Bill Ayers to Endorse McCain and Palin

October 13, 2008 (Chicago, Illinoize) William Ayers, former sixties radical associated with the organization “Weather Underground,” announced today that he is formally endorsing the candidacy of Republican John McCain for President. Ayer’s brief association with Democratic candidate Barack Obama has been at the center of a conservative allegations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists”.

“At this point, no one can fuck up the U.S.A. better than four to eight years more of Republican rule,” Ayers said at a press conference in Chicago “Weather in our heyday couldn’t have done such a good job. Obama is not prepared to fuck shit up, and Biden certainly is ill-qualified to do so as well.”

Speaking at a Indigenous People’s Day party in the backyard of his suburban Chicago home, Ayers remarked “You know, it only takes a single spark to start a barbecue, I really believe that. OK, maybe not just a single spark, but some lighter fluid, and some good starter coals too.”

McCain had this to say “This really touches me deeply. In some ways, Ayers and I are both war veterans. Did I tell you that I served my country bravely in Vietnam? That I was captured by the Vietcong and tortured? I’m a goddamn war hero, bitches! If you ever forget, ask Obama who always reminds people how much he respects my service to this country, you motherfuckers!”

Asked to comment, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin remarked “John and I are sincerely surprised to receive Ayer’s endorsement. It is a sign of the depth of support in America for our campaign.”

And in other hot San Francisco political news:

No and Yes

This week, debate about kicking the ROTC off of campuses has reached an interesting fever pitch. Here in San Francisco. As my friend, Marc Norton reports in Beyond Chron:

The San Francisco school board voted in November 2006 to end JROTC in San Francisco schools this June. Last December, the school board extended JROTC for another year, until June 2009. However, the JROTC Must Go! Coalition continues to press the board to end JROTC now. (See “JROTC Must Go Now” in the May 14 Bay Guardian

The JROTC Must Go! Coalition represents a shift in strategy for many in the anti-war left. Discouraged by large mobilizations, groups such as these have focused on the local arena: bringing creative tactics to challenge military recruiting at ROTC programs nationwide. These groups succeed in bringing essential information recruiters aren’t going to tell your kids before they sign up. Little details such as the real limits on accessing college funds, fiscal hardships, and of course risks. I have known many an ex-service person who wished they were gotten the other side of the story.

Any sports fan can tell you that any strategy only has a limited life-time. Unless it is remixed and revised, the play just dies. The other side runs interference, having studied its opponents strengths, and learning how to beat back its advances.

This well could be happening to the counter-recruitment movement in the near future. The problem is that every single ROTC program could be shut down, and kids would still turn to the military out of sheer economic necessity.

The ways in which race, class and now gender are intertwined are extremely clear in the case of military service. Approximately two-thirds of service people are working-class white people from rural areas. This is a reversal of the Vietnam-era statistics where working-class people of color from urban areas dominated. Movements such as the Chicano Moratorium and the massive GI Resistance efforts helped to reverse this, which held for many years. As the War on Terror became a disaster even by terms of US Imperial interests, the military has had to ramp up its efforts to recruit in cities, and in communities of color. Young women are being recruited into the military like never before.

So I’m wondering, if cities like San Francisco, Berkeley, and others are really interested in curbing military recruitment–why stop just saying no? What are economic strategies that would provide life-changing alternatives for young people considering military service? Should they create Urban Peace Corps where participants are paid as well, or better than soldiers? Should the anti-war movement be pushing for universal access to four-year education? Programs such as these probably would only put a dent in the conditions caused by the global economy, yet should be explored fully.

One popular left-wing slogan is “One No, Many Yesses,” yet sometimes the demands and complexity of organizing leaves us in the “no” gear for a long-time. This November, it is very possible the liberal president will be elected. This president will be able to sell incursions into Iran and other countries, even as s/he nominally ends a war in Iraq. With this at stake, it is time for us to start figuring out what we’re going to say yes to.

This May Day–The Strike!

I’m honored to be invited to read at City Lights’ grand May Day event, The Strike! It is a sequel of sorts to a reading which happened during the last Presidential election year, entitled Manifesto. Like last time, thirty poets are going to sound-off (three minutes at a time) on the subject of empire, only now we’re supposed to answer the question So what are we gonna do about it? Obviously, the “surge” of poetry isn’t likely to stop the war, but hopefully it might just put a spring in your activist step, and maybe, provide some inspiration to delete the empire once and for all!

A City Lights May Day event
@ First Unitarian Universalist Church 1187 Franklin Street at Geary, San Francisco, CA
Doors open 7 pm; performance begins 7:30 pm
Admission: $12.00 @ door

Join City Lights and friends for an evening of narratives that cut through the core of the neo-liberal agenda

30 local poets, performers, fiction writers, playwrights, and musicians deliver 3 minute pieces offering imaginative responses to the hunger of global capital and its effects upon community

STRIKE addresses strategies of resistance. We pose the question: what serves as meaningful resistance in an age of disaster capitalism? We shall explore the liberation of the commons- through poetry, performance, music, and magic.

Participants:
Charlie Anders
Maxine Chernoff
Justin Chin
Diane di Prima
Camille Dungy
Ananda Esteva
Guillermo Gomez-Pena
Lisa Gray-Garcia
Jack Hirschman
Paul Hoover
Kevin Killian
Joseph Lease
Jon Longhi
Michael McClure
Cameron McHenry
Annalee Newitz
Barbara Jane Reyes
Al Robles
Leslie Scalapino
Matthew Shenoda
Bucky Sinister
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Amber Tamblyn
James Tracy
Roberto Vargas
Youth Speaks
more to come..

All Silent on the Democratic Front

This past weekend at the National Labor College, in Silver Springs Maryland, Iraq Veterans Against the War, VFP (Veterans for Peace), VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War), MFSO (Military Families Speak Out), held this generation’s “Winter Soldier” hearings. The testimony was from service people whose tours of duty had taken them to Iraq and Afghanistan. 

I won’t go into detail about the testimony. You can see plenty of that at the IVAW website. Where you can’t see it is most of the mainstream media.  The SF Chronicle, Washington Post, New York Times all seem to have a media blackout on the proceedings. They are always quick to dismiss civilian anti-war activists as kooks, ideologues, and out of touch with the mainstream. When current and former service people speak-up–they are largely just ignored.

Of course, there is some very good coverage of the event in the mainstream media–but you’ll have to find that in websites originating the the Philipines, Italy, and the UK.

The Democrats were largely silent on this as well. John Kerry said not a peep. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as well. The message is: vote us in, let us take care of getting the nation out of Iraq. It ain’t gonna work that way. Remember, the Vietnam War ended under a Republican Administration. That was because of the resistance of soldiers and the Vietnamnese people, and the anti-war movement.

Dogs of War

(Picture of Mr. Noam Chompsky)

Last Wednesday, Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick was indicted by a federal grand jury for illegal dogfighting. The pictures weren’t for the faint of heart. It seems as if in the games Vick refereed, the loosing dogs were hung by trees. That is, if they managed to live that long.

If the allegations are true, this of course is disgusting. Truth in advocacy here: I’m a pushover for dogs, and I have two of them at home. The thought of one of their cute loving faces mangled by Pitbull or Rotweiler boils my blood. You don’t need to be a robe-wearing pacifist to concur with Ghandi on the subject: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

However, something even more disgusting is at foot here; truly an even greater marker of the moral progress of the nation: the continuing appeal of racism.

Talk-radio and the blogosphere practically exploded with calls for Vick to hang from a tree himself. A sample culled from a simple Google search last Friday:

• “Someone should take him and hang him from a tree.”
• “If it were up to me, I would put Michael Vick in a pit with some dogs and see how he mother fucking likes it.”
• What if we hung the Atlanta Falcons the next time they loose a game?”
• “Well, he is from the South after all.”

These are just some of the more printable reactions. Needless to say, such comments can only be taken in context.

The context of advocating hanging a black man from a tree.

The context of sicking dogs on a black person.

The context of the south.

The context of war. What does war have to do with it?

On the same day Vick was indicted at least 103 Iraqis were killed by American forces in Iraq and the death toll for American service mean reached 3,632. Beyond the normal alternative media outlets that note these things, discussion was scarce.

Vick creates reprehensible deed against man’s best friends. The cyber gloves come off and suddenly thousands of people have a pass to advocate lynching. The War Without end take the lives of more Iraqis and Americans and…

You can hear a pin drop in the far corners of cyberspace.

If convicted, Vick may, and should, spend quite a few years in prison. Yet the true dogs of war seem headed towards comfortable retirements at the Bohemian Grove–a quiet indictment of the moral progress of this nation.

Book Review:Challenging Authority

Book Review: Challenging Authority
by James Tracy‚ Apr. 18‚ 2007

Originally published in Beyond Chron (www.beyondchron.org)

“How Ordinary People Change America” by Frances Fox Piven

Too often, discussion about the viability of change sprouting from the electoral system is shrunk to fit bumperstickers. Even harder to find is nuanced analysis when the politics of protest—direct action, and mob action become the issue of the day. Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America by Francis Fox Piven offers readers a history lesson of the ways in which progressive change has in the past, actually happened—a complex dance between disruptive populist forces and the formal electoral system.

Piven is one of the Left’s preeminent Political Scientists. Others in academia have done their best to delete the role of protest in social change; she has made a career of writing the common person back into the history. Best known for the groundbreaking Poor People’s Movements: How they Succeed and Why the Fail she asserted over twenty years ago that reform moves best when the action remains direct. Challenging Authority expands on this theme.

The book asserts that disruptive politics have always forced electoral/representative; as well as regional coalitions splinter and realign, making reform possible. This is in stark contrast to the dominant model of party building—unite a large enough mass around a platform common enough to hold—a culprit commonly referred to as the Lowest Common Denominator. For Piven, it is dissensus, not the consensus that is the engine of progressive reform.

The mass direct action of the Civil Rights movement plied pro-segregation Dixiecrats to split from the Democratic Party making it possible for a portion of movement demands to be satisfied. Spot-on is the understanding that one day’s movement victory might become tommorow’s liability. Piven explains:

Moreover, the movement wins what it wins because it threatens to create and widen divisions in electoral coalitions, because it makes enemies and activates allies. The threat of dissensus has inevitable limits, however. On the one side, the mere fact of concessions, even limited concessions, tends to rob the movement of its erstwhile allies. After all, grievances have been answered, so what more do these people want?…The party may succeed in regrouping as a dominant party no longer vulnerable to the threat of dissensus, as the Republican Party did after the Civil War, and as the Democratic Party did after the 1930s. Or it may survive, albeit in a weakened state, as the Democratic Party did after the civil rights movement cost it the support of the South.

While dissensus has its limits, the consensus carries its’ own costs. It is hard to imagine a New Deal without the disruptive actions of the Unemployed Workers Movements willing to physically confront evictors and relief bureaucrats. Roosevelt, wouldn’t have likely come up with the idea on his own. Eminently pragmatic, he responded to a strong mass movement in cold, calculating terms and ended up backing the creation of a social safety net.

Piven applies this logic to the Abolitionist movement as well, noting that even simple oral agitation polarized the pro-slavery coalitions that stretched beyond North-South borders. Piven also credits the insurrections and escapes of slaves as a major catalyst in the end of slavery; a simple truth deleted from many historical accounts. Both Lincoln and Roosevelt were far from natural allies of reform. Lincoln attempted to accommodate slavery and avoided emancipation. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, beginning the internment of Japanese Americans.

One of the most challenging concepts in the book is the concept of interdependent power as a key to movement gains. Piven believes that even within domination, the underdog’s power lies in the fact that the elite really needs her or him. The Boss needs workers to profit, the landlord needs the rent of the tenant, and disruption tends to be bad for business if sustained. True enough, however it doesn’t leave much to work with if one’s movement’s vision lies in transforming this dynamic altogether.

While the world is a much different place that the thirties, the sixties or the 1860s Challenging Authority’s basic premise is directly relevant to today’s activists. Presidential elections on the horizon, progressive forces would do well not to abandon independent disruptive dissent; just as ignoring electoral formations altogether is equally counter-productive. When it comes to the basics of economics and empire, Democrats and Republicans often stand on common ground, differing only on how to manage similar agendas.

Piven’s gift to the reader lies beyond her sharp analysis, eloquent prose, and nuanced understanding of history—she reminds us that the days inbetween the elections, and not just the one’s in preparation for them, count for something. That understanding may be the only thing that can ever elevate American politics from the gutter of soundbites, scapegoating and false promises.

A Tale of Two Movements Part I

This beginning of this week marked the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. The end of this week marked the 3,233^rd death of an American soldier and the deaths of at least 59,408 Iraqis. In San Francisco, the anti-war movement marked the occasion in much the same manner it did the invasion—a series of non-violent civil disobediences (“die-ins”) that shut down key intersections of the financial district.

I was one of about five dozen people who were arrested for refusing to move out of the intersection of fifth and Powell when told to do so by the police. At 850 Bryant (SF’s southern police station), protesters were placed into small corrals made out of police barricades and never even saw the inside of the station. All were promptly cited and released by officers who were by the most part, very restrained, professional, and polite.

Non-violent civil disobedience seemed to me the least we could do, at least to send a message that somebody in San Francisco wasn’t waiting for the Democrats to swing low a sweet chariot. The organizers of the event pulled off a disciplined, creative action that momentarily injected some political clarity into the evening news.

Yet I left the police station with a cloud of dissatisfaction over my bald head. I was emotionally prepared to commit a symbolic act of defiance, in hopes that the symbol could give rise to substance. It took me an entire day to fully comprehend what had bothered me so deeply.

That realization hit me on lunch hour the next day. I attended a press conference for the People’s Budget Campaign, at City Hall. The People’s Budget is an ambitious project in which dozens of community groups from all over San Francisco draft a “shadow city budget” based on human needs and unite for a budget that actually increases spending on healthcare, housing, and community safety. The groups represented here are the ones I have worked and struggled with for the past decade and a half. These are the people who fight the good right everyday because their very survival depends on it. (eg PODER, Coalition On Homelessness, SF Organizing Project, CLAER).

Suffice to say that the $410,825,804,723 spent on just the Iraq war could fund every item of the People’s Budget; in fact thousands of People’s Budgets in every city. Very clearly, the cost of US imperialism is exacted both here and abroad. Yet in a time when large populist movements must be built; the word “fractured” doesn’t even begin to describe what it going on.

More like segregated.

Yes, segregation. We have separate movements. One has to find ways just to survive, squeezing little drops of sanity from a municipal budget. The people at this rally represented the rainbow of the urban working-class. There were a quite a few allies, but it was obvious that the People’s Budget was deeply rooted in the neighborhoods. On the other side of the colorline, the classline and the generation line was the anti-war movement. If you think it is possible for one group to stop a war, or to transform a city, then I guess this is no big deal.

I bring this up not to guilt-trip or to point fingers.I would gladly be arrested again and again in the company of these brave people if it could end the war a minute earlier. However, how effective can a “movement” be with this many degrees of separation?

In the next post I’m going to explore tangible ways to bring the domestic fight against empire together with the international fight against empire. I’m interested in hearing your ideas.

 __________________________________________________________

On my reading list this week:

Left Turn Magazine #24

“The War at Home” by Francis Fox Piven

“The Cost of Privilege: Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism” by Chip Smith

Governing Under the Influence of…

San Francisco is a city that enjoys booze and sex. We enjoy both in every conceivable variety and mixture. This joie de vivre is responsible for attracting folks from all over the globe to live here, brave the high rents, and ignore the fact that the City only really enjoys 1.5 changes of season. Mayor Gavin Newsom’s troubles raise a lot of questions, but with the very critical exception of the possibility of sexual harassment in city employment, none of it is anybody else’s business.

I write this as someone whose “Matt for Mayor” sticker only recently fell off his bike.

I’m not writing to defend the Mayor, rather the basic principles of privacy which dictate that we treat sex, and sexual indiscretions, as solely the business of the of those having it or directly harmed by it. That excludes just about everyone, except for three people.  Once the decency police are unleashed, they rarely relent. Then no one’s bedroom is safe. As for the booze, you can’t throw a rock in this town without hitting someone who is high on something. As the great prophet Marilyn Manson said “We’re all stars in the dope show.” That means that if you aren’t a star, you are probably a supporting character. We on the left are the first to call for Harm Reduction, and compassionate approaches to the illness of addiction. That said we can only sincerely wish the Mayor a speedy and meaningful recovery.

However, there is one form of governing under the influence that always needs scrutiny-the influence of corporations, big money, crooked lobbyists and the real estate industry.

So ultimately Gavin Newsom will be judged not by the influence of alcohol and women in his life.

Rather, when the true history of the Newsom years are written, the following questions will need to be answered:

Did the Mayor preside over a redevelopment of the Bayview District which revitalized the neighborhood for the exisiting community or one that decimated one of the last African-American communities in San Francisco? Did he truly deal with the homeless epidemic or did his programs pit various populations of poor people against each other for the same small scraps of housing? Did this administration manage to stem the tide of street violence without turning San Francisco into a surveilance state? Did San Francisco stand by while the Inland Boatmen’s Union was busted by the Hornblower Corporation? Will San Francisco be developed in a way that preserves the brilliant diversity of our city, or turn Baghdad-by-the-Bay into Disneyland of the North? Will our city find a way to build more truly affordable family housing, or will the city become a sick version of Logan’s Run, where no one over thirty is welcome?

At each of these points, tough decisions will have to be made.

While some of them might require a stiff whisky, none should be made under the influence of the kind of money that would steal your mother’s pacemaker if it means a higher return on a Tenancy in Common.

The answers to these questions are, everyone’s business.

Interview with Carolyn Ho: Mother of Lt. Ehren Watada

On February 28th, the Chinatown Tenants Association hosted a talk by Carolyn Ho, the mother of Lt. Ehren Watada, who is facing court-martial for his refusal to be deployed to Iraq. I was honored to be invited to this event by Reverend Norman Fong of Chinese Community Development Center, who is one of my personal heroes. I caught up with Ms. Ho following the powerful speech to talk about building a truly grassroots anti-war movement.

JT: You have chosen to speak out not only in support of your son; but against the war in Iraq. What do you see is the state of the anti-war movement in the United States?

CH: I think that the anti-war movement is obviously now part of the mainstream national agenda. It is not just the agenda of the Left anymore. Early on, it was the Left, and some intellectuals sounding out a warning about what this war is about. Now the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose the war; that is what the elections showed us. Of course, some Congress people are now trying to tell us the opposite; that the elections really weren’t a statement on the war!

A Decade of Displacement-SF in the Nineties

This essay was written for City Lights Publishing’s anthology “The Political Edge,” a good collection of work about our fair city.

“The housing crisis doesn’t exist because the system isn’t working. It exists because that’s the way the system works.”- Marcuse

Whether fleeing from a death squad in Latin America or a homophobic family in the Midwest, many have sought refuge in San Francisco. Those who consider San Francisco an “island,” offer ample evidence: the sizable protest culture, gay marriages, and the municipal minimum wage. Certainly we live in a beautiful city, worth fighting for. However, cold, hard reality demands that we acknowledge the ways that San Francisco is nearly identical to every other city in the nation.
Segregation? Here? Maybe not apartheid or “separate but equal” but let’s just say that here two people can walk down the same street and experience it in completely different ways. One person can look at Valencia Street and wonder where the best crêpes are, the other can wonder if the can make it to the bus stop without being stopped by the police.