Archive for November, 2008

Barack Obama’s ascendency to the U.S. presidency has been consistently portrayed as the culmination of the African-Americans protracted struggle for “equality” in America. In a sense it is, because all advancements secured by Africans in America have enhanced the rights of all people, but those advancements have seldom moved the majority Africans in America out of the economic and political doldrums. The brutal truth is this portrayal is both facetious and inaccurate.

While it is true that for the first time white Americans in significant numbers have voted for a “Black” man as President, it is of course inaccurate to say that Barak Obama represents or even reflect the historical or contemporary experience (legacy) of African-Americans who are connected at the Hip to White America. Afterall, with the exception of Tiger Woods (who has tried to invent a Race to match his background) how many Africans in America were raised in Hawaii by white Grandparents and went to Harvard Law school? Clearly those whites who voted for Obama voted for him based on the “American Story” version of “Dreams of My Father” rather than Nightmares of my Ancestors. Hence, it is facetious to claim the majority of white voters consciously voted for an “African-American” descendant of the slaves their forebears terrorized and exploited for centuries– they voted for an African-American without that baggage, perhaps trusting that he couldn’t experience a DNA induced flashback to the bull-whip days on the plantation and go buck-wild as commander-and-Chief because he had no cultural-social connection to that past. I think this was at the basis of the claim by many whites (especially from among “undecided” and neo-liberal Whites) that they “didn’t really know Obama or who he really was”. I am sure many will consider such distinctions “playa hating”, or another knock on a Black mans achievements. Quite the contrary. Such distinctions are often the strand of thread upon which history hangs in the balance. I know for a fact white lefties, Blacks of all classes are disconcerted by the above view. But those same lefties and Blacks wouldn’t express such disconcertion with a similar analysis of Roosevelt (whose diability was an important subjective factor in his political carreer) or perceive a critique of John F. Kennedy’s relationship to his Quasi-Gangster Dad and Clan Patriarch as inappropriate in ascertaining what influenced the character of JFK.

Clearly Obama is extraordinary individual and is to be commended for his success. His success has opened up plenty African minds to their own self-value. But just feeling good about ones self won’t stop others who don’t feel so good about you from pursuing their nefarious ambitions.

That the Obama campaign was able to effectively avoid entirely the influence of a Race based power paradigm in formulation of U.S. foreign policy in no small part was due to the McCain camp’s absolute lack of racist subtlety. The racist and reactionary Rightwing supporting McCain attacked Obama with excerpts from the sermons of his family Pastor Jeremiah Wright, an activist and Liberation Theologian, in an attempt to associate the ideology of Black Nationalism, the noble legacy of Black militancy with Obama and thereby frighten white voters into knee jerk racist apoplexy. Not a difficult task for a nation that has never confronted the true legacy of its history. As if “thinking Black, thinking African, or viewing history from the experiences of one’s own peoples was a form of subversive moral blasphemy. Perhaps it is. Michelle Obama (who does have the Bullwhip days in her family DNA memory) was attacked as “un-American” for saying “for the first time” she felt proud of America” – a sentiment shared by 90 % of African-Americans – when Obama received the Demorcatic nomination. To reassure White folks that African history in America was not his legacy, his basis of analysis and frame of reference, Obama renounced all association with Rev. Wright and defined Wright’s views as “divisive” rather than rather than worthy of challenge by American historians. Moreover, Obama didn’t take the Wright imbroglio as an opportunity to educate America about Race, instead he merely distanced himself from the issue and moved on to win the ultimate political prize in the land, the Presidency of the United States. To Many of course this was “strategy” after all, you can’t scare “white people” who believe they have an innate right to piss on the rest of the world while whistling the battle hymn of the republic and expect to win a national election. Only a monumental crisis that threatened everyone’s livelihood could shake up white folks more than the prospect of a Black President, and lo and behold, finance capitalism’s October surprise – economic meltdown. America woke up to the reality of debt based prosperity as the American empire tumbled into financial distress. Fannie and Freddie were on Viagra and the pharmacy wasn’t taking anymore credit. Of course this opportunistic view in itself is deprecating because it also presumes that White American are bunch of historically challenged and ignorant Hoogies and can’t be trusted to think beyond their narrow self interests. So the economy Gave Obama boost – but he probably would have won anyway.

Even if McCain had ran his campaign like the Clintons, he may have still lost, but he would have had a broader spectrum of undercover racist whites on his side, and conservative self-hating Negroes applauding his virtues. Indeed up until the Democratic convention disgruntled Hillary supporters were anti-Obama and mumbled their support for McCain ostensibly because of his “inexperience”. Hanoi Shorty tried to exploit this discontent among white female Democrats by appointing “Muffy” from Alaska, Sarah Palin as his running mate. She was a true political Palindrome – an air head spelled the same backwards as forward- an affront to any thinking woman, White or Black. Few could believe it! Obama couldn’t have chosen a better opposition to run against if he wanted too. The McCain – Obama contrasts were so stark and glaring that they could have illuminated Ray Charles way to Georgia were he still alive. Clearly the only way Obama could lose was if the Republicans “butched-off “ the elections as they did the previous two national elections. Of course the rest is “history” (his-story) and as George Will the erudite right-wing pundit explained, the Obama campaingn has relieved white America of the lode stone of race – “Obama is white America’s emancipation proclamation”. I would suppose George Will envisions a different reconstruction scenario from the one that took place at the end of the civil war.

The Obama rise to political imminence has given Bigots and White-supremacy a pass – straight to the gun shops. White supremacy is going back underground for awhile – to resurface in opposition to the grass roots struggles against racist cops; the war on urban communities financed by the government as “Drug Wars, and gentrification; domestic colonialism (subjugation of entire communities to Criminal Justice systems that feed Black flesh into the economic matrix of a Prison Industrial complex that enriches rural white communities) soon to be transformed by Obama and his Kool-drunk minions into “District Anti-Terrrorism Committees” under the jurisdiction of Homeland Security. “Now that we found love what are we going to do with it? Build more jails? Kill more Muslims? Gentrify culturally Black communities?

Weeks after the historic U.S. election we have some glimpse of the quality of “Love” we’ve just found by electing America’s first Black President. Not encouraging. It’s as though like most Africans in America, President Elect Barak Obama is looking for love in all the wrong places. President Elect Obama, advocate of a fresh approach to government, after his historical triumphe turns to former Clinton appointees to manage his transition to State power and fill out his cabinet. Least we be reminded by images of Black women from Harlem’s roughest projects singing “stand by your man” when Hillary appeared at Harlem’s historical Abyssinian Baptist church at the height of the Lewinski scandal, former President Clinton is considered by many wanna be middle-class Blacks as the first Black President in all but hue only. Clinton was a consummate manipulator of the Black gatekeeper class – those Blacks who derive income and status off of America’s race politics and exploitation of African-American marginalization. Clearly continuation of Empire cloaked in the rhetoric of change looms on the horizon not real change. Least we forget, it was both Democrats and Republicans that have presented us with this historical moment of global economic crisis, foreign interventionist wars, and collapse of urban infrastructures. To transcend the myopia of his social being and truly move America in a new direction President elect Barak Obama is going to have to be as “Black” he can, rather than as white as the position requires. An extremely difficult challenge made all the more impossible by Obama’s failure to educate whites to the simple notion that African experience in America could embrace both the “Rosseta stone” to the Republics salvation and the chronicle of its fall
In Search of One’s Identity: In the Land of the Blind the person with the one eye is King.

The overwhelming majority of African-Americans are descendants of the victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. At best it can be said that African history in the U.S., (the Black Experience in America) obliquely relates to Obama’s social existence – indeed it is probably the social and psychological disconnect that many offspring of mixed-racial unions experience and strive in their personal lives to reconcile that inspired Obama to settle in Chicago and do work in the Black communities there. Rather than the altruistic sacrifice of a brilliant Harvard Law graduate who shunned corporate (and hence a successful) law career as popularly portrayed. Perhaps Barak was trying to find his roots as a Black man. Only President Obama can honestly answer whether this is true or not, and how much political ambition flavored his reconciliation with his “Africaness”, for he has clearly renounced any connection to the ontological Black American experience when he denounced Reverend Jerimiah Wright to appease white bigotry. Again and again Obama, directly and indirectly insinuated that the “African” experience in America is in fact the “American” experience – hence there is no legitimacy to African-American claims of sovereignty – to sovereign thinking or Africans in America charting their own political destiny based on that experience. In an almost African soap opera twist, both the historical debt of post slavery reconstruction and emancipation, as well as the concept of post-industrial reparations have been neutered by the first successful Presidential campaign of a Black person.

Clearly jingoistic American nationalism has achieved its greatest victory over the ideology of African self-determination. It follows that because “race” is purportedly no longer a factor, (relegated to the dustbin of history by Obama’s election) there can be little legitimacy to the proposition that Africans in America constitue a distinct people who were culturally and socially traumatized by successive systems of chattel slavery, feudal share-cropping, wage slavery, and now the prison-industrial plantation system. Clearly, the Barak Obama success marks the absolute distortion of African history in America and its appropriation by the state and dominant white culture. It is as if during the centuries long horror of White supremacist domination, our struggles, sacrifices, and triumphs were really fought by Blacks to enrich the humanity of the White majority and burnish the imagery of the “American Dream”. When in fact we have always sought independence, self-sufficiency, dignity and freedom for ourselves in a world dominated by Europeans.

However, many will argue that Obama’s upbringing doesn’t mattter now Because people of all racial and class persuasions voted for the 44th President of the U.S. But it is precisely because Obama’s personal history rise that he has risen to political superstardom in this historical moment – when white America still infected with the ignorance of white supremacy is so frightened, fed-up, and hungry for change that they would throw their weight behind the vision of an extraordinary Black man for the chief-executive post of the Nation.

African history, once confined to the back of American textbooks, has now, in its revised and sanitized version become a major text of the great melting pot myth – that bouillabaisse of ethnic mingling that Newark mayor Corey Booker (himself a light-skin former law school whiz who moved to the Hood for political positioning, described as a “delicious” mixture of ethnic blending). Unfortunately the Black experience on America’s soup line was less like a flavorful meal and more like force feeding at Guantanamo.

African history in what was once the European settler-state of America conferred the experience of both de facto and de jure predatory discrimination, consigned generations of Africans to feudal share-cropping, discriminatory wage slavery, criminalization of culture, and predatory discrimination. All of this is what has brought us to this moment in time, and while we must not dwell in the past, we must understand it to inform the present and help prepare us for the future. Should we let go of our legacy, born of resistance and nurtured with the blood of countless African heroes and sheroes (of whom white America would define as terrorists and radicals). Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, Malcolm, Marcus, were heroes of our cause as are Assat Shakur, Mumia Abu Jamal, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, and dozens of others – not the cause of white supremacist America. President elect Obama when asked did he think, if Dr. King were alive today whether he would have endorsed Obama for President; Barak wisely commented that he would probably have endorsed neither he or McCain, but would have been in the street organizing poor people. Perhaps Obama is more acutely aware of his real historical legacy than the millions of African-American who voted for him, and distilled their dreams and hopes in him. He does not so much represent the culmination of the Black experience in America merely because he’s dark skinned by European standards, as he represents the attempt of an entire culture, state, and economic system to redefine itself in the 21st century without being held accountable for its historic crimes. In a way President Obama is the bridge between the known and the unknown of that process – he stands astride the historic moment of global realignment between the powerful and the powerless, between the dispossessed and the rich, and he knows it.

His foreign and domestic policies will tell us exactly how powerfully he is influenced by the countless African bones at the bottom the Atlantic Ocean that have enriched Europe and the Americas, or how strongly he is tied to the very forces that have enslaved and exploited the African world and peoples of color around the globe. While the first Black President figures this out, we, poor people, ordinary people, activists, educators, opinion makers must not tip-toe around issues to burnish the image of the First Black President. This is no time for platitudes of shallow good will, but the time to organize a true peoples movement for change in America, a movement led by the millions of victims of Americanism. As Black Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks once wrote in the second sermon on the Warpland: “we are the last of the loud…..so have your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind”…..

Dhoruba Bin-Wahad
November 2008

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By David Graeber

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction—even of “progressives”—is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

The first question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine what a better world would even be like?

Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain, for instance, what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imagined the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around? This is just one extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, it’s dragging the entire capitalist system down with it, and possibly, the earth itself.

The spirals of financialization and endless string of economic bubbles we’ve been experience are a direct result of this apparatus. It’s no coincidence that the United States has become both the world’s major military (”security”) power and the major promoter of bogus securities. This apparatus exists to shred and pulverize the human imagination, to destroy any possibility of envisioning alternative futures. As a result, the only thing left to imagine is more and more money, and debt spirals entirely out of control. What is debt, after all, but imaginary money whose value can only be realized in the future: future profits, the proceeds of the exploitation of workers not yet born. Finance capital in turn is the buying and selling of these imaginary future profits; and once one assumes that capitalism itself will be around for all eternity, the only kind of economic democracy left to imagine is one everyone is equally free to invest in the market—to grab their own piece in the game of buying and selling imaginary future profits, even if these profits are to be extracted from themselves. Freedom has become the right to share in the proceeds of one’s own permanent enslavement.

And since the bubble had built on the destruction of futures, once it collapsed there appeared to be—at least for the moment—simply nothing left.

The effect however is clearly temporary. If the story of the global justice movement tells us anything it’s that the moment there appears to be any sense of an opening, the imagination will immediately spring forth. This is what effectively happened in the late ‘90s when it looked, for a moment, like we might be moving toward a world at peace. In the US, for the last fifty years, whenever there seems to be any possibility of peace breaking out, the same thing happens: the emergence of a radical social movement dedicated to principles of direct action and participatory democracy, aiming to revolutionize the very meaning of political life. In the late ‘50s it was the civil rights movement; in the late ‘70s, the anti-nuclear movement. This time it happened on a planetary scale, and challenged capitalism head-on. These movements tend to be extraordinarily effective. Certainly the global justice movement was. Few realize that one of the main reasons it seemed to flicker in and out of existence so rapidly was that it achieved its principle goals so quickly. None of us dreamed, when we were organizing the protests in Seattle in 1999 or at the IMF meetings in DC in 2000, that within a mere three or four years, the WTO process would have collapsed, that “free trade” ideologies would be considered almost entirely discredited, that every new trade pact they threw at us—from the MIA to Free Trade Areas of the Americas act—would have been defeated, the World Bank hobbled, the power of the IMF over most of the world’s population, effectively destroyed. But this is precisely what happened. The fate of the IMF is particularly startling. Once the terror of the Global South, it is, by now, a shattered remnant of its former self, reviled and discredited, reduced to selling off its gold reserves and desperately searching for a new global mission.

Meanwhile, most of the “third world debt” has simply vanished. All of this was a direct result of a movement that managed to mobilize global resistance so effectively that the reigning institutions were first discredited, and ultimately, that those running governments in Asia and especially Latin America were forced by their own populations to call the bluff of the international financial system. Much of the reason the movement was thrown into confusion was because none of us had really considered we might win.

But of course there’s another reason. Nothing terrifies the rulers of the world, and particularly of the United States, as much as the danger of grassroots democracy. Whenever a genuinely democratic movement begins to emerge—particularly, one based on principles of civil disobedience and direct action—the reaction is the same; the government makes immediate concessions (fine, you can have voting rights; no nukes), then starts ratcheting up military tensions abroad. The movement is then forced to transform itself into an anti-war movement; which, pretty much invariably, is far less democratically organized. So the civil rights movement was followed by Vietnam, the anti-nuclear movement by proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the global justice movement, by the “War on Terror.”

But at this point, we can see that “war” for what it was: as the flailing and obviously doomed effort of a declining power to make its peculiar combination of bureaucratic war machines and speculative financial capitalism into a permanent global condition. If the rotten architecture collapsed abruptly at the end of 2008, it was at least in part because so much of the work had already been accomplished by a movement that had, in the face of the surge of repression after 911, combined with confusion over how to follow up its startling initial success, had seemed to have largely disappeared from the scene.

Of course it hasn’t really.

We are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there. The problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them. Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) The more creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be: that’s why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring—as on production lines—that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically.

Communism then is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism—and, it has become increasingly clear, rather a disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better one: preferably, one that does not quite so systematically set us all at each others’ throats.

All this makes it much easier to understand why capitalists are willing to pour such extraordinary resources into the machinery of hopelessness. Capitalism is not just a poor system for managing communism: it has a notorious tendency to periodically come spinning apart. Each time it does, those who profit from it have to convince everyone—and most of all the technical people, the doctors and teachers and surveyors and insurance claims adjustors—that there is really no choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again, in something like the original form. This despite the fact that most of those who will end up doing the work of rebuilding the system don’t even like it very much, and all have at least the vague suspicion, rooted in their own innumerable experiences of everyday communism, that it really ought to be possible to create a system at least a little less stupid and unfair.

This is why, as the Great Depression showed, the existence of any plausible-seeming alternative—even one so dubious as the Soviet Union in the 1930s—can turn a downswing into an apparently insoluble political crisis.

Those wishing to subvert the system have learned by now, from bitter experience, that we cannot place our faith in states. The last decade has instead seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global media. They range from tiny cooperatives and associations to vast anti-capitalist experiments, archipelagos of occupied factories in Paraguay or Argentina or of self-organized tea plantations and fisheries in India, autonomous institutes in Korea, whole insurgent communities in Chiapas or Bolivia, associations of landless peasants, urban squatters, neighborhood alliances, that spring up pretty much anywhere that where state power and global capital seem to temporarily looking the other way. They might have almost no ideological unity and many are not even aware of the other’s existence, but all are marked by a common desire to break with the logic of capital. And in many places, they are beginning to combine. “Economies of solidarity” exist on every continent, in at least eighty different countries. We are at the point where we can begin to perceive the outlines of how these can knit together on a global level, creating new forms of planetary commons to create a genuine insurgent civilization.

Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form—this is why it became such an imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that’s not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we’re all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.

One might object: a revolution cannot confine itself to this. That’s true. In this respect, the great strategic debates are really just beginning. I’ll offer one suggestion though. For at least five thousand years, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt—this was true long before capitalism even existed. There is a reason for this. Debt is the most efficient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent inequality and to make them seem right and moral to everyone concerned. When the trick no longer works, everything explodes. As it is now. Clearly, debt has shown itself to be the point of greatest weakness of the system, the point where it spirals out of anyone’s control. It also allows endless opportunities for organizing. Some speak of a debtor’s strike, or debtor’s cartel.

Perhaps so—but at the very least we can start with a pledge against evictions: to pledge, neighborhood by neighborhood, to support each other if any of us are to be driven from our homes. The power is not just that to challenge regimes of debt is to challenge the very fiber of capitalism—its moral foundation—now revealed to be a collection of broken promises—but in doing so, to create a new one. A debt after all is only that: a promise, and the present world abounds with promises that have not been kept. One might speak here of the promise made us by the state; that if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own affairs, we would at least be provided with basic life security. Or of the promise offered by capitalism—that we could live like kings if we were willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination. All of this has come crashing down. What remains is what we are able to promise one another. Directly. Without the mediation of economic and political bureaucracies. The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?

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By Black Workers for Justice

“Layoffs” at their highest point in years . . . . “Mortgage/ Credit Crisis” with Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac failing one day… today Merrill-Lynch and Lehman Brothers failing…tomorrow which one next? All help to point out the interconnection of the financial crisis to all sectors of the global economy. The CORPORATE-OWNED MEDIA and their profit-driven news outlets refer to it as a “financial crisis” instead of an “economic crisis” to give the impression that it is mainly a problem involving the banking system and not the entire profit-driven capitalist system that impacts all working people, their families, and communities. They are hoping that we working, poor, and oppressed peoples sit by silently. . . .wait and see how things work themselves out.

It shows how “profits before people” capitalism, without saying it, is not in the best interests of the majority of the peoples of the world. Events now easily allow us to examine how greedy capitalism concentrates the control of the economy in the hands of a small rich ruling class made up of the owners of big banks, corporations and financial institutions. With this continuing CRISIS we clearly see that the US government is controlled by this small and powerful “capitalist ruling class” of owners using their political influence to direct the government (through its “paid-for representatives”) to use money that should provide for healthcare, education, and jobs etc. to bail out the big powerful banks and corporations of the ruling class. They do this so that the capitalist system and profits for the super-rich are maintained at our expense as workers and oppressed people throughout the USand globally.

History reveals that the USand all capitalist governments will do anything to protect its system of profits for the super rich, including making wars for the control of oil and cheap labor markets. Or using the police and jails to protect businesses before rescuing people affected by disasters like Hurricanes Katrina. Or contaminating communities with disease-laden industrial dumping. Or fighting hard to stop workers from forming trade unions that unite and empower them to directly challenge the injustices of the corporations and government institutions that exploit working people and their communities. Just look at our long history as workers and oppressed people.

Workers are taught that this same capitalist system is the basis for freedom and prosperity. We all know from our history and direct experiences that the prosperity has not been for the working class whose income barely allows us to exist…to pay expensive medical bills, rent or own a home, buy enough gas to get to work. A prosperity that doesn’t even grant us workers, and retired or unemployed workers as well, a cost of living raise to keep up with rising living expenses. A prosperity which requires that we work longer hours and second jobs to have a relatively decent way of life but little time to enjoy it because we must always be thinking about how to get ahead and keep our heads above water.

When the government bails out these big capitalist institutions and their rich owners, it means that the resources and programs needed by the masses get cut. It means that workers are pitted against each other, competing for the scraps that are left, intensifying racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-immigration and religious intolerance to take attention away from the real source of the problem. Their tactics divide working people so that we cannot unite to challenge the rich capitalist power and control over governments and our lives.

Social movements of working and oppressed people fighting for quality education, decent jobs, affordable housing, universal healthcare, environmental justice, an end to unjust wars and for many other democratic and human rights must become stronger and more active as it involves more young people. Trade unions must contribute more to the broader social movements, seeing struggles at the workplace as a leading part of their larger struggles in society to build power for working people.

UE150 has an important role to play in building a fight-back workers movement against conditions, policies and powers that sacrifice decent working conditions, quality healthcare and public services, and denies worker and human rights on the job and throughout society. This movement must also struggle against unjust wars that continue the destruction of human life and countries and that divides the world¢s peoples. The Mental Health Workers Bill of Rights Campaign and the Workers Bill of Rights struggles in Raleigh and Charlotte cities are part of this fight-back movement that must be further developed throughout the state.

The strike of the Moncure workers in Sanford, the struggles of the, Freightliner, Smithfield and FLOC workers to build rank-and-file democratic unions must be developed and supported as part of this workers fight back movement. The struggle for collective bargaining rights for public sector workers is critical to empowering workers to challenge the shifting of funds and resources away from workers and human needs to bail out those who only want to make a profit. These struggles need to be united into a rank-and-file led workers alliance.

This crisis makes clear that trade unions must encourage and engage their members to use their organizations and resources to support the larger struggles of working people, to be active in struggles against oppression, to learn more about the economy and society and to be willing and prepared to challenge capitalism no matter what label the media, owned by the big capitalist corporations, give to those speaking out.

Barack Obama, who has has made change the cornerstone of his campaign, must be challenged and supported to speak out against this crisis and to put forth real alternatives that empower working people, place major restrictions and regulations on the use of government funds to bail out banks and corporations, oppose these unjust wars that, in addition to killing for profits, take major resources from the needs of working and poor people and communities in the US.

Unions that spend time making deals with the corporations and don’t engage their members dis-empower the workers. UE150, while small with limited resources compared to most other unions, has an engaged rank-and-file membership trying to find creative ways to challenge injustice and give voice to the rank-and-file. It is not mainly a lobbying organization with consultants spending most of their time wining and dining legislators, framing out legislation they hope would be acceptable to those in power.

The “social justice trade unionism” of UE includes a history of standing up against the forces of capitalism. We must learn more about social justice unionism and the history of struggle of unions like the South West Workers Union and UE. We must and will continue this tradition as we build the NC Public Service Workers Union UE-local 150 widely throughout North Carolinaand eventually throughout the South.

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