Photo: J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, US, on August 20.,Photo: Bloomberg

When Does Power Concede? Thwarting MAGA Will Take More Than Protest and Symbolic Resistance.

If we want to deploy actual power to block Trump’s vicious agenda once he takes control of the federal government, we will have to look to the states.

By Van Gosse  

The Nation via Portside

Nov 20, 2024

“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, opportunity, and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people—you come through me.”

—Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker

This remark at Governor Pritzker’s postelection press conference was the sole heartening thing I have heard since the debacle of November 5. Why?

Frederick Douglass famously asserted, “Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will.” This maxim is usually invoked to stress the need for tenacity, as in the United Farm Workers’ “¡Sí, se puede!” (“Yes, we can!”), or the motto of African revolutionaries in the Portuguese colonies, “A luta continua” (“the struggle continues”), or the Wobbly martyr Joe Hill’s “Don’t mourn, organize.”

But Douglass’s insight goes deeper. He understood that oppressive power will concede nothing except when confronted by a countervailing power; that moral righteousness and steadfast commitment avail little unless the oppressed grasp the necessary tools. The arc of justice does not bend by itself; it is bent—or not.

Certainly, resistance to MAGA will brew, but we need to be strategic about how to make that resistance effective. Progressives cannot afford to be like the proverbial French generals, always fighting the last war. In this case, the “last war” is the mass Women’s Marches of January 2017, the largest protests in US history—until the Black Lives Matter mobilizations in 2020! But today, when Trump has targeted dissenters and is itching to use federal and paramilitary forces against his opponents, those kinds of protests cannot be our only way to resist.

The question now is how to deploy actual power to block the vicious MAGA agenda once it takes control of the federal government.

In my view, we should take up one of the most effective forms of resistance to unjust authority in US history—fighting at the level of individual states and municipalities, where governors and legislatures, mayors and city councils act to protect their own citizens. Yes, I am talking about “states’ rights.”

Here we face a problem of historical memory. Throughout the 20th century, the term “states’ rights” meant the right of a state to disfranchise, segregate, exclude from public services, and deny basic physical safety to some of its own citizens. That was the constitutional rationale underlying Jim Crow from Virginia to Texas, how Chicanos were treated in the Southwest, and Native American peoples virtually everywhere. In 1948, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond led a walkout from the Democratic convention when the party finally endorsed civil rights. He convened a States’ Rights Democratic Party and swept four states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama) as the only “Democrat” on the ballot.

Eight years later, 101 Southern Members of Congress issued the Southern Manifesto, damning the Brown v. Board of Education decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power” that would “encroach upon the reserved rights of the states and the people.” And Ronald Reagan sounded a loud dog-whistle on August 3, 1980, telling whites at the Neshoba County fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi—where the KKK had murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in 1964—that “I believe in states’ rights…. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”

But there is also a powerful history of state and local resistance to injustice that we can draw on. As Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction and my The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War document, in the half-century preceding Lincoln’s election, governors, legislatures, towns, and cities in much of the North resisted the legal claims of the slaveholding states, defending the rights of their citizens against “the Slave Power”—meaning the South’s domination of national politics. As this defiance spread in the 1850s, it effectively nullified the federal government’s ability to enforce the claims of slave-owners.

There is a further implication for our own time, when Republicans controlling red states seek to abrogate the citizenship of those deemed “other,” whether immigrants, trans persons, or anyone not white. In the antebellum era, “states’ rights” meant that when a state granted citizenship to African Americans by enfranchising them if male, authorizing them to testify against whites in court, issuing passports to them (as Massachusetts did in the 1850s), and protecting them against slave-catchers via “personal liberty” laws, that state’s governor, legislature, and courts were deliberately confronting those states that refused citizenship to Black people.

Up until 1850, the central issue was the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, which required states to comply with the Constitution’s specification that any “person held to Service or Labour in one State,” if escaping to another, must be returned. In the 1810s, legislators above the Mason-Dixon responded viscerally to well-organized kidnapping rings in the Chesapeake, which regularly abducted persons of color (especially children). In 1820, Pennsylvania passed the first “personal liberty” law, further strengthened by an 1826 act making it extremely difficult for a slave-owner to to reclaim his human chattels.

By the 1830s, an anti-slavery constituency formed among Northern Whigs led by the congressman (and former president) John Quincy Adams. It became popular to defy the South by refusing to extradite fugitives or persons charged with aiding escapes. A pattern was set in 1837–38 when Whig and then Democratic governors in Maine denied Georgia’s demand for the rendition of an enslaved stowaway and the captain of the ship on which he escaped.

The most famous instance of this de facto nullification was the “Virginia Controversy” of 1839–42, during which New York Governor William H. Seward resisted five Virginia governors demanding the extradition of three Black seamen, New York citizens, who helped an enslaved person to escape from Norfolk. Seward’s rationale here bears special notice for our time. He wrote one governor that extradition was valid in his state only if the supposed crime was “treasonable, felonious or criminal,” and it was “not a felony nor a crime” in New York to help someone escape from bondage, adding that “it is absurd in this State to speak of property in immortal beings, and consequently of stealing them, as it would be to discourse of a division of property in the common atmosphere.” Not only that. In 1840, he signed a bill mandating jury trials for alleged fugitives from slavery, and in 1841 approved legislation revoking the “nine months law” which permitted slaveholders to bring their chattels into the state.

Seward and his Ohio ally (later governor) Salmon P. Chase took the doctrine of a state’s right to guarantee liberty to the Supreme Court in 1842 and lost in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, when the court voided the conviction of a professional slavecatcher. But the Prigg decision also removed the requirement that state authorities cooperate in recapture. As a consequence, individual states and localities continued to turn a blind eye to “rescues” of captured fugitives, often by free Black folk.

Matters came to a head after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. That draconian legislation repealed habeas corpus for all persons of African descent in the “free” states. The reaction across much of the North was violent outrage. In 1852, the Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings told a mass meeting, “I would sooner see every slave holder of the nation hanged then to witness the subjugation of northern freemen to such a humiliating condition. If this law continues to be enforced, Civil War is inevitable.”

Spectacular rescues ensued, from Christiana just above Pennsylvania’s border with Maryland (where a slaveholder was killed) to Syracuse’s “Jerry Rescue” and multiple confrontations in Boston. Powerful political figures like Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner and Pennsylvania Representative Thaddeus Stevens defended the men arrested during these actions, whom juries proved singularly unwilling to convict.

Beginning in 1854, as the new Republican Party coalesced, eight Northern states passed stringent personal liberty laws. The resolution by Vermont’s General Assembly in 1858, following the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, gives their flavor: “That all laws of Congress which recognize the right of property in man, or deprive any person of liberty without due process of law and a jury trial…are unconstitutional, void, and of no effect…. That these extra-judicial opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States are a dangerous usurpation of power, and have no binding authority upon Vermont, or the people of the United States.”

Dred Scott was the final straw, as it guaranteed slaveholders the right to take their human property anywhere in the United States and erased any possibility of Black citizenship. The Wisconsin legislature nullified it, and Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court followed suit when queried by the legislature whether Black Mainers could still vote as they had since the state’s founding. It was a short route from there to Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and then secession, when four of the slaveholding states cited the refusal to return fugitives as a central reason for leaving the Union. They had been met with power, and retreated.

Lessons for today

What is the lesson of this history from our seemingly distant past? Constitutional scholars will likely declare it irrelevant, given more recent precedents, and no one can imagine that this Supreme Court—any more than the court led by Chief Justice Roger Taney that issued Dred Scott—will support states and cities that defy Trump. This is not a legal strategy, in any case—no more than resistance by New York or Ohio to the slave power’s domination was.

It is as political as could be: putting up a wall against oppression, securing a border for freedom, creating sanctuaries for the oppressed, refusing to cooperate with a government that validates cruelty via mass deportations of the undocumented and persecution of anyone involved in abortion or gender-affirming care.

That was the implication of what Governor Pritzker said: Now we must expand the zone of freedom state by state—by any means necessary. The fighting words of Vermont’s legislature in 1858 seem fresh: “Whenever the government or judiciary of the United States refuses or neglects to protect the citizens of each State in their lives and liberty, when in another State or territory, it becomes the duty of the sovereign and independent States of this Union to protect their own citizens, at whatever hazard or cost.”

Van Gosse is Professor of History emeritus at Franklin and Marshall College and cochair of Historians for Peace and Democracy. ...Read More

Photo: New policies could force deportations for some troops, or their family members. (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services)

Trump Confirms He’s Declaring National

Emergency So Military Can Deport Migrants

The president-elect and his team are working on ways to boot undocumented immigrants as fast as possible without legal repercussions

By Ryan Bort

Rolling Stone

Nov 18, 2024 - Donald Trump‘s determination to conduct mass deportations of undocumented immigrants is very real, and he wants to start cracking down immediately. One of the ways he plans to do so is by declaring a national emergency that will enable him to use the military to help boot migrants out of the United States.

The president-elect on Monday responded “TRUE!!!” to a Truth Social post about reports that his incoming administration is “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”

The confirmation came at 4:08 a.m.

Trump built his 2024 presidential campaign around a vow to lock down the border and forcibly — and violently — deport the undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. He spoke repeatedly about an “invasion” of migrants who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, and even claiming that undocumented immigrants have been “conquering” American cities.

He’s been insistent since winning the election that immigration is his top priority, telling NBC News that his administration will spare no expense when it comes to deportation. “It’s not a question of a price tag,” he said. “It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”

There will certainly be a price tag, however, and it will be high given the logistical implications of removing millions of people from the nation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not currently equipped to carry out Trump’s deportation agenda, which calls for quadrupling the number of deportations the agency carries out every year. 

Politico reported Monday on some of the tactics the administration plans to start cracking down, noting that deportations will commence within Trump’s first 100 days in office, and that his team is looking for ways to expedite the process that will withstand any legal challenges from rights groups. Trump is also expected to quickly do away with a Biden administration policy that prioritized deporting migrants who threatened public safety and national security, and directed ICE officers to take “the totality of the facts and circumstances” into consideration before deporting migrants with criminal convictions.

Tom Homan, the immigration hardliner Trump recently tapped as his “border czar,” has said criminals will be the first to go, while teasing the administration’s aggressive approach to deportation. “I got three words for them: shock and awe,” Homan told Donald Trump Jr. of the administration’s approach. “Shock and awe. You’re going to see us take this country back.” ...Read More

Photo: Norma Palacios with domestic workers rallying in Los Angeles on behalf of striking workers at an Audi plant in Mexico, February 10, 2024. David Bacon.

Domestic Workers: A New Face Of International Solidarity

Norma Palacios Interviewed by David Bacon

Dollars and Sense 

November/December 2024

Norma Palacios is one of the three general secretaries of the National Union of Domestic Workers (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras del Hogar, or Sinactraho). Her parents were domestic workers, and she started doing the same work at 19 years old. She stopped working after the pandemic, but was a domestic worker until she turned 50 years old.

Last year we celebrated eight years of being established as a union, but we went through a training process for two years before that, which included a reflection on why we had to organize and what we could achieve. About 100 women participated. We organized and established Sinactraho so that we would have a voice, through our representation as a Mexican union at the national level. We complied with all the requirements and we are now functioning as a union.

In Mexico, the vast majority of the women are working for private people. Worldwide the conditions are not very different, whether there is legislation or not. Most do household work or domestic work, and many are indigenous women. Whether paid or unpaid, household work is devalued, and this has an impact on how it is seen, whether it is treated with dignity, and how household work is recognized. We have many strategies to organize ourselves for power, recognizing first that we are domestic workers, strong and powerful women, and then looking at how this work impacts society. Without our work, many of our employers would not be able to go to work.

We suffer from a lack of lack of labor rights, because in legislation in Mexico the value of this work is not recognized. Many of our colleagues suffer discrimination, even violence, and in the end we are left completely unprotected after having worked many years of our lives.

These are the main problems domestic workers have in Mexico, all due to the fact that this work is not recognized as work. By referring to it as "help," it disguises the true relationships. Because we do not have a written contract, we have no right to a fair number of hours in a day, a fair salary, rights such as social security, vacations, housing, and to organize.

In Mexico, the regular domestic workers, that is, our coworkers who live in the workplace, which are the employers' homes, stay with a single employer all week. Other domestic workers have multiple employers. Placement agencies are also an issue, basically outsourcing, because they negotiate wages and assign work, but without any labor protection.

Mexico has ratified Convention 189 of the International Labor Organization, which obligates it to comply with its protection of rights. This led to progress in legislation. The social security law was changed to give access to mandatory social security, but they don't say when, or what will happen to employers who do not comply.

Workplace inspection in this sector is also a problem in Mexico. It's a problem everywhere, and if it's a problem in the automotive sector, you can imagine there's even less for us as domestic workers, and that has an impact. That it makes it more difficult for us to make domestic work a decent job. There are many problems with wage theft. That led many domestic workers to organize ourselves. It is a process that takes time, because we have to go through a process of winning dignity, of recognizing ourselves, of assuming responsibility. If there is no commitment and responsibility to the organization, and to defending our rights, we will always have bad conditions.

We all fear that if we talk back to our employers, they will fire us, but that is what the union is for, to defend our rights. And we have had many success stories. Once we were established we created an advisory program, lawyers who help us defend the workers.

Government enforcement is not enough, and apart from that, there is a lot of ignorance about our labor conditions. The inspectors need to understand that household work is a job. But many people in government bodies are employers themselves, so logically they are not going to want to recognize our complaints. We still do not have a collective contract, but we are trying to promote the signing of an individual contract. There is a great lack of employers who want to sign them, however. And we have to train our colleagues so that they know how to defend themselves and establish that dialogue with employers.

I had the experience of having signed a written contract with an employer, but there is a lot of ignorance. In Mexico, the majority of workers belong to the informal sector, and there is not a lot of information available about why it is important to have a written contract.

We have to start from the right to organize in a union because that gives you power. It completely changes the panorama. Our coworkers have shown a lot of progress, regardless of the legislation that exists and its shortcomings. If you have to look for a change in legislation to be able to form a union, then do it. But in the meantime, we can't stay here doing nothing. In Mexico we don't precisely know how to force employers to comply and many workers are unaware that domestic workers are covered in this labor reform. On an international level, domestic workers need alliances. An alliance with our colleagues in the United States in our own sector would help us, because we are all workers. ...Read More

Photo: A Ukrainian artillery unit at a front line position in Donetsk Region in November. Photographer: Diego Fedele/Getty Images

Russia’s War Against Ukraine Enters a Dangerous New Chapter

Ukraine launches first attack on Russian soil with US missiles, Putin broadens guidelines on potential use of nuclear weapons. Russia Will React Accordingly to ATACMS Strike, Says Foreign Minister Lavrov

By Alan Crawford

Bloomberg

Nov 19, 2024 Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is escalating after months of bloody attrition.

As the conflict entered its 1,000th day, Ukraine took advantage of its newly granted long-range missile capabilities to strike a military base on Russian territory. Moscow, which has warned against such action, stepped up its threat of a nuclear response to conventional attacks.

The twin developments early on Tuesday rattled investors who have long tuned out of the war’s daily grind, prompting a rush into haven assets. In reality, the recent arrival of North Korean troops to support Russian forces on the battlefield had already upped the ante.

The prospect of Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January and his pledge to end the war in short order has created a new sense of urgency for Ukraine and its allies.

Earlier this week, President Joe Biden dropped his longstanding opposition to long-range strikes on Russia with the American-made Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMS. The administration will also provide Ukraine with antipersonnel land mines to blunt the advance of Russian troops, according to a US official who asked not to be identified.

The US-provided mines are “non-persistent,” becoming inert after a pre-set period of time that can last from a few hours to two weeks, the official said. The land mine decision was reported earlier by the Washington Post.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been pleading for more weapons to strengthen his hand, the Biden administration is sending Kyiv as much aid as possible before it leaves office, and Germany’s Olaf Scholz called Putin last week to sound him out on talks. The Russian leader showed no interest in compromise, Scholz reported.

“The current situation offers Putin a significant temptation to escalate,” Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said in a post on X. Such a move would allow both Putin and Trump to blame Biden for the spiraling conflict and serve as a premise for direct talks, she said.

“This marks an extraordinarily dangerous juncture,” she added, since Putin may be trying to convince Western leaders they have to choose between a nuclear conflict or a settlement on Russia’s terms.

The news sent investors into some of the world’s safest assets. The yield on 10-year Treasuries fell as much as seven basis points, while the rate on equivalent German securities dropped 11 basis points. The moves also spread to the currency market, lifting the Japanese yen and Swiss franc.

Still, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sought to calm worries about a nuclear escalation, even as he accused the West of escalating the conflict. “We are strongly in favor of doing everything not to allow nuclear war to happen,” he said at the G-20. “A nuclear weapon is first and foremost a weapon to prevent any nuclear war.”

What’s Russia’s Nuclear Doctrine? How Has It Changed?

But Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, who spoke with Putin last month, warned that if Moscow is threatened “he won’t hesitate for a second — he will use nuclear weapons.” The Russian leader wouldn’t seek nuclear confrontation now, though, as his forces are doing well on the battlefield, Vucic said in Belgrade on Tuesday.

The US signaled it wouldn’t adjust its nuclear posture in response to Russia’s decision to change its doctrine. A National Security Council spokesperson, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the move wasn’t a surprise.

The attack came as Biden and Scholz were gathered with other Group of 20 leaders at a summit in Rio de Janeiro where maneuvering over Russia’s war has been one of the major points of contention.

The host, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, has tried to shut down debates over the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza in order to focus on climate change and poverty. But his heavy-handed and, at times, chaotic management of the meeting has left many other leaders ill-tempered.

Adding to the sense of unease, two undersea data cables were damaged in the Baltic near the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Monday. Governments in the region have repeatedly reported cyber attacks, disinformation and incursions by Russian jets and have warned that they will be under threat if Putin secures victory in Ukraine. The Swedish police said it started a probe into the cable breaches as possible sabotage.

“Something is going on there,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said.

The origins of this week’s developments can be traced back to Pyongyang’s intervention in war last month, a move that came in defiance of warnings from Washington.

That was the shift that persuaded Biden allow ATACMS strikes on Russia. Deploying North Korean troops in combat took the situation to “another level,” Oleksandr Polishchuk, Ukraine’s ambassador to India, said in an interview in New Delhi Monday. ...Read More

'Now might be the only chance': Maddow exhorts Senate Democrats to act on Trump nominees ...12 min

From Upton

Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University

Essays on the Ongoing Transformation of Higher Education

By Daniel Morris

and Harry Targ

Paperback USD 17.00

This is a unique collection of 15 essays by two Purdue University professors who use their institution as a case-in-point study of the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education' from 1923, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then and brought it up to date with more far-reaching changes today. time. They also include, as an appendix, a 1967 essay by SDS leader Carl Davidson, who broke some of the original ground on the subject.

Click HERE to Purchase

New Studies

on the Left

Paperback $19.95

...is a journal of socialist theory and practice. It is the successor to ‘Dialogue and Initiative, published as an annual journal of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism in book form from 2012 to 2022. It will continue the CCDS policy of left unity, including articles with a variety of left perspectives, including debates.

This issue contains over 30 articles grouped under the headings of Analysis and Global Reach, Debate and Controversy, Labor, Socialism, and Book Reviews. Some are reprinted from other sources, but many appear here for the first time.

Among the authors are David Bacon, Joan Braune, Carl Davidson, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Jerry Harris, Jay Jurie, Paul Krehbiel, Sun Liping, Adewale A. Maye, Duncan McFarland, Jasmine Payne-Patterson, Vijay Prashad, Nikhil Pal Singh, Harry Targ, and Janet Tucker.

Table of Contents

Click HERE to purchase

Click here for a free copy of Paul Krebiel's article 'Union Stewards Councils: the Next Step Forward'



HOLIDAY SALE ON EVERY TITLE BEGINS TODAY!

Hard Ball & Little Heroes Press is sharing the holiday spirit by offering a 25% discount on ALL TITLES from November 15-December 25. Enter SOLIDARITY in the discount box when you order a book, 25% will be automatically taken off your cost.

Happy holidays! Tim Sheard, editor

For the children...



Good Guy Jake...An inspiring Children’s Christmas story for Labor!

Imagine young children reading a book about a union that wins back the job of a sanitation worker unfairly fired for taking toys out of the trash. That’s what they will discover in Good Guy Jake. 

For years Jake has repaired and painted broken toys he pulled from the trash on his rounds and given them to the children in the local shelter at Christmas. But when an angry motorist reports Jake to the sanitation company, Jake is fired for breaking city regulations. 

His union takes the case to arbitration. There, the union brings in a crowd of children, who show the judge the toys Jake gave them and tell her that he taught them the true meaning of Christmas.

Photo: A black autoworker installs engines into Ford automobiles. ,Bettmann / Getty Images

History Lesson of the Week: How the UAW Broke Ford’s Stranglehold Over Black Detroit

In the early 1900s, Ford Motor Company commanded strong loyalty from Detroit’s black workers. But the United Auto Workers broke Ford’s stranglehold through patient organizing, cementing an alliance that would bear fruit for decades.

By Paul Prescod  

Jacobin via Portside

In December 1942, during the heat of World War II, a private report trickled in from an investigator at the Office of War Information. The department was busy monitoring the progress of defense production and the potential explosive effects of racial discrimination in employment. Discussing Detroit, the investigator noted, “It is remarkable how thoroughly the whole Negro community supports and believes in the UAW [United Auto Workers]. . . . The leadership of the UAW . . . has converted them into a solid union asset.”

Just ten years earlier, most black Detroiters would have had a hard time imagining this. The auto companies, especially Henry Ford personally, commanded the loyalty of and hegemonic influence over the city’s black workers through a sophisticated web of paternalism and patronage. Most black workers were understandably skeptical of trade unions given past discriminatory practices and their cynical use as strikebreakers by employers.

But through patient, thoughtful, and skilled organizing, the UAW was able to break through Ford’s stranglehold over Detroit’s black workers and cement a productive alliance that would bear fruit for decades.

This process, described in excellent detail in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick’s Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, should serve as inspiration for organizers today seeking to build broad labor-based coalitions to counter corporate dominance. The story is also a quintessential example of the emergence and consolidation of the civil rights/labor alliance that was so critical for advancing the cause of working people throughout the twentieth century. ...Read More

Adelante #4 is out! A special on immigration for the closing days of the election. Use it everywhere!

Get it here: http://ouleft.org/Adelante-4.pdf

By Bill Gallegos, excerpted from our new fall issue of “¡Adelante!”

U.S. GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump demonized Mexicans and immigrants as a central part of his 2016 presidential campaign. In 2024, he has doubled down. If elected, he promises to unleash an ethnic cleansing campaign to deport the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. This is horrible enough as a complete violation of human rights. But this pogrom is only one piece of the larger anti-democratic ‘Project 2025’ of the Heritage Foundation. They are coming for all of us. While singling out Mexican immigrants, Trump aims at all immigrant communities, including growing communities in the South, Midwest, and East.

Thankfully the political energy has shifted since President Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Vice-President Kamala Harris is now the Democratic Party candidate, and the polls show a significant shift in her direction. More than a million new volunteers have signed up for Harris, and hundreds of millions of new dollars have been contributed to her campaign.

The Biden-Harris Administration has been mixed on immigration: on one hand, it continues to support the legalization of Dreamers (DACA) and pushes for a path to legalization for the spouses of immigrants with legal residency. On the other hand, it has denied asylum protections for refugees crossing the southern border and supported legislation for increased militarization as well as new administrative hurdles. While our most important fight is against the MAGA right, the fight for full rights and protections for immigrants is a long-term struggle beyond the November elections.

The Biden dropout also creates significant opportunities for the left and progressives to advance the fight against the fascist threat, to advance a progressive platform, and to put new pressure on both Biden and the Harris campaign to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. It enables us to push back strongly against Trump’s racist threats against immigrants while advancing a positive program for immigrant rights.

This week's topic:

FOREIGN POLICY, THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM, AND THE RISE OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH, a power point

Click the picture to access the blog.

Tune of the Week: Bruce Springsteen - No Surrender (from Born In The U.S.A. Live: London 2013) ...6:50 min.

Book Review: Black Coal and Red Bandanas: An Illustrated History of the West Virginia Mine Wars

The first graphic novel published by Working Class History, written by Raymond Tyler, illustrated by Summer McClinton.

Edited by Paul Buhle within introduction by Shaun Slifer and foreword by Gordon Simmons.

In the early twentieth century, strikes and union battles were common in industrial centers throughout the US. But nothing compared to the class warfare of the West Virginia mine wars. The origins of this protracted rebellion were in the dictatorial rule of the coal companies over the proud, multiracial, immigrant and native-born miners of Appalachia.

Our illustrated history begins with Mary Harris “Mother” Jones's arrival at the turn of the century. Whitehaired, matronly, and fiercely socialist, Jones became known as the “miners’ angel” and helped turn the fledgling United Mine Workers into the nation’s most powerful labor union. “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living” was her famous battle cry.

In 1912, miners led by stubborn Frank Keeney struck against harsh conditions in the work camps of Paint and Cabin Creeks. Coal operators responded by enlisting violent Baldwin-Felts guards. The ensuing battles and murderous events caused the governor to declare and execute martial law on a scale unprecedented in the US.

On May 19, 1920, in response to evictions by coal company agents, gunshots rang through the streets of a small town in “Bloody Mingo” county. In an event soon known as the “Matewan Massacre”; the pro-union, quick-draw chief of police Smilin’ Sid Hatfield became an unexpected celebrity—but also a marked man.

Events climax with the dramatic Battle of Blair Mountain that pitched the spontaneous Red Neck Army of ten thousand armed strikers against a paid army of gun thugs in the largest labor uprising in US history and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War.

This graphic interpretation of people’s history features unforgettable main characters while also displaying the diverse rank and file workers who stood in solidarity during this struggle.

Praise

“It is past time to use the unique attributes of graphic arts to tell the remarkable story of the West Virginia Mine Wars. Black Coal and Red Bandanas applies the stark colors of its title to allow the reader to visualize the world in which it is set.”

—Denise Giardina, author of Storming Heaven

“Black Coal and Red Bandanas excels at delivering history through the unique narrative strengths of comics. By emphasizing character-driven drama at the heart of an expansive movement, Tyler and McClinton convey decades of struggle with humanity and clarity.”

—Nate Powell, illustrator of the March trilogy and Lies My Teacher Told Me: A Graphic Adaptation

“Black Coal and Red Bandanas is an accessible and inspiring piece of labor history chronicling the stories of ordinary West Virginians who rose in pursuit of justice. Thoughtfully written narrative joins rich artwork to present the saga of Blair Mountain in a way that will captivate readers of any age or background.”

—Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“An immensely important addition to the labor canon, Black Coal and Red Bandanas brings readers right into the thick of the Mine Wars’ hidden history, when working people of various creeds and colors banded together to fight the ‘thug rule’ of industrial overlords who valued profit over human life. An empowering story for our times.”

—Taylor Brown, author of Rednecks ...Read More

Film Review: 'Rita,' A Real-Life Guatemalan Tragedy Is Exposed in a Devastating Dark Fantasy About Young Girls in an Abusive System

Following his Golden Globe-nominated ‘La Llorona,” director Jayro Bustamante continues to explore his country's social ills through a genre lens in this new hard-hitting, cleverly stylized work.

By Carlos Aguilar

Variety

A ghostly apparition clamored for justice in Jayro Bustamante’s blazing political horror “La Llorona,” about the genocide of Indigenous people in Guatemala. In the genre, the Central American auteur found a piercing vehicle to discuss the sociopolitical afflictions of his homeland. With “Rita,” Guatemala’s entry for the international feature Oscar (Bustamante’s third time representing the country), he returns to this mode for a gritty, dark fantasy based on an unspeakable 2017 tragedy involving young girls placed in a government-run shelter, which remains unpunished today. To disclose further details about the case would spoil “Rita,” but it suffices to say no happy resolution came to pass.  

Thirteen-year-old Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz) has landed at a facility for troubled girls — somewhere between a juvenile detention center and an orphanage — after escaping abhorrent abuse at home. But the conditions there are more akin to that of a rundown prison. Girls in each room see themselves as distinct otherworldly creatures, hence the costumes. Rita landed with the angels, girls who wear feathered wings, but there are also fairies, and the more enigmatic group that self-dominates “the stars.” There’s an air of theatricality to the disguises they wear. Given that Rita explains this is not exactly how the events took place, one is initially inclined to think that these whimsical accessories are only their imagination. The true meaning behind them proves far more sinister.

Consistently a film of stark beauty, “Rita” exhibits a sometimes dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish quality that cinematographer Inti Briones mines from the contrast between the fairytale attires and the harshness of the setting, aided by elements of production design as well as some digital effects. Rita walking through the spectral halls at night, always wearing her wings, is the image of a heavenly creature trapped in an inescapable abyss. That’s especially the case when she runs into unsettling entities, some intangible and other more dangerous flesh-and-blood ones — sexual predators abound among the staff in charge of caring for the girls.

At first with cautious skepticism, Rita begins to form alliances with other angels, such as the endearing Bebé (Alejandra Vásquez) and the no-nonsense Sulmy (Ángela Quevedo). They have been there longer and have hard-fought intel on how to navigate the daily horrors.

Over the course of his stellar career, Bustamante has often successfully guided first-time actors into emotionally challenging performances. The ensemble of young female actors, some of whom turn in characters representing defined archetypes, often comes across as a singular, unified entity on screen with some room for individual standouts (Vásquez being one). With the demanding title role, Santa Cruz makes her striking film debut. Oscillating between fury and vulnerability, playing a survivor whose sole objective is rescuing her younger sister from experiencing the same harm she has, Santa Cruz searingly projects the indelible hurt Rita carries behind her eyes. Beyond being laced with magical realism, what elevates “Rita” is that the adolescent heroines are not devoid of spunk, nor presented as morally pristine, but rather as reacting to the violence and mistreatment that have shaped their young lives. They curse their victimizer with the most strident of Spanish expletives. They smoke. And they are smarter, if less powerful, than their captors.

Fittingly, one of the most terrifying scenes has little to do with the supernatural, but instead concerns itself with the grotesque ignorance that upholds the conditions that allow for the girls suffering. The long-haired social worker (Margarita Kenéfic), at times referred to as “the witch,” summons Rita to her office to inquire about the events that led her to be placed in this institution. As the teen expounds on the monstrous acts her own father committed against her, the elderly woman suggests that Rita is not blameless in the situation. The blood-boiling conversation is reflective of how these girls — most of them rape victims — are perceived by the system. One of the guards even justifies his actions explaining these are not girls, but criminals.

On the production side, “Rita” made history as the first co-production between Guatemala and the United States, via Bustamante’s company La Casa de Producción and the American outfit Concordia Studio. Most of Bustamante’s recurrent adult actors from his last three features have small parts here, including “Ixcanul” star María Telón, playing Rita’s guardian angel, a woman who took her in after she ran away from home. The lead in the gay-themed “Tremors,” Juan Pablo Olyslager, and Sabrina De La Hoz, prominent in “La Llorona,” both appear playing malevolent characters working for the oppressive powers that be.

To powerful, even shocking effect, Bustamante’s incisive writing slowly deploys revelations that point us to rethink what we thought we knew about the narrative, in particular with regards to the costumes and rituals the girls have implemented for their own collective safety. However, more than any of his other issues-centered marvels to date, “Rita” falls a bit didactic at the end. But since the case on which “Rita” is based remains controversial and unsolved in Guatemala, one can somewhat forgive, or at least understand, the filmmaker’s need to explicitly spell out his intent via narration. Nonetheless, Bustamante remains a narratively resourceful and exciting artist. If not a flat-out consummation of his talents, “Rita” certainly expands his scope into more intricate tonal and stylistic experimentation, as he completely frees himself from the chains of straightforward realism. ...Read More