Remembering the Battle of Blair Mountain ~~ DAVID ROVICS

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/06/remembering-the-battle-of-blair-mountain/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~ 

 

At the beginning of August, 1917, a multiracial group of tenant farmers and other people mostly from Oklahoma, including the infamous abolitionist John Brown’s grandson, began what they hoped would turn into an armed uprising in Washington, DC, from different parts of the country, with the aim of putting an end to the imperial, capitalist war machine.

Hard-pressed tenant farmers from all backgrounds — white, black, brown, indigenous, women, men, including prominent indigenous women organizers — were involved with this abortive effort that became known as the Green Corn Rebellion.  Less well-known than even this virtually unknown Oklahoma uprising is the fact that it was born out of a secret multiracial network known as the Working Class Union, with an estimated 35,000 members in Oklahoma alone, which had been waging a campaign of armed resistance and industrial sabotage against the landed gentry and the mine operators of the region for years.

Although most people reading this are probably people already fairly knowledgeable about historical events a lot of other people have never heard of, my guess is most of you have never heard of the Working Class Union in Oklahoma or their campaign of sabotage and armed struggle, or the fact that it was a consciously multiracial endeavor.

One hundred years ago this month, in August, 1921, in another part of the US, a multiracial uprising of union coal miners commandeered trains and cars across the state of West Virginia and emptied armories of their contents, as they marched to the town of Mingo, where a hundred of their fellow union miners were being held without charge by the corrupt authorities.

Somewhere around 15,000 miners engaged in three days and nights of crossfire with thousands of the more “well-to-do” members of West Virginia society, including every cop in the entire state and all the gun thugs the mine operators could find available to hire.  It was an explicitly multiracial uprising, led by a union movement that had for decades been explicitly antiracist, acutely aware of the ways the bosses used the racial divide in the US to keep the working class in a constant state of conflict.  So much of the labor movement of the day rejected this strategy and employed their own strategy of radical inclusion.

How thoroughly did the black miners of West Virginia feel about their part in the union movement in 1921?  Of the 15,000 or so people laying siege to Mingo at the end of August of that year, an estimated 2,000 of them were black.

This was a multiracial uprising of unprecedented scale.  During the three days that the miners were trying to liberate their comrades imprisoned in Mingo, dozens of people were killed, the total numbers never to be known.  Thousands of women of all backgrounds were actively involved with the struggle, coordinating essential logistics like food and medical care for thousands of men under arms.

Just three months earlier in Tulsa, Oklahoma, planes dropped explosives on the black community of Greenwood, razing the entire neighborhood to the ground, killing hundreds of black people from the community in a racist lynch mob consisting of thousands of members of the white community in Tulsa.  Refugees were interned and treated terribly by the authorities.  People whose lives, homes, and businesses were destroyed never saw any compensation for their losses, or even any apologies worth mentioning.  The intergenerational trauma stemming from this pogrom continues to this day.

The impact of this racist pogrom on the black people of Oklahoma and beyond is incalculable.  The impact of learning about this horrible event — one of so many similar horrors throughout the history of this settler-colonial empire we call the United States — is also hard to calculate.

This is especially true when all you know about the history of 1921 is the Tulsa Race Massacre.  Everyone should know about this massacre, in all its horrific detail.  Everyone should know about the planes dropping explosives, and the systematic destruction of the city.  Everyone should know about later efforts to hide the history, to pave over what remained of Greenwood with a highway.

But everyone should also know that the second time planes were used to drop explosives on people in the United States was in August, 1921, in West Virginia.  And these planes were from the US military, flown in from bases hundreds of miles away, to drop bombs on a multiracial uprising of union miners.

There is so much more that can be said about what led up to both the Tulsa pogrom and the multiracial uprising in West Virginia, which both happened within months of each other in 1921.  The impact of the unspeakably horrendous bloodbath known as World War 1, along with the terribly devastating global pandemic that it gave rise to, would be hard to overstate.  Massively traumatized populations are more likely to take up arms in whatever circumstance.  History demonstrates this pattern abundantly.  Which doesn’t explain either of these events, but understanding 1921 in the context of 1918 is absolutely essential.  1921 didn’t happen in a vacuum.

The main point I would venture to make here is that we cannot begin to understand the realities and complexities of the present day, to say nothing of the history of this country, if when we think of 1921 we remember the Tulsa Race Massacre, but not the Battle of Blair Mountain.

And why would we do that?  Don’t ask me.  Ask the corporate and so-called “public” media in this country.  Ask them why they ignore the biggest multiracial uprising in the history of this country.  They’ll say they’re not ignoring it — look, West Virginia Public Television did a barely-funded little documentary about that, they may say.

But barely mentioning a major historical event is more or less the same as ignoring it, in terms of the impact on the populace.  At this point, given the media coverage and the speeches of prominent politicians and so much more, the Greenwood pogrom may be said to have achieved the historical notoriety it so richly deserves.  What an extreme example of what a white supremacist, settler-colonial mentality can achieve, under the right — that is, wrong — circumstances of population-wide PTSD and widespread poverty and unemployment, on top of the centuries of racist brainwashing from the top that has characterized colonialism from the beginning of the practice.

But in the face of such a longstanding history of white supremacy and settler-colonialism, is it not worth mentioning that so much of the labor movement explicitly rejected that nonsense?  Is it not worth noting that an interracial army of union miners spontaneously organized an uprising in August, 1921, that had to be put down by federal troops?  Is it not worth mentioning that none of the organizers of this multiracial uprising could be convicted by a jury anywhere in the state of West Virginia afterwards?

What do you think of when you think of West Virginia?  Let me guess.  Racist white hillbillies.

There is another America.  You will not hear about it on television.  PBS — and all the corporate networks — almost completely ignore labor history.  Multiracial uprisings are completely ignored, as if they never happened.  If we don’t learn about this side of our history, and only learn about the lynchings, nothing good will come of this “education.”

I have never heard Al Sharpton give a speech where he doesn’t mention the martyrs, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.  Reverend Sharpton is not pandering to anyone by mentioning these three names like a mantra in every speech.  He is educating the people, whoever is listening, about the multiracial history of resistance to class- and race-based oppression in this country.

Just as no one can understand the relevance of the Civil Rights movement without knowing about the multiracial Freedom Riders and other such efforts, the idea that so much of a society can know about the racist pogrom in Oklahoma in 1921, but not about the multiracial uprising in West Virginia three months later, tells you everything you need to know about what’s wrong with how education, and the media, function in this capitalist society.

For whatever it’s worth, in my role as a topical songwriter, I have written songs about all of the events I’ve mentioned here — the Green Corn Rebellion, the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the Battle of Blair Mountain.  I did that because I think it’s so important that all of these things be remembered.  I shudder at the thought of only knowing about one of these events without knowing about the others.  What must that do to the spirits of so many people, led to believe that our history consists of nothing but racial division and subjugation.

There is another America.  Remember it.  Whether Jesus ever lived or died, I don’t know.  But those miners died for you.  You should at least know who they were.  And then let’s all follow in their footsteps.  Long live the multiracial uprising in the hills of Appalachia in 1921.  Long live the Battle of Blair Mountain.

  https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2jxSGvg_-czWhkYXBFvYe14JnFDit4h

Principles of Radical Political Economics ~~Al Campbell, Ann Davis, David Fields, Paddy Quick, Jared Ragusett and Geoffrey Schneider

https://urpe.org/resource/principles-of-radical-political-economics/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

1. Radical Political Economists oppose injustice and oppression rather than supporting the status quo.

The starting point for radical political economists is agreement on the need to oppose injustice and oppression and the conviction that a theoretical understanding of contemporary societies can contribute to the political movements necessary to address them.

 

2. Capitalism contributes to injustice and oppression.

“Radicalism” consists of the recognition that the capitalist organization of production constitutes a major “root” of injustice and oppression.

 

3. Social relations are shaped fundamentally by class, nation, race and gender.

An understanding of social relations necessitates the recognition that people are constituted into groups by class, nation, race and gender. This distinguishes Radical Political Economy from approaches that take as their starting point the preferences of unrelated individuals.

 

4. The capitalist class derives its profits from the work of laborers.

Capitalism is a system of production, historically distinct from earlier systems, in which the capitalist class – the owners of capital in both its industrial and financial form – derive their profit from the production carried out by wage-laborers. Capitalists pay workers less than the value that workers create and are able to appropriate this surplus because they own and control society’s productive resources.

 

5. Inequality is driven by the class division between labor and capital.

Drawing a clear distinction between income derived from labor and income derived from the ownership of capital is necessary for an understanding of income inequality within and between countries.

 

6. Accumulation drives economic change and fosters regular crises.

The drive to accumulate capital constitutes the main force determining the direction of economic change, but it is an uneven one that results not only in periodic recessions but more serious economic crises. Economic instability is a characteristic of capitalism

 

7. Governments generally act in the interests of the capitalist class.

The capitalist class dominates both national and international governmental organizations, and political decisions are determined primarily by the interests of that class, namely the pursuit of profit.  Appeals to the “humanity” of decision-makers cannot succeed in protecting those who are victims of this drive for profits.

 

8. The capitalist system is sustained by the use or threat of violence.

The capitalist class draws, when necessary, on the use of state-sanctioned force within and between countries to maintain and expand its system.

 

9. Capitalists attempt to instill a pro-capitalist ideology in people.

The long-term stability of capitalism also requires the promotion of the false belief that, despite some problems, people live today in “the best of all possible worlds” and that “there is no alternative” (TINA).

 

10. The ever-present threat of unemployment and poverty undermines the ability of workers to bargain for higher wages.

The continuous threat of unemployment and poverty plays an essential role in profit-making by limiting workers’ ability to bargain for higher wages.

 

11. Capitalists exploit divisions within the population.

The continuing inequalities between peoples on the basis of race and nationality  within individual countries have historical roots, from the practice of genocide to participation in the institution of slavery. The use of contemporary state-sponsored violence, such as the disproportionate incarceration of minorities, serves not only to concentrate unemployment and poverty on minorities, but to contribute to an ideology that aims to unite the “favored” workers with the capitalist class.

 

12. Globalization has created an international division of labor while fostering inequality.

Globalization constitutes the continued expansion of capital that takes the form of an increase in the international division of labor and the dominance of finance capital in international economic relations.  The benefits of globalization have accrued mainly to the global capitalist class.

 

13. Wealthy countries continue to exploit poor countries.

The historical process of imperialism and its current neo-colonial form lie at the root of the vast disparity between the countries of the North and the South.  This continues to operate through the process of globalization by multinational corporations furthered by capitalist-dominated institutions such as the IMF and WTO.

 

14. Household production constitutes an important component of total production.

Production consists not only of that which takes a monetized form, but also subsistence and household production. Recognition of this contributes to an understanding of the oppression of women who are primarily responsible for this category of production, and of the interaction between patriarchal structures that long preceded capitalism, with contemporary relations of productions.

 

15. The drive for capitalist profits is resulting in climate change, threatening lives of billions.

The looming disaster of climate change must be analyzed through the lens of national and international class relations. Driven by competition, corporations’ decision-making consistently ignores environmental damage in its local, national, and international operations. At the global level, rivalry among the “big” powers that include the US, the EU, China and Russia threatens the lives of billions of the world’s peoples.

 

16. All economic decisions should be made democratically with the goal of maximum development of human potential.

Radical political economists envisage and struggle for a society in which production is organized as the outcome of the decisions of politically and socially active people, all of whom have equal status.  We look forward to a society that provides people with the opportunity to live and work, individually and collectively, in activity that has as its goal the full development of human potential.

SANDINISTA NICARAGUA, MORE DIGNIFIED AND VICTORIOUS THAN EVER By Carlos Fonseca Terán,

https://popularresistance.org/sandinista-nicaragua-more-dignified-and-victorious-than-ever/

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Nicaragua Is In The News Again.

But Not For Being One Of The Countries With The Greatest Reduction In Poverty And Social Inequality Worldwide Since 2007 (Poverty By Half, Extreme Poverty By A Third, And Going From Being The Fourth Most Unequal Country To Being The Fourth Least Unequal In Latin America).

Nor is Nicaragua news for being the country with the highest level of direct ownership of the means of production by the working class in the Western Hemisphere (more than 50% of GDP and nearly 80% of economic units); nor for being one of the countries in the world that has most reduced illiteracy in the same period of time (from 35% to 3%); or for being one of the countries with the largest increase in per capita investment in health (from U$32 to U$70) and with the largest reduction in infant mortality (from 29 to 11.4 per 1,000 live births).

Nicaragua is not news for being the country in the world that has most reduced the gender gap (from 90th to 12th), the country with the highest presence of women in its cabinet (58.82%), as well as having the fourth highest presence of women in the legislative branch (48.4%) and being the country that most radically applies the criterion of gender equity across its social policies.

Nor is this country in the news for being among the countries that have most increased electricity coverage (from 53% to 99%) and the one that has most increased its renewable energy sources (from 2% to 90%); nor for being the safest country in Central America and one of the safest in Latin America (with a rate of 3.5 homicides per year per 100,000 inhabitants, Costa Rica being the closest with 11.2); nor is Nicaragua news for having one of the governments in the world with the highest sustained popular support for the longest period of time (with rates around 60% in the last eleven years, almost uninterruptedly).

But it is not for any of these achievements that Nicaragua has once again become newsworthy, but because it has applied its laws in a sovereign way, the most recent of these laws having been approved by an overwhelming majority of the people’s representatives in the legislature and under which the relevant authorities, using their legitimate powers and fulfilling their constitutional duty, have ordered the arrest of various individuals (nineteen at the time of writing) for one or other of the following crimes:

• Actions publicly declared and undertaken by almost all those who have been arrested, aimed at achieving the imposition against Nicaraguan institutions and citizens of unilateral coercive measures by a hostile foreign power, the United States, with the purpose of boycotting public administration and the application of State policies, including the implementation of social programs thanks to which Nicaragua has reached the indices mentioned above via its model of social transformation and improvement in the living conditions of the great majority of its citizens.
• Conspiracy to destabilize the country, in the service of that foreign power, the United States, through the implementation of terrorism and violent actions in general.
• Money laundering in the financial operations of the “Violeta Barrios de Chamorro” Foundation, which also financed journalists, “political analysts” and writers (all of them claiming to be “independent”) with money coming from agencies known for their role in destabilizing governments not aligned with the interests of the United States, some of those agencies being the US government bodies like USAID and NED, but also others like the Soros foundations, and also European agencies such as OXFAM. That funding has been acknowledged by the people concerned. It is worth noting that when Nicaragua’s Foreign Agents Law was created, which obliges those who receive donations from other countries to report them and inform about their final use, this foundation formally closed its operations to evade complying with the law, in spite of which it continued receiving funds from the foreign agencies cited above as well as others. The specific operations of this criminal network are still under investigation by the competent authorities, who will explain the results of the investigation in due course.
• Serious anomalies in the administration by a banking entity of financial resources used to support illicit activities linked to finance from the aforementioned agencies.

Nicaragua is not obliged to justify to foreigners what it does or does not do in full and legitimate exercise of its sovereignty and self-determination, and in the defense of those principles, but in the face of the campaign of lies against the country that flood the news media daily, it is right and proper to defend it, just as the Sandinista Revolution has the right and duty to defend itself in any context, including of course, the battle of ideas.

The laws being applied by the Nicaraguan authorities to the people detained and who are receiving due process in accordance with the current legal norms, are similar to those that exist in most countries whose governments, brazen in their interference, have condemned the approval and application of those laws in Nicaragua for crimes committed after their entry into force, not for crimes prior to their entry into force, but for crimes committed subsequently, in compliance with the principle of laws being non-retroactive since the illegalities and crimes committed and promoted by most of these people during the attempted coup d’état in 2018 have already been judged, and for which those convicted were subsequently granted pardon, for the sake of peace and stability of the country.

When we talk about the crimes committed in 2018, during the coup attempt, they include murder and other crimes that caused dozens of deaths of Nicaraguans, about which it is worth remembering that, of the total of something over two hundred dead caused by the coup attempt, most of them were Sandinistas, of which, in turn, the majority died as a result of cold-blooded murders, after being kidnapped and subjected to torture, many of them documented by the perpetrators themselves in videos, circulated in social media, while in contrast, all the deaths in the opposition ranks were the result of street fighting, generally provoked by them.

But that atmosphere of instability and chaos lasted just three months (from April 18th to July 18th 2018), because the country very soon recovered tranquility and peace, thanks to the massive and organized participation of the people defending their nation and their revolution, as also happened during the war of aggression imposed on Nicaragua by Ronald Reagan’s government  in the 1980s, in which the Sandinista Revolution was also victorious, although in that case only after several years of intense struggle.

Turning now to the current situation, as is well known, at different times some of those recently detained by the Nicaraguan authorities had expressed presidential aspirations in the context of the upcoming elections to be held on November 7 of this year. Specifically, of the nineteen against whom an arrest warrant has been issued and of which there are seventeen under arrest, five had expressed that they wanted to run for the presidency, and two of them had submitted requests to the political party of their choice to do so, but there are six other presidential aspirants among the extreme right wing coup plotters, who are at liberty and for whom no arrest warrant has been issued and no indictment has been initiated; of them, there are also two who have submitted requests to be considered as presidential candidates by the political party of their choice. Not to mention the other sectors of the right wing that are likely participate in the elections.

The presence of presidential aspirants among those detained has led detractors of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government to argue, abandoning all logic, that the investigative processes and the arrests made out are irrational, given that they self-evidently harm the political image of the government. That is to say, according to these “analysts”, presidential aspirations should endow impunity and even worse, that the impunity should result from the government acting out of political convenience, obstructing the relevant institutions from fulfilling their role and applying the relevant legal norms, in strict compliance with the rule of law. In one opinion article, the writer even appeared scandalized because one of those implicated as a beneficiary of funding from the aforementioned agencies, who is not under arrest and was only called to testify before the Public Prosecutor’s Office, is a winner of the Cervantes Literature Prize, as if this were a license to commit crimes.

Yes, it is indeed the case, from the electoral perspective, that the application of the law to these individuals has a political cost for Sandinismo, but the institutions of the Nicaraguan State would be very wrong to act on the basis of political criteria derived from electoral calculations, since the country’s self-determination and sovereignty are imperative and are, moreover, inalienable principles of Sandinismo. This should serve as a lesson to the demagogues who spend their lives demanding that Nicaragua respect the rule of law and the subordination of institutions to the established legal order. This is, furthermore, the best demonstration that the reason for the arrests are not because the people concerned are political opponents or because they have aspirations to the presidency of the Republic.

Moreover, in all the opinion polls, including those conducted by the opposition, none of those detained even comes close to having the popular support of Sandinismo and in particular, the level of popular support for the President of the Republic, Comandante Daniel Ortega Saavedra, thus confirming that the arrests have been made using the strictest and most transparent application of the laws that govern the Nicaraguan State. And it is worth reiterating that these laws are very similar to those in force in the very same countries whose governments have condemned Nicaragua for the arrests.

A situation of particular concern in some sectors outside Nicaragua, in certain cases due to disinformation and in others due to lack of political awareness, has been that among the nineteen individuals against whom arrest warrants have been issued of whom seventeen have been detained, six of them belong to a political group created in the nineties by former Sandinistas, and among these six are three who held high positions in the Sandinista government of the 1980s and participated in the liberation war against the Somoza dictatorship.

First of all, it should be clear that none of that history should be a reason for impunity for anyone, but in the case of the former Sandinistas, the fact that they are no longer Sandinistas is not the reason for their arrest, since it does not constitute a crime, unlike treason which is one of the crimes for which they have been arrested, as is the case with the other people under arrest, all on the strictest legal basis. But there are things that very few people know among the ranks of the international Left outside Nicaragua, and this makes some people defend the individuals mentioned here as if they were the same revolutionaries they were earlier in their careers, and nothing is further from the truth.

These former Sandinistas joined the right wing early in the 1990s, when, while still militants of the FSLN, they publicly renounced socialism, anti-imperialism, the popular struggle and the vanguard character of the FSLN. In the end, they were defeated internally in the FSLN’s Extraordinary Congress of May 1994 and they chose to abandon the FSLN and found a party in which they continued calling themselves Sandinistas, and which they also finally ended up renouncing, as was to be expected. Such that those people who continue to call them Sandinistas, if they are so fond of them, should respect them a little more and not call them something they themselves now reject. By the way, one of the individuals detained, of those who were linked to the Revolution and then took the path of the right, a while ago complained, using a good Nicaraguan term, that the name “Sandinista” caused her revulsion. So their admirers should think twice before continuing to describe them in that way.

It would take far too long and, anyway, is beyond the scope of this article to narrate here the history of this betrayal of Sandinismo. But it is worth mentioning some fundamental facts. Although these people were a minority in the FSLN Congress in 1994, since they were also a minority in the party’s rank and file, they were nevertheless a majority among those who had held senior government and party posts in the 1980s. They were also a majority among those who had been elected to the legislature in the 1990 elections, so they exploited these advantages and shortly after the defeat suffered by Sandinismo in those elections they appropriated the material patrimony of the FSLN, and then in 1995 proceeded to reform the Constitution via a pact with the right wing. As a result, they eliminated the right to free health care and education, legitimized the privatization of public services, created a second round of voting so as to prevent the FSLN from winning the elections and imposed limits on presidential re-election to prevent Comandante Daniel Ortega from running again as a candidate, and they even established the qualified vote to elect magistrates in the different institutions, with the hope that they themselves might be elected.

But after the disastrous electoral results of 1996 for the parties promoting those reforms, the only way to secure a qualified vote, a requirement imposed by those same parties to elect the positions in question, was an agreement between the two main parties of the time, the FSLN and the PLC, which the ex Sandinistas manipulated to accuse the FSLN of doing exactly what they themselves had already done when no law obliged them to do so, namely make a pact with the right wing, in their case for purposes harmful to the people’s interests. But nothing they did then compares to what the ex Sandinistas would end up doing in the elections of 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2016, when they supported candidates of Nicaragua’s most recalcitrant and fundamentalist right wing, which had the support of the United States. It is as if, for example, in Argentina, former guerrillas who had fought against the military dictatorships in that country had supported Macri in the presidential elections there, or as if in Chile they had supported Piñera, or in Brazil Bolsonaro.

The political parties that made the constitutional reforms of 1995, among them the ex Sandinistas recycled as an upstart right wing, consulted no one, not even even for the sake of appearances. In the following year’s elections, all together they did not even receive 10% of the vote, which made evident the illegitimate and spurious character of their reforms. All this in spite of the fact that by having control of the electoral power, they blocked, in a self-evidently arbitrary way, any candidate who hindered their plans in those elections, something they forget when they accuse Sandinismo of sectarian abuse of the State institutions, since from their point of view only the right wing are impartial and transparent, when it controls those institutions. A curious fact is that the ex Sandinistas in question were even allies of the FSLN as part of the National Convergence political alliance in the local elections of 2000 and 2004, and also in the national elections of 2001, until they ran again on their own account in the national elections of 2006.

But the final definitive validation of these ex Sandinistas as counterrevolutionaries with no possible redemption was the failed coup attempt in 2018, when they united with pro-imperialist forces and led the armed counterrevolutionary actions that took place between April and July of that year. These individuals, who in the 1990s had already renounced the red and black flag, in 2018 accompanied the neo-Somocista hordes that repeatedly burned that revolutionary symbol, as also happened with the desecration of monuments and even the tombs of Heroes and Martyrs of the Revolution. One more expression of the levels to which these people had already descended by then, was their participation in meetings with individuals like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Marco Rubio, from whom they received support, as the coup plotters did in general from Álvaro Uribe, with whom they proudly took pictures, and from Jair Bolsonaro, who, making a fool of himself in the way only he knows how to do, offered Brazilian territory to prosecute the Sandinistas.

The café lounge pseudo-Left, which loves to join in the declarations of the imperialist powers against the Sandinista government, has long reproached the ruling Sandinistas in Nicaragua for an alleged alliance with private business leaders and the Catholic Church. Regarding the former, in Nicaragua, since Sandinismo returned to government, the percentage of GDP produced by means of production under associative, cooperative, family and community ownership went from less than 40% to more than 50%, to the detriment of traditional private enterprise, which saw its economic importance decrease from more than 60% to less than 50% of GDP, and in the first nine of the fourteen years that Sandinismo has been in government since 2007, the minimum wage of workers increased ten times more than in the seventeen neoliberal years. This is hardly favorable to the interests of private capitalist enterprise.

When it first came to power in 1979, Sandinismo offered private enterprise a framework of understanding and consensus for the sake of the country’s stability, but since at that time solidarity with the Sandinista Revolution was in vogue, the characteristic snobbery of the café lounge Left did not allow it to accuse Sandinismo at that time of seeking alliances with business people, who in the end back then did not accept the offer of coexistence, as they did when Sandinismo returned to power in 2007. Then, for some years, big business had no other option but pragmatism. However, after some time, at the first opportunity that presented itself and as is to be expected when there are contradictions between antagonistic interests, private business lashed out against the Sandinista government and, together with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, was among the most aggressive sectors during the 2018 coup attempt, curiously enough with the support of all those people outside Nicaragua who accused Sandinismo of being allied with them.

As for the alleged alliance of the FSLN with the Catholic hierarchy, this is a kind of worldwide urban myth. There has not been a single day since Sandinismo returned to government in 2007, as there was not before, of course, in which Nicaragua’s Catholic Church leaders have not uttered all kinds of attacks against Sandinismo. The myth of this false alliance stems from the rapprochement that Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo made with Sandinismo during the last years of his life, but that rapprochement cost him precisely the support of the Vatican, so that as soon as he gave the first signs of reconciliation with Sandinismo, Cardinal Obando fell foul of Nicaragua’s Catholic Church hierarchy. There are also sectors on the Left whose problem is simply not having the infallible compass of anti-imperialism. That is to say, when one lacks direct knowledge of the situation of a country, it is enough to see which side the Empire and its disinformation media are on in order to at least have the ability to give the benefit of the doubt .

In Nicaragua the term “puchito” is popularly used as a synonym for little, and partly for that reason the coup leaders are known as “los puchos”, but the use of the term “pucho” in this case, has a connotation that is applicable beyond a quantitative sense, to allude to those who have no vocation for power, despite the fact that they have exercised it for so long. In Nicaragua, the bourgeoisie seems to have lost its instinct for power as a social class, an unusual phenomenon, but symptomatic of a true revolution.

At the world level, however, unfortunately, there is also an abundance of what one might call the “pucho Left”, that is, those self-styled Leftist sectors, which are stumbling around disoriented in the world or even in their respective national situations, without a compass to guide them, not just because they are a minority, but because they have not matured enough politically or worse, because they have started rotting away at some point in their erratic wandering. That Left which instead of denouncing imperialist interference, instead of attacking the common enemy of those who are supposed to fight for systemic change at a global level, and that in addition, despite their own impotent inaction, presume to judge who is revolutionary and who is not, or which revolution is a true one and which revolution is not, should make their own revolution so as to be able to preach by example and earn the moral authority to speak in the way they do.

But the coup right wing in Nicaragua is also puchito because it has no life of its own. It is a right wing on life-support provided by its imperialist owners. And it is not the fault of Sandinismo that the puchito right wing is led by confessed traitors to the nation, who would also be in jail in any self-respecting country. They are money launderers and even drug traffickers, like some others who were arrested some years earlier, not for the other crimes they had also committed, about which some of them even publicly boasted in messages broadcast in widely disseminated videos, and for which they had already been pardoned before, but in these other cases for common crimes very appropriate to their questionable moral condition, although now they seek to present themselves as political prisoners.

Finally, the strength of the coup-mongering right wing in Nicaragua is evident when, despite its most visible spokesmen being arrested for their misdeeds, not for their presidential aspirations or for simply being opposition, the most absolute calm prevails in the country. Life continues its course in the most serene atmosphere of peace imaginable, and not even the self same puchos interrupt their normal routine or even their recreational activities. If the arrested criminals were really political leaders, the situation would be very different. In 2018, when the coup plotters followed the orders of the interventionist imperialist agencies, they manipulated many people via psychological warfare using it as a component of the new coup d’état format designed by their imperial owners. Back then they wasted no time asking for permission to take to the streets.

But while it is easier to manipulate people than it is to convince him they are being manipulated, when they do finally become aware of the deception they have suffered then it is very difficult to manipulate them again. And that is what happens when the new psychological warfare coup formats fail. They will never again snatch from the Nicaraguan people the peace that has cost them so much nor the only true peace of social justice and freedom it makes possible.

Just as it is true that happiness can only be achieved when certain ethical values prevail and which overall in society can only predominate as the product and fundamental content of its revolutionary transformation. That kind of change is the only one from which the new Nicaragua under construction could emerge and from which it is emerging, with Sandinismo at the forefront, in permanent rebellion and victorious resistance against the world power of imperialism. And that itself is part of a long tradition of struggle dating from even before the mid-nineteenth century, when Nicaraguan and Central American forces defeated the filibuster troops sponsored by southern United States slave-owners; passing through the expulsion of the occupying US troops by General Augusto C. Sandino in the 1930’s; the overthrow in 1979 of the Somoza dictatorship imposed by the United States after the assassination of Sandino; the victory against the war of aggression imposed by the US government in the 1980s, and then against the neoliberalism imposed by electoral blackmail in the 1990s and following years, and finally against the attempted coup d’état in 2018. The tradition includes all the new victories that are being added in this struggle, one of whose fundamental objectives is, as Carlos Fonseca, whose birthday is commemorated today, declared: “A change of system, the overthrow of the exploiting classes and the victory of the exploited classes”.

In other words, the Sandinista government is popular rebellion in power, fighting from the government against the age-old system imposed by the oppressor classes; and as Ricardo Morales Avilés said, for this struggle to bear fruit “so many things must be changed … first power, property, ourselves, and then… fresh air and maize for everyone; fresh air and flowers for all”. This is what Sandinista Nicaragua is committed to achieving, today more dignified and victorious than ever.

How Corporations Pumped Up CEO Pay While Their Low-Wage Workers Suffered in the Pandemic ~~ SARAH ANDERSON

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/14/how-corporations-pumped-up-ceo-pay-while-their-low-wage-workers-suffered-in-the-pandemic/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

During the pandemic, low-wage workers have lost income, jobs, and lives. And yet many of the nation’s top-tier corporations have been fixated on protecting their wealthy CEOs, even bending their own rules to pump up executive paychecks.

A new Institute for Policy Studies report finds that 51 of the country’s 100 largest low-wage employers moved bonus goalposts or made other rule changes in 2020 to give their CEOs 29 percent average raises while their frontline employees made 2 percent less.

Among these 51 rule-rigging companies, average CEO compensation was $15.3 million in 2020, while median worker pay was $28,187 on average. The average CEO- worker pay ratio: 830 to 1.

How exactly did these companies rig their CEO pay rules? Let’s look at a few examples.

Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta had the largest paycheck among the rule-rigging companies. After he failed to meet the goals associated with his multi-year stock awards, the board “modified” the awards by disregarding poor 2020 financial results and changing the performance metrics. Those maneuvers inflated his total compensation to $56 million — 1,953 times as much as the company’s median worker pay of $28,608 in 2020.

At YUM Brands, the owner of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, CEO David Gibbs garnered positive media coverage by donating $900,000 of his salary to pay for $1,000 bonuses for restaurant general managers. But the board changed its bonus metrics to give Gibbs a special cash bonus and stock grant worth more than 2.5 times his voluntary salary cut. This largesse boosted Gibbs’s total compensation to $14.6 million — 1,286 times as much as median worker pay of $11,377. The fast food giant did not offer hazard pay to these frontline employees, whose average wages are just $9.75 per hour, according to Payscale.

At Coca-Cola, none of the top executives met their bonus targets last year either, but the company board used “discretion” to give them all bonuses anyway. For CEO James Quincey, that $960,000 bonus, combined with new stock-based awards, drove his total compensation package above $18 million, over 1,600 times as much as the company’s typical worker pay. In December 2020, Coca-Cola announced plans to cut about 2,200 jobs, or 17 percent of its workforce. About 1,200 of the layoffs will hit U.S. workers.

How did corporations justify such extreme disparity in a year of extraordinary hardship for workers?

The most common defense was the “talent retention” argument. In a report filed with the SEC, for example, Hilton explained that the “projected zero payouts” on the CEO’s performance stock awards would’ve “impaired the awards’ ability to retain key talent.”

This is the Great Man Theory: one heroic individual in the corner office almost single-handedly creates company value, so pay him whatever it takes to prevent him from abandoning ship.

The notion that one CEO is worth hundreds — if not thousands — of times more than their workers has always been absurd. But in the middle of a pandemic crisis, when frontlines employees are demonstrating just how essential they are to our economy and health, it’s even more preposterous.

So what can we do about it?

One bill pending in Congress, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, would use tax policy to incentivize corporations to narrow their pay divides by reining in executive compensation and lifting up worker wages.

Under this proposal, companies with pay gaps between their highest-paid executive and median worker of less than 50 to 1 would not owe an extra dime. Corporations that refuse to narrow their gaps below this threshold would face graduated rate increases starting at 0.5 percentage points on ratios of more than 50 to 1 and topping out at 5.0 percentage points for companies with gaps above 500 to 1.

The Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act would generate an estimated $150 billion over 10 years that could be used to create good jobs and meet human needs. If the bill had been in place in 2020, Walmart, with a pay gap of 1,078 to 1, would have owed an extra $1 billion in federal taxes — enough to fund 13,502 clean energy jobs for a year.

Amazon, with a 1,596-to-1 pay ratio, also would have owed an extra $1 billion, enough to underwrite 115,089 public housing units for a year. (Amazon’s highest-paid exec last year was Worldwide Consumer CEO David Clark, with $46.3 million.)

Home Depot, with a 511-to-1 gap, would have owed an extra $800 million, enough to create 18,329 jobs that pay $15 per hour with benefits for a year.

It’s time for public policy to shift corporate America away from a business model that creates obscene wealth for a few at the top and economic insecurity for so many of the rest of us. By inflating executive compensation while their workers struggled during a pandemic, corporate boards have just strengthened the case for tax penalties on huge CEO-worker pay gaps.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Rising Food Prices and War ~~ Thom Hartmann and Richard Wolff

https://www.rdwolff.com/thom_hartmann_rising_food_prices_could_bring_world_war

Food lines, growing prices, and widening inequality are all leading to global unrest. Economist Richard Wolff warns that it will only get worse. 

What is the relationship between rising food prices and social unrest? Prices have increased by 2.4% in just February. What does this mean for the economy? What does that mean for the world's hungry? Professor Richard Wolff joined The Thom Hartmann Program to discuss how healthy the economy is for food and whether there is trouble on the way.

 

With Covid Delays, You May Die Waiting for Disability Benefits ~~ BOBBI DEMPSEY

https://inthesetimes.com/article/covid-delays-disability-benefits-social-security-insurance

Jade Dunham was 15 when she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. 

Since then, she says, she has been on ​“almost every medication on the market for my condition.” 

The disease is chronic and debilitating, and Dunham’s symptoms are wide-ranging. They affect nearly every routine task she attempts. 

“My shoulders no longer have cartilage, and I have holes in the humeral head of both joints [at the shoulder], meaning I will require both to be replaced,” Dunham says. ​“I can no longer lift my arms above the elbows without severe pain. My left foot and ankle are bone-on-bone and become so painful to walk on, I have to crawl.”

“My hands are damaged, my knees are damaged, my neck cracks and pops to the point I get severe headaches,” Dunham adds. 

Because of the severity of her rheumatoid arthritis, Dunham, now 28, is unable to work. Last fall, she and her husband were living in an old RV in southeast Minnesota, the only option they could find. But the RV had no heat, leaving them in a tough situation as the colder weather rolled in. Dunham’s husband has additional health issues, making his employment sporadic and unpredictable. 

In July 2019, Dunham applied for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), a federal program meant to provide basic financial support to people unable to work because of a disability. The program is managed by the Social Security Administration (SSA).

The average monthly disability benefit isn’t much at $1,259, which varies based on age and savings. For Dunham, though, that steady income would be life-changing. Six months after applying, however, she was denied due to ​“lack of supporting evidence.” 

Dunham can appeal the SSA’s decision, but it won’t be easy. Early in her application process, Dunham sorted through two 75-pound boxes of her medical records — the supporting evidence she says she needs. But her housing circumstances forced her to suddenly relocate, and she lost access to those precious records. 

To replace the records, each medical provider will generally charge a fee to hunt them down and make copies. In cases like Dunham’s, with an extensive treatment history, those charges add up.

"I definitely cannot afford to get my records or mail in the pile of records due to cost," Dunham says. "We can barely afford food."

Meanwhile, SSA field offices were closed to the public nationwide for months in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, opening on an extremely limited basis in late October 2020. Even if Dunham were able to get the documents, she would likely have to mail the boxes, ​“and I can only imagine how much that would cost,” she says. 

“I definitely cannot afford to get my records or mail in the pile of records due to cost,” Dunham says. ​“We can barely afford food.” 

For now, Dunham is at a standstill. Meanwhile, according to her most recent breathing test, her lungs struggle to perform at 60% capacity.

A slow process made slower

Obtaining disability benefits is a notoriously time-consuming and slow-moving process. It involves considerable red tape and many potential pitfalls — and In These Times has found that it’s been made even more challenging during the era of Covid-19. 

The first step is to submit an application in the SSDI system, whether online, by phone or in person. An applicant is required to submit documentation related to their income and medical background. After that, the case is forwarded to a state-level agency, Disability Determination Services. This agency may request additional medical records and require more forms and documentation from applicants, or even request an applicant be evaluated by one of its approved doctors, called a ​“consultative examination.” 

In 2019, about 2 million disabled workers filed applications for disability benefits, according to SSA records. Through the first three quarters of 2020, roughly 1.4 million applications from disabled workers had been received. (This figure includes applications to SSDI as well as the related needs-based Social Security program called Supplemental Security Income. Although it’s possible to apply for both programs, most people who receive benefits are only enrolled in one or the other, and the SSA does not generally differentiate between the programs in its official statistics.)

The SSA notes that, during normal times, processing an application for disability benefits can take three to five months. For most applicants, that’s just the end of part one. According to SSA data, between 2008 and 2017 (the most recent 10 years for which data is available), the average percentage of applicants who were awarded benefits at the initial claims level hovered around 30%.

The other 70% of applicants can appeal the decision within 60 days, which can lead to hearings before an administrative law judge, a review by SSA’s Appeals Council and eventually federal court. Denied applicants who do not appeal in that time frame can opt to just start the process over. 

SSA records show that, for fiscal year 2020, about 430,000 administrative judge hearing requests were received. Many offices encourage hearings via teleconference — which can sometimes help things move more quickly — but applicants have the right to opt out, and during this period, 34% of applicants did so.

It’s common to hear applicants share stories of getting caught in a years-long cycle of hearings and appeals. A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that almost 110,000 people died while waiting for an appeal after initially being denied disability benefits between 2008 and 2019. 

Difficulties at every step

The process can seem to move at a snail’s pace — and the Covid-19 crisis has, by many accounts, made that worse. 

Some people haven’t gotten through the initial application stage at all, hindered or discouraged by pandemic disruptions. 

“Research shows that, when the Social Security Administration closes a single field office, disability applications from those who live nearby decrease,” says Stacy Braverman Cloyd, director of policy and administrative advocacy at the National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives (NOSSCR). ​“Now, we are seeing the effect of closing every field office in the country, plus closing many libraries and social service organizations where people might access the internet or get help applying for benefits.” 

But the need for disability benefits has not gone away. ​“In fact,” Cloyd says, ​“as we learn more about the health effects of Covid-19, we may see SSDI applications from those who survived it but have severe and long-lasting impairments as a result.”

Cloyd notes that advocates have heard from many individuals who have submitted an initial application but hit technical issues that halted their progress, or who needed in-person assistance that is no longer offered. 

The pandemic has also led to slowdowns on the agency side. 

Nick A. Ortiz of the Ortiz Law Firm in Pensacola, Fla., has handled thousands of disability claims over the past 15 years. In late May 2020, he noted slowdowns for both initial application responses and reconsideration appeals, the first step after being denied. 

“We estimate that Covid delays are adding an additional 20 to 60 days to processing times,” Ortiz says.

Applicants at the next level of appeal — a hearing — have a choice: telephone conference, or wait for the hearing offices to reopen. The first option still involves some delays, but many applicants prefer it to the indefinite prospect of the alternative. As the SSA website notes, ​“If you do not want a telephone hearing and you ask us to postpone, please be aware that we do not have an estimate of when we will be able to hold your hearing.” And no hearing, no benefit. 

“In light of the fact that reopening may not occur for several more months, all of my clients have universally agreed to go with a telephonic hearing,” Ortiz says. 

The transition to the virtual environment may make some aspects of the process easier for some (transportation, childcare and appropriate clothing become less of an issue), but it has created new challenges. 

“One main hiccup is the greater chance for technology failures,” Ortiz says. ​“When you are connecting five to six individuals together via a conference call, there can be audio problems or other technical problems. One issue we’ve had on a few occasions was audio cutting in and out. That hearing had to be continued to another date.”

Another issue, Ortiz says, is privacy. ​“It is hard to ensure that all parties are taking adequate precautions to ensure that there are no third parties listening in to the hearing or recording,” he says. ​“The judges are relying on the claimant’s representation on the record that there are no third parties listening in or assisting in the claimant’s testimony.”

Still, there are reasons for optimism. 

“SSA has published contact information for its field offices on the ​‘office locator’ tool on its website, created a coronavirus [resources] web page, and finally switched from paper fax machines — which often ran out of paper or memory while staff was out of the office — to machines that put faxes directly into SSA employees’ computers,” Cloyd says. ​“Although there are still policy changes and IT modernizations that would help claimants and their representatives, SSA deserves credit for the work it has already done to help serve the public in challenging times.” 

Ortiz also notes the remote SSA working environment has eliminated some of the geographic restrictions that, in the past, often contributed to delays.

“Our hearings with administrative law judges are typically assigned to a particular Office of Hearings Operations (OHO),” Ortiz explains. ​“For example, our cases in Northwest Florida are typically assigned to the Mobile, Ala., OHO. However, as most of the hearings are now conducted by phone, we are seeing more cases being handled by OHOs outside of our area. Several of our cases are being heard by a Montgomery, Ala., OHO, and several other cases have been assigned to the National Hearing Center.” 

By allowing cases to be spread out among areas where the backlog may not be as heavy, this broader geographic distribution has helped speed up some processes, Ortiz says. 

An update posted to the SSA website notes that it will also begin offering online video hearings via Microsoft Teams. Claimants can attend these hearings using a smartphone, tablet or computer. 

But these small steps are not enough to overcome other setbacks. Claimants often sit in a holding pattern, sometimes waiting more than a year for a decision. 

The SSA acknowledges that waiting is a problem, and one it is working on. ​“Our priority is to reduce the average wait for a hearing decision to 270 days in fiscal year 2021,” an SSA spokesperson tells In These Times. As of the end of March 2020, according to the agency, the average waiting time for the fiscal year to date was 408 days.

“We have made significant progress by reducing the average wait by nearly 9 months since September 2017,” the spokesperson says. ​“While to date we have continued to decrease the average wait during the Covid-19 pandemic, our inability to hold in-person hearings has slowed our progress toward elimination of the backlog. While we still plan to eliminate the backlog next year, we continue to work through the potential impact of Covid-19.” 

As of October 2020, the SSA is ​“doing very limited walk-in appointments in their field offices,” Cloyd says. However, ​“the Office of Hearing Operations has not begun offering in-person hearings yet and has no public time frame for doing so.” 

Meanwhile, for people on the edge like Dunham, just the prospect of attempting this process more than once is difficult. ​“I will likely need to start all over again, [which] is frustrating,” Dunham says. 

Dunham did get some heartening news recently: She’d been approved for a low-income apartment, meaning she’ll have access to more stable housing. But the arduous process of trying to access disability benefits has made her even more frustrated with the stigma and skepticism attached to them. 

“The system is so difficult to navigate that it wouldn’t be beneficial for anyone looking for a quick buck who doesn’t want to work,” Dunham says. ​“I can’t imagine anyone who would go through the SSDI application process because they thought it would be easier than working.”