Thursday, June 27, 2024

Baltimore Longshoreman on the Key Bridge Collapse: “It’s not surprising that this ship lost power.”

Veteran longshoreman John Blom on the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and the slow recovery ahead for port workers.
JUNE 14, 2024
IN THESE TIMES
Crews conduct a controlled demolition of a section of the Francis Scott Key Bridge resting on the Dali container ship in Baltimore on May 13, 2024. The Francis Scott Key Bridge, a major transit route into the busy port of Baltimore, collapsed on March 26 when the Dali container ship lost power and collided into a support column, killing six roadway construction workers.
ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES


Read the full transcript below.


Nearly two months have passed since the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, and the city is still reeling from the disaster. The bridge collapse immediately rendered the Port of Baltimore inoperable, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs, and billions in wages, business revenue, and state taxes. While channels into the port have begun to open back up slowly, workers on the waterfront have been deeply affected, and the road to recovery will be long. As questions linger about the root causes of the Key Bridge collapse and what sort of future Baltimore can salvage for itself, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Marc Steiner, host of The Marc Steiner Show, team up to speak with John Blom, a veteran longshoreman who worked in the Port of Baltimore for over 30 years, to get a workers’ history of the port and its meaning to the city it nurtured.

TRANSCRIPT


This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

John Blom: Hi, my name is John Blom. I was a longshoreman in the Port of Baltimore for 35 years prior to my retirement in October of 2012. We held all kinds of little jobs of all different varieties. I worked as a short order cook to a forklift operator to a chauffeur. You name it, I did it. Clerk typist, lifeguard. I did all kinds of jobs before I came on the waterfront, and 35 years ago I came on the waterfront.

Maximilian Alvarez: All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers. Lead positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and become a paid monthly subscriber on Patreon for just five bucks a month. If you want to unlock all the great bonus episodes that we publish for our patrons, and please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to the​re​al​news​.com/​d​onate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and around the world.

My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’m the host of Working People and Editor in Chief here at The Real News Network.

Just last year, the Port of Baltimore created around 15,300 direct jobs with nearly 140,000 jobs overall linked to port activities.


Marc Steiner: I’m Marc Steiner, host of the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News, and it’s a pleasure to be here with my friend and colleague, Max Alvarez.

Maximilian Alvarez: Hell yeah, baby. I am really excited to be co-hosting this special episode with my man Marc Steiner. This is the podcast crossover that everyone’s been waiting for and this will not be the last time that we team up here on the show and elsewhere at The Real News. You can be sure of that. It has been a month and a half since a freight ship that had just left the Port of Baltimore slammed into the iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge on the morning of March 26th. As we know, six immigrant construction workers who were working a night shift on the bridge at the time and who did not receive a mayday warning from the ship or emergency dispatch lost their lives when the bridge collapsed.

The impact of this catastrophe on the families, friends, coworkers, and communities of those workers is impossible to quantify and they will be dealing with this devastating loss for the rest of their lives. But the bridge collapse has also had wide ranging and devastating impacts on fellow workers in the Port of Baltimore itself and in the regional economy. As Dominique Philippe August reported for Baltimore’s ABC affiliate, just last year, the Port of Baltimore created around 15,300 direct jobs with nearly 140,000 jobs overall linked to port activities. Those jobs generated nearly 3.3 billion in personal wages and salaries, $2.6 billion in business revenue and nearly $400 million in state and local tax revenue annually, according to the Maryland Port Administration.

Today, as part of our continuing coverage of the causes and impacts of the Key Bridge collapse, we’re going to zoom in on the waterfront and we’re going to get a veteran Longshore worker’s view on all of this, and we are honored to have John Blom with us on the show today.

Marc Steiner: Like Max said, today, we’ll continue to explore the aftermath of that disastrous and deadly collapse of the Key Bridge right here in Baltimore. It left six workers dead. It’s a critically important story that crippled the livelihoods of over 15,000 workers whose lives are tied to that port of Baltimore, along with another 140,000 workers whose jobs have also been affected. The Port is now just beginning to open up, but there’s going to be a long road to recover from starting now. I’m excited to have my old friend and comrade, John Blom here with us today. He spent 30 years on those docks as longshoreman and leader of the union.

Maximilian Alvarez: And I’m so grateful to Marc for connecting me with John, and I’m so grateful John to you for being here with us on the show today. I have so many things I want to ask you about, but to just get us started, I really wanted to just take the next few minutes and ask like we do here on the show every week, if we could just hear from you a bit more about your life and work on the waterfront. I mean, so many of us have no idea what that day-to-day work looks like, and you of course have spent a full career living and working on the waterfront and you’ve seen things change over recent decades. So I wanted to ask if you could just take us and our listeners there for the next few minutes, tell us a bit more about how you came to work at the waterfront, what being a longshore worker in the port of Baltimore was like during your time there and how you saw the job itself and the conditions that people are working under change over the years.

“You are just as likely to work on a Sunday night as you are to work on a Tuesday morning, and you really never know in advance.”


John Blom: Well, it changed quite a bit during the course of my career as a longshoreman. It’s not like a regular 40 hour a week job. You are just as likely to work on a Sunday night as you are to work on a Tuesday morning, and you really never know in advance for the vast majority of the people who work on the waterfront. That was certainly my case. I did not have a regular job for quite a number of years and before I ended up being a union official as a longshore worker, you load and unload vessels. That’s what a longshoreman does. You unload and unload ships and as everything from automobiles to sacks of sugar to boxes of bananas to mobile cranes. And your job is to either take ​’em on the ship or get ​’em off the ship as quickly and as efficiently as you can.

Like I said, you’re not guaranteed anything except for an opportunity to try and work. So certainly one of my first reactions when I saw the bridge collapse was, ​“Oh my, there’s going to be a lot of people who are going to be out of work for a long time here,” and because you’re not guaranteed anything, they’re not guaranteed anything. Everything on the waterfront goes by the number of hours you work, so you accumulate health insurance based on the number of hours. There’s an A plan and a B plan, and if you don’t make 700 hours in a year, you don’t get any health insurance whatsoever. Same thing with a pension. You have to make a thousand hours worth of credit in order to qualify for a pension year. And same thing with holiday pay, so you’re not guaranteed anything. When I first started on the waterfront, it was all hands free, it was all boxes, bales, drums, that kind of stuff.

Maximilian Alvarez: And John, can you just for our listeners there, so when we’ve talked to fellow longshore workers, they’ve talked to us a bit about containerization, but I just wanted to quickly pause on that. For anyone listening who may not know what that means, if you could just quickly sum that up for them.

John Blom: Sure. So a container is 20 foot or 40 foot long, looks like the back of a tractor trailer basically, short ones or longer ones, and they have holes on each of the corners so you can stack them and secure ​’em to each other and secure them to the decks of the ship. Prior to containers, everything was done by hand. So if you had, I don’t know, just to give an example, you had a load of bananas and I worked a lot moving a lot of bananas during the course of my career. Now they’re loaded up in the country that the bananas grow in into these containers and the containers as one lift go right onto the ship. So before, a banana boat would be in port for 14 hours and you’d basically work from 8:00 AM to midnight to unload all the bananas.

Now that same thing could be done with about a third of the number of workers in about a third of the amount of time. So it was a huge difference. Prior to longshore, workers would work in groups called gangs, and the gang when I was in in the mid to late seventies was 21 people per gang. Now with containerization, the international union saw that there was no way you were going to stop this from happening, so how best to compensate people? And there was a program called the Guaranteed Annual Income Program that came into effect and it went into effect coast wide, but in Baltimore it never paid anybody anything.

That changed when I led some people into picket lines and press conferences and everything, trying to figure out why it wasn’t paying off and making sure it was because folks were working a lot and then they stopped and there was very little work to be done. So that’s what the Guaranteed Annual Income Program was. The work crews went from 21 to 17 and the guaranteed annual income was the sweetener for the longshore person that wasn’t working, so that they would not suffer too greatly from containerization. Anyway, in the Port of Baltimore, after some significant effort, it began to pay off and it paid off for a number of years. Slowly it became less and less prevalent and management realized what was going on, decided to offer folks a buyout of that program. Now, at the point where they offered the buyout, there were not that many people collecting the guaranteed annual income or GAI was called. And actually there was a discussion to measure an opposed buyout. There was a discussion at the union meeting. I actually remember standing up at the union meeting and saying to folks, ​“Folks, this is sort of, think of this as the fire insurance at your house that you probably have never had a fire at your house. Hopefully you never will. Maybe your neighbors never had either, but if there happens to be one, it’s a really good thing to have insurance and you should think about this program like that.”

There were a number of people who had not collected any money and the senior guys were watching some of the younger people collect money and not work, and here they were working for it. And so there was some resentment between members of the union. Anyway, they voted to take this buyout.

Maximilian Alvarez: Well, if I can, I want to toss it to Marc in a sec talking about how this is all means for how we interpret the bridge collapse. But I guess just by one more quick question by way of getting us there, what does all of this say for, again, folks out there who have no idea what it’s like to work on the waterfront and have no idea what you and your coworkers and fellow union members have been experiencing over the past few decades? What did these things that you’re telling us about the containerization, the guaranteed income, the buyout, what are these signs of, in terms of the larger shifts in the shipping industry that you think folks out there are not seeing?

John Blom: Well, everything prior to containerization was done by hand. So if there were a hundred pound bags of sugar, you would be handling them in the hold of the ship, loading onto pallets and lift and having those pallets being high off the ship. Now all that stuff is in containers.

Baltimore in particular has a lot of what’s called RoRo cargo, which is cargo that rolls on and rolls off of the back of these ships, and it’s actually the number one roll-on roll-off. So it’s automobiles, it’s farm tractors, it’s bulldozers, it’s mobile cranes, you name it, we handle it. So I’ve worked on everything, done everything from actually nuclear power plants to lots of drums, bales, boxes during the course of my working career. It was certainly physically more difficult, mainly earlier on, but it was certainly tiring. People made more hours, it was easier to make more hours because it was a lot of, we called it asses and elbows. That’s what it was, a lot of difficult work. And so like I said, if a ship came in with just bananas these days, it would be in and out of the port in four hours, whereas it was 14 hours in the past. Same thing with there were times where I worked a whole week loading or unloading a single ship. That never happens these days. If something lasts for a second day, it’s surprising.

So the number of hours, and like I said before, the hours depends on whether you have health insurance or a pension year, all that good stuff.

Marc Steiner: So a couple things I was really thinking about in terms of the disaster, you’re talking about containerization. This is a total aside. It made me think about when I was a kid, I used to hang at the docks a lot in Baltimore and I used to collect animals off of bananas: boa constrictions, monkeys, all kinds of stuff, shit like that in the bananas, I would take ​’em home.

“You went to sleep that night thinking that you’ll be at work tomorrow and next thing all of a sudden, no job, no work.”


Maximilian Alvarez: I still can’t believe you had a pet monkey in Baltimore because of that.

Marc Steiner: I had a pet monkey and many boa constrictors, and it just made me think about how much the port has changed and how much the work has changed and how fewer men and women are working as longshoremen than before, and how that has just changed. And it changed in your lifetime when you started.

What year did you start working at the port?

John Blom: I started working in the port in the beginning of 1977.

So at that point, as a junior person, I didn’t work on a container until probably two or three years into my working career, not even once, because that was a relatively cushy job and I got all the drums and bales and a hundred pound bags of sugar and all that good stuff. Now that none of that stuff is handled by hand anymore at this point. That’s the big thing about containerization, that it changed at the point of manufacture or the point of when it’s loaded onto this truck, it never has to be unloaded again until it gets to its destination. Whereas in the past it would have been, we loaded it onto the truck, brought it to the pier, unloaded it from the truck, loaded it onto the ship, unloaded it from the ship, then put it into a truck at this destination and then brought to its place. So you can just imagine the huge savings as far as the amount of labor is concerned, the amount of time concerned, that containerization made.

Baltimore, like I said, has a lot of automobiles in RoRo and they have not figured out how to mechanize that. So you still do physically drive all the equipment on and off and secure it, and that’s the harder part of the job is securing all this stuff with chains to make sure that when the ship hits rough weather, that one thing doesn’t end up on top of the other.

Marc Steiner: So I am curious about a couple of things here. One, when you first heard about the disaster happening and the ship just losing all of its power and hitting the bridge and knocking the bridge down, six workers killed or missing, what was your reaction? I know when you work a job, even if it’s not your job to inspect the ships or do any of that kind of work, you’re always talking about it. You’re always talking about what’s wrong, what’s right. So what were your first thoughts and when you saw this happen, but what went wrong? What the fuck happened?

John Blom: Certainly my first thoughts were, ​“Oh my God, how many people have gotten killed who were on the bridge?” It’s pretty amazing that we tragically lost six people, but it could easily have been 46 or 66. So it was fortunate that it was sort of in the middle of the night and also that somehow the people on the ship were able to contact the proper authorities to stop more people from driving across the bridge when the ship actually hit it.

My first thoughts were certainly towards the casualties that I figured there were quite a few, and luckily there were nowhere near as many as I had initially feared. But my second thought was, ​“Oh my God, there’s nobody who’s going to be coming in and out of the port of Baltimore for months.” And some people, some when they get a dollar in their pocket, spend a dollar right away. Other people are a little bit more prudent and there are those who couldn’t be prudent because they didn’t have enough seniority, they would really be hurting.


In Ohio's Cancer Cluster, Workers Fight for Justice—and Transparency
“They hired the healthiest workers because it takes us longer to get sick.”
MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ



Maximilian Alvarez: Well, let’s talk about that a little bit, John, because I think this is again, why it’s so important to do this follow-up coverage, even if the initial frenzy of media coverage has passed away, we’re used to this in every story that we cover. It’s the same thing with the train derailment in East Palestine. Everyone’s covering it for about a month and everyone leaves and the disaster stays. So this is par for the course, and there’s so much devastation that is being felt now and is going to be felt for months and after this, but we’re not talking about that because so few people are talking to people like you. And what we’re trying to do here with this coverage, and Marc and I are going to continue doing interviews like this, just get to the bottom of the Key Bridge collapse, the conditions that led to that sort of collapse, just like we’re looking at the conditions that are leading to us having over a thousand trained derailments in this country every single year, the conditions that are leading to Boeing planes falling out of the sky or BP oil spills happening on our coast.

We’re investigating this by talking to folks like you and fellow workers in the ports in construction on those ships to try to piece together on the ground view of a situation that I think we would all agree is reaching crisis levels. But what you’re talking about is a really key aspect of this, which is what is the bridge collapse going to mean for port workers, people on the waterfront and the broader economy? So pull on that thread even more. Tell us, tell our listeners what they are not seeing when they hear that, ​“Oh, the port’s going to be shut down or traffic’s going to be slowed,” what does that mean for people like you and the people you work with now and in the long term?

John Blom: Well, certainly what it meant immediately was that there was no work that was going to be happening. No ships were you to go in and out of the port. Those who were there were stuck there and those who were trying to arrive. So it meant that basically unbeknownst to you, you woke up, you went to sleep that night thinking that you’ll be at work tomorrow and next thing all of a sudden, no job, no work. So that was certainly, I’m not sure exactly what more you’re trying to get at.

Marc Steiner: I mean this is because it was a disaster on the human side with workers. I mean, there were 15,000 direct jobs affected and 40,000 other jobs indirectly affected. I mean, this crippled a lot of people. And I was wondering, I was just thinking about you and your time as a union official, your time on the docks, if you were there right now, if you were still actively working on the docks in the union, think about that reality. What would you be doing? What are the fights going on now around that with the workers who’ve lost their jobs, who aren’t getting any money, who are stuck? The port is just about to reopen, right?

John Blom: So it’s like any other, anytime you reach any other type of crisis scenario, trying to do the best you can, trying to figure out what are you going to do? What can I do to support myself and my family, how can I pay my bills? That’s kind of what people were thinking about. And at this point, it looks like things will be relatively back to normal by the end of this month. And certainly there is some work that is beginning to happen now. There’s been some channels opened, not the complete one. You have to realize how big these ships are. These ships are enormous. They, they’re bigger than aircraft carriers. The ship that hit the bridge is the size of three football fields put on end to end to end had over 9,000 containers. So over 9,000 truckloads of cargo on the ship. And in the pictures, you can see the ones that are above deck but below deck, they’re eight deep below the decks. So there may be six or seven high above the deck, and there are eight deep below the deck. Those tremendous amounts of cargo that these ships hold, when I first came on the waterfront, a big ship would maybe hold like 200 containers. These hold multiple thousands.

Marc Steiner: So what you describe, it makes me think, I mean, how much things have changed both in terms of the size of the ship, the kind of deregulation of inspection and safety from your perspective, what are the things that have really led up to this disaster and how it has affected the workers themselves on the docks from your time?

John Blom: For one thing, the shipping companies are paid by the people with the cargo to move containers from one place to another. The time they spend in the port, they’re not making any money. When they move the cargo from point A to point B, that’s when they make their money. It’s not surprising that this ship lost power and everything. It certainly happened to ships when I was on them, like working tied up in the dock because longshoremen work on the piers, they’re not seafarers. We don’t work on the ships as they’re moving up and down the coast.

And a lot of these companies have had a lot of consolidation. And so they’re chartering slots on various vessels. So this was not a Maersk line vessel, but it was the Maersk line that had chartered this ship. And to get something like that off of line in order to do any kind of repairs is tremendously costly because if they have to take it out of the water, they have to take all these containers off, go someplace on a dry dock. I mean, probably literally millions of dollars to do that. So they’re doing patch, patch, patch. And like I said, it was not super surprising to me that a ship lost power, it certainly happened during my time on the waterfront. And that’s part of the reality of the new world these days, that it’s a lot easier to just patch something rather than actually fix it the right way.

Maximilian Alvarez: Well, and John, what’s so wild to me is hearing what you just said and hearing the echoes of that in so many other industries that we talk about in so many other workers that we talk to, right? You already mentioned that the port of Baltimore is, I believe you said, the largest kind of port that is offloading and unloading from the rail yards. And this connects directly to the kind of years-long coverage we’ve been doing on the railroads. And one of the many things that workers, engineers, conductors, everyone working on or around the railroads has been telling us is like, ​“Yeah, we’re going through the same thing. They have been cutting our staff cutting safety and maintenance measures year after year after year, reducing the number of people in the dispatch office, yada, yada, yada, reducing the amount of time that people have to check those cars because it’s so costly and expensive to say, this car needs extra repair.”

You got a bad car and send it to the machine shop to get it fixed. So from a managerial and corporate and Wall Street led perspective, you see the incentive throughout the supply chain to be telling workers to work faster with fewer people and chew their head off if they raise red flags when it comes to safety and maintenance measures. So eventually you’re going to get catastrophes like East Palestine where you also have these massive trains that have been getting longer and heavier over years carrying all these toxic cars, loads of materials bombing through people’s backyards, right? And so it kind of feels like a catastrophe is inevitable, but what’s going on in that industry is very much not unconnected to what you have been seeing and describing in your industry.

And so I say that all to say one of the issues that connects these two struggles and that people have been asking us about is what that means for public safety when so much of that freight contains toxic material. There were over 50 containers on the dolly itself that had toxic materials. So I wanted to ask if you could give us some insight on that. What are the working conditions on the waterfront, the corporate consolidation in the shipping industry and the railroad industry and all that kind of stuff, what does that mean for workers like you and your coworkers in terms of public safety and the handling of toxic materials and how seriously we are taking that task?

John Blom: So when you are working on these ships, especially nowadays with containerization, you don’t really know what’s in them. I mean, the hazardous hazmat things have little stickers on ​’em and say what it is, but unless you were carrying a cheat sheet with, you’d really have no idea what it was. It’d be useful for the fire department should they have to respond to an emergency, but you don’t really know what you’re handling. You’re handling all kinds of stuff and every once in a while you get a clue of something that was really valuable because they’d have armor. They literally have an armored car waiting, watching the container come on or off the ship and going with it. So I wonder, was it in that one? No, you don’t really know. I mean, certainly work on the waterfront was much more interesting when I first started in that you knew what you were handling, but these days, if you work on a container ship, you have no clue what you’re handling.

Marc Steiner: So I wonder how you’ve seen things change. Let’s stick with that for a moment. How have things changed drastically on the docks from when you started? The image of a longshore person is like big, burly guys. They’ve got heavy stuff to lift. All these things have changed on many levels. How have they changed that way? How have they changed in terms of safety, how have they changed in terms of what the union can do or can’t do to protect its workers in the dock?

Because I remember when you were in the union, I mean when you were really active in the union, you were among the lead fighters making sure the workers were safe. How has it changed? Did this disaster bring some of that to light?

John Blom: Yeah, I can’t say that this really brought a lot of that to light. I mean, it’s changed tremendously and there were a lot more injuries back in the old days, but there were a lot more things like cold muscles and those kinds of things. Now everything is tons and tons of stuff. There’s no light stuff. And so any accident that does happen is much more serious, or it tends to be much more serious. I watched a couple of people lose their lives during my working career on the waterfront, and that’s difficult. I watched the person who was my boss, who I’d worked with for quite a number of years, get run over by a forklift and killed.

One of the things that happened after 9/11 is that Customs and Border Patrol decided we had to start X-raying containers. And while this was happening, while I was vice president of local, I think, but what they were doing was these mobile X-ray machines we’re on wheels, and what they were asking our workers to do was to drive through these X-rays. I wondered about that and it was like, hmm, I know when I go to the dentist before I go to do anything too far as dental, they’ll put a lead shield over top of me. The person taking the X-rays will leave the room. And here they were telling Longshore the drivers who were driving containers that they had to drive through this X-ray x-ray machine and was, you can imagine it was quite a bit more powerful than a dental and that it went through a metal container and through whatever was inside the container.

And it was actually a picture that was circulated around of a skeleton driving a container through. Anyway, so I took this to the international union and they changed the practice where, hey, we would have people park the truck close to where this mobile X-ray machine was and have the driver get out and stand safely away. They do the X-ray and check out what was in the container, what was the manifest, and then the person would get off and drive it off. So it was actually one of the things that I was able to accomplish actually as a union official. And I believe I probably saved quite a few lives, honestly, from cancers, from radiation.



“[Doing] any kind of repairs is tremendously costly because certainly if they have to take [the ship] out of the water, they have to take all these containers off, go someplace on a dry dock. I mean, probably literally millions of dollars to do that.”


Marc Steiner: I mean, it seems also just one quick thing here, thinking about what just happened on the Port, the disaster and what you’ve seen over those 30 years on the docks about the size of the vessels getting larger, getting fewer and fewer inspections on the boats and the flaws in the construction of the bridge itself. And all that has to do with lack of regulation, cutting back on regulations that have to do with worker safety. How have you seen that change in your time? I’m curious. I mean, I guess most of the guys that you probably worked with all retired too.

John Blom: No,a bunch are still there. Quite a number of ​’em are still there, but I certainly don’t know everybody, which at the point when I retired, I knew everybody and they all knew me, but when I first started, the ships were way smaller, way, way smaller. The largest ships when they built the Key Bridge were about a third of the size of the dolly. That was the largest ship. And so I’m not sure that at the time that they built the Key Bridge that that was irresponsible. I don’t think anybody really anticipated the ships being as large as they are now. I certainly didn’t.

Maximilian Alvarez: It’s just like we said, this has been coming up in conversation with folks about this, even if it wasn’t sort of active deregulation affecting your industry, deregulation has affected the ports and from different sides even to the point of how many of these are under flag of convenience? How big are these ships? How often do they have to be inspected?

So really the question is just like, are there other signs that you saw working on the waterfront of this sort of trend that has led us to where we are now, where the ships are so large and crews are so small and all that kind of stuff? Any other kind of signs like that that you saw even secondhand being there on the waterfront?

John Blom: Well, certainly the consolidation of, just like in every other industry, consolidation of the waterfront. And so there are a lot more companies, so there were quite a number of different things, but we didn’t really, ships were not inspected that we saw very often at all. Customs would go on to a ship, but I don’t know, they would actually, I don’t know if I actually saw anybody actually investing in checking out the ships themselves. It was much more checking out the cargo or checking on whether the crew was trying to smuggle whatever drugs or whatever into the United States. I didn’t really witness them actually inspecting the ships themselves. Now that the cranes that work at the port get inspected on a regular basis, and there are certainly people who are on top of that.

Maximilian Alvarez: And again, we’re going to keep investigating this. We’re going to keep talking to folks like John who have spent their lives working in and around the port of Baltimore, try to give you guys this kind of panoramic view of this port, the activity there, the conditions that workers on in different parts of it are working under how that affects us, what we as working people can do to improve this situation and try to not only take better care of our fellow workers who are there on the waterfront, who are there filling potholes on bridges like the Key Bridge, let alone workers like the ones who are still stuck on that ship and to say nothing of other seafaring workers whose voices need and deserve to be heard. So I promise y’all listening, this is just the beginning. We’re going to keep on this and we’re going to keep talking to more incredible folks like John and learning everything that we can from them.

And John, I really wanted to thank you for giving us this time and giving us your insight and sharing it so generously with us. And I know we only got you for a few more minutes here, so I wanted to just sort of zoom out for a second, even beyond the kind of Key Bridge collapse and the devastation that is left in its wake and the effects that workers, particularly in the port of Baltimore are currently feeling and are going to be feeling for some time. I wanted to ask just like as someone who has been fighting for and representing Longshore workers here in Baltimore for so long, what message do you have for folks listening to this about just what workers in that industry in this union are going through in general, what we can all do to be more invested in that and help workers who need it and stand in solidarity with our fellow workers on the waterfront? Any sort of bigger points about this industry, about the men and women who make it run that you really want to share with folks who haven’t spent decades in that industry?

It’s a hard industry to get a hold of because you’re doing all kinds of things, but the work is interesting. You do all kinds of work, you handle all kinds of things. You’re not like an assembly line. You’re not doing the exact same thing every day. You can be doing all different kinds of things, and so it keeps it interesting. You’re also working with different people every day primarily, so you’re not working with the same group of folks, and so you get a sense of a broad spectrum of humanity.

I’m just curious, in the time we have, about what you’ve heard, what do you think is going on with the men and women who work in that port as longshoremen and what they’re going through now and how they’re surviving? Because when, I mean the Longshore Union is union that fought and fought and fought for their workers to make a really, really decent wage, great benefits built families, were part of the core of building a middle class in Baltimore along with the steel workers, but what are you hearing from folks about what’s going on with ​’em now? How are they faring through this? What are the struggles like?

“There are a lot of people who depend upon the Port of Baltimore who are not unionized.”


John Blom: Well, I think that they’re hanging in. I think they’re hanging in and the end is in sight. I think today they’re having a couple of ships that have not been in the port show up, so that’s a good thing. People will gradually be getting back to work, and I’m sure by the end of May there will be quite a number of people who are back to work. So then it’s a matter of, because everything is done by hours there, the union is going to have to do some negotiating with management about that. People would get credit for some hours, do some kind of a formula where people get credit so they don’t lose pension years, for instance, or lose their A plan and better insurance, CRA plan insurance for the family because they spent a couple of months without working. I think that’s the biggest challenge right now for people who are working in the industry. But that’s the longshoreman. We’re unionized. There are a lot of people who depend upon the Port of Baltimore who are not unionized, who work in warehouses and do all kinds of other things, and they’re certainly not getting any compensation or anything like that. So it was a big blow. I think it was millions of dollars per day for the state of Maryland. The state of Maryland was losing by not having that cargo flowing through the port.

Maximilian Alvarez: All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our wonderful guest, John Blom. I want to thank my colleague and comrade Marc Steiner for co-hosting this episode with me. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’re going to keep building out our coverage on the causes and human impacts of the Baltimore Key Bridge collapse and our discussions about what we can all do to make sure catastrophes like this don’t happen again. So please stay tuned for that and we will see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. If you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. And please go explore all the great work that we are doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real​news​.com/​d​onate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Kari Lydersen, In These Times, ​“Making waves: Baltimore longshoremen fight for democracy within union
Dominick Phillippe-August, WMAR, ​“Nearly 140,000 jobs could be impacted by Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse
Dan Belson, Baltimore Sun, ​“Largest channel so far opens for 24/7 vessel traffic into Port of Baltimore after Key Bridge collapse
Michael Sainato, The Guardian, ​“Maryland lawmakers draft emergency bill to help Baltimore port workers

Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…Jules Taylor, ​“Working People” Theme Song


Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Jules Taylor


Help In These Times Celebrate & Have Your Gift Matched!
DONATE



MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ is editor-in-chief at the Real News Network and host of the podcast Working People, available at InThe​se​Times​.com. He is also the author of The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke.
VIEWPOINT

The Myth of the "Poll-Driven" Democrat Is Cover for Conservative Policy Preferences

SPLIT THE PARTY IN TWO

Selective “popularism” is being used by the Democratic Party establishment to pursue reactionary ideological goals.
JUNE 25, 2024
IN THESE TIMES
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks in the East Room at the White House on June 18, 2024 in Washington, DC.
(PHOTO BY KEVIN DIETSCH/GETTY IMAGES)




Apopular misconception has taken hold, even among many on the Left, that Democrats’ policy preferences are entirely driven by polling, by chasing what is popular at the moment. The general argument goes like this: because the modern Democratic Party is primarily run by lawyers, corporate managers and marketing types who are largely devoid of any long-term vision, ideological agenda or commitment to activists or movements for social change, party elected officials and their advisers simply put their fingers to the wind and chase what they think the public wants. They run from poll-tested idea to poll-tested idea in hopes they can marshal more than 50% of available votes.

While there is some truth to this perception, as a catch-all for what motivates Democratic Party priorities, this ​“driven by polls” narrative often obscures the more cynical aims of establishment Democrats, and how selective their appeal to what’s popular can be.

Recently, this mode of politics — much like the term ​“neoliberal”—has been reclaimed by corporate apparatchiks within Democratic politics under the label of ​“Popularism.” The concept, coined by writer Matthew Yglesias and political consultant David Shor, seems simple enough. As Vox​’s Kelsey Piper puts it, ​“People trying to win elections should talk about the political positions they hold that are popular, and not the unpopular ones.”

Well ho hum, sounds like some good country-fried, suspender-slapping political advice. Promote what is popular and downplay or deprioritize that which polls badly. Seems simple enough.

This framing, that Democrats are pursuing this or that policy because it’s What The Public Wants, seeks to remove agency or moral choice from politicians, and launder responsibility for bad policy onto a faceless public. When it comes to explaining the actions of the current president, this approach fundamentally serves as a conversation-stopper: Look, Biden is just doing what voters want. Under this line of reasoning, we can’t really be too upset at any right-wing turns by Democrats because they are simply Responding To The Market.

But a deeper analysis shows this isn’t really true, and is more often than not a sleight of hand — a clever use of rhetoric that seeks to evade deeper ideological conflict in favor of maintaining the status-quo. Those gaining power and money under the banner of liberalism while promoting conservative (often cruel, classist and racist) positions would rather eat glass than have to defend those positions on their merits. Appealing to doing what may be unseemly, but necessary, because it’s What The Public Is Demanding avoids this awkward debate altogether. They’re not moral agents pushing a particular worldview, afterall, but messengers of the people, and one can’t really get mad at the messenger.

Let’s take one recent example. Many Biden defenders insist, or heavily imply, that the president’s right-wing turn on ​“border security” is motivated by broad public popularity—that they Have No Choice but to adopt a hard right turn because ​“70% of Americans support” it. But polls also show:


84% of Americans support adding dental, vision and hearing coverage to Medicare


74% of American voters say they still believe that ​“increasing funding for child care and early childhood education programs is an important priority”


72% of Americans want to expand Social Security


71% of Americans support government funded universal pre-K.


69% of Americans support Medicare for All


67% of Americans support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza


66% of Americans support 2 years of government-funded, free college.

These are super-majority popular policies, so why isn’t Biden running on any of them in 2024?

It’s true that Biden does have some popular populist policies: raising taxes on the wealthy and supporting more pro-union legislation, for example. But these policies are not central to his current campaign messaging –  – and they certainly have not been given nearly as much emphasis as Biden’s recent so-called ​“border crackdown.” And when it comes to Gaza, Biden’s recent calls for a ceasefire amount to simply rebranding his previous position of advocating a temporary pause in fighting for hostage exchanges, not an actual end to the war.

The campaign, instead, has downplayed economic populism and, according to their own strategists, decided to focus on more abstract ​“defending democracy” rhetoric and the theme of Donald Trump’s corruption. Which is all fine and good, and certainly merits mention. But if Biden, and the Democrats more broadly, are motivated by focusing on popular positions — as the defenders of their cruel border policies insist — then why isn’t the president running on policies like adding dental, vision and hearing coverage to Medicare? Expanding Social Security? Increased funding for child care and early childhood education programs? Government-funded universal pre-K? Free college? Medicare for All?

Some of these policies the White House at least nominally supported back in 2021 — like expanding Medicare and free college — but Biden was stymied by conservative Democrats and Republicans who blocked his Build Back Better bill. But why wouldn’t Biden say that he’s putting these policies on the front burner for his next term? Where is the Democrats’ own Project 2025 (the GOP’s far right playbook for a second Trump administration)? Why not put forward a bold wish list of popular progressive policy that will motivate the base and provide a grand vision for a more equitable future?

If Democrats really did things because they were popular and helped them win elections, then they would seemingly embrace such policies rather than running on cruel, racist policies like cutting down on asylum requests by migrants.

Selective Popularism isn’t just a mode of campaigning, it’s also a mode of media coverage — a form of conservative ideological reproduction under the guise of speaking on behalf of the Average Voter. The New York Times has mastered this particularly greasy mode of reporting, especially when it contains a racial angle, selectively highlighting what Black voters are demanding of Democrats — but only when it happens to overlap with what their wealthy, largely white readership and leadership want.

In 2021 and 2022, in the wake of racial justice uprisings, the New York Times published several reports on how Black voters were demanding more policing in their neighborhoods and Democrats were responding organically to this demand in the face of pressure to defund and reform police departments coming from (largely white, it was implied) Soros-funded nonprofit types and grassroots activists. The slippery, push-poll nature of this premise notwithstanding, what is noteworthy is that, even if readers uncritically accepted the premise that, in general, Black voters demand more cops and longer prison sentences in response to rising crime rates, this stands as a very rare instance of the New York Times repeatedly covering and centering the preferences of Black voters.

Black voters also tell pollster after pollster that they — far more than white voters—want more unionization, a higher minimum wage, reparations, free healthcare, free college, affordable housing and more money for schools. But, mysteriously, the New York Times did not make any of these demands the subject of numerous articles employed to pressure Democrats on policy and rhetoric. Why not? If the New York Times and the Democratic Party are simply compelled to respond to Black voter demands, why do neither entities seem to care, in any sustained or central way, about any of these left populist economic demands from Black voters?

This is how the ​“Popularism” scam works: When over 50% of the public, or a subset of the public, conforms to your ideological preferences, you highlight, focus on, and center this demand, painting it as organic, and laundering your ideological preferences through this faceless public. When the public, or a subset of the public, broadly supports that which is contrary to your conservative agenda — unionization, better wages, free college and free healthcare — you simply… ignore them.

The Popularism tool can be wielded whenever it suits a conservative agenda and pleases wealthy donors, but never beyond this utility. It’s a selective bludgeon. Similar to how Defending Human Rights or Fighting Corruption is utilized to justify militaristic U.S. foreign policy, Popularism is something that can be seen as good in the abstract, but when selectively applied by self-serving actors, reveals a more systemic and cynical approach to politics.

The entire premise of Popularism is its own form of anti-politics.


The entire premise of Popularism is its own form of anti-politics. The underlying premise that politicians should simply follow what is popular (or, to be more generous, emphasize that which they support that happens to be popular) assumes that perceptions are fixed or exist independent of partisan messaging. On the topic of immigration, as Yglesias and the Biden White House argue, the majority of the public is axiomatically conservative, and nothing Biden says or does from the bully pulpit can change that.

That Democrats have, since the Clinton era, embraced right-wing framing around immigration while in power, and that this, perhaps, is one reason why the public has xenophobic tendencies is, to their mind, not a factor (DACA carveouts being the exception, but even this messaging reinforced the assumption that undocumented immigrants were engaged in some horrible transgression). The possibility that decades of bipartisan fear mongering about ​“illegal immigration” — and the partisan media polarization around this framing — may shape the public’s opinion isn’t an idea that’s engaged with, much less refuted. It’s just taken for granted that politicians live outside of politics, that they don’t inform the public’s views but only act as a mirror for them.

But partisan polarization around topics is very real and measurable. For example, the percentage of Republicans who said they would back a presidential candidate who was a former felon tripled just days after Trump became one. Trust in the FBI and CIA completely inverted along partisan lines after the 2016 election over the topic of Russiagate. Indeed, under Trump, Democrats had more liberal views on immigration (relative to both 2016 and under Biden), in part, because Democrats were making pro-immigrant arguments, focusing on Trump’s gross rhetoric while appealing to universal humanism. Harvesting this movement against Trump’s border policies gained enthusiasm, votes and money. Rather than sustaining this moment and fighting for more humane border policies, Biden has instead—by Democrats’ own admission—embraced many of Trump’s core policies on the issue. Why?

We’re led to believe Democrats are only doing this because They Have No Choice and immigration is a Major Point of Concern For Voters. But, again, this explanation ignores how Democrats themselves feed that perception. Which is more likely: That powerful political actors in the White House and Congress are mere spectators responding organically to the general public? Or that there’s an emerging bipartisan view—reinforced by a national security state consensus warning about an upcoming deluge of climate refugees—that a hyper militarized border is essential to stem migration and protect U.S. interests while continuing to allow the fossil fuel industry to operate and create environmental havoc?


Migrants seeking asylum wait to be apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border protection officers after crossing over into the U.S. on June 25, 2024 in Ruby, Arizona.(PHOTO BY BRANDON BELL/GETTY IMAGES)

Note that the White House and Democrats rarely even bother making the moral or policy argument for adopting a cruel Republican-style border crackdown. They insist they are only doing so because the public demands it. And if they don’t, Republicans will win and do their plan plus a lot of other bad things. Conveniently, this approach avoids ideological debates, discussion of priorities, and the central issue of why both parties are so dead set on militarizing the border. It takes the politics out of politics and places blame for reactionary agendas on nebulous public preferences.

And this is the appeal of the myth of the poll-driven Democrat. Strictly speaking it’s true, but it’s true only within very narrow ideological confines. It’s true only insofar as it doesn’t offend big donors, the military state, or the corporate interests that dominate the mainstream Democratic Party. It’s true insofar as it only goes to the right. With the rare exception of Trump sometimes shying away from an explicit embrace of cuts to Social Security or Medicare, our media never insists that Trump or Biden are ​“forced” to go left because of the popularity of a number of left-wing policies.

Our elected officials, mysteriously, are only forced to go right, by the fickle masses who are compelling them into supporting reactionary agendas that just so happen to overlap with the demands of billionaire donors and the national security state. These policies are ​“poll driven” when they can help avoid messy public debates about which humans matter, and what agendas are worth fighting for. In this sense, hyperfocusing on polling as a way of understanding increasingly conservative Democratic Party priorities avoids asking deeper questions. It serves as an ideological and moral laundromat for a party leadership that, more often than not, adopts conservative positions for the simple fact that they and their rich friends and financial backers mostly just agree with them.







Adam H. Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast.

Socialist Party of Canada
SPC One World - One People Logo

Manifestos

How U.S. Cities Outsource Their Carbon Emissions to Rural Areas

While the rest of country benefits, rural communities are disproportionately exposed to the pollution caused by power and food production.
IN THESE TIMES
JUNE 26, 2024

Emissions from power plants, like the coal-fired power plant in Colstrip, Montana, shown here, are a particularly potent source of green
house gases, and nearly half of those emissions are produced by rural power plants.
PHOTO BY WILLIAM CAMPBELL

Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in the Daily Yonder. For more rural reporting and small-town stories visit dai​lyyon​der​.com.


A new report shows that at least 36% of annual greenhouse gas emissions in the United States come from rural America, but they’re mostly used to produce energy and food for urban and suburban America.

And while rural communities — particularly low-income and rural communities of color — are exposed to a disproportionate amount of greenhouse gas emissions, they’re not receiving the federal investments to decrease these emissions.

“If we really want to meaningfully reduce emissions, [we need to invest] in efforts that are rural to reduce the emissions that are connected to that consumption,” said Maria Doerr, lead author of the report and program officer for the Rural Climate Partnership, in an interview with the Daily Yonder. ​“Rural America is the source of these emissions, but they are not the ones driving the demand that creates these emissions.”

The report was produced by the Rural Climate Partnership, a project of the nonprofit rural advocacy group the Heartland Fund. Using data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), they found that energy production and agriculture are the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions in rural America. Industry like natural gas, petroleum, and cement manufacturing was the third leading source, and transportation and residential energy uses were the fourth and fifth, respectively.

Doerr said that the emissions produced by power plants are a particularly potent source of greenhouse gas emissions, and nearly half of those emissions are produced by rural power plants. ​“That energy is being shipped out to the cities and suburbs,” Doerr said.

While the rest of America benefits from this power, rural communities are exposed to the toxic air pollutants from this power’s production. And these effects aren’t felt equally.

Approximately 37% of rural residents within a three-mile radius of rural combustion plants are low-income, and 29% of residents within that radius are Black, Indigenous, or people of color, according to the report. Long-term exposure to these pollutants can lead to respiratory and cardiovascular problems, immune system damage, and cancer, according to the EPA.

The federal government has passed legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change, but very little has been earmarked for rural America.

Of the combined total appropriations from three major climate laws — the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — only 2.3% of the funding is earmarked exclusively for rural communities, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution. About 20% of the funding is rural-stipulated.

Rural America should be prioritized for this funding because it’s at the center of some of the most carbon-intensive industries, according to the Rural Climate Partnership.

“In the vast expanse of rural and small-town America, there is a story that has been largely untold, one of significant emissions reduction potential shadowed by systematic underinvestment,” wrote Doerr in the report.

Doerr said they hope this report encourages legislators to rethink rural America’s role in climate solutions.

“I hope that this report can help start some powerful conversations about…how we support, uplift, and invest in rural America and rural-based climate solutions,” Doerr said.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: We Must Understand Israel as a Settler-Colonial State

“Just as the U.S. celebrates itself as ‘a nation of immigrants,’ Zionists celebrated Palestine as a land without people for a people without land.”
IN THESE TIMES 
JUNE 24, 2024

An Israeli flag flies on the border with the Gaza Strip during an Israeli bombardment on November 8, 2023.PHOTO BY RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

While attending the University of Oklahoma in 1956 – 57, I met a Palestinian petroleum engineering student named Said Abu-Lughod. Said, whose older brother Ibrahim Abu-Lughod would become a renowned professor at Northwestern University, told me how Israeli settlers had violently forced his family out of their ancestral home in Jaffa during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This had happened only eight years earlier, when Said was 12 years old. His family fled as refugees to Jordan. ‘

Said also gave me a book—What Price Israel? by Alfred M. Lilienthal — that truly changed my thinking. Now there are many excellent studies by Palestinian and other historians, but in the 1950s there was nothing else like it. (Later, I met the author while attending the 1983 United Nations’ Conference on Palestine— also attended by Yasser Arafat and a large Palestine Liberation Organization delegation — and was able to thank him.)

This experience as a teenager was my introduction to the concept of settler colonialism and made me a supporter of Palestinian self-determination and right of return. It’s also what led me to study history and eventually to write my doctoral dissertation on Spanish settler colonialism in New Mexico, still a major issue there today.

When I left Oklahoma in 1960 to attend San Francisco State College, I had expected — without basis — the city to be a hotbed of anti-colonial fervor. This was long before the famous strikes of 1968, but there was a very visible group on campus of mostly white activists attached to the U.S. Communist Party. I was attracted to the zeal with which they supported the burgeoning Black civil rights movement in the South, and, though I was married and working part-time, I attended their rallies on campus as often as I could. What puzzled me about them, however, was their vocal celebration of the state of Israel. Many had visited and lived and worked for a time in the socialist kibbutzim there. Most of these students were not themselves Jewish; the one who became my best friend was from a working-class Greek immigrant family in Indiana.

Just as the U.S. celebrates itself as “a nation of immigrants,” Zionists celebrated Palestine as a land without people for a people without land.


Their support for Israel was emblematic, I came to understand later, of the seductive mythology that settler-colonial states cultivate and depend on. These young people were drawn to the story about a state created to protect Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Also, the mystic chords of American settlement resonated strongly then, largely due to the ​“new frontier” rhetoric of John F. Kennedy. The grandson of immigrants was elected president and inspired young people. In accepting his nomination in Los Angeles, Kennedy intoned: ​“I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3,000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. … We stand today on the edge of a new frontier.” In the young students’ minds, the state of Israel was duplicating that promise. They had little knowledge of the Indigenous peoples who were driven out of their villages and homelands here in North America and even less about the existence of Palestinians.

Although there are stark differences and time frames for the establishment of settler colonialism, there is a common thread that defines the process. To understand this, it’s helpful to distinguish, as historian Lorenzo Veracini does, between ​“settlers” and ​“immigrants”: While migrants enter existing political orders, ​“settlers are founders of political orders” and carry their sovereignty with them.

Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of South Asian origin who grew up in Uganda, puts it this way in his book Neither Settler Nor Native: ​“If Europeans in the United States were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies in the New World. Instead, they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.”

Still, the United States celebrates itself as ​“a nation of immigrants,” just as Israeli Zionists celebrated Palestine as ​“a land without a people for a people without a land,” a homeland for Jews from all over the world, a nation of refugees — rhetoric that echoes U.S. ​“nation of immigrants” mythology. Rhetoric that ignores settler colonialism, writes Mamdani, ​“is essential to settler-colonial nation-state projects such as the United States and Israel,” which cloak themselves in the nonpolitical project of immigration to hide their true project of fortifying the colonial nation-state.

Though the apt term ​“settler colonialism” wasn’t invented until rather recently, the practice of settler colonialism dates back many centuries. It didn’t begin in Palestine in 1948 or with Dutch Afrikaners establishing the apartheid regime in South Africa around the same time, but was an invention of British colonialism, starting with the 1607 establishment of the ​“Plantation of Ulster” in colonized Ireland. It soon became a model for the Anglo colonization of North America.

The founding of the United States as a capitalist settler state less than two centuries later marked the beginning of a hundred-year war to erase North America’s Indigenous nations and communities, violently seizing their farms and grasslands, replacing them with Anglo and other Western European settlers and creating a massive economy. This was made possible by violently kidnapping, enslaving and transporting Africans, practically depopulating the west coast of Africa.

Anglo settlers also established colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with their own ethnic cleansing of Indigenous populations. The French and Spanish, meanwhile, established their own settler colonies in Central and South America, the Caribbean, the Pacific and North Africa, the most famous being Algeria.

These settler colonies all had a common purpose, what the Nazis called Lebensraum—that is, the territory that a state or nation believes is needed for its perceived natural development. This was initially tied to the rise of capitalism in Great Britain and the creation of the plantation and single-crop agriculture for profit. In the case of Britain’s settler colonialism in Northern Ireland, that single crop was the potato. The 13 settler colonies that Britain planted in North America starting in 1607 were required, with enslaved Africans’ labor, to produce tobacco and indigo (for dye) to market in Europe initially and then, with the conquest of the Caribbean islands, rice to feed the enslaved Africans.

Though not the dominant form of Western imperialist conquest, settler colonialism has distinct advantages over other forms, such as European military and administrative control over India and Africa — and, if measured in terms of the land, resources and wealth accumulated by the colonizing nation, it’s been the most effective. The British colonization of Ireland helps explain why: By enticing landless Scots, Welsh and Anglo settlers to usurp land from Irish farmers, Britain evicted the Irish off their small holdings in Northern Ireland — exploiting the settlers’ zeal to take free land forcibly. With British colonization across the Atlantic, landless Britons were encouraged to do the same thing in North America. After its founding, the new United States used the same settler-colonial tools to seize the rest of the continent within a century.

It is no coincidence that these imperial powers, with their histories of violent anti-Semitism, became the strongest backers of a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab region. A heavily-armed, Western-leaning state was just what they needed to protect their interests against a rising tide of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialist sentiment.


Jewish settler colonialism, culminating in the state of Israel, was a compressed version of these earlier Anglo settler colonies, encouraged by the British under the mandate of Palestine. Jewish people had always lived in the area, along with dozens of other communities, including new monotheistic religion offshoots of Judaism with the rise of Christianity and Islam. The late 19th century rise of political Zionism called for all Jews to return to and dominate Palestine.

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency, announced the establishment of the state of Israel, immediately recognized by U.S. President Harry Truman and, a year later, by the United Nations. But settler colonialism in Palestine did not begin with Jewish Holocaust refugees. In 1908, oil was found in Iran, a discovery that would condemn the Middle East to more than a century of imperial interference and violence. British, French and U.S. oil companies came to dominate the region. It is no coincidence that these imperial powers, with their histories of violent antisemitism, became the strongest backers of a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab region. A heavily armed, Western-leaning state was just what they needed to protect their interests against a rising tide of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialist sentiment. Imperial Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, supporting a ​“Jewish homeland” in Palestine.

At the time of the Balfour Declaration, Jews made up about a tenth of the population of the territory. The British did not consult with the Palestinian Arab majority. By 1947, the Jewish population was about 33%. Nevertheless, the partition plan passed that year by the UN General Assembly gave them about 55% percent of the land.

It’s vitally important that Israel be understood as a settler-colonial state because it would be impossible to understand the current conflict in Gaza without understanding its settler-colonial context. As historian Rashid Khalidi observes, the conflict is not between two equal national movements fighting over the same land, but rather is ​“a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.”


ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Hayward. She is a highly regarded writer, historian, speaker, and activist in the international Indigenous movement. Dunbar-Ortiz has written extensively on social justice issues, especially in relation to women’s liberation and indigenous sovereignty. Her many notable books include Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (2018), An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014), which received the American Book Award, and The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and its Struggle for Sovereignty (1997). Her latest book it Not ​“A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (2021).
THE DREADED ORIGIN OF CULTURAL MARXISM
 
In Defense of the Frankfurt School

NEITHER TONY GRAMSCI NOR RAYMOND WILLIAMS WERE MEMBERS
JACOBIN
06.25.2024

The Frankfurt School, a group of theorists who grappled with the defeat of Europe's revolutionary left, are often misunderstood. Critics charge them with obscurantism and elitism. They argued that, on the contrary, it was capitalism that obfuscated reality.


Herbert Marcuse, professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. (Getty Images)

Few thinkers have been as consistently misunderstood as the group of anthropologists, economists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers that came to be known as the Frankfurt School. The grouping refers to the second generation of scholars associated with the Institute for Social Research, a private academy established to counter academic conservatism in 1920s Germany.

The institute sought to ask why Karl Marx’s predicted revolution never took place and distinguished itself from other academic analyses of capitalist society through its conviction that both high and low culture were worthy objects of inquiry. This inquiry was, they argued, supplementary to an economic analysis rather than an alternative to it. Their direct experience of fascism, as German Jews exiled from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, informed their thinking, which provided a materialist explanation of the relationship between capitalist exploitation and racial domination.

An Elitist Critique?


It is, however, hard to overcome the apparent aloofness of Frankfurt School thinkers from our times and from popular culture in general. Its famous first generation (which included Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse) hailed from privileged bourgeois industrialist backgrounds and wrote famously convoluted academic treatises. Critics, not without good reason, charged them with obscurantism, cultural elitism, liberalism, anti-activism, and even deep state collusion.

The last of these accusations has stuck most tenaciously, despite being the least plausible. Marcuse was, during the interwar and war years, in the employ of America’s Office for Strategic Services, a forerunner organization to the CIA. Critics, Marcuse wrote to Jürgen Habermas in the 1960s, “seem to have forgotten that the war was a war against fascism.” Within the context, aiding the United States was not a crime for which he had “the slightest reason for being ashamed.”Critics, not without good reason, charged them with obscurantism, cultural elitism, liberalism, anti-activism, and even deep state collusion.

Similarly, Adorno wrote for a number of journals that received covert CIA funding in the postwar period, such as the German Der Monat, British Encounter, and Italian Tempo Presente, although none of them contradicted Adorno’s public positions, their principal aim being to counter totalitarian currents.

While the charge of CIA collusion can be easily disregarded, those of obscurantism, elitism, crypto-liberalism, and anti-activism are harder to counter. These slurs are most commonly leveled at Adorno, not least as he has emerged as the most quoted of his group of peers. Even as an Adorno scholar, I at times struggle to defend him. He, after all, favored elite art forms over bourgeois culture, detested jazz, prioritized theory over political praxis, and once called the police on his own students while they occupied his faculty.

Capitalist Abstractions

In a 1977 TV interview with the philosopher Bryan Magee, Marcuse called Adorno “a genius,” who spoke in fully formed “ready to print” sentences, only to state later in the same interview that he himself did not always fully understand Adorno’s prose. Such contradiction enforces a suspicion widely held in both right populist and left activist circles that critical theorists prefer the mystique of academic obscurity to textual clarity. The issue of clarity, however, was somewhat more complicated for Adorno who saw the fragmentary nature of his own writing as a response to the fragmentation of late capitalist society.

While capitalism tends toward homogenization of cultural forms, it fragments working, social, and home life. In the introduction to Adorno’s Minima Moralia — a book entirely comprising short aphoristic texts and subtitled Reflections From Damaged Life — the philosopher states that to properly give expression to societal conditions one must reject formal coherence. His hope, ambitious as it may sound, was that the fragmentation of the text would expose the false harmony of consumer society.

This tendency toward fragmentation can also be seen in Adorno’s preference for abstract art, a perennial target in accusations of cultural elitism from both the Left and the Right. Stalinism maintained a deeply hostile attitude toward Russia’s avant-garde, preferring social realism instead. The Nazis of course dedicated exhibitions to “degenerate art.” What “cannot be understood . . . but needs some pretentious instruction book to justify [its] existence will never again find [its] way to the German people,” Hitler said of expressionist and abstract painting.

The perceived distance of abstract art from reality threatened the reactionary idea of social order. Yet Adorno argued it was capitalism that caused and expedited estrangement of nature, a phenomenon that had its roots in humankind’s tendency toward identity thinking — i.e., the need to control nature by categorizing and identifying it.

The second generation of the Frankfurt School saw such estrangement as a main theoretical concern. They had firsthand experience: the first half of the twentieth century witnessed both the most developed societies that have ever existed and the advent of world wars, mass displacement, genocide, and the dawn of the nuclear age — tragedies that showed the utopian and dystopian sides of modernity.To the extent to that Adorno was an obscurantist or a thinker who preferred abstraction, it was a reaction against the co-optation of culture by industrial capitalism.

The response of the Frankfurt School was to challenge the idea that the progress celebrated by liberal society was as complete as it seemed. The transition from first nature — the sphere of animal instinct and biology — to second nature — language and culture — was far from complete. Despite the best intentions of Enlightenment thinking and early science to mediate between humanity and nature through rational inquiry, industrial capitalism was red in tooth and claw to a demonstrably greater degree than nature itself. It was, Adorno argued, reasonable to develop a healthy skepticism toward the promises of Enlightenment because “no universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”

The cruel irony of modernity is that industrial society emerged to resist the unavoidable pull of human life toward death yet created lethal threats of a new kind. This did not just mean illness and want, but also destructive tendencies toward violence, which humans are capable of inflicting on themselves and others — what Sigmund Freud, the strongest influence on the Frankfurt School other than Marx, referred to as the death drive. But instead of an escape from our destructiveness, modernity armed human beings with more lethal capacities for self- and other-directed harm. From the trenches of World War I to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, human beings have proven capable of dealing out death on an unprecedented scale.

Dialectics of Enlightenment


This dialectic of Enlightenment was observed by the main figures of the Frankfurt School, who linked it to a growing sense of cultural malaise. Not only had industrial society produced new forms of human suffering, but the industrial reproduction of art stripped it of its quasi-spiritual calling. Analyzing the transformation of human subjectivity, Marcuse referred to the “one-dimensionality” of life in the postwar period, arguing that in the context of abandonment of transcendent forms of meaning, consumers settled into accepting weak fulfillments of their actual desires.

Like Adorno, Marcuse felt that one of the greatest tricks of an advanced industrial society was to make citizens and consumers feel that they were happily choosing their subjugation (and an inferior fulfillment of their desire). We can observe this trend today amongst internet users who seek the adoration of followers rather than real life friendship, subordinating themselves to stereotypes conveyed via social media to gain recognition.

To the extent that Adorno was an obscurantist or a thinker who preferred abstraction, it was a reaction against the co-optation of culture by industrial capitalism. The cultural figures he lauded — Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Gustav Mahler, Edgar Allan Poe, Arnold Schoenberg — all incorporated an element of aesthetic dissonance into their work.

For Adorno, this shock was capable of confronting individuals with the reality that artworks were the product of the labor of individuals, a revelation that he called the artwork’s “truth content.” Far from being an elitist and an obscurantist, Adorno intended to break the false spell of a culture industry, which hid human labor behind glossy packaging and glitzy images. Ultimately, his reasons for favoring high art were that it operated with far more honesty about the conditions in which it was produced than popular culture.The idealistic hedonist, in their effort to turn away from capitalist society, was at risk of rejecting the discipline needed to change society for the better.

But Adorno’s hostility toward the culture of his present also manifested as a deep suspicion of its politics. The latter came to a head infamously when the Frankfurt professor called the police on protesters at his university in 1969. In a correspondence with Marcuse, who held a far more sanguine view of the student movement, Adorno wrote that he was “the last person to underestimate the merits of the student movement; it has disrupted the smooth transition to the totally administered world. But it contains a grain of insanity in which a future totalitarianism is implicit.”

The letter exchange signaled a wider rift between the two thinkers. While Adorno feared his students, Marcuse had become a regular attendant and speaker at protests in the United States. But there were costs to be paid on either side of the barricade. Marcuse’s embrace of the student movement led critics to accuse him of helping to found a New Left less interested in class struggle in the workplace and more concerned with race and sexuality.

Indeed, Marcuse did emphasize the need for the creation of an alliance of migrants, students, and workers, as part of the “Great Refusal” — an uprising against consumerist and imperialist values that would usher in a new world. But the philosopher’s emphasis on nonworkers was primarily an attempt to find a vantage point from which the bamboozling effects of one-dimensionality could be challenged, rather than to supplant trade unionism altogether.

Marcuse saw in the hippy and student countercultural movements of his time wellsprings of resistance to the stupefying effects of the media. Yet in his An Essay on Liberation (1969), he also warned that the aesthetic and hedonistic movements of the 1960s counterculture allowed for their own co-optation and conversion into media spectacle and consumer fad. The idealistic hedonist, in their effort to turn away from capitalist society, was at risk of rejecting the discipline needed to change society for the better. Before long, Marcuse’s fears were realized and hippy culture would become a fashion, co-opted by the culture industry adorning Coca-Cola adverts on billboards.Adorno and Marcuse may have had differing solutions to the challenges of modernity, yet they each prefigured the cultural malaise of our digital age.

But the Frankfurt School’s interest in the leveling effects of capitalism on culture remain salient today. As governments across the globe have worked to restrict the right to protests, political resistance has largely moved online, taking the form of maximalist sloganeering and the embrace of radical political symbols, often mediated through the internet language of videos and memes. When these ideas filter up into the mainstream, it is in the form of xenophobia and bigotry modeled on, or responding to, fringe political discourse.

What is referred to as “the culture wars” grew up on social media before becoming part of mainstream political debate. The language in which concerns about the oppression of minorities is broached often ignores the material reality underpinning them. This, too, can be seen as a sign of one-dimensionality. In the absence of political possibilities, people, rather than grapple with this difficulty, have chosen to withdraw into a sphere in which action seems possible, yet only at the expense of theoretical rigor. Their need to engage politically is only falsely satisfied, in terms of attacks on other hapless online subjects.

This returns us to Adorno’s consideration of identity thinking as an irresolvable problem at the core of human thinking and action. While technology gives us the means for ever more political expression, we are reduced to controlling identificatory practices: i.e., call-out and cancel culture. Adorno and Marcuse may have had differing solutions to the challenges of modernity, yet they each prefigured the cultural malaise of our digital age.


CONTRIBUTORS
Mike Watson is a theorist, critic, and curator who is principally focused on the relation between culture, new media, and politics.
A Charter School Network in Los Angeles Goes Union

AN INTERVIEW WITH NICOLE BARRAZA MARIN HODGES

Earlier this month, teachers at all six Citizens of the World charter schools in Los Angeles voted overwhelmingly to unionize with United Teachers Los Angeles. Jacobin spoke to two teachers about the organizing drive.


A teacher greets her class during the first day of school in California on August 11, 2022. (Paul Bersebach / MediaNews Group / Orange County Register via Getty Images)

INTERVIEW BYSARA WEXLER
06.26.2024
JACOBIN


On June 12, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) announced that teachers at all six schools in the Citizens of the World Charter School network voted overwhelmingly to unionize. The teachers, who backed the union with 90 percent support, are unionizing as the Citizens of the World Charter (CWC) Educators United local of UTLA.

Citizens of the World teachers join a small segment of unionized charter-school teachers, who represent about 11 percent of all teachers employed by charters. The win is significant because if unions were to succeed in growing their presence in charter schools more broadly, it would mean a major blow to charter boosters’ decades-long effort to undermine teachers’ unions. Jacobin contributor Sara Wexler spoke to two Citizens of the World teachers about their organizing drive and why they decided to unionize.
SARA WEXLER

What sparked the decision to unionize?

MARIN HODGES

The educators at Citizens of the World, Los Angeles, care deeply about our students and our mission, but teachers’ voices have not always been central to our decision-making process. So while teachers have attempted to advocate for themselves in the past, we’ve seen little meaningful change because of the top-down structure of our organization. Having a union will give teachers more input in decisions that are affecting them directly, which will make our school a more positive environment for both educators and our students.
NICOLE BARRAZA

It feels like we don’t have an equal stake when it comes to our voices being heard and decisions being made. I personally feel frustrated by that because we are the ones that the decisions and policies affect the most, along with our students. It’s really important that we are able to have a say in how things are run at our schools, because we know firsthand what’s going to help our conditions for our students.
SARA WEXLER

Do you have specific examples of your voices not being heard, or policies or conditions that you would have liked to have input on?
NICOLE BARRAZA

There are two specific things recently. One is our changing salary table, which is a very different structure than what it has been in the past. On the new salary table that Citizens of the World approved, educational experience [i.e., relevant college or graduate coursework] does not carry as much weight anymore; it’s more about how many years you’ve taught. That in itself I was not very excited about, but also, the new salary scale got approved rather quickly. I know there were lots of teachers who were at the board meetings voicing their concerns about it. I worry about retention of staff, because the longer someone has been teaching, [the better they are typically] able to serve our students.

The other thing is, Citizens of the World had been talking about changing our special-education program and the type of support we need. It feels as though they’re going to be cutting back, and that is something that I feel we need more support in typically. Being on the ground as a teacher, I see the needs more clearly than people who are in the regional support office do.
SARA WEXLER

Can you give me a timeline of the organizing for the union? When did the organizing begin, and what did the lead-up to the vote look like?
MARIN HODGES

Educators at Citizens of the World Los Angeles have been discussing unionizing for much longer than I have been a part of the organization. But the conversations have really ramped up over the past few months, starting around April when we were presented with the opportunity to work with United Teachers Los Angeles.Once we were confident that we had a supermajority of over 85 percent of our educators on board, we introduced the official petition to join UTLA.
NICOLE BARRAZA

From what I know, teachers have been talking about this for years. Changes like the salary table [adjustment], I think, prompted us to mobilize more quickly.
SARA WEXLER

How exactly did you go about organizing?
MARIN HODGES

There were representatives across each of the campuses who started having conversations with each of our individual educators to see where people were at. Once we were confident that we had a supermajority of over 85 percent of our educators on board, we introduced the official petition to join UTLA.
NICOLE BARRAZA

I came on a little bit later. I feel like it was trickling throughout the teachers, the conversations. . . . One of the representatives at my school was trying to tackle those conversations with other educators one-on-one, to share the information and what we needed in order to unionize. That felt like a little bit of a slow process because we were trying to be discreet about it and make sure that everybody felt like they knew what was going on in those one-on-one conversations.

When I was brought in at our campus specifically — we’re three floors, and the main person who was organizing at our campus was on the first floor. She was friendly with the first- and second-floor people, but didn’t know anyone on the third floor that well. So that became my torch to bear, to pass it on to the upper-grade teachers who I had a relationship with.
SARA WEXLER

Did you face any challenges or obstacles, whether that was convincing other teachers or overcoming resistance from school administration?
NICOLE BARRAZA

Again, we had over 90 percent of educators sign the petition, we do have a very high level of support among our teachers. I think the only reticence I faced was that some teachers might have felt a little bit scared, because it is a change.

But so many of us were on board. And for various reasons: each teacher has had some sort of dissatisfaction somewhere. Again, whether it was the salary table or changes in special education, there are things that we know could be improved or done in a different way. So even teachers who were a little like, “I’m not sure about signing” were still expressing their verbal support for us — at least the teachers I talked to. Even if we didn’t get their signatures, they still were like, “I want to be kept in the loop, and I want to see where it goes; I want to be involved more in the future. I’m just maybe not ready right now.”

At my campus, my administration has not made any comment to us yet. I don’t know exactly how they feel or if they will be an obstacle. Similarly, there are some parents who have shown support at my campus, but I haven’t received much negative feedback.
MARIN HODGES

We didn’t receive much pushback from educators. Almost everybody was on board.

I think we love our school; we all care about making our organization a better place. I would agree that there was a little bit of fear or hesitation from some educators because we don’t always associate charter schools with unions. But I think reminding them that this particular union [UTLA] represents over a thousand charter educators at nine different schools across Los Angeles was helpful. And emphasizing the supermajority — that we had over 90 percent of educators that were on the same page and that we are all stronger together — was important in having those discussions with people who were a little more hesitant.
SARA WEXLER

You have previously taught at schools that did have unions in the past. Did you sense differences coming into a charter school without a union in the work environment?
NICOLE BARRAZA

I love Citizens of the World Charter, and I decided to work there despite there not being a union. Every time I’ve been at a school that has a union, I think I felt a little more at ease. You just feel a little more protected. So when there were talks about starting a union here, to me it was a no-brainer: of course I would love to be a part of a union.

For me, the draw of Citizens of the World was based on other things. We were very focused on diversity and inclusion, on social justice education for students, and social emotional learning. We’re encouraged and expected to be teaching those topics to our students. And that is the type of school I was looking for.

Even though there was no union, and I knew I would be getting a pay cut from where I was before, those were such big draws to me that it didn’t really matter. I was willing to take that hit.

But there are things for which it is nice to have that union representation. Not having a contract is something that can feel challenging at a charter school; you don’t know what’s going to happen year to year.Not having a contract is something that can feel challenging at a charter school; you don’t know what’s going to happen year to year.

I had an issue with my offer letter this past year, and it all got worked out. But I had to have a meeting with someone in our regional support office, and I remember feeling like this is something that a union rep would help me with. I was feeling like I don’t have anyone to turn to — I can’t really ask my administration for help. It was a small instance where I was like, man, this is what a union is for, for those tough conversations and that protection, and that extra voice and support in those rooms.

So it does feel different being here, and I’m hopeful that as our union grows and continues and we’re able to successfully get a contract with our employer, everybody will feel that across the board. I hope that all our educators at our school feel more at ease and confident with themselves and their jobs.
SARA WEXLER

You’re going into bargaining soon. What do you think your main demands will be at the bargaining table?
MARIN HODGES

Our charter includes seven different campuses across five different regions. We all have our own unique communities that we serve and our own unique needs. In the fall, we will start the process of soliciting input from our educators to make sure that we are representative of all the needs that we see across all of our campuses.

Some of the things that have come up in conversation already have been smaller class sizes, smaller caseloads for our special education teachers, more teaching assistants [TAs] in our classrooms, more funding for our arts programs. So a wide variety of issues that we will definitely tailor down once we start having more specific conversations with the educators we are representing.
SARA WEXLER

How do you imagine a union changing your experience at your workplace?
NICOLE BARRAZA

My hope is that it will make our teaching more sustainable. It’s not a secret that nationwide, teaching is just not a very sustainable job. Things like lower class sizes, extra support in the form of teaching assistants — all those things can help make your job as a teacher more manageable and can improve the learning experience for our students.

To me, creating an environment where teachers feel supported, where the job can be done for a long time, is the goal. But [improving] those working conditions for our teachers is what is best for the students as well, because a thriving teacher is going to have thriving students.
MARIN HODGES

Citizens of the World attracts some really incredible people. I love the people that I work with. They all care deeply about our school and about our students, but the workload is unsustainable at times. I’m hoping that having a union will help us with teacher retention so that we can recruit and retain amazing educators across Los Angeles, which will ultimately help our students.
SARA WEXLER

Do you mind saying more about your working conditions, like the heavy workload you just mentioned?
MARIN HODGES

From a middle-school perspective, taking away TAs puts that responsibility back on the lead teacher, meaning that we might not be able to provide as much support for our students, especially those who really need the extra help. Adding additional classes for teachers, additional grade levels from year to year — so maybe one year you’re teaching eighth grade, and the next year you have to teach eighth and seventh grade. Larger caseloads for our special education teachers is also a big concern: they’re adding more and more students every year.
NICOLE BARRAZA

Generally, in education, there’s always a million things to do, and we have little prep time. That’s another thing we didn’t mention: our specialist time, which is our planning time, has been shortening.That workload is very time-consuming. And I don’t mean time-consuming in the constraints of my work hours — I mean outside of my work hours it’s a lot.

I’m trying to think of how to explain the demands of teaching in a sound bite. You’re on for seven hours a day with your students. Every decision in the classroom is for them. One way I’ve seen it explained is: you’re presenting a seven-hour meeting, and then after that you have to use your own time to plan for that, in addition to meetings and trainings and miscellaneous things that pop up.

That workload is very time-consuming. And I don’t mean time-consuming in the constraints of my work hours — I mean outside of my work hours it’s a lot.

Having those extra supports, even little things like having a teaching assistant, even for part of the day, makes a huge difference. Because they can help manage the classroom; they can help you run small groups. They can help a lot with social-emotional needs of the students that you, as the one adult in the room, can’t always get to, or that are challenging to get to.

I envision a better world for our teachers. In general, we need more support. And I am hopeful that this union for our school can be a step in the right direction to give teachers the support that they need.

CONTRIBUTORS

Nicole Barraza is a fourth-grade teacher at Citizens of the World Charter Silver Lake Elementary. She has been with Citizens of the World Charter for two years and has been teaching for seven years.

Marin Hodges is an eighth-grade math teacher at Citizens of the World Charter School Silver Lake. She has been with the organization for two years.

Sara Wexler is a member of UAW Local 2710 and a PhD student at Columbia University.