Daily Archives: January 5, 2021

Photo: David Rovics.

Have you ever found yourself surrounded by masked rioters being chased by flag-waving patriots and thought, Ive seen this movie before?

I woke up this morning dreaming that I was speaking at one of your rallies. I thought then, well, if I probably wont be getting an invitation to speak at one of them, what would I say if I were to be asked to share some words?

Contrary to popular opinion in kindergarten, words are far more powerful than either sticks or stones, and I think this is something that most of us actually already know. Words can be used to divide and rule entire societies, it seems. We can have some people on some TV networks saying some sets of words, with other people on other networks using different vocabulary, and a different perspective, to talk about the same issues, and pretty soon we can achieve an endless series of tragic physical results from such words.

So I especially like to avoid alarm-bell words that require lots of defining if youre going to use them successfully, or else no one really knows what they mean. If I do use such a word, Ill tend to define it clearly first, unless Im writing for a very particular audience. Im mostly talking about ism words such as as socialism, anarchism, communism, capitalism, fascism, nationalism, supremacism, racism, anti-racism, sexism, progressivism, conservatism, liberalism, elitism.

Other words are important, or at least to some people they can be, so Id want to first say that Im so sorry Aaron Danielson was killed. Without getting into the details and not having been present, many of us were expected something like this to happen. Whether the next person killed at a protest was going to be shot or run over was unknown, but that someone else would be killed was just a matter of time.

Many people, of course, avoided downtown that day, knowing there would be lots of armed people with different opinions all in the same place at the same time, shouting at each other and worse. Other people, perhaps people with stronger political convictions than most, cant stay home. Such as many of the folks who I hope might be hearing these words right now.

There are a lot of people, from a wide variety of political orientations, who would think it pointless for me to be even attempt to communicate with you. They think the divide is too great. Theyre expecting all the predictions of civil war to come true. They think folks like you and I live in our insulated little echo chambers, in different worlds, and we couldnt even communicate with each other if we tried. And then, going to protests, as you and I have done so often, any of us can bear out the fact that there is a whole lot more bear mace being sprayed in different directions than anything resembling communication going on. Looking at my YouTube channel, the comment section on certain songs largely consists of people exchanging death threats with each other.

But I think the folks who think were hopelessly polarized and have no grounds for communication are completely wrong. I think we live in the same world, and we face the same sorts of problems, and could benefit from the same sorts of solutions, too, and I think many of you already agree with this notion. Thats what I would really want to focus on, if I were speaking at one of your rallies.

I think about so many of the rallies when Ive seen you guys around, and I dont want to judge too much by appearances, but to me you look mostly like members of the working class. Some of you might be rich, I dont know, but Id be willing to bet that at least 99% of you arent. Many of you are military veterans, which is also true of no small number of those among the ranks of the groups you oppose.

Being members of the working class living in the Portland area, as so many of you are, and as I and most of my friends are, Ill bet there are a whole lot of things we have in common.

Ill bet half of us live in the same sorts of two-story, wooden, grey, Class C apartment complexes that you can see lining most of the major roads in most of the neighborhoods of both Portland and across the river in Vancouver. Ill bet many of us have the same landlord, in the form of an investment group, such as Prime or Randall. Ill bet our apartment complexes are managed by the same stingy management company, such as CTL. And Ill bet your rent also doubled over the past ten years, and this development has caused you great consternation, made you angry, made you want to find solutions.

Oh, and did you happen to notice that during the time your rent doubled, Obama was in the White House? Hard not to notice coincidences like that.

And while your rent was doubling during the Obama years, maybe you, like me, were having kids, making a family, hoping to move into a bigger place, maybe to buy a house, only to see any such hopes dashed by the reality that the cost of buying a house or renting a bigger apartment was out of the question, if you didnt have a six-figure income.

And during that decade, who was running the city you lived in, where the rents and the taxes kept going up and up, while your income did not? Democrats. I noticed that, too.

When you look around your neighborhood at all the construction sites here in the booming Pacific Northwest, and you see the workers, and when things break at your apartment complex and you see who comes to do repairs, and who maintains the grounds, did you notice that most of the people doing most of the work are immigrants? I noticed that, too.

And who are the people always advocating for the rights of immigrants, and for taking in more immigrants and refugees, while the cost of living keeps going up and jobs are as scarce as they are? Democrats, once again, as I know you have observed.

Have you ever wondered, if we had a lot less immigration in this country, what that might do to wages in the construction industry? Theyd go up, right? Thats obvious, isnt it? Same for other industries, too, right?

A lot of people look at all of this, they put two and two together, and they conclude that the policies of the Democratic Party are not very conducive to our survival. If they want to do things like welcome lots of immigration, export jobs with free trade deals, and govern cities in such a way that the rent doubles every ten years, maybe its very reasonable to conclude that the Democratic Party isnt representing the interests of the general population. Did you reach that conclusion at some point along the line?

And then someone comes along who wants to deal with this mess, to do something on behalf of most people, drain the swamp, build the wall, stop the flood of immigrants taking so many of the jobs, end the endless wars and stop policing the world, get out of free trade deals, put up tariffs, and try to make moves to reverse the trend of everything going in the wrong direction all the time, and for supporting his evidently reasonable policies, you are called every bad name in the book.

But then, as you have been giving your support to this president, you may have also been noticing that many of the policies hes been talking about are opposed not only by the Democrats, but, at least until very recently, by most of the Republican leadership as well. You may also have begun to notice that the man doesnt necessarily support the things he says he supports, and he hasnt drained the swamp at all. Am I right? Or did I just lose you there? Im just guessing there are a lot of you who realize, on some level, along the line, that Trump is mostly just saying the things he thinks you want to hear, and then governing on behalf of big business, like very rich politicians have done in DC for a very long time.

Being a history buff, if I were speaking at one of your rallies Id want to try to talk about what I see as some pretty clear historical parallels between now and a century ago. Trump seems new and unconventional in many ways, but this kind of societal divide between large groups of economically struggling Americans on different sides of issues like immigration goes way back.

Exactly one hundred years ago here in the Pacific Northwest and around the United States, as well as across Canada, conflict raged in the streets. Veterans of the First World War made up the ranks of many of the people involved on all sides of it. The cities were full of returning soldiers, many of whom were sick with the Spanish Flu. Disease was rampant, there was insufficient housing, and not enough jobs, either. At the same time, a massive influx of immigrants from war-torn Europe was coming, along with the returning soldiers from the war.

It was a situation designed for conflict, and conflict there was. On one side were people who viewed themselves as patriots, who wanted to control the dramatic impact that widespread immigration was having on the job and housing markets, and in society generally. On the other side was a labor union led largely by immigrants, who said everyone the working class throughout the world, regardless of nation, race, gender or other such factors should be organized into One Big Union.

This movement saw the First World War and immigration from Europe that was going on at the time as just two more ways the ruling class was trying to divide the working class, and have us fighting each other, whether on different sides of trenches in European wars, or in competition over low-paying jobs here in the US, in order to make sure those jobs keep on paying badly, and the owners make more profits. Instead of opposing immigration, they organized immigrants along with everyone else. They had learned that they had to make a choice between supporting their nation, in the sense of supporting the imperial goals of their governing elite, or supporting their class, and they chose the latter.

Today, there is no massive, ecumenical movement of the working class for us all to join. No such alternative like that currently exists. When it did exist, laws were passed, called the Alien and Sedition Acts, and a national police force was formed called the FBI in order to destroy the movement. Union halls across the country were burned to the ground, and union organizers of all races were lynched under bridges here in the Pacific Northwest.

But the kind of vision that formed this movement that was so targeted by the authorities back then has in the past been so powerful that it has brought down governments, it has forced the worlds biggest corporations to make massive concessions, it has reshaped entire societies for the better. It has also brought down upon it such terrible repression, it has been so targeted by the authorities and so alternately vilified and silenced by history, that even the very concept that the movement ever existed seems like a utopian fantasy, not like a practical reality that has shaped the world as we know it, perhaps more than any other force besides gravity.

I may be a geek, but if I had the chance to speak at one of your rallies, Id want to talk about patterns. There is a pattern happening here, and these consistencies between Portland in 1920 and Portland in 2020 are not accidental. The dynamics of the conflicts in this society now are created by the same sorts of people who were creating them back then. In many cases, their direct descendants. These things tend to run in the family, as does inherited wealth.

Why does the political elite enact policies intended to create these conflicts, and why do they then make moves to exacerbate them? In the back of our minds, I think we all know the answer. If I were speaking at one of your rallies, and I asked this question, would anybody shout, divide and conquer, or am I being overly optimistic? Because it seems to me that as long as those who, for example, support increasing immigration and those who support decreasing immigration can be in conflict with each other over the scraps dropped from the table of the ruling class, the ruling elite wins.

The ruling class logic is so simple and effective on us, its hard to even see its there. Most Mexicans accept such low wages because theyre either undocumented and living in the shadows of the law, or theyre competing with people who are in that situation. And, as you know too well from personal experience, in all likelihood, the rest of us are competing with them, too. And unless we take the concept of exclusion to its logical conclusion and we really think laws and walls are going to keep out the hundreds of millions of people just on the other side of the southern border who also need to feed their children, or unless we believe genocide is the actual solution here, then all the people living in this country are going to have to have the opportunity to work, and if theyre going to work, theyre going to have to be paid, and if theyre going to to be paid, then whatever theyre paid is what youre going to get paid, too. So if you want to be paid well, and to live in an affordable place, you have to stand up for everyone elses rights to a living wage and decent housing. Thats what these conflicts in other societies have taught us. The ruling elite here learned those lessons from history, too, which is why they divide and rule the way they do.

Im a musician, by profession, and before the pandemic I used to tour a lot. Ireland is one of the places where I have the most fans. There are reasons for this, both political and cultural, but Ill save that discussion for another time. Point is, I have a fairly deep familiarity with some other countries where I have spent a lot of my time over the decades, working. In a part of Ireland called Northern Ireland, which is more a political term than a geographical one, the population is fairly evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants. The Catholics there have long lived as second-class citizens, and what has come to be known as the Troubles, which resulted in thousands of people being killed in Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s, was largely about Catholics having equality with Protestants.

So, you can see if you look at it that there is this, even now, a simmering conflict going on between two groups of people in this very conflicted part of the world that we call Northern Ireland. If youre part of the society, you will likely have developed ideas about the folks who live on the other side of the wall those Protestants only care about other Protestants, or those Catholics are criminally inclined, etc. and you likely will have developed a sort of bipolar, Catholic/Protestant view of the world, as a sort of default, whether you feel passionately about it or not.

But if you back up and look at it from the outside even if you just go work in England for a few years, like so many Irish do, from both sides of the sectarian divide what youll see looking back at Northern Ireland are two groups of people we call Catholics and Protestants, one group of which is generally a little better-off than the other, but what youll notice most of all is that the majority of both Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are poor by European standards. I heard one speaker at a union rally in Derry note that the Catholic community in Northern Ireland has the fifth worst quality of housing in Europe, while the Protestants have the sixth worst housing standards.

Back to the US. Contrary to the rhetoric, our ruling elite consists of millionaire Democrats as well as millionaire Republicans. The Congress consists almost entirely of millionaires, the Democrats being slightly richer than their Republican counterparts. And history shows us in abundance that different elements of the two groups of millionaires are always vying, over the years, decades, and centuries, to convince us all that they represent us, or different elements of us, the people of this country. What theyre doing in their efforts to appeal to different segments of society, in effect, is practicing divide and rule politics. Who theyre trying to divide from whom doesnt even vary that much over the years, though the dynamics evolve somewhat.

What Id most want to get across, if I were ever to have access to your attention, is that the reason they need to divide us is because they cant afford to have us be united. And the reason they cant afford to see us united is because they dont rule on our behalf, they rule on behalf of the 1%. Neither party represents us, the working class majority, of whatever color or gender. And Trump doesnt, either, no matter how much he may succeed in painting himself as an outsider or a rebel of some kind.

What the elite from both ruling parties want is division. What they want is for us to shout at each other and shoot each other. They will try in so many different ways to make that happen. They and their friends who run the major social media platforms, with their conflict algorithms, and their friends in the corporate media, whether CNN or Fox will do their best to reduce the debate to some people calling others fascists who love racism, while others are called communists who hate freedom, or anarchists who love chaos and arson.

What they fear most, I would conclude, is a united working class. Or, to put it another way, a working class that is aware of its own existence. Or, to put it another way, class solidarity, and especially international class solidarity. What they love most are pawns.

Read the original here:

An Open Letter to Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys (CC: ANTIFA) - CounterPunch

We need your help. The economic fallout of the coronavirus crisis is threatening our ability to keep producing the quality reporting you've come to love. If youre able, please consider making a monthly contribution to the Mercury.

Minneapolis residents protest the police shooting of Dolal Idd. Getty Images / Stephen Maturen

Happy New Year, dear reader! We at the Mercury have been hibernating the past ten days to cleanse ourselves from 2020 and to prepare for a new 12 months of unknowns. Which means: We have some catching up to do in this morning's news roundup! Let's jump right in to make sure you (and we) start this new year off somewhat informed:

- Alas, COVID-19 didn't disappear at the strike of midnight on Dec. 31, 2020. Instead, countries like the UK, Japan, Scotland, Thailand, Israel, and South Korea are ramping up regulations as COVID-19 cases surge into the new year.

- Of course, the US hasn't been spared from this uptick. While holiday health department closures have delayed reporting on the current number of US cases, the national outlook is grim. To help the COVID-19 vaccine catch up with the continuing case count, some health officials are proposing halving vaccine doses or even holding off on distributing the second dose of the vaccine to stretch the vaccine across more Americans. (Dr. Fauci isn't on board).

- In a Saturday phone call, Donald Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" more votes the flip the state's presidential race results in Trump's favor. In the recording obtained by the Washington Post, Trump cited baseless conspiracy theories as to why he believes he still won the stateall rejected by Republican Raffensperger, who put it this way: Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.

- This incredibly shady, probably illegal move comes days before Georgia is set to hold its much-anticipated runoff elections for its two US Senate seats. The Tuesday election will determine which party will have political majority over the Senate in president-elect Joe Biden's first years in office, a sure way to predict how difficult (or easy!) it will be for him to pass progressive policies through our deeply partisan legislative branch. Here's what you need to know about tomorrow's dual races.

- Some good news:

- A UK judge has denied the US' request to extradite Wikileaks' Julian Assange to face charges of espionage and government hacking, citing concerns about the threats to Assange's mental health in US prison. Another opportunity to discuss the US' incredibly fucked-up incarceration system wasted on the privileged, white, and wealthy.

- At least one person has died from a COVID-19 outbreak in a San Jose hospital that might have been spurred by a staffer who "wore an inflatable holiday costume to lift spirits," according to the Los Angeles Times. Investigators believed the staffer's fan-powered Christmas Tree costume spread the infection across the medical facility.

- In Minneapolis, 2021 began with a scene reminiscent of 2020: Hundreds of people in the streets protesting the police killing of a Black man. On December 30, Minneapolis police fatally shot 23-year-old Dolal Idd during a traffic stop, where police say Idd had fired a gun. Information about the case remains predictably hazy, but the way local law enforcement have responded to the caseincluding conducting a raid on Idd's family home before telling Idd's family members he had been killedhas been enough to spark outrage.

- In Oregon, the last week of the year was also defined by protests. On New Year's Eve, some 100 Portlanders gathered downtown to demonstrate against police violence, a gathering that ended with looting, vandalism, and small fires. Mayor Ted Wheeler called the protest "selfish," and led largely by young white men associated with violent antifa and anarchists (Editor's note: cringe). Wheeler vowed to increase penalties for people repeatedly arrested for protest-related vandalism. The following day, about 200 right-wing protesters met in Salem to oppose the state government's COVID-19 safety restrictions and spread false information about the virus' spread in Oregon. Three were arrested.

- Multnomah County District Attorney will finally be sworn-in today, where he'll hopefully unveil some hints of how he'll fulfill his bold campaign promises of criminal justice reform. Watch the 1 pm ceremony here.

- A weather check: Expect rain to continue throughout the day with some bonus wind. Fun!

-Finally, the most meaningful thing I watched on my time off:

Follow this link:

New Year, Same News: Trump Pushes for Election Fraud, Minneapolis Police Kill Black Man, and Wheeler Bemoans Antifa - The Portland Mercury

Trump supporters gather for the Stop the Steal rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12, 2020.

Photo: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA/AP

On Wednesday, President Donald Trumps craven loyalists in Congress plan to disrupt the certification of President-elect Joe Bidens victory. Whether cynical or delusional, their plan to reject swing-state electors will fail to overturn the election results. Meanwhile, Trump has called upon his supporters to descend on Washington, D.C., that day to demand that Congress hand him a second term. The protest, he tweeted, will be wild.

Under the auspices of Trumps last stand, violence from his furious supporters seems all but inevitable.For Black communities and other communities of color in Washington, thousands of white supremacists amassing in their city is in itself a threat of violence. For far-right groups, the presidents call represents a follow-up to his earlier, perturbing suggestion that the Proud Boys stand by. Now, they are being activated.

Posts about Wednesdays protests shared on Telegram and Parler,the social media platform preferred by the far right, include promises of boots on the ground and anonymous tips for smuggling guns into Washington, where gun laws are strict. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, posted that his group would turn up in record numbers. The last major Stop the Steal rally inWashington in December ended in four stabbings as Proud Boys attacked passersby and anti-fascist counterprotesters after dark.

Yet the last stand narrative surrounding Wednesdays planned protests is no more than the rhetoric of escalation. There should be little doubt that Trump, desperate and wretched in defeat, will continue to call upon his base of white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, Proud Boys, and other fascists to rally after the election is certified perhaps long after Biden is inaugurated.

Even without Trumps direct incitements, the far-right violence emboldened under his presidency is not going away.

Even without Trumps direct incitements, though, the far-right violence emboldened under his presidency is not going away. While the stated aim of die-hard Trump supporters may for the moment be to reverse a stolen election, these groups will continue to exist and spread violence as a central part of their ethos when they gather en masse. That ethos, of course, is white supremacy. It is no accident that in addition to the stabbings, Decembers Stop the Steal rally inWashington saw members of the fascistic group vandalize two Black churches and tear down and burn Black Lives Matter flags an act of destruction for which Tarrio was arrested inWashington on Monday.

An exclusive focus on far-right attacks in response to Trumps loss risks overlooking the ways already extant white supremacist violence will remain the core extremist threat under Biden. Attacks might come from far-right vigilantes, but we should also be wary of violence perpetrated by government agencies, such asimmigration authorities and police.

Its clear that white supremacy undergirds the commitment to restoring Trump as president. While the fight to overturn the election could well dissipate, the racist, fascistic ideology driving the effort will remain intact.

Armed militia members watch members of antifa during a Stop the Steal protest at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Dec. 12, 2020.

Photo: Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

Focusing on the roots of Trumpian violence does not mean ignoring the new dangers posed by the spread of baseless conspiracies around the presidents electoral loss, which have now become central to the true believers worldview. We now have millions of people that essentially believe that an evil cabal has staged a coup on the government and that militant action is the only solution, Shane Burley, the Portland, Oregon-based author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It, told me. That is the recipe for seemingly impulsive acts of violence. Im more concerned about lethal far-right vigilante attacks now than I was when Trump was elected.

The loss and his refusal to concede have infused a renewed and dangerous millenarianism into a significant portion of his base, who believe in the necessity of Trumps presidency with ultrareligious zeal. It makes for fertile ground for sporadic political violence: Numerous election officials and Republicans who have challenged Trumps lies have been threatened since November.

Thedanger posed by even a tiny percentage of those who believe the election fraud conspiracies and are willing to take violent action is disturbing. If just one in 100,000 of the people who voted for Trump came to that conclusion, youd have an army of 740 domestic terrorists, wrote Paul Waldman in the Washington Post. How much death and chaos could they cause with a campaign of bombings and mass shootings?

The concerns are entirely valid but not to the exclusion of the larger, ongoing white supremacist threat.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies found that white supremacist groups were responsible for two-thirds of the 61 terrorist plots and attacks in the first eight months of 2020. Since 2009, the far right has been responsible for over 70 percent of extremist murders. In 2019,the FBIs annual Hate Crime Statistics Act report recorded 7,314 hate crimes, up from 7,120 the year before. These frightening numbers have led to calls for new policies: A number of national security experts have urged Biden to take on right-wing extremism through a strategy of counterterrorist law enforcement.

While a shift away from the Trump administrations blustering and dangerous focus on anti-fascists, leftists, and Black liberation fighters would be welcome, it would be misguided to treat the states law enforcement apparatus as an ally in the struggle against white supremacist violence. The intractable racism in U.S. policing is reason enough to draw this conclusion. And while certain far-right groups, like Boogaloo adherents, see an enemy in law enforcement, we should keep in mind that our enemies enemies are not our friends. Instead, the conflict between anti-racist anti-fascists, white supremacists, and law enforcement is rightly described by some anti-fascist theorists as a three-way fight.

It is for this reason that calls for anti-fascists and anti-racists to simply ignore the far-right rallies like the one inWashingtonare understandable but wrongheaded. They amount to a call to treat violent racists as a passing nuisancethat will disappear under the Biden administration a belief nearly as delusional as the conviction that Trump won the election. One need not take up the militant tactics associated with antifa to see the importance of gathering in great numbers to overwhelm a rally of white supremacists. Indeed, large numbers of counterprotesters lessen the need for physical confrontation to stop the far right from roaming the streets.

In this pandemic moment, the far right holds an advantage: Trumpian fanatics who either dont believe in the danger of Covid-19 or dont care about spreading it to those around them are more willing to travel from around the country to converge,as they will this week. Undue burden thus rests on local anti-fascist, anti-racist organizers. Yet this summers potent uprisings made clear that in every city, those who would crush white supremacy are able to gather in vast numbers in our own hometowns and with a message of Black liberation in robust opposition to everything for which white supremacists stand.

See the original post here:

Far-Right Violence Will Continue With or Without Trump - The Intercept