Category Archives: Wage Slavery

Pennsylvania is poised to become another battleground in the growing fight over teaching race and racism in public schools.

Two Republican state lawmakers have introduced legislation that would constrain how schools teach the concept of race and the conflict over critical race theory, or CRT, will likely become a key part of the upcoming Pennsylvania governors race.

That has a coalition of educators and politicians who oppose the efforts to put limits on teachers sounding an alarm. They worry that replacing Gov. Tom Wolf, who is considered a liberal Democrat and is term-limited, with a conservative could be the difference between such a bill passing and being vetoed.

My fear is that Republicans have already stated publicly that this is what theyre running on in the 2022 campaign, said Tamara Anderson, one of many local educators organizing against these attacks with Black Lives Matter Week of Action-Philly. So this isnt going to just go away, its going to continue. How prepared are we on this side, not just to go into battle, but to protect our teachers and our students rights? Because that is who they are threatening.

Most K-12 schools are not actually teaching critical race theory an academic framework for examining how laws and institutions perpetuate systemic racism. But the term has become a catchall among those who want to limit how schools teach about Americas legacy of slavery and segregation.

House Bill 1532, sponsored by two Republican state representatives, Russ Diamond and Barb Gleim, is the latest attack by conservatives on what they argue is critical race theory being taught in schools. Chalkbeat has tracked at least 27 state-level efforts attempting to restrict educators from discussing systemic racism, critical race theory, and The 1619 Project, which was published by The New York Times and developed by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones.

The Teaching Racial and Universal Equality (TRUE) Act, as the Pennsylvania bill is called, would limit how schools teach concepts related to racism. In their memorandum, the two lawmakers say schools should be teaching that every individual is equal under the law and that no individual should ever be labeled superior or inferior simply due to their race or genetic makeup.

Democrat State Rep. Chris Rabb argues that if Democrats do not have a solid gubernatorial candidate going into the March primary, the debate around teaching race in schools will be a major issue in the race for governor, tilting swing voters.

Wolf, whose term ends January 2023, would turn down such legislation, according to fellow Democrats. But the state has bounced from red to blue leadership and back over the last 20 years, so anything is up for grabs next year, including language surrounding teaching race in the classroom.

If we have a conservative who replaces a liberal Democrat, which I would call Gov. Wolf, then this has the ability to become state law, Rabb said.

Names floated as possible Democratic candidates for governor include Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney. On the Republican side, former congressman Lou Barletta, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Gale and former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain top the list.

Bartletta and Mastriano, who are staunch supporters of former President Donald Trump, have said publicly they do not support what they believe is critical race theory being taught in school.

We will never, ever, ever teach critical race theory in Pennsylvania while Im governor, Barletta said earlier this month. We are not going to teach children to hate each other. In fact, we are going to teach them to learn our history and be proud of our country we live in.

Anderson, the teacher opposing the bills banning CRT, fears the mislabeling of critical race theory by conservatives will ultimately affect curriculum. She says school districts across the state could adopt language from the legislation and ban any teaching of race, including topics such as segregation, redlining, or Juneteenth.

Anderson mentions two events where concerned educators can get involved. National Weekend of Action to Teach Truth is Aug 27-29, led by the Zinn Education Project, Rethinking Schools and Black Lives Matter at School. And Oct. 14 is the national day of action, organized by the National Black Lives Matter at School. The date is George Floyds birthday and will address the targeting of teaching about race, Anderson said. Organizers are asking teachers in Philadelphia and across the country to decolonize their curriculum by starting Saturday schools and freedom schools on the weekend, including in states that have banned CRT.

Conservatives pushing anti-CRT bills paint the framework as a threat of sorts against white Americans, said Rabb. Others have raised concerns that, without the proper guidance, academic leaders and politicians can adopt simplistic views of what it means to teach in culturally responsive ways.

In Rabbs view, that is just a ploy to distract voters from other issues such as voter suppression, increasing the minimum wage, and climate change.

This is a very sexy boogeyman because it hits all the buttons, Rabb said, adding that the more attention the issue gets, the more likely a critical mass of Americans will believe critical race theory is divisive as opposed to the racism and sexism that is divisive that critical race theory seeks to address in good faith.

Its a bitter irony, said Rabb, because by embracing critical race theory and embracing diversity perspectives and contributions related to these matters, we can have difficult conversations in good faith to move us forward together as a society.

But Jay McCalla, a well-known political commentator who served in the administrations of former Democratic mayors Ed Rendell and John Street, told Chalkbeat he doesnt think critical race theory will be a big issue and will not drive Black voters in Philadelphia, who traditionally vote Democrat.

I think it matters very much in the Republican Party who beats the drum loudest to back critical race theory, but I dont think its an animating principle for Black voters, said McCalla, who also served as former managing director for the city Were going to be focusing on the Democratic candidate who talks about violence and how hes got a plan to curb gun violence.

Pat Christmas, policy director at the Committee of Seventy, an election watchdog group in Philadelphia, says Trump and his politics will also impact the dynamic of the governors race.

I think its fair to say his politics are very attractive to some Republican voters across the state of Pennsylvania, but very unattractive to others, Christmas said. Whether its critical race theory or education funding or election reform and voting rights. All these issues are going to be quite important.

In the meantime, the local coalition opposing the anti-CRT legislation is also seeking to get Philadelphias Board of Education to take a stand, said Adam Sanchez, who teaches social studies at Central High School.

We want the board to say that regardless of what happens in the legislature, were going to continue to encourage our teachers to teach about racism and teach about the truth and the past of this country, Sanchez says.

The School District of Philadelphia is the only district in the state that requires students to take an African-American history course to graduate.

These issues will not go away, Rabb said. We have to have these earnest discussions because if people think critical race theory is talking about victimization and talking about how white people are inherently bad, that is our point of reference, weve already lost the argument.

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Educators say teaching about race could be at stake in governors race - Chalkbeat Colorado

A woman and man cutting endive lettuce in the Imperial Valley. (David Bacon)

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If the Senate passes the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, and President Biden signs it, US growers and labor contractors will benefitbut most farmworkers will not.

Undocumented farmworkers need and deserve legal status in this country. They have fed us, not just during the pandemic but for as long as weve had wage labor in agriculture.

But farmworkers, along with all other undocumented families, need and deserve a bill that provides legal status without imposing the notorious H-2A and E-Verify programs as the price. Growers need labor, but farmworkers need a sustainable future that promises dignified and well-paid work, not just for this generation but for generations to come.

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act passed the House once under Trump, and then again this spring. With no discussion of its possible negative impact, every Democrat in Congress voted for it except Maines Representative Jared Golden. Yet this bill, presented as a legalization program for undocumented farmworkers, will likely lead to the replacement of as much as half of the nations current farm workforce by workers brought into the United States by growers using the H-2A guest worker program. That, in turn, will cement in place the existing deep poverty in farmworker communities, and make it much more difficult for farmworkers to change this. MORE FROM David Bacon

Rosalinda Guillen, director of the women-led farmworker organization Community to Community in Washington state, has a long history of pushing for equitable opportunities for farmworkers and their families to build community. The nations farmworkers, she says, should be recognized as a valuable skilled workforce, able to use their knowledge to innovate sustainable practices. Most are indigenous immigrants, and have the right to maintain cultural traditions and languages, and to participate with their multicultural neighbors in building a better America. This bill instead treats farm workers as a disposable workforce for corporate agriculture.

Last year growers were certified to bring in 275,000 H-2A workers. That is over 10 percent of the farm workforce in the United Statesand a number that has doubled in just five years, and tripled in eight. In states like Georgia and Washington, this program will fill a majority of farm labor jobs in the next year or two.

The H-2A program has been studied in many reports over the last decade, from Close to Slavery by the Southern Poverty Law Center to Ripe for Reform by the Centro de Derechos de los Migrantes to Exploitation or Dignity by the Oakland Institute. All document a record of systematic abuse of workers in the program, and the use of the program to replace farmworkers (themselves immigrants) already living in the United States.Current Issue

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In 2019 the Department of Labor punished only 25 of the 11,000 growers and labor contractors using the program despite extensive violations; the punishments were small fines and suspension from it for three years. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act continues this abuse, and will accelerate sharply the replacement of the existing workforce.

The bill freezes the minimum wage for H-2A workers, already close to minimum wage, for a year, and opens the door to abolishing the wage guarantee entirely. This will not only hurt H-2A workers themselves. It will effectively push down the wages of all farmworkers.

A long record documents the firing, deportation, and blacklisting of H-2A workers who organize or strike. Familias Unidas por la Justicia, the new union for Washington farmworkers, has helped those workers protest, but seen them forced to leave the county over and over again as a result. Growers are currently permitted to violate antidiscrimination laws by refusing to hire women or older workers. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act does not protect them.

The bill, however, does have a provision making it mandatory that growers use the notorious E-Verify system to check the immigration status of workers, and refuse to hire anyone undocumented. This provision will have an enormous impact. Half of the nations 2.4 million farmworkers are undocumented. While some will qualify for the bills tortuous legalization program, many will not. Denying jobs to hundreds of thousands of farmworkers will cause immense suffering for their families. This would be a bitter reward for feeding the country through the Covid crisis.

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Those who qualify for legalization will be required to continue working in agriculture for a period of years. Losing employment will therefore mean losing their temporary legal status, making it extremely risky for them to organize unions or strike. Growers, meanwhile, will use the H-2A program to replace domestic workers who cant legalize or who leave the workforce for other reasons, including local workers who organize and strike. There are no protections in the bill at all for farmworkers right to organizeeither for H-2A workers or workers who are living here.

This is a very threatening scenario for farmworker families. Ramon Torres, president of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, says, In Washington state we have fought with labor contractors and growers for years to protect farmworker rights, of both H-2A and resident workers. Our lived experience tells us what the impact of this bill will be.

Excerpt from:

This New Law Would Be Good for Growers, Bad for Farmworkers - The Nation

Millions of spectators tuned in Friday to watch the opening ceremony of the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics. But will the behind-the-scenes happenings keep viewers coming back for the next two weeks even more than the feats of athletic prowess?

Students in one UNLV virtual classroom are poised to find out.

Their assignment? Watch the Olympics with those questions in mind: How do topics like race, gender, class, politics, sustainability, and mental health intersect with the games and play out on the world stage?

Were going to see all of those elements take place in the Tokyo Olympics, said Kendra Gage, an assistant professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic studies who leads the Topics in Sports History: The History of the Modern Olympics course.

The Olympics is an area we can study to see changes that have occurred and still need to occur in our society and the larger global society as well.

Students in Gages class, which has been offered several times at UNLV over the past 10 years, will produce individual podcasts that compare and contrast Olympic history with the present day.

I love sports but I especially love the Olympics, Gage said. There is just so much history that can be unpacked.

We checked in with Gage to get the scoop on some of the readings and conversations she expects to stoke discussion among her students, as well as the media and viewing public.

It all started in the 19th century with one man: Pierre de Coubertin. After traveling abroad to the U.K. and America, he was frustrated with the academic and physical educational systems in his home country of France. In short, he was part of high society and thought many of the French were in todays terms lazy and needed to do better at expressing cultural values to the world.

His idea? Recreate the ancient Greek Olympics as a vehicle to bring nations together and as a platform for people to showcase health and cultural progress, highlight fair and equal opportunity, and to display cultural expression.

Coubertin created the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1894, and in a nod to the ancient Greek Olympics the first games were held in Athens in 1896.

The event was an immediate success, and the second games were held in Paris. Interestingly, the third games in 1904 encountered a bit of a hiccup. The event was held in St. Louis a small city at the time that was hard for international spectators to reach by boat then train and was therefore attended by a mostly U.S. contingent. However, it was held alongside the St. Louis Worlds Fair, another international expo that also featured games, so most of the publics focus was on that rather than the Olympics. In fact, some participants were surprised to receive Olympic medals because they thought they were competing in the Worlds Fair games.

Rather than winning, early on the emphasis was on participation and bringing together nations in a neutral environment that wasnt meant to be political. But politics are inherently a part of sports especially when you build them on a platform to express nationalism and against a backdrop of World Wars and the Cold War, where nations are trying to prove theyre a superpower.

The only times the modern Olympics have been canceled was in 1916, 1940, and 1944 both because wars meant the event wasnt a safe place and the IOC didnt want politics involved. However, politics came into play very loudly from the start and continue to be entrenched today.

In regards to gender, the Olympics grappled with gender issues from the first games. No female competitors were allowed, as Coubertin felt womens only roles should be as spectators and to put crowns upon winners' heads.

For the second games in Paris, 22 women participated in high society sports like archery and lawn tennis. In 1904, a few women were allowed to compete in basketball and boxing. They were exhibition sports, rather than an official part of the games, but those were the first barriers to be broken. Today we see more female athletes because the IOC has been committed to gender balance.

I like to use the 1936 Olympics as an example because it was held in Berlin. Hitler was in power and there was a large call in the U.S. to boycott the games. Organizers balked at the controversy, calling the event a site of neutrality devoid of politics. American Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage traveled from the U.S. to Germany for a tour, where he was assured that all competitors would be treated equally and that the German team would allow Jewish athletes. He came back and convinced the U.S. to participate. Even Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender called on Black Americans to show their place in the world. Today, we know that the games were leveraged as a platform for Hitler to show his dominance in the world, and it's the first time we see politics play out in an overt way on the Olympic stage.

Relatedly, Brundage eventually became known as Slavery Avery because of his own history of sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism. That partially includes the 1968 Olympics when two Black track stars Gold medalist Tommie Smith and Bronze medalist John Carlos were kicked off the U.S. team after raising fists, now known as the Black Power Salute, on the award podium while the national anthem played. Brundage, who was then president of the International Olympic Committee, was instrumental in getting Carlos and Smith kicked out of the Olympic Village.

The impact of the Cold War is another big one. There was an us vs. them tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, which exploded in a fixation on the medal count as a means of showing superiority. This was evident in the 1980 Miracle on Ice hockey match, where the U.S. defeat of the Soviets was seen as a shift in the balance of power in the Cold War.

Initially, Olympic athletes were supposed to be amateurs they collected no pay for participation in any sort of sports. That evolved over time because the Olympics became much more commercialized. To do that, you have to use pro athletes and, to fund training, you need brand endorsements from companies.

Pierre de Coubertin was a member of the aristocracy, so he wanted the games to focus on gentlemen's sports and they dont take pay for play. That changed when the Soviet Union started to participate. They took young kids to Moscow for vigorous training. At first, people around the world were opposed and saw it as manipulation and oppression. But the Soviet Union did so well that others began to replicate their model.

The U.S. started club sports, where kids as young as 3 or 4 would participate. And it came to a head with U.S. participation in basketball when NBA players became involved in the Olympic games. So, the idea of amateurism is completely out the window.

Now we see people who are generally paid decently to play at this elite level. And thats another interesting facet: Some athletes rely on their Olympic performance to get brand endorsements afterward and therefore continue to train and make a living.

An extreme example was Jim Thorpe, a Native American athlete whose 1912 Olympic medals and records were stripped because the IOC discovered he was paid $25 per week to play semi-professional baseball prior to competing. In that era, it was common for athletes to play professionally before Olympic competitions but use pseudonyms to avoid detection. Thorpe didnt change his name and therefore came under fire. His medals were posthumously returned to his family and there are calls for his records to be restored as the rightful sole champion. Thorpe has been called one of the greatest Olympians of all time.

Yes, absolutely.

For example, not all of this years games are being held in Tokyo. The locations are spread throughout the country. In the future, we might see a main host city with other cities involved to alleviate both the costs and environmental impact of the Olympics.

With that said, we need future host cities to consider ways to make the Olympics more eco-friendly. I just watched a program on the Las Vegas water shortage. Would hosting the games here further strain our resources? It has nothing to do with the games themselves, but must be addressed on the global stage. So far, Tokyo has been called the most eco-friendly of the games, but I'm curious to see final reports. The 2028 games will be in Los Angeles and will likely impact Las Vegas directly, so our leaders should start anticipating that.

Also, gender equality needs to be addressed. We still see global wage gaps between men and women, and the Olympics is another platform to discuss that. The IOC itself has very few women within its organization, so the organization should address that as well.

Last, Id say that Im always a big fan of watching which new sports they add each time. The five newest are skateboarding, karate, surfing, sport climbing, and a re-introduction of baseball and softball. Several of them show a mesh, with the X Games meeting the Olympics, which is an interesting transformation. It shows how sports are evolving, whats popular, and whats not.

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More Than the Games: The Olympics and the Global Spotlight on Societal Issues - UNLV NewsCenter

A review of Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World by Liam Campling and Alejandro Cols (Verso, 2021), 20

Capitalism and the Sea is an engaging new study of capitalisms transformation of the human relationship to the sea. It uses a Marxist approach to understand how capitalism constantly reinvents itself to maximise profit and, in the process, intensifies exploitation, privatises vast areas of the sea and commodifies the species that inhabit them. The book is divided into sections on circulation, order, exploitation, appropriation, logistics and offshore. However, it is the excellent chapter on appropriation that offers the pivotal argument, detailing how changing capitalism remodels and reshapes how society interacts with the seas and oceans. These reflections demonstrate how capitalists have been able to extend property relations created on land into all those parts of maritime space that modern technology allows them to reach.

Liam Campling and Alejandro Cols carefully describe how capitalism transformed the conventional forms of trade that went before it. Before plantation slavery formed new markets based on the commodification of human beings and their transportation on slave ships, it was necessary to develop the fundaments of a capitalist credit system such as stock exchanges and bills of exchange, an early credit instrument that acted as a store of universal value (p42). The sea became the subject of centuries of intense legislative activity designed to reproduce the land-based property relations at sea. By the early 17th century, the struggle over maritime law had become whether the sea was to be free, mare liberum, or closed, mare clausum? Did territorial sovereignty extend into the sea? Could states control which ships went where and what the ships masters and owners did when they got there?

For the British state, the dominant imperial power in the 19th century, freedom of the seas meant the right to enforce its own economic interests. Thus the British navy attacked China in 1839 to force it to accept imports of opium, despite Chinese attempts to fight an epidemic of addiction. There were legalistic sleights of hand that removed hindrances to trade during wartime such as the Declaration of Paris in 1856, which allowed enemy goods to be transported under neutral flags.

With their detailed accounts of these sorts of machinations and manoeuvres by competing states, Campling and Cols demonstrate the impossibility of understanding the development of capitalisms relationship to the sea without an appreciation of the role of colonialism and imperialist rivalry. The British Empire ruled the waves when it subsidised the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) to run a mail service to its overseas territoriesa function that later widened to include carrying settlers, narcotics, colonial troops and imperial administrators (p82). However, as Germany and Japan became centralised states and industrial powerhouses, they developed their own military and imperial ambitions that began to challenge British naval dominance. Similarly, the United States navy was massively expanded and modernised from the 1880s onwards. Nevertheless, Britain continues to pursue a position as an imperialist naval power to this day, as shown by the recent launch of the 3 billion warship HMS Queen Elizabeth. This new aircraft carrier is an attempt by the British state to flex its fading imperial muscleand a valuable tool for currying favour with squalid regimes in North America and the Middle East that are hungry for military cooperation with Western states.

Capitalism and the Sea also describes how capitalist states have shaped big business on the high seas. One example of this was the web of national and international deals made through the conference system of shipping cartels, under which state subsidies were used to exclude competition from rival economies. States also heavily subsidised their own capitalists in order to incentivise the development of national fishing fleets because investors often refused to risk money in ventures that could literally sink, taking all their capital with them. Of course, they were less concerned about losing workers to accidents and drowning: people were often much cheaper to replace than fishing gear and boats. Even now, fishing fleets in advanced capitalist economies often receive massive state subsidies.

Throughout capitalisms history, states have also developed various ways of laying claim to fish, and Campling and Cols reveal how the strongest states were able to overturn existing fishery-ownership conventions in the 20th century. Before the Second World War, both Spain and Japan developed large, technologically advanced distant water fleets that generated huge profits, soaked up unemployed labour and acted as a naval reserve. These fleets caught much of the tuna processed in the expanding canneries that were providing cheap food to a rapidly expanding global working class. Indeed, in 1941, the ability of capitalists from different states to move and fish on the high seas was effectively written into the Atlantic Charter, agreed between the US and Britain. According to the Charter, the end of the war should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance because the seas did not belong to any one state. Nonetheless, as the war finished, the US was able to limit Japans distant water fleet, reducing competition to its own fishing industry and ensuring Japanese fishing boats could not be used as a military reserve. Moreover, national states also moved to maintain exclusive control over the seas and fisheries adjacent to their own land.

After 1950, these manoeuvres often included smaller nations struggling for national sovereignty and seeking to protect their resources from incursions by capital based in the biggest imperial powers. The USs claim to exclusive rights to mineral resources miles off its coasts after the Second World War became the precedent for the creation of exclusive economic zones (EEZ). EEZs, in which states claim special rights over marine resources, were codified in the Third United Nations Conference on the Sea between 1973 and 1982. This was an important step in the further imposition of property relations on the sea. Where previously fishers took as much of the free gift of fish as their skill, equipment and luck allowed, they now had to pay to access fisheries. States that owned EEZs gained rent from other states that wanted access, effectively appropriating part of the surplus value created by the labour of foreign fishers working in its waters.

EEZs were shaped by the legacy of 19th century imperialism, and maps of these territories often mirror the colonialism of this period. For instance, France has the largest total EEZ in the world, including the vast area around its colony of French Polynesia, a collection of 118 geographically dispersed islands and atolls in the South Pacific Ocean. Through such relics of its colonial past, French capital has access to enormous maritime resources. In comparison, China has a very small EEZ relative to the size of its population.

How much respect states really displayed towards EEZs depended on the structure of their national fishing industries. The US had heavily invested in its distant water fishing fleet and tried to prevent tuna stocks being considered part of EEZs. Its boats simply continued to fish in the EEZs of less powerful states without paying for access. When the Solomon Islands tried to detain US-owned boats in order to prevent them fishing illegally in its waters, the US simply repaid the value of the boat and catch to its owners. It then deducted these costs from the aid money that the Solomon Islands received.

EEZs have not been imposed in the same way on the sea floor, which was declared the common heritage of humanity by the UN General Assembly in 1970. However, these areas may become a site of new struggles when capitalists develop the technology to plunder the bottom-most parts of the sea that are currently unreachable.

Capitalisms expansion into every aspect of human interaction with the sea has involved a long process of disciplining workers. Indeed, it is a testament to hundreds of years of class struggle that so much of the infrastructure of modern capitalist shipping and fishing is designed to undermine class solidarity and trade unionism. New, highly mechanised container ports with relatively few workers have been built away from established harbours with their traditions of portside solidarity and their neighbourhoods of unionised dockers, fishers and seafarers. For a few dollars, ship owners can register vessels in a state other than their own under a flag of convenience (FOC), allowing them to avoid national tax regimes and health and safety regulations, and circumvent trade union rights. However, Capitalism and the Sea reminds us that the dockers in the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) refused to unload FOC ships that had neglected to sign up to ITF agreements in the 1990s. This action successfully pressurised ship operators to prevent their crews from unloading cargoes from non-compliant ships. This provides a glimpse of the power of workers to challenge capitalist power on the sea.

Both ship owners and operators, which are often separate businesses, regularly deny responsibility for accidents and abuses on their vessels. Campling and Cols detail how operators use racism, the threat of unemployment, language barriers and the isolation experienced by maritime workers to undermine solidarity. Working regimes in commercial fisheries and shipping are often tightly hierarchical and prison-like. Instructions are orders and disobedience is a serious offence.

Huge shipping corporations, such as Denmarks Maersk, pay crew from the Global South far less than those from the US and the European Union for doing the same work. There is a long, racist history of workers being denied shore leave and crews being left unpaid and unable to get home when companies go bust or their owners walk away. Campling and Cols note 367 such abandonments since 2004, although they do not mention the practical solidarity from activists, dockers unions and other trade unionists that have supported crews with food, money and tickets home. They do, however, discuss examples of how fishers unions have sought to defend their members jobs by appealing to the national interest. This framing has often undermined workers ability to organise in cases where a single boats crew is made up of workers from different countries. All this cuts against the simple fact that fishery workers from different countries share the same problems.

There is a vast system of law and regulation that applies to work in fishing and shipping, but enforcement of workers rights and health and safety safeguards can be very lax. Because of this, these industries see persistent slavery, trafficking of fishers between boats, and physical and sexual violence, including murder, theft of wages, as well as systematic neglect of health and safety. Campling and Cols record these problems in detail and offer occasional glimpses of how workers can organise a serious fight for better conditions and wages.

With the historically low levels of strikes across the world on land and sea before the Covid-19 pandemic, capital can appear very strong against workers isolated from trade unions and their own communities. Nevertheless, class struggle is inherent to capitalism, and the maritime sector is no exception. Many seafarers have protested and struck in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Gazan fishers went on strike when two were killed by the Egyptian navy in November 2020. Workers from Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu, India, began an indefinite strike over the arrest of nine fishers by the Sri Lankan navy in January 2021. Californian crabbers also struck over wholesale prices; they failed to win everything they wanted but got more than if they had not fought back against the wholesalers. There are many other examples over the past two decades of marine workers striking and protesting all over the world, including in Chinese shipyards, Canadian container ports and Middle Eastern docks. Workers have been arrested, jailed and killed, but many others have won, sometimes aided by solidarity from other workers and trade unions.

One disappointing aspect of Capitalism and the Sea is that it talks so little about women fishers and seafarers. The authors do note:

During the age of sail, women were regularly on board ships in port and the wives of warrant and junior officers regularly went to sea and worked on the ship. Women would also disguise themselves as men to work as crew and, more rarely, as marines (p112).

However, the only other substantial reference to women explains, Rates of exploitationcannot be understood in the absence of unpaid human labour, not leastbut not limited tothe social reproduction of human beings, which is disproportionately provided by women (p111). This limits the work of women in fishing and seafaring communities to unpaid social reproduction, ignoring the work of female wage labourers in coastal areas such as those who processed herring by hand in Norway, Britain and Iceland throughout the 20th century. The women employed to bait hooks for line fishing are also passed over. Despite these omissions, the authors do note that, as well as the women working in canning factories around the world, there have been many other examples of female workers employed in fisheries and waterborne trades.

Today, with their destruction of the oceans ecosystems, capitalists are showing just how powerful they can be. Nevertheless, the commodification of marine species and the damaging of ecosystems with climate change has also had repercussions for capital. One such repercussion was the re-emergence of piracy off the coast of Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden in the first decade of this century. In these areas, communities have been under pressure from climate change, industrial commercial fishing and foreign intervention from states such as the US. Campling and Cols point out that international campaigns against the pirates have repurposed imperial outposts in Dubai, Djibouti and the Seychelles. Tellingly, however, the operational headquarters of the Horn of Africas Maritime Security Centre is based in Hertfordshire, England.

The campaigns against piracy reveal much about the priorities of capitalist states. There has been too little international cooperation to prevent slavery, murder and sexual violence at sea or even illegal fishing. Little joint action has been taken to protect the seas fragile ecosystems despite the fact that their destruction poses a threat to the survival of the entire planet. Nevertheless, states have swung into action to protect the profits of owners and operators of container ships, oil tankers and other bulk carriers in regions where pirates operate. Framed by these failures and false priorities, Capitalism and the Sea is an important and rewarding read, as well as a valuable addition to the growing body of work studying capitals relationship to ecology and the destruction of the environment on which we all rely.

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Big business on the high seas International Socialism - International Socialism Journal

by JAY COST

The Biden Administration has made infrastructure spending a top priority of its first-year agenda, and prospects seem surprisingly good for a bipartisan deal. It actually seems possible, even in this age of hyperpolarization, that the two sides might come together on some kind of agreement. But what sort of package should Republican lawmakers accept? While both sides generally support infrastructure spending, they have strikingly different reasons for doing so. And Republicans should insist on a package that facilitate the partys top priority of economic development.

The GOPs commitment to infrastructure spending goes back to the very origins of the party. The Lincolnian Republicans were at first a hodgepodge collection of disparate groups opposed to the spread of slavery, but the dominant force within that early coalition was the remnant of northern Whigs. A cornerstone of Whig policy was spending on what they often called internal improvements, which the party viewed as essential to regional integration and economic development. In the 19th century, it was the Republicans who spearheaded federal support of railroad development, including the transcontinental railroad. In the 20th century, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower initiated the Interstate Highway System. Though the GOP has evolved a great deal since its beginnings, infrastructure has remained a Republican priority because the party still stands for those 19th century ideas of promoting private sector development and linking disparate parts of the country together.

The Democratic path toward support for infrastructure was markedly different. Generally opposed to such programs prior to the Civil War, in their Jacksonian belief that the Constitution prohibited them, the party only embraced it in the 20th century as part of its reorientation toward an expansive vision of the central state. Franklin Roosevelts New Deal enacted massive expenditures on infrastructure, but then again it enacted massive expenditures on virtually every imaginable policy program. Importantly, Democratic motivation for infrastructure spending was (and is) different than the GOPs. While the party has historically touted infrastructure spending to promote economic development, the social welfare aspect is at least as important. The New Deal was not simply about building roads and buildings and clearing forests, it was about putting unemployed men to work to accomplish those tasks.

The difference in party motives remains to this day and is evident on several specific political debates. A good example is the continued divide over the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which mandated that projects on public works that receive federal funds must pay workers the local prevailing wage. Democrats, spurred on by their allies in the construction unions, strongly favor the act, while Republicans generally believe it should be repealed. The former see it as a form of redistributive public policy while the latter see it as interfering with the efficiency of federal spending.

An even more substantial point of division between the two parties is how to pay for such programs. Because Democrats view infrastructure spending in part as a way to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, they have no problem raising taxes to finance such projects. But because most Republicans primarily see infrastructure as a means to economic development, they see tax increases as a self-defeating form of financing, as it takes capital out of the private sector, where it is best directed for growth. Instead, Republicans usually prefer to finance infrastructure through spending cuts, which are anathema to the Democratic agenda.

So as an issue, infrastructure is one where the devil is most definitely in the details. There seems in general to be common ground between the two sides, but philosophically the parties have notably different reasons for supporting increased spending.

If anything, the divide between the parties has only grown greater in the last few years, as the Democrats have moved substantially to the left. Moderate Democrats are fewer and farther between, while socialist Bernie Sanders is the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, an important perch from which to influence domestic policy. Many in the party now seek to redefine infrastructure as a catchall term for their entire agenda. The expansion of a cradle-to-grave welfare state, from new programs on childcare to an expansion of Medicare, is now human infrastructure. The Green New Deal, with its massive transfer of wealth based on magical notions of a carbon-free economy, is likewise now infrastructure. And buried deep within the Biden Administrations infrastructure plan are all kinds of goodies for labor unions and restrictions on what policies states who accept federal dollars can actually accomplish. Destroying federalism is apparently now infrastructure in the Democratic mind.

As bipartisan negotiations over an infrastructure package continue this summer, Republicans should be mindful of their bottom line as a coalition. Any bill that hopes to have Republican support has to focus on physical infrastructure that facilitates regional integration and above all economic development. That is why the party supports such spending, and it should be its sine qua non in any negotiations. If Democrats insist on redefining the term infrastructure to include their redistributive agenda, Republicans should walk away from the bargaining table and instead take the issue to the voters in 2022.

Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on elections, politics, and public opinion.

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If Everything is Infrastructure, Common Ground will be Hard to Find - The Ripon Society

Enormous human betterment has occurred since The Enlightenment, chiefly because crusading liberals overcame conservative resistance, time after time.

Modern democracy arose because Americas radical founders renounced the divine right of kings and took up arms against England and George III. They created government of the people, with no aristocracy.

Slavery ended because radical abolitionists hammered the entrenched institution until the horrible Civil War wiped it out.

Following the new knowledge given to humankind by Gandhi, many more gains in human rights started to be made with nonviolent struggle instead of war.

Women gained the right to vote because radical suffragettes fought for decades against their inferior status.

Couples gained the right to birth control because radical feminists especially Margaret Sanger battled against prudes and the church.

Workers gained the right to organize unions because President Franklin Roosevelts New Deal defeated corporate opposition and legalized it. And retirees gained Social Security pensions because the progressive New Deal created the safety net program.

Jobless people gained unemployment compensation and those injured on the job gained workers compensation because the New Deal created them too. Additionally, it set the 40-hour work week, banned child labor, and set a minimum wage.

The poor gained welfare protection from the liberal New Deal also.

Censorship of sexy books, magazines and movies was wiped out by progressive court cases. So were bluenose laws forcing stores to close on the Sabbath.

The historic civil rights movement and the progressive Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren struck down Americas cruel Jim Crow segregation. The Warren court also ended government-led prayer in schools. It wiped out state laws against birth control. Later liberal justices gave women and girls a right to choose to end pregnancies.

Taboos against lotteries, liquor clubs and other sins fell away.

Strides toward universal health care as a human right for everyone included Medicare, Medicaid, Childrens Health Insurance, Veterans care, government employees coverage, and finally Obamacare.

Conservatives tried to prevent teaching of evolution in public schools, but they failed.

Conservatives tried to teach creation in public schools, but they failed.

Conservatives tried to block sex education in public schools, but they failed.

Puritanical right-wingers made racial intermarriage a crime, but the liberal Warren court legalized it.

Puritanical right-wingers jailed gay lovers, but progressives on the high court forced the government to get its nose out of the bedroom.

Fundamentalists fought same-sex marriage, but Democratic state legislatures and, ultimately, the Supreme Court legalized it.

Humanism means helping people, and secular means doing it without supernatural religion. Decade after decade, century after century, leftist reformers defeated conservatives to advance secular humanism. At the same time, churches and their magical beliefs faded enormously from western democracies.

More recently, international warfare has virtually disappeared.

Pioneer Unitarian minister Theodore Parker said the arc of history bends toward justice and Martin Luther King Jr., who spent years as a young man attending a Unitarian church, adopted the phrase masterfully.

The past shows a clear pattern of human progress of civilization bending toward justice. Lets hope it continues.

James Haught, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is editor emeritus of West Virginias largest newspaper, The Charleston Gazette-Mail, and author of 12 books.

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Conservatives have always looked to stop social progress - theday.com

Virginia Military Institute cadets march during the inaugural parade of President George W. Bush in 2005.(Tim Shaffer/Reuters)

What started as an effort to address allegations of racism and inequality has spiraled into a cultural assault on a venerable institutions heritage.

In our age of cultural revisionism, can an institution with a distinctive military history at odds with prevailing progressive narratives and norms about identity reform itself without completely renouncing its heritage? The recent and ongoing assault on the Virginia Military Institute illustrates that Orwellian historical obfuscation and submission to the application of critical theory as a governing principle are the inevitable consequences of these absurd and arbitrary political imperatives. The results are anything but tolerant, equitable, or inclusive.

It would be hard to conclude otherwise from the final report the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) released last month of its investigation into the culture, policies, practices, and traditions of VMI following allegations of systemic racism at the school. The Roanoke Times first reported some of the allegations last June, which emerged as African-American alumni shared accounts of racism at the school over social media. Others circulated petitions to remove a statue of former VMI professor and Confederate General Stonewall Jackson from its prominent position in front of the schools barracks, and to deemphasize other elements of the schools distinctive heritage and symbolism. The outcry came amid the broader cultural upheaval and invigorated attention to racial injustice in America that followed the killing of George Floyd in police custody.

VMIs then-superintendent, retired U.S. Army general J. H. Binford Peay III, responded to the allegations, first in a letter on June 4 and then in another on July 29, which included a five-pillar action plan to address at least some alumni concerns. The plan announced that the school would deemphasize the prominence of Jacksons statue by recentering its flagpoles to abut a statue of VMI graduate George C. Marshall, while also removing ceremonial tributes to the schools involvement in the Civil War Battle of New Market in May 1864. But it was not until October, however, after Ian Shapira detailed a harrowing selection of the allegations in one of what would become a series of articles for the Washington Post, that Virginias Democratic political leadership in the Executive Mansion and the General Assembly took notice and issued a scathing letter of their own on October 19, accusing the Institute of a clear and appalling culture of ongoing structural racism and demanding an independent, third-party review of VMIs culture, policies, practices, and equity in disciplinary procedures.

The president of VMIs Board of Visitors responded the following day, welcoming an objective, independent review of VMIs culture and the Institutes handling of allegations of racism and/or discrimination and pledging the full cooperation of VMI officials in the review. Yet only two days after the reply, before any such investigation could begin, Virginia governor and VMI graduate Ralph Northam conveyed that the states political leadership had lost confidence in General Peays ability to lead a transformation necessary to address the allegations, spurring Peays resignation on Monday, October 26.

That Thursday, October 29, the Board of Visitors voted to remove the statue of Jackson, reversing its previous position, while also establishing a permanent diversity and inclusion committee, now the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, and a building and naming committee, now the Commemorations and Memorials Naming and Review Committee.

* * *

What began early last summer as a movement against systemic inequalities in Americas criminal-justice system the disproportionate mass incarceration and police killing of African Americans morphed quickly into a broader upheaval concerning itself with allegations of systemic racism and oppression in a nation that has still not healed the wounds of slavery over 150 years after Emancipation. The protests, in turn, redirected their attention from specific and legitimate policy problems to the destruction and removal of monuments and memorials to dead Caucasian men, especially those affiliated with the Confederacy.

The relationship between Confederate symbols and institutional racism against black Americans traces its roots to the political failures of postwar Reconstruction which coincided with the beginning of Americas failure to successfully integrate freed slaves into society as citizens. The Ku Klux Klan, established by former Confederates, adopted the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of terror, segregation, and white supremacy in the lawless post-war South. An emblem that was once a soldiers flag a banner of honor for veterans and their friends who fought and died in a war that was, for many, not of their choosing became a symbol of racial oppression.

All of this injustice the enduring systemic inequalities in our country, including in policing traces its roots to the evils of slavery. But the American Civil War did not cause slavery; it ended it. And whatever the opinions of its participants and its casualties North or South may have been on the matter, a faithful understanding of history requires us to acknowledge that their involvement in that war was far more complicated than contemporary conversations acknowledge. We benefit from the hindsight of being able to examine in toto the history they lived and created in each moment but suffer from our tendency to compress, categorize, and oversimplify as that history recedes away from us in time.

The Civil War began at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Virginia did not pass its Ordinance of Secession until April 17 (a previous proposal failed on April 4), after President Lincoln called for states to provide troops to suppress the rebellion on April 15. For Virginia, threats to the preservation or continued expansion of slavery proved insufficient causes for secession or war. The threat of invasion of its neighboring states and the request to furnish troops for that purpose, however, were unacceptable affronts to their concept of sovereignty. Slavery, though undeniably a cause of the first wave of secession across the Deep South in December 1860, nonetheless did not become a central issue of the fighting for Union forces until after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. As National Reviews Dan McLaughlin has noted, the Union mostly fought to preserve the nation against secession, and only a minority of its members (especially at the outset) saw the war as an anti-slavery crusade. People today might be surprised to learn that Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland did not secede, but nonetheless maintained slavery and remained in the Union.

History is often more complicated than what we are able to capture in a sentence.

* * *

Central to the complaints, political turmoil, and relentless media scrutiny that VMI endured over the past year was the statue of Jackson, sculpted and donated to the school in 1912 by a VMI graduate and veteran of the Battle of New Market, Moses Ezekiel. This points to the broader source of controversy: The schools association with (and institutionalized tributes to) individuals affiliated with the Confederacy or, more specifically, affiliated with the Institute prior to 1865. We may understand the decision of the Institute to honor and revere its erstwhile professor so prominently as an homage to his character and his prowess as a military officer (which earned him international renown) as well as a branding decision. Honoring the legacy and affiliation of a military man with the reputation of Jackson, though he was a poor professor, was distinctively appropriate for a Southern military school.

Similarly, and more poignantly, the honors paid to the cadets who fought and died at the Battle of New Market on May 15, 1864, are fitting and proper: not because they fought for the Confederacy a fact incidental to their action but because they responded to the call of duty with a selfless sense of sacrifice to defend their native state, making VMI the only school in American history to fight and suffer casualties as a student body in battle. Their foe, General Franz Sigel, was the first commander of an Army dispatched by General Ulysses S. Grant to wage total war against Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley through the destruction of food supplies, crops, and farmland upon which the Confederacy relied to feed its soldiers.

These points, of course, should not diminish the legitimacy or gravity of the allegations of racism voiced by African-American alumni and cadets last year (or at any time): The experiences they detailed are, indeed, unacceptable for any institution in the 21st century. They warrant investigation and remediation. Unfortunately, these legitimate complaints have received only shallow and fleeting attention, even in the investigation, as instruments of political theater.

The complaints, too, that VMI has too long emphasized its distinctive history from the Civil War era at the expense of acknowledging the more recent significant contributions and accomplishments of its graduates including men such as George C. Marshall, Jonathan Daniels, or General Darren McDew also bear due consideration. Venerations of Stonewall Jackson and the Battle of New Market no longer offer the appeal they did a century ago. The school does and should stand for more than its contributions to the defense of its native state during the Civil War.

But there is something troubling in the response that VMIs Board of Visitors has adopted. Rather than seeking to better understand and convey the significance of Jackson or New Market and why they remain worthy of continued respect, not as trifles of Confederate apologia, but as distinctive elements of the Institutes history the school instead chose to allow its critics to misrepresent them as artifacts of hate.

We have seen the same treatment worse, in fact of Confederate monuments and memorials across the American South in recent years. There endures an unsettled debate over whether some were erected as markers of racism and segregation. But we must recognize that at least some of the monuments exist as due tributes erected to the memory of a war, its casualties, and its veterans, that shaped the collective memory of a country for over a century, in the wake of utter destruction, loss, and trauma. The men and women who erected these memorials friends, families understood the collective memory of the experience as something worthy of commemoration: not in hate, but in reverence. May they not also mourn their dead? The commandment to honor thy mother and father is one we may all recognize, even if we are not religious.

Monuments to men such as Lee or Jackson and especially and even more so, monuments to ordinary soldiers, such as the Howitzer Monument or the Soldiers and Sailors Monument removed from their pedestals in Richmond, Va., last summer are tributes to neither slavery nor racial oppression, but to dead men who answered what they understood to be an obligation of duty to their native state. We would do well to recall that soldiers dont start wars; civilians do. And civilians decide what happens when they are over. Soldiers merely endure, fight, die, or, if they are fortunate, live to remember their lost friends. Horrifyingly, they have become political pawns through which politicians may claim cheap victories in response to unrest over legitimate social grievances like what we witnessed last summer. It is much easier to remove a statue of a dead man than to provide a policy solution to racial injustices that deprive living men and women of their rights to life, liberty, security of person, and dignity. A monument to a dead soldier does not assault another mans dignity, but a mischaracterization of its meaning is an insult to both.

* * *

One million dollars and seven months later, the SCHEV investigation of VMI and its final report, conducted and produced by law firm Barnes and Thornburg, produced no new facts that previous reporting had not already offered. The executive summary merely recapitulates in more formal terms what we have already heard from Virginias Democratic leadership and Shapiras salvos in the Washington Post: that VMI does not live up to progressive expectations of diversity, equity, and inclusion as informed by principles of critical theory and intersectionality. It is a school too dominated by white men. But failure to match arbitrary diversity targets does not illustrate a clear and appalling culture of ongoing structural racism.

The body of the report reviews the stories we have seen elsewhere and perhaps unearths a few more, pairing them with statistics as paltry evidence of the Institutes insufficient diversity. Among the skewed statistics is one that claims that VMI does not match the racial and ethnic composition of the surrounding general populations: VMI had a higher percentage of Caucasian cadets relative to the composition of the surrounding population and the Commonwealth, except compared to Lexington (Appendix D, page 11). But the surrounding population the authors appear to offer as an example (at least in their chart) is the city of Lynchburg, located on the other side of Amherst County well beyond Rockbridge County and Lexington and with a population ten times greater. Geography and research methods are, of course, not among the subjects covered in law school or on the bar exam.

This raises a question that appears to remain unanswered: What are the objectives of diversity and equity in this context? What targets of ethnic and racial composition and outcomes should a rural state school such as VMI reflect? And how do those objectives relate to the distinctive history of a place?

Diversity in the 21st century is a valuable if not essential objective for organizational success especially because we live in increasingly globalized and pluralistic societies. But efforts to cultivate diversity should also preserve and curate respect for the unique history and culture of a place. VMI is and long has been a distinctive institution because of its unique place in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and its history as our nations oldest state-supported military college. To erase or recast that history because we have misrepresented it is to indulge in an irresponsible act of cultural destruction. Efforts to create diversity and cultural sensitivity training that the report recommends should bear this in mind. Apparently, no one reminded Barnes and Thornburg to be mindful of its own likely unconscious biases about what should constitute diversity and the distinction between urban and rural contexts.

What the report is interested in, of course, is not so much inclusion as diversity of racial identity and equity which, of course, concerns itself not with equality of opportunity but equality of outcomes. Indeed, as noted in a Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this year, the government cant measure equality of opportunity, but it can measure equality of result. If the results are not equal, they assume unequal opportunity. This cuts to the heart of the investigation and the report, which is, put bluntly, an exercise in counting things especially survey-response percentages and the composition of populations by markers of racial and ethnic identity. For bureaucrats, diversity only runs skin deep.

The report also gives extensive attention to the perspectives of the 385 interviewees, noting that perceptions were as important as facts in establishing an understanding of racial intolerance at VMI. How one reconciles perceived slights and wrongdoings with actual ones is a question the report does not attempt to answer. The report also gives extensive attention to the perspectives of the 385 interviewees, noting that perceptions were as important as facts in establishing an understanding of racial intolerance at VMI. How one reconciles perceived slights and wrongdoings with actual ones is a question the report does not attempt to answer. But this reflects the increasing prioritization of feelings over rational engagement with facts and aversions to potentially offensive ideas and emotional harm in American academia. Another trend in academia reduction to binary moral thinking that understands the universe and each individual as easily classifiable into simple categories of good or evil also overshadows the events of the pastyear.

But to set aside the other faults of a report submitted to justify its own existence, one of its primary recommendations bears consideration here: specifically, that the Institute should temper associations between VMI and the Civil War and Confederacy. The Institute is well on its way to doing this, but as previously suggested, it is ineffective and distracts from real problems of racial inequality. The report, in its own stumbling manner, illustrates why this is the case:

Among Caucasian current cadets who participated in the survey, 59% rated the extent to which the statue of Stonewall Jackson promotes racial intolerance and/or discrimination as none . . . By comparison, among African American current cadets who participated in the survey, 25% rated the extent to which the statue of Stonewall Jackson promotes racial intolerance and/or discrimination as none, 25% rated the extent as a little, and 50% rated the extent as a lot (384).

Clearly, there exists a perception among African-American cadets that a statue of Stonewall Jackson promotes racial intolerance. For reasons outlined above, we may understand why this perception prevails. But it is apparently lost on the authors of the report, who take the claim for granted. Ezekiels statue of Jackson does not promote racial intolerance in its spirit of reverence for his military service or its design; only the incorrect interpretations others have ascribed or attributed to it do. This, of course, is a problem of misattribution that looms over calls to remove many statues erected to honor historical figures not because their statues represent racial oppression, but because we have superimposed that interpretation over the original intent of their artists and patrons. But if one believes that all soldiers associated with the Confederacy or even all Caucasian men of historical prominence are inherently evil and unworthy of reverence by even their families with due consideration for the constraints of their historical context, there are more insidious claims behind such a mentality that demand our reconsideration.

On May 3, the Board of Visitors, at the recommendation of the Commemorations and Memorials Naming and Review Committee, voted to make another round of changes, mostly removing or deemphasizing Jacksons name from prominent buildings on Post, including the main entrance to the Barracks and the schools chapel (Jackson Memorial Hall). Among the changes, however, was an announcement that the statue of Virginia Mourning Her Dead, also sculpted by Ezekiel, would be reinterpreted to honor all former cadets who have died in wars and military conflicts since 1839.

The change is well-intentioned but flawed for multiple reasons. First, VMI already has a Memorial Garden dedicated to this purpose. Second, the stated purpose of the statue by its sculptor was to specifically commemorate the loss of his friends who died in the battle who were, notably, not former cadets but current cadets at the time of their deaths. Perhaps an expanded significance does not diminish and even enhances the original intent of the artist. Strangely, however, an inventory of artifacts on Post with ties to the Confederacy produced months before the Boards decision already indicated this broader purpose.

At a meeting earlier this year, the Naming Committee prepared an Inventory and Review of Monuments and Memorials Related to Confederate Iconography. Perhaps the most troubling fact about this list is the appearance of a statue of George Washington, which predated the Civil War with no other acknowledgement for its significance relative to the other memorials identified. George Washington, of course, was a prominent Virginia planter who freed his slaves upon his death, the commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution, and the first president of our United States. His appearance on this list leaves us to wonder: what are the limits of the current episode of political theater, what do they conceal, and do they feature any serious consideration of the facts of history?

One year later, what have we accomplished? The Institute and its faculty, administrators, cadets, alumni, and parents, no doubt wish to get on with their lives as Virginia and the United States emerge from the restrictions of the pandemic. The turmoil of the past year will fade into memory as the bread and circuses of ordinary life return to divert us. VMI has found itself a capable leader in alumnus Major General Cedric Wins. The legacy of the investigation and the consequences of the premature political censure that preceded it will linger as the school strives to reconcile its mission to prepare citizen-soldiers for lives of public service through bonds of uniformity and camaraderie with the political imperatives of identity, diversity, and equity in numbers at all costs even the cost of truth, cultural distinctiveness, tolerance, and real inclusion.

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An Equity Audit Wants the Virginia Military Institute to Renounce Its History - National Review

The next high-profile elections arent until next year. And when the first few fellows from a brand-new voting group called the New Pennsylvania Project started knocking on doors in places like Norristown or lower Bucks County this summer, they werent pushing a candidate merely asking unregistered or infrequent voters whats on their mind. No wonder executive director Kadida Kenner says the main reaction so far has been surprise.

We can talk about [federal COVID-19] funding not being used [by Pennsylvania], or economic justice and raising the minimum wage, or education justice and the large spending gaps between schools, Kenner said of the groups early door-knocking efforts. These are the ideas and issues that engage low-participation voters, or those who have not registered to engage in the political process. We have to overcome all these barriers to entice certain folks to go out and register.

Only in existence since early May, the for-now Harrisburg-based New Pennsylvania Project if the name sounds familiar, its a riff on the wildly successful New Georgia Project launched by Stacey Abrams in the 2010s is on the cutting edge of whats emerging as the Democrats main strategy for 2022 and beyond to fight GOP intransigence on voting rights and outright suppression laws enacted in some Republican-controlled states.

The Republican plan for the next batch of elections hinges heavily on a blueprint of making it more difficult for people, but especially young voters and Black and brown folks, to cast ballots rolling back mail-in voting that flourished in the 2020 pandemic or making it harder, eliminating drop boxes, or curtailing early voting hours. The Democratic response inspired by the Georgia success of Abrams and other voting advocates behind shock victories there for President Biden and two Democratic Senate candidates is to get more Black and brown and young voters jacked up about elections, then get them to the polls despite these obstacles.

Youre not asking them for a vote thats really important, Kenner said of the method. What she means is that the New Pennsylvania Project aims to have door-knockers working in underserved communities year round, with a more issues-oriented approach, as opposed to traditional method of a politician showing up a few weeks before Election Day.

Kenner, whod been director of campaigns for the left-leaning Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, said the new effort came together amid the frustration of among top Democrats about the 2020 election results, when statewide success for Biden didnt translate into gains in legislative races, and the party endured surprising defeats for state treasurer and auditor general. Not surprisingly, Kenner and the ideas chief backers including the former auditor general, Eugene DePasquale, as well as Bucks County donor and defeated 2018 congressional candidate Scott Wallace and Karl Hausker, husband of failed 2016 Senate hopeful Katie McGinty looked south to the Peach State for inspiration.

After Republicans gained total power over Georgia politics in the Tea Party era and enacted some of the nations most regressive voting restrictions, amid large-scale purges of voter rolls, Abrams then a Democratic legislative leader hatched a plan for fighting back. Founded in 2013, her New Georgia Project went door-to-door talking about that states failure to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The idea was that many people dont need to be sold on the Democratic Party or a specific candidate, but the more fundamental case that voting even makes a difference.

Progress from the New Georgia Project, a second group later founded by Abrams, called Fair Fight Georgia, and a wave of related efforts mostly led by Black women was slow at first, but the drives signed up 200,000 new voters in 2018 (when Abrams ran for governor and fell just short) and a whopping 800,000 in 2020-21, when Biden became the first Democrat to win the states electoral votes since 1992 and January run-off wins by Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock gave the party control of the U.S. Senate. One of Kenners first acts in leading the New Pennsylvania Project was to travel to Atlanta and meet with Abrams lieutenants, to learn what she called the secret sauce.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats have held a registration edge, but in 2020 Republicans closed their deficit from 800,000 to just 600,000 voters partly because of Donald Trumps ability to woo working-class former Democrats, and partly because the GOP didnt suspend its door-to-door efforts as Democrats did in the worst of the pandemic. Kenner believes the key to reversing the statewide trends can be found in some key urban and suburb areas greater Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, northeastern Pennsylvania, parts of Bucks County and urbanized Philadelphia suburbs like Norristown or Chester and among under-40 voters, especially non-whites.

Kenner said one of her first challenges is selling some big-ticket donors on the New Pennsylvania Projects unconventional mission. Were asking that you give it to a group thats not going to knock on your door with a D or an R on its chest, she said. Theyre going to knock on the door and talk about issues there people care about, and organically these folks will understand and vote their values, and realize they need to come out in every election, twice a year here in the commonwealth, and become super voters.

READ MORE: How Georgias women of color beat voter suppression and saved democracy | Will Bunch

Earlier this month, Vice President Kamala Harris announced from the White House a similar, $25 million voter registration effort backed by the Democratic National Committee.. Veteran Democratic strategist Ed Kilgore described in a New York magazine piece as part of a fallback strategy for voting rights because two major pieces of federal legislation to thwart Republican voter-suppression efforts are blocked by a GOP Senate filibuster.

The situation is paralleled in Harrisburg, where hopes of building on 2020s pandemic changes that led to a modern record for Pennsylvania turnout have been thwarted by gridlock between Republican lawmakers who want new restrictions and the veto power of Democratic Gov. Wolf. Without new voting rights laws, turnout-boosting schemes like the New Pennsylvania Project might not only be the Democrats best shot, but its only path.

In the Keystone State, this effort is led by an activist, in Kenner, with the zeal of a late-life convert. A Pittsburgh native who was raised in suburban West Chester and after a successful career as a retail manager went back to Temple for a mid-life degree in journalism and a new life in Charlotte producing sports telecasts, Kenner was thrown a curveball in 2016. Struggling to find work as college sports boycotted North Carolina over its anti-transgender bathroom bill, she took a job with Hillary Clintons presidential campaign. But Clintons defeat and the arrival of Trump convinced her that political change was now her calling.

Kenner, 46, also feels the quest for equity is in her blood. Her great-grandfather, M.L. Clay, was freed from slavery to become one of most prominent African-American businessmen in Memphis at the turn of the 20th century a bank vice president and industrialist who associated with the likes of Ida B. Wells and Booker T. Washington only to be gunned down on Beale Street over his wealth. Her modern hero is Bayard Rustin, who was also raised in West Chester and went on to organize the massive 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Kenner has a large poster with Rustins image and his words, The proof that one truly believes is in action that she carries around Pennsylvania. He literally travels with me, she said. Hes currently in the back seat of my car so wherever I go he can go with me.

She marvels that Rustin organized the 1963 march where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech without email, without Facebook, without social media, and he got 500,000 people to the Mall, and to know he had to do that behind the scenes because they kept him literally in the closet as a gay man. Fifty-eight years later, Kenner will have to combine those modern tools with old-school organizing to put up similar numbers in the voting booth, in an era when increasingly its the fate of democracy itself thats on the ballot.

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Is the Stacey Abrams method the only hope for saving democracy in Pa.? | Will Bunch - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Highschoolyearbooks are filled with the idyls of youthfootball games, proms, and notes from best friends forever. My 1980 high school yearbook was no different except for one picture.

The photography club snapped a shot of a massive billboardopposite the entrance tothe homepost ofthe 82ndAirborne Division. The message was the crowning glory of the Jimmy Carter yearsIRAN,LET OUR PEOPLE GO.That is what we had become,anation reduced tobegging Tehrans theocraticfanatics torelease U.S.diplomats and soldiers.

In the 1970s, the world assumed thattheUnited States was on an inevitable decline riven by problems at home and indecisiveness abroad. The crime was out of control.Oil prices had tripled,and gas lines were everywhere.Americans learned a new word:stagflation.

Thedefense budget tanked;there was no fuel for vehicles and no money for training.Overseas, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan,and Cuban proxies were rampaging through southern Africa.Meanwhile,Jimmy Carter apologized on behalf ofAmerica. Someacademics assessed as they do nowthat Americahad entered the Thucydides trap. In this trap,America played the role ofAthens and the Soviet Union played the role ofSparta.

Then-Senator JoeBidencut hispoliticalteeth inthis decade of disco and malaise.Hewas on the wrong side of historythen andwaswell onhis way to being, asformer Secretary of Defense Robert Gatessaidyears later,wrong about every major national security issue for40years.

It isa small wonder,that the Carter years have returned with a vengeance.Inflation is soaring. So, too, is the number of murders.Oil prices are climbing as thepresident strikes at the heart of American energy independence, all the while giving the green light for Putin to tie western Europe to a Russian gas pipeline.

Once more,theleader of the free worldfumbles opportunities to cooperate with allies and enables our adversaries in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was sentto Asia to reassure allies with memories of Obama-era indifferencetoward the Pacific region that Biden is cut from a different cloth.Yet even as Austin offeredthese assurances, the Biden administration was proposinga flat defense budget,one insufficient even to maintainpurchasing power.The incongruityhasnotbeenlost on nations looking to stand together with Washington to prevent Chinese military dominance of the Pacific region.

The same attitude applies to the Middle East where Arab statesin 2020buried age-old animosities toward Israel so as to stand together against the mullahs in Tehran. Throwing awaytheyears of progressencapsulated by the Abraham Accords, the Biden White House has returned to the Obama-era appeasement of Iran and its proxies.

Even in Europe,the message is one of retreat. The Trumpadministration halted Russian aggression in Ukraine by providing Kiev with weaponsable tokill Russian president Vladimir Putins tanks,helicopters and planes. The Biden-Harrisadministration unilaterallychoked offthe flow of military supplies to Ukraine, in the hope that Moscow would reciprocate.Instead,Putinhasmoved tens of thousands of troops to the border opposite Ukraineandcontinues to wage war on the cyber commons vital to American security.

People in London, whichis one of Americasmost important allies, wereleft flabbergasted by apresident who could not comprehend that Northern Ireland was a constituent part of the United Kingdom,not a province of the Irish Republic. The Canadians are reeling from the loss of thousands of oil and gas jobs as America relinquished its energypartnershipwith the stroke of apresidential pen.Thepresident of the French Republic declaredthat the wokepresidency of Joe Biden is a threat to the very soul of the French nation.

All of this means that America is now led by those who believe they exist to manage national decline,not lead the world.Secretary of State Antony Blinken has asked the United Nations Human Rights Council,a forum for world thuggery,to investigate racism in America. That means unleashingcouncilmembersChina, Russia,and Cubato vilify the United States with Foggy Bottoms blessing.

This is not new ground for Blinken. In March, the Chinese foreign minister hammeredhimby simply echoing Bidens own woke critique of America.The Wall Street Journalposited that the Chinese made clear that after the Trump years, Beijing wants a return to the policy of Obama accommodation to Chinas global advances. Blinkencould only respond with faculty lounge pieties about Americas imperfections.

In April, Bidens ambassador to the United Nations, Laura Thomas-Greenfield, embarrassed the United Statesbydenouncing her own nationbefore the UNHuman Rights Council, declaring that the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.

Theinabilityof these top officialsto be anything but defensive abouttheirown country sets the tone for what to expect in the next four years. How can America cope with a rampant China when her own leaders do not believe that the country is worth defending, even rhetorically? If they will not stand for a nation grounded in the universal principles of human dignity and individual freedom, then where will they stand?

Let us be clearaboutwhat is at stake. China and itsjunior partners, Russia and Iran, seek nothing less than the overthrow of the United States as the worlds most powerful country with the Middle Kingdom being at the center of a new world order.

Carter famously said that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan revealed what was at the heart of Moscows ambitions. He immediately putintoproductionthe B-1 bomber, theAbrams Tank and the Minuteman 3systems Ronald Reagan would build upon to confront the Kremlin.

At least the man from Plains was honest enough toreverse course when he realizedhe was wrong.Do notcount on a similar epiphany from the current occupant of the White House. One canonly pray that Americanswill not witnessmoregrovelingbillboards on Bragg Boulevard.

A former secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairsandundersecretaryof Defense for Personnel and Readiness, Robert Wilkie is a visiting fellow in The Heritage Foundations Center forNationalDefense.

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Is Joe Biden the 2021 Version of Jimmy Carter? - The National Interest

By Kim Harrisberg

JOHANNESBURG, July 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - From factories and malls going up in flames to supermarkets stripped bare by looters, South Africans were shocked this month when the army was used to stem the worst violence in decades.

What exactly sparked the riots and how do government, and regular citizens, hope to build back better in one of the world's most divided and unequal countries?

What triggered the violence?

When former president Jacob Zuma was arrested on 7 July and jailed for refusing to appear at an inquiry into high-level corruption during his nine years in office until 2018, his supporters took to the streets to demand his release.

The protests quickly evolved into widespread looting as rioters blocked major highways and set fire to chemical plants, farms and food storage facilities. The violence claimed more than 300 lives and billions of rands worth of damage.

President Cyril Ramaphosa called the riots "a failed insurrection" by Zuma supporters, signalling an ongoing political battle within the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which took power at the end of apartheid in 1994.

Did coronavirus play a role?

While some looters were filmed driving in expensive cars to raid malls, many said they were poor and jobless. Women, including the elderly, stole food and nappies while children grabbed clothes and shoes.

Coronavirus has decimated the economy, with the first hard lockdown in 2020 causing 3 million job losses within months, with women in the informal sector particularly hard hit.

Almost half of South Africanssurveyed by research firm IPSOS last year said their household often went hungry because they did not have enough money to buy food.

And unemployment hit anew record high of 32.6% in the first quarter of 2021, with more than 7 million people unemployed.

Child support grants were topped up during the pandemic, andnew relief schemes were introduced but these benefits stopped in April, as the government said it could not afford them.

In June, South Africa went in to a third lockdown, causing massive hardship for poor families who rely on daily wage labour like construction and domestic workers, creating a tinder-box ready to ignite.

Isn't South Africa the richest country in Africa?

South Africa is a country of paradoxes. It is not uncommon to see a shoeless beggar hold out his hand towards the tinted windows of a Ferrari at the traffic lights.

Rich in diamonds, gold, platinum, copper and coal, South Africa is home to36,500 dollar millionaires - twice as many as any other country on the continent, according to New World Wealth and AfrAsia Bank.

Meanwhile, more than half of South Africa's 60 million people live in poverty, official statistics show.

This deep inequality stretches back to 17th century colonialism and slavery, followed by 46 years of racially segregated, white minority rule from 1948 to 1994.

Racial tensions remain, with roughly 70% of privately-owned farmland in South Africa owned by whites, who make up less than 9% of the 58 million-strong population.

What happens next?

Despite the violence and loss of life, many have lauded Zuma's imprisonment as a sign that all are equal before the law.

Ramaphosa announced acrisis relief fund for South Africans whose businesses were looted and asked the public to donate. But some on Twitter decried it as a "relief fund for the looters" or worried it would provide "more for people in govt to steal".

Ramaphosa also said he was considering introducing a basic income grant, which civil society has long lobbied for, and met with 90 business leaders to discuss urgent relief efforts.

The millionaire businessman's wing of the ANC is under pressure from the Zuma faction and the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters, both of which have called for mines and banks to be nationalised and land confiscated without compensation.

Ramaphosa's planto revive the economy and create jobs by building ports and generating energy has won support, though critics say the ANC must do more to end corruption, unemployment and simmering anger over continued wealth disparities.

Meanwhile, ordinary South Africans have wasted no time responding to the crisis with fundraising networks and street clean ups, and charities have rallied to collect food parcels while lines snaked outside soup kitchens.

Related stories:

Sharp-eyed grandmothers combat looting and crime in South Africa

In South Africa, a zero-waste food bus hopes to drive away hunger

Trash for cash: South Africans fight hunger with digital currency

($1 = 14.5396 rand)

(Reporting by Kim Harrisberg @kimharrisberg; Editing by Katy Migiro. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking, property rights, and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

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What's behind the rioting that rocked South Africa? - Thomson Reuters Foundation