US clings to exceptionalism, hindering cooperation with China


By Einar Tangen
China.org.cn,
May 6, 2024


U.S.-China relations are at an inflection point. Pressing global issues like climate change, a faltering global economy, conflicts and technological disruption demand a cooperative, consensus-driven approach to avert potential disaster.

Washington recognizes this on one level, constantly turning to Beijing to help solve global challenges. Yet recent visits to China by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen show the U.S. remains unwilling to compromise its faith in American exceptionalism – the belief that global peace and prosperity hinges on the imposition of American-style political and economic governance in all countries, even at gunpoint if necessary.

Lacking a new strategy, America's political elite have reverted to their 1970s playbook against Japan. This includes constant, unsupported claims of unfair competition driven by internal overcapacity due to subsidies.

If you have any doubts, look at old pictures of politicians, local and national, wielding sledgehammers and bats to destroy Japanese electronics and cars.

China's electric vehicle (EV) market started developing 12 years ago. By 2018, over 150 companies populated the EV market. Today, only a handful remain viable due to domestic competition spurred by innovation, costs and consumer demands. The reality is that Chinese EV makers have surpassed their international rivals, but like with Japan's auto ascendance decades ago, Washington's answer isn't to compete, but to intimidate and cry foul over U.S. companies' failures.

Blinken's visit to China aired a litany of accusations, including "market distortions," against the backdrop of a faltering U.S. economy that just reported a lackluster 1.6% first-quarter GDP growth.

Yet, as Bloomberg Businessweek reports, the real issue is not only America's failure to compete, but the effects it is having on its domestic economy:

"A laid-off YouTube employee is down to his last paycheck. A former startup worker has to borrow money from his family to pay his mortgage. A veteran financial consultant can barely land an interview. They're all victims of stalled white-collar hiring across much of the U.S. industries such as finance, technology and media, and professional services like law and accounting, have turned into a pocket of weakness in an otherwise-robust labor market."

Statistics across major metro areas reflect decreasing high-income service jobs, especially tech roles, while subsidized U.S. chip plants face delays due to a lack of skilled engineers. So, while openings for low-paying service jobs remain high, corporate America slashes payrolls as personal debt and loan defaults continue to surge. Inevitably, this is going to hurt consumption, the largest part of the U.S. economy.

A sharp depression in U.S. demand would hit commodity and manufacturing globally, triggering a global depression. Instead of trying to work together with China for a global solution, the U.S. strategy centers around denial and "flipping the script," accusing China of distorting the market, as it distorts its own, by offering massive subsidies to chip makers and the domestic automobile industry.

Accusing others of your own actions is a short-term PR tactic, but it seems Washington's only move these days. Washington's faith in American exceptionalism precludes cooperation, favoring hegemonic domination over partnerships. This stance is what holds back the possibility of substantive U.S.-China cooperation.

The author is a senior fellow at the Beijing-based Taihe Institute.

Military Industrial Complex

The most significant pronouncement of the 1960's which literally created a new perspective on Post War America for the radical Left and Right. And it is not only relevant today but continues to be the basis for a coherent oppositional critique of the neo-con agenda of American Empire and American Exceptionalism.

The irony is that the those on the New Left like the SDS accepted Eisenhower's assessment of the dangers and used as a critique of American State Capitalism while those from the Old Left embraced it during the cold war as 'anti-Stalinists', and became the founders of the Neo-Con movement in America today.

It was the SDS that inspired the emergence of the libertarian left and the left libertarian critique of this model of State Capitalism.

Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation
January 17, 1961

"Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

EISENHOWER: SOLDIER OF PEACE

HE was a soldier who loathed war.

He was a politician who abhorred politics. He was a hero who despised heroics. Yet there was nothing inconsistent about Dwight David Eisenhower. As much as any other American of today or yesterday, he was the storybook American. A man of luminous integrity and decency, of steadfast courage and conscience, he embodied in his wide smile, high ideals and down-to-earth speech all the virtues of a simpler and more serene America.

In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Eisenhower's challenge from 40 years ago is more relevant today than ever, and he seemed to know it would be. ''Down the long lane of the history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.... Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.'' Such words are rare in Washington today, but tomorrow their echo can still be heard.

Mega-contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel supply the government with brawn. But the biggest, most powerful of the "body shops"—SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the Iraq war.

The War Business

And so, for the private contractors that increasingly make up the infrastructure of our armed forces, fortune has arisen from tragedy. During the first Iraq war, in 1991, one in a hundred American personnel was employed by a private contractor. In the second Iraq war, that ratio is closer to one in ten. The Washing ton Post reports that as much as one third of the rapidly expanding cost of the Iraq war is going into private U.S. bank accounts.

The original point of this massive outflow of federal dollars was to save money. In Donald Rumsfeld's vision, privatization would bring the unbending discipline of the marketplace to bear on war itself. In 1995, well before his return to Washington, Rumsfeld presented to America his "Thoughts from the Business World on Downsizing Government," a monograph informed by his experience as both a White House chief of staff and defense secretary (under Gerald Ford) and a CEO of two large American corporations (General Instrument Corp. and G. D. Searle). "Government programs are effectively insulated from the rigors of the marketplace, and therefore are denied the possibility of failure," he wrote. "Sometimes, nothing short of outright privatization can restore the discipline of a bottom line."

Eisenhower's Farewell Warning Was Meant For Our Time

To be sure, there isn't really such a corporation: the Omnivore Group, as it might be called. But if there were such a company—and, mind you, there isn't—it might look a lot like the largest government contractor you've never heard of: a company known simply by the nondescript initials SAIC (for Science Applications International Corporation), initials that are always spoken letter by letter rather than formed into a pronounceable acronym. SAIC maintains its headquarters in San Diego, but its center of gravity is in Washington, D.C. With a workforce of 44,000, it is the size of a full-fledged government agency—in fact, it is larger than the departments of Labor, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development combined. Its anonymous glass-and-steel Washington office—a gleaming corporate box like any other—lies in northern Virginia, not far from the headquarters of the C.I.A., whose byways it knows quite well. (More than half of SAIC's employees have security clearances.) SAIC has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. The contracts number not in the dozens or scores or hundreds but in the thousands: SAIC currently holds some 9,000 active federal contracts in all. More than a hundred of them are worth upwards of $10 million apiece. Two of them are worth more than $1 billion. The company's annual revenues, almost all of which come from the federal government, approached $8 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, and they are continuing to climb. SAIC's goal is to reach as much as $12 billion in revenues by 2008. As for the financial yardstick that really gets Wall Street's attention—profitability—SAIC beats the S&P 500 average. Last year ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, posted a return on revenue of 11 percent. For SAIC the figure was 11.9 percent. If "contract backlog" is any measure—that is, contracts negotiated and pending—the future seems assured. The backlog stands at $13.6 billion. That's one and a half times more than the backlog at KBR Inc., a subsidiary of the far better known government contractor once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Halliburton Company.

It is a simple fact of life these days that, owing to a deliberate decision to downsize government, Washington can operate only by paying private companies to perform a wide range of functions. To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS. In Washington these companies go by the generic name "body shops"—they supply flesh-and-blood human beings to do the specialized work that government agencies no longer can. Often they do this work outside the public eye, and with little official oversight—even if it involves the most sensitive matters of national security. The Founding Fathers may have argued eloquently for a government of laws, not of men, but what we've got instead is a government of body shops.

Port Huron Statement

of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962

The Military-Industrial Complex. The most spectacular and important creation of the authoritarian and oligopolistic structure of economic decision-making in America is the institution called "the military industrial complex" by former President Eisenhower, the powerful congruence of interest and structure among military and business elites which affects so much of our development and destiny. Not only is ours the first generation to live with the possibility of world-wide cataclysm -- it is the first to experience the actual social preparation for cataclysm, the general militarization of American society. In 1948 Congress established Universal Military Training, the first peacetime conscription. The military became a permanent institution. Four years earlier, General Motor's Charles E. Wilson had heralded the creation of what he called the "permanent war economy," the continuous use of military spending as a solution to economic problems unsolved before the post-war boom, most notably the problem of the seventeen million jobless after eight years of the New Deal. This has left a "hidden crisis" in the allocation of resources by the American economy.

Since our childhood these two trends -- the rise of the military and the installation of a defense-based economy -- have grown fantastically. The Department of Defense, ironically the world's largest single organization, is worth $160 billion, owns 32 million acres of America and employs half the 7.5 million persons directly dependent on the military for subsistence, has an $11 billion payroll which is larger than the net annual income of all American corporations. Defense spending in the Eisenhower era totaled $350 billions and President Kennedy entered office pledged to go even beyond the present defense allocation of sixty cents from every public dollar spent. Except for a war-induced boom immediately after "our side" bombed Hiroshima, American economic prosperity has coincided with a growing dependence on military outlay -- from 1941 to 1959 America's Gross National Product of $5.25 trillion included $700 billion in goods and services purchased for the defense effort, about one-seventh of the accumulated GNP. This pattern has included the steady concentration of military spending among a few corporations. In 1961, 86 percent of Defense Department contracts were awarded without competition. The ordnance industry of 100,000 people is completely engaged in military work; in the aircraft industry, 94 percent of 750,000 workers are linked to the war economy; shipbuilding, radio and communications equipment industries commit forty percent of their work to defense; iron and steel, petroleum, metal-stamping and machine shop products, motors and generators, tools and hardware, copper, aluminum and machine tools industries all devote at least 10 percent of their work to the same cause.

The intermingling of Big Military and Big Industry is evidenced in the 1,400 former officers working for the 100 corporations who received nearly all the $21 billion spent in procurement by the Defense Department in 1961. The overlap is most poignantly clear in the case of General Dynamics, the company which received the best 1961 contracts, employed the most retired officers (187), and is directed by a former Secretary of the Army. A Fortune magazine profile of General Dynamics said: "The unique group of men who run Dynamics are only incidentally in rivalry with other U.S. manufacturers, with many of whom they actually act in concert. Their chief competitor is the USSR. The core of General Dynamics corporate philosophy is the conviction that national defense is a more or less permanent business." Little has changed since Wilson's proud declaration of the Permanent War Economy back in the 1944 days when the top 200 corporations possessed 80 percent of all active prime war-supply contracts.

The Return of the SDS


During the late 1960s, when students all over American were practicing direct democracy on campus by waging massive student strikes and taking over their university buildings, the three essays collected here for the first time were among the most widely read pieces of student radical literature. Their author, Carl Davidson, was national vice-president and inter-organizational secretary of the SDS. Starting from the sociologists' conclusion that modern universities are "knowledge factories" designed to serve the Military Industrial Complex, Davidson, in these essays, explored various analogies and connections between students and the working class and outlined a theory of student syndicalism that characterized a critical phase in the development of SDS. Drawing not only on classical Marxism but also on IWW and anarcho-syndicalist ideas as well as on newer revolutionary currents such as the Dutch Provos and French Situationists, these writings were among the most original and influential documents of the American New Left in its dynamic first decade, and remain an unexcelled "how-to" manual for insurgent students seeking to gain some measure of control over their lives. In a new afterward, the author situates the rise of student syndicalism in its historic context, while reflecting on the meaning of these writings for today.

The SDS of the sixties had its roots in the League for Industrial Democracy, a socialist organization with credentials. The League included Norman Thomas, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London. In the early 1960’s the youth branch of the league clashed with the old establishment and created Students for a Democratic Society. In the early sixties SDS was small, and disorganized because of an understandable aversion to centralization and a belief in localized participatory democracy. SDS involved itself in the civil rights movement and quickly grew. The strength of the SDS, and probably the reason it grew so quickly was that it had no official ideological line. It was certainly radical, but it made no policy naming it Anarchist, Marxist-Leninist, Democratic Socialist, or anything else. Instead it incorporated all of these, and the liberal students too. By creating unity among radicals in general where factionalism once existed the SDS became the biggest, most effective, and most known radical organization of its time.

Especially notable was the preference for community organizing among SDSers. Though many of these campaigns weren’t successful in accomplishing their goals, the idea was the right one. Any radical student organization must be an organization of action, of union organizing, and of protest organizing. Because these actions were so visible, they further contributed to SDS’ growing numbers, and as the organization grew they began to implement all the right actions that gained public attention and in some cases real change. The SDS organized boycotts, direct action, civil disobedience, and also did teach-ins and propagated ideas of class-consciousness. At its height the SDS was able to organize huge marches on Washington, and even gained the qualification of a true radical organization: interference by the FBI.

The American Student Movement of the 1930s

The modern American Student movement began in the 1930s, when the National Student League joined with the Student League for Industrial Democracy to form the American Student Union (ASU). During its peak years, from spring 1936 to spring 1939, the movement mobilized at least 500,000 college students (about half the American student body) in annual one-hour strikes against war. The movement also organized students on behalf of an extensive reform agenda, which included federal aid to education, government job programs for youth, abolition of the compulsory Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), academic freedom, racial equality, and collective bargaining rights.

The Student League for Industrial Democracy was the student affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID).

There were two distinct groups called the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) in two different periods - one existed from 1931 until 1935, the other existed from 1945 until 1960.

The first SLID was formed when radical student members of LID left in 1931 and formed the New York Student League (which was renamed the National Student League a year later). In response to this new group, LID formed SLID in 1931. SLID existed until December of 1935 when, like the student members of LID in 1931, it became too radical for LID, and split off from LID. SLID joined with the National Student League (NSL) when it split from LID, with SLID and NSL combining to form the American Student Union.

The reincarnation of SLID is the more well-known one. In 1945, LID decided to recreate SLID. SLID was a small and fairly moribund group throughout the 1940's and 1950's, much like LID which now was more liberal and anti-communist than socialist. In 1960, SLID renamed itself Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) so as to have a more wide appeal among college students. SDS would become the largest and most influential left-wing student group in American history.

League for Industrial Democracy (or LID)

At Port Huron, Tom Hayden clashed with Irving Howe and Michael Harrington over perceived potential for totalitarianism. Hayden said, "While the draft Port Huron Statement included a strong denunciation of the Soviet Union, it wasn’t enough for LID leaders like Michael Harrington. They wanted absolute clarity, for example, that the United States was blameless for the nuclear arms race...In truth, they seemed threatened by the independence of the new wave of student activism..."

By 1965, SDS had totally divorced itself from the LID, and it became a publishing front for the followers of Max Shachtman, who had dominated the organization since the late 1950s. To this day, the post office box of the Shachtmanite legacy group Social Democrats USA is held under the name League for Industrial Democracy.

League for Industrial Democracy (LID)

"The league was established in 1905 to educate students and other members of society about socialist principles of democracy and labor. Over the years it lost its progressive orientation and by the 1950s became involved with the CIA in efforts to combat communism." Now dominated by anticommunists, its board is composed primarily of neoconservatives associated with the Social Democrats USA and the international institutes of the AFL-CIO.

"Included among LID ranks are Sol Chaikin, Eric Chenowith, William Doherty, Evelyn Dubrow, Larry Dugan, Jr., Norman Hill, David Jessup, John T. Joyce, Tom Kahn, Jay Mazur, Joyce Miller, Albert Shanker, Donald Slaiman, John T. Sweeney, and Lynn R. Williams. Penn Kemble and Roy Godson, a specialist in labor and intelligence theory, are also LID directors. The league received a NED grant in 1985 "for a study on the interrelationship between democratic trade unions and political parties, with special emphasis on socialist and social democratic parties, to examine their attitudes toward U.S. labor, foreign-policy, [and] economic issues.""

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What is 'The 1619 Project' and why has Gov. DeSantis banned it from Florida schools?

C. A. Bridges, The Daytona Beach News-Journal
Sat, January 28, 2023 

Students at Eastern Senior High School in Washington reflected on the 1619 Project.

"The 1619 Project," a six-part documentary series based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning essay and podcast series developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, is now streaming on Hulu.

The project, a series of essays, poems and multimedia by Hannah-Jones, other New York Times writers and historians first published in The New York Times Magazine in 2019, examined the impact of slavery on American life, economics and culture through the current day.

The cover of "The 1619 Project"

Arguments over the importance, relevance and accuracy of the project began immediately, and it became a lightning rod in the battle of how race should be taught in schools. Political leaders publicly praised or denounced it. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it "a lie." Former president Donald Trump condemned "The 1619 Project" as "toxic propaganda" and "ideological poison" that "will destroy our country," and he called for an alternative lesson plan in response. The Biden Administration cited the project in a request for a grant to support "antiracist" education. GOP leaders in multiple states filed bills to cut funding to K-12 schools and colleges that provided lessons derived from the project.

Florida went further in 2021 by specifically banning "prohibited material from The 1619 Project" in any educational curriculum. Later that year when Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his proposal to restrict diversity training and race discussions in Florida businesses and schools in what he called the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act," he claimed the new bill built on the 1619 Project ban.

So what is it?

Watch it yourself:How to watch ‘The 1619 Project’ on Hulu this month

What is 'The 1619 Project'?

Nikole Hannah-Jones is shown in the newsroom of The New York Times in New York in 2017.

In 2019, The New York Times Magazine published a series called "The 1619 Project." It included 10 essays, a photo essay, fiction pieces and poems, artwork, images and audio files by Nikole Hannah-Jones and several historians and thought leaders to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first known enslaved Africans in the British colonies that became the United States, a point often considered as the beginning of American slavery. Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for her introductory essay in the project, "America Wasn't a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One."

More material was added in later editions and a school curriculum was developed with the Pulitzer Center, which said that by February of 2021, more than 4,000 educators from all 50 states reported using it.

The project was compiled into a best-selling anthology book and is now a six-part documentary on Hulu hosted by Hannah-Jones and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey. The series expands on many of the themes that appeared in the podcast. Each episode of the six-part series will focus on a theme: “Democracy,” “Race,” “Music,” “Capitalism,” “Fear” and “Justice.” The first two episodes of the series premiered on Hulu Thursday, Jan. 26, and two additional episodes will be released each week on Thursdays.
What are the main points of 'The 1619 Project'?

Ultimately, the project as a whole makes the case that much of the inequality still present in American society today can be traced, directly or indirectly, to the institution of slavery and the people who believed in and profited from it.

"The 1619 Project" seeks to look at American history through the lens of slavery and reframe it by challenging the traditionally taught idea that American history began with the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 or even with the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620.

"No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed," it says at the very beginning of the project. "On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully."

The essays touched on such topics as American Capitalism and its source in slavery, racial beliefs that still persist in medicine, why race is the reason the U.S. doesn't have universal health care, the reasons behind the country's racial wealth gap and its prison system, and more. Most economic, educational and political institutions in the U.S. are described as having been formed or were strongly based on the benefits of slavery or the need to compromise with slave states even after slavery was formally abolished, as spelled out in essays such as "What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to the Politics of Slavery" and "How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam." The project and later additions also seek to supply what the writers consider is the missing Black history that is often omitted, ignored or outright whitewashed in traditional American history.

"Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all," Hannah-Jones wrote.

1619:How an accidental encounter brought slavery to the United States

US history is complex:Scholars say this is the right way to teach about slavery, racism.

More:Parents want kids to learn about ongoing effects of slavery – but not critical race theory. They're the same thing.
What are the complaints about 'The 1619 Project'?

The complaints range from minor academic quibbles to accusations of an attack on America itself.

One of the most hotly contested claims was made by Hannah-Jones in her introduction when she wrote that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery," saying that by 1776 Britain had become "deeply conflicted" over slavery and that "it is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers."

A letter, signed by five historians and published in New York Times Magazine in December 2019, claimed the project had "significant factual errors" and accused the creators of putting ideology before historical understanding. The Times defended the project and pointed to the positive feedback from educators, academics and historians, but did eventually soften some of the claims to say "some of" the colonists fought to preserve slavery, but not all of them. Hannah-Jones later admitted on Twitter that she may have worded it too strongly.

Others argue that the project misrepresents U.S. history and demeans the Founding Fathers, undermining the concept of American exceptionalism. Some historians, including Dr. Susan Parker of Flagler College in St. Augustine, pointed out that African slavery existed for more than half a century before 1619 (although that was in then-Spanish Florida and not the British colonies).

The larger issue is the concept presented in the project that America is structurally racist and that white people are inherently privileged, something that critics call politicized activist liberal indoctrination or "leftist political propaganda." "The 1619 Project" came along as Black Lives Matter rallies brought racial injustice to a national discussion and "critical race theory" or CRT — originally a once-obscure legal theory on how systematic racism permeates American life today — was turned into a catch-all term for any teaching on race that may be considered by detractors as divisive or revisionist.

More:Schools can teach full US history under critical race theory bans, experts say. Here's how

"Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense. Voters did not vote for it," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and almost 40 other Senate Republicans wrote in a letter to the Biden administration. "Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil."

Critics also have pointed to teachers they say have used CRT-based lessons to humiliate students or even flunk white children.

“I think that issue that we all are concerned about — racial discrimination — it was our original sin. We’ve been working for 200-and-some-odd years to get past it,” McConnell said later. “We’re still working on it, and I just simply don’t think that’s part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about.”

Some historians say the bills to block CRT and "The 1619 Project" are part of a larger effort by Republicans to draw America's culture wars into classrooms and glorify a more white and patriarchal view of American history that downplays the ugly legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black people, Native Americans, women and others to the nation’s founding.

Teaching kids to hate America? Republicans want ‘critical race theory’ out of schools

More:Republican state lawmakers want to punish schools that teach the 1619 Project

Mitch McConnell: 1619, American slavery starting point, not an important point in history
What did Florida Governor Ron DeSantis say about 'The 1619 Project'?

Gov. DeSantis has made the battle against what he calls woke indoctrination one of the cornerstones of his policies.

In 2021 Florida's Board of Education banned critical race theory, mentioning "The 1619 Project" by name.

DeSantis built on that with his "Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act" or "Stop W.O.K.E. Act," which, among other things, outlaws the teaching of white privilege (the notion that white people have had advantages over racial minorities simply because of the color of their skin) and any teaching that could make students feel "guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions, in which he or she played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex." The law specifically banned the "1619 Project" in classrooms and placed critical race theory in the same category as Holocaust denial, a legislative analysis shows. The bill dubs such teachings as "indoctrination" and specifies that teachers accused of violating it may be sued by anyone.

Fighting 'indoctrination':Gov. DeSantis takes on how racial history is taught in Florida schools

What does it mean to be 'woke'?And why does Florida Governor Ron DeSantis want to stop it?

More:Gov. Ron DeSantis' Stop WOKE Act will have 'chilling effect,' say teachers and Democrats

“We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other,” he said in his announcement. “We also have a responsibility to ensure that parents have the means to vindicate their rights when it comes to enforcing state standards.”

The new guidelines seek to change how teachers approach U.S. history, civics and government lessons with an added emphasis on patriotism and the U.S. Constitution.

Last September, during a press conference on tax relief, he again called out the project by name.

"We are required to teach slavery, Post-Reconstruction and segregation, civil rights, those are core parts of American history that should be taught," he said during a press conference on tax relief, "but it should also be taught accurately. For example, the 1619 Project is a CRT version of history, it's supported by The New York Times. They want to teach that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery. And that's false."

However, his message may have been undermined by his further declaration that it was solely the "American revolution that caused people to question slavery."

“No one had questioned it [slavery] before we decided as Americans that we are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights and that we are all created equal,” DeSantis said.

'Stop the Black attack': Civil rights attorney threatens to sue over African American Studies

Florida education officials: African American Studies AP course 'lacks educational value'

Several prominent historians denounced this as false since they said slavery was questioned and resisted by a large number of people across the world and in America — especially by the enslaved people themselves — well before the Revolution.

Contributors: Ali Wong, USA TODAY; Melody Mercado, Des Moines Register; Mark Harper, The Daytona Beach News-Journal

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: 'The 1619 Project,' now on Hulu: Why are states banning it in schools?

A new partisan era of American education

Story by Zachary B. Wolf • 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he’s protecting kids from indoctrination and political agendas, but the zeal with which he has pushed expansive efforts to remake the Florida education system also represents an effort to influence young minds.

Changes coming to African American studies course

The College Board, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Advanced Placement program offered across high schools, said it would change a new AP African American studies course that DeSantis said violated a state law to restrict certain lessons about race in schools.

His state’s Department of Education complained the college-level course mentioned Black queer theory and the idea of intersectionality. Read more about why Florida rejected the course.

“Governor DeSantis, are you really trying to lead us into an era akin to communism that provides censorship of free thoughts?” the civil rights lawyer Ben Crump said at a press conference on Wednesday in Florida, where he announced he would sue DeSantis on behalf of three high school students if DeSantis would not negotiate with the College Board about the AP course.

A list of names at colleges and universities

DeSantis recently demanded a list of names of staff and programs related to diversity at public colleges and universities, part of a crackdown on “trendy ideology.”

Separately, he wants details on students who sought gender dysphoria treatment at state universities.

A conservative Christian model for a state school

DeSantis also wants to remake the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal arts school, as a sort of “Hillsdale of the South,” according to Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz.

Hillsdale, as USA Today points out, is a private, conservative Christian college in Michigan.

A new DeSantis appointee to the New College of Florida board of trustees has clashed with board officials over his request to open every meeting with a prayer.

This is a trend

Republicans across the country are focused on education. They want to guard against anything perceived as pushing equity rather than merit.

Virginia’s governor sees a conspiracy in how school districts recognize distinction in a scholarship program based on scores on the PSAT.


Related video: Students, officials plan to sue Florida over rejection of AP African American Studies course (WESH Orlando)   Duration 1:22  View on Watch

WESH  OrlandoFlorida to be sued over rejection of African American Studies course
1:37

CBS NewsFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis sued over rejection of AP African American studies pilot program
5:28

WPTV West Palm Beach, FLProfessor: Teaching African American studies without discussing suffering is tough
1:54

‘Maniacal focus’ on equity

The state attorney general has launched a discrimination investigation into whether the Fairfax County Public Schools system – including Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a nationally recognized Virginia magnet school – discriminated against students by not informing them of recognition under the National Merit Scholarship program.

The students qualified for recognition but did not advance in the competition for a scholarship.

Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, according to CNN’s report, claimed these revelations were a result of the “maniacal focus on equal outcomes for all students at all costs.”

“The failure of numerous Fairfax County schools to inform students of their national merit awards could serve as a Virginia human rights violation,” the governor’s office said in a previous statement provided to CNN.

Fairfax County Public Schools superintendent Michelle Reid told CNN the recognitions should have come earlier, but cited a lack of a “division-wide protocol” rather than any kind of mania about equity. Read more about the controversy.

Targeting professors in Texas

Texas officials also have their eyes on the state’s colleges and universities, according to CNN’s Eric Bradner.

“Our public professors are accountable to the taxpayer because you pay their salary,” said Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in an inauguration speech. Bradner notes Patrick has pushed to end tenure at Texas public colleges and universities.

“I don’t want teachers in our colleges saying, ‘America is evil and capitalism is bad and socialism is better,’” he said. “And if that means some of those professors that want to teach that don’t come to Texas, I’m OK with that.” Read Bradner’s full report.

Meanwhile, in South Dakota, lawmakers are looking to develop a social studies curriculum based on “American exceptionalism,” propelled by the governor’s desire to put more patriotism in the classroom.

Affirmative action at the Supreme Court

The focus by Republican politicians on issues of race in colleges and the classroom is mirrored by the potential for a court-mandated turnaround in how American students are viewed for admissions.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in October in two separate cases regarding affirmative action and seems poised to say colleges and universities cannot consider race in admissions.

Nine states have already outlawed affirmative action for public universities. Voters in California were the first to do so, and the end result was falling enrollment, in particular among Black students at top public schools in the University of California system and at the University of Michigan. Those states both encouraged the Supreme Court not to outlaw affirmative action.

Florida, which also ended the practice, encouraged the court to throw affirmative action out.

Education was a major focus for Republicans in the recent election. While it clearly worked for DeSantis in Florida and a year earlier for Youngkin in Virginia, the mixed results for Republicans writ large may call the strategy into question as the 2024 election looms.

A new era

I read on the education news website Chalkbeat about a new study that predicts more politics in the classroom as Americans increasingly sort themselves by political ideology.

In the working paper, David Houston, an education policy professor at George Mason University, argues that previous debates over desegregation, prayer and sex education in public schools were divisive but not inherently partisan.

He points to the moderate positions of previous presidents as proof. Then-President George W. Bush worked with then-Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy on education reform in 2001. Former President Barack Obama was praised by Republicans in 2012 for his work on education.

Those stories feel like they’re from a different universe when today’s Republican governors are looking to root out liberal extremism in schools.

Houston argues in his study, which is based on survey data, that the US may be on the cusp of a new and divisive era with “heightened partisan animosity across all aspects of education politics.”

CNN.com

Anarchist Censorship

The Article Infoshop Does Not Want You to Read!

I emailed Chuck O the 'owner' of Infoshop, an American anarchist web site, on 14.06.2004 asking him to post my article Post-McQuinn Anarchism,(see below) on Infoshop as part of the Post-Left Anarchist debate he and Jason McQuinn, 'owner' of Anarchy 'a Magazine of Desire Armed', are foisting on the anarchist movement in North America.

I had posted it to the International Anarchist Studies website as a reply to the debate ongoing there between Peter Staudenmaier and McQuinn.

It is in the reply section under Peters article entitled:
Anarchists in Wonderland: The Topsy-Turvy World of Post-Left Anarchy

In reply to my request to the Rev. Chuck O (as he titles himself at Infoshop, clearly appointing himself as an anarchist of the 'catholic' persuasion: his way or the highway) that he publish this on Info shop he sent me the following dismissive response which I have included below. And in my own charming way asked him again to publish it. He did not reply.

That little spat did nothing, there was no posting of my article on Infoshop. So on June 18 I posted it myself under Anarchist Opinion on Infoshop. And low and behold, it still, as of this date June 22, has not appeared.

The very reverend Chuck O. as the owner of the site, in violation of the anarchist principle of free speech, has censored an opinion he does not like. I leave it to you to determine, whether you agree with me or not as Voltaire would say, whether such obvious censorship should be practiced by self proclaimed anarchists.

In true American entrepreneurial style of his libertarian predilections, Chucky has decided that ownership allows him the corporate right to determine what gets published on 'his' web site. So much for Infoshop being a voice of the anarchist movement. This is another case of Anarchism Inc. once again proving that "the only free press belongs to those that own one."(A.J. Liebling)

Now that I am on Chucks enemies list I feel I am in good company. But at least we all know now that Chuck O. is truly an American libertarian, and like his pal McQuinn, they believe they own the rights to (c) anarchism. This is the reality of their post-left-anarchism. Hey they would do Murray Rothbard proud just kidding, he at least supported free speech. McQuinn and Chuck O. are not anarchists they are members of that fraternity of American Exceptionalism known as libertarianism. Ironically they would say they are the left of that movement.

Finally I am incredulous that the Institute for Anarchist Studies has even given the Post Left Anarchism debate any academic credibility by allowing it to be seriously discussed in the Theory and Practice section of their web site. It is a chimerical debate of navel gazing proportions. It is simply an argument circulated by McQuinn and Co. as simple economic self promotion, it sells his magazine, and gets him paid speaking engagements. It has no more credibility than that.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHUCKO EMAIL

At 11:36 PM 6/14/04 -0700, you wrote:
>What a pile of crap and ignorant garbage!
>
>It's a good thing that anarchism has moved beyond marginal cranks such as
>yourself!
>
>Oh, by the way, as somebody in "McQuinn's circle of friends," I've long
>appreciated Bookchin andhis contribution to anarchism.
>
>Chuck0
>
Ouch you cut me to the quick I am stunned and agog at your debating skills, your Swiftian editorial pen, please, please do not pummel me oh great one.
If I am a marginal crank it must be because I belong to a marginal movement or are you in your American wisdom assuming that the anarchist movement is marginal in Canada?
Did you even bother to read my article or in fact do you even read the shit you publish on Infoshop, be it the utopian ranting of CrimeThInc. or even over the top ranting of your 'friend' McQuinn when he is challenged.
Shall we hum a few bars of Phil Ochs small circle of friends....you can barely fund raise the money you need to continue your publishing efforts, while Democrats score millions from their web sites, talk about marginal.
But I digress, I don't give a shit if you don't like my opinion, at least if you are going to debate my ideas debate them, do not dismiss them as crap or marginal, twit. Do you intend to publish it or are you the Chief Anarchist censor now?!
As for you liking Bookchin good for you, however I maintain that McQuinn is trying to posit his critique as post-bookchin, and he is not a major anarchist theorist except in his own mind, and obviously yours. I noticed you didn’t mention Dolgoff so am I to assume that like McQuinn Dolgoff is too left for you.
Yours from the margins,
Eugene Plawiuk

------------------------------------------------------
AND NOW THE ARTICLE CHUCK O. DOESN'T WANT YOU TO READ:


Post-McQuinn Anarchism


Girl: What'cha rebeling against Johnny?
Johnny: What'cha got!
The Wild Ones

This in a nutshell sums up the rebellion of Jason McQuinn, and the debate on Post Left Anarchism. That this debate, which in itself is a strawdog, should appear on the web site of IAS befuddles the mind (as it clearly befuddled Mr. McQuinn from his snarky comments on your asking him to publish here).

It is strictly an American debate. It takes place in the context of the American Anarchist Milieu and that milieu alone. It does not encapsulate the rest of North America, such as Canada or Mexico, nor does it address the anarchist movement in Europe, Latin America, Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia-Asia.

It is an argument that has been used to sell a magazine, and to prop up the Infoshop web site with an apparent theory they can embrace. It did not need to be placed with such prominence on the IAS site, which only gives greater credence to this little idea whose time has come and, unfortunately for its authors, gone.

It is not a new idea, as McQuinn admits, it is founded on the ranting of self-appointed theorist Bob Black. Mr. Black is very good himself at taking other peoples ideas and making $$$$ by restating them as his own. In this case his critique of work, workerism, etc. was lifted from LeFargue's The Right to Be Lazy, the proto-situationist text The Right to be Greedy, and from the writings of Wilhelm Reich and the European far left (such as Paul Cardin/Castoradis and Maurice Briton).

Mr. Black has made a tidy sum and a small reputation by attacking and denouncing those he does not like. This he believes makes him a critical thinker in critical theory, actually all it does is make him a critic.

A rebuttal of Mr. Black's post-left anarchism is the essay McAnarchism by Tim Balash.

McQuinn's essay is overly generalized, setting up strawdogs (and proceeds to berate his critics for doing to him what he does in his own essay) of some ambiguous Leninist left. Painting with broad brush strokes the workers movement, the socialist movement, and the communist movement and yes the anarchist movement as if it were all one large monolithic structure unaffected by history. This static strawdog is then knocked down with a fallacious argument that there needs to be a new theory of anarchism, that there has not been any new anarchist theory since Malatesta died.

Ah and that’s the crux of this post left anarchism. It is the new theory of the movement, brought to you by Mr. McQuinn via Mr. Black. The fact that Mr. McQuinn, supposedly a student of Paul Goodman, misses a vast school of post-Malatesta anarchist thought in his essay shows just how specious his argument is. He mentions nothing of Emma Goldman, Alexader Berkman, Elise Recluse, Victor Serge, Ward Churchill, Nicholas Walter, Stewart Christe, Albert Meltzer, Wilhelm Reich, Alex Comfort, George Woodcock, Paul Goodman, Sam Dolgoff, Murray Bookchin, etc. etc. I could go on and on. But you get the point.

That is the crux of his argument, that there has been no new anarchist theory, (which is an entirely false argument) and post left anarchism is the answer. If it is an answer what is the question? Well simply put it is what is the alternative to Murray Bookchin. Let’s call a spade a spade shall we. Stripped of its vacuous rhetoric, vast flourishes of generalizations, McQuinn is, like his mentor Bob Black, attacking Bookchin. So Post-Left Anarchism should rightly be called Post Bookchin Anarchism.

No one in the McQuinns circle of friends, those being the folks publishing and editing his little magazine, likes Bookchin. And resent his popularity, his efforts to theorize, any more than they like Sam Dolgoff, or Malatesta. Like Bob Black, they literally seethe with apoplexy against anyone who would align anarchism with class struggle.

It is the individual that is supreme, cries these radical subjectivists. Ah yes that revolutionary school of thought of Francis Dashwood, DeSade, Stirner, Nietzche, and Crowley that desire must be unleashed. The individual is king, we are all to be kings, in worlds of our own creating. Such magickal thinking is not a theory it is the musings of would be aristocrats, looking backward to some decentralized village community where hermits freely associate or lock their doors.

It is American Exceptionalism not anarchism. It's roots are in the rural artisan culture of America that harkens backwards to its past, rather than accept that America was and is part of the ascendancy of Capitalism. It is, like Proudhonism and his American proponents Tucker, Josiah Warren and Lynsander Spooner, the anarchism of small shopkeepers.

There is nothing new in this. Its clear in the wrintings of the Greenwich Village bohemian anarchist artist Hyppolite Havel, long before Mr. McQuinn or Mr. Black recuperated it for themselves.
Stripped of its rhetoric it is the theory that Anarchism is Anti-Political, and Anti-Organization. That small sect of Anarchists that would have nothing to do with any organization that would have them as a member, as Grucho Marx would say.

And again it is an attack on those who see class struggle as a crucial part of anarchism, in this case the unstated object of this attack is Bookchin, but it could just as easily be Dolgoff.

There is no class struggle in America is the crux of American Exceptionalism and it is the crux of McQuinns theory. So what is the basis of the struggle? Well as the quote says above, What'cha got. We should just revolt, because freedom is revolution. Or as Abbie Hoffman once said; Revolution for the Hell of It.

This is not a theory and it is certainly not an argument that demolishes class struggle anarchism, nor is it even an alternative to class struggle anarchism. It would like to be but it isn't. It is however an argument that is made to criticize class struggle anarchism, and to say American anarchism is an exception.
It is an attempt to say that any subjective struggle is anarchism as long as it is not organized, not permanent, and not political.

It is the anarchism of food coops, food not bombs, homes not bombs, the black block. It is the anarchism of hippie culture, and DIY. It is in a word not anarchism but reformism. McQuinn's anarchism can be summed up in the old cliche, if it feels good do it.

Shucks I just hate dating myself, by even remembering all this old stuff from the Movement days of the late sixties and early seventies, but since we are looking backwards with McQuinn and company, his argument is based in the little pamphlet still in circulation entitled Anti-Mass. Add some Bob Black school of vitrupitive caustic comments posing as a critique and there you have post left anarchism.

In fact I am surprised that McQuinn did not entitle his essay Listen Anarchist! But that would have been too obvious as to whom his comments were aimed at. After all the Bookchin debate has been going on for decades so it hardly qualifies for a "new" theory.

I certainly hope that we can move on from this navel gazing self-aggrandizing debate that exists simply to sell Mr. McQuinns magazine and assuage his ego that he his a profound thinker. His desire may be armed but his Post Left Anarchism is sightless.

June 2004
Posted on the web on Indymedia, Resist.ca, FLAG, and through email lists.
NOT posted on Infoshop by decision of the ‘owner’ Chuck Muson.

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Dual Power In Mexico

We are on the eve of revolution.

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 16 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of thousands of supporters of leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador elected him as "legitimate president" of a parallel government on Saturday in protest against the allegedly flawed July presidential elections.

Reminding me of a certain incident in the spring of 1917 in Russia when another dual power situation occured....Workers Power and the Russian Revolution

The revolutionary reawakening of Mexico
The revolutionary mass movement that has been brought into being in Mexico by the electoral fraud perpetrated in the Presidential elections has reached a point where clearly the power is there for the taking. If there were a genuine revolutionary party at the head of the masses we would be on the eve of socialist revolution.

By Alan Woods
Friday, 08 September 2006

Woods is of course a Trotskyist and his Leninist approach to dual power is the same old flawed theory that the masses need the party to take state power. Indeed the masses need to use this situation of dual power a ciris in the Mexican State to remove the army, police, courts, etc. from their communities the very basis of bourgoise power. That power does not come for a party but through the creation of community assemblies and workers councils. Always has always will.

The Zapatista's offer a very real model of this kind of community engagement crucial to this current situation of dual power. The competing political parties who compteted in the election and have declared themselves victors, now are appealing to the people to recognize their government as legitimate. The fact that the this creates a very real power vacuum can allow the people and their autonomous organizations an opportunity to challethe very structure of the State in Mexico. Something that could not have been done in 1910-1911 during the first Mexican revolution.

Backgrounder: Mexico's dangerous political chasm

To many observers, López Obrador's behavior only confirms charges made during the campaign that he represents ``a danger to Mexico." The reality is more complicated, and understanding it requires some appreciation of how the losing side views the controversy. To them, López Obrador's reaction is not demagoguery from a politician who cannot accept defeat, but rather a natural response to past electoral fraud and to deeply rooted injustices in Mexican society.

Mexico has seen many protests like those orchestrated by López Obrador. They represent a revival of the so-called second round -- practiced by both Calderón's National Action Party, or PAN, and López Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, during the early 1990s -- in which candidates cheated of victory by the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, took to the streets to ``defend the vote." Such tactics are far less justifiable since a set of electoral reforms took effect in 1996, but memories die hard. The left faced more fraud than the more conservative PAN did over the last two decades, and López Obrador himself lost a deeply flawed election for governor of Tabasco in 1994.

Even the post-reform period has not been free of controversies. In 2003, the PAN joined forces with the PRI to name the leadership of the independent agency that administers elections over the objections of the PRD. Then, last year, PAN and PRI legislators impeached López Obrador as mayor of Mexico City on a minor charge, and Mexico's attorney general attempted to prosecute him. Had legal proceedings continued, they would have prevented López Obrador from running for president. Only widespread public opposition and mass protests forced the administration of President Vicente Fox to back down.

We are on the eve of Revolution in Mexico again, as we were almost 100 years ago.
The revolution of 1910 was not just a national revolution but one that impacted directly on America, and whose impact reamains today. The current American political and media campaign against Mexican migrants is the result of the 1910 revolution. The porous border works both ways, while imposing NAFTA on Mexico was deemed as the solution to the problem of Mexicos lack of industrial development, it has done little to stop the tide of Central American economic refugees seeking the good life in America, as America exploits their countries.

Americas intervention in the Mexican revolution and in all subsequent revolutions in Latin and Central America is based on the imperialist policy of the Munroe Doctrine. It is an extention of the plantation poltical economy that dominated the Old South in the U.S. It was Confederate America that invaded and took over the former Spanish colonies in the region. And they did it as an expansion of their plantation agrarian economy.

What Amercia exported was a deliberate policy of economic underdevolopment, aligning with Hacienda owners to maintain a cheap labour peasant economy. That underdevelopment continues today with minimal industrialization in the region, labour intensive, and export driven. Thus NAFTA and other economic agreements are still based on the American plantation mentality of the Confederacy. The ideal being America manufactures and exports, Latin America, Mexico, Central America and the Caribean provide raw resources, agricultural products, and parts.

Thomas D. Schoonover. The United States in Central America, 1860-1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System.

In the nine essays which comprise the book, Schoonover illustrates this theme and draws out the complexities of competition between social imperialistic nation/states, in particular the rivalry between the United States and Germany for Central American trade, and the policy conundrum when the dynamics of foreign policy conflict with the ideology of racial hierarchy.

Each essay deftly places an important, often well-known, incident in U.S.-Central American relations into a world systems conflict. From this point of view, confederate diplomacy toward Central America is seen as a new peripheral state exerting the political power of cotton because confederate diplomats misunderstood the relationship of their political economy within the world system of the time. During the Civil War, moreover, they sought bases for privateering and trade but had to overcome the recent legacy of filibustering expansionism. After the Civil War, as Schoonover argues in "George McWillie Williamson and Postbellum Southern Expansionism," the South, now with the full support of the northern industrial elite, continued to seek expansion southward. Since "overproduction," the received wisdom of the time, overseas outlets were considered by many the key to maintaining jobs as a means to social stability. To bring to life the dynamics of tensions between various metropole states competing for economic advantage in Central America as well as the tensions between the imperatives of social imperialism abroad and aspects of the domestic ideology, Schoonover presents two fascinating case studies. In the Eisenstuck affair of 1878-79, a dispute erupted after the step-daughter of Paul Eisenstuck, who married into a Nicaraguan family and later filed for divorce. This dispute led to alleged violence against the Germans, and the German government sought U.S. support. At this point the United States was caught in a dilemma: if the United States did no support Germany, the principle of rights for foreigners would be compromised. If the United States did support Germany, it risked the enmity of Nicaragua and might compromise that founding document of American dominance--the Monroe Doctrine. Either way, the status of the United States as the primary metropole power in the region was at stake.

At times tensions within the United States' world view, ideology and the demands of social imperialism were played out in Central American diplomacy. In his chapter titled "The World Economic Crisis, Racism, and U.S. Relations with Central America, 1893-1910," Schoonover examines the dilemma American diplomats faced representing North American Negro workers in Guatemala. Within the context of early-twentieth-century racism, does the United States exert its power to protect citizens of color against unjust charges? Race also played an important role, Schoonover argues, in rationalizing Theodore Roosevelt's actions in Panama during the revolution of 1903. In this essay, Schoonover also analyzes the arguments of a Columbia University Law Professor's memo justifying Roosevelt's actions in terms of American exceptionalism: "Exceptionalism places the U.S. government beyond contract and international laws." This idea from the past has been resurrected today.

Like Russia, the Mexican revolution was an inspiration for a mass movement to overthrow capitalism. Like Russia it was peasant based, a movement for land reform, and thus was limited in its scope. The underdevelopment of the working classes in both countries limited their ability to confront the worlds industrializing hegemon the United States. Europe itself was aflame in revolutionary movements at the end of WWI and only the boom in the North American economy offset the pending doom that old Europe faced.

As America intervened in Mexico it too intervened to prop up old Europe. It could because of a crucial new resource that would fuel post WWI American capitalism and its resulting Fordist modes of production. Oil.

But still another economic power stands in the wings of the world political theatre: petroleum.

The victory of the Entente in the World War was in the last analysis a victory of the superior war technology of America. For the first time oil triumphed over coal for the heating of the submarines and ships, of the aircraft, motors, tanks, etc., was accomplished with oil and by a technology which had undergone especially high development in America and opposite which the German technology was backward. After the ending of the World War, the most pressing imperative for America, if it did not want to lose again the hegemony won over world economic domains, was to bring the oil production of the world into its hands in order to thus monopolise the guarantees of its ascendancy.

The richest oil field lie in Asia Minor (Mossul) and belong to the zone of the English protectorate; the way to them leads over Europe. American oil capital began very quickly to secure this path for itself. Starting from France it pressed on by courtesy of the gesture of the French statesman or the bayonet of the French military towards Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, as far as Turkey. The war between Greece and Turkey, the revolution in Bulgaria, the Lausanne talks, the Balkan incidents, the military convention between France and the little Entente, etc., are more or less connected to the perpetual striving of American oil capital to procure for itself a large base of operations for the confrontation which must follow sooner or later in the interest of world monopoly over oil with the competitors, England and Russia. Just as the oil trust has been at work for decades in Mexico to obtain dominion over the Mexican oil fields through a chain of political shocks, putsches, revolts and revolutions, so it also leaves no stone unturned in Europe in order to take possession of the approaches to the oil districts of Asia Minor, against every competitor and every opposition. Germany represented the only gap in the path. As the endeavours to detach South Germany from North Germany and bring it under French overlordship did not lead to the goal—in spite of the enormous sums made ready for the financing of the Bavarian fascist movement and anti-state conspiracy and because the interests of New York clashed here with the interests of Rome, oil capital applied other tactics. Supported by the depreciation of money consequent on inflation and certain stock-exchange manoeuvres, it bought up one economic combine after another and thus gradually brought the entire power of German capital under its control. When the Stinnes combine, for which the proffered quota of shared profits was not high enough, offered resistance and opposed its conversion into the mere appendage of an international community of exploitative interests, force was resorted to. The military occupation of the Ruhr meant the fulfilment of long-cherished wishes of oil capital just as much as it was a deed after the heart of the French mining industrialists.

From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution by Otto Ruhle 1924

The dual power crisis in Mexico, the turn to he left in Latin America are the result of American intervention in the regions since the 19th Century. The industrialization of these regions in the 20th century opened the possibility of real proletarian revolution. Unfortunately that development was not as advanced as Fordist production in the U.S. Thus these revolutions were limited to national movements and land reform for the mass of the population who were peasants.

Bolivia today is a prime example of this contradiction, that the working class in that country remain indigenous peasants in an underdeveloped economy. They may mine, and work in gas plants but their basis of existence is sharecrops predominately cocaine. Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, Argentina all face similar problems of underdevelped industrialization because of a lack of Fordist production. Only Mexico has a fordist economy. One that can compete with America.

And contrary to the purpose of NAFTA it was not to allow for greater development of this fordist base in Mexico, but to act as a buffer, to restrict that competitive development.

The Mexican crisis along with the move to the left in Latin America, shows that contrary to the myth of American Hegemony and it's Cold War victory, revolution is still the counterbalance to Imperialism and rapacious capitalism.

Argentina proved that when its economy went down the drain. Dual power was created in the communities, new currencies and barter were developed, community assemblies organized all forms of social and ifrastructure needs. Workers seized their bankrupt factories and made them operational, and profitable. A dual power situation still exists in Argentina, regardless of the State or ruling party in power.

While America worries about its border security, and the vast wave of migration from Mexico, there is a revolution brewing on their border that no fence will contain.

Viva La Revolucion!

¡Tierra y Libertad!

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