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'Lives are already being lost because of Texas politicians' refusal to acknowledge and prepare for the realities of the climate crisis.

Feb 18, 2021 - While Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is under fire for fleeing to Cancún for a vacation as his constituents endure devastating power outages as well as food and water shortages due to rare winter weather, climate campaigners are pointing to the compounding crises in the Lone Star state as proof of the need for a Green New Deal.

As dozens of people have died and millions have spent days without electricity, some right-wing news outlets and lawmakers—including GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who's facing calls to step down—have lied about the state's power problems, blaming renewable energy, even though the outages are largely tied to issues with gas, coal, and nuclear facilities. Abbott even claimed Tuesday on Fox News that "this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America."

The Green New Deal resolution introduced in 2019 by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) calls for creating millions of jobs by transitioning to a 100% renewable energy system and launching a "national mobilization" to build "resiliency against climate change-related disasters." Although the measure has yet to be passed by Congress, Greenpeace USA and the Sunrise Movement argue that the current conditions in Texas—which scientists link to the climate crisis—bolster the case for it.

"Many people across the country are realizing for the first time that fossil fuels are not only polluting, but they are also unstable. Millions of Texans are being let down by coal, oil, and gas right now," Greenpeace USA climate campaigner Ashley Thomson said Thursday. "Our greatest concern is for the communities facing record cold temperatures, power outages, and uncertainty."

"Climate denial is not a victimless crime, and lives are already being lost because of Texas politicians' refusal to acknowledge and prepare for the realities of the climate crisis," she added. "We owe it to everyone impacted to help them recover and rebuild, and to do everything we can to fight for a more resilient and truly sustainable energy system."

Not only is Texas still largely dependent on fossil fuels, but much of the state has its own power grid. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), as Texan Samantha Grasso explained at Discourse Blog earlier this week, "was borne out of Texas' brainless reflex to buck federal regulation."

That move may now be part of the problem. As The Daily Poster noted, "Electricity market incentives are currently structured in such a way that Texas' power companies receive more money if they don't weatherize all their plants and shut down some of them during cold weather."

As power slowly returned to homes and businesses in the southern state, Thomson declared that "in Texas and around the country, we deserve a world beyond fossil fuels."

"Only a Green New Deal-style investment in our shared future can get us there," she continued. "It's time to fundamentally fix the grid so it can deal with the present and increasing impacts of the climate crisis. It's time to make investments nationwide in clean energy jobs, climate jobs, and climate solutions—putting millions of people to work while we build the renewable energy infrastructure of the future."

In addition to highlighting the Green New Deal, Thomson pointed to the THRIVE Agenda unveiled in September by a coalition of labor unions, advocacy groups, and Democratic members of Congress. The related resolution lays out an equitable and green economic recovery from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic....Read More

July 3, 2017 - When Frederick Law Olmsted passed through Texas, in 1853, he became besotted with the majesty of the Texas legislature. “I have seen several similar bodies at the North; the Federal Congress; and the Parliament of Great Britain, in both its branches, on occasions of great moment; but none of them commanded my involuntary respect for their simple manly dignity and trustworthiness for the duties that engaged them, more than the General Assembly of Texas,” he wrote.

This passage is possibly unique in the political chronicles of the state. Fairly considered, the Texas legislature is more functional than the United States Congress, and more genteel than the House of Commons. But a recurrent crop of crackpots and ideologues has fed the state’s reputation for aggressive know-nothingism and proudly retrograde politics.

I’ve lived in Texas for most of my life, and I’ve come to appreciate what the state symbolizes, both to people who live here and to those who view it from afar. Texans see themselves as a distillation of the best qualities of America: friendly, confident, hardworking, patriotic, neurosis-free. Outsiders see us as the nation’s id, a place where rambunctious and disavowed impulses run wild. Texans, it is thought, mindlessly celebrate individualism, and view government as a kind of kryptonite that weakens the entrepreneurial muscles. We’re reputed to be braggarts; careless with money and our personal lives; a little gullible, but dangerous if crossed; insecure, but obsessed with power and prestige.

Texans, however, are hardly monolithic. The state is as politically divided as the rest of the nation. One can drive across it and be in two different states at the same time: FM Texas and AM Texas. FM Texas is the silky voice of city dwellers, the kingdom of NPR. It is progressive, blue, reasonable, secular, and smug—almost like California. AM Texas speaks to the suburbs and the rural areas: Trumpland. It’s endless bluster and endless ads. Paranoia and piety are the main items on the menu.

Texas has been growing at a stupefying rate for decades. The only state with more residents is California, and the number of Texans is projected to double by 2050, to 54.4 million, almost as many people as in California and New York combined. Three Texas cities—Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio—are already among the top ten most populous in the country.

The eleventh largest is Austin, the capital, where I live. For the past five years, it has been one of the fastest-growing large cities in America; it now has nearly a million people, dwarfing the college town I fell in love with almost forty years ago. Because Texas represents so much of modern America—the South, the West, the plains, the border, the Latino community, the divide between rural areas and cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, and Kansas and Louisiana more out of whack, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future.

I’ve always had a fascination with Texas’s outsized politics. In 2000, I wrote a play that was set in the state’s House of Representatives. The protagonist, Sonny Lamb, was a rancher from West Texas who represented House District 74, which, in real life, stretches across thirty-seven thousand square miles. (That’s larger than Indiana.) While I was doing research for the play, I met in Austin with Pete Laney, a Democrat and a cotton farmer from Hale County, who, at the time, was the speaker of the House. Laney was known as a scrupulously fair and honest leader who inspired a bipartisan spirit among the members. The grateful representatives called him Dicknose.

We sat down in the Speaker’s office, at the capitol. I explained that I was having a plot problem: my hero had introduced an ethics-reform bill, which triggered a war with the biggest lobbyist in the state. How could the lobbyist retaliate? Laney rubbed his hands together. “Well, you could put a toxic-waste dump in Sonny’s district,” he observed. “That would mess him up, right and left.”

Laney’s suggestion was inspired by an actual law that the Texas House of Representatives had passed in 1991. It allowed sewage sludge from New York City to be shipped, by train, to a little desert town in District 74, Sierra Blanca, which is eighty miles southeast of El Paso. The train became known as the Poo-Poo Choo-Choo.

“Another thing,” I said. “I’d like my lobbyist to take some legislators on a hunting trip. What would they likely be hunting?”

“Pigs,” Laney said.

“Pigs?”

“Wild pigs—they’re taking over the whole state!” Laney said. Feral pigs are a remnant of the Spanish colonization, and now we’ve got as many as three million of them, tearing up fences and pastureland and mowing down crops, even eating the seed corn out of the ground before it sprouts. They can run twenty-five miles per hour. “You ever seen one?” Laney went on. “Huge. They got these tusks out to here.”

“How do you hunt them?”

“Well, I don’t hunt ’em myself, but I got a friend who does.” He punched an intercom button on his phone. “Honey, get Sharp on the line,” he said.

In a moment, John Sharp was on the loudspeaker. The former state comptroller of public accounts, he is now the chancellor of the Texas A. & M. system. “Sharp,” Laney said, “I got a young man here wants to know how you hunt pigs.”

“Oh!” Sharp cried. “Well, we do it at night, with pistols. Everybody wearing cutoffs and tennis shoes. We’ll set the dogs loose, and when they start baying we come running. Now, the dogs will go after the pig’s nuts, so the pig will back up against a tree to protect himself. So then you just take your pistol and pop him in the eye.”

And these were progressive Democrats. More or less.

For more than a century, Texas was under Democratic rule. The state was always culturally conservative, religious, and militaristic, but a strain of pragmatism kept it from being fully swept up in racism and right-wing ideology. Economic populism, especially in the rural areas, offered a counterweight to the capitalists in the cities. ...Read More

BY JACQUELINE SERRATO 

Chicago-style coalition-building helped to produce the first Black mayor of Chicago and put its first Latinx representatives in office. Some even believe its legacy led to the election of the city’s first Black woman mayor. But unbeknownst to many, this form of organizing started in the streets fifty years ago with what was called the “Rainbow Coalition”: a progressive, fundamentally socialist movement that set the foundation for radical ideals and civil disobedience in Chicago. 

On a February afternoon in 1969, Chairman Fred Hampton and his contingent of Illinois Black Panthers went looking for a Puerto Rican kid by the name of Cha-Cha in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. Hampton had just read in the paper that the Young Lords street organization had shut themselves in the 18th District police station—along with the police commander and the media—to protest the ongoing police harassment of Latinx residents.

The Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers established themselves on the West Side of Chicago in 1968 and functioned under a ten-point program of self-empowerment and service. Their Oakland, CA founding members were already involved in multiracial movement-building through the left-wing and anti-war Peace and Freedom Party. 

Shortly after meeting, the two youths would found the original Rainbow Coalition: a “poor people’s army,” as José “Cha-Cha” Jimenez refers to it, that joined forces with working-class whites from the city’s North Side. As men were landing on the moon for the first time in a global display of American exceptionalism, the Rainbow Coalition was drawing citywide and nationwide attention to police brutality, premeditated gentrification, and institutional racism in Chicago. ...Read More

FEB 19, 2021 - Republican control over redistricting in key Southern states, along with Supreme Court decisions that gutted protections for voters of color, could result in historically unfair congressional maps after the next round of gerrymandering, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

The redistricting that followed the 2010 census resulted in "some of the most gerrymandered and racially discriminatory maps" in history but the next cycle of redistricting could be even more fraught with abuse in Southern states, according to the report. Florida, Texas and North Carolina, all of which are expected to gain House seats following the 2020 census, as well as Georgia, pose the highest risk of producing maps that are racially discriminatory and favor Republicans.

The report cited a confluence of factors for the growing risk. The next round of redistricting will be the first since the Supreme Court in 2013 gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states with a history of racial discrimination to receive advance clearance from the Justice Department before making any electoral changes. The court's conservative majority later ruled in 2019 that federal courts had no jurisdiction to review partisan gerrymanders, which have been "heavily accomplished by discriminating against communities of color," said Michael Li, the author of the report and senior counsel for the Brennan Center's Democracy Program.

Single party Republican control over the map-drawing process and rapidly changing demographics, coupled with the weakened protections, are likely to result in even more "unfair" maps in those states than the last round. "Invariably, communities of color would bear much of the brunt, facing outright discrimination in some places and being used as a convenient tool for achieving an unfair partisan advantage in others," the report said.

Li said that Southern Republicans often focus on race because "it's really hard to gerrymander" without "using communities of color."

"While last decade you saw Republicans pack Black voters in states like North Carolina into districts and try to justify it on the basis of complying with the Voting Rights Act," he said, "the danger this decade is they will pack Black voters and Latino voters into districts and simply say they were discriminating against Democrats because the Supreme Court said that's OK."

Democratic groups argue that despite the Supreme Court's decisions, there has been progress in forming nonpartisan or bipartisan commissions to take redistricting out of the hands of state legislatures.

Under Chief Justice John Roberts, "there has been this sort of chipping away at voting rights, a lot of really frustrating decisions coming from the court," Marina Jenkins, director of litigation and policy at the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in an interview. "That is sort of balanced, at the very least, by gains that have been made in a number of states in terms of changing who holds the pen on map-drawing."

Though some states with past abuses have moved toward creating nonpartisan commissions for redistricting, the majority of House districts will be drawn under single-party control. Republicans have a massive edge over Democrats in terms of state legislative power: They hold control over 181 congressional districts while Democrats will determine the maps for just 49 seats. Single-party control is "by far the biggest predictor of redistricting abuses," the Brennan Center report said.

Republicans have worked for years to carve up states to benefit the party using extensive demographic research that typically sought to dilute the voting power of Black residents. Files obtained from the computer of Thomas Hofeller, the late Republican gerrymandering guru, showed that the GOP in some states relied on spreadsheets breaking down neighborhoods by race to draw more friendly districts. But technological advances have birthed efforts like REDMAP, which helped the Republican Party pick up seats by carving out favorable districts using advanced software and terabytes of data. Improved data and technological advances have only increased the danger posed by single-party control since 2011, according to the Brennan Center report.

The 2011 redistricting cycle was one of the most extreme examples in history of how highly partisan gerrymanders allow lawmakers to choose their own voters, rather than the other way around, and allow the GOP to wield a disproportionate amount of power.

Republicans took over full control of redistricting in states like Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on the strength of the 2010 Tea Party wave, allowing them to set up near-permanent majorities for the following decade. Republicans created maps that allowed them to win 10 of 13 House seats in North Carolina and 13 of 18 in Pennsylvania, even though they received roughly the same amount of votes statewide as Democrats did. The Brennan Center in 2016 found that gerrymandering in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania alone was responsible for giving Republicans an additional 16 to 17 more seats in the House than they would have had with fair maps. ...Read More

JUNE 24, 2020 - Eluard Luchell McDaniels traveled across the Atlantic in 1937 to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War, where he became known as “El Fantastico” for his prowess with a grenade. As a platoon sergeant with the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigades, the 25-year-old African American from Mississippi commanded white troops and led them into battle against the forces of General Franco, men who saw him as less than human.

It might seem strange for a Black man to go to such lengths for the chance to fight in a white man’s war so far from home—wasn’t there enough racism to fight in the United States?—but McDaniels was convinced that anti-fascism and anti-racism were one and the same. “I saw the invaders of Spain [were] the same people I’ve been fighting all my life," Historian Peter Carroll quotes McDaniels as saying. "I’ve seen lynching and starvation, and I know my people’s enemies.”

McDaniels was not alone in seeing anti-fascism and anti-racism as intrinsically connected; the anti-fascists of today are heirs to almost a century of struggle against racism. While the methods of Antifa have become the object of much heated political discourse, the group’s ideologies, particularly its insistence on physical direct action to prevent violent oppression, are much better understood when seen in the framework of a struggle against violent discrimination and persecution began almost a century ago.

Historian Robert Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism—one of the definitive works on the subject—lays out the motivating passions of fascism, which include “the right of the chosen group to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law”. At its heart, fascism is about premising the needs of one group, often defined by race and ethnicity over the rest of humanity; anti-fascists have always opposed this.

Anti-fascism began where fascism began, in Italy. Arditi del Popolo—"The People’s Daring Ones”—was founded in 1921, named after the Italian army’s shock troops from World War I who famously swam across the Piave River with daggers in their teeth. They committed to fight the increasingly violent faction of blackshirts, the forces encouraged by Benito Mussolini, who was soon to become Italy’s fascist dictator. The Arditi del Popolo brought together unionists, anarchists, socialists, communists, republicans, and former army officers. From the outset, anti-fascists began to build bridges where traditional political groups saw walls.

Those bridges would quickly extend to the races persecuted by fascists.

Once in government, Mussolini began a policy of "Italianization" that amounted to cultural genocide for the Slovenes and Croats who lived in the northeastern part of the country. Mussolini banned their languages, closed their schools, and even made them change their names to sound more Italian. As a result, the Slovenes and Croats were forced to organize outside of the state to protect themselves from Italianization and allied with anti-fascist forces in 1927. The state responded by forming a secret police, the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell'Antifascismo, the Organization for vigilance and repression of anti-fascism (OVRA), which surveilled Italian citizens, raided opposition organizations, murdered suspected anti-fascists, and even spied on and blackmailed the Catholic Church. Anti-fascists would face off against the OVRA for 18 years until an anti-fascist partisan who used the alias Colonnello Valerio shot Mussolini and his mistress with a submachine gun in 1945.

Similar dynamics presented themselves as fascism spread across pre-war Europe.

The leftists of Germany’s Roter Frontkämpferbund (RFB) first used the famous clenched-fist salute as the symbol of their fight against intolerance; when, in 1932, they became Antifaschistische Aktion, or “antifa” for short, they fought Nazi anti-Semitism and homophobia under the flags with the red-and-black logo that antifa groups wave today. That fist was first raised by German workers, but would go on to be raised by the Black Panthers, Black American sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics and Nelson Mandela, among many others.

In Spain, anti-fascist tactics and solidarity were put to the test in 1936, when a military coup tested the solidarity among working and middle-class groups who were organized as a broad-based popular front against fascism. The anti-fascists stood strong and became an example of the power of the people united against oppression. In the early days of the Spanish Civil War, the Republican popular militia was organized much like modern Antifa groups: They voted on important decisions, allowed women to serve alongside men, and stood shoulder to shoulder with political adversaries against a common enemy.

Black Americans like McDaniels, still excluded from equal treatment in the U.S. military, served as officers in the brigades of Americans who arrived in Spain ready to fight against the fascists. Overall, 40,000 volunteers from Europe, Africa, the Americas, and China stood shoulder to shoulder as antifascist comrades against Franco’s coup in Spain. In 1936 there were no black fighter pilots in the U.S., yet three black pilots—James Peck, Patrick Roosevelt, and Paul Williams—volunteered to fight the fascists in the Spanish skies. At home, segregation had prevented them from achieving their goals of air combat, but in Spain, they found equality in the anti-fascist ranks. Canute Frankson, a black American volunteer who served as head mechanic of the International Garage in Albacete where he worked, summed up his reasons for fighting in a letter home:

We are no longer an isolated minority group fighting hopelessly against an immense giant. Because, my dear, we have joined with, and become an active part of, a great progressive force on whose shoulders rests the responsibility of saving human civilization from the planned destruction of a small group of degenerates gone mad in their lust for power. Because if we crush Fascism here, we’ll save our people in America, and in other parts of the world from the vicious persecution, wholesale imprisonment, and slaughter which the Jewish people suffered and are suffering under Hitler’s Fascist heels. ...Read More

Feb 16, 2021 - It was after midnight on Jan. 18 when Tulare County sheriffs walked into the encampment of unhoused people on the levee of the Tule River. “They parked on the highway,” remembers Rosendo “Chendo” Hernandez, who shares a small trailer parked under a tree with his partner Josefina. “I heard them walking around in front, and then they called out to me to open my door. They said we were trespassing on private property and we had to leave.”

Sheriffs made him sign a notice, Hernandez says, giving him a week to remove his possessions and find another place to live. Deputies then went to other levee residents who have set up shacks or impromptu shelters along the river. Mari Perez, the executive director for the Central Valley Empowerment Alliance, which just operates out of the Larry Itliong Resource Center in nearby Poplar, estimates that includes about 150 people. “They said they’d arrest us if we didn’t sign,” Hernandez recalls, and one officer, he charges, drew his gun. “People are on edge, especially because of what happened on the St. John’s River.”

The sheriff’s warning to the Tule River residents came 10 days after police in neighboring Visalia, Tulare County’s largest city, evicted another group of people on the St. John’s River levee. Residents there were forced to take what possessions they could carry, while heavy construction equipment piled up what was left. A fire later broke out in which those possessions were incinerated.

*  *  *

Tulare County is not unique. Similar situations face unhoused people across the state. Here they are unfolding along rivers in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, the country’s richest and most productive agricultural region. That wealth, however, does not produce housing for the valley’s impoverished residents, who instead face the use of law enforcement to remove them and render them invisible.

The use of police to get rid of the encampments of people living outdoors is hardly new, whether in the San Joaquin Valley or the rest of California. In 2009 a sweep by Visalia police of St. John’s River camps was witnessed by Bill Simon, then chair of the Fresno chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Afterwards, “The river was as empty as the dreams of the homeless who were being evicted,” he observed. “Some people [had] lived there for as long as seven to 14 years.”

Fresno, the valley’s biggest city, not only has the largest number of residents living on the street, but a long history of efforts to make them leave. The city passed a “ban on camping” on the streets in August 2017. In 2018 police had 9,000 “contacts” with people sleeping on sidewalks, yet their numbers continued to swell.

Fresno, the Central Valley’s biggest city, not only has the largest number of residents living on the street, but a long history of efforts to make them leave.

Jerry Dyer, former Fresno chief of police, was elected mayor last year, and he announced a new initiative on Jan. 22, “Project Offramp,” to force homeless people to leave camps set up on the property of Caltrans. “Even though it’s not our jurisdiction,” Dyer admitted, he will send police and city workers to tell the people sleeping near freeways to leave. “We can’t get used to homeless people living in our neighborhoods … It’s time we reclaim our neighborhoods and reclaim our freeways,” Mayor Dyer earlier told the local Fox affiliate.

The Offramp project will supposedly find housing for the 250 people which Dyer estimates live near freeways. But they are only some of the 2,386 people living out of doors in Fresno city and county in 2020, an increase of 598 just from the previous year.

Nevertheless, in 2019 the U.S. Supreme Court backed a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals holding that “people experiencing homelessness cannot be criminally punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no available alternatives,” according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. NLIHC president and CEO Diane Yentel explained, “Cities must stop attempting to criminalize and hide their communities’ homeless people and instead work toward providing real solutions, starting with the only thing that truly ends homelessness: access to safe, affordable, accessible homes.”

Tulare County clearly can’t deal with the number and rapid increase in people who have no adequate place to live.

Police and sheriff actions to eliminate outdoor encampments, therefore, require that displaced people must have access to alternative housing. Hernandez says that the notice from the Tulare County sheriff claimed replacement housing was available, although the deputies couldn’t tell him where it was. “A trailer park would charge us $450 a month,” he says, “and we just don’t have it.” Last year the New Porterville Rescue Mission on A Street was closed by the city after it couldn’t come up to safety and health codes, and one resident complained of pervasive cockroach infestation.

*  *  *

Part of the Tule River levee lies inside Porterville, while part of it is in the county’s unincorporated area. According to the Kings/Tulare Homeless Alliance’ 2020 Point in Time survey, 704 people in Tulare County were sleeping outside and more than two-thirds of them had been doing so for more than a year. Over half are Latinos or other people of color, and their number has nearly doubled since 2013. In Porterville itself 174 people were unsheltered. Only 163 people in both Porterville and the surrounding county were able to find beds in a shelter. While social services exist for unhoused people, Tulare County, like every county in California, clearly can’t deal with the number and rapid increase in people who have no adequate place to live. ...Read More

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Feb 15, 2021 “Good news in these difficult pandemic times,” says Arquimedes Torres, a craftsman who makes furniture from bejuco, a kind of wicker. Until Friday, his business was semi-clandestine, like part of that of his neighbor Ramiro, who grows and sells medicinal and ornamental plants. On that date, the government announced a substantial increase in the scope of activities of Trabajadores por cuenta propria (‘independent workers,’ TPCs), a euphemism behind which private enterprise is often disguised. This is a long-awaited step, because, from the 127 activities that were previously allowed for TPCs, the number of productive sectors in which private individuals can operate has risen to 2,000. This includes Arquimedes and Ramiro.

According to Labor Minister Marta Elena Feitó, the measure “will favor the economic and social development” of the island. Development and increased productivity, especially in the agricultural sector, are the basis of the socialist government’s policy to deal with the devastating effects (an 11% drop in GDP last year) produced by the policy of economic suffocation of the island adopted by former President Trump, as well as COVID19, whose second wave is hitting Cuba hard.

The 617,000 independent workers represent 13% of the total workforce.

But if one also takes the number of workers employed in the private entrepreneurship sector (1,600,300 in 2018) as a measure, the proportion rises to 38% of all employment that produces goods and services. If the private sector has achieved this with a drastic limitation to 127 activities (and with other obstacles such as the lack of a wholesale market), it is clear that it is by no means a marginal phenomenon.

Thus, the approved reform is potentially the first step towards a mixed economy, in which, together with the state sector, private entrepreneurs and cooperatives operate with the same structural importance. One hundred twenty-four activities, not yet specified by the government, will remain excluded from the TPC system. But they will presumably concern the “sensitive” sectors: defense, media, healthcare, and basic energy.

Although an economic measure, the decision to open up to the private sector—or not—has always had a political significance in Cuba after Castro’s revolution. In 2013, after the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party had given the green light to a series of economic-social reforms (the so-called Lineamentos), Raúl Castro publicly argued for the need to change “the political vision” that existed towards TCPs, eliminating prejudices towards private entrepreneurs.

Since the end of the last century, both the issue of foreign investment and independent work were seen as “a necessary evil” to tackle the economic crisis. An “evil” that was never fully stomached by the orthodox wing of the Communist Party, which saw the TCPs as a kind of “Trojan horse of capitalism.”

So they proceeded with steps forward and steps back, according to the balance of the political leadership: with liberalizations subsequently limited by restrictions and trabas (obstacles) aimed at locking private individuals into the uncomfortable role of “fellow travelers.”

The decision to extend the space granted to the TCPs, and in such a significant way, confirms that “if we want to move towards the future” (Raúl Castro), the private sector, like foreign investment, must be considered “strategic” for the island’s economic development while maintaining the goal of “prosperous and sustainable socialism.”

The new measure adopted by the government also goes in the direction outlined by the Tarea ordenamiento economico, which came into force on 1 January. The reform provides not only for the elimination of dual currency circulation and a fixed exchange rate of the Cuban peso with the US dollar (one dollar for 24 pesos), but also a progressive autonomy of state enterprises—which will have to be active or close down—and an important role for the provinces and municipalities.

These will decide on the granting of new licenses to private individuals, after examining their proposals. The ability and intelligence of local administrators to “facilitate” the process of creating new TPCs will be a factor on which the prosperity of their territories will partly depend: improved economic revenues for families, more employment, better services, etc. According to economist Triana Condovì, opening up to the private sector would also serve to reduce the current trend of emigration of the high-skilled workforce to other countries that offer better earnings.

The next step in the “new socialist economic model,” according to economist Juan Valdés Paz, should provide a legally defined space for the private sector: essentially a law for micro and small businesses (Mpymes). The development strategy should adapt to this new ownership structure while maintaining the predominant role of the state form of production.

Originally published in Italian on February 12, 2021 ...Read More

The Western left has largely fallen in line behind interventionist platitudes of “standing with the Chinese people, not the Chinese government.” But their cover of “principled critique” elides the fact that criticism does not exist in a vacuum. In this case, it is greasing the wheels for Western imperialist intervention under the auspices of a “new” Cold War. 

Amidst the feverish critiques of China made by a growing cadre of “China scholars,” “media watchers,” and “think tank freelancers” across the Western world (the “free world,” they might tell you), a virulent distaste toward China for supposedly ethical reasons has become the norm. We’ve woken up to find ourselves in a Twilight Zone where the precondition for engaging with Sinophobia is the performance of a different kind of Sinophobic antipathy—one that disavows the possibility of Chinese political legitimacy while it virtue signals the Western critic’s own commitment to “justice.” 

We’ve woken up to find ourselves in a Twilight Zone where the precondition for engaging with Sinophobia is the performance of a different kind of Sinophobic antipathy—one that disavows the possibility of Chinese political legitimacy while it virtue signals the Western critic’s own commitment to “justice.” 

Western critiques of China, however, lay bare its stakes even as it feverishly disavows the very position from which it emerges. As principled Marxists, we must always ask after the historical context and political functions in which our words and actions take meaning.

Why, we must ask, is it so enticing to name China as the “new” face of imperialism, even as the United States retains undisputed global military supremacy, with more than 800 military bases abroad and an international sanctions regime enabled by the dollar standard?

Why do we continue to insist on the morally-bankrupt argument of “inter-imperialism” and shared sins when the very people whom we benefit by doing so are, in order of significance, the U.S. military, the Euro-American military-industrial complex, and international right-wing white supremacist organizations?

***

A series of frighteningly simple assumptions undergird China-watchers’ performance of ethical commitment. Many a think piece has begun with the proclamation that the new era of multipolarity will be defined not by U.S. imperialism, but by Chinese hegemonic ascendence. Such arguments, as they are furthered by Western leftists, adhere to a simple definition of imperialism, usually cropped from Lenin. Their reduced theoretical analysis goes like this: imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, borne by “the persistent tendency of mature capitalist state systems to generate violent conflict,” as Amiya Kuma has put it. Since China is capitalist, same as the rest of the world, it must also be veering toward imperialism, especially since it seems to be opening a number of trade partnerships with other Global South nations. 

Unlike the late capitalist dons of Europe and the U.S., however, this Chinese “capitalism” is framed as more aggressive and predatorial; China’s relations with other Global South nations can’t be anything but exploitative, since exploitation has been the dominant theme in post-1945 relations between Euro-American empires and the rest. China must be chomping at the bit to rise to similar dominance: her boundless appetite for labor and raw materials from the developing world bespeaks her endless greed, alerting us to the stakes of her menacing rise. (Naturally, this discourse is also pulsating with sexualized pathology and racialized excesses.) Since it is the job of any Marxist to oppose the capitalist foe, “we” must stand against China’s bad-faith practices, and, armed with questionable sources and plenty of U.S. State Department-sponsored media material, “we” must correct China’s malignant development. ...Read More

Tune of the Week: Take Me Home - Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle

Feb 15, 2021 - The grinding quality of American presidential memoirs owes to the cross-purposes they serve: to deliver a point-by-point defense of the administration’s record, while trying to persuade the public that their departed leader was indelibly, even endearingly, human.

Obligatory features include mischievous tales of bucking White House protocol; an extended homage to the presidential predecessor who was a fine man on a personal level; a printed extract of a letter from a constituent or child reassuring the president that he should regret rien (nothing- Ed); and shout-outs to sundry staff and swamis, whose capsule biographies expand and contract in proportion to their fealty.

If Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs became an accidental modernist classic, it was because he evacuated his own personality so completely from his account that he figured as another instrument of war. Barack Obama’s A Promised Land is somewhere at the opposite end of the spectrum. The expectations for the book recall the expectations for his presidency. Obama is aware of this and aware that his ability to report on the progress of his self-awareness was always part of his appeal. Addressing a crowded hall at the New York Public Library in the post-election haze, Zadie Smith proclaimed Obama an evolutionary advance in the history of democratic representation: “This new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them.”

Two years into his presidency, the head of the Harvard history department declared, at book length, that Obama was a Pragmatist philosopher-king, who had planted the torch of John Dewey and William James in the Oval Office. Not to be outdone, a leading sociologist at Yale claimed that the president was his own social movement.

Compared to the and-then-we-became-buddies volubility of Bill Clinton’s My Life, and the point-blank basicness of George W. Bush’s Decision Points, Obama’s A Promised Land is both a more disciplined and ambitious undertaking. It could have been titled “The Education of Barack Obama,” if that didn’t suggest a few more degrees of irony than he is willing to allow. Obama tends to believe he made the best of each of the quagmires he inherited. Accompanying his exculpatory agenda, there is an edifying one: The memoir is aimed at young idealists, whom he spoon-feeds background history, from the rise of Putin in Russia to the story of Saudi oil.

The smoothness of the narrative benefits from the fact that Obama sees his political ascent as inextricable from his own individual narrative. Early in the book, he divides himself into a series of stock characters: the Frank Capra Obama who comes to Washington “starry-eyed” (foil: Rahm Emanuel); the wised-up Philip Marlowe Obama who gets all the best lines as he tries to steward the status quo (foil: the irrepressible paladin, Samantha Power); and the Jack Ryan man of action determined to deliver on his ideals (foils: David Plouffe and Reggie Love, who bear witness to the force within him). Despite being more thoroughly the work of a single hand than its predecessors, the strange experience of reading this presidential memoir is that it feels more storyboarded: more crisp, more conventional, more strategic, more Netflix-series friendly.

Capra Obama occupies the opening portion of A Promised Land. There is ample evidence that Obama was a complicated young man, not only as relayed in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, but also in letters that emerged later, written in his college years, when he coldly registered the limits of “bourgeois liberalism.” Any access to this countercurrent has been shut off in the first part of A Promised Land, in which Obama talks of his youthful patriotism. “The pride in being American, the notion that America was the greatest country on earth—that was always a given,” writes Obama. “As a young man, I chafed against books that dismissed the notion of American exceptionalism.” Likewise, he began to see himself less as an inheritor of the civil rights struggle but rather its culmination and fulfillment. Black people of a certain age, he writes, “now recognized in me some of the fruits of their labor.”

After college, Obama moves to Chicago to become a community organizer, where he warms his hands on the embers of the civil rights movement, and believes he grasps the limits of Harold Washington’s original “rainbow” coalition. “Maybe there was another way,” he writes. “Maybe with enough preparation, policy know-how, and management skills, you could avoid some of Harold’s mistakes.” A different future unfurls before him. Obama meets the rusted language of class solidarity with gleaming paeans to self-actualization. “Maybe the principles of organizing could be marshaled not just to run a campaign but to govern—to encourage participation and active citizenship among those who’d been left out, and to teach them not just to trust their elected leaders, but to trust one another and themselves.” This is almost exactly what did not happen when Obama became president. Once he assumed office, Obama’s meticulously constructed campaign booster rocket fell away. He began filling the ranks of his administration with Clintonite apparatchiks. Although it can be tempting to blame this continuity on Obama’s inexperience or opportunism, it was perhaps more the result of having assumed leadership over a party that was so ideologically barren that it could not sprout a bureaucracy that was anything more than a tumbleweed of status-quo technicians.

The main antagonist for Capra Obama is not any Mr. Potter but his own demons. At first, he wonders if it is even ethical to attend law school, until his mother sanctions his decision to go. At every station on his pilgrim’s progress to the White House, he relates that he was gnawed by self-doubt. “Was it just vanity? Or perhaps something darker—a raw hunger, a blind ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service?” he asks himself when, as he is deciding whether to run for president, a voice pursues him, whispering “No, no, no.” The authenticity of such a scene is beside the point. Why does Obama feel the need to dramatize what other presidents take more or less as a given? It seems to stem less from any genteel desire to conceal ambition than to dramatize his political rise as a morality play in which idealism vanquished vanity. Such a staging partially obscures the other factors of Obama’s ascent: his luck, his uniquely advantageous position in the meritocratic elite, and—perhaps most crucially—the broader context of a Democratic Party and union sector that had been lobotomized by Clintonism, which made wagering on an individual savior seem worth the gamble.

How does Obama conquer his doubts? The scene is telling. When Michelle asks him, in front of his staff, why he needs to be president, Obama launches into a full-Capra mini-speech about how kids around the country, Black, Hispanic, or just plain awkward, “will see themselves differently.” The reader expects this sentimentalism to be swiftly subjected to severe inspection. With Black wealth having cratered across his two terms, how much did the kids get to do with their personal epiphanies? Instead, the camera pans back to Michelle: “Well, honey, that was a pretty good answer.”

The same format replays when Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Early in the morning, Obama learns he’s won the prize. “For what?” he asks, with winning self-deprecation. Michelle, winningly as well, acts as if he’s just found a toy in his cereal. But when the camera finally gets to Oslo, Obama has imbibed the hype. Looking down from the window at an assembled crowd of adoring Norwegians holding candles, Obama makes a kind of peace with his savior status. The voices return: “Whatever you do won’t be enough,” I heard their voices say. “Try anyway.”

The electoral gods smiled on Obama when it came to higher office. In 1996, he ran unopposed in the Democratic primary for a seat in the Illinois state Senate, while in his 2004 run for the U.S. Senate, his Republican rival collapsed in a sex scandal. Less commonly cited, but no less remarkable was the change in Democratic primary rules for proportional voting that allowed Obama to defeat Hillary Clinton for the nomination in 2008. In the campaign for the presidency itself, Obama faced down an opponent who was convinced he could be forgiven for economic illiteracy in the midst of an economic recession. He also had other winds at his back: Colin Powell had been floated as a plausible “moderate” Black candidate some years before, and, more acutely, the popular energy generated by Bush’s Katrina response and Iraq War—the second ignited some of the largest protests in recorded history—would propel anyone into the White House who knew how to harness a modicum of it. ...Read More

Feb. 16, 2021 - “Judas and the Black Messiah” is a very good — nearly great — movie about the charismatic Fred Hampton and the way the Black Panther Party was targeted by the United States government. Yet neither the standout performances from Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield nor the sensitive and insightful direction by Shaka King are the most remarkable aspects of the film: Not since Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic “Malcolm X” has there been a mainstream American film this thoroughly Black and radical.

Black History Month was a mystery to me as a kid. I could never understand why we were taught some Black history but not nearly enough, not even close. We would learn about Frederick Douglass but not Nat Turner. Booker T. Washington but not W.E.B. Du Bois. Our teachers made a point of telling us about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but completely neglected Malcolm X. With this approach, they tacitly communicated that only the Black historical figures who included white people doing the work of Black liberation were the ones worthy of remembrance. This was especially true when it came to Black radicals. The Panthers, who were important to my community when I was growing up, and the Black Power movement were never part of the narrative at school. The same can be said of Hollywood.

Hollywood has long told Black stories from the perspective of white people. Think of Oscar-winning dramas like “The Blind Side” (a white adoptive mother comes to the aid of a Black football player), “The Help” (a white journalist awakens to the injustices Black maids face in the civil-rights-era South) or “Green Book” (a white chauffeur helps a Black classical pianist): Instead of exploring what Black characters endured, these movies catered to white audiences, giving them lessons on how to better perform their whiteness while in proximity to Blackness.

This tradition of making Black films about white people thus makes the mere existence of “Judas and the Black Messiah” shocking and exhilarating. The movie, available on HBO Max and distributed by Warner Bros., is not exactly hostile to white people, but for a mainstream movie likely to garner Oscar attention, the version of Blackness it depicts, one rooted in an unapologetic love of the descendants of enslaved people, is rare. Surprisingly, it does not apologize for Hampton’s embrace of Blackness nor his deep suspicion of capitalism. It also does not sugarcoat the depiction of the Judas of the title, the F.B.I. plant Bill O’Neal. In another era, if a studio film tackled the material at all, Hampton would have been secondary in the story of a sympathetic informant. Instead, King is intentional about putting us on the side of the Black radicals, and we see the government for what it was: a destructive force.

The movie isn’t perfect. Hampton was a fiery speaker, yes, but to fully understand him and his appeal, one must see him in action — a vantage the movie does not afford its viewers. What made him a legend in Chicago was his organizing skills and his undeniable charisma. But his most important achievement was bringing together the Rainbow Coalition, an alliance of the Black Panthers; the leftist, mostly white Young Patriots Organization; and the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican gang that was concerned with human rights. This is not really given much screen time. Instead, the film shows us a Hampton who has already reached his zenith — it does not show us the work he did to get there. Obviously, a film is not a history lesson, but a bit more time could have been devoted to Hampton’s ideas.

Recent documentaries like Stanley Nelson’s “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” and Göran Olsson’s “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” have examined the Panthers’ history and what they stood for. There have been a handful of features about the Panthers, most notably the beautiful and intimate “Night Catches Us” (2010), which depicted what happened to former members who tried to make a life outside the party. Perhaps the drama that comes closest to what “Judas” has achieved is a movie about Black nationalism, Lee’s “Malcolm X.” The politics of the two films are similar in that they both depict men who are vocal in their vision of Black self-determination. Yet “Judas” is more explicit about how Hampton married his racial critique with an economic one.

It’s clear why we finally got a film like this. Black protesters have forced this country and its cultural creators finally to pay attention to its vicious legacy of white supremacy. Not only have people been in the streets for the past few years chanting “Black Lives Matter,” but Hollywood has also been an explicit target for criticism. It was only a few years ago that #OscarsSoWhite forced the academy to do some serious soul searching about how the industry marginalizes Black talent. More still needs to be done to make the industry an equitable place for all stories and creators, but the work so far is already having an impact.

And it’s important to see a film telling a story about Black figures who have been neglected by America’s history books. If nothing else, the movie might inspire viewers to dig deeper and learn more about the Black radicals it depicts. Hampton and the Black Panther Party were always heroes to me; this is a film that does justice to their memory....Read More