Tuesday, April 06, 2021

Facebook Sure Seems Desperate To Pass This Latest Data Breach Off As Old News For Some Reason

Brianna Provenzano 
4/6/2021

In the aftermath of bombshell reports of a massive data breach that may have compromised the personal information of as many as 533 million users, Facebook has committed absolutely to trying to spin the leak as old news, no big deal, definitely nothing to see here, no need to even think about this too much at all, really.

© Photo: Josh Edelson / AFP (Getty Images)

In a blog post published after 6 p.m. on Tuesday night, Mike Clark, Facebook’s product management director, directly alludes to an April 3 Business Insider article that reported that a hacker had published the personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users online for free over the weekend. In the post, however, Clark attempts to downplay the breach as a previously reported-on threat — one which is no longer active or pertinent to current users.

“We believe the data in question was scraped from people’s Facebook profiles by malicious actors using our contact importer prior to September 2019,” Clark writes. “...When we became aware of how malicious actors were using this feature in 2019, we made changes to the contact importer. In this case, we updated it to prevent malicious actors from using software to imitate our app and upload a large set of phone numbers to see which ones matched Facebook users.”

Facebook also says that it’s “confident that the specific issue that allowed [hackers] to scrape this data in 2019 no longer exists” — but that will likely be little comfort to users whose data is currently sitting exposed in an online trove for all the world to see.

The admission that Facebook knew of the hacks as early as 2019, but chose not inform users that their data had been compromised, is pretty wild in and of itself, particularly in light of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal that rocked the company less than five years ago. And yet, Clark’s insinuation that the data breach is a non-story is also being echoed by Facebook’s cronies all over Twitter, with communications officials Liz Bourgeois and Andy Stone chiming in on April 3 with statements about how reports of the breach were based on “old data” and that Facebook had “found and fixed this issue in August 2019.”

That timeline becomes more interesting when you remember that in 2018, the European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which, among other things, exists to ensure that large, data-mining tech giants like Facebook are more transparent with users about how their information is being used — which includes disclosing instances where their data has been compromised. But in its own statement on the breach, the Data Protection Commission of Ireland recently claimed that Facebook responded to its requests for clarification by advising that the datasets appeared to have been scraped between June 2017 and April 2018 — conveniently, just one month before the GDPR went into effect.

“Because the scraping took place prior to GDPR, Facebook chose not to notify this as a personal data breach under GDPR,” the post reads.

How very lucky for Facebook that these data breaches would have been caught just one month before the platform was obligated to report them to the public, and that the fixes to the vulnerabilities were so thorough that users don’t even need to worry about the specifics of them after the fact. Looks like there’s nothing more to see here, folks!

The data leak in question, originally published in a “low-level hacking forum,” according to Insider, exposed data from users in at least 106 countries, including over 32 million based in the US, and included personal identifiers such as phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates and, in some cases, email addresses. If you’re interested in checking to see if you’ve been compromised, the websites The News Each Day and HaveIBeenPwned have simple tools you can use to cross-reference your phone number with what’s been leaked online.

 

Chomsky on the ‘joke’ of ‘Russian interference’ and the savagery of US sanctions

Noam Chomsky says that ongoing US claims of Russian interference are a joke — all the more so as the US continues to ravage multiple states with savage sanctions that target civilian populations and COVID-19 bullying that denies countries Cuban doctors and Russian vaccines.

Noam Chomsky weighs in on the Putin-Biden row; new US claims of “Russian interference”; the “savagery” of US sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and other nations; US pressure on Brazil to reject Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine and on Panama to reject Cuban doctors; and more. Chomsky’s latest book is “Chomsky for Activists.”

  

The Greater the Disaster, the Greater the Profits

The border-industrial complex in the post-Trump era

March 24, 2021
 Todd Miller


A photo released by Congressman Henry Cuellar's office shows a crowded U.S. Customs and Border Protection temporary overflow facility in Donna, Texas. According to Rep. Cueller, the photo was taken between March 20-21, 2021.,


In late February, I drove to see the Trump wall in Sasabe, Arizona. As soon as I parked, a green-striped Border Patrol vehicle stationed a quarter of a mile away began to creep down the dirt road toward us. Just ahead, a dystopian “No Trespassing” sign was flapping in the wind. It was cold as I stepped out of the car with my five-year-old son, William. The wall ahead of us, 30-feet high with steel bollards, was indeed imposing as it quavered slightly in the wind. Through its bars we could see Mexico, a broken panorama of hills filled with mesquites backed by a blue sky.

The Homeland Security vehicle soon pulled up next to us. An agent rolled down his window and asked me, “What are you doing? Joyriding?”

After I laughed in response to a word I hadn’t heard in years, the agent informed us that we were in a dangerous construction zone, even if this part of the wall had been built four months earlier. I glanced around. There were no bulldozers, excavators, or construction equipment of any sort. I wondered whether the lack of machinery reflected the campaign promise of the recently inaugurated Joe Biden that “not another foot” of Trump’s wall would be built.

Indeed, that was why I was here — to see what the border looked like as the post-Trump era began. President Biden had started his term with strong promises to reverse the border policies of his predecessor: families torn apart would be reunited and asylum seekers previously forced to stay in Mexico allowed to enter the United States. Given the Trump years, the proposals of the new administration sounded almost revolutionary.

And yet something else bothered me as we drove away: everything looked the same as it had for years. I’ve been coming to this stretch of border since 2001. I’ve witnessed its incremental disfigurement during the most dramatic border fortification period in this country’s history. In the early 2000s came an influx of Border Patrol agents, followed in 2007 by the construction of a 15-foot wall (that Senator Joe Biden voted for), followed by high-tech surveillance towers, courtesy of a multi-billion-dollar contract with the Boeing Corporation.

Believe me, the forces that shaped our southern border over the decades have been far more powerful than Donald Trump or any individual politician. During the 2020 election, it was commonly asserted that, by getting rid of Trump, the United States would create a more humane border and immigration system. And there was a certain truth to that, but a distinctly limited one. Underneath the theater of partisan politics, there remains a churning border-industrial complex, a conjunction of entrenched interests and relationships between the U.S. government — particularly the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — and private corporations that has received very little attention.

The small border town of Sasabe and its surrounding region is a microcosm of this.

The cumulative force of that complex will now carry on in Trump’s wake. Indeed, during the 2020 election the border industry, created through decades of bipartisan fortification, actually donated more money to the Biden campaign and the Democrats than to Trump and the Republicans.

The Complex

In the 12 years from 2008 to 2020, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) dolled out 105,000 contracts, or a breathtaking average of 24 contracts a day, worth $55 billion to private contractors. That sum exceeded their $52 billion collective budgets for border and immigration enforcement for the 28 years from 1975 to 2003. While those contracts included ones for companies like Fisher Sand and Gravel that built the 30-foot wall my son and I saw in Sasabe, many of them — including the most expensive — went to companies creating high-tech border fortification, ranging from sophisticated camera systems to advanced biometric and data-processing technologies.

This might explain the border industry’s interest in candidate Biden, who promised: “I’m going to make sure that we have border protection, but it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it.”

Behind that bold, declarative sentence lay an all-too-familiar version of technological border protection sold as something so much more innocuous, harmless, and humane than what Trump was offering. As it happens, despite our former president’s urge to create a literal wall across hundreds of miles of borderlands, high-technology has long been and even in the Trump years remained a large part of the border-industrial complex.

One pivotal moment for that complex came in 2005 when the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Jackson (previously Lockheed Martin’s chief operating officer), addressed a conference room of border-industry representatives about creating a virtual or technological wall. “This is an unusual invitation,” he said then. “I want to make sure you have it clearly, that we’re asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business. We’re asking you. We’re inviting you to tell us how to run our organization.”

Of course, by then, the border and immigration enforcement system had already been on a growth spurt. During President Bill Clinton’s administration (1993-2001), for example, its annual budgets had nearly tripled from $1.5 billion to $4.3 billion. Clinton, in fact, initiated the immigration deterrence system still in place today in which Washington deployed armed agents, barriers, and walls, as well as high-tech systems to block the traditional urban places where immigrants had once crossed. They were funneled instead into dangerous and deadly spots like the remote and brutal Arizona desert around Sasabe. As Clinton put it in his 1995 State of the Union address:


“[O]ur administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.”

Sound familiar?


The Clinton years, however, already seemed like ancient times when Jackson made that 2005 plea. He was speaking in the midst of a burgeoning Homeland Security era. After all, DHS was only created in 2002 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. In fact, during George W. Bush’s years in office, border and immigration enforcement budgets grew from $4.2 billion in 2000 to $15.2 billion in 2008 — more, that is, than during any other presidency including Donald Trump’s. Under Bush, that border became another front in the war on terror (even if no terrorists crossed it), opening the money faucets. And that was what Jackson was underscoring — the advent of a new reality that would produce tens of thousands of contracts for private companies.


In addition, as U.S. war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq began to wane, many security and defense companies pivoted toward the new border market. As one vendor pointed out to me at a Border Security Expo in Phoenix in 2012, “We are bringing the battlefield to the border.” That vendor, who had been a soldier in Afghanistan a few years earlier, smiled confidently, the banners of large weapons-makers like Raytheon hanging above him. At the time (as now), an “unprecedented boom period” was forecast for the border market. As the company VisionGain explained then, a “virtuous circle… would continue to drive spending in the long term based on three interlocking developments: ‘illegal immigration and terrorist infiltration,’ more money for border policing in ‘developing countries,’ and the ‘maturation’ of new technologies.”

Since 9/11, border-security corporate giants became big campaign contributors not only to presidential candidates, but also to key members of the Appropriations Committees and the Homeland Security Committees (both House and Senate) — all crucial when it came to border policies, contracts, and budgets. Between 2006 and 2018, top border contractors like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon contributed a total of $27.6 million to members of the House Appropriations Committee and $6.5 million to members of the House Homeland Security Committee. And from 2002 to 2019, there were nearly 20,000 reported lobbying “visits” to congressional offices related to homeland security. The 2,841 visits reported for 2018 alone included ones from top CBP and ICE contractors Accenture, CoreCivic, GeoGroup, L3Harris, and Leidos.

By the time Donald Trump entered the White House in 2017, the border-industrial complex was truly humming. That year, he would oversee a $20-billion border and immigration budget and have at his disposal nearly 20,000 Border Patrol agents (up from 4,000 in 1994), 650 miles of already built walls and barriers, billions of dollars in border technology then in place, and more than 200 immigration-detention centers across the United States.

He claimed he was going to build his very own “big, fat, beautiful wall,” most of which, as it turned out, already existed. He claimed that he was going to clamp down on a border that was already remarkably clamped down upon. And in his own fashion, he took it to new levels.

That’s what we saw in Sasabe, where a 15-foot wall had recently been replaced with a 30-foot wall. As it happened, much of the 450 miles of wall the Trump administration did, in the end, build really involved interchanging already existing smaller barriers with monstrous ones that left remarkable environmental and cultural destruction in their wake.

Trump administration policies forced people seeking asylum to wait in Mexico, infants to appear in immigration court, and separated family members into a sprawling incarceration apparatus whose companies had been making up to $126 per person per day for years. He could have done little of this without the constantly growing border-industrial complex that preceded him and, in important ways, made him.

Nonetheless, in the 2020 election campaign, the border industry pivoted toward Biden and the Democrats. That pivot ensured one thing: that its influence would be strong, if not preeminent, on such issues when the new administration took over.

The Biden Years Begin at the Border

In early January 2021, Biden’s nominee to run DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas disclosed that, over the previous three years, he had earned $3.3 million from corporate clients with the WilmerHale law firm. Two of those clients were Northrop Grumman and Leidos, companies that Nick Buxton and I identified as top border contractors in Biden’s Border: The Industry, the Democrats and the 2020 Election, a report we co-authored for the Transnational Institute.

When we started to look at the 2020 campaign contributions of 13 top border contractors for CBP and ICE, we had no idea what to expect. It was, after all, a corporate group that included producers of surveillance infrastructure for the high-tech “virtual wall” along the border like L3Harris, General Dynamics, and the Israeli company Elbit Systems; others like Palantir and IBM produced border data-processing software; and there were also detention companies like CoreCivic and GeoGroup.

To our surprise, these companies had given significantly more to the Biden campaign ($5,364,994) than to Trump ($1,730,435). In general, they had shifted to the Democrats who garnered 55% of their $40 million in campaign contributions, including donations to key members of the House and Senate Appropriations and Homeland Security committees.

It’s still too early to assess just what will happen to this country’s vast border-and-immigration apparatus under the Biden administration, which has made promises about reversing Trumpian border policies. Still, it will be no less caught in the web of the border-industrial complex than the preceding administration.

Perhaps a glimpse of the future border under Biden was offered when, on January 19th, Homeland Security secretary nominee Mayorkas appeared for his Senate confirmation hearings and was asked about the 8,000 people from Honduras heading for the U.S. in a “caravan” at that very moment. The day before, U.S.-trained troops and police in Guatemala had thwarted and then deported vast numbers of them as they tried to cross into that country. Many in the caravan reported that they were heading north thanks to back-to-back catastrophic category 4 hurricanes that had devastated the Honduran and Nicaraguan coasts in November 2020.

Mayorkas responded rather generically that if people were found to qualify “under the law to remain in the United States, then we will apply the law accordingly, if they do not qualify to remain in the United States, then they won’t.” Given that there is no climate-refugee status available to anyone crossing the border that meant most of those who finally made it (if they ever did) wouldn’t qualify to stay.

It’s possible that, by the time I went to see that wall with my son in late February, some people from that caravan had already made it to the border, despite endless obstacles in their path. As we drove down Highway 286, also known as the Sasabe Road, there were reports of undocumented people from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico all traveling through the rugged Baboquivari mountain range to the west of us and the grim canyons to the east of us in attempts to avoid the Border Patrol and its surveillance equipment.

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans against what he dubbed “the military-industrial complex” in 1961, he spoke of its “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual… felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal government.” Sixty years later, something similar could be said of the ever-expanding border-industrial complex. It needs just such climate disasters and just such caravans (or, as we’re seeing right now, just such “crises” of unaccompanied minors) to continue its never-ending growth, whether the president is touting a big, fat, beautiful wall or opting for high-tech border technology.

For my son and me, the enforcement apparatus first became noticeable at a checkpoint 25 miles north of the international boundary. Not only were green-uniformed agents interrogating passengers in any vehicle heading northwards, but a host of cameras focused on the vehicles passing by.

Whether they were license-plate readers or facial-recognition cameras I had no way of knowing. What I did know was that Northrop Grumman (which contributed $649,748 to Joe Biden and $323,014 to Donald Trump in the 2020 election campaign) had received a valuable contract to ensure that CBP’s biometric system included “modalities” of all sorts — face and voice data, iris recognition, scars and tattoos, possibly even DNA sample collection, and information about “relationship patterns” and “encounters” with the public. And who could tell if the Predator B drones that General Atomics produces — oh, by the way, that company gave $82,974 to Biden and $51,665 to Trump in 2020 — were above us (as they regularly are in the border regions) using Northrup Grumman’s VADER “man-hunting” radar system first deployed in Afghanistan?

As we traveled through that gauntlet, Border Patrol vehicles were everywhere, reinforcing the surveillance apparatus that extends 100 miles into the U.S. interior. We soon passed a surveillance tower at the side of the road first erected by the Boeing Corporation and renovated by Elbit Systems ($5,553 to Biden, $5,649 to Trump), one of dozens in the area. On the other side of that highway was a gravel clearing where a G4S ($49,233 to Biden, $33,019 to Trump) van usually idles. It’s a mobile prison the Border Patrol uses to transport its prisoners to short-term detention centers in Tucson. And keep in mind that there was so much we couldn’t see like the thousands of implanted motion sensors manufactured by a host of other companies.

Traveling through this border area, it’s hard not to feel like you’re in a profitable version of a classic panopticon, a prison system in which, wherever you might be, you’re being watched. Even five-year-old William was startled by such a world and, genuinely puzzled, asked me, “Why do the green men,” as he calls the Border Patrol, “want to stop the workers?”

By the time we got to that shard of Trump’s “big, fat, beautiful” wall, it seemed like just a modest part of a much larger system that left partisan politics in the dust. At its heart was never The Donald but a powerful cluster of companies with an active interest in working on that border until the end of time.

Just after the agent told us that we were in a construction zone and needed to leave, I noticed a pile of bollards near the dirt road that ran parallel to the wall. They were from the previous wall, the one Biden had voted for in 2006. As William and I drove back to Tucson through that gauntlet of inspection, I wondered what the border-industrial world would look like when he was my age and living in what could be an even more extreme world filled with ever more terrified people fleeing disaster.

And I kept thinking of that discarded pile of bollards, a reminder of just how easy it would be to tear that wall and the world that goes with it down.

Copyright 2021 Todd Miller

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Todd Miller, a TomDispatch regular, has written on border and immigration issues for the New York Times, Al Jazeera America, and the NACLA Report on the Americas. His latest book is Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders. You can follow him on Twitter @memomiller and view more of his work at toddmillerwrit
r.ecom

WE SHOULD ALL READ HALL

Why We Need Stuart Hall’s Imaginative Left

Why We Need Stuart Hall’s Imaginative Left.

 A pioneer of cultural studies, Hall showed a generation how to meld identity and Marxism.

April 3, 2021 
Jessica Loudis
THE NEW REPUBLIC

Stuart Hall, The Open University (OU) is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0


When Stuart Hall died in 2014, he was one of England’s best-known intellectuals, celebrated for his pioneering writings in cultural studies, a field he helped invent along with Raymond Williams, and for his work as a spokesman of the New Left. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. described him as “the Du Bois of Britain,” and The Guardian called himthe “godfather of multiculturalism.” During the six decades he lived in England, Hall appeared regularly on TV and radio (including on his own BBC series about the history of the Caribbean), popularized the term “Thatcherism,” co-wrote an influential book on race and policing, and helped found The New Left Review.

Hall took a more expansive view of popular culture than the previous generations of British leftists, who tended to deride it as a monolithic means by which the working-classes were subjected to upper-class hegemony. He saw pop culture as a field of struggle, which held the potential to bring about positive change, rather than simply oppression. As his thinking evolved, he came to insist on a larger vision of politics, one that ventured beyond traditional actors and institutions into more subjective realms. Politics, he argued, was not simply a matter of elections: Politics was everywhere, present in everything from soccer games to soap operas. “The conditions of existence,” he once remarked in an interview are “cultural, political and economic”—in that order.

Despite this reputation, Hall’s legacy was far from assured by the time he died. By 2014, his only single-author book had fallen out of print, and his essays were scattered across obscure journals and anthologies. In the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton admonished Hall for his “frenetic recycling of theories in the realm of culture,” calling him “less an original thinker than a brilliant bricoleur, an imaginative reinventor of other people’s ideas.” Only recently have American publishers attempted to revive his legacy. Duke has launched a book series dedicated to his collected writings, edited by Catherine Hall and Bill Schwarz, as well as publishing a collection of essays by David Scott, a cultural anthropologist at Columbia who is working on a biography of Hall. Harvard is publishing a trifecta of lectures Hall delivered at the university in 1994 as The Fateful Triangle; MIT is releasing an anthology of essays about his work, and Routledge is putting out a conversation between Hall and bell hooks.

These efforts are well-timed: Hall’s work has become especially resonant as Britain has voted for a narrower identity and a more isolationist attitude to the rest of the world. Because of his own ancestry as “part Scottish, part African, part Portuguese-Jew,” Hall always saw identity as pluralistic, and rejected the notion that a person was strictly “English” or “Jamaican.” Towards the end of his life, Hall came to believe that the intransigence of cultural differences would not be able to mesh neatly with the government and conservative media’s increasing demands for “Britishness.” This was partly because of the “regressive modernization” Hall saw under Thatcher—which has echoes in Brexit and Donald Trump—but also because of the imaginative failure on the other side of the political divide; the way the left simply accepted a conservative vision of the world as the consensus on reality.

Hall was born in Jamaica in 1932 into the “brown middle class,” the child of a United Fruit worker and a light-skinned mother. His mother, whose family had once been wealthy, idealized the estate days of colonialism and prevented her son from playing with children she considered beneath them. As the darkest member of a family that insulated itself from the world of “black Jamaica,” Hall became, he writes, increasingly alienated at home and gravitated towards “the less-colour hierarchical Jamaica that was emerging.” Although independence was still decades away, Hall came of age at a time of burgeoning anti-imperialism. During his first term in high school, an older boy was suspended for throwing a book at a colonialist history teacher. That boy, Michael Manley, went on to become head of the leftist People’s National Party and, eventually, prime minister.

In 1951, Hall left Kingston for a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford. It was his first trip to England, and despite having grown up in the shadow of British Empire, he was struck by how “impenetrably English” everything seemed, how behavior was guided by a matrix of unwritten rules and social codes. Several days later, Hall’s conception of England was challenged when, passing by Paddington Station, he saw “a stream of black people spilling out into the London afternoon”—his first encounter with the Caribbean diaspora, which began arriving in England three years earlier on the SS Empire Windrush. He recalled the moment in his autobiography, Familiar Stranger:


It is hard to reconstruct the effect of seeing these black West Indian working men and women in London, with their strapped-up suitcases and bulging straw baskets, looking for all the world as if they planned a long stay. They had made extraordinary efforts within their means to dress up to the nines for the journey, as West Indians always did in those days when traveling or going to church: the men in soft-brim felt hats, cocked at a rakish angle, the women in flimsy, colourful cotton dresses, stepping uncertainly into the wind, or waiting for relatives or friends to rescue them from the enveloping strangeness. They hesitated in front of ticket windows, trying to figure out how to take another train to some equally unfamiliar place, to find people they knew who had preceded them.

As Hall would later say in interviews, he arrived in England when it was transitioning from “a class society to a mass society”: a moment marked by the influx of immigrants, the breakup of so-called “traditional” culture in favor of Americanization, and the rise of socially conservative, free-market politics.

At Oxford, that bastion of Englishness, Hall ran with the foreign students (excluding V.S. Naipaul, whom he remembers as a snob), and, though he initially aspired to be a novelist, became increasingly invested in “Third World” liberation politics. The literature department at the time was grappling with the legacy of F.R. Leavis, whose journal Scrutiny revolutionized criticism by applying it, disdainfully, to mass culture. Hall gravitated towards the Marxist scholars taking aim at Leavis’s belief that only great English novelists could save civilization from the so-called barbarians. The young critic read Raymond Williams and studied with Richard Hoggart, whose revolutionary Uses of Literacy would soon apply a literary-sociological lens to British working-class culture. At the same time, Hall began taking regular trips to London, staying with the “bearded radicals” his parents had warned him about.

Despite misgivings, Hall was on course to earn a place within the British literary establishment. He completed his undergraduate degree and started writing a doctoral thesis on Henry James, uncertain where this endeavor would lead him. Then, 1956 upended everything. As Russia invaded Hungary to crush a nascent revolution, and Britain and France invaded Egypt to stop the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Hall abandoned his thesis to become a part-time teacher and activist. While he had never been a fully committed Marxist, the events of that year, he would later write, “brought to an end a certain kind of socialist innocence.”

Out of this rude awakening, the New Left was born. The following year, as Ghana declared its independence, Hall founded a magazine called Universities and Left Review, which three years later would combine with The New Reasoner to form the New Left Review. In the interim, he set up and ran the Partisan Café in London to help fund the publication. The coffee bar became a favorite hangout for the anti-Stalinist left, attracting hundreds to its weekly meetings, including Eric Hobsbawm, Karel Reisz, Doris Lessing, John Berger, and undercover members of the police. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament also grew out of these gatherings, and Hall’s speeches for the organization helped solidify his reputation as an activist and public intellectual. Eight years later, he was recruited by Hoggart to help run the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

While Hall’s political commitments were established by the time he left Oxford, his intellectual methodology was forever shifting, moving from political sociology to media theory to structuralism—whatever proved most useful in unpacking the materials mass culture served up. Hall first gained recognition as a media theorist for his innovative work on reception theory, which analyzed how a reader’s background and experiences influenced their reading of a text. His thinking was revolutionized in the 1970s, however, when Frankfurt School and key continental European thinkers were translated into English. Suddenly, through their willingness to read politics through the lenses of institutions and popular culture, Adorno and Althusser offered new tools with which to understand the changing political climate of Britain.

Antonio Gramsci, the early twentieth-century Italian political theorist, proved especially influential. From him, Hall borrowed the notion of “conjunctures”—periods in which “different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions” come together to form distinctive historical moments. This idea would form the basis of Hall’s early approach to politics. The post-WWII consensus, in which Western Europe countries embraced cradle-to-grave welfare programs, was one such conjuncture; the rise of Thatcherism, as Hall would demonstrate, was another. Against those willing to subordinate history to sweeping global theories, Hall emphasized the distinctiveness of specific moments.

While Hall occasionally draws heavily on jargon, there is a generosity and literary imagination in his writing—a recognition that humans are complex, contradictory creatures shaped by, among other things, what they believe, where they live, how they shop, and who they sleep with. As a foreigner and a black man in England, Hall refused pious or reductionist interpretations of politics, such as dogmatic Marxism, which failed to account for people like him.

This is evident in his political essays, but it is conveyed more explicitly in a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Urbana-Champaign in the summer of 1983, recently reissued by Duke as Cultural Studies 1983, which would become the theoretical basis for the field. The lectures construct an analytic framework through borrowing from, and occasionally discarding, the ideas of Hoggart, Leavis, Durkheim, and Levi-Strauss, as well as Althusser and Gramsci. In these talks, we see Hall questioning Marxist orthodoxy, and grasping beyond it:


I wonder how it is that all the people I know are absolutely convinced they are not in false consciousness, but can tell at the drop of a hat that everybody else is. I have never understood how anybody can advance in the field of political organization and struggle by ascribing an absolute distinction between those who can see through transparent surfaces, through the complexity of social relations… Indeed, I have always undertaken to move from the opposite position, assuming that all ideologies which have ever organized men and women organically have something true about them.

Hall characterized ideology as the frameworks with which people translate and interpret society, and he saw them functioning all around him—on TV and in pubs, in classrooms and cinemas, and especially in media. As historian Frank Mort notes, while reading culture as political was groundbreaking at the time, it did draw on a history of left-leaning sociological work in Britain. (Accordingly, Hall once remarked that he wanted “to do sociology better than the sociologists.”) From the 1930s to the mid-60s, the Mass Observation movement aimed to chronicle the “everyday lives” of British people, and in the 1950s the Institute of Community Studies mapped the family structures of low-income communities in London. The Institute eventually spawned the Open University, where Hall taught for 18 years after leaving Birmingham.

By the mid-‘60s, Hall had married Catherine Barrett, a British feminist historian whose work would deeply influence his own, and had co-written The Popular Arts, one of the first books to apply serious analysis to popular film. At that point, the couple was living in the industrial English city, which, as James Vernon observes in an excellent essay on Hall and race, was riven by racial tensions. The year they moved there, Vernon writes, a “Conservative Party candidate ran an election campaign on the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.’ ” Three years later, in 1968, conservative MP Enoch Powell would deliver his infamous “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham, suggesting that a flood of immigrants would result in just that. That same year, Catherine gave birth to their daughter, the first of two children.

The late ‘60s and early ‘70s in England saw the rise of left-wing social movements, namely black power and feminism, which Catherine participated in by starting Birmingham’s first women’s liberation group. It was also the era of screaming headlines about crime and the so-called “Sus” laws, which gave police carte blanche to stop and harass “suspicious” young (black) men. This set the stage for Hall’s breakthrough work, which applied a zoom lens to the conflicted national mood. InPolicing the Crisis, Hall and his co-authors examined the explosion of news reports about the rise of “muggings” in the UK, arguing that this trend captured a moral panic about outsiders and immigrants, and generally reflected a feeling of decline as England, struggling with unemployment and an inefficient welfare state, transitioned away from a social democratic order.

Hall’s analysis, which elaborated on his earlier media studies work, was among the first to identify journalistic fearmongering and openness to austerity as the factors that would bring radical conservatives to power. In the final sentence, he predicted the continued ascent of Margaret Thatcher. Unfortunately, he was right. In 1979, the year after Crisis was published, Thatcher was elected Prime Minister.

Thatcher’s victory marked the beginning of a new historical moment. Elected by lower- and middle-class voters following England’s “winter of discontent,” Thatcher took aim at trade unions, entitlement programs, and nationalized industries—gutting the Keynesian public policy that had propped up the country for more than three decades. In its place, she offered what Hall later described as a “a deeply rooted, closed conservatism around a tiny myth of a nation with a homogenous culture… coupled with a rabid short-term individualism that is tied to the market place.”

In Thatcherism, Hall found the case study that would consume much of his work and, ironically, exemplify the kind of cultural politics he had hoped to activate on the left. His essay “The Great Moving Right Show,” written in 1979, was an attempt to dissect the phenomenon and its traction among voters. To Hall, Thatcherism reflected what Gramsci called an “organic” crisis: a moment when people cease to trust political leaders and parties, and upstart forces challenge those seeking to conserve the old order. During these periods, contradictions arise that band together disparate groups, and the very idea of what is considered “ordinary common sense” changes. Thatcher did not succeed by tricking voters, Hall posits, but rather by constructing a worldview that mapped onto their real lives and problems (if not their class identities) and advancing policies that reflected those concerns. He takes this as a reminder that “interests are not given but always have to be politically and ideologically constructed.” Hall would spend the rest of his life criticizing Thatcher, but he did credit the ingenuity of her tactics.

As the ‘80s advanced, the children of the Windrush generation took to the streets to protest the structural racism that their parents had endured in silence, and Hall turned his attention to the left’s failure in the face of Thatcherism. In his riveting 1987 essay “Gramsci and Us,” Hall blamed the Labour Party for its administrative understanding of politics, and its belief that political subjects are one-dimensional actors whose motivations can be reduced to economic interests. That year in Britain, there was no shortage of crises. Thatcher was reelected, race riots broke out in Leeds, and one person a day was dying of AIDS. Yet the left, Hall wrote,


does not seem to have the slightest conception of what putting together a new historical project entails. It does not understand the necessarily contradictory nature of human subjects, of social identities. It does not understand politics as a production. It does not see that it is possible to connect with the ordinary feelings and experiences which people have in their everyday lives, and yet to articulate them progressively to a more advanced, modern form of social consciousness. … It does not recognize that the identities which people carry in their heads—their subjectivities, their cultural life, their sexual life, their family life and their ethnic identities, are always incomplete and have become massively politicized.

Thatcher’s reality was now Britain’s, and party politics offered no answers. In light of this, Hall focused his attention on the “identities which people carry around in their heads.” Culture was now the main turf of politics, and individual identities were being negotiated on this turf. The left, despite its claims to inclusivity and social justice, had failed to provide a vocabulary that was human and specific enough for people to recognize themselves in.

Meanwhile, across England younger generations of black and Asian artists were discovering Hall’s work. This included Isaac Julien, Keith Piper, and other visual artists and filmmakers who would eventually form the British Black Arts Movement. John Akomfrah, a filmmaker whose archival documentary The Stuart Hall Project (2013) rivals Raoul Peck’s I am Not Your Negro in its intellectual and emotional depth, was among them. Describing Hall’s allure in Stuart Hall: Conversations, Projects, Legacies, Akomfrah wrote that “for a group of young people who had gone from coloured to black… and many other derogatory epithets in between in their very short lives,” Hall’s ability to move fluidly between identities, subjects and theoretical positions was precisely the appeal. In the last decades of his life, Hall became the founding chair of Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and the photography organization Autograph ABP, both of which named their libraries in his honor, and he continued working with the British Film Institute, a relationship that extended back to the ‘60s.

Where organized politics had failed, art emerged as a way to access individual subjectivity. To see “how difference operates inside people’s heads,” Hall said in a 2007 interview, “you have to go to art, you have to go to culture—to where people imagine, where they fantasize, where they symbolize.”

Jessica Loudis is the editor of World Policy Journal.

Talking Socialism | Catching up with AOC

You cannot say nothing will change. We can make the argument that not enough is changing fast enough. These are not nitpicking questions, because this is how the language we use communicates to individuals who is included, who you consider a person.


March 27, 2021
 Don McIntosh 
DEMOCRATIC LEFT

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her way to speak at NYC’s Women’s March, Photo by Corey Torpie


Bronx Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, best known as AOC, is DSA’s foremost socialist superstar. Her June 2018 primary win—a 29-year-old taqueria bartender defeating the third most powerful Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives—inspired up to 10,000 people to join DSA.

The Netflix documentary Knock Down the House details her life story leading up to that victory. Since then, her influence has only grown. Earnest, fun, relatable, and fierce, she became one of Congress’ best known members overnight, and used the attention to pull the national conversation leftward. In October 2019, her endorsement revivified Bernie Sanders’ campaign following his heart attack.

Today—with over 12 million Twitter followers, her picture on the December cover of Vanity Fair, and mass cultural appeal to teens and the not-yet-political—she continues to use her unasked-for celebrity to build support for a democratic socialist agenda. On Jan. 28, more than a quarter of a million people streamed her impromptu teach-in on the gamer platform Twitch.tv. The topic was the GameStop stock market rebellion, but the discussion encompassed a critique of Wall Street and a plug for a wealth tax.

AOC spoke with me by Zoom Jan. 26.

What was your path to joining DSA?

I love this question because I think that my path in DSA very much shaped my organizing strategy. I didn’t grow up in an incredibly ideological household. I have friends that grew up the children of unionists, professors, individuals two or three generations deep into working class movements. That was not my family. I grew up very working class. My mother cleaned houses. My father had a small business. Both my parents grew up in extreme poverty.

What initially drew me to DSA was the fact that they showed up everywhere that I showed up. I started my work as a community organizer before I even knew about the existence of DSA, and I was busy doing work in my community, working with children, working with families, advocating for educational equity. A friend of mine invited me to a DSA meeting in the Bronx/Upper Manhattan Branch. We were in the basement of a church uptown, in Washington Heights I believe. It was my first time being exposed to DSA, and to me it was like, ‘Okay, we’re hearing all this rhetoric and having discussions.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, another group of folks talking.’ Like this is great, this is encouraging.

This was around the time when DSA was picketing one of the major camera companies in New York City, trying to call attention to the warehouse workers. And they brought undocumented warehouse workers to the meeting, and translated their testimony. And on top of that, the chapter had free childcare provided to anyone who wanted to show up. And that to me … at the end of that meeting, I was like, ‘Okay, this is real.’

You know, there’s a lot of people who talk about class issues, there’s a lot of people who are deep in the discourse of struggle. But to me, as someone who grew up in these environments, it was the translation to action that was distinctive to me.

That is what made DSA initially distinctive to me, and made it something that was flagged to me as worthy of continued attention. And then Jabari Brisport ran for City Council. It felt like something fundamentally different to me, even in the context of electoralism.

Ironically enough, before I ran for Congress, and before Jabari had run for City Council in that first race, I myself had huge doubts around electoralism. That’s why I dove into community organizing, because I was one of those folks that felt, “We’re not going to get any substantive change through electoral politics. It’s just not going to happen.”

I felt that way because I grew up around Bronx machine politics, where there was a lot of cynical use and weaponization of identity under the guise of lobbyist-driven policies and corporate policy. I had essentially given up on it, and I felt the only way we’re going to do this is by committing ourselves to our communities.

And so it was that first meeting that I felt, ‘Okay, this is something that’s real.’ Also, in the history of New York City and in communities of color, when you have the Young Lords and you have this organizing heritage, there has historically been tension between DSA and these organizing collectives of color, whether it was Latino and Puerto Rican collectives, Chicano collectives, black collectives…. It was like, “Oh, it’s these white folks. [LAUGHS.] There was this historical fissure. But it really felt like a moment where we were coming together. And so when I would see DSA showing up providing real structural support at BLM rallies, or support for abolishing ICE, where we felt like there wasn’t this class essentialism, but that this really was a multiracial class struggle that didn’t de-prioritize human rights, frankly, I was really impressed. And I felt like it was something worth being part of.

My run for Congress, so much of it was based in coalition building. In the New York City context, I wasn’t a DSA candidate that was homegrown from the start. I went through a process of earning the DSA endorsement. And that was in addition to stitching a collective together of the movement for Black lives and the movement for immigrant rights. Our congressional district is half immigrant, extraordinarily working class and just incredibly diverse in the Bronx and Queens. Along with Senator Sanders’s campaign, which I also proudly worked on, prior to all of this, you know, all of that, I think, really contributed to this moment.

And, for me, there’s a real distinction between us saying that we’re about something and us really being about it in our actions. And it was really that distinction, in the action and in the praxis, that made it distinctive to me and made it something to be a part of.

What a great story. Thank you for sharing that.

DSA’s priorities really are your priorities as well, Green New Deal and Medicare For All in particular. There’s no getting around the fact that each of those are going to require an act of Congress. What is the most strategic thing that DSA members and chapters could be doing right now to bring that about?

I’m a big believer in exercising a dual approach. First of all, I think you’re right, there is no Medicare For All without an act of Congress. The thing is legislation after all.

I think sometimes people fall into this trap of wishful thinking about a poll question, thinking that support is solid, and that it is unsusceptible to the propaganda of corporate lobbyists and the health insurance industry. I think the first thing we need is real honesty about the work to be done ahead of us. There are some issues that poll really well, and the polling is concrete. There are other issues that poll one way or another, and the polling can really fluctuate with just one ad campaign.

Actually, we experienced this in a positive way with the Green New Deal, in that the oil and gas lobbies have gone in so hard to try to give the Green New Deal a bad name. And even after the total hammering that it experienced by the Republican Party, it still doesn’t poll that poorly. However, one thing that we do see is that even in areas where it may not poll as well as we would like, what we find is that it’s highly susceptible to positive messaging. Once we go in and either send organizers, or have other forms of messaging, and actually explain what the Green New Deal is, polling skyrockets for the issue. And so, in terms of tactics and what’s needed, I think we need to actually make the case for single payer health care that is free of cost at the point of service. And we have to say what we mean by Medicare for All, because as we know, there are a lot of cynical actors that try to add all these ellipses, like “Medicare for All who want it that make less than $100,000 per year.” And that’s why we have to engage in the work of organizing.

So I would say in terms of our strategic priorities, yes, it’s continued organizing, yes, it’s also continued support on the state level, for various health care initiatives, such as the single payer proposal in the state of New York.

There’s a lot of that work that we can do outside of electoralism. But there is critical electoral work to be done as well. I think the strategy of supporting candidates, when that strategy is very calculated, focused, precise, when we aren’t casting our net too wide beyond the capacities of any given local organization, is extremely effective. Mounting continued primary challenges or just supporting candidates in general, putting candidates in open seats … I’ve seen the impact of it from the inside—how much even incumbent members of Congress will totally reinvent themselves in a far more progressive direction, because they know that their communities are watching.

In the best case scenario, we get incredible new members of Congress, or we win these open seats, you know, Rashida Tlaib was an open seat. And at worst, we get almost a radical change in the agenda of the incumbent that is presently there. And so in many ways, it’s a win-win in getting that internal traction, that is necessary.

We’ve heard again and again from conservative Democrats, that an AOC style agenda might fly in Queens or the Bronx, but it can’t win in more competitive districts out in Middle America. What’s your answer to that?

I think it’s totally false. I think that their critique may be more aesthetic, to be honest. After all, I was born in the Bronx, and I’m bred in this community. And this is my community. So of course, you know, if I just walk over to another state in Nebraska or whomever, they’re gonna suss out real quick that perhaps I’m not a Nebraskan. But I don’t think that that is really related to policy. I think it’s because I’m a New Yorker, and I act like a New Yorker. And you know what? I need to act like a New Yorker so that I can represent New York’s 14th Congressional District. But I don’t think that critique really holds water in terms of the actual policies that we are supporting. Sure, in terms of my style of advocacy, it’s not going to be the style of advocacy for another local community. But I’m aware of that. And that’s not my job. My job is not to represent any other district than mine right now.

It also applies the other way: They could not come to New York and to our district and be successful here. So it cuts both ways. And I think it’s important that we send the message that our communities are just as necessary, and just as critical as any other. But that said, again, this has nothing to do with the actual policy. A lot of times, it’s the style of that advocacy, and I think that you can just see the importance of a multiracial, and multi-identity, multi-gendered, geographically diverse movement. That’s ultimately the strength and beauty of our collective work with Bernie. There are communities that I’m able to speak to and organize, there are communities that Bernie and I are able to speak to and organize, and there are communities that Bernie is able to speak to and organize. And when we come together, we’re able to build trust, and expand that collective power among all the folks that resonate with each of us individually. The idea, like, “She’s not going to win in this one community or another community” … I’m not trying to, you know? What we’re trying to do is build movement in that community. And that is a very different question than trying to litigate one personality versus another.

Some on the Left have looked at Biden’s record and his differences with the Bernie wing of the party, and they conclude that no progress is going to come out of the Biden administration. What’s your view?

Well, I think it’s a really privileged critique. We’re gonna have to focus on solidarity with one another, developing our senses for good faith critique and bad faith critique. Because bad faith critique can destroy everything that we have built so swiftly. And we know this because it has in the past, and it’s taken us so many decades to get to this point. We do not have the time or the luxury to entertain bad faith actors in our movement. But also we have to value our solidarity with one another. For anyone who brings that up, we really have to ask ourselves, what is the message that you are sending to your Black and brown and undocumented members of your community, to your friends, when you say nothing has changed? Perhaps not enough has changed. And this is not a semantic argument. Just the other night, we in collective struggle were able to stop the deportations of critical members of our community. And that would not have happened in a Trump administration.

Thank you.

They were just on the belt ready to go. And you just cannot say that nothing will change. We can make the argument that not enough is changing fast enough. And these really are not nitpicking questions of semantics, because this is how the language that we use communicates to individuals who is included and who do you consider a person. When you say “nothing has changed,” you are calling the people who are now protected from deportation “no one.” And we cannot allow for that in our movement. That’s not a movement that I want to be a part of. And I know that’s not the movement that we are a part of. We’re so susceptible to cynicism. And that cynicism, that weaponization of cynicism, is what has and what continues to threaten to tear down everything that we have spent so much time building up. We’re allowed to win too, by the way. [LAUGHS.]

I prefer winning, actually.

Millions of people are excited about you being in Congress and rooting for your success. But at the same time, no other figure has been targeted by the Fox News crowd quite like you have. Why do you think that they worked to make you such a bogeyman for the right wing, and what’s it like to be on the receiving end of that?

I think they’ve done it because they know that we are a threat. Particularly because of the fact that I’m a movement candidate. If I was just some kind of one-off singular candidate, I do not believe that we would be attracting the energy and attacks that we attract. So much of this organized power and organized capital has frankly correctly identified that my candidacy is not an individual venture, but that it is representative of an actual working class movement. There is a rush to define me to the country before I have the opportunity to define myself. And if you can get enough people to just tune me out or tune any other person out before they even get the opportunity to hear what one has to say, you’re able to go a long way in preserving the current power structure. However, I don’t think that strategy lasts the test of time. I think it was a very strong short-term strategy. I mean, it continues to be a strategy. But I honestly believe that what was just attempted was: We’re going to throw the book at any candidate like this. We’re going to make an example out of her for everyone else. And then we’re just going to tar and feather her in the press. And then we’re going to mount a $3 million Democratic primary challenge against her that’s bankrolled by Wall Street, that was also a Latina, down to having a hyphenated last name. [Ed.: AOC was challenged in the 2020 Democratic primary by Michelle Caruso-Cabrera.] And it was just the most cynical, disgusting thing. But it was also trying to convince Democrats that this is too dangerous, and that this is a liability. They did that in hopes that it would succeed. And not only was it not successful, but we crushed them, just completely crushed them.

It was very exciting to see that result.

It is exciting, because they weaponized all the cynical powers of trying to get someone of my ethnicity, trying to even confuse people in terms of the name—Caruso Cabrera versus Ocasio Cortez. And [her campaign] had, you know, $3 million, she was a CNBC anchor, so she had TV and camera training and all of it. And the fact that it was so desperately unsuccessful, I think really speaks to the strength of this movement, that there is a glimmer of hope that it will not be distracted by all of the kind of tricks up this corporate establishment’s sleeve. And then beyond that, we went to a general election, which had $10 million behind it, backed by a Republican who then tried to do this whole … I might be getting my my music references mixed up, but trying to do like this whole like “John Mellencamp” vibe, trying to convince people that he’s not actually Republican, that he’s just a working class dude. So it really shows what their strategy was, which is “we’re gonna throw the book at her,” and we’re gonna try to wound her so badly that she doesn’t win re-election and this just becomes a flash-in-the-pan thing. I mean, in the general election it was the second most expensive congressional race in America.

I did not realize that.

Yeah, in the United States, it was the second most expensive race in the country. And so their strategy was to make quick work of us. And they threw everything that they could, and it didn’t work. And now I think they have a problem on their hands. [LAUGHS]

Yeah, because you got re-elected. In fact you absolutely crushed.

And not only that, but we also expanded our presence with the election of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. It’s really showing that this is not going away.

You’re one of 435 representatives in the House, four of whom are open socialists now. Pessimists might look at that and find that daunting, but you put on a recent Twitter video in which you listed all the specific things you personally got done in two years. You tried to do it in two minutes. It took you four, talking as fast as you could. So for our readers, what are some of the most impactful items on that list?

Well, for me, I’m already thinking about this term so far, things that aren’t in the video but have already been early wins. And by the way, this just speaks to talking about how nothing will change … we’ve already had really two very significant wins. One non-electoral, which was the Hunts Point Produce workers, being able to support them in securing wage increases and protecting their health care in their strike efforts. [Ed.: At the nation’s largest wholesale produce market, located in the Bronx, Teamsters struck for first time in 35 years. AOC skipped the presidential inauguration to join them on the picket line. After a week on strike, they won $1.85 an hour raises]

The reason I bring this up is because I do not believe that they would have had the structural and community support they were able to generate, if we hadn’t been building momentum on both electoral wins and non electoral wins. You know, if Joe Biden didn’t win the presidency, that would have been a harder strike. Even though they don’t seem connected, there is something to be said about the morale of seeing your actions manifest into change. I don’t know if as many elected officials would have shown up if they didn’t feel like more people weren’t paying attention. And so to have that institutional support for their demands, really allowed the community to rally around, along with the on-the-ground support that DSA provided.

You know, I thought one of the things that was so inspiring in talking to many of these unionists was that they expressed to me shock, every night that I was there, that so many young people showed up to the picket line. They had no idea what was going on. But they were thrilled. And they knew that it was adding so much power to their strike efforts. And it really kind of goes both ways too. It elevated the consciousness of even the unionists, of the fact that they weren’t alone, and that their struggle was part of a larger collective one, really made the strike stronger. And the other [win] was being able to secure $2 billion for FEMA reimbursements for funeral expenses.

For those who died of COVID.

Yeah, for individuals who have died of COVID. And there’s a couple of reasons why this was so important. First of all, this was a homegrown effort. New York 14 was the most heavily impacted congressional district at the outbreak of the pandemic. And Elmcor and our constituents in East Elmhurst, which is kind of in the shadow of Elmhurst Hospital, the most heavily hit hospital in the country at one point, they reached out immediately. And they said, this is a disease that is disproportionately impacting people along lines of race and class. It is disproportionately impacting the Black, the brown and the low income. And as a consequence, the subsequent deaths, particularly at the beginning, were concentrated among Black patients, brown patients and low income patients.

So you take that a step further, and the expenses for a funeral can go $5,000 to $10,000. That is a life-altering expense for a working class family, when the average American has 400 bucks in savings, especially in the middle of a pandemic, when this is not something that is planned or expected at all. That’s the kind of death that is earth-shattering, that can put a family under for a decade plus, if not more. I experienced this myself when my family lost my dad, and we saw how expensive it was. And it took a decade to get out from that debt.

So when you target this for reimbursement, it’s actually quite a progressive cash transfer. Because when you are reimbursing those who have died of COVID, and COVID is disproportionately impacting the Black and the brown and the working class, you are able to lift those families or at least patch them through to prevent inequity and inequality from further bottoming out the bottom. And that’s the reason we prioritized it so much. The fact that we were able to actually pass it on to the Trump administration is pretty remarkable. We were able to get $2 billion authorized under Trump. Now that FEMA is operating under Biden, we can now work with the administration to administer these funds, and dole them out in a way that is not going to be as stonewalled or corrupt as it would be under the Trump administration.

One of the exciting things about your early days in Congress was your willingness to break from convention, like when you blew the lid on the freshman orientation that was crawling with corporate lobbyists, or appeared at the Sunrise Movement sit-in in Pelosi’s office. Has your strategy shifted at all from those days?

I don’t think so. I do think that the pandemic has complicated those things a little bit, because a lot of stuff really does happen behind closed doors. And it’s funny, but you know, people will say and do things at a cocktail party that they will not do on a Zoom call. So I would say that the opportunities for disruption have varied a little bit in this digital situation that we’re in, but I still think they exist.

One thing I do think has changed is that I do believe we’re getting more sophisticated. I think about all of our tactics as different tools in a toolbox. And when I first started, I had a hammer. And when you have a hammer, everything’s a nail, as they say. But then as you learn about other methods, you can get a wrench, and then you get a screwdriver, and then you’re able to add a lot more to your tools. You add the tools of electoralism — supporting other members to join. You have the tools of sunlight.

There’s this one moment I’ll never forget. We were going through the appropriations process, I believe in 2019 or so. And basically, this is how we fund the entire government, we go along and we fund each agency after the other. And there are these massive multi-thousand-page packages. And I remember finding … sometimes it’s as simple as hitting Control-F and just trying to find every policy-related keyword, to see what’s getting appropriated, and see what you can dig through. That’s literally how some folks go about this, when you’re given 1,000 pages of legislation 48 hours before it drops. But we found this really bizarre appropriation for fossil fuel facilities, and it was like a multi billion dollar giveaway, I believe, at the time. And we were like, “Where did this come from? Did someone slip this in?” And we were gonna propose an amendment to take it out. So we raised the question about this. And because no one wanted to ‘fess up and actually own that they were the one who put that in, it was withdrawn without actually making it a floor fight. Yeah. I don’t think we ever got to the bottom of who was behind that. Clearly, you know, this is lobbyist driven. This was a lobbyist’s language that someone asked to put in. But because the actual line item was so shameful, no one wanted to actually ‘fess up to the fact that they put this in.

There are so many of these wins, that aren’t necessarily public fights every time. They are wins to the tune of millions and billions of dollars that could then be shifted to other priorities. Some of that work is quiet, but it is just as significant as some of the public fighting and organizing. Not to disparage that either, but they complement one another.

You’re famous for skillfully clapping back at haters from time to time, but you don’t come off as mean, and you never punch down. How do you stay so positive?

Oh, thank you. Well, you know, positivity is an organizing tool. And I say that with so much earnestness. There’s a reason why Jabari [Brisport] won, there’s a reason why Zohran [Mamdani] won, there’s a reason why Marcela [Mitaynes] and Phara [Souffrant Forrest] — these wins that we had on the state level, why those candidates won. Look at them. They are relentlessly positive. They are people that you want to be around. And they are not cynical, and they do not engage in “more socialist than thou.” They are just relentlessly positive.

And I think the most important thing that we can do in order to win is to be people and spaces that people want to be around. And that is our organizing priority. We have to make Medicare for All something that everyone wants to be a part of. We have to make Green New Deal something that everyone wants to be a part of. I think people sometimes are dismissive of this, in thinking that it’s less serious than study. But who’s gonna join your book club if it sucks? Who’s gonna join your reading group if they feel judged? So the important thing we need to do is to really create something … excuse my language … but that’s fucking fun.



Photo by Corey Torpie

Don McIntosh is a me
mber of the Democratic Left editorial team.

Democratic Left is the magazine of the Democratic Socialists of America. Signed articles do not necessarily express the position of the organization


https://portside.org
The Self-Determination Act Could Finally End US Colonization of Puerto Rico

For more than 120 years, the US has colonized Puerto Rico. But a new bill cosponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would finally give Puerto Ricans the chance to decide their political relationship with the United States.

April 2, 2021 
Natalia Renta 
JACOBIN

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Last month, New York representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez — joined by New Jersey’s Bob Menendez in the Senate — introduced the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act of 2021. If passed, the legislation would create a process for Puerto Ricans to finally determine the nature of their relationship with the United States, which for more than 120 years has colonized the island.

The Self-Determination Act comes as Puerto Ricans are rising up — against a federally imposed fiscal control board, government neglect in the wake of Hurricane Maria, gender and racial violence on the island, and business as usual in local government — making the status quo colonial relationship untenable. The bill correctly recognizes that Puerto Ricans themselves — not their colonial overseers — have the right to determine their own future.

Here is how the law would work. First, the Puerto Rican legislature would pass a law to initiate a status convention. Residents of Puerto Rico would elect delegates to the status convention, who in turn would outline a slate of political status options and accompanying transition plans in consultation with a commission composed of members of Congress and the presidential administration. The political status options could include statehood, independence, free association, or any option other than the current colonial arrangement. The status options, and the accompanying transition plans, would then be put to a vote in a special referendum on the island. Finally, Congress would ratify the selected status option — deferring entirely to the choice of Puerto Rican voters — and the US and Puerto Rican governments would begin to implement the new arrangement.

Puerto Ricans have voted on several political status referenda over the years. Indeed, some statehood proponents point to the most recent referendum — an up-or-down statehood question in November 2020 — to argue that Congress should immediately pass a bill that would put Puerto Rico on a path to statehood.

But Puerto Ricans have never had a chance to vote on their preferred political status with the benefit of knowing the implications of each option and what a transition process would look like. For example, if Puerto Rico were a state, could the Puerto Rican courts and legislature continue to operate in Spanish? Under a “free association,” would residents of Puerto Rico be able to retain US citizenship? If the island became independent, would the United States provide any reparations to Puerto Rico for over a century of exploitation and neglect? Many more questions related to culture, language, taxes, debt, and citizenship, among others, loom large.

With the requirement that each political status option presented in the referendum be fully defined and include a transition plan, the process outlined by the Self-Determination Act would finally give the people of Puerto Rico a meaningful voice in their political future. Additionally, the bill allows for ranked-choice voting, meaning that residents can voice their true preferences without worrying that their vote won’t matter if their top choices are not supported by a majority.

It is also worth noting that past referenda have been plagued by controversies, including concerns over how the questions were structured, a boycott, and in the case of the most recent referenda, election irregularities that have triggered litigation. The Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act would provide a clear, transparent process that would put all options on the table and guarantee residents a fair vote.

The timing of the bill is not accidental. In the last several years, a cascade of events — the ongoing debt crisis and the fallout from Hurricane Maria, most notably — have made painfully clear that whatever language the United States chooses to use, Puerto Rico is a twenty-first-century colony.

By the time the then governor declared the island’s debt unpayable in 2015, Puerto Rico had already been experiencing years of economic contraction caused in large part by federal policies foisted on Puerto Ricans. In the summer of 2016, the Supreme Court issued two decisions that dealt a blow to any semblance of the island’s autonomy — invalidating a Puerto Rico bankruptcy law even though it could not avail itself of federal bankruptcy protections, and declaring that Congress retains ultimate control over Puerto Rico under the Territorial Clause of the US Constitution.

Later that summer, Congress invoked its authority under the Territorial Clause to pass the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). This law imposed an unelected, unaccountable Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) (which those on the island labeled “la Junta”) and created a path of austerity to pay Wall Street at the expense of Puerto Ricans. Still reeling from the debt crisis, the island was hit by Hurricane Maria — and promptly abandoned by the federal government. Some experts estimate the hurricane caused over a thousand deaths, many of them avoidable.

Puerto Ricans have not taken these events sitting down. Organizations like Casa Pueblo and Comedores Sociales, active before Maria, played a critical role in its aftermath. Pension-holders have organized through Construyamos Otro Acuerdo (“Building Another Agreement”) to demand their pensions remain intact through the PROMESA bankruptcy process instead of being slashed in favor of Wall Street creditors. Colectiva Feminista en Construcción (“Feminist Collective Under Construction”) has brought issues of gender and racial violence to the fore. Perhaps most significantly, in the summer of 2019, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the streets and successfully demanded the resignation of Governor Ricardo Roselló, chanting, “Ricky renuncia y llévate a la Junta” (“Ricky, resign and take the Junta with you”). In the wake of #RickyRenuncia, a progressive party not defined by political status preferences — Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana (“Citizens’ Victory Movement”) — emerged as a significant political force on the island.

It is in this context of colonial injustice and left organizing that the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act emerged, with broad support from progressive organizations and parties from both the island and the diaspora.

There is no easy resolution to 123 years of US colonialism in Puerto Rico. The relationship has caused, and continues to cause, great harm to the island. While no bill will single-handedly resolve more than a century of injustice, any just path forward will require a credible, inclusive, and democratic process. With an organized and engaged Puerto Rican public — a requirement for the passage of the bill and the success of the process it outlines — the time is ripe to end US colonialism in Puerto Rico once and for all.

Natalia Renta is a senior policy strategist at the Center for Popular Democracy.