RENT INCREASES DRIVE INFLATION

Kansas City Tenants Launch National Rent Strike to Demand Federal Rent Cap

Striking renters are protesting dismal living conditions and demanding protection from abusive corporate landlords.

By Mike Ludwig

September 28, 2024

Source: Truthout


A member of the Tenant Unions Federation, a national "union of unions," gathers in Washington D.C. in May to demand better protections from abusive corporate landlords that benefit from federally backed financing.

Tenant unions protesting dismal living conditions at two apartment complexes in Kansas City, Missouri, have voted to withhold rent on October 1 if their demands are not met — the opening salvo in what organizers say is the first coordinated rent strike aimed at pressuring federal regulators to cap rent increases and protect tenants from abusive corporate landlords.

The Tenant Union Federation, a national “union of unions,” announced on September 27 that tenants at the Quality Hill Towers and Independence Towers apartment buildings in Kansas City have voted to go on rent strike. In a statement, Kansas City tenant organizers said both properties suffer from bug infestations and have fallen into disrepair, leaving residents to live in “abysmal” conditions.

The Tenant Union Federation said tenants organizing in North Carolina, Michigan, Illinois, South Carolina, Kentucky, Montana and Illinois are preparing to join the picket line and vote in the coming weeks on withholding rent from corporate landlords that similarly benefit from federally guaranteed financing.

“The tenants in the buildings that have authorized strikes live in appalling conditions and endure extreme and aggressive rent hikes,” Tara Raghuveer, director of the Tenant Union Federation, told Truthout in an email. “Their buildings were purchased with money backed by their tax dollars.”

Raghuveer said the coordinated rent strikes are the first in the United States to challenge both individual company landlords and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), where regulators oversee government-backed mortgage programs that finance many large housing complexes nationwide.

“Through hundreds of millions in federal financing, our government is in bed with greedy and negligent landlords like those at these properties,” Raghuveer said.

Along with much-needed repairs to the buildings in Kansas City, striking renters are also demanding FHFA introduce a nationwide 3 percent cap on annual rent increases at multifamily properties benefiting from federal financing. With the nation facing a severe shortage of housing as millions of people struggle to pay inflated rental prices, a groundswell of tenant activism has injected ideas such as rent control into the mainstream political conversation.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has pledged to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases” if elected. In July, the White House called on Congress to pass legislation requiring landlords who own at least 50 units to cap rent increases at 5 percent for two years or risk losing lucrative federal tax breaks.

The Biden-Harris administration pitched the rent cap as a stopgap measure that would stabilize rental prices at 20 million units as more housing is built in response to the nation’s dual crises of housing insecurity and homelessness. However, the powerful real estate and corporate landlord lobby has dug in for a fight against the proposal, which critics see as an election year effort to excite voters that would be likely to fail in a deeply divided Congress.

Back in Kansas City, Independence Towers has been in the local news as residents speak out against poor living conditions, including water damage, sewage backups, loss of hot water and pest infestations. The former landlord, FTW Investments, recently agreed to hand the property over to a court-appointed manager after mortgage lender Fannie Mae filed a lawsuit claiming the company failed to provide a safe living environment and fell behind on payments.

Fannie May and Freddie Mac are known as “government sponsored enterprises.” They manage federally guaranteed mortgages under a program created by Congress and supervised by the FHFA. About 12 million rental units are in properties with federally backed mortgages, and it’s this funding mechanism that tenant activists say the government should use as leverage to rein in corporate landlords.

The original owner of Independence Towers owes Fannie May more than $5.5 million in loan payments and fees, while Quality Hill Towers received a $9 million federally backed loan, according to local reports. The tenant unions organizing in the buildings include hundreds of residents representing more than 60 percent of the occupied units across both apartment complexes, organizers say.

Eliot West has lived with her parents in Independence Towers since 2016. In a statement, West said her family was forced to relocate from their apartment after the top story of the building was locked down and condemned. The family has dealt with mold, cockroaches, and dysfunctional heating and cooling for years. The tenant union says Fannie Mae installed portable A/C units to address the problem, but the family’s electric bill quadrupled as a result. Fed up, West decided to organize with the union.

“We’ve experienced our walls and ceiling collapsing, infestations of roaches and bed bugs,” West said during a news conference in May.

Tenant organizers say the court-ordered manager that took over as landlord at Independence Towers has failed to communicate with residents and make necessary repairs. The building’s tenant union is withholding rent to demand that Fannie Mae provide a permanent fix to heating, plumbing and other problems, and refrain from evicting residents in the meantime.

At Quality Hill Towers, striking renters are demanding Fannie Mae foreclose on the current owner, Sentinel Real Estate, and require the new landlord to negotiate a lease agreement with the union. The tenant union also wants Sentinel or a replacement landlord to bargain a collective lease agreement with the Quality Hill Towers Tenant Union and refrain from evicting tenants without good cause.

Sentinel Real Estate did not respond to a request for comment by the time this story was published.

The Biden-Harris administration is eager to show voters that it takes the housing crisis seriously and has produced lengthy policy documents, including a 19-page a “Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights” released in January 2023. However, without legislation from Congress the administration is left with only its power over federal agencies.

The Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit in August against realty software company RealPage over an alleged scheme allowing landlords to illegally coordinate rent hikes. On September 24, the Federal Trade Commission announced a $48 million dollar settlement with Invitation Homes, the nation’s largest single-family home landlord, for an “array of unlawful actions against consumers” such as charging junk fees and stealing security deposits.

After hearing from housing advocates, the FHFA announced in July new rules requiring landlords who own multifamily properties financed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to provide tenants with a 30-day notice of a rent increase, a 30-day notice of a lease term’s expiration and five-day grace period for late rent payments. The rules go into effect in February 2025.

Striking tenants say these protections are the bare minimum. They are demanding that federal regulators to use their control of rental property financing to take decisive action and place firm conditions on federally backed mortgages, including the 3 percent rent increase cap and protections for tenants against harassment, no-fault eviction and poor living conditions.

Raghuveer said the tenants in Kansas City are only the first to authorize rent strikes as part of a coordinated campaign to hold corporate landlords and FHFA to account, and every first of the month provides another opportunity for tenants in other buildings to join them.

“Around the country, tenants are organizing unions in federally financed properties,” Raghuveer said. “They are prepared to escalate if FHFA fails to negotiate on our demands for national rent caps and tenant protections.”

Judges in TikTok Case Seem Ready to Discount First Amendment

By Ari Paul

September 28, 2024

Source: FAIR



A US circuit court panel appears ready to uphold a federal law that would effectively ban the popular social media network TikTok because it’s owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The legal attacks on the video platform—which FAIR (8/5/20, 5/25/23, 11/13/23, 3/14/24) has written about before—are entering a new phase, in which judicial interpreters of the Constitution are acting as Cold War partisans, threatening to throw out civil liberties in favor of national security alarmism.

Earlier this year, despite widespread protest (Guardian, 3/7/24), President Joe Biden signed legislation forcing TikTok’s owner “to sell it or face a nationwide prohibition in the United States” (NBC, 4/24/24). Advocates for the ban charge that data collection—which is a function of most social media networks—poses a national security threat because of the platform’s Chinese ownership (Axios, 3/15/24).

Given that TikTok is a global platform, with 2 billion users worldwide, demands that ByteDance sell it off are in effect another name for a ban; an analogy would be Beijing allowing Facebook to operate in China only if Meta sold the platform to a non-US company.
The Wall Street Journal (9/18/24) stood up for the government’s right to ban speech it doesn’t like, i.e. that of “foreign adversaries.”
‘Foreign adversary controlled’

Now TikTok is fighting for its right to remain unbanned in the US court system, taking its case straight to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. All three of the judges, two of whom were Republican appointees, questioned TikTok’s plea that free speech was at stake. The discussion suggested that the ban will survive the appeal, and ultimately be decided by the right-wing-stacked Supreme Court.

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial (9/18/24) praising the TikTok ban and the judges who appear ready to validate it, said:


But Congress didn’t restrict speakers on TikTok. What’s really at issue is Chinese control of the app, and TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. TikTok is welcome to keep operating and its users to keep posting. The law merely says TikTok cannot do so while remaining what Congress calls a “foreign adversary controlled application.”

The DC Circuit’s panel grasped this distinction. Judge Douglas Ginsburg wanted to know “why this is any different, from a constitutional point of view, than the statute precluding foreign ownership of a broadcasting license?” Good question.

Ginsburg’s question isn’t as “good” as the Journal thinks it is. Broadcast licenses are finite, as there are only so many FM radio slots in a given geographical location, which requires government management of that limited space. That just isn’t the case with global internet-based media, which have heretofore been accorded the same strong First Amendment protections that pertain to print publications, not the lesser shield granted to broadcast media.

The editorial went on to quote TikTok’s lawyer saying “‘lots of US speakers,’ including Politico, are owned by foreign entities” prompting Rao to reply, “But not foreign adversaries.” Sri Srinivasan, a third judge on the panel—appointed by Barack Obama, and well-known for his bipartisan appeal (NPR, 5/23/13)—also followed the logic of the “China exception” to free speech, asking whether a Chinese-owned entity should be banned if the US were to go to war with China (Reuters, 9/17/24).
“When you have speech in the United States, our history and tradition is we do not suppress that speech because we don’t like those ideas,” a lawyer for TikTok argued (Roll Call, 9/16/24).
‘Skeptical’ of free-speech argument

Few other outlets outright agreed with the judges, but many reported that the judges were “skeptical” or showed “skepticism” of the free-speech argument (NBC, 9/16/24; Washington Post, 9/16/24; Roll Call, 9/16/24), while Politico (9/16/24) and the New York Post (9/16/24) said the judges “grilled” the app’s lawyer.

The leaders of the ominously titled House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party filed an amicus brief (8/2/24) with the appeals court, saying the law does “not regulate speech or require any social media company to stop operating in the United States,” because it is “focused entirely on the regulation of foreign adversary control.”

This, right here, is key. China is officially designated as an “adversary,” along with Iran and Cuba, despite the fact that China and the US have formal diplomatic relations and do billions of dollars in trade. The suggestion is that US citizens can and should be denied access to news and views that are tied to so-called adversary countries.

Iran’s Press TV is no objective media outlet by any measure, but would be important viewing for anyone who wants to further understand the Middle East, the same way one might explore Israel’s Haaretz or Qatar-based Al Jazeera. Its website is currently operational, but in 2021 the US government seized “33 Iranian government-affiliated media websites,” including that of Press TV (Al Jazeera, 6/23/21).

FAIR (8/5/20) has raised the concern that if TikTok is banned because of its Chinese affiliation, then Chinese newspapers and broadcasters, which many people rely on to inform themselves of the Chinese government perspective, could also be censored. These outlets have been feeling federal heat ever since the US State Department, in a move reminiscent of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, forced Chinese state media outlets to register as foreign agents (ABC, 2/18/20; FAIR.org, 2/28/22).
Support for banning TikTok has fallen from 50% in March 2023 to 32% in July/August 2024 (Pew, 9/5/24).
Unpopular censorship

Unsurprisingly, the potential ban of the fourth-most popular social media platform in the US is unpopular with the public. Pew Research (9/5/24) reported: “The share of Americans who support the US government banning TikTok now stands at 32%. That’s down from 38% in fall 2023 and 50% in March 2023.”

That’s not surprising given that users say a ban “would hurt countless people and businesses that rely on TikTok for a significant portion of their income,” according to AP (3/16/24). “TikTok has become an unrivaled platform for dialogue and community.”

Many Americans are turning to the network for news (Bloomberg, 9/17/24). And TikTok has also been cited for being an important communications tool for labor unions (Vice, 5/7/21; Wired, 4/20/22; Fortune, 9/1/22) and other progressive causes (Politico, 3/27/22; Nation, 1/25/23). It is easy for some people to disregard the platform as a space for silly videos and memes made purely for entertainment, but clearly it has much more social utility than the scoffers realize.

TikTok (3/21/23) claims 150 million users in the United States; its users are disproportionately young, female, Black and Latine (Pew, 1/31/24). Pulling the plug on such an operation would be as disruptive as suspending postal operations—which, of course, is also on the conservative agenda (New Yorker, 5/2/20).
“Millions of Americans use TikTok every day to share and receive ideas, information, opinions and entertainment from other users around the world, and that’s squarely within the protections of the First Amendment,” noted EFF (6/27/24).
‘Demanding legal scrutiny’

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a press release (6/27/24) that its amicus brief, which was joined by other media freedom groups, addressed the First Amendment concerns of the law:


​​The amicus brief says the Court must review the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in April—with the most demanding legal scrutiny, because it imposes a prior restraint that would make it impossible for users to speak, access information and associate through TikTok. It also directly restricts protected speech and association, and deliberately singles out a particular medium for a blanket prohibition. This demanding First Amendment test must be used even when the government asserts national security concerns.

The argument in favor of this law boils down to McCarthyite anti-China xenophobia: America’s most sacred liberty must be abandoned out of fear of the Red Menace. The paranoia manifests in other ways, too: State governments, mostly those controlled by Republicans, are enacting laws against land ownership by Chinese citizens (Politico, 4/3/24).

The House of Representatives has passed legislation that would authorize “more than $1.6 billion for the State Department and USAID over the next five years,” part of which would “subsidize media and civil society sources around the world that counter Chinese ‘malign influence’ globally,” reported Responsible Statecraft (9/11/24). The outlet added, “It’s possible that the program could in some cases be used to subsidize covert anti-Chinese messaging,” reminiscent of “the way Russia is accused of covertly funding anti-Ukrainian messaging by US media influencers.”
TikTok is directly owned by TikTok Inc., a US-based company that is ultimately owned by ByteDance, a company incorporated by Chinese investors in the Cayman Islands. As Chicago Policy Review (7/26/24) noted, “If the CCP wanted TikTok to steal Americans’ data, it would not have chosen this corporate structure that is designed to insulate TikTok from Chinese influence.”
Spies don’t need TikTok

Even Washington Post columnist George Will (5/15/24), one of the loudest conservative voices in US media, framed the “national security” issue with TikTok as a weak and vague excuse to subvert free speech. “Respect for the First Amendment has collapsed, and government has a propensity for claiming that every novel exercise of power legitimates the next extension of its pretensions,” he said. “TikTok will not be the last target of government’s desire to control the internet and the rest of society’s information and opinion ecosystem.”

And the “national security” concerns of the US government (Bloomberg, 7/27/24) don’t hold water. The Citizen Lab, published by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, issued a report (3/22/21) on both TikTok and another ByteDance app, Douyin. The report found that both apps “do not appear to exhibit overtly malicious behavior similar to those exhibited by malware.” Researchers did not “observe either app collecting contact lists, recording and sending photos, audio, videos or geolocation coordinates without user permission.”

More recently, the Chicago Policy Review (7/26/24), published by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, found that the corporate structure of ByteDance does not indicate that China’s Communist Party has firm control on day-to-day operations as the US government contends. Further, it argued that party or government control of TikTok would have little value for Beijing:

First, China has little incentive to spy on ordinary Americans, since most data has no national security relevance. Second, the Chinese Communist Party does not need to subjugate TikTok to spy on the social media of powerful Americans. Chinese state intelligence can obtain valuable information by monitoring users’ behavior and posts on TikTok and other social media applications. Banning TikTok would not solve the problem of foreign intelligence agencies gathering social media data.

At the same time, Republicans pretend to care about free speech in social media when it comes to claims that Facebook is icing out conservative voices (New York Post, 9/16/24), decrying fact-checking and content moderation by a private entity as censorship. Those sanctimonious appeals to constitutional liberty ring hollow when all the branches of government are working to destroy an entire network.

What Ever Happened to Globalization?

By Jeremy Brecher

September 28, 2024

Source: STRIKE!



Globalization has been the hallmark of the economic world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Since the Great Recession of 2008, however, globalization as we knew it has been changing fast. That change is an important part of what is being called the “polycrisis,” the convergence and mutual aggravation of geopolitical, economic, governance, climate, and other crises. This commentary examines the rise and fall of globalization as we knew it. The next commentary explores what is emerging from it. Both are part of a series on “The Polycrisis and the Global Green New Deal.”

Over the last four decades the world has undergone a transformation in the structure of the global economy — generally known as “globalization.” While there had been a global economy since 1492 or even before, this new globalization represented a profound change in the relations between national economies, national governments, and the world economy. Goods and money grew increasingly free to move anywhere around the world to make greater profits. Corporations went global. New global institutions enforced the unimpeded movement of capital. The ideology and political practice that has come to be known as “neoliberalism” beat down efforts by national governments and popular organizations to restrict this freedom. But since the Great Recession of 2008, the trend of globalization has been reversed. This Commentary examines why and how.
Globalization: The Backstory

Both neoliberal globalization and today’s retreat from it represent phases in the long history of the changing relations between markets and states. To grasp the rise and fall of globalization, it helps to put both in historical perspective.[1]

In medieval Europe, markets were extremely limited; most economic activity was controlled by feudal lords, whose peasants produced for them directly, or by guilds organized by craft. Within this system, markets, trade, and a class of capitalists gradually grew.

The emerging system of markets and capitalists had an ambiguous relation to the system of territorial states. Many capitalists traded internationally, but most also developed close ties with their “home” states, each providing support to the other. According to historical sociologist Michael Mann, by the time of the Industrial Revolution, “capitalism was already contained within a civilization of competing geopolitical states.” Each of the leading European states “approximated a self-contained economic network,” and economic interaction was largely confined within national boundaries – and each nations’ imperial dominions.[2] European states shaped trade, often aiding it by national policies, war, and empire. By the 20th century, Europe and its offshoots like the United States – what came to be known as “the West” — controlled most of the world.

A series of industrial revolutions, from the invention of machine production to today’s computer-based technologies, immensely increased human productive capacity. The increased production was and remains controlled primarily by capitalist corporations, which organized an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s economic activity. The size of these corporations grew exponentially. By the mid-20th century a small number of giant corporations, integrating all aspects of production from raw materials to the consumer, dominated major markets in each major country. A growing proportion of people became their employees.

The Great Depression of the 1930s represented a worldwide breakdown of this system, marked by decline of production and mass unemployment of human and material resources. Many nations began developing versions of “regulated capitalism,” in which the state assumed considerable responsibility for overall management of the national economy.

The general crisis also led to economic nationalism, intense international competition, national and inter-imperialist rivalry, and eventually World War II. As the war drew to a close, the victorious nations initiated the Bretton Woods system to establish a degree of international economic regulation to forestall trade wars and downward economic spirals. It instituted the International Monetary Fund to support fixed exchange rates among different national currencies and a World Bank to aid reconstruction and development. It established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to base world trade on the “Most Favored Nation” principle under which nations agreed to assure each other trade conditions as favorable as those they gave any other nation. The Bretton Woods system created international supports for regulated national economies in which countries would be able to forestall devastating recessions and depressions. National economies remained “coordinated and territorially contained,” at least in comparison to the impending era of globalization.[3]

Globalization and its Crisis

Regulated national capitalism and the Bretton Woods system contributed to an unprecedented period of sustained growth in the world capitalist economy from World War II to the early 1970s. The years from 1948 to 1973 saw global growth rates of nearly 5 percent per year. But in the early 1970s capitalism entered a worldwide crisis. Global economic growth fell to half its former rate and corporate profit rates plummeted.

This extended crisis was met by several related strategies on the part of governments and corporations that together constituted what came to be known as “globalization.” [4]


Capital mobility Companies expanded their “capital mobility”– their ability to move production and money around the world without impediment. This cut costs by moving production to locations where labor was cheapest and environmental and other regulations weakest.

Transnational networks Corporations restructured from vertical and horizontal integration within national economies to what economist Bennett Harrison described in 1994 as “the creation by managers of boundary-spanning networks of firms, linking together big and small companies operating in different industries, regions, and even countries.” The ultimate power and control remained concentrated with the largest institutions: “multinational corporations, key government agencies, big banks and fiduciaries, research hospitals, and the major universities with close ties to business.” Harrison described this “emerging paradigm of networked production” as “concentration of control combined with decentralization of production.”[5]

Neoliberalism International networked production was supported by a national and global policy framework that became known as “neoliberalism,” which aimed to dismantle barriers to international trade and direct all public policy to the goal of capital accumulation.

Together these practices have gone under the rubric of “globalization.”

Over the course of four decades globalization transformed the world economy. As one recent study put it, “State-centric territorial competition” has been “substantially displaced in significance” by an “economic globalization” which creates its own set of international structures through global networks.[6]

From the 1960s to 2007 trade growth as a proportion of global GDP nearly doubled, from less than 10% to nearly 20%. However, this global system produced a devastating crisis, generally known as the Great Recession. Since 2008 the same measure of global economic integration has dropped steadily – back to the level of 2000. In parallel, global cross-border bank lending fell from 60% of global GDP in 2008 to 37 percent by 2023.[7]

This apparent “de-globalization,” however, is far from reestablishing the “coordinated and territorially contained” economies of the pre-globalization era. In fact, world trade has continued to grow. What’s happening has appropriately been called “geoeconomic fragmentation.”[8]

Geoeconomic fragmentation is part and parcel of the polycrisis – both an effect and a cause. The growth of geopolitical conflict, preparation for war, and actual war are a driving force in geoeconomic fragmentation as nations, coalitions, and corporations vie for dominance in global networks. So is the rise of xenophobic nationalistic political movements espousing economic nationalist policies.[9] So is the response to the climate crisis, with global struggle to control networks of climate-protecting products and to displace the costs of climate protection onto others. At the same time, geoeconomic fragmentation and the economic warfare that accompanies it aggravates geopolitical conflict, nationalistic politics, and climate catastrophe.

[1] For a fuller though still compact review of this history see Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage, 2nd Edition, July, 1999, Chapter 2: “The Era of Nation-Based Economies.” This account focuses on the capitalist West because most of the main forces shaping the global economy originated there. https://www.jeremybrecher.org/downloadable-books/globalvillage.pdf

[2] Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 1986, Volume 1, p. 513. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/sources-of-social-power/71430B753552703F801E9C6087E524D6

[3] Seth Schindler et. al., “The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks,” Taylor & Francis Online Geopolitics, Vol. 29, 2024, Issue 4, September 7, 2023. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2023.2253432?src=

[4] See Brecher and Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage, Chapter 3: The Dynamics of Globalization,” Ibid. https://www.jeremybrecher.org/downloadable-books/globalvillage.pdf

[5] Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean: The Changing Landscape of Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility, New York: Basic Books, 1994; cited in Global Village or Global Pillage, 53-4. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA17502440&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00197939&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E9e9c1b95&aty=open-web-entry

[6] Schindler et. al., Ibid. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2023.2253432?src=

[7] Adam Tooze, “Chartbook 198: Globalization: The Shifting Patchwork,” February 27, 2023.


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Jeremy Brecher is a historian, author, and co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability. He has been active in peace, labor, environmental, and other social movements for more than half a century. Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Strike! and Global Village or Global Pillage and the winner of five regional Emmy awards for his documentary movie work.

Hundreds of Unions, NGOs in Spain Call for General Strike in Solidarity With Palestine

Nationwide protests demand action against Israel’s actions in Gaza

By Senhan Bolelli

September 29, 2024

Source: Anadolu Ajansı


Reporters Without Borders (RSF) stage a demonstration at Plaza Mayor in Madrid, where they filed their fourth complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israel, condemning the killing of over 130 journalists in Palestine in the past year. RSF members also stated that the largest massacre against the press in the shortest time took place in Palestine, during demonstrations held in 10 cities across Europe on September 26, 2024.

More than 200 trade unions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Spain on Friday initiated a 24-hour general strike titled “Against the genocide and occupation in Palestine.”

As part of the nationwide strike, demonstrations took place in the capital Madrid and other major cities such as Barcelona and Bilbao, with university students suspending classes in solidarity.

The unions and NGOs expressed that Israel’s attacks on Gaza have become “intolerable,” urging the Spanish government to “immediately cut diplomatic, commercial, and military relations with Israel” to prevent its participation in “Israel’s ethnic cleansing.”

The unions organized various demonstrations throughout the day, including protests at factories that produce military equipment and in front of the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Madrid.

‘Biggest action’

Carmen Arnaiz, secretary of Social Activities at the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), which led the strike, stated, “We organized this action with the support of many NGOs to respond to the demands of Palestinian workers,” she told Anadolu. She emphasized that “the biggest action we can take as trade unions is a general strike,” calling the strike symbolic yet significant.

“The message we want to send to the Spanish government and the world is to cut all relations with Israel,” Arnaiz said, condemning Israel for its “total violation of international law and human rights” and labeling its actions as genocide.

Arnaiz further advocated for controlling arms exports to Israel and investing in health, education, and social services instead of weapons. She stressed the need for global demonstrations in support of Palestine.

“It is necessary to prevent the killing of civilians, including thousands of women and children, from entering a vicious circle as if it were normal.”

The secretary criticized bans on demonstrations supporting Palestine in several European countries, including Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and the US, describing them as “fascism.” She called such bans “scandalous,” citing a recent incident in Germany where a child was confronted for carrying a Palestinian flag.

“It is incomprehensible that Germany would track down a 10-year-old boy just because he was carrying the Palestinian flag and violently take it away.”

“Banning the right to protest and freedom of expression is a huge dilemma, especially for Europe, which claims to be a world leader in this regard,” she stated.

“I expect the civil society in Europe, which I think does not agree with such bans and violence, to react,” the official underlined.

“It is a terrible thing to ban a demonstration against genocide,” she added.

Flouting a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire, Israel has continued a brutal offensive on Gaza following a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas last October.

More than 41,500 people, most of them women and children, have since been killed and more than 96,000 injured, according to local health authorities.

The Israeli onslaught has displaced almost the entire population of the territory amid an ongoing blockade that has led to severe shortages of food, clean water, and medicine.

Israel also faces accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice for its actions in Gaza.

In Austria, Communists Could Get Back Into Parliament

Austria’s Communist Party hasn’t had an MP since 1959. But after years showing its worth in bread-and-butter local campaigns, the party has a realistic chance of a breakthrough in Sunday’s general election.

By Tobias Schweiger, Magdalena Berger 

September 29, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Image by DimiTalen, Public Domain Dedication


Rarely in Austria’s history has a general election been so unpredictable as this Sunday’s vote for the country’s federal parliament. While polls in recent months have shown a head-to-head race between the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), there is also some movement on the long-dormant left wing of the spectrum. The Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) has a realistic chance of returning to parliament for the first time since 1959.

Much of the reason owes to an organizational overhaul that the KPÖ began some three years ago. In June 2021, it elected an entirely new leadership, which shifted the party’s strategic focus toward building local and regional-level structures, as well as providing direct aid to working people.

Since then, through a series of electoral advances in Styria (electing a Communist mayor of Graz), Salzburg, and Innsbruck, the KPÖ has laid the groundwork for the jump to the national parliament. In the process, it has developed the concept of the “useful party.” KPÖ politicians and activists hold “social office hours” where they help constituents navigate government bureaucracies and even provide them with direct financial support. This is made possible by the party’s elected officials, who take home from their salaries only what an average Austrian tradesperson earns (about €2,500 per month) while donating the rest to a social aid fund.

All in all, the KPÖ has focused on bread-and-butter issues, and especially exploding rent prices. This has built up its profile as the top party for affordable housing. Whether this approach will be enough to regain national representation remains to be seen. In Austria, parties need to win at least 4 percent of the national vote to enter parliament; polls currently put the KPÖ between 3 and 4 percent.

Tobias Schweiger, the lead candidate on the KPÖ’s electoral slate, has served on the party’s National Executive since 2021. He sat down with Jacobin’s Magdalena Berger to discuss the challenges of party building, what the KPÖ’s “social office hours” might look like on the national level, and ideas for initiatives such as a socialized energy sector.

Magdalena Berger

The KPÖ has long been described as a classic cadre party, with rather high obstacles to joining. While it is more open today, it’s still not necessarily easy to become a member. There are anecdotes of people wanting to become active within the party but giving up after not being contacted by the party following an initial meeting. Why might that be?

Tobias Schweiger

For a small party that relies a lot on volunteer labor, it’s difficult to build structures from the ground up that facilitate participation. This is especially true in Austria, where the culture views party membership as the be-all and end-all of political participation. But [onboarding new members] is much easier when you can rely on paid party apparatuses, when your organizers and community managers are employees with time and technical resources.

This is not to say that it isn’t a priority for us to enable people to get active with us. However, our national team is relatively small, and sometimes classical organizational procedures don’t go entirely smoothly. Especially for a party that has a pronounced bottom-up structure and puts considerable responsibility in the hands of its locals, transformations [like the one the KPÖ has been through in recent years] are often complex.

It’s virtually unavoidable that such changes are messy, particularly in work-intensive areas. Integrating prospective members is one of the most error-prone areas in the structure of any organization. We’re aware of the problem, but we often lack the resources we need.

Magdalena Berger

Do you think that the party’s recent successes at the state level have strained its structures? The KPÖ has become a significant presence fairly suddenly, after decades of irrelevance.

Tobias Schweiger

Yes, of course. Integrating prospective members depends on a number of factors. For example, on a surface level, people have noticed that it has taken a long time for someone from the party to get in touch with them. But for it to be possible at all to contact people and invite them to a meet and greet, a whole series of processes must be in place, such as up-to-date, internal schedule coordination and a tight communication network. In other words, it requires more work than just one person calling a list of people on one day.

In recent years, we’ve changed a lot in order to move beyond merely interpreting the world and toward organizing everyday class interests. That demands an extraordinary amount of attention to detail — and time.

Magdalena Berger

As you’ve described, you’re trying to build a party from the ground up. Is the timing of the current elections inconvenient, given how far along you are in this process? Are the national structures developed enough?

Tobias Schweiger

I don’t think we can say that the election is coming too early. For years, we found that electoral campaigns weren’t optimal for building organizational structures. However, we’ve corrected this analysis in the current election year. Our locals have drawn a lot of motivation — from the polls, but also from the solid result in the EU election, where we nearly made it into the European Parliament.

At the moment, our locals are undergoing an incredible amount of structural development. More people are taking on responsibility. Things that required a lot of work one year ago are now done without a second thought. This is partly because an electoral campaign has a clear goal and a clear beginning and end — a collective mission.

Still, many of the events organized in a classical electoral campaign aren’t sustainable in the longer run — take info stands, for example. But we’re seeing that things can go hand in hand, that structures can be built that will be functional after an election. At any rate, an election comes when it comes. For us, the election is definitely accelerating the party’s development.

Magdalena Berger

In an interview in 2022, you said that the “state of the party is not what we’d like to see in a Communist Party.” A goal of the leadership at the time was to make the KPÖ capable of campaigning and making political interventions. How far have you come in realizing this goal?

Tobias Schweiger

It’s hard to assess our ability to intervene politically. But there have been moments that have illustrated how far the KPÖ has come. We should really take seriously the national government’s claim (made by Minister Karoline Edtstadler this April) that they have increased [housing] vacancy taxes because the KPÖ gained popularity over the housing issue, and they want to take the wind out of our sails.

There is anxiety that a critical mass for a left-wing oppositional force could form. This is also evident in how focused the bourgeois press is on our position on war and peace. There’s a fear that the opinion of what is in fact the majority of society on this issue might gain political expression — outside of the [far-right] FPÖ, which of course addresses the issue through a shallow populism. These arguments have brought us more relevance than we’ve had in decades.

When it comes to other sociopolitical issues, we probably haven’t yet achieved the same level of relevance. In that sense, we are far from satisfied with where we are at.

Magdalena Berger

In other words, you’ve come a long way but not yet reached your goal?

Tobias Schweiger

There have been many positive developments in recent years. In particular, we have come to view solidarity projects as a real cornerstone of party development. This is a substantial advance precisely because it has implied a change in our understanding of what a party is. This may sound small, but it’s a major step.

Magdalena Berger

This understanding is closely connected to your aim to make a tangible difference in people’s lives — to be “useful.” How would a KPÖ parliamentary group make a difference in people’s everyday lives in this country?

Tobias Schweiger

We could do what we’ve been doing on a much greater scale by geographically expanding our social office hours. More people would then have access to them, and we would have greater insight into what people in different regions view as the main social problems. While I believe that people throughout Austria face quite similar problems, the specific information we get from office hours is still relevant.

It also makes a difference whether people read in the newspaper about the [Communist] mayor of Graz helping someone or whether they know someone personally who has received support from the party or have interacted with us themselves.

Magdalena Berger

Have you already considered the specifics of how this project could be expanded? Holding office hours on a national level is more complicated than doing so locally. They might be accessible to someone in Vienna, the national capital, but what should a KPÖ voter do who lives seven hours away in Vorarlberg?

Tobias Schweiger

This hasn’t been finalized yet, but our plan is to define areas for which different people will be responsible. This would mean, for example, that I might offer regular social office hours not only in Vienna but also [at the state level] in Lower Austria. We still have to decide on what makes the most sense.

If we make it into parliament, we’ll probably win around seven seats. Our seven members of parliament would then donate most of their salaries, substantially increasing our social fund.

Magdalena Berger

Members of Austria’s parliament currently earn around €10,000 a month before taxes. KPÖ elected officials make a pledge to only keep about €2,500 after taxes. That comes out as a major amount for direct aid provision.

Tobias Schweiger

Exactly. This would also allow us to enable people in different parts of the country to conduct office hours themselves — to give them the financial means to do so. This would be a significant change, with a direct impact on local people.

We’ve decided that our social fund should mainly exist to provide money to people in urgent need. Part of the money also goes to expanding and financing our solidarity projects. One such example is our free kitchens, an important project that supports food security.

The project has been quite successful and is being offered by more and more locals because it brings together people from various social groups. Neighbors, precarious students, and people living in poverty sit together and get to know one another, and a space emerges where people talk about what’s going on in their lives. It’s almost like a collectivized social office hour, but also a democratic space. Organizing these events is extremely cheap, but locals have limited budgets.

If we enter parliament, the considerable increase in our financial resources would open up new possibilities for action. Another potential outlet is our party newspaper, Argument, which we recently revived. Our goal is to turn it into a monthly paper, then a weekly, and finally a daily in order to essentially build a counter-public.

Another priority is political education. This can mean organizing seminars or hosting speakers who have something interesting to say — events that allow us to advance the party intellectually. Once we set up a party academy, we will have a serious structure for continuous intellectual networking and activity.

Magdalena Berger

So, you see joining parliament as a way to foster the party’s intellectual development?

Tobias Schweiger

Yes, and this brings us back to our ability to intervene politically. The immediate intervention that a party can make is always only one element of what a communist intervention in society can mean. An intellectual structure is another part of that. Right now, there are hardly any intellectuals championing the KPÖ in the bourgeois press, let alone formulating demands that go beyond our own.

Entering parliament wouldn’t instantly solve all of these problems. But it would mean achieving a critical mass in terms of finances and personnel that could at least be used to address them.

Magdalena Berger

At the same time, making it into parliament also involves dangers. Particularly for governing parties, there’s the risk of beginning to view the state as something to merely be administered. How do you approach this tension between electoral success and the trap of reformism to which others have fallen victim, such as Germany’s Die Linke?

Tobias Schweiger

Even on the national level, this question is not quite so urgent. We don’t want to join a governing coalition with anyone, and no one wants us as coalition partners. We mean it when we say that parliament needs an oppositional force that is not simply part of the political spectrum.

In parliament, you receive a greater share of the bourgeois public’s attention. And at the moment, there is a clear overlap between the objective need for a KPÖ in parliament and our subjective interest in this. We want to be an oppositional social force, a counterforce.

Magdalena Berger

But mightn’t parliamentary work cause you to lose sight of the goal of a liberated society?

Tobias Schweiger

There’s a tension there. Of course, parliamentarism has thousands of pitfalls. On noncore issues, there’s a tendency to formulate positions that actually fall short of what should be the positions of a Communist Party. I’ve also noticed this as lead candidate.

But the thing is: I’m aware of this. I seek out lively exchange with party members so that we can correct one another, something that is made possible by the interpersonal solidarity within our party.

Magdalena Berger

Let’s discuss the KPÖ’s positions. Your electoral program demands that “housing, energy, health care, healthy food, and a livable environment” be communally organized. Does this mean these areas should be socialized?

Tobias Schweiger

Socialized housing is far more comprehensive an agenda than the specific demands we are currently making. But there is still a connection. If you advocate public housing, this typically means advocating for a state-level project. Whether this project is truly socialized is an open question. It depends on whether people have a say in how apartments look and how they’re used.

This has always been important to us — to say that it’s not just a matter of creating state-owned apartments but also of ensuring that they have value for the people. Housing shouldn’t simply be affordable; it should allow for democratic participation.

Maintaining a perspective beyond the state and capital, we should recognize that communally designed public housing will of course be easier to transform than housing that has been built as an individual’s speculative asset. How housing is designed will determine whether or not it will be adaptable to a new social order. That’s what I mean when I say there’s a connection between our demands and socialization.

We are, of course, aware that calling for more public housing in isolation is not communism. Every sociopolitical force should advocate more public housing today.

Magdalena Berger

You understand the demand as more or less a first step.

Tobias Schweiger

Yes. We’ve elaborated on this more rigorously in our demand for basic energy security. In Austria, our energy companies are almost nationalized, but they exist as stock corporations. This means that although they are state-owned, their purpose is to make a profit for shareholders. Their interest lies in profit maximization, as we saw during the recent energy crisis in particular.

We say that there should be basic energy security. Electricity for fulfilling fundamental needs should be provided free of charge, and all electricity consumption beyond that should be progressively priced. This would facilitate ecological regulation, but it would above all eliminate energy poverty in one fell swoop.

Magdalena Berger

And how might this be implemented?

Tobias Schweiger

We would have to re-socialize the already nationalized energy companies. Step one would be to return to a collective use principle, or to restructure the energy stock corporations into nonprofits in the hands of the state. But this is only one of the things that would need to happen. The way companies currently produce energy prevents them from moving away from fossil fuels and divesting from international raw materials markets.

This shift would require a massive expansion of renewable energy, but this often meets with popular resistance, as people don’t necessarily want, for example, wind turbines in front of their house. So, we say that these semi-state or state companies should be restructured into renewable energy cooperatives in which the people are a direct stakeholder. These energy cooperatives would then be incorporated into the state as nonprofit energy companies. Firstly, this would give the people a direct say, and secondly, it would create a trend reversal. Wind turbines would no longer be a means of production owned by someone else and used by them to produce my energy for profit. Rather, they would become a guarantor that my home will never go cold or dark.

And just like when it comes to the question of housing, this kind of infrastructure can be more easily transformed given changes in the overall balance of power vis-à-vis the state and capital. These are our “transformative approaches,” which of course cannot avoid the fundamental question of how society should be organized. But they allow us to already start building the infrastructure we need today and tomorrow, and to do so with an eye toward their future adaptation.

Magdalena Berger

You said earlier that nowhere are you quite so attacked as on issues of war and peace. I’ve noticed the KPÖ is quite vocal on Russia, Ukraine, and Austrian neutrality — but somewhat less so on Israel and Gaza. Why might that be?

Tobias Schweiger

I would say that daily media cycles in Austria are partially to blame. To the bourgeois public, there is a difference between the two conflicts. They don’t actually care about Israel and Palestine, let alone the people there. They may project their resentments onto the conflict, but they’ve grown used to its escalations for decades. For them it’s enough to periodically assert (a pro-Israel) “Staatsraison” and attack anyone who interprets the situation differently.

Russia’s war of aggression has changed how Austria conducts foreign policy, shifting it away from how it has advanced its diplomatic interests for decades. It has threatened the hegemony of the geopolitical model that Europe and the US — with all its contradictions — have pursued and developed for decades.

Magdalena Berger

But wouldn’t you say that the party itself is also to blame? The Young Left and the Communist Youth of Austria, essentially your two youth organizations, launched a joint campaign in 2022 called “Youth Against War.” Today, when I look at the communication channels of the Young Left, I see barely anything about Israel and Gaza, even though the topic is politicizing young people with immigrant backgrounds in particular.

Tobias Schweiger

I think it’s important that our position on Israel and Gaza be relevant to lived realities here. As opposed to a mere article of faith, it should offer people possibilities to act. Austria could intervene in geopolitics in a way that befits its neutrality. It could say: “We believe that the best way to bring about peace for the civilian population on the ground is a two-state solution.”

But Austria hasn’t even recognized an independent Palestine, so achieving this recognition should be in the foreground of our foreign policy activism. Of course, the demand for recognition should go hand in hand with other demands, such as for a cease-fire and negotiations. But a long-term perspective is also important.

This might sound more boring than a lot of what’s out there. But at the same time, debates about internationalism often miss something: people feel like they have truth but no power. And truth without power leads to feelings of powerlessness, which in turn lead to resignation. This produces frustration but no vision for a liberated society — and also no answer as to how I can connect conflicts and power relations in Austria to crucial issues of internationalism.

Magdalena Berger

Final question: After the election, what comes next for the KPÖ?

Tobias Schweiger

Whatever happens, we will continue to develop as an organization. This will involve important projects such as expanding our free kitchens and office hours. These two projects are now so widespread that we can refer to them as general projects. But many other ideas are in the works. In Innsbruck, the KPÖ has organized outings to gather wood for stoves, and in St Pölten, it has hosted clothing swaps that have put young women in particular in touch with the party.

We are building a party that enlivens neighborhood life while working to build socialism. That was our goal prior to the election and will continue to be so afterward. The only difference the election result will make is the financial means we have to pursue this goal.

Should You Lose Your Right to Vote if You Have a Criminal Record?

By María Constanza Costa

September 29, 2024

Source: Nonprofit Quarterly


Image by Shane T. McCoy, United States Marshals Service, Public domain

As of 2022, an estimated 4.4 million people in the United States had lost their right to vote due to felony convictions. This is equivalent to the population of Kentucky or Oregon. A report published in June by Human Rights Watch, The Sentencing Project, and the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project seeks to challenge this common practice.

The report—Out of Step: US Policy on Voting Rights in Global Perspective, authored by a nine-person team led by Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy at The Sentencing Project—examines the laws of 136 countries worldwide with populations greater than 1.5 million people.

Of these, 73 rarely or never deny a person the right to vote for a criminal conviction, and 35 never deny the right to vote based on criminal status. Among those 35 are Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and Taiwan.

So, how did so many US states come to deny millions the right to vote? And how can this change? Those are key questions for the report authors.

Racist Roots of Disenfranchisement Laws

Perhaps unsurprisingly, state voting rights can vary wildly. As Porter tells NPQ, “On the low end in the United States, people can be convicted of felonies when it comes to certain administrative offenses such as financial fraud and drug possession.” She adds, “There are several states…where people are disenfranchised for life.”

But Porter notes that on “the opposite end of that, there are several jurisdictions within the United States where people never lose their right to vote because of a felony conviction. That includes two states…Maine and Vermont. And it also includes two territories: Puerto Rico, which expanded voting rights to people completing their prison sentences in the 1980s, and the District of Columbia, which expanded voting rights to people completing their felony sentences in prison a few years ago in 2020.”

These kinds of crime disenfranchisement laws in the United States date back to the end of the Civil War. After formerly enslaved Black men gained the right to vote through the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, state lawmakers began expanding the list of felonies to target the African American population.

At the same time, states began revoking voting rights for any felony conviction. Although the federal government outlawed some “Jim Crow laws” through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, felony disenfranchisement laws remain on the books in 48 states.
Persistent Disenfranchisement

Black Americans continue to be disproportionately arrested, incarcerated, and subjected to harsher sentences, including imprisonment without parole. Jonathan Topaz, a staff attorney at the ACLU Voting Rights Project—and another report author—also spoke with NPQ. He explains that “it was a very conscious effort by the White majority at that time to re-disenfranchise Black folks.”

Topaz adds that “criminal disenfranchisement was one of the mechanisms along with things like poll taxes and literacy tests that were designed, again, to limit the political power of newly enfranchised Black folks.”

The impact on the Black electorate was and is significant. Currently, the report indicates that one in 19 Black Americans of voting age is disenfranchised at a rate 3.5 times that of people who are not Black. Nationally, 5.3 percent of Black adults in the United States are disenfranchised, compared to 1.5 percent of the adult population that is not Black. More than one in 10 Black adults are disenfranchised in seven states—Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia.

But not only the Black American community is affected. At least 506,000 Latinx Americans, or 1.7 percent of the voting-age Latinx population, are also disenfranchised.

As Brian Miller, executive director of Nonprofit Vote, described to NPQ, “There are people of color much more likely to be impacted by the justice system, often incarcerated or incarcerated at notably higher rates. And the impact of that is that if you also couple that with a rule that prohibits ex-felons or people with criminal records from voting, then you’re getting a double whammy. Not only the racially disparate impact on incarceration, but also a racially disparate impact on people’s right to vote.”

The organizations dedicated to promoting the right to vote for people with criminal records found that in recent years, some US jurisdictions have taken steps to restore voting rights. Most states no longer disenfranchise people for life, and many allow people released from prison to vote.

This is the case of Florida, which, in 2018, passed an amendment reforming the 150-year-old constitutional text. This amendment restored voting rights to ex-convicts, excluding those convicted of murder and serious sexual offenses.

Before the amendment, Florida was only one of four states in the union that automatically and permanently revoked the right to vote of anyone convicted of a felony. However, subsequent action by the state legislature effectively negated the constitutional amendment, and an estimated 900,000 Floridians are still denied the right to vote.

There are currently two states, Iowa and Kentucky, where voting rights for former prisoners can only be restored through an individual petition or application to the state government.

Legal restoration is only one step toward full restoration. In many states, such as Florida, citizens who rejoin society can only vote after paying various legal financial obligations, essentially creating a system of paying to vote. “This policy of disenfranchising folks for basically inability to pay these fines, fees, and costs is pretty astonishing….Lots of states seem to condition the right to vote on your ability to pay, which is really anathema to democratic values and principles,” says Topaz.

Misinformation from election officials about legal reforms has also hindered voter registration. As Porter explains, there is “a lack of information from formal government agencies that notify people of changes in laws, and even a lack of understanding by officials themselves. Other barriers are the fact that for eligible incarcerated voters, the logistics of being registered to vote, having accurate voter registration information so they can access their ballot leading up to the election cycle is also a significant barrier.”

International Trends

Globally, the trend is toward greater inclusion of people with criminal records—with voting rights protected in a growing number of countries. For example, in 2014, Egypt repealed a sweeping law that indefinitely banned anyone convicted of a crime from voting. In 2020, Uganda’s Supreme Court upheld the constitutional right to vote for all citizens over 18, including incarcerated people.

In 2022, Tanzania’s Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a law that disenfranchised people sentenced to more than six months in prison, saying it was too broad and inconsistent with the country’s constitution. That same year, the Chilean government removed voting barriers for detained people, allowing them to vote in the 2022 and 2023 constitutional referendums.
Broader Implications

The right to participate in the conduct of public affairs, which includes the right to vote and to be elected, is at the very heart of democratic governments based on the will of the people, according to the United Nations. Genuine elections are necessary and fundamental components of an environment that protects and promotes human rights.

As Miller explains, even public safety benefits from increased access to the polls: “There are studies that have shown that when people start voting, there’s a recognition that they’re part of the community and that the likelihood of them reentering the criminal justice system is notably lower. If you permanently disenfranchise someone, you’re permanently putting them on the fringe and the chances of them reentering the justice system is higher.”

Miller points out that even if the motivation is not about enabling full civic participation and instead is narrowly focused on reducing crime, “we should be allowing folks to fully participate in the democratic process.”


María Constanza Costa is a political scientist, journalist, and associate professor for the seminar “Islamism, Nationalism, and Popular Mobilization in the Middle East” at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. She is also an international news columnist at Panamá Revista.

Will Walz or Vance Tackle Issue of VA Privatization?

OR WILL THE MODERATORS?!

By Suzanne Gordon, Steve Early

September 30, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Image by Susan Ruggles, Creative Commons 2.0



Amid the rhetorical fog of their game-changing presidential debate in June, Donald Trump and his then-opponent only dealt with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in passing.

Former president Trump claimed that, after he vacated the White House, “crazy Joe Biden” no longer allowed military veterans to choose between VA care and private sector alternatives to it. When he was in the White House, Trump asserted, VA patients could “get themselves fixed up” in private hospitals and medical practices, rather than waiting “three months to see a doctor.” The results of this outsourcing were “incredible,” and earned his administration “the highest approval rating in the history of the VA.”

In response, President Biden understandably failed to make two points in response, either due to cognitive decline or cognitive dissonance. One, out-of-control spending on private care has left the VA-run Veterans Health Administration (VHA) with a projected $12 billion budget shortfall for fiscal year 2025—which is not good news for veterans. And two, a Democrat in the White House didn’t abandon privatization since there has been more of it under him than Trump.

Biden instead pivoted to talk about the PACT Act of 2022, which has helped nearly a million post-9/11 vets file more successful disability claims based on their past exposure to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the next decade, the PACT Act authorizes hundreds of billions of dollars for effective delivery of their medical care and financial benefits—but all of that is dependent on a well-functioning VA.

This brief and unilluminating exchange left unaddressed the real challenges facing the federal government’s third largest agency. The VHA operates the nation’s largest public healthcare system and provides high-quality, direct care (not insurance coverage) for former service members, who have low incomes or service related medical problems. But, in the September sequel to the presidential debate in June—with so many other things to talk about—veterans affairs became a topic little discussed by Trump or VP Kamala Harris.

Vance vs. Walz

The next opportunity for a more substantive exchange about the past, present, and future of VA care will be Tuesday night, Oct. 1. During their first and probably only vice-presidential debate, two former non-commissioned military officers will have the chance to embrace or reject the costly and disastrous bipartisan experiment with VA outsourcing that began under Obama, continued under Trump, and expanded under Biden.

Not surprisingly, Governor Tim Walz is the one more likely to do that. Because, on the campaign trail, Senator J. D. Vance– a fellow beneficiary of VA educational benefits–has been, in Trump-style, bashing the VA and talking up privatization.

In a recent podcast interview with Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL turned influencer, Vance claimed the agency is so slow moving and uncaring that “veterans spend three hours on the phone trying to get an appointment” and you even “have people commit suicide, because they’re waiting 28 days to get an appointment with a doctor.” The solution, according to Vance, is “give people more choice. I think you will save money in the process.”

After winning the first of six House races, before becoming governor of Minnesota, Walz joined the House Veterans Affairs Committee (HVAC)—a low-status committee assignment spurned by many aspiring politicians. In 2018, he joined just 69 other House Democrats in opposing the VA MISSION Act, one of Donald Trump’s proudest legislative achievements and the basis for his 2024 campaign pledge to make VA “patient choice” more widely available.

Walz warned, accurately, that MISSION Act outsourcing would force the VA to “cannibalize itself” by diverting billions of dollars from direct care delivery to reimbursement of private-sector providers. This incremental defunding of VHA hospitals and clinics now threatens to leave them in what Walz called a “can’t function situation.”

In Congress, Walz also became an advocate for fellow veterans with service-related conditions. His own hearing damage resulted from repeated exposure to artillery blasts, during 24 years of National Guard training exercises. He won applause for co-sponsoring a bill, focused on suicide prevention services; it was name after a Marine veteran who killed himself in 2011 after long struggles with PTSD and depression.

A Union Ally (Sometimes)

Walz’s role as ranking Democrat on a then Republican-led HVAC is fondly recalled by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents VA employees in his home state. During his first run for Congress, the then-high school teacher and coach reached out to local AFGE leader Jane Nygard, who discovered that “he’s not someone who just says something to make you happy, he actually takes action.”

According to Nygard, “whenwe had issues with the St Paul VA, which had bad management and low staffing, Congressman Walz, a fellow union member, listened to our union. He got the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service involved and we ended up having a three-day retreat with upper management. Eventually, upper leadership retired and labor relations improved.”

The one bad mark on Walz’s union report card is his vote in favor of the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Act of 2017. This Trump-era effort to strip VA workers of their due process rights in disciplinary cases was challenged in court by AFGE. To his credit, Biden’s VA Secretary Denis McDonough ended a five-year legal battle over implementation of the Act by reaching a settlement with the union last year. Thousands of unfairly fired workers became eligible for reinstatement or back pay, at a total cost estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the Federal News Network.

Other workers or managers terminated for “grievous misconduct” were not covered by this deal. Nevertheless, Trump has promised to “fire every corrupt VA bureaucrat who Joe Biden outrageously refused to remove from the job.” A campaign spokesman for Vance recently hailed the MISSION Act as “bipartisan legislation that expanded veterans’ access to quality care and cut needless red tape.” Tim Walz’s opposition to it was “not the kind of leadership veterans need in Washington,” the spokesman said.

Party Platform Differences

To do anything at the VA different or better than Biden did–or Trump before him–Walz and Harris first need to win in November. They can both boost veteran voter turnout, particularly in battleground states, by zeroing in on the skimpiness of the GOP’s plan for “Taking Care of Our Veterans”—all 47 words of it!

This lone paragraph, buried in the Republican platform adopted in Milwaukee, leads off with immigrant bashing. The Party pledges “to end luxury housing and Taxpayer benefits” for border-crossers and “use those savings to shelter and treat homeless Veterans.” In addition, a second Trump Administration will “expand Veterans’ Healthcare Choices, protect Whistleblowers, and hold accountable poorly performing employees not giving our Veterans the care they deserve.”

The equivalent Democratic Party platform statement is far more substantive. It covers veteran homelessness and suicide, PACT Act implementation, improving mental health programs, new services for female veterans, support for family members caring for VA patients, and cracking down on scams targeting veterans who file disability claims over their toxic exposures.

“Going forward,” the Democrats declare, “we will strengthen VA care by fully funding inpatient and outpatient care and long-term care, and by upgrading medical facility infrastructure.” Unfortunately, this otherwise laudable campaign pledge fails to acknowledge the reality of VA outsourcing, under Biden, which has further diverted funding from VA direct care and infrastructure upgrades for the last four years.

Tying Trump-Vance to Project 2025

At least some VA defenders in the Democratic Party are tying Trump and Vance to the VA-related recommendations of Project 2025. As Iraq war veteran and U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA.) points out, that Heritage Foundation playbook for the GOP “takes dead aim at veterans health and disability benefits.”

In August, Deluzio warned readers of Military.com that his Republican colleagues on the HVAC have often “sided with corporate interests to outsource care” for VA patients. And now their presidential transition planners at the business-backed Heritage Foundation want to refer even more vets to “costly private facilities, a fiscally reckless move that…has ballooned costs for the VA.”

According to Deluzio, the “ultimate endgame of these plans is to dismantle the VA’s own clinical care mission—should send shivers down the spines of America’s veterans and those who want the best care for them.”

On the campaign trail, Trump and Vance have been diverting attention from that “endgame” by positioning themselves, over and again, as defenders of “patient choice.” At a mid-August event at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in western Pennsylvania, Vance referenced the very real healthcare access problems of “our veterans living in rural areas.” He assured his invitation-only crowd that, if “those who put on a uniform and serve our country… need to see a doctor, we got to give them veteran’s choice to give them that ability to see a doctor.”

In Detroit, at a late August convention of the National Guard Association, where he was warmly received, Trump again accused the Biden-Harris Administration of gutting his many “VA reforms” related to “choice” and “accountability.” He hailed VA outsourcing as a great system of “rapid service,” in which patients “go to an outside doctor…get themselves fixed up and we pay the bill.”

Between now and November 5, veterans need a lot more factual information about VA privatization to counter the steady drumbeat of “fake news” they’re getting from Trump, Vance, and the GOP. Let’s hope that now retired National Guard Sergeant Waltz steps up to the plate and takes a winning swat at the former Marine corporal from Ohio who became a Yale-educated lawyer and multi-millionaire venture capitalist with little personal need for the VA services so important to working class vets in his own state and others.

The Dutch Asylum Crisis Law Is Baseless And Dangerous

The new Dutch government has declared an “asylum crisis,” allowing it to take emergency anti-migration measures without parliamentary approval. Based on trumped-up claims about migrants, it rewards decades of far-right posturing on the issue.

By Helmer Stoel

September 30, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Dick Schoof, Prime Minister of the Netherlands, and Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, in July 2024.

On September 13, Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof held a press conference to announce his new government’s coalition agreement. Essential to these plans — as the coalition’s four right-wing to far-right parties had already agreed in May — is the introduction of an unprecedented “asylum crisis law.” In an extraordinary expansion of the tools to restrain migrants, it will allow the government to take anti-immigration measures without the approval of the parliament or senate.

The declaration of an alleged “asylum crisis” is the culmination of a more than two-decade-long offensive by right-wing populist forces. In 2001, the media-savvy dandy Pim Fortuyn, the father of this part of the political spectrum, changed the rules of Dutch politics by making an obsession with “immigrants” socially acceptable. Four years later, Geert Wilders founded his anti-Islam electoral vehicle, the Party for Freedom (PVV). The neoliberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) under Mark Rutte, in power for the last fourteen years, maintained a symbolic distance from the PVV, allowing its purported liberal “reasonableness” to compare favorably with Wilders’s “extremism.” Yet the PVV and several big Dutch media channels have constantly put migration on the agenda. Hamas’s October 7 attacks were further used to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment.

This provided the background for the November 22, 2023, general election, which set the stage for the new government. The snap vote came after then prime minister Rutte opportunistically let his government fall by refusing to compromise on migration; Dilan Yesilgöz, his successor as VVD leader, then embraced a far-right course on the issue. Presented with the choice between original and copy, at election time voters chose the former. In the vote, the PVV secured almost a quarter of seats in parliament. Other big winners were the right-wing populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) and the vaguely Christian democratic New Social Contract (NSC).

After long, soap-operatic negotiations, a new cabinet was finally put together earlier this summer. The PVV, a party of which Wilders is the only member, lacked suitable seasoned politicians to deliver a prime minister. After a chaotic process, Schoof — a senior bureaucrat with no political experience, but who is former chief of the national counterterrorism unit — was shoved into the limelight. The government that Schoof now leads is the Dutch version of technopopulism, to use the term coined by Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti. Claiming to be “prime minister for all Dutch people” and to “address the real problems of the Dutch people,” Schoof offers a deeply political program dressed up as sober, technocratic pragmatism.

As elsewhere in Europe, migration has been declared the root of all evil. Dutch experts and engaged policymakers tirelessly point out that there is no “crisis,” but to no avail. In the course of 2023, for instance, the number of asylum seekers was no more than the average over the 1990s. In fact, the Netherlands’ acceptance of refugees is around the European average; Germany, Sweden, and Austria take in more people per capita. Just as crucially, the government’s exclusive focus on asylum seekers is highly misleading, since migrant workers make up the bulk of the migration flow. The Dutch labor market, which underwent far-reaching liberalization in the 1990s under the two liberal–social democratic cabinets, runs partly on cheap labor, which is shamelessly exploited in horticulture and distribution centers.

Still, migration is serving as a lightning rod to distract from growing social disparities. The real crises in society — the housing crisis, the energy crisis, and crisis over social security — mainly affect the working class and lower-middle class. These ills are partly a product of the VVD’s neoliberal policies, which have stopped the construction of social housing, slowly dismantled public services, and reduced real incomes. For years, the ruling parties of both center left and center right mainly represented the interests of relatively wealthy, university-educated urbanites and ignored the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. With a recent attack raising the value-added tax on higher education, books, and culture, the new far-right government seems to want a form of symbolic revenge.

Given that evidence of the migration “crisis” does not exist, it was no accident that during his presentation, new prime minister Schoof spoke of “an experienced crisis” — what people believe to be a drama. After the chorus about migration has been heard for decades, it has started to have its effect in creating a moral panic. It is reminiscent of what psychologists would call illusionary truth effect: false information is accepted as “true” through repeated exposure and familiarity. Although right-wing populism is often explained as emerging from a crisis, it just as often derives its success from staging its chosen narrative of crisis.

Before looking to solve a problem, one can first ask whether the terms of the problem make sense. Unfortunately, this is just what isn’t being done. Despite their declared abhorrence at Wilders’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, all parties on the left-wing side of the spectrum — the social democratic Labor Party (PvdA), the green party Groenlinks, and the Socialists — have over the years come to accept the terms of the problem as posed by the far right. Recently, Frans Timmermans, the leader of the PvdA-Groenlinks alliance, declared, “With us it is always possible to discuss how to make asylum policy stricter and more austere, as long as you stick to the law.” More than two decades after far-right leader Pim Fortuyn was murdered, his language has become hegemonic.

The announcement of the “crisis” is just the beginning. In a farcical spectacle, Marjolein Faber, the PVV minister for asylum and migration, has announced in a letter to the European Commission that the government is going to present an opt-out from the European migration pact. On her first international journey, she chose to visit Denmark — a country that negotiated an opt-out in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty to allow it stricter rules than other European Union member states for dealing with asylum seekers (for instance, they cannot appeal being rejected). Following in its footsteps, the PVV wants to treat migration on a European level as a zero-sum game. A competition between European countries for the strictest migration policies without collectively addressing the question of migration could potentially lead to a disastrous erosion of asylum seekers’ legal rights throughout Europe.

The novelist W. F. Hermans once described the idea that “we must not stay behind” as the typically Dutch angst. For at least the last two decades, the Netherlands managed to present itself as progressive on the world stage, even if this reputation was already living off the past. Now the small country can congratulate itself for not “staying behind” in another way: with the new government’s plans, at a stroke it finds itself at the forefront of the far-right wave in Western Europe.

Despite their significant differences with the PVV, parties like the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Rassemblement National in France may push for similar measures. But discord is already emerging in the Netherlands’ far-right coalition government. The question is how long the staged “asylum crisis” can mask the cynical motives that lie behind it.