What’s Trump’s Game? Trying to Save a Weakened US Empire

By Kim Scipes

February 18, 2025

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


Image by Emanuel Leutze, public domain


Donald Trump has hit the ground running, asserting himself and his will to power to the maximum, starting before his second presidency began but accelerating upon his assumption of the Office of the Presidency, barely three weeks ago. Talking out of both sides of his mouth, and using Elon Musk as his hitman, Trump is following the principle “Chaos are us!” From talking about annexing Greenland to Canada to the Panama Canal and all of Gaza, much less obliterating agencies such as US AID (US Agency for International Development) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) while remaking the Department of Justice his satrapy, Trump has dazzled on-lookers with his audacity and lack of limits.

This is not being done to help working class voters, whose lives he promised to improve. It has been done to cause confusion, doubt and uncertainty among those who oppose him, and to scare the Democrats into acquiescence. Some have described this as “shock and awe”; I prefer the more specific name of “Blitzkrieg”; it wasn’t for nothing that Musk gave what appeared to be a Nazi salute to one of his recent audiences.

In an excellent encapsulation of the insanity of all this, Michael Albert wrote a piece titled “Appropriate Response”, which appeared in ZNetwork on February 5. He captured the ranges of responses to Trump rather well. How to tell what is “real,” and what is “diversion”? Albert has been trying decipher what’s going on but hasn’t been able so far; yet he is far ahead of many others.

I think the message is understandable once it’s approached at the correct level.

Unlike most critics, I see the world as an integrated whole; I reject just reviewing the United States as an individual country. But it’s not enough to simply be aware of the US’ interconnection with other nations and their corporations, as evidenced by global trade: we must see the US elite’s historical determination since at least 1945 to dominate other countries. Therefore, I argue we need to see the United States as the homeland of the US Empire. The purpose of the Empire is to enable the US elites to dominate the world in every way, while making the individual and familial rich and their ilk even more insanely wealthy.

Once we become aware that the US ruling elites are operating on these lines—and Alfred W. McCoy in his brilliant 2017 book, Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (Haymarket Books) claims that all serious US political analysts accept this understanding, with debates being over whether the US Empire will fall or if it can be maintained—then it behooves us on the left to drop our hesitancy and adopt this perspective of Empire.

What we are seeing in an inter-elite “debate” as to how to maintain if not expand the Empire.

To explain, however, we must take it out of the Democratic-Republican dichotomy; keeping it like this only confuses things. The Democrats and Republicans have traditionally been united in supporting the Empire in this post-1945 period, although specifics have varied by presidential administration. We have got to approach this with fresh eyes.

The reality is that the US Empire was established after World War II under President Harry S. Truman, beginning in 1947 with the Greek-Turkey crisis of that year, leading to the Marshal Plan that same year. The CIA was also established that year. Despite very little attention being paid in the electoral campaign to “foreign affairs,” Truman’s approach was “legitimized” by his victory in the 1948 presidential election over Thomas Dewey.

Now, the Empire was not launched “fully developed” out of the heads of Truman and top members of his administration but they had a framework from which the Empire has generally been constructed: blaming everything terrible on the then-existing Soviet Union and subsequently on “bad guys” US intelligence services have decided to demonize.

When this project began in the late 1940s, the US had almost unquestionable dominant power in the world, and especially outside of the Soviet Union and its Empire, which included Eastern Europe and after 1949, also China, at least until 1963. Besides the greatest Navy and Air Force in world history, the US Empire had the atomic bomb—two of which it had dropped on Japan—and the CIA. But, underlying all of this military, political, cultural (including scholarly), and diplomatic power, it had the strongest economy in the world. In the early 1950s, the US produced 50% of all the goods and services produced in the world! That means the US alone produced as many goods and services as the rest of the world combined! The US appeared to be all-but-unchallengeable outside of the Soviet Empire.

But what was also expanding was the concept of “third world” national liberation, as shown by success of the Chinese Communists in 1949 in seizing state power. This was projected by US politicians, and dutifully followed by the mainstream media, as “communism” seeking to conquer the world, and arguing that the US had the duty to fight it to keep the “free world” safe from this infestation. Thus, the US fought wars in Korea and later Vietnam (and elsewhere).

The reality of these upsurges around the world from below was not because of “the communists”—although to their credit, communists were often involved—but were people rejecting imperialism and how the imperial countries had oppressed their countries and exploited their peoples. (By 1915, every country in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East had been colonized by the imperial countries, including the United States; there were only three exceptions: Ethiopia, Siam-now Thailand, and Persia-now Iran.) These formerly colonized countries wanted their independence and freedom, and a growing number of their peoples were willing to fight for it.

Those anti-colonial forces often included labor movements. Workers in ports, on docks, in transportation, and mining industries often unionized and participated in anti-colonial liberation efforts. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), beginning in the very late 1890s-early 1900s under Samuel Gompers, began fighting against these efforts around the world, and especially in Latin America, as these workers’ efforts often targeted US investments in their respective countries; see his intervention in the Mexican Revolution about 1915, before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The AFL also became very adamant in opposing “communism” before World War II, while the CIO turned on its left in 1948-49. (The work detailing labor imperialism around the world has almost been ignored by most labor scholars. See my article, “The AFL-CIO Foreign Policy Program: Where Historians Now Stand.”

In addition to the national liberation struggles, the post-World War II economic recovery of countries such as the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Japan—each imperial countries on their own—came to increasingly challenge the economic dominance of the United States, first by competing against US corporations in their own countries, then by importing into the US, and then to setting up production facilities inside the US. The US lost its overall economic dominance in the world economy.

The US responded, especially to the national liberation struggles, with the CIA. Along with the US labor movement in some cases, the US overthrew democratically-elected governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), and Chile (1973); they also tried in Venezuela in 2002, but failed. The US also supported dictatorships in a number of efforts to ensure that resistance would not emerge in the world.

In 1962, the US Government under President Kennedy created USAID, the Agency for International Development as a counterpart to the CIA. USAID was supposed to be the “good guys,” providing aid to organizations in the “developing world.” (The term developing world was utilized to avoid mentioning the reality that these countries had all been plundered relentlessly by imperial countries like the US, England, France, the Netherlands, etc.) What was hidden from Americans, for example, was that USAID would offer “aid” in exchange for support for US foreign policy, say in the UN, etc., but what must always be remembered is Robert Heinlein’s claim that “there is no such thing as a free lunch”: the US does little or nothing in the world that doesn’t directly benefit the US Empire. So, while USAID has provided health care and other humanitarian benefits around the world, its ultimate purpose is to protect the US Empire.

These programs collectively became known as “soft power” institutions. Basically, they were intended to get the US’ way without having to send in the Marines.

In 1983, after seeing the CIA get exposed for its operations around the world, and seeking new ways to continue its dominance, the Reagan administration created the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy. Based on the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the US Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Private Enterprise and the AFL-CIO’s “Solidarity Center”—each the international wing of their respective organizations—they have operated around the world to maintain the US Empire as an expansion of “soft power.” They operate under the concept of “democracy promotion,” but it is an attenuated, constrained type of democracy, not the one person, one vote form of popular democracy that most Americans recognize: it’s as phony as a $3 bill! And more dangerous!

The problem for the Empire is that escalating economic challenges from the other imperial countries as well as from some corporations from the formerly colonized countries have gutted the US economy. The ability to maintain the Empire became questioned.

By the late 1970s, this began getting serious and, in response, US corporations decided to leave the US and relocate major operations outside the US; and by the early 2000s, this definitely included China. Massive US investments, along from those of other imperial countries, has allowed China to become a serious economic competitor to the US, and the Chinese have used money derived from these investments to modernize their military, drastically reduce the poverty of their people, and expand foreign aid around the world to enhance their economic, political, diplomatic and military power.

In response, the US has been increasing its national debt; the US Government is now over $36 trillion in debt—which is approximately 120 percent of the entire US Gross Domestic Product—and this has grown from under one trillion ($909 billion or $ .9 trillion) in 1980 and continues to grow. In other words, as bad as our economy is doing over the last 40+ years, it is still doing as well as it has not because of solid economic growth but because of political leaders writing hot checks or checks with “insufficient funds.”

So, the economic and political challenges continue to take place despite the US spending millions if not billions of dollars in “soft power” operations around the world, thus showing the continuing contraction of the power of the US Empire; it’s dying.

With that understanding, what Trump is doing is clear: he is gutting soft power operations—why pay for them if they are failing?—and going back to “traditional” imperialism. This will be shown in the expansion of the US military, and the billions of dollars spent on war fighting capabilities while the US social order continues to disintegrate internally. In fact, the Republican Party (a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump) just proposed increasing the US war budget—I refuse to call it “defense”—for this year by $150 billion, from $800 billion to $950 billion.

Where this becomes even clearer is that, as said above, the AFL-CIO has been conducting overseas operations for over 100 years to advance the well-being of the US Empire; its leaders believe that the US should rule the world, regardless of cost.

Yet, despite supposedly being funded my union members’ dues, during this period of “soft power,” the AFL-CIO has garnered over 90% of its annual foreign operations budget from the US Government with a back-of-envelope calculation of this totaling over $1 billion since 1983, all unmentioned and hidden from AFL-CIO affiliated unions and their members. It has proven itself as subservient to the US Government, and this has been developed from forces internal to the labor movement and not outside, such as the US Government, the State Department, the CIA, etc.; the AFL-CIO has not been forced to take these actions by outside organizations. And still, it has lost major funding that previously had been channeled through USAID or NED.

This is despite the efforts of the Solidarity Center, whose website proclaims:

No other organization matches the breadth and depth of the Solidarity Center’s work

The Solidarity Center is a leading international, U.S.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing global worker rights. As a critical force in the global labor movement, our programs are instrumental in fostering fair economies and vibrant democracies.

And it brags about being active in over 60 countries and serving over 70 million people.

Yesterday, an inside source reported that, in response to the cuts in the budgets of USAID and NED, both have been funding conduits for the Solidarity Center, that the Solidarity Center had cut approximately 50 percent of its staff worldwide, somewhere around 400 people. Obviously, its’ work was not as important as they thought it was!

It is this attack on the AFL-CIO’s “Solidarity Center” and its operations that illuminate the Trump game most completely: even if one is serving the interests of advancing the US Empire, as the Solidarity Center has been, if it had been unable to run its operations efficiently and be able to prove desired results, it has been thrown in the trash heap.

The US Empire is failing. The US economy has been gutted, people’s living standards are falling, with homelessness and unemployment rising, and spending more and more money on the war machine will not improve things for working people. They need this money to go into education, a national health care system, investments in infrastructure, projects to mitigate the climate crisis, transfer into alternative energy systems, and support for good people around the world. Trump cannot overcome this.

His desperation shows.

We need to provide viable alternatives, such as telling the truth to our people.

This article was co-published with Green Social Thought.

Notes

For a much deeper analysis, with stunning data on economic inequality in this country, see my “Special History Series: 40 Years of the United States in the World (1981-2023) at https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/special-history-series-40-years-of-the-united-states-in-the-world-1981-2023/. For a listing of all my writings, many linked to original articles, go to https://www.pnw.edu/personal-faculty-pages/kim-scipes-ph-d/publications/.

For an analysis by LEPAIO (Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International Operations), of which I’m a co-founder, about the cutbacks against the Solidarity Center—over 400 people have already lost their jobs—go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqJ0aWKlGng; for a number of webinars about AFL-CIO operations around the world, go to LEPAIO’s website at https://aflcio-int.education/.

For two excellent reports on “soft power,” which came out after I completed my article, see “Far From Benign: The US Aid Industrial Complex” by Binoy Kampmark at https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/14/far-from-benign-the-us-aid-industrial-complex/ and “How the US Uses ‘Aid’ as Soft Power to Dominate the World” by Matt Kinnard and Rania Khalek at https://znetwork.org/zvideo/how-the-u-s-uses-aid-as-soft-power-to-dominate-the-world-w-matt-kennard/.


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Kim Scipes, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Purdue University Northwest in Westville, Indiana. He is a long-time labor and political activist who has been publishing on AFL-CIO foreign operations since 1989; his path-breaking book is "AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?" (Lexington Books, 2010, 2011 paperback). He is one of the founders of LEPAIO, the Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International Operations (https://aflcio-int.education). A former Sergeant in the USMC, he “turned around” on active duty, and has been a political and labor activist for over 50 years. He has published several books and over 250 articles in the US and in 11 different countries. His writings, many with links to the original article, can be found at https://www.pnw.edu/faculty/kim-scipes-ph-d/publications/.

Clinging Onto Hope in Fascist Times: An Interview With Bill Ayers

By Bill Ayers, Richard McDaniel

February 19, 2025

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


Portrait by Robert Shetterly / Americans Who Tell The Truth

Bill Ayers is a retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a co-founder of the Weather Underground.


“Our strength lies in a large political message, a large moral vision, a large mobilization of people, and that’s our only strength,” claims Bill Ayers. A retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ayers is infamous for being a co-founder of the Weather Underground. Founded in 1969, the Weather Underground bombed various public buildings (most prominently the Pentagon and the Capitol) throughout the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to combat American imperialism and racism. Ayers resurfaced in public view during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign due to his loose connection to Barack Obama. Further, Ayers is a prolific author. His latest book, When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer, was published last fall. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Ayers. Even at the age of 80, Ayers is still every bit as passionate about issues regarding education, colonialism, white supremacy, and war. In this interview, Ayers specifically provides indispensable insight on the nature of grassroots activism and on the necessity of remaining hopeful even under the contemporary threat of fascism.

Richard McDaniel (RM): You’ve called the concept of the “white working class” a “fiction built with white supremacy.” Why?

Bill Ayers (BA): Well, because I think that the idea that you can separate the working class into these neat categories around race is a fiction. I think that we settle too often for labels that might be useful in terms of our conceptions, but are actually fundamentally weak. I think that white supremacy is foundational to this country. As I’ve often thought (in my recent book this is kind of a big theme), all Americans are touched with the idea of freedom. We all think that freedom is the best thing in the world. Well, what anybody means by it is a mystery. So, we have the Black Freedom Movement, which means one thing to me, and then we have the Freedom Caucus (the right-wing group in Congress), or the insufferable Ron DeSantis’ [book] The Courage to Be Free. Or, I just got a new Visa card called “Freedom Unlimited.” That just made me want to jump off a bridge. This is ridiculous! What is freedom? And so, foundational to the American experience is a freedom for the conqueror, [which translates to] murder and mayhem for the conquered.

We are a country built on two original sins. One is the sin of slavery, and the other is a sin of settler-colonialism: conquest, murder, mayhem, annihilation. We have to keep that in our minds as we think about moving forward. So, the working class. What is the working class? Well, the working class are those who have to sell their labor in order to live, and they sell it to capitalists (typically). So, the working class is complex, multi-layered, difficult to understand, difficult to contain in a single slogan. But, people start talking about the “white working class,” especially the Democratic party officials when they start saying: “Well, our problem is we lost the white working class.” To me, that is absolute fiction. It defines something that’s not defined in the actual world. If you go to the UAW, there’s not the “white working class” and the “black working class.” There are white people and black people, and race is a fundamental dividing line in our country. There are people who are seduced by white supremacy into working against their class interests. There’s no question about that, but that doesn’t make an entire hegemonic reality called the “white working class.”

I want to trouble that notion because I find the opportunism of the leaders of the Democratic party to be overwhelming and appalling. In their looking at this last national election, for example, they’re all obsessed with: “What was wrong with our message? What was wrong with our…?” They become both narrow and opportunistic, and they fall into all the traps that make this country a problem, both for people here and in the world. What I would rather people spend time thinking about is: What do we stand for in principle? What do we care about ethically, morally? What are we willing to fight for? If you think about the “why” of building a social movement or a political party instead of always thinking operationally–What do I do? Where do I look? How do I appeal?–[that makes] a much stronger basis. Let me back up again. Another thing that I would say is that we have two major political parties in this country. The Republican party was captured a long time ago, but it’s been captured by a populist, racist, white supremacist ideology–a kind of ring-wing populism. It has now transformed in the last few months–we’ve watched it happen–into a constitutional fascist party. By that, I mean it’s using the levers of power and the levers of the law to remake the country so that it is run by and for oligarchs. It is standing firmly against the needs of the masses of people, the working class included. I think that’s the reality we have to look at. The Republican party is now–its recent history as a right-wing populist party, which has now transformed into a constitutional fascist party.

On the other side, we don’t have a party of opposition. We have a series of blocs that come together as a coalition called the “Democratic party.” It is not a vehicle–it’s not a party in the sense that it has a political line and it has a disciplined structure. It’s not like that at all. The Republican party is much more in that realm. So, that means that the Democratic party is a frail instrument of opposition. In fact, I think that you could argue that the Democratic party, in many ways, laid the foundation for a lot of the worst things we’re seeing as this constitutional fascist party goes to work. The Democratic party laid the groundwork for the genocide in Gaza, laid the groundwork for undoing some of the progressive moves that had been made in both the 1930s and the 1960s and ‘70s. I have no allegiance to or affection for the Democratic party as it exists, and I’ve never been a Democrat. So, I’m not as freaked out as some people. I think what we need to do is build an irresistible mass movement of opposition to this fascist movement, but also to the consensus between the two parties around world domination, around militarization. We will oppose these things by building a mass opposition, not by throwing in with the Democratic party.

One last thing on the party politics. You know, the fact that we have normalized the idea that we all get solicitations from candidates, and that we’ve normalized the idea that, in order to run for office, your main job is raising millions and millions of dollars. That is an atrocity. That has nothing to do with democracy, nothing to do with freedom. Yet, that’s what we’ve normalized. I’m still getting texts from the Democratic leadership saying: “We just need you to kick in $20 and we’ll turn this seat.” It’s an obscene idea that the way you participate, and the way you show that you’ve got popular support, is by how much money you raise. That is really a perversion of any notion of democracy.

RM: In an effort to combat the roughly 6,000 Vietnamese that were murdered every week by American imperialism, the Weather Underground famously destroyed government property. How did the Weather Underground succeed in smuggling bombs into the Capitol and the Pentagon? Was there just a lack of security in these government buildings?

BA: There was a lack of security for sure. First, let me backup a minute. Yes, 6,000 people a week were being killed by our government in Indochina, and that went on for ten years. I was first arrested opposing that war in 1965. I was arrested many, many more times. I did organizing work full-time as an anti-war activist and organizer. But, we couldn’t stop the war. By 1968, it was clear that the war was lost. Yet, the killing went on. So, the questions were: Where do we go from here? How do we oppose this regime when it’s already been defeated politically and ethically, but still continues its murderous path? For the left, and even for the country, there was a crisis because a majority of the country opposed the war. Those of us who had sacrificed and worked hard to end it felt, in 1968, for a minute that we won a victory, and then the war escalated. So, what do you do? One of my brothers joined the Democratic party and tried to build a peace wing. One went to Canada and opened a home for deserters. One went to the communes.

There were many things to do, but I became part of a group out of Students for a Democratic Society. We built an organization away from the eyes of the state, and we felt that we had to find a way to survive in what we thought of as impending American fascism. So, we began to build an underground. When three of our comrades were killed in an accidental bombing explosion, we went underground. We wanted to take the war to the warmakers. We wanted to issue a screaming response, and so we figured out ways to destroy property. It was extreme vandalism, [which] is one way to think about it. It was extreme vandalism with a political message. We weren’t the first or the last people to engage in extreme vandalism, but ours was focused on two things which are still the focus of my politics. One was U.S. imperialism abroad, and one was white supremacy at home. So, we built the capacity to commit illegal, some would say insane (but I don’t think they were insane), actions that destroyed government property or that destroyed a police station.

How did we do it? We figured out ways to breach the security of places like the Pentagon. Now, one could argue that it would be impossible to do today, but that’s not true. But, I’m not that interested in tactics. I’ve never been much of a tactician or much of a person who knows how to do those kinds of things. Rather, I think we should be thinking about: How do we build mass consciousness around the evils of war and racism? I think that’s the most important thing. Figuring out how to evade capture and so on is not that important, actually. In fact, let me transition into [a] slightly different space. I actually think that if you ever start to think that our military versus their military, that we could win, or if you think that our spycraft versus their spycraft gives us an advantage, you’re way off-base. The reality is that, if it’s a clash between their army and our army, we lose every time. If it’s a clash between our imaginations and their imaginations, or our ethical stance and their ethical stance, I think we have a very–not only a good chance of winning, but we will win. That means that we can transform society into a peaceful, just, balanced world if we have large numbers of people involved.

So, I know everybody in the anti-war movement has figured out how to use Signal on their phones. I hate Signal. But, I mean, I have it, [and] I’ve used it. I used it when we were involved in an illegal action shutting down a war munitions plant in Chicago. Everybody wanted to be on Signal, so I was on Signal. There were also a lot of things that I learned in that demonstration. But, once the encampments happened in universities–[after] the encampments were crushed by the fearful, backwards university administrations, to then say: “We’ll meet in small groups on Signal.” [It] makes no sense to me. That’s a time when you should have a big meeting, [and] invite the entire university to an auditorium, because our strength is in numbers. It’s not in Signal. I may have gone off on a tangent, but I think it’s important that militants today (and organizers today) can’t get caught up in the idea, because they’re savvy about technology, that somehow technology is where our strength lies. That’s not where it lies. Our strength lies in a large political message, a large moral vision, a large mobilization of people, and that’s our only strength.

You asked initially about the Weather Underground and a tactical question, which I really don’t have much knowledge of or ability with. But, I wanted to move away from that and say: If you focus on [tactics] in your organizing or in your thinking about how to organize, you will go down a dead end. They have all the strength, and we have all the weaknesses. Our only strength is in talking to people and building bigger and bigger coalitions of people who see that their lives could be materially, spiritually, and ethically better without the capitalist, greedy, acquisitive, militaristic, predatory system that we live in today.

RM: In a 2012 interview, you rightly stated that “you can’t be free if you’re not enlightened.” Why does the United States have such a hard time at granting equal education to all students?

BA: That’s why. You answered the question by asking it! I mean, one of the things we’re witnessing right now that I think is really important to name is that one of the hallmarks of fascism, or any autocratic rule, is to destroy the university. One of my messages as a teacher, and I write about this in everything I write, [is] that free people read freely, that you need no one’s permission to interrogate the world. That has to be the major message that teachers in a free society give to their students: “You have a right to be here. You have a right to read freely. You have the right to investigate the world, and, in fact, your responsibility is to try to understand what’s going on around you.” As Charlie Cobb said in 1963 when he wrote the proposal for Freedom Schools: “The black children of Mississippi have been denied many things: fully funded education, fully trained teachers, [and] decent facilities. But, the fundamental injury is being denied the right to think for themselves about the circumstances of their lives and how they could be otherwise.” That’s the most radical thing a teacher could say: “You have a right to understand the circumstances of your lives and how they could be otherwise.”

So, who’s afraid of that very sensible thing that I just said? People who are afraid of it are the people in 1963 in Mississippi who ran the plantations. They’re afraid of that because an enlightened group of workers will overthrow the plantation. That’s why reading was outlawed during slavery. Frederick Douglass famously tells the story of his master’s wife teaching him to read, and the master finding out about it and exploding, saying: “You can’t teach him to read! That will unfit him to be a slave.” Exactly. Reading, education, [and] knowledge is liberating at its best. That means you can’t have any restrictions on how you interrogate the world. You don’t need your parents permission, you don’t need your teacher’s permission, [and] you certainly don’t need the government’s permission to interrogate the world. So, what are we witnessing right now? Banning books in Florida and Oklahoma, closing libraries in Arizona and Georgia, firing teachers all over the place, [and] fighting the teachers unions because the teachers unions are standing up not just for wages and benefits, but for kids’ right to learn.

We’re seeing this attack on universities, which now has taken on a whole new dimension and is attacking research, attacking graduate schools, attacking the bank accounts of the universities (so the endowments are now under siege), and so on. The big research universities are the product of the 20th century, and I can give you my critique of them. I have an endless critique because I lived in them for a long time. Of course, I’m very critical of the universities as they are, but what we’re witnessing is not the undoing of the universities as they are for a more liberatory, participatory move. We’re witnessing the undoing of them precisely so that people can’t think, can’t learn, can’t know, [which makes people] have blinders on that will limit their capacity to act. That’s the fundamental feature we’re witnessing when I talk about the drift, or now the lurch, toward fascism. The attack on the universities is clear.

One more [thing]. In the spring of last year, we saw the creation of encampments all over the country to deal with a fundamental, major political issue that was rocking the world and rocking the nation. Kids took the initiative to say: “Let’s start a conversation. We’ve got an encampment here.” I went to five of them. They were absolutely utopian communities. People were taking care of each other. There were free libraries. People were reading. People were asking questions. People were learning at an incredible rate, and it’s exactly what you want a university to be. The administrations could’ve said: “These kids have highlighted a major issue of our times. Let’s talk. Let’s have a conversation throughout the university.” Instead, they went to Washington, they cringed in front of the no-nothings, they came back to their campuses, [and] they called the cops on American universities. Then, when the students and teachers were away (when people weren’t paying attention), they changed the rules about when you could speak up, how you could speak up, what you could speak about, and they fired several faculty members, including Katherine Franke, [who was] a tenured law professor at Columbia University. They fired her. How is that possible? Some places that I know of closed departments as a way to fire a tenured professor.

The university presidents could not go before Congress and do what you and I could do easily, which is not just to defend the first amendment (it wasn’t about the first amendment), but to also defend academic freedom, which means the freedom to learn, the freedom to teach, [and] the freedom to think. That’s academic freedom. It goes way beyond the first amendment. [The] first amendment is that the government “shall make no laws.” That’s easy. The right to think, the right to teach, the right to learn–those are fundamental to a free society. That’s what was under attack last spring. That’s what’s under attack in a systemic way as the fascist constitutionalists take power. They’re going to undo the Education Department. Why? Well, because education is their enemy. Reading is their enemy.

The other thing that I would say about the spring and about what’s going on now is [that] there’s been a lot of comparisons to McCarthyism. There’s some truth in that. The universities were pathetic during the McCarthy era as well, as were many businesses and many other places. But, there’s a difference. McCarthyism was about: “What are your associations? Are you in the communist party? Do you associate with communists?” This is about: “What book are you reading? Let me look at your curriculum.” We had university presidents like the president of Columbia naming professors who were teaching the wrong things. That’s just unprecedented, and it’s outrageous. It is the hallmark of fascism.

RM: In your book, Demand the Impossible, you wrote that hope is “an antidote to cynicism and despair” and is the “capacity to notice or invent alternatives” to the existing world. Unfortunately, however, many Americans feel pessimistic and are discouraged to take the steps necessary for change. How do we cultivate a culture of hope in the United States?

BA: Well, we have to, first of all, advocate for it and believe in it. I’ll tell you a couple of things. One is–I think I might’ve written about this somewhere, but I’m often accused of being an optimist, and I’m not an optimist. My mother was an optimist. Karl Marx was an optimist. I used to accuse my mom of being a Marxist because she thought she knew how things were going to turn out. I have no idea how things are going to turn out, and neither do you, the pundits, nor the people who are analyzing why the Democrats lost. Nobody knows how things are going to be tomorrow. That gives me hope because both the pessimists and the optimists are determinists. They know what’s going to happen. The pessimists sit on their couch, smoke a joint, and watch the world go to hell. The optimists wave cheerly from the window into the sunshine. Both are wrong because we don’t know. We don’t know whether we’ll be able to build a movement. We don’t know whether catastrophic capitalist climate collapse is going to do us all in sooner or later. We don’t know.

But, what we do know is, because we don’t know, we could choose to be hopeful. It’s often been said [that] the day before any revolution, the talking heads are certain that it’s impossible, and the day after they can explain why it was inevitable. That’s incidentally why I don’t find the debriefing of the Democratic party’s loss to be that interesting or illuminating because people go on MSNBC and pretty much bullshit. They don’t know. They would be better served if they were out organizing for a vision of a new world that is within reach. I always say to myself: “I’m not an optimist. I’m not a pessimist.” I choose hope precisely because I don’t know what’s coming. Try and fail and try again and fail again, but fail better–that, to me, is the rhythm of a real radical or a real revolutionary. You have to keep trying because you don’t know what’s coming and you know what exists is unacceptable. The mayhem and the murder and the cruelty is unacceptable, and we have to find a way to do our work. For me, as I’ve often said, I get up every morning and think: “Maybe today we’ll overthrow capitalism.” Then, I go to bed every night disappointed (a little bit), but I get up the next morning and say the same thing. Why not? Because you don’t know. Why not get busy with projects of repair, reimagining, and revolution? That’s how I want to live my life.

I had dinner with Eduardo Galeano (the Latin American revolutionary from Uruguay), who wrote the book Open Veins of Latin America. He’s passed away. But, twenty years ago I had dinner with Eduardo, and we were exchanging views on a lot of things. We got to talking about how we both were often accused of being romantics, optimists, utopians. I feel like I’m not guilty of being an optimist. I’m guilty of being a bit romantic, being hopeful, all that. But, Galeano told me the best story. He said that a person he met accused him of being a utopian, and the guy said to him: “What good is utopia?” Galeano’s response was: “Well, it’s true. I take two steps towards utopia, and utopia walks two steps away. I walk ten steps towards utopia, [and] utopia walks ten steps away. It’s good for walking.” I thought that was marvelous. It keeps you going because you have a north star, not a dogmatic fixed image of what we could build. You have an idea that we could move towards more participation, more transparency, more democracy, more mutual aid, more mutual regard. That’s where I want to go: more peace, more justice, more joy. That gives me the ability to keep on walking.

I would say the issues that you raised, and that have been my issues my whole life (war and white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism), are the core issues that we are facing today. So, you think about the Black Panther party. How did the Black Panther party get started sixty years ago? It got started around the killing of black youth by the police in Oakland. That’s still an issue, and that’s only the tip of an iceberg of what white supremacy is. But, I think that I’m deeply involved–in my active work now, besides teaching and writing–in the anti-mass incarceration movement, the peace movement (the anti-genocide movement), the climate catastrophe movement, [and] with working on questions of homelessness. These are all things that matter. From my way of thinking and talking about how we get people hopeful, I would say that if you spend all of your time looking at the sites of power you have no access to (the White House, the Medieval Auction bloc called the Congress, the Pentagon, Wall Street), you’re bound to feel hopeless. The powerful will not make you feel hopeful. But, if instead you spend your time in the sites of power you have absolute access to (the classroom, the house of worship, the street, the community, the workplace, the neighborhood)–you have access to all of that, so why aren’t you spending your time there rather than watching MSNBC or reading The New York Times and feeling like shit all day?

To me, we have to stay hopeful because it’s the logical thing to do, and it’s the only way to live because you don’t know. The other way of saying it that [Antonio] Gramsci put it that a lot of people quote is to be a “pessimist of the head and an optimist of the heart,” or something like that. The idea being that you can be analytical and make sense out of all the stuff that’s going on, but you still have to have a heart that yearns for something better and that can find energy to organize for that something better. That, I think, is where we should all be living.

What the US Can Learn From South Koreans Who Stopped an Authoritarian Power-Grab

South Koreans reversed a martial law decree in just six hours, showing how ordinary citizens and politicians can take fast action to uphold democracy.

By Jungmin Choi

February 19, 2025

Source: Waging Nonviolence


Light sticks from K-pop idol concerts have become a symbol of mass demonstrations. (Telegram/Bisang Action)



As Elon Musk and his DOGE team set about dismantling government agencies, many Americans expected a strong response from Congressional Democrats. Instead, party leaders offered weak statements and little resistance to being refused entry to the very agencies they are tasked with overseeing.

This lack of urgency amid what’s being called an administrative coup stoked a wave of angry calls to “do more.” In their outrage on social media, many pointed to decisive action taken by politicians in other countries facing crisis. For example, someone on BlueSky noted that “South Korean politicians were literally scaling fences to protect their government,” while “our senators are sending out pre-scheduled tweets about the Super Bowl.”

South Korea is a particularly apt example in this context. After all, something incredible happened there two months ago, and it could be just the kind of inspiration Americans need to turn the tide on the Trump administration’s dangerous power-grab.

On Dec. 3, at 10:23 p.m., South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol unexpectedly declared nationwide martial law, citing the need to eliminate pro-North Korean elements and anti-state forces. He then established martial law command, mobilized troops and stripped citizens of their fundamental political and social rights. This included prohibiting all political activities by the National Assembly and political parties, control over all press and publication freedoms, a ban on strikes, slowdowns and assemblies, and the ability to arrest and detain anyone without judicial procedures or warrants.

The last time martial law was declared in South Korea was in 1979, following the assassination of then-President Park Chung-hee. However, what happened in December would be considered a self-coup — where an incumbent president takes actions to acquire or demand greater power while in office — and no South Korean president has done that since October 1972.

The martial law situation came to an abrupt end when the National Assembly passed a resolution demanding its withdrawal on Dec. 4 at 1:01 a.m. In response, martial law forces gradually withdrew from the National Assembly building. The Presidential Office announced the lifting of martial law at 4:26 a.m., and it was formally rescinded through a cabinet council resolution four minutes later, effectively terminating the entire episode within about six hours.

Subsequently, a nationwide movement demanding both the Yoon Suk Yeol administration’s resignation and comprehensive social reform was initiated. President Yoon is currently under detention and indictment while simultaneously facing impeachment proceedings. Many high-ranking officials from the Yoon administration have either resigned or been impeached, and numerous general-grade officers involved in the incident have been detained.

There were many reasons that the self-coup failed, including command confusion due to the extremely small number of personnel involved in planning the attempt. However, none of these factors could have halted the coup without civilian action. Here are four key lessons from this movement that contributed to their victory.
1. Take action commensurate with the threat and move quickly

The South Korean Constitution explicitly states that when the majority of the National Assembly request that martial law be lifted the president must comply. After martial law was declared, civil society activists shared information about the police blockade of the National Assembly and the possibility of MPs being arrested, calling for people to gather at the Assembly.

As activists arrived, they began livestreaming the situation outside the assembly via social media. The opposition leader also initiated a livestream from his car while heading to the assembly, appealing to supporters to gather. Over 16,000 people assembled outside the assembly that night. They arrived before the martial law forces’ armored vehicles and helicopters, helping MPs scale the walls of the blockaded assembly building. Those who arrived by taxi reported that drivers didn’t accept the fare.

Elderly citizens stated they came thinking that they have lived long enough, and should take bullets instead of the young if the military opened fire. Young people reported standing in front of tanks with their bare hands, thinking that they wouldn’t actually shoot. They stood against armored vehicles and buses carrying martial law troops with nothing but their bodies, while recording and transmitting footage in real-time through social media. Most citizens who rushed to the assembly had no knowledge of nonviolent direct action or nonviolence training, yet instinctively grasped what was most crucial.

MPs weren’t the only ones scaling the assembly walls that night. Parliamentary aides and staffers also climbed over with citizens’ assistance. While citizens outside surrounded and blocked tanks, armored vehicles and buses, helicopters landed inside the assembly grounds. Parliamentary aides defended the main assembly building, constructing barricades with furniture at the entrances and using fire extinguishers to repel martial law forces who broke through windows. Assembly staffers prioritized protecting the generator, since modern parliamentary voting requires electricity.

Ultimately, the martial law troops failed to occupy the main parliamentary chamber due to the resistance mounted by citizens, parliamentary security personnel and legislative staff, including lawmakers’ aides.
2. Encourage defections from security forces

A common testimony from citizens who confronted martial law forces that night was their open or subtle resistance to the coup attempt. They didn’t forcefully enter the National Assembly by actively repelling citizens gathered in front of the parliament and didn’t forcibly remove resisting aides from the assembly building. When they were ordered to seize the servers of the National Election Commission, they delayed by eating instant noodles at a nearby convenience store. And when the president’s arrest warrant was executed, Presidential Security Service officers either took leave or remained in standby areas, disobeying the Security Service chief’s orders, leading to the president’s arrest.

There are many reasons that they acted this way. It partly stemmed from the military command’s secretive preparation and execution of the coup. The martial law troops reportedly did not know their destination until moments before boarding military helicopters, and none received proper briefings. The new generation of military personnel, raised after procedural democracy began taking root, also possesses more civic consciousness than their predecessors. They were capable of independently assessing that the situation by no means warranted martial law, and thus would have been less receptive to orders to mobilize force to stabilize social order under such circumstances.

Ordinary citizens also actively encouraged soldiers to defect or not follow unlawful orders. Until the assembly passed the martial law termination, civil society organizations repeatedly issued statements appealing for disobedience from martial law forces. Citizens outside the assembly physically blocked martial law troops attempting to enter, tearfully appealing for disobedience with pleas to stop. They were urged to not commit crimes against the people by following unlawful orders. There were some citizens who were former special forces veterans, and they appealed for restraint by emphasizing their shared unit background. And lawyers’ group even distributed templates to the Security Service for them to justify refusing unjust orders.

3. Beware of the next martial law

Although the National Assembly passed a resolution demanding the lifting of martial law, it took approximately four hours until the president actually lifted it. During this time, people maintained their position in front of the National Assembly, preparing for the possibility that the president might reject the assembly’s demand. According to a government investigation that followed, President Yoon allegedly issued directives to “enter the National Assembly main chamber by force, including the use of firearms if necessary, to remove the members.” Furthermore, it was revealed that he instructed the military to “continue with the operation regardless of the martial law being lifted, as it could be declared two or three more times if needed.”

While the first coup attempt ended in failure after six hours, citizens remained anxious about the coup forces continuing to occupy key government positions. As soon as dawn broke on Dec. 4, civil society organizations across the country began issuing statements and holding press conferences throughout the day, demanding the president’s arrest, resignation and parliamentary impeachment.

The opposition party announced their intention to file criminal complaints against the president and the minister of defense for insurrection and to pursue impeachment. The secretary general of the National Assembly issued measures completely prohibiting the entry of Defense Ministry staff and police officers into the assembly building. Many opposition members of parliament, including the assembly speaker, stayed within the parliament building for about a week rather than returning home or to an official residence, preparing for contingencies such as abduction.

Civil society organizations held large-scale daily protests in front of the National Assembly to protect the parliamentarians while simultaneously pressuring the assembly to swiftly pass the presidential impeachment motion. On Dec. 14, as the National Assembly passed the impeachment motion, over a million people turned out for the mass demonstration. They shifted from the National Assembly to the vicinity of the presidential residence and the Constitutional Court, continuing to demand the president’s arrest and urging the Constitutional Court to expedite its impeachment deliberations.
4. Create festive, diverse forms of resistance

As large-scale demonstrations continued daily in front of the National Assembly, organizing the crowds became the primary consideration. Notably, light sticks emerged as a new symbol of mass protest, replacing the traditional candlelight. While candlelight maintains a somewhat solemn atmosphere, light stick at the protests created an ambiance reminiscent of K-pop concerts, where they are often used by fans to cheer for their favorite idols. They created remarkable synergy at the protests when combined with hit songs that were sung as protest chants. (When the Jeju Air accident claimed 179 lives in late December, light sticks were temporarily replaced with candles as a gesture of mourning.)

This played a crucial role in attracting younger generations, who comprise the K-pop idol fanbase, to the rallies. Another characteristic feature of South Korean mass protests — food sharing — evolved significantly, with participants pre-paying for dozens or hundreds of cups of coffee, beverages, various snacks and meals at nearby cafes and restaurants, or sending coffee and snack trucks to protest sites. The rallies were basically structured like festivals, featuring various musicians and artists. Speeches were limited to two minutes each, with pre-registered free speech sessions, ensuring that participants had an opportunity to share their perspectives with the crowd.

Many other groups participated. Unions for metal workers, railway workers and transport workers went on strike and held demonstrations at local ruling party offices and the offices of parliamentarians who refused to cooperate with the impeachment motion. History teachers created and distributed educational materials as teaching resources. The 34-page PowerPoint presentation distributed online was structured in four sections: the nature of martial law, historical cases of martial law in South Korea, problematic aspects of the Dec. 3 martial law declaration, and the creation of slogans for protests and collective actions. It was designed for immediate classroom implementation. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions developed a website facilitating easy transmission of text messages to anti-impeachment parliamentarians, effectively rendering their mobile phones unusable due to the overwhelming volume of incoming messages.

Following the failure of this six-hour attempted self-coup, South Korean social movement organizations initially concentrated their efforts on pursuing presidential impeachment through the National Assembly, followed by demands for the president’s arrest. Currently, they are campaigning for the Constitutional Court to deliver a final verdict for the president’s dismissal. To this end, on Dec. 11, an umbrella organization called Emergency Action for Yoon Out and Social Reform was established by some 1,550 civil society groups.

South Korean social movements, drawing from their experience of successfully impeaching President Park Geun-hye just eight years ago, shared the assessment that their previous achievement was limited to merely shifting political power from conservatives to liberals. Therefore, this new umbrella organization set its objectives beyond the immediate resignation of the president. It’s aiming to establish the Seventh Republic of Korea that would achieve comprehensive social reforms through public discourse.

To achieve this, Emergency Action is conducting large-scale weekend demonstrations in front of the Constitutional Court while simultaneously operating 11 subcommittees composed of member organizations to design visions for social reform, develop reform proposals through deliberative processes and gather public opinion through discussions.

It is worth noting the role of the opposition party during the self-coup attempt. Parliamentary members who had military and National Intelligence Service backgrounds, and were previously considered conservative within the opposition party, played crucial roles. These members had easier access to internal information due to their existing networks. They had carefully observed the widespread appointment of the president’s private associates to key positions in the military and executive branch since the fall of 2024, interpreting these moves as preparations for declaring martial law.

Their intelligence capabilities enabled the opposition party to prepare for the possibility of martial law. In September, they had already proposed amendments to strengthen the requirements for declaring martial law. Moreover, opposition lawmakers had already agreed to gather at the National Assembly if necessary, which enabled them to move swiftly on the day martial law was declared and pass a resolution to lift it.

In South Korea, the prevention of a self-coup — which could have easily succeeded given the mobilization of martial law forces — was achieved through swift action based on identifying methods to lift martial law within the existing system. Had the coup succeeded that day, reversing the subsequent dictatorial situation would have been far more challenging.

The dangers of the moment are still real. Since the president’s arrest on Jan. 26, the situation has grown more complex with signs of far-right mobilization. South Korea has entered a prolonged struggle to strengthen its imperfect democracy, but its example should provide inspiration to all, including Americans, even as South Koreans work to defend and expand upon their recent victory.


Jungmin Choi is a campaigner at World Without War, a South Korean antimilitarist organization based in Seoul that supports conscientious objectors and takes action against the arms trade.

US Federal Workers Hold Nationwide Day of Action to “Save Our Services” From the Trump/Musk Purge

By Eric Blanc, Amy Goodman , Juan Gonzalez

February 19, 2025

Source: Democracy Now!

Today federal workers nationwide are calling for support for a “Save Our Services Day of Action” mobilizing nationwide in opposition to Elon Musk’s efforts to dismantle government agencies through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Workers plan to protest outside of federal buildings and Tesla dealerships to show support for the work of federal agencies. “It’s not just about federal workers,” says Eric Blanc, author and assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. “If they take out the federal unions, that’s our best block right now against Trump’s authoritarian power grab.” This comes as Musk has gained access to the sensitive information of millions of Americans, all the while laying off government workers en masse. The layoffs have affected the FAA, NIH, IRS and more.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.

We’re going to end with federal workers today. Federal government workers and union members are holding protests in cities across the country in what they’re calling the Save Our Services Day of Action.

For more, we’re joined by Eric Blanc, professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, author of the new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. He’s offering organizing support to today’s protests.

Eric, thanks so much. It was great to see you last night as you talked about your exhaustion but exhilaration around these protests. You were remembering Jane McAlevey, the great labor strategist, last night at CUNY. But, today, talk about what’s happening. Is it twice a day in cities all over the country, lunch and after work?

ERIC BLANC: Every major city in the country is going to have a big protest, and the locations and the times differ. What I would recommend for anybody who wants to support federal workers and understands the importance of protecting our services against Musk’s coup and power grab is to go to the website that we set up, where you can see your local event. That’s go.workersfiremusk.com. So, you just go to the website go.workersfiremusk.com, and then you can find your local rally. There’s noontime and 5:30 rallies in lots of places, but that’s the best place to find information.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Eric, what’s been the actual number of federal workers already either forced out to take voluntary retirement or given layoff notices?

ERIC BLANC: I mean, to be honest, everybody’s head is spinning. We don’t even have those numbers yet. What we do know — what we do know is that the stakes couldn’t be higher — right? — for everybody. And this is not just about federal workers. And that’s their message that they’re coming out with today, is that the attacks on federal workers, they’re the canary in the coal mine. If they take out the federal unions, that’s our best block right now against Trump’s authoritarian power grab. And if you can destroy the power and resistance of federal workers and their organized efforts, then that’s going to allow Trump to go after all the services and decimate all the public sector. And, you know, who’s going to provide Social Security? Who’s going to provide Medicare? Who’s going to provide basic health and safety regulations for workers? This impacts everybody. And that’s the message that workers are getting out there.

AMY GOODMAN: Eric, all over the country — I mean, the message being put out from the Oval Office is that workers are fat. You’re the unnecessary fat. They’re the corrupt ones. They’re the ones who are bleeding the budget dry. Can you respond to that, as you talk about federal workers as the canary in the coal mine? I mean, we’re seeing it’s more than a quarter of a million probationary workers that have been fired, but probation includes people who have been there for decades who get a promotion and they then go on some kind of probationary period. They, too, get fired.

ERIC BLANC: Yeah, look, the big lie getting put out there right now is that the reason working-class Americans are hurting is because of federal employees. And there’s just no basis for this. Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, has a $412 billion net worth. That’s more — that’s significantly more than the total pay of every federal worker, 2.3 million federal workers. They get $217 billion per year. Musk makes more than all of them combined, almost double. So the idea that what’s at the root of people struggling is federal workers, rather than the billionaires that are taking our country into the ground, it’s ludicrous. And I think it’s time for people to start speaking out.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you so much, Eric, for being with us. We’ll be out covering those protests in New York City, both at — I think it’s, what, 12:30 and — or 12:00 and 5:30?

ERIC BLANC: Yeah, so it’s going to — in New York City, it will be noon at Foley Square and then 5:30 at Foley Square. And we’re expecting a big turnout, so hope to see you there.

AMY GOODMAN: Eric Blanc, professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, author of We Are the Union. He is organizing along with federal workers around the country.

A happy belated birthday to Neil Shibata and to Hugh Gran! And, Juan, once again, happy 29th anniversary! It is so wonderful to be here with you on this day and with all the listeners and viewers around the country and around the world. We wish we could give you slices of cake around the country and around the world, because Democracy Now! is everyone’s. Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Thank you so much to our remarkable staff, past and present. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.


Eric Blanc is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, the author of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (University of California Press, 2025), and an organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.

U$A

The Strike at Kaiser

By Cal Winslow

February 16, 2025

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



2400 striking behavioral health care workers in Southern California have taken to the streets – literally. On February 8, workers sat down in the middle of Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles, blocking traffic in front of Kaiser Permanente’s Los Angeles Medical Center. The strikers, members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), blocked traffic until a dozen of them, as well as California Labor Federation President Lorena Gonzalez and other supporters, were arrested. The sit-in marked day 110 of the strike. The strikers want parity with Kaiser’s workers in Northern California, workers who won significant gains in a 2022 10-week strike.

The Southern California workers want their patients to have timely visits. Today, they complain, members (Kaiser has 4.8 million fee paying members it provides services for) can book in for treatment, but frequently endure four weeks or longer for return appointments and treatment. This even though California mandates a maximum wait time of 10 business days for both initial and return visits. They also want time to do their jobs, to provide mental health care for the Kaiser members who deserve it and pay for it. They want seven hours per week to prepare for appointments, devise treatment plans, provide resources, file mandated reports, go to the bathroom, and so on.

It is astonishing that Kaiser, the largest HMO in the country with profits of $4.1 billion in 2023 and $64 billion in the bank will cancel thousands of appointments rather than meet these minimal demands. And blatantly oblivious it seems to a national crisis in mental health, compounded no doubt by the new regime in Washington. This is in defiance Medicare standards, of its own employees, also of the Southern California labor movement which provides many thousands of members, and an array of elected officials who have called out the giant HMO for having shown no urgency in reaching an agreement. These include Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire who have urged Kaiser to “resume good faith negotiations with NUHW as soon as possible, and to agree to the union’s reasonable contract proposals in order to ensure the delivery of timely and appropriate behavioral health services to your patients.”

Governor Gavin Newsom, in a February 6 letter to both parties, wrote, “Getting our full behavioral health workforce back to work gives us the best chance to address the needs that will undoubtedly grow in the weeks and months to come in the Los Angeles region and elsewhere,” noting that in the wake of the wildfires “thousands of Californians are grappling with extreme loss and displacement” and offering to assist in “identifying a mutually agreed-upon mediator.” As of now Kaiser hasn’t responded to Newsom’s offer of mediation to help settle the strike.

Instead, Kaiser executive Dawn Gillam has doubled down on maintaining the disparity between Kaiser’s Northern and Southern mental health systems, insisting “we are two different business models… and we have two different geographic markets that are very different.” Really. Kaiser’s slow-motion bargaining is set to resume on February 17, it will not schedule another until March 6.

It is a great tribute to these workers that they have held out for more than 100 days and show no sign of weakening. 82% signed a petition committing them to support the strike as long as it takes. I can only say that forcing these workers away from their jobs, without pay, for so long including through the holidays – these are people with lives to live and families to support – is purely and simply unconscionable, cruel.

The National Union of Healthcare Workers is a member-led movement that represents 19,000 healthcare workers in California and Hawaii, including more than 4,700 Kaiser mental health professionals: psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, addiction medicine counselors, licensed clinical counselors, and marriage and family therapists.


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Cal Winslow is a retired Fellow in Environmental History at the University of California, Berkeley and is Director of the Mendocino Institute. He was trained as an historian at Antioch College and Warwick University where he studied under the direction of the late Edward Thompson. He is a co-author of the re-released Albion's Fatal Tree (Verso 2011). In the 1970s he worked as a warehouseman, truck driver and journalist, a participant in and observer of the rank-and-file workers’ rebellion of the decade. He is an editor of Rebel Rank and File, Labor Militancy and Revolt from below During the Long 1970s (Verso, 2010). He taught labor studies at the Center for Worker Education, City College of New York and was a visiting Senior Lecturer at the Northern College for Residential Adult Working Class Education in South Yorkshire. His is author of many books, including E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left (Monthly Review 2014). His most recent is Radical Seattle, the General Strike of 1919 (Monthly Review, 2019). He lives with his family on the Mendocino Coast of Northern California. He and his wife, Faith Simon, a Family Nurse Practitioner specializing in pediatrics, are founding members of Mendocino Parents for Peace and are associated with the Bay Area gathering Retort.

Conservation Groups File Lawsuit to Protect Elk Habitat, Wildlife Corridors and Old Growth Forests in Montana

Mike Garrity

February 20, 2025
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Rocky Mountain Elk, Lolo National Forest, Montana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Native Ecosystems Council and Council on Wildlife and Fish filed a lawsuit in federal court in Montana against a road-building and commercial logging project on public lands in the Big Belt Mountains of Montana.  The challenged Wood Duck project is located in a wildlife corridor that is critical for recovery of grizzly bears, and is highly desirable elk habitat.  Logging and road building harm elk and grizzly bears and will likely displace both species from the public lands in the area.

The lawsuit raises challenges against the project, and also against the Forest Service’s failure to implement strong protections for public land elk habitat, grizzly bear travel corridors, and old growth forest across the Helena – Lewis and Clark National Forest.

This area is a key travel corridor for grizzly bears to provide critical genetic exchange between the Yellowstone and Glacier National Park grizzlies to avoid inbreeding.  Additionally, the area is already experiencing an exodus of native elk herds fleeing the heavily-logged and roaded National Forest lands for refuge on private ranch lands, much to the chagrin of hunters seeking elk on public lands, as well as private land ranchers.

While the Forest Service has masked its commercial logging agenda in recent years behind the claim that extensive logging and road-building on public lands are necessary for wildfire prevention, that is not the case here. The agency admits that “Wood Duck is not a fuels reduction project,” “there is no wildfire risk reduction component of the project purpose and need,” and “the Wood Duck project area does not overlap with wildland urban interface.”

One of the primary problems in this project area is the fact that 90-95% of elk in this hunting district are displaced during hunting season from public lands with high road densities onto private land where no public hunting is allowed, according to data collected by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks.  Yet the Forest Service failed to disclose this critical data from the State in the Project environmental assessment. And when the State proposed closing a number of roads to improve the situation for elk habitat and elk hunters, the Forest Service refused to even consider the State’s proposals in the Project environmental assessment.

Another concern is the old growth logging authorized by the Project. Old growth-dependent wildlife species are a rare terrestrial community in Montana. Interior forest mammals, raptors, woodpeckers and songbirds need a certain level of closed canopy forest for cover as well as large dead trees for nesting or denning.  This type of forest can take hundreds of years to grow and is highly desired by commercial logging interests due to the economic value of large trees.

The law requires widely-distributed and connected old growth throughout the National Forest, and throughout each Geographic Area in the National Forest. Yet the Forest Service refused to provide any map of existing old growth at these scales.  Thus, the public is left to wonder how much old growth is left, and whether these rare, old-growth dependent forest species will go extinct from a failure to preserve an adequate amount of their habitat.

The government has to follow the law just like anyone else.  Now more than ever — when the government breaks the law, it is our obligation to stand up and stand in the way.

Please help us to challenge this illegal action in court, and force the government to follow the law.

Mike Garrity is the executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.