions as well?

All these agencies are constitutionally subject to civilian control. But none are outside the climate of political influence, the attentions of lobbyists, monied interests, contractors, and ambitious demagogues. Trump boasts the endorsement of the major police and law enforcement associations. The history of the FBI features J. Edgar Hoover and a tragic litany of extra-legal assaults on immigrants, the civil rights movement, and political activists. It includes assassinations, dirty trick fabrications, and racist blackmail. The Pentagon has spawned more than a few “outlaw” generals who eventually had to be brought down. As to the police, videos have made visible the racist, often deadly, police violence commonly applied in many black and brown communities. This background gives impetus to the ambitions of Trump and acolytes like Jiuliani and Gingrich.

Comey may or may not have acted on behalf of Trump, but pressures from the extreme right must surely have a presence within “law enforcement”. The FBI has no business interfering in an election. Instead of demanding that Comey supply more “information”, the demand should be that he apologize and retract his improper letter to Congress.

This whole election is bizarre. We didn’t need the FBI to make it a nightmare.

“POLITICAL CORRECTNESS” AND FREE SPEECH — A TANGLED WEB

It’s never been simple. There’s more obfuscation today than ever about First Amendment issues. 

The Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision is prime evidence of how chicanery can distort concepts of freedom and free speech into their opposite. Its interpretation of “free speech” bestowed special privilege on corporate wealth to dominate the electoral process. 

But there’s lots more evidence of obfuscation, including in new battles roiling college campuses over free speech and “political correctness”. Just as civil rights activities precipitated the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, protest movements are at the center of today’s campus controversies. Notable are the rise of  “Black Lives Matter”, opposition to Israel's occupation of Palestine, and insistence on full gender equality.

As is their wont, university administrations have opened the new academic year with stern warnings and rules for incoming students. The University of Chicago Strikes Back Against Political Correctness, setting the tone for other colleges to follow. What’s wrong with that? Certainly commitment to academic freedom requires encouraging students to listen and think, to hear and argue contrary opinions, while exercising their full rights as citizens to organize and advocate. 

Well there’s the rub. These administrative admonitions say nothing about rights to protest and collective action. Worse, they say nothing about the most serious violations of academic freedom in which many campus administrations are implicated.  Wealthy donors have withdrawn or threatened to reduce funding to pressure universities to crack down on “political correctness”; a major complaint is that universities are “coddling” students who complain about racism on campus.  

One of the most egregious violations of academic freedom is being challenged now by faculty at UC Berkeley, where an ongoing course on Palestine was arbitrarily cancelled after a coalition of 43 Jewish organizations complained.

There’s a lot more to be thought about, but I try not to let these blogs get too long. Still, I'd like to leave a little food for thought for those who might take at face value the declarations concerning “political correctness” on campus . (No, it’s surely not simple, not without complications.)

First, so-called “political correctness” may sometimes be stifling or plain foolish, but that's not why Donald Trump has made attacking “political correctness” a primary cause? Is it that he aims to make racism and "hate speech" acceptable?

The second question evokes a long story in its own right. Anti-Semitism is the charge used to suppress protests against Israel’s occupation regime. That “justifies” violations of academic freedom and even legislative actions to stop boycott and divestment efforts. Opposition to what is happening now in Israel, not only in the occupied territories, in no way contradicts condemnation of the horrors of anti-Semitism past or present. Plain to see, Israel already has its Donald Trumps in power, open racists who dominate Netanyahu’s cabinet. Jewish or not, one can no more be silent about that than we can bow to “our own” bigot’s frightening bid to gain the White House. 

A special meeting of Berkeley's Academic Senate will consider the administration's decision to capitulate to an off-campus pressure group by closing down a course . It should turn back outside interference and return to the hard-won core principles of the Free Speech Movement.            

HOWARD SCHACHMAN

Howard Schachman died on August 5th. Another dear friend gone. I feel like a performer in Haydn's Farewell Symphony, as most friends of my generation leave the stage one by one.

Howard was remarkable, an outstanding biochemist and a brilliant advocate for academic freedom and civil liberties. He kept at it without pause, giving a graduate seminar course on ethics in science up to and including the last of his 97 years!

I can give personal testimony to his passion and effectiveness in defense of academic freedom. One small thing of many he accomplished was to lead faculty colleagues in beating back efforts by the UC Regents in 1964 to veto my faculty appointment on political grounds. At the same time, he began a successful campaign over a two-year period to rehire a faculty member, Eli Katz, who had been fired for refusal to answer questions about his politics from the House Un-American Committee and the UC Administration.

Of course there was a far bigger story in 1964. Howard and I found ourselves standing together at the Sproul Hall steps (later officially renamed for Mario Savio) right after the last student protesters were dragged out and arrested. We got together with a few colleagues and organized the meeting later that day that formed the Committee of 200, which organized faculty support for the students. Howard was part of the leadership group that formulated the eventual Academic Senate Resolution, passed overwhelmingly, that marked the victory of the Free Speech Movement with the University's acceptance of its main principles.

There is a lot more, from opposition to the Loyalty Oath in the 1950s to the many-sided struggles against subordination of the university and academic research to corporate and military interests. Howard strongly opposed UC's ties to the nuclear weapons labs. There was no stronger voice for fairness and integrity in the scientific community than Howard's.

Above all, I miss dear friends, Howard and Ethel, both having played their parts beautifully. And the symphony continues.

A MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE?

I Ran the CIA. Now I'm Endorsing Hillary Clinton. Michal J. Morell, NY Times, August 5, 2016:

"I also saw the secretary’s commitment to our nation’s security; her belief that America is an exceptional nation that must lead in the world for the country to remain secure and prosperous; her understanding that diplomacy can be effective only if the country is perceived as willing and able to use force if necessary; and, most important, her capacity to make the most difficult decision of all — whether to put young American women and men in harm’s way."     M.J. Morell

"In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."     M.J. Morell

* * *

As the wave of opposition to Trump swells, beware a dangerous undercurrent. 

More and more Americans are appalled at the notion that Trump could make it to the White House. A smashing defeat for Trump and Trumpism  — still not assured — would be a historic rejection of racism, xenophobia, and a potential "law and order" dictatorship. Now there is an undertow in the growing number of ultra-conservative and neocon power-brokers embarrassed by Trump to the point of panic. They seek to rescue their policies and political fortunes from a Trump-GOP debacle. This takes a variety of forms: the Koch brothers putting their wealth into trying to "save" Congress, more and more neocons and war hawks endorsing Hillary in the hope she will promote their aims in foreign and military policy.

The most dangerous proposition, bluntly stated by former CIA Director Morell, and more than hinted at by Hillary's campaign (and the media), is that Trump is Putin's pawn. In Trump's incoherent flood of comments, he has suggested trying to get along with Russia and has questioned NATO expansion. This doesn't turn his 'Fortress America' military bombast into a song of peace, nor make him less of a bully, nor make him a sane custodian of the 'dooms day' button. But to suggest that questioning renewed allegiance to cold war policies is un-American, that criticism of military policy is "aid and comfort" to a foreign power, surely brings back dismal memories of McCarthyism.

The fact remains that Hillary, who has embraced many progressive values in her domestic agenda and has been impacted by the Sanders uprising, has not budged from commitment to a failed and increasingly perilous foreign policy. What Morell chooses to endorse is precisely what should be feared, opposed, and changed. What the country does not need is reinforcement of the illusion of "the exceptional nation" charged with the mission of "leading" the world, "willing and able" to use force and engage in endless wars, with a president capable of deciding to "put young American women and men into harm's way".

We don't want a president whose vision of the world is based on which nations accept US preeminence and which do not. The priority should be to seek and promote the common interests of humanity, most of all preventing nuclear war and meeting the challenges of climate change. In today's torn and turbulent world, problems abound and short term fixes are rare. But people are sick and tired of commitment to endless and expanding wars. If Hillary isn't moved toward a more flexible, realistic and peace-oriented approach in foreign affairs, if the neocons and hawks are allowed to dominate, she may invite unintended consequences. Not a few Americans may see her as a president who would expand our wars and pursue the role of world policeman.

Then, the crowning travesty in this bizarre election, Trump might appear to some as the "peace candidate", not the Manchurian candidate conjured up by operatives of the CIA.

FROM LINDA BURNHAM

This is a profound look into the horror that is tearing at the heart of the nation. The author, Linda Burnham, is Research Director of the Domestic Workers' Alliance.

Please Post or Circulate Freely

                        Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Dallas

July 11, 2016

A thick strand in the history of U.S. policing is rooted back in the slave patrols of the 19^th century. Patty rollers were authorized to stop, question, search, harass and summarily punish any Black person they encountered. The five- and six-pointed badges many of them wore to symbolize their authority were predecessors to those of today’s sheriffs and patrolmen. They regularly entered the plantation living quarters of enslaved people, leaving terror and grief in their wake. Together with the hunters of runaways, these patrols had a crystal clear mandate: to constrain the enslaved population to its role as the embodiment and producer of massive wealth for whites and to forestall the possibility that labor subordinated to the lash might rebel at the cost of white lives.

How far have we come, really? Having extricated ourselves from a system of bottomless and blatant cruelty we have evolved a system that depends on the patty rollers of today to constrain and contain a population that, while no longer enslaved, is ruthlessly exploited, criminally neglected and justifiably aggrieved. Ruthlessly exploited by the low-wage industries that depend on ample supplies of cheap labor, by the bottom feeders of capital – pay-day loan companies and slumlords come to mind –­ by the incarceration-for-profit industry, by the municipalities that meet their budgets by preying on poor people, generating revenue by way of broken taillights, lapsed vehicle registrations and failures to signal.

Linda Burnham

Criminally neglected by policy makers – 152 years’ worth and counting – at every level of government. And so our education policy appears to be: starve the public system until it collapses and to hell with the children whose parents have no alternative. Housing policy stubbornly stacked against the development and maintenance of low-income housing. Jobs policy that, against an ideological backdrop that touts personal fulfillment and prosperity through honest effort, reduces grown men to selling loosies and cd’s on street corners to provide for their families.

Justifiably aggrieved because we still must assert, against the relentless accumulation of evidence to the contrary, that Black lives matter.

And all this on top of the foundational failure to financially repair or compensate the formerly enslaved or their descendants.

So today’s patty rollers are expected to contain any overflow of bitterness and anger on the part of the exploited, neglected and aggrieved, maintaining order in a fundamentally – and racially – disordered system. Their mandate is as clear as that of their forefathers: to constrain a population whose designated role is to absorb absurdly high rates of unemployment and make itself available for low-wage, low-status work without complaint, much less rebellion. Those who fear a spiraling descent into disorder, know this: we are merely witnessing the periodic, explosive surfacing of entrenched disorders we have refused to face or fix.

Our narratives and debates about good cops and rogue cops, better training and community policing are important but entirely insufficient. No doubt the patty rollers of the 1850s could have been trained to reign in their brutality. Given the gloriously diverse dispositions of our human family, patrollers likely ranged from the breathtakingly cruel to the queasily reluctant enforcers of patent injustice. All that is, at bottom, beside the point. Whether cruel or kind, restrained or rogue, their job was to police – and by policing, maintain – a barbaric system.

Today’s police can be better trained to recognize implicit bias, to dial back on aggression and deescalate tense encounters. All to the good, as far as it goes. But none of it changes their core mandate in poor Black communities: to control and contain, by any means necessary, a population that has every reason to be restive and rebellious.

*                      *                      *

“Was he colored?” That’s what my grandmother would say whenever she heard news about a criminal act. She knew that if the alleged perpetrator were “colored” his criminality would be read not simply as the act of an individual, but as an expression of an ingrained racial tendency. Somehow being Black meant that the actions of every random thief, rapist or murderer who was also Black redounded to you and your people. I imagine most Black families had a version of “Was he colored?” And I wouldn’t be surprised if Muslim American families have an equivalent expression today. Untying the knot of individual culpability and the consequences of racial belonging is nowhere near as straightforward as it might seem.

I was on a dance floor on Thursday night, desperately trying to shake off the news from Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights. My phone was in my back pocket and, like an idiot, when it buzzed with an incoming text, I left the dance floor and stepped outside to the news from Dallas. Though the action was still unfolding, I immediately surmised that the shooter was “colored,” and that he had been trained by the U.S. military.

 It has fallen to President Obama, time and again, to make sense out of the incomprehensible and bind the wounds of a nation apparently bent on self-destruction. In the aftermath of Dallas, Obama quickly condemned the despicable violence of a demented, troubled individual. The president’s intent was clear and laudable. He sought to defuse tensions by definitively asserting that the shooter’s action was not associated with a political movement or a particular organization, that his murderous deeds should in no way be linked to African Americans in general. He struggled to shift the focus from “Was he colored?” to “Clearly he was crazy, right?”

But before boxing Micah Johnson up and setting him aside as deranged and demented it’s worth asking a few questions. Honestly, good people, did anybody in their right mind – that is, not troubled or demented – think that the police could continue to pick off Black people at will and on camera without producing a Micah Johnson? And is troubled and demented shorthand for “traumatized by repeated exposure to the graphic depiction of the murder of people who look just like me?” Or for “agonized by the fact that the officers of the law who placed a handcuffed man in the back of a van and snapped his spine in an intentionally “rough ride” were neither held criminally accountable nor labeled troubled and demented?” Or for “depressed beyond imagining and haunted by the ghosts of the men and women whose lives were snatched by the side of the road, down back alleyways, and in precinct stations from one end of the country to the other before the era of cell phone video?” Or for “pierced through the heart by the voice of four-year-old Dae’Anna, comforting her mama?” Because if demented and troubled is shorthand for any of that, then Micah Johnson may have been a lone gunman, but he is far from alone.

That whoosh you heard on Friday morning was the sound of people rushing to condemn the Dallas shootings, or to extract condemnations from others. There is, of course, no moral justification for gunning down police officers. And, retaliatory violence aimed at the armed representatives of the state, beyond being a suicidal provocation, also shuts down all avenues for advancing the cause of racial justice.  But there is a lot of room for reflection between the cheap polarities of condemn or condone.

So here we are, once again, with calls from all quarters for dialogue across the racial divide. But if the long years before the emergence of the various movements for Black lives have taught us anything, it is this: our purported partners in dialogue simply turn their backs and leave the table as soon as the pressure is off. This moment calls for the vigorous defense of our right to continued protest and the intensification and elaboration of multiple movements for Black lives – for the sake of our ancestors and the generations to come. And for the sake of this country that is our home.

Linda Burnham

MORE HORROR

The next horror wasn't long in coming. Dallas, St. Paul, and Baton Rouge, all within just over a day.

Taken together, what happened in rapid succession in these three distant locations may have the greatest impact on the country, its direction, and the upcoming elections.

There is polarization on basic economic policy and also, potentially, on crucial matters of war and peace. But the future may well turn on the storm over systemic racism and violence. Race hatred, jingoism and xenophobia are what Trump counts on to inflame vigilantes in the name of "law and order". Racism is the fault line on which he hopes to stage an upset win in November.

The conscience of many Americans has been shaken by heart-searing videos and by the rising cry that Black Lives Matter. Will the appeal of justice and reason be strong enough to prevent escalation of the violence into a full-blown war? Can it force a halt to the killings? Can it bring about a massive rejection of Trump and Trumpism?