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.

The War is at Home, Already

It was the day after Christmas, and President Bush signed a budget bill, handed to him by Democratic Party-led Congress, that only the Grinch could love—a budget bill that provides another 70 billion for war.  Democratic Presidential candidates have learned to talk tough on the horrors of the Iraq occupation that has claimed 1,165, 204 human lives—yet ignore the collaboration that their own party has in the ongoing carnage. So jumping up on your high-horse and criticizing the Republicans for scuttle-butting an expansion of health-care for children means very little when your party has just signed off on war-spending that could have achieved the unthinkable—insuring not just the children, but their parents as well!

 

Have you ever wondered exactly what the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost your community? Thanks to the National Priorities Project (www.nationalprioritiesproject.org) you don’t have to spend hours pouring through the federal budget to figure it out. For those of us who were products of the post Proposition 13 California Public Schools, the help with the arithmetic of tragedy is appreciated.

 

Based on what each city has paid for the war up until now, lets take a look at what this war is taking from my home, the San Francisco Bay Area:

 

San Francisco

• 632,683 People with Health Care OR
• 2,744,841 Homes with Renewable Electricity OR
• 28,661 Public Safety Officers OR
• 22,972 Music and Arts Teachers OR
• 236,568 Scholarships for University Students OR
• 117 New Elementary Schools OR
• 4,611 Affordable Housing Units OR
• 574,609 Children with Health Care OR
• 182,819 Head Start Places for Children OR
• 23,240 Elementary School Teachers OR
• 20,592 Port Container Inspectors

 

Oakland

236,029 People with Health Care OR

 1,023,994 Homes with Renewable Electricity OR

 10,692 Public Safety Officers OR

 8,570 Music and Arts Teachers OR

 88,254 Scholarships for University Students OR

 44 New Elementary Schools OR

 1,720 Affordable Housing Units OR

 214,364 Children with Health Care OR

 68,203 Head Start Places for Children OR

 8,670 Elementary School Teachers OR

7,682 Port Container Inspectors

Nothing About Us, Without Us! - Interview with Leroy Moore

I originally published this in Left Turn Magazine, October 2007.

Leroy F. Moore, Jr. is a radical Black organizer in the disability and racial justice movements. He works with Disability Advocates of Minorities Organization, Poor Magazine, and Harambee Educational Council, an organization for parents, advocates and young adults focused African Americans with disabilities. Long a fixture in the anti-police brutality and homelessness efforts nationwide; he is now taking on the hip-hop industry with a groundbreaking compilation of disabled rappers: Krip-Hop. He is also a member of the Molotov Mouths Outspoken Word Troupe.

Leroy

LT: Tell me a little bit about your background, what led to your politicization?

LM: I was born with cerebral palsy into a family that was and still are activists. My father was a Black Panther and my mother was an independent thinker. I had no choice but to be an activist.

My experiences in both communities-Black and Disabled, and how they treated, or better yet, not treated both of my identities gave me a real eye-opener on how society treats Blacks and other people of color with disabilities.

Racism in the disability movement and services for people with disabilities became clear when I was mainstreamed from my all Black Special Education class to a majority White non-disabled mainstream class. From that point onward, I had the question of race and disability in my head.

LT: You talk about the “intersection of race and disability” How exactly are these entwined? Some present disability as color-blind, something that could happen to anybody.

LM: The reality of race and disability has been with us since day one. Disability is a part of our fabric of our being, just like race, all the way back to Moses. People of color have found themselves in situations where the onset of disability is delivered by the oppressive society we live in. From robbing the land from Native Americans to slavery to the Tuskagee Experiment, to today’s budget cuts in mental health, hospitals, and the violence we seemed to live in at home and abroad, this country’s action and policies have helped increase disability in POC communities.

Italian Street Art

(Milan)

Travelling through Italy, it was a kick to compare and contrast the Street Art (Spray Paint Grafitti, stencils, stickers) to the ancient murals and statues of the Roman Empire and Vatican Inc. Politically, the two art forms couldn’t be farther apart: one commissioned by power and the other committed on the fly. However, both are comments on empires past and present.

(Venice)

North American lefties can often romanticize Europe as an oasis of tolerance and enlightenment. However, xenophobia and bigotry against North African immigrants and Arabs runs pretty high there too. In Rome, I witnessed Italian police chasing African immigrants all around the Vatican City area for the crime of selling knock-off Prada bags on corners.

(Venice)

A variation on a stencil that I think originated in North America.

(Milan)

The issue of Blood Diamonds is very much in the public awareness in Italy.

(Bologna)

Portions of an incredible 400-foot mural in Milan dedicated to Carlo Giuliani.

Finally, some apolitical eye-candy…

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

Their Land Grabs, and Ours

These are the notes I prepared for a talk at Counterpulse on 2/14/07. The talk was part of a series on urban life and resistance co-sponsored by City Lights Foundation and Shaping San Francisco. Thanks to Chris Carlsson for inviting me to speak and Erick Lyle for rounding out the evening with an inspiring talk about housing takeovers in the Mid-Market redevelopment area.

Patterns of displacement as resistance remain pretty constant throughout the centuries. They are revised, re-ramped and remixed; given a different face. The political economy in which each story occurs in is often very different from the last. But the blueprint of domination, the strategies of the elites, the response of everyday people tends to remain quite constant.

Take for instance, settlers on this continent clearing the prairie of Native Americans. For the most part they were those of limited resources who bought the lie that the land was theirs to take, and that no-one of any consequence was there before, just savages a notch or two above animals. Then the settlers too were largely displaced, often urbanized as robber barons cleared their claims to make way for railroads.

Jump to today where the presence of young artists and bohemians is manipulated in order to soften up a neighborhood, make it appealing for the truly rich to walk in and finish the process of destroying a working-class neighborhood. The process is of course, economic but is far more complex than political economy of a ‘hood.

In order for their land-grabs to be successful, the Real Estate Industry breaks bonds of solidarity neighbors might develop with one another by amplifying anxieties of community safety, immigration, and sexuality to warp the discussion about how a city can develop. This masks a discussion that is about class hatred and white supremacy in the codes of revitalization.

Then debates around housing to boil down to “supply and demand” without ever asking “what kind of supply, and what kind of demand?” The discussion hardly ever arrives at what it takes to make an open, egalitarian city that honors its workers, preserves communities of color, and develops a strong artistic life that cannot be manipulated to help destroy all desirable areas of life.

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.