People Before Profit blog

Against the Grain: Kerry and Evil

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 10:08:00 +0000

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger has figured out that the barbaric beheadings by “Islamic” terrorist groups “could pose a political problem for John Kerry.” Henninger used his column “Wonder Land” in the Journal’s Friday edition (6/25) to try and reap some partisan advantage for the ultra-right out of the recent murders of Nicholas Berg, Paul M. Johnson and Kim Sun Il.

His article, besides being grossly distasteful, shows the extreme lengths the ultras have to resort to in order to justify Bush’s war mongering policies. In this case, Henninger maintains that conservatives have a monopoly on the belief in “evil” and liberals like Kerry don’t.

His argument goes this way. The beheadings are “evil.” Bush has called the “Islamic” militants the “evildoers” and uses the concept of “evil” in his thinking and his speeches. John Kerry doesn’t talk about “evil” therefore liberals either don’t believe in “evil” or “don’t wish to allow the idea of evil to be explicit in our politics.”

Having come to this conclusion, Henninger contends that the American people will wonder which of the residential candidates has the “moral fiber” to stand up to the “evildoers.” Its a slam-dunk that its Bush!

The liberals, i.e., the Democrats, Henninger maintains, don’t believe immutable evil. They believe it is possible to enlighten evildoers - that they can be shown the errors of their ways and change their behavior. Henninger implies this is a political (if not a moral) problem for John Kerry.

Henninger is off base on several issues, not the least of which is Theological. If Bush is a Christian and doesn’t subscribe to the view Henninger foists off on Kerry, he would be rejecting a central belief of his own religion - the principle of redemption.

Who is Henninger to decide what is evil and what isn’t. Using the concept of “evil” in political discourse just muddies the water and leads to emotional shouting matches not reasonable discussions on which policies the nation should follow.

For example, I am sure we would all agree, across the board, that the acts of terrorist beheading are “evil.” But many might also think it is “evil” to drop cluster bombs deliberately in residential areas of cities where the majority of people killed are innocent women and children and that a government that does this is made up of “evildoers.” Some may even think mass killings such as just described are even “more evil” than isolated individual acts of terrorism - evil as they be.

And what about abortion? Is that evil? Henninger seems to think so. “But as with abortion,” he writes, “it is in Mr. Kerry’s interest to suppress explicit moral references in politics.” So abortion is a moral issue not a legal or constitutional issue. Granted that people have different moral concepts, especially in a multicultural pluralistic bourgeois democracy such as the United States, the question is do we really want to decide these moral issues in the political arena.

The answer is a resounding “NO”! People’s moral choices are personal and private. The ultra-right thinks there are absolutes - just as the “Islamic” radicals are evil-doers so are people supporting abortion rights, or who are against any other “moral” belief held by the true believers.

That is not democracy. That is, in its own way, the same kind of mental lock-down exhibited by the so-called “Islamic” fundamentalists whom also like to toss around the E word. So the question is not is there “evil” or not. The question is do we want this essentially faith based religious concept to be a central issue in our political debates and elections. No rational person could wish for this and if Henninger is correct and John Kerry doesn’t want to use the ultra-right religious lingo of the Bushites, then John Kerry is correct.

Personally, after reading Henninger’s article, I think using the deaths of the three recent victims of terrorism for partisan political purposes is itself a tad evil.

--Tom Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.

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Bush Angers Cuban Americans

Sat, 26 Jun 2004 02:35:00 +0000

The latest anti-Cuban regulations have done much to bring Cubans living in the US together. One issue more than any other has provoked their outrage: the definition of 'family.' The 500-page report from Bush’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba announced a few weeks ago is cunningly designed to starve Cuba of vitally needed dollars and international support.

Among its stipulations is a rethinking of what constitutes a family, allowing Cuban Americans and Cubans living here to visit loved ones on the island only once every three years. To do that they must seek a license from the US government. Under these new regulations 'family' now consists of immediate family: parents and siblings. Cuba, like many other countries, embraces the concept of the extended family, which includes uncles, aunts, cousins and even long-time friends. Not so, says the president, and Cubans are boiling mad.

No other group must apply to the government for permission to visit loved ones; no other group is limited to one visit every three years; no other group is told how much money it can take or is their visit limited to only 14 days. This is clearly discrimination, and they’re mad as hell and won’t take it any more.

This one issue has done more to unite Cubans of all political strips than anything else. Immediately after the regulations were announced, Cubans gathered here in Miami to voice their outrage, sending a barrage of faxes, letters and phone calls. Several spokespeople flew to Washington to visit congressional representatives pointing out that this is clear discrimination against Cuban and Cuban Americans living here. No other national or ethnic group is targeted in this way. Our Constitution forbids discrimination against US citizens and legal residents. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the upcoming election.

One of the local policemen assigned to 'guard' the meeting of about 300 people at a local hotel told me that he was so angered that if Bush 'wins' again, he will move to Spain. But Spain has a socialist prime minister, I pointed out. It’s better than Bush, was his response.

Further, tightening restrictions to deprive the Island of much-needed hard currency will increase even further the pressure that shortages bring. Dollars in remissions and from these family visits and tourism from the US amounts to about 200 million dollars annually. Most Cubans in the United States don’t want to see their loved ones suffer more hardship. Cutting the flow of dollars will reduce the island’s ability to import food and medicine. Further, Cubans who are allowed to visit family will be limited to taking but $50 per day and only 44 pounds of luggage. Heretofore they took duffel bags and suitcases of clothing, appliances and medicine. Now they will be severely restricted in bringing such assistance. Yet another hardship for their families.

Come the elections it will be interesting to see who they back. Many are US citizens and can vote. And at this juncture, Bush is persona non grata on Calle 8.

--Barbara Collins is a contributor to Political Affairs.

Bill O'Reilly's Final Solution: Bomb the Living Daylights Out of Them

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 06:55:00 +0000

From Dissident Voice June 23, 2004

There he goes again. Here's what Bill O'Reilly had to say on his June 17 broadcast of The Radio Factor: O'REILLY: Because look ... when 2 percent of the population feels that you're doing them a favor, just forget it, you're not going to win. You're not going to win. And I don't have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all. I have no respect for them. I think that they're a prehistoric group that is -- yeah, there's excuses.

Sure, they're terrorized, they've never known freedom, all of that. There's excuses. I understand. But I don't have to respect them because you know when you have Americans dying trying to you know institute some kind of democracy there, and 2 percent of the people appreciate it, you know, it's time to -- time to wise up.

And this teaches us a big lesson, that we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans. Just as we did in the Balkans. Bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds, ain't going to work. O'Reilly also declared the Iraqis are 'just people who are primitive.'

The Fox news host has a history of making racist remarks and advocating the mass murder of civilians. When four armed US mercenaries were killed in Fallujah, O'Reilly commented: 'Problems continue for the U.S. Military in Fallujah. Why doesn't the U.S. Military just go ahead and level it?' He made it clear he doesn't 'care about the people of Fallujah' and that 'we know what the final solution should be.' Apparently, the mass slaughter of hundreds of civilians in Fallujah by the US military just didn't do it for O'Reilly.

O'Reilly's bloodlust also extended to Afghanistan. A few days after 9/11 he declared 'the U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble-the airport, the power plants, their water facilities, and the roads' if the Afghan government did not extradite Osama bin Laden. O'Reilly continued: 'This is a very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard. Remember, the people of any country are ultimately responsible for the government they have. The Germans were responsible for Hitler. The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target civilians. But if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.'

The Geneva Convention states that destroying infrastructure essential to the survival of civilian populations is a war crime and the 'starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.' Besides being an obvious racist, O'Reilly is an advocate of targeting and killing civilians (non-white folks, of course) that clearly constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

When the United States deliberately targeted and systematically destroyed Iraq's water treatment facilities during the first Gulf War in order to create 'favorable conditions for disease outbreaks, particularly in major urban areas' (according to a 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document) and followed that with a deliberate policy of blocking humanitarian supplies to deny necessary repairs, medicines and medical equipment, Denis Halliday, former Deputy Under Secretary of the UN, declared the policy as 'genocidal.' O'Reilly is openly advocating genocidal tactics to be used against civilians -- proposals that would kill millions of civilians if they were carried out.

The virulent racism and fascist mindset of O'Reilly is also pervasive within the US military. The racist contempt of the Iraqis and blatant disregard for civilian lives by US troops in that country is disturbingly common. One need only look at the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib for confirmation, not to mention US troops murdering Iraqis by deliberately firing into crowds of unarmed protesters, dropping large bombs in urban neighborhoods, slaughtering wedding parties, engaging in collective punishment, house demolitions, kidnapping, torture, and firing into vehicles filled with civilians at military checkpoints. A number of American troops perceive Iraqis as 'untermenschen' -- the Nazi expression for 'sub-humans.'

To those who object and protest such actions, O'Reilly suggests you just 'shut up' or you will be declared an 'enemy of the state.' He made his feelings about dissent pretty clear shortly before the war started. On February 26, 2003 he said:

'Once the war against Saddam Hussein begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if you can't do that, just shut up. Americans, and indeed our foreign allies who actively work against our military once the war is underway, will be considered enemies of the state by me. Just fair warning to you, Barbara Streisand and others who see the world as you do. I don't want to demonize anyone, but anyone who hurts this country in a time like this, well. Let's just say you will be spotlighted.'

You are either with us or against us. America über alles. Sound familiar?

--Thomas Wheeler is a contributing editor to Alternative Press Review. He can be reached at: thomasdwheeler@comcast.net.

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The Supreme Court and the HMOs

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 13:14:00 +0000

The June 21st US Supreme Court ruling that HMOs are not responsible for medical malpractice even when their decisions and offerings for patient care result in negligent damages should come as no surprise. Nor should it be that the majority opinion was writtten by a member of the most conservative click on the bench, Justice Clarence Thomas. It is now over a dozen years since the then newly elected President Bill Clinton sent his unofficial cabinet member wife, Hillary Rodham, off to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to meet with a cabal of authorities. That were charged with formulating a universal health care system for the country, something the President had promised while on the hustings. The group consisted of six people from banking, insurance and finance, but not a single doctor, health care professional, union leader or consumer. The result further shamed our nation as being the world's only developed country without a universal federally -sponsored health care delivery program for all. We were left worse off after the group returned to the comforts of Washington and Wall Street.

Hillary Rodham was told of the insurance industry's, under banking aegis, taking over the entire private health care system, with the two federal systems, Medicaid and Medicare, not far behind. The Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) was strengthened as the overseer of the practice of medicine. Nurses, retired clinicians, technicians and other experts from the financial world made decisions as to lengths of patient stay, surgical permission and post op and hospital home care. Their bottom line was the HMO's bottom line. And this was done by long distance telephone. The HMOs became the purveyors of medical care. It was obvious that with medical practice also becoming more and more within the aspects of commercial US medical practice (no other nation in the world has such a litigation incidence or meaning), it was only a time bomb waiting to explode that eventually, patients were going to suffer from doctor and hospital neglect under HMO compliance and directives. Just last year there was a network TV drama depicting such a scenario, only in that fictional drama, the patient and her family won out. That is not the way it ever happens in real life. This new Court ruling only cements this egregious policy.

US medical practice has been taken away from the MD and is now in the hands of the MBA. Doctors are getting permission via that long distance 800 line to people who decide on the very aspects of patient care. Clarence Thomas, the rest of the Court and the entire Congress will never have to feel such a deprivation; their health care is of the finest order in Washington, with doctors and patients properly discussing their needs and carrying out the treatments. With Medicaid and Medicare as well starting to feel the sting of privatization and HMO control, even those insured will be under such dual control and that does yet not even address the over 40 million people without any health coverage at all.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been silent about her Wyoming debacle a decade or so ago. There are no plans to actively debate health care in Congress this session, despite the several proposals in committee. We all await what the campaign this year will bring us and hopefully John Kerry will call President-select Bush down for his ignoring this burning issue. For now, the Court has solidified what we knew along - the people of the USA are being treated by a combination of authorities, and you can only seek redress from the half that doesn't have a licence to practice medicine.

--Don Sloan is assistant editor of Political Affairs, is a medical doctor and is preparing a manuscript titled 'Practicing Medicine Without a License: The Corporate Takeover of Health Care in USAmerica.'

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July 2004 (print edition)

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 12:31:00 +0000

Inside... Just Do It? View from Left Field: Interview with Lester Rodney Standing Tall for Peace: Questions for Toni Smith Book Review - The Assassination of Julius Caesar, by Michael Parenti Poetry - Tables

In the print edition...

My Big Fat Greek Profits Froso Kortzidou

On Being Radical Chic Don Sloan

Plus more book reviews, more commentary, a marxist quiz, letters, poetry, art and so much more...

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Not Getting By

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 12:19:00 +0000

Somebody’s getting rich off of George W. Bush’s tax scheme. According to a recent AP report that looked at his tax records, the resident of the White House gave himself a tax break of over $41,000 in 2003. This figure is only slightly lower than the median household income for 2002 (latest figures available), according to the US Census Bureau. The nation’s officially recorded median household money income declined 1.1 percent in real terms to $42,409 in 2002 (and by 1.7 percent in 2001). This came to a loss of $720 last year, or nearly a month’s supply of groceries for a smaller family.

Since median income means that one-half of all incomes (and the people receiving them) were lower than $42,409, Bush took in one tax cut more than many families took in all year. Not a bad haul for lifting a pen to sign a bill into law. Perhaps he plans to do better next time.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, about 1.7 million more people were in poverty in 2002 than in 2001 raising the total to 34.6 million and the official poverty rate from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.1 percent in 2002. Nearly 3 million new people have become poor since Bush took office.

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Truth and Consequences: Socialist Ideas and Organizing Workers

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 12:09:00 +0000

Transport workers are on the move under global capitalism. This fact points to the continuing relevance of Lenin’s argument in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism that in the major imperialist countries heavy industry will have a tendency to decay and be replaced with light manufacturing and transportation accompanied by the incredible growth of finance capital as the principal motor of imperialist development. The great weight and latent power of the transport trades logically becomes even greater as these tendencies unfold. As the role of transport workers develops in this period of capitalism, it is worth considering the role of Communists in this key industry and how these considerations might affect their work generally.

The Communist Party USA does well as a small party of the working class building essential coalitions for the advancement of the working class and the great mass of the people. However, in this historic period of intensifying global crisis of imperialism, Communists should more carefully define and develop their work. We can look to the theoretical contributions of Antonio Gramsci for help.

Gramsci showed that the primary method of ruling-class control in the imperialist democracies was through cultural hegemony or the manufacture of the consent of the ruled. He demonstrated that the only class capable of saving and advancing civilization from the horrors of imperialism was the organized working class united through a mass Communist party. This movement would prove effective and relevant when it openly organized the working class into a new ruling class on political, industrial, social, spiritual and intellectual grounds. Communists are not, in Gramsci’s view, just sophisticated coalition builders that workers can 'tolerate or relate to.' Communists are sophisticated defenders of all the humane gains of civilization and the organizers of a new one where human need and not profit are first.

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Fascist Threat Needs Study

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 12:06:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: In the May issue (print edition only), Political Affairs ran a brief discussion of the threat of fascism and the right danger. PA contributing editor Gerald Horne continues that discussion here.

Fascism – or more precisely, the 'threat' of fascism – is a phenomenon that drives political strategy in this nation and abroad as evidenced by May’s PA discussion. Yet, despite its major importance, fascism has received surprisingly scant historical and theoretical attention on this side of the Atlantic in recent decades; this is akin, in a sense, to colonialism driving political strategy in Africa, though this phenomenon dissipated years ago while imperialism has assumed profound importance.

Yes, fascism will not necessarily arise in the same way in all nations. At times, however, certain forces on the left tend to gravitate toward the now discredited right-wing creed of 'American Exceptionalism' in detecting a rising threat of fascism under every bed, though this is terribly demobilizing and disorienting and inconsistent with global patterns. In any event, it would be quite useful – given the centrality of fascism’s threat as a pivot of many political strategies on the left – for someone or some group to conduct a systematic and thorough analysis of the roots and prospects of this phenomenon in the US. In the absence of such an analysis, the US left is akin to a pilot that may be flying into perilous weather but blithely oblivious to the dangers ahead.

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Stepping Up to the Plate: How the Reds Helped Integrate Baseball

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 12:02:00 +0000

Mass spectator sports possess tremendous contradictions. Sports are products of industrial capitalism whose development mirrors the history of industrial capitalism. The 'big leagues' in all major sports control most of the wealth, commercialized 'amateur' college sports serve as minor leagues for professional football and basketball in the US, and mass spectator sports have been spread throughout the world through the influence of great imperialist powers, primarily Britain, its colonies and the US, who developed and codified the sports of world football (soccer), rugby, hockey, cricket, baseball, basketball and American football. For example, US marines brought baseball to the Caribbean and British colonialists brought cricket to India and other lands.

Contradictions, however, are not one-sided. While most spectator sports 'teach' competition and aggression, they also provide for working-class people a practical example of solidarity. Latin American Marxist sociologists, for example, have contended that working-class people often express a solidarity and enthusiasm in soccer stadiums that they cannot show in their workplaces or in the larger society. Workers also see in the games more justice than in the larger societies – the teams that work together best usually win, and the 'stars' really are outstanding players not rich capitalists who have gained their wealth by inheritance, speculation or serving the corporate power structure. Even in colonies, as C.L.R. James showed in his classic study of West Indian cricket, Beyond a Boundary, and others have also noted, colonized peoples learn to literally beat the colonizers at their own game, transforming institutions of cultural hegemony or domination into centers of resistance.

Communists don’t stand on the sidelines bemoaning contradictions but 'accentuate the positive' within those contradictions to advance working-class and democratic struggles. In the United States, the best example of this in sports culture remains the struggle to integrate professional baseball, which should be seen as one of many democratic struggles of the 1930s and 1940s in which the Communist Party USA, its press and its activists played a leading role.

The story of baseball’s integration doesn’t start in Brooklyn in 1947 with Jackie Robinson....

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Standing Tall for Peace: Questions for Toni Smith

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 11:44:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: Toni Smith was the starting forward/center and team captain at Manhattanville College in New York and recently graduated. The media spotlight shone on her in the spring of 2003 as she, among millions of others, decided to protest US militarism and war. Before each game, instead of saluting the US flag as is customary during the national anthem, she turned away with her head bowed. She immediately became a renowned figure, as many in the peace movement compared her with Muhammad Ali, Tommy Smith and John Carlos.

PA: You’ve become well known for the kind of protest you made against the war. How did you come to feel so strongly about it?

TS: I always felt that way, but it never occurred to me to put my beliefs ahead of what I felt like were other priorities: my team, my school, 'doing the right thing.' Prior to my stand I simply stood, faced the flag with my head down and thought of something else, I reflected on the anthem, did whatever, I wasn’t paying attention. Then, in the beginning of that last season, I had to think about it another way. I came to realize that I didn’t believe in what the flag stands for. I don’t feel like it represents me, my beliefs or my family. That is more important than my position on the team. Before, I thought, 'I’m the team captain. My team is looking to me. I have to set a good example.' But when it boils down, being a member of a basketball team is a privilege. It’s not more important than my beliefs. That really shifted for me. I realized that being on a team doesn’t mean I have to salute the flag, that they don’t go hand in hand, which had been my misconception previously because they have always been in place. They’ve always been in place in the professional basketball associations. When I stopped to think about it, one has nothing to do with the other. My love for basketball has nothing to do with my beliefs. Why should I compromise my beliefs because something has become the norm?

PA: Should sports become a public venue for expression of different political beliefs?

TS: I don’t think the sports arena has to become a venue for different beliefs, but if the goal is to keep politics out of sports, then the flag should be kept out of sports, because the flag is inherently a political symbol. The flag was instated before sporting events to try to prove our superiority over other countries.
PA: What were the most memorable responses to your stand?

TS: Definitely from my teammates. Half of the team was opposed to my stand. They were very uncomfortable. But I think a few of them were more influenced by their parent’s rage. I think a lot of them didn’t really know where they stood, but they knew that their parents believed that it was wrong. So they tended to follow that. They were really uncomfortable with the heckling, we were in the paper, and people were saying bad things about us. The natural response in humans is to look to place the blame in order to release the anger. So, of course, the easiest place to do that was me because I generated it. There were definitely a lot of issues between me and a few members on the team. Surprisingly it never really got transferred onto the court. It never really affected our performance, but off of the court, there wasn’t a friendship. There was barely even an acquaintance or any kind of relationship other than teammates. After the season was over, we didn’t speak anymore.

PA: Were there some positive responses?

TS: There was tons of support for me on campus, especially from the Black and Latino communities. Even those people I hadn’t spoken with very much before – we were on kind of a 'hi-bye' basis – came out and supported me with signs. They would speak to me on campus. They would go out of their way to show their support. Verbally and out in the open, there was an equal amount of supportive responses as negative responses on campus.

PA: Even with a lot of support, it must have been a difficult personal decision. What kept you going?

TS: First, my stand wasn’t completely a stand against the war, although that was the icing on the cake. My belief is that the flag represents the rise of American power since the slave trade and going back in history. I’m very unhappy with how America has become such a worldwide power. When I decided not to face the flag, it was for personal reasons. It was a personal choice I made not to compromise my beliefs and not to sell out on myself. When I realized the responses that I was getting and the repercussions of my actions, people were so angry and so closed to any alternative opinion.

I found out that a lot of people weren’t even interested in my reasons, even my teammates. None of my teammates asked me why I was doing what I was doing. They made assumptions. They decided to have a team discussion about what I was doing without me. All of this made me want to stand my ground even more. It reconfirmed for me why I was standing for what I believed in, because, especially at that time after 9-11, everyone was in such a panic. Actually I’m really stubborn. So when people were saying, 'Stop doing that. You’re a disgrace,' all of the negative backlash just made me say, 'Now you’ve made me want to keep doing it. Even if I didn’t want to before, now I do.' Just because of that thinking.

PA: How did the team end up doing?

TS: Our record was 17-8, which is the third best record in Manhattanville women’s basketball history. So what’s funny about that is that a lot of the comments I got and my team got was, 'How can you do this to your team? How can you disgrace your team? You’re bringing your team down.' All of this and we have one of our best seasons ever. We just had a really good team, and before everything unraveled, we had tremendous potential. Our team bonded. Our practices were great. We had great talent. I think that from day one, we all knew that. From day one we said, 'This year is our year. This year we’re going to defy the past and the previous records.' I think that was clear for everyone regardless of our personal beliefs, regardless of the tension and the falling outs, that was clear. We were not going to sacrifice the potential that we had.

PA: Can you talk about how you got interested in sports?

TS: This is actually a new revelation I’ve had in the last year. I’d never put my finger on it before. Because I’m mixed – my mother is Jewish and my father is mixed, white, Black, and Native American – so growing up, I didn’t feel like I was white. My mother is white, but my father is noticeably not white. So I didn’t have any experience growing up, although my skin is light, as a white person. Somewhere around sixth grade there was a cluster of the Black girls in my class, and they would hang out together during lunch and recess. Then there were the white girls. And there was a pretty good mixture, half and half. I always felt myself straddling this line in between. I didn’t quite fit in with either group. I didn’t jump double-dutch, because I was afraid of the rope. Whatever the white girls did at recess, I didn’t completely fit in. Some of the conversations they had and the way they thought were really uncomfortable for me because I had a different view.

So one day I picked up basketball. When I played basketball I noticed that boys at that age don’t make that distinction, I mean, the ones who were playing sports didn’t have a Black-white distinction when they are playing sports. They just said, 'How good are you in that sport?' There was no separation of activities; that was my experience. Back then there was no WNBA, so it wasn’t common for girls to play. We were scattered around the country playing with boys.

PA: They were kind of skeptical about you playing with them?

TS: Yes, but when I got better, they became amazed. It was fun, and I was really interested in getting better. Although, I still didn’t fit – I wasn’t a guy – it was an elevated exclusion. I didn’t fit in, but they didn’t say you can’t play. They said, 'Oh my god, I want to watch even more because there is a girl on the court.'n

Book Review - The Assassination of Julius Caesar, By Michael Parenti

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 11:35:00 +0000

We often hear the United States compared to ancient Rome – usually negatively. Critics of US foreign policy refer to a new Roman Empire and to Paul Bremer as a proconsul in Iraq. These references are comprehensible because Rome and its institutions, both religious and secular (especially Roman law) are part of the foundations on which so-called Western civilization is based. The founders of the United States used many Roman symbols in representing the new republic (res publica). The imperial eagle, the arrows of war, the olive branch, the idea of a Senate – even the classical architecture of Washington, DC is based on the public buildings of Rome (and Athens). Now that many elements of the right see this country as the dominant world power, the analogies with ancient Rome as a universal empire are becoming more numerous even in the popular media.

Michael Parenti’s new people’s history of Ancient Rome is thus both timely and relevant. Written in his usual popular and accessible style, this book will make available to a wide working-class audience an easily understandable and reliable portrait of Rome at one of its most important historical junctures: the transition from an oligarchical republic to a full-blown imperial system.

The life and death of Julius Caesar is the focal point of this work. Departing from the consensus of classical scholars who refer to Caesar as a tyrant who trampled on the personal liberties and freedoms of Republican Rome symbolized by the rule of the Senate, Parenti marshals convincing evidence to support what has been the minority view – that Caesar was actually a representative of popular democratic tendencies among the Roman people and that his enemies and assassins really stood for the interests of a small elite portion of the ruling class who used the power of the Roman state for personal enrichment and the exploitation of the masses.

The class struggle in Rome was basically between the optimates (the best) who represented the wealthy latifundistas (plantation owners) and the popularis (relating to the people) who tried to improve the living standards of regular citizens of the republic. 'As a popularis, Julius Caesar introduced ‘laws to better the condition of the poor,’ as [the ancient historian] Appian wrote,' Parenti points out. This is what ultimately cost him his life on March 15, 44 B.C.

The optimates were also the creditor class, and Parenti remarks that their policies created 'penury and debt' that crushed average citizens. It was Caesar who tried to alleviate this suffering and prevent the loss of freedom for the debtor, actions 'upon which today’s bankruptcy laws are based' – a citizen’s freedom was to be 'inborn and unalienable.'

Caesar has also been blamed for the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. Parenti shows, however, that the destruction of ancient culture, the burning of books and the closing down of libraries and educational institutions was done by the 'Christ worshipers' when they came to power. 'Though depicted as an oasis of learning amidst the brutish ignorance of the Dark Ages, the Christian church actually was the major purveyor of that ignorance.' Parenti even suggests that Caesar’s rule was 'a dictatorship of the proletarii' since he ruled against the 'plutocracy on behalf of the citizenry’s substantive interests.' And, he says Cicero, one the most dedicated of the optimates, is quoted as lamenting the fact that Caesar wanted to bestow Roman 'citizenship not merely on individuals but on entire nations and provinces.' It is no surprise then to discover that even to this day people leave flowers at the site of Caesar’s murder every March 15.

Parenti also criticizes contemporary classicists who ignore the class struggles of the ancient world – seeing the masses as rabble and expressing sympathy for ancient ruling-class elites and their treatment of the common people. Parenti says he has 'tried to show [that] what we know of the common people tells us that they displayed a social consciousness and sense of justice that was usually superior to anything possessed by their would-be superiors.'

Parenti lists four tenets of the ideology of the optimates which he says characterize 'all ruling propertied classes.' Namely, 1) the ruling class treats its interests as the general interest; 2) social welfare programs are bad for those who receive them as they 'undermine the moral fiber' of the poor; 3) the redistribution of wealth at the expense of the wealthy is detrimental to society as a whole; and 4) attacking the reformers and their characters is a better way to defeat reform than attacking the particular reform itself.

This is an excellent book and a good read. By understanding the class struggle in ancient Rome, as presented by Parenti, we will better understand the struggle being waged in the world of today.

The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome By Michael Parenti New York New Press, 2003.

Just Do It?

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 11:22:00 +0000

Let’s start with a fact. People do not just 'like' sports. Talk to an athlete or a fan and you will find that there are beauties that belong specifically to baseball, soccer or basketball, beauties that are only brought out in the playing itself, and that show themselves in a certain pose of the body, a flash of agility or a triumph of coordination that is best described as 'flow.' Those who really know their game feel that it contains the basis for an entire ethics, that if we appreciate how the sport disciplines shape our minds and bodies we will have access to a model for living; and that, in playing, we will learn something about ourselves. The trained eye sees in each player or team not just a contestant or a 'side' but a distinct style of interacting with the game, a certain way of taking up the equipment of the sport and making it their own. And the players themselves see their teammates and adversaries in this way, in pick-up games and at the professional level. My teammate or opponent has a particular repertoire of 'moves,' a way of cutting his figure into the structure of the game. Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali are not really the names of people, but refer to singular, unrepeatable ways of speaking the language of their sport with their bodies. They are the poet laureates of basketball and boxing.

This may all sound overblown, but I think it gives expression to the way that athletes and fans feel about sports. There is an aesthetic, ethical and nearly religious relationship to the game that recognizes a basic truth about sport: that it is not just a leisure activity but a unique way of learning about our bodies, our relations with others and our freedom. If sport were not this, it would be impossible to explain the pseudo-philosophy of sneaker ads or the romanticism of Hollywood sport films. Nike can build an entire world view out of its 'just do it' slogan only because sport is, in itself, a profound experience, only because sport makes us suspect that it has important lessons to teach. Of course, none of this is reflected on in the heat of a contest. Athletes and onlookers alike are wrapped up in the game and could care less about the deeper meaning of what is going on. They are living through the experience, not reflecting on its significance. And this not-reflecting is part of what sport is. But this is no excuse for those of us who think about such things to drop the ball. Sports are such an important part of our everyday living, so dominant in our culture, that we cannot let shoe companies or television networks have final say on what they mean.

But how have progressive commentators tended to talk about sports? Unfortunately, they often behave as if sports are too lowly to require serious thought. The attitudes here range from simple dismissal to sophisticated critique, but almost everyone seems united on one basic point: sport, in and of itself, is not valuable as an area of human experience. On the one hand, there is the view that sports are something we enjoy for entertainment, but which we shouldn’t bother about when we are asking serious questions about society. Then there is the more 'sophisticated' ideological critique. Sport, we are told, is a kind of distraction that draws our mental and physical energy away from more pressing political matters. I recall Noam Chomsky once complaining that if Americans spent half as much time thinking about politics as they do memorizing sports statistics, we’d be far better off as a nation. Others may speak of how sport is fueled by the competition, violence and winner-take-all attitude of a capitalist, patriarchal society. And even when progressives look at sport as a lens through which to view working-class culture, or as a way of reading the contradictions present in a given society, there is often too little emphasis placed on just what kind of lens sport is. These commentators look at sports to learn about other aspects of the society, not about sport itself.

But there is a lot we can’t know if we stay on this level. For instance, when the women’s movement struggles for the application of Title IX to collegiate athletics, is it just a matter of equal opportunity and access? Or is there something about sport itself and the experience it gives us of our bodies that makes this issue particularly important for young women living in a sexist society? What is the significance of sporting leagues and events in which people with cognitive and physical disabilities compete? When Jackie Robinson struggles against racism at every step of the way, and still manages to excel in the major leagues, is this just a symbol for the kind of courage and heroism demonstrated by countless Black people during the period of de-segregation? Or does the game of baseball provide a way of dramatizing that heroism that only sports can provide? What are we to make of Greg Louganis, Arthur Ashe, Katie Hnida, Tiger Woods or Manon Rheaune? Are these figures important in their own right; is there something significant about the public display of the gay, Black or female body as graceful and physically glorified? Finally, is there something in sport itself that makes it an essential feature of working-class existence? Or should we treat sport as just another form of entertainment with no particular virtue of its own. Even to begin looking at these questions, we will have to ask a question that seems ridiculously simple: What is a sport?

Let’s try and zero in on sport by putting it between two things that it’s not. A sport is not a game. It is true that games and sports both suspend the seriousness of life. They bring us into conflict and cooperation with others, but in relation to goals and rules cordoned off from the aspirations and laws that govern our most earnest pursuits. Of course, we become 'invested' in our games and sports, often to the point of embarrassment. And all the words that describe the stakes of our everyday living have a place there: success, failure, victory, defeat, frustration, humiliation and triumph. We can make 'costly mistakes,' be 'disappointed' in others or ourselves and develop good or bad 'habits.' But sports and games share something essential in that they both lift this drama out of the sphere of mundane life where it weighs upon us with an unmistakable gravity. They both take the high stakes of life and pin them to 'useless' activities with which we can either pass the time or challenge ourselves.

What make sports different from games are two things. First, though games and sports are both rule-governed competitive activities, a sport must involve some kind of physical exertion and physical skill. Sports are not easy, and to play them I have to throw myself into the act. If I want to excel in a sport, I have to discipline and refashion my body, shape it to respond to situations and solve physical problems it would never encounter in the course of daily affairs. I have to react faster, be stronger, steadier or more precise than I normally would. Second, sports have a different kind of history and tradition than games. Even though dodge ball can be exhausting and requires agility and stamina, it is not a sport because there are no long-term statistics kept, no records, no hall of fame and no 'classic games' that go down in history and are held in public memory. Of course, if dodgeball became a recognized sport, there would be famous players, statistics and all the rest of it. But that’s just the point. It would mean something different to play dodgeball with your friends if there were a professional dodge-ball league or a national dodgeball team. These ways of distinguishing sports from games aren’t hard and fast because there are borderline cases. Is bowling a game or a sport? What about golf? Or chess? But I think our way of drawing the distinction makes sense of these borderline cases. People wonder about golf and bowling because they question the level of physical exertion required. Meanwhile, although you don’t need to get up to play chess, there are those who argue for its status as an Olympic sport because of the well-chronicled history of chess masters and the great matches they have played.

But sport is also not work. Though it involves my body in an exacting effort that can become exhausting, sport frees this effort from the arduous toil to which it is bound in work. Even if it is the same exact movements that I carry out when at work and when competing, they take on an entirely new significance when they are liberated from the confines of the labor situation. There are lumberjack competitions that involve nothing other than sawing down trees and cutting up logs. But when these 'tasks' are integrated into the context of a sport, the effort and sweat expended on them are detached from the work-situation where my 'livelihood' depends on them. My effort is dramatized, and is held in the balance between the 'thrill of victory' and the 'agony of defeat.' In sport, my struggling body can attain glory in its successes, and because of this, no matter how much pain my exertion involves, I enjoy my effort. Only when defeat is certain do I discover its 'futility.' Only then do things become tedious; only then do I have to be a 'good sport' to continue on. There are, of course, people we call 'professional athletes' who receive salaries for playing sports. Still, we shouldn’t let this trick us into thinking that when David Beckham steps out onto the field he’s 'working.' He works when he shoots commercials or public service announcements. And even though nothing he does on the soccer field transgresses the laws of political economy, we would pass over the meaning of what he’s doing if we insist on reducing it to work just because he’s getting paid. People dream of becoming professional athletes precisely because they fantasize about a life where they are paid, not to work, but to play.

So what does all this mean? Where has our attempt to answer the ridiculously simple question 'What is a sport?' gotten us? Are we now in a position to address the more complex questions we posed at the outset? We can, I think, at least make a beginning. We have seen that sports are a kind of escape from the cares of the work-a-day world, but that this escape, whether we’re watching or playing, is not the same kind of escape as a game, literature, music, art or simple relaxation. This is because what we experience in sports is the effort of the focused body, working toward a 'useless' goal, in which it can be glorified. Sports provide a specific structure that allows this glorification to happen. First, it is the body-in-effort that is glorified or attains a special kind of value. It is what succeeds or triumphs in its grace, coordination, focus or 'flow.' To win or to triumph, to play the game well, is to make my body adequate to some goal beyond its normal 'reach,' or beyond the reach of 'normal' bodies. Second, that in which I glorify my body is its 'work.' But the work I accomplish in sport is thoroughly 'useless' by the standards of the work world. I shoot an arrow into a target, throw a ball through a hoop, or run toward an arbitrary goal. I concentrate all my power and focus on these aims, but they are freed from the serious consequences that govern my normal concerns. Third, the body-in-effort attains glory in that its triumph in its work is commemorated by being 'entered into the records.' This means that score is kept, records are held, medals are awarded, etc. There is a running record in each sport that documents excellence and promises to the athlete a place in history.

We can now begin to see how the relation between labor and sport makes sense of its importance in working people’s culture, especially under an economic system that conceals the social and historical value of work. Only in sport can one turn away from the monotony and toil of labor and rediscover the body-in-effort as graceful, exalted and capable of glorification. Sport is a significant departure from work precisely because it is not rest or leisure, but an exertion and effort liberated from tedium. In work, I am always being confronted with tasks, things I have to do in order to do other things. And I do these things in order to get paid, and I get paid in order to take care of others and myself. This whole cycle is lived under the sign of necessity. It weighs upon us and exhausts us, not necessarily because it physically tires us, but because it is work. Sport is the opportunity to place the body in a new sort of world, where its skill and effort are made poetic and lyrical, where they are enjoyed and celebrated. No matter how our economy is organized, sport will always be a special kind of transformation of the effort our bodies exert in our everyday life and work. It is not some symptom destined to wither away with the exploitation of one human being by another. We can talk all we’d like about how sports encourage competition, and how the fanatical identification of onlookers with one side or another leads to a nearly violent desire to crush the opponent. But beyond or behind this, fans and athletes who truly love their sports can always appreciate a 'good game.' Beyond the question of which side wins or loses, fans and athletes have a sense of whether the game itself is being respected or abused. We can talk all we’d like about how sports are a way of avoiding our responsibilities, of displacing our emotions and attaching our aspirations to meaningless outcomes. But why should it be sports, and not something else that so absorbs our attention? Only by looking into the essential features of sport itself can we begin so see the reason behind this appeal and its connection to our economic existence.

But perhaps the most important consequence of this kind of questioning is that it puts us on the road to understanding the extent of the crisis we face concerning gender and sports. It was no one less than Plato who argued that in a healthy society women must be allowed to engage in athletics alongside men. He was well aware that this flew in the face of the social conventions of his time. But he insisted. We should keep his insistence in mind when we hear 'common sense' reasons for the inferiority of women’s athletics, and when the notion of devoting equal resources to them is dismissed as ridiculous. If sport is defined as the opportunity to glorify the body as a subject of effort, skill, coordination, strength and agility, then it is obvious that sports are a vehicle of liberation for women, whose bodies are too often considered passive objects incapable of navigating the world without a male guide and protector. And the systematic exclusion and undervaluation of women in sport is part and parcel of this oppression. How can we measure the existential consequences of having never been encouraged to play sports, of never having known what it means to triumph or to fail in the unique context of bodily effort that sport provides? I hope that our reflections have at least given the hint that exclusion from sports is not a trivial matter, but should be considered on par with being deprived of an education in art or literature. This may seem laughable, as it was during the time of Plato. But we would do well to think twice. The effort to win equal access to sports for women involves opening up an entire dimension of experience, one that re-captures the body-in-action as a source of power and value.

Poetry - Tables

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 10:59:00 +0000

Tables

Senior year, sixteen, balancing trays of steak and beer to take to fat, drunk men. Rancid women hissed steam, blamed me for their children’s boredom and fickle tastes.

Strangers clamored to be fed and cleaned. They complained, howled, smacked my rear end, called me sweetie. They left me five-dollar bills, often sliding them into my hip pocket with sly self-congratulation.

Closing shifts were a blur of broom handles and kitchen clatter. The stench of day’s-end fish swaddled my swollen ankles. Grease seeped into my skin, turned me gray.
At home, ten o’clock, I did homework under desklight, studied trigonometry circles in my name tag and stained shirt. I drew lines, planted dots on graphs, plotted my days into an arc, eased and pointed toward an unnamed freedom, charting a better path, a way out.

Christine DeSimone Blue Collar Review, Spring 2004

View from Left Field: Interview with Lester Rodney

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 09:57:00 +0000

Lester Rodney was the sports editor of the Daily Worker between 1936 and 1958. His contributions to sports history and to the working-class movement is detailed in Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports by Irwin Silber (Temple University Press, 2003).

PA: How did you come to work for the Daily Worker?

LR: That was in 1936. I had become radicalized by the Depression, which wiped out our home and my father’s job. But I was not a Party member, and in fact I used to argue with Communists at NYU where I went at night while working Depression jobs in the daytime. Inevitably I encountered the Daily Worker on the campus.

In the 1930s on any college campus in New York, if somebody wasn’t a Communist, a socialist or a Trotskyist or some variation of radical, they were pretty much brain-dead. So I encountered the Daily Worker . I argued against it. I came from a totally different background, a Republican family actually. I looked at it and I saw in the Sunday Worker that they had a sports column and some articles. Being very much interested in sports, I read it and I thought it was pretty good, but a little heavy handed and there were traces of sectarianism. (That word wasn’t in my vocabulary then.)

My curiosity was piqued, and after a couple more issues, I decided to write a letter to the editor suggesting, as a young man who was not a Communist but who was a sports fan, that it lighten up. I thought that sports were something that working people were into, especially the new generation of people who read the paper. They shouldn’t shy away from, though it may be true that sports is used to divert workers from the realities of life and so on, that’s inevitable, the fact that sports is something that appeals to workers, trade unionists, radicals and so on.

So I wrote this letter to the Daily Worker , and I got a reply from the editor, Clarence Hathaway. And he invited me to come in and chat. I went in and he said, 'How would you like to do a few things with us?' Gratis of course. So I said, 'Sure.' This was early in 1936.

PA: What kind of stories did they cover before you joined the staff?

LR: I can’t remember exactly. Some of the stuff was fine, but there was a tone in there, a reminder that sports – I don’t remember if the phrase was used – was the 'opium of the masses.' It was that kind of thing. They were talking already about the fact that there were no African Americans in baseball, but let me put it this way: there was nothing in it that reflected a pure interest in the sports world. For an average reader, if someone were to go out canvassing with the Daily Worker , he would find no point of contact with that sports writing. Well, I shouldn’t say no point of contact. It was a kind of faltering, half-hearted attempt to get in on the new popular front concept and so on. I would say it tended to be heavy handed.

PA: What kinds of contributions did you make toward the DW becoming more expansive?

LR: The first thing I did was begin writing about sports per se. I established the fact that we were interested in covering the sports scene in its entirety, which included the things that were wrong with it. We told the readers that we would analyze the teams – why the Dodgers were in sixth place and so on. In other words we established the fact that this was a legitimate sports section, which I had to do, by the way, to get membership in the Baseball Writers Association of America, which enables you to go to the press box and talk to the players on the field.

So I did that in conjunction with what turned out to be the campaign to end discrimination in baseball. The difference was that in addition to stressing the amazing fact that our national pastime didn’t allow players with black skin to play, it also dealt with the players as they were. It didn’t treat them as auxiliaries to the plot. One of the objectives of the campaign was to talk to white players and managers about this to shoot down the myth that was promulgated that the white players would never stand for desegregation.

PA: Do you recall if white players knew that integrating baseball would raise the talent level?

LR: You could be a racist and concede that. There was no great consciousness about it by white players. The culture of the times accepted racism right down the line not just in sports. As I pointed out in Press Box Red, you could go back and look at the great newspapers in the 1930s, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, etc., and you’d look in vain to see any mention whatsoever of the fact that half way through the 20th century in the land of the free that Black players weren’t allowed in our 'national pastime.' There were no editorials about it. There were no questions to the magnates and the commissioner of baseball. There were no investigative articles about 'who are the Black players' or 'are there Black players good enough' and so on and so forth. So it was a wide open field for us.

My job in addition to doing that was to establish a regular sports page. In other words, I had to cover games and report on them in order to get credentials. From that base we could pursue the campaign.

PA: What were some other major stories you covered?

LR: In 1938 there was the Joe Louis/Max Schmeling fight which had a tremendous meaning beyond the event itself. Hitler was in the ascendancy and had sent a telegram to Schmeling saying 'Confident that you will defeat Louis.' The whole thing took on a political atmosphere. They practically hung the swastika on Schmeling’s jaw. So that certainly was something we covered thoroughly. I went to Joe Louis’ training camp. Richard Wright, the Black novelist who was a Communist at the time, asked me to take him along to meet Joe Louis, and I did that. That was a big thing for our paper, covering that fight in a way that nobody else covered it.

Initially, baseball was the big thing. Baseball at that time was the national pastime in truth much more than today when there are so many different interests in sports. There was no National Basketball Association then or professional football league of any account. Baseball was the center of attention of most young men particularly. So we covered the games just the same as the other sports writers but in addition we began to introduce these other questions. But separate. We didn’t write stories about how the Dodgers defeated the Giants 3-2 and so and so pitched, and then in the next sentence say, 'but where were the Black players?' We just ran sports stories, but separately in the same page we began raising the question of Black players.

PA: How did the paper propel the campaign for integration to its successful conclusion?

LR: In the 1930s, the Daily Worker had an influence far beyond its circulation. The main reason for that was that we had a lot of young trade unionists reading the Daily Worker and in the Party. That’s why when there was a May Day parade, we had baseball teams from the Furriers’ union, from the Transport Workers, from different unions holding up signs: End Jim Crow in Baseball. It was the fact that the Party was influential then in the CIO.

We stimulated a petition campaign wherein young Communists mostly and others went to the ballparks with petitions asking fans going in to sign a petition to admit Black ballplayers to professional baseball. That resulted in a million and a half signatures that landed on Judge Landis’ desk. There was a direct influence that stemmed from the Daily Worker campaign. The other thing was that we interviewed managers and players in conjunction with the Black press, which happily joined in with us. We exchanged stories, notably with Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, which was then the largest Black newspaper, but it was a weekly with a limited circulation, so they were happy to get their articles printed in the crucial New York market through us. We didn’t want it to be a Daily Worker exclusive. We wanted to end the ban. We were very happy as the war approached that people like Eleanor Roosevelt spoke out – not Franklin, Eleanor – and trade unions. The National Maritime Union was very good at that time.

PA: Did you continue to cover sports after you left the paper in the late 1950s?

LR: The Daily Worker was closing actually, that was in early 1958. I left and went to California. I never wrote sports again.

PA: Did you continue to follow sports?

LR: Sure. I didn’t drop interest in sports suddenly. I was voted by my peers an honorary lifetime membership in the Baseball Writers Association, which enables me even to this day to go into the press box of any baseball field in the country.

PA: Do you still do that?

LR: Sure.

PA: The big issue today in baseball is steroid use. Do you think it will have an impact after we’ve heard about all these players (like Mark McGwire) who have admitted to using or are suspected of using them?

LR: McGwire used a substance that isn’t quite the kind of thing they are talking about with steroids.

PA: It was an enhancement.

LR: It was an enhancement but it wasn’t illegal or banned by baseball so I don’t see how it could put an asterisk next to him. He didn’t defy the rules. There is a common feeling that Barry Bonds had a personal trainer who was involved with steroids. Yet there is the good old principle of innocent until proven guilty because there is no hard evidence. He denies it and says that he is willing to be tested at any time.

PA: Do you think it will negatively affect baseball’s image, because in the past few years some baseball players have set these new records that were deemed unachievable before?

LR: There is something to that. But you must also realize, and people who never played baseball may not realize this, that you can take steroids until the cows come home, but unless you have eye-hand coordination, you’re not going to get the bat on a 90 mile an hour fastball. You’ve got to be a hell of an athlete to begin with. You can’t say that Barry Bonds is an ordinary player who used steroids. He’s not ordinary. He’s a great athlete who may have enhanced his strength. He still has to time the ball and drive it.

PA: Can you comment on the role of the embargo against Cuba has on the level of talent in professional baseball in North America?

LR: Cuba has incubated a lot of great ball-players most of whom remain in Cuba. A few of them defected and gave an indication of the quality of baseball in Cuba. If there were sanity and the embargo were lifted, I’m sure Cuba would be happy to have Cuban nationals play in the big leagues as other countries do.

PA: Another major issue with the rise of the WNBA, women’s soccer, and the attempts to form women’s professional baseball teams is the question of gender and sports. Did this ever become a theme or an interest for sports writers in those days?

LR: I’m sorry to say that it didn’t. We were better than the other papers on it, but we lagged behind on that question. We should have campaigned, not to have women in the big leagues, that would have been physically impossible, but to have equal facilities in college and to cover women’s events in the sports section though they weren’t as visible as they are today. The answer is we reflected the Party’s failure on that. We could have done more in the sports section about that, even though it was before the day of organized women’s sports teams and millions of girls playing soccer and so on.

The visibility of women in sports impacts on the self-esteem of young girls. So it has a social impact immediately. It reinforces their rights in the workplace even. You can’t argue that girls can’t do this or girls can’t do that. Girls can do almost anything. So in that sense it is the emergence of women’s athletics, even with all of the commercialized sins that begin to appear, after all this is taking place within a capitalist system. Women’s sports are exploited too as men’s sports are. Still, the very fact of the emergence of women as athletes, I think, plays a positive role in the never-ending fight for equality.

PA: The big story in that regard is in professional golf.

LR: The Masters. I salute Martha Burk. She’s changing her tactics now instead of just going down there and confronting them – they just shoved her off to the side anyhow. She investigated all the companies that subsidize the Masters. She has prepared questionnaires for them about their job process with women and so forth. She’s going to shine the light on them and maybe make them worry a little. That’s very good.

Somebody could justly argue that very few women golfers can compete with men golfers. And that’s just true, but still there are women who are very close and there are a few examples of that. I would rather see the immediate emphasis be on the college level, for instance, facilities are equal and teaching are equal for the golf teams and encourage women from the ground up to get in their and improve their game. That’s what happened in basketball. There was a successful fight to apportion equal money to women’s sports. That has redounded in the emergence of women’s basketball, which is an amazing spectacle. They play really well. But the sportswriters say, 'Oh, but they could never play in the NBA.' Those are the same sportswriters who couldn’t keep up with them. The gap tends to close. The men remain as great as they are, and the women get better all the time. We’ve seen that in swimming where the women have come quite close to men.

PA: As with the campaign to integrate baseball in the 1940s, do you regard professional male golfers as having a responsibility to say something?

LR: Absolutely. I would like to see Tiger Woods speak out and the other golfers of course. I wouldn’t just focus on him. Golf is the most socially stratified of all the sports. It’s not like baseball or basketball or football. That’s why Hootie [William 'Hootie' Johnson, chair of the Augusta club where the Masters is held] gets away with this. The history of golf is of privacy, of clubs, of wealth. That’s not true of the street sports: baseball, football, basketball, soccer.

PA: Doesn’t the suggestion that Tiger Woods has a special responsibility leave the other golfers off the hook?

LR: There’s two things to that. You’d like all the golfers to speak out about not excluding women. It’s unfair to single out the Black golfer in that respect. It’s a gender thing in golf. On the other hand, Tiger Woods, who should know something about what discrimination is in this world and being the champ and as great as he is, you could almost say that he could afford to speak out. He’s not going to destroy his career. I’d sure like to see him speak out. That’s all I can say about that.

PA: Earlier you said that the way you regarded the Daily Worker was as heavy handed. Do you…

LR: Well that’s not the total way I regarded the Daily Worker. It began to make connections with me on the social scene. I was a child of the Depression. I graduated high school in 1929 right in the teeth of the Wall Street crash. My father lost his job and had a stroke and died prematurely. I appreciated the Daily Worker even though I wished it would be better.

PA: I guess what I’m driving at is the role of sports coverage itself has in appealing to a working-class and mass audience and its continuing responsibility to speak about social issues.

LR: In that period especially it was perfectly legitimate to challenge players on the question of discrimination in their game, which we managed to do having established that we really covered baseball and weren’t just using it as a pretext for the campaign.

PA: Do you see anything that equals that now?

LR: No I don’t see anything of equal intensity, as outrageous, or as amazingly unjust as the ban against Black players. It was criminal. Look at Barry Bonds. Forget about the steroids. Just look at the super athlete that he is. Imagine that he couldn’t play on big league teams. I tell this to young people. They gasp, 'They couldn’t do that.' But they did do that. They kept Josh Gibson, the greatest catcher who ever played, from laying in big league baseball. It was a crime. There’s nothing quite like that today. It disenfranchised hundreds of American athletes. It was as if there was a ban on great violinists from coming to Carnegie Hall. It was unthinkable. That’s why we were able to win such a lot of support.

PA: The flip side is, is there a sports news venue that does that same kind of work that Daily Worker did?

LR: There’s no periodical that I know of that does except the radical press occasionally. There are organizations now. Richard Lapchick, his father was Joe Lapchick at St. John’s University then of the New York Knicks, who brought in a Black player, has an institute in Central Florida that monitors discrimination of all kinds and publicizes it. So there’s that. Of course another major difference between now and the 1930s is that the sportswriters themselves are free to write about things that are wrong. In those days sportswriters wouldn’t even think about handing in a story about discrimination. They wouldn’t let them.

The best example of that was in 1937. Joe DiMaggio was a Yankee for a year and a half. I was in the Yankee clubhouse and somebody, not me, somebody asked him, 'Joe who’s the best pitcher you ever faced?' – thinking in terms of big league pitchers. Joe without any hesitation said Satchel Paige. He’d played in post season exhibition games against the Negro league players led by Satchel Paige, so he knew how good he was. He didn’t say Satchel Paige who should be in the big leagues…He just said it matter-of-factly. But in saying that he still knew that they were barred. So the next day, the Daily Worker had a tremendous headline: Paige the Greatest I Have Faced – DiMaggio. Reporters from every other major paper were in that dressing room with me and not a word appeared in any of those papers.

Word got around finally, but its impact was lessened by the fact that the other papers didn’t run it. If the Daily News had run that headline, it would have hastened the campaign. This doesn’t mean that the sportswriters were all racists. They worked for a living and they knew that you didn’t report such things in their papers. They knew what their papers were at that time. The papers didn’t deal with discrimination in those years. It was self-censorship.

Book Review - The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Bill O’Reilly, by Peter Hart

Mon, 21 Jun 2004 15:43:00 +0000

No one can trust what Bill O’Reilly says. Some television viewers who have seen him consider him to have been more believable at his previous job with another sensationalist program, Inside Edition – one of the very first tabloid 'news' programs. Anyone who has either listened to O’Reilly or heard him promoting himself or his books on the radio doesn’t have to wait long before they find themselves questioning the things he says. Ironically, he touts his show as a 'no-spin zone,' which he then qualifies by saying that his opinion, even if shown to be based in imagination rather than fact, doesn’t count as spin as it is only opinion, not an attempt to present facts.

Peter Hart’s new book, The Oh Really? Factor, tabulates literally hundreds of things O’Reilly has said on his program or other venues that have a tenuous relationship with reality. This book follows closely on the heels of such hilarious and pointed works as Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country? The former provoked an attention-grabbing lawsuit from the Fox News Corporation for using the channel’s misleading slogan 'fair and balanced.' Franken’s book shot to the top of the best seller list after the suit was announced.

Hart’s book should prove to be even more informative as it puts massive amounts of quoted materials and with rational alternative perspectives or fact-based analysis. Readers of The Oh Really? Factor quickly discover O’Reilly to be a man, tortured by an inferiority complex, who refuses to adequately research material for the stories he televises, ignores or shuts down alternative views, belittles efforts to analyze events using facts or logic and, when caught in a lie, simply refuses to acknowledge a mistake.

Bill O’Reilly’s bio on his website claims that he received a degree in journalism from elite Boston University. I’m afraid he’ll just have to produce a transcript, because I don’t believe it. If proven to be true, Boston University should be embarrassed, though really they aren’t responsible for the actions of the people they graduate. If this were the case, Harvard and Yale might reconsider the degrees they awarded on the current resident of the White House.

The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly Peter Hart and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting New York, Seven Stories Press, 2003.

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The GNU Left

Mon, 21 Jun 2004 15:35:00 +0000

In the Information Technology world, the Free Software Foundation is the organization that struggles against the drive to convert knowledge itself into a capitalist commodity known as Intellectual Property. The emergence of Linux, the fastest growing computer operating system (OS), has done much to validate the FSF work. Today, the FSF and the Linux movement have given rise to an increasing number of politically active programmers, including the Progressive Programmers League, based in the United States.

How It All Began...

Computer programmer Richard M. Stallman left MIT and launched the GNU Project in 1984. His goal was to develop a complete UNIX style operating system free of the restrictions associated with commercial software. UNIX is the industrial strength operating system (OS) that dominates servers on the Internet and in the corporate sector.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a non-profit charity that distributes the GNU Project’s software and accepts donations to keep the Project alive, was founded in 1985.

The word GNU is a recursive acronym, meaning 'GNU’s Not UNIX,' a play on words that is common among hackers (a term of honor that has been misappropriated by the press).

UNIX Systems are proprietary products of software vendors and are generally quite expensive (there is a charge per user). They are considered to be Intellectual Property – they cannot be modified or redistributed without permission (and substantial payment).

GNU software, now called Free Software, is freely available, freely modifiable and freely redistributable. Variants of the GNU operating system, which use the now famous Linux 'kernel' (the basic software that starts the computer), are often simply called Linux but this a misnomer. Systems based on GNU Software and the Linux kernel are more accurately called GNU/Linux systems.

The Linux kernel was written by Finnish graduate student Linus Torvalds and published on the Internet in 1991. This pivotal component of an operating system arrived at just the right moment for the GNU Project which had lacked this essential ingredient. The combination of the two projects caused a sensation in the computer world.

In the next decade GNU/Linux moved from being a hobbyist’s tool to an enterprise quality operating system – it is still the fastest growing system on the Internet to this day.

Free/Open Source Software

Open Source is a popular synonym for Free Software which was coined in 1998. This was primarily a marketing decision as programmers trying to enter the corporate sector had difficulty convincing CEOs that Free Software wasn’t inferior to commercial, proprietary software.

According to the Open Source Initiative: The basic idea behind Open Source is that when programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, adapt it and fix bugs, thus creating a better product than the traditional closed (proprietary) model.

The FSF opposes use of the term Open Source and does not wish to be 'lumped in' with the Open Source Movement: The fundamental difference between the two movements is in their values, their ways of looking at the world. For the Open Source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, 'Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.' For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.

Not surprisingly, FSF leader Richard M. Stallman is an outspoken opponent of George W. Bush and a peace activist. His personal views are online at www.stallman.org and he has written a book: Free Software, Free Society.

Stallman is well known for publicly stating his opposition to the 'Open Source' monicker, however, the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement do work together against a common foe: ...the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement... disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects. We don’t think of the Open Source movement as an enemy. The enemy is proprietary software.…The main argument for the term 'open source software' is that 'free software' makes some people uneasy. That’s true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might rather ignore. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may reject the idea for that. It does not follow that society would be better off if we stop talking about these things.

Free Software operating systems (GNU/Linux), productivity applications, databases and other types of software, are all now freely available. Most of these products are released under the GNU General Public License (or 'CopyLeft') which contains provisions that block any attempt to make derivative works proprietary. Products are licensed under the GNU GPL to make certain they, and any derivative works, remain free.

From Toy to Cancer

The popularity of GNU/Linux amongst younger programmers produced something many would have regarded as an oxymoron a decade earlier: the programmer activist.

GNU/Linux activists in the late 1990s began appearing at software stores to protest new releases of Microsoft Windows - and to hand out free GNU/Linux CDs to shoppers. In 1999, GNU/Linux activists protested a University of Michigan decision to sell Microsoft products at the Student Union.

In 2003 independent film producer J.T.S. Moore released Revolution OS: Hackers, Programmers and Rebels Unite!, which chronicles the rise of GNU/Linux from a 'toy' that Microsoft refused to comment on to a phenomenon that CEO Steve Ballmer called 'a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.'

Today, despite minor disagreements over terminology, licenses and a rivalry between Linus Torvalds and Richard M. Stallman (known simply as RMS), Free Software developers and users agree that there many compelling reasons to choose Free Software.

For free speech advocates the pernicious business practices of Microsoft (periodically investigated by the Department of Justice and a convicted monopolist) and the anti-democratic Intellectual Property constructs are foremost.

For developers of software the issue of having access to the uncompiled computer source code (instructions in non-binary human readable form, i.e. the trade secrets) and the ability to modify this code are paramount.

For discriminating users, weary of the fragile Windows, a stable, reliable operating system is critical.

For most, these issues meld together into a common belief that Microsoft is not only ethically challenged but unable to produce viable software.

The Development Model

According to Eric S. Raymond, author of the influential essay, 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar,' the reason Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is simultaneously faster to produce and more reliable than proprietary software is the model of development used by FOSS developers.

The sheer volume of the talent pool that produces GNU/Linux and its productivity applications could never be equaled by Microsoft. The wide open 24 hour a day international 'Team GNU/Linux' works in a bazaar where progress is the only constant. The closed, proprietary shop of Microsoft is likened to a cathedral staffed by monks, an environment that stifles creativity and offers only incremental progress.

The Corporate Sector

Today, many young programmers, weaned on GNU/Linux, are moving into IT jobs. They influence or may even be the decision makers. This is changing the industry and many proprietary vendors, like the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), are feeling the pinch.

In fact, SCO is now engaged in what many view as a frivolous lawsuit against IBM. IBM has embraced GNU/Linux and the Open Source development model (but NOT Free software) and has published its own AIX (IBM’s UNIX) source code in order to donate it to the movement.

SCO claims its has partial ownership of this code and has filed suit. It appears even a lawsuit has helped the GNU/Linux movement – shortly after the lawsuit was announced, the Novell corporation bought SuSE, a German brand of Linux. RedHat, the US Linux vendor allied with IBM, has countersued SCO.

With IBM saturating valuable commercial air time during Fall football games and the IT giants suing one another it seems clear Linux is at home in the corporate arena. But it has also moved into the non-profit sector in a big way.

Free Geek

One of the problems that emerged from the technological revolution is the waste issue.

What to do with old computers? The pace of technological change has resulted in a vicious cycle. Intel produces faster hardware and Microsoft produces feature rich (slower) 'improved' versions of Windows, which in turn demands faster hardware from Intel.

Critics call this the Win-Tel monopoly as users are always chasing new features, usually in the form of a software upgrade which, after user frustration with poor performance, results in a hardware upgrade... followed by a new software upgrade. The old machines are often to be found in landfills.

A Portland, Oregon non-profit founded by Oso Martin has devised a way to address this problem. Owners of old hardware donate it to 'Free Geek' (www.freegeek.org) in return for a tax writeoff. The computer’s hardware is tested and repaired if necessary.

The Microsoft software is removed and Linux installed. Much of this work is done by volunteers who are trained by Free Geek staff. They, in turn, receive free computers as compensation. Leftover machines are provided to underprivileged children and non-profits. Some equipment is also sold to computer hobbyists in the Free Geek Thrift Store.

At the same time the Free Geek recycling project was gathering steam in Portland, a group of programmers, known as the Regina Project (originally based in Regina, Saskatchewan), were writing software for healthcare providers.

Eventually several software packages appeared from this group, one of which, SQL Clinic, came to the attention of Free Geek. It arrived in time to help local Oregon social service agencies confronted with a crisis.

Measure 30 was a tax increase intended, in part, to provide relief to non-profits in Oregon. It was defeated in a public referendum forced by hard right Republican Dick Armey and his DC-based group 'Citizens for a Sound Economy' which simply spent tons of money to propagandize against taxes. This exacerbated economic crisis resulted in a need to drastically reduce costs for agencies operating in Portland and the rest of Oregon.

A regional foundation, the Meyer Memorial Trust, approved a grant to a local healthcare provider looking to move from proprietary software to F/OSS. SQL Clinic (www.sqlclinic.net) was selected for this project. The 2.3 version of the application, however, did not meet every need. Thus, Free Geek programmers rewrote major portions of it.

Today, SQL Clinic 3.0 is an electronic medical record (EMR) for providers of outpatient psychiatric services. This program is available for free to any other organization needing this capability.

The SQL portion of the name refers to the 'Structured Query Language', which is the interface language for relational databases. Technical details and support contracts are available from or .

Support is geared towards fostering independence as each 'customer' in turn may become a vendor, if they are so inclined. In this manner, SQL Clinic’s development model is complimented by a progressive business model: revenue that funds development is generated not by charging for software but by charging for technical support – support designed to promote freedom.

Free Geek’s new programming arm, Collaborative Technologies, wrote the current version of the software, in consultation with the original author, adding the features needed by the Portland provider.

This experience brought together two teams of programmers from the East and West Coasts of North America. During this collaboration discussions moved from software to social justice issues.

From these discussion a new group was created: the Progressive Programmers League. Linux activists in both groups who are committed communists, socialists, wobblies and greens came together. These progressives united to form a collective that does free or low cost software development for non-profits and has stated goal of: expanding geek awareness from single issue to a multi-faceted (e.g., class) consciousness that fosters activism. The PPL writes CopyLefted software for non-profits which then goes into the pool of publicly available software, most of which is housed at the Open Source Developers Network.

--PPL also has an online magazine called the Electronic Worker now under development. Submissions are welcome. To learn more about the Free Software Movement, to get involved with the Progressive Programmers League, or to get help building a website or database application for the web, contact or ronb@freegeek.org.

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The Verala Project and the CIA

Mon, 21 Jun 2004 14:52:00 +0000

There is an amazing attack on John Kerry in Saturday’s (6/19) New York Times, authored by one of the Times’ newly appointed columnists recruited from the ultra-right fringe. David Brooks, whose articles would be right at home in the Washington Times, has attacked Senator Kerry for saying the CIA funded and directed Varela Project to destabilize the Cuban government was 'counterproductive.' Unlike his opposite number at USA Today (DeWayne Wickham) who two years ago recognized that the 'Varela Project is a nonstarter' with Cubans, Brooks is trying to peddle the line that this CIA scheme is actually a homegrown popular Cuban initiative for 'democracy.'

Brook’s appointment at the Times further solidifies the newly gained reputation of the 'paper of record' as an unreliable source of news and information (Jason Blair, WMD’s, etc.). The article in question, 'Kerry’s Cruel Realism' reads like a press release from a PR firm for the anti-Cuba lobby or the Miami Mafia.

Here what Brook’s says about the Varela Project. It is 'one of the most inspiring democracy movements in the world today.' It is led by Oswaldo Paya who, according to Brooks, models himself after Martin Luther King, Jr. To my knowledge Dr. King was not funded by the US government.

Brooks alleges that due to a 'loophole' in the Cuban Constitution, Paya’s Varela Project (named after a 19th century Cuban priest who was in the independence movement) collected over 10,000 signatures (he needed notarized signatures which he didn’t get) to force a referendum that would lead to real 'democracy' in Cuba. Anyway, it is myth that the Cuban Constitution permits the kind of Referendum Paya is calling for as Wickham’s piece in USA Today reveals.

As a result of a 'crackdown' by Cuban authorities, Brooks says, the referendum did not take place and 75 'dissidents' (but not Paya) were sentenced to jail. Kerry, Brooks writes, has shown 'his true nature' by calling the Varela Project 'counterproductive' thus betraying the hopes of the Cuban people – boo-hoo.

Kerry, it seems, wants to play down 'promoting democracy' abroad in favor of 'focusing narrowly' on national security. The US promoting democracy! What planet is Brooks from? Every basic democratic movement I can think has been opposed and/or violently destroyed by the US. Who overthrew the democracy in Iran to reinstall the Shah in the 1950s, or the Arbenz government in Guatemala, who invaded Vietnam to prevent the holding of elections to reunify the country because Ho Chih Minh might win, who colluded to overthrow Allende, and created the contra terrorists in Nicaragua? The list of the US attempts to 'promote democracy' abroad goes on and on.

As for the Varela Project, both its name and its program were created by the CIA and Oswaldo Paya was hand picked by the Agency to be the leader of this Washington sponsored farce. With all of the resources of the Times, Brooks cannot be ignorant about this.

The 75 so-called 'dissidents' were all people who were funded right out of the American Interest Section located in Havana by the American section chief James Cason. Some $20 million, according to press reports, was funneled to the 'democracy movement' through organizations associated with the misnamed National Endowment for Democracy a surrogate CIA front which, even though its money mostly comes from the US government, masquerades as an NGO.

How would Attorney General Ashcroft react if he found 75 American citizens carrying on with demonstrations and demanding 'real' democracy in the US, who were secretly on the payroll of a foreign government openly dedicated to the destruction of the US government? Would he go for indefinite detention without access to a lawyer or a trail maybe?

Brooks also faults Kerry for turning his back on future 'humanitarian interventions' such as the one 'to promote democracy in Iraq' (over 16,000 innocent civilians murdered by the US, the torture and killing of defenseless prisoners most of whom were innocent of any crimes, 'humanitarian' suspension of the Geneva Accords, etc.).

And to top off his ridiculous article, Brooks says that unlike Kerry, Carter, Reagan and Bush (41) 'understood that democracy advances security, kowtowing to dictators does not.' Brooks is so ideological he can’t include Clinton in his list. Carter, Reagan, Bush promoted democracy! They funded the worse murdering thugs since the Nazis! The Taliban and their like in Afghanistan, the contras in Latin America (over 200,000 poor peasants and indigenous people killed courtesy of your tax dollar at work – or by illegal funds that democracy promoter and all around humanitarian Ronald Reagan got from the Ayatollahs through illegal arm sales.

That the New York Times prints such nonsense as is churned out by Davis Brooks is reason enough to look to the independent alternative press, such as Political Affairs or the People’s Weekly World for basic information as to what’s happening.

--Thomas Riggins is book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.

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Book Review Essay - Spain Betrayed, by Ronald Radosh

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 06:35:00 +0000

I first met author Ronald Radosh nearly 30 years ago at a convention of historians when he was supposedly on the left. It was a meeting I would come to regret. My doctoral dissertation was soon to be published as a book, and Radosh began denouncing it. I wondered how he had seen it. I soon discovered from a mutual friend that he had gotten an advance copy from the New York Times for the express purpose of blasting it. My friend showed me a letter where he called me something like a liberal wolf in socialist sheep’s clothing and accused me of being aligned with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and George Kennan in a plot to discredit William Appleman Williams. I contacted the New York Times and the review was never published, to the chagrin of my publishers, who thought a hatchet job review in the Times was better than no review.

Subsequently, when my book was published and I was coming up for tenure, gossip was circulated that Radosh had accused me of plagiarizing from an unpublished Master’s Thesis of his, which I had cited. When I indignantly contacted him about this, he denied that he had made any such charge, but continued to denounce my work. I eventually got tenure, after two failed attempts (I never really thought the gossip had much to do with my difficulties).

Meanwhile, I entered a period of detente with Ronald Radosh. I next met him in June, 1978, at a rally in Union Square commemorating the 25th anniversary of the death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. When I told him I was going to visit the Soviet Union in the summer for the first time, he went over the top and told me that it was my duty as someone on the left, to demonstrate against Soviet repression in Red Square, no less.

Ronald Radosh was never a good historian in my opinion, when he was either on the left or on the right. His work was heavy-handed and descriptive in its use of materials. The ideas were drawn from others, William Appleman Williams, primarily, when he was on the left, and those professional anti-Communist writers, both old and new, whose specialty is political conspiracy and spy stories, now that he has made his way to the red-baiting right.

As an historian, he is very much in the tradition of what Gore Vidal called the scholar squirrel; someone who hoards documents the way a squirrel hoards nuts, lining them up mindlessly and assuming that the documents themselves have all the answers.

Radosh also has the very ugly habit of seeing himself as the victim of unfair attacks and conspiracies, from establishment liberals when he was on the left and from anybody and everybody to the left of him today.

Coming from a CPUSA family, he wrote with Joyce Milton, a journalist, The Rosenberg File, which sought to use FBI documents to defend the guilt of Julius Rosenberg and the existence of far-reaching Soviet espionage activities, which constituted the reason for existence of the Communist Party USA. When many writers, myself included, took issue with his arguments and evidence, which fitted nicely with the cold war revival launched by the Reagan administration, his rather Nixonesque response was that the 'left' was out to get him.

Since then, Ronald Radosh has acted as a sort of comic right-wing vigilante, advancing himself with conservative establishments and searching for old and new Reds to offer up as sacrifices to the Church of St. J. Edgar, the blessed Red-baiter.

In 1996, a book of his denouncing left influence in the Clinton administration (strange since Clinton is widely and rightly considered to have been the most conservative Democratic president of the 20th century) was disseminated by Republicans and even mentioned by Republican candidate Bob Dole, who, as I remember, referred to the author as 'Ronald Kardash' (perhaps the high point of Radosh’s long quest to gain attention from well-known people, first on the left, then on the right).

Recently, Radosh denounced a former student of mine, Alan Singer, a dedicated educator and activitist now a professor at Hofstra, for actively criticizing the Bush administration’s policies in the wake of the September 11 attacks under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation.

When I was at City College, I remember reading about a man named Pfefferkorn, a Jew who converted to Christianity and then spent the rest of his life seeking to destroy all Jewish texts during the Renaissance. Erasmus, the great Renaissance scholar, fought him fiercely and said of him, 'he was a bad Jew and a worse Christian.' Whenever I now think of Ronald Radosh, I think of Pfefferkorn and believe that he and the far right deserve each other.

All of this is a prelude to Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, a selection of documents from Soviet archives, some which are interesting in themselves, which Radosh and his associates have put together the way the House Un-American Activities Committee used to publish Soviet and Communist Party documents, using the sort of analytically biased descriptive commentaries that one usually finds from police agents.

Radosh has worked with Mary Habeck, Coordinator of the Russian Military Project at Yale and Gregory Sevostianov, referred to as editor-in-chief of Modern and Contemporary History magazine and a member of Russia’s Academy of Sciences. Since I do not believe that Radosh reads Russian, they and others have apparently translated the documents, to which he brings all of the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet conventional wisdom that he can muster.

The documents as I read them show that the Soviets were supporting the Spanish Republic and the Spanish Communist Party and opposing POUMists, anarchists and others. Nothing here is new. Nor should anyone be surprised that the Soviets were seeking to use their involvement in Spain to advance their overall collectively security policy.

Given where Radosh stands politically today, his revival of the contention that the Spanish Communists and their Soviet allies suppressed a great anarchist peasant revolution in the countryside is rather hilarious. Might not Radosh’s new found friends at the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute come to the conclusion that the man who titled his unintentionally funny memoir, Commies, (as if there were people interested in his poor man’s God that Failed interpretation of himself) is a crypto-Red, or at the very least, an agrarian reformer, maybe even a secret Trotskyist who will advance the permanent revolution when and if the Bush administration makes him director of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

To be serious for a moment, which this work really doesn’t deserve, the Spanish Republic without Soviet aid and the support of the predominantly Communist International Brigades would have perished in 1936. On the other hand, if socialist Prime Minister Leon Blum had the courage to stand with his Communist allies against the capitalist class of his own country to send the French army across the Pyrenees to aid the Republic when Franco launched his coup, Spanish fascism would have been crushed in 1936.

Soviet policy was to develop collective security alliances with the non-fascist states, England and France, and aid the Spanish Republic, hopefully making it into an example of successful collective security. For Stanley Baldwin and his successor Neville Chamberlain, Spanish fascism, even German fascism, were very preferable to the victory of the Spanish left, and certainly to the increased influence of the Soviet Union. Insofar as Spain was 'betrayed,' its own landlord and capitalist classes, the Roman Catholic Church, the British Empire which put forward the 'non-intervention' policy which aided Franco, who had all the military assistance he needed from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and all of the powers, including France and the US, who went along with the British policy, both in Spain and at Munich, betrayed Spain and their own people by doing business with Hitler

The complicated and sometimes brutal and sleazy internal power struggle that Soviet officers commented on in these documents is the stuff of politics in most places and most times. Were Radosh and his collaborators not committed to transforming these documents into an anti-Soviet catechism complete with a myriad of deadly sins, they might have made use of them to add something to our understanding of the political history of the Spanish Civil War.

Rather like the Nazis, who planned after they had won the war to create a meticulous museum of European Jewry in Prague as a record of a 'dead race,' to show to the world the 'facts' of its evil and why it was destroyed, Yale University Press, true to its university’s founding in colonial times as a right-wing religious alternative to Harvard has dedicated itself to publishing a long documentary series on the global Communist movement, of which Spain Betrayed is probably a typical example, from a perspective that portrays it as a 'dead' and 'evil' movement.

The Nazis lost the war of course and never got to build their museum of horrors. Yale will produce its documentary history, which, if this work is an example, will provide catechistic commentaries for amateur and professional anti-Communists, along with sources that serious scholars will eventually use to write serious scholarship, after disassociating themselves from the authors of the Yale histories. Like many ordinary people through the world living under regimes which bombard them with crude anti-Communist propaganda, many who read the Yale histories will probably learn to read between the lines and find that Communists the works seek to demonize both interesting and worthwhile

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.

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Outsource Bush, not Jobs

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 06:07:00 +0000

'[F]oreign outsourcing of service jobs is good for the American economy' is the mantra of Bush administration officials Treasury Secretary John Snow and Council of Economic Advisers member Gregory Mankiw, according to a recent report by Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF).

The Bush administration also has worked to aid the outsourcing of manufacturing work. According to the AFL-CIO, 2.7 million such jobs have been lost since Bush took office, despite the administration's attempt to count fast-food jobs as manufacturing.

Estimates show, according to FPIF, that as many as 3 million jobs will be outsourced overseas by 2015 and about 40 percent of the top 1000 richest corporations have already done some outsourcing. 14 million jobs 'are vulnerable' to it.

Outsourcing stems from the drive to increase profit margins by lowering labor costs. Mainly, this is accomplished by moving unionized work to non-union shops in parts of the world (or other parts of the US) where labor receives fewer protections. Outsourcing overseas has been greased by international financial institutions and free trade agreements, privatization efforts and weaker social safety nets and protections for working people.

In the US, pro-outsourcing corporate groups such as the Coalition for Economic Growth and American Jobs, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Information Technology Association of America have adopted and pushed the view of the dominant pro-outsourcing voices in the Bush administration. Their claim is that production in regions and countries where the price of labor is low will lower the costs of commodities here.

This argument seems logical, until one looks at the escalating costs here of goods manufactured overseas, e.g. clothing and apparel. Also, when the cost per item produced is compared to the price you pay at the shelf, it is clear that huge profits are still made on huge mark-ups.

While Senator John Kerry has called for tax penalties for outsourcing companies, the Bush administration has simply tried to sidestep discussing the problem. Bush has cited 'over-regulation,' trade barriers and high corporate taxes as the causes of outsourcing. The FPIF report notes, however, that rapid overseas expansion of US multinational firms accompanied by a much slower growth in the US 'has coincided with increased trade and investment liberalization and a declining corporate tax burden.'

In other words, trade liberalization, de-regulation and privatization promote an atmosphere of capital movement, while a lower tax burden has freed up more capital for movement. In fact, when compared to other industrialized countries, existing US regulations and taxes provide a much more open environment in which outsourcing work overseas and the elimination of jobs can take place.

The most successful way to reduce the drive to outsource work is by pushing for stronger legal protections for workers in all countries and supporting the basic right to organize a union in a workplace. Simultaneously, international financial agreements demanded by the IMF, the World Bank and other international financial institutions that keep developing countries in debt should be eliminated. Massive debt relief for developing countries needs to be on the agenda.

Loans and investment should be freed up for internal development of local economic infrastructure in developing countries not for currency and bond schemes designed to produce massive economic and productive shifts toward dependency on international capital, exporting raw materials and importing manufactured goods in unbalanced and unfair ways.

Labor rights and development reform are two key concepts that will reduce and perhaps even end the 'race to the bottom' for the world’s workers.

--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs. Reach him with your comments at or post your thoughts publicly below.

Book Review - The Twilight of Equality? by Lisa Duggan

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 05:58:00 +0000

The US, as a model competition state in Philip Cerny's memorable phrase, does constitute an appropriate case for a thorough study of the neoliberal agenda enshrined after the deliberate disintegration of welfarism beginning in the 1970s. Since the US is a bastion of capitalism and a perfect example of a economic, social and cultural contradictions, it is not sheer coincidence that this formidable book is being published at this time.

Historian Lisa Duggan began redefining conventions in her acclaimed book Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. She continues the tradition in this short, descriptive, and energetic, if occasionally overheated, effort which solidifies her status as an expositor of American radical politics. Duggan draws from the tense well of history – in all its potency – to reconstruct the genesis of economic, social, political, and cultural inequalities in America. She shows how the US, by adopting the utopian paradigm of material prosperity for all (or rather the mighty), began to shove aside its welfarist disposition to cater to the voluptuous, largely selfish appetites of corporate interests. But this move was not an attempt to reallocate scarce resources as claimed; rather, it was a blatant struggle to uphold the interests of a select few and to institute a power play dominated by neoliberal actors.

Duggan is analytically on-target when she brings to light the fissures that form when the 'public' is systematically differentiated from the 'private' in state, economic, familial, and civil societal spheres. The 'public' arena as viewed by neoliberal politics is emphatically the state and its apparatuses, whilst the 'private' dimension is the family. Not surprisingly, this distinction would go on to create a false separation of the cultural from the economic. By viewing the economic as synonymous with the 'private,' the former is heralded and given unprecedented dominance while the latter is obscured, deemphasized or outrightly belittled.

Three developments would arise from these events. First, the dualistic construction of publicness/privateness catalyzes the neoliberal order’s superficial vision of 'reform' without the democratization of inclusion – an arrangement which obfuscates an understanding of changing conceptualizations of identity.

Second, consideration is given neither to the disenfranchised, disparaged and delineated 'other' nor to the realities of forcefully ebbing equality, racism, genderism, and sexuality-based oppression, simplified and softened by rhetorics of economic or political reordering.

Third, and most importantly, a distinction would materialize between the once unbroken continuum of economic and identity politics, and thus spawn epileptic crises in the realm of affirmative and corrective activism. Duggan shows how the separation between the economic, political, and cultural has created a militating gap and rigid dichotomies in progressive-left politics. These opposing camps are manifested in such forms: 'economic vs. cultural, universal vs. identity-based, distribution vs. recognition-oriented, local or national vs. global branches.'

In a characteristic manner, Duggan’s far-reaching, radical point of view takes on sharply pedagogical and reductive analyses of left politics. Her narration could be irritatingly opinionated in some respects but overall brilliantly bold and coherent. She rebuts the puritanical and the implicit, and makes a potent case for various hues of the unrepresented or underrepresented in American politics.

Nothing in The Twilight of Equality? is out of reach for those already familiar with the central ideas – whether it’s the injustices of exclusion, the history of the dismantling of social braces under neoliberal auspices or the complexities of sexual an politics. However, for the often grandiloquent language of her discourse and the highly-charged academic terminologies she employs immodestly, Duggan might appear somewhat abstruse or elevated to the very people she ought to reach the most – those un-Ivory Towerized activists who create tangible quantum effects, change-wise, across the landscape.

Many would probably agree with Lisa Duggan’s cleverly outlined thesis, many more would likely disagree. Regardless, hers is not only a historical-political critique of the contradictions laden in US neoliberal politics, but a socio-cultural evaluation of changes that have taken place in society since the demise of Keynesian-type economics. Duggan is hopeful about the ordering of America’s steps toward 'newly imagined possibilities for equality in the twenty-first century.' No doubt, hers is a sensible kind of hope.

Lisa Duggan The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy Boston, Beacon Press, 2003.

--Akinbola E. Akinwumi is a writer and researcher based in Lagos, Nigeria.

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