People Before Profit blog

The Road to Everywhere

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 12:05:00 +0000

As the U.S. Senate considers a stand-alone national Renewable Energy Standard this fall, a new study from the Apollo Alliance finds that comprehensive energy and climate policies, and a focus on infrastructure spending on clean transportation could create 3.7 million jobs in the US, including 600,000 in manufacturing over the next six years if their recommended Transportation Manufacturing Action Plan (TMAP) is passed.

The Apollo Alliance is a coalition labor, business, environmental, and community leaders – advancing a vision for the next American economy centered on clean energy and good jobs. In a separate report published earlier this month, the organization noted that congressional inaction on the President's already proposed infrastructure plan, and associated bill, has already cost 88,000 jobs this year in Missouri alone!

USWA president Leo Gerard joined the Alliance at a news conference this past week, and said: “This is an opportunity to rebuild the important transportation infrastructure of this country and to put it in a first class system, The additional benefit we can call the triple bottom line. We get to create good family supporting jobs, we get to spend dollars in a way that is going to grow the economy but just as importantly, we take carbon out of the air.”

Missouri is just one of many states that would greatly benefit from the President's recently re-articulated call for a complete "infrastructure overhaul", also announced on Monday, which includes a a $50 billion investment in roads, bridges, railways and electric grids he says are "woefully" inadequate. His comments came after a meeting with Cabinet officials, governors and mayors where officials discussed a new government report on infrastructure that argues a significant improvement effort could help create jobs and boost economic output. Obama proposed a six-year plan that would rebuild and modernize hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, bridges and rail lines as well as overhauling the way the government funds infrastructure projects.

The report also has some new thinking about public/private partnerships to expand the total amount of directed infrastructure investment. The possible, perhaps probable, paralysis in Congress on additional stimulus will compel mobilizing more private capital to meet the scale required. Which "green" technologies, which mix of short and long range interests, will be promoted may be strongly influenced by private partners. When analyzing the "extreme positions" of various parties in debates about "clean" or "green" technology subsidies, or human impact on climate change, or for that matter anything threatening the monopolistic structure of the current energy industry, I keep in mind the inevitable consequence of a government industrial policy that picks winners vs losers is a guarantee of political opposition from potential losers who will be put out of business. Privatizing some of the capital inputs into public or quasi-public utilities and infrastructure may help speed the desired overall technological re-allocation of capital – overwhelm the resistance of the old with opportunities for the new. With more room to expand, fewer overall losers letting off steam.

But a price will be paid. In a sense the government will be placing a very strong bet on the markets – so strong that it will leverage the restructuring needed in financial markets toward more long range stability and a 21st century infrastructure. But the vulnerability of the government initiative to capture by the monopolies it is trying to restructure requires some public transparency to minimize. Otherwise it can just be the beginning of a new "bubble," or worse a continuing stalemate AND a financial collapse from some unknown "externality."

The report notes the following in its call for a National Infrastructure Bank, a big step toward a real national industrial policy that can mobilize both public and private resources:

"Not all infrastructure projects are worth the investment. Investing rationally in infrastructure is critically important, as is providing opportunities for the private sector to invest in public infrastructure. There is currently very little direct private investment in our nation’s highway and transit systems due to the current method of funding infrastructure, which lacks effective mechanisms to attract and repay direct private investment in specific infrastructure projects. The establishment of a National Infrastructure Bank would create the conditions for greater private sector co-investment in infrastructure projects. A National Infrastructure Bank would also perform a rigorous analysis that would result in support for projects that yield the greatest returns to society and are most likely to deliver long-run economic benefits that justify the up-front investments."

For all the current complaints heard from some quarters about Chinese "unfair subsidies," there is complementary argument that stronger and smarter subsidies of the Chinese variety are necessary here to secure our own sustainable future through what is clearly a deep, and structural crisis in class and industrial relationships within US society.

Public sponsored or partnered capital projects (like rails, airports, roads, etc) can return in value many times their cost. The report documents the major positive impact of 'smart' investment in transportation, health care, and 'green' industries on the cost of living for working families. Transportation/commuting costs in particular are the number two expense for most families, just below housing, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Thus bonds (debt) sold to fund capital transportation investments are a pretty good bet to pay off in substantially reduced transportation cost per family, and thus should raise wealth and reduce long term debt to asset ratios.

The establishment of a National Infrastructure Bank would certainly require Congressional Action. The truth is: the republicans will oppose it on principle as "more socialism." They would be right. It is "more socialism." But to the capitalists who may be reading this: consider that this is exactly the dose of socialism, that can save, and even stabilize, the future of capitalism for the next generation. at least. The alternative is continued instability, aggravated inequality rivaling India or Pakistan, and continued relative decline in US economic performance and standard of living.

Unfortunately, until something is done in the short range about 10% plus unemployment, there is not likely to be a lot of long range thinking predominant in Washington DC, or anywhere else. There are three approaches to this possible, in this writer's opinion.

    1. Cut through the red tape and make as many of the infrastructure projects "shovel ready" as possible. Focus on funding these. But it won't be enough to dent short range unemployment sufficiently. For youth, and seniors at least – including those laid off within a few years of social security, millions of whose pensions and retirement savings have been lost – the government must become the employer of last resort through national state and local service programs. Those programs also should also undertake contributions toward infrastructure, at least where the goods are true "public goods", not in competition with private markets. These WPA style programs do not create deficits; nor are they inflationary. At the same time they substantially improve the bargaining power of workers in many labor markets, especially in times of high unemployment.

    2. Adopt the Republican approach: "the hungry dog hunts harder." End unemployment extensions. Cut the minimum wage. Privatize social security. The "market" will find the appropriate "full employment" minimum wage – with the appropriate armed protection of course. You want to retire -- save on your own, why should we help you? This is the class warfare proposal.

    3. Attempt to maintain the status quo: pass the unemployment extension, continue to challenge the Republicans on stimulus until some "externality" changes the balance. Play defense on the Republican attacks. 10% or worse unemployment remains. Unfortunately this could be the road to nowhere.

    The first choice seems the best. But adopting the employer of last resort approach to unemployment simply gives us the stability to focus on infrastructure, on a sustainable future. As Naomi Nye says – "its late – but everything comes next." From where we are now, infrastructure is the road to anywhere, and everywhere.

Winning Land, Mitigating Sprawl and Climate Change

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 12:00:00 +0000

If anyone has any doubt of the importance of what Barack Obama's 2008 Presidential victory contained for the local level, just direct him or her to Naugatuck. Conn. For 13 years, a land struggle there for passive open space, that is land with no impervious surfaces, ebbed and flowed with national, state and local politics. The 2008 election of our first African American president set the stage for a decisive people's victory.

In the mid-1990s, an educator, a pipe fitter and a high school student met under a tree on 39.3 acres of town-owned land in the Gunntown neighborhood. They discussed how to save one of the last bits of undeveloped land in this sprawled, Connecticut town. This uncontrolled growth due to speculation and profit happened big time in this former manufacturing town (rubber) of 30,000 people. The Gunntown land contained a variety of important wetlands and attendant wildlife. Democratic, Independent and Republican administrations all wanted to plow and pave this environmentally important land, mostly for a sports complex.

The Soviets had the slogan Peace, Bread, Land on their banners when they stormed the heavens during the October revolution. Of course that was land for food crops. We decided to test the waters for defending this land as a nature preserve and for passive recreation. Little did we know then that passive open space would be one of the important keys to mitigating climate change, generating green jobs and free outdoor recreation.

A quick side trip:

1. Climate Change - Alterations in the prevailing temperature, H2O cycle, humidity and happening at an accelerating rate. We are coming out of the last ice age but the industrial revolution, producing mega-amounts of CO2 that prevents radiant energy from dissipating in space, is accelerating climate changes. Before the industrial revolution, there was 280 parts CO2/Million of atmosphere by volume. Where did that CO2 come from? - living organisms. As of 2007 and the industrial revolution of the last two hundred years, it's 384 parts CO2/Million of atmosphere by volume. Utilities, coal, oil are the main culprits. CO2, H2O vapor, and Methane (CH4) trap heat in the atmosphere. In fact CH4 has 21X the heat trapping power of CO2. Another example, 1 cow = 600 L CH4/day. There are 1.3 billion cows in the world. So our numbers and demands of our species make a substantial impact in numerous ways. In Hanoi, 1997, I interviewed Dr. Phan Nguyen Hong, world expert on mangrove forests and an environmental activist. He stated that the sea level, rising there at 0.19 cm per year, was generating storm surges that negatively impacted villages along the lengthy shoreline of Vietnam.

2. Green Jobs - Are blue and white-collar employment that has been upgraded to better respect the environment. Examples: Union construction workers, electricians, plumbers, engineers who build energy-efficient green buildings, wind power farms, solar farms, wave energy farms. Workers engaged in sustainable agriculture e.g. Half of Havana's vegetables are grown in urban gardens, and passive open space.

Let's go to the opposite. The dirty fuel industry has taken an enormous toll on our class and the environment in 2010. The killing of workers in the natural gas explosion in Middletown, CT, coal miners in West Virginia, Siberia and the oil workers in the Gulf Coast explosion are examples. With the latter, jobs lost, particularly among fisher people, will be considerable. There are over 3,000 oil platform rigs in the Gulf of Mexico alone.

By the spring of 2009 the Obama victory inspired a forward-looking candidate for Mayor, Bob Mezzo (D), to embrace the issue of passive open space for the 39.3 acres of town-owned land in the Gunntown neighborhood of Naugatuck. For the first time in our 14 years of the grassroots environmental group, we had a candidate who recognized the ecological importance of this land that is 40% wetlands. He saw the need to expand recreation in town beyond active organized team sports to include passive open space with low-impact recreational activities. He forth-rightly debated, blogged and embraced these points on his campaign literature.

Of course support for passive open space in the Gunntown neighborhood didn't arrive in this candidate's head on a passing cloud. In the early part of the millennia, Bob Mezzo originally supported sports fields for Gunntown along with other Democratic and Republican politicians. It took continuous political work, especially at town meetings, with constant pressure, constantly applied by greens and bringing a crowd of family and friends along - always bring a crowd. Into the new millennia these meetings were televised. We were always surprised at the number of T.V. viewers who acknowledged are presentations at town meetings.

Some background. In 1995, I gave a presentation to the local high school ecology club. In that club were some girl scouts who became very interested. They saw a possibility to win scout awards via this effort to save the land and develop trails there for people to enjoy the natural area. They brought many family members and friends. They brought imagination and energy. So what developed among greens was a composition of youth/older folks in leadership and membership. Unity included a multiracial/multinational dimension which we, the Party, nurtured. It was Portuguese, Panamanian, African American, Mexican, and white male/female. A PWW route was initiated.

Unity within the environmental movement was essential. The Naugatuck River Keepers, Naugatuck River Revival, the Sierra Club, Girl Scouts, Naugatuck Garden Club, the Pollution Extermination Group (PEG) and the Naugatuck Land Trust were crucial to success. Unity included other organizations like, at times, the local Taxpayers group. Just like the Tea Party, we should not paint these groups, especially rank and file members, as all hopelessly reactionary. Individual leaders and members can be reached. We were able to present data that passive open space was a buffer against tax increases and won some taxpayer leader's support.

The Western Connecticut Labor Council deserves special note. The Labor Council participated on a number of levels. The President of the Labor Council met with a number of environmental leaders in the early 1990s and came to a number of grassroots environmental meetings and helped out. The Labor Council Vice-President came to a town meeting and spoke as a Labor representative about the importance of recreational areas for working people. State Parks at this time were moving toward usage fees. We agitated around this as a double tax. (This also appealed to the taxpayer group.) When a children's play on the land was proposed, another Labor Council member also participated on the play's subcommittee. The community outreach director of the environmental group was a Labor Council member. All this and ultimately with the developing progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which emerged with the Obama victory, were decisive. Differences were put aside and greens focused like a laser beam on preserving the Gunntown neighborhood land.

The grassroots environmental group was led by three chairpeople, all young people and most recent by a progressive who was respectful of our work. Greens participated in registering voters for the Presidential campaign and directly on the Mayoral campaign committee. Environmentalists took electoral responsibility for a west side neighborhood of the town going door-to-door with electoral literature. We raised the importance of the preserving Gunntown land and recruited people in this turf to help distribute electoral literature. The Gunntown passive open space issue was the first question to be considered by mayoral candidates in the press. Letters to the editor clearly favored passive open space, which is land with no impervious surfaces, no hard surfaces. Greens seeded some letters to the press. This encouraged other citizens to write supportive letters. This latter development was another indication that we represented a majority sentiment for passive recreation at Gunntown. We learned quickly that sentiment and spontaneity alone wins nothing. It was an organized movement representing that sentiment, including the electoral arena, that won a victory.

The forward-looking mayoral candidate skillfully put forward a holistic plan of development that included green jobs construction on brown fields in the downtown area (Renaissance Place), synthetic turf for athletic fields and a passive park in the Gunntown neighborhood. While not endorsed by the Democratic Party, he won the primary. He won the Mayoral race by a 20 percent plurality, beating an incumbent, William Bronko (R), who favored plowing and paving his way to athletic fields there. The incumbent was in a long line of politicians who attempted to use sports as a reactionary tool and feed disunity in the town. People rejected this and voted for change with a clear message. The environment was important, especially land preservation; so let's start with the land at Gunntown.

Debunking the ideological fog of "The land must be used" has to be persistent. This fog seems to roll in on two different feet. One is a spin off of the old manifest destiny racist concept. "Look the Native Americans aren't using the land. We can use it better." The other is to have greens appear to be elitists. "The land must be used for all the people, not just a few greens." Explaining that these passive green areas are a carbon sink where CO2 is absorbed thus helping to mitigate global warming, should be a part of every conservation/preservation thrust. We are part of the environment, not functioning in some other dimension. Katrina victims found this out as that hurricane picked up extra velocity over the extra warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Also, there is much more opportunity from toddlers to retirees to enjoy and learn about the environment from passive open space.

There were many lessons along the way to victory. Environmental victories are like union victories. Using picketing of town hall, demonstrations on the town green, press and editorial conferences, and packing/speaking at town meetings, we won a vote for a Passive Park And Nature Preserve in the Gunntown neighborhood. It was an expansion of democracy at the grassroots. It took many years. This is similar to long battles for union recognition at a work place. We then entered seven months of intense negotiations with the Parks Commission to work out the details of the Passive Park And Nature Preserve. In other words, we negotiated and won our first plan for the Passive Park just as a union negotiates its first contract.

Secondly, political power at the Mayoral level put us over the top. Loss of political power could potentially lead to a different approach to the town-owned land at Gunntown down the road and the environment generally. We cannot afford to become cynical about electoral politics. It is never a question of smaller government or no government but whose government to do what. We will need to do constant political/educational/cultural work around the importance of wetlands and passive open space. We need to help people make ecological connections and demand the same of candidates and elected officials. We need to continue to help citizens take their environmental sentiments and connect them to green groups, green jobs, and electoral politics. Just as in union struggles, what is won in one contract battle can be taken away in the next. This victory was possible as an expansion of democracy at the grassroots. The price of this democratic, environmental victory is vigilance, activism and constant recruiting to peoples' movements.

Photo by Senor Codo, courtesy Flickr, cc by 2.0

Harlem Health Politics in the 1920-30s, an Interview

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 11:36:00 +0000

Editor's note: The following is an interview with Jamie J. Wilson, author of Building a Healthy Black Harlem. Listen to the excerpted audio version here.

PA: I wanted to talk to you about your new book, Building a Healthy Black Harlem. In the book you descibe how African American residents of Harlem were facing a particular health care crisis in the early part of the 20th century.

JAMIE WILSON: It was not only that they were dealing with a crisis per se. The title is Building a Healthy Black Harlem, and the focus, for me at least, is on building a healthy community. The question is how did recently arrived migrants and immigrants – immigrants, of course, from the English-speaking Caribbean – go about formulating and creating strategies to ensure that they had a healthy community? Part of that was about housing and part of that was about politics, and in my book I argue that they had to sit down and think about the ways in which they were experiencing compromised health. Along with the wonderful Harlem Renaissance we think of in the 1920s and early 1930s, it is necessary to think about the concrete strategies and ways in which Harlem residents went about figuring out what it means to be healthy and what it means to be a community. So the story really is about a community-building strategy and community-building ideas.

PA: One of the cultural responses in Harlem to this community-building process and the response to compromised health care that you describe is the turn to the popular use of magico-religious practices, the kinds of practices which may not have been the best solutions to this issue, but which, in your view, have a certain kind of significance in themselves. Could you describe that situation?

JAMIE WILSON: At that time the people of Harlem were suffering from tuberculosis in large numbers. From 1923-1927 pulmonary tuberculosis caused 1839 deaths among Harlem residents, or 193 deaths per 100,000 people. If you look at the same period of time in Manhattan, the rate is 150 per 100,000. If you look at some of the causes of sickness, one is you have people who are coming to Harlem from completely different cultural situations. Infant mortality was also at a high rate.

Magico-religious workers are individuals who fuse ideas relating to supernatural controls and phenomena, occult practices and religious beliefs, in order to provide answers and directions to their clientele, and this involves all matters of community life, including, but not limited to, money, love, family, and physical and mental health.

In the African American tradition, and I’m not saying that every single person subscribed to such an idea, there is the notion that there are individuals who possess the ability to tap into the supernatural world in order to help people in their personal development. So the term magico-religious workers is broad. It involves a spectrum of individual creativity, of beliefs, practices and cultural traditions which people draw upon and utilize.

What I am suggesting is that while there were some people who were peddlers of innocuous goods and dubious cures and some people who wanted fast monetary gain, there were also some self-described healers, clairvoyants, fortune-tellers, magicians and spiritualists who did help people deal with their new environment. Here I am talking about a psychosocial approach to Harlem and understanding the residents of Harlem. Because if you are coming from a place like Virginia, or if you are coming from the Bahamas or Jamaica, this is a really new environment for you. So if I can go to a fortune-teller down the street because I’m not feeling well on that particular day, or I don’t think I have control over my existence at that moment, that person can give me some sort of psychosocial care.

Now we all believe in psychiatrists, and when we are not feeling well and we have the blues, we can go to a psychiatrist. What I am arguing is that some of these magico-religious workers provided psychiatric care for people. But during this same period of time in New York City and in the United States, you have the professionalization of American medicine, and the rise of these magico-religious workers essentially is coming under assault. I suggest in the book that there was a criminalization of magico-religious workers, and through this criminalization of magico-religious workers, you had an undermining and an undercutting of some individuals who provided necessary care for a community that had very few or no other health care outlets.

PA: And in the process there is the elimination of what you describe as a kind of psychological/psychiatric cultural system which was in place for immigrants coming to Harlem, but while that’s under assault there is nothing to replace it.

JAMIE WILSON: There was no replacement. And decisions were being made about the health care of Black individuals in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s by people who didn’t even belong to the community, who didn't really understand what the community was about, or how some of the people in the community worked. For example, in the 1930s the health commissioner of New York City said that central Harlem, the geography or political space I am writing about, required 62 public health nurses, but they only received 29 from the health department and 14 from private agencies. That total of 43 public health nurses left a gap of 19 nurses who were needed for the maintenance of health standards and services in the community. You did not have a great deal of municipally-funded or privately-sponsored health clinics. In fact, in 1927 there were only about 40 or so health clinics in Harlem, nine percent of Manhattan’s total, and they had to accommodate 270,000 residents, or 14 percent of Manhattan’s population. There was a criminalization of magico-religious workers, people who are providing some care, and again I’m not saying that every single one was doing the right thing or really helping, but you had the criminalization of certain people who are providing care, some modicum of care, and then they were not replaced by city-sponsored or state-sponsored health services.

Harlem Hospital is an example of that. Harlem Hospital was a place in the 1930s where people said you went to die rather than to be healed. Harlem had 14 percent of Manhattan’s child and baby clinics, but the proportion was well below the community’s needs, because Harlem’s infant mortality rate was 25 percent of Manhattan’s total. So if we just look at the mortality rates of individuals, the care that people are being provided – or the lack of care – the needs of residents and what was provided didn’t equate.

PA: The community-building process that you describe, and the gap between needs and the actual provision of care, seemed to spur all kinds of political activism. One of the new and important things was the vote. Increasing numbers of Black voters in New York started to leverage their votes, especially around the issue of meaningful health care. Could you talk a little about how that took place?

JAMIE WILSON: Prior to World War I, Blacks had little sway in New York City politics, primarily because there really wasn’t a large concentration of Black voters. Of course, Black people had always been in New York City and many people had voted, even when, in the American South, people could not vote due to disenfranchisement. But after World War I, with the addition of more Blacks to the voting rolls in Harlem, politicians began to listen a bit more attentively to Black voices. You had John Hylan’s election as Mayor in 1917 and 1921, and Black people were organizing, the people who were arriving in the area. In 1917, for example, people like W.E.B. Du Bois were calling on Black people to split their votes between the parties to gain more accountability, and also asking them to consider New York Democrats separately from their Southern white racist counterparts.

This kind of debate has occurred throughout African American history. It is the notion that, in order to make sure politicians listen to you, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. In the 1917 election, the Republicans received 31.4 percent of Harlem’s vote, the Democrats 20.2 percent, the Fusion Party 20.5 percent, and the Socialists 19.5 percent of Harlem’s total vote. If you look at the particular ways in which people were thinking and advocating, Black people were creating new strategies. And, of course, you also had the United Colored Democracy, which was a Black auxiliary in New York City which also aroused people and got them together.

But as we both know, and I think your listeners know, it is not always the particular forms of voting that called for or caused change in Harlem. If you look at the 1935 race riot, that is what spurred the state to actually do something and the city to actually do something. So when Hylan was reelected in 1921, the NAACP and other community organizations placed issues of health care and hospital discrimination before him as major issues affecting Harlem’s Black population. And in exchange for handling the Harlem Hospital situation and in exchange for handling the poor health care options, they decided to promote the Democratic Party. In 1921, Harlem’s residents voted overwhelmingly for Hylan with 71.4 percent of their votes. So people were now voting for the first time in order to encourage their politicians to look at their particular needs.

PA: That shift in political alignments predates the shift toward backing Roosevelt and the Democrats during the New Deal process. One of the things you discuss in the book about the New Deal is that its policies tended to focus on class-based issues and to sideline or ignore, or mostly ignore, issues that were central to African American communities, and this impacted how New Deal policies affected Harlem. Could you describe that process?

JAMIE WILSON: The New Deal planners looked at what they called the “Negro problem” as a class problem. By improving the economic conditions of workers, their line of argument went, Black problems would be automatically resolved. To a certain extent, I think we can all kind of understand where that was coming from. But because of the condition of Black people in the United States – Harlem itself developed at least partially along racial lines – and because of the racism and discrimination that were prevalent throughout New York City in the 1920s and 30s, one needs to look at the ways in which race and class intersected in that particular geographic and political space.

What I am arguing is that the New Deal responses to Black Harlem residents were at best mixed. Because by not including explicit race-based initiatives and proposals to eliminate segregation and racism, the New Deal policy makers constructed barriers to community development and bolstered structures of inequality. I find it particularly problematic to try to ignore racism in the United States, as if by not explicitly dealing with racism, racism is going to go away, and of course that did not happen in the New Deal.

In some of my research I looked at a particular building in Harlem, at #24 67th Avenue. In the 1930s, as most of us know, the vast majority of Black women were domestic servants, and a large portion of Black men were porters or cooks or waiters – along those lines. The people who lived in this house at 24 67th Avenue in Harlem, over half of them were not even covered by Social Security, because Social Security did not include domestic workers. So we have to look at the particular, racially-based ways that put some Black people into this economic position, and then we need to sit and think about how we can deal with the racist policies that led to it in the first place. This was one way in which the New Deal did not deal with Black working-class issues in Harlem.

Another way it did not really deal explicitly with racial issues was in the discrimination in hiring in the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration. The PWA was created in 1933 as an effort to create employment opportunities for the unemployed, as organized by Roosevelt in his first 100 days. As a result, in New York City in the 1930s, Fiorello LaGuardia created the New York City Housing Authority. The New York City Housing Authority was supposed to create housing for Black people and housing for white people throughout the city. The problem was that even in Harlem, with the creation of the Harlem River Houses, Black people in their community could only receive three percent of the skilled jobs in the construction of the Harlem River Houses. That’s one example of an explicitly racist policy.

I’m not saying that Roosevelt himself was a racist. What I am saying is that the New Deal projects subcontracted to New York City contractors who had traditionally racist views and opposed hiring Blacks. You had the creation of a number of public works throughout New York City and New York State, and Black people could not be hired, and if they were hired, for example for the Triboro Bridge, they were hired in the poor-paying jobs and were restricted to the dirtiest, hardest work.

So, on the one hand, you create these policies absolutely, and they are supposed to bring the unemployed up, but when they employed racist tactics and discrimination and segregation, then Black people did not benefit in Harlem to the extent that they should have. That is part of my argument.

PA: I think one of the most interesting parts of the book is how you show how African Americans in this community saw health as encompassing all kinds of different aspects of social life, from having sanitary housing to safe streets and parks, to access to hospitals and clinics with African American doctors and nurses, and to a good-paying job so you could afford it. What relevance does it have for us today, when we are still debating a lot of these same issues on a national scale?

JAMIE WILSON: Well, I think that world view is the world view of most people. I don’t think that Black people had a particular monopoly on it in Harlem in the 1920s. I think we all understand that health is not just the absence of illness, or the absence of disease, but that it means so much more. I also think that the Black people who were coming to Harlem from these different areas were considering what it means to be healthy and raise healthy children in a new space. I pretty much agree with the World Health Organization definition of health: It is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease. As I note in the book, we can sit and debate all of the varying understandings of health, but if we limit our understanding of health solely to biomedical terms applied in a clinical setting, where good health is often defined by the absence of disease, we miss the point.

In the book I examine different notions of well being and wellness. Throughout the book I use well being and wellness more or less synonymously. By them I mean an intangible, often unquantifiable state of psychological soundness: the absence of dis-ease and the absence of discord. We in many ways know what a state of well being and wellness is by defining what it is not. It is not hunger, it is not anxiety, it is not stress and it is not fear; it is not despair and it is not depression. And Harlem residents in the 1920s and 30s, the working class, the working poor, Black health officials and Black elected officials, were all sitting and thinking about what this meant.

In one chapter, I look at the multiple ways in which they addressed these problems. It was about going into people's homes and helping them, and in some respects cleaning up their houses. It was about going to lobby the mayor and the hospitals in order to get better care. It was about stepping out on your own, which many Black physicians and nurses did, creating their own spaces for people to come and seek care. It was about meeting young women at the bus station and at the train station who were arriving for the first time in Harlem. It was providing lunches and services for people through churches, such as the Abyssinian Baptist Church did. It was about looking at people holistically, about looking at people in their totality, in terms of all the myriad things they come in contact with on a regular basis, and trying to address them. That is what I think is so interesting about the Harlem situation, and that is how I think it is best to understand health and health care in that particular setting.

What comes out for me, as much as history can be didactic and help us learn how to deal with the present, what the Harlem situation tells me, is that one has to have a multifaceted strategy in order to improve health care locally, statewide and nationwide. On the one hand, we need people on the front lines actually providing care. Absolutely these people need to be valued and these people need to be trained. But we also need to have people pressuring the politicians. We elect people to look out for our own well-being, but what I think is absolutely important, in order to create the kind of health care we need – which I think should be a single-payer, state-sponsored health care system – is for us as citizens to fight for what we think we need. Harlem residents improved their community, building a healthy Black Harlem. They improved their community within the constraints of their lives and the political constraints, and we have to do the same thing. We can’t rely on politicians to do it. They are part of the solution but, at the end of the day, we have to create our own vision of what we think health and healthy systems are, and then we have to fight for it.

Living in an Era of Change

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 10:30:00 +0000

The 29th CPUSA Convention was a big success and will hopefully go a long way toward improving the party’s contributions to the democratic movement. The strategic policy of uniting all the core forces and movements to defeat the ultra-right and consolidate the people’s coalition was resoundingly re-endorsed by the delegates. The quality of the discussion both before and at the convention reflected the hard work that members are involved in on the ground and a willingness to do the kind of hard thinking necessary to match it.

Recent articles in Political Affairs and People’s World show that the party’s process of confronting contemporary political challenges and looking for ways to move forward did not end when the convention adjourned in New York.

In their Political Affairs article, “Radical Ideas, Real Politics,” Joel Wendland and Peter Zerner launched a discussion of why Marxism remains an “essential, objective, and working-class-based” methodology for analyzing and meeting the tasks that lie ahead. I agree with the authors’ premises and in this article hope to draw attention to the need to think anew about organizational and communication issues. While this is of course an inwardly-focused matter, it has important ramifications for our ability to turn our “radical ideas” into “real politics.” Particularly, this has to do with the way we communicate our message to America’s working people, how we envision our approach to electoral politics, and our relationship to other organizations on the center and left.

Wendland and Zerner said, “There are no past experiences in other societies which can serve as models for today’s complexities, contradictions, and possibilities.” The party has rightly determined that any future socialism in our country will be uniquely American, in tune with the history, experience, and traditions of the U.S. people. Bringing our organization into accord with our vision of what socialism will be and how it will come to the United States means rethinking how the CPUSA presents itself.

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE

For more than ten years now, the party has been taking a hard look at its ideology, organizational structure, personnel requirements, and financial accounting and made the decisions necessary to ensure the survival of the organization.

The Marxism that is now practiced in the CPUSA and learned at YCL schools is an open, innovative, and creative methodology that has – to a great extent – left behind the dogmatism and sectarianism of what passed for ‘Marxism-Leninism’ in the past.

The structures of the national office and the various departments of the party have been reorganized and reconfigured to more efficiently carry out the tasks entrusted to them. Instances of repetition of responsibilities and overlapping assignments have been remedied in many situations. This of course led in some cases to personnel consolidation and a lowering of staff requirements.

On the financial front, for too many years the party had been eating into the financial legacy left to it by previous generations, thereby jeopardizing its future survival. Thanks to the work of the finance department, our organization is now on a much firmer footing and lives within its means.

None of these were easy challenges, but to its credit the party and its leadership have been up to the task. I think that our process of renewal should continue moving forward no matter how difficult we may find it. With that said, I turn to what I feel to still be a key, but unaddressed, issue.

FACING THE FUTURE

The Communist Party USA has a 90-year history which its members can take pride in. From the struggles for industrial organization during the Depression to the defense of civil liberties against McCarthyism’s attacks, and from the fights against racism to the struggles for peace, the party has shown itself time and time again to be a steadfast fighter for the interests of the American working class and people. The pages of the party’s history are filled with such chapters. These proud traditions should never be forgotten.

However, the organization cannot live on its laurels forever. A way must be found to build on these traditions while also making the CPUSA a political organization that is suited to meet the political needs of today.

The party has to be brave enough to collectively face up to the reality that, no matter how correct it may be when it comes to theory or strategy and tactics, as long as it bears the name ‘Communist Party’, it will be cutting itself off from large numbers of progressive activists and leaders. Many on the left agree with the CPUSA’s emphasis on center-left unity, its focus on defeating the ultra-right, and its approach to political independence.

Communism, though, is equated with names such as Stalin, Ceausescu, and Mao in the popular consciousness. Unfortunately, names such as DuBois, Winston, or Flynn do not pop into the minds of most people. The communist ‘brand’ is undeniably sullied beyond reprieve for the vast majority of Americans. Pleading with people to allow us to explain what communism is really about is a pretty useless and time-wasting tactic. The struggle for a better future – a socialist future – does not have to (and should not) always result in a debate about the Soviet experiment.

In a recent letter to the editor of the Morning Star, the newspaper associated with the CP of Britain, a reader expressed clearly the same types of points when attempting to persuade his comrades it was time to change the party’s name: “We can continue to roar from inside our ghetto but no one will listen if we don’t change our language.” He continued, “Our aim should be to communicate with people on their level, not seek to maintain a spurious purity of dogma” (Morning Star letters, 16 May 2010).

As much as it may hurt for many members to admit, no organization named the Communist Party will be a part of the mainstream of American politics. The CPUSA came closest to that in the 1930s and 40s, but that success is unlikely to be repeated. Too much history has happened since then: McCarthyism, the Stalin revelations, the Cold War, fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the CP-ruled states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Communism is a brand tarnished beyond repair in the United States.

A few critical readers of this article will undoubtedly charge that I am guilty of “American Exceptionalism” – the old criticism hurled against CP leaders who sought a more nationally-specific path to socialism. The party is an American institution dealing with the political challenges of the modern United States. If our theories, strategy, and tactics were not uniquely American, then we would be of no use to the working class. As Wendland and Zerner said, we are trying to reach America’s working people – “our constituency.”

While history may eventually call upon a political organization to complete the historic tasks associated with a communist party by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, that period of time is not upon us. John Case made this observation when in a recent PA article he said that naming the party communist “before such time as the tasks of constructing a society reflecting the communist ideal are fully prepared, is premature.” (Reflections on the 29th Convention of the CPUSA, June 2010)

His point gets right to the heart of the matter. To simply sit satisfied in our small organization called the Communist Party and take comfort in the conviction that history will push us to the fore is to live in a fantasy world. It does a disservice not only to our own political effectiveness, but to the larger movement that needs the kind of insights into theory, strategy, and tactics that we can help develop. We have to remove this obstacle from our full participation in the democratic struggles of our time.

Many Communist Parties around the world went about transforming themselves at times of crisis, when they were no longer in tune with the broad trends of progressive politics in their countries or their bases of support were shrinking. The CPUSA, though small, does not find itself in such a condition. We are relatively united and making a positive contribution to the broad people’s coalition in our country.

We should take advantage of this situation to undergo a more thorough renewal. The crisis of socialism is now twenty years passed, and conditions have developed which make it possible for the CPUSA to become a more outwardly-oriented socialist organization.

As Sam Webb said in his report to the 29th Convention, “Our socialist vision should have a contemporary and dynamic feel…If it has an ‘old or foreign’ feel, people will reject it.” I think this insight should be expanded beyond just our vision of socialism as expressed in our statements and publications; it should include our “brand,” so to speak. If people are turned off by the name on the label, it is unlikely they will take too much time to see what is inside the package.

Just as the Soviet model of socialism always had that foreign feel for the vast majority of Americans, so too does the name Communist Party. We can argue over whether this is due more to decades of red-baiting, propaganda, and repression or to the less-than-sterling historical record of many governments run by Communist Parties. At this point in history that does not matter for purposes of what our organization should call itself. The causes of anti-communism should of course continue to be investigated by historians, but when our members are on the front-lines of the struggle against the ultra-right, do we really want the whole history of communism to be their primary hurdle?

Our chief adversaries should be the ultra-right, not the general public’s preconceived notions of what communism is or was. Let’s jump more solidly into the mainstream of political struggle. We should project our vision of a more just, equitable, and solidaristic future (i.e. socialism) without making our coalition allies instantly associate us with all that was reprehensible about Stalinism.

In discussions I have had with some people, it has been stated that it doesn’t matter what we call ourselves, we would still be red-baited. That is almost certainly true. However, it cannot be denied that red-baiting is a lot easier for the ultra-right demagogues like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh when we stubbornly stick to a name that may make us feel comfortable but does little to help us expand our influence.

An organization does not have to be called ‘Communist Party’ in order to be oriented toward socialism. A change of name does not mean a change in principles.

But changing the name is not just a pragmatic concern. It should not be seen as simply switching the sign on the storefront. While we would be re-emphasizing the positive traditions we have always stood for – peace, equality, democracy, and socialism – we would also be publicly rejecting the negative traits associated with communist parties, particularly those of the Soviet bloc. We would be declaring in the clearest way possible our rejection of the history of purges, repression, undemocratic practices, dictatorial power, and subordination that sullied the Soviet period.

Of course a change in name will not be some kind of panacea for the party’s long-standing problems of recruitment and retention. But over the years, people have overwhelmingly joined the CPUSA because of the work they see its members doing and the theoretical education that it provides. These are the key characteristics of our organization that would be preserved and hopefully expanded. Changing the name will not bring members pouring into the organization; that is not what I’m claiming. But given that the party has been a rather negligible force on the American political scene as a whole for at least the last several decades, we have to ask what benefit do we get from retaining a name from another era?

There is also the real possibility that if the name "Communist Party" is dropped, it will be picked up by some ultra-left formation or sect. We can be sure that "Communist Party" would still be a hot brand on the sectarian left as demonstrated by the never-ending list of parties with the names containing the words socialist, labor, workers, communist, liberation, Marxist-Leninist, or some combination thereof. If we surrender the title, we would be taking a risk that some grouping with politics very different from those of the CPUSA would try to lay claim to not only the name but the history and the heritage that goes along with it. While such a turn of events would perhaps not do justice to the party’s past, we have to decide whether it is more important to be loyal to a name or to our long-term goals – the real things that generations of party members have struggled for in our country.

OPENING DOORS OUTWARD

Having dealt with the name issue, I would like to briefly comment on our efforts to dive more into the mainstream of progressive and left politics in the United States. This means looking at questions of not just our name, but the type of organization we see ourselves to be. Is the CPUSA really a political party? Is it an organization or association of progressive working-class activists? What form would make us the most effective fighters for unity and social progress?

To deal with the first question, we have to ask not only whether the CPUSA is a political party, but we have to understand what a political party really is in the United States. The question here is not as simple to answer as it is in multi-party parliamentary systems, for instance. Generally, political parties in the latter types of systems are organizations contesting for office around an agreed ideological platform and having official membership rolls. Communist parties, though of course having their own unique characteristics such as democratic centralism and a revolutionary perspective, have historically been formed with such a system in mind. The CPUSA for instance, was formed as a political party in this sense.

But the two-party system of the United States does not fit neatly into this historical understanding of what parties are and what characteristics they have. In our country, as in many two-party states, the parties are coalitions of interests that broadly correlate to a right-left division, but which include people and forces of vastly differing classes, backgrounds, and goals. Political organization, especially as illustrated by the primary system for candidate selection, is relatively loose.

What this means in practice is that the two parties have become institutions of a semi-governmental nature. In order to win the majority of offices, candidates must pursue the nomination of one of the two main parties. For those on the left, this means contesting the Democratic primary process and engaging in the local Democratic platform development process. This is the only realistic way to bring progressive principles into electoral reality – definitely at the state and national level, and sometimes the local level as well.

The reactionary right accepted this reality more than 30 years ago and committed themselves to pursuing their aims through a shift in state power. Without a doubt, they were largely successful. The domination of the ultra right over much of the political life of our nation from roughly 1980 to 2008 has exemplified their victory. The Republican Party, though always the defender of corporate interests, was not always the instrument of the Palin-Rand type of fringe elements which dominate today.

Not all elements of the progressive left have drawn the appropriate lessons from this historical development. Sam Webb points this out in his article, “A Cautionary Tale” in People’s World. As he says, the lesson is simple: “The electoral arena is of overriding importance. The notion that electoral politics has little progressive potential, that it is ‘politics lite,’ that it pales in the face of direct action (an unnecessary juxtaposition) is mistaken and harmful.”

Political independence has for quite some time, and increasingly in the recent period, been operationalized within the context of the two-party system. Webb drew our attention to this in his keynote address to the party convention. He said:

New forms of political independence have developed in recent years in important ways, but differently than most of us on the left imagined. To our surprise, they took shape within the framework of the two-party system, not outside of it, and within labor and other major social organizations, operating under the broad canopy of the Democratic Party.

I agree with Webb that if any alternative, independent third party ever emerges, these formations and organizations will be its basis. I would stress even more, though, that we should look realistically at the openings for such a third party to develop. Serious electoral reform has not been on the table for decades and is not likely to appear on the popular agenda anytime soon. Efforts to operate in the electoral arena in opposition to both the Democratic and Republican parties only results in splitting the center-left vote and helping the right wing back into office. States or localities that allow fusion votes or alternative voting systems may be able to bypass this problem, but these local specificities cannot be the basis of a generalizable strategy.

Forces on the progressive left must organize as currents within the orbit of the Democratic Party, but as elements separate from it. This is the stance taken by the organized labor movement. And, if the CPUSA is honest with itself, we would see that this is an approach which we have already taken for quite some time as well. Our members participate in the Democratic primary process at the local level, volunteer in GOTV efforts, and many take part in the platform-drafting process in their local Democratic committees. More participate in Democratic-aligned outfits such as Organize for America, Progressive Democrats of America, or the Campaign for America’s Future.

However, by not formally affiliating with the Democratic Party organizationally (though many members do individually), the CPUSA and some of these other left formations are able to maintain the independence that allows them to join in the mass coalition efforts to defeat the ultra right without endorsing or accepting the corporate influence and control that prevails among too many top Democratic policy-makers.

All of this is to say, we have to consider the possibility that our current practice, which is broadly in agreement with the understanding of political independence summarized above, may not best be served by our continued adherence to a specifically party-type of organization. I would suggest that we ponder whether it may be appropriate to drop not only the “communist” half of our title, but the “party” half as well.

It is my belief that we could be more effectual operating as a socialist and working-class political organization which does not present itself as a “party” as such. By doing so, we could eliminate the ambiguities and confusion which sometimes arises when CPUSA members run as Democratic or independent candidates. Our members can freely participate in the Democratic Party process, with the Working Families Party or other independent political formations, etc. as appropriate to the circumstances and in accordance with collective judgment of the situation. The details of what such an organization would look like would of course have to be discussed in greater detail by the party as a whole, but it is a transformation worth considering.

So as should be clear, this article is both a call for change as well as a suggestion for the codification of existing practice. The CPUSA has done much to renew itself and join the 21st century. It is now time to move forward with this process and remove any obstacles that still stand in the way of fully participating in the broad democratic upsurge of our times. We are living in an era of change and must do everything to make sure we stay in tune with the movement of history.

Reply to "Living in an Era of Change" by C.J. Atkins

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 10:29:00 +0000

Response to Living in an Era Change

I agree the Communist Party should change its name. Why? Primarily because its hard, in fact impossible, to design a growth strategy for the Communist Party that does not immediately get compromised BY the name. And the first step in compromise is the reluctance or unwillingness of either its members or friends to openly and publicly associate with it. Most every growth scheme falls prey to this weakness. Its pointless, in politics, to give excuses for this, no matter if they are valid. For example, the legacy of the repressions against members of the Communist Party casts a long shadow. But the minute you offer that as one 'explanation' of what stands in the way of a party named "Communist Party" achieving a mass influence, you have not weakened the obstacle, but probably strengthened it!

Against this weakness, evidence is constantly available showing that the actual political positions of the Communist Party, including the very democratic visions of both structural reform, and a democratic socialist-market transition period, articulated in many of its leaders' speeches, and in documents from its conventions, are embraced by tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of working and progressive people. But none of these folks feel any incentive to submit to a journey through the entire history of 20th century socialism, especially the collapsed Soviet model, or commit themselves to any perspective not thoroughly allied to science, and the rise in wealth and power of the working class, in order to join this struggle.

Another important casualty of both the name "Communist Party" and the party's small size is a nearly constant infection with sectarianism of various kinds that wastes a lot of time and does a lot of damage way beyond its actual numbers. A substantial portion of the comments debate on the PWW website is of this character. Whereas the DESIRED interactions is with broader forms: OFA, PDA, or Center for American Progress, and many others. Thats where the debates about tactics strengthening the positive forces within the Democratic party toward a more consistent class position on health care, financial reform, energy, infrastructure stimulus, toward a firmer stand on direct government employment to turn back the right influence on the unemployed and other victims of the economic crisis, toward more internationalism in approaches to global inequality – thats where debate will have their greatest impact.

Sectarianism of many kinds has long plagued both the US labor movement, and the Left in general. Some groups have even MORE trouble with it than the CP. The only way to prevent sectarianism from continuing to marginalize us to stay focused on the overall progress of the labor and workers' movements as a whole.

How do we fulfill that overriding mission in these times? Not a simple question to answer. And neither dogma, or fine quotes of so-called authorities will help much. Defining the tasks that most mark and define "the overall progress" of the movement must be the cornerstone of the name-change discussion. I think C.J. may not be correct in thinking a name change will not also require some policy changes, as well as some important political preparation.

On political preparation, the result must be a significantly LARGER organization, as well as one that can more easily form and participate in coalitions and electoral formations. A name change that sounds good but does not result in more members will be a sterile move, and will not impress many. On policy, the bottom line must be: following this crowd is the path to more VISIBLY more wealth and more power and more equality – and a stronger peace – for working people. We must accept that for the foreseeable future, a mixed economy, significantly "more socialist" than the current mix, but still supporting a very large market system, will be the best hope the further advance or working peoples interests. We should ENTHUSIASTICALLY promote reforms in this context. The objective changes in infrastructure, education and public goods required to recover full employment, and a rising standard of living, will raise the overall socialization of capital and work to unprecedented levels – levels that in turn may lay the foundations for the elevation of much of an advanced society's work to something very close to communist labor as envisioned by Karl Marx. While markets will remain, it is clear that a very strong tendency in high tech production and services, as well as in areas of the economy afflicted with large market failures, is toward the exchange of very WEAK commodities, that are either quasi or outright public goods still outfitted in commodity dress but only for lack of new, suitable clothes.

The "new" party must be unabashedly public and open. Such a transition is likely to require some difficult changes in style for an organization that for much of its life has had to cope with semi-legality. In fact, I suggest that the first steps toward this may be more wisely initiated as electoral formations with an explicitly electoral mission before attempting to reinvent the entire organization. Choosing elections as the test proves to mainstream political forces that you intend to be serious, and to the sectarian left that we won't be found on the sidelines.

Lets face it: the new policy and new formation(s) are social-democratic plus internationalism in political content. No one know for sure how long 10% unemployment – and thus the threat of profound instability and fascist dangers – will last. Krugman says – until there is a big leftward shift – forever. Even Republicans make no predictions – and they normally feel free to lie with impunity. We have solutions, or at least we will. We can get our message out there. There are places where we can run as Democrats, and many local elections where non-partisan or independent candidates are highly viable. Yes we can!

I submit our planning NOW for the 2012 elections are the best framework for finding out how serious we are, and how far we can go.

Thanks to C.J. for introducing what SHOULD be a VERY important discussion.

The Global Water Crisis Should be a Top Priority Issue

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:50:00 +0000

Original source: The Guardian (Australia)

While climate change has captured the headlines, many countries are running out of freshwater supplies, threatening human health and causing conflicts between nations. Water should be at the top of the global and national agendas. In recent years, climate change seems to have elbowed out other environmental issues to become the number one global problem. But the alarming problems of water – increasing scarcity, lack of access to drinking water and sanitation, pollution, flooding – are equally important and an even more immediate threat.

Women and girls collecting drinking water at a river they share with cattle and other livestock in Bishikiltu (Oromia), Ethiopia.

On July 28, the UN General Assembly in a historic decision recognised the right to water and sanitation as a human right. This is a fitting recognition of the crucial importance of water to the survival of individuals and the basis for development of nations and indeed the world.

The extensive floods in Pakistan are also a current reminder of two things: the devastating impact of climate change on rainfall and the flow of water quantities; and the importance of properly managing water drainage, especially in the major rivers and waterways.

The increasing shortage of water in many countries has become a crisis. A decade ago, it was predicted that a third of the world’s population would be facing water scarcity by 2025. But this threshold has already been reached. Two billion people live in countries that are water-stressed and by 2025, two-thirds of the world population may suffer water stress, unless current trends alter.

Even more dramatic, it is predicted that wars will be fought over water this century, just as wars were and are still being fought over control of oil these past decades.

“The global population tripled in the 20th century but water consumption went up sevenfold,” noted Maudhe Barlow of the Council of Canadians and an expert on the global water crisis in her book Blue Covenant.

“By 2050, after we add another 3 billion to the population, humans will need an 80 percent increase in water supplies just to feed ourselves. No one knows where this water is going to come from.”

Loss of water supplies

There is a rapidly growing demand for freshwater but its supply is limited and decreasing.

Water supply is affected by the loss of watersheds due to deforestation and soil erosion in hills and mountains. There is also a severe depletion of valuable groundwater resources as water is taken up for agriculture and industry, and is being dug from deeper and deeper sources.

Mining of groundwater has caused the water-table to drop in parts of many countries including India and China, West Asia, Russia and the United States.

Agriculture uses 70 percent of water because industrial agriculture requires large amounts of water. It takes three cubic metres of water to produce a kilo of cereals, and 15 cubic metres of water to produce a kilo of beef because of the grain fed to the cows.

A lot of surface water is also polluted and thus not available for human use, or if it is used, the polluted water causes health problems. Five million people die from water-borne diseases annually.

Water supplies are also being affected by climate change. Global warming is causing an accelerated melting of the glaciers and there will be less glaciers in the future.

For example, the Himalayan glaciers feed many of the great rivers in India, China and Southeast Asia, “The full scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe,” according to Yao Tandong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The acute water problems facing Yemen are described in the London-based Guardian on February 27.

The country’s capital Sana’a is predicted to run out of water in 2017, as four times as much water is taken out of its river basin as falls into it each year. Of the country’s 21 main water aquifers, 19 are no longer being replenished after a drought and increased demand.

The water situation is so serious the government has considered moving the capital as well as desalinating coastal seawater and pumping it 2,000 metres uphill to Sana’a.

Conflict over water supplies

Water scarcity has also become a reason for conflict. This is especially when a source of water such as a major river serves more than one country.

The country or countries that have the upper reaches of the river can affect the volume of water flowing into the countries at the lower parts of the river.

In Africa, about 50 rivers are each shared by two or more countries. According to an issue of Population Reports, access to water from the Nile, Zambezi, Niger, and Volta river basins in particular has the potential to ignite conflicts.

It also describes how the Aral Sea Basin in Central Asia is beset by international conflicts over water among Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan which all depend for their survival on the waters of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers.

The Middle East has been running out of water. In that situation the grounds for conflict have increased. In his recent book Water, Steven Solomon describes the growing tension over the sharing of water resources of the Nile especially between Egypt and Ethiopia.

In the Jordan River basin, writes Solomon, “in one of the world’s political hot spots, Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and Syrians contest to control and divide the scarce resources of a region that long ago ran out of enough freshwater for everyone.”

There can also be similar competition for water within a country, for example between states that share the same river.

According to Population Reports, in the western US, farmers who want more irrigation water face off against urban areas that demand more water for households and other municipal uses.

In India, Karnataka state was in a water dispute with Andhra Pradesh over the height of a dam on the Krishna River, which could affect the amount of water available for use by both states.

Private vs Public control over water systems

Another issue is the fight over the systems for owning and distributing the scarce water resources. In her book, Maudhe Barlow describes the recent policies to privatise water, which until recently was under direct control of government authorities.

Privatisation was first carried out in Western countries and then spread to developing countries through World Bank loans and projects.

This has led to adverse effects on people’s access to water, according to Barlow, who also documents the fight by citizen groups in many countries to make water a public good, and to make access to water a human right.

Water as a top priority issue

All the above issues should be taken with the same seriousness as climate change, because water is about the most important item needed by everyone, and its scarcity affects both human health and geo-politics.

As Solomon puts it: “An explosive new political fault line is erupting across the global landscape between the water Haves and water Have Nots... Simply, water is surpassing oil itself as the world’s scarcest critical resource.

“Just as oil conflicts were central to the 20th century history, the struggle over freshwater is set to shape a new turning point in the world order and the destiny of civilisation.”

Thus, water must be recognised as a crisis issue and solutions to the crisis should be at the top of the global and national agendas.

It is thus timely that the UN General Assembly, the world’s top policy forum, has adopted the resolution that the right to water and sanitation is a human right. Operationalising this right so that all human beings have access to water, and that all countries have the capacity to obtain, manage and wisely use water resources, is an imperative.

--Martin Khor is the Executive Director of the South Centre, www.southcentre.org

Photo: woodley wonderworks, courtesy Flickr, cc by 2.0

Cuba's Economic Reforms Based on Socialist Principles

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:21:00 +0000

Editor's note: The following is re-posted from Umsebenzi, an online newsletter of the South African Communist Party.

What is the nature of the economic problems Cuba is currently experiencing?

In the context of our other problems, the US economic and financial blockade is hurting our economy more now. The blockade has been the main obstacle to our social and economic development over 48 years. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, we lost our main trading partners. It was a severe blow from which we have not yet recovered. The 2008 global economic crisis also hit us hard. The price of nickel, a major export earner, has gone down. And we have had huge losses with the hurricanes. But also our productivity is too low. We need greater efficiency and more saving to ensure economic growth. We are a small country with limited resources. We need better organize our production, improve discipline, and update our economic model. We are importing far too much, especially food, and need to be more self-sufficient. We need to focus far more on agriculture. Food production has now become an issue of national security.

Isn't the US blockade easing?

In practical terms, no. The main aspects remain and overall the blockade has even got worse. Since 2009 there have been more prohibitions on companies doing business with Cuba. Yet 187 countries voted against the blockade in the UN General Assembly. Direct economic damages to Cuba since the blockade began in 1962 until December 2009, according to conservative estimates, surpass 15,4 billion US dollars. If this was calculated according to the present value of the US dollar, it would be about 23,9 billion dollars.

But if you have economic problems how does it follow that you have to retrench half a million state workers? Especially since you're a socialist state?

We are not retrenching. That's a capitalist term. We are not putting people out in the street. We are not going to leave them without social assistance. We are re-organising the workforce, not firing workers. We are directing them to other areas of work vital for the economy, mainly food production. We are making these changes as part of updating our economic model in order to ensure that our socialist system is sustainable on the basis of the rational and effective use of the workforce. The first phase will be concluded by the first quarter of 2011. As part of the process, we are giving people land, and helping them to make productive use of it. A significant section of this land is near the urban areas, where 80% of the working population lives. If this land is used to produce food, it will also reduce the fuel and transport costs because it's near the urban areas. We have too many bureaucrats and professionals, not enough artisans. We want to move people from just producing paper to areas of the economy in which they can be productive and contribute to the economy. We are trying to find new areas of work for them. As President Raul Castro says, 'we have to remove once and for all the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where you can live without working'. If they do not accept work that the government directs them to, they can be self-employed. We have opened up 178 areas in which they can work. Over 2 years, the state will have to give up about a million workers.

Are you going to re-skill the workers? And what areas are you opening up?

Yes, we are going to fully support the workers to get new skills and other means to get started. Our higher educational institutions are also going to assist. Banks will help with loans. Our main priority, of course, is food production, with the emphasis on substitution of imports, but we also want to increase imports in certain areas. The new areas being opened are in tourism, trade and services, mainly. We are to allow more people to be self-employed as transport providers, bricklayers, stonemasons, plumbers, electricians, panel-beaters, shoe-repairers, hairdressers, shoe-makers, accountants and so on. We are also to allow people to have restaurants with up to 20 seats. Labour must be got from the owners' families, but they can also employ a limited number of people.

Will there be a minimum wage for those employed and any restriction on the profits of the restaurant owners and others?

Yes, there will be a minimum wage. These will be limited enterprises and they won't be able to make huge profits. We are introducing new redistributive taxes. In fact, new regulations related to this, including the modification of the tax system, have already been published in a special edition of the government gazette.

But ultimately you will be introducing a further measure of private enterprise?

But we're not opening the door to capitalism. No way! Our economic reforms are based on socialist principles. In any case, we have always had self-employed workers. We are just increasing their numbers. Self-employed workers may be able to accumulate more in certain cases, but that'll be based on their hard work, not through exploiting others.

But in the context of the joint ventures with the private sector and other economic reforms since the early 1990s aren't you gradually drifting away from socialism?

No, no! We are consolidating socialism in new difficult global conditions. We are not expanding the private sector significantly, and the fundamental means of production remain in state hands. Even where people work on the land, the product will be theirs, but the state will retain ownership of the land. We are not privatizing the land. And if people do not make productive use of the land, we will take it back from them as part of our leasing agreement and allocate it to others. It's impossible to seriously build socialism with our low productivity. We must have a strong economy, especially to ensure our free health and education systems. You must understand we are shaping our own Cuban model of socialism. Ours is an authentic Cuban revolution. It's not been imported from anywhere. It's based on our history, our culture, the nature of the Cuban personality, the psyche of the Cuban people, our natural resources, our climate, our position as a small island, our location in the Caribbean, and our specific problems now. We are not perfect but we are working very hard to make socialism work. We have to make these changes to preserve socialism in the context of the economic and financial crisis and the anachronistic US blockade. The changes we are making are under the control of the Cuban Communist Party, with the support of the people. The changes we are making are under the control of the Cuban Communist Party, with the support of the people. After 51 years of our revolution, we cannot afford now to make major strategic mistakes.

Have there not been increasing inequalities within Cuban society since the economic reforms of the early 1990s? And with the reforms, a change of values? And what about corruption?

Yes, there are inequalities, and we are addressing this to prevent the gap growing. But the major distortions come from the money sent to Cubans by their relatives from the US and elsewhere. For example, one US dollar is equivalent to the entire ration card we give to our people. So those who get money from outside are better off. Over time, we want to do away with the two currency system we introduced after collapse of the Soviet Union. (Cubans use the Cuban peso which is weak compared to the US dollar, but US dollars are exchanged into the convertible peso which is closer in value to the US dollar). But to do this, we have to increase the productivity of our workforce, to have a strong economy. We can then raise the salaries of workers. And, yes, we are also aware that the values of people can change. We are addressing this in various ways, including through new and more intensive ideological programmes in our schools, the Young Communist League, the mass organizations, workplaces and elsewhere. We have open debates about this issue. That's the best way to deal with it. We are also getting stronger against corruption through prevention measures and prosecutions of offenders. Any process of change will have challenges. Our economic reforms will be managed gradually and progressively to try to prevent distortions. Of course, this is not the first time we've introduced reforms, but we are aware of the far-reaching consequences, and we are working towards avoiding possible negative effects.

So what is the response of workers to your new economic reforms?

We have spent long hours with the trade unions and workers. We discuss our problems. We make them public. That's how we can solve them. If we are open with people they will support us, as they did during the 'Special Period' after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc. We have also been given lots of ideas by the public and are including these in our plans. But the workers are worried. You see, until now the state has been doing everything for them. They have become too dependent on the state, on the excesses of government paternalism. Now they have to adjust. It won't be easy, but we will do it. In a situation like this, the government has to be part of the solution. We are not going to leave the workers alone. We are going to assist them in their new work. We have to make these changes. If we don't make them we will burden future generations. We are doing this for us but mainly for our children.

Engels on the Theory of Value

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:09:00 +0000

Engels discusses the origin of the Marxist theory of value in Part II, Chapter V of his 1878 book Anti-Dühring confuting the views of the self-styled "socialist" German Professor Eugen Dühring. He does this by first taking issue with Dühring's faulty views and then presenting what he takes to be the correct – Marxist – outlook.

Dühring holds, in the first place, that the primary lesson of political economy is that the rule of wealth (and those who control it)throughout all world history is to be understood, in his words, as "economic power over men and things." Engels rejects this opinion for two reasons. First, the wealth associated with the ancient tribal and village societies at the basis of civilization was in no way created my "domination over men." These were cooperative non-class societies. Second, when we do come to more advanced class riven societies the wealth they created was more the domination over things that were then used to dominate people. Throughout history we see "that wealth dominates men exclusively by means of the things which it has at its disposal."

The reason Dühring has explained wealth as primarily the domination over humans is that he wishes to remove the discussion of exploitation from the realm of economics to that morality in order to resuscitate a version of Proudhon's "Property is theft" slogan. Dühring has divided the production of wealth into two great divisions; one of PRODUCTION and the other of DISTRIBUTION.

The production of wealth that is domination over things is GOOD but the wealth produced by domination over humans is unjust and BAD.

Dühring's ideas applied to present day capitalism amount to the following: the capitalist system's production of wealth is fine and good and can be preserved, but the capitalist system's method of distribution is evil and bad and must be abolished. Engel's says views like this, that we can keep the capitalist mode of production and at the same time create a different and just mode of distribution, are "nonsense" and are expounded by people who have never grasped "the connection between production and distribution."

Dühring, having explained the origin of wealth, now turns to the subject of VALUE, and explains to us what "value" is. The value of a thing is, he says "the price or any other equivalent name, for example wages." The idea that Price = Value = Wages is absurd according to Engels.

So, what we have to find out is what value is and how it is determined. Dühring continues with a longer bombastic discussion of value and finally arrives at the conclusion that something's value depends on the labor time it takes to make it. He says: "The extent to which we invest our own energy into them (things) is the immediate determining cause of the existence of value in general and of a particular magnitude of it."

This is pretty pitiful as, Engels points out, this was already known, in the general way Dühring puts it, long before his (Dühring's) own time. And besides that, it is wrong in the way Dühring expresses it. It is not just your own energy – you have to make something with a USE VALUE and you have take into consideration the SOCIALLY NECESSARY labor time it takes to make something.

But Dühring's theory gets worse. Besides the labor it contains there is another factor determining "value" and that is the fact another group of men besides the workers intervene and demand payment for the access to nature and the tools necessary for labor. This is done by force, "sword in hand," and amounts to an increase in the price of commodities and their value so that this group can collect its money. Dühring says this amounts to a "tax surcharge" imposed by force [added to the original or "real" value].

Engels makes short work of this theory. If this is how prices are really set and value determined then what we have is, in effect, monopoly pricing. There are only two ways this could work. First all the sellers are jacking up the prices of their products. So as sellers they are reaping the profits of their "tax surcharge." But since all the products undergo this increase, the sellers, when they are buyers, also have to pay it and the surcharge cancels out. Engels says in this case "the prices have changed nominally but in reality – in their mutual relationship – have remained the same" and Dühring's forced increase in value is an 'illusion.'"

The second way of explaining the increase in value is the "tax surcharge" actually represents real value that the men with "swords in hand" are getting – namely they are getting value added to their products in the form of the unpaid labor of the working people. And this is just Marx's "theory of SURPLUS-VALUE." So Dühring's explanation of the creation of value is either an illusion or it is Marx's theory, a theory which Dühring rejects.

At least Dühring thinks he rejects it. His own theory, however, is just a "slovenly and confused" version of the theory of value proposed by David Ricardo and improved by Marx. Marx says: "The value of commodities is determined by the socially necessary general human labour embodied in them and this in turn is measured by its duration. Labour is the measure of all values, but labour itself has no value."

Dühring is trying to revive a really outmoded view that the value a commodity has is determined by the PRODUCTION OUTLAYS one of which, WAGES, measures what Dühring calls the "expenditure of energy" of the workers. This accounts for the production value of a commodity. The rest of the "value" is the "surcharge" added by the capitalist.

The view that wages = value = price [putting the "surcharge" aside] has been outmoded since the days of David Ricardo, Marx's immediate predecessor. Engels points out this view coexisted in Adam Smith with the view that labour time was the determinant of value but no one following scientific principles uses it now. However, there are still some who try to explain value this way [as true then as in 2010] for it is "the shallowest sycophants of the existing capitalist order of society who preach the determination of value by wages..." and who even say the capitalist's profits are themselves his wages – i.e., "the wages of abstinence", of risk, management, etc. This is the kind of vulgar economics upon which Dühring founds his socialism.

Let's look at the real beginning of human society. At some time in the distant past primitive groups of ancient humans scrabbled about in bands spending most of their time in search of food. This conditioned lasted for untold generations from the time of our separation from the common ancestor we shared with the chimpanzees – about five million years ago. Sometime in the last ten to 20,000 years in our own species some groups (Engel's says "families") began to collect or create more food and useful instruments than they needed for day to day survival. A surplus of subsistence was created beyond the costs of maintaining the population and the surplus even was able to grow to the point of a creating a "social production and reserve fund."

The creation of this fund was a revolutionary historical development and the beginning of all human progress from then until now. However in "history, up to the present, this fund has been the possession of a privileged class, on which also devolved, along with this possession, political supremacy and intellectual leadership." Today, as in the past, this fund is a social fund made up of "the total mass of raw materials, instruments of production and means of subsistence." Every war – imperialist or guerrilla – revolt, revolution, peasant uprising, worker's strike and election is a struggle over the control of this fund between those who control (or wish to control) it and those who make it. Socialism will exist when this fund is controlled by those who actually create it – the productive portion the society – the working people – and it has become THE COMMON PROPERTY OF SOCIETY.

Today this fund, in almost every country in the world, rests in the hands of the capitalist class. This would be impossible if value was determined by wages. In that case the workers would get back in wages the value they created and there would be no capitalist exploitation.

It is, however, the quantity of socially necessary labour expended, not wages that determines value. The workers create more value for the capitalist than he pays out in wages and this fact explains the origin of the profit on capital. It was Marx who discovered that these profits were merely a part, along with other kinds of appropriation, of the surplus value created by the workers. It is our duty as Marxists to educate the working people about these facts. Once the workers are aware of the true origin of THE WEALTH OF NATIONS they will take steps to end their own exploitation and in so doing the exploitation of humanity in general.

World Economy: The Elusive Recovery

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:55:00 +0000

Original source: People's Democracy (India)

The optimism that overcame global governments when growth figures for the last quarter of 2009 were released is fast receding. Growth has slowed sharply in the subsequent two quarters and unemployment rates are in danger of rising further. In the United States for example, growth in the last quarter of 2009 which was placed at 5 percent relative to the corresponding quarter of 2008, is estimated to have fallen to 3.7 and 1.6 percent in the subsequent two quarters. Unfortunately, this occurs at a time when the resolve to address the crisis has considerably weakened.

Not surprisingly, on September 9, the OECD which had, like many other organizations, been upbeat about the recovery of the world economy from the Great Recession, issued an interim assessment that reflected a new skepticism. “The world economic recovery may be slowing faster than previously anticipated”, it argued, with growth in the Group of Seven countries in the second half of 2010 projected at around 1½ percent on an annualized basis compared with its earlier estimate of around 2½ percent in the Economic Outlook released in May.

This was of significance because 2009, which was otherwise a depressing year, ended on an optimistic note. Considering the year as a whole, growth was negative in the leading economies and highly so in Japan, Germany and the UK. The recession that had set in at the end of 2007 had revealed itself in 2008 and intensified in 2009. What was most disconcerting was the sharp increase in unemployment rates in the US (from 5.8 percent in 2008 to 9.3 percent in 2009) and the high levels at which they stood in Germany (7.5 percent), France (9.4 percent) and the UK (7.5 percent).

However, as noted above, by the time full year’s figures for 2009 were available there was cause for optimism. The quarter-on-quarter annual growth rates seemed to suggest that the recession was already bottoming out in the third quarter of 2009 and had touched respectable levels in the last quarter, especially in the United States, Japan and France. The world it appeared was well on the way to recovery even though the high unemployment levels were still a cause for concern.

DASHED OPTIMISM

Unfortunately, that optimism has been dashed by performance during the next two quarters, when growth has decelerated quite sharply in the US and Japan, though it has gathered momentum in Germany and improved elsewhere in Europe. The difficulty is that Germany’s success as an exporter is often at the expense of other countries in the eurozone. Therefore, it is this turn over the first two quarters of 2010 that has affected the OECD’s projections and precipitated a sense of gloom.

It must be noted that the IMF has been more optimistic in its World Economic Outlook released in time for the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF held in October. It projects world output to grow at 4.8 percent during 2010, as compared with a contraction of 0.6 per cent in 2009. This, of course, is largely because of the optimism generated by the sharp recovery in the emerging markets of Asia and Latin America. In fact, the IMF has been forced to recognize the considerable unevenness in growth performance. It notes that: “The United States and Japan experienced a noticeable slowdown during the second quarter of 2010, while growth accelerated in Europe and stayed strong in emerging and developing economies.” And again that: “Household spending is doing well in emerging market economies, but in advanced economies, low consumer confidence, high unemployment, stagnant incomes, and reduced household wealth are holding consumption down.”

The recognition of these differences is partly visible in the optimistic growth projections. The emerging and developing economies are expected to grow by 7.1 percent in 2010, as compared with 2.5 percent in 2009. On the other hand, the advanced economies are expected to grow by 2.7 percent in 2010, as opposed to the contraction of 3.2 percent they experienced in 2009. This modest recovery too is to an extent due to the significant turnaround in the newly industrialized Asian economies (included by the IMF among the advanced) from -0.9 percent in 2009 to 7.8 percent in 2010. In sum, the core of capitalism as we know it today is even in the optimistic projections of the IMF expected to grow rather slowly this year.

The fundamental problems remain the same. Household balance sheets are under strain because of the legacy of debt accumulated during the boom. Unemployment is curtailing current incomes. And credit is either unavailable to or being avoided by those who need to expand consumption because of a collapse of net worth. In the event, private consumption expenditure in much of the developed world, which stagnated in real terms in 2008 and declined significantly in 2009, is unlikely to recover substantially in 2010. On the other hand, governments across the developed world, overcome by conservative fears of excess public debt, are holding back on public expenditure or resorting to severe austerity measures that are sparking public dissent as in parts of Europe. Aggregate spending therefore is low. Not surprisingly, output growth remains sluggish.

In sum, the fear that an early retreat from the stimulus would deliver a second dip is still with us, at least in the developed world. Even in the US, where talk of a stimulus is repeatedly heard, the requisite action to spur the economy is not forthcoming. The situation in the US is most appropriate for recovery led by fiscal expansion. The unemployment problem persists and may be worsening as indicated by the fact that overall jobs fell by 95,000 in September. This was despite the fact that the private sector created 64,000 jobs that month and indicates that government spending cuts are substantially to blame. Unutilized capacity is rampant. And inflation is at a low that worries even Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. Consumer prices in the US rose by just 1.1 percent over the year ending September 2010 and by just 0.1 percent between August and September. Bernanke has declared that “inflation is running at rates that are too low” and called for an inflation target of “two per cent or a bit below.”

WRONG BELIEF

This would imply that a major stimulus is in order. But when talk of the stimulus arises it takes the form only of a monetary stimulus or “quantitative easing”. This involves large doses or several billions of dollars of asset purchases by the Federal Reserve aimed at injecting liquidity into the economy and driving down interest rates. The problem with this approach is the belief that the desire or inducement to spend or invest exists and the problem is the lack of credit to fuel such spending. That is a belief that has been proved wrong many times over in recent history. Yet there are myriad ways in which liquidity is sought to be injected into the system. For example, the Treasury department has announced a $1.5 billion program aimed at small businesses and designed to trigger $15 billion in additional private lending.

What the quantitative easing does is that it lowers UN interest rates, widens the differential between interest rates in that country and elsewhere in the world and encourages, therefore, the carry trade. When additional liquidity is injected, financial investors (rather than industrial firms) borrow dollars at low interest rates, convert those dollars to currencies of countries where interest rates or financial returns are high or just higher and make an investment to benefit from the differential in returns.

The consequence of encouraging movements of this kind is that there is a surge of capital flows into emerging markets in Asia and Latin America that is strengthening their currencies and inviting intervention on their part to prevent currency appreciation that worsens their competitiveness. The fall outs are the much talked about “currency wars” that are mistakenly presented as the cause of rather than, partly, the result of uneven development. It is not that the faster growth of these emerging economies is the result of undervalued currencies. To the extent that in some cases that faster growth is the result of export success, the success is due to cost competitiveness which in substantial measure stems from the availability of cheap surplus labour in a context where capital and technology are mobile but labour is not. Best-practice technologies are combined with cheap labour in these locations for production for world markets. Overall, it is better performance resulting from cost competitiveness which delivers a trade surplus and encourages the capital inflow surge that tends to appreciate the currencies of these countries and undermine their competitiveness.

It is in this light that we must view the IMF’s optimism that comes from the fact that the emerging markets are doing well enough to lift “global growth.” That unevenness is not the basis for combined growth but for conflict that demands responses that could undermine the competitiveness of the emerging market economies. Moreover, the capital inflow surge into some of these emerging markets results in real estate and stock market bubbles that are likely to burst and therefore render such growth fragile. What is needed is a return to an effort at having a globally synchronized fiscal push with measures to distribute the benefits of that push across continents and countries. It is that option that the IMF foregoes when it emphasizes the need to “stabilize and subsequently reduce high public debt” and calls for “a strengthening of private demand in advanced economies” without explaining how that is to be ensured.

Photo by Editor B/Bart Everson, courtesy Flickr, cc by 2.0.

African American Youth Joblessness and the "New Normal"

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:44:00 +0000

Original source: BlackCommentator.com

It's possible that I just didn't see it but one of the most significant and alarming statistic in the nation's September employment report seems to have gone mostly unnoticed. So here it is. The unemployment rate for each of the major demographic groups remained about the same last month, some even declined a tad. However, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for African Americans between the ages of 16 and 19 reached 49 percent, up from 45.4 percent in August and 41.7 percent for the same period last year.

It used to be that when people concerned with the matter commented on the black teenage jobless rate, they would put in a line about half, or nearly half, of the young people were without work in major urban centers. Now it's the case from Boston to Bakersfield. Is this the "new normal" we hear so much about?

Pointing to a somewhat different set of statistics, here is what David Rosnick of the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote October 8:

The economy lost 95,000 jobs in September - 77,000 of which were temporary Census positions - while the unemployment rate held at 9.6 percent. Including downward revisions in payroll employment for July and August, there are 110,000 fewer jobs than reported one month ago.

Though the overall rate of unemployment did not change in September, different populations were not similarly affected by employment changes. The employment-to-population ratio was unchanged at 58.5 percent. While white adults saw relatively little change in their EPOPs (-0.1 percentage points for men, 0.1 percentage points for women), the EPOP for black men aged 20 and over fell 0.5 percentage points in the month and 2.6 percentage
points for African-American teens.

The fall in the latter is particularly striking as only 16.2 percent of black teens were employed as recently as May. Ten years ago, 29.5 percent of black teens were employed compared to 11.7 percent in September.

This cannot be considered acceptable. The Congress and the White House should be told that this is unacceptable. Those people out there trying to rally the "hip-hop vote" ought to take the lead in saying this situation cannot endure.

There is already far too much pain and economic insecurity in the African American community which has taken a big hit economically because of the system's most recent crisis. If it remains almost impossible for a couple of generations of young women and men to earn a decent living, it is calamitous for black people and the country. They cannot become the personification of the "new normal."

And we don't need to hear anymore misleading claims that these young people have been "left behind by history," victims of technology and globalization. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke said the other day that the country's current jobless level reflects the state of the economy, is not what some refer to as "structural" and that little of it can be traced to people having the wrong skills or being in the wrong location. This view was echoed last week by labor market expert Peter Diamond, recipient of this year's Nobel Prize for Economics.

The New York Times said editorially last Sunday that as soon as the November election is over the President "needs to fight harder for big stimulus projects - in infrastructure or alternative energy. He has to keep pushing until Congress and the public understand that without more stimulus the best that can happen will be years of only limping along." For these unemployed minority youth it's much worse than limping along.

Last week, President Obama took questions from an audience of young people, in person and by way of Twitter, during a session streamed live on the Web. At one point a young black man complained that despite all the government recent spending "our unemployment rate still rises" and that even though he is a college graduate he's having trouble finding a job. The President responded with his now stock answer: the jobs were lost before I was elected and the Administration kept the country out of a real depression. These kids know what a real depression feels like. It's having empty pockets in a madly consumerist society. It's being unable to plan for a family and things like having children and sending them to school.

The question is where do we go from here?

The President recently laid out a proposal for a moderate stimulus program involving a reasonable project to see to the country's real infrastructure needs. But we didn't hear much about it after that and the trifling Congress adjourned to go home and try to save their collective butts.

At the beginning of the year, the Economic Policy Institute projected that unemployment for African Americans would reach a 25-year high of 17.2 percent this year with the rates in five states exceeding 20 percent. Three quarters into the year it stands at 16.1 percent, up from 15.5 percent a year ago. "These sobering data show us that the nation must do more to address the ongoing human tragedy brought on by this recession," EPI researcher Kai Filion commented at the time. "There is no reason why we should tolerate such outcomes - elected officials can and must put millions of Americans back to work with bold, targeted job creation policies."

Among the consequences Filion predicted is a staggering poverty rate of 50percent for African American children.

When the International Monetary Fund met in Washington October 9, its managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, issued a sobering warning. "We face the risk of a lost generation," he said. "When you lose your job, your health is likely to be worse. When you lose your job, the education of your children is likely to be worse. When you lose your job, social stability is likely to be worse - which threatens democracy and even peace. So we shouldn't fool ourselves. We are not out of the woods yet. And for the man in the street, a recovery without jobs doesn't mean much."

Photo by AFL-CIO, courtesy Flickr, cc by 2.0

Book Review: Building a Healthy Black Harlem

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Building a Healthy Black Harlem: Health Politics in Harlem, New York, from the Jazz Age to the Great Depression
By Jamie J. Wilson
Amherst, New York, Cambria Press, 2009

In a period of national struggle for a universal, affordable health system, Jamie J. Wilson's new book, Building a Healthy Black Harlem, a story of the fight to improve health conditions and medical care in Harlem in the first few decades of the 20th century is as relevant as ever. In addition to serving as a strong, well-researched historical study of Harlem's African American community to care for one another and to win meaningful resources to service the community, Wilson does well to link those efforts to today's issues.

Wilson opens the book with a careful quantitative study of the health conditions in Harlem in those years. He links those conditions to the economic and political realities as they were impacted by racial discrimination and structural racism. As he notes, "By the late 1920s, de jury and de facto segregation in New York City had created a situation where black Harlem had within its boundaries some of the most densely populated block, many congested and unsafe apartment buildings, and excessively high rents." Both sanitary conditions and the spread of infectious disease presented combined with this background to make Harlem's mortality rates among the highest in the city. In addition, policies of overt discrimination and exclusion in the city's medical centers and hospitals meant that most of Harlem crowded into a single public hospital and a handful of private sanitariums and community clinics.

In the attempt to compensate for this dire situation African Americans turned to what Wilson's describes as "magico-religious" caregivers. Unwilling to dismiss this portion of the health services sector as simply "quacks" as the authorities in the city and the state had done, Wilson argues the hundreds of men and women who worked in this field served a particular cultural need and reflected a commonly held belief in the interrelatedness of "sickness, health, and well-being [that] were situated in and ideological and cultural world." Simply put, "magico-religious practitioners and their Black clients understood the connectedness of their environment and their well-being and sought avenues to improve both in a society in which racism prevented their ready access to either. To this effect, Wilson argues, occult practices and other forms of "quack" medicine may not have been serious medicine but these practitioners south "to help their clients take control of their lives and the healing process."

A statewide political and criminal campaign to outlaw and suppress these practices may have been well intentioned on the part of the newly professionalizing medical field, but little was done in the way of trying to improve the dire health conditions in Harlem that caused such practices to flourish.

Wilson continues the narrative by examining the community movement to win political concessions from the city to hire African American doctors at Harlem Hospital. In fact, Wilson reveals how this fight came at a time when African American voters began to understand the failures of the Republican Party to address their needs and the beginnings of the shift in party loyalty to the Democrats formalized under Roosevelt's New Deal administration in the 1930s. To African American Harlemites the struggle for more Black doctors and nurses meant more than token representation. The goal was increased community control over decision making in the health care field. Some early successes in the fight revealed growing African American power. In a chapter on the impact of the New Deal on health reform in Harlem, Wilson details the fight for increased access to affordable medical care, improved sanitary conditions in housing, access to public housing as an alternative to privately controlled apartment buildings, and improved education, child care, and safe streets and parks that Harlemites linked to the fight to improve the overall health of their community.

This important historical study is a rewarding and quick read. If you are interested in a rare look at the struggle for civil rights as it was linked to the issue of health care this useful little book will likely fill a big hole in your library.

Straightedge: Revolutionary Abstinence

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 07:07:00 +0000

Intoxication: derived from the Latin word “intoxicatio,” meaning “to poison one’s self.”

The “straightedge” movement was born almost 30 years ago, spontaneously and simultaneously in different parts of the USA. Youths who had entered the punk rock counterculture as an outlet for rebellion soon realized it was saturated with many of the same crutches and negative influences as mainstream society: drug abuse, promiscuity, sexism, racism, chauvinism, homophobia, and identity found in fashion trends. A new level of rebellion, a counterculture of counterculture, was formed in positive, sober living. This was not so much a political movement as a desire to not be associated with “those guys”: the partying types. The partying types were synonymous with violence, date rape, unaccountability, escapism, and wrecked cars.

The term “straightedge” was officially coined in 1984 in a phone conversation between Ian McKaye (at the time singer of the band Minor Threat from Washington, D.C.) and Kevin Seconds (singer of 7 Seconds from Reno, Nev.). However, sober bands like SS Decontrol and DYS were spearheading the movement in Boston in 1981. The Minor Threat song “Out of Step” states the fundamentals: “I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I don’t f**k. At least I can f**king think.” Emblems of identity emerged in the forms of a black sheep, an “X”, and variations of the “X.” Soon after the coining of the name, vegetarianism and veganism were de facto added to the regimen. The stage was set for a secular, positive youth movement, and after three decades it is stronger than ever.

Straightedge may sound basic and “common-sensible,” but the social sciences under the surface show a more advanced strategy for revolutionary social change.

From a sociological standpoint, drug use is wrecking, and has always wrecked, a stable family or relationship environment. Seventy-five percent of all domestic violence is directly linked to drug abuse. Sixty-five percent of drug addicts (including alcoholics) are introduced to the substance via their family or closest friends. Fifty percent of the citizens of the USA have a loved one who is suffering from drug abuse at any given time. Twenty-five percent of all deaths can be attributed to drug use. Since drug use is a prerequisite to drug abuse, abstaining from the initial drug use prevents a person from becoming one of the aforementioned statistics. Also, the family’s money is not spent on drugs. Drugs are relatively inexpensive, and a staggering amount of the world’s poor will spend their last dollar on a temporary escape, contributing to their own poverty.

Alcohol manufacturers, coca and marijuana syndicates, and “chemists” have created a colossal destructive industry based on both legitimate and black market demand. Philip Morris Intl and Anheuser-Busch, although both household names, are no more concerned with the public well being than the Sinaloa Cartel (Mexico) or the Noorzai Organization (Afghanistan). By using the tactic of “voting with dollars,” the straightedge movement reduces demand for their “goods” and limits their power, one person at a time. It can be argued that if an activist spends his or her energy fighting against Huntington Life Sciences or Wal-Mart, and then heads home to a six-pack and terrorizing their kids … the gesture is wasted.

Unfortunately, straightedge is also true-to-form with other revolutionary movements in these ways: a) it is exhausting for many, and b) it can lead to social isolation.

The social norm in much of the world is to partake in social drug use (for example, having a beer or two) and attend parties. Sometimes the desire to be part of the majority outweighs the virtues of the counterculture, and many members wind up “selling out” (sometimes after decades of sobriety). More commonly, the presence of a straightedge enthusiast, or “edge kid,” causes the nearest friends and family to develop a negative defensive response to such a positive lifestyle. There are a number of reasons for this: feelings of inferiority, constant reminder of mistakes made via drug use, feeling of recruitment pressure, and seeing the sober person as an outsider who is distancing himself or herself. The “sellouts” often consider themselves shunned (even when self-induced) by the straightedge community, and often become vehement antagonists to the movement.

Whether a person chooses to become a member of the straightedge movement for personal, political, economic, or social reasons, the similarities and trials prove to be no different than in many other kinds of radical groups.

But here’s the bottom line for me. I tried my first drug (cocaine) when I was only 12 years old, and I partook of my last drug (alcohol) at age 13. I have been sober for 21 years and a member and advocate of the straightedge movement for 20. My family lineage is littered with crutches, and my environment is overwhelmingly escapist. Without sobriety, I am certain that my life would have taken a darker turn or even ended in a young death. I cannot prove this, of course, but the proof for me has been watching my childhood friends and family members become addicts and corpses because of drug use. I also find comfort in the knowledge that no pusher, manufacturer, conglomerate or cartel has made a penny from me in the last two decades.

Photo courtesy Nicholas James

Poem: Socialism

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 07:01:00 +0000

“Everyone knows socialism
Is kaput, Marilyn says,
dead as a doornail, discredited
since the fall of the Berlin Wall,

how can you call yourself
a socialist – I mean, after all
the terrible things
that have happened?”

“Don’t you read
the New York Times, Jack?
Don’t you watch
the evening news?”

“Yes, terrible mistakes
were made,”Jack says,

“From the zigs and zags
of agricultural policy
to the theory
of socialism in one country,

from the sweep
of Stalin’s prison camps
to the lack
of workers democracy.

In the end the workers turned away
from the Party,
a bureaucracy in the name
of socialism ruled,

though that doesn’t mean
the workers of the world won’t
rise up, plant that flag
again and again

until we get it right,
find the solution
to war, poverty
and unemployment –

who knows, with a little courage,
learning the lessons of the past,
maybe sooner
than some people think,

Just look at the BP oil disaster
and the stock market crash,

I mean, capitalism isn’t
doing so well these days,
in case you hadn’t noticed,
Marilyn,”

“Yes, Marilyn says,
gazing inwardly,
“Yes, that is
true. “

(this poem is reprinted from Chrishe Summer, 2010
issue of Blue Collar Review)