Sunday, December 20, 2020

EDITORIALS

COVID-19 proved 2020 was truly the Year of the Nurse

New Mexico Lt. Governor Howie Morales

When the World Health Organization (WHO) named 2020 as the ‘International Year of the Nurse’, it had no inkling of how true that would become. The designation was meant to honor the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale, a Victorian-era reformer of hospital care, and to raise recognition of the nursing profession. Then the Coronavirus pandemic struck. As the year draws to a close, we truly have learned how essential nurses are to everyone’s lives in 2020. We must not forget it.

Hospitalizations for COVID-19 infection across the U.S. have soared daily, setting new records for weeks on end. More than 3,000 Americans are dying every day from the virus, and infected patients are stretching U.S. medical facilities to the breaking point. In New Mexico the trends are no different. ICU beds are full across the state.

Who are on the frontline in our hospitals today? Nurses. During the decade in which I worked in healthcare, I observed dedicated nurses delivering personalized, patient-centered care consistently.

New Mexico’s nurses are the backbone of the state’s health care system, and they always have been. Nurses are the ones who step forward to try to keep gravely ill patients alive, and uniquely are present to give comfort and consolation to patients’ families. They perform irreplaceable, vital work in our system of health care.

Since the onset of the pandemic in March, nurses have been in the eye of the storm, along with doctors, nursing assistants, respiratory therapists, housekeepers, maintenance, dietary, patient care techs, administration, and other support staff. All of them are essential workers risking their lives during the pandemic. But are there enough nurses?

Globally the WHO identified a severe shortage of health workers, in particular nurses, who account for more than 50% of the current shortage in health workers. The WHO estimates that 2020 will have seen a shortage of nearly 9 million nurses. In the U.S., employment of nurses is projected to grow 12% from 2018 to 2028, much faster than the average for all occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS predicts that the U.S. will need an additional 200,000 plus nurses per year from now through 2026, adding up to more than one million nurses. It is a big number to reach.

In New Mexico there are just under 16,000 licensed RNs, Clinical Nurse Specialists, Certified Nurse Practitioners and Certified Nurse Midwives actively practicing today. We know we need more of them, especially in rural, low-income and Native communities.

The state legislature has long recognized the shortage of health care providers in New Mexico, and with Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has taken positive steps to meet the health care needs of our residents. They have taken action to strengthen the state’s nursing workforce with incentives including new education loan programs, the Safe Harbor Act, authority for prescribing controlled substances, and training and retention measures. All of them are important.

The pandemic has put nurses and health care workers under enormous mental, emotional and physical strain. They worry and are exhausted by unusually long shifts, day after day because of staffing issues. Nurses have been concerned about staff falling ill to the virus. The re-use of N95 masks and a lack of adequate personal protective equipment at times that may have put them at risk for infection are also serious causes for alarm. Despair and PTSD from dealing with so much death firsthand are having a harsh impact on many nurses’ lives.

When the pandemic is over, we cannot allow the current emergency standards to become the new normal in our hospitals. The COVID-19 crisis has shown that New Mexico must make investing in our nurses and health care workers a top policy priority for the future – better pay along with more respect. That is how we retain and recruit nursing and health care professionals, who also have families to raise, like the rest of us. And nurses and other health care workers should also receive pandemic hazard pay.



President Donald J. Trump joins Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in conversation during their visit to the home of Mohandas Gandhi Monday, Feb. 24, 2020, in Ahmedabad, India.
(Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Sonali Kolhatkar and Independent Media Institute December 19, 2020

India's farmers are revolting against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government in a mass movement that has drawn international attention. The world's largest democracy is witnessing a collective groundswell of protest as hundreds of thousands of farmers, largely from the states of Punjab and Haryana, have laid siege to the outskirts of the capital of New Delhi, determined to occupy the edges of the city until Modi reverses unpopular new laws that they say are anti-farmer.

About half of India's workers depend on the agricultural industry, and the government has long had in place regulations to protect farmworkers, acting as a middleman between farmers and buyers of their produce. Now those protections have been upended. In September 2020, Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pushed three deregulatory bills through Parliament amid chaos and even some opposition from within his own party.

Amandeep Sandhu, author of Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines, has been closely following the farmers' protests. In an interview, he explained to me that the first of the three bills scrapped the Essential Commodities Act, a 1955 law that stabilized food prices by preventing traders from hoarding supplies. According to Sandhu, "now traders can stockpile as much food as they want and can play the markets as they wish." Two-thirds of India's population of 1.3 billion rely on subsidized food rations, which Sandhu says are now endangered.

Another of the deregulatory laws would leave farmers to negotiate directly with buyers without government intervention to set basic minimum prices. Although this theoretically could result in farmers being able to demand higher prices, during years when there is a surplus of crops and subsequent plummeting prices, farmers could be financially destroyed. In short, the new laws are designed to subject hundreds of millions of poor farmers to the whims and demands of the market.

Modi's third controversial law centers on contract farming and enables corporate buyers to directly hire small farmers to produce specific crops. But Sandhu explained that it also protects corporations from liabilities. "If a small farmer has entered into a contract with a corporation and the corporation reneges on the contract, the farmer cannot go to court."00:00

Even before these new laws were put in place, India's farmers were being pushed to the brink. Millions are in debt as banks refuse to lend to the cash-strapped workers, driving them to illegal lenders that charge exorbitant interest rates. Farmer suicides in India have been on the rise, exacerbated by the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic this year.

According to Sandhu, "for many decades farmers have been protesting against the 'green revolution' model of agriculture," which emphasizes an increase in productivity above all else including farmer livelihoods. Writing for CNN.com, Simran Jeet Singh and Gunisha Kaur explained, "Just as some medications are tested on humans of developing countries before being accepted in developed nations, the Green Revolution was an agricultural experiment tested out on the fields of Punjab."

In further unleashing market forces on farmers through his new laws, Modi may have gone too far. "These very farmers are the BJP's core constituency," said Sandhu. "These are the ones who got the government elected in the first place."

Offering a stark contrast with struggling farmers are wealthy Indian elites who have seen their riches multiply each year. A 2018 report found that the wealth of the richest 831 Indians amounted to a quarter of India's gross domestic product. Chief among them is Mukesh Ambani, Asia's richest man, who has launched dozens of new businesses in the agricultural sector in just the last few months. India's second wealthiest person is Gautam Adani, and both men are considered close political allies of Modi. Protesting farmers say Modi's controversial farm bills were written to benefit the likes of Ambani and Adani. Earlier in the protests, farmers burned effigies of the prime minister and his billionaire buddies.

Modi has claimed that deregulation will bring wealth and prosperity to farmers and that objections to the laws are purely political. Because most of India's left-wing parties and prominent political figures from the opposition Congress Party have expressed support for farmers, the BJP-led government claims that farmers are being misled into believing the laws are bad for their bottom line. But one farmer from Punjab told Al Jazeera, "There is no politics in it, we feel the laws are going to benefit corporates and not poor farmers like us."

Modi has implored the farmers occupying the edges of Delhi to go home, claiming that the new laws are written to benefit them and are a "gift." He has offered to amend the laws as a compromise, but the farmers are standing firm, saying nothing less than a complete repeal of the laws will be satisfactory. India's former economic adviser Kaushik Basu agrees with them. Basu, who also served as chief economist of the World Bank and is currently a professor of economics at Cornell University, said the bills were "flawed" and "detrimental to farmers." He explained, "Our agriculture regulation needs change but the new laws will end up serving corporate interests more than farmers."

The new laws impact farmers' control over what to grow, whom to sell to, what prices they can rely on, and whether or not their crops will have buyers—all presented in the form of an unsolicited "gift" from a government that for years has ignored their plight. It's no wonder they are rebelling.

Solidarity with Indian farmers is high across the nation. In late November, nearly a dozen trade unions launched a massive general strike, bringing the nation to a standstill for a day. More than 250 million people are estimated to have participated, making it the world's largest protest in history. The farmers called for a second strike a week later and remain on the outskirts of New Delhi, blocking five major highways and saying they aren't leaving anytime soon. Sandhu shared that "farmers from Punjab and Haryana came with rations of their own for six months to one year and are willing to stick it out. The farmers who are coming from longer distances will be fed by those who are already there."

Indian agriculture affects the rest of the world, with a large percentage of the global spice market originating from Indian farms. Exported staples such as rice and milk and even cotton used by the apparel industry could be impacted by the new laws.

Diaspora Indians are now speaking out. Thousands of Indian origin residents of Britain rallied in London, declaring, "We stand with farmers of Punjab." Canadian Indians protested in various cities, with many saying they still had family who farmed in India. In California—home to a large population of Punjabi Indian Americans, many of whom are farmers themselves—a massive car rally in Silicon Valley called attention to the farmers' demands. And in Seattle, Councilmember Kshama Sawant of the Socialist Alternative Party sponsored a resolution to express solidarity with Indian farmers.

For now, a stalemate remains with the government and farmers facing off against one another, refusing to back down. Sawant had perhaps the most eloquent framing of what's at stake, saying, "Indian farmers are facing the same exploitation by the billionaire class that farmers and workers are facing worldwide."

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
INDIA
Farmers to observe hunger strike on Monday; halt highway toll collection in Hry from Dec 25-27

Farmer leaders also urged people to beat utensils during Modi's 'Mann Ki Baat'

By PTI December 20, 2020

Intensifying their agitation against the Centre's new agri laws, farmers on Sunday announced that they will observe a day-long relay hunger strike on Monday at all sites of protest in the national capital and halt toll collection on highways in Haryana from December 25 to 27.

Farmer leaders also urged people to beat utensils on December 27 during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Mann Ki Baat' radio programme, the same way the prime minister had asked people in March to beat 'thalis' (steel plates).

Modi had asked people to express gratitude towards those at the forefront of combating the coronavirus and extending essential services by giving a five-minute standing ovation by clapping, beating plates or ringing bells.

Thousands of farmers, mainly from Punjab and Haryana, are protesting against the laws for the last over four weeks at various border points of Delhi and demanding that the legislations be repealed.

"Farmers will begin a day-long relay hunger strike on Monday at all sites of protest against the new agri laws. It will be started by a team of 11 members at protests sites here, including the Singhu border," Swaraj India chief Yogendra Yadav said and added that "we appeal to everyone at all protest sites across the nation to participate in the same".

"Protesters are being threatened by the Haryana government. This is against the direction of the Supreme Court. I urge them to stop harassing farmers from tomorrow," he said at a press conference at the Delhi-Haryana Singhu border.

The Supreme Court on Thursday had said the farmers agitation should be allowed to continue "without impediment" and this court will not "interfere" with it as the right to protest is a fundamental right. It had also put a sole caveat that there should not be any breach of peace either by farmers or police.

While announcing the next move by protesting farmers after their hunger strike, farmer leader Jagjeet Singh Dalewala said farmers will halt toll collection on highways in Haryana from December 25 to 27.

"From December 25 to 27 all toll booths in Haryana will not be allowed by us to collect toll, we will halt them from doing so. On December 27, our prime minister will say his 'Mann ki baat' and we want to appeal to the people to beat 'thalis' during his address, the same way the PM had asked the country to bang utensils for coronavirus," the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader said at the press conference.

When the prime minister will speak, "we appeal to the people of the entire country to bang utensils in your houses throughout the duration of his programme to drown out his Mann Ki Baat", he said.

The 'Mann Ki Baat' is Prime Minister Modi's monthly radio address to the nation.

Farmer leader and senior BKU member Rakesh Tikait, who was also part of the press conference, said that farmers protesting the new agri laws will celebrate Kisan Diwas on December 23 and "we request people to not cook lunch for a day".

Earlier in the day, the protesting agriculturists paid tributes to farmers who died during the agitation and also lit candles in their memory.

The All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC) also wrote to various traders' unions requesting their support to the ongoing farmers' agitation.

Farmers are protesting against the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020, the Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020.

The three farm laws, enacted in September, have been projected by the government as major reforms in the agriculture sector that will remove middlemen and allow farmers to sell anywhere in the country.

However, the protesting farmers have expressed apprehension that the new laws would pave the way for eliminating the safety cushion of Minimum Support Price and do away with the mandis, leaving them at the mercy of big corporates. The Centre has repeatedly asserted that these mechanisms will remain.



INDIA 
In court, the government continues its game to drive a wedge between farm protest leadership


PRABHJIT SINGH 20 December 2020




Farmers protest at the Singhu border against three recently enacted farm laws. Farmer unions have not yet agreed to become party to a petition filed in the Supreme Court challenging the protests. 


SHAHID TANTRAY FOR THE CARAVAN

On 16 December, the Supreme Court proposed the formation of a committee comprising representatives of the central government and farmers organisations to resolve the ongoing deadlock over three recently enacted farm laws. In its interim order on 16 December, the court granted eight farmer leaders, the “permission to implead as respondents” to a petition seeking the removal of the protesting farmers from the Delhi border. Though not officially stated, it is likely that these eight names were proposed by the centre. It is telling that the list of eight names does not include Joginder Singh Ugrahan, the leader of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta Ugrahan), and one of the key people leading the ongoing protests.

Ugrahan has been at the forefront of the agitation at the Tikri border between Delhi and Haryana, leading over one lakh farmers. The central government had earlier invited Ugrahan alone for talks on 28 November when protesting farmers had first gathered at the Tikri and Singhu borders. Ugrahan had refused to participate. “They should call everyone and not try to divide us,” he told me at the time. The centre later attempted to isolate Ugrahan. He was not part of a delegation invited by the union home minister Amit Shah for an informal meeting on the evening of 8 December. That meeting did not yield any conclusive agreement.

On 16 December, I spoke to Ugrahan. He described the SC order as a “judicial intervention that the central government wants, to kill democracy.” He added, “Whenever there is a mass movement governments look forward to support from courts. I think such an act is an attack on the people’s democratic rights.” Ugrahan continued, “The court is looking at the masses, including women and children, sitting in protest in cold wave conditions as their democratic right. The judiciary knows that the farmers in the country are facing severe economic crisis.”

The eight farmer leaders named by the court represent different factions of farmers’ unions, primarily the Bharatiya Kisan Union. The list includes the following leaders—Rakesh Tikait of the BKU (Tikait), Jagjeet Singh Dallewal of BKU (Sidhupur), Balbir Singh Rajewal of BKU (Rajewal), Harinder Singh Lakhowal of BKU (Lakhowal), Buta Singh Burjgill of BKU (Dakaunda), Manjit Singh Rai of BKU (Doaba), Kulwant Singh Sandhu of Jamhoori Kisan Sabha, and Prem Singh Bhangu of Kul Hind Kisan Federation.


CURRENT ISSUE
DECEMBER 2020


However, the farmer unions have not yet agreed to become party to the petition in the court. On 16 December, the leadership of the 30 main farmer organisations from Punjab, camped at the Singhu border, resolved not to become impleading parties suo moto in the court case. This includes all the eight leaders named by the court and their respective unions. This decision was taken at a meeting of the 40-member Sanyukt Kisan Morcha on 16 December. The SKM is a national farmer’s collective, comprising of 40 farmer organisations—the 30 farmer unions from Punjab, and 10 other organisations from outside the state. The SKM includes farmer leaders from Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Kerala.

One of the key participants of the 40-member group spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. “It was a trap that we decided to avoid,” he said. Several other farmer leaders also described the act of joining the court process as a “trap” set up by the government. They implied that this was a way to get them to negotiate and comprise on their key demand that the three laws be fully repealed.

While briefing the media after the SKM meeting, Balbir Singh Rajewal of BKU (Rajewal), was somewhat more restrained. He is one of the eight leaders named by the court. He said that “any decision on the court matter” would be taken after consulting lawyers that the farmer unions had reached out to. He disclosed four shortlisted lawyers—Prashant Bhushan, Colin Gonsalves, H S Phoolka and Dushyant Dave.

I also spoke to Darshan Pal of the Krantikari Kisan Union, one of the key leaders during the talks with the government. Referring to the court petition, he said, “It seems this move is the BJP’s game plan after its failure during the talks with us.” Pal does not feature on the list of eight names proposed by the court. Since 3 December, the central government has held several rounds of talks with representatives of farmer unions at Delhi’s Vigyan Bhawan. These talks have failed, with the farmers demanding a complete repeal of the three laws.

On 17 December, a day after the entire farmer union leadership declined to join the court case suo moto, the SC issued a second interim order. “In order to bring about an effective solution to the present stalemate between the protesters and the Government of India, we consider it appropriate in the interests of justice to constitute a Committee comprising of independent and impartial persons including experts in the field of Agriculture for the purpose,” the court said. “This may not be possible without hearing all the necessary parties. Till the parties come before us, it would be advisable to obtain suggestions about the constitution of the said Committee from all the parties which may be submitted by them on the date of next hearing in the matter.”

In its 17 December order, the court added, “We clarify that this Court will not interfere with the protest in question. Indeed the right to protest is part of a fundamental right and can as a matter of fact, be exercised subject to public order.”

During the proceedings, the court asked the government’s standing counsel whether the centre can give a commitment that the contentious farm laws will not be implemented while the court is hearing petitions seeking removal of the farmers’ protests. When SA Bobde, the chief justice of India asked KK Venugopal, the attorney general, whether the centre could assure that no executive action will be taken under the laws, Venugopal replied that he would get back after “taking instructions.” Tushar Mehta, the solicitor general, added, “It will be tough.”

Since September, at least three petitions have been filed in the SC challenging the centre’s farm laws. While hearing Sharma’s petition to remove the farmer protests, the court made a mention of these petitions, but did not state when they will be heard. Referring to the three farm laws, the court said, “The writ petitions challenging the said laws have been filed before this Court and will be decided in due course.” In October, the court had asked the attorney general to file a reply to the petitions within six weeks.

After the court stated that it would not interfere in halting the protests, the farmers’ leadership at both Tikri and Singhu borders seemed to be in an upbeat mood. On 18 December, Ugrahan was speaking to the media at the Singhu border. “Imposing the flawed laws on the people is not right,” he said, pointing out the government’s “double standards” since the protests began. “The government has brought in some non-entity organisations of farmers which were never heard of and is trying to portray that the farmers were all for the farm laws,” Ugrahan told the media. “On the one hand they are talking about amending the laws, on the other hand they are telling the people that the laws were right. We won’t leave Delhi till the government annuls these farm laws.”


PRABHJIT SINGH is a contributing writer at The Caravan.

RACE
Is Freedom White?


In a political season of dog whistles, we must be attentive to how talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else.

JEFFERSON COWIE

George Wallace blocking a federal agent from entering the University of Alabama to enroll Black students, 1963. Image: AP

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Alabama governor George Wallace’s most famous sentence fired through the frigid air on the coldest day anyone in the state could remember. His 1963 inaugural address—written by a Klansman, no less—served as the war cry for the massive, violent response to the nonviolent civil rights movements of the 1960s. Wallace’s brand of right-wing populism would reconfigure U.S. party politics, making him, as his biographer put it, the “invisible founding father” of modern conservatism. As so many pundits have pointed out, when Donald Trump talks about “domination” today, he is talking the language and politics of Wallace.

Black Lives Matter protesters may have to go beyond tearing down Confederate monuments and ending police brutality to untangle one of the nation’s central ideological commitments: the freedom to dominate.

Yet Wallace’s famous speech was less about segregation than it was about freedom—white freedom. Other than its infamous applause line, the inaugural mentions “segregation” only one other time. In contrast, it invokes “freedom” twenty-four times—more times than Martin Luther King, Jr., used the word during his “I Have a Dream” address the following summer at the 1963 March on Washington. Freedom is this nation’s ill-defined but reflexive ideological commitment. Winding through the heart of that complex political idea, however, is a dark and visceral current of freedom as the unrestrained capacity to dominate. Today’s Black Lives Matter protesters may have to go beyond tearing down Confederate monuments and ending homicidal police brutality and stand before the challenge of untangling one of this nation’s central ideological commitments.

Oppression and freedom are not opposites. They are mutually constructed, interdependent, and difficult to separate. As African American historian Nathan Irvin Huggins put it, “Slavery and freedom, white and black, are joined at the hip.” We remain burdened by the question posed by eighteenth-century English poet and essayist Samuel Johnson: “Why do we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?”

In American mythology, there exists a gauzy past when white citizens were left alone to do as they pleased with their land and their labor (even if it was land stolen and labor enslaved). In the legend, those days of freedom and equality were, and still are, perpetually under assault. Most often the entity threatening to steal or undermine freedom in the American melodrama is the federal government. In the federal government’s checkered—perhaps “occasional” might be the better term—history of protecting minority populations from white people’s dominion, it presents a constant threat to the liberty of white people. That is why, as southern historian J. Mills Thornton put it, southern history—I would say U.S. history—displays an obsessive “fear of an imminent loss of freedom.” Understanding the anxious and fearful grind produced by threats to the domination-as-freedom complex helps us understand what Richard Hofstadter called the “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” of the “paranoid style” in U.S. politics. The government is not just coming for your guns, its coming for your freedom—the freedom to dominate others.

The ancient republican societies to which the American revolutionaries looked for ideas and inspiration also had a problem with the fusion of freedom and slavery. As classicist Moses Finley explains about the ideological development of the old republics, “One element of freedom was the freedom to enslave others.” This had legal and political ramifications that rippled through Western history. The United States, from colonial times to the Civil War, inherited and reinvigorated the ancient republican values but did so in a setting of chattel slavery and settler colonialism, which caused white freedom to take its most virulent form. As Edmund S. Morgan explains in American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), white people could extol the entire republican package of equality, freedom, and democracy more effectively in a slave society than they could in a free one. As he puts it, what developed was “a rough congruity of Christianity, whiteness, and freedom and of heathenism, non-whiteness, and slavery.”

 

POLITICS

The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism

Recent debates have centered on whether it’s appropriate to compare Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

ALBERTO TOSCANO

In the wake of the 2016 election, public intellectuals latched onto the new administration’s organic and ideological links with the alt- and far right. But a mass civic insurgency against racial terror—and the federal government’s authoritarian response—has pushed hitherto cloistered academic debates about fascism into the mainstream, with Peter E. GordonSamuel Moyn, and Sarah Churchwell taking to the pages of the New York Review of Books to hash out whether it is historically apt or politically useful to call Trump a fascist. The F-word has also been making unusual forays into CNN, the New York Times, and mainstream discourse. The increasing prospect that any transfer of power will be fraught—Trump has hinted he will not accept the results if he loses—has further intensified the stakes, with even the dependable neoliberal cheerleader Thomas Friedman conjuring up specters of civil war.

Is it historically apt or politically useful to call Trump a fascist? The long history of Black radical thinking about fascism and anti-fascist resistance provides direction in this debate.

Notwithstanding the changing terrain, talk of fascism has generally stuck to the same groove, namely asking whether present phenomena are analogous to those familiar from interwar European dictatorships. Sceptics of comparison underscore the way in which the analogy of fascism can either treat the present moment as exceptional, papering over the history of distinctly American forms of authoritarianism, or, alternatively, be so broad as to fail to define what is unique about our current predicament. Analogy’s advocates point to the need to detect family resemblances with past despotisms before it’s too late, often making their case by advancing some ideal-typical checklist, whether in terms of the elements of or the steps toward fascism. But what if our talk of fascism were not dominated by the question of analogy?

Attending to the long history of Black radical thinking about fascism and anti-fascist resistance—to what Cedric Robinson called a “Black construction of fascism” alternative to the “historical manufacture of fascism as a negation of Western Geist”—could serve to dislodge the debate about fascism from the deadlock of analogy, providing the resources to confront our volatile interregnum.

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Long before Nazi violence came to be conceived of as beyond analogy, Black radical thinkers sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left. They detailed how what could seem, from a European or white vantage point, to be a radically new form of ideology and violence was, in fact, continuous with the history of colonial dispossession and racial slavery.

Black radical thinkers have long sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left, revealing fascism as a continuation of colonial dispossession and racial slavery. 

Pan-Africanist George Padmore, breaking with the Communist International over its failure to see the likenesses between “democratic” imperialism and fascism, would write in How Britain Rules Africa (1936) of settler-colonial racism as “the breeding-ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today.” He would go on to see in South Africa “the world’s classic Fascist state,” grounded on the “unity of race as against class.” Padmore’s “Colonial Fascism” thus anticipated Aimé Césaire’s memorable description of fascism as the boomerang effect of European imperialist violence.

African American anti-fascists shared the anti-colonial analysis that the Atlantic world’s history of racial violence belied the novelty of intra-European fascism. Speaking in Paris at the Second International Writers Congress in 1937, Langston Hughes declared: “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.” It was an insight that certainly would not have surprised any reader of W. E. B. Du Bois’s monumental reckoning with the history of U.S. racial capitalism, Black Reconstruction in America (1935). As Amiri Baraka would suggest much later, building on Du Bois’s passing mentions of fascism, the overthrow of Reconstruction enacted a “racial fascism” that long predated Hitlerism in its use of racial terror, conscription of poor whites, and manipulation of (to quote the famous definition of fascism by Georgi Dimitrov) “the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist sector of finance capital.”

In this view, a U.S. racial fascism could go unremarked because it operated on the other side of the color line, just as colonial fascism took place far from the imperial metropole. As Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials have suggested in their vital The US Antifascism Reader (2020):

For people of color at various historical moments, the experience of racialization within a liberal democracy could have the valence of fascism. That is to say, while a fascist state and a white supremacist democracy have very different mechanisms of power, the experience of racialized rightlessness within a liberal democracy can make the distinction between it and fascism murky at the level of lived experience. For those racially cast aside outside of liberal democracy’s system of rights, the word ‘fascism’ does not always conjure up a distant and alien social order.

Or, as French writer Jean Genet observed on May 1, 1970, at a rally in New Haven for the liberation of Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale: “Another thing worries me: fascism. We often hear the Black Panther Party speak of fascism, and whites have difficulty accepting the word. That’s because whites have to make a great effort of imagination to understand that blacks live under an oppressive fascist regime.”

It was largely thanks to the Panthers that the term “fascism” returned to the forefront of radical discourse and activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The United Front Against Fascism conference held in Oakland in 1969 brought together a wide swathe of the Old and New Lefts, as well as Asian American, Chicano, Puerto Rican (Young Lords), and white Appalachian (Young Patriots Organization) activists who had developed their own perspectives on U.S. fascism—for instance, by foregrounding the experience of Japanese internment during World War II. In a striking indication of the peculiarities and continuities of U.S. anti-fascist traditions, among the chief planks of the conference was the notionally reformist demand for community or decentralized policing—to remove racist white officers from Black neighborhoods and exert local checks on law enforcement.

Political prisoners close to the Panthers theorized specifically about what we could call “late fascism” (by analogy with “late capitalism”) in the United States. At the same time that debates about “new fascisms” were polarizing radical debate across Europe, the writing and correspondence of Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson generated a theory of fascism from the lived experience of the violent nexus between the carceral state and racial capitalism. Davis, the Black Marxist and feminist scholar, needs little introduction, her 1970 imprisonment on trumped-up conspiracy charges having rocketed her to the status of household name in the United States and an icon of solidarity worldwide. Fewer remember that the conspiracy charge against Davis arose from an armed courtroom attack by her seventeen-year-old bodyguard, Jonathan Jackson, with the goal of forcing the release of the Soledad Brothers, three African American prisoners facing the death penalty for the killing of a white prison guard. Among them was Jonathan’s older brother, the incarcerated Black revolutionary George Jackson, with whom Davis corresponded extensively. Jackson was killed by a prison sniper during an escape attempt on August, 21, 1971, a few days before the Soledad Brothers were to be tried.

In one of his prison letters on fascism, posthumously collected in Blood in My Eye (1972), Jackson offered the following reflection:

When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape-recorder that cost him a week’s labor, and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism simply as an economic geo-political affair where only one party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed.

Jackson encourages us to consider what happens to our conceptions of fascism if we take our bearings not from analogies with the European interwar scene, but instead from the materiality of the prison-industrial complex, from the “concrete and steel,” from the devices and personnel of surveillance and repression.

In their writing and correspondence, marked by interpretive differences alongside profound comradeship, Davis and Jackson identify the U.S. state as the site for a recombinant or even consummate form of fascism. Much of their writing is threaded through Marxist debates on the nature of monopoly capitalism, imperialism and capitalist crises, as well as, in Jackson’s case, an effort to revisit the classical historiography on fascism. On these grounds, Jackson and Davis stress the disanalogies between present forms of domination and European exemplars, but both assert the privileged vantage point provided by the view from within a prison-judicial system that could accurately be described as a racial state of terror.

Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson saw the U.S. state—the carceral state and racial capitalism—as the site of fascism. This fascism originated from liberal democracy itself. 

This both echoes and departs from the Black radical theories of fascism, such as Padmore’s or Césaire’s, which emerged from the experience of the colonized. The new, U.S. fascism that Jackson and Davis strive to delineate is not an unwanted return from the “other scene” of colonial violence, but originates from liberal democracy itself. Indeed, it was a sense of the disavowed bonds between liberal and fascist forms of the state which, for Davis, was one of the great lessons passed on by Herbert Marcuse, whose grasp of this nexus in 1930s Germany allowed him to discern the fascist tendencies in the United States of his exile.

Both Davis and Jackson also stress the necessity to grasp fascism not as a static form but as a process, inflected by its political and economic contexts and conjunctures. Checklists, analogies, or ideal-types cannot do justice to the concrete history of fascism. Jackson writes of “the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.” He remarks that fascism “developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism’s dilapidation.”

Where Jackson and Davis echo their European counterparts is in the idea that “new” fascisms cannot be understood without seeing them as responses to the insurgencies of the 1960s and early 1970s. For Jackson, fascism is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary form, as evidenced by the violence with which it represses any consequential threat to the state. But fascism does not react immediately against an ascendant revolutionary force; it is a kind of delayed counterrevolution, parasitic on the weakness or defeat of the anti-capitalist left, “the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried—a consciousness that was compromised.” Jackson argues that U.S.-style fascism is a kind of perfected form—all the more insidiously hegemonic because of the marriage of monopoly capital with the (racialized) trappings of liberal democracy. As he declared:

Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of a faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange.

In Davis’s concurrent theorizing, the carceral, liberationist perspective on fascism has a different inflection. For Davis, fascism in the United States takes a preventive and incipient form. The terminology is adapted from Marcuse, who remarked, in an interview from 1970, “In the last ten to twenty years we’ve experienced a preventative counterrevolution to defend us against a feared revolution, which, however, has not taken place and doesn’t stand on the agenda at the moment.” Some of the elements of Marcuse’s analysis still resonate (particularly poignant, in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s murder by police, is his mention of no-knock warrants):

The question is whether fascism is taking over in the United States. If by that we understand the gradual or rapid abolition of the remnants of the constitutional state, the organization of paramilitary troops such as the Minutemen, and granting the police extraordinary legal powers such as the notorious no-knock law which does away with the inviolability of the home; if one looks at the court decisions of recent years; if one knows that special troops—so-called counterinsurgency corps—are being trained in the United States for possible civil war; if one looks at the almost direct censorship of the press, television and radio: then, as far as I’m concerned, one can speak with complete justification of an incipient fascism. . . . American fascism will probably be the first which comes to power by democratic means and with democratic support.

Davis was drawn to Marcuse’s contention that “fascism is the preventive counter-revolution to the socialist transformation of society” because of how it resonated with racialized communities and activists. In the experience of many Black radicals, the aspect of their revolutionary politics that most threatened the state was not the endorsement of armed struggle, but rather the “survival programs,” those enclaves of autonomous social reproduction facilitated by the Panthers and more broadly practiced by Black movements. While nominally mobilized against the threat of armed insurrection, the ultimate target of counterinsurgency were these experiments with social life outside and against the racial state—especially when they edged toward what Huey P. Newton named “revolutionary intercommunalism.”

Race, gender, and class determine how fascist the country might seem to any given individual.

What can be gleaned from Davis’s account is the way that fascism and democracy can be experienced very differently by different segments of the population. In this regard, Davis is attuned to the ways in which race and gender, alongside class, can determine how fascist the country seems to any given individual. As Davis puts it, fascism is “primarily restricted to the use of the law-enforcement-judicial-penal apparatus to arrest the overt and latent revolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people, tomorrow it may attack the working class en masse and eventually even moderate democrats.” But the latter are unlikely to fully perceive this phenomenon because of the manufactured invisibility of the site of the state’s maximally fascist presentation, namely, prisons with their “totalitarian aspirations.”

The kind of fascism diagnosed by Davis is a “protracted social process,” whose “growth and development are cancerous in nature.” We thus have the correlation in Davis’s analysis between, on the one hand, the prison as a racialized enclave or laboratory and, on the other, the fascist strategy of counterrevolution, which flow through society at large but are not experienced equally by everyone everywhere. As Davis has written more recently:

The dangerous and indeed fascistic trend toward progressively greater numbers of hidden, incarcerated human populations is itself rendered invisible. All that matters is the elimination of crime—and you get rid of crime by getting rid of people who, according to the prevailing racial common sense, are the most likely people to whom criminal acts will be attributed.

CONTINUE READING HERE 

Caste Does Not Explain Race

POSTED ON SATURDAY, DEC 19, 2020 2:06PM BY ROBIN VARGHESE

Charisse Burden-Stelly in Boston Review:


In the late 1940s, the Cold War was heating up. In the United States, anticommunism had reached a fever pitch at the same time that antiblack violence had forcefully re-emerged in the form of lynching and race riots. At this auspicious moment, Lincoln University historical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox published his 624-page tour de force, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948). Cox’s book put class struggle, racial violence, and relentless political-class competition at the founding of the capitalist world-system in 1492, though it argued that these constitutive features had existed in nascent form since much earlier. Cox contended that economic exploitation was at the root of U.S. racial hierarchy. In particular, it was responsible for structuring relations among the white ruling class, the white masses, and Black people as a racialized class of workers.

Cox’s book refuted the “caste school” of race relations. For nearly a decade, Cox had challenged scholars who compared U.S. race relations to the caste system in India—caste being a religious-social structure that preceded the rise of capitalism. In a 1942 article, “The Modern Caste School of Race Relations,” Cox noted that, despite their claims to originality, researchers such as W. Lloyd Warner, Allison Davis, and John Dollard were simply recapitulating a caste hypothesis that had been “quite popular” in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Cox did not speculate why—in the context of the Great Depression, ascending fascism, and increased racial violence—the caste hypothesis had been “made fashionable” again. However, he noted that the resurgence of caste as a model for explaining the racial order in the United States separated race relations from class politics just when a racialized struggle over resources was intensifying.

More here.


Women aren’t objects to be examined, tested and selected by men’ – calls to outlaw ‘medieval’ virginity testing

“How is this medieval practice still taking place in modern Britain?”


 by Joe Mellor December 15, 2020 in News

Credit;PA


One might assume that this barbaric practice was already banned in Britain, but that is not the case.

Now proposals to outlaw “medieval” virginity testing in the UK have cleared their first parliamentary hurdle.

Conservative Richard Holden cited the World Health Organisation and said there is “no scientific evidence at all” to support the testing.


He added 21 clinics have been identified in the UK and charge between £150 and £300 for the procedure.


MPs allowed Mr Holden to introduce his Virginity Testing (Prohibition) Bill for further consideration in the Commons.

Addressing the chamber, Mr Holden (North West Durham) said: “When I have mentioned to MPs and constituents that so-called virginity testing is still taking place, their reaction has been universally the same – how?

Modern Britain

“How is this medieval practice still taking place in modern Britain?”

THIS IS THE ORIGIN OF THE TWO FINGER VIRGINITY TEST IN THE COLONIES

Mr Holden praised a BBC investigation for highlighting the issue, adding: “How are we in a position where virginity testing is still taking place in the UK when Britain has clearly shown a strong lead on other issues internationally, like on female genital mutilation?”

After he highlighted the lack of evidence to support the procedure, he went on: “This should be banned on the basis of fraud alone.

“But there is a second bigger question about what it says about us as a society if we allow this practice to continue.
Harmful

“What does it say about our attitudes towards what is acceptable towards women.

“Women aren’t objects to be examined, tested and selected by men.”

Mr Holden warned there are also physical and psychological effects from the “harmful” procedure.

He asked for his Bill to return for further consideration on January 8, although it will struggle to become law in its current form if it does not receive Government support due to a lack of parliamentary time.



Brazilian Supreme Court Rules Anti-Vaxxers 
Will Be Banned From Public Spaces

Bolsonaro said: ‘Nobody can force anybody to take the vaccine. 
We’re dealing with lives, where is our freedom?’

ANOTHER KENNEY

BY : EMMA ROSEMURGEY ON : 18 DEC 2020 18:22
PA Images

The Brazilian Supreme Court has ruled that anyone who refuses to be vaccinated against COVID-19 could face being banned from public services and places.

10 out of the 11 justices that make up the court agreed that all Brazilians should be vaccinated, despite President Jair Bolsonaro proclaiming he will not be vaccinated and no one else should be forced to.


Bolsonaro has promised to make all of the COVID-19 vaccinations available to citizens living in Brazil, however he has also publicly spoken out against having it, discouraging many others from doing so in the process.

BRAZILS BIGGEST ANTI-VAXXER
PA Images

However, a statement put out by the government following the ruling suggests that anyone who refuses to be vaccinated could face having certain rights revoked, such as welfare payments, public school enrolment or even entry to certain public spaces.

One of the judges who voted in favour of the measures, Justice Ricardo Lewaandowski, said that while forcing members of the public to be vaccinated without consent was ‘flagrantly unconstitutional’, ‘the collective health cannot be harmed by those who deliberately refuse to be vaccinated,’ according to G1, via WA Today.

A number of vaccinations against potentially fatal illnesses such as measles and meningitis are already mandatory for children living in Brazil, and the Supreme Court has already dismissed a case from parents requesting to opt out of the vaccinations on religious grounds.

PA Images

Following on from the ruling, Bolsonaro said: ‘Nobody can force anybody to take the vaccine. We’re dealing with lives, where is our freedom?’

So far, more than 184,000 Brazilians have lost their lives to coronavirus, with more than 7.1 million cases recorded in the South American country since the pandemic began. As many as 1,000 Brazilians are reported to have died on Thursday, December 17, when the Supreme Court’s ruling was announced.

On Wednesday, the country’s health minister Eduardo Pazuello announced plans to roll out the vaccine in four different phases, based on priority groups, despite none of the vaccines being officially authorised yet.

PA Images

Meanwhile, it seems as though the government might have a big job on its hands trying to get people through the doors to be vaccinated, with just 73% of the population saying it’s open to being vaccinated. This is down from 89% who said they would be willingly vaccinated back in August.

According to a Datafolha survey, 22% of people in Brazil are firmly against being vaccinated, up from 9%.

Naked Man Wearing Only A Panda Head Filmed Rollerblading On Highway
BY : SAMAN JAVED ON : 19 DEC 2020 
Caters


A naked man wearing nothing but a giant panda head has been filmed rollerblading down a highway in Ohio.


The bizarre incident, which occurred on December 15, was caught on video. The footage shows him zooming down the eight-lane highway at an impressive speed.


Adding to his outlandish appearance, he also seemed to be clutching what at first looks like a golf club.


A closer look reveals that he is holding a selfie stick to capture himself on the highway, because if you’re going to rollerblade naked down a highway, you’re going to need a selfie…

DASH CAM Check out the bizarre incident here:


One motorist, Dijon Revels, who captured the scene, can be heard saying: ‘This motherf*cker’s on the freeway naked!’

The panda head-wearing man is honked at by several drivers on the road concerned for his safety as he races alongside the vehicles.

Keeping to the hard shoulder, he continues to glide down the road.

The man’s identity is not yet known, according to authorities. An official from the Ohio Department of Transportation told WTRF-TV that they were most concerned by his choice of transport.

Caters

‘Pedestrians are not permitted on interstate highways. There are signs posted at all the entrance ramps. This is a safety issue,’ the department said.

The video has since been reposted to social media, where users are both amused and shocked by the footage: ‘Sometimes you gotta do crazy sh*t to stay sane,’ one person said.

Another was impressed by the man’s speed, commenting: ‘So we just gone ignore the fact that he is keeping up with the pace of traffic?’

Another said: ‘I’m surprised it’s Ohio, that screams Florida man.’

OHIO IS DAMNED COLD IN DECEMBER UNLIKE FLORIDA
BEST THING OF 2020
Another Mysterious Monolith Appears At Adventure Park In New Zealand

BY : EMILY BROWN ON : 20 DEC 2020 
Christchurch Adventure Park/Facebook/PA Images


After a relatively quiet week on the monolith front, another of the mysterious structures has popped up at an adventure park in New Zealand.


It all started in the desert in Utah, and since then we’ve heard reports about monoliths appearing in Romania, California and Hungary, to name a few.


The latest monolith was discovered this weekend, December 19, in Christchurch Adventure Park, near Canterbury on New Zealand’s South Island.
Christchurch Adventure Park/Facebook


The official Facebook page for the park shared a picture of the metal object standing tall on a grassy patch near its 1.8km chair lift.


Alongside the image, staff wrote: ‘Mysterious monolith appears in the Park. Does anyone know what this is or where it has come from? As we genuinely don’t…’


While most of the other monoliths have popped up in relatively remote places, the Christchurch Adventure Park appears to be an exception. It is located on 358 hectares of privately owned land and is home to New Zealand’s longest chairlift, as well as mountain bike trails and New Zealand’s highest and longest ziplines.

Christchurch Adventure Park/Facebook

Hundreds of social media users were quick to comment on the Facebook post, offering advice and speculation about how it came to be in the park.

One person expressed belief that the structure was ‘either a ploy or a piece of art’, while another suggested: ‘Kick it and see if aliens come out.’

Earlier this month, a group of artists known as The Most Famous Artist claimed responsibility for the monoliths, with founder Matty Mo saying the group was ‘well known for stunts of this nature’.

Keep your eyes peeled, folks – who knows where the next one might turn up.
THIRD WORLD USA

54 Million Americans Will Lack Access To Adequate Food By End Of Year

BY : JULIA BANIM ON : 20 DEC 2020 
CBS DFW/PA Images


A new analysis from Feeding America, a US based anti-hunger organisation, has found that 54 million Americans will lack access to adequate food by the end of the year.

The organisation distributed 4.2 billion meals up and down the country between March and October this year. A 60% average increase in food bank users has also been noted over the course of the pandemic, with around four in 10 users being first-timers.

Those who are at highest risk for serious coronavirus-associated illnesses include seniors, individuals with chronic illness and people of colour. In many cases, Feeding America has found that the same individuals will be the ones who are hardest hit by the economic ramifications of the pandemic.
PA

According to the report from Feeding America, unemployment in the US has ‘soared’, resulting in increased demand for food banks and pantries:

Before the COVID-19 crisis began, more than 37 million people, including more than 11 million children, lived in a foodinsecure household.


Pre-pandemic data reflects the lowest food insecurity rates seen since before the Great Recession, but the current crisis is likely to reverse the improvements that have occurred over the past decade.

RED STATES
The four states with the highest projected food insecurity rates for 2020 are Mississippi (24.1%), Arkansas (22.5%), Alabama (22.2%) and Louisiana (21.7%).

Within these four worst hit states, it’s expected that over one in five residents will be food insecure by the end of the year, meaning they won’t have the money or resources required to put food on the table, AP News reports.

It’s estimated that the rates of those facing hunger will be as high as one in six people, escalating from 35 million in 2019 to more than 50 million by the end of 2020. Among children, this rises to an alarming one in four.
PA

Low-wage workers, many of whom were employed in the service industry, have felt the economic impact of the virus the most. However, many of those on higher wages have also been affected.

A September report from the anti-hunger organization, the Food Research & Action Center, found that one in four of those reporting they didn’t have enough food to eat usually had incomes which exceeded $50,000 per year prior to the outbreak.

SCOTLAND

‘I thought I was evil’: Call to ban gay conversion therapy

Justin Beck tells his story as 5000 people sign petition calling on ministers to end controversial practice.



By Sasha Spratt

Faith leaders from around the world are calling for an end to the criminalisation of the LGBT+ community and a ban on conversion practices.

A recent petition to the Scottish Parliament calling on ministers to end the practice in Scotland has gathered more than 5000 signatures and is due to be heard by the Equalities and Human Rights Committee

The charity Stonewall defines “conversion therapy” or “gay cure treatments” as “any form of treatment that aims to change a person’s sexual orientation or to suppress a person’s gender identity” – meaning it can happen anywhere and by anyone.

Justin Beck, 36, realised he was gay as a teenager.

Having grown up in a religious family he attended bible study several times a week, as well as regular Sunday services. At the age of 17, he decided to move churches; he wanted to stop being gay.

“I would put myself forward for healing every Sunday, then that would ramp up to things like exorcisms to have demons cast out of me,” said Justin.

Asked if at any point people in the church looked to speak to him about the options available to him and how he may be able to live his life he said: “Everyone knew what it was and the line that I was given all the time is that ‘you just have to have faith’.”
Justin and his partner Paul Hardie.

After six years Justin stopped the therapy. He said being told that he simply didn’t have enough faith “was a slap in the face”.

“I had absolutely zero self-esteem, I hated myself. I wouldn’t look in mirrors or windows, I hated everything about myself,” he said. “I thought I was evil.

“It was a lot to then try and pull myself back together and rebuild my life.”

In 2018, the UK Government pledged to ban the practice, but two years on there’s been little movement.

Wendy Morton MP, Minister for European Neighbourhood and the Americas, said: “The Global Interfaith Commission’s declaration on LGBT+ lives is an important step towards equality and we fully support its call to end violence, discrimination and the ongoing criminalisation of same-sex conduct in 69 countries.

“The British government is firmly committed to protecting the rights of all individuals and have been clear that conversion therapy, wherever it occurs, is an abhorrent practice and should be stopped.”

Campaigners say it comes in many forms and can cause lasting damage to people’s mental health. Psychology and psychiatry bodies say there is no science to support its effectiveness, but the controversial treatments are still made available through religious and cultural groups.

“[Current UK Government plans] are seeking an approach that covers public health providers and psychologists and a clampdown on regulations on how they go about the practice,” said Tristian Gray, one of the lead petitioners to the Scottish Parliament.

“This would leave out most cases of conversion therapy.” 

Blair Anderson

Blair Anderson, 22, is a law student in Glasgow and is now estranged from his family after they couldn’t accept his sexuality due to their faith.

“When someone in a position of authority with a duty of care is actively trying to suppress someone’s sexuality or gender identity for their own ends – that is the same thing that conversion therapists are trying to achieve.”

The petition calling on Scottish authorities to ban conversion therapy will be heard by the Equalities and Human Rights Committee in the coming weeks.