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March 26, 2021 = Brad Greve knew it was just a matter of time before the computer chip shortage disrupting the auto industry had a ripple effect on aluminum manufacturing in Iowa.

Greve and his colleagues at Arconic Davenport Works—members of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 105—supply the Ford F150 pickup and other vehicles.

 

Automakers forced to cut production because of the semiconductor crunch scaled back the amount of aluminum they take from the facility, just as Greve expected, posing another potential setback to a plant already fighting to rebound from the COVID19 recession.

America cannot afford to jeopardize major industries for want of parts.

The nation's prosperity depends on ensuring the ready availability of all of the raw materials and components that go into the products essential for crises and daily life.

That will mean ramping up domestic production of the semiconductors—now made largely overseas—that serve as the "brains" of automobiles, computers, cell phones, communications networks, appliances and lifesaving medical equipment.

But it will also require building out supply chains in other industries. For example, America needs to produce titanium sponge for warplanes and satellites, pharmaceutical ingredients for medicines and the bearings that keep elevators and other machinery running.

The failure of just one link in a supply chain—as the semiconductor shortage shows—has the potential to paralyze huge swaths of the economy. That's why it's crucial not only to source components on U.S. soil but also to incorporate redundancy into supply lines so that the industry can survive the loss of a single supplier.

"It's that ripple effect," said Greve, president of Local 105, recalling the time when a fire at a diecast parts supplier disrupted production of the F150. "If you shut down a car manufacturer—or they can't get one part—you can affect a whole lot of jobs around the country."

COVID19 interrupted computer chip production even as demand for televisions, home computers and other goods soared among consumers locked down in their homes. Now, neither U.S. automakers nor manufacturers of other goods can obtain adequate amounts of the semiconductors they need.

 

Because of the shortage, carmakers cut shifts and laid-off workers. The production cuts come when the nation needs the boost from auto sales—and other items containing semiconductors—to climb out of the recession.

Although the decreased aluminum shipments haven't resulted in layoffs at Davenport, the automotive supply chain meltdown couldn't have come at a worse time. When the pandemic curbed air travel last year, airplane manufacturers cut back on the aluminum they get from Arconic.

"Automotive is what kept us going," Greve said.

America was once a leader in computer chip manufacturing. But as with many other industries in recent decades, the U.S. frittered away the upper hand while other countries boosted production.

The nation's share of chip manufacturing capacity fell from 37 percent to 12 percent over the past 30 years. And although demand for chips continues to grow, the U.S. stands to gain only a fraction of the additional capacity currently in the pipeline.

That leaves the country overly reliant on foreign suppliers who can encounter their own production shortfalls, as happened during the pandemic, or who can cut off shipments for political or economic reasons at any time.

"If you're going to war with somebody, they're not going to sell you anything," Greve said, noting dependence on overseas supplies threatens the nation's ability not only to make cars and other consumer goods but also to obtain the chips needed for defense and intelligence purposes.

 

Although the current crisis centers on semiconductors, neglect of the nation's manufacturing base decimated America's capacity to produce parts and components for many other industries.

"It affects everybody," Libbi Urban, vice president of USW Local 9231, said of hollowed-out supply chains that threaten jobs and access to goods. Because of the semiconductor shortage, automakers now take less of the galvanized steel she and her coworkers make at ClevelandCliffs' New Carlisle, Indiana, Works.

Shortages of medical and safety equipment during the pandemic revealed how much manufacturing power the nation let slip away.

But it wasn't only the finished products, like face masks, America found itself illequipped to produce. Makers of hand sanitizer and cleaning products struggled to obtain adequate supplies of the hand pumps and spray triggers made overseas.

"How much time and money are being lost waiting on overseas companies to get products and supplies to the U.S.?" Urban asked.

President Joe Biden took the first step toward rebuilding manufacturing power with an executive order in February requiring immediate reviews of supply chains for the semiconductor, pharmaceutical, electric battery, and rare earth minerals industries as well as longer-term reviews of other sectors.

But after identifying weaknesses, America needs to implement a strategy for restoring supply lines and ensuring long-term resiliency.

That will include direct investment in U.S. manufacturing facilities, such as the $37 billion Biden proposed to ramp up chip production. ...Read More

By Peter Laarman

A dream shared by many will finally come to fruition Sunday night when the April 4 anniversary of Dr. King’s murder serves as a springboard for reflection on King’s radical vision for a transformed America. For purposes of the launch, it helps that Sunday also happens to be Easter and the last night of Passover: sacred days that still signify revolutionary hope. Over thirty national faith leaders have signed a statement of support for the project; some of these leaders, like Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr., were close collaborators with King during his lifetime.

What’s called the April 4 Project represents a “beloved community” collaboration among the National Council of Elders, the National Black Justice Coalition, and a host of other justice-oriented organizations. Due to ongoing Covid concerns, the event will take place in the form of a webinar, during which a celebrity cast of readers (among them Jane Fonda, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ibram X. Kendi, Andrew Bacevich, and Bill T. Jones) will present King’s 1967 speech at The Riverside Church—” Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Afterward, a panel featuring Bill McKibben, Medea Benjamin, Ash-Lee Henderson, and Corrine Sanchez will discuss the significance of King’s vision for the current moment.

King’s speech, given to a packed Riverside Church exactly one year before he was killed in Memphis, is notorious for the way it provoked fury, condemnation, and distress at the time. Fury from the Johnson Administration and its pro-war supporters; blistering condemnation in the mainstream media; and acute distress among many of King’s allies who felt that he was sacrificing domestic civil rights goals on the altar of the antiwar cause.

Given how the practice of radical nonviolence implies a willingness to sacrifice, how much are you personally willing to sacrifice for the achievement of the long-awaited radical revolution of values?

Written in large part by the late Vincent Harding, Jr.—a legendary figure in his own right—the speech builds quietly until it rises to a mighty coda. King begins by describing his calling to speak out as a “vocation of agony,” signaling that he knows this speech will be inflammatory and does not take lightly what he considers to be his prophetic duty. He says that he approaches his task with humility and acknowledges how all of us operate with limited vision. He makes it clear that he is addressing “my beloved nation” as a patriot and not as a mouthpiece for either North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front (“Viet Cong”)—entities which he does not regard as “paragons of virtue.”

Then King proceeds to make the antiwar case with unparalleled clarity, citing the reasons he’s calling for the slaughter in Southeast Asia to end:

The war has eviscerated domestic anti-poverty efforts; war is always “the enemy of the poor.”

War punishes the poor in a second way by sending the poorest to do the fighting and dying; King is scandalized that the United States finds it possible to make poor whites and poor Blacks fight and kill Asians together but won’t allow them to be schooled together here at home.

War’s organized lethal violence represents a defeat for the wider cause of nonviolence—and here is where King enraged liberals and conservatives alike by calling the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

King must and will remain true to his faith in Jesus Christ as a peacemaker and reconciler.

People of genuine faith have loyalties that transcend nationalism: the idea that all are brothers and sisters, created equal under one God, cannot just be some empty slogan that has no application in the real world.

The true meaning and value of nonviolence is how it “helps us to see the enemy’s point of view.”

The last point opens to the part of the speech I’d forgotten but that came back with tremendous force upon re-reading: a very long section detailing the utter corruption of the U.S. “cause” in Southeast Asia: this country’s nine years of covert support for French recolonization efforts, its failure to recognize the Vietnamese determination to be independent from China, it's abhorrent marching of Vietnamese women and children into concentration camps (the U.S. military called these “strategic hamlets”), and its indiscriminate use of napalm and Agent Orange to lay waste to the land and its people, killing millions of noncombatants in three countries (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia).

King broadens his critique of this war into a sobering look at how a country—ours—that once claimed to stand for revolutionary ideals became the ally of dictators and tyrants and counterrevolutionary forces everywhere. He cites examples of U.S.-sponsored counterinsurgency: Venezuela, Guatemala, Peru, South Africa, Mozambique.

Once he has placed the United States squarely “on the wrong side of the world revolution,” King delivers the gut punch—the part of the speech everyone remembers if they remember it at all:

And these haunting words—haunted by our knowledge that the Second Indochina War would grind on for eight more excruciating years:

Reading “Beyond Vietnam” today stirs up deep memories and raises difficult questions for me. I was just cutting my activist teeth in 1967, and I wondered then—as I do now—about my vocation and our vocation as seekers of justice and peace.

Today, as then, the Left is divided between so-called “centrists” (ignoring how far to the right the center has moved) and those who claim a radical perspective. Both camps want to be considered “progressive,” but the centrists deride the radicals as delusionary and naive about how politics work, whereas the radicals dismiss the centrists as sellouts to the corporate agenda and as uncritical champions of American exceptionalism. The presidency of Joe Biden—a centrist politician par excellence—brings these fissures to the fore and creates irresistible catnip for the chattering classes.

I will always identify proudly with the radical camp. I don’t think there can be any compromise with white supremacy or entrenched corporate power. But I do still wonder whether my side is really as radical as it claims to be. I worry about performative wokeness and virtue signaling and the kind of celebrity activism that these days is often fueled by Hollywood and hedge fund money (in some ways reenacting the much-derided radical chic of the 1960s).

It’s painful to have to say it, and in no way do I intend to give aid and comfort to the howling hyenas of the Right who now focus their attacks on Critical Race Theory, but representation by itself can never substitute for reparation, let alone revolution. All of the elite institutions that are striving for diversity and inclusion will not disturb the peace of the Corporate State in the slightest degree. A more diverse elite is still an elite. There’s even a name for what we see emerging now (and an illuminating new book about it): identity capitalism. King long ago recognized this trap; he said he feared “integrating my people into a burning house.” 

To be clear, I have no doubt that if he were here today, Dr. King would celebrate the way in which race and the toxic legacy of white supremacy have been moved front and center in the national conversation. But I also think he might have hard questions for us oldsters who are still trying to fight the good fight as well as for the young woke ones. ...Read More

March 31, 2021 - Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to social media Tuesday night with a detailed reminder of the root causes of Central Americans and other migrants seeking asylum at the United States' southern border.

The New York Democrat is known for engaging with constituents and critics alike on social media. One Instagram user asked the congresswoman: "Why are you not addressing the border crisis and the kids in cages like you used to?" She responded in a series of what are called "stories," which disappear from the platform after 24 hours—though recordings of her comments are now circulating elsewhere online.

"Are you for real?" Ocasio-Cortez said, visibly frustrated by the claim. "So let's talk about this because so much of our national conversation, which is not a conversation, about immigration is driven by people who could not care less about immigrants."

"So often, people wanna say, 'Why aren't you talking about the border crisis?' or 'Why aren't you talking about it in this way?' Well, we're talking about it, they just don't like how we're talking about it," she continued. "Because it's not a border crisis. It's an imperialism crisis. It's a climate crisis. It's a trade crisis."

"And also, it's a carceral crisis," Ocasio-Cortez added, "because as I have already said, even during this term and this president, our immigration system is based and designed on our carceral system."

The congresswoman, an outspoken opponent of former President Donald Trump's immigration policies, put out the videos as the Biden administration is struggling to process asylum-seekers at the southern border—particularly children, who are generally not being deported under a public health law invoked by both administrations to limit access to the United States during the coronavirus pandemic. 

President Joe Biden has been criticized this month for restricting journalists from entering facilities for the children. As the Associated Press reports:

The Biden administration for the first time Tuesday allowed journalists inside its main border detention facility for migrant children, revealing a severely overcrowded tent structure where more than 4,000 people, including children and families, were crammed into a space intended for 250 and the youngest were kept in a large play pen with mats on the floor for sleeping.

...The children were being housed by the hundreds in eight "pods" formed by plastic dividers, each about 3,200 square feet (297 square meters) in size. Many of the pods had more than 500 children in them.

Ocasio-Cortez is not alone in pushing for a more comprehensive conversation about immigration. In a Sunday appearance on CNN, fellow "Squad" member Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y. ) not only called for providing better resources, safety, and housing to those currently seeking asylum but also advocated for the U.S. government helping to "rebuild Central America in the same ways that we have destroyed it."

On Instagram Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez similarly said that "number one, our solutions need to be rooted in foreign policy, because our interventionist history in foreign policy and history over decades of destabilizing regions drive people to migrate—but people don't wanna have that conversation."

"Secondly, let's talk about the climate crisis because the U.S. has disproportionately contributed to the total amount of emissions that is causing a planetary climate crisis right now," she said, while emphasizing that the Global South is disproportionately bearing the brunt of the consequences, including droughts, floods, and wildfires.

"Then we have the issues of trade, which economically contribute to... some of these conditions that add fuel to the fire," Ocasio-Cortez explained, before challenging the way that some political figures, reporters, and others are discussing the rising number of people—including children—seeking to enter the country.

She asserted that "anyone who's using the term 'surge' around you, consciously, is trying to invoke a militaristic frame and that's a problem, because... this is not a surge. These are children, and they are not insurgents, and we are not being invaded—which, by the way, is a white supremacist idea." ...Read More

“Realignments happen when a long-term social transformation, a crisis, and the right leader converge to change the landscape,” writes political journalist George Packer in The Atlantic. The word often resurfaces with the inauguration of new presidents. Particularly with his 2008 election, which brought a super-majority for his party in the Senate, Barack Obama was seen by some commentators as ushering in a permanent Democratic majority. That is, until Donald Trump broke through the Democrat’s “Blue Wall” in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and flipped at least some voters in the white working class, giving rise to speculation that his win was the realignment of lasting consequence.

Biden’s election has been seen as less historically weighty than those of his predecessors. Nevertheless, his success in passing the landmark $1.9 trillion recovery bill led New York Times columnist David Brooks to dub him a “transformational president” and prompted New York magazine’s Eric Levitz to contend that “the law could plausibly mark a leftward realignment in American policymaking.”

Such claims are not unique. Left scholar Mike Davis notes that, while it is mostly old-timers who remember when the idea of realignment was at the peak of its popularity, the notion that certain moments represent fundamental ruptures, reshaping what ideas parties stand for and what constituencies they represent, has a stubbornly persistent appeal. Even as academics debate the theory’s validity, he writes, “the thesis of the ‘critical election’ that durably realigns interest blocs and partisan loyalties remains the holy grail of every actual presidential campaign.”

Outside of presidential elections, realignment has another meaning for social movements promoting far-reaching change. For groups like Sunrise and Justice Democrats — known for its critical role in recruiting Ocasio-Cortez and propelling her insurgent primary campaign in 2018, as well as for helping to support other members of “the Squad” — it is a way of thinking big. Rather than being content to remain in the role of always pushing from the outside or supporting a few handpicked politicians, the concept encourages them to aspire to a more fundamental shift in power relations. It is part of a strategy to form and advance a bloc that can become a dominant force in the U.S. political system. It means, effectively, building a bold new party within the shell of the old.

The academic theory of electoral realignment has been called “one of the most creative, engaging and influential intellectual enterprises undertaken by American political scientists during the last half-century.” It was first advanced by Harvard professor V. O. Key, Jr. in his 1955 article “A Theory of Critical Elections.” Later, it was developed by scholars including Walter Dean Burnham, a student of Key’s, and James Sundquist, a former speechwriter for Harry Truman. The theory proposed that America’s political party system has evolved in punctuated bursts — often 30 to 40 years apart — and that certain vital elections end up defining their eras by mobilizing fresh groups of voters and putting new issues at the fore of the public agenda.

Think of contests such as the election of 1860, which marked the ascendance of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party and presaged a civil war over slavery; or 1896, when business-funded Republican William McKinley defeated populist-aligned William Jennings Bryan; or 1932, which gave rise to the New Deal order. These elections had generational consequences. They set the mold for the type of governance that followed in subsequent decades: After New Deal liberalism became dominant, even its critics were forced to govern within its core assumptions about the role of government. Likewise, after the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, even Democrats acquiesced to the idea that “the era of big government is over.”

Each of the major claims of academic realignment theorists has been disputed, with a variety of other scholars arguing that American party development is in fact more gradual and that punctuated 30-year cycles cannot be reliably predicted. But even as this academic debate unfolded over the decades — and indeed even before many of its key entries were written — the concept of realignment took on a life of its own both in popular commentary and in the world of political organizing.

In the early 1960s, a number of leaders on the democratic socialist left, including Michael Harrington — whose 1962 book, “The Other America,” helped to animate the Kennedy administration’s War on Poverty — set out to intentionally fracture the Democratic Party in order to build it into something better. Southern Dixiecrats had been an important part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, but their inclusion had proven to be a devil’s bargain. Today, it is well known that powerful racist senators maintained Jim Crow by obstructing civil rights legislation for decades; less well-remembered is the critical role the “Southern Vote” played in pushing anti-union legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act. As historian Paul Heideman explains, “Figures from Walter Reuther to Martin Luther King, Jr. noticed that the Democratic Party contained within it both the most liberal forces in official American politics, like Hubert Humphrey, and the most reactionary, like Strom Thurmond … [T]he Dixiecrats had prevented the Democrats from assuming a coherent political identity as the party of American liberalism.”

Harrington and others believed that, if “Southern racists and certain other corruptive elements” could be pushed out, the Democratic Party could resemble something like a mainstream European social democratic party. Harrington argued in 1962 that a union of welfare state liberals, organized labor, Black voters empowered by the civil rights movement, peace movement constituencies, and other progressive “conscience” voters could “forge a dynamic new coalition which will force a basic realignment in American politics.” From that time until his death in 1989, Harrington and the organizations he would help form — first the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and later the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA — would be associated with this realignment strategy.

Bayard Rustin, another important backer of the strategy made this point in his famous 1965 essay, “From Protest to Politics.” A prodigiously talented organizer who was kept out of the spotlight due to homophobia but nevertheless served as an advisor to King and a lead planner for the March on Washington, Rustin wrote: “It may be premature to predict a Southern Democratic party of Negroes and white moderates and a Republican Party of refugee racists and economic conservatives, but there certainly is a strong tendency toward such a realignment” — a tendency, he believed, that would only grow stronger as millions more African Americans in Southern states were registered to vote.

Elsewhere, Heideman notes, Rustin further explained his thought: “If we only protest for concessions from without,” the strategist reasoned, “then [the] party treats us in the same way as any of the other conflicting pressure groups. This means it offers us the most minimum concessions for votes.” However, he concluded, “if the same amount of pressure is exerted from inside the party using highly sophisticated political tactics, we can change the structure of that party.”

Secondly, on the labor front, realigners had envisioned backing from unionists in the mold of Walther Reuther of the United Auto Workers — a stalwart progressive who lent active support to civil rights struggles. They instead ran up against an AFL-CIO under the direction of George Meany, a bureaucratically-minded labor leader who prided himself on never leading a strike and never walking a picket line. The labor federation backed the hawkish foreign policy, and in 1972 the AFL-CIO declined to officially endorse the presidential campaign of Democratic nominee George McGovern. For his part, Meany was seen golfing with Nixon and members of his cabinet. Tragically, by the end of his life, Bayard Rustin had become ensconced in defending such labor officialdom; once a prominent pacifist, he took on the role of scolding radical critics of the Vietnam War.

“Like us, the New Right believes in realignment,” wrote historian and future Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee national director Jim Chapin in 1975. Although slowed somewhat by the crisis of Watergate and then by the Democrats’ move to nominate a Southern evangelical, Jimmy Carter, in 1976, the Republicans were able by the 1980s to realize a version of the “southern strategy” famously articulated by Nixon aide Kevin Phillips. A newly aggressive assault on organized labor helped. With profit margins declining in the 1970s, segments of capital that had previously tolerated New Deal policy revolted. They joined with other corporate interests to break the unions — an attack fully backed by the White House once Ronald Reagan took office. Meanwhile, operatives such as Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation, deftly brought apolitical religious conservatives into the Republican fold under the banner of the “moral majority.” ...Read More

'ILLUSTRATION BY NAYA-CHEYENNE

MARCH 8, 2021 - They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi jabbed at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her progressive ?“squad” of allies— Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) — in 2019. 

In an October 2020 Vanity Fair profile, Ocasio-Cortez vowed, ?“You keep telling me I’m just four votes, so I’mma go get more.”

Sure enough, in January, newly elected Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) — progressives who successfully primaried centrist incumbents, much like Ocasio-Cortez— were inducted into the Squad. 

But back in October, Ocasio-Cortez had a few others in mind. Tallying potential allies to Vanity Fair, Ocasio-Cortez listed prospective Congress member Kara Eastman of Nebraska (who lost a second close attempt to unseat a Republican) and one seated Democrat: Rep. Jesús ?“Chuy” García (D-Ill.).

García might seem an unlikely Squad ally. The mild-mannered, middle-aged, mustachioed legislator joined the freshman class of 2019 with decidedly less fanfare and has shared none of their national media spotlights. Unlike the four younger, more vibrant, and magnetic upstarts, all of whom fall a decade or more beneath Congress’ average age of 58, Chuy is 64 with 30-plus years of political experience. He won his seat without a fight.

While García is little-known nationally, in Chicago he is known simply by his nickname, Chuy, and for a political career that has bucked the city’s political establishment. His soft-spoken, sometimes equivocal manner can often seem at odds with his fiery resume. In 1983, García was a core part of the multiracial coalition of Blacks, Latinos and ?“lakefront liberals” who upended Chicago’s notorious Democratic machine to elect Mayor Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor.

In 2015, with the backing of the Chicago Teachers Union and a progressive coalition furious at sitting Mayor Rahm Emanuel, García forced a runoff election. Emanuel won, but suddenly, García was synonymous with a progressive agenda, winning an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). During the 2020 presidential contest, García became a surrogate for Sanders, helping raise Sanders’ profile in Latino communities nationwide.

Given this history, it’s not surprising that García has taken up with Congress’s left rebels. Ocasio-Cortez was at odds with the Democratic leadership from the beginning, joining 150 youth climate activists with the Sunrise Movement in a sit-in at Pelosi’s office even before she was sworn in. When Ocasio-Cortez introduced her first piece of legislation, the Green New Deal, on Feb. 7, 2019, García signed on that day. In turn, the entire Squad co-sponsored García’s “Reward Work Act,” co-introduced with Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a bill that would curb corporate stock buybacks and require publicly traded companies to allow workers to elect a third of their boards

When Tlaib and Omar vocally fought a House resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, García was one of only 16 Democrats to vote against it. (He stopped short of endorsing the movement, citing as the reason for his vote: “the resolution does not advance the goal of a negotiated peace process.”)

García also co-founded the Future of Transportation Caucus with Pressley and Mark Takano (D-Calif.), served as one of four co-sponsors on all six bills and resolutions in Ocasio-Cortez’s Just Society package, and co-signed a bill by Omar for student loan relief and Rashida Tlaib’s proposal to study racism in the auto insurance industry.

Eighty-six percent of García’s bills were co-sponsored by at least one member of the Squad, according to an In These Times analysis of bills in the 116th Congress that had co-sponsors or a vote. And García in turn co-sponsored or voted for 64% of Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed legislation and 50% of the Squad’s as a whole.

In a statement to In These Times, Pressley, a Chicago native, called García “a trusted partner in good trouble” and praised his legislative record. ?“I often say that the Squad is big, because it includes anyone committed to the work of building a more equitable and just world. I can think of no one who fits that description better than Chuy García. He’s a real one.”

García returns the compliment: “They are my allies. They are my soulmates. I love them.” He believes progressives can’t do without a young, fiery front line to help grow the movement with a new generation. “I’m going to turn 65 in April; I’m an older guy and I don’t have some of their attributes,” he says. For example, he doesn’t share the Squad’s charisma and social media savvy (though his Twitter feed does include cute videos of him shoveling snow, making tamales and sewing shut a Thanksgiving turkey to “lock up the flavor”).

But where García does align with Squad members and the Democratic Party’s larger crop of left challengers is in the conviction that politicians must be accountable, specifically, to working-class communities and grassroots movements.

“You have to maintain face-to-face contact, you’ve got to communicate in Spanish, and you must stay rooted in working-class experiences and values in order to be successful and make your movement sustainable,” García says.

As García’s national profile grows, it’s these working-class communities (and experiences) at home in Chicago he will have to remember to stay in the good faith of the Left.

García has deep roots in Chicago’s predominantly Mexican neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village. As a boy, García moved to Pilsen from Mexico in 1965. He grew up in Little Village, where he still lives today. The anecdotes about his community work are many and varied. In 1997, he fought the University of Illinois at Chicago’s expansion into Pilsen, advocating for affordable housing instead. In 2001, García led a 19-day hunger strike to force Chicago to build a new high school in Little Village, which opened in 2005.

“If there was any fight anywhere that a union asked him to be there, he’d be there,” says Carl Rosen, president of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and a long-time friend of García. García says Rosen keeps him honest.

García was first elected to the U.S. House in 2018, stepping into a seat held for 26 years by another member of Mayor Harold Washington’s coalition: Luis Gutiérrez. 

Gutiérrez, who has been called the ?“Martin Luther King Jr. for Latinos” because of his crusading support for immigration reform and anti-colonial policies in Puerto Rico, had become more and more of an establishment figure in Chicago. In the 2015 mayoral election, for example, Gutiérrez endorsed Rahm Emanuel over García. Progressives who remembered Gutiérrez’s socialist roots and principled 1993 vote against the North American Free Trade Agreement (which García pushed Gutiérrez to make, according to both García and Rosen) were disappointed in Gutiérrez’s allegiance to ?“Mayor 1%.” 

After 13 terms, Gutiérrez announced he would not seek reelection — just a week before the 2017 deadline to file. Instead, he anointed García as his successor, a move that veteran politicos saw as a way to neutralize Emanuel’s likeliest adversary in the 2019 Chicago mayoral race. (Emanuel later decided not to run.) 

By 2018, then, García was squarely mixed up with Chicago’s Democratic establishment, especially in the eyes of the city’s young, very left, and very energized coalition of Black and Brown activists and organizers. They had been galvanized by the city’s police shooting (and subsequent cover-up) of Laquan McDonald, as well as Emanuel’s spree of public school and mental health clinic closings. When García endorsed Lori Lightfoot for mayor—a favorite of lakefront liberals opposed by the Chicago Teachers Union and various racial justice activists — they felt betrayed. 

Outside a congressional campaign fundraiser in the summer of 2018, García was confronted by protesters from a neighborhood organization he had helped found: the Pilsen Alliance, a 21-year-old anti-gentrification group. They wanted García to include Medicare for All in his congressional platform. 

“At that moment, he was kind of wishy-washy,” recalls Pilsen Alliance director Moises Moreno. “We were just there to make sure.” (García did become a co-sponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2019.) 

The way Moreno sees it, García can be counted on to take a progressive stance — when pushed. Pilsen Alliance is part of a statewide coalition to repeal Illinois’ ban on rent control, for example, and Moreno gripes it took too long for García to voice his support. Moreno chalks it up to Chuy’s lifetime in politics, begetting pragmatism and an attachment to long-standing relationships that can read as complacency.  ...Read More

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Photo: Uyghur separatist Faruk Altay flaunts his dedication to the US military

MARCH 31, 2021 - Cultivated by the US government as human rights activists, Uyghur American Association leaders partner with far-right lawmakers and operate a militia-style gun club that trains with ex-US special forces.

On March 21, US-government-funded Uyghur activists were caught on video disrupting a gathering against anti-Asian racism in Washington DC, barking insults at demonstrators including, “Wipe out China!” and “Fuck China!” The Uyghur caravan flew American and “East Turkestan” flags and drove vehicles adorned signs bearing slogans such as, “We Love USA,” “Boycott China,” and “CCP killed 80 million Chinese people.” 

Organized by the Uyghur American Association (UAA), the drive-by heckling of anti-racist demonstrators drew widespread condemnation on social media, including from other sections of the Uyghur separatist movement. Salih Hudayar, the self-proclaimed “Prime Minister of the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile,” slammed “the UAA’s reckless drive-by” for causing “severe backlash against Uyghurs,” and insisted that Uyghur Americans were “not racist.”

The UAA has attempted to distance itself from accusations of extremism and racism, stating that its members’ actions were misrepresented. Despite refusing to rescind their call for China to be “wiped out,” the UAA declared that it “condemns any form of bigotry and stands with all victims of racism.”

However, an investigation by The Grayzone into the Uyghur separatist movement in the Washington DC area has uncovered a jingoistic, gun-obsessed subculture driven by the kind of right-wing ideology that was on display during the March 21 car caravan through downtown.

Leading figures of the UAA operate a right-wing gun club known as Altay Defense. Proudly dressed in US military fatigues, Altay Defense drill in advanced combat techniques with former members of US special forces who also train private mercenaries and active-duty US service members. Members of the militia-style gun club espouse pro-Trump politics and anti-immigrant resentment.

The UAA is the US-affiliate of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), an international network whose first president outlined an objective to precipitate the “fall of China” and establish an ethno-state in Xinjiang. The recipient of millions of dollars of funding the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government-sponsored entity, this network works closely with Washington and other Western governments to escalate hostilities with China.

Despite claiming to represent the interests of China’s Uyghur and Muslim minority populations, many of the UAA’s closest allies represent some of the anti-Muslim, far-right forces in Washington, from Republican Rep. Ted Yoho to the Family Research Council, as well as the FBI.

During the pandemic, the UAA and members of its affiliate organizations helped inflame anti-Asian resentment by spreading far-right propaganda referring to Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus,” and claimed that China was waging a “virus war” against the world, “[p]urposefully, intentionally export[ing] the virus to cause the pandemic.”

Behind its carefully constructed image as a peaceful human rights movement, the UAA and its offshoots in the DC-based Uyghur separatist lobby are driven by far-right ideology and envision themselves as militant foot soldiers for empire.

“I belong to America!” Uyghur human rights leader teams up with far-right, Islamophobes in anti-China crusade.

The UAA’s ultra-patriotic reverence of the US and fanatical anti-China politics have been on full display under the organization’s current president, Kuzzat Altay.

A demonstration organized by the UAA in Washington DC on June 21st, 2020, to “thank the Congress and the White House for passing the [Uyghur Human Rights and Policy Act] into the law.”

Altay frequently takes to social media to make his allegiance to Washington known. 

“May GOD bless you American Veterans! May GOD bless America!” declared Altay on Veterans Day in 2019.

Shortly following the illegal US assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, Altay left no doubt as to where he stands: “Looks like the war just started […] I belong to America!”

Amid the US uprisings against police brutality and systemic racism sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Altay chided Black Lives Matter protesters, saying that he “support[ed] peaceful protestors […] but do[es] not support looters, rubbers [sic] and criminals”

“Your LOVE for #America should be greater than your HATE for #Trump,” Altay pronounced.

The degree of Altay’s infatuation with the US is only matched by the ferocity of his enmity towards China. “The most normal thing that I could ever imagine is anti-China activities every freaking day,” Altay stated on July 25, 2020. “You should help us to stop China. China is ALREADY the common enemy of humanity.”

 Altay is a staunch supporter of Washington’s new Cold War agenda. Applauding the Trump administration’s trade and technology war, Altay declared “[a]ll counties [sic] should treat #Huawei as war criminals.” 

Despite claiming to be the international representatives of Xinjiang’s predominantly Muslim, Uyghur ethnic group, and struggling against religious persecution, Altay and his comrades have routinely teamed up with far-right, Islamophobic forces in the US to advance their separatist campaign. 

The UAA has worked closely with Republican Rep. Ted Yoho, a homophobic, anti-abortion ultra-conservative who once told a Black constituent that he was not sure if the Civil Rights Act was constitutional. Yoho was one of only four lawmakers to vote against legislation making lynching a federal hate crime. In a high-profile dust-up on Capitol Hill, he reportedly called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “fucking bitch.” In 2019, Yoho was one of 24 members of Congress to vote against a resolution condemning bigotry because it included anti-Muslim discrimination.

Yoho has also ardently supported regime change in Venezuela, defended US missile strikes against Syria, and proclaimed that the “US army must defend Taiwan” against China. ...Read More

Qiao Collective has written a short reflection on the protests that is not meant to provide a comprehensive review of the event but instead provide a reframing of how Westerners approach the event. Read it linked here.

The protests included competing agendas: a bourgeois faction demanding the neoliberal path, students protesting corruption, workers frustrated with market reforms. Working-class consciousness was subsumed to elite factions, some of whom sought alliances with Western operatives. But the West clings to a savior narrative of Chinese people longing to be freed by Western intervention. The version of Tiananmen Westerners mourn is nothing more than a fairy tale. It makes a mockery of the Chinese people and the political debates that have forged China's path.” ...Read More

In Union Made, a fast-paced romance with a political edge, Pac-Shoppe department store employees are fighting for union representation.

“ An awesome read with fascinating twists and turns featuring the unlikeliest of romantic interests, further demonstrating that love and relationships can develop under any conditions…Highly Recommended! - -- Labor Press

“…captures the blood, sweat, tears, courage, love, and solidarity that animates a union organizing drive. - OSM! MAGAZINE

“The dilemmas of union organizing, class struggle and romance are described compellingly and in clear and entertaining prose in Union Made.” - Portside

“[The book is} addictive. Kind of like M&Ms.” Phineas Baxandall, author of Current Economic Issues: Progressive Perspectives from Dollars & Sense

Young Europeans' swerve toward the right and far right gets another movie thrown at it with the premiere of Je Suis Karl, from German director Christian Schwochow (November Child, Cracks in the Shell). The film tries to follow in the footsteps of previous German-language films such as The Edukators, The Wave and last year’s And Tomorrow the Entire World, all works that attempt to figure out what it is about political extremes that seduces young people — and how their idealism and hormone-powered gumption can eventually come head-to-head with the much uglier realities of politics and life.

Schwochow has recently been more active in high-profile TV, directing, among others, the “Prince of Wales learns Welsh” episode of The Crown and the first season of the successful German series Bad Banks. From those ventures, he seems to have picked up a knack for staging scenes for maximum impact on a tight budget. (The frequent shallow focus and densely saturated hues also feel music-video ready.) But on the flip side, there’s a sense that he’s frequently content to let his characters drift a little in their scenes. That's not an issue when character arcs are planned over several seasons. But too often throughout the two jam-packed hours here, there’s a nagging sense that Schwochow and his screenwriter, Thomas Wendrich, make the characters simply perform their actions rather than feel or live them, eager to move on to the next plot point without waiting for the emotional beats that follow the actions.

The extent to which Karl and his political pals are willing to go to obtain their goals is a radical and perhaps narratively even brave choice that Je Suis Karl doesn’t quite know how to milk for drama because it hasn’t dramatized Karl as a character beyond his function as an avatar for real-life European leaders. Ditto the treatment (or lack thereof) of the refugee Maxi’s parents help cross the border in a prologue. Its placement is so obvious and his characterization so perfunctory that you just know he will be used as a deux ex machina during the film’s flying-bullets final act.

What remains are quite a few charismatic performances. Niewoehner is asked to be magnetic, and that he is, even if his character often seems more in love with the spotlight that his political ideas afford him rather than with the ideas themselves. Wedler and Peschel, as the rebellious daughter and the distraught, grieving father who don’t understand each other anymore, are also credible in their odd-couple configuration. It’s just a shame we don’t get to know them better, because the world could use another film or two about the dangerous allure of the extreme right and how it preys on people who are eager to finally have an outlet for all their anger and frustration. ...Read More