Weather Modification: Myths and Facts

Carmelo Ruiz

It is a safe bet to say that all progressive readers have some familiarity with conspiracy theories about weather modification. These theories, that range from “chemtrails” to the HAARP project, propose that sinister government and corporate forces are altering local weather and the whole globe´s climate with purposes that range from warfare to climate change mitigation. The most extreme version of these theories holds that all of climate science is a fraud, including the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and that the bizarre and extreme weather observed all over the earth in recent years is not caused by the burning of fossil fuels but by weather modification technologies invented and used by an evil cabal of scientists and shady figures bent on world domination- an image straight out of an Austin Powers film. These theories, which are increasingly popular, play into right-wing anti-environmental themes. In a 2013 column, Canadian scientist and outspoken environmental activist David Suzuki likened belief in “chemtrails” to climate change denial:

“I don’t have space to get into the absurdities of belief in a plot that would require worldwide collusion between governments, scientists and airline company executives and pilots to amass and spray unimaginable amounts of chemicals from altitudes of 10,000 metres or more. I’m a scientist, so I look at credible science — and there is none for the existence of chemtrails. They’re condensation trails, formed when hot, humid air from jet exhaust mixes with colder low-vapour-pressure air… Why do so many people accept a theory for which there is no scientific evidence while rejecting a serious and potentially catastrophic phenomenon that can be easily observed and for which overwhelming evidence has been building for decades?”

After publishing the column, Suzuki received a barrage of verbal abuse and ridicule from “chemtrails” believers. The tone of these attacks is startlingly similar to the vitriol and invective that he has received in the past from anti-environmental campaigners. (I believe I myself will be targeted by these believers once they finish reading this article.)

As an activist and researcher, I myself began researching HAARP (the High-Frequency Advanced Auroral Research Project) in the mid-1990s. According to its Wikipedia entry, it is:

“an ionospheric research program jointly funded by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the University of Alaska, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).[1]^… its purpose is to analyze the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance.[2] The HAARP program operates a major sub-arctic facility, named the HAARP Research Station, on an Air Force-owned site near Gakona, Alaska.

The most prominent instrument at the HAARP Station is the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), a high-power radio frequency transmitter facility operating in the high frequency (HF) band. The IRI is used to temporarily excite a limited area of the Ionosphere. Other instruments, such as a VHF and a UHF radar, a fluxgate magnetometer, a digisonde (an ionospheric sounding device), and an induction magnetometer, are used to study the physical processes that occur in the excited region.”

The second paragraph is what really worried me. It seemed to me, and to many North American activists, as a dangerous and irresponsible act of global vandalism to shoot high-powered electromagnetic waves into the ionosphere “to see what happens”- and the U.S. military’s involvement in this venture was definitely not reassuring. However, after years of consulting sources and reading differing viewpoints, I was not able to find any credible evidence that HAARP was causing extreme weather events or earthquakes, as the believers claim. Furthermore, the advocates of this conspiracy theory consistently tend to mix it with other even more outlandish pseudo-scientific claims, and with right-wing rants about climate change and climate science being an environmentalist “hoax”. Some anti-HAARP campaigners even claim that environmentalism is a sinister United Nations plot to subjugate the United States and impose a socialist world government (!). Ditto about “chemtrails”.

Conspiracy theories about “chemtrails” and HAARP may be pure bunk, but weather modification is real. Its advocates call it geoengineering.

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In February 2015 the U.S. National Academies of Science released a two-volume report on geoengineering that calls for increased investment in this field in order to counter climate change. According to its executive summary:

“Climate intervention is no substitute for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and adaptation efforts aimed at reducing the negative consequences of climate change. However, as our planet enters a period of changing climate never before experienced in recorded human history, interest is growing in the potential for deliberate intervention in the climate system to counter climate change. This study assesses the potential impacts, benefits, and costs of two different proposed classes of climate intervention: (1) carbon dioxide removal and (2) albedo modification (reflecting sunlight). Carbon dioxide removal strategies address a key driver of climate change, but research is needed to fully assess if any of these technologies could be appropriate for large-scale deployment. Albedo modification strategies could rapidly cool the planet’s surface but pose envi­ronmental and other risks that are not well understood and therefore should not be deployed at climate-altering scales; more research is needed to determine if albedo modification approaches could be viable in the future.”

The NAS report adds that:

“Discussions of geoengineering are often controversial because of the societal, economic, and ethical implications. Those dimensions are critically important, but a first requirement to support informed discussions and decisions is a sound scientific understanding of the proposed techniques, including what they are, how they would work, the expected risks, and the possible consequences (intended and unintended). In particular, there is a need for improved understanding of the physical potential and technical feasibility of geoengineering approaches, as well as an evaluation of the potential consequences of various techniques on other aspects of the Earth system, including ecosystems on land and in the oceans.”

One of the study’s funders was the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Rutgers University climate scientist Alan Robock has publicly expressed concern about the CIA’s interest in weather modification technologies. Robock claims that on January 19 2011 two men who claimed to be working as consultants for the CIA, Roger Lueken and Michael Canes, asked him “If another country were trying to control our climate, would we be able to detect it?” In Robock’s words:

“I told them that I thought we could, because if a cloud in the stratosphere were created (the most commonly proposed method of control) that was thick enough, large enough, and long-lasting enough to change the amount of energy reaching Earth, we could certainly see it with the same ground-based and satellite instruments we use to measure stratospheric clouds from volcanic eruptions. If, on the other hand, low clouds were being brightened over the ocean (another suggested means of cooling the climate), we could see telltale patterns in the tops of the clouds with satellite photos. And it would also be easy to observe aeroplanes or ships injecting gases or particles into the atmosphere. At the same time, I wondered whether they also wanted to know if others would know about it, if the CIA was controlling the world’s climate. Given that the CIA is a major sponsor of the recently released US National Academy of Sciences reports on geoengineering (which they have renamed “climate intervention”), the question arises as to the possible interest of the CIA in global climate control.” (Boldface added)

Not surprisingly, the U.S. military has also pondered the wartime uses of this bundle of novel technologies. In 1996 the Pentagon released a report titled “Weather as a force multiplier”. To quote from its executive summary:

“In 2025, US aerospace forces can “own the weather” by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. It provides opportunities to impact operations across the full spectrum of conflict and is pertinent to all possible futures. The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for the use of a future weather-modification system to achieve military objectives rather than to provide a detailed technical road map… A high-risk, high-reward endeavor, weather-modification offers a dilemma not unlike the splitting of the atom. While some segments of society will always be reluctant to examine controversial issues such as weather-modification, the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own peril. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary.” (Boldface added)

Independently of its use by entities such as the CIA and the Pentagon, a number of voices from the scientific community and civil society warn that geoengineering is a bad idea altogether, not only because of potentially disastrous and irreversible consequences for the earth’s ecosystems but also because it can end up being used as a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which is the only real solution to climate change

“Technofixes—technical solutions to social problems—are appealing when we are unwilling to change ourselves and our social institutions” decries Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Australia. “So here is the essential problem that the council scientists do not confront: Does anyone really believe that while warming is suppressed with a sulfate aerosol shield a revolution will occur in our attitudes and political systems? No. Yet every scientist… is convinced that if albedo modification is implemented and not followed by a program of global emission reductions, then we are almost certainly finished. Sulfate spraying without a change in the political system would make the situation worse.”

“Presenting geoengineering as something to use only if necessary is at the heart of its proponents’ argumentation; trying to justify the investment of public and private funds on very high risk technologies”, warns Silvia Ribeiro, of the ETC Group, in a column published in the Mexican daily La Jornada. “In any case, it is not directed at changing the causes of climate change, it only deals with the symptoms: attempting to lower the temperature by blocking solar radiation or removing carbon from the atmosphere after it has already been emitted.”

Ribeiro adds that if geoengineering is permitted “it will be a juicy business for investors, because by continuing to emit greenhouse gases, global warming will continue, and the sale of technologies to palliate the consequences would have no end, generating perpetual dependence on whoever controls them… It makes no sense to talk about an experimental stage of geoengineering, given that because of its scale and duration, experimentation equals implementation, putting at risk many countries (which surely will not even know that this could be the cause of their problems) and entire ecosystems.”

In order to provide reliable and accurate information as well as critical perspectives on geoengineering, the ETC Group teamed up with Biofuelwatch to set up Geoengineering Monitor. “Our goal is to serve as a resource for people around the world who are opposing climate geoengineering and fighting to address the root causes of climate change instead”, says its web page.

It is a most timely initiative. In order to have an intelligent debate on climate change and geoengineering it is necessary to separate the conspiracy theories from the hard facts.

America’s Surging Carbon-Free Movement

Robert Hunziker

When a Rockefeller decides to divest fossil fuel investments, heads turn. After all, America’s pioneer/father of oil production is John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) founder of America’s first great business trust, Standard Oil Company, dominating the oil industry for years.

In September 2014, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, an $860 million philanthropy, decided to join the divestment movement of college campuses around the country. These forerunners of decarbonizing are acting on “environmental principles,” according to John Schwartz, Rockefellers, Heirs to an Oil Fortune, Will Divest Charity of Fossil Fuels, The New York Times, Sept. 21, 2014.

In recent years, 180 institutions, including philanthropies, religious organizations, pension funds and local governments, as well as hundreds of wealthy individual investors, have pledged to sell assets tied to fossil fuel companies and to invest in cleaner alternatives. In all, the groups have pledged to divest assets worth more than $50 billion, and individuals more than $1 billion.

The divest movement has quietly, but quickly since 2011, gone from small student activist groups into mainstream America. The real value behind divestment is not necessarily the financial impact on fossil fuel companies. They are enormously well capitalized, and millions or billions leaving the ship will not deter their business plans. The real value to the divestment movement is all about “changing the conversation about the climate.” Indeed, this is a bell-ringer.

Does Divestment Work?

“The evidence from South Africa suggests that divestment, while ineffective in a financial sense, can have an impact by shaping public discourse,” Eric Hendley, Does Divestment Work? Harvard University, Institute of Politics, 2015, “Divestment from select fossil fuel producers would send a powerful message to the energy industry and the nation. It would signal that America’s universities take the climate-energy challenge seriously.”

Interestingly, ever since the first American mass student protest movements of 1936-39, when 500,000 collegians protested with one-hour strikes against war as well as demanding job programs for youth, academic freedom, racial equality and collective bargaining rights to the anti-war movement against U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s, deep schisms within American society are exposed, ultimately leading to progressive changes in attitudes of mainstream America, relatively speaking.

The student divestment movement against fossil fuels started at Swarthmore College in 2011. Overall, 400 college campuses now have active divestment movements. Similar to student movements in the past, this nascent movement has now moved beyond higher education.

Students serve as the nation’s alter egos, and history has proven them right, time and again, because their cause comes from a high plateau on moral grounds. Their allegiances are to principled values, not neoliberal economic statistics like profits for the sake of profit. Ask the Rockefeller heirs about the value of a higher moral ground.

America’s Impending Renewables Revolution

U.S. economic history provides insight to what happens when major economic transformations occur. The Roaring Twenties were not called “roaring” for nothing. That era experienced an ongoing economic renaissance as automobiles took over the roads.

From 1910 to 1930 U.S. GDP increased 300%. That whopper of an economy occurred while one of the America’s biggest industries, manufacturing of horse-drawn carriages, went out of business! The conversion from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, the 15 millionth Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1927, set the nation’s economy on fire.

It is believed America’s renewable energy conversion will mimic the Roaring Twenties. Fossil fuels are today’s horse-drawn carriages.

Across the nation, one-fourth of U.S. land area has winds powerful enough to generate electricity as cheaply as natural gas and coal. That’s not all, the solar resources of just seven southwestern states could provide 10 times the current electric generating capacity.

According to Greenpeace-USA, ironically, in North Dakota alone, the home state to a massive fossil fuel fracking boom, there is enough wind power to produce nearly 1/3rd of the total electricity consumption for America.

And, enough sunlight hits the earth’s surface in one hour to power all humanity for one year.

Congressional Endorsement of Solar

NASA’s Space Station, which is funded by Congress, monitored by Congress, and praised by Congress survives in outer space amongst the harshest of elements 100% solar 24/7 even when shaded as solar rechargeable fuel cells take over.

Congress knows all about the benefits of solar power. In fact, they endorse it because they personally oversee how enormously effective it is as the “one and only source of energy” for America’s astronauts.

If Congress can endorse solar outside of Earth’s atmosphere, surely Congress can endorse it within Earth’s atmosphere.

It’s much, much, much easier to construct solar panels on Earth than in gravity-less outer space where temperatures run between + 1,000 degrees F (that’s really hot!) and minus 455 degrees F (that’s really cold!), depending upon whether one is in the sun or the shade.

America’s Enormous Renewable Potential

By 2050, clean energy would save an average American consumer $3,400 per year versus fossil fuel usage, this according to The Solutions Project. That’s because the price of fossil fuel rises regularly, but with clean energy, where raw materials are free, once the infrastructure is built, prices would fall.

The Solutions Project, developed by Stanford University scientists led by Mark Jacobson, Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering is a nonprofit organization based upon plans for a 50-state roadmap to 100% renewable energy.

According to Dr. Jacobson, the country is ready for it. His detailed plan provides for existing renewable technology to supplant almost all fossil fuels. No new technology is required.

As for jobs, according to Daniel Kammen, professor in UC Berkeley’s Energy & Resources Group and Goldman School of Public Policy and head of UC Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory: “Across a broad range of scenarios, the renewable energy sector generates more jobs per average megawatt of power installed, and per unit of energy produced, than the fossil fuel-based energy sector.”

As it happens, America’s politicians have a fancy for jobs. Every political debate involves the effectiveness of how a given party can create jobs. Welcome to the renewable energy “job-creation machine.” Rebuilding the nation’s energy infrastructure with renewables would be equivalent to a new Marshall Plan but in America, an era that witnessed strong job growth, happy workers, and productive enterprises.

Indisputable Success of Green Economics

Clean, green energy in North Carolina supports more than 1,200 companies employing more than 15,200 high-paying jobs. Thus and so, North Carolina is a prime example of the benefits of investing in green energy, which creates twice the number of jobs as investing in coal and almost three times more than natural gas.

As a result, North Carolina is attracting international companies, now investing and creating jobs in America, companies like Siser, USA, an Italian company, and Schletter, a German company that manufactures solar mounting systems.

Green technology is helping to reverse the decades-old trend of American multinationals exporting good, solid American middle class jobs to lousy low paying weak regulatory countries, a deplorable consequence of transnational globalization heavily influenced by neoliberal tenets, i.e., privatization of public assets, minimal government, reduced public expenditures on social services, and in reality, a big time emphasis on “personal liberty maximization” by eliminating governmental programs for society, or a dog-eat-dog world where each individual stands his/her private ground, defending one’s property against the hapless masses. Let the chips fall where they may… today’s right wing Republican mantra! Thus, society turns asocial, a brutalizing world of “haves opposing have nots,” thereby guaranteeing social discord.

“North Carolina reaped revenue from clean energy projects of $2.67 billion from 2007 to 2013, a figure nearly 20 times greater than the state incentives of $135.2 million, according to an analysis prepared by RTI International,” Clean Economy Rising: Solar Shines in North Carolina, A Brief from the Pew Charitable Trust, October 2014.

In short, green energy’s payback is 20-to-1. Wall Street salivates over such numbers.

Just like that, North Carolina is demonstrating superb results with green technology promoting growth, high-wage jobs, a strong tax base, as well as attracting international companies. That’s called prosperity!

America’s climate deniers in Congress should really, seriously, decidedly take a taxpayer-paid (of course) field trip to North Carolina, a state that is creating high-paying jobs, attracting foreign investment, and generating a strong revenue base by promoting green technology. Then, maybe Congress will reverse all fossil fuel subsidies, converted to renewable energy subsidies, helping spark a renaissance of growth in America.

Imagine the spectacular results for the entire country if Congress initiates a nationwide plan for converting fossil fuels to renewable energy, similar to JFK’s charge to go to the moon. Evidenced by the Space Station, Congress already knows how effectively solar power works

Whichever political party jumps on board the renewable economic revolution first will likely “seal the deal” for political dominance for some time to come as Americans once again “whistle whilst they work,” as the renewable revolution brings high paying jobs all across the country. And, workers once again have a sense of pride, making good money just as they help rescue the planet from ill effects of fossil fuels.

It’s the Roaring Twenties, sans oil, redux!

Thanks to the leadership of America’s prescient students.

Lower Drinking Age, Raise Killing Age

David Swanson

The United States sends people to kill and die in war that it doesn’t trust with a beer.

It trains police in war skills to assault young people it suspects of going near beer.

Here’s an idea: Drink At 18, Don’t Kill Till 21.

Alcohol prohibition is not working, and creates unsafe drinking by people old enough to vote, drive, and work. A case can be made, and is being made, for returning the drinking age to 18.

But allowing 18-year-olds to join the military has created illegal and immoral recruitment of minors, not to mention deep moral regret, post-traumatic stress, and suicide in young veterans.

Raising the age for war participation (for joining either the military or one of its contractors) to 21 would do more for education and informed career choices — not to mention reducing drug and alcohol addiction, and suicide — than banning alcohol does.

Make-Daiquiris-Not-War is a policy based on actual dangers. The problem with alcohol is not responsible drinking of it. Alcohol is not a satanic liquid to be counter-productively made into a forbidden fruit. The problems with alcohol are: drinking and driving, which should be addressed by avoiding the driving, not through an unenforceable ban on drinking; drinking to dangerous excess, which should be addressed through open discussion, not the secretive plotting of contemporary speakeasies; and addiction, which is driven not so much by the chemicals involved as by the life of the person who becomes addicted.

And what could we most easily do to assist young people in leading more fulfilling, less horrific, lives? We could put off the decision to join in a program of mass murder until age 21, thereby giving a young person a chance to consider all the options.

In many nations there is no drinking age. In others the drinking age is after you’re dead (alcohol is prohibited). Among those with a drinking age between zero and forever, far and away the most common is 18.  Exceptions are Egypt, Kazakhstan, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, United Arab Emirates, Cameroon, Indonesia, the United States, and various Pacific island colonies of the United States, all of which make the legal age to drink 21.

But how’s that working out for them? In Egypt if you happen to witness the police murder someone, you’ll face prison or worse, while the U.S. President chats with the Egyptian President promising him more weapons and money, but if you want to drink underage, apparently nobody really minds. The inevitable result of making it legal to sell alcohol to some but not all adults (taking adults to be 18 and up) seems to be either stiffer and stiffer penalties or routine violation. This of course creates both a disrespect for laws and drinking in secret without appropriate discussion of dangers and measures to prevent recklessness.

In Argentina enlistment in the military is allowed at 21, or at 18 with parental consent. In Bahrain and Kazakhstan military enlistment starts at 15. Who’s right? Who’s respecting the enlistees? Well, according to some brain scientists at MIT — not that they should know anything:

“As a number of researchers have put it, ‘the rental car companies have it right.’ The brain isn’t fully mature at 16, when we are allowed to drive, or at 18, when we are allowed to vote, or at 21, when we are allowed to drink, but closer to 25, when we are allowed to rent a car.”

Scientists at Dartmouth agree. (But they would, wouldn’t they?) Not to mention neuroscientists who write books and go on NPR.

So upping the killing age to 21 would be moving in the direction of the wisdom of the scientists and the rental car companies. Why lower the drinking age at the same time? Because alcohol needs to be treated principally not as a means of drunken escape, but as an enjoyable beverage with dinner. Nations with no drinking age at all tend to have less alcoholism than do puritanical nations. The point is not that 18 year olds are qualified to head off to parties at which they’ll drink gallons of hard liquor (as some currently do, law or no law) but that alcohol, like other enjoyable and risky parts of life — from dangerous sports to sex to other drugs to those televisions in airports blasting Fox News — should be dealt with openly and calmly by parents and teachers and friends, with the actual dangers made crystal clear and imaginary dangers debunked.

The fact is that prohibiting alcohol leads to more reckless drinking, while prohibiting war participation leads to less reckless killing. We’ve got our priorities wrong. Let’s rework them.

Sexual Violence is a Trademark of Imperialism

Brian Platt

A new report out of Colombia reveals that between 2003 and 2007 US military personnel and contractors stationed in Colombia raped at least 54 children and dozens of women. According to Renan Vega, the lead author of the report,​“There is abundant information about the sexual violence, which occurred under absolute impunity because of the bilateral agreements and the diplomatic immunity of United States officials.” (TeleSur, 3/23)

In 2004 54 girls in the town of Melgar were sexually abused by American military contractors. The abuse was filmed and sold as pornography. The victims and their families were then forced to flee the town under threat of death. In 2007 an Army sergeant and a contractor raped a 12 year old girl inside a US military base. Colombian authorities were blocked from making an arrest by the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) foreign nations sign when forced to host American soldiers. The perpetrators were then flown back to the US to evade charges. (TeleSur, 3/23)

Horrifying as these actions are they are nothing new or unusual. In 2006 US soldiers raped 23 women in Colombia. In 2007 there were another 14 reported cases. Nor are these actions relegated to just Colombia. The vast overseas network of American military bases that buttresses the empire represents also a vast system of rape and violence. Twenty years ago 85,000 Okinawans took to the street in protest after two American marines and a sailor kidnapped and raped a 12 year old Okinawan girl “just for fun” according to one of perpetrators. Admiral Richard C. Macke, commander of US forces in the Pacific, heaped insult onto injury when he responded to questions about the rape, “I think that [the rape] was absolutely stupid. For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl,” meaning a prostitute from one of the many brothels set up for the use of American servicemen.

Indeed the life of Okinawans is considered cheap by their American occupiers. As historian Chalmers Johnson notes, between 1988 and 1995 169 soldiers in Okinawa were court-martialed for sexual assault. This rate was twice the rate of the general population in the United States. A startling fact consider the great lengths the military goes to cover-up rape at its overseas bases and the immense social pressure in places like Okinawa on women not to report. In fact the 169 number must be a vast underestimation of the actual level of victimization. (Blowback)

In South Korea rape was baked right into the American occupation. According to historian Bruce Cummings during the Korean War the South Korean armed forces reformed the network of “comfort women”—mostly Korean women forced into slavery to serve as prostitutes for soldiers—that the Japanese military had built during its occupation of China and Korea. US soldiers took part in the rape of comfort women during the war. And after the war when many of these women too shamed by a sexist society to return home they formed the original labor force for the brothels that ring American bases in South Korea. (The Korean War)

During the 1960s revenue from prostitution in these camp towns made up 25% of South Korean GNP. At one point ROK dictator Park Chung-Hee even pushed for the importation of women from the southern part of the country to these rape camps out of fear that he was losing sex tourism revenue to Japan. (JoongAng Daily,10/30/08; Violence Against Women, 9/2007)

Sexual violence continues around American bases in Korea today. In 2011 Private Kevin Lee Flippin robbed, beat, and raped a 17 year old Korean girl at knife point. That same year another Camp Casey soldier broke into an elderly couple’s home and beat them with a piece of lumber before trying to rape the 64 year old woman (Stars & Stripes, 10/21/11; 2/28/11). These incidents are exceptional only in the fact that they sparked mass outrage in Korea forcing the US press to report them.

When revelations of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq first appeared in late 2003 it revealed a pattern of sexual violence different only in type from that visited on those surrounding America’s overseas basis. At the infamous prison US soldiers and their contractors sodomized prisoners with broom handles and chemical lights. Inmates were raped while soldiers watched and took pictures perhaps “just for fun” like their compatriots in Okinawa (Guardian, 9/20/04; Daily Telegraph, 5/28/09; Washington Post, 9/19/11). When the Senate torture report investigating activities at Guantanamo Bay was released late last year again it was revealed that sexual assault played a large role in America’s imperial prisons. (Feministing blog, 12/12/14)

Today the major American news organizations remain silent regarding this explosive report out of Colombia (FAIR, 3/26). The network of overseas bases that hold up the American empire and the violence that they bring to those around them are too important to American capitalism to risk. News organizations see no need to get Americans riled up about imperialism and occupation as the US stands to increase its military commitment in Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East all in the name of “democracy” and free markets. For the people in the 130 countries in which the US military currently operates, however, this report out of Colombia represents something very different. This violence deeply rooted in racism and sexism is the face of American imperialism around the globe. It is time the empire was torn down.

The Future of Indian Communism

Ramchandran Viswanathan

Saanje se utee woh dhun sabne suni hai,

Jo thar pe gujri woh kis dhil kho patha hai 

(None ever realize the travails of the strings

All have heard only the notes they bring)

– Sahir Ludhianvi, the Marxist poet

Vijay Prashad in his book, ‘No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism’, has brought not the strains but the travails of the communist heart strings to the public domain. This book, while delineating the historical roots and actual praxis the communist movement, explores the polity, state and society in India from the Marxist perspective; bringing into sharp focus what remains buried under deep layers of oblivion in the annals of official and mainstream history. What he refers to as the ‘the Left’ are the formations of Communism and its left allies. The book notes the ‘Left’s’ valuable contributions to India’s Independence, its nation building endeavor. It captures the growth, fragmentation and consolidation of the ‘Left’; goes on to affirm that ‘Left’ has a coherent alternative political philosophy, its strategy and tactics surely need to be deftly honed to render it more ‘easily comprehensible’ to people with added ability to draw attention across the country.

Vijay Prashad introduces the term ‘Gandhi moment’, drawing on the robust criticism of Gandhi by Marxists RP Dutt, EMS Namboodripad and SA Dange, in the course of the freedom struggle itself; taking off from his earlier remark, ‘Indian nationalism was far richer than Gandhi’s contribution and Gandhi was not sacrosanct’, in the review of Perry Anderson’s ‘Indian Ideology’. In the 1920s, India bristled with popular energy when ‘democracy and justice’ were becoming its irreducible values’. In this milieu, the Gandhian Bargain with its implicit promise that ‘India’s freedom from British rule would produce a dynamic toward the fullest democracy and equality, even within the constraints of a structure that set one class against the other’; could bring ‘all the people, with divergent class background and interests, into the widest embrace of the national movement’. He goes on to add that the magnates, claiming to ‘represent healthy capitalism’, recognized these merits of Gandhi, were swept in to his moment ‘to help Gandhiji as far as possible’ and work with their own common objectives. Gandhi came to personify the Congress (Indian National Congress) – the dominant organization in the national movement. Vijay Prashad shows how these industrialists were quick to manipulate industrial strikes to morph into communal riots, which they managed to do when faced with industrial action in Bombay (1929); or ‘collude with the British against the socialists and the communists’, if need arose, as they did later when Congress proclaimed the ‘Quit India’ campaign in 1942 and they felt it was crossing the Rubicon.

Alongside the communists, Bhagat Singh, Subashchandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, MA Jinnah, BR Ambedkar, Jayaprakash Narayan, all ardent champions of the nationalist cause, were quick to perceive the contradictory role of Gandhi – his now ON and now OFF methods of launching and calling off mass civil disobedience – and his propensity to substitute ‘uncritical faith’ for ‘independent thinking’; and they formed the ensemble that contested ‘Gandhianism’, the dominant ethos of their period. Nehru succumbed to the inherent charms of Gandhianism sooner while his Socialist admirers joined the communists or remained immersed in their sterile anti-communism. Bhagat Singh was martyred and Subashchandra Bose exiled himself; while Jinnah, the secular democrat, Jayaprakash Narayan, the irrepressible socialist and Ambedkar, the eternal outspoken intellectual, all had to move along their own individual paths.

As Vijay Prashad, succinctly summed up in his article ‘Between Quam and Nation’, the anti-colonial freedom movement of the Subcontinent as ‘a river fed by powerful streams – some of them were revanchist and saturated in religious millenarianism, others came from indigenous socialist traditions that morphed with the entry of Marxism and the USSR into the currents of communism and socialism, and yet others drew from British liberalism (including the Fabian Society) and the worldview of the Indian capitalist class to forge the Nehruvian mainstream’. What united this stream of nationalism was its antipathy to colonial rule, although even this was only articulated in the mainstream as anti-colonialism at the end of the 1920s. The social effect of the Great Depression set off by the late 1920s, Gandhi’s compromises with Viceroy Irwin in 1931, and the hanging of Bhagat Singh by the British threatened the Congress hegemony and Gandhi’s sway over the national movement.

Why the Congress leadership and Gandhi, in particular, should move towards a truce when Bhagat Singh and his associates were being tried for sedition remains shrouded in mystery. Irfan Habib, in his ‘Studies in Ideology and History’, while pointing out Sumit Sarkar’s argument that Indian big business pressure was at work, concedes that Gandhi could not wholly ignore the opinion of this class, however much his own backers from amongst its ranks (like Ambalal Sarabhai and GD Birla) remained loyal and appeared unassertive. AG Noorani in his book ‘The Trial of Bhagat Singh’ brings to light the fact that Gandhi’s later claims of ‘having brought all the persuasion at his command to bear upon the Viceroy’ Irwin (for the release of Bhagat Singh) – while signing the infamous pact with him – ‘are belied by the record that came to light four decades later’. This was also the period when the British with their avowed zeal to crush the spreading ‘Bolshevik menace’ had launched a series of conspiracy cases against the communist agitators and activists, trying to set up its all-India centre and the mass organizations of peasants, workers and students. It was on March 5, 1930 that Gandhi signed his pact with the Viceroy Lord Irwin, wherein no demand was made for the release of these revolutionaries; Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were surreptitiously sent to the gallows on March 23, 1931. The source of India’s descent to the present could be located in this moment.

The Congress regained its waning popular appeal, in the aftermath of Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom; by articulating the general aspirations of the people through the resolutions it gave shape to at its Karachi session in 1931. The resolutions of the Karachi Congress session condensed the broad socialist demands that had become common sense in India by 1931. The ‘social contract’ enshrined in the Karachi Congress resolutions helped the Congress to capture power in the provincial legislatures in 1937 elections, held under the Government of India Act 1935 which bestowed voting rights for only 3 percent Indians. The terms of this ‘social contract’ were the building blocks of India’s Republican Constitution and became an inalienable part of the post-1947 ‘Nehruvian’ consensus as part of the Gandhian Bargain. The manner of functioning of the 1937 Congress ministries helped to cement its role as the arbiter of propertied class interests as it took a more strident anti-Left line. From here there was no looking back for the Congress and the bonds strengthened further after the transfer of power. In the post-independence period, the Congress reneged on the issue of ‘economic freedom’; and by default all the other terms of the above social contract are under a veritable attack by the Sangh Parivar (the Saffron family – Hindu Right) – the cluster of organisations forming the backbone of the right wing BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) – ensconced in the seats of power now.

The Congress leadership, having failed – at the most decisive moment – in 1931 to launch any campaign for the release trial of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, sensed their moment had come in 1942, when the hordes of the Axis Powers were marching ahead in almost every continent in all directions. With great alacrity it issued the call to ‘Do or Die’, premised on the mistaken reading of the prevailing international situation that the British were on the losing side and this was the most opportune moment for giving the final push to end British rule. In the years 1945-46 immediately after the war, a great mass upsurge spanned across several countries around the globe – China, Burma, Malaya, Indo-China, Indonesia, Greater Arabia as also Greece, Italy and France – and India was no exception. In India ‘the subterranean people’s movement did not translate into a general and open revolutionary upsurge’. The Cabinet Mission’s Plan, of May 16, 1946, envisaged a federal India and offered the basis for a historic compromise that failed to materialize; as at this momentous juncture, the Congress and the Muslim League were in as much hurry to assume the reins of power, as the British were eager to transfer power and. This cleared the road to perdition – for the holocaust of partition – altering irretrievably the subsequent history of the subcontinent. The ‘disruption of advanced peasant movements in Punjab and in Bengal’ was the less known but significant fallout of 1947 partition. The supremacy of the bourgeoisie from the initial phase of the freedom struggle, their presence among the peasantry and the failure of the working class ideology to establish its hegemony over the national movement coupled with an absence of ‘peasant rebelliousness’ (in the classical sense) capable of bringing about regime change helped in ample measure to bring about this dénouement.

To borrow Aijaz Ahmad’s expression: In the case of India, in 1947, ‘a revolution against foreign rulers (turned into) an immeasurably powerful ‘restoration’ of the rule of the indigenous propertied classes’.

Vijay Prashad takes us through the post-Independence history of India and points out how the big bourgeoisie had been calling the shots all along from the first years of Independence to this day; and how the ingredients of the Gandhian Bargain, sustained the major political events of the entire twentieth century, certainly till the 1980s, when the Bargain began to fray. ‘Early in its career, it (the big bourgeoisie) made the most of the import-substitution and license raj and when these policies had run their course it remained unwilling to plough in the profits towards any investments for industrial growth; and turned against these supports with vehemence, making the case that they had always been against these policies’. With the declaration of Emergency (by Indira Gandhi in 1975), the socialists, namely Jayaprakash Narayan, welcomed the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – established in 1925, drawing inspiration from Hitler and Mussolini’s fascist storm troopers) to the center of political life, giving it legitimacy and authority where it had none before. The socialists’ deep antipathy to Mrs. Gandhi and the Congress coupled with a deep seated animosity towards communism, their inability to draw a fine line between their national vision and that of the Indian Right allowed them to embrace the Hindu Right and turned them to being the enablers of the Hindu Right. The problem of the RSS tore through the Janata Party regime that took power after the revocation of Emergency in 1977. Indira Gandhi’s restoration in 1980 was made possible, in no small measure, by her transformation from a socialist into a defender of the Hindus and the dismantler of the system of state intervention in the economy, heralding the arrival of ‘political Hinduism’ and ‘liberalization’ – the shape of things to come.

The capitalist class’ political commitment to the Congress-run consensus withered as the party’s monopoly on power frayed. An earlier capitalist party – Swatantra Party (Freedom Party) – had failed to make a breakthrough between 1959 and 1974 because of Congress hegemony. By the 1980s, the BJP had absorbed sections of the Swatantra ethos, and the Congress itself had incubated elements eager to break with the Nehruvian paradigm national development path. In 1984 Indira Gandhi was assassinated and Rajiv Gandhi, who followed her, met the same fate in 1991. The Congress Party’s turn to liberalization in 1991 with the so-called ‘Rao-Manmohan reforms’, culminated a long process led by Rajiv Gandhi signaling the ‘onset of the neoliberal regime; and set in motion the ‘institutionalization of communalism in structures of the Indian state’ and kowtowing of imperialism as a subordinate ally. The BJP’s rise power, challenging the Congress hegemony, with the formation of ‘Vajpayee government in 1998 inaugurated a new phase in which a drastically reorganized power bloc, composed of all the non-Left parties, brought apparent stability to bourgeois rule in India; and heralded a new consensus in the Indian ruling class in favour of a closer alliance with imperialism externally and the imposition of neoliberal order domestically.’

Writing in general terms, on the ebbs and flows in the wave of communism that continues in India, Vijay Prashad says:

Over the course of history of the Indian republic from 1947 to 1991, the Left parties in governance – at the provincial level – provided the most significant land reform and agricultural worker tenancy programme, enacted deep local self-government schemes and provided a safe haven from the toxic social agenda of political religion. Outside the government, the Left participated in a wide range of struggles – for the rights of workers and peasants, for the defence of the good side of history against the bad. This was a period when the Left went through a series of major debates on its varied analysis of the role of imperialism, the class character of the Indian state, the nature of Indian democracy and the strength of the popular classes. Of the 29 provinces, Kerala, West Bengal, Tripura, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are the main pockets of Left influence. Most other regions of the country, beyond these core regions of the ‘Left’, remain ‘no land for communists’. The Left’s attempt to ‘govern and mobilize within the domain of industry in both Kerala and West Bengal’ crashed hard upon what Frantz Fanon called ‘the old granite block upon which the nation rests’. One of the most fascinating elements of the Indian communist movement’s history has been its creative and dynamic rural policy and its inability to develop as imaginative an industrial policy. What is clear is that a cognate industrial strategy of the Left was quite simply blocked. It could not take place. It is what produces the conjunctural crisis for the Left Front’s defeat in the 2011 West Bengal elections. The electoral defeat of the ‘Left’ is neither an ideological collapse nor an organisational rupture; it cannot be measured simply in terms of its electoral slide, it is an ideological defeat that one has to recognize. But the harm seems all the greater because of the apparent ‘annihilation of the working class block to fight against the very powerful bloc of Property and Privilege’. It reaffirms the fact that, in this epoch of complete hegemony of international finance capital, ‘the task of carrying forward the dialectics of subversion of the logic of capital should remain the bedrock of Left praxis – its political formations, mass organisations as also the state governments run by them’.

Prashad sums up the present thus: “The Congress remains wedded to its drift rightwards, the former socialist parties seek alliance of power rather than ideology (and) such a barren landscape leaves the Left on a lonely track, to plot a strategy to arise as the only capable alternative to the entire political class. India, of course, requires such an alternative.” It is not just the case that ‘Neoliberal policies have created great new differences amongst the rural population: a new class of beneficiaries emerges out of the old privileged sections, and the working classes are more and more fragmented’. As Aijaz Ahmad observed: ‘The neoliberal order is not only a vast system of brutal exploitation, a low wage regime…also of social uprooting and social disorientation…the social decomposition caused by this extreme capitalism contaminates and poisons the consciousness of countless’ among all classes. In the words of Prabhat Patnaik, ‘The horizon of possibility in India has been set by neoliberal policy with ‘full integration between neoliberal authoritarianism of capital in the domain of political economy with communal authoritarianism in ideology and state power’. It is on this count that the Congress has forfeited the affections of propertied classes.

Vijay Prashad’s summary findings in regard to parliamentary democracy in India are pertinent: ‘Livelihood is a central problem for the vast majority, but it is rarely the case that an election is fought on the sociology of starvation. It is rather fought constituency by constituency, with factors of caste and gender, political tradition and political violence as the main vectors’; and speaking of the present, in most cases, fealty to any political tendency is conspicuous by its absence. In the world’s largest democracy, election are won, by money and force, by the forces of rotting fascism’; and electoral success buttresses extra-legal power. The 2014 parliamentary elections were no exception this trend. Vijay Prashad drives home the fact that, in these elections, the BJP earned only thirty one percent of the popular vote, unevenly spread across most regions of the nation, except the Hindi heartland, with low margins of victory in much fractured contests which means that a plurality of India’s voters did not bring it to power. This was also the case with the BJP’s predecessor, the Congress Party, but the sweep of the Congress was more evenly spread across the nation for many decades before its gradual atrophy began.

Again reverting to Aijaz Ahmad’s expression, the passive revolution of 1947 that ‘restored’ the rule of the indigenous propertied class has now morphed into ‘complete negation of all that has been progressive in our history’, with the cultural hegemony of the RSS in place. The resistance to Hindutva fascism ‘necessitates a transformation of the national-popular consciousness through refounding of the communist movement to become a ‘collective intellectual’ for the anti-fascist forces, a reconstitution of a nationalism from the Left and the defence of the most cherished aspects of our national compact’.

It has been appositely said that the choice before us is ‘Socialism or barbarism’ and that ‘fascism is the result of our failure to make revolution’. Fascism is also the outcome of corralling the revolution. The book reaffirms that only the Left is equipped to meet the challenges of our times head on; its ideology, strategy and tactics have to be become common sense of the people.

Ethiopian Brutality, British Apathy

Graham Peebles

On 23rd June 2014 Andergachew Tsige was illegally detained at Sana’a airport in Yemen whilst travelling from Dubai to Eritrea on his British passport. He was swiftly handed over to the Ethiopian authorities, who had for years posted his name at the top of the regime’s most wanted list. Since then he has been detained incommunicado in a secret location inside Ethiopia. His ‘crime’ is the same as hundreds, perhaps thousands of other’s, publicly criticising the ruling party of Ethiopia, and their brutal form of governance.

Born in Ethiopia in 1955, Andergachew arrived in Britain aged 24, as a political refugee. He is a British citizen, a black working class British citizen with a wife and three children. Despite repeated efforts by his family and the wider Ethiopian community – including demonstrations, petitions and a legal challenge – the British government (which is the third biggest donor to Ethiopia, giving around £376 million a year in aid), have done little or nothing to secure this innocent man’s release, or ensure his safe treatment whilst in detention.

A tale of neglect and indifference

After nine months of official indifference, trust and faith in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) is giving way to cynicism and anger amongst his family and members of the diaspora. The elephant in the room – the unspoken question of racial discrimination – is surfacing. Is the FCO’s apathy and neglect due to Andergachew’s colour, his ‘type’ or ‘level’ of Britishness, is there a hierarchy of citizenship in Britain? If he had been born in England, to white, middle class parents, attended the right schools (educated privately as over half the British cabinet was) and forged the right social connections, would he be languishing in an Ethiopian prison, where he is almost certainly being tortured, abused and mistreated.

Andergachew is the Secretary General of Ginbot 7, a campaign group that fiercely opposes the policies of the Ethiopian government – the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF); highlights the regime’s many and varied human rights violations, and calls for the adherence to democratic principles of justice and freedom; liberal ideals, many of which are enshrined in the country’ constitution. A broadly democratic piece of fiction that is consistently ignored by the ruling party – even through they wrote it.

Political dissent inside Ethiopia has been criminalised in all but name by the EPRDF. Freedom of assembly, of expression, and of the media, are all denied, so too affiliation to opposition parties. Aid that flows through the government is distributed on a partisan basis, so too employment opportunities and university places. The media is almost exclusively state owned, Internet access (which at 2% of the population is the lowest in Sub-Saharan Africa), is monitored and restricted; the government would criminalise thought if they could.

The population lives under suffocating repression and fear and the vast majority, we understand, despise the government. Human rights are ignored and acts of state terrorism are commonplace, some of which, according to human rights groups, constitute crimes against humanity. Such is the reality of life inside the country for the vast majority. A stifling reality of daily suffering that animated the actions of Andergachew Tsige and the other members of Ginbot 7, and which has cost him his liberty.

For challenging the EPRDF, in 2009 and 2012, he was charged with terrorist offences (under the notorious, universally condemned Anti Terrorist Proclamation of 2009), tried in absentia and given the death penalty. The judiciary in Ethiopia is constitutionally and morally bound to independence, but in practice it operates as an unjust arm of the EPRDF. A conviction (unless for traffic violations, for example) handed down in a trial where the defendant is not present, is a violation of the second principle of ‘natural justice’, – Audi alter am partum (hear the other party) – and is therefore illegitimate. Such legal niceties, however, mean nothing to the EPRDF, who have dutifully signed up to all manner of international covenants, but ignore them all. They like trying their detractors (activists, journalists, political opponents) who live overseas, in absentia and handing out outrageous judgements; they are particularly fond of the death penalty and life imprisonment. It is hard to think of a more arrogant and paranoid regime. They rule, as all such groups do, by the cultivation of that ancient tool of control: fear.

British complicity

Given the nature of the EPRDF government, little in the way of justice, compassion and fairness can be expected, in relation to Andergarchew, or indeed anyone else in custody. Self-deluding and immune to criticism, the EPRDF distorts the truth and justifies violent acts of repression and false imprisonment as safeguarding their country from ‘terrorism’. Complete nonsense! The only form of terrorism rampaging through Ethiopia is State terrorism, perpetrated by the EPRDF and their uneducated vicious thugs, in and out of uniform.

Andergachew Tsige is a British citizen, and the British government has a constitutional and moral responsibility to act energetically and forcefully on his behalf; to their shame, so far the FCO and the coalition government more broadly, have been consistently woeful in their efforts. In February a British delegation led by Jeremy Corbyn, Mr Tsege’s constituency MP, was due to visit Ethiopia in an effort to secure his release. But, The Independent reports, “the trip was abandoned after a meeting with Ethiopian ambassador Berhanu Kebede [a more arrogant, duplicitous man, is it hard to imagine] in London.” A member of the team, Lord Dholakia, the vice-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on Ethiopia, said, “it was made clear that they would not be welcome.” The Ethiopian ambassador apparently told the parliamentarians “that there was no need for them to go to Ethiopia as the case is being properly handled by the courts.” Again – nonsense: Andergachew is yet to be formally charged, has been denied contact with his British solicitors, as well as consular support, and has received only one brief visit from the British ambassador, in August; a meeting controlled fully by the Ethiopians. The FCO have said they “remain deeply concerned about Ethiopia’s refusal to allow regular consular visits to Mr. Tsege and his lack of access to a lawyer, and are concerned that others seeking to visit him have also been refused access.” So why are you not acting, using your ‘special’ position to secure this innocent man’s release: do something, is the cry of the family, the community and all right minded people.

At what point, does neglect in the face of injustice and abuse become complicity? If you allow illegal detention and the violation of international justice to take place and you say and act not, are you not guilty in aiding and abetting such actions? If you give funds to a government – the EPRDF – that is killing, raping, imprisoning and torturing its own citizens, and you do and say nothing – as the British, the American’s, and the European Union do, even though you know what’s happening – you are, it is clear, complicit, that is to say, party to the crimes being committed.

Thinking About My Own Death

Missy Beattie

During one of my frequent visits to Kentucky, my parents talked about their obituaries. I reached for paper and began to write. This was long before either had infirmities. Probably they were gauging time, measuring the future against the past with the realization that they’d lived much longer than they had left.

I listened, listed, and wrote paragraphs, the numerous activities defining meaningful lives, and then read it to them. Wait a minute. I still have this among memorabilia. Be right back.

This piece would be too lengthy if I included everything I wrote that day. But here’s some of it: During high school, Geraldine, known as Gigi, was a volunteer with the Red Cross, rolling bandages for the wounded. She studied music at the Boston Academy, was a charter member of the Junior Woman’s Club, chair of the Republican Party, chair of the Jessamine County Polio Foundation, scout leader, den mother, library board member, soloist in the church choir, was known for her baking and candy making. In later years, she denounced the Republican Party.

Daddy’s accomplishments were vast—his education, military service and discharge as a captain after 38 months overseas, his career, membership on many boards at both the city and county levels, his church involvement as adult men’s Sunday school teacher, elder, deacon, trustee, and then an active retirement during which he was city commissioner, Jessamine Arts Council member and, well, on and on and on.

After entering the names of their children, their children’s spouses, and the grandchildren, I called it a wrap.

Years later when Mother and Daddy moved in with Laura and Erma because they couldn’t take care of themselves without help, we talked again about the obits. Neither wanted any more than a mention of their love for each other, their children, and grandchildren.

All week, I’ve thought of Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz’s desperate need for attention—to be immortalized for a self-orchestrated act of violence. “One day I’ll do something that will change the system, and then everyone will know my name and remember it,” he’d said to his girlfriend.

And I’ve questioned the meaning of this. What’s the significance of having one’s name remembered by everyone and especially for causing immense anguish? Really, what motivates craving remembrance for any action, period?

I think about my own death. I’m not as old as my parents were when they asked me to compose their obituaries. But I clearly see what they wanted then and what they later shed. As death neared, love was all that mattered.

Right now, I might say I want to be remembered for my sense of humor and compassion—but only by my children, my grandson, Laura, Erma, my brothers, and my closest friends. Maybe that they’d mourn for me a little while, just a little while, and then carry on, living fully. But when death is waiting close by, I know what will be substantive, love only, and I won’t care if they remember anything after I die, except that I loved them with all my heart.

The New Face of the American Class Struggle

Louis Proyect

A 1954 film titled “Salt of the Earth” told the story of a courageous strike by the mostly Mexican-American zinc miners against a ruthless corporation that was based on a 1951 strike in New Mexico. Produced by Paul Jarrico and directed by Herbert Biberman, two Hollywood blacklistees, it was remarkable for both its power as film and for its fearless radicalism in a time when the left was being hounded out of existence. It derived much of its strength from the casting of New Mexican miners in leading roles, such as Juan Chacon, the president of a miner’s union, as a strike leader. And of critical importance in a time when reaction was running full throttle, the film depicted a victory of workers against insurmountable odds, just as had taken place in 1951.

I could not help but think about the 1954 classic when watching a screening of “The Hand that Feeds”, a documentary that opens today at Cinema Village in New York. If “Salt of the Earth” was a fictional film based on the facts of a real life strike, “The Hand that Feeds” is by contrast a factual film with all of the heartrending drama of a fictional film blessed with a “star” who led a struggle of twenty workers at Hot and Crusty, a bagel shop that was a stone’s throw from Bloomingdales in New York. In a panel on storytelling I chaired at this year’s Socially Relevant Film Festival, a documentary filmmaker explained that casting is as important for the documentary as it is for narrative films. One cannot imagine better casting for this documentary than the mostly undocumented Mexican workforce at Hot and Crusty, starting with Mahoma López, the 2014 counterpart to the Juan Chacon of sixty years ago.

At the very beginning of the film Mahoma López is heard saying: “Immigrants make this city run. You get settled in, and see the reality of how dollars are earned. I’m not so into being the victim. We basically started a war.”

If you live in New York, you will very likely be familiar with someone like Mahoma López who you will run into behind the counter when you are picking up a bagel in the morning on your way to work. There will be small talk about the weather and a smile from him but that is about the extent of it. “The Hand that Feeds” puts you on the other side of the counter as you learn the realities of life for such workers. They work sixty hours a week but without any sick or vacation pay. They lack health insurance. They can be fired at the drop of a hat if they have an “attitude”. The boss can get away with this because the worker is afraid of being reported to la migra and because he or she has family members in New York or Mexico who face certain disaster if the breadwinner loses a job. In many ways, it is just a small step above slavery.

The workers at Hot and Crusty finally said ¡Basta Ya! In 2012 and approached the Laundry Workers Center in New York for help in winning the wages that had been stolen from them. Originally intended to fight for the rights of laundromat workers who were also super-exploited, the Laundry Workers Center saw no reason not to get involved with delicatessen workers—a far cry from the narrow jurisdictional limitations of the official trade union movement today.

The culture of the Workers Centers that have come into existence in metropolitan areas around the United States is much more akin to the labor movement of Debs era when the IWW oriented to the most exploited and frequently immigrant layers of the working class. That is a culture that Ben Dictor, the Laundry Workers Center attorney and adviser to the Hot and Crusty workers, identifies with as should be obvious from his membership in the IWW at the University of Florida at Gainesville when an undergrad. As part of the resurgence of anarcho-syndicalism, the revivified IWW is a reminder that American trade union militancy is ready to break through once again.

In his introduction to Why Unions Matter, Michael Yates writes:“A fundamental goal of a union is to change the relationship between labor and management. Again and again, when workers are asked why they support the union or what the union has meant to them, they say that their fight for a union was a fight for dignity and respect.” That phrase rings through in every scene in “The Hand that Feeds”. Nothing can be more inspiring than to see a 2014 version of salt of the earth type people not only demanding their place in the sun but winning it through struggle.

After the last public space had been cleared of Occupy protesters, a mood of despair sank in among the left. How could we ever defeat such a powerful and determined “one percent”? That, of course, was the same question that zinc miners faced in 1951 at a time when resistance to the corporate behemoth seemed just as futile.

In a conversation I had with Ben Dictor, he explained that the left and the labor movement (with the emphasis on movement) have to join forces with the most oppressed workers to move forward. With workers becoming more and more part of a “precariat”, the role of a union is not just to fight for material gains but to give people a feeling that they are fully realized human beings. When twenty workers form a union at a bagel shop, they will continue to get not much more than a minimum wage but at least they will not be at the mercy of a boss who treats them as if they are on a plantation.

It was probably inevitable that the Hot and Crusty workers would hook up with Occupy activists since they seemed like natural allies. If it were too risky for someone working behind a counter to raise a ruckus, the risk of an arrest would not intimidate the young activists who had camped out in Zuccotti Park. The activism in ”The Hand that Feeds” is a heady cocktail with equal parts of the Latino workers and the Occupy movement that took their cause as their own. If the New Mexico strike of 1951 brought together local workers and the radical movement of that day (the union representing the zinc workers had a longstanding CP leadership), the Hot and Crusty strike of today is a marriage of the typical worker of today in the rapidly expanding service sector and the Occupy type activist who is likely to have read Noam Chomsky rather than Gus Hall.

There are other differences between the 1950s and today in terms of trade union organizing strategy. When the old left was involved with organizing efforts, it was always with the understanding that certain industries were more critical than others when it came to the vulnerability of the “one percent”. The CP organized dockworkers and the Trotskyists organized teamsters because a strike could shut down the transportation of critical goods that were essential to the economy as a whole.

But could the same be said about a bagel shop?

A shortsighted and dogmatic approach to such struggles misses their greatest potential, which is to invigorate a trade union movement that is slowly dying because of its refusal to conduct a social struggle of the sort that the IWW conducted in its day or that the CIO conducted in the 1930s. When rallies were being held outside the bagel shop, representatives from the transit workers union and the postal workers union showed up to offer solidarity. Trust me when I say that a subway strike or a postal strike can shake the system to its foundations. As the struggle of service workers at places like Hot and Crusty or McDonalds deepens, we can expect the more traditional unions to follow their example as the lesson sinks in that the boss seeks to eliminate all unions, even those who leaderships seek to “play ball”.

If “The Hand that Feeds” was not much more than the typical documentary with a heavy quotient of academic experts on low-paid undocumented workers and stock footage drawn from television news, it would still be worth seeing. But what makes it exciting is the impressive cinematic skill of husband-and-wife director team Rachel Lears and Robin Blotnick who are Brooklynites with a sure feel for city life as well as a flair for the dramatic. Indeed, it was their work with the Occupy Wall Street media project that put them in touch with the Hot and Crusty workers to begin with.

Like the directors I ran into at the Socially Relevant storytelling panel, they have a keen understanding of what makes a documentary work. Unless you see the need for drama, you will be losing the chance for drawing an audience in closer to the matter at hand.

In “The Hand that Feeds”, one of the central dramas involves Mahoma López’s wife who is a member of a Pentecostal church whose pastor preaches that we are in “end times”. As such, there are groups—as she says on camera—that say good things but might be doing the work of Satan. There is every indication that she sees Mahoma’s newfound activism as vulnerable to the Dark Side, even though the loss of his income might ultimately explain her worries just as much.

Another key drama involves a co-leader of the strike who is suspected of selling out to the boss who has promised a management job in exchange for abandoning the union organizing drive. By gaining the trust of all the workers, including him, Lears and Blotnick allow them to open up on camera about the doubts they have about each other and about themselves as well.

Like other important documentaries that start at the inception of a powerful social struggle, the essential drama is about whether or not it will succeed. Would the struggle for a union end happily in this case or would the film end like Barbara Kopple’s 1990 “American Dream”, a documentary about the crushing of a strike at Hormel.

I do not think it is a spoiler to reveal that the workers win in “The Hand that Feeds”. My strongest possible recommendation is to see this film at the Cinema Village to be reminded of how good a victory can feel. This film is a shot in the arm to a movement that can sometimes forget what power we have, even in the darkest of times. We may not have the cops or army or courts on our side but we have the vast majority of humanity as allies even if not all of it presently understands their class interests. It is best for us to think of ourselves as the future vanguard of a mass movement that cannot only give workers a sense of their “dignity and respect” as Michael Yates puts it, but everybody in the 99 percent.

Within that emerging vanguard, people such as Ben Dicktor, Rachel Lears, Robin Blotnick, and the Hot and Crusty workers are among the leading forces. Despite the mood of gloom that affects some on the left, their example is a ray of light that illuminates the way forward.

I invite you to see the film and to bookmark its website for information on the changing face of the American class struggle.