OutRage!ous Censorship of "Gay Imperialism"

The reader of Critical Montages has long been familiar with the problem of Islamophobia in general and its unfortunate manifestations on the (broadly defined) Left in particular in the age of the "war on terror." The reader is also well acquainted with queer variants of it, such as attempts at gay-washing of Israel. Left-wing criticisms of these phenomena, especially by queers of color themselves, are indispensable to our struggle to displace the hegemony of liberal imperialism.

One such queer-of-color criticism of "gay imperialism," a collection of essays titled Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality, however, is being censored in Britain, apparently by Peter Tatchell of OutRage!, who evidently felt his sensationalist brand of activism and rhetoric ought to be above critical scrutiny and got the publisher of the book to take the book out of circulation. For more information about this OutRage!ous censorship, see:

• Johanna Rothe, "Out of Place, Out of Print: On the Censorship of the First Queerness/Raciality Collection in Britain" (MRZine, 15 October 2009)


• Aren Aizura, "Racism and the Censorship of 'Gay Imperialism'" (MRZine, 23 October 2009).


• Umut Erel and Christian Klesse, "Out of Place: Silencing Voices on Queerness/Raciality" (MRZine, 24 October 2009)

How can leftists beat this censorship? In addition to the actions recommended by Aren Aizura, I suggest a couple more, in the short term:

• Hold public forums to discuss the censorship of queer-of-color criticism of "gay imperialism."


• Open up your journals, classrooms, and so on (if you work in publishing, education, and related industries) to discussion of this problem.

In the long term, though, we need to work on creating a Queer Left, informed of Marxist Feminism, capable of discussing such questions as religion and sexuality in proper historical materialist fashion (i.e., supplying missing materialist foundations to Foucauldian critique of the dominant discourse on sexuality).

Bolivia: Morales Wins amidst Opposition Pressure

Bolivia: Morales Wins amidst Opposition Pressure
by Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, 11 August (IPS) -- A storm of opposition broke out in Bolivia against President Evo Morales, whose mandate was resoundingly ratified by more than 63 percent of the votes in the referendum according to the consensus of exit polls broadcast by the major television networks in the country.

Bolivia has been shaken by the fiery speech of the leftist leader, who after confirming his new triumph offered to reconcile his proposed new constitution with the autonomy statutes approved in the departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, and Tarija, and the fervent rejection of his proposal by the opposition leader, Santa Cruz Governor Rubén Costas, whose mandate was also ratified.

While Morales called for unity between the departments in the west of the country, where he received the highest level of support, and the so-called "Media Luna" in the east, Costas said that the majority vote for non-ratification of the presidential mandate in this area and Chuquisaca in the south means a rejection of "dictatorship and the draft constitution that leads to confrontation among brothers."

The main square of La Paz, awash with supporters of the ruling Movement toward Socialism (MAS), roared when Morales ended his speech with the phrase coined by the Cuban Revolution "Patria o Muerte (Fatherland or Death)," the crowd shouting in response: "We will win!"

1,000 kilometers east of the seat of government, in the 24th of September Square in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a chorus of supporters of rightist Costas repeated the word "independence" while he proclaimed the local victory against "Chavista Evoism."

With this particular expression, the followers of the leader of the Cruceño conglomerate of employers, landlords, and rightist groups, united in a conservative civic movement, are trying to tie the internal politics of Morales with his main external political ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

The ATB television network reported that, according to the exit polls, the yes vote for ratification of the mandate of the first indigenous president of Bolivia and Vice President Álvaro García Linera added up to 63.1 percent of the total votes at all the polling stations installed on Sunday.

For its part, the Unitel television network announced a 63.52 yes vote, based on the count of the surveys from 93 percent of the polling stations.

To remove Morales and García Linera from their office, the no votes had to exceed 53.740 percent of the valid votes, which was the percentage that this slate won in the December 2005 elections.  In the case of the eight governors who also put their mandates at stake on Sunday, the rejection had to be more than 50 percent to remove them.

Morales's victory is a bittersweet one, political analysts hastened to say, seeing the president with strong support in only the departments of La Paz, where his support reached 81 percent of the votes; Oruro, 81 percent; Potosí, 79 percent; and Cochabamba, 71 percent.

Instead, the voices in favor of revocation of the mandate of the leftist leaders at the helm of the government dominated in Santa Cruz, where the yes votes were only 39 percent, while they reached 43 percent in Beni, 49 percent in Pando, 47 percent in Tarija, and 46 percent in Chuquisaca, according to data from Unitel.

The preliminary count of the referendum votes on television channels, in the case of the governors, indicates that the governor of the department of La Paz, José Luis Paredes, must leave his office as 57 percent of the voters said no.

Thus the Paceños condemend the unstable behavior of this political veteran, which oscillated between independence and clear pronouncements in favor of autonomy and influential groups of the autonomist departments, on top of his style of administration characterized as corrupt by the national government.

In Cochabamba, Governor Manfred Reyes Villa also lost with disapproval of 60 percent of the electorate, among whom are coca growers who support Morales, their former trade union leader, and opponents of the administration of the rightist regional leader and former ally of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (1993-1997 and 2002-2003).

The ranks of government supporters, meanwhile, lost the governorship of the Oruno department, held by Alberto Aguilar, who was rejected by 54 percent of the voters, according to preliminary data from the exit polls.

At the forefront of the victors is the rightist Costas, who obtained a 66 percent support, the result that he interpreted as support for the process of autonomy, which he heads along with the local governments of Beni, Pando, and Tarija.

With the strength of support for his mandate, Costas proclaimed the creation of an "organ of security" parallel to the police, a tax collection agency, and an office of coordination to transfer resources generated from oil to other departments, replacing the Ministry of Finance that currently fulfils this role.

Among the opposition leaders who received the most votes is Tarija Governor Mario Cossío, who ran against the forecasts portending his defeat and won a 64 percent approval.

Beni Govenor Ernesto Suárez received a 61 percent support, while his Pando counterpart Leopoldo Fernández got a 56 percent support, according to the same initial unofficial calculations.

Mario Virreina from the governing party, who runs the department of Potosí, surprised by the wide support of 75 percent he won.  He is the only card that the Movement toward Socialism has at the level of local governments.

---

The original article in Spanish appeared on the Web site of IPS on 11 August 2008.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

Exit Polls: Morales Ratified by Larger Margin than in 2005

Exit Polls: Morales Ratified by Larger Margin than in 2005
by TeleSUR

The exit poll results ratified the mandate of President Morales and his Vice President García Linera and recalled three of the eight governors who were subjected to voting at the referendum.

The exit poll results published by TV Bolivia give victory to Morales and García Linera with 61 percent of the votes. (Photo: TeleSUR)

The initial results of the exit polls of the recall referendum held this Sunday in Bolivia are seen to result in the confirmation of President Evo Morales and his Vice President Álvaro García Linera in office, with 61 percent voting yes and 39 percent voting no, according to the estimates published in a news report by TV Bolivia.

Another survey by the Captura Consulting Group also gives victory to Morales and García Linera, though with 60 percent versus 40 percent, with a margin of error of 5 percent.

If this trend holds, the Morales-García Linera duo will have earned more than 7 percentage points above 53.7 percent that they needed, which was what they won in the presidential election of December 2005.

ATB, a private channel, noted that the president won 56.7 percent of the votes in his favor.

In the exit poll results of the recall of governors, José Luis Paredes, the opposition governor of La Paz (west), was recalled by 60 percent of the voters voting no, against 40 percent voting yes.

Manfred Reyes, the opposition governor of Cochabamba (center), was also recalled from office by a 40 percent yes vote versus a 60 percent no vote.

Mario Cossio, the governor of Tarija (south), won 65 percent of the votes, against 35 percent voting no, in the referendum, confirming him in his office.

Mario Virreira, the governor of Potosí (south), won 77 percent of the votes, against a 33 percent no vote, which ratifies his mandate as governor of this department.

Ernesto Suárez, the governor of Beni (North), won 72 percent of the votes, with 28 percent voting no, which ratifies his mandate as governor of this department.

Leopoldo Fernández, the governor of Pando (north), won a 59 percent yes vote, against a 41 percent no vote, thus also confirmed in office.

Rubén Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz (east), was confirmed in office by 79 percent voting yes, against 21 percent voting no.

Alberto Aguilar, the governor of Oruro (southwest), from the ruling party Movement for Socialism (MAS), obtained a 42 percent yes vote against a 58 percent no vote, which revokes his mandate.

The TeleSur special correspondent to La Paz, Patricia Villegas, said that the first official report of the National Electoral Court (CNE) will come at 20:00 local time (00:00 UTC).

Bolivia: Evo Morales Gano Referendo Presidencial

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The original report in Spanish was published on the Web site of TeleSUR on 10 August 2008.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

Bolivia: Regroup the Patriotic Movement

Bolivia: Regroup the Patriotic Movement
by Andrés Soliz Rada

The decree to nationalize hydrocarbons (1 May 2006), which enjoyed 95% public approval, was the zenith of the Evo Morales government.  Now it has lost the Chuquisaca Prefecture, by a narrow margin, but legally, which lets the referendums that approved the autonomy statutes in Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni, and Pando camouflage their illegality.  It should be remembered that, in politics, if we wish to advance, it is more important to criticize our own errors than the errors of others.

The separatist schemes in Bolivia have escalated geometrically from the arbitrary election of "governors," the outrageous creation of a virtual parliament, which passes "laws" in Santa Cruz (published in its "legal gazette"), to making it impossible for the President to visit the official premises controlled by the opposition.  Meanwhile, the armed forces and the police are unable to contain a creeping coup d'état through regional autonomies which, step by step, are disintegrating the nation.

Unfortunately, the MAS, with NGO funding, gave the pretexts that their adversaries needed.  Only an absolute myopia (or bad faith) explains why the officialdom welcomed the proposal of Román Loayza, the head of the MAS bench, to change the name of the country from Bolivia to Tawantinsuyo and that of Plaza "Murillo" in La Paz to Plaza "Tupaj Katari."  Similarly, Foreign Minister Choquehuanca couldn't resist warning that domestic workers, Aymara and Quechua, could poison their employers, opponents of the regime.

The physical abuses committed by irregular groups against parliamentarians, journalists, and opposition governors (who got their names attached to dogs whose throats were slit in Achacachi) explain the present difficulties.  Such actions obscure the cruelty of oligarchic racists, who, on several occasions, beat Quechuaymara Indians in Santa Cruz and stripped campesinos naked in front of the "House of Liberty" in Sucre.  In short, the MAS, instead of strengthening the alliance of mestizos and the indigenous against oligarchs, isolated the indigenous by pitting them against mestizos and agents of imperialism.

The government, abandoning the legal channel and tolerating corruption (not judging, for example, frauds in road construction as serious), had to submit itself to the illegalities of the opposition, since it approved a reckless draft Constitution, which, recognizing 36 indigenous nations, divorced Evo from middle strata.  Lending money from Bolivia's foreign exchange reserves at 2%, only to receive loans at 8% from the very banks and entities that benefit from that money, has demonstrated the fragility of the government's anti-neoliberal convictions.  Likewise, sending troops to Haiti has put its anti-imperialist rhetoric into question.

However, Vice President Álvaro García Linera, (who inspired the gaffes of Loayza and Choquehuanca), recently made the correct decision to reconsider the MAS's program of government, in which state capitalism regains its status as the engine of the country's economy, replacing the unviable politics of ethnic fragmentation.  Based on this program, which is an expression of state capitalism, the government must put an end to the plagues of corruption and indigenous exclusion that still exist and must give effect to regional autonomies that bring the country together.  Consistent application of this program will prevent the dismemberment of Bolivia.  Then, Evo could better face the recall referendum on the tenth of August and, if that referendum doesn't come to pass, the early elections that his opponents demand.

---

Andrés Soliz Rada is a former Minister of Hydrocarbons of Bolivia.  The original article in Spanish was published in Rebanadas de Realidad on 5 July 2008.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

America's Jazz Diplomacy Revisited

When America finds itself on the defensive on the PR front, it puts its talented -- and preferably Black -- tenth forward. During the Cold War, it sent its best jazz musicians -- Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other geniuses -- on international tours, whose photographs are now on display in the exhibition titled "Jam Session: America's Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World" at the Meridian International Center.

"Louis Armstrong in Cairo in 1961," Louis Armstrong House Museum

Reviewing the exhibition, Fred Kaplan reports that "Curtis Sandberg, the curator at Meridian International, said that during the three years it took to prepare the show his staff would frequently gaze at the photos and say, 'Why aren't we doing something like this now?'"¹

But cultural power rises and falls with economic power, and American culture no longer enjoys the same edge -- the ability to combine innovation and mass appeal, drawing upon cultures of Blacks and immigrants, and market its products worldwide -- it did at the height of the Cold War.

Today jazz in America is for connoisseurs, not for masses. The largest film industry in the world is Bollywood, whose films, salacious and yet demure ("[f]ilmmakers in India are banned from glorifying drinking, drug abuse and smoking, or including scenes 'degrading or denigrating women in any manner'"), are "popular in regions where Hollywood has had only limited success, like the Middle East."² Jackson Pollock's Abstract Expressionism could be plausibly promoted as "free enterprise painting" (in the worlds of then MOMA President Nelson Rockefeller) superior to Soviet socialist realism, but Jeff Koons and his ilk can only serve as a test of what the market bears. As for literature, even English professors would get stumped if they were asked to come up with the ten most influential American writers alive today in whom the rest of the world ought to take interest.

The only field of culture in which America truly eclipses all others may be the art of self fashioning. That's what Barack Obama is good at,³ and that's what he sells. So far, it's sold very well in America. Will the rest of the world buy it, though?

1 Fred Kaplan, "When Ambassadors Had Rhythm," New York Times, 29 June 2008. The historical facts in Kaplan's article are based on Penny M. Von Eschen's excellent research: Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Cornell UP, 1997); and Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2004). See, also, Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New Press, 2001).

2 Thomas Fuller, "It's Bollywood!/'They Can't Compete with Us in Emotions': Indian Movies Speak to a Global Audience," International Herald Tribune, 20 October 2000.

3 Matt Taibbi on the art of being Obama:

Here's the thing about Obama, the reason they call him a "natural" and a "rare talent." When Hillary Clinton spouts a cliché, it's four words long, she's reading it off a teleprompter, and it hits the ear like the fat part of a wooden oar. Even when Hillary announced she was running for president, she sounded like she was ordering coffee. Obama on the other hand can close his eyes and the clichés just pour out of his mouth in huge polysyllabic paragraphs, like Rachmaninoff improvisations. In this sense he's exactly like Bill Clinton, who had the same gift. He is exactly what is meant by the term bullshit artist. ("Obama Is the Best BS Artist Since Bill Clinton," AlterNet, 14 February 2008)

Iraq: We All Work for the Casino in the Green Zone

Iraq: We All Work for the Casino in the Green Zone
An Interview with Martin Eisenstadt

As you know, there's a talk of developing the Green Zone. The Marriott Hotel chain is here, and I too am involved in hospitality. I'm representing interests that are building a hotel. . . . Five stars, a casino, gambling, and it's going to be here in the Green Zone.

The sponsors are a Dubai-based company which has a lot of experience with hotels and casinos in the Middle East. And there's also a Las Vegas partner.

There's a lot of disposable wealth now in this region, as you must know -- a lot of foreign investors, foreign contractors, the troops are paid in dollars.

I'd call it a cultural center. We're excited to build hotels, to build golf courses, to bring Madonna, and to bring Elton John.

Money does talk. Democracy is the first step, but it needs to be followed by capitalism and entertainment, because that's what brings people together, and it's worked many times before. I noticed that now in the Green Zone there's even a Wendy's. Wendy's is a very famous American hamburger restaurant. . . . Do what tastes right! Yeah, Wendy's, it's an exciting process. I see the Green Zone transforming before my eyes.

And it's to the benefit of the Iraqi people, because that disposable income trickles down, as we say in America trickles down, when the people with the big money are spending that at roulettes they are also leaving tips to waiters. We have 6,000 rooms, we need many young girls to clean them. We're going to have a golf course, which needs gardeners, people with the gardening background.

The massage. We're gonna be able to bring people from all around the world, so your masseuse might actually be from the former Soviet Union or from Thailand. A boxer might come from America, mixed martial artists might come from Brazil. That's what I'm trying to convey. And there's been some lobbying, because there's a vote this week in the parliament. Democracy is vibrant, it's alive, and the Iraqis feel . . . right, the feeling is here, the feeling of democracy.

There's an issue of legalized gambling. I know in Kurdistan there is a casino that is very successful, and that's what we are trying to bring to Iraq. And I'm telling you, Iraq is already transforming, but soon it's gonna be like Berlin, it's gonna be like Okinawa, it's gonna be like Seoul, it's gonna be like Las Vegas, but within the Iraqi context, sensitive to the sensibilities of local people, of course. There'll be a mosque, a room for prayers, five times a day, there will be a call for prayers. We're gonna have a special section for Shesh Besh. Backgammon. Not just roulettes, blackjack, and poker, but a special section for Shesh Besh. So, we are going to incorporate local norms. And we are going to have off-track betting for the camel races in Dubai and countries nearby.

But yes, the pizzazz, the Vegas pizzazz, the American, can-do, let's-have-fun, we're-all-one attitude, yes, unapologetically, we're going to bring that here, but mixed with local sensibilities.

When you have a jack and a six, and you hit, everybody is in it together. That rush transcends your language, your culture, your religion. That I think is what's gonna really bring people together.

Whether you are Shia, Sunni, or Kurd, you're gonna be seen wearing the same casino uniform, with the same nameplates. which says we're all one, we all work for the casino, there are no differences between us. Our employment is going to be one third, one third, one third, so that all the peoples of Iraq are represented.

I haven't spoken as much about this in America, but I think here it's ok, it's gonna happen soon. I'm probably soon gonna be an advisor for the McCain campaign, because my candidate, Rudi Giuliani, dropped out. And I can assure you that John McCain supports this effort. John McCain will likely be the next American president. And I think the people here in Baghdad should understand that a future American president supports this endeavor.

John McCain as the head of the Indian Affairs Committee in the Senate knows hands-on, full well, the importance of development, how a casino, haw a sauna, how a golf course can transform a people, can transform a region and bring peace to groups that otherwise fight. We also had a racial conflict, between Indians, the white people, the Caucasians from Europe, and the Black people from Africa. And somehow casinos have managed to fix that divide. Only twenty years ago the Indians were drunk, and homeless, and committing crimes. Today, they're prosperous and wealthy, driving a Mercedes, with their kids with Game Boys and PlayStations, satellite dishes on their homes. And so too the Black people with sports have managed to advance themselves in this kind of entertainment sector. It's brought harmony between all the peoples. And we intend to bring the same thing here to Baghdad.

Iraq has changed. I think it's because of casinos. You find that today there's a wide consensus, across the board the American people are committed to helping Iraq see this problem through to its end. We're not gonna cut and run, we're partners, we're in this together for at least a hundred years. And I'll see you at the blackjack table. And what happens in the Green Zone stays in the Green Zone.

---

This is a partial transcript (omitting the interviewer's questions) of a program that is said to have been broadcast on Al-Iraqia in February 2008, featuring Martin Eisenstadt speaking at the "Baghdad Business 2 Business EXPO." H/T to Juan Cole, Raed Jarrar, and Rick B. The video is (most likely) a satire.

Bolivia: The Crime of Indigenous Insubordination

Bolivia:
The Crime of Indigenous Insubordination
by Jubenal Quispe

Bolivia today lives under the most cruel and appalling xenophobic dictatorship of masters whose demented pride has been wounded. If you haven't already seen it, watch this video.

It happened on the 24th of May, in Sucre, the capital of Bolivia and crucible of the failed attempt at Bolivian mestizaje.

Those who believed that ignorant racism was a bitter memory in Bolivia were wrong. White Bolivia, created and ruled by masters, was and is essentially anti-Indian. In 1825, the masters founded the Republic of Bolivia in the House of Liberty in the city of Sucre, excluding and subordinating indigenous peoples. Almost two centuries later, last week in front of the same mythical House, before TV cameras, they flogged insubordinate indigenous brothers. It was a macabre act that symbolizes the ethnophagic essence of official white Bolivia.

Given this situation, several questions arise. Where is the state, the monopoly of legitimate force? Will it be completely weakened in Bolivia? And if that's the case, what is the government of Compañero Evo Morales to do if there is no longer a state to manage? Or could it be that xenophobic violence of masters today is tolerated by the state so that its opponents would defeat themselves? These are questions that the government must answer. But the urgent question is: Why does white Bolivia hate Indians so much? There are many answers to this question.

They hate us because we are the mirror that reflects their failure and their historic defeat. They had nearly two centuries since the founding of Bolivia to build a "modern" and mestizo Bolivian nation, according to their interests and aspirations, but they failed morally and intellectually. Today, Bolivia is not "modern," nor is it mestizo. In two centuries of governing, they created only a kleptomaniac bureaucracy that squandered the country.

They copied educational reforms and compulsory military services and used the state to promote public policy to destroy our cultures, but they failed even in this. Now, as never before, Bolivian diversity bewilders them even in their bedrooms. Our presence pains them for it reminds them of their almost innate sterility, their impotence to achieve their aspirations.

They suffer from chronic anomie (lack of identity) in the face of multiple and dynamic indigenous identities that are affirming themselves everywhere. They suffer from profound existential insecurity because they can no longer affirm themselves by negating and annihilating the different, the Other. This pathological insecurity unleashes xenophobic behaviors in them. But with these attitudes the only thing they gain is national and international repudiation. Thus they are caught in the maelstrom of solitude.

They flog our brothers in public squares, as they flogged our fathers and grandfathers to death, because our presence reminds them of their schizophrenic reality. They dream of being Western, but indigenous genes run in their blood. They long to practice liberal morality, but their weak will pushes them to the vices of Indians whom they hate so much. They suffer from profound cultural schizophrenia: always hating what they are and dreaming about what they are not. They are unhappy wretches who don't even know who they are, much less have a clear vision of Bolivia as a country, nor have they ever had one. It pains them to go down in the history of Bolivia as vile moral and intellectual failures. It pains them that from now on criminals will no longer pass for national heroes in history.

It is demonstrated that the indigenous people are what they could not be: the bastion of the Bolivian identity in the making. We have defended and recovered the natural resources and dignity of the people against multinational corporations, monsters to whom the masters of white Bolivia prostituted themselves. Our achievements for Bolivia pain them because they demonstrate their fateful failure. So they humiliated our brothers in front of their House of Liberty.

The flogging that our fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters endure pains our soul, but it's a productive pain because it keeps and will keep alive our fruitful and subversive historical memory. Together with our unburied dead who roam the fertile Bolivian lands demanding justice, we will fight till we restore dignity to the life without dignity to which they condemned us. We were not born only to die trying, nor have we risen only to surrender at dawn.

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Jubenal Quispe is a lawyer, theologian, and writer in Spanish and Quechua. He is a university lecturer and researcher at the Maryknoll Center in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The original article in Spanish was published in Bolpress on 30 May 2008. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

Evo Appeals for Dialogue and the Opposition Challenges Him to Win His Mandate at a Recall Referendum

Evo Appeals for Dialogue and the Opposition Challenges Him to Win His Mandate at a Recall Referendum
by Bolpress

Abruptly, and at record speed, the Senate passed a law to hold a recall referendum.

President Evo Morales invited the opposition governors of the "Media Luna" (the half-moon-shaped region composed of the Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, and Tarija departments) to resume dialogue on Monday afternoon with an agenda for open discussion and offered guarantees for autonomy within limits of law. The opposition forces responded to the president's appeal by passing, at record speed, a law to hold a recall referendum on the mandates of the president, the vice president, and governors.

Trying to pave a path to a pact, President Morales said he was willing to accept any kind of international mediators and observers. Vice President Álvaro García Linera, hopeful that the opposition governors would respond positively to the appeal, suggested this morning that they reach a consensus on a "package of decisions" to exit the political crisis, including a recall referendum.

But the opposition in the Senate responded to the executive branch's invitation by approving at record speed a law to plan a referendum on whether to recall the highest national and departmental authorities that was introduced by the president himself and that has already been approved by the Chamber of Deputies .

The opposition lawmakers, who have a majority in the Senate, passed the recall plan by a large majority, rapidly approved all terms of each of its articles, established its rules, and sent it to the executive branch for enactment. They argue that the time has come for the people to decide whose position is right in the current political crisis -- the government or the opposition.

If the president does not sign or veto the law within 10 days, the vice president and the Congress could give the green light to the referendum. If Morales does not sign the law, he would leave an impression of great political weakness.

MAS Senator Félix Rojas said that the congressional caucus who supports the executive branch is in agreement with the law for a recall referendum but does not consider it sensible or appropriate to support it at a moment when efforts are being made to bring the government and the opposition to an agreement. Now the country is calling for resumption of dialogue, but if this referendum plan is authorized, it will harm the chance of any political rapprochement, he said.

Senator Antonio Peredo (MAS) said that the opposition is seeking to put the president "off balance" vis-à-vis what is happening in the country. "Given the illegal fashion in which the referendums are held in the departments, they want to give the president a hot potato; they are seeking an open confrontation between the central government and the governors," he said.

According to the rules established by the Senate this Wednesday, to recall the president and the vice president, more than 53.7% of voters must vote against them at the referendum. If both authorities lost the mandate, general elections would be held immediately.

The opposition maneuver is intended to block any attempt on the part of the government supporters to adopt laws for constitutional referenda, to ratify the Constitution adopted by the Constituent Assembly, and to put an end to controversy and set a ceiling on land ownership (5,000 or 10,000 hectares).

Before the "head start" of the opposition, García Linera announced in the morning that the central government will respect the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs, expressed his full support for all democratically elected authorities in Bolivia, and called for dialogue. After meeting with Vice President García Linera, US Ambassador Philip Goldberg suggested that the OAS, friendly countries, the Catholic Church, or another institution chosen by the parties in conflict could mediate the dialogue.

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The original article in Spanish was published in Bolpress on 8 May 2008. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

Evo's Dilemmas

Evo's Dilemmas
by Néstor Kohan

The Right respects legality only when legality favors it. The history of our America has shown that a thousand times. The confrontation that is convulsing Bolivia today is no exception.

The Santa Cruz autonomy referendum is just the tip of the iceberg. To limit the debate to a question of legal pettifoggery would be a very serious error. It is an open secret that the bourgeoisie of the "Media Luna" (the half-moon-shaped region composed of the Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, and Tarija departments), white and racist, lumpen and dependent, are planning to overthrow Evo Morales. That's not all. They are advised and directed by US Ambassador Philip Goldberg (who worked in Kosovo between 1994 and 1996. . .).

The CIA is implementing a predictable plan in Bolivia. Combine a Kosovo-style secessionism, psychological warfare, and incitement to internal counterrevolution as it did yesterday in the Chile of Salvador Allende and is doing today in the Venezuela of Chávez. Goldberg is following a textbook scheme. Use foundations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other agencies to transfer money to "independent" NGOs and rightist groups, just like in Venezuela. Since 2005, the USAID has given $120 million a year to the supposedly "democratic" opposition.

The central plaza of Santa Cruz is full of young Mormons -- blue-eyed blonds in white shirts -- who barely speak Spanish and warn against "the devil." . . . To suggest that Evo Morales in this context sit down and dialogue meekly with this warrior bourgeoisie funded by the United States is not only unrealistic and hardly pragmatic. It is simply suicidal.

As Morales himself acknowledged in an interview that he gave in La Paz in March 2008 (see <amauta.lahaine.org>), the MAS has arrived at the government, but it has no power. That is precisely the problem. If we wish to transform Bolivian society from the bottom up, we cannot avoid the problem of power at risk of losing everything.

The current dilemma of Evo and the MAS is whether it is possible to restrain the Right by making concessions or preferable to confront it and advance the process. The answer is complex because the Bolivian government is not homogeneous. It is pulled between two poles: the option of its moderate advisers (where some officials of the old political class turned progressives today and some academic fellow travelers of the process are ensconced) and the option of its most radical activists and social bases. The latter propose to radically push the process of reforms to the point of breaking the implicit pact that ties the hands of the government and will slowly weaken it. If this option ends up prevailing, Evo must not only intensify the confrontation with the "Media Luna." He should also impose price controls to curb inflation (the slogan that, as we have been able to hear firsthand, his own bases have cried out to him in some demonstrations) and accelerate the process to regain the full -- not just partial -- control of natural resources.

There is little time left to choose between these two alternatives. History is cruel and does not forgive indecisions. The people left behind, humiliated and exploited, are waiting. Bolivia is in its decisive hour. The outcome will affect the entire region, from Venezuela to Argentina.

---

Néstor Kohan is a teacher at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) and coordinator of the Colectivo Amauta-Cátedra Che Guevara. The original essay in Spanish was published in Bolpress on 5 May 2008. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

Adolph Reed, Jr., a Clinton Supporter

Adolph Reed, Jr. turns out to be a Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter, mainly on the basis of electability.

And, as many Progressive readers may know, I'm hardly a Clinton fan. I'm on record in last November's issue as saying that I'd rather sit out the election entirely than vote for either her or Obama. At this point, though, I've decided that she's the lesser evil in the Democratic race, for the following reasons: 1) Obama's empty claims to being a candidate of progressive change and to embodying a "movement" that exists only as a brand will dissolve into disillusionment in either a failed campaign against McCain or an Obama Presidency that continues the politics he's practiced his entire career; 2) his horribly opportunistic approach to the issues bearing on inequality -- in which he tosses behaviorist rhetoric to the right and little more than calls to celebrate his success to blacks -- stands to pollute debate about racial injustice whether he wins or loses the Presidency; 3) he can't beat McCain in November.

Frankly, I suspect that Clinton can't beat him either, but there's no way that Obama will carry most of the states in November that he's won in the primaries and caucuses. ("Obama No," The Progressive, May 2008)

That just about negates almost all valid points of his Obama criticism (now marred by his citation of other Clinton supporters like Paul Krugman and Sean Wilentz), for what Obama does HRC does also, except she isn't Black, so she can't celebrate her success as "Black success" (but that's not a point in her favor, is it, since this difference is a matter of social identity -- she celebrates her success as "female," even "feminist," success). Reed should have stuck to his earlier declaration that he would be "sitting this one out."

American Jews Oppose Military Action against Iran

This just in: American Jews are opposed to any military attack on Iran, by a large margin, according to the American Jewish Committee's 2007 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion (6-25 November 2007).

7. Would you support or oppose the United States taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons?
Support	35
Oppose	57
Not Sure	8

The rest of the survey is just as good.

No, this doesn't surprise us: the fact obscured by both the Israel lobby and some of its most foolish critics is that, after all these years, Jewish Americans still largely lean to the Left, thinking more like oppressed Blacks than privileged whites, and adjusted for income differences (lower incomes tend to correlate with more progressive opinions on foreign policy as well as economics), Jewish Americans are probably the most progressive group in the USA; and that neo-conservatives are a tiny minority at odds with a great majority of Jewish Americans they claim to represent (Glenn Greenwald, "New Poll Reveals How Unrepresentative Neocon Jewish Groups Are," Salon.com, 12 December 2007). Now, isn't it great to have what we know confirmed by the American Jewish Committee again?

Update

"Two-Thirds of Israelis Oppose Attack on Iran: Poll" (Agence France Presse, 6 December 2007). Take that, neo-cons!

Sex and Race

Reactions against racism of James Watson -- who said "he is 'inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa' because 'all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas all the testing says not really'" -- came very fast: Robin McKie and Paul Harris, "Disgrace: How a Giant of Science Was Brought Low" (Observer, 21 October 2007). It may be a sign that the scientific establishment now accepts as the scientific norm that race, IQ, or both are social constructs rather than immutable biological essences, scientists such as the late Stephen Jay Gould having successfully educated their fellow scientists and the general public.

It has not gotten that far when it comes to gender, though, probably because most people, even many scientists, still think that gender, unlike race, has a biological foundation called sex. However, the concept of sex has changed as much as gender -- for instance, from the one-sex/two-gender model (according to which a woman is an "imperfect" man) before modernity to the two-sex/two-gender model (which has us believe that men and women are "opposite" sexes) after modernity in the West (see Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Harvard University Press, 1990) -- demonstrating that it, too, is a social construct.

Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham

De jure discrimination of all kinds can be abolished for working-age adults under capitalism. Abolition of de jure discrimination brings the spirit of capitalism closer to the pure spirit of "Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham." The closer the spirit of capitalism gets to "Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham," the more class power the bourgeoisie enjoys. The working class lose class struggle by winning culture wars . . . on capitalist terms.

(The only de jure discriminations that cannot be abolished under capitalism probably are discrimination between individuals capable of consent and individuals incapable of it; that between convicts and "law-abiding citizens"; and that -- as long as it is based on the system of nation-states -- between citizens and non-citizens.)

Once de jure discrimination gets abolished, what happens?

1. Those old criticisms of sexism, racism, heterosexism, etc. that were aimed at attainment of equal rights become neutralized at best and become agents of capital and empire at worst.

2. Elimination of de jure discrimination does away with the material basis that united upper and lower classes and strata of each oppressed community. Now, upper classes and strata of women, Blacks, queers, etc. can move up and away from their lower-class and -strata counterparts. At the same time, women, Blacks, queers, etc. of lower classes and strata get confronted with intensification of their class exploitation that is articulated with their gender, race, sexual, and other oppressions, intensification often expressed through criminalization, most obviously in the case of Blacks, for racial oppression is more intimately intertwined with class oppression than gender, sexual, and other oppressions (because the "Black race" is a category that emerged from New World slavery and Jim Crow, thus overrepresented in the lower strata of the working class, whereas women, queers, etc. are not over- or underrepresented in any class or strata). Elimination of de jure discrimination destroys civil rights movements through their success, so women, Blacks, queers, etc. of lower classes and strata now face a more powerful capitalism, better legitimated in multicultural fashion, without the material and ideological resources for resistance that their erstwhile organic intellectual leaders supplied.

What explains working-class opposition to struggles to abolish de jure discrimination? De jure discrimination confers economic rent on those who are not discriminated against. Its abolition intensifies competition -- hence opposition to it. It's no secret that the seemingly more gender-egalitarian spirit of capitalism today has been achieved, in the case of the United States, by bringing men down as much as bringing women up.

Therefore, leftists do ourselves no favor, for instance, by forgetting the fact that families, for the working class, have been units of survival in the face of, and sometimes resistance to, capital as well as sites of gender, sexual, and other oppressions. Atomization that destroys families destroys them as units of resistance as well as sites of oppressions. The same applies to all other units of survival which sometimes become units of resistance while being sites of oppressions at the same time: trade unions, religious organizations, political parties on the Left, formerly and actually existing socialist states, etc.

For the working class, the question is how we can win culture wars in such a way that we can make use of the advantages that victories in culture wars bring -- de jure elimination of obstacles to class unity -- while coping with disadvantages that arise from destructions of old units of working-class survival and resistance. Only by doing so can we propose an alternative to both plain and simple reaction to the atomizing power of capitalism on one hand and the new spirit of capitalism that exploits it at working-class expense on the other hand.

So far, leftists have been unable to answer this question in practice if not in theory.

Gone with the Wind, Remade by Lars von Trier

It would be interesting if Lars von Trier remade Gone with the Wind. He could pick the elements that are already in the book and/or the film, sharpen the characters' political differences, change the plot, film it from slaves' and ex-slaves' points of view, and add voiceover narration by John Hurt.

Ashley Wilkes is a southern plantation master and member of the Ku Klax Klan, attached to the Lost Cause. Rhett Butler is a businessman from a big city, who knows that the South would lose the war, is not attached to the Lost Cause, would rather do business with Yankees than fight them, but is not about to become a race traitor either. Scarlett O'Hara is presented with two ruling-class political visions. She is first attracted to Ashley's, and then she becomes disillusioned with it, as Ashleys of the South restore white supremacy with terrorism. She embraces Rhett's as the "progressive" political alternative to Ashley's, only to be disillusioned with it, too, as Rhetts of the South decide to live with white restoration rather than build a "new South." She moves back to Tara, alone, and tries to manage it according to her "new South" principle, only to find her plantation threatened to be taken over by a joint-stock company in which Ashley and Rhett have major interests, for her "new South" plantation is boycotted by Ashleys and Rhetts of the South. Then, the film quotes Scarlett's famous soliloquy, substituting Tara for Rhett: "I can't let Tara go. I can't. There must be some way to keep it. Oh I can't think about this now! I'll go crazy if I do! I'll think about it tomorrow. But I must think about it. I must think about it. What is there to do? What is there that matters?" Scarlett's face dissolves into a montage of scenes that show her new management style, in keeping with what it takes to keep her plantation and make it prosper, which in turn dissolves into a montage of modern plantations and sweatshops in America and the rest of the world.

But von Trier has already made a film like that; it's called Manderlay.

Obama Yo Mama

The 2004 elections, among other things, ushered in the twilight of Black broker politics: "Having virtually shut down the activist wing of the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement in favor of electoral and broker politics at the dawn of the Seventies, Black leadership now finds itself blackballed from the $200 million-plus soft money Democratic campaign feast. Essentially, they have been sidelined from the only mass action game they chose to play" ("Black Anger, White Money: A Crisis for Black Leadership," The Black Commentator 109, 14 Oct. 2004).

Having dumped Black brokers who emerged from movement politics, the Democratic Party cultivated the great white hope of a Black politician, Barack Obama, whose message on race and class would never alarm even the most anxious white mind: "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America" (Barack Obama, Keynote Speech at the Democratic National Convention, Boston, 27 Jul. 2004).

What does Obama have to say about George W. Bush's latest speech on the Iraq War?

Obama waxes hawkish: "I believe the president must take a realistic look at our current strategy and reshape it into an aggressive and workable plan that will ensure success in Iraq" (emphasis added, Barack Obama, qtd. in Dori Meinert/Copley News Service, "Dems, GOP Differ on Bush Speech," The Lincoln Courier, 29 Jun. 2005). In other words, No Exit. What's his plan, then?

"It is a challenge now to try to fix the mess that has been made by this administration," Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said in an interview. "There aren't any easy answers. It would be irresponsible to just spout off without having thought through what all the alternatives -- and implications of those alternatives -- might be." (Charles Babington and Dan Balz, "Democrats Press Bush Harder on Iraq: Words Reflect Drop in Public Support for War," Washington Post, 22 Jun. 2005, p. A6)

Should he not have thought about "all the alternatives" to the continuing occupation of Iraq and their "implications" by now, especially since he had already thought about what to do about Iran (David Mendell, "Obama Would Consider Missile Strikes on Iran," Chicago Tribune, 25 Sept. 2004)?

Surely, the American people "want and deserve better answers about where we go from here in Iraq" (Barack Obama, qtd. in Mark Silva, "Bush: Iraq Is Worth Sacrifice: President Invokes Sept. 11 in Appeal for Support," Chicago Tribune, 29 Jun. 2005) than Bush's insistence that their sacrifice is worth it; but they also want and deserve better answers than what Obama delivers.

Black Army Recruits Down 41% since 2000

Here is an extremely important fact: Black volunteers for the Army "have fallen 41 percent" (Tom Philpott, "Military Update: Black Army Recruits Down 41 Percent since 2000," The Daily Press, March 6, 2005). To be more precise, "[f]rom 22.7 percent at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the share [of Blacks among recruits] slid to 19.9 percent in 2002; 16.4 percent in 2003 and 15.9 percent last year, according to figures provided by Army Recruiting Command spokesman Douglas Smith. The slide has continued, dropping to 13.9 percent as of Feb. 9." -- a severe blow to the Army, since it depends upon Blacks to supply "about 23 percent" of its active-duty troops today (Robert Burns/Associated Press, "Young Blacks Less Willing to Join the Army," Detroit Free Press, Tuesday, March 8, 2005). "Officer recruiting is hit, too. Black soldiers enrolled in the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps program is down 36 percent since 2001" (Philpott, March 6, 2005). Women are also shunning the Army: "the share of females in Army recruiting classes falling for four years running, from 21.6 percent in 2001 to 19.2 percent last year. It has slipped still further this year to 17.1 percent" (Burns, March 8, 2005). The plan to increase active-duty Army soldiers by 30,000, approved by Congress last year, is now in danger. The Army is about "6 percent behind schedule to meet its 2005 recruiting goal" (Burns, March 8, 2005).

The Iraq War -- especially fear of killing and dying in combat -- made all categories of youths less likely to join the military: fear of death and injury is "the top reason to avoid service for 26 percent of youth in 2004, almost double the 14 percent reported in 2000" (Philpott, March 6, 2005). Blacks' reasons for refusing to join the military, however, show a higher level of political consciousness than those of other groups: "Black youth were less supportive of U.S. troops' presence in Iraq, less likely to feel the war was justified, more disapproving of the Bush administration's handling of foreign affairs and more disapproving of its use of U.S. military forces than were whites or Hispanics," according to the Defense Department's Youth and Influencer Polls (qtd. in Philpott, March 6, 2005). Counter-recruitment activists should take note of the fact that parents -- particularly mothers -- are the most important influence, especially in Black communities: "A July 2004 study of parents' influence on young people of recruiting age found that black parents have more say in their child's career decisions than is the case with white parents. Also, black parents trust the military less and have more moral objections to military service" (Burns, March 8, 2005). It makes sense to emphasize community organizing more than campus organizing for the purpose of counter-recruitment.

The "propensity to serve" is thankfully very low, according to the "U.S. Military Image Study" (August 4, 2004) prepared for the Army (which both Burns and Philpott cite in the aforementioned articles).



What makes a minority of young people still consider enlistment? The top reason is, not surprisingly, money for college: 42% mention "education," and 27% specifically say that "pay for education/$ for college" is the top-of-mind reason for joining the military ("U.S. Military Image Study," August 4, 2004). That means that the anti-war movement is inseparable from a movement for economic justice. Already, the equivalent of four-year scholarships at public universities for "7,499,971 students" (National Priorities Project, Cost of War, March 8, 2005) has been spent on the Iraq War! Activists have to struggle harder for more state subsidies to higher education and lower tuitions and fees, so that all who want to go to college can do so without risking their lives in Iraq or anywhere else.

Last not the least, the "U.S. Military Image Study" is worth reading in its entirety, as it presents many fascinating findings that have not been reported by the media. To take just one example, the study, in the inimitable language of marketing experts, offers an unintentionally funny recommendation to the Army in its conclusion: "For the Army to achieve its mission goals with Future Force Soldiers, it must overhaul its image as well as its product offering" . . . because, "[i]n today's reality, the risk/reward ratio is even more out of balance" than usual (emphasis added, August 4, 2004, p. 98).

Gary Webb: Blacklisted by the White Corporate Media

Gary Webb shot himself, twice in the head. Coroner Robert Lyons says, "It's unusual in a suicide case to have two shots, . . . but it has been done in the past, and it is in fact a distinct possibility" ("Gary Webb's Death Confirmed as Suicide," Editor & Publisher, December 15, 2004). Conspiracy theorists suspected that the CIA or Contras killed him, but what drove Webb to death was far more mundane and insidious: the power of elite orthodoxy that controls the corporate media, which does not brook any radical challenge to the dark alliance of money and power that links Washington's domestic and foreign policies and devastates the Black and Latino working class at home and abroad.

Webb gained national attention in the 1990s after writing a series of stories for the Mercury News linking the CIA to Nicaraguan Contras trying to overthrow the Sandinista government and to drug sales of crack cocaine flooding South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s.

The Mercury News and others later questioned the conclusions in Webb's reporting, and he left the San Jose newspaper in 1997 after being moved to a suburban bureau. The paper later published an apology.

Webb's ex-wife, Sue Bell, told the Bee Tuesday that Webb, 49, had been distraught for some time over his inability to get a job at another major newspaper. "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," Bell said.

The Bee also reported that Webb had paid for his own cremation earlier in the year and had named Bell months ago as the beneficiary of his bank account. He had sold his house last week, because he could no longer afford the mortgage, and was upset that his motorcycle had been stolen last week. (emphasis added, "Gary Webb's Death Confirmed as Suicide," December 15, 2004)

Why did Webb's articles on the CIA-Contra drug connection constitute a radial challenge, though, since some elements of the connection had already been reported in the mainstream media, to say nothing of the conclusion of the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations (led by Senator John Kerry) that "senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras' funding problems" (1989)? Peter Kornbluh wrote in 1997:

Although many readers of the Mercury News articles may not have known it, "Dark Alliance" is not the first reported link between the contra war and drug smuggling. More than a decade ago, allegations surfaced that contra forces, organized by the CIA to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, were consorting with drug smugglers with the knowledge of U.S. officials. The Associated Press broke the first such story on December 20, 1985. The AP's Robert Parry and Brian Barger reported that three contra groups "have engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua." ("Crack, the Contras, and the CIA: Storm over 'Dark Alliance,'" Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1997)

Kornbluh went on to explain:

The Mercury News series "touched a raw nerve in the way our stories hadn't," observes Robert Parry. One reason is that Parry and Barger's stories had focused on the more antiseptic smuggling side of drug trafficking in far-off Central America. Webb's tale brought the story home, focusing on what he identified as the distribution network and its target. the inner cities of California. Particularly among African-American communities, devastated by the scourge of crack and desperate for information and answers, Webb's reporting found ready constituencies. From Farrakhan followers to the most moderate of black commentators, the story reverberated. "If this is true, then millions of black lives have been ruined and America's jails and prisons are now clogged with young African-Americans because of a cynical plot by a CIA that historically has operated in contempt of the law," wrote Carl T. Rowan, the syndicated columnist.

The wildfire-like sweep of "Dark Alliance" was all the more remarkable because it took place without the tinder of the mainstream press. Instead, the story roared through the new communications media of the Internet and black talk radio -- two distinct, but in this case somewhat symbiotic, information channels. With the Internet, as Webb put it. "you don't have be the New York Times or the Washington Post to bust a national story anymore." (emphasis added, January/February 1997)

Webb's story sparked rallies, protests, and demonstrations in Black communities, criticizing not only Republicans but the Bill Clinton administration and the corporate media:

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) told a Los Angeles rally last month that "people in high places were winking and blinking, and our children were dying. . . . We are going to make somebody pay for what they did to our community."

Joe Madison, a Washington radio host and NAACP board member, told his listeners yesterday: "Clinton doesn't want to take on the CIA. The Republicans don't want to expose the contras as drug smugglers and thugs. And the CIA doesn't want to admit it trampled all over the Constitution." Madison was arrested with activist Dick Gregory last month in a protest outside CIA headquarters.

Derrick Z. Jackson, a Boston Globe columnist who is black, declared: "The only conclusion is that Ronald Reagan said yes to crack and the destruction of black lives at home to fund the killing of commies abroad."

Some white journalists have also jumped on the bandwagon. New York Observer Editor Joe Conason praised the "stunning articles," saying: "If Bob Dole or Bill Clinton actually cared about drug addiction . . . they would start asking tough questions about the role of the Central Intelligence Agency."

In Internet postings complaining about the lack of coverage, one person said: "Why is The Post quiet about the CIA/LA Cocaine Connection?" Another questioned whether the paper's black writers have been "muzzled."

In fact, Post columnist William Raspberry has written that he does not know if the charges are true but is struck by the "willingness . . . of so many black leaders to take the story literally." The Post has run three news stories and several items and columns on the controversy. Webb, who has conducted numerous broadcast interviews and is now getting calls from the likes of Montel Williams, sees a clear racial split in the reaction.

"When I've done TV and radio things, the producers who have been pushing the story have been predominantly black or other minorities," Webb said. "They have thanked me. It was networking by minority journalists that got this thing out to the general public." (Howard Kurtz, "Running with The CIA Story; Reporter Says Series Didn't Go as Far as Readers Took It," The Washington Post, October 2, 1996, p. B1)

Blacks listened to Gary Webb, recognized the truth in his story, made connections between the impacts of Washington's domestic and foreign policies, spread the word through such channels as the Internet and Black talk radio that are not fully controlled by elite orthodoxy, and took public actions attempting to "Crack the CIA." That is what made Webb dangerous. Consequently, Webb was blacklisted by the white corporate media, unable to obtain "a job at another major newspaper" and pay for the mortgage ("Gary Webb's Death Confirmed as Suicide," December 15, 2004).

Gary Webb, R.I.P.

From Black Reconstruction to Operation Dixie

Tom Engelhardt, commenting on "a map floating around the e-universe in recent days [which] shows Pre-Civil War Free vs. Slave States," writes that "[t]he 2004 electoral map probably does tell us that, under the endless layers of a quarter-century of 'culture wars' and 'moral issues,' including those of abortion and gay marriage, lies the heavy historical burden of America's slave past and racial history" ("Mapping the Election," TomDispatch.com, November 14, 2004).

("Free States vs. Slave States ~ Oh How Far We've Come. . . ," Sensory Overload, November 04, 2004)

Democrats cry foul over "President Richard Nixon's decision to pursue a 'southern strategy' (based, in part, on seeing the strength of segregationist Governor George Wallace's third-party presidential bid in 1968 in which he garnered 46 electoral votes and about 13% of the popular vote)," the strategy "meant to drive a wedge right into the greatest of all New Deal Democratic Party contradictions -- the long-lived, increasingly uneasy alliance of the northern liberal and southern white conservative wings of the Party" (Engelhardt, November 14, 2004).

The "southern strategy," however, has worked only because both the Republican and Democratic Parties, alike controlled by the ruling class, chose to crush poor farmers' and workers' attempts to overcome white supremacy and advance their class interests -- from Black Reconstruction to Populism to Operation Dixie.

As Nathan Newman and J. J. Gass note, "The ultimate bulwark of white supremacy was violence" (emphasis added, "A New Birth of Freedom: The Forgotten History of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments," 2004, p. 16). Had the North had the political will to do so, it would have refused to demobilize the Union Army ("The Union Army is quickly demobilized. From a troop strength of one million on May 1, only 152,000 Union soldiers remain in the South by the end of 1865" ["Reconstruction Timeline: 1863-1866"]), placed the South under the Union Army's military dictatorship for a decade or so, confiscated all land of the big Confederate land owners, and redistributed it to Blacks and poor whites in the South to break the economic base of white terror that would later culminate in the Colfax massacre and other atrocities.

Some white Radical Republicans knew that expropriation of Confederate landlords was what it would take to truly reconstruct the South, though they were a minority among the party elite, according to Eric Foner:

The idea of remaking Southern society led a few Radicals to propose that the federal government overturn the plantation system and provide the former slaves with homesteads. In a speech to Pennsylvania's Republican convention in September 1865, [Thaddeus] Stevens called for the seizure of the 400 million acres belonging to the wealthiest ten percent of Southerners:

The whole fabric of southern society must be changed, and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. . . . How can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs? If the South is ever to be made a safe republic let her lands be cultivated by the toil of the owners.

Confiscation, Stevens believed, would break the power of the South's traditional ruling class, transform the Southern social structure, and create a triumphant Southern Republican party composed of black and white yeomen and Northern purchasers of planter land.

Even among the Radicals, however, only a handful stressed the land question as uncompromisingly as did Stevens. (Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877, Harper Perennial, 1990, p. 107)

Freedmen and -women wanted land, correctly believing that's the necessary condition for their freedom and autonomy:

As A. Warren Kelsey, a representative of Northern cotton manufacturer shrewdly observed:

The sole ambition of the freedman at the present time appears to be to become the owner of a little piece of land, there to erect a humble home, and to dwell in peace and security at his own free will and pleasure. If he wishes, to cultivate the ground in cotton on his own account, to be able to do so without anyone to dictate to him hours or system of labor, if he wishes instead to plant corn or sweet potatoes -- to be able to do that free from any outside control. . . . That is their idea, their desire and their hope.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Most of the land occupied by blacks in the summer and fall of 1865 lay within the "Sherman reservation." To [Freedmen's Bureau Commissioner Oliver Otis] Howard fell the melancholy task of informing the freedmen that the land would be restored to their former owners and that they must either agree to work for the planters or be evicted. . . .

Howard requested the assembled freedmen to appoint a three-man committee to consider the fairest way of restoring the planters to ownership. The committee's eloquent response did not augur well for a tranquil settlement:

General, we want Homesteads, we were promised Homesteads by the government. If it does not carry out the promises its agents made to us, if the government haveing concluded to befriend its late enemies and to neglect to observe the principles of common faith between its self and us its allies in the war you said was over, now takes away from them all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for your late and their all time enemies . . . we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former. . . . You will see this is not the condition of really freemen.

You ask us to forgive the land owners of our island. . . . The man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes and who stripped and flogged my mother and my sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut except I will do his planting and be satisfied with his price and who combines with others to keep away land from me well knowing I would not have anything to do with them if I had land of my own -- that man, I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?

In these words, the committee expressed with simple dignity the conviction of all freedmen that land was the foundation of freedom, the evils of slavery could not be quickly forgotten, and the interests of former master and former slave were fundamentally irreconcilable. (Foner, pp. 48, 72-3)

What prevented the Republican Party from heeding the Black and white Radical Republicans' call for land reforms? Foner explains: "Blacks' quest for economic independence not only threatened the foundations of the Southern political economy, it put the freedmen at odds with both former owners seeking to restore plantation labor discipline and Northerners committed to reinvigorating staple crop production" (p. 48).

The Northern business elite even feared that Blacks, if allied with poor white farmers and workingmen, would go the way of the Paris Communards!

• The Death of Reconstruction expands our understanding of the North during the generation following emancipation. Reading broadly in the region's newspapers, magazines, and popular books, Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the story of southern Reconstruction that was available to literate northerners. This popular account, she argues, explains why northern sympathizers deserted the former slaves. These often partisan media initially depicted the freedpeople as good workers who subscribed to free labor principles and a harmony of interest between labor and capital, in this regard comparing favorably with strike-prone laboring Democrats who regarded capital as their natural enemy. Soon, however, observers began to wonder whether universal male suffrage would sustain the free labor vision or instead enfranchise workers who would champion collective entitlements rather than individual liberties. The rise of a "labor interest" among black southerners rattled northern Republicans, who feared that the freedpeople were coming under the sway of demagogues.
  
  Even as the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, reports from Louisiana and South Carolina indicated that politics by ex-slaves challenged property rights and proper government in ways reminiscent of the oft-reported horrors of the Paris Commune. In the context of northern fears of labor unrest, Richardson argues, white northerners even interpreted white supremacist massacres as justifiable defenses of the social order. Efforts to secure national civil rights protections seemed to demand an expanded federal government that would rely on freedpeople's votes while turning them into its subservient wards. The Republicans' resulting fear "that the mass of African Americans hoped to use the national government to attain prosperity," instead of relying on their own hard work, rendered northerners unwilling to rescue their onetime southern allies from Democratic terrorists. Thus the disfranchisement and segregation of black southerners proceeded without substantial northern resistance. (Stephen Kantrowitz, "The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901. By Heather Cox Richardson" [Book Review], The Journal of American History 89.3, December 2002)


• Why did northerners abandon Reconstruction? After years of pursuing a rough equality for the newly freed slaves, why did they walk away and watch in silence as Jim Crow descended on the South? Historians have offered a number of explanations for this abandonment: partisan politics, racism, war weariness, corruption, class needs of planters. But Heather Cox Richardson argues that these explanations, while compelling, are "disparate aspects" (p. xi) of the northern experience. How, she asks, did they fit together? The answer can be found in northerners' adherence to free labor ideology.
  
  This is a big topic, and to make the job manageable, Richardson focuses almost entirely on northern newspapers and opinion makers: she follows the trajectory of the northern discourse about the nation's political economy between 1865 and 1901. Having fought a war for free labor, Republicans were committed to the South's transformation into a free labor society and were drawn to the newly emancipated slaves as ideal free laborers: workmen who "worked hard and skillfully, lived frugally, saved their money, and planned to rise as individuals through their own efforts" (pp. 7–8). These "good" workers, who believed in the harmony of interests between employees and employers, stood in sharp contrast to bad workers: those who allied with the Democratic Party, believed that "polarizing wealth meant the creation of economic classes locked in inevitable conflict" (p. 8), and looked to the federal government for help in solving their problems.
  
  When recalcitrant southern whites interfered with the South's transition to a free labor society, Republicans concluded that the federal government would have to assume an active role in the process. Republicans passed civil rights legislation and the Fourteenth Amendment and then fought for universal male suffrage, all to ensure the protection of the freedmen's economic rights. But Republicans' commitment to black male suffrage evoked Democratic complaints of corruption and empire building, and the freedmen's political activism, viewed in the context of increasing labor unrest in the North, engendered Republican worries that enfranchising black men would "harness the government to the service of disaffected workers, who hoped to confiscate the wealth of others rather than to work their own way to economic success" (p. 82). In South Carolina, a convention attended by ex-Confederates protested new taxes and accused black legislators of plundering property holders, fueling northern concerns. In 1871, Horace Greeley chided "lazy" blacks (p. 99) who were unwilling to work, drawing a parallel between the Paris Commune and the South Carolina freedmen.
  
  Though not all blacks fit this category -- Republicans praised those blacks who achieved success in an individualistic fashion -- an image of "an uneducated mass of African-American voters pillaging society was one of the most powerful ones of the postwar years" (p. 118). Increasingly, Republicans "read the Northern struggle over political economy into the racial struggles of the South" (p. 94) -- including the campaign for a civil rights bill and the 1879 black exodus -- and the debate over Reconstruction was recast as a debate over state action, individualism, and the American way of life. By the 1890s, it was clear to northerners that their faith in the freedmen as free laborers had been misplaced, and virtually all black activism had come to symbolize the threat that European-style class conflict posed to American individualism. Thus northerners who hoped to preserve traditional American values accepted black disenfranchisement and came to believe that blacks were "bound by race into permanent semi-barbarism" (p. 224). (Melinda Lawson, "Heather Cox Richardson. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901" [Book Review], American Historical Review 108.5, December 2003)

W. E. B. DuBois called Black Reconstruction "a glorious failure." It was a lost opportunity of world-historic proportions.

The same elite opposition to communism, which organized labor was unable to defy, explains the failure to unionize Southern workers, leaving white workers unacquainted with the power of interracial solidarity and vulnerable to racist demagoguery:

One important outcome of the Truman years’ CIO commitment to anti-communism and to the Democratic Party was the defeat of Operation Dixie, launched in 1946 as a major effort to organize the Deep South. Initially launched with 400 organizers and a $1 million budget, “Operation Dixie” was cancelled two years later following pressure from racist, anti-communist Dixiecrat governments and employers. The CIO leaders had to choose between organizing the South and maintaining the labor-Democratic alliance. Art Preis explained their dilemma:

It was impossible to support the Democratic Party and not reinforce its Southern wing, the chief prop of the Jim Crow system and the one-party dictatorship in the South. The CIO leaders refused to wage political war against the Southern ruling class because that would undermine the whole Democratic Party and put an end to the Democratic Party-labor coalition.15

Present-day company threats to move to the Sunbelt if workers do not accept concessions and the generally lower wages of workers in the South are the living legacy of this decision. A weakened labor movement was the result.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . [T]he alliance between organized labor and the Democratic Party strengthened throughout the next 20 years while the coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans passed restriction after restriction on labor unions. Following the 1943 passage of the Smith-Connally Act, the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) placed a number of restrictions on union activities, including barring communists from leadership positions, outlawing sympathy strikes, and imposing “cooling-off” periods on strikes. The Communist Control Act (1950) allowed the government to remove elected union leaderships by fiat and to deny collective bargaining rights to “communist” unions. The Landrum-Griffin Act (1959) allowed union leaders to use “trusteeships” against militants and allowed the government to take over unions. (Lance Selfa, The Democratic Party and the Politics of Lesser Evilism, 2004)

That's the legacy of the duopoly of the parties of the ruling class: sacrifice of the interests of Blacks in particular and workers in general, especially in the South.

Elogio del cimarrón en Venezuela

El Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas presents an exhibition "Oscuridad, Silencio y Ruptura: 150 Años de la Abolición de la Esclavitud en Venezuela" (displayed from August 1 to September 12, 2004). Jesús García, the head of the Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations and one of the exhibition's organizers, says:

"En esta oportunidad hacemos énfasis en el valor político de nuestro aporte, concretamente del cimarronaje", como se conoce en América Latina la rebelión de esclavos negros que huían a zonas deshabitadas en las que podían vivir libres, durante la dominación española y hasta que las nuevas repúblicas abolieron la esclavitud.

El énfasis se debe a que "para mostrar la presencia de las culturas africanas en Venezuela se ha privilegiado lo accesorio u ornamental, como la música, la vestimenta o la participación en el culto católico, sin replantearse lo más profundo, que fue su sometimiento a la esclavitud y la rebelión destacada por los cimarrones", dijo García.

Durante siglos, desde la famosa rebelión en 1552 del negro Miguel, quien se proclamó rey de una comunidad de esclavos sublevados en las minas de Buria, 200 kilómetros al oeste de Caracas, miles de cimarrones huyeron de casas y plantaciones de sus amos blancos y crearon decenas de comunidades libres o "cumbes", base de poblaciones de mayoría negra que se desarrollaron en costas y llanuras.

Fenómenos similares se registraron en otros lugares de concentración de esclavos, como Cuba, Haití o Brasil. (Humberto Márquez/Inter Press Service, "Elogio del cimarrón," August 26, 2004)

IPS provides an English translation of Márquez's article: "Black Contribution to Local Culture Has Been Largely Ignored" (August 26, 2004).

The exhibition was brought to my attention by an email newsletter of TransAfrica Forum, an important network of Black intellectuals on the broadly left side of the political spectrum. It is doubtful, however, that Venezuela (or Haiti, Nigeria, Sudan, international debt, and other issues discussed in the same TransAfrica newsletter) is on the radar of politically conscious segments of the Black working class in the United States in the same way as South Africa during the anti-Apartheid struggle, national liberation movements in the rest of Africa, and the Cuban Revolution once were. At least not yet. How do we expand international solidarity beyond links to intellectuals?

The 1840s

In response to the Congressional Black Caucus's attempt to browbeat him into withdrawing from the presidential election, Ralph Nader wrote: "can you imagine if the Abolitionist Party was told not to run against the pro-slavery Whigs and Democratic Parties in the 1840s" ("In a Letter to the Congressional Black Caucus: Nader Asks for an Apology for 'Obscene Racist Epithet' Made at CBC Meeting," July 13, 2004)! Nathan Newman, a dogged defender of the Democratic Party, retorts on his blog:

[I]t's actually not hard to imagine people criticizing the Abolitionist Party -- actually called the Liberty Party.

William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent Abolitionist in the period, strongly condemned abolitionists running candidates. It wasn't that he supported the Whigs -- the more anti-slavery party -- but that he thought playing spoiler roles was hardly a recipe for recruiting support to the cause.

And the result in 1844 was that the Liberty Party tipped the election to the pro-slavery, pro-war James Polk.

The result was the war with Mexico that pro-slavery Democrats saw as a tool to expand the number of slave states into the Southwest.

So just as the Liberty Party candidate of 1844 tipped the election to a rightwing racist who would launch an imperial war, so too did Nader's candidacy in 2000 tip the election to Dubya and the war in Iraq.

So to answer Nader's question, many anti-slavery people at the time and today see the Liberty Party Presidential candidacies as misguided and ultimately contributing to rightwing government. ("Nader Defends Mexican-American War," July 14, 2004)

William Lloyd Garrison, fearful of "spoiling" the election for the Whig Party? That's very far from the truth. Garrison's principle, if anything, was a radical combination of anarchism and pacifism inspired by faith in the power of non-resistance -- the very opposite of the spirit of small-minded pragmatism at the bottom of today's Anybody But Bush and Nader arguments:

We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government; neither can we oppose any such government by a resort to physical force. . . .

As every human government is upheld by physical strength, and its laws are enforced virtually at the point of the bayonet, we cannot hold any office which imposes upon its incumbent the obligation to compel men to do right, on pain of imprisonment or death. We therefore voluntarily exclude ourselves from every legislative and judicial body, and repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of authority. If we cannot occupy a seat in the legislature or on the bench, neither can we elect others to act as our substitutes in any such capacity. (William Lloyd Garrison, "Declaration of Sentiments Adopted by the Peace Convention," September 28, 1834)

As for the Liberty Party, it, too, played its role in furthering the abolitionist agenda in the United States: "Although its vote never exceeded 3% of the votes cast in a presidential election, the party did further political abolitionism. In closely contested state and local elections, the Liberty party often held the balance of power, sometimes causing major party candidates to take advanced antislavery positions in a bid for its support" (Kinley J. Brauer, "Liberty Party," Encyclopedia Americana). More importantly, one mustn't forget that many Libertymen eventually joined with anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats to form the Free Soil Party, whose members would later became the radical wing of the Republican Party. Out of many seeming failures can a movement grow.

Update:

Mark Lause, a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, has a webpage that collects many third parties' platforms (from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century): "Insurgent America On Line: 'Third' Party Platforms."