Join us for this Zoom event to hear from U.S. citizens who attended the January 10 inauguration of Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo, and to discuss how we can build solidarity with left and socialist movements in Latin American. It will address the significance of the Nicaraguan election, participation of representatives of other Western Hemisphere countries and peace and solidarity movements, and the future of Nicaragua. All three participants are long time Central American solidarity activists.

Luci Murphy, Claudia Jones School for Political Education.

Teri Mattson, Code Pink Latin America campaigner, host of CODEPINK's weekly YouTube program "WTF is Going on in Latin American and the Caribbean," and board member of Marin Interfaith Task Force on the Americas.

Karl Kramer, member of CCDS national coordinating committee.

For more information, email-[email protected]

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

by Karl Kramer, member of the National Coordinating Committee

Augusto Sandino, the revolutionary leader of the 1930s after whom the Frente Sandinista para Liberación Nacional (FSLN) was named, said "only the workers and peasants will fight to the finish."

CCDS was sent an invitation to the toma del president, or inauguration, of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo of the FSLN, which was held on January 10. I attended as the CCDS representative, and along with members of other organizations from the United States that had long fought against U.S. imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean, was warmly greeted in a manner that you would expect for foreign dignitaries and diplomats, although none of us had any formal role with the U.S. government.

In fact, the Biden administration had boycotted the inauguration declaring it illegitimate and just before it took place launched another round of sanctions to punish the country.

My main take-away was that President Ortega, Vice President Murillo and the FSLN have the widespread support of workers, campesinos (peasant farmers) and youth. Anyone who believes there is a loyal left opposition to the FSLN is on the wrong side of history.

A splinter group had split from the FSLN and formed the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS), or Sandinista Renovation Movement, which now calls itself Unamos. A number of intellectuals and artists left with the split. A couple of prominent members are Gioconda Belli, a renowned poet, and Gabriela Selsa, the daughter of Eduardo Selsa, an Argentinian who wrote a book about Sandino. They are both leaders of PEN Nicaragua. Many intellectuals in the United States have been swayed to support their cause.

Gioconda Belli wrote an editorial for the Los Angeles Times, which ran on November 5, during the Nicaraguan elections. A key line in the editorial is her answer to the charge that people being arrested in Nicaragua are traitors selling out the country to the imperialist United States. "They knew these lies would resonate with historical truths, even though the U.S. has changed its tune vis-a-vis Nicaragua in the last decade and even sent millions of dollars in aid to the Ortega government until the 2018 crackdown," she wrote. So, in the view of Belli, U.S. imperialism is a thing of the past.

I had arranged with a friend in San Francisco to meet with her sister who lived in Managua to get her views of the events of 2018. Over lunch in downtown Managua, she told me that her husband is a friend of the husband of Suyén Barahona, the president of MRS. They witnessed her paying maras, or gang members, from El Salvador at the UNAM, or national university, to appear as students as they launched violent attacks burning public buses, ambulances, health clinics and schools, the very things that symbolize the gains made by the Ortega administration since its election in 2006. It is well known that massive funding was coming from the United States through the National Endowment for Democracy.

This needs to be seen in the context of the new model of hybrid warfare that was developed during the 2014 U.S.-European Union-sponsored coup in Ukraine and used against Venezuela and Cuba. Some of the features are violent street demonstrations, hidden snipers, cyber warfare and mass disinformation, particularly on social media, to create economic sabotage, political instability and conditions for regime change.

An analogy to the narrative created in the U.S. media about the Nicaraguan elections would be that participants in the January 6 Capitol attack were arrested because they are opponents of Biden and presidential hopefuls for 2024. It was pointed out that those arrested had not filed candidacy papers or were even considered as possible candidates by any of the political parties that were on the ballot. There were plenty of choices of candidates on the ballot.

I met with Domingo Francisco Perez, the General Secretary of the UNE, the government employees’ union, which is a member of the FNT labor federation, which includes unions that represent health care workers, teachers, factory workers, construction workers, university professors and administrators, as well as small fishing cooperatives and street vendors in the informal economy. He said that the percentage of unionization in the country was 35 percent of those involved in productive activity. He said the labor movement is strongly supportive of President Ortega and a part of the FSLN. Gustavo Porras, the president of the national assembly, is the leader of the FNT labor federation. I talked to people on a U.S. delegation which met with the Asociacion de Trabajadores del Campo (ATC), the organization of campesinos, who said they were strongly supportive of the gains made by President Ortega. Thousands of energetic and enthusiastic members of the FSLN youth and students attended the inauguration, showing the administration’s popularity among youth which overwhelmingly voted for the Frente.

The inauguration highlighted the presence of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, President Miguel Dias Canela of Cuba, Vice President Cao Jianming of the National People’s Congress of China, and a delegation representing Iran. This represents a multipolar ecosystem of mutual support in which countries can sustain themselves in the face of an onslaught by the United States and the European Union seeking global hegemony. There also were representatives of Guatemala, El Salvador, the two previous FMLN presidents of El Salvador Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sanchez Ceren, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Mexico, Bolivia, Belize, Ecuador, and India.

President Ortega recognized on stage as representative of the United States, Brian Willson, who in 1987 lost his legs sitting on train tracks to block trains carrying munitions destined for Central America at the Concord Naval Weapons Station in California. The train conductors sped up the train when they saw the peaceful demonstrators on the tracks, severing the legs of Willson who was the last to jump. Also recognized on the stage were United Steel Workers attorney Dan Kavalik, Luci Murphy of the Claudia Jones School for Political Education, Margaret Kimberly of the Black Agenda Report and Jemima Pierre, both of the Black Alliance for Peace.

Kavalik told me later that because Willson represents such a moral authority in the solidarity movement that he was under tremendous pressure to support MRS. When Daniel Ellsberg’s daughter contacted him, he told her to "fuck off.""

Honoring Anne and Carl Braden and their stand against white supremacy. January 2022

Fourth Monday in September, watch here: IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY AND HIGHER EDUCATION

Platypus Review 143 | February 2022

Daniel Deweese: Could you say a little about your political history? What motivated your interest in the history of American communism and its relation to the black struggle?

Timothy Johnson: I've been involved in the Left and particularly in the African American movement since I was a teenager in high school. I was involved in organizing around various community issues. Most people my age — I'm 69 — were first radicalized by Malcolm X. I remember reading, when I was beginning high school, Malcolm X's autobiography, and an article that appeared in the magazine Sepia, which was a low rent version of Ebony magazine. There was a line in Sepia that said something to the effect of, even though Malcolm X was a racist, he was not racist in his readings and two of his most liked authors were Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant, two people I had never heard of, so I went to the high school library and asked if they have anything by Immanuel Kant. The librarian brought me the Critique of Pure Reason, which I read, but it didn't have anything relevant to what I was interested in at the time. I went back later and said, “have you got anything by Karl Marx?”, and the only thing they had was a copy of Capital, which I read, and it made sense. If people approach it just as a regular book instead of some real involved theoretical piece, it's much more readily understandable. This was around the time the Black Panther Party was beginning. I read something by them, and they said that they were Marxist-Leninist, and I thought “this is an interesting organization”. I did some work with them around the Ohio area, went to college, and lived in several different cities involved in various kinds of work, but mostly smaller collectives in any given city, mostly based in the African American community and most self-identifying as a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist. In the early 1980s, I joined the Communist Party and worked for the newspaper in California, which is the People's World, which then merged into the People's Daily World on the East Coast. I was a reporter in Los Angeles for a year or so, and then moved to New York to edit the paper's magazine section.

DD: What was the Black Belt thesis?

TJ: The Black Belt thesis was essentially a result of a newly developed communist movement trying to come to terms with how to approach the question of racism and African American oppression theoretically. Of course, they unfortunately were burdened by the Socialist Party's approach, because most of the people in the newly founded Communist Party in 1919 came out of the socialist movement, and the socialist movement had a varied approach. On the one hand, some people thought that the struggle against racism was an important part of the class struggle. On the other hand, you had people that were essentially racist and saw no need to address this issue. A large group of people in the middle said, we need to talk about the question of racism, but we do not need a specific program because, primarily, we do not want to alienate white workers. That was pretty much the Socialist Party position in the South, where they said, if we say anything that speaks towards the equality of African Americans, we are automatically going to lose all the white socialists in the South and a large number of white socialists in the North.

In that period, adopting that position led to the U.S. Communist Party's greatest organizing of any group on the Left in the African American community. Within that context, they took up the issue of the Scottsboro defendants and turned that into an international issue. They took up cases of lynching and turned those into international issues at the same time in the North. They fought for voting rights, for housing, non-discrimination, employment non-discrimination, for the unions being open to African American workers, and for unions taking positions against racism. An interesting side note is that even though this kind of Black Belt theory originated through the Communist International, U.S. communists, and communists from other parts of the world, it is also something that has always captured the imagination of the African American movement. Particularly the nationalists, because a little after the party announced the position of self-determination for the Black Belt, the Nation of Islam, led by Elijah Muhammad, started in Detroit where the party had a heavy presence. Their position was, essentially, this is the black nation, and if you ever look at Muhammad Speaks, which used to be the name of their paper, one of their demands was X number of states in the South, where black people are majority, and that was directly taken from the Communist Party and the Comintern position. Read more

Fight Back!: One month ago, you held the second national conference of the Alliance. What came out of that?

Frank Chapman: Quite a bit came out of it; but let me first address why it was important to have it. December 4th and 5th was just over two years since we held the re-founding conference in 2019. We held the re-founding conference six months before the outbreak of the George Floyd rebellion. At the time, we realized that the struggle for community control of the police was at the epicenter of the Black Liberation movement.

Fight Back!: What’s happening in the struggle against police crimes nationally?

Chapman: 22 cities came to our Second National Conference, all of which had participated in the rebellion. It was very revealing to look at the report backs organizers in these cities gave:

Adrian Romero, Utah Against Police Brutality, Salt Lake City: Police murdered Darien Hunt, permanently disabled Abdi Muhammad, both teenage boys. We fought for a police accountability council, the local legislature blocked it and made it illegal in retaliation, but we have continued to fight, bringing thousands of people onto the streets.

Sydney Loving, Dallas Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression: We led the largest protest in Dallas history during the 2020 uprising, with Black women and families leading the march. This led to the resignation of their police chief for her crimes against demonstrators.

Omar Flores, Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (MAARPR): The NAARPR conference in 2019 gave us direction and certainty of what needs to be done. Taleavia Cole, sister of Alvin Cole, came to the conference, and has been organizing with MAARPR since the uprising. Alvin Cole was a 17-year-old Black child who was shot by Wauwatosa PD. The family of Jonathan Tubby, an Indigenous youth killed in Green Bay, also travelled with us to this conference.

Regina Joseph, Tallahassee Community Action Committee (TCAC): NAARPR’s first call to action coincided with the week Tony McDade, a trans man, was murdered by TPD. The second call to action coincided with the George Floyd rebellion.

Angel Buechner, Twin Cities Coalition for Justice for Jamar (TCC4J): TCC4J is boots on the ground for community control of the police, setting up CPAC tables in neighborhoods and parks. Angel introduced a new chant: Rain, sleet, or snow, we demand community control!

Sol Marquez, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Centro CSO, Los Angeles, CA: We came to this conference with the family of David Ordaz, Jr., killed by East L.A. Sheriff Dept., his sister Hilda, his daughter Emily, and his widow Jazmine. We uplift Chicano victims of police brutality because police violence has to do with Black folks, and it also has to do with Chicanos, Latinos, and Indigenous people.

Carlos Montes, Centro CSO: In LA we had hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in the George Floyd rebellion. There was a rash of killings in the Black community in LA and also in the Boyle Heights community. The family of Anthony Vargas got involved not only in advocating on behalf of their son, but calling in to get rid of Sheriff Villanueva, and fighting for community control to give power to civilians.

Neal Jefferson, Jacksonville Community Action Committee (JCAC): Led the largest protest for the Black freedom struggle in Jacksonville history in the summer of 2020, over 10,000 people hit the streets on a rainy day. We have worked with the families of Jamee Johnson, Vernell Bing, Kwame Jones, Leah Baker, Reginald Boston Jr., and others.

Fight Back!: The call to the NAARPR conference stated that riding on the crest of the George Floyd rebellion, NAARPR has emerged as a mass movement for community control of the police. Can you tell that story?

Chapman: Here are some more aspects of it: what we have demonstrated in the wake of the rebellion is that Black and brown communities throughout this country are ready to take up this fight. They’re sick and tired of the police tyranny going on in their communities, and able, willing and ready to engage in the struggle for community control of the police.

Everywhere throughout this country, the police are actively engaged in a conspiracy to either stop the Black Liberation movement from happening at all, or to squash it where it has emerged. We must continue to organize and be prepared to wage the struggle for community control of the police. This is a very important democratic demand of our people. Read more

Without a new approach to manufacturing, we may protect the environment better but continue to reinforce racial and economic inequality.

By Carl Davidson, Bill Fletcher Jr. and Nina Gregg

A vital next step is getting 100 or more members of Congress to sign on to the bill and a parallel process in the Senate. The designers of the legislation—a core team of progressive electoral leaders; advanced manufacturing advocates; trade union veterans; community, faith, and education leaders; and solidarity economy thinkers—have launched the Manufacturing

Workers or minority entrepreneurs can take over hundreds of thousands of viable inner-city and rural manufacturing firms whose white owners are retiring. With adequate funding and support, worker-cooperative ownership can succeed by learning from the Union Coop model designed by the United Steelworkers and from the example of the longtime achievements of the Mondragon coops in the Basque region of Spain.

Carl Davidson--Carl Davidson, a New Left writer going back to the 1960s, is currently active in Reimagine Beaver County and Progressive Democrats of America and manages the SolidarityEconomy.net website.

Bill Fletcher Jr--Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a longtime trade unionist and international activist, co-author of Solidarity Divided, and author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” – And Twenty Other Myths about Unions.

Nina Gregg--Nina Gregg consults with social justice organizations, advocacy groups and educators and is on the Leadership Team of Blount County SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) and on the board of Three Rivers Market Cooperative in Knoxville, Tennessee

By Rafael Pizarro

I was in New York one morning in May of last year, when flowers were blooming and things seemed (incorrectly, as it turned out) to be opening up for the first time since the pandemic, and was on line at the Met Museum with a friend. Then I got a text: the Biden administration was closing the ICE detention center in my county. A group I belong to in southeastern Massachusetts where I live, Bristol County for Correctional Justice, had been fighting the local white-supremacist sheriff over his treatment of people held by ICE since they opened the facility after Trump was elected and created the locally run detention programs. After a riot instigated by the sheriff that brutalized detainees and sent a couple to the hospital, we demanded an independent investigation. Our voices were joined by other community groups and by elected leaders, including our senators, Warren and Markey. This spurred the Attorney General to conduct an investigation that found that the sheriff and his officers had violated the detainees’ human rights. It was closed soon after that.

There would be no visit to the museum (so I missed my chance to see Alice Neel’s first big retrospective). I spent the rest of the day on the phone with reporters and allies. We felt, as I said to reporters and they quoted, “ecstatic” over the closure, especially since the majority of the inmates had already been freed altogether by a federal judge due to COVID (and that Republican judge’s opinion that immigrants shouldn’t be held in prison), or made to wait at home for hearings with a tracking device, rather than sitting in prison. This means that the vast majority weren’t just re-incarcerated, they were let out in one way or another. From an original 150, in the end, only seven remained in custody, at last check.

We celebrated the victory, but as only one stop in our struggle. While the sheriff reserved his worst treatment for immigrants, not surprisingly he’s just as brutal to other people held in jails here, most of whom are pre-trial, and the vast majority of these just couldn’t pay their bail. We have been working to expose conditions at the Ash Street Jail, the oldest continuously operating jail in the U.S. It’s so old that Lizzie Borden had been held there. One inmate told us that he’d been suffering from a hip injury for months and was still waiting to see a doctor. Note: after some inquiries from reporters, he has now been scheduled to see a doctor. Sewage seeps into cells and rats and vermin are common.

Nevertheless, we are very hopeful. Just as we were able to shine a spotlight on the abuses at the ICE detention center, we’ve been able to get very good coverage of our struggle on behalf of others held in our local jails. Much of this is focused on exposing the sheriff. Recently, a national coalition BCCJ belongs to, Communities for Sheriff Accountability, together with Common Cause, released a report on sheriffs who solicit donations from companies they then contract with. That story has gotten a lot of media, including much focused on our local sheriff, who is highlighted in the report.

Most importantly, though, there is an election this year. We believe we’ve found a candidate who agrees with our program and has a proven ability to win elections. We haven’t yet announced our endorsement, but most of us are working on their campaign.

I don’t know exactly where I’ll be stationed when we win that election, but I know I’ll be really tired! It’s been four years of constant struggle. There have been some victories, some progress, but we’re still reaching for the most important goal right now, the election of a new sheriff. After that, who knows? We also lobby for free phone calls, banning cash bail, and other systematic problems. While, as a group, we’re not abolitionist, we are growing and learning as we integrate more and more with the larger correctional justice movement. We hope our work here can also serve as an example to others.

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Sign up to get the Zoom link in March. Go to [email protected] to get on the list!

This letter written to Pat Fry from Mark Hannay, director, thanking her for all the work she did to make this a ​successful ​ event.

Thank you everyone for everything you did to make our online Annual Gala last evening such a success!

Nearly 100 people attended, we heard some inspiring and informative remarks, shared our appreciation of and love to honorees, and got ourselves ready for what lies ahead in 2022.

Special thanks to our honorees that were so inspiring:

*Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY-8), for governmental leadership

*-Barbara Bowen (Professional Staff Congress CUNY) and Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez (New York State Nurses Association), for trade union leadership

*Mary Clark (Citizen Action of New York) and NY-4 Health Care Action, for community leadership

-*Thanks also to Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine for bringing us up to date on the state of the pandemic in our city and what work lies ahead in that regard. In a phrase: “Rebuild, fund, pay attention to public health!”

If you weren’t able to attend, we missed you! However, please keep in touch with us via our website and Facebook page.

If you haven’t yet made a personal financial contribution and would like to:

Individuals can donate here.

Organizations and unions can donate here.

We thank the following groups and unions who joined our Host Committee:

AARP New York State

Anthony DiMarco Health Care for US Fund

Chinese-American Planning Council

Citizen Action of New York

Coalition for Asian-American Children and Families

Commission on the Public’s Health System in New York City

Committee of Interns and Residents, SEIU Healthcare

Communication Workers of America, District 1, Local 1102, and Local 1180

Community Health Care Association of New York State

Community Healthcare Network

Community Service Society of New York

District Council 37 AFSCME

Doctors Council, SEIU Healthcare

Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies

Greater NYC for Change

1199SEIU-GNYHA Healthcare Education Project

Health Services Employees, Local 768, District Council 37 AFSCME

Housing Works

Hudson Center for Health Equity and Quality

International Guild of Cinematographers, Local 600 IATSE

Make the Road New York

Medicare Rights Center

New York City Americans for Democratic Action

New York City Central Labor Council

New York Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

#NYDocs Coalition

New York Gray Panthers

New York State Nurses Association

New York Statewide Senior Action Council

Open Door Family Medical Centers

Physicians for a National Health Program, New York Metro Chapter

Primary Care Development Corporation

Professional Staff Congress CUNY, Local 2334 AFT

Raising Women’s Voices-New York

Theatrical Stage Employees, Local One IATSE

1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East

United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 AFT

United University Professions, Local 2190 AFT

Westside Federation of Senior and Supportive Housing

Workers Circle

We thank everyone for your financial support of our Gala, and look forward to working with you in our efforts during 2022. Thanks also for all you do to fight for health care for all New Yorkers and all across the US.

In solidarity,

Mark Hannay

Director

Jan 14, 2022 | PDA Blog

“Neoliberalism is a term used to describe the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism. A significant factor in the rise of conservative and libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominately advocated by them, it is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society…”  Wikipedia

Member of the Wisconsin Peace Action steering committee, Purdue Professor of Political Science, Emeritus will initiate discussion of these critical and complicated issues. Targ, a long time activist, is current a Co-Chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism CCDS, and blogs at www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com

  We live in a World of Cognitive Warfare A recent Adocument prepared by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)  suggested that “in cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the battlefield. The aim is to change not only what people think, but how they think and act. Waged successfully, it shapes and influences individual and grown

https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2021/05/20/countering-cognitive-warfare-awareness-and-resilience/index.html)

The Brooklyn Peace Vigil against war with Russia was called by Brooklyn For Peace. http://www.brooklynpeace.org

Contact Janet Tucker at [email protected]

BY WILLIAM HARTUNG

2021 was another banner year for the military-industrial complex, as Congress signed off on a near-record $778 billion in spending for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That was $25 billion more than the Pentagon had even asked for.

It can’t be emphasized enough just how many taxpayer dollars are now being showered on the Pentagon. That department’s astronomical budget adds up, for instance, to more than four times the cost of the most recent version of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which sparked such horrified opposition from Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and other alleged fiscal conservatives. Naturally, they didn’t blink when it came to lavishing ever more taxpayer dollars on the military-industrial complex.

Opposing Build Back Better while throwing so much more money at the Pentagon marks the ultimate in budgetary and national-security hypocrisy. The Congressional Budget Office has determined that, if current trends continue, the Pentagon could receive a monumental $7.3 trillion-plus over the next decade, more than was spent during the peak decade of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when there were up to 190,000 American troops in those two countries alone.

Sadly, but all too predictably, President Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops and contractors from Afghanistan hasn’t generated even the slightest peace dividend. Instead, any savings from that war are already being plowed into programs to counter China, official Washington’s budget-justifying threat of choice (even if outshone for the moment by the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine). And all of this despite the fact that the United States already spends three times as much as China on its military.

Overcharging the Pentagon for spare parts has a long and inglorious history, reaching its previous peak of public visibility during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Then, blanket media coverage of $640 toilet seats and $7,600 coffee makerssparked public outrage and a series of hearings on Capitol hill, strengthening the backbone of members of Congress. In those years, they did indeed curb at least the worst excesses of the Reagan military buildup.

Such pricing horror stories didn’t emerge from thin air. They came from the work of people like legendary Pentagon whistleblower Ernest Fitzgerald. He initially made his mark by exposing the Air Force’s efforts to hide billions in cost overruns on Lockheed’s massive C-5A transport plane. At the time, he was described by former Air Force Secretary Verne Orr as “the most hated man in the Air Force.” Fitzgerald and other Pentagon insiders became sources for Dina Rasor, a young journalist who began drawing the attention of the media and congressional representatives to spare-parts overcharges and other military horrors. In the end, she formed an organization, the Project on Military Procurement, to investigate and expose waste, fraud, and abuse. It would later evolve into the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the most effective current watchdog when it comes to Pentagon spending.

A recent POGO analysis, for instance, documented the malfeasance of TransDigm, a military parts supplier that the Department of Defense’s Inspector General caught overcharging the Pentagon by as much as 3,800% — yes, you read that figure right! — on routine items. The company was able to do so only because, bizarrely enough, Pentagon buying rules prevent contract officers from getting accurate information on what any given item should cost or might cost the supplying company to produce it.

In other words, thanks to Pentagon regulations, those oversight officials are quite literally flying blind when it comes to cost control. The companies supplying the military take full advantage of that. The Pentagon Inspector General’s office has, in fact, uncovered more than 100 overcharges by TransDigm alone, to the tune of $20.8 million. A comprehensive audit of all spare-parts suppliers would undoubtedly find billions of wasted dollars. And this, of course, spills over into ever more staggering costs for finished weapons systems. As Ernest Fitzgerald once said, a military aircraft is just a collection of “overpriced spare parts flying in formation.”

The next level of Pentagon waste involves weapons we don’t need at prices we can’t afford, systems that, for staggering sums, fail to deliver on promises to enhance our safety and security. The poster child for such costly, dysfunctional systems is the F-35 combat aircraft, a plane tasked with multiple missions, none of which it does well. The Pentagon is slated to buy more than 2,400 F-35s for the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. The estimated lifetime cost for procuring and operating those planes, a mere $1.7 trillion, would make it the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons project ever.

Once upon a time (as in some fairy tale), the idea behind the creation of the F-35 was to build a plane that, in several variations, would be able to carry out many different tasks relatively cheaply, with potential savings generated by economies of scale. Theoretically, that meant the bulk of the parts for the thousands of planes to be built would be the same for all of them. This approach has proven a dismal failure so far, so much so that the researchers at POGO are convinced the F-35 may never be fully ready for combat.

Its failures are too numerous to recount here, but a few examples should suffice to suggest why the program minimally needs to be scaled back in a major way, if not canceled completely. For a start, though meant to provide air support for troops on the ground, it’s proved anything but well-designed to do so. In fact, that job is already handled far better and more cheaply by the existing A-10 “Warthog” attack aircraft. A 2021 Pentagon assessment of the F-35 — and keep in mind that this is the Department of Defense, not some outside expert — found 800 unresolved defects in the plane. Typical of its never-ending problems: a wildly expensive and not particularly functional high-tech helmet which, at the cost of $400,000 each, is meant to give its pilot special awareness of what’s happening around and below the plane as well as to the horizon. And don’t forget that the F-35 will be staggeringly expensive to maintain and already costs an impressive $38,000 an hour to fly.

In December 2020, House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith finally claimed he was “tired of pouring money down the F-35 rathole.” Even former Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown acknowledged that it couldn’t meet its original goal — to be a low-cost fighter — and would have to be supplemented with a less costly plane. He compared it to a Ferrari, adding, “You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays.” It was a stunning admission, given the original claims that the F-35 would be the Air Force’s affordable, lightweight fighter and the ultimate workhorse for future air operations.

It’s no longer clear what the rationale even is for building more F-35s at a time when the Pentagon has grown obsessed with preparing for a potential war with China. After all, if that country is the concern (an exaggerated one, to be sure), it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which fighter planes would go into combat against Chinese aircraft, or be engaged in protecting American troops on the ground — not at a moment when the Pentagon is increasingly focused on long-range missiles, hypersonic weapons, and unpiloted vehicles as its China-focused weapons of choice.

When all else fails, the Pentagon’s fallback argument for the F-35 is the number ofjobs it will create in states or districts of key members of Congress. As it happens, virtually any other investment of public funds would build back better with more jobsthan F-35s would. Treating weapons systems as jobs programs, however, has long helped pump up Pentagon spending way beyond what’s needed to provide an adequate defense of the United States and its allies.

And that plane is hardly alone in the ongoing history of Pentagon overspending. There are many other systems that similarly deserve to be thrown on the scrap heap of history, chief among them the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), essentially an F-35 of the sea. Similarly designed for multiple roles, it, too, has fallen far short in every imaginable respect. The Navy is now trying to gin up a new mission for the LCS, with little success.

This comes on top of buying outmoded aircraft carriers for up to $13 billion a pop and planning to spend more than a quarter of a trillion dollars on a new nuclear-armed missile, known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD. Such land-based missiles are, according to former Secretary of Defense William Perry, “among the most dangerous weapons in the world,” because a president would have only minutes to decide whether to launch them on being warned of an enemy nuclear attack. In other words, a false alarm (of which there have been numerous examples during the nuclear age) could lead to a planetary nuclear conflagration.

The organization Global Zero has demonstrated convincingly that eliminating land-based missiles altogether, rather than building new ones, would make the United States and the rest of the world safer, with a small force of nuclear-armed submarines and bombers left to dissuade any nation from launching a nuclear war. Eliminating ICBMs would be a salutary and cost-saving first step towards nuclear sanity, as former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg and other experts have made all too clear.

And yet, unbelievably enough, I haven’t even mentioned the greatest waste of all: this country’s “cover the globe” military strategy, including a planet-wide “footprint” of more than 750 military bases, more than 200,000 troops stationed overseas, huge and costly aircraft-carrier task forces eternally floating the seven seas, and a massive nuclear arsenal that could destroy life as we know it (with thousands of warheads to spare).

You only need to look at the human and economic costs of America’s post-9/11 wars to grasp the utter folly of such a strategy. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the conflicts waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, thousands of U.S. troops killed, and hundreds of thousands more suffering from traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. And for what? In Iraq, the U.S. cleared the way for a sectarian regime that then helped create the conditions for ISIS to sweep in and conquer significant parts of the country, only to be repelled (but not thoroughly defeated) at great cost in lives and treasure. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, after a conflict doomed as soon as it morphed into an exercise in nation-building and large-scale counterinsurgency, the Taliban is now in power. It’s hard to imagine a more ringing indictment of the policy of endless war.

Despite the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, for which the Biden administration deserves considerable credit, spending on global counterterror operations remains at high levels, thanks to ongoing missions by Special Operations forces, repeated air strikes, ongoing military aid and training, and other kinds of involvement short of full-scale war. Given the opportunity to rethink strategy as part of a “global force posture” review released late last year, the Biden administration opted for a remarkably status quo approach, insisting on maintaining substantial bases in the Middle East, while modestly boosting the U.S. troop presence in East Asia.

As anyone who’s followed the news knows, despite the immediate headlines about sending troops and planes to Eastern Europe and weapons to Ukraine in response to Russia’s massing of its forces on that country’s borders, the dominant narrative for keeping the Pentagon budget at its current size remains China, China, China. It matters little that the greatest challenges posed by Beijing are political and economic, not military. “Threat inflation” with respect to that country continues to be the Pentagon’s surest route to acquiring yet more resources and has been endlessly hyped in recent years by, among others, analysts and organizations with close ties to the arms industry and the Department of Defense.

For example, the National Defense Strategy Commission, a congressionally mandated body charged with critiquing the Pentagon’s official strategy document, drew more than half its members from individuals on the boards of arms-making corporations, working as consultants for the arms industry, or from think tanks heavily funded by just such contractors. Not surprisingly, the commission called for a 3% to 5% annual increase in the Pentagon budget into the foreseeable future. Follow that blueprint and you’re talking $1 trillion annually by the middle of this decade, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense. Such an increase, in other words, would prove unsustainable in a country where so much else is needed, but that won’t stop Pentagon budget hawks from using it as their North Star.

In March of this year, the Pentagon is expected to release both its new national defense strategy and its budget for 2023. There are a few small glimmers of hope, like reports that the administration may abandon certain dangerous (and unnecessary) nuclear-weapons programs instituted by the Trump administration.

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a senior adviser to the Security Assistance Monitor and a columnist for the Americas Program.

Standing Up: Tales of Struggle

reprinted from The New York Labor History Association (NYLHA)

Reviewed by Jane LaTour, a former Executive Board member at the New York Labor History Association, Jane worked on factory assembly lines for seven years and took part in many campaigns in the workplace. Her first job in the labor movement was as a union organizer for District 65. She twice served as the director of the Women’s Project for the Association for Union Democracy (AUD). Her book, Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Women in New York City Organizing for Equality was published in 2008.  

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In addition, we learn that the foreign policy/military/covert intervention complex have been strategizing about new forms of war planning (reference to a recent NATO report below). Along with preparedness for nuclear war, conventional war, hybrid war, and cyber war, we now are engaged in building a capacity for “cognitive war.” The latter refers to ways in which information, symbols, and myths can be disseminated all across the face of the globe. The cognitive warriors draw upon psychology and biology to figure out ways to shape people’s consciousness. The imagery of the “fog machine” in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest describes well how inmates in an insane asylum are blinded from seeing reality clearly.

Some time ago the eminent political scientist Murray Edelman wrote a book entitled The Symbolic Uses of Politics. In it he postulated that most people experience the political world not through concrete reality but through emotional symbols. For example, the classic way in which people relate to their political institutions is through the flag of their nation. Americans viewing the flag see images of men in combat fighting for freedom or men and women standing in line waiting to vote for their preferred political candidates. A colorful cloth with stars and stripes gets transformed in our consciousness into a rich, glamorized history even when the emotive images are in direct contradiction to people’s lives.

Writers such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Robert McChesney accept implicitly Edelman’s counsel that people experience the world indirectly and usually in emotional form. They also assume, as does Gitlin, that what we read, see, and hear about the world is framed for us. They go further to suggest that what Marx called the “false conceptions about ourselves” in symbols, myths, rituals, and frames are usually the product of ruling class interests.Branding Purdue University

On October 27, 2021 a story appeared in Purdue Today, “Purdue Only University in Fast Company Magazine’s Inaugural List of ‘Brands That Matter’.” The story indicated that Purdue University was honored as the only university among companies and organizations that were named by 'Brands That Matter' “that give people compelling reasons to care about them, offer inspiration for others to buy in, and authentically communicate their mission and ideals.” “…Purdue joins 95 internationally recognized brands, including Nike, Zoom and Yeti and other large multinational conglomerates….”

 A recent document prepared by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)  suggested that “in cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the battlefield. The aim is to change not only what people think, but how they think and act. Waged successfully, it shapes and influences individual and group beliefs and behaviors to favor an aggressor's tactical or strategic objectives.”

https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2021/05/20/countering-cognitive-warfare-awareness-and-resilience/index.html)

Time of day:

Karl Kramer went to Nicaragua for the presidential inauguration, as a representative of CCDS. The administration of Daniel Ortega has wide support among workers. There is no “loyal left opposition.” In 1990 Chamorro won the presidential election after relentless US harassment that it was clear would not let up until Ortega was out of office. Karl described split in the FSLN, amid false claims that the US has changed its tune and imperialism is a thing of the past. The people being arrested were painted as being potential candidates in opposition to Ortega, which Karl says is analogous to saying that the people involved in the January 6 insurrection in the US were arrested because they were planning to run against Biden supporters in 2022. The arrested Nicaraguans had not filed candidacy papers.

Pat Fry added that at the day of the inauguration the US slapped additional sanctions on several Ortega supporters. The FSLN welcomed Karl as our delegate and provided hotel accommodations for him. She and Karl have been invited by the CCDS Socialist Education Project to publicly report on Cuba and Nicaragua, at the February Fourth Monday webinar.

The US is still working to destabilize the Sandinista government, both through propaganda lies and acts of terrorism and violence.

Harry Targ pointed out similarities between the hybrid war Karl described and what’s going on in Ukraine.

Jay recalled the assassination of Benjamin Linder, whose memory Karl said is honored in Nicaragua.

Pat will send out the registration for the webinar hosted by the Alliance for Global Justice. She noted that while this segment in our agenda is titled “Pink tide in Latin American: focus on Nicaragua and Cuba”, there are hopeful things going on in many other Latin American countries as well. Karl is going to the inauguration in Honduras. Colombia may break to the left. In Brazil, Lula is way ahead in the polls. US Imperialism appears more and more on the ropes, boding well for the end of neo-liberalism in Latin America.

Tom asked if the Sister Cities program is still in existence. Pat says existing sister cities still have relationships, not sure about the program as a whole.

Carl Davidson said in all the cases where countries are breaking away from US domination it’s because they have formed new relationships with China. While neo-liberalism is still highly dangerous against other countries, it has been circumscribed by relationships with China. And it’s called the “pink tide” because it’s not always what we would call “red,” but represents the progressive majority.

Pat noted that she previously sent a proposal for CCDS participation in the May Day celebration in Cuba and that we should try to send 4-5 (young) people as the CCDS portion of the US delegation.

Jay sent an email earlier with an analysis by the Washington Post of electoral demographics in Florida. He reported on how campaign financing is hidden and cloaked, to spread misinformation. Including Republican fake advocacy in primaries to try to ensure the Democratic candidate would be easier for the Republican to beat. Jay says we should be thoughtful about just getting progressive candidates out there, it doesn’t mean that they will win even if their positions are more attractive to us.

He and Meta have written an article for the next Dialog & Initiative, examining the ideas of Daniel Kahneman on “two forms of thinking”, Abraham Maslow and others. Jay says we can look at the social unit of analysis as Maslow looked at the individual hierarchy of needs. Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Jay is deeply concerned on a personal level with the two upcoming elections (2022 and 2024). If De Santis continues to rule Tallahassee, and Trump comes back to power, Medicare for All is a moot point; we won’t have anything, not health care, response to climate change, or anything we need, if the elections revert to the ultra right.

Meta: progressive agenda bodes ill if SC electeds are returned to office. As people enter the voting booths, their decisions are influenced by whether their low-on-the-hierarchy needs aren’t met (food, shelter). Automatic responses come not just from society but also our own value structure. White supremacy leads to fear by African Americans and prejudice by whites. Right wing establishment runs fear tactic ads, which people react to automatically. Faced with threats, people will respond with flight, fight or freeze. Ads showing black candidate as darker than he actually is caused large numbers of people to flip from supporting the progressive Black candidate to voting for Lindsay Graham even though they didn’t even like him.

Carl Redwood posted in the chat: It may be important for us to learn more about racial capitalism that doesn't see racism as an invention of capitalism. From Boston Review. https://bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice/

Meta also recommended when reacting to scare tactics and misinformation on social media, don’t preserve the thread with the other information in it but rather start your own thread. Otherwise people will be seeing the misinformation one more time. We can describe what we want and NOT reply to the anti types of messaging. No taxes means nothing in the commons and yet this very group really wants TriCare—even beyond Medicare for All—at least in SC. Activate our own fast thinking in our own ads. Instead of calling out… we need to call in people to our side. E.g., We want good workers and good workers are healthy. We get healthy people by ensuring Medicare for All. Or Healthy happy workers make enough to live.

Report on what is happening in the US Senate

Harry reported on effects of voter suppression. He sent an article from Ballotpedia prior to this meeting, looking at states lacking competitive elections. Pat said the doom and gloom about the mid-terms is palpable but she points out that the networks (Indivisible, MoveOn) that can achieve the necessary voter turnout haven’t been activated.

Harry wants us to issue a statement. Erica thinks a statement aimed at the corporate media would be appropriate to help refocus their agenda. Pat thinks we need a call to action rather than statement. Carl recommends people get involved in the Inside/Outside project led by Organizing Upgrade. Also, Carl is working on Version 5 of his “6 Party” presentation. Randy noted that we can have a real effect on building a left influence in Congress.

Tom said he hasn’t noticed any kind of membership drive. Has there been any concerted effort to pull in new members? Steve responded that there is an organizing committee that met a couple of months ago, but attempts at organizing or membership committees have not been sustainable. We don’t have generational information in our database. Tom asked if there is a generic piece of CCDS recruiting literature. Carl has a basic brochure which he believes he can upload to the website. The Goals and Principles are already listed on the website.

Finance Report Meta Van Sickle -- $8,165.94 in assets.

Our net income this year was almost $2k partly as a result of fundraising around Karl’s Nicaragua trip. She asked Karl to send an invoice for his expenses. The fundraising raised $250 and Meta suggested we match that with another $250. Karl said his only expense was $150 for a Covid test. But his plane fare was over $1200 and that was paid by Pat.

His report was partly objective info and partly opinion. Ira is still an active member of the Greater Louisville Central Labor Council, although he is retired. The US Labor Movement is really becoming a “movement.” Struggles over wages, hours and working conditions are increasing and becoming increasingly militant. But how do we understand the difference between militant and understanding that capitalism is still alive and well? There has been defiance in the private sector workforce, increased labor militancy – e.g., Amazonians United. He reported on the ARA – Association of Retired Americans. He has become involved in it. Originally founded by the AFL-CIO. He didn’t think much of it but has become involved and in Louisville he thinks there is a good group.

Ellen agrees about local groups but described the ARA as worthless, all they want is money. Karl reported that from the Mexico Solidarity Committee he learned that there is organizing among workers in Guanajuato and elsewhere. Randy reported on a Steelworkers strike in west-central PA; he helped raise money for them on the basis that part of their demand was for increase medical benefits. He pointed out to them that this is part of the struggle for health care.

Ira asserted that workers today don’t know anything about organized labor, history but are interested organizing. He also thinks it would be useful for retirees to get involved with the ARA.

HR 5124 – the Manufacturing Renaissance Campaign. Was introduced to congress in August 2021. To bridge the gap between labor and environmental groups. HR 5124 main sponsor is Jan Schakowski. The Green New Deal is not brought to you by lawyers and legislators, but by people who “make stuff”, the bill would bring money to regions to support advanced manufacturing. Has some good co-sponsors but needs many more. Parts of it can be implemented through presidential executive orders.

Asks: People can ask their Congresspeople to support the bill

Set up local support. Carl can do powerpoint presentations for local groups. If you are interested in a presentation contact [email protected]

This is an implementation of the “just transition” that Green New Deal advocates are demanding. Has implications for public education as well. Vocational training currently is completely outmoded.

Presented by Harry Targ &Tom Gogan

Harry displayed the formal proposal for a Move the Money Task Force. Inspired by Tom Gogan’s work in New York. Modeled on the Health Care Task Force started by Marilyn and Sandy. So this new task force would organize periodic webinar reports on military spending and move the money campaigns. As recommended by Betty Brown, the new Poor People’s Campaign is advocating for reducing the military budget; we might want to endorse and participate in the PPC mobilization in June.

Tom reports that they got exactly half of the NYC Council to endorse the MTM program – blocked by the speaker of the council. Now a new council with new speaker and they are hopeful as they restart the work. The NYC campaign involves several CCDS members and many organizations.

Harry Targ

Monday 4^th Monday will be an exciting Webinar – Remembering Carl and Anne Braden. In February Karl and Pat will report on Nicaragua and the Pink Tide. Subsequent webinars will focus on the elections.

Marilyn Albert

Reported on developments – nationally some health care aspects of the Build Back Better bill are still in play. Particularly, addressing the drug price negotiation limitations. Opponents object that the bill has a price tag of $1.7Trillion over 10 years – but the cost of American health care over the same next 10 years will be $51Trillion!!

She warned about the Direct Contracting efforts to privatize Medicare.

On April 2-3 there will be a virtual conference of single payer activists. Register for it at www.healthcare-now.org

In California the CalCare act was crafted by the California Nurses Association with little consultation with other advocacy groups. A few key changes have given the bill more life, the Speaker now supports it, so it has passed the Health Care Committee and Appropriations Committee. It needs to pass a floor vote of the full Assembly in the next couple of weeks, and well may pass, but then must pass the Senate and THEN must be signed by the governor, about which supporters are less optimistic.

March 16 there will be another meeting of the Medicare For All update group. To get Zoom link , email – [email protected]

Ira: SNCC has had their last national meeting; at age 78 Ira is the youngest SNCC member around. There is a SNCC Legacy project, similar to ALBA, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.