The Democrat's "Plan B" for immigration reform: same old shell game

Sen. Bob Menendez and some others have floated trial balloons saying the Democrats "Plan B"  for some sort of concession to the immigrant rights movement in the Reconciliation Bill is updating the "Registry Date." 

'Registry' allows immigrants to get legal status 

The "Registry Date" was the mechanism used 100 years ago to straighten out the immigration papers of European immigrants. Basically it said if you had been here since before a given date, you should go tell the attorney general so he could just recognize you as being a permanent resident and give you a green card.

The measure was adopted in 1929, and it was meant to be, and essentially was, a statute of limitation on undocumented status. And over the decades, the date was updated several times ... until it stopped benefitting mostly Europeans.

So the last time the date was moved was as part of the misnamed Reagan "amnesty"  of the mid-1980s; and to this day it remains set in 1972, a half-century ago.

The proposal being floated now is for making 2010 the cutoff. That would in theory benefit a majority of the undocumented, but would not begin to redress the harm of the two-decade bipartisan persecution and  criminalization of immigrants.

There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of families that have been divided by the Bush-Obama-Trump and now --let's be honest-- Biden criminalization and deportation madness. A registry date change simply ignores the reality of the need to redress that damage.

So welcome as legalization of some --even many-- among the undocumented would be, it is no substitute for a real change in policy.

The Democrat's somewhat disingenuous argument for saying a registry date change fits in a budget reconciliation bill would be that it just updates a deadline for filing a petition for adjusting your status, a mere technicality but --oh happy coincidence!-- it would mean gizillions of dollars flowing into the government because of the filing fee for that petition. So, you see, this is mostly a budgetary measure to raise funds for the feds, like, say, increasing the luxury tax on imported perfume.

The obvious retort is that although disguised as a mere technical change in a deadline, this is in fact a humongous shift in immigration policy. So nice try, but no cigar.

What else should be noted is that the option of updating the registry date has been open since forever to supposedly pro-immigrant Democrats (and yes, to Republicans, too, when there were still some pretending to be pro-immigrant), and they never seriously considered putting it into any piece of must-pass legislation until now, when --oh so conveniently-- the Democrats can shift the blame for it being thrown out on an obscure, unelected official, the Senate parliamentarian. 

So until they prove otherwise, my response to the "Plan B" is that this is just one more three-card-monte con job and I say to Biden, Schumer, Pelosi and their ilk: you bastards, that is one more you owe us.

Today was a good day: the fall of Kabul

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
                               -- T.S. Elliot

Everyone was surprised that Batista fled La Habana on New Year's Eve at the end of 1958. But also ...

• The Shah, Teheran.
• Somoza, Managua.
• Ghani, Kabul. 

The rapidity with which the South Vietnamese position collapsed in 1975 was surprising to most American and South Vietnamese observers... For instance, a memo prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and U.S. Army Intelligence and published on 5 March indicated that South Vietnam could hold out through the current dry season—i.e., at least until 1976.      -- Wikipedia

That's what they said about Fidel and the Sandinistas, too. That bit about the dry season in Vietnam was essentially the sort of lie that the major media were parroting about Afghanistan even a couple of days ago. 

But the reality of post-WWII colonial occupations is this: the second most people in the country become convinced that the challenged client regime no longer has unstinting unconditional, unlimited, American backing, its collapse is a question of weeks. The precise timing depends on the skills and calculations of  the insurgents. 

That the puppet regime in Afghanistan would end like this was obvious months ago, with the first reports of rural districts (roughly equivalent to American counties) "falling" to the Taliban because the insurgents made the soldiers at government outposts an offer they couldn't refuse: if they surrendered their positions and weapons, they could simply walk away.

You say, "wait!" That isn't really an offer they couldn't refuse because they had the alternative to resist a Taliban advance. And precisely the point is the government soldiers did not see any reason to act as government soldiers once someone showed up asking, "are you the people fighting for the government?"

That's when I knew it would end like this, and said so publicly on Radio Migrante months ago. The timing, of course, I had no way of knowing, it simply depended on when the Taliban felt they were in a position to tap the house of cards so the structure would collapse. It turned out that was 9 days ago. The first provincial capitals "fell" to the Taliban August 6. On August 15, they talked into the presidential palace without resistance.

I guess one could say this is one more attempt by history to teach the American rulers that the age of colonialism ended with their victory in WWII. 

The American revolution was the first major anti-colonial revolution of the modern epoch, however immensely flawed (slavery of Blacks, genocide against the Indians, brutal exploitation of the immigrant proletariat from Europe). 

I guess it shows that as a supremely social species, we advance only grudgingly. and perhaps it is fitting that such a major anticolonial victory well into the 21st century should also certainly be flawed, as was the one that set the pattern by having its slave owning leaders proclaim that "all men are created equal," and, no, Jefferson didn't mean "and women too," (see: Sally Hemings).

To deny the victory over colonialism and imperialism that has just taken place because of "Islamo-fascism" and similar denunciations is to misunderstand how historical progress takes place, including that, in a lot of ways, it sucks. Just ask Washington's and Jefferson's slaves. But despite that, July 4, 1776, was a great day. 

And today, too, has been a good day, despite what is to follow.

You want COVID to be over? Make it so ...

Today, after a year of hiding at home, I went back to the Radio Migrante studio at the GLAHR offices to do a webcast show from there for the first time in a year. 

After a year of doing our daily "Todas las Voces" streaming show remotely, it was a liberating experience.

Radio Migrante 26-III-2021

Because of my age (I turn 70 in a couple of months) and pre-existing conditions (too many to list) I had been strongly advised to hide in the deepest cave I could find until COVID was over. Doing an internet streaming program in the second decade of the 21st Century made it possible, barely an inconvenience. My older brother (a distinguished college professor) once told me that Jean Paul Sartre had said that "hell is other people." An even worse hell is the one without other people. Even online, with video and audio and interactivity, it is not the same.

I volunteered for the vaccine trials (where half the participants get the real thing and half a placebo) out of cowardice: a 50% chance of protection is way better than 0% ... and trusting the vaccines likely would work.

In December I was was enrolled into the J&J trial, but a 50% chance of contracting a deadly disease ain't so good so I still stayed in my cave despite getting a shot.

Now that the main part of that trial has concluded, and the vaccine has been authorized, participants in the study were "unblinded" and a few days ago I was told that I had in fact received the vaccine last year and have been fully vaccinated for months.

So given that this vaccine --and all the others with detailed published trial results (and, yes, including Russian and Chinese shots)-- are (roughly) totally effective in preventing severe disease leading to hospitalization and possibly death, and after talking to medical folks, I decided that for me, COVID --or at least extreme COVID, hiding in a cave-- is over.

Today I spent more time just informally talking to people in person after the show than I have in a year. And yes, we kept our distance, and had masks much of the time when not eating. Still, it was liberating, exhilarating.

Our society as a whole, and the entire world, also needs to be liberated from this pandemic. That starts with the responsibility of everyone who has the privilege of being able to get vaccinated now to actually do so. And that means us, people in the United States, who have access to the world's biggest stash of shots. All the science suggests that the vaccines greatly reduce or block viral transmission. And that is what so-called "herd" --group-- immunity is about. But it only works if close to everyone is vaccinated.

Within a few weeks, it is likely that the United States is going to be awash in vaccines. In addition to the three already approved, the federal government has already bought enough shots of those three and other vaccines likely to be approved soon to cover the country's entire population two or three times over. Our responsibility is not to agonize over the ethics of being ahead of billions of people in Asia or Africa with access to the vaccines: right now we cannot fix that. Our responsibility is to bare the arm and receive the shots. That will set the stage for the fight to have all those "extra" doses we as a country have already bought to be shared so that the whole world --the entire human race-- can be protected. 

And not just our "extra" doses but as many more as can be produced in our country, and as many more as can be produced by sharing the technology and patents involved with everyone. Many other countries can produce vaccines. And all those than can should be doing so. Pharmaceutical profits be damned. 

And in our specific case, we should let our "last name" ... of America ... be our starting point. Let's truly be of America, and just as our government is doing for the population of the United States, if we want to show the world we are truly a great nation, the United States, working together with other countries of the Americas, should guarantee vaccines for all Americans --North, South or Central-- this very year. 

Sí se puede. Yes we can.

But the first step is for you to get vaccinated as soon as you possibly can. It is one more step towards freedom from COVID. And once we learn that together we can free ourselves from COVID, I think it pops the lid from the can on what together we can do..

Today I felt liberated. Let's make it so for our entire race, the human race, because while there is a soul still imprisoned or threatened by COVID, none of us will truly be free. 

Who was behind the organizing that turned Georgia Blue?

Georgia's Blue? What's up with that?

A lot of people are scratching their heads and wondering, how did Georgia wind up Blue in the electoral college maps while Texas, North Carolina and even Florida remained red?

In the end, it was over 120,000 doors

There are undoubtedly many factors to take into account, but at least in Georgia, I believe the difference came from two extraordinary women political leaders who inspired the sort of grass-roots, from below organizing work that leads to permanent change.

One is Stacey Abrams, who everyone has heard of, the Democratic candidate for governor in 2018 who established the New Georgia Project (in its various incarnations).

The other is Adelina Nicholls, who almost no one has heard of, and is the founder and executive director of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR). 

Yes, Stacey Abrams is, in a sense, more significant, for her ties are to the much larger Black community. But as we say in GLAHR, "Aquí estamos y nos nos vamos," we're here and we're not leaving, and this year, we Latinos have made ourselves felt. 

I have not an ounce of doubt: we pushed Biden over the top. Yes, we stood on the shoulders of a giant, the Black community, and proudly so, and so we flipped the state from red to blue. 

It is not a question of who deserves more credit, but of what together we can accomplish.

The activist movement associated with GLAHR [GLAHR itself is a 501c(3) non-profit and was not directly involved in many phases of this] targeted suburban Atlanta's two main (until now) Republican-dominated counties for a sustained campaign beginning with voter registration and culminating with dozens of election defender teams at polling places on  November 3. 

For the Latino movement, the central objective of the overall campaign was not the presidential campaign but knocking out the 287G "polimigra" programs which are authorized by the elected sheriffs of the two counties. 

Key in that was defeating the Republican candidates for Sheriff, one an incumbent, the other the chief deputy of the retiring office holder.

In that, GLAHR made an alliance with activists from SONG (Southerners on New Ground), and people activated by the BLM upsurge this summer. 

Because of Covid-19 and my age (I'm 69), my participation has been limited to the streaming show GLAHR folks do every day, otherwise. I've been mostly observing from the sidelines while this has been going on But these activists conducted a year long campaign and in the decisive phase this fall, knocked on 120,000 doors in Cobb and Gwinnett. If you want to see the biggest vote total shifts in Georgia, go look at those two counties and compare them to 2016.

But of tremendous importance to the Latino community, both counties elected candidates for sheriffs that are pledged to stop 287G, the program that creates a direct pipeline to deportation from a county jail where people can be booked for nothing more than a traffic ticket.

Although various Latino groups are claiming they did all sorts of things in Georgia, so many thousands of phone calls and tens of thousands of texts, that  I know of, no one else was on the ground in Georgia knocking on doors and talking to people apart from Stacey Abrams' and Adelina's movements. And if you're questioning the reality of what I'm saying about the Latino activist side of this, on this facebook page you can examine the receipts.

And as for South Georgia, the only group that I know of who also did door-knocking GOTV there were the activists from GLAHR's local "Comités Populares." 

Various reports have highlighted the role played by the campaign against Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County (Phoenix & metro area) in leading to this year that state going blue.

But people are not aware that the same idea has been followed in Georgia. Which is, of course, no coincidence. Because many leaders of both the Georgia movement and the Arizona movement are part of Mijente, which grew out of the "not one more" campaign aimed at deporter-in-chief Barack Obama in the last years of his administration. 

Some people say that we in Georgia followed AOC's call for "deep canvassing," going out and actually talking to people, and not just buying ads on TV and sending mailings. Others noted that we've been following what Brazilian Paulo Freire taught more than a half century ago in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

I hope some day soon some progressive national media will come down to Georgia and present to the country a more complete picture of this extraordinary victory.

The pandemic wins the presidency

As of Friday November 6, at 7:26 PM, 235,988 is the one Trump number no one on CNN can bring themselves to mention.

April 2020: Coronavirus mass burials, Hart Island, New York

That's because that's the number of people who couldn't vote for or against Trump because Covid killed them. And there's nothing in John King's Magic Wall that can analyze or contextualize those six digits, only the certainty that in a couple of minutes, they will change to add one or two more to the total.

The media covers the vote count as if the universe was created to contain it, but we are not about the election, the election is about us, and while we've been absorbed by numbers and red and blue splotches on maps, the exponential growth Dr. Fauci warned us about months ago has arrived.

It's not chestnuts that are roasting by this open fire. We're having a holocaust for the Holidays.

From the archives two decades ago: On Trotskyism, and why I am not a 'Trostskyist'

[The post below is something I wrote two decades ago in reference to a long-forgotten conference dealing with the legacy of Trotskyism. It was written for the Marxism email list, maintained to this day by Unrepentant Marxist Louis Proyect, who together with this writer and many other on that list in those days, had come out of the wreckage of what had been until the 1980s the main Trotskyist group in the United States, the Socialist Workers Party.

[I had been a prominent leader of the SWP for several years before leaving the group in 1985. A few months earlier in the year 2000 I'd become embroiled in a controversy with the SWP over the case of Cuban 6-year-old Elián González, which earned me a two-page centerfold spread denunciation in the May 22, 2000, edition of the paper, which was a gratifying confirmation that the criticism I'd leveled against the SWP cult for denouncing the raid that freed Elián and returned him to his father had struck home.

[Recently there's been a lot of discussion in the DSA around various issues that led me to seek out and re-read this old post. That led me to think it was worth resurrecting although I do not have the time to explain why apart from saying that the underlying issues of the relationship between the actual social movement of working people, political organizations, and ideology or "theory" are present in both cases.

[Unfortunately I also don't have the time to try to make this post more understandable to those who did not live through those times as part of those circles. But I wanted to make it accessible as I started to write an article about current concerns where I wound up making reference to this post.]

*  *  *

Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2000 00:07:19 -0700

I've read with some interest the reports on the conference and related matters.

It seems to me the question that deserves the most thought is the legacy of Trotsky, of Trotskyism, and of the Trotskyist movement. They are not the same thing.

To start with the Trotskyist movement. It seems to me the current of Bolshevik-Leninists that arose in the USSR to fight against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union was entirely progressive and historically necessary. It was most of all a fight to rescue and preserve genuine Marxism. I believe Trotsky will be long remembered for this. And his analysis and understanding of the degeneration of the Soviet Union is now part of the ABC's of Marxism.

I think [Argentine socialist] Nestor [Gorojovsky] is right to place the Russian Revolution in the context of the great sweep of revolutions called forth by the development of capitalism in Europe, and the events now going on in Belgrade as quite likely their closing chapter.

I do not believe the Belgrade events close the book on the Trotskyist movement, however, no more than the 1989-1991 capitalist restorationist counterrevolution in  the USSR and Central and Eastern Europe did. I believe the book was closed on the specifically Trotskyist movement as "the" revolutionary movement by the Second World War and its immediate result, the anticolonial revolution, and this was shown in practice in China in 1949, and confirmed again in the 50s in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Algeria.

The case of Cuba is particularly definitive because there was no question there but that these were fresh revolutionary currents, totally outside the by-then "traditional" tendencies in the workers and communist movement. There were undoubtedly many individuals who came out of the Trotskyist tradition or who were influenced by it who simply became part of the Cuban revolutionary movement. But those who chose to remain specifically and distinctively Trotskyist became, inevitably and irremediably, a sect.

In fact, the Trotskyist movement had been in a certain sense a sect all along, since the 1930s. I do not mean by this that they were sectarian (though many were) but that they were a strictly ideological formation, with a fully worked out theory and program, and the boundaries of the group were set overwhelmingly by this ideological frontier. A few times various Trotskyist groups began to go beyond being a mere sect formation in the direction of being an expression of the actual movement of social forces, but these remained in all cases, as far as I know, extremely limited and partial developments. In the one case I know best, that of the SWP in the mid-70s, the development was totally unconscious, a byproduct of its "intervention" in the mass movements of those days, and no one in the SWP except perhaps Peter Camejo even had an inkling of what was going on, what it really meant. Even incipient as Peter's tendency towards de-sectification may have been, he was instinctively rejected and pushed outside the party as a foreign organism.

I don't say this lightly, and it may seem to contradict what I said before about the importance of the fight waged by Trotsky and his comrades to preserve genuine revolutionary Marxism. But it was inevitable under the circumstances given the nature of the fight, an ideological one, that it had to be waged precisely by sect-like formations. Engels once said, I think in reference to the American SLP, that even sects can play a positive role during periods of downturn, because they keep alive socialist ideas.  Or to put it in American terms, without DeLeon, there would have been no Debs.

Marx and Engels's Communist League was a very similar formation to the Trotskyist movement, a purely ideological group, a group that largely played a role in the fight over ideas, creating a clear, Marxist pole of attraction in the inchoate communist rebelliousness of the mid-1840s. But it was a consciously anti-sect "sect," a group whose central ideological leaders understood that, at bottom, communism was not a doctrine but a movement, that the role of communists was not to teach the proletariat how to fight but to learn, to draw lessons and generalize them, bring to consciousness the actual existing social tendencies, motion and struggle. That's why in 1848, with the ink on the Manifesto barely dry, the Communists disbanded the Communist League, and Marx, Engels and some of their closest friends set up a daily newspaper instead.

The Communist League was briefly reborn following the defeat of the revolutions of 1848, when it was unclear whether the defeat was for an entire period of merely a momentary setback. When the actual reactionary nature of the new period, based on a vigorous capitalist expansion became clear, Marx, Engels and their closest friends made the conscious decision to wind up the organization. This was the logical, practical result of what they wrote in the Manifesto that the Communists did not have a set of their own sectarian principles by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement. Marx and Engels turned instead to strictly literary and theoretical work.

Similarly, throughout the 1930s and into the 40s, while the largely ideological battle against the Stalinist perversion of Marxism was paramount, the existence of these new "Communist Leagues" seems to me quite justified. But with the emergence of the anticolonial revolution, the right decision, whatever its forms, would have been to do something like what Marx and Engels did when the revolution in Germany broke out in 1848. China proved the Fourth International was not in fact the world party of socialist revolution, and to maintain those structures and groups could only lead to one's isolation from the real movement.

The Cuban Revolution unleashed a powerful wave of radicalization among young people throughout the continent. The emergence of this new generation of fighters posed very sharply and in real life the issue of whether the Trotskyists would become part of the renewed movement or would instead opt to become the church of LDT. Varying currents of the Trotskyist movement were well represented in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, and despite lip service and even World Congress resolutions about becoming integrated into the historic current represented by OLAS, no Trotskyist current saw its way clear to doing what Marx and Engels did almost by instinct in 1848, which is to dissolve into the general revolutionary movement.

The reason for this is that large wings of the communist movement have abandoned the viewpoint of the Manifesto on an essential question, the relationship of the communists to the proletariat, the proletarian movement and to other proletarian parties. Lenin is usually blamed for this, although usually it is thought of as "credited" with this and as far as I can tell whether for good or ill, it is a bum rap.

This arose in the 1920s in the Comintern, and has been deepened and hardened since. And it is not even so much a question as to whether what the Comintern did in the first congress or the second congress was the right thing at that time. It is the idea that these are the right things for all times, places and circumstances, that there is some "ideal" form of party organization and mass movement form. This is not Marxism but Platonism, and I think it is totally alien to how Marx and Engels, and, yes, Lenin, approached these questions.

Whether Trotsky would have had the same approach of discarding old, worn-out organizational forms is an interesting question. The comment Nestor quoted about how if W.W.II came out the way it actually did, all the books would have to be rewritten, is certainly suggestive.

This idea of "the Leninist strategy of party building" as the sure-fire formula for revolutionary success, the turning of the Russian experience into a "model," is a mistake. It is an understandable mistake, and one that the new generation of fighters that came up in Latin America in the 60s ALSO made vis-a-vis the Cuban model, but which the Cuban leadership itself eventually came to recognize as a mistake. The reason that Cuban communists do not run guns to guerrilla groups in Latin America today is not that they have abandoned their sympathy, solidarity and support for revolutionary movements throughout the hemisphere, but because they do not believe this is helpful, you can't repeat the Cuban experience, history has proved that, you have to create your own revolutionary tactics and strategy in each country based on the history, the psychological makeup and concrete circumstances of each people.

What was wrong with those Trotskyist currents who tried to become part of the general "Cuba-inspired" movement while retaining their own identity? It was a totally ideological differentiation, not a political one. Communism is a movement, not a doctrine, and if there was to have been a differentiation, it should have been along political lines of cleavage on what was to be done, on the ground, in specific circumstances in a specific country, not ideological ones about who was right in Soviet Russia in 1927.

This insistence on maintaining the Church of Saint Leon led inevitably to countless political mistakes, such as the US SWP's insanely sectarian articles about the "Stalinism" of the Vietnamese comrades and its quite ignorant and arrogant criticisms of the Vietnamese line on the Paris Peace Accords. Similar things can be said about its stance towards Chile, the Allende government and the coup, and if more similar examples are wanted, go to the Militant's web site and look up their articles on Hugo Chávez.

For to maintain a group around the lessons of China in the 1920s and Spain in the 1930s at its core can only makes sense if the issues now are posed in exactly the same way then, so that you could take Trotsky's articles, change a few names, dates and places, and publish it as your analysis of something happening today.

This is why I am not a Trotskyist, and it has, really, nothing to do with how much of what Trotsky wrote I agree with or how important I think his legacy may be. It has to do with Marx and Engels's idea that Communism is not a doctrine, it is a movement. 

That's why when people press me on what sort of Marxist I am, I'm much more likely to say that I'm a fidelista rather than a trotskista, although I agree with Fidel that it's better not to "personalize" these things. But I said fidelismo because fidelismo is the communist movement we've got in the here and now --and, of course, I believe to the marrow of my bones it is genuine 100% real communism, not some fake or perversion. 

If I had lived in Russia in 1917 I hope I would have been a Leninist, or if in the 20s and 30s, a Trotskyist, but as I see things, beginning in the late 1940s, "Trotskyism" as a separate distinct current and organization should have begun to melt into and simply become part of the past of the revolutionary movement, and certainly by the early 60s this was an urgent, pressing, overriding political necessity.

To try to maintain a separate, distinct "Trotskyist"  (or "Maoist" or "Stalinist" or "Leninist" or even, depending on the circumstances, a "Fidelista" or "Marxist" current) cannot but push you in an incorrect political direction, because it puts you in a false position on the relationship between the communist movement and communist theory, and on the relationship between the communists and the working class movement. 

Metro Atlanta DSA crisis deepens #DSASoWhite #DSAEnglishOnly

[This is a Facebook post in a thread initiated by Alexander Hernández, of the Metro Atlanta DSA,  asking people to support his democratic right to have a resolution saying defeating Trump and Trumpism should be the overriding priority for the our DSA chapter discussed and voted on at our next DSA meeting.

[Catie L, of the current executive committee responded that Alexander had had lots of chances to make his resolution more to the liking of our chapter nomenklatura, and (in true beaner/greaser style) Alexander refused to.

[Thus, Katie avers, "The EC isn't blocking anything; they voted to move forward with the voting & resolution committee's recommendation that it not be included on the agenda because it was improper."

[Got that? The EC --executive committee-- "isn't blocking anything" on account of it "moved forward" with the censorship committee (I mean "voting and resolutions committee") recommendation that it not be included in the agenda because it was "improper."

[And the difference between this and what Alexander describes as blocking is ... nothing. nada. zero. zip. Catie says they're not "blocking" his resolution from coming up for a vote. They're merely saying it can't be "included on the agenda because it was improper."

[WHY? Katie explains it in great detail: "As much as I am loathe to recommend folks read 50+ Slack threads, hopping on our chapter Slack and reading the discussion surrounding this will really illuminate the reality of the situation". It sure does. Telling people to go to an internal DSA forum structured in a way that only office workers and professionals have experience with tells me everything I need to know.

[If this were only the first, the second, or the hundredth such incident befell on spics like Alexander or me on the Anglo left in the United States, I might overlook it.

[But as it happens, I'm now headed towards my 70th birthday and after more than a half century of this bullshit, I've had enough. For more details, read through to the end to see what happened to the (supposedly) most widely supported resolution at the last DSA convention, and why I say not just #DSASoWhite but #DSAEnglishOnly.]

*  *  *

Catie, You may be " loathe to recommend folks read 50+ Slack threads," but you can recommend it until you're blue in the face.

I'm not going to discuss this on that corporate abomination Slack. PUBLISH the entire debate in a public space like a blog or a medium message. Maybe I'll read it, but the way I'm feeling right now, I doubt it.

Oh, but it reflects badly on the DSA to air our dirty laundry in public. So fucking be it.

It reflects WORSE on the DSA that you as a member of the local exec say let's go back to the Stalinist cult of secret "internal discussions," only this time through the corporate management control tool Slack.

"Internal" discussions. Been there. Done that. Not doing it any more.

A socialist organization, if it is truly socialist, does not belong to itself or its members. Socialism is the expression of the working class as it has emerged and developed under capitalism. If it were true to its socialist name the DSA and all of us as members would understand INSTINCTIVELY that all DSA business belongs to OUR CLASS, our people, the working people.

We as socialists should be trying to fashion a movement that helps working people come to a point where "they" (we) free ourselves. We do not want condescending saviors to rule us from a judgement hall.

Lenin and his friends, enemies and rivals in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party NEVER had secret written discussions in private bulletins and publications and it speaks to how profoundly Stalinism (including Trotskyism, which is just the mildest, most equivocal manifestation of Stalinism) completely corrupted the socialist movement in the imperialist countries since the early 1920s.

As for that august body, "The voting & resolutions committee" of Atlanta DSA having given an uppity spic like Alexander a chance to make his resolution more to the liking of some people by providing "options to amend and/or clarify the resolution," f*** them.

ALL I see here is the same thing I've experienced in the white-dominated U.S. socialist movement for half a century. we spics don't follow the rules, we spics are wrong.

I think this is just one more more item in a mountain of evidence that it is not possible to build a real multi-national (multi-ethnic/multi-racial) socialist movement in the United States.

A year ago at the time of the last DSA convention I wrote a resolution which was the resolution that got the most votes of any proposal at the convention. It instructed the incoming National Political Committee of the DSA to orient to the Latinx communities beginning by creating an editorial board to run a Spanish-language web site in the 90 days following the convention. It was specifically approved and sponsored by the Metro atlanta DSA chapter. No-One, here or elsewhere, said word one against it.

The ONLY suggestion was from the comrades of the Socialist Majority caucus who suggested that to take into account complications and unforeseen circumstances, "if possible" (or words to that effect) be added to the 90-day goal.

A year later we are in the middle of a crisis which needs to be recognized as a proletarian pandemic, to a very large degree, meaning, one centered in the industrial working class, people in Amazon warehouses, PPP textile mills, meat processing plants, fruit packing sheds and canneries. Those are major centers of Coronavirus spread, alongside nursing homes and prisons.

The result is that Latinx folks are a little over one sixth of the population but one third of the Covid cases. And when you get down to prime working age populations 20-50, there are more Latinos who've tested positive than the majority nationality, Anglos ("non-Hispanic white"), never mind Blacks, and when you get to schoolchildren, ages 5-17, Latinos are the ABSOLUTE MAJORITY of those who have tested positive for the virus.

There is nothing that could have been more timely, more righteous or more revolutionary than the American socialist movement reaching out to the Spanish-dominant immigrant core of the Latino community. THat is EXACTLY what simply implementing the convention resolution would have led to. That is EXACTLY what the DSA's national leadership refuses to do, even now, months into the pandemic.

But back to Atlanta. If the Metro Atlanta DSA leadership can find the time to figure out the ways to prevent a spic like Alexander from presenting and having his resolution voted on, then my question is:

WHY, in the middle of a pandemic centered in the Latino proletariat haven't you found the time to write a resolution demanding that all members of the National Political Committee resign for having failed to even fake a gesture to implement the MOST supported resolution adopted by the last convention, the one that ORDERED the incoming NPC to orient the DSA to reach out precisely to this layer of the population?

Or what about a resolution calling for a national dues strike against national DSA until and unless the NPC actually OBEYS the MANDATE of the resolution that had the greatest support at the last convention?

Why don't I write it such a resolution, and propose it to the Metro Atlanta DSA?
BECAUSE that is exactly what I did last year, and I remember writing then how tired I was of having to do this, of bearing the burden of the white man's racism, how I wished that for once I didn't need to be the one to tell the biggest socialist group in the country that in a world where their country had the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in the entire fucking world, they couldn't be English-only.

So, sure. A spic like Alexander couldn't bring himself to follow all the rules and accommodate the resolutions committee and HOW DARE HE complain to working people in general instead of keeping it "inside" the socialist family.

But a spic like José did follow all the rules and got Metro Atlanta DSA to endorse and support and got the ENTIRE national DSA to endorse and support and mandate the NPC to act.

And the along came a once-in-a-century pandemic that shows WHY orienting to the most oppressed and exploited layers of the working class is absolutely essential but never mind, we're so full of our "collective power" and "rank and file" strategies that we don't notice that the single most affected sector of the working people don't hear a word the DSA says because the DSA won't speak in a language they understand.

#DSASoWhite

#DSAEnglishOnly

More than a third of all people who've had coronavirus in the United States are Latinx

More than one third of all people who have tested positive for Coronavirus in the United States are Latinx, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control.

Buried deep in the CDC web site are web pages with charts showing that as of June 21, Latinos were 34.3% of those who have tested positive. The figure for Anglos --"non-Hispanic whites," in government lingo-- was 34.8%, barely half a percent higher.

But we "Hispanics" are only 18.3% of the country's population, and Anglos are more than 3 times as many at 60.4%. If you do the math it means that if you're Latinx, you're three and a quarter times more likely to have tested positive for the virus than if you are white.

There has also been a large disparate impact on the African American community. They account for 21.3 percent of cases but only 13.4 percent of the population, which means a Black person was almost three times more likely than a white one to become infected.

The relatively little attention on the disparate impact of Covid-19 on minority communities has been focused overwhelmingly on the Black community and for a very good reason: the best available data has been on the race of the dead. And deaths among Latinos don't seem to be that high -- the latest data (on figure 2a of this CDC web page) shows deaths among Latinos are 18.3%. What you must remember is that 80% or more of the deaths are among those of Medicare age, but only 8% of those over 65 are Latino.

It is in the very youngest demographic --minors-- where we are over-represented, with a quarter of the country's children. And among the children, 54% well over half of those under 18 who have tested positive for the virus are Latinx.

The DSA's AFROSOC Caucus channels Stalin

The official Afro-Socialist and People of Color caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America succeeded in forcing the cancellation of an online forum co-sponsored by the Lower Manhattan and Philadelphia units of the organization because it didn't like what the speaker was going to say.

That speaker was to be Adolph Reed, a Black Academic, holding forth on "Dangers of Disparity Ideology," which, as best as I understand it, is that the questions of the race (and unstated but implicit, ethnicity/nationality) of Covid-19 victims should be ignored so at to not to obscure the issue of class.

If I can be forgiven for being so old, Reed's theses is the sort of idiocy I've been hearing since I was in high school and sneaking into Students for a Democratic Society meetings at the University of Miami in 1969 where adherents of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party's "Workers-Student Alliance" Caucus sang the praises of the strategy, "Black and white, unite and fight," i.e., putting aside issues of race.

But the truth is that this idea --and especially grey versions of it, not quite so starkly Black-and-white as I painted it above-- have a huge amount of currency in the new socialist movement that has arisen in the United States in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and Sanders 2016 and 2020.

Yet the statement put out by AFROSOC demanding Reed's scheduled webinar be turned into a debate (with whom? we were never told!) says quite clearly that all the comrades who are inclined to agree with him should be driven out of the DSA: "It is a reactionary and class reductionist form of politics that should have no place in DSA."

Read it again: "should have no place in the DSA." In this way, the statement makes clear no debate was wanted or intended.

Inside the AFROSOC/POC Caucus, the trick that was used to impose this Stalinist notion was to present for a vote two options: demand that the event be cancelled or that it be turned into a debate.

The point was to make it seem like demanding the debate was something other than censoring Reed and preventing him from having his say.

But "demanding a debate" --especially under current Covid-19 circumstances-- the day before an event is not a serious demand.

The word "debate' was just a way of provoking enough of a ruckus so that the event would be cancelled. And the result was that the lead sponsor, a Lower Manhattan DSA branch committee, did cancel it, supposedly because Reed decided to withdraw, some said, but who knows.

So let's not bullshit each other: the effect was exactly what was intended. Reed's viewpoint is simply verboten, not allowed, beyond the pale: "a reactionary and class reductionist form of politics that should have no place in DSA."

This idealist, moralistic way of posing the question, a "form of politics that should have no place in DSA" brings out sharply what it wrong with it: right now, it does, in fact, have a place within the DSA. That is material reality. The actual truth of the DSA as it exists: not a statement of what I wish would be true, but, on the contrary, simply a statement of the facts on the ground.

Let me repeat: it is a fact the those ideas are in the DSA, shared to a greater or lesser degree by many members.  Hence the importance of a real discussion, and even debate, and thus the attraction of the debate demand. The Caucus rejected demanding that the event be cancelled but through the 11th-hour debate demand, in practice, on the ground, in the real world, it led exactly to that outcome: cancellation. That is what was wanted by the instigators: "should have no place in DSA."

But if you really think you can dictate that people abandon their erroneous opinion, you might want to check how far the Catholic Church got with its campaign against the heretical idea that the earth went around the sun instead of the other way around. You can force someone to recant. But it still moves.

It will take time, discussions, and most of all experience in further struggles for those current DSA members who hold ideas like Reed's to discard them. And some never will. Believe me. Been there. Done that. Despite that some --many-- will be excellent socialist militants, in real life, on the ground.

Yet there may come a time when people with such ideas and those of us who reject them might not be able to coexist in a common organization. But the Afrosoc position paper claims that the moment has already arrived:

Efforts like these have proven to be incapable of building a multiracial working class base for socialist politics. More importantly, events like these undermine the organizing work DSA is doing in Black, Indigenous and people of color communities. DSA already gets smeared for being too white (which it is) as if it’s irredeemably white and that only communicates to BIPOC folks that they shouldn’t join DSA. What do these DSA organizers think they’re saying to their BIPOC comrades by hosting this kind of event? How do they think this event is going to help in our efforts at recruiting a more diverse DSA?

This is preposterous. To think some Black or Latinx activist is going to be held back from joining the Metro Atlanta DSA, my chapter, because in New York a committee from one of a half dozen branches held an online forum that promoted supposedly bad ideas to literally handfuls, if not dozens or even a hundred people, is absurd.

On the contrary, I think a group really grappling with these issues both in theory and its activism would prove immensely attractive to young militants. Those are the sorts of issues that hooked me into getting involved in SDS way back when.

But the same can't be said of a group where you suddenly face peremptory demands coming out of the blue to brand as anathema certain ideas and shut down all discussion of them (and with the supposed moral authority of ALL the "people of color" in the organization, even though fewer than 30 actually voted, out of hundreds or perhaps thousands of POC members).

But the issue of why the DSA has not become a more diverse organization is an immediate and pressing one. And I wish I had a comprehensive formula for solving this, but all I have is a very modest grain of sand.

Delegates to our last DSA convention ratified by an overwhelming margin --the highest of any resolution by far-- a text saying the DSA should orient to Latinx communities beginning with establishing a Spanish-language web site with its own editorial board.

Given the weight that the Afrosoc/POC statement on Reed's forum gives to making sure even a local New York online event "is going to help in our efforts at recruiting a more diverse DSA," one would think a body that is supposed to be the primary expression of oppressed minorities in the DSA in general would have assiduously followed, step by step, the efforts made by the national staff and National Political Committee to implement this convention mandate.

Has the Caucus done that? No it has not. And how do I know that? With apologies to Bernie:

I wrote the damn resolution.

The tremendous concern of those who run this DSA grouping for getting people who are not white anglos to the DSA has been absent in this case even though the resolution specified a goal of 90 days, and we've already tripled that.

And this Caucus has not lifted a finger --nay, not even a toenail-- to push for the implementation of this resolution. Shutting down Adolph Reed from having his say under DSA auspices to literally several if not dozens of comrades who mostly would not agree with him anyways was of overriding importance.

Trying to get the DSA to address the tens of millions of people in this country whose primary language is Spanish ... that can wait. Forever.

What this suggests to me is that this DSA Caucus might be vulnerable to being accused of fraud. Despite the claim that it is representative both of Blacks and other "People of Color," in reality Latinos are officially 18% of the U.S. population, by far the largest nationally oppressed group in the United States, but it does not seem to strike the Caucus leaders that their priorities and actions should conform to that reality.

Which raises the obvious question: if this caucus doesn't work, why not organize a Latine caucus? And the answer is that the DSA has been such a catastrophic failure in attracting Latinx people, and in providing vehicles through which a message like this can reach a large percentage of the membership, that trying would likely be a waste of time.

But if that is so, can the DSA really become the organization so many members want it to be, the political expressions of the multinational/racial U.S. working class?

Official: April jobless was 19.5%, not 14.7% Unofficial: the truth is even worse, 31.6%

It was there, not quite in plain sight, but buried on page 11 of a 14-page FAQ on the impact of the pandemic on the jobs report, which was referenced in a technical note attached to the end of the mind-numbing statistical dump that the Bureau of Labor Statistics issues once a month....

7.5 million were counted as just absent, not unemployed

Basically, the survey takers classified many millions whose work places had shut down as absent but employed (like for example someone on vacation or ill, whether with or without pay). The Bureau of Labor Statistics admits they should have been classified instead as being on temporary layoff. 

It turns out that people being surveyed for the unemployment report are asked whether they were at work during the reference week (the week that includes the 12th day of the month), and if not whether that was because they were laid off, furloughed, on vacation, ill, etc. or absent for some "other reason." People who say they were furloughed or laid off but expect to be called back to the same job are unemployed. Those absent due to vacation, illness or whatever, including "other reason" are still employed.

Those counted as employed but absent for "another reason" jumped from 620,000 in March to 8.1 million in April. After much explicating and analyzing, adding and subtracting, the FAQ admits these are really virus layoffs.

And thus we come to question 14 of the FAQ:  "What would the unemployment rate be if these misclassified workers were included among the unemployed?" (And, yeah, it was in bold in the original.)

If the workers who were recorded as employed but not at work the entire survey reference week had been classified as “unemployed on temporary layoff,” the overall unemployment rate would have been higher than reported....

 If these 7.5 million people were to be considered unemployed on temporary layoff, the number of unemployed people in April (on a not seasonally adjusted basis) would increase by 7.5 million from 22.5 million to 30.0 million.... The resulting unemployment rate for April would be 19.2 percent (not seasonally adjusted), compared with the official estimate of 14.4 percent (not seasonally adjusted). Repeating this exercise ... with the seasonally adjusted estimates ... yields a similar 4.8 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate for April—or 19.5 percent, compared with the official seasonally adjusted rate of 14.7 percent. [Emphasis added]

How can one possibly justify reporting such a colossally flawed statistic? Well, "According to usual practice, the data from the household survey are accepted as recorded. To maintain data integrity, no ad hoc actions are taken to reclassify survey responses."

But even that correction paints a false picture. The government also keeps track of people who have been looking for a job but not in the previous four weeks (2.3 million so called "discouraged" workers), as well as those who have only been hired to work part time but want full time jobs (10.9 million "underemployed").

Together with the officially unemployed, these are included in another unemployment measure, called "U-6".

The April report pegs it at 22.4% using raw figures and 22.8% with the seasonal adjustment. Adding the 7.5 million "misclassified" (their word) brings it up to 27.3% and 27.7%, assuming the seasonal adjustment would also be 0.4%.

And there's still one more problem.

The number of persons not in the labor force who currently want a job, at 9.9 million, nearly doubled in April. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the last 4 weeks or were unavailable to take a job.

It is pure sophistry and bad faith to say that in the middle of a pandemic where the government is ordering people to stay at home, shutting down schools and closing businesses and plants, those five million extra people that just showed up aren't obviously people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic.

Especially when the rate of labor force participation and the percentage of the population that has a job both plunged to levels not seen since Richard Nixon was President, as the report itself explains. That pretty much proves that what you've just done is disappeared millions of people from the statistics.

I leave aside the cynicism of saying that people who don't have a job, want one and are wuilling to take one but don't fit the government's definition of "looking for a job" should not count as unemployed.

So here is what we have: 22.5 million officially unemployed in the monthly report. Add to that 7.5 million misclassified, 2.3 million discouraged, 10.9 million underemployed and 9.9 million who want a job but don't count. That's 53.1 million, and works out to 31.6%.

On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, what if Covid-19 were the cure, not the disease?

We just blew through the 50th anniversary of Earth Day without even noticing.

I'm old enough to remember the first one, and that I was an 18-year-old college freshman who thought there was some validity to it but mostly the focus needed to be on Imperialism and the Vietnam War, as well as racism, which was the war at home. I thought mostly the liberals were using the environment to distract us.

Just saw a link to something being promoted by Michael Moore, "Planet of the Humans," with tagline something like "what if a single species dominated the entire planet?" Posted on account of Earth Day.

Didn't watch it; watched something else and then wrote this instead.

Despite most definitely being of that generation, I don't believe in Gaia or all that crunchy granola kind of thinking. I don't believe the planet or the universe is conscious, a spirit being ...

But for some reason, I do believe in poetic justice. And while I don't believe this pandemic is the cure outraged deities have prescribed for the infestation of this planet, yet the next one might be ... a simple virus, with an incubation period of a few days, like this one, including a period during which you're contagious but asymptomatic, but with the mortality of Ebola, untreated AIDS or perhaps just this mortality, but like the Spanish flu of a century ago, killing mostly younger adults, not the elderly.

Not the physical disappearance of every last homo sapiens on the planet -- there are usually survivors -- but enough initially to cause civilization's collapse and that collapse taking care of most of the others.

That comes from the link I actually did click on the YouTube page where Michael Moore's post also appeared, which was to a documentary about the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations more than a thousand years BC.

It explored the theses that the root cause may have been climate change ... the sudden emergence of a much drier climate in the eastern Mediterranean.

Which is the other fevered Covid-19 nightmare: it is neither the wipe-out pandemic, nor a foreshadowing, but a distraction from finally trying to ward off the climate going crazy, as it appears to have done at the end of the bronze age.

You may think we're scientifically and technically advanced enough to cope. That may be, but it may also be true that our political class and institutions are so corrupt and decrepit as to put salvation beyond our reach.

Look at Western Europe and the USA: China gave us the sincerest possible warning: they did complete lockdown on a province with more people than Italy or Spain.

We blew it so completely that both here and there we have infections and deaths orders of magnitude greater than China's.

Were I to believe in Gaia, I might think the Coronavirus was mostly her way of warning us to fix the way we handle our common affairs. Whether climate change or another pathogen, we cannot continue as we are and survive, at least not most of us.

Coronavirus: either very low risk or deadly, urgent health emergency ... but not both

The following is something I posted on a bulletin-board service in my neighborhood that I belong to. Someone posted a viral email from James Robb, MD, a virus doctor. It provoked a lively debate about the U.S. Government's actions on coronavirus. The link above has the email as well as background info on Robb. I also checked him out on the Internet, and the top anti-bullshit site Snopes.com has even more background info. Dr. Robb may be mistaken, but he is totally legit.

What, me worry? Boomers should realize that
this is not about "the" future but about our future.

On the facemasks debate: what the government is trying to convince us of --facemasks provide NO benefit-- is patently false, as the viral letter from the virus doctor explains. By preventing you from touching your face, and especially your nose and mouth, you avoid contamination from viruses on the surfaces you touched.

However, when you think about it, it is obvious this can only be minimal protection, and there is a very strong argument to be made that, given the shortage, every last mask should be reserved for use by actually infectious patients (so they don't spread the disease) and especially for our health care providers.

And that should be done by the government simply taking control of the entire supply. Eminent domain. And, of course, pay compensation to the owners and suppliers.

But Trump won't do that so we get the cock-and-bull about the face masks being so absolutely useless and worthless that people shouldn't buy them so that they can be available for medical use where they are most needed. One or the other. Confiscate all the face masks and punish the sellers because they're a fraud or requisition them as a desperate necessity.

I wish the government would stop treating us like children.

I watched Mike Pence's press conference Wednesday. The risk is low, just ignore it, go about your normal life, nothing to see here. If THAT were true there wouldn't be a White House task force meeting around-the-clock and holding daily press briefings. The White House hadn't had a press briefing for most of a year before this. Now every single day. Really?

And then I saw that in Seattle, people with "underlying" medical issues like high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, pregnancy or cancer, as well as those over 60 should stay home and especially avoid places where there are people, and the more people the more you should avoid them.

You know how that makes a cancer survivor with high blood pressure and heart disease who is about to turn 69 feel? Grateful not to be pregnant or have diabetes, but I've changed my twitter handle to "Likely coronavirus fatality."

For whom the bell tolls, or why my name on Twitter is now "Likely Coronavirus Fatality"

And so it begins ...

In Kirkland, a Seattle suburb, a 59-year-old man with no travel or other known contact with the epidemic died Friday. He tested positive for the virus, and was the first American to die of the disease.

Also in that same suburb, although no link to the dead man has been reported, a long-term-care nursing home is off-limits after a resident and a caregiver both tested positive for coronavirus. Fifty more patients and caregivers have come down with symptoms, but their tests aren't done yet.

A nearby fire department station has also been declared off-limits because of exposure to ill seniors at that nursing home. Two dozen firefighters and  have been quarantined, along with two police.

Three days earlier, on Wednesday, we were told a woman from Vacaville, California, an hour northeast of San Francisco, had tested positive for the virus.

She had been hospitalized for ten days, first at a smaller hospital, before being taken to the U.C. Davis medical center in Sacramento. She'd had no travel outside the U.S. or contact with anyone who might have been exposed to Coronavirus so she wasn't tested until U.C. Davis doctors insisted the Federal Government's Centers for Disease Control bend its rules and test her because, although she had no known link to the epidemic, her doctors had ruled out all other causes for her illness.

After that first case, the CDC made more exceptions. So on Friday, another California woman with no know source of contagion became a confirmed COVID-19 patient, this one being treated at the Mountain View El Camino hospital. If you saw the news stories, notice how none of them mention Silicon Valley, though the hospital is a 10-minute drive from Apple headquarters.

Friday night, another unknown source case was confirmed out of Oregon, in Lake Oswego. The person had fallen ill February 19. After seeing it in the news, I had to Google it to find out it was just 8 miles south of the center of Portland. The patient is an elementary school employee. The school is now closed until Wednesday.

It was only on Saturday, after the emergency cover-your-ass press conference Trump called on hearing of the first dead American, that we learned of the CDC's hyper-restrictive tests policy.

The announcement was that the CDC had relaxed its rule of only testing people with travel to international virus hot spots or had other direct links to the epidemic. Now people hospitalized with a respiratory syndrome that aren't positive for a flu virus or bacteria can be tested, too. And local labs,  not just the CDC in Atlanta, will be able to test for the disease.

From this information we must assume there are now active outbreaks in the Seattle, Portland, Silicon Valley and Vacaville areas, and early in the week we will hear of dozens more cases there, as the work of tracing contacts and placing them under quarantine really gets underway.

But almost certainly there are other outbreaks --perhaps many more-- that will come to light now that the CDC has abandoned its head-in-the-sand no tests for 99.9% of Americans policy.

Especially in major transportation hubs, like Atlanta, where I live. If the virus is already widespread in the wild, how could it not be in the city with the world's busiest airport?

A number of cases wouldn't already have drawn attention because we're in the middle of a very active flu season: in the big majority of cases there is no difference a patient or doctor can see between influenza and COVID-19 without laboratory tests.

The WHO international expert mission to China report published on Friday, Feb. 28, emphasizes that most transmission in China has been within families. Many Chinese live in multi-generation traditional families that are rare in the United States.

The report notes that in the relatively few infections detected among minors (2.4% of the total) the children were tested because others in the household were sick. A Chinese CDC study of 44,000 confirmed cases said there were no deaths among children under the age of 10.

That's the good news. The bad news is that COVID-19 has it out for seniors. The majority of the deaths in the Chinese epidemic have been of people 60 or over.

The death rate among those over 80 that have been infected is 15%. For those reported as "retirees," it is 9%. Your chances of dying also are higher if you are male, have had cancer, have high blood pressure or have heart disease.

What they don't say is what are your chances if you are close to 70, retired, and a cancer survivor that's been diagnosed both with high blood pressure and heart disease, all put together.

And on top of that if you have the bad luck to live in a country run by a narcissistic jackass who insists on saying Coronavirus is a hoax to make him look bad and gives happy-talk press conferences highlighting how very few cases we've had but forgets to tell you we have so few because his CDC had been refusing to look for them.

So, yeah, they way things have been going, call me Likely Coronavirus Fatality.

Why I am withdrawing from the DSA Socialist Majority Caucus

[The Democratic Socialists of America held their national convention in Atlanta August 2-4. I was a delegate and candidate for the DSA National Political Committee. I was also a member of the Socialist Majority Caucus although not on its slate of candidates, in part, I am sure, because other caucus members realized, as I did, that increasingly my views diverged from the approach the steering committee had decided on with the support of active caucus members.

[That approach was to become, in essence, a faction like the other main factions operating prior to the convention, one called Bread and Roses (formerly the Spring Caucus and prior to that Momentum), Build (which curiously claimed not to be a caucus), and the Collective Power Network. 

[There was also a North Star Caucus that operated as an ideological tendency rather than a faction because it did not seek to place a slate of its own members on the National Political Committee. In my view the difference between a tendency and a faction is that the latter seeks to place its own people on leadership bodies, which tends to transform the group into a disciplined fighting organization, a faction.

[Simultaneously with publishing this, I'm also informing the caucus through its internal mailing list that I am withdrawing from the grouping.]

DSA members in the Socialist Majority Caucus and I'm sure others who read carefully  my campaign leaflet for our recent DSA convention cannot possibly have failed to understand that I was criticizing the way this and other caucuses wound up functioning:

    Finally, I am running against factionalism. We need to channel our discussions and collaboration through structures and spaces which are open to everyone in the DSA.
    Members have a right to form caucuses, but caucuses carry a price. Separate discussion lists, private zoom calls, by-invitation-only conventions, “whipping the votes” through one-sided phone conversations, these practices undermine the cohesion of the DSA and can even compromise the integrity of the organization.

What I wanted and understood to be an aspect of the Socialist Majority project originally was the idea embodied in the "this caucus is not a caucus" proposal for its name, a formation that, yes, favored a range of ideas we have in common, but especially what I thought was a common view on the right way to function in the "big tent," multi-tendency organization we are all for.

And that way is to combat the fragmentation into caucuses for essentially no good reason. And having ongoing caucuses now seems to me to be unjustified at this stage of the organization.

Even for a convention, factions should not be formed on the basis of affinity, agreement with general principles, friendships and associations developed through collaboration on common projects, followers of particular individuals, electioneering for leadership posts, etc., but --if necessary under certain circumstances-- on concrete differences over what the organization should be doing and how it should function.

The difference that justified a caucus in my view was precisely that we should not be functioning with these permanent factions but that they should be dissolved into the general organization, not by some sort of prohibition, but by convincing comrades not to function in this way. In addition, I think I made a mistake in supporting Single Transferable Vote (STV) election for the NPC, a type of proportional representation, which very strongly encourages factional functioning merely for electioneering.

I now think we simply should have let delegates vote for 16 people and, subject to our gender and people of color demographic requirements, let the raw number of votes for each determine the winners.

I really found extremely off-putting and essentially undemocratic the way caucuses tried to game the STV system by urging delegates not to vote their best judgement, but asking different comrades rank the candidates in various sequences on the basis of some formula or calculation. I think this sort of "tactical" voting undermines individual and collective integrity. We end up voting for a faction and not candidates. If that's the way it is going to be then it should be proposed, honestly, openly and transparently, that voting be for slates.

I realize I have an extremely distinct outlook. I may be the only one in this caucus or among the delegates who in the past was centrally involved in the leadership of a leading socialist organization that I helped destroy through undemocratic practices, trumped-up disciplinary expulsions, and all sorts of underhanded maneuvers and manipulations.

Nothing going on in the DSA today resembles what happened decades ago in the Socialist Workers Party, but at any rate, I think certain lessons are applicable.

Sill, I've decided not to try to start a discussion to convince comrades in this caucus to dissolve now.

I've realized from discussions in my local and at the convention that younger comrades find my views on these issues almost completely inaccessible if not downright incomprehensible. A discussion would be a fruitless exercise.

Better to concentrate on the practical work. And practical collaboration is now the best way to try to get away from the fragmentation of the DSA into rival factions.

On the results of the DSA convention: exhilarating but a little frustrating

This is what the future looks like: a convention of millennials committed to transforming the United States.

Some 1,000 delegates and I'm not sure how many volunteers and other members met in Atlanta August 2-4 for the biannual convention of the Democratic Socialists of America.

On the daily radio show I co-host, I said that as a delegate I found the convention incredibly exhilarating although at times frustrating -- and, ironically, for the same reason.

The DSA has grown explosively over the past few years and is now more than ten times the size it was when the Bernie phenomenon first exploded in the summer of 2015. That growth shaped the convention.

For a life-long socialist who first read the Communist Manifesto in high school more than half a century ago, and after a few years of radical upsurge had to live through decades of retreats, it was just incredible seeing this completely new generation of fighters grappling with how to advance a movement now looked to by literally tens of millions of people in this country.

Especially because this is a totally new generation, overwhelmingly without experience in the socialist or any other movement not weighed down by the mistakes of 20th century socialism. But this freshness also showed in so much time consumed by procedural wrangling, instead of political discussion. Yet the way the DSA is today, that was inevitable.

The main contested issue at the convention as I saw it was between a layer of comrades that wanted to foster greater decentralization by taking financial resources away from the National Office and giving them to local organizations. I think the claim to help especially the smaller Locals is legitimate and many delegates su[ported them. But the main resolutions proposed went beyond that, promoting a dis-empowering of the DSA as a national organization. But a more cautious resolution on the same issue (also by an Atlanta delegate) was approved.

The decentralizers lost by around a 55 to 45 margin on their resolutions, although I did not keep a close tabs on the exact count, and the margin might have been a little bigger. But a more cautious resolution on the same question (by one of our Atlanta delegates, by the way) was approved.

Dues sharing may seem like a strange main issue. But there was overwhelming consensus at the convention on the practical tasks and priorities for the DSA, things like medicare for all, an ecosocialist green new deal, tenant justice, immigrant and refugee rights, and, of course, backing Bernie -- to name just a few causes that DSA'ers are involved with.

On the resolutions I felt most strongly about, the one I wrote on orienting to the Latinx community starting with a Spanish-language web site, received the highest vote (88%) on the "consent agenda," a list of resolutions with so much support in a pre-convention delegate poll that they are voted and ratified as a group at the beginning of the convention.

The second-highest vote on that "consent agenda" was for an immigration resolution calling for open borders, which I also supported even though I would have changed some of the wording.

Another resolution also approved on that list was a resolution I co-authored on immigration work. It said, in part, "The National Immigrant Rights Working Group shall approach immigrant rights organizations ... to help to organize national-scale mobilizations" against Trump's immigration policies, and indeed the steering committee of the working group has already met and started to aggressively implement this provision.

A third resolution from Atlanta approved on the consent agenda was by City of South Fulton councilman khalid, demanding presidential candidates support reparations for Black people.

I did run for the national leadership but was not elected, nor did I expect to be. As the convention drew closer I realized that I wanted to focus on how the way I view things is very different from most other comrades, and on explaining why.

So among other things I wrote extensive comments on the Open Borders resolution, dealing with imperialism and Latino identity even though those were side issues and I supported and voted for the resolution.

I explained my overall priorities for changes in the DSA in a piece I published here and as a campaign leaflet that was distributed at the convention. That stressed the DSA needed to focus on the Latinx and Black communities, not mainly as a question of organizational resources but a political orientation. I also insisted this meant focusing on the South, and the real situation on the ground in these and other Republican-dominated areas needed to be taken into account in our national projects.
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Language justice and the DSA's internal culture in relation to the Latinx community were central topics in a blog post also published on an internal forum. The piece explained why I was refusing to sign a "motherhood and apple pie" transparency pledge that was backed by almost all other NPC candidates. My explanation also had an extensive polemic against the factionalism that was being promoted by the way most caucuses were functioning (and still are).

This may seem like a Quixotic campaign. But my original motivation in running for the NPC was to make sure that the Spanish-language web site and immigration resolutions were implemented if approved.

With the overwhelming support they received and seeing a number of millennial Latinx comrades who are strongly involved in the fight for immigrant rights running, and some were sure to be on the incoming NPC, that was no longer a big issue. So I decided to switch to a propaganda campaign that I hope started to raise some issues I care deeply about and I think will be important for the DSA going forward.