Wednesday, December 30, 2020
THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION: THE "UNFINISHED REVOLUTION": A Repost from 2012
Saturday, December 26, 2020
IN TIMES LIKE THESE (Essay revised 2012, 2015, 2020, 2023)
I
And I am weary and my heart is worn
When the songs they’re singing don’t mean nothing
Just cheap refrains play on and on...
When leaders profit from deep divisions
When the tears of friends remain unsung
In times like these it’s good to remember
These times will go in times to come
I see the storm clouds rise above me
The sky is dark and the night has come
I walk alone along this highway
Where friends have gathered one by one
I know the storm will soon be over
The howling winds will cease to be
I walk with friends from every nation
On freedom’s highway in times like these.
All year (written in 2012) we have been celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the birth of Woody Guthrie. “This Land is Your Land” has become the new national anthem, particularly for the 98 per cent of the population, mostly the American working class.
Singers now sing the forbidden verses challenging the rights of private property and choruses of cheering people, young and old, black and white, straight and gay, join in. It is a song of struggle, pride, and recognition that this world belongs to everybody.
Although the song has inspired us all as we sing it, sometimes we forget that the trajectory toward progressive change is not smooth. Guthrie’s friend and voice of our times, Pete Seeger, reminds us that “it is darkest before the dawn.”
Perhaps the anthem of these times, after hundreds of domestic instances of violence from Columbine to Newtown, from Trayvon Martin to Jordan Davis, to the streets of Chicago, is most poignantly articulated by Arlo Guthrie. And it is an anthem that activists should sing as we struggle against bombings, drones, economic blockades, covert interventions, assassination lists, killer teams, police violence, wars on drugs, huge appropriations of human resources to kill, violent video games, war toys, endless television shows and films that portray and normalize killings, as well as the tragedies such as at Newtown (and New York, Ferguson, Chicago, Charleston, San Bernardino and on and on).
Major targets of violence and murder are educational institutions and particularly young people, Black and white, men and women, and gay and straight, often students. It is ironic that it is in these institutions and among young people in general that some of the most creative debates ensue around direct physical violence and structural violence, economic, sexual, and racial.
Therefore, in the midst of our deep sorrow, we remember Arlo Guthrie’s words. “In times like these,” despite the emotional energy and time spent achieving some electoral, labor and Occupy victories, we get weary and our “heart is worn.” While we see the “storm clouds rise above,” we should remember that “the storm will soon be over.” Why? Because “I walk with friends from every nation, on freedom’s highway in times like these.”
[
Wednesday, December 23, 2020
A SEASON FOR HOPE, A SEASON FOR STRUGGLE
Harry Targ
Turn, Turn, Turn
Words from Ecclesiastes, text adapted and music by Pete Seeger
(chorus)
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time for every purpose, under Heaven
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
(repeat chorus)
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together
(repeat chorus)
A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing
(repeat chorus)
A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time to love, a time to hate
A time for peace, I swear it's not too late
We received a wonderful Chanukah present the other day, a children’s book
called “Turn! Turn! Turn!” It is an illustrated adaptation by designer Wendy
Anderson Halperin, of words from the Old Testament and music by Pete Seeger.
This present rekindled for me emotions, as I am sure it does for others, as I
remembered things past; youth, family, naïve images of peace and tranquility.
There is poignancy for us now too as we move towards the holidays at the same
time that we struggle over the range of issues that will shape the destiny of
humankind: peace, saving the environment, jobs, and health care reform.
This season progressives are debating whether we will be betrayed by the new
administration; whether outgoing President Trump is the biggest scoundrel in US
history or the manifestation of a system;
and more importantly how to build further our peace and justice movements.
But then “Turn, Turn, Turn” reminds us that “to everything there is a season.”
The song suggests that the ebbs and flows of history are not bound by
calendars, dates and times, and heroes and villains. A “season” is defined by
its historic projects.
And these historic projects, the words suggest, include “a time to reap,” “a
time to build,” “a time to break down,” “a time to cast away stones,” and “a
time to gather stones together.”
Our projects, our seasons, entail defeats and victories, tears and laughter but
the seasons go on and encompass “a time to love” and “a time to hate.” And in
the end the song declares, “ I swear it's not too late.”
So if we are inspired by the song, as we were in the 1960s, we remember that
the struggles for peace and justice are not about individuals, political
parties, and calendar deadlines but about the continued commitments which we
have made to create peace, save the planet, put people back to work, and
provide secure health care for all.
Tuesday, December 15, 2020
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Harry Targ
When I studied voting behavior in the 60s, the received wisdom and statistics referred to 1932 as a transformative election. From then until 1968, or perhaps 1972 about 44 percent of voters identified as Democrats, and those identifying as Republicans were in the high 30 per cent range. This was also paralleled, particularly by the early 60s, with a “trust in government” as measured by polls at an all-time high. In 1964 85 percent of people polled said they had some or high “trust in the president.” By the 70s all this began to decline: Trust in government by 1976 was lower than 40 percent and despite a slight increase in the 1980s dipped again to way below 40 percent in the 1990s.
What happened: a shift away from the “Golden Age” of capitalism (high mass consumption, good paying jobs for sectors of the working class, children of workers planning on going to college, etc. etc.). Democrats, unable to deal with the contradictions of capitalism, shifted to the right: neoliberalism meaning austerity and deregulation, rejecting ties to organized labor, ending welfare “as we know it,” riding the “growing crime” bandwagon etc. At the same time Democrats gave modest support to an emerging identity politics. And Nixon’s Southern Strategy was sanctified by Reagan and Reaganomics, and later fully endorsed by Clinton. And with the new century this all was exacerbated by colossally disastrous policies; wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the frittering away of government surpluses and some of workers’ gains. This century has been a disaster for reasons of economic immiseration, racism, war, domestic violence, and environmental devastation.
Now add to this capsule summary the long history of slavery, the ideology of white supremacy, a foreign policy based on American exceptionalism, and a gerrymandered political system that guarantees the power of the rich/white minority (usually male). This is a toxic history and environment which fuels poverty, inequality, powerlessness, profound alienation AND the exacerbation of the history of genocide and racism in the United States. And, in our own day, this has led to the rise of violence and the threat of violence in our political system.
In my view, all these dimensions need to be addressed as we ask ourselves the question: “Where do we go from here?” The history is complicated, the factors shaping our current political circumstances are varied; class, race, and gender figure prominently in the analysis; and the answers require us to address the twenty-first century capitalist economic system and institutionalized racism today.
Sunday, December 13, 2020
THERE COMES A TIME...
Harry Targ (written three days ago)
Speech, Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley
December 12, 1964
******************************************************************************************
Bethany Bruner
" Feds join investigation into death of Ohio Black man shot 'multiple times' by deputy"
The Columbus Dispatch, December 8, 2020.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Casey Goodson Jr. died after being shot "multiple times in the torso," and preliminary information indicated his death was a result of a homicide, a coroner in Ohio announced Wednesday.
Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon
“Fla. Home Raid Alarms Researchers,”
USA Today Network, December 10, 2020.
Images of state agents drawing guns as they
raided the home of the fired Florida Department of Health data scientist
Rebekah Jones on Monday were met with alarm by fellow researchers and academics
across the United States.
Rebekah Jones
There will be no update today. At 8:30 am this morning, state police came into my house and took all my hardware and tech. They were serving a warrant on my computer after DOH filed a complaint. They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids..
"AG Curtis Hill joins
Todd Rokita in call for Supreme Court to hear election lawsuit"
Indianapolis Star, December 9, 2020
Indiana’s attorney general-elect Todd Rokita is calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a lawsuit by the state of Texas alleging that election practices in four battleground states where President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
*******************************************************************************
It is not that these outrages have not occupied my mind over
the last fifty years. They have. And like millions of activists, I have joined
organizations, hit the streets, written diatribes, and even had the opportunity
to be interviewed and given presentations on these subjects. But there was
something about the stories today that led me to the laptop. I had to have an
outlet for my anger.
First, a young African American man was shot multiple times in
Columbus, Ohio and subsequently authorities jockeyed to cover up the shooting.
Once again, a totally innocent person (not that anyone could be justifiably
shot) had his life snuffed out by murderous and racist police. And the
investigation of the alleged causes and resulting consequences of this murder
will take months or maybe even years.
And looking elsewhere in the paper, I read that Florida
Department of Law Enforcement agents invaded at gun point the home of a data
analyst who had been fired from that state’s Department of Health last May for
“insubordination.” She claimed she was fired for refusing to manipulate state
data on the incidence of the corona virus. Such data might have conflicted with
the Florida Governor’s desire to open public facilities despite the spread of
the disease. During the home invasion these armed police confiscated her
computer, hard drives, and phone.
And the last straw, just today, was a story in the Indianapolis
Star that the outgoing and incoming Attorneys General of the state of
Indiana have joined a suit to be heard by the United States Supreme Court that
would invalidate the presidential election in four states won by
President-elect Joe Biden. (Since this article was written the Supreme
Court denied the motion, which had been endorsed by 106 Republican Congress persons, but
thousands of protestors hit the streets on December 12 in Washington D. C. demanding
that the election be ruled invalid).
And so today, I am reminded, as I am more and more
these days of Mario Savio’s statement of outrage at the University of
California, Berkeley in 1964. There are times that the operations of government
become so odious, that they must be stopped; that our acquiescence to injustice
and threats to democracy constitute complicity.
However, fifty-six years of political work, since
Mario Savio’s speech, has taught us that the outrage must be channeled into
education, organizing, and agitation. Outrage is the start but not enough to
bring about change. As these examples of racism and police violence, censoring
the disclosure of uncomfortable information, and efforts to stifle democracy
suggest, the struggle must continue. And particularly after the pandemic is under
control and we can meet and mobilize again, we must rebuild our organizations,
work together, and transform our political institutions and criminal justice
system.
Perhaps a twenty-first century analogue to the Savio
statement is the declaration: “Enough is Enough.”
Thursday, December 3, 2020
PROGRESSIVE MOBILIZATIONS IN THE INSTITUTIONS AND ON THE STREETS: The Years Ahead
The message still holds as we finish our compaigning.
(Part one discusses the historic transformation of the Democratic Party. Part two is an updated discussion of the reasons for the Trump victory in 2016. It reviews some of the political activism of the period between 2016 and 2020)
Harry Targ
Part One
Our first task was to defeat Donald Trump. That task
has been completed. Our second task is to continue to build a more progressive
and humane society while pursuing a peace and solidarity agenda in the
international system. A central element of moving from the first task to the
second is mobilizing to educate and agitate for progressive reforms and to
oppose, when necessary, the new administration if it stands in our way.
Discussions about the pursuit of the second task have
begun. Many of these discussions revolve around assessments of the recent
elections: contexts, organizing experiences, and outcomes. There has been some
discussion of the economic circumstances which have shaped voting behavior--growing
economic inequality, declining real wages, evictions, medical bills, and other
basic economic vulnerabilities There has been discussion of tactics such as organizing
grassroots groups, the internet, canvassing, and calling blitzes. There have
been some useful testimonials of personal contacts about talking to voters with
competing views, breaking through ideology, confronting fundamentally reactionary
attitudes about race, religion, women’s issues, and guns. And there has been
discussion of the critical nature of issues that need to be addressed: health
care, climate change, racism and police violence, jobs, and, of course, how to
respond to the pandemic.
All of these conversations are useful and important as
we finally move beyond the elections. However, one set of issues has not been
addressed. That is why 70 million plus voters who, after the pandemic, economic
crisis, and spreading environmental calamity, still voted for President Trump.
Concern is also raised about the losses Democrats incurred in the House of
Representatives and the probability of the Senate continuing its deadlock. And
despite some progressive candidate victories in state and local elections, red
states and counties largely remained red as well.
Historic Changes in the Democratic Party
What seems missing from these discussions on the
election outcomes is an analysis that links history and political economy to
the changes that have occurred in the Democratic Party from Keynesianism and
the capital/labor compromise of the late 1940s to neoliberalism, reflected in
the sector of the Democratic Party that gained dominance in the 1980s,
sometimes referred to as “The Third Way.”
Looking at the twentieth century, Franklin Roosevelt’s
presidential victory in 1932 and three subsequent victories presaged both a
transformation of the Democratic Party and public policy from laissez faire to
state-directed policies designed to address social safety needs (creating jobs,
supporting farmers, investing in public works, and funding the arts (theater,
murals, music, historical writing for example). It was assumed that fiscal
stimuli, putting money in workers’ hands would jump start the economy. Fiscal
stimuli were paralleled by increased government regulations of banking,
labor/management relations, and wages and hours. To be clear, the New Deal
programs would not have occurred if millions of working-class men and women had
not hit the streets to demand them. And also, to be clear, as much as the New
Deal programs helped large sectors of the working class, workers of color were
disgracefully excluded from many of them. But nevertheless, the thrust of
public policy, mostly advocated by Democrats was for positive government. The
Democratic Party institutionalized the New Deal, the Fair Deal in the Truman
years, and, in the 1960s, the Great Society.
Most white workers, and increasingly Black workers,
saw the Democratic Party as their home. From the 1930s until the 1980s, voter
studies showed majorities of voters identified with the Democratic Party. And
even mainstream Republicans, such as Dwight Eisenhower, embraced workers’ rights
to form unions and Social Security.
However, the Democratic Party began its long decline
in 1968, with candidate Richard Nixon’s appeal to “the silent majority” and his
embrace of a “southern strategy.” Nixon played on growing frustration with
Vietnam era protestors and the centrality of the civil rights campaigns in
American life. George Wallace became a popular racist third-party candidate for
president.
The last gasp of the New Deal/Fair Deal/Great Society
tradition was reflected in the overwhelming defeat of populist presidential
candidate George McGovern in 1972. Two years later, because of his criminality,
President Nixon was forced out of office and his successor Gerald Ford lost the
1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter.
These political eruptions occurred in a
decade, the 1970s, when the United States was experiencing declining relative
power in the world, both politically and economically. In addition, the
contours of American politics were dramatically affected by the oil crises of
the 1970s, the inability or refusal of government at all levels to continue to
afford the supports that workers had come to expect, and the radical
transformation of production, highlighted by millions of jobs lost through
outsourcing and deindustrialization. The dramatic changes in the political
economy of capitalism and the increased appeal of racism were reflected in a
substantial change in the campaigns and policies of the Democratic Party
The Democratic Party and “The Third Way”
Jimmy Carter planted the seeds for the shift in the
Democratic Party from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism and the Party’s “Third
Way.” Michael Jordan Smith succinctly summarizes
a theme of the recent book “Reaganland,”
The book’s author, Rick Perlstein, reports
on “the Democrats’ fatal abandonment
of economic fairness in favor of balanced budgets, deregulation, and fiscal
conservatism. Carter led and presided over this transition, over the objections
of traditional liberals including Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill. But Carter
joined with a revitalized business lobby, which gradually succeeded in
persuading Democratic politicians that neoliberalism was the only way forward.
To this day, the Democratic Party hasn’t fully recovered.” (Michael Jordan Smith,
“When Conservatism Triumphed,” The Progressive, August 17, 2020)
President Reagan’s 1980
message, which resonated with a work force that was experiencing seven percent
unemployment and double digit inflation, was “Government is not the solution.
Government is the problem.” Armed with theories from conservative economists,
Reagan expanded dramatically the policies initiated by President Carter. These
included deregulation of the economy, lobbying for the privatization of public
institutions, downsizing programs of welfare and safety nets. To secure support
for programs of austerity, Reagan began the process of destroying the influence
of the labor movement, criminalizing the behavior of people of color, and
shifting the discourse from poverty’s connection to economic failure to blaming
the victims of poverty for their own misfortunes. And, in the main, the
Democratic Party either only weakly opposed the Reagan austerity agenda or
cautiously supported it. What would later be called the “neoliberal agenda”
became the dominant ideological framework of discourse of conventional politics.
In 1985, Washington D. C.
Democrats formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The Council
articulated the view that the Democratic Party was losing its grip on public
support because it was “too liberal.” It developed a “Third Way” agenda that
was less committed to working people, was more hostile to people of color,
shifted policy advocacy from providing social safety nets to expanding law
enforcement, and was less vigorously supportive of government regulation. When
Bill Clinton was elected president, he enshrined the neoliberal agenda in the
program of the Democratic Party. Third Way Democrats no longer even pretended
to represent the interests of working people in policy even though they
continued to express empathy for the vast majority of people.
One stark optic of this
was reflected in a Frontline documentary on globalization which showed
candidate Bill Clinton meeting steelworkers at a plant gate during a 1992
campaign stop. He promised them that he would serve their interests,
particularly by opposing the then controversial North America Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA). The next scene in the documentary shows Clinton meeting with
financier Robert Rubin, getting schooled on the “realities” of the modern
economy (PBS, Commanding Heights). Despite labor opposition to NAFTA,
including progressives in the labor movements of Mexican and Canadian workers,
Clinton leaned on Democrats in the House of Representatives to support it.
Clinton’s aggressive support of NAFTA was metaphorically analogous to President
Reagan’s firing of the PATCO workers in 1981 after they endorsed his candidacy
for president.
Part Two: Adapted and edited from an earlier assessment of the constellation of political forces that led to the surprise victory and support for Donald Trump.
Trump’s core constituency all along
has been sectors of finance capital, insurance, real estate, the
military/industrial complex, and drug companies whose profits have come from
domestic investments or sales and speculation overseas. It also includes
portions of small and medium sized businesses whose viabilities have been threatened,
not by big government, but by the further monopolization of the economy.
In addition, some workers displaced
by the underside of neoliberalism, including capital flight, automation, and
trade, have supported Trump because they saw no positive economic future in a Hillary
Clinton presidency in 2016. Finally, the Trump constituency has included a
percentage of voters who are ideological legatees of white
supremacy.
Therefore, the Trump coalition from 2016 to today has consisted of fractions of
capital who gain from a more muscular and economically nationalist policy
agenda, marginalized portions of the so-called “middle class,” sectors of the
working class, and portions of all of these whose political learning has
centered on the history and consciousness of white supremacy (“make America
great again”).
Trump’s major adversaries have come from a core sector of the ruling class that
has dominated the policy process at least since the 1980s, the neoliberal
globalists. In response to the squeeze on profits of the 1970s, the
capitalist elites began to promote a dramatic shift in the character of the
economy in the direction of “neoliberalism.” Drawing upon an economic ideology
with a long history from Adam Smith, to Milton Friedman, to mainstream
neoclassical economists of the late twentieth century, every administration
from Carter to Trump has engaged in deregulation of economic life, reduced
government programs that help the poor and working classes, weakened the rights
of workers and their unions, and advocated the privatization of public institutions. The Republicans have
advocated the privatization of Social Security and the postal service. The
neoliberals in both Democratic and Republican administrations “went global;” developing
a network of economic ties via trade agreements, the globalization of
production, and integrating corporate boards. Capitalist elites from every
continent began to develop common approaches to national policy via such
informal organizations as the Trilateral Commission, meetings of the G7
countries, and the annual World Economic Forum.
Debt poor countries were the first
to be forced to embrace neoliberal policies, followed by the former Socialist
Bloc countries, then the Western European social democracies, and finally the
United States. A significant portion of this qualitative change in the way
capitalism works has involved increased financial speculation (as a proportion
of the total gross domestic product), dramatic increases in global inequality
in wealth and income, and increasing economic marginalization of workers,
particularly women, people of color and immigrants.Candidate Donald Trump
orchestrated a campaign against the neoliberal globalists who dominated the
political process in the United States since the 1980s. While he epitomized
finance capital, albeit domestic as well as foreign, and represents the less
than one percent who rule the world, he presented himself as a spokesperson of
the economically marginalized. He attacked the capitalist class of which he is
a member. In addition, he blamed the marginalization of the vast majority on
some of their own; people of color, women, and immigrants.
Resistance to Trump, 2017 to 2020
Since the November 2016 election,
masses of people have been mobilizing in a variety of ways against the agenda
of the newly elected president. The women’s marches and rallies of January 21,
2017 and International Women’s Day on March 8 were historic in size and global
reach. Since then there have been huge mobilizations to reduce the use of
fossil fuels and prevent climate disaster, to support immigrant rights, to
provide basic health care, and most recently around police killings. Many of
these manifestations of outrage and fear occurred as planned events but also
from the beginning of Trump’s term there were numerous spontaneous acts at
Congressional town hall meetings and even in airports challenging his
directives to refuse people entry into the United States.
A multiplicity of groups formed or
increased in size since January, 2017: former Bernie Sanders supporters;
anti-racists mobilizations particularly against police violence; those calling
for sanctuary cities and defending the human rights of immigrants; progressive
Democratic organizations; and women’s mobilizations. Traditional left
organizations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America, benefiting from
the Sanders campaign, tripled in size between 2016 and 2020. And organizations
such as The American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood reported large increases in financial
contributions. Since the 2016 election the mobilization of millions of
people bolstered the spirits of
progressives everywhere. They have felt that at this point in history a new
progressivism was about to be born. But the story has been made complicated by
the nature of the opposition to Trumpism.
Oppositions to Trumpism: Neoliberal
and Progressive
Paradoxically, while the last four years has been “a teachable moment” as well
as a movement building moment, progressive forces are struggling to be
organized. In and around the Democratic Party there is a conflict over the
vision and the politics it ought to embrace at this time and in the coming
period. The Sanders supporters, inside and outside the Democratic Party, and
progressive Congress persons such as the “Squad” have marshalled much support for a progressive
agenda: single-payer health care, a green jobs agenda, protecting the
environment, tax reform, building not destroying immigrant rights, defending
women’s rights, and cutting military spending. With the brutal policies
advocated and already instituted by the Trump administration, progressive
democrats and their allies on the left have struggled mightily to articulate a
program, and create some organizational unity to challenge Trumpism. And that
struggle remains relevant since the 2020 election, particularly given the fact
that candidate Trump received in excess of 70 million votes for reelection.
The dilemma for progressives is that
opposition to Trumpism and all it stands for has been and must be a key
component of reigniting a progressive majority in the coming decade. But if it
does not address the fundamental failures of the neoliberal agenda, including
challenging neoliberal globalization, the current phase of capitalism, Trump’s
grassroots support will continue, even after he reluctantly leaves the White
House. Working people who ordinarily would vote for more liberal candidates for
public office need to believe that future candidates are prepared to address
the issues, often economic, that concern them.
Therefore, the fundamental project for progressives today includes mobilizing
against Trumpism while articulating an alternative political and economic
analysis of the current state of capitalist development. In concrete terms,
this approach means challenging the legitimacy of the legacy of the Trump
administration and its allies in Congress while articulating the perspective
that mainstream Democrats, the neoliberal globalists, are part of the problem,
not the solution.
This alternative analysis requires a
bold challenge inside the electoral arena and in the streets that calls for progressive
reforms: single-payer health care; cutting the military-budget; creating
government programs to put people to work on living wage jobs in infrastructure,
social services, and public education; addressing climate change: and fiscal
and regulatory policies that reduce the grotesque inequality of wealth and
income which has increased since the 1980s. It might boldly include discussions of a guaranteed income
for all and/or the right to a job for every member of the society.
The tasks are challenging but
another world is possible.
Thursday, November 26, 2020
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
CHUTZPAH ABOUT CUBA Originally Posted in November, 2020
(Fidel Castro died four years ago. The US blockade during the Trump era has become more extreme since this essay was written. Leaders of both political parties continue to articulate the view that Cubans clamor for “freedom” from their socialist dictatorship. And Cuban support for the revolution continues).
Harry Targ
Cuban society has been an experimental laboratory...
If one set of policies became problematic, the Cubans moved in different
directions. Usually change came after heated debate at all levels of society. (Harry Targ, Cuba
and the USA: A New World Order?
International Publishers, 1992, 6)
The predominant image
projected about Cuba from U.S. official government sources and the media has
not changed much over the last two hundred and fifty years. From the founding of the United States until the 1890s Cuba was seen as a victimized land
populated by masses eager to break away from Spanish colonial control
preferably to affiliate with the United States. Early American political
figures such as Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams proclaimed that the
United States was willing and able to appropriate the island nation when the
Spanish were ready to leave the Caribbean. In the antebellum period, Southern politicians
urged that Cuba be incorporated into the slave South.
In the period before the
Spanish/Cuban/American War of 1898, the images of the U.S. obligation to the
Cuban people presented in newspapers and theaters likened the former to a
masculine hero compelled to rescue Cuba, characterized as a damsel in distress.
The brutal Spanish were figuratively raping the Cuban women. At the same time
Afro-Cuban men, the narrative suggested, were unable to liberate their people.
Consequently, the United States, it was broadly proclaimed, must act on behalf
of the Cuban people.
After the
Spanish/American/Cuban War the U.S. generals and diplomats wrote the Cuban
constitution in negotiations with the departing Spanish and hand-picked Cuban
leaders. Over the next sixty years the floodgates were opened for ever larger
investments in U.S. owned sugar plantations. After World War II, the U.S.
domination of the Cuban economy expanded to include tourism, casinos, and
gangsters. In every epoch, a popular story about the U.S./Cuban relationship depicted
a stern but wise parent necessarily overseeing an energetic and passionate, but
immature, child.
But then the long
revolutionary struggle of the 1950s achieved victory and the narrative changed.
The ungrateful Cubans followed the treacherous new leaders: Fidel Castro, Che
Guevara, and a grassroots movement of peasants, workers, students, women,
Afro-Cubans, and solidarity workers from across the globe. As the U.S.
government and the dominant media saw it the revolution meant nothing but
trouble: communism; crazy ideas about free health care and education; great
debates about moral versus material incentives that even found their way into
work sites; the export of medical expertise; and sometimes the provision of
soldiers to help anti-colonial struggles. It was all bad news for almost sixty
years.
Despite the best efforts of the United States to derail the trajectory of Cuban society, the Cuban revolution survived. During the Obama administration wiser heads in Washington decided that economic blockades, internal subversion, assassination plots, and efforts to isolate Cuba from the international community were ineffective. It was time for a new policy: normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba. Official spokespersons suggested and media outlets declared that the best way to help the Cuban people recover from their sixty years of pain and suffering was to establish normal diplomatic and commercial ties with the island. However, the Trump Administration overturned the modest Obama era policy changes toward Cuba, imposing over 230 new restrictions on US/Cuban economic relations.
In a 2015 essay in USA Today, “Cubans Are Still Waiting for
the Thaw,” Alan Gomez argued that Cubans were getting impatient with the pace of
change that had occurred since December, 2014, when Presidents Castro and Obama
announced the opening of relations. He quoted a Cuban economist who said that
because relations with the United States were critical to a small country like
Cuba, the latter wanted to be careful not to make any mistakes in developing new
policies.
But Gomez suggested the
Cubans were restless. He reminded the reader that Americans were very frustrated
with the stagnation of the U.S. economy during the recent recession. But just imagine
he posed:
… going through that
kind of economic malaise for more than half a century.
So when they’re told that the end is near, that the Americans and ... their money are coming to save them, you
can’t blame them for getting antsy ... as
they look over the horizon (USA Today, April 23, 2015).
Chutzpah is a Yiddish word
that means audacity or nerve. Usually it refers to statements made that are so
outlandish that they defy the imagination. This statement, suggesting that Cubans
have been waiting for sixty years for the Americans to come with their ideology
of possessive individualism, markets, support for big corporations, and the promotion of consumerism, ranks among
the great expressions of chutzpah in our time. It ignores the beacon of hope,
the inspiration, the material progress in health care, education, culture, and
work place experimentation in the relations of production, which makes Cuba an
actor many times bigger in the eyes of the world than its size. And what most Cubans see, and the vast majority of the world observes, is a desperate US attempt to starve the Cuban people into surrender.
In the end, a real transformation of United States/Cuban relations will require a fundamental change in the American consciousness such that it respects the qualities of both countries, not the superiority of one over the other, and an end to the economic blockade.
Friday, November 20, 2020
HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE PANDEMIC
Harry Targ
Paradoxically,
we on the left (compared with the 1960s) give inadequate attention to higher
education, a source for training workers, transmitting ideology, employing
hundreds of thousands of workers both instructional and support, and the
generation of profits for corporations as higher education is privatized. Many
communities survive because of the colleges and universities in their midst,
much like factories and mines kept many communities alive economically in the
twentieth century. As with everything else, the pandemic raises fundamental
questions about our economy, our institutions and our public policies. Ht
***********************************************************
The New York Times article, posted on FB. raises questions about leadership at colleges and universities and the criteria that were used to open campuses and shut them down for Thanksgiving vacations (with students returning to their homes).
Tracking the
Coronavirus at U.S. Colleges and Universities - The New York Times
(nytimes.com)
PS. To the extent that financial viability has been a driver of the response of higher education to the pandemic, federal financial policies to maintain the viability of such institutions during the crisis, such as continuing to provide salaries, research support, transfer to online programs etc., should have been encouraged. Instead, CEOs of universities and politicians live by an ideology of “balanced budgets,” (except for military spending). Without “looking outside the box,” the fiscal crisis of higher education and the pandemic are insoluble.
Sunday, November 15, 2020
The United States/Cuba Story is Largely Unchanged After 26 Years: It is time to make a change in US policy.
This article appeared a long time ago. It remains true today 26 years later. HT
The Chronicle of
Higher Education
Taking a More
Realistic View of Cuba
By Harry R. Targ
OCTOBER 19, 1994
When I was a small child, my parents took me
to Starved Rock State Park, in LaSalle, Ill. Three hundred years earlier, on a
rock formation 125 feet above the Illinois River, a group of Native Americans
had taken refuge while being attacked by enemies from below. Fully surrounded,
cut off from the outside world and its sustenance, they had eventually died of
hunger and thirst.
As I returned from my latest trip to Cuba last June, the image
of a proud, defiant, and encircled people starved to death by a more powerful
enemy flashed across my mind. I had traveled to the island as a member of a
delegation of philosophers and social scientists attending an international
conference at the University of Havana. It seemed to me that the metaphor of
Starved Rock better represented the reality of relations between the United
States and Cuba than the more-conventional metaphors favored by the news media.
Since Cuba’s social and political revolution in 1959, the media
and the U.S. government have depicted American-Cuban relations in cold-war
terms -- as a battle between good and evil, freedom and tyranny, democracy and
dictatorship, capitalism and communism. Now the cold war has ended, but the
policies of the United States toward Cuba remain the same.
Despite the fact that journalists and politicians do not seem to
have adapted to the changing world, other concerned Americans have been forging
a new relationship with Cuba. Over the last decade, the U.S. government (which
restricts travel to Cuba) has allowed some scholars, peace activists,
health-care professionals, and others able to demonstrate a professional
interest in Cuba to travel to the island. Cuban Americans also have been
allowed to return there to visit relatives.
Unfortunately, decisions made by President Clinton in August now
severely restrict the categories of people who will be allowed to visit in the
future -- including researchers. That is unfortunate, both because avenues for
research will be closed off and because the scholars who visit Cuba come back
with a story very different from the one told by American politicians.
Scholarly analyses of the historical relationship between the two countries and of recent changes in Cuba suggest that U.S. policy toward the island is misguided. It is vital to remember that the Cuban economy and political system were shaped by 450 years of Spanish colonial rule, followed by 60 years of almost total U.S. control of the country’s economic and political life.
Significant U.S. investment in the Cuban sugar industry began in
the 1880’s and expanded rapidly over the next 30 years. The United States
undertook a virtual military occupation of the island after the end of the
Spanish-American War in 1898.
At the time of the revolution in 1959, U.S. investors controlled
80 per cent of Cuba’s public utilities, 90 per cent of its mines, 90 per cent
of its cattle ranches, 50 per cent of its railways, and 40 per cent of its
sugar crops. Twenty-five per cent of the deposits in Cuban banks belonged to
Americans, who also owned the lavish hotels and casinos in Havana. U.S.
influence over Cuba had been insured by agreements reached in the 1930’s, which
guaranteed that Americans would purchase about 65 per cent of Cuba’s sugar
crop.
In short, by the late 1950’s, Cuba’s economy depended on
foreign-owned exports and a foreign-owned tourist industry. Most important, the
wealth accumulated from that economy was disproportionately distributed among
small numbers of foreign investors and wealthy Cubans, leaving most of the
population in poverty.
The inequitable economic system that had been created in the era
of Spanish colonialism and reproduced later under U.S. control was maintained
by a Cuban dictatorship supported by the United States. By the 1950’s,
powerlessness and poverty had created revolutionary ferment. Cuban
revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro sought economic and political democracy,
improved health care, better education and housing, and a diversified economy
free from foreign control.
Under the eight U.S. Presidents in office since the late 1950’s
(with only a modest reduction of tension during the Carter years), our foreign
policy has opposed the Cuban revolution. Initially, the U.S. canceled sugar
purchases, created an economic blockade of the island, and ended diplomatic
recognition. Although the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco -- the Central Intelligence
Agency’s planned invasion of Cuba with 1,400 dissident Cuban refugees -- was
crushed in three days, efforts to overthrow the revolutionary government
continued.
Since the Bay of Pigs, the United States has put pressure on its allies to end their ties to Cuba, supported subversion and assassination teams, paid for projects to destroy crops on the island, encouraged defections and the flow of refugees to U.S. shores, supported at least 12,000 Cuban refugees in Florida in various covert and other anti-Cuba projects, and periodically threatened the island with military assault.
The low-intensity war on Cuba gained another weapon when
Congress created “Radio Marti” in 1983 and “TV Marti” in 1990 to beam
anti-Castro propaganda to the island. In 1992, Congress further tightened the
economic blockade by barring multinational corporations with U.S. involvement
from trading with Cuba.
Few Americans know that in spite of being forced by U.S.
hostility to seek alliance with the Soviet Union, Cuba went to great lengths to
establish its own international identity and carried out economic programs at
home that sometimes contradicted Soviet advice. For example, in both the 1960’s
and the 1980’s, Fidel Castro adopted some economic reforms and programs that
Soviet advisers strongly opposed, decentralizing economic decision making and
giving incentives to workers. These policies have been described in detail by
scholars, including the political scientist Max Azicri in his 1988 book Cuba:
Politics, Economics, and Society. Other scholars have analyzed similar
issues and trends in such collections as the 1989 The Cuba Reader: The
Making of a Revolutionary Society, edited by Philip Brenner, William
M. Leo Grande, Donna Rich, and Daniel Siegel, and the 1990 Transformation and
Struggle: Cuba Faces the 1990’s, edited by Sandor Halebsky and John M. Kirk.
It is true that Cuba got oil, heavy machinery, and other
products from the Soviet Union, but it received them in exchange for
agricultural and other commodities, not as handouts. The distinction is
important, because it highlights the fact that Cuba was not a mere extension
and tool of the Soviet Union, as U.S. policy makers have portrayed it.
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Cuba has taken several
steps to make up for its trade losses. Economists, political scientists, and
others who have visited Cuba in recent years have witnessed steps that the
Cuban government has undertaken to increase tourism to earn valuable foreign
currency; establish joint tourism ventures with investors from Spain, Great
Britain, and Canada, among other countries; pass new laws encouraging foreign
investment; expand its sophisticated, government-supported program of
biotechnological research; and increase exports of new serums and medical
equipment to a variety of countries. Despite the portrait in the U.S. media of
a country isolated from the rest of the world, Cuba has expanded its trade with
Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Scholars have observed other important changes in recent years,
including the government’s agreement to allow Cuban citizens to use American
dollars to buy goods not available under rationing (although Mr. Clinton in
August restricted the right of Cuban Americans to send dollars to the island),
transformation of state-run farms into agricultural cooperatives, and legalization
of the establishment of small private enterprises. These changes have been
debated on Cuban television and in thousands of workplaces around the country.
Even before the economic crisis brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars noted that Cuba had begun to institute a variety of reforms to try to rekindle enthusiasm for the ideals of the revolution and to engage Cubans more directly in decisions affecting their lives. For example, the campaign of “rectification” (now halted because of the economic crisis) sought, among other things, to increase worker participation in plant decisions and to involve more young people and women in politics.
Some reforms have continued in the 1990’s. The rules for last
year’s election were changed to give Cubans more voice in the political
process. In prior elections, people voted for representatives to municipal
assemblies, which in turn selected the provisional assemblies, which then
selected national legislators. In the 1993 election, however, Cubans voted
directly for candidates for the national legislative body. Eighty-three per
cent of the legislators elected are serving for the first time, and they
include larger numbers than ever before of young people, women, and Cubans of
color.
Evidence gathered by academics and others in visiting
delegations suggests that despite the economic problems, most Cubans still
support their government. At the time of the 1993 election, right-wing
Cuban-American radio broadcasts from Miami urged Cubans to reject Castro’s
regime by not voting or by defacing their ballots. But more than 90 per cent of
eligible voters did vote, and fewer than 10 per cent of the ballots were
defaced or left blank. Despite the fact that most U.S. media outlets never
mentioned the Cuban election, many American scholars and researchers saw it as
a referendum affirming the Cuban government.
It is important to note that even the Cubans on the island who
blame the country’s government for their economic hardships view militantly
right-wing Cuban Americans (such as Jorge Mas Canosa of the Cuban American
National Foundation in Miami, who has advised Presidents Reagan, Bush, and
Clinton on Cuba) as a greater threat to the country than the economic crisis. I
and many of my colleagues who have attended scholarly meetings on the island
have heard this sentiment voiced by ordinary Cubans again and again. Most
Cubans see vocal Cuban-American leaders such as Mas Canosa as direct
descendants of the hated former dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar and his
henchmen.
In sum, several of Cuba’s economic difficulties are rooted in
its history of foreign domination, first by Spain and then by the United
States. But the Cuban revolution has survived, creating a humane regime for
most of its population, with particular successes in health care, education,
housing, and science. Life-expectancy and infant-mortality rates are similar to
those in the United States, the literacy rate is 97 per cent, and the number of
teachers has increased elevenfold since the revolution. While poor by many
indicators -- such as per-capita income -- compared with most other third-world
countries, Cuba has accomplished an admirable degree of social and economic
development.
The implications for the United States seem clear: It is time
for a change. Our current policies are not only irrational, given that the cold
war that inspired them is over; they are inhumane and out of touch with the
desires of most Cubans, whom we claim to be trying to free.
It seems unlikely that U.S. policy will change, however, until the American public becomes much better informed about the history of Cuban-American relations and the current state of affairs in Cuba. Those of us who have visited and studied Cuba must speak out and try to present a broader and more realistic picture of today’s Cuba, for surely mutual isolation and hostility are unnatural for two countries just 90 miles apart.
Cuba is no longer allied with a superpower enemy of the United
States. Cuba is reforming its economic and political system in line with
changes occurring in economic and political structures around the world. It is
time for the United States to begin negotiating the end of its economic
blockade. Then it can start to forge reasonable new political, economic,
cultural, and scientific connections with the island.
Harry R. Targ is professor of political science at Purdue
University. He is the author of Cuba and the USA.: A New World Order?
(International Publishers, 1992).
The Bookshelf
CHALLENGING LATE CAPITALISM by Harry R. Targ
Read Challenging Late Capitalism by Harry R. Targ.
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