Chris Hedges's Blog, page 545

Supreme Court Ruling Is a Major Setback for Unions

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that government workers can’t be forced to contribute to labor unions that represent them in collective bargaining, dealing a serious financial blow to organized labor.

The court’s conservative majority scrapped a 41-year-old decision that had allowed states to require that public employees pay some fees to unions that represent them, even if the workers choose not to join.

The 5-4 decision fulfills a longtime wish of conservatives to get rid of the so-called fair share fees that non-members pay to unions in roughly two dozen states. Organized labor is a key Democratic constituency.

The court ruled that the laws violate the First Amendment by compelling workers to support unions they may disagree with.

“States and public-sector unions may no longer extract agency fees from nonconsenting employees,” Justice Samuel Alito said in his majority opinion in the latest case in which Justice Neil Gorsuch, an appointee of President Donald Trump, provided a key fifth vote for a conservative outcome.

Trump himself tweeted his approval of the decision while Alito still was reading a summary of it from the bench.

“Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!” Trump said in the tweet.

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote of the big impact of the decision. “There is no sugarcoating today’s opinion. The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this Nation’s law — and its economic life — for over 40 years. As a result, it prevents the American people, acting through their state and local officials, from making important choices about workplace governance. And it does so by weaponizing the First Amendment, in a way that unleashes judges, now and in the future, to intervene in economic and regulatory policy.”

The court’s three other liberal justices joined the dissent.

The court split 4-4 the last time it considered the issue in 2016 following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Last year, unions strongly opposed Gorsuch’s nomination by Trump.

The unions say the outcome could affect more than 5 million government workers in about two dozen states and the District of Columbia.

The case involving Illinois state government worker Mark Janus is similar to the one the justices took up in 2016. At that time, the court appeared to be ready to overrule a 1977 high court decision that serves as the legal foundation for the fair share fees. But Scalia’s death left the court tied, and a lower court ruling in favor of the fees remained in place.

The unions argued that so-called fair share fees pay for collective bargaining and other work the union does on behalf of all employees, not just its members. More than half the states already have right-to-work laws banning mandatory fees, but most members of public-employee unions are concentrated in states that don’t, including California, New York and Illinois.

Labor leaders fear that not only will workers who don’t belong to a union stop paying fees, but that some union members might decide to stop paying dues if they could in essence get the union’s representation for free.

A recent study by Frank Manzo of the Illinois Public Policy Institute and Robert Bruno of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign estimated that public-sector unions could lose more than 700,000 members over time as a result of the ruling and that unions also could suffer a loss of political influence that could depress wages as well.

Alito acknowledged that unions could “experience unpleasant transition costs in the short term.” But he said labor’s problems pale in comparison to “the considerable windfall that unions have received…for the past 41 years.”

Billions of dollars have been taken from workers who were not union members in that time, he said.

“Those unconstitutional exactions cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely,” Alito wrote.

Kagan, reading a summary of her dissent in the courtroom, said unions only could collect money for the costs of negotiating terms of employment. “But no part of those fees could go to any of the union’s political or ideological activities,” she said.

The court’s majority said public-sector unions are not entitled to any money from employees without their consent.

___

This story has been corrected to reflect that the earlier Supreme Court decision was in 1977.

A Warmer World Needs More Habitat Protection

Some time later this century, the world’s need for protected habitat will be more acute even than today.

The greatest danger to the wild vertebrates that roam the planet will not be the intruding humans, their livestock and their pesticides and herbicides. It will be human-induced global warming and climate change.

The conversion of wilderness—forest, grassland and swamp—to urban growth, agriculture and pasture has already caused losses of perhaps one species in 10 in the natural ecosystems disturbed by humankind.

But what could be catastrophic climate change driven by profligate human burning of fossil fuels could by 2070 overtake the damage delivered by changes in the way land is used, with catastrophic consequences for birds, reptiles, mammals and other vertebrates.

Losses could reach 20% or even 40%, according to a new study in an academic journal, the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

And a second, separate study in another journal spells out the challenge for governments, communities and conservators: the present targets for biodiversity conservation are simply inadequate. They leave 83% of the land surface unprotected, and 90% of the oceans not effectively conserved.

There have been calls to set at least half of the globe aside for the wild animals, plants and fungi that—until human numbers began to expand—dominated the planet. But the latest study, in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, suggests that even a half-share for nature might not be enough to save many species from extinction.

Researchers have been warning for two decades that climate change poses a real threat to the thousands of known species of wild creature, and millions of plants and animals yet to be identified and monitored.

They have argued that climate change will damage the forests that provide a natural home for countless forms of life; that global warming already presents dangers for known species; and that climate change may already have claimed more victims than anyone has so far realised.

Natural Answer

They have also, in different ways, proved again and again that rich, biodiverse habitats, especially forests, are part of the natural machinery for limiting climate change—and in any case, in simple cash terms, forests are worth more to humankind as natural forests than as plantations, or cattle ranches.

And to rub home the message a third study in the same week, in the Journal of Animal Ecology, highlights the direct dangers of warmer sea waters to the colonies of black-browed albatross in the Southern Ocean. Meticulous monitoring since 1979 has shown that the biggest variation in population growth depends simply on sea water temperatures as the juvenile birds set off for their first year of independence over the open sea.

The cold Antarctic waters are rich in dissolved oxygen and support enormous levels of plant and tiny animal life on which the birds, fish and sea mammals depend. As waters warm, food becomes less available.

“As our oceans are projected to warm, fewer juvenile albatrosses will manage to survive and populations are expected to decline at a faster rate,” said Stéphanie Jenouvrier, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US.

The albatross populations of the Southern Hemisphere are already vulnerable: climate change will make them even more at hazard. And researchers have already pointed out that although great tracts of the world have already been declared reserves, many of those territories already protected have been systematically degraded by human invasion.

Heavy Demands

“Humanity asks a lot of the natural world. We need it to purify our water and air, to maintain our soils, and to regulate our climate,” said Martine Maron of the University of Queensland, Australia, who led the Royal Society study.

“Yet even as we increase the extent of protected areas, they don’t necessarily prevent the loss of natural systems. They’re often located in areas that might not have been lost anyway—and the current target of protecting 17% of terrestrial systems will never be enough to protect species as well as provide the benefits humanity needs.”

And her co-author James Watson, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, who is also based at the University of Queensland, said: “We need a big, bold plan.

“There is no doubt that when we add up the different environmental goals to halt biodiversity loss, stabilize runaway climate change and to ensure other critical ecosystems services such as pollination and clean water are maintained, we will need far more than 50% of the Earth’s natural systems to remain intact.”

Mattis in China to Discuss North Korea

BEIJING—U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and his Chinese counterpart struck a positive note as they sat down Wednesday to tackle the thorny issue of how to get North Korea to fulfill a pledge to abandon its nuclear program.

Mattis said he and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe opened discussions in Beijing with a “very open and honest dialogue.”

Wei said the visit is important to increase strategic trust and enhance the cooperation between them.

In a later meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping — who also heads the commission overseeing the People’s Liberation Army — called relations between the militaries a “model component of our overall bilateral relations.”

Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, said the U.S. assigns the same degree of importance to the relationship.

“So I’m here to keep our relationship on a great trajectory, going in the right direction,” he said.

None of the leaders mentioned specific issues in their opening statements in front of reporters, but North Korean denuclearization was expected to top the agenda.

President Donald Trump’s announcement of a suspension of major annual military exercises with South Korea fulfilled a long-time Chinese wish.

China is the North’s main source of aid, trade and diplomatic support and backs Pyongyang’s call for a “phased and synchronous” approach to denuclearization, as opposed to Washington’s demand for an instant, total and irreversible end to the North’s nuclear programs.

The visit also comes amid a brewing trade war between the world’s two largest economies and sharp U.S. criticism over China’s militarization of its island holdings in the South China Sea.

The Pentagon disinvited the Chinese navy from a multinational naval exercise the U.S. is hosting this summer in what it called “an initial response” to China’s fortressing of man-made islands in the crucial waterway.

Despite that, both sides reaffirmed the importance of maintaining exchanges, with Mattis saying he was visiting because of the importance that “we in the U.S. military place on the military-to-military relationship with the (People’s Liberation Army).”

A Gitmo for Children on the Border

By the time Donald J. Trump threw in the towel, who among us hadn’t seen or heard the chilling videos in which U.S. border officials shamelessly grabbed uncomprehending children and toddlers from their pleading mothers and fathers? Some were told they were being taken to bathe or shower by people with little sense of the resonances of history. They were, of course, creating scenes that couldn’t help but bring to mind those moments when Jews, brought to Nazi concentration camps, were told that they were being sent to take “showers,” only to be murdered en masse in the gas chambers. Some of those children didn’t even realize that they had missed the chance to say goodbye to their mothers or fathers. Those weeping toddlers, breast-deprived infants, and distressed teens were just the most recent signs of the Trump administration’s war against decency, compassion, and justice.

Because the victims were children, however, it was easy to ignore one reality: new as all this may have seemed, it actually wasn’t. Dehumanized, traumatized, and scared, those children — their predicament — shocked many Americans who insisted, along with former First Lady Laura Bush, that this was truly un-American. As she wrote in the Washington Post:

“Americans pride ourselves on being a moral nation, on being the nation that sends humanitarian relief to places devastated by natural disasters or famine or war. We pride ourselves on believing that people should be seen for the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We pride ourselves on acceptance. If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents — and to stop separating parents and children in the first place.”

Her essay essentially asked one question: Who have we become? Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, tweeting out a picture of the Birkenau concentration camp over the words “Other governments have separated women and children,” suggested an answer: we were planting the seeds that could make us the new Nazi Germany.

But let me assure you, much of what we saw in these last weeks with those children had its origins in policies and “laws” so much closer to home than Germany three-quarters of a century ago. If you wanted to see where their ravaging really began, you needed to look elsewhere (which, surprisingly enough, no one has) — specifically, to those who created the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility. From its inception beyond the reach of American courts or, in any normal sense, justice, this prison camp set the stage structurally, institutionally, and legally for what we’ve just been witnessing at the border.

Kenneling Children

The fingerprints of those who created and sustained that offshore island prison for war-on-terror detainees were all over that policy. Not surprisingly, White House Chief of Staff and retired General John Kelly, former head of SOUTHCOM, the U.S. military combatant command that oversees Guantánamo, was the first official in the Trump administration to publicly float the idea of such a separation policy on the border. In March 2017, answering a question from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the separation of children from their mothers, he said, “I would do almost anything to deter the people from Central America” from making the journey here.

Just such separations, of course, became the well-publicized essence of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy at the border and, until the president’s executive order issued last week, the numbers of children affected were mounting exponentially — more than 2,000 of them in the previous six weeks, some still in diapers. (And keep in mind that there already were 11,000 migrant children in U.S. custody at that point.)

Apprehended at the border, the children were taken to processing facilities, separated from their parents thanks to a mix of Department of Homeland Security, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Justice policy directives, and then locked up. From the moment they arrived at those facilities, the echoes of Guantánamowere obvious (at least for those of us who had long followed developments there over the years). First, there were the most visible signs; above all, the children being placed in wire cages that, as journalists and others who saw them attested, looked more like holding cells for animals at a zoo or dogs at a kennel than for humans, no less children. This was, of course, exactly how the first Gitmo detainees were held back in 2002 as that prison was being built.

President Trump foreshadowed the treatment to come. “These aren’t people,” he said in May, referring to undocumented migrants crossing the border, “these are animals.” To make the children’s caged existence worse still, the lights were kept on around the clock and the children subjected to interruptions all night, recalling the sleep deprivation and constant light used as a matter of policy on detainees at Guantánamo Bay. In addition, caregivers were not allowed to touch the children. Even shelter workers were forbidden to do so, which meant adults were not able to console them either. And bad as any of this sounded, such conditions were but a prelude to a much deeper tale of abuse at government hands.

As at Guantánamo, those children were also being subjected to a regime of intentional abuse. The cruel and inhuman treatment began, of course, with the trauma of separation from their parents and often from their siblings as well, since children of different genders were sent to different facilities (or at least different parts of the same facility). Such policies, according to pediatrician and Columbia professor Dr. Irwin Redlener, a leading authority on public policy and children in harm’s way, amount to “child abuse by the government.” In other words, it all added up to a new form of torture, this time visited upon children.

Asking for Congress and the White House to end the policy of separation, members of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry weighed in on the harm that the trauma of forced separation can cause: “Separating these children from their families in times of stress creates unnecessary and high-risk trauma, at the very time they need care and support the most.” In addition, the “children who experience sudden separation from one or both parents, especially under frightening, unpredictable, and chaotic circumstances, are at higher risk for developing illnesses such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other trauma-induced reactions.” (Ironically, one of the few characteristics Justice Department lawyers in George W. Bush’s administration acknowledged would constitute torture was “prolonged mental harm.” In their words, for severe pain or suffering to amount to torture would require that “the acts giving rise to the harm must cause some lasting, though not necessarily permanent, damage.”)

Name me the parent who doesn’t think that his or her child would suffer lasting harm if separated from his or her closest attachments. Yet, in a press briefing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen bluntly insisted that “claiming these children and their parents are treated inhumanely is not true.” It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that the parents of the children were being tortured, too, not knowing where their children were being sent or held and when (or even if) they would ever see them again.

Perversely, administration spokespersons seemed to think that a trade-off had occurred: the loss of basic human rights for at least the pretense of pleasant cosmetic props. Some of the children at least were given toys and games. Nielsen even bragged that Trump administration officials had “high standards. We give them meals, we give them education, we give them medical care. There is videos, there is TVs.”

This, too, should have been a reminder of Guantánamo logic. The more the prisoners there were deprived of in terms of legal and human rights, the more the Bush administration boasted about the creature comforts offered to them, like movies, halal food, and even comfortable chairs (while they were being force-fed) — as if the presence of toys could counteract the wrenching separation from a parent (or a comfortable chair, force-feeding).

Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, caught the hypocrisy of it all, reporting that the children she saw were surrounded by “toys, books and crayons,” but banging the floor and crying out in pain.

Creating Gitmos

Beyond the physical and emotional deprivations, there were the legal ones. The stay of those children was indefinite, the defining characteristic of Gitmo. Before the Trump separation policy started, children, as minors whose parents were awaiting decisions on immigration status, could only be held by the government for 20 days. With “zero tolerance,” their saga suddenly became interminable.

Legally, like their parents, they were also reclassified. These were no longer the children of migrants or asylum seekers in immigration court, for whom there were strict policies and time limits on detention. They were now the children of alleged criminals, having essentially been rendered orphans. At Guantánamo, changing legal categories in a similar fashion — that is, defining the prisoners’ detentions as military, not criminal in nature — accomplished the same trick, avoiding the application of due process and rights for the detainees.

Which brings up yet another fundamental parallel between Gitmo’s prisoners and the children’s Gitmo at the border. Those being held were described in both places using the same crucial term: detainee. Guantánamo branded this word forever as beyond the bounds of normal legality because the Bush administration officials who set up that system wanted to ensure that the normal legal protections of both national and international law would not be extended to those captured and held there. Guantánamo, the government insisted, was not a prison. It was merely a “detention center.” So many years later, it still is, while those incarcerated there have often served “sentences” of a decade and more, even though only a handful of them were ever actually sentenced by a court of any sort. In 2018, that same label was taken from those accused of being battlefield enemies and slapped on the children of asylum seekers.

As with Guantánamo, lawyers who wanted to represent the parents, whose fates were to determine those of their separated children, found themselves impeded in their access to the detained adults. No one familiar with Gitmo could have missed the parallel. Lawyers seeking to provide assistance to war-on-terror detainees were kept out of Guantánamo for more than two years after it opened.

The Southern Poverty Law Center recently filed suit claiming that, at two detention centers, authorities had limited the access of those undocumented immigrants to lawyers, violating due process. To make matters worse, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s Department of Justice recently decided not to renew two programs that offered legal aid lawyers to undocumented immigrants facing deportation. Meanwhile, that department has instituted a new policy in which pro-bono lawyers (those from NGO groups seeking to represent the detainees) now have to go through a certification process before taking them on at their own expense.

The media has been similarly restricted. Photographs of the detention “camps” for those children were left to the government alone to provide. So, too, when Guantánamo opened, visiting journalists were ordered to leave their cameras behind. These restrictions stayed in place as official policy, intensified by none other than John Kelly. (Ironically, the Pentagon itself sent out the iconic early 2002 images of kneeling, shackled, orange-jump-suited detainees.)

For 16 years now, opponents of the U.S. detention center on the island of Cuba have understandably warned that its remarkable disregard for the rule of law would inevitably creep into America’s institutions. For the most part, their worries centered on the federal court system and the possibility that defendants there might someday lose basic rights. Now, we know that Guantánamo found a future in those detention camps on our southern border. Don’t think it will be the last place that the influence of that infamous prison will pop up.

While this moment of crisis may have passed, consider this piece, at best, a requiem for a tragedy that has barely ended (if it has) — and also a warning. The legacy of Guantánamo continues to haunt our laws, our imaginations, and our way of life. It’s time to do what we have failed to do for so long now: push back hard on the truly un-American policies spawned by that prison and apparent in so much else of Donald Trump’s America. We need to do so now, before the way of life we once knew is largely erased. It’s time to insist on the right to bring up our children in an America of compassion, law, and respect for the rights of all, not in one whose leaders are intent on robbing them — and so many other children — of their future.

How a Socialist Latina Millennial Beat a Wall Street Favorite

It might seem unbelievable that after Bernie Sanders’ immense success in the 2016 Democratic primaries, running a grass-roots campaign that condemned Wall Street’s influence and called for social justice, Democrats can still be caught off guard by progressives unseating party heavyweights.

And yet, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win in New York’s 14th Congressional District primary was nothing short of incredible. The victory stunned even her, as the video below illustrates.

Challenger @Ocasio2018 toppled one of the top Democrats in Congress, @repjoecrowley, Tuesday night in their primary in the 14th District. The victory stunned even her, live on our channel. #NY1Politics https://t.co/fnK1O0bacz pic.twitter.com/RjuqHJpn1p

— Spectrum News NY1 (@NY1) June 27, 2018

A 28-year-old socialist Latina running against Joe Crowley, the fourth most powerful Democrat in the House of Representatives, probably didn’t raise many alarms within a political establishment that seems hellbent on ignoring a growing desire for the Democratic Party to move left.

Ocasio-Cortez, however, had an important trick up her sleeve: She understands and connects with the constituents she seeks to represent. After all, this imperfect democracy still runs on votes, and Wall Street support—which Crowley’s campaign had plenty of—no longer holds the sway many in the Democratic National Committee may believe it does.

In the run-up to Tuesday’s election, Ocasio-Cortez, the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a father from the South Bronx, said, “What I want the party and people all over the country to know is that my campaign represents authentic, accountable racial and social justice.” In a congressional district that includes the Bronx and Queens and whose population is 70 percent people of color, the millennial activist tapped into an issue of representation as she opposed a political star who had run unchallenged for years.

Crowley—a friend of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who was expected to replace her as Democratic leader—“prioritize[s] lobbyists over working families,” according to his opponent. Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, makes up for the gap in political experience through organizing skills learned during Sanders’ 2016 campaign, as well as other grass-roots efforts.

Crowley, a 10-term House member, raised $3 million, compared with his opponent’s $200,000. A quick comparison of campaign finances hints at what Ocasio-Cortez means when she talks about Crowley’s priorities, and may also get to the heart of why 57.5 percent of voters in New York’s 14th Congressional District—where the average income is $47,000—chose her. The Ocasio-Cortez campaign video below is another good place to start for those wondering which issues voters care about in 2018.

It’s time for a New York that works for all of us.

On June 26th, we can make it happen – but only if we have the #CourageToChange.

It’s time to get to work. Please retweet this video and sign up to knock doors + more at https://t.co/kacKFI9RtI to bring our movement to Congress. pic.twitter.com/aqKMjovEjZ

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) May 30, 2018

In the moving clip, the educator and organizer lists the need for “Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee and criminal justice reform,” and highlights her presence in the community, as well as Crowley’s clear absence.

This was @Ocasio2018‘s platform, taken from her office in Elmhurst, Queens —> pic.twitter.com/w9KqwRl00x

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) June 27, 2018

“I’m an organizer in this community, and I knew living here and being here and seeing and organizing with families here, that it was possible,” Ocasio-Cortez said after her victory. “I knew that it was long odds, and I knew that it was uphill, but I always knew it was possible.”

I want to congratulate @Ocasio2018. I look forward to supporting her and all Democrats this November. The Trump administration is a threat to everything we stand for here in Queens and the Bronx, and if we don’t win back the House this November, we will lose the nation we love.

— Joe Crowley (@JoeCrowleyNY) June 27, 2018

Now the media are flooded with articles asking the question on many minds: “Who is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?” The profiles paint a picture not just of a courageous underdog fighting for social justice at a time when it’s needed more than ever, but also contain hints of progressive things to come, whether or not the Democratic or Republican parties are ready to face them.

Cynthia Nixon, the actor running to dethrone Andrew Cuomo as New York’s governor and also part of the pink wave of female candidates seeking political positions, seems to agree. “[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] represents the future of the Democratic Party,” Nixon said. “Alexandria and I are joining together to take on the old boys club, rejecting corporate money and run people-powered campaigns that envision a progressive New York that serves the many, not just the few who can afford to buy influence.”

The Seventh Exclusion: Key Moments in Racist U.S. Immigration History

I had predicted, after Donald Trump’s announcement that he wanted to try to keep Muslims out of the United States, that he might well have some success in that endeavor. Courts, as SCOTUS just showed once again, are reluctant to micro-manage the executive branch on things like who can enter the country. Non-U.S. citizens don’t have a constitutional right to visit the United States, so in principle the president can keep some people out, especially if the State Department cooperates in declaring a security threat. In other words, Rudy Giuliani may be as loony as the Mad Hatter, but he knew exactly how to get Trump the racist Muslim ban he wanted and make it stick in the U.S. system.

Ironically, the court decision came back the same day as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset win in the 14th Congressional District in New York. The 19th-century, Protestant, Know-Nothing conspiracy would have tried to exclude her from the U.S. for being of Catholic heritage.

The travel ban upheld by a narrow majority on the Supreme Court causes untold heartache to Iranian-Americans, Yemeni-Americans and other groups designated for exclusion. It also injures the First Amendment of the Constitution, which forbids the state to take a position on good and bad religion. It was a sad day when the full court did not agree with the federal court in Hawaii, which made cogent arguments for the policy having originated in an intention to discriminate on the basis of religion, which is unconstitutional. It has nothing to do with security—the nationalities banned haven’t engaged in terrorism on U.S. soil in this century. Most terrorism in the U.S. is committed by white nationalists (many of whom support Trump).

U.S. history is replete with racism as public policy. It has been more often our history than not, and the era since 1965 has been unusual inasmuch as there has been widespread public pushback against the use of race for policy purposes. Trump’s movement is an attempt to see whether that widespread U.S. consensus of the past few decades can be reversed. Just as the Ku Klux Klan took over the Democratic Party in the 1920s, including the whole state of Indiana, so white nationalism has taken over the Republican Party today, including the GOP majority on SCOTUS.

As I have argued in the past, there have been at least six major times in American history when people were excluded on the basis of race or religion (religion is tied up with race in the racialist imaginary).

Here is my list, to which the Roberts court has just added our seventh:

1. Chinese Buddhists: Both racism and religious bigotry built up toward Chinese-Americans brought in from 1849 to build the trans-American railroad. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first time a whole people was excluded from the United States. In the prejudiced language of the day, that Chinese were Buddhists, Confucianists or Taoists, i.e., “pagans” or “heathens” from an evangelical point of view, was one of the reasons they should be kept out of the country. The total exclusion lasted until 1943, when 100 Chinese a year began being admitted, which was not much different from total exclusion. In 1965, the Immigration Act ended racial and religious exclusions based on racism and religious fanaticism, including of Chinese. Chinese-Americans have made enormous contributions to the United States, despite the long decades during which they were excluded or disrespected.

2. Japanese Buddhists: In 1907-08, the U.S. and Japan concluded a “gentlemen’s agreement” whereby Japan would limit the number of passports it issued to Japanese wanting to come to the United States. In turn, the city of San Francisco agreed to end the legal segregation of Japanese-Americans in that city (yes, they had their very own Jim Crow). Not satisfied with the agreement, in 1924, racist congressmen ended Japanese immigration completely. This action angered Japan and set the two countries on a path of enmity.

3. Indian Hindus, Sikhs and other Asians: Not satisfied with measures against Buddhists, white Christians next went after Hindus and Sikhs. The 1917, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act excluded from immigration everyone from the continent of Asia—it especially aimed at Indians, especially Sikhs, but also included Koreans, Vietnamese, Thais, Indonesians, etc. The provision in the act barring “polygamists” was aimed at Muslims. Would-be Muslim immigrants were asked at their port of entry if they believed a man could have more than one wife, and if they said yes, were turned away. Japanese were not part of the act only because the above-mentioned gentlemen’s agreement already mostly excluded them. Filipinos were not excluded because the Philippines were then an American territory (i.e., colony).

4. Syrian-Lebanese: In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan reappeared on the national stage and agitated against immigrants, Catholics and Jews. The Klan infiltrated the Democratic Party, took it over and won the whole state of Indiana. The racist 1924 Immigration Act set country quotas based on the percentage of Americans from that country already present in 1890. One consequence of basing the quotas on 1890 rather than, as was originally proposed, 1910, was that populations that came in big numbers during the Great Migration of 1880-1924 were often given low quotas. Populations that came in the 18th century or the mid 19th (in the latter case, Germans) had relatively large quotas. Syria-Lebanon (which were not separated until the French conquest of 1920) were given a quota of 100, even though tens of thousands of Lebanese came to the United States, 10 percent  of them Muslim, during the Great Migration. That community produced the great Lebanese-American writer and artist, Kahlil Gibran.

5. Other Middle Easterners, including Armenians: The 1924 Nazi-style quotas based on “race,” which mostly lasted until 1965, excluded most of the Middle East. The quota for Egypt? One hundred. Palestine? One hundred. Turkey? One hundred. Even the persecuted Armenians were given only 100 spaces annually. The racial hierarchies visible in the 1924 act fed into an increasing concern with eugenics, with fears of decadent races and a determination to strengthen the master race by forbidding intermarriage and even by experimenting on live human beings.

6. Jews: In the 1930s, when it would have mattered, the U.S. government excluded Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany from coming to America. As I wrote elsewhere, “The U.S. in the 1930s did betray its ideals as a refuge for people yearning to be free. The episode of the SS St. Louis, a ship full of 900 Jewish refugees that got close enough to Miami to see its lights before being turned back to Europe, epitomized this failure. A third of the passengers were later murdered by the Nazis. One Jewish refugee the U.S. did take in was Albert Einstein. How would we not have been better off if we’d had more like him?” Racists of that time argued that German Jews shouldn’t be admitted because Nazi agents might covertly exist among them.

The only way to undo Trump’s Muslim ban, and to begin to undo the untold damage he’s done to the country, is to organize and canvass and publish and elect the opposition in 2018 and 2020. The courts are not going to save us from Trumpism. The GOP Congress is not going to save us from Trumpism. Civility is not going to save us from Trumpism. We’re on our own, friends. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has shown the way.

 

Prominent Democrat Loses in N.Y. Primary; 3 Trump Picks Win GOP Contests

NEW YORK — As Donald Trump’s party came together, a 28-year-old liberal activist ousted top House Democrat Joe Crowley in the president’s hometown Tuesday night, a stunning defeat that suddenly forced Democrats to confront their own internal divisions.

Crowley, the No. 4 House Democrat and until Tuesday considered a possible candidate to replace Nancy Pelosi as leader, becomes the first Democratic incumbent to fall this primary season. He was beaten by underfunded challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former Bernie Sanders organizer who caught fire with the party’s left wing.

Crowley’s loss echoed across the political world, sending the unmistakable message that divisions between the Democratic Party’s pragmatic and more liberal wings may be widening heading into the high-stakes November midterm elections. It also exposed a generational divide among Democrats still struggling with their identity in the Trump era.

“The community is ready for a movement of economic and social justice. That is what we tried to deliver,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview with The Associated Press. She said she knew she could connect with the district, which includes Queens and part of the Bronx. “I live in this community. I organized in this community. I felt the absence of the incumbent. I knew he didn’t have a strong presence.”

Trump, on social media at least, seemed equally excited about Crowley’s defeat.

“Perhaps he should have been nicer, and more respectful, to his President!” Trump tweeted, oddly taking credit for a victory by a candidate more liberal than Crowley. He added: “The Democrats are in Turmoil!”

All in all, Trump had reason to celebrate Tuesday night as all three of his endorsed candidates survived primary challenges that could have embarrassed him and the party.

Those included New York Rep. Dan Donovan, who defeated convicted felon Michael Grimm in New York City’s only Republican stronghold, and former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who once branded Trump “a fraud” but has warmed to the president in the past two years.

Yet none of the day’s contests mattered more to Trump than the one in South Carolina.

Gov. Henry McMaster, one of the president’s earliest and strongest supporters, survived an unusually tough challenge from a political newcomer, self-made Republican millionaire John Warren.

The White House went all-in for the governor in recent days, dispatching the president and the vice president to the state in an effort to prevent a political debacle.

Trump’s party did just that on Tuesday, though the president has a mixed track record when weighing in on party primaries: His preferred candidates have suffered stinging losses in Alabama and western Pennsylvania in recent months.

With the November general election a little more than four months away, more than half the states had selected their candidates after the day’s final votes were counted across South Carolina, New York, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Maryland, Colorado and Utah.

History suggests that Trump’s Republican Party, like the parties of virtually every first-term president dating back to Ronald Reagan in 1982, will suffer losses this fall.

Yet Crowley’s loss suggests that Democrats must overcome intraparty divisions if they hope to take control of Congress and key governors’ offices nationwide.

In New York, Ocasio-Cortez cast Crowley as an elitist out of touch with the community.

“This race is about people versus money. We’ve got people, they’ve got money,” Ocasio-Cortez said in biographical web ad that followed her through mundane New York life, dressing for work, walking, changing into high heels on the subway platform. “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office.”

Trump got more good news elsewhere in New York City as Grimm failed in his political comeback attempt at the hands of the Trump-backed incumbent Donovan.

Grimm had held the Staten Island seat until 2015, when he pleaded guilty to knowingly hiring immigrants who were in the country illegally to work at his Manhattan restaurant and cooking the books to hide income and evade taxes.

More than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away in deep-red Utah, former Massachusetts Gov. Romney defeated little-known state Rep. Mike Kennedy, who questioned Romney’s conservative credentials and ability to work well with the president. Romney, too, was endorsed by Trump despite his aggressive criticism of the president before his election.

In a weekend op-ed published in The Salt Lake Tribune, Romney wrote that the Trump administration’s policies have exceeded his expectations, but he pledged to “continue to speak out when the president says or does something which is divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.”

Trump cheered Romney’s win on social media: “I look forward to working together – there is so much good to do. A great and loving family will be coming to D.C.”

Not to be forgotten: races to determine gubernatorial candidates in Maryland, Colorado and Oklahoma.

In Maryland, former NAACP President Ben Jealous seized the Democratic governor’s nomination. He would become the state’s first African-American governor if he beats Republican incumbent Gov. Larry Hogan this fall.

In Colorado, five-term Democratic congressman Jared Polis won the Democratic nomination in the race to replace outgoing Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper. And in Oklahoma, former state Attorney General Drew Edmondson beat former state Sen. Connie Johnson to win the Democratic nomination in the race to be the state’s next governor.

Oklahoma voters also backed the medicinal use of marijuana despite opposition from law enforcement and business, faith and political leaders.

But Crowley’s defeat overshadowed much of the day’s developments.

He becomes the first congressional leader to fall in a party primary since former Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was stunned by unknown conservative Dave Brat in 2014’s midterm election.

That loss, and perhaps this one, cemented the GOP’s sharp shift away from the political center and foreshadowed the anti-establishment fervor that fueled Trump’s election in 2016.

And while Trump cheered Crowley’s downfall, so did liberal leaders who backed Ocasio-Cortez.

“These results are also a shot across the bow of the Democratic establishment in Washington: a young, diverse, and boldly progressive Resistance Movement isn’t waiting to be anointed by the powers that be,” said Matt Blizek, of MoveOn.

___

Kinnard reported from South Carolina. AP writers Brian Witte in Annapolis, Maryland, and Lindsay Whitehurst in Salt Lake City contributed.

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Find all of our primary coverage here: https://apnews.com/tag/Primaryelections

Why Work Isn’t Working in Trump’s America

Donald Trump’s popularity rose this spring to a new personal best—45 percent (up from a dismal 38 percent in April). The boost was because “the U.S. unemployment rate has hit lows not seen in decades,” according to a June Gallup Poll. So runs a common story in the dominant corporate news media in recent weeks.

There is likely some truth in the narrative. Americans have long tended to give presidents higher approval ratings when the jobless rate drops. Official unemployment continues to fall for reasons that have little to do with Trump (it’s really about the timeworn ebbs and flows of the capitalist business cycle), though he and his Republican Party partners are quite happy to take credit.

But Trump’s new high in approval remains quite low by historical standards. Insofar as a president’s popularity reflects labor market conditions, his persistent low approval rating may have something to do with the difference between the official U.S. unemployment rate (U3) that is typically reported in U.S. media and the “real unemployment” rate (U6) that Federal Reserve chiefs have long recognized as the more relevant measure. The U3 number defines the unemployed population narrowly as those jobless people who have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks and are currently available for work. It is currently at 3.8 percent, quite low by historical standards. It hasn’t gone below 4 percent since 2000.

The “real” U6 measure expands the definition of the unemployed to include involuntarily part-time workers and “discouraged” and other “marginally attached” workers who have been available for employment in the last year but have given up on finding work for which they are qualified. By this measure, U.S. unemployment is 7.6 percent.

Real unemployment would be over 9 percent if the 2.3 million people kept behind bars in the U.S. (more than 1 in 110 of all Americans and 6 percent of all black men in their 30s) were factored in. The United States’ globally unmatched and racist mass incarceration system artificially suppresses the U.S. unemployment rate (especially black and Latino joblessness) to a significant degree.

Meanwhile, the overall U.S. labor force is shrinking, something that also helps suppress official unemployment statistics. The civilian U.S. labor force participation rate (LFPR)—the percentage of all work-eligible, nonmilitary Americans 16 years and older who are employed or actively seeking work—is currently , “everybody works and still can’t make ends meet.”

Which brings us to the unpleasant subject of wages. As Dolack reports, the percentage of total national income going to workers (as opposed to investors) has fallen significantly over the last half century (from 52 percent in 1969 to 43 percent today). If the U.S. labor market is so “tight” now, under Trump, however, then surely U.S. wages must be getting made great again, right? In theory, yes. But that’s not what’s happening.

As Bloomberg reported in early June, citing data from Trump’s Labor Department, “average hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, were unchanged in May from a year earlier, even as nominal pay accelerated to a 2.7 percent annual gain from 2.6 percent in April. For production and nonsupervisory workers, real average hourly earnings fell 0.1 percent from a year earlier.” When you also factor in the overconcentration of wage growth in the most well-paid segments of the workforce, it is clear that U.S. wages are heading nowhere near what it would take to boost many Americans out of poverty and near-poverty (“low income”), categories that currently describe a remarkable 140 million Americans, equivalent to 44 percent of the U.S. population. The ratio of CEO pay to workers’ wages now averages 339 to 1.

U.S. job growth for years has been “strong,” but for what kinds of positions? Low-wage and often temporary McJobs with no prospects for advancement and benefits. Jobs that pay so poorly that hundreds of millions of Americans have to borrow money or supplement full-time employment incomes with food stamps and visits to lack $500 in savings) are compelled to sell and degrade their species-defining human capacity for engaged and creative labor for the basic “instrumental” purpose of obtaining enough money to buy necessities for themselves and their families. Their own senses of how and why humanity should interchange with itself and nature through the collective labor process are coldly irrelevant under capitalism. The nature and purpose of the tasks workers perform is, in Marx’s words, “external to the worker” and is therefore “forced labor.” Such work, Marx observed, “is not the gratification of a need”—of the natural human drive to produce or provide something useful and/or beautiful—but “merely the means of satisfying needs external to it.”

“External labor, labor in which man alienates himself,” Marx wrote, “is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification.” Such “estranged labor,” as he called it, lurks at the hidden and dark heart of modern dehumanization.

To make matters worse, the long hours of voiceless and alienating “mortification” required to get by in a low-wage economy leaves workers with too little time and energy for meaningful participation in what’s left of U.S. democracy beyond the workplace. (The United States has the longest working hours among the world’s rich nations.) This relates back to their workplace experience, where the despotism of the bosses is empowered by corporate-captive government policies that favor employers over employees within and beyond the jobs. Time, as is too rarely noted (but as the pioneers of the U.S. labor movement knew quite well), is a democracy issue.

Even the instrumental goal of getting wages through employment is hostage to the timeworn vagaries of capitalist accumulation and business cycles. Nobody should be so dull and historically blind as to believe that the Obama-Trump job expansion isn’t headed for a major reversal. That’s not how capitalism rolls. Nobody knows exactly when the next “correction” or, as seems distinctly possible, collapse will occur, but the fact that it is coming and will be traumatic should not be in doubt. All the standard signs are there—extreme levels of inequality, massive debt, outlandish price-earnings ratios, massive profits based largely on speculative and parasitic nonproductive investment and over-easy credit. Millions of Americans will lose their jobs and be plunged into despair when the Trump recession hits. As Hedges recently reflected:

[The currently reigning] circular use of money to make and hoard money is what Karl Marx called ‘fictitious capital.’ The steady increase in public debt, corporate debt, credit card debt and student loan debt will ultimately lead, as [the Wall Street veteran and financial expert] Nomi Prins writes, to ‘a tipping point—when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds’ … [and] the next financial crash … won’t be like the last one. This is because, as [Prins] says, ‘there is no Plan B.’ Interest rates can’t go any lower. There has been no growth in the real economy. The next time, there will be no way out.

When the crash hits, Hedges writes, rage will “explode … into a firestorm” and “the political freaks will appear, ones that will make Trump look sagacious and benign.”

On the positive side, the breakdown will slow the pace of capitalogenic carbon emissions that are destroying livable ecology before our very eyes. Americans will have more time on their hands—time to organize for the nationalization of the reckless and parasitic big banks, which are widely and justly hated across the land (see Glen Ford’s recent Left Forum talk on this topic here). With the banks stripped of their parasitic lords and function and brought under popular control, we can use the nation’s worker-generated economic surplus to move the nation off of profit, war, empire, inequality and ecocide and on to the paths of democracy, social justice, peace and environmental sustainability within and beyond the workplace.

An essential part of this “radical restructuring of society itself” (what Martin Luther King called in his final essay “the real issue to be faced” and the real challenge posed by “the black revolution”) will be the widespread creation of what the clever Marxist economist Richard Wolff calls worker self-directed enterprises: firms organized “such that workers become their own bosses.”

Wolff explains:

Specifically, that means placing the workers in the position of their own collective board of directors, rather than having directors be non-workers selected by major shareholders … the development of a major—and, if possible, prevailing—sector of the economy that is comprised of enterprises (offices, factories, farms, and stores) in which the employees democratically perform the following key enterprise activities: (a) divide all the labors to be performed, (b) determine what is to be produced, how it is to be produced, and where it is to be produced, and (c) decide on the use and distribution of the output or revenues (if output is monetized) therefrom.

Ordinary workers and citizens deserve the basic human right to be in charge of their own work lives—of how their core human labor powers interact with nature and society. This is democracy and dis-alienation 101. It is also survival and sustainability 101. We have endured a half-millennium of capitalism, of societies and nations ruled (whatever their varying and changing outward political forms, including “parliamentary democracy”) by unelected and overlapping dictatorships of money, class and empire.

This profit-, accumulation- and growth-addicted regime has brought us to previously unimaginable levels of social disparity—three absurdly rich people now have as much wealth between them as the bottom half of the U.S. population—paired with a pace of environmental destruction that poses the near-term risk of human extinction. It’s long past time to, in Marx’s words, “expropriate the expropriators.”

Justice Ginsburg and Mr. Rogers: Antidotes to Trumpism

At a time when the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. lacks a superego and the characters on multiplex screens mostly are superheroes, it’s not easy to find individuals of judgment or of human scale.

Still, if you want to avoid the bombast and gigantism of cable news and of movies like “Avengers: Infinity War,” “The Incredibles” and “Jurassic World,” then look for the soft-spoken, life-size documentaries “RBG” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” One is an affectionate biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the five-foot giant of the U.S. Supreme Court and popular embodiment of liberal values. The other is an intimate portrait of Fred Rogers, the six-foot pillar of children’s television and a lifelong Republican.

Politics is not the point of either film. RBG’s career-long commitment to fairness and Rogers’ to empathy make the indefatigable justice, 85, and the late TV host, who would have been 90 this year, spiritual bedfellows. At the box office, these hers-and-his documentaries are the surprise art-house hits of the summer, ordinarily a time when superheroes and satiric comedies sell all the tickets.

The draw of these two modest documentaries is of particular interest, says box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian of ComScore, because it reflects the desire of moviegoers “to dive deeper into the human condition via the life stories of two notable and inspiring cultural figures in the midst of a very divisive and politically-charged climate.” Hear, hear.

Eight weeks out, “RBG” earned $11 million on fewer than 300 screens; after three weeks “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” scored nearly $2 million on 348 screens. While it’s fair to say that neither is likely to gross as much as one of Michael Moore’s explicitly liberal critiques of Republicans (e.g., “Fahrenheit 9/11”) or Dinesh D’Souza’s conservative takedowns of Democrats (e.g., “Obama’s America”), by the evidence of diverse crowds I’ve seen at both it’s equally true that neither “RBG” nor “Neighbor” preaches to the choir.

Those of diametrically opposite political beliefs can agree with one of the justice’s early arguments before the Supreme Court that a widower denied survivor rights benefits by Social Security—which extended those benefits to widows—was an example of how gender inequality harms men as well as women. Likewise, those of differing convictions can embrace Mr. Rogers’ gentle modeling of inclusion when, at a time many protested integration of public swimming pools, on television he soaked his feet in a wading pool alongside an African-American to show how easy and natural it could—and should—be.

Incrementalists both, the justice and the TV host embraced two principles: that slow and steady wins the race and the debate; and that when one adopts a confrontational tone, the listener hears anger; when one adopts a conversational tone, the listener is more likely to hear what the speaker has to say.

Today, when everyone from cable television hosts and guests to congresspeople appear to be yelling over each other, it’s bracing to remember that Ginsburg and Rogers both emerged on the American scene at a comparably polarized moment in American history. “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” made its television debut in 1968, as anti-war protesters faced off against the Silent Majority. Ginsburg attained public prominence in 1972, when she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU.

Across America both documentaries play to sell-out crowds. It’s as if they were intentionally designed to mend the frayed social fabric or engineered as an antidote to Trumpism. Kudos to “RBG” directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen and to “Neighbor” director Morgan Neville for making movies that remind us of the importance of comity, community and consensus.

Donald Trump Is a Test of Our Patriotism

On this coming Fourth of July, it’s worth pondering the true meaning of American patriotism – as opposed to the malignant, distorted view of it propounded by Donald J. Trump.

For Trump, the central challenge of American patriotism is to secure our borders. “Without borders, there can be no nation,” he says.

But excluding foreigners has never been a dominant part of American patriotism. For most of its existence America has been relatively open to people from the rest of the world, especially those fleeing tyranny and violence.

America’s core struggle has been one of inclusion, not exclusion. We have strived to extend equal citizenship to Native Americans, African Americans, women, and LGBTQs.

The poems of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and the songs of Woody Guthrie, expressed loving devotion to America while turning that love into a demand for justice.

“This land is your land, this land is my land” sang Guthrie. “Let America be America again,” pleaded Hughes: “The land that never has been yet–/And yet must be – the land where everyone is free./The land that’s mine – the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME –.”

Trump’s patriotism centers on symbolic displays of loyalty like standing for the national anthem and waving the American flag.

But such displays haven’t been at the center of American patriotism, either. Historically, American patriotism has meant taking a fair share of the burdens of keeping the nation going.

This includes volunteering time and energy to improving the community and country. It has meant paying taxes in full rather than lobbying for lower taxes, seeking tax loopholes, or squirreling away money abroad.

It also means refraining from making political contributions that corrupt our politics, and blowing the whistle on abuses of power even at the risk of losing one’s job.

Real patriotism involves strengthening our democracy – defending the right to vote and ensuring more Americans are heard, not claiming without evidence that millions of voted fraudulently and pushing for laws that make it harder for blacks and Latinos to vote.

True patriots don’t inundate government with industry lobbyists, attack the freedom of the press, criticize judges who disagree with them, or fill the airwaves with lies. They don’t direct employers to fire employees who exercise their freedom of speech.

True patriots don’t court foreign dictators, and don’t excuse tyranny by denigrating America.

When asked whether Vladimir Putin is a killer, Trump responded “you think our country’s so innocent?” When asked about Turkish strongman Erdogan’s disdain for civil liberties, Trump said “when the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.”

True patriots don’t fuel racist, religious or ethnic divisions. They aren’t homophobic or sexist. To the contrary, true patriots seek to confirm and strengthen and celebrate the “we” in “we the people of the United States.”

Trump is the first United States president to use the term “we” to refer only to his supporters. “My supporters are the smartest, strongest, most hard working and most loyal that we have seen in our countries history,” he tweeted recently. “As we get stronger, so does our country.”

A majority of today’s Americans do worry that the nation is losing its national identity. But that identity has never been centered on our support for a particular president or his policies.

Nor, more fundamentally, has our identity depended on the whiteness of our skin or the uniformity of our ethnicity.

Our national identity has been our shared ideals.

If we are losing our national identity it is because we are losing those ideals: a commitment to the rule of law, to our democratic institutions, to truth, to tolerance of our differences, to equal political rights and equal opportunity, to participating in our civic life and making necessary sacrifices for these ideals we hold in common.

We must share these ideals if we are to have a functioning society. Without them, there is no America.

Trump is doing everything he can to destroy these ideals. We must do everything we can to strengthen them.

This is the true test of our patriotism.

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