End the Blockade of Cuba: Remembering Fidel

 Trump’s Cuban Policy as a Metaphor for US Politics (tandfonline.com)

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.

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

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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.

 https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2020/07/new-thinking-political-economy-and.html

 

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).

China Plus Podcast of July 31, 2020 "China-US Relations at Turning Point? "

 

http://chinaplus.cri.cn/podcast/detail/1/232452

VINCE EMANUELE, ANTI-WAR VETS, AND THE 99%

    Harry Targ, The Rag Blog | November 6, 2011

 “I grew up in Chicago and Northwest Indiana. Working-class family, father was a Union Ironworker… mother was a stay at home Mom.” Vince Emanuele joined the Marines after graduating from high school. “I came out of boot camp a hard chargin’ Devil Dog.”

He served in the Marines from 2003 until 2005 stationed in California, Kuwait, and Iraq. His eight month deployment in Iraq involved him in street patrols, looking for snipers and land mines, “along with shooting at innocent civilians, destroying their property and beating up prisoners.”

While in Iraq the fascination with war that he had acquired as a kid playing video games dissipated. His father sent him reading material — Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Hunter Thompson, The Nation — and he and friends began to reflect on what they were doing in Iraq. He came to the view that the war was “illegal, immoral, unjustified, and unneeded.” He was not spreading “democracy” or “peace” and the U.S. war effort was not winning the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people.

After returning to the U.S., Emanuele joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, has been organizing vets in Indiana and Illinois, created a weekly radio show called “Veterans Unplugged” which is available online, and has become a prominent activist for social, economic, and political justice in the heartland of America while finishing an undergraduate political science degree.

Emanuele recently spoke on a panel organized by the Lafayette Area Peace Coalition. He elaborated on the current plight of veterans, particularly veterans who served in the two longest wars in U.S. history, Afghanistan and Iraq.

While acknowledging that the current military force has chosen to enlist in regular army or reserve units, the 21st century enticement to serve is really an “economic draft.” With declining incomes, wages, job opportunities, and rising educational costs, more and more men and women, he said, have seen military service as the only escape from lives of economic marginalization.

He spoke of the culture of militarization to which every new recruit is exposed: a process of dehumanization; the spread of racism, particularly targeting stereotypes of Muslims; sexism; and homophobia. In reality the military experience of young people, Emanuele said, involves placing raw, uneducated, teenagers in a war zone, with weapons and a license to kill. The victims of the actions of these raw recruits, schooled in video games and super-patriotism, were the millions of Iraqi and Afghan citizens who most fervently wanted the young foreigners off their land.

Emanuele presented some figures on the impacts of military service on returning veterans. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2010 there were 20.2 million men and 1.8 million women who had served in the military). In 2011, Emanuele reported:

§  Rates of unemployment of returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq are higher than in the non-veteran population, both men and women;

§  African-American vets experience double the unemployment rate of white vets;

§  80,000 returning veterans are currently homeless (56 % of homeless vets are African American or Latinos);

§  20% to 50% of 21st century returning veterans suffer some form of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (an estimated 350,000 to 1 million vets);

§  1,000 returning vets attempt suicide each month.

Emanuele, connected the plight of returning veterans to the military-industrial complex and imperial wars. As a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, he highlighted the long tradition of soldiers resisting participation in unjust wars:

§  In 1781 the Pennsylvania militia mutinied against war profiteers and for food;

§  Between the 1870s and the 1890s, National Guard soldiers often refused to fire on striking workers;

§  In 1919 unknown numbers of U.S. soldiers refused orders to go fight against the Bolsheviks who had come to power in Russia;

§  Thousands of World War I veterans, known as the Bonus Army, assembled in Washington D.C. in 1932 to demand back pay due them from their active duty experience;

. From 1964-75 a massive GI anti-Vietnam war resistance movement emerged with over 300 GI antiwar newspapers produced, 10 % of all Vietnam era soldiers going AWOL or deserting, and a broad array of other forms of antiwar resistance and opposition to military recruiting.

 

Emanuele stressed the commonality of experience and vision that is shared by most veterans with the Occupy Movement. He suggested that peace and justice activists must understand that returning veterans are a vital part of the 99% movement committed to radically restructure American society.

He argued that the 99%, including vets, must see the vital connections between the global capitalist system, the military-industrial complex, and the pain and suffering that have generated war and economic insecurity in the 21st century.

Emanuele ended his talk with reference to the frank admission of General Smedley Butler who oversaw the effort to crush the army of Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua in the early 1930s. Butler admitted that he, as a Marine General, had served as an instrumentality of Wall Street, putting down popular rebellions in the service of profit.

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Vince Emanuele  

Face Book

November 10, 2020

Today is the 245th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. As a former marine, I'm extremely uncomfortable with the glorification of militarism and war. At this point, I'm not sure what to say because I've said it all before. The wars continue. Veterans kill themselves in record numbers. Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians, Libyans, Somalis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and countless others across the globe continue to endure the brutal, horrific, and murderous legacy of U.S. militarism.

In typical contradictory fashion, it's also worth noting that my time in the USMC was both the best and worst thing that's ever happened to me. For years, I was resentful. These days, however, I'm grateful, not only for navigating my time in the military with as much dignity as possible but for coming home and doing something positive with my life and for the friends and family who made that possible.

So many of our brothers and sisters are no longer with us. Some died overseas, some took their lives after returning home. For the people on the opposite end of Uncle Sam's whip, life is difficult beyond imagination. Those of us who served have a responsibility to speak the truth about U.S. foreign policy.

The future of the species and planet depends on our ability to develop alternatives to war and meta-violence. It's our only hope. It won't be easy, nor is success guaranteed, yet persist we must.

As Oliver Stone once wrote, "Those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know, and to try with what's left of our lives to find a goodness and a meaning to this life."

 Semper Fi.

 End the wars.

PFC Vincent Emanuele, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, Alpha Company, 3rd Platoon, 1st Squad, 3rd Fire Team

Emanuele writes for several outlets including Telesur and Counterpunch. He currently works for PARCMedia. PARCMedia is a news and media project founded by two USMC veterans, Sergio Kochergin & Vince Emanuele. They give a working-class take on issues surrounding politics, ecology, community organizing, war, culture, and philosophy.

“Become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PARCMEDIA
Follow Us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Vince_Emanuele
Follow Us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/1713FranklinSt/
Follow Us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parcmedia/?”...  

THE ELECTION AND POST-ELECTION SEASONS: NOT MUCH NEW SINCE 2014

 WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2014

WHAT TO MAKE OF ELECTORAL POLITICS 2014?

Harry Targ

I am looking at exit poll data and, as in prior election seasons, more Democratic votes came from the young, women, African Americans, Latinos, voters with post-graduate degrees and educational levels at or below high school, and low income citizens. This national polling data comports with results from many individual Congressional and state races. These groups of voters (or comparable groups of non-voters) will stay the same or increase as a percentage of  potential voters in 2016 and beyond.

This data speaks to the necessary expansion of electoral and “street heat” strategies that prioritize several issues. Progressives need to continue to combat racism and sexism in all its forms. This translates into reversing voter suppression laws and other tactics to stifle voting, renewing the Voting Rights Act, pursuing equal pay for equal work legislation, opening the doors for citizenship to all migrants to the United States.

In addition, support for an expanded economic populist agenda is central to any progressive historical change. Candidates for public office should be pressured to support living wage legislation at the national and state levels, expand on worker rights to form unions, a green jobs agenda, revising the Affordable Care Act into a single payer system, and federal legislation (paralleling the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights) guaranteeing every worker the right to a job. This program of social and economic justice should be basic to every candidacy at the federal and state levels in 2016. To advocate for such programs, movements inside and outside the electoral arena should spend the next two years engaging in education, agitation and organization.

In addition to struggles over concrete policies, progressives should engage more vigorously in ideological struggle. In general, this means addressing racism as a central undercurrent in American political culture: research and education that documents the centrality of the racialization of the 2014 election would inform discussion in the weeks ahead.

Also, a centerpiece of American political history, paralleling and sometimes overlapping with racism, is the politics of fear. The sources of fear in the past have included racial and ethnic others, foreigners, and communists. This election season fear was generated by half-truths about terrorists particularly from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an invasion of Central American children, and a mysterious contagious disease traveling from Africa to the United States. The politics of fear must be challenged, not accommodated, introducing a politics of reason. That is progressives should demand that candidates address real issues rationally, demonstrate arguments using data, and to the contrary avoid simplistic sound bites. The people who need to be motivated should be treated with respect, including assuming that they understand their self-interest and can be convinced by compelling arguments.

Finally, campaigns opposing big money in politics need to continue. This includes the only short-term challenge to big money that has any chance of electoral success; that is organizing masses of people. In addition to increasing the struggles to build multi-issue mass campaigns, progressives can avail themselves of a multitude of media projects: alternative radio and television, free distribution newspapers, blogs, websites, and face book networks, as well as organizing study circles on college campuses, in senior centers, community centers, and public libraries.

I feel this morning the way I felt the day after Ronald Reagan was elected president. While the Reagan presidency institutionalized a neoliberal economic agenda that has shaped the national and global economy ever since, we also witnessed in the subsequent years the largest rally in United States history against nuclear weapons, a vibrant Central America solidarity movement,  an anti-NAFTA campaign that almost defeated the passage of the treaty in Congress,  various huge mobilizations against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the election of the first African-American president in United States history. Joe Hill was correct when he urged his comrades “don’t mourn, organize.”